Next was another boy in a loincloth, who wrestled with a tiger, and then the inevitable dancing ponies, and a slim girl in a red costume with glass beads sewn on it who danced on the broad back of a hippopotamus. A trainer walking ahead of it threw it cabbages.
The crowd was in a good mood, and Emer sat happily eating a box of sticky sweets and licking the honey off her fingers. There was another fanfare, this time from a military trumpet, and a gate swung open at one end as the animals disappeared back to their stalls at the other. A gold cart came out, drawn by white horses with gilded hooves and purple ribbon in their manes. It was loaded with every conceivable example of Rome’s conquests: gold vessels from the temple in Jerusalem, silver bowls full of pearls from the waters of Britain, dark furs from Germany, grain from Egypt, wine in red-glazed amphorae from Gaul, bolts of bright silk, and even twenty pairs of slaves, each matched for height and coloring.
Vettius rose and beamed, and a slave beside him held up an enormous silver bowl full of more little balls, these made of gold and silver with the emperor’s name stamped into them. These were the special prizes, the people’s share of the booty and Domitian’s proof of the breadth of his rule. The fact that the conquests were his father’s was not mentioned, and the people didn’t care. Vettius flung the little balls into the crowd, and they scrambled for them with a savagery that was soon appalling. Slaves in the imperial livery were throwing others all through the tiers. There was another trumpet fanfare, and while Vettius continued to toss his prizes with an aim that grew steadily more evil-minded, a garlanded box behind the imperial one began to fill up. The occupants were pointed at eagerly by the crowd, and ignored by Vettius and the aedile beside him, who was supposed to be running the show. They were a display for the crowd only, the same foreign “residents” who had sat with Nyall Sigmundson in their special box in the new amphitheater. They rated no extra courtesies from the imperial box as they sat to watch the spoils of their former territories tossed to the crowd.
Forst shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Are you ready to go?”
Emer shook her head. “There will be animals again later.” A little silver ball dropped from the air, and she shot a hand out and snatched it, laughing, while a bald man with a wrinkled chin glared at her from the seats in front of them. “Look!” She twisted the ball open eagerly and shook the little bronze ticket out into her hand.
“What do you need with a pair of fancy slaves?” Forst said sourly.
“No, look, it’s a pearl necklace!” Emer sat looking at the ticket with greed. Never in her life had she owned anything like a pearl necklace. If it was long enough, she could take two of the pearls off and make pins for her hair, too. She caught Forst’s expression. “And don’t say I mayn’t have it! I’ll take Quartus and collect it myself if you won’t!”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t have it,” Forst said. “I reckon that would be too much to ask. But Quartus can fetch it without you.” He glanced at the burly slave sitting next to her. Quartus belonged to Appius Julianus, and he was big enough to defend a pearl necklace. “And without me.” He looked at Vettius with distaste. “I’m damned if I’ll take that toad’s dole with a ticket in my hand.”
It was late when they came back to the farm. Forst left Emer alternately holding the pearl necklace against herself in front of a bronze mirror, and trying to get two pearls off the ends to put in her red hair. The mares were settled in a paddock of their own and seemed to be less twitchy, and a barefoot urchin who belonged to the master’s household was sitting on the paddock rail waiting for him.
“Clear off,” Forst said automatically. “You’ll scare them.”
“I won’t,” the boy said. “And I’m not your slave. They aren’t your horses,” he added as an afterthought.
“Close enough,” Forst said. He raised a hand, and the boy hopped off the fence, out of reach.
“Master wants you,” he said. “Maybe you’re in trouble. They’ve been looking for you all day.” He stuck his tongue out and ran.
“How many mounts have we got,” Appius said almost as
Forst came through the door, “that are ready to go into the line?”
Lucius Paulinus was with him, sitting in the chair by the general’s desk. He gave Forst a friendly greeting, but his face was angry.
Forst thought. Most of the horses ready for the sale ring were only broken to saddle. They would go to a cavalry training camp to be schooled with the recruits who would ride them. Horses with enough training to go straight into the field were fewer. “None,” Forst said after he’d reviewed the stock on hand. “Not enough to do any good. A dozen maybe. That’s not counting the three hundred head we just sold to that Spanish officer.”
“Have they been delivered?” Appius asked.
“Not yet. But he’s paid. Or at least I have an army treasury chit for them.”
“Give it back,” Appius said.
Forst whistled. “He’s going to be mad.”
“I imagine. But the horses are going to the Rhenus.”
Forst’s hands stiffened, and he spent a moment carefully relaxing them. “Is there a war there, sir?”
“I have not been informed of one,” Appius said. “But the emperor has requested all the remounts we can give him, delivered to him personally, so you can draw your own conclusions, like the rest of us.” He shot Forst an ironic look. “You will be in an admirable position to find out, Forst. You are going to take them to him.”
“Me?”
“You.” Appius’s face turned serious. “You’re the only person I’ve got to send with them. Unless you think that old Alan can make an Alps crossing at his age?” He paused. “Or that I can’t trust you in Germany?”
Forst flinched, but it was a fair question. “No,” he said slowly. “I’ll be taking them for you. And you can trust me.” Forst hoped he was right.
As he left he heard the talk start up again behind him. Lucius Paulinus was speaking loudly, in a black, angry voice.
“You can bribe the emperor with three hundred horses if you want to, Appius, but he won’t put a leash on Vettius. And don’t tell me he doesn’t know what Vettius is doing.”
“I have no intention of telling you that,” Appius said grimly.
“Do you want to ask me again why I wouldn’t work for him?” Lucius said.
* * *
My dearest Flavius,
The most awful thing has happened since you left and poor Papa is just prostrated by it and so depressed and only mopes about the garden instead of business, and Mama has gone to bed, and I simply don’t know what to do, you must talk to the emperor. Your father told Papa that he might be able to help, but I do think that you could do so much more, don’t you, since you are on his staff?
Flavius blinked his eyes and read the first few lines of Aemelia’s letter again. He held it sideways, as if it might make more sense that way, and peered at it. It was wound on a wooden pin, and it seemed to go on without end. He turned it around again and plunged on.
If you can’t, we are just going to be ruined, and there is another baby on the way, but now I don’t know what to do! It is such a disgrace, and all because of that terrible man that you never liked, poor Papa should never have got involved with him, but of course he didn’t know. But now he can see that Marius Vettius is the worst kind of a thief and all the judges seem to be eating out of his hand and of course all the evidence is forged and Pausanias is only a freedman.
Vettius. Flavius grasped the name and held onto it. Who Pausanias was, he had no idea. And it appeared that Aemelia was pregnant, again, which always seemed to render her hysterical. He revised that thought guiltily. The last time she had lost the baby in her fourth month, so no wonder she was upset. But something besides the baby had reduced her to a state of total unintelligibility.
He read on and gradually began to sift the details from the letter. His mouth had a furious set to it by the time he had finished.
* * *
“
My dear Julianus, I never interfere with the law.” Domitian was stretched out on a couch having his back rubbed by a blond slave with a pretty face and bowed legs like a frog’s. He talked to Flavius over his shoulder.
He looked like he was half-asleep.
“It would appear that the law has already been interfered with, sir,” Flavius said. He felt like a fool standing at attention talking to a man who was lying face down.
He expected Domitian knew it.
Domitian made a clucking noise with his tongue. “Then I am sure that the courts will put things to rights. I never tolerate dishonesty, you know. But I really can’t run around personally arguing lawsuits; it isn’t dignified.” Flavius sighed. He really hadn’t expected much more. The emperor was setting a high record for spending money, and some of it was certainly coming from Vettius. Looked at one way, Domitian was being remarkably tactful. He might have simply confiscated the disputed estate and let both claimants whistle for their money. Flavius hoped he wouldn’t think of that.
“Do let me know how it all comes out, Julianus,” Domitian said as he left. The slave poured a sweet oil between the emperor’s shoulder blades and rubbed it in with the heels of his hands. “I do hate to see you troubled.”
* * *
Forst sat on a rock that looked down into the horrifying gorge that fell sheer from the side of the road. The horses were being given their morning ration by the team of stableboys he had taken with him. It took too long and left too much time to think. The last time he had crossed the great barrier of the Alps, he had walked, with a rope around his neck, in the company of a hundred other hopeless and captive souls and a guard commanded by a soldier who spoke no German and made his wishes known with a stick.
It was all a long time ago, and it had all been buried under the neat layers of a pleasant life that were built up in Emer, the horses, and the small whitewashed house with a garden that Appius Julianus had given them. He hadn’t even wanted to go back to Germany, not for years, not since he had married
Emer. Now suddenly all the layers were stripped away again, and he felt naked under them, going back to Germany with Nyall’s ghost by his side and three hundred head of horses to be used to fight his own people.
Even the horses were part German, many of them, bred from a German stud that Correus had brought back from the Rhenus seven years ago. It might be no bad thing to be a horse, Forst thought, and not know the difference.
One of the stableboys shouted to him, and he picked himself up and dusted the dirt and gravel off the seat of his breeches. The ground was cold, even through his boots. He swung himself into the saddle, grateful for the horse’s warmth against his legs.
The loose horses were boxed in between the riders, and they went slowly, hoping to meet no traffic in the opposite direction. One spooked horse on this road could panic the lot of them. Forst was grateful that they were all cavalry-trained. It made them more unflappable. They were weapons, Forst thought. He might as well be shipping a load of new pilums to the Rhenus forts.
That thought had been coming into his mind more often with every day on the road. And every night it had been replaced by sad, disjointed dreams in which he rode side by side again with Nyall and Kari and the rest. But the dreams always ended with a fight against the Romans, and at the end Nyall and Kari would be dead, and Forst would look down at himself and find he was wearing Roman armor.
One of the stableboys was whistling. Forst recognized the tune and gritted his teeth.
Oh, we’re going to fight the heathen in the
wilds of German-ee,
On a tall horse, a black horse, a
horse named Victor-ee!
It was an old cavalry canter song that Alan used to sing. Alan had served in the auxiliaries when Claudius was emperor. Now they were fighting in Germany again, maybe fighting the last sad remnants of Forst’s own folk. The cavalry canter tune went maddeningly, insistently through his head, and last night’s dreams came up in his mind’s eye in cadence with it. The
Germans had never had enough horses – only the lords could ride into battle.
Such thoughts were dubious companions for a man with nothing but a grief to keep him company. It may have been small wonder that by the time they were on the downward side of the trail, into Augusta Raurica, Forst was no longer sure to whom he was taking those horses – or himself.
XIII The Shadow of the Hawk
The Rhenus looked peaceful enough: fat fields checkered and sleeping under the August sun, and here and there the lean shape of a patrol galley slipping by along the river. Fields on the eastern bank had been taken under the plow as well, Forst saw, and much of the timber cleared. This was the Agri Decumates, the triangle of land between the upper reaches of the Rhenus and the Danuvius that the Romans had moved into ten years ago, and the lands nearest the river had become as Roman as the old colonies on the western bank. But there was a dark forest smell to the air all the same, which Forst could feel almost like a cloud blowing out of the wild lands beyond the neat fields.
They passed Argentoratum under the shadow of its gray stone walls. Forst’s hands began to shake on the reins, and his horse jibbed and fidgeted under him. Argentoratum had been timber built twelve years ago, and when Forst had seen it then, it had been burning. One of the last desperate defenders in that fort had slashed a short sword into Forst’s thigh so that he had fallen and his horse’s hoof had come down on him just above the ear. When he woke up he had been tied to a stake in the ground, and an irritable-looking man with what Forst thought now must have been the staff of Aesculapius, the Romans’ healer god, on his belt buckle, had been pouring wine into the wound. The ragtag camp of the beleaguered Romans hadn’t been far from the Rhenus, but for Forst the Free Lands across the river had suddenly become as distant as Valhalla above the rainbow bridge.
Now there was Argentoratum Bridge, stretching solidly across the shining sweep of the river, broad enough to carry three hundred horses and one bad conscience. It would be so easy to turn them and cross over into the Free Lands. Forst was a warrior, or he had been one, and like most of his kind he had never thought overmuch about his honor. Honor was there, it was part of a man, like his head. He did not go against it, ever. There was not much more to it than that. But now the question had got tangled. There was his honor as a man of the Semnones, a debt to Nyall’s ghost, maybe. And there was the honor that he had sworn to Appius Julianus to take his horses to the Roman emperor.
They rode past Argentoratum Bridge while Forst thought it out with very little conclusion except that there would be more bridges before Moguntiacum.
Beyond Argentoratum and the city that circled the fortress, the road grew bare of civilian traffic. A farmer in a field by the road was hurriedly cutting hay, in the manner of a man who shutters up a house before a storm, as if he knew that war was coming and wanted his hay in before it was ridden over. He watched them with nervous eyes as they passed. It was the first sign that Forst had seen of the frightened scurrying that a war casts over the villages in its path. The stableboys seemed not to notice. They had been born in Rome, where wars did not come. But Forst could feel it, the way an animal in the field feels a hawk overhead. The horses’ shoes made a harsh rumble on the road like moving thunder.
But they weren’t at war here, that was the odd thing. The west bank of the Rhenus was well into the Roman zone, with the river and the new forts of the Agri Decumates for a buffer. He was still puzzling over that when the farmer threw himself flat in his hay like a rabbit. A stableboy screamed a warning that ended in a choke of terror.
Forst’s first thought was: Where did they come from? Then he saw the old grove of oaks with the thick woodland on either side that ran nearly down to the river. Oaks were sacred to the Mother. They would have left them alone when the land was cleared. The wood was no more than two acres, but it was older than the Roman-kind, thick virgin forest deep enough to have hidden the thirty men who now seemed to rise up out of the earth at his hors
e’s feet.
They had been waiting for him. He thought furiously: Why didn’t they give us an escort at Argentoratum? He had his sword out now, hacking desperately at the spear points rushing at him. Because he hadn’t stopped at Argentoratum to ask for an escort. Because he had had it in his mind to take the horses over the next bridge to whoever ruled now in Nyall’s place. Forst’s sword knocked a spear shaft to splinters, and the man rushed in, pulling his own sword. His tunic and breeches were gray-green like the oak grove.
Forst slashed his sword into the other man’s ribs, and he twisted and yelped. It was the first sound they had made, and it ended in a choke as Forst drew his sword back and stabbed with it, through the throat. The man’s head flew back openmouthed, and Forst saw with a furious recognition that the pale hair was knotted on one side of his head. But the man was young, and the face behind the beard was not one that he knew. The smell of death was in the air, fear and sweat and his own anger, but there was something wrong with this strange, silent fight. Germans went loudly into battle, shouting curses at the enemy. And they should have cut him down by now. There were more than enough to do it. He swung his sword, breaking another spear, and risked a look around.
Most of the attackers were fanning out, catching loose horses to ride. It was the horses they wanted. The stableboys were a panicked huddle at the center of the herd.
At least the question of honor had been answered for him. To forswear his word to Appius and take the horses across the river might have been something he could do. To let them be taken from him with an ambush for an excuse to hide behind was not. He kicked his heels hard into his horse’s flanks and dropped the reins long enough to put two fingers in his mouth and whistle.
The horses threw up their heads in confusion. The whistle mimicked the notes of the cavalry Advance, but they were riderless. The smell of blood began to spread fear inward through the herd like a ripple. They bucked and snorted. Forst whistled again, and they panicked. They galloped back and forth along the road and into the wood and the plowed fields. A few plunged into the shallows of the river. Forst rode for the nearest of the attackers and caught him from behind as he swung himself onto a rearing horse. The horse screamed and trampled the man under him, slipping in the blood on the paved road.
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