Barbarian Princess

by Barbarian Princess (retail) (epub)

  “I was wondering if you’d be back at all, sir,” Julius said when Correus appeared at the hut door the next evening. “We’ve kept up the place like, me and the cat, but it’s not much to come home to.”

  “I’m sorry, Julius. I didn’t think I could face it any sooner.” He looked about the little hut, as spotless as Freita had ever kept it, and the cat came up and twined around his ankles. “I’ve made arrangements to have Aeshma shipped back to Rome. Do you want to go with him?”

  Rome. Julius’s face lit up. “I think I’d better go, sir. They’ll have to throw him for sure to get him on board if I don’t, and he might hurt himself.” Rome. “Would it be all right to take a day or two for holiday, like, on the way back?”

  “Take a week if you like,” Correus said. “But don’t get into trouble. My father will be less inclined to get you out again than I would.”

  “Yes, sir! What about the cat, sir?”

  “Take it to the quartermaster,” Correus said. “He’s been moaning about rats in the granary, so he’ll be delighted.” Correus didn’t want to look at the cat. Aeshma was his horse, too, had been his horse first, but the cat was all Freita’s.

  He went and gave Aeshma’s gray hide a final pat and told him what a fine time he would have terrorizing the rest of his father’s stock. The gray stallion whickered and butted his head against Correus’s chest, and for a moment Correus thought about keeping him here for no better reason than that Aeshma had been his and Freita’s together, and he couldn’t bear to sweep everything they had had out into the wind. But Aeshma was totally unfit for army work, and Correus didn’t need two horses – he had Antaeus, who was properly trained, stabled in the cavalry barns already. “Behave yourself,” he said into a gray ear, and Aeshma snorted at him.

  Three days later Julius rode Aeshma out of Isca to catch a ship at Portus Adurni in the south, and the Second Legion sailed on its own errand westward.

  III Flavius

  Flavius Appius Julianus, noted on the army rolls as “the younger” to distinguish him from his famous father, and known in the family as Flavius, sat cross-legged on the bed in his quarters in the Praetorium at Lindum. He was mending the red leather strap of a chariot bridle and whistling between his teeth. He had brought a new pair of ponies across with him when he had been given the Lindum posting, and he still didn’t like to think about the Channel crossing – they had worked themselves into hysteria and kicked down their stalls, and he had had to stay in the hold with them for the entire crossing. They were flighty creatures, all air and fire, but they had already won two local races, and Tribune Marcellinus had made him a fat offer for them. Flavius chuckled and inspected his handiwork. It was pleasant to have a flea to put in the tribune’s ear.

  He tossed the bridle onto the bronze and leather clothes chest at the foot of the bed and lay back, hands behind his head. Life was inordinately pleasant. Gaius Gratus, legate of the Second Legion Adiutrix, was a stiff-necked, birth-proud martinet, whose officers invariably put in for transfer within a month of their posting. In Flavius the army had found at last the buffer to keep life tranquil. Although the Julianus family could claim no more than knightly birth, they could trace their line back almost to the founding of the City. With Flavius’s aquiline face and dark, immaculate curls, Gratus took to Centurion Julianus on sight, and Flavius responded with the ease and unselfconsciousness of one who knows his own birth and position to be above reproach. Since he was equally at ease with the legate’s officers, they also took to the new staff aide, and Flavius became a sort of filter through which the legate’s wishes were passed and rendered inoffensive. The cohort officers sympathized loudly with him, and Flavius responded in kind for form’s sake, but in truth he didn’t miss a field command. He had a talent for handling men but not in the role of a field officer. He admitted as much reluctantly, and some days not at all when the shadow of his brother and his famous father hung too heavily about him, but in truth he was well suited where he was. He was rapidly making himself indispensable to Gratus, a crony of the emperor’s, and with his wife coming to join him, he couldn’t think of much else to ask for.

  Aemelia… Flavius whistled cheerily to himself as he thought of his wife. Aemelia’s dark, flower-petal beauty would be as exotic in Lindum, where the native women were big-boned and fair, as a cultivated rose in a cornfield. Her father was a senator, and the legate would undoubtedly ask them to dine. There would be no protests at the Lady Aemelia’s presence in Lindum, although Flavius would have to see to her housing himself, of course. Rules were rules. He had a house already rented, a pleasant one in the best part of the civil settlement, built in the Roman style, around a courtyard and heated by a furnace and hypocaust. A pleasant place to spend off-duty hours, and with Aemelia all to himself, her vision of him might improve somewhat. Flavius knew well enough that his wife had married him because she couldn’t have his brother, and he had been glad enough to get her that way or any other. It had been an arranged marriage, looked on in kindly fashion by both Appius Julianus and Aemelia’s father, who had summed up his opinion of a match with the wrong brother succinctly: “I’ll cut your bastard’s throat for him if he so much as looks sideways at my daughter.”

  He knew just when Aemelia had changed her mind about marrying him, Flavius thought. It had been when he had told her that he, Flavius, loved her – and that Correus didn’t. He wasn’t sure whether Aemelia believed that yet or not, but under that last uncertainty, her determination to defy her father and the world had crumbled. Her strength of will had been pushed far beyond its limits already.

  Aemelia didn’t love him, Flavius thought. And unaccountably, infuriatingly, he had fallen in love with her. But she had set herself to be a good wife, and with the action often came the desire. “Patience,” he whispered to the empty air.

  His reverie turned to a half-waking dream in which Aemelia was running to meet him along the canal bank outside Lindum Fort, her slaves struggling under a mountain of trunks behind her, and her dark eyes bright as a bird’s at the sight of his own dear face.

  A hand shook him from this pleasant vision, and he found himself blinking up not at Aemelia’s parted lips and flushed cheeks, but at his optio’s equine countenance.

  Flavius groaned. “Oh, no.”

  “General’s compliments, sir, and you’re wanted right away,” the optio said.

  Flavius picked up a comb and ran it through his dark curls before a gilt-framed mirror. “What, uh, crisis is occurring at the moment?” He knotted his neck scarf carefully. “It all looked peaceful enough this morning. Oh, no, not marching orders! My wife’s due to arrive any day now!”

  The optio’s long face was worried. “I don’t think so, sir. There was a courier came in, but not from the west. He was on the Eburacum road. But the general’s pacing like a wolf in a pen, and he looks mad enough to chew a sword in half.”

  “Oh, lord. Well, I’d better go and find out why.” Flavius swirled his scarlet cloak around his shoulders, gave it a military twist, and stuck the pin home.

  Nothing looked particularly unsettled as he crossed the narrow walk between the Praetorium and the Principia, the headquarters building. But Flavius recognized the harassed-looking man at the desk outside the legate’s office as Gratus’s personal optio, and his expression said plainly that he would rather be serving Hecate in hell.

  “You’re to go straight in, sir,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Flavius said dubiously. The door swung open silently, and he poked his nose around it. “You sent for me, sir?”

  The man at the desk looked up, and Flavius drew a quick, shocked breath.

  “Yes, Centurion. Sit down, please.” Gaius Gratus’s face was pale under its normal olive tone, and his eyes were bright – the hard, sharp glitter of a man pushed one step past what he can live with. His hands were laid flat, palms down on his desk in a gesture like prayer.

  “What has happened, sir?” Flavius took two fast steps into the office. “Can I get
you anything? Some wine?”

  “No, thank you, Julianus. I am not ill.” He swallowed. “Sick at heart perhaps.”

  “Sir?”

  “I’ve just had word of the one thing no commander wants to look in the face,” Gratus said. “Mutiny.”

  “Not in the Adiutrix, sir!” Mutiny was a horror that happened more often than Rome liked to admit. But not in the Adiutrix. Flavius would have sworn for the Adiutrix.

  “No,” Gratus said. “No, it was the Ninth.”

  Flavius sat down slowly. The Ninth Legion Hispana had been unstable ever since it had been nearly destroyed in Queen Boudicca’s rebellion some fifteen years ago. It had been reconstituted afterward, but a rebuilt legion was thought to be unlucky. True enough now, it seemed. “How bad?”

  The legate of the Adiutrix took a deep breath and spread the story out for his aide. It was bad enough. The ringleaders of the mutiny had been caught and put to death in the ancient, vengeful fashion decreed by the old laws – death by stoning. And there had been two senior officers among them.

  “Mithras,” Flavius whispered, and put his head in his hands. Gratus went on relentlessly, but his voice was tired and it shook. The Ninth Hispana was on the edge of collapse, and its legate had sent him a desperate message to say so. The strongest of the local tribes, the Brigantes, were growing troublesome, and now there was nothing in their way but a legion too demoralized to take the field.

  “I’ve ordered three-fourths of our men north to Eburacum,” Gratus said, “before the Brigantes start a war. We’ll march in the morning.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll see that everything’s ready.”

  “No.” Gratus put out a hand. “No, I want you to ride to Governor Frontinus and tell him to keep an eye on the southeast during our absence. There’s no defense there with us in Eburacum, and if his West Britons take it into their heads to strike that way, we could have another civilian slaughter on our hands.” He handed Flavius a tablet with a seal of purple wax. “That’s your pass and your orders to report to the governor. The rest you take in your head. That’s why I’m sending you and not a courier.”

  Flavius nodded. Courier-carried messages could be intercepted, and couriers could be made to talk. It was urgent that the governor know what had happened in Eburacum, and that he could expect no help in West Britain from the Adiutrix. It was even more urgent that some unruly tribe not learn that the civil settlements of the southeast lay undefended. The rebellion in which Boudicca of the Iceni had wrecked a legion and three cities was not so long distant that most soldiers in Britain didn’t shudder when her name went by.

  Flavius rose and tucked the wax tablet into his tunic. “I’ll start tonight, sir. I ought to make it as far as Margidunum. As I remember there’s a decent inn there. I can pick up a fresh horse tomorrow at Ratae.”

  “Just make sure you pick up an escort when you hit Silure lands,” Gratus said with a grim smile.

  Flavius saluted. He smiled back. He and the legate had always understood each other.

  “And report to me at Eburacum as soon as the governor stops swearing and gives you the return message.”

  Flavius trotted back to his quarters, shouted for his body slave, and sat down to scratch a hasty message in wax to his wife. The slave, Bericus, came on the run.

  “Pack my kit – no more than will go in the saddlebags. And saddle both horses.”

  “Yes, sir!” Bericus scented excitement in the wind. “Where are we going, sir?”

  “I’m going to play courier for the legate,” Flavius said. “You’re going to Portus Adurni to catch my wife when her ship docks, to tell her so.” He handed the boy the wax tablet. “Give her this, and take her to Aquae Sulis. I don’t want her in Lindum till things settle down. There’s trouble brewing, but you’re to keep your mouth shut about that.”

  “Yes, sir. Uh, sir – why not Londinium?” Bericus’s young face was wistful. “There’s nothing in Aquae Sulis but fat old hens with gout.”

  “Londinium’s awfully big, and she’s awfully young,” Flavius said. “And so are you. I think I’d feel safer with you in Aquae Sulis. If it’s any comfort to you, you may take Nestor. I’m going to have to ride like Hades, and I’ll change horses at Ratae. I’m damned if I’ll leave Nestor there.”

  “Yes, sir.” Bericus decided that more questions would be a mistake and scrambled into the bedchamber to shake out clean tunics from the clothes chest. His master’s he folded carefully and rolled in a spare cloak, while his own were stuffed into the second pair of saddlebags with more regard for speed. He added to Flavius’s a comb, razor, hand mirror, writing materials, and a flask of liniment advertised to cure sore muscles in man or beast.

  As Bericus departed for the stables, Flavius sighed and began to buckle on the skirt of red leather strips that went under his lorica. One of the charms of being a staff officer was not having to wear armor except on parade. He buckled on the segmented plates of his lorica, strapped on greaves, and knotted the helmet strap under his chin, pausing first to affix the red transverse crest that advertised his centurion’s rank. He tucked his vine staff under his arm and looked thoughtfully at the packed kit on his bed. He dragged a pair of soft boots from the clothes chest and managed to squeeze them in as well, in case it rained. It always rained in Britain.

  The horses were saddled by the time Flavius reached the stables, and he gave Bericus a smile of encouragement when he found him already sitting, eyes proud, astride the bay Nestor.

  “Give him his head, and don’t push him. You have a few days to spare. More maybe, if they’ve had to wait out a storm at Grannona.”

  Bericus nodded, and Flavius checked the girth on the second horse, a chestnut of uncertain ancestry usually allotted to Bericus. He swung into the saddle. It was hot, and in the air there was the omnipresent smell of water from the canal, part of the system that drained the fenlands to the south and linked their rivers into a highway for the transport ships. The canals had been dug after Boudicca’s rebellion, with the Corps of Engineers for architects and her sullen, beaten people for a labor force. They were a message cut across the fenlands: Rome does not forget.

  They clattered across the wooden bridge as a barge poled by underneath, loaded with a farmer and his fat wife and a crate of clucking chickens. Market day in Lindum. Flavius wondered if this elderly and contented-seeming countryman had been among the baying horde that had sent three cities up in flames. They said that Boudicca had cursed the Ninth when she died. He thought with a shudder of the news out of Eburacum. It would seem the queen’s curse ran true. Flavius put a heel to the chestnut’s flank. He thought of Londinium burning. Londinium and Camulodunum and Verulamium – all rebuilt now, more populous than ever. They might burn again if he didn’t get to Governor Frontinus before news of the troubles at Eburacum reached the restless tribes of West Britain.

  * * *

  “A transport now. Today. And an escort.”

  The camp commander at Glevum gave an implacable stare at the aquiline face confronting him from under a centurion’s helmet and crossed his hands on his stomach, tipping back in his chair. “I’ve told you: I haven’t got any transport and I haven’t got any escort and the governor sailed three days ago from Isca. That’s in a boat, you understand, and he’s going right round the coast till he finds a nice place to stop. And it so happens I don’t have a spare boat to send after him.”

  Flavius put both hands down on the camp commander’s desk and leaned over him. “Let me explain. I have orders from Legate Gratus at Lindum to find Governor Frontinus and give him a message – before he engages the enemy.” He produced his orders and held them under the camp commander’s nose. “Now if I don’t find the governor before that, the governor is going to be awfully unhappy, and the one he’s going to be unhappy with is you. So you get me a courier ship and a courier’s escort, because I expect we’ll have to ride to catch up to him.”

  “Courier ships are for couriers,” the camp commander said stubbornly. �
�I can’t let anyone that comes along whistle one up for a free ride.”

  Flavius took a deep breath and pushed the wax tablet closer so that the camp commander’s eyes crossed slightly as it approached. “I am a courier, and these are courier’s orders. Now get me that ship.”

  The optio at the next desk had been watching this exchange thoughtfully and now came to his own conclusion. “He can’t be a courier, sir. He’s an officer.”

  Flavius exploded. “Which is more than you’ll be if you don’t get a troop of horse and a galley and a crew to row it out into that river in one hour! Get me that ship or you’ll spend the rest of your tour cleaning latrines in an outpost in Numidia!”

  The camp commander wavered. He was beginning to have the uncomfortable feeling that Flavius was going against regulations, but that he was also in the right. Since neither outranked the other, it was a stalemate until someone gave in, and apparently it wasn’t going to be Flavius. The camp commander mulled it over. Glevum wasn’t really his fort; it had been the home base of the Second Augusta until construction had begun at Isca. Far from holding the exalted rank of camp prefect, the commander was merely the man whose troops had been left behind as garrison. If he held up the governor’s message, the governor might very well send him somewhere to rot for ten years or so. On the other hand, if the governor questioned the use of the courier ship, he had Flavius to blame it on. The camp commander put his fingertips together and thought until he could see Flavius practically hopping with fury.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “I suppose I can give you a galley, and there’s a troop of Spanish cavalry eating their heads off with nowhere to go. You can have half of them. But the galley has to make turnaround and sail for Glevum on the next tide. Once you’re landed, you’re on your own.”

  Flavius started to protest, changed his mind, saluted, and waited patiently while the camp commander scratched his orders on a tablet. He presented them to Flavius, returned the salute, and folded his arms on his chest as Flavius took his departure. It had been a draw, he thought.