"She's gotten away," the one called Luca complained.
"We'll pursue on foot. The Attacotti have the endurance to run down a horse."
His men groaned.
"Chances are she'll spill."
"What about the others?" a companion asked.
"With the girl gone, we'll tie them and take them-"
"No!" cried Savia.
Then there was a birdcall again, sharp and urgent. The barbarians froze. They could hear a low rumble of approaching horses.
"Romans, Arden."
There was no hesitation. The barbarian whistled just once, and the brigands melted into the trees, vanishing as quickly as they'd appeared. Only their leader hesitated, stooping to scoop the seahorse brooch from the mud. Then he too was gone. Only a rocking of disturbed branches showed where the Celts had been.
Savia remained still as a statue, shocked by the sudden turnaround. Clodius reared up from the dirt to fumble for his sword and then stopped in humiliation.
His captor had stolen it.
Valeria had left them all behind, pounding down the track in fear and exultation, breathless at the power of the animal under her, the horse's muscles rolling like the waves of the sea. She felt guilty at leaving the others but knew she was their only hope: she must find help! And then suddenly her mount stumbled and she was flying through the air, landing so hard that the wind was knocked out of her. She tumbled over and over before fetching up against a log.
The idiot steed had thrown her.
The horse got to its feet, saddle askew, and limped off with a snort and an accusing look, as if it was her fault.
Now the barbarians would catch her.
But then there was the sound of approaching hooves from ahead, many of them, and she stood shakily, as filthy as her would-be abductor. Dazed, she saw the dull glitter of armor and weapons through the leaves and slowly recognized the purposeful rhythm of Roman cavalry. Far more men, in fact, than Galba had left with, pounding hard to save her! She swayed with emotional exhaustion, relief and joy overtaking her. Two leading scouts pulled up and shouted their bizarre discovery of this bedraggled figure. Next came a trumpeter and standard-bearer, then the officers…
"Marcus!"
She ran down the track past the Roman scouts, all decorum forgotten, legs half bare, her cloak gone to reveal the shape of her shoulders, her stola torn and covered with mud, twigs the only decoration in her hair. In the saddle ahead was the tall praetor, resplendent in a mail lorica of golden leaf, a traditional crested helmet on his head and a red cape rippling behind, the very picture of Roman military bearing.
Lucius Marcus Flavius sawed on his reins in shock, his white mount skidding to a halt and his cavalry bunching behind him. "Valeria?"
"Brigands, Marcus! They might kill the others!"
"By Hades and Gethenna!" a familiar voice cursed. "I leave that young fool for a day-" Galba! Waving his arm, the senior tribune led a contingent of men around the couple at a charge back toward the cart.
Valeria tried to grasp Marcus, reaching for his leg, but before she could do so, he dismounted and unhooked his cape to cover the girl, acutely aware of the curiosity of his remaining horsemen. Her disarray was bewitching, the beauty of her body apparent. Then she was wrapped, the enclosure of the cape like a heated blanket, and Valeria sagged with relief. Savia will be scandalized, she thought, but I'm going to lift my face until he kisses me. Yet Marcus wouldn't comply with her wish. Instead, he held her by both shoulders.
"What are you doing alone?" By Jupiter and Mithras, he thought, his intended bride was as dirty as a pig girl and as lost as Ulysses. He was embarrassed.
"A barbarian tried to steal me!"
"A barbarian?" He still didn't comprehend what had happened.
"Bandits, Marcus! They made us prisoner but I stabbed his horse and rode off. Clodius tried to save us, but-"
"Who?"
"My escort! A new tribune!"
Marcus remembered the name from dispatches. "And where is this escort?"
She pointed. "Where Galba went!"
Finally he understood her urgency and remounted; then looked down in confusion. She lifted her arms. After hesitating a moment, he swung her up behind him, and her hands circled his waist, breasts pressed against the hard armor of his back. For the first time since leaving home she felt truly safe. Then they pounded back down the lane the way she'd come with thirty more men around, swords unsheathed, ready for an enemy. When they pulled up at the cart, Clodius was standing alone, unarmed and forlorn.
"Where are the bandits?"
"They fled into the forest."
"It was Valeria!" cried Savia, appearing from a hiding place behind the cart. "She unhorsed the thief!"
Marcus glanced over his shoulder, still not comprehending.
"I stabbed his horse with my brooch pin," Valeria explained again.
"They ran when they heard your horses," Clodius added gloomily. His clothes were filthy, his scabbard empty, his neck red. The blood from his wound had dried like a bib on his bright new chain mail, baptizing the armor with a reddish brown stain. "They took nothing but a few pinecones."
"Cones?"
"Stone pine, Marcus!" Valeria said. "For the ceremonies of Mithras. I was bringing them to you as a present, but the barbarian decided they would protect him-"
The praefectus shook his head. "Cones. By the gods."
"They must have slipped through as traders," a centurion suggested. "Or over the top at night. A bribed sentry, perhaps. It was a bold gamble."
"A gamble for what, Longinus?"
"Loot, I suppose."
"They wanted the lady Valeria," Clodius said.
"My escorts were willing to die before that happened," Valeria interjected. She didn't want the men punished. "Brave Clodius had his throat cut."
"Brave who?"
The junior tribune saluted in pained embarrassment. "One-Year Appointed Tribune Gnaeus Clodius Albinus, reporting for duty, praetor."
"By the horns of Mithras, it gets worse and worse."
Clodius bowed his head. "This is not how I imagined us meeting, praefectus."
"Nor did I. Well, welcome to Britannia, junior tribune. It appears you've had quite a reception."
Clodius stood stiffly. "Let me remount, and we'll see the reception!"
"So I'd hope. And your horse?"
He glanced around, immediately miserable again. "It ran away."
Someone laughed. A sharp glance from Marcus silenced it. Then the praefectus glanced again at the woman behind him. "Go to the cart and repair your clothing." It wasn't a suggestion, it was an order. She slipped off the horse's rump and went to Savia, who'd retrieved Valeria's cloak and now bundled her in it.
"And for the sake of Mars, find something to bandage your throat, tribune," Marcus growled. "You're dripping like a gutter." Clodius retreated to comply.
There was noise, a crash of branches, and Galba and his troopers came bursting out, horses lathered, men cut from vine and twig, their leader furious and frustrated, glancing at Valeria with disbelief. He saluted. "No sign of them, praefectus."
"No sign?" Marcus looked at one of the mounts. Titus was sitting behind a trooper with a rope bound around his wrists, face turned away. "Who's that man there?"
"One of mine, ambushed. We found him unconscious and bound."
"And these brigands? Are they smoke that vanishes?"
"They're quick, and they know this wood, I think. Every trail and every hole." Galba looked at Valeria again. "My apologies, praefectus. I thought us almost home and had orders to collect those remounts. If I'd insisted your lady stay with me-"
"It was my decision to hurry, not Galba's," Valeria corrected. "Nor Clodius, nor Titus. I simply yearned to see you and insisted on the quickest way."
Marcus scowled. "Yet all of you were surprised. And if Galba hadn't met my exercise near the Wall and told me you were near, we might not have rescued you at all."
"Fortune played with us
this day," the senior tribune observed grimly. "Ill and then good. If gods exist, then perhaps they're at war with each other."
"It was the one true God who saved us," Savia spoke up. "I was praying."
Marcus ignored this. "But why Valeria?"
"For ransom," Galba said. "A wealthy husband-to-be, a senator's daughter. I wouldn't have thought any man so bold or foolish, but this rogue must be both."
The praetor nodded glumly. It was no secret in the province that his family was rich. Every man credited it for Marcus's appointment to the Petriana. "Galba, how far did you hunt?"
"No more than a quarter mile."
"Then we'll run them down yet." Marcus turned to the troop of cavalry behind him. "Decurion! Half to the right, half to the left! Now, into the trees! Find them!"
The Roman horse plunged gamely into the forest, but it was hard going. The animals stumbled on the uneven ground, branches swatted at the rider's helmets, and brush caught on weapons. They looked, and sweated, for hours, but had no better luck than Galba had. The Celts had disappeared like mist before the sun.
The bodyguard Cassius, gladiator and slave, had disappeared with them.
XIII
If all the spectacles of human existence, a wedding is the most public and private of ceremonial contracts. It is that rare moment in Roman life where a display of affection is allowed and even encouraged, and yet the true emotions of the principals remain hidden behind a veil of ritual and revelry. A Roman wedding is always a mixture of love, strategy, breeding, and money, and a Roman marriage is a mysterious combination of companionship, alliance, selfishness, and separation. No outsider can understand its complexities. As for sex, well, that is always simpler with one's slaves.
Yet it seems that if Valeria is to be fully understood, then her relationship to her new husband is crucial to that understanding. Perhaps this makes me a voyeur, but I'm a voyeur in quest not of sexual titillation but of high truth: the political consequences of betrothal. At least that's my justification. I'll confide in these private pages that it's the unraveling of the human heart, not the frailties of empire, that really sustains my odyssey. So I'm human. What of it?
My informants in this matter are two. Valeria's handmaid Savia was as shamelessly curious as I am, and eventually won from her mistress a bride's assessment. Savia comes back to my interrogation chamber in a mood of tentative triumph, sensing how necessary she's become to my investigation. She still hopes I'll buy her. She tells much of what I am about to relate.
The other that I interview is the centurion Lucius Falco, the veteran who fought with Galba. He lent his modest villa for the wedding and became a temporary confidant of Marcus. There's some interesting nobility to this soldier, I sense, a quiet belief in happiness and justice that some would judge admirable. Others, naive.
There is no requirement in Roman law for a wedding ceremony, of course. Even custom often dispenses with formal ritual. Yet Falco tells me that he and his wife were eager for the union to be formalized in their home, located near the fort of the Petriana on Hadrian's Wall.
"Why?" I ask him, to judge the honesty of an answer I already know. Like the other soldiers I'm interviewing, Falco is a practical and stoic man, his military bearing giving him dignity and his legionary ancestry giving him pride. Of mixed Roman and Briton blood, he is the son of a son of a son of soldiers of the Sixth Victrix-each generation following the next into the legion as the army strains to maintain its numbers, each retiree adding to the estate his family has established in the lee of the Wall. This history gives him a sophistication I can make use of; he understands the mix of dependency and resentment that swirls on both sides of the barrier. He knows how permeable a Roman border can be.
"My wife urged that we host it in order to be polite," he replies to my question. "Lucinda is sympathetic to officers' wives on the Wall. It's a male world, lonely for highborn women, with brides strung out along eighty miles of stone and mortar. And a wedding is as daunting for a maiden as it's longed for."
Not as candid an answer as I would like. "You'd also attain social prestige by hosting the wedding of a commanding officer," I suggest.
He shrugs. "Undeniably. My family's house has been pressed into duty for generations. We've given shelter to the good and the bad: to inspectors like you, to military contractors, to magistrates, to generals, and to their wives, mistresses, and courtesans. It's the Bite."
The Bite, I know, is what soldiers such as Falco pay their commanders to be kept at the Wall and not sent overseas. The bribes also buy leave to tend to crops and animals. Playing host to the parasites of officialdom is a way for an officer to ingratiate himself.
"You didn't resent this new commander?"
"I had good relations with Galba and expected the same with Marcus."
"You didn't have to choose between them?"
"I try to stay on good terms with everyone. A man advances only as fast as his friends allow it."
"I appreciate your candor."
He smiles. "Lucinda had another motive. She said cavalrymen have the patience of a battering ram and the delicacy of an elephant. She wanted to befriend Marcus's new wife and give her encouragement."
"You agreed?"
He laughs. "I complained how much it was going to cost!"
"Yet the wedding was an investment."
"Luanda told me Marcus might ride to my rescue one day. I told her that on the night in question, Marcus would be too busy riding his new bride!"
"And her response to that?"
"She hit me with a spoon."
I shift restlessly, considering how to get to what I really want. "Your wife is not highborn herself is she?"
For the first time Falco looks at me warily, as if I might know more than he assumed. To judge what my informants tell me, I have to know something of who they are, so I ask ahead. "She's a freedwoman," he says. "My first wife died, and Lucinda was my closest slave. We fell in love…"
"Not so extraordinary these days. A love match, I mean."
"I consider myself a lucky man."
"What I'm after is the degree of love between Marcus and Valeria, the mood you saw on their wedding night."
"Wedding night! That's the least typical of all the nights of a marriage. And yet we could all see that Marcus was nervous…"
XIV
The wedding of Marcus and Valeria began in the long blue twilight that reigns in the spring of Britannia's north. Clouds blew away to leave the sky as clear as a river pool, the first evening star glowing like a welcoming lamp. The lights of the villa of Falco and Lucinda were lit in reply, candles flickering among hanging garlands and oil lamps throwing a wavering blush. Slaves hummed songs of merriment in anticipation of a banquet of such excess that there'd be delicacies enough even for the field hands to share: chicken in fish sauce, pork with apricot preserves, milk-fed snails, stuffed hare, salmon in pastry skin, lentils and chestnuts, onions and leeks, oysters packed in seaweed, and shrimp hauled in brine barrels from the coast. The kitchens steamed and smoked with grouse, pigeon, stewed lamprey, and haunches of venison. There were platters of olives and cheese, sweet cakes and sweetmeats, boiled eggs, pickled vegetables, and dried figs. Flasks of honeyed mead glowed like amber, while Briton beer and Italian wine filled flagon and cup. Some of the food had to be imported, given the paucity of imagination of Britannia's cooks, but Marcus and Falco had spread enough coin to quiet any grumbling about Roman snobbery. So much money, in fact, that it ensured a steady stream of well-wishers and gifts to the villa door.
An aristocrat's honor was the honor of his neighborhood. The alliance of Marcus and Valeria promised to elevate the status of not just the Petriana cavalry but also the adjoining village. A senator's daughter! Even the natives coveted an invitation.
The loan of his villa had given the centurion Falco a tentative familiarity with his new commander, of course. Marcus had money and position, and Falco had experience and local ancestry. Each could appreciate the usefulness of the ot
her, and the centurion tried to cement a relationship as they dressed.
"So what's your feeling about ending bachelorhood, praefectus?" Falco asked conversationally as Marcus carefully folded and draped his ceremonial white toga, the Roman muttering about the intricacy of patrician dress. "Are you gaining a companion or losing freedom?"
Marcus frowned at himself as he tilted one of Lucinda's face mirrors this way and that. He disliked ceremony and was uneasy being the center of attention. Both, unfortunately, came with his new command. "You're the married one-you tell me. I've gained this posting and a new chance. What Valeria will become remains to be seen. She seems sweet enough."
"Sweet! By the gods, she's beautiful! Eyes like a starry night, skin like the blossom of spring, the curves of a Venus-"
"You'd better not let Lucinda hear such poetry. She'd be jealous."
"She was jealous the moment that nymph rode in on her mule cart, looking better after ambush than other women after their bath. I envy you this wedding night."
Marcus shook his head. "Thank the gods it's even occurring. That thief half stripped her. To almost lose the girl near my doorstep, and with it my appointment… what near disaster I escaped! Can you imagine the fury of her father? The outrage of mine? I've come a thousand miles to make my reputation, not squander it."
"You'll have your revenge. Galba's informants are offering gold, and barbarians will sell their own mothers. Meanwhile, you have a more delicious conquest."
Marcus's polite smile betrayed unease. The truth was that he was awkward with men and shy with women. Females had always seemed utterly mysterious, frequently frivolous, and deliberately unpredictable. Moreover, he'd never had a virgin. "I know little of young women," he confessed.
"That will change tonight."
"It's not that I'm not looking forward to her. It's just-"
"You're a good horseman, no?"
"You're the cavalryman to judge that."
"Women are no different than a horse. Slow and gentle is the best way. At the least the result is children. At the best, love!"
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