by R. W. Peake
“That’s a foolish thing to do, girl,” I gasp. “No amount of money or whatever you have in there is worth dying for.”
I know she cannot understand me, so instead she just stands there looking at me, with an expression on her face that I need no translator to interpret for me. My heart is pounding, and I realize that it is not just from the exertion; she is really very beautiful, her cheeks flushed from our chase, her red hair spread around her face like fire. I feel a stirring in my loins that I do not expect, and I take a step toward her, our eyes locked together. Just as I am about to reach her, she says something in her tongue, then thrusts the bundle out in front of her. That is when I see a pair of the deepest blue eyes I have ever seen, staring at me from within the bundle. A round face, with a wisp of the same color red hair on its head, the babe does not seem frightened at all, just stares at me with an intense curiosity. I feel like I have been dashed with a bucket of cold water, my member going limp immediately from the shame of what I was about to do, followed immediately by the return of the anger. Anger at this woman for trying to use her child as a shield to spare her life, counting on whatever it is in the human heart that wants to protect a helpless infant; anger at being put in this position in the first place, knowing that my orders are very clear and very strict. Most of all, I am angry at myself for this feeling that is in me, a sense of shame at what I am about to do that I interpret as weakness. Looking over the head of the babe into the mother’s eyes, I can see in that instant she knows that there is no mercy to be had. Not from me. Not from Caesar. And not from Rome. For I am a Legionary of Rome, and I do as I am commanded. At least, that is what I tell myself as I plunge my sword, through the baby and into her mother.
That is when I always wake up, soaked in sweat with a pounding heart, despite it being almost forty years since that day that we destroyed the Usipetes and Tencteri tribes as we were conquering Gaul, while marching with Caesar.
Part 1
Chapter 1- Who Is Titus Pullus?
These are the words of Titus Pullus, formerly Legionary, Optio, Pilus Prior and Primus Pilus of the 10th Legion, now known as 10th Gemina, Primus Pilus of the 6th Ferrata, and Camp Prefect, as dictated to his faithful former slave, scribe and friend Diocles.
This is being written in my sixty-first year, three years after my retirement as Camp Prefect, in the tenth year of the reign of Augustus, and 489 years after the founding of the Roman Republic. I have more than 40 military decorations, including three gold torqs, three set of phalarae, two coronae civica, three coronae murales, and a corona vallaris. I have more than 20 battle scars on my body, all of them in the front, and my back is clean, never having been flogged in my 42 years in the Legions, nor turning my back to the enemy. Although my record is not as great as the revered Dentatus, I am well known in the Legions, and I have given the bulk of my life and blood to Rome.
My goal is straightforward; with these words I plan on recording all of the momentous events that I participated in as a member of Rome’s Legions, during a period that changed the very foundations of Rome itself.
When I was young, Rome was ruled by the Senatus et Populus Que Romanum, the Senate and People of Rome. Every year two Consuls were elected from the Senate to run Rome for that year; now, only one man rules, the members of the Senate are his pets, and Rome has never been stronger or mightier than it is right now. The letters SPQR are now famous throughout all of the world, known and unknown.
Although it is no longer in my nature to express excessive pride that some have called hubris in the same way as I did in my youth, it is with some justification that I lay claim to playing a small role in expanding Rome’s fortunes. However, I do so in the name of my fellow Legionaries, those still living and those long or recently dead. For it was with our strong right arms and our sharp blades that such titanic changes were made possible, our legs that carried us as the agent of change to be used by a great man, a man who saw what needed to be done in order to ensure the future prosperity of the city and country he loved more than life itself. His work was unfinished when he was struck down, and it is the very same man known now as Augustus, whom under a different name, that of his adopted father, picked up the ivory baton of imperium and carried it forward to complete what the great man started.
If, dear reader, you are looking for elegant and witty prose, know this now; I am a simple soldier, and have a simple soldier’s story to tell. Despite being literate and possessing a fair hand for simple letters and documents, I have no training or experience in these matters. This is why I am dictating this account to my former slave, scribe and friend Diocles, who is trying his best to keep up with me as I talk. My purpose is to offer an account of these great events, and a viewpoint of the great men of our day, as I saw them and lived through them. I make no claim to be intimates of all of the First Men of Rome, yet I can say that most of them of whom I speak in this account knew me by name. I saw them at their finest, and some I saw at their lowest point, but most importantly I saw them as they appeared to the eyes of their Legions.
Also in this account, I will endeavor to recall conversations and events as exactly as possible, and I must beg the reader’s forgiveness because of the coarseness and crudity of some of the conversations, because they are the words of soldiers and are not the manner of speech one would normally use in polite company. However, I have made a vow to Jupiter Optimus Maximus that I will recount as faithfully as I can all that transpired in those days. One might ask, how is it possible that I will be able to remember conversations that occurred thirty or forty years earlier? First, I have been blessed with the type of memory that seems to retain more than others, and second, even as events were transpiring, I had an idea that they were noteworthy. Perhaps I even had it in the back of my mind that I would one day want to record the events of the day, although I had no idea how I could accomplish this. When I enlisted in the Legions, I was barely literate, able to write my name, and to read very simple instructions and the like, meaning the idea of writing this down would have been nonsense. However I somehow always knew that one day I would be in the position where I either had the ability myself, or I would be able to use someone to create this record. In fact, that was the great, burning ambition of my life, to elevate not only myself but those who follow bearing my name into the equestrian class, an ambition that has been fulfilled.
Now, as I look back on my life, I know that I am nearer to the end than to the beginning, and despite being in good health, only the gods know how much longer I will live. Therefore, I have decided to start this last mission of mine, and will devote almost all of my time to it. In truth, I have nothing much else to do; I am a wealthy man, and while I hold office here in Arelate it is mainly a ceremonial post, leaving me free to come and go as I please, just as long as I am present to march at the head of the procession on festival days. Truth be told, I am bored. I know that I no longer have the strength of body to continue in the Legions, but my spirit is still as if I were a 16 year old lad, on the lookout for adventure and a way to improve my station in life. Such is the cruel humor of the gods; ability may wane, but desire never does.
And I am lonely; I miss my comrades, I miss the Legions and the life of the Legions. I will find myself staring at my armor, my helmet, shield and sword, and thinking, if only I could stop time. But I can’t, so there is no use in dwelling on it. Perhaps that is why those few comrades of mine who managed to survive as long as I have drink as much as they do. In particular, I miss my friends Vibius and Scribonius, but Vibius is dead more than ten years now, and while Scribonius is alive, he is far, far away and with his nose buried in a book, I am sure. Thinking of Vibius in particular only makes me more melancholy, both for his death and for all that transpired between us. When all is said and done, I am a warrior without a war to march to, and I fear that this fact alone, not any sickness of the body or just plain old age will finally send me to the afterlife.
Before I go, however, I have one last job to do, not dissimil
ar to some of the jobs I had to do in the Legions. It will take patience and endurance, but most importantly it will require me to relive certain memories that I have not thought of in many, many years. Nevertheless, now I must turn my mind’s eye to the past, moving back over the years, and the miles, and the battles, to find the young man that I was, the young man who was looking for adventure and a way out of his life, along with his best friend.
Chapter 2: Joining the Legion
I joined the Legions as part of the dilectus authorized by the Senate in the year of the Consulships of Marcus Piso Frugi and Marcus Mesalla Niger, journeying to the provincial capital of Scallabis where the new Legion was gathering. I came to the capital accompanied by my best friend Vibius Domitius and his father, along with my own father and our slaves Phocas and Gaia. Growing up on a small farm outside the town of Astigi, a two day’s journey south of Corduba, it was a farm in name only. My father was completely indifferent towards making the farm anything more than a source of subsistence, and a poor one at that, preferring instead to lavish his love and time on endless amphorae of wine. In short, he was a drunkard, and he hated me with a passion, claiming that I was the source of all of his sorrows, insisting that I had killed my mother. I was, and am very large in both height and breadth, and I was such a large baby that the strain of delivering me into the world was too much for her. The result was that she died shortly after I was born, and it was for this reason my father bore me such hatred that rarely a day went by that he did not remind me of the circumstances of my birth. The one fortunate outcome his feelings for me had, however, was that he was persuaded to swear that I was of a legal age to join the Legions in this dilectus when in fact I was still only sixteen, a year short of the minimum age at that time, albeit with a little prodding on my part. I took this risk because it was the only way that Vibius and I could join together, since he was a year older than I was, and we had been friends for ten years. We met by virtue of my rescuing him from having his head being dumped into a bucket of cac by some older boys one day when I went to town to buy some nails. Vibius was small, both as a boy and now as a man, but he was exceptionally strong, was quick as lightning, and possessed that ferocity that comes from being small one’s whole life and having to fight for everything. We made an odd pair to look at, yet from the day we met we were inseparable, and both of us shared the dream of joining the Legions since either one could remember, making it unthinkable for one of us to join the army without the other, even if it meant that I had to lie to get in. Both of us were so fixated on being the best Legionaries possible that we badgered one of Pompey’s veterans who lived nearby, a man who lost an eye fighting Sertorius and who we called Cyclops, into training us in the exact manner of the Legions. He had been drilling us for two years, several times a week, making us confident that we would acquit ourselves well when we began our real training. In fact, on the day when we bade Cyclops farewell, he took me aside to tell me that he thought I had the makings of a superb Legionary, the highest praise I had ever been given, by anyone.
I was leaving behind my two sisters, Livia and Valeria, and despite the fact I loved both my sisters, it was Valeria I was closest to, because she had essentially been my mother in everything but name. Now they were both married and I was left alone to fend for myself with our father. Our slave Phocas, and his woman Gaia, the names given to them by my father, did their best to protect me from Lucius, but they were slaves and there is only so much a slave can do to a master. Fortunately, my father’s beatings were long since ceased, once I became much larger and stronger than he was, yet that did not stop him from constantly reminding me how worthless I was, and how I would never amount to anything. Deep down I knew that if I did not leave the farm soon, there would come a point where I would strike my father down. When I was young, I possessed a fearsome temper, and had not developed the sufficient amount of self-control to that point to be sure that I would be able to stop myself if my father went too far one day, and no matter what the provocation, any son who kills the paterfamilias faces the harshest punishment under Roman law. Therefore, it was better for everyone that I took this step in joining the Legions, and to that end I made a deal with my father that if he would swear that I was the legal age to join, he would never have to gaze on my face again, a pact that was mutually satisfactory. Of course, nothing is ever that simple; in order to finally persuade him it was in both of our best interests, I swore that if he did not enter into this agreement that he would never be able to sleep soundly again, for I would find a way to kill him.
For Vibius it was more straightforward. He was the youngest of several sons, with no hope of inheriting his father’s business, so his options were limited. He could have been apprenticed to another craftsman, but the dream of joining the Legions burned so brightly in both of us that in truth there was little question which path he would take. Dreams of glory and the riches that waited were too strong a lure to keep Vibius in Astigi, despite his feelings for Juno, a friend from our childhood and to whom he had pledged his eternal love, a promise that she returned. The fact that I was in love with Juno as well was something that I kept hidden for the whole length of our friendship.
Two days after I first donned the toga virilis on my sixteenth birthday in April, about a third of a watch before first light, Phocas and I hitched the mule to the wagon, with Gaia packing the food we would eat on the way, along with various other essentials. All my belongings, or at least those that I planned on taking with me, were in a bundle as part of the load, along with obligatory amphorae of wine to keep my father Lucius properly lubricated along the way. He was much more pliable and cooperative with a skin full of wine at hand, and both Phocas and I were nervous that somehow things would fall apart and my father would try to sabotage the deal we made. He had been more sullen than usual since our agreement, yet to that point did or said nothing to indicate he was having a change of heart. To remind him of the threat I made, I had taken to wearing a dagger, given to me as a gift by our tutor Cyclops. The point, so to speak, was not lost on Lucius, as I saw him eying it continuously, no doubt imagining the feeling of it plunging into him should he try to betray me. Once the wagon was loaded, Phocas went to inform my father Lucius that all was ready. He walked out, wrapped in his cloak, already staggering a bit, since he had not slept but been drinking all night. Without a word, he climbed into the back of the wagon, onto the makeshift pallet that Gaia had prepared, and within moments was snoring loudly. Phocas and I exchanged a glance, then he mounted the wagon and with Gaia beside him and with me walking beside the wagon, we left the only home I had ever known. I wondered as I stopped for a moment to gaze back at the modest farm, its main house not much better than some of the hovels I would come across in Gaul, if I would ever see it again, and if I did, under what circumstances. Then I turned and trotted to catch up with the wagon.
Just after dawn, we met with Vibius and his father, both of them astride mules. Vibius’ father stank of lime and rawhide, marks of his trade as a tanner, but he was pleasant enough. His good spirits I suspected came from the relief he felt at having solved a dilemma without lifting a finger, increasing his family fortunes by subtraction since Vibius was one less mouth to feed. I also believe our choice absolved his conscience of having to make a decision about Vibius’ future since he was not going to inherit the business. Despite that, I could also sense some genuine affection on the part of Vibius’ father towards his youngest son, a feeling only strengthened by what I witnessed on our journey to Corduba. At least I could see a resemblance between the two; Vibius was the image of his father, the same short but powerful frame and bandy legs, as if they had been born astride a mule, with pigeon chests and muscular forearms. And they had more similarities than physical, as I was to learn on the journey. Juno was standing there, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy, signs that she had spent the last night with Vibius in a state other than connubial bliss. Despite the fact that they were as yet unmarried, their love for each other, and the ardor that
young men and women all suffer from combined to make any idea of Juno’s maidenhead remaining intact, as by rights it should have, an impossible burden for the both of them to bear. Normally, this might have caused Juno’s father to exercise his rights as paterfamilias and kill Juno while demanding some sort of punishment from Vibius and his family, except their love for each other and the affection that Juno’s father had not just for his daughter but for Vibius as well, all worked to cause him to turn a blind eye to their passion. I knew that Vibius and Juno were having sexual relations, but Vibius was kind enough and cared enough about Juno to avoid the normal boasting a man does to his best friend about his conquests. Although we never spoke of it, I believe that Vibius knew I loved Juno as he did, and it was a mark of his friendship that he did whatever he could to avoid rubbing what was in effect a failure in my face. Regardless, it hurt; nevertheless, I smiled as I went to Juno to give her a farewell hug. Putting my arms around her, I could feel my heart racing, the unbidden and unwelcome thought coming of what it would be like if there were no clothes between us, if we were alone and……..I shook my head, trying to banish the thoughts that were bound to make my feelings known if I allowed them to continue.
Juno, for her part seemed oblivious to my struggle, stood on her tiptoes to whisper in my ear, “Titus, please take care of Vibius. Make sure he comes home to me.”
“I will,” I promised, and I meant it sincerely.