Dreaming the Eagle

by Manda Scott

  Later that evening he had been summoned before the emperor, who had bestowed the medallion and the citizenship and the place in Corvus’s cavalry wing as he had promised and had explained what was required in return, the last element of which was entirely unexpected but should probably not have been so. Fever and fear of the coming day had kept Bán from sleep all that night. In the morning, he had prayed to Iccius and then his mother for a means to escape what was asked of him but neither had come. Standing now under the lash of the sea and the wind, exhaustion dragged at him more than the pain or the nausea. He ached for a return to the river. He had been immune to fear then, or had believed himself so.

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  Corvus had come up behind him, the sound of his footsteps lost in the oarsmen’s chant. The prefect braced his arms on the bow rail and narrowed his eyes against the wind. A greening bruise discoloured his jaw where a Chatti blade had struck his helmet flaps; his left arm bore another where the shield had been smashed back by the force of a blow. To balance them, his hair was newly trimmed and he wore the medallion of valour that had been the personal gift of the emperor following his actions in the attack. Bán wore its twin, hung on a thong from his neck and hidden, temporarily, beneath his tunic.

  Corvus turned sideways to the rail, appraising. Since the battle, he had never been far away, nor left it long between visits. More than Theophilus, he knew the black pit into which Bán had fallen. Unlike the doctor, he chose to ignore it and deal instead with the necessities of life and the small hooks of challenge and friendship that would lead Bán back into living. Bán had not engaged with any enthusiasm but it had been impossible fully to resist. Then he had been given new orders by the emperor and the upsurge of fear had destroyed in moments the patient work of half a month. He could hide it from Theophilus, but not from Corvus. Nor, particularly, did he want to.

  The grey eyes narrowed. “Look at you. You have a fever, anyone can see it. You should have stayed ashore, and failing that you should be belowdecks in the care of the physician.”

  “You think so?” Bán wisped a grin. “I had peas and lentils for dinner last night—Theophilus’s remedy for the convalescent. It would be colourful were I to spew it on the walls, but I’m not certain it would make me more popular. Anyway, can you imagine what it would do to the crew? You know what it’s like when you’re living on a diet of fish and one man chucks it back—all the rest catch the smell and their stomachs rebel in sympathy. The emperor would have me flayed alive for turning his prize battleship into a two-man rowing boat with its own vomitorium.”

  “You know what I mean.” Corvus was not in the mood to be diverted. He frowned into the horizon. “You could have told him you weren’t fit. You still could.”

  “You tell him for me. I’ll come and weep at your crucifixion.” Bán spat. The wind caught it and smeared his face. He wiped himself dry with his sleeve. “Forget it. It’s not as bad as you think. The Bán who was enslaved is not the Bán who woke in your tent in Durocortorum, and that one is different again from the one who has been dragged back to life by Theophilus. Besides, you forget. I am not Bán. From last night, I am Julius Valerius.” He tried to smile, but the wind had numbed his cheeks and it was enough to move his lips to speak. He shook his head and turned back to the rail. “Go back down below. You have a speech to make. You should be practising it.”

  Corvus said nothing. His eyes roamed empty space beyond the bow where grey sea and grey sky merged on the grey horizon. The gulls were a sound without shape. Bán tapped the Roman’s shoulder and pointed over the shield-side rail. “You’re looking the wrong way. It’s over there. We are making our own wind. The other ship is under sail and must travel at the behest of the gods.”

  The merchantman they sought was close enough to show her markings. She tacked sharply and wallowed in the apex of the turn. Her single square sail flapped and bellied in the wind, filling to show the image of the war eagle freshly painted across it. As she came about, the yellow eye and the painted beak showed on her prow.

  Three more turns brought her within hailing distance of the trireme. The prefect who had completed the lighthouse had the Euridyke’s command. His grandfather had been a Phoenician slave in Augustus’s navy at Actium. His father had been granted Roman citizenship on completion of his service to the navy of Tiberius. It was the grandson’s intention that he live long enough in the favour of the newest emperor to sire the sons who might follow in the family fortunes. He stood amidships, watching the approaching sail, and issued orders with a calm that quelled the fomenting panic on his ship.

  Commands were shouted between one ship and the next and the merchantman changed her angle to the wind and slowed. Men moved on her deck, hauling in the sail. A single man stood at the bow, where he had been all along. His shield boss caught the flat light from the sea and made it gold. His yellow cloak buffeted the changing wind. Straw-red hair, one shade darker than the Batavians’, flagged out above it. Behind Bán, on the Euridyke’s upper deck, the tone of the oarsmen’s pipe changed and was echoed on the decks below. At a single high blast, the shield-side rowers lifted their sweeps from the water. Eighty-five oars rode high, dripping foam onto the sea, then plunged in again at a harder angle. On the sword side, the great beams swept wide. At the stern, the steersman threw his full weight on the oar. Bán felt the deck swoop beneath his feet as the ship leaned into the turn. His stomach followed. He reached out and gripped Corvus’s arm.

  “Go down and put on your good cloak. Tell His Excellency that the Chieftain of all Britannia awaits his pleasure.”

  “Are you coming?”

  “I’ll be in the right place when he wants me.”

  The Chieftain of all Britannia. Amminios, son of Cunobelin, brother to Togodubnos and Caradoc, recent owner of two slaves and a pied colt, stood in the prow of his merchantman, watching as the Euridyke came alongside. Under the Phoenician’s direction, the oarsmen shipped their oars on the shield side and the two ships came together, gunwales kissing as lightly as men could make them.

  The captain of the merchantman stood by with a rope. One of the Euridyke’s men, a Hibernian who spoke Gaulish with a flat, southern dialect, shouted at him to stand clear but either the man’s accent was too thick or the master was too overwhelmed by his first sight of the emperor to take notice. He stood in the same spot, gaping, and only a lifetime of rapid reflexes caused him to step smartly sideways as the plank dropped from the trireme fell forward onto his ship. Even so, the edge of it caught him on the shoulder and the bronze spike on the end that smashed into his deck nearly cost him a foot.

  He was a big man, as were all ship’s masters, and there was no doubt that he had a comprehensive command of seafaring vernacular. He had taken breath to air it when he remembered in whose company he stood. He stopped, suddenly, his mouth flapping. His gaze skipped from the wreck of his deck to the person of His Imperial Majesty, cloaked in scarlet and wearing, ludicrously, a cuirass of solid gold.

  The emperor smiled. He glanced sideways at his escort. “The captain takes issue with our first corvus. We believe his sponsor will take more issue with the next.”

  The men of the escort laughed, as men will laugh who have been ordered to wear full armour aboard ship in mid-ocean and who have heard the man who gave that command make a jest. Corvus, who was wearing his own newly silvered cuirass beneath his cloak, smiled tightly. Bán had decided long ago that he was not going to laugh at jokes he did not understand. He kept his eyes on the master of the merchant ship and said nothing.

  The emperor had a way of reading men. He gestured expansively to Corvus. “Our new citizen does not understand the source of our levity. You should explain to him.”

  “My lord, of course. Forgive me.” The prefect turned with a care he never showed on land. In formal Gaulish, he said, “The boarding plank is known as a corvus for the spike at the end, which impales enemy ships as a raven’s beak impales carrion flesh. It was used as far back as the
first Punic Wars and recently to great effect by the deified Augustus as a means by which legionaries from one ship could march across and give battle on another.”

  Bán nodded, to show he had listened and understood. He said nothing. His whole attention was fixed on the bow of the other ship.

  The emperor was in a buoyant mood. “It is an outmoded means of naval warfare, as our naval prefect will inform you if you give him time. Still, we believe that in this instance it serves to anchor our ship securely to the enemy’s, and it will embolden those who feel themselves at risk on the high seas, allowing them to cross from one ship to the other in safety.”

  Gaius looked around him. His escort stared fixedly ahead. No order had been given to cross to the other ship and they would not march a step without one. It was Amminios who made the move. One could imagine that he had always been good at sea; from early childhood he must have made the crossing regularly between his father’s court and his mother’s holdings in Gaul. He sprang down from the foredeck of his ship and leaped lightly onto the bridging plank. By accident or design, a space had grown between the ships before the corvus fixed them, leaving a spear’s length of dead water that sucked and gurgled beneath. Amminios wore no armour, but his sword alone would have dragged him under were he to fall.

  “Your Excellency…” On a swaying plank above the Ocean, he made the obeisance. “My messengers will have brought word of my coming. I would have come to you sooner but the shipping lanes have been closed for winter and this is the earliest I could find a man prepared to travel. I have paid twice the worth of this boat to persuade him to leave the safety of the white cliffs, and even so he complains it is too dangerous. Seeing the ease with which you have travelled out to meet us, and”—his eyes comprehensively surveyed the gilded armour and the polish of the escort behind—“observing Your Excellency’s supreme command of the Ocean has shamed him into behaviour that is not becoming a ship’s master. Allow me to apologize on his behalf. I would not have something so trivial spoil the joining of our endeavours.”

  His Latin was excellent. Bán could have told them that had he been asked, but Gaius had not been interested in Amminios’s linguistic skills. His only question, in an evening of orders, had been to ask if the Chief of the Britons could swim. Bán’s reply that it was possible, but not certain, was the sole reason the Euridyke had not made use of her bronze prow-ram to sink the merchantman on first meeting.

  … joining of our endeavours … Gaius stared in thoughtful silence. He was a man brought up in the world of flattery and deceit, where every sentence held layers of meaning. Had he not been able to see to the heart of things, he would have died in childhood with his brothers. He raised a brow and nodded to Corvus, who raised his arm in command. The escort party stepped forward to the edge of the deck, marching as if on dry land. On the side decks, a party of eight Scythian archers nocked their arrows, raised their bows and waited for the order to draw.

  Corvus took the final step up onto the planking and saluted as one Roman officer to another. In perfect Trinovantian, he said, “Amminios, son of Cunobelin, leader of the war eagles and Chieftain of all Britannia, in the name of Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, Emperor of Rome and all her provinces, I accept the unconditional surrender of your lands, your ship, your warriors and your person. You will lay down your sword and deliver yourself to the authority of Rome.” He repeated it, redundantly, in Latin.

  The sea sucked and hissed between the boats. A single gull mewed, higher and more plaintive than the oarsmen’s pipe. Amminios said nothing. His eyes held those of the emperor for longer than any man still living and when they drifted sideways, as if by chance, it was to fix on the newly made auxiliary behind him, a man not in armour but bearing a medallion of valour in gold on his chest.

  “Bán?” The silence lasted a heartbeat longer. Then the Chieftain of all Britannia, to the surprise of those who did not know him, threw back his head and laughed. The echo of it warned off the gulls and made the archers tense at their bowstrings. The escort, their commander and the emperor waited him out. At the end, sobering, he made the warrior’s salute. In perfect, unaccented Latin, he said, “Bán of the Eceni. How the dead get around.”

  Bán was kneeling at the edge of the latrines, vomiting, when Theophilus found him. He had long passed the point where his stomach had anything to give, but the retching continued and he was too far gone to notice who came to help him, or to care. Long fingers wrapped his shoulders and sat him upright, wiping the bile from his nose and chin. A goblet was pressed into his hands and retrieved and refilled when he dropped it.

  “Here, I’ll hold it for you. Now drink…good. Yes, take it. Drink as much as you can. You have a fever. I said it yesterday. You should not have gone on the ship. Come inside now—”

  “No, not inside. I need fresh air.”

  It was already dark. The spring equinox had not yet passed and night drew in more quickly here in the north than it had done at the river. The coastal mist rose to make low cloud, so that the sunsets were short and startlingly vivid but the moon and the stars were invisible. In the legionary camps on the outskirts of the town, the lighthouse made a mockery of the dark. A fire roared furnace-hot at the top of it, showering sparks at the night, casting an unwavering light across the town and the emperor’s residence. Out in the camps the light was softer, and kinder to the elderly. Theophilus lost ten years in its glow; one could see that he had been striking in his youth. His eyes searched Bán’s.

  “You were part of the procession,” he said. “I was busy with some men of the Second who had food poisoning so I did not watch. Did it go well?”

  “It went well for Gaius. The town magistrates were not about to be caught sleeping a second time. And Amminios still hopes for his support later. He played his part well.”

  In truth, Gesoriacum, given an extra day’s warning, had shown that she knew exactly how to welcome a glorious general home from his victory over the Ocean and the barbarian hordes. Had the deified Julius himself ridden into town with Vercingetorix bound in chains in his chariot, they could not have made a better spectacle. It was not an official victory parade—that was Rome’s prerogative—but the citizens who lined the street leading up from the quay waved boughs of laurel, or such alternatives as could be found in the second week of March, and a chariot had been unearthed and gilded and white horses found who could lead it without jibbing at the noise so that the god on earth might ride ahead of his army with his captive, bare-headed and stripped of his weapons, walking behind.

  Bán had not expected Amminios to carry it off with such dignity. He himself had marched in his place in the escort and had received the accolade of the crowd and had hated himself for it afterwards. His sickness came in part from that. He had been on his way to find a blanket in his tent when the urgent need to empty his stomach had overwhelmed him. He crouched now, shivering, and remembered.

  “Theophilus, this is not a fever. There is not an infusion or a salve that will heal it. When I am gone from here, or he is, I will be as I was before. In the meantime, I will keep out of his way.”

  “Out of Gaius’s way, or Amminios’s?”

  “Both. They are men of a kind. They recognized that when they met on the ship. Neither of them is safe to the rest of us.”

  “Did he know you?”

  “Amminios? Of course.”

  “But he did not betray you?”

  “What is there to betray? Gaius knows all there is to know about me. I am his living proof that the barbarians can be civilized; that what is needed by the lands beyond the Ocean is the civilizing hand of Rome and, in time, her people will become model Roman citizens. Had he known how Roman Amminios was, he would not have needed me as proof. It was there already.”

  The beaker he held contained only water. Steadying one hand with the other, he swilled his mouth and spat. The taste of bile lingered behind his teeth. He stood and did not sway. “I am going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

 
“You could sleep indoors. I have an empty bed in the infirmary and a brazier lit.”

  “I don’t think so. You forget, I’m in the cavalry now. I share a tent with seven Gauls. So far, I am their mascot, their good-luck charm who will bring them the emperor’s favour. It will not take too many unearned privileges for that to change. Besides”—Bán smiled and was surprised to find it real—“I am still a barbarian at heart. I prefer a night spent out of doors, sleeping in the company of others, to one in a room on my own. The day that changes, you can account me fully Roman. Or Greek.”

  “Never that.” The old man stood. The caduceus hanging at his chest took life from the glow of the lighthouse. The snakes writhed up the staff, sleek as eels. “Take care. You are right in your assessment. Each of these men is dangerous, but only Amminios is abroad tonight.”

  “What?” Bán’s chest closed, denying him air. “He’s not in the magistrate’s mansion? Where is he, then?”

  “I don’t know, except that he is not inside. They had him eat as a guest at the banquet—Alexander feasted those of his foes who surrendered voluntarily, and so Gaius must do the same—but he was given leave to go out afterwards.”

  “Where, Theophilus? Where has he gone?”

  “I don’t know. He has given his word to remain within the boundaries of the two camps and I believe he will keep it. As you said, if he wants Gaius’s help next summer when the Rhine has been tamed, he won’t run for cover now. But equally, he won’t harm you, not when you are so clearly in the emperor’s favour.”

  “No. He won’t have to. It’s not how he works.”

  “The colt?” Theophilus was always quick to understand; it was what made him pleasant company. “Corvus is inside. He cannot be reached but Civilis and Rufus will be close by. Should I find them?”

  “No. This is for me alone.”

  The shaking had stopped, and the nausea—both luxuries too far. Bán smiled, differently, with the warmth of the lighthouse full on his face, and saw the change reflected in the physician’s eyes. He had forgotten what it was truly to hate, and to have the freedom to act on it. He took care to put warmth into his voice for Theophilus’s sake. “Thank you, but this is not their business, nor yours. Go back to the infirmary now and be seen by those whose word will count if they are required to testify. Whatever happens tonight, you are not a part of it. You have been good to me. I am grateful.”