Barbarian Princess

by Barbarian Princess (retail) (epub)

  “By all means, my dear, let Cook have his stove,” Appius said good humoredly. It was pleasant to have no greater dilemma to resolve.

  “We really should put in an appearance at the emperor’s birthday games, don’t you think?” Antonia went on. “Flavius and Aemelia and her parents will be dining with us afterward. I told Cook a family party. Nothing too elaborate. Oh, and the kitchen cat has had her kittens – in our bed, I’m afraid.”

  Appius began to laugh, his dark eyes crinkled shut. Antonia always saved these small domestic crises for a time when she thought they would amuse him. It came with years, that instinctive knowledge of how the other one thought. “Nothing particularly important,” she had said. Only the things that made a marriage familiar and comfortable thirty years down the road. He didn’t love her, not with that dreadful ache and longing that his sons seemed to feel, but he licked the honey from his fingers and laughed again and thought that he hadn’t missed so much after all.

  XIX “…And Roll in Me Arms”

  Correus sat with his feet in a pot of hot water in the privacy of Silvius Vindex’s tent. The first week out of winter quarters was always murder, no matter how much drilling they’d done over the cold months, but it didn’t do to let his equally footsore troops know it.

  Centurion Vindex gave a grunt of pleasure as Julius knelt and poured a hot kettle over his feet, as well. A pot of wine was warming on the little iron brazier in the corner of the tent, and Vindex gave Julius a smile of thanks. His own body servant had been left behind with a broken arm in the hospital tent at Deva, the souvenir of a day’s hunting in the wilds of Ordovician country, and Julius, whose devotion to his master generally extended to the master’s friends, had adopted Centurion Vindex for the interim. He poured two measures of wine from the spouted pot on the brazier, and Correus and Vindex accepted them gratefully.

  “When we get back to civilization, Julius, I’ll buy you something,” Vindex said. He leaned back on his elbows on the camp bed and wiggled his toes in the pot of water. His sleek cap of dark hair was powdered with dirt and bits of grass from the turf they’d cut that afternoon. “I want a bath,” he said thoughtfully, weighing his dislike of being dirty against the fast-running waters of the snow-fed stream below the camp. It had looked depressingly cold.

  “Bathe in this,” Correus said, splashing his feet in the warm water. “You’ll freeze solid like a Gorgon’s stone in that river.”

  “Maybe I’ll just get used to being dirty,” Vindex said.

  They were griping as usual over the discomforts of a campaign trail, but there was a gleam in their eyes all the same. They had spent the end of last summer detached from their legions under Agricola’s direct command, chasing the Ordovices. Cadal, whom Correus rather liked, had made one desperate stand near Bryn Epona and lost the better part of his war band to Agricola’s mixed force of legionary detachments and auxiliaries. It had been a short, fierce battle, a matter of tactics and a good general and the old, familiar discipline that was the army’s pride.

  Cadal recognized a certainty when it stuck its helmet crest in his face. He had shown his practical side and consequently got the best possible terms from Rome. Cadal might lack that bright fierce flame that had lit Bendigeid – and then consumed him – but Cadal made peace and Cadal would survive.

  After that, Agricola turned his eye to Mona, which had grown into a druidic stronghold again in the years since Suetonius Paulinus had burned it and where Cadal’s malcontents had gone rather than face the inevitable. The island attack had been decided upon at the last moment on the advice of the frontier scouts, who had said bluntly that they wouldn’t turn their backs on Mona just now. There had been no fleet handy, and Agricola mulled it over for a day, then picked out the strongest swimmers from his auxiliaries, and launched a surprise attack.

  Cadal’s malcontents and the outlawed Druids had quarreled with each other over everything that could be quarreled over. The Ordovician warriors had waved their spears and shouted for one last fine charge for honor’s sake, and the Druids had looked solemn and made great magics and tried to stave off Rome with a handful of mistletoe. And in the end, with each faction ordering the other to do it their way, they had squabbled and put curses on each other until, seeing Agricola’s auxiliaries emerge like so many water-demons from the surf, they lost their heads completely and surrendered.

  It was the sort of mopping-up operation of which Correus had never been particularly fond, although the aftermath had been reasonable – by Roman standards. The warriors might as well have stayed with Cadal in Bryn Epona and swallowed their pride, Correus thought grimly, watching a transport ship settle in the water as her hold was loaded with chained figures. The Druids they could catch had been executed, but it was thought that most of them had sailed for Hibernia and found sanctuary there. Agricola had looked wistfully across the Hibernian Channel at the island in the west and told his second-in-command that one legion with the right commander could take it. But not this season. There were other horizons that beckoned still more strongly.

  They wintered around the new fortress at Deva, and Correus breathed a sigh of relief because the holy women on Mona had been left pretty well alone, and he had made sure that the woman who had once been a princess of the Silures was still among them. He didn’t see her, but he sent a letter to Ygerna by courier to tell her that her mother was still alive. He tried to sound like an elderly uncle when he wrote it, but he wondered if Ygerna would be deceived.

  But it didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered now but the new campaign and the fiery little general who led it. They were on the march with the first thaw, north through Brigante country in two columns, one from Deva in the west, the other from Eburacum in the east, laying down a string of forts that would keep the Brigantes quiet while Agricola took his legions northward. They would reach the unknown wilds of Caledonia before they stopped, where the Picts, the Painted People, lived in their mysterious mountain fastnesses.

  It was high adventure, a campaign to make a reputation on, and Correus and Vindex would have traded years of sore feet and no baths to be part of it. This was what they had signed on for, what they had endured the miseries of their cadet days for, to go where no Roman feet had marched before and see what no civilized eyes had ever seen. Lucius Paulinus would be gnashing his teeth with envy, Correus thought, mildly surprised that his brother-in-law hadn’t shown up on the frontier before now to get in on the fun. This was the campaign that every officer waited for. They looked at each other over their wine cups and grinned.

  By late July they reached Brocavum on the edge of the Lake Country, only a bit more than a day’s march from the Ituna Estuary that marked the boundary of Brigante lands from their wild kinsmen the Selgovae to the north. It was wild land, gray blue and open, with wild water everywhere, and an edge-of-the-unknown feel to it that made them just stand staring northward when their legion halted its march at midafternoon. Even the news that the emperor was dead hardly touched them here on the edge of the wild.

  Vespasian had died on 23 June of undulant fever and a stomach chill caught in Campania, and now there was a new emperor in Rome – the Praetorian Prefect Titus Caesar.

  “Tchah!” Vindex made an irritated noise through his teeth. “They’ll be sorry they did that.” For the first time a son had actually succeeded his father to the purple of the Principate, and opinion that no good would come of it had run high in Rome since Vespasian had made his intentions known. It was a peaceable way to settle the succession, but Titus had led a rackety life and the Senate gloomily prophesied the emergence of another Nero.

  “I don’t know,” Correus said. “Flavius likes him, and I’ve a better opinion of Flavius’s notions than I used to.”

  Vindex chuckled. He had watched the brothers snarl at each other all through the days of their cadet training and thought that it was a wonder that one of them hadn’t strangled the other before they had got things sorted out. “Well, unless he recalls everyone wholesale,
it won’t affect us much out here.” They were eating what passed for dinner in a camp cook’s vocabulary behind the newly dug ditch and wall of Brocavum. “Still, I’d like to be comfortable about matters at home. What does your father think?”

  “He seemed to think well enough of him when Flavius got his posting,” Correus said. “Of course, that was before Vespasian died. I hope there’s no doubt it was natural causes. We’re so far behind with the news out here, Rome could be overrun with little men from the bottom of the sea, and we wouldn’t know it for weeks. Father said he was the sort of man to make – gestures. When Britannicus died – Flavius and I were babies then, but Father told us later – Titus was supposed to have finished off the wine that Nero gave Britannicus and been sick for days. They were the same age, about fourteen, and very close, and of course there was talk about Britannicus’s death for years, especially after it got to be so plain that everyone would have done better if someone had poisoned Nero right off and made Britannicus emperor. The story about Titus may be just palace rumor, but Father said it sounded like him.”

  Vindex looked dubious. “In the guards’ camp they said it was as good as a death mark to look cross-eyed at him. And I don’t much like his habits.”

  “Boys?” Correus shrugged. “Not in my line, but plenty of men do. I never heard they got any political favors. And if you mean his women and his wild parties, we’re hardly in a position to fault a taste for those.”

  “He has a bad reputation,” Vindex said. “It makes Rome look bad. That Jewess of his—”

  “‘That Jewess’ is Herod Agrippa’s daughter.”

  “And her reputation is worse than his. Damn it, man, she lived with her brother!”

  “Well, she’s not living with him now,” Correus said tolerantly. “And I don’t care if he goes to bed with billy goats if he keeps the Senate and the army in order. He’s not a Nero, Vindex, you wait and see. Besides, he won’t have a prayer of keeping his Jewess now, poor woman. The Senate will be as obnoxious about her as you are.”

  “I am not being obnoxious about her. I know what you’re thinking. But you can’t equate your Freita with a middle-aged tart who married her uncle and committed incest with her brother. The Senate had every right to squawk.”

  “The Senate squawked because she’s a Jewess,” Correus said. “They didn’t give a damn about her sex life. They were just afraid he’d marry her.”

  “Well, it would raise a hell of a stink, and that wouldn’t keep things stable.”

  “No, I suppose not. But he has my sympathy, and I’ll reserve judgment on his fitness for the purple until he’s had a few months to dig in.”

  “Oh, I, too,” Vindex said magnanimously. “Being as I don’t expect I’ll be asked for my views anyway.”

  They laughed and finished the disgusting remains of their dinner. The supply train hadn’t caught up with them yet, and the camp cooks were improvising. They didn’t cook very well even under optimum circumstances. They strolled off arm in arm to check their sentries and watch the moon finally come up over the heathered hills. A fox called somewhere in the distance, and the steady hum of insects swelled all around them as night fell.

  “We’ll be off again in the morning,” Vindex said, and took a deep breath of the sharp, clean air.

  Correus nodded, his eyes bright with the same spark. It was like standing at the edge of the world. He could bury a lot of doubts in the excitement of that.

  * * *

  The thin wooden leaves of the tablet sat staring up at him from his lap, weathered gray against the red leather fringe of his harness tunic. Orders, sealed with a lump of scarlet wax along the edge, inscribed unmistakably, indelibly, with his name and rank. Orders. The supply train had come in, with messages from the northernmost post station stuffed into the lead wagon among the grain sacks and onions.

  The tablet looked up at him blankly, and he flicked a fingernail against the wax seal. He had taken it back to his tent because he didn’t want to open it; and it was easier to not open it here, where he could sit and stare toward the blue green land in the north instead, than by the supply wagons, where his friends could give him the curious eye.

  He slit the wax with his thumbnail and swore when it split the nail down to the quick. Like the rest of Agricola’s army, his hands and nails were callused and ragged from a summer of digging roads and ditches out of new land. He stuck the broken nail in his mouth for a second and then spread the wooden tablet open on his lap.

  A naval posting at Misenum, Italy. A fat promotion for a career centurion. Correus made a face and read it through again. A shadow fell across the neat writing on the tablet. “Thinking of refusing a gift from Caesar?” Julius Agricola inquired. “Unwise.”

  Correus stood up and saluted, and Agricola dragged another camp stool into the tent doorway and sat on it. He motioned Correus back to his own stool. “What’s the posting?”

  “Marines,” Correus said sourly. “Out of Misenum.”

  Agricola whistled.

  “I don’t want it,” Correus said flatly. “Did my brother do this?” The tablet carried the emperor’s cypher – all military orders did – but he suspected that in this case Caesar’s gift was literal as well as figurative. It came too close on the heels of Titus’s accession.

  “I expect he may have,” Agricola said. “But you’re overdue for promotion, you know. You’d have been recommended before now if you hadn’t been so damned useful here, and I don’t know why you didn’t put in for it yourself. I was going to hunt you out a more senior post in Britain, but someone else’s good intentions seem to have got in first.”

  “Flavius. I don’t want it,” Correus said again.

  “What makes you think you have a choice?”

  “Isn’t there any way?” His eyes drifted to the north again.

  “Well, you could refuse it,” Agricola said. “If you’ve a fancy to command the Eighth Cohort of the Second Augusta for the rest of your life.”

  Correus grimaced. An officer with an eye to his future didn’t turn down a promotion. Not if he ever wanted to see another one. “Couldn’t you—?”

  “No. I intend to walk very carefully with the new emperor. If you think this campaign is important to you, Julianus, mull over what it means to me.” The general’s jaw was shadowed with a stubble of beard, and his hands were as worn as Correus’s. When Agricola said, “Dig a ditch,” he, too, got down in the ditch and dug. He would take the north of Britain, Correus thought, if only because wanting to would burn him up if he didn’t. And every step he took would be with that in his mind.

  “Don’t grieve over it, my friend,” Agricola said now. His eyes, too, were on the blue green north, but they were ruefully honest under the dark brows. “You might get more glory in the fleet, where you can keep it to yourself. And you need this posting, you need the experience, if you’re going to go beyond cohort centurion. Your father would tell you that. And someone thinks you’re going somewhere, or you wouldn’t have got the job.”

  Correus knew that, and he knew he should be grateful. The Misenum post was a way to give him naval experience, considered necessary to a well-rounded career – for a man who was going to the top. With most centurions, the army didn’t bother.

  Agricola’s strong-boned face swung around and laughed at him. The general had taken his helmet off, and the twilight breeze lifted the thick brown hair. His neck scarf was powdered with dust from the dried edges of the turf blocks with which they had built their camp. “You’ll get other chances to go exploring, lad. Take your medicine at Misenum and you might grow up to be a general. Maybe I’ll leave Hibernia for you.”

  Correus smiled. “Not if you get bored, sir, you won’t.”

  “No,” Agricola admitted. “I doubt I would. But there’ll always be some place no one else has looked at before. You’ll find one. And for now, you’ll say your good-byes and get on your horse for Misenum.”

  He stood up and put his helmet back on his head, and Correus st
ood, too, and saluted, trying not to make it too plain how much taller he was than the general. It didn’t seem to bother Agricola. Agricola knew perfectly well that he could take on any two of his troopers, probably including Centurion Julianus, and tie them into sailor’s knots with each other. He nodded briskly at Correus and set off to see what else needed straightening.

  Correus put the wooden tablet into his marching kit and started packing. He could say his farewells to Vindex and the rest tonight, and maybe they’d get drunk together. Vindex was due for promotion, too, but the chances of them landing in the same spot were a million to one. Too many good-byes in the army, he thought, knowing that there was another good-bye he was going to have to say, and no pious self-delusion was going to get him out of it.

  * * *

  They got drunk that night. Or at least Vindex and his cronies did, while Correus sat like an Eastern god on the floor and drank enough wine for three men but somehow stayed sober. They put a wreath of heather in his hair and sang to him:

  Farewell for I must leave thee, I’m off to the army,

  And I might not be back when it’s over,

  So come and hold me hand and watch the moon arisin’

  And roll in me arms in the clover!

  They ended it with a long-drawn howl of appreciation, and someone brought in a woman they had found with the baggage train who looked as if she’d do most things for a price. They put a wreath of heather in her hair, too, and presented her with a flourish to Correus, but he just smiled and shook his head and gave her a coin anyway. She took it and the cup of wine someone gave her, and after a while he saw that she had gone away again with Centurion Aquila. They sang some more, old marching songs and “The Tribune’s Horse,” and a rude one that Vindex knew called “The Tax Man of Upper Aquitania.” Correus laughed and started them on “The Quaestor from Paestum,” which had verses that they made up as they went along, but his heart wasn’t in it. He sat on the floor with his legs crossed under him and his hands on his knees, looking more and more like an Eastern idol with the heather wreath on his head and his face blank as a stone. Vindex sighed and shook his head and finally called for Julius to come and take his master back to his tent before he froze solid that way.