by Paul Waters
‘That will take months – you know it will. The barbarians are in disarray; if we strike now, we shall secure the frontiers for a generation.’
‘So you suppose. But the risk is too great. I cannot agree to it.’
There was a pause; both men looked at one another in silent incomprehension. Somewhere outside I could hear the quartermaster shouting out orders as the wagon-train was unloaded, and the sounds of moving baggage.
‘Very well,’ said Julian, ‘you have made your opinion clear. No blame can attach to you. You may have that in writing if you wish. Now was there anything else, Prefect? If not, I have work to do.’
Florentius hesitated; his expression tightened. He had not expected to be overruled. He dwelt in an ordered world of fawning bureaucrats where his instructions were followed without question. It was as if one of his servants had suddenly slapped him in the face. Now his eyes swept over the rest of us for the first time, and over the crude little peasant’s room that was Julian’s quarters, with its muddy stone floor and bare walls and cracked windows. He was wondering whether to feel humiliated, whether he could read it in our faces. But everyone was keeping his expression as wooden as the prefect’s, giving nothing away.
‘There is another matter,’ he said coldly. ‘But it would be better, I think, if I spoke to you in private.’
If some goodwill had existed between the two men, I daresay Julian would have led him off by the arm, or asked us to step outside. But instead he replied that whatever the prefect wished to say could be said openly in front of his friends. I suppose he expected some private threat from the emperor, or a complaint about how Gaudentius was ejected from the camp.
‘Very well,’ he went on coldly, ‘as the Caesar wishes. I bring news of your wife. She has given birth to a son. The child was stillborn.’
There was an astounded silence. The young orderly in the small open room beyond dropped his pen. I heard it clatter and roll on the stone floor. Julian drew in his breath, and for a moment stared at the window. His colour scarcely changed.
‘Thank you, Prefect. Was there anything more?’
Florentius shook his head. The self-satisfied curl on his lips had melted away. I think even he realized he had gone too far.
‘In that case,’ said Julian, ‘I believe this meeting is over, so you will excuse me.’ He turned to the chief engineer, who was standing against the wall, looking appalled. With hardly a pause he went on, ‘We were in the middle of inspecting the rope bindings on the bridge, were we not? Let us go and finish, then, while there is still daylight.’
And he stepped out of the door, and after a moment the engineer remembered to hurry after him.
For all my closeness to Julian, it had taken some time before I discovered that he had a wife. Even then it was from another that I heard it, for he himself had not spoken of her.
She was a woman many years his senior, whom he had been compelled to marry when he was appointed Caesar. Her name was Helena. She was the sister of Constantius. Once, in Paris, I had caught a glimpse of her as she hurried along the colonnade towards her apartments; a stocky lumbering woman with straight brown hair and short legs. I do not think there was even the pretence of love between them. Little wonder, for if she resembled anyone at all it was her brother the emperor, a fact that was sure to chill the marriage bed.
But one never heard of women being taken to his room, or boys either. A saying he had picked up from his philosopher teachers in Athens was that a wise man is the master of his passions. He despised grossness in all things, and prided himself on controlling his appetites. Yet I suspect, in the end, his reticence had as much to do with shyness, and not considering himself attractive. He hated the thought of forcing himself on anyone. He had seen too much abuse of power, and would not have men accuse him of it.
That evening, after supper, I walked down to the river with Marcellus. A mist was rising from the water; the air smelled of wet leaves and river mud. Torches illuminated the hulls of the boat-bridge, and the ramp of the causeway, and the guards’ hut by the water. We strolled down the slope to look. Hawsers bound each boat one to the other, and already the causeway across the hulls was almost complete. We greeted the guards and walked on, talking quietly.
Presently Marcellus broke off. ‘See there,’ he said, nodding into the mist.
I looked up. Ahead, a solitary figure stood gazing out across the water. I recognized the square shoulders under the shabby army-issue cloak. Touching Marcellus’s arm I said, ‘We should leave him. I expect he wants to be alone, after today.’
But as we veered off he raised his arm, and called to us to join him.
For a while he stood in silence, gazing out across the Rhine at the mist-shrouded line of forest. Then, in a voice laden with melancholy, he said, ‘Always the night comes on. They are out there somewhere, watching us, like wolves in the dark, waiting for us to falter.’
Wanting to dispel a little of his pain, I said, ‘The word has spread of your victories. They will think twice now. Already you have done more than anyone thought possible.’
He nodded, frowning, and pulled the cloak around him.
‘Yet there is so much more. Standing here at the limit of civilization, with nothing but endless waste beyond, a man feels his responsibility. Death comes to us all, for that is in our nature; but we are the slaves of Fate only if we choose it.’
He fell quiet. Presently he said, ‘I loved my life in Athens, where no question was forbidden, no subject avoided out of fear of heresy. I wept when I was called away; I wept for the end of my happiness. And now I am here, a soldier making war. But I fight so that those men in Athens may live on in freedom, speaking their minds, and dispelling a little of the darkness.’ He gestured towards the forest. ‘Where are their philosophers? Where are their great libraries and cities? They do not want to possess what we have; they want only to destroy it. They would cut down the philosophers along with the rest, if once we let them in.’
The wind stirred, sighing and eddying in the trees. Behind, on the high ground of the camp, the lights on the palisade flickered, and disembodied sounds of laughing voices came drifting down.
Julian turned and looked, the distant torchlight shining in his dark eyes.
‘But I have learned something here in Gaul; I have learned that a man must engage with the world, for only then can he know his true self, and bring it under the rule of reason. Those priests of my childhood feared the greatness in man, and so they denied it. The age of heroes was finished; the best of men were no more than the worst, serfs to their jealous god. Such is their truth, and they would make us in their image. How they would have laughed if I had told them I should drive the barbarians from Gaul. Yet here I stand, and up there the men make merry, knowing their homes and wives and children are safe tonight. I am my own proof that men can be more than they know. But first must come the vision. Without that there is nothing.’
FIVE
THE WEATHER TURNED COOL and clear, good marching weather. Shortly before the army crossed the Rhine, I was passing through the camp when someone called my name.
Dawn was breaking, and turning I was dazzled by the low sun rising over the palisade. I shaded my eyes with my hand. A figure was standing in the path of light, some paces off. His hood was up; but as I turned he pulled it from his head, and then I saw his face.
He had aged, and there was an old livid scar running from his right temple to his cheek, ruining the handsome features I had once known so well. But his blue-crystal eyes and his strong, serious mouth were the same.
‘Durano!’ I cried.
His call had been uncertain. But now, seeing my smile, he strode forward and we fell into a laughing embrace. ‘Come on,’ he said, throwing his arm about my shoulder just as he had always done, ‘I was on my way to breakfast.’ And as we walked he told me how he had recently arrived, coming up from the south with the baggage-train.
At his tent, a lean, olive-skinned girl was crouching, kindling a f
ire. He spoke a few brisk words to her in some barbarian tongue I could not follow, and at this she went off and brought bread and cheese and wine. We sat on the low timber bench and ate, and as I pulled at the rough army-issue loaf and dipped it into my earthen cup of wine, I asked Durano about his comrades I had known in London – Tascus, Romulus and Equitius.
He frowned as he chewed on his food. Tascus, he said, had picked one fight too many when he was drunk, and got himself stabbed in the neck in a tavern brawl. As for Romulus, he had fallen in the battle at Strasburg.
‘And Equitius?’ I asked.
‘He was with Magnentius at Mursa. After that I don’t know. Maybe he made it; many did not.’
We spoke for a while of the great battle of Mursa, and the war between Magnentius and the emperor Constantius. I had been a youth in London at the time. The war had bled away the strength of the West; it had torn apart the imperial family, and eventually, in the exhaustion that followed, had let in the terrors of the scavenging barbarians and – far worse – the horrifying, corrupt treason inquisitions of the emperor’s agent, the notary Paulus.
It was true, too, I reflected, that, but for the war, I should not have met Durano; for it had brought him to London. And without that, my life would have taken some other course. I shrugged. I am what I am, I thought. All I can do is make the best of it. It is no use unpicking the past.
Durano, too, had fallen silent. When I looked round he had shaken the cloak from his shoulders, exposing the insignia on his tunic.
‘You’re a centurion then,’ I said.
‘First rank too. I was promoted two years ago.’
So we talked of that, and then of our lives, skirting around what was painful to remember. And as we talked I remembered the unsure youth I had once been, orphaned and alone, whom he had befriended. He had taught me to fight, and opened my heart to love, when I had supposed I should never be fit for either.
I sensed, behind his easy talk, that he was remembering it too. Wounds heal, I thought; yet the scars remain. He was a tough weathered soldier now. But I had known a younger, tender Durano, who had given much, and taken little in return; and in my youthful folly I had hurt him.
In front of us the servant-girl was going about her tasks. She had fetched a pile of dry twigs and, kneeling down, was carefully adding them in little bunches to the fire, pressing them into the small flame with her fingers. Her black hair was cropped short, so that she looked almost like a young recruit; and round her neck she wore some kind of charm, a plaited torque fashioned in bronze, with a dragon’s head wrought at each end. She caught me looking. I smiled and she looked away. She had a lithe body under her loose homespun clothing, like a young runner’s; but her eyes were not childlike: they were dark and thoughtful, and spoke of old suffering.
Durano, seeing my glance, said, ‘The Germans took her. They kept her as a slave, but she escaped. I found her wandering in the forest.’
I asked him if he owned her.
‘No, I don’t own her. She had enough of that from them. She stays because she wishes.’ He spat on the grass and twisted the fleck of white spittle into the ground with his foot. ‘She won’t speak of what they did to her; but even now she starts awake at night. She hates them, and would fight them herself if she could.’
We sipped at our wine, and for a while we talked of military matters – the coming campaign across the Rhine; his own troop; everyday camp gossip. Then he said, as if the thought had only just come to him, ‘You have a friend in the cavalry. He is crossing to Germany with us, and you are staying behind.’
I turned and met his eye. ‘Yes,’ I said. And then, ‘So you knew I was here.’
He laughed lightly, self-consciously, making the weathered lines crease in his face. ‘I knew,’ he said. ‘But time passes.’
I understood. He had his pride, after all. It would not have done for him to come seeking me out, only to find I did not know him, or did not wish to.
I toyed at the fire with a twig and for a short while did not speak.
Presently I sighed and said, ‘I was young, Durano. I did not know myself. But I owed you better. I should have been killed long ago, but for the things you taught me.’
He made a gesture that I was making much of little. But when I looked at him I could see in his face that he was pleased. At least, I thought, I am no longer the tongue-tied boy I was, who dared not speak what he felt. I reached out and touched my finger to the scar on his temple. The wound had long since healed, but there was a dark furrow where the flesh had knitted.
After a moment he took my hand, and brought it gently down, holding it in his, looking into my open palm.
‘That was a German sword,’ he said. ‘I got it at Strasburg. It was the same day Romulus died.’
‘I am sorry,’ I said.
He released my hand and shrugged. ‘It is war. Men die.’ And then, after a moment, ‘Why don’t you fight beside your friend?’
I drew my breath and frowned at the pale morning. It was something Marcellus and I had spoken of often, and it troubled me.
I said, ‘He is in the cavalry; I am not.’
But Durano carried on looking at me, knowing as well as I that this was not a proper answer. And so I added, ‘He is a better horseman. He would always be looking out for me, and not for himself. That is what he says.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Then you are right to keep away. Each to his own strength. The men speak well of him. They say he’s quite a warrior: he fights from the front.’
‘So I have heard.’ And it was true that one or two friends, thinking they were doing me a kindness, had praised his bravery in battle, giving me blow-by-blow accounts of how he risked himself. To this I had listened and said what was expected. In truth I had rather not have known.
Then, like an arrow coming unseen from the sky, he said, ‘Do you love him, Drusus?’
I looked at him, to see if he was laughing at me. But his rugged face was serious, and his blue eyes returned my gaze without mockery.
So I answered, ‘Yes, I love him. But I cannot do his fighting for him, nor stop him fighting. Some things a man must leave alone, or they break at his touch. I know that now.’
He nodded, and studied my face without speaking. He had never been much of a talker, when it came to what mattered. It was a thing I liked about him.
After a pause he said, ‘It is with the gods; it is better thus.’
Then he drew himself up and stretched, like a man rising from his bed, spreading his tanned arms with their hard muscle and old sword wounds.
Around us the camp was stirring. We finished the bread, mopping up the crumbled cheese from the dish, and drank the wine, and soon afterwards I took my leave, promising to see him beyond the Rhine, when the rest of the army met up with the vanguard.
As we clasped each other’s arms in farewell, he caught me back and said he had a favour to ask.
‘Then ask,’ I said.
He tipped his head to where the barbarian girl was sitting close by, busy with some sewing work. ‘She has looked after me well, and for little reward. She has suffered enough from men. Find her something, will you, if I don’t return?’
I promised I should, and made a sign against ill omen. He laughed at that; and then we parted.
But before I rounded the corner something made me glance back. Durano had already gone; but the girl was still there, sitting on her low stool outside the tent. Her sewing – a scarlet tunic of Durano’s – lay on her lap. Yet her eyes were not downcast. She was watching me as I went, cool and bold and appraising.
Two days later, the vanguard of the army crossed the Rhine.
I stood watching from the western bank, with Oribasius at my side, while in front of us the army advanced over the boat-bridge, in single file, breaking their step to reduce the swaying of the floating causeway. The causeway – a continuous road linking one boat to the boat beside it – extended now from the west bank of the great Rhine river to the east. On the far side, in
the clearing beside the forest, those who had crossed were waiting, formed into defensive lines. Already advance scouts had reported the area by the bridgehead clear; but a river crossing is a dangerous time, and the men were unnerved by the vast German forest, which is full of terrors.
By noon they had all crossed; then there was a lull as the companies re-formed and prepared to march.
I had been looking for Marcellus, and now I caught sight of him, looking fine and straight-backed on his chestnut mare, riding up the line to the head of his squadron. Young Rufus was beside him, talking and pointing, full of happy expectation. I smiled to myself. I might almost have been jealous, for the boy was in love, if only he had known it. For the past days, whenever I had seen him, he had talked of little else but the campaign, and of Marcellus, who would be with him. One night in bed I had even teased Marcellus about it. But there was nothing in the boy’s open simplicity to distrust.
There was a stirring. Severus, seated on his horse at the front, raised his arm and gave the signal, and then the trumpeters sounded the order to advance.
I glanced across at Julian. He was standing a little apart from the rest, frowning silently out at the army on the far bank, watching it move off under the forest canopy. He hated not being in the front line. He would have led them himself, if Severus had not dissuaded him, telling him bluntly how much he risked if he fell.
The land opposite was held by a Suomar, the chieftain of the German Alaman tribe. As the boat-bridge had neared completion and he saw we were in earnest, he had presented himself to Julian and asked for a treaty of peace, which Julian granted on condition that he allowed safe passage for the advancing troops, and handed back the Roman captives he held as slaves. This Suomar agreed to, and the treaty was sworn. Afterwards, with every appearance of friendliness, he had offered us scouts, two of his young warriors, who knew the pathless forest and would guide us.