by Manda Scott
The mist had cleared. The parade ground had been so smooth a man might have pressed it with a flat iron, but neither of these facts made any difference to the quality of the display. Bán reached in under the brown mare’s belly and brushed dried sweat from her girth. It was not her fault that she was mediocre, or that he had spent all of his spare time with the Crow, making the infinitesimal progression towards mounting and riding, when he could have been practising with her. The mare was safe and had nothing to recommend her beyond her colour, which had matched the others of the troupe and had lent them a temporary uniformity, at least until the cantered circles had started.
“Did Galba say anything?”
Rufus leaned against the post that marked the stall’s edge. The Gaul had been made a decurion in Corvus’s new cavalry wing, and one would have thought he had better things to do than lean against a lump of oak talking to a probationary who had yet to be placed in a unit. Corvus had charged him to keep an eye on his protégé, that was well known. It was not always appreciated.
“Galba said nothing.” Bán stooped under the belly of the mare and began to work under her mane where the lathered sweat had dried in creamy waves. “The emperor called for his meal before he had a chance to step down from the stands.”
“He’ll do it later. You’ll get your place in the cavalry yet. He’s seen you in practise, and he knows who you are.”
“He hasn’t the slightest idea who I am. He never comes down here. Perulla will make the decisions, and whatever he might have thought before he’s just seen enough to change his mind for ever.”
The mare had changed legs unexpectedly just before the end of the charge and come raggedly to the halt half a pace ahead of the line. It was not the only mistake, but it was the most obvious and had made of Bán a spectacle that he never wished to repeat. Bán said, “If I spend the next twenty-five years marching in line with a hundred stinking Gauls, it will be my own fault. If you see Corvus, tell him that from me. And he can have the Crow. I wouldn’t wish on him the life of an infantry packhorse.”
“Corvus wouldn’t take that mad bastard beast as a gift if you died and left him in your will. In any case, it’s not over yet. Don’t give up hope.” Rufus patted the mare on the rump, raising dust. “Don’t stay too long here. Get yourself to the parade ground and find something useful to do. Unless Civilis is lying through his ugly German teeth, there’ll be something worth watching before the emperor finishes his lunch.”
If Civilis had lied, more men than Rufus had heard him. Bán took a shovel and basket to gather horse dung from the parade ground and found three ahead of him doing the same, with more brushing the turf free of straw and others repairing a board in the stands where a nail may, or may not, have been loose. Gaius had retired to Galba’s headquarters within the legionary camp of the XIVth half a mile upriver. If anything did happen, there was little chance of their seeing it, but still they worked on the parade ground and Perulla did not stop them.
The sun rose above the top edge of the forest as they worked. It was the best time of day; for a while, the river livened, became a rippling of molten silver that lit the trees along its banks so that what had been black became green and one could imagine the forest, if not a friend, then not so implacable an enemy.
The alarm was raised first by the Praetorian guards stationed outside the door to the governor’s lodgings half a mile upstream. The German horse guard had been dismissed, which had offended many of those so recently instated, but they had retired to their quarters and stabled their horses to await a further command. The source of the commotion was not immediately apparent. Galba’s residence was the best guarded in the whole of Upper Germany, and only one truly desperate to die would risk attacking it. Still, it seemed that someone had, and that men on horseback were riding out in defence of their emperor. It was a while before the probationaries, leaning on their shovels and brushes, saw anything but a knot of hard-ridden horses, with cloaks flying behind. Some thought that the horse guard were back but there was too much armour and it flashed too brightly and, as the group came closer, it could be seen that there was gold at the head of it—that the emperor led himself, on his flashy white war-horse, with every piece of harness metal bar the mouth-bit in gold and his cuirass embossed with images of Alexander. The man was no rider; he kept his balance by his hold on the horse’s mouth and the bit was savage. Blood ran freely in the foaming saliva. Bán turned away and so was first to see the attackers.
“Chatti!”
He thought he screamed it but his voice had lost its power. In his place, the pied colt screamed for him—a shattering challenge that took all the fury the beast harboured and gave it voice. The horse was far back in the lines, but the sound of it reached them as if he were close and the noise alone made the rest of the probationaries turn towards the river. To a man, they paled. Everybody knew the Chatti—the tribe of men bred for war, descendants by reputation if not by blood of the renegade Arminius, who emerged from deep in the forest to harry the villages and settlements on the Roman side of the river. They knotted their hair as the horse guard did, but wore the scalps of their vanquished dead in knitted capes about their shoulders and hung rotting skulls from their belts. Bán saw thirty or more of them surge up out of the water with their horses, shake themselves like dogs and mount, swinging rust-dulled greatswords of a size that could part a man’s skull as a hand knife parts an apple. He had opened his mouth again to shout the unnecessary, reflexive warning when they thrashed their horses to a gallop and the war howl began.
It had been different when the horse guard had raised the cry on parade—more ordered, less terrifying. Hearing it now, one could begin to understand why the Gauls said that their champion Vercingetorix had been defeated, not by the Roman legions, but by four hundred Germanic horsemen riding for Caesar. It was said they had hacked limbs from men for the joy of it, leaving them to die slowly on the field, and now, hearing their cry, Bán could believe it. The sound carried death in the heart of it, more certainly than the river. A man would have to be tired of life, or supremely self-confident, to ride against the Chatti.
The Emperor Gaius Germanicus, it seemed, was such a man. Riding hard at the head of his Praetorian Guard, he raised his voice in the cavalry paean, realized he could not be heard above the clamour, and wheeled his sword above his head instead. Light flared on iron polished to silver and an edge as fine as a man could make it. It was not a weapon that would last against the killing blades of the Chatti, but none could tell him that.
The men of the legions had seen the danger. The XIVth were fastest to respond but even the probationaries were dashing for their weapons. Bán hesitated, wanting to go to the Crow, but there were tales of what happened to men who deserted in the face of the enemy and he would not have it said he showed fear in the first attack. In any case, the Crow, of all horses, could look after itself.
He was halfway across the parade ground when the horn sounded from the riverside, a long, sighing note with another just after. He sprinted on, trying to remember whether the command to charge had that second shorter note beyond it or if what he had heard was, instead, the order to regroup on the standard. He was at the gates when it sounded again, louder, and the actions of the men around him told him all he needed to know. He clung to the gatepost, doubled up and panting and struggling for breath to speak.
“He’s stopping us? We’re not to go out to help?”
He asked it of the air and the gods because he had thought Galba neither a coward nor a traitor, but the command did not make sense. Perulla the centurion answered.
“That’s the ‘hold firm’ they’re sounding. If you want to hear it as the charge, you’re welcome. Myself, I think we should hold firm exactly where we are.”
The centurion was not a tall man—the Romans never were—but he was broad and he wore his parade ground armour as if born to it, the mail shirt long ago moulded to his shoulders and back, wearing thin beneath the arms and in the folds above
the belt. He stood upright between the gateposts with his left hand on Bán’s shoulder and his right arm thrust across the opening so that none of his charges, turned dull-witted by the war howl or the promise of action, might throw themselves out.
None of them did. They gathered in a ball behind him instead, crunched together, swaying. Bán was at the head, the unvoted spokesman. “What do we do?” he asked.
Perulla smiled, dryly. It was the first time Bán had seen him do so.
“You should go to that bloody horse of yours and see if you can shut it up before Gaius orders its throat cut. After that, I think perhaps we might get ourselves in a line and march over to hold firm by the governor’s residence. If we get a move on, we’ll be in place in time to hail our emperor’s courageous victory when he returns from his battle.”
It was Civilis.
Word spread quietly and with care amongst those who had stood along the length of the via principalis and burst their lungs shouting “Gaius Germanicus! Gaius Germanicus!” as their emperor rode past. It filtered down as a disbelieving snigger from the stone-built dormitories of the XIVth to the half-finished wooden huts of the probationaries, gathering credence as it went. Bán was in the remount lines, making the most of the quiet time to settle the Crow. He heard the whisper and chose not to believe it. Rufus arrived to lean on the stone manger at the head of the stall and put him right.
“Of course it was Civilis. Who else would it be? Not even the Chatti are howling mad enough to cross the river in broad daylight when every sentry’s on knife-edge in case Gaius walks past and finds him asleep on the job. It’s why they stood down the horse guard—half of them are Batavians. They’d have recognized their own kin and pulled away. The Praetorians have had their brains addled by the river; they’d fight their own sisters if the lasses turned up with red hair and swords in their hands. All they needed was the boy at the head cursing them for cowards and they waded in as if their lives depended on it.”
“Did they kill him?”
“Civilis? Don’t be daft. He led them a dance up the river, tripped a couple of their horses and dived back into the water with his men. Praetorians don’t swim and the emperor wouldn’t let them try. He had them decorate a few trees to mark the location of his victory the way Caesar did in the old days and rode back in triumph. You know the rest.”
He did. Bán had been one of the many strung along the length of the main street bursting his lungs as the emperor rode past. The euphoria of it had caught him in spite of himself and he had found he wanted to believe that some kind of battle had happened and the enemy had been routed. The reality left him with a sour taste in his mouth.
He turned his attention back to the Crow. There was no knowing why the colt had become so angry but, with time and quiet and no people to harass it, the beast had calmed. Bán took a chance and lifted one hind foot that had seemed hot in the morning. A bruise showed on the sole near the point of the frog. He reached in his belt for a hoof knife and pared away a sliver of horn. Rufus chattered on, talking nonsense about the Chatti and the horse guard and Civilis, who was now, apparently, going to be made prefect of his own Batavian cohort on the strength of his “services to the emperor.”
Bán spat onto the sole and rubbed the horn clean with his thumb. The bruise was an old one, nearly grown out, and the heat he had felt, if it had ever been real, had gone. He dropped the foot and eased himself upright, stretching the knots from his spine. The Crow fly-kicked and he dodged without thinking. It was part of the way they were together. He gathered the hoof knives and grooming brushes and, with Rufus, began to walk back up the horse lines towards the camp. He had grown over the winter, and was almost as tall as the Gaul. Walking beside him, he was pleased with the difference. If Rufus noticed, he said nothing and they crossed the empty parade ground in silence.
It was not yet evening. The sun slanted from the west, casting long shadows across the packed earth. Bán pushed open the gates to the compound and stood back to let the Gaul go in ahead of him, asking, as he did so, the question that had been burning in his mind since the imperial visit began. “Do you think we’ll go to war? Perulla was saying he thought it would happen this summer; that if Galba could promise to secure the frontier against the Chatti, Gaius would build a fleet and sail for Brit—”
He stopped because Rufus had stopped, and Rufus had stopped because Perulla was waiting on the other side of the gate, with Civilis and a trio of the emperor’s horse guard behind him. Bán tasted bile in the back of his throat.
Perulla stepped forward. He raised his right hand in a salute that made no sense.
“Bán son of Eburovic? Hostage of the Eceni?”
Bán felt the air leave him. Not since Cunobelin’s dun had he been so addressed, and never in Latin. Rufus jabbed an elbow at his arm. He nodded. His voice was lost.
“Your presence is required by the emperor.”
“Now?”
“Immediately.”
The horse guard flanked him. He no longer felt himself tall.
Until that moment, he had believed Amminios’s new bathhouse to be the epitome of Roman ostentation. Then he stepped through the doors of the governor’s residence at Moguntiacum and his memories fell to dust. He walked too fast down wide, airy corridors, past unblemished marble and skin-smooth plaster, treading on sweeping, lyrical mosaics. Amminios had done his best to ape his adopted culture and fallen so very short. He had aspired to display his wealth and had, instead, displayed its absence. Here, in Galba’s mansion, restraint was everything, fuelled by wealth beyond measure. It showed in every perfect line and arch, in the marble busts of the ancestors settled in their alcoves and the single springing athlete in bronze. Colour was used with subtle elegance; the floor mosaics mingled fluid blues and greys and aquamarines so that Bán walked on running water with Neptune at its heart. On the walls above, a single narrow-banded frieze ran at head height along the length of the corridor. Achilles slew Hector, Scipio vanquished Hannibal, Octavian destroyed Antonius. They passed one after the other in flashes, separated by the heads of the guards.
They came to a double door of yew, carved with the pegasus and boar locked together, symbols of the XIVth and XXth legions. The guards halted, not quite in step. The tribune of the Praetorian Guard saluted. Nobody spoke. Bán might have thought himself suddenly deaf but for the trickle of water from a fountain somewhere close by and the cackle of two cockerels fighting in the world beyond the walls.
The tribune knocked once. The door swung open. The room beyond was quite different from those through which they had passed. Restraint had been abandoned in favour of an opulence Amminios would have recognized. Silks in scarlet and gold adorned the walls. The fountain Bán had heard from outside sang in the far corner, playing water onto golden dolphins. A dais had been raised on the northern wall and the chair standing on it had lions carved into the armrests and an eagle above the back.
The emperor wore purple and the cuirass of gold with scenes of Alexander’s victories in relief across it. Eight men of the Praetorian Guard, in scarlet and polished armour, stood in pairs on either side. Other men, not in armour, stood ready to take notes. One, with the look of a Greek, was permitted to sit. Behind them, Galba stood below the emperor’s right hand and to his left, still and tense, stood Corvus.
They brought Bán to the foot of the dais, so that he would have to crane his neck upwards if he wished to see Gaius properly. No-one had ever schooled him in the manners of address to an emperor, or even whether it was permitted to look him in the eye. Bán gazed at the legs of the chair. They ended in carved leopard’s feet, with the claws extended. He did not look up.
“This is the Briton? The hostage who would fight for Caesar, as the Gauls did for our honoured ancestor of that name?” The voice was deeper and less brittle than his reputation suggested, more the adult than the spoiled child.
Corvus answered him. “My lord, yes. He is of the Eceni, who hold land to the north of that held by the late Cunobel
inos.”
The emperor was familiar, it seemed, with the politics of Britannia. He raised a brow and nodded. “His name?”
“My lord, he has no Roman name as yet; it will be given only when he receives his posting. In his own land, he is called Bán, which means ‘white’ in the tongue of Hibernian, the island where he was conceived. His mother had a dream of a white-headed horse on the night of his birth and he was named for it.”
Bán stared at the leopard’s feet. In his head, he counted the toes over and again. In all of his life, he had heard his mother’s birth-dream related only twice: once to himself in the summer after Hail was born and he had his own horse-dream, and then again by the first elder grandmother, shortly before she died. Only Macha could have told Corvus. Or perhaps Luain mac Calma, who knew too much and spoke too freely… Hibernia, where he was conceived … His mother had not told him that. He searched for Iccius to ask if it was true and failed to find him. A stranger’s voice washed over him.
“…Does he not hear? Or perhaps he does not understand? Tell me he speaks Latin. It is enough that we recruit barbarians into our forces. I will not have it if they do not speak a civilized language.”
“My lord, he understands—”
“I speak Latin.” Bán raised his head and looked into the stone-still face of Galba, governor of Upper Germany, whose eyes, famously, were of a blue to match the mosaic of his floors. Beside the governor, Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, Emperor of Rome and all its provinces, sighed through pinched nostrils and snapped his fingers, and Bán felt his head turn to the sound as a hound to its master’s whistle so that, whether it was permitted or not, he stared up into the dense, clouded gaze of the emperor.
“White. Very good, for one so black.” There was amusement there, and so much more. The eyes and the voice and the light, curving smile all spoke differently. Bán watched the eyes with their promise of death and let the voice sweep past. “They tell me you are a prince among your people. Is that true?”