by Paul Waters
Soon the port official returned with a detachment of men. They were not imperial troops, but some sort of local militia, little more than youths got up in rough, makeshift uniform. But they moved with sturdy pride, and their weapons – hunting knives or odd swords – were oiled and polished. There followed more discussion in the lee of the warehouse. I could not hear what was said. Once or twice their leader, a young captain with a broad, farm-boy face, glanced up with a furrowed brow. But the shipmaster, at least, was smiling. He was rid of us; and after some brief negotiation we were led away, out through the walled gateway of the docks.
We passed through a run-down quarter of ships’ chandlers, coopers, sail-makers, and the kind of low taverns one finds at any harbour. Most were shuttered and closed. From a doorway a gaunt-looking street-trull called out and flashed her breast at Marcellus; but then she noticed our fettered wrists, and seeing there was no business to be had she abandoned her pretences and hawked and spat.
‘Why is it so quiet?’ I asked the captain. ‘Where are the people?’
The captain frowned. ‘There is no work. They have gone away.’
He had an honest, open face, and it seemed to me he was not happy with the task he had been given. So with a smile I asked how the town managed for itself, with all the trade gone.
He gave me a wary look, to see if I was somehow trying to trick him. No doubt he had been told I was a dangerous criminal. But then, with a shrug, he answered, ‘We manage well enough. We have to. Now stop talking.’ And after that he moved away from me.
That night we were shut up in an ancient cell built into the bricked inner arches of the town wall, the kind of place municipal authorities use for common thieves and such people. It was dripping-damp and smelled like a latrine. But before he locked us in for the night the young captain unchained us, and tossed in an armful of clean straw from the horse-manger outside. Next morning he brought goat’s cheese wrapped in a cloth, and milk and rough barley-bread, and allowed us to stand in the open and wash at the trough.
As I splashed my face I glanced about, taking care to be discreet, for the captain had told his men to kill us if we tried to run, and they were as tense as hounds on a hunt. We were in a paved open area just within the town gate. Around us, a convoy of men and transports was assembling. I asked someone who was standing at a mule-cart what was happening.
He eyed my clothing – I was still dressed in the formal tunic I had worn for Aquinus’s funeral, dark-red heavy wool, with a black cloak over – and asked where I was from. When I told him he said, ‘The roads are not safe to travel. Is it not so in Britain? No? Then you are fortunate. No man will go alone if he can avoid it. The barbarians lie in wait and pick off the unwary, like wolves taking lambs, and the emperor does nothing.’ He kicked at the wheel of his cart as if he hated it. It was laden with crude earthen pots and dishes, packed with straw. ‘I was a rich man once,’ he said. ‘I had a thousand iugera of land beside the Rhine. Now I am reduced to this.’
‘What happened, sir?’ I asked.
‘What happened?’ He regarded me sidelong, to see if I was mocking him. But judging I was in earnest he continued, ‘It is a story told a hundred times, why tell it again? The Franks came from the forest across the river. They burned my home and took my land.’ He made a blowing sound at his raised palm, as if he were blowing away a speck of dust. ‘All gone, everything I worked for; and now I am here. We live like prisoners behind the walls. My wife takes in sewing, and I am reduced to peddling this cheap ware, which once I should not have deigned to eat from.’
Someone called him. But before he walked off he added, ‘My wife calls it fate. She takes it calmly.’
‘But not you, sir?’
‘A man should be master of his fate,’ he answered. ‘We had what we had, and we have lost it. Well I have said enough. It is treason to speak thus.’
It was well after sun-up before we set off.
I had supposed we were the only prisoners; but before we left, six old men were led down in chains from the town. They had well-bred, intelligent faces, and were dressed in what once had been fine clothes. They were the kind of solid citizens who form the backbone of any provincial city, and just those whom the notary liked to implicate in his webs of treason, so he could confiscate their wealth. They gazed hopelessly at the ground, and did as they were ordered. I could not speak to Marcellus, for we were being kept apart, but I caught his eye and he frowned back at me. We had seen the same oppression in Britain, before we drove the notary out.
The old men were loaded onto an open cart, and we were told to climb up after them. Then the captain shouted the order for the gates to be opened.
From Boulogne we moved east, passing through good, flat farming land. But good though it was, the fields had been left untended, and were growing over with tall grass and saplings; and if we saw a farmhouse or settlement, it had a wall thrown up around it, crude work of wooden pikes or scavenged masonry, put up in a hurry. Then, arriving at Rheims, we found the city gates shut against us, and no traffic on the road, though it was daylight still.
We halted, and the captain shouted up at the grey, corbelled walls. From the gatehouse heads appeared, townsmen with spears. Were we mad, they called, when they had found out who we were, thinking to travel at such at time? Had the captain not heard then? German tribes had swept in from beyond the Rhine; word was that the fortress city of Cologne had fallen. No one knew how far the barbarians had penetrated, or how great were their numbers. But great or few, there was no Roman army to oppose them, and each city of Gaul was forced to look to its own defence.
So at Rheims we waited. It seemed that no one knew what to do. Days passed; but every delay that kept us from the notary was welcome.
We were kept on the upper floor of a disused townhouse, with bare boards and crumbling plaster, and a window that gave out onto a muddy court.
One early morning, the young captain appeared with the guard who brought our breakfast. He stood leaning at the door while we ate; and after a while he spoke. His orders, he said, had been to take us to Trier, the Western imperial capital. But now, since the road was no longer safe, he had decided to take us to Paris, where he could hand us over to the authorities and be done with us.
He had spoken awkwardly, and when he was finished he waited, shifting uneasily from foot to foot. He was a simple farm-lad with an unruly mop of curling, corn-coloured hair; he would have been happier building hayricks, and there was too much decency in him not to feel shame at holding prisoner men who were old enough to be his grandfather.
Sensing he was eager to talk, I asked if he would eat with us. As I had guessed, this was the lead he had been waiting for, even if he did not know it himself. He came forward and squatted down, and one of the old men pushed the common platter of bread and cheese to him, and asked him about his family.
His father, he said, farmed a plot not far from Boulogne – you could see the fields from the high part of the town, where the old temple was. He had two brothers; he was the third son – the youngest.
‘I too have a son,’ said the old man. ‘He is in the army, serving the emperor on the Persian border. I expect I shall not see him again.’
The captain paused and looked at him. ‘I am sorry, sir,’ he said through the food in his mouth. ‘I do not understand why the world is as it is.’ He fell silent, and chewed with a furrowed brow. After a few moments he said, ‘There are baths close by. If I take you there, will you promise not to try and run?’
‘Run?’ said another, giving a bitter laugh. ‘Where to? We are too old to run. We have no money; we are already half dead. I will not lose the last of my dignity.’
So we got our first proper bath for many days, a naked row of grim, unhappy old men, the captain, Marcellus and I.
We fell to talking, as one does at such times, and soon the talk turned to the barbarians.
‘Sometimes weeks pass and you do not see them,’ said the captain, shaking his head, ‘and then, whe
n you think it’s safe again – there! They have you.’ He made a motion across his throat with his finger. He knew of whole families – father, mother, children, grandparents – who had been found cut to pieces on their farms, when they could just as easily have been spared. On one farm he had found two young children, a son and a daughter, strung up from the trees behind the grain-store. ‘The girl,’ he said frowning, ‘was naked. She was six years old. My brother knew the family.’
‘Is that why you joined the militia?’ asked one of the old men.
The captain paused before he answered. ‘I wanted things to be better,’ he said.
The old men looked at one another. It seemed cruel to ask the obvious question: why he was escorting helpless townfolk far from home when he should be protecting his farm and family. I suppose he sensed it, for presently he said unprompted, ‘I try to do my duty. I don’t know what else there is.’
I asked what had happened in Gaul. He told me how last year the emperor had sent a general to set things to rights, but instead of fighting the enemy the general had declared himself Augustus. So the emperor sent another general to remove the first. Then the prefect had been caught plotting, and he too was ordered back to court. Little wonder, he said, kicking the water with his naked foot, that the German tribes were tearing Gaul apart.
After this, one of the old men said, ‘And what then of the notary Paulus?’
The captain pulled a face. He threw a quick, wary glance across the steam-filled room before he answered. Narrow spears of winter sunlight were shafting in from the little windows under the tiled, domed roof. No one else was there. Even so, he lowered his voice before he spoke. The notary, he said, was supposed to be at Trier, where he had taken up residence in the imperial palace while he conducted his inquisitions. He paused, then added, ‘But one of my men has got it from a tavern-keeper here in Rheims that the notary fled when the German barbarians took Cologne.’
‘Where to?’
The captain shrugged. ‘Who can say? All of Gaul is like a stirred-up wasps’ nest. No one knows anything for sure.’
Private looks were exchanged. Marcellus said, ‘Who then is at Paris?’
‘I heard the emperor’s cousin is on his way. The emperor has promoted him to Caesar, and sent him to Gaul to save us.’
‘What, Julian?’ cried the old man beside Marcellus. ‘Can the emperor do no better? Julian is little more than a boy, and certainly no soldier.’
‘So people say. But word is he is surprising everyone of late. He has been fighting the barbarians in the south, and now he is marching north. They say he is an honest man.’
‘Then he must be rare as a butterfly in winter,’ said the old man bitterly. But he had little else to cling to, and so he said no more.
And thus it was, that winter, in my twenty-first year, and all because Cologne had fallen and the barbarians had come swarming across the Rhine, that I came to Paris, a small city I had never heard of. It changed my life forever.
It had rained all day, grey gusting swathes of it, driving in from the west. But, as we approached, the clouds finally frayed and parted, and the sky flared into a towering sunset, reflecting on the river in the valley ahead, and glancing off the wet terracotta tiles of the city spread before us. The town itself was unwalled – the first in Gaul I had seen without walls – but in the middle of the river, on its own boat-shaped island, a squat, ancient-looking citadel rose up, its sheer walls mottled in the slanting sunlight.
As we descended into the low valley the road divided. The eastern fork led to a square-walled army fort on the hill; the other, which we took, continued south, down to the bridge and the island citadel.
The cressets had been kindled by the time we reached the inner courtyard. We were received into a high, vaulted chamber that was divided into iron-barred pens, like a place for sheep or cattle. Here we waited, while a bored-looking clerk copied the details of the warrant onto a wax tablet, and called each of us before him.
When my turn came he peered at me, peered again at the warrant, then with a flick of his hand beckoned Marcellus up from behind.
‘Wait over there,’ he told us, gesturing to one side.
We waited, watching while a steady traffic of officials passed to and fro, dressed in their long dark tunics, clutching papers and tablets and scrolls, some deep in conversation, others staring fixedly ahead, all seeming busy, none of them noticing for an instant the prisoners and clients waiting to be seen.
‘All this activity,’ muttered Marcellus, who had no time for bureaucrats, ‘and yet the province burns.’
But presently a dapper young man in green and scarlet livery came up and asked us to follow him. He wore a wide belt of brown leather, studded with silver. It was fine and showy. I noticed it bore no weapons.
He seemed rather pleased with himself, but he was civil enough. He conducted us from the chamber, along one of the many corridors, and then up a flight of ancient stone steps, worn down by generations of footfalls. We climbed for some time, past tiny window embrasures that showed the river and land beyond, until we emerged at last into a wide high-walled courtyard somewhere in the upper part of the citadel.
In the middle a huge old cedar grew black against the darkening sky, rising from the flagstones. On one side, high up, a wooden walkway followed the line of the outer rampart, below the parapet. Here and there, narrow window-slots looked down from stone walls; but no lamps burned in them, and there was no sign of life, no sounds of voices – only the distant sweep of the river far below, and, in the boughs of the cedar, the indignant chirruping of some night-bird.
‘This way,’ said the liveried youth.
Soon he paused at a studded door with an iron handle. He unlatched it, and gestured us inside, saying others would come soon.
Then he left us.
Something was not right. I frowned to myself, trying to think. The room was long and whitewashed and unadorned, with a narrow mullioned window at one end. Someone had lit a lamp for us; it flickered from a recessed ledge. By its light I saw there were two beds, neatly made up with clean sheets and bolsters; and against the wall a table and a washstand.
I was about to comment on this to Marcellus; for one did not, in my experience, encounter prison cells furnished in such a way. But before I could speak, he called from where he was standing by the window. ‘Come, Drusus, look here!’
He had opened the shutter and was fingering the stone mullion. ‘See, there are no bars. It is narrow, but we could get through.’
I moved up beside him. ‘Yes,’ I said, tapping the rough stonework, ‘I think so.’ I paused and frowned. Then, with a jolt, I realized what had been troubling me. ‘But wait, Marcellus!’ I cried. ‘Did you see keys or locks? Did you hear the guard close the bolt?’
He looked at me. And then I leaped past him to the door, and heaved on the iron-wrought handle. The latch clicked, and the door swung open.
I peered out across the dark courtyard, with Marcellus pressing up beside me.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘unless—’ But before he could finish I caught his arm and hushed him. On the far side of the great courtyard a door had opened, showing distant figures silhouetted by the light within. We drew back inside, and eased the door closed. Soon footsteps sounded outside on the flags. There was a tap, a silent pause; then the latch stirred, and two servant-boys entered, bearing in their arms a pile of towels, and, on top, two neatly folded tunics.
‘I am sorry, sirs,’ said one, ‘for keeping you waiting. I expect you are tired after your journey, and will be wanting to wash and change. I have sent for warm water. It will be here directly.’
I stared at him, and after a courteous pause he eased past me and set down the towels on the washstand, while his companion began unfolding the tunics, one on each bed. They were of fine white linen, with a waterleaf border embroidered in green.
Seeing me staring he turned with a look of concern. ‘I know, sir; forgive me. But I could find nothing bett
er at this short notice. If you will tolerate it for today, I shall have something more suitable made up by morning.’
I gaped, first at the clothes, then at him. He smiled, then gave a small, polite cough. He must have supposed I was simple.
‘My lord Eutherius sends apologies,’ he continued, ‘that he has not been able to greet you personally. But he hopes you will feel disposed to join him later for dinner.’
I looked at him, but it was Marcellus who spoke. ‘Delighted,’ he said, in his best charming voice.
It was as well he was there. I do not think I could have uttered a word.
I thought my twenty years of life had been eventful and varied; but nothing had prepared me for Eutherius.
We had stripped and washed, and dressed in the fine new clothes that had been brought for us. Later the servant-boy returned. He escorted us through the citadel, along dim corridors lit by bare lamps, through cavern-roofed halls, and down stone stairways, until we came to a part of that great rambling fortress that looked less like a barbarian stronghold and more like a rich man’s palace.
We came at length to a room that put me in mind of some costly woman’s tiring-chamber, decorated with silk hangings of vermilion and pink. Silver lamps in the shape of swans burned on a wrought standard, suspended on little chains. At one side, three upholstered couches had been placed around a low polished table. Arranged upon it, in green glass bowls, were figs and sweetmeats, and tiny cooked eggs garnished with herbs.
‘Please,’ said the servant, making a civil gesture for us to sit. The lord Eutherius would be with us directly.
So we sat. The servant went off, and we waited, alone and unguarded, and stared about at the festoons of silk, and at the little glass bowls, and at each other.
Presently voices sounded outside. The double-doors with their painted panels opened, and a large middle-aged man swept in.