Now, he looked into her eyes, and she knew that all that he was about to tell her, was the truth.
“I come from Gades. It’s a small town in southern Spain. But my father was not from there originally. He came from Campania, in southern Italy. My father was an old army veteran. He served in a Marian legion during the civil war, and later in Spain under Sertorius.” He smiled at her puzzled expression. “Have you heard of any of these people?”
She shook her head.
He smiled. “It doesn’t matter. I suppose, it doesn’t. Well, eventually, when Spain came back into the Roman fold, my father was discharged and settled down on a small plot of land given to him by the state. He married a local Iberian girl, and when he wasn’t farming, worked as a cutler. As with many of the discharged veterans, he had to play the game for any work to come his way, so he became the client of a local magistrate – a man who had once served under Sertorius as a legate – a man by the name of Marcus Valens.”
“Senator Valens?” she asked.
He nodded. “The same. He was not a senator then, but he was on the rise. His family was a prominent one in Spain, if not in Rome, and he was making his way up the cursus honorum. He was my father’s patron, and every morning my father duly paid him a visit for the daily salutato. My father was a good client. Seldom, if ever, did he turn down a request made of him. He was well-respected in the community and his own popularity among the local veterans increased Valens’s clientele by ten-fold. Valens, on the other hand, was not a good patron. He demanded much, and gave little in return. My father worked hard for him, but he and my mother soon had children, and more mouths meant not enough food. Even with the small farm and his long days of work, we did not have enough – at least, not after the patron took his share. Then one day, my father ran into a freed slave he had once known in the army. This man had once worked in the mines in the north and had come to Gades looking to resurrect a forgotten Carthaginian silver mine. It was only a few miles outside of town, but it was in a difficult spot and none of the locals knew of its existence. It had been abandoned for generations. The land had been in the hands of a Roman family that had never even seen it. It was abandoned and not being worked. The slave had corresponded with the Roman family to get permission to buy the land, but even without knowing about the old silver mine, they set the price too high for his purse. As an old comrade of the wars, he came to my father seeking help. Of course, my father could not afford to buy the land, either. But my father was an enterprising man. He pooled together a group of veterans, and they all pitched in to buy the land together. He did all of this without telling Valens, and that is not the expected etiquette due to a patron. The patron is supposed to know all. But who could blame my father? Had he told him, that greedy bastard would have likely bought the land himself and cut my father and all the others out entirely.” Lucius sighed and took a sip of the ale. “Well, the mine was successful, and I’m not ashamed to say largely due to my father’s management of the whole thing. But he never once shirked his duties to Valens. My father simply worked from the dark hours of the morning until midnight, seldom getting much sleep. The others recognized my father’s talents and awarded him a controlling share of the mine. He went from struggling cutler to mine owner in the matter of a few months. It was quite a change, and the change had the added burden on him. It has been many years now, and my father’s image begins to fade in my memory, but I do still have the impression of a trudging, exhausted shadow that entered our small house each night and was gone before I woke up in the morning.”
“Valens found out about the mine.”
“Of course. There was no way to keep it a secret. My father had to sell his ore on the market, and the Valenii controlled most of the shipping in the area. A conflict was inevitable. My father and his friends knew this. They got the idea to form a sort of mining guild, offering protection to each other, and presenting Valens with a rock-bottom prices. There was enough to go around. Much to my father’s surprise, Valens took him up on the offer. Silver started to flow out, and money started to come in, for everybody, and my father’s station among the local community started to rise. I believe that is the real reason Valens hated him, not because he had started the mining operation behind his back. Eventually, my father developed a clientele of his own. Some of them came from Valens, and this did not sit well with my father’s former patron.
“To better manage operations, my father moved our family into a respectable villa closer to the mine. I remember wearing newly spun fabric for the first time. And my father bought my sister and me a pony, which we kept in a small stable on the property and the two of us got up early each morning to go out and feed her and watch her clop about. It was the first time I remember being truly comfortable – truly happy.”
“My father’s popularity grew with his wealth. The success of the mine meant a flood of money into the local economy, and soon everyone saw prosperity. People began trying to persuade my father to run for local office. This put him squarely at odds with the Valenii, but you would not know it. Marcus Valens and his brother would often stop by the house, smiling and bringing gifts, talking of how admirably my father ran the mine, and commenting on what a fine, strong young man I was growing into – I still wore the purple stripe at the time. They would kiss my mother, smile at my sister, and leave us all charmed and feeling loved. But my father’s face always turned grim when they left. He did not trust them, especially Marcus. I think, during the years as his client, my father had learned just the type of men the Valenii were.”
“So, Marcus Valens killed your father?”
“No. Not directly. He was too clever for that. My father was too popular. Had Valens killed my father outright, his reputation never would have recovered. Reputation is everything among my people. You can hire all the cut-throat assassins you like to kill your enemy in his bedchamber while he sleeps, but stab him yourself in broad daylight, and you’re considered a rogue and a villain.”
“What happened then?” she asked curiously.
“While my father and his colleagues ran the mine, most of the manual labor was done by slaves – mostly Illyrians and Nubians. My father had purchased hundreds of them with the profits of the first shipments of ore. They were hard men, and had been bought cheaply. Some had been born into slavery, but some were merely criminals, spared from the galleys or the cross. Conditions were terrible in the mine, but then I have never seen a mine that wasn’t so. That is a slave’s lot in life, isn’t it? To do the dirty work for their masters? Much like being in the legions. Anyway, like all groups of slaves, they had a rebellious element – a few ring leaders that daily whispered poison into the ears of the others. There was one slave, especially, that was the chief ring-leader, a sinister looking bald fellow with half of an ear missing. The bastard would always glare at me whenever I came to the mine, as though he would choke me with his chains were I to stray too close to him. I’ll never forget that face.”
“On the day after I turned sixteen, I was set to leave home. My family’s station had risen substantially by the time I donned the toga. My father had seen to it that I was trained in the military arts, and they came to me naturally, but he did not want me to end up in the legions as he had done. So, I was earmarked for a proper education at a Greek institution in Rome. I was to disembark the next day, and had spent most of the day packing and saying goodbye to my friends. But there was one final thing I wished to do, and that final thing quite probably saved my life that night. Throughout my youth, whenever I was in a contemplative mood, I would often retreat to an old Carthaginian shrine up in the hills overlooking the sea. I was there that night, looking out at the moonlit expanse of water that I thought would carry me away the next day to a new life of adventure. My heart was filled with expectation, for I had never been to Rome before. Nevertheless, I was at the shrine, dreaming away the night when it happened.”
“What happened?”
“The slaves revolted. They broke out of their pens a
nd overpowered their overseers. Then they began to ravage the countryside for miles around, starting with my family’s villa. They were like a nightmare realized, hacking, raping, murdering, burning as they went. Somehow, they obtained weapons, and none of the defenseless families living anywhere near the mine stood a chance.
I found my home in ruins the next morning. My sister had been murdered, but not before she had been brutally raped and tortured. We had had a reflective moment together only the day before – two siblings who might not see each other again for a very long while. I embraced her, not knowing it would be our last embrace in this life. My mother’s body was burned beyond recognition, but I’m sure she suffered a similar fate as that of my sister. And my father…I found him in the courtyard. He had been bound, stripped, and lashed until his bones were exposed, and then they had impaled him on a sharpened fencepost and left him to die, his dignity and greatness reduced to a broken and wrecked body. He never regained consciousness and died shortly after.”
Gertrude’s eyes looked pained for him, and she rested a soft palm on his face, as if to console him, but Lucius simply shrugged.
“It took nearly a full week to bring the slaves under control. It was Marcus Valens, at the head of the local militia that took credit for stopping them. The ring leaders were crucified and the others made to taste the lash. Valens then ordered that the spared slaves have their tongues cut out. I thought it absurd at the time, but now I realize it was to keep them silent lest they tell of his involvement.”
“But how do you know he had anything to do with it?” she asked skeptically. “Slave revolts are not uncommon. We have experienced them among our own slaves.”
“How many of your slaves were armed with iron weapons? Ours were – good ones. There were no armories for them to raid. The weapons had to have been delivered to them. But no advocate ever looked into that little fact. The Valenii spent the succeeding weeks leading the investigation down the wrong path, and months dragging my father’s name through the mud. They claimed that my father was at fault, that the conditions in the mines caused the revolt, that my father should have known better than to purchase slaves from the rebellious parts of the world, that he did not ensure there were adequate guards, and so on. When they got through, the locals were ready to strike my family’s name from every inscription on every monument. With half of the mine owners dead and the local economy beginning to suffer, the Valenii swooped in like heroes, assuming ownership of the mine with the justification that Marcus was the original patron to most of the dead families and so should take control of their assets. They even declared themselves the guardians of the surviving family members, vowing that each one would be well cared for. In most cases, that meant shipping them back to Rome or somewhere else where they could cause no trouble. I was no exception. I was a young man full of rage, newly orphaned, newly penniless, and entirely at the mercy of my father’s patron. You see, at the time, I was still completely unaware of the Valenii’s guilt in my father’s murder. With the greatest display of sympathy for my loss, Marcus Valens kindly informed me that the Seventh Legion was recruiting in Nova Carthago, and that he was certain my father would have wanted me to serve as a soldier, as he once did.” Lucius chuckled softly. “What a fool I was. I bought the whole story, like a wet-nosed gelding. I was recruited and trained, and marched off with the Seventh. But before the legion left there, something happened that exposed the Valenii for what they truly are. On the eve of the Seventh’s departure, I felt I owed a debt of gratitude to Valens for the kindness he had shown me, and I wished to thank him in some way. I learned that he had a shipping agent near the docks, so I went there hoping to leave a letter that it might be delivered to Valens personally. When I found the agent, he was supervising the loading of a trade vessel down at the waterfront. I approached him with my letter, asking could he forward it to his master, but the response I got was far from what I had expected. He treated me with contempt and an air of impatience from the start, but when I told him who I was, he became not only discourteous, but agitated, as if my mere presence was causing him great discomfort. He snatched the letter from my hands, and told me curtly that I must leave the docks at once, that I was interfering with his work, and that if I did not, Marcus Valens would hear of it.
“I did as he requested, thinking nothing of it initially, but then had a second thought to go back and make sure he hadn’t tossed my letter into the harbor. As I approached the vessel, I noticed that several of the men who were engaged in loading the cargo onto the ship looked very familiar – one in particular, a bald-headed man. On closer examination, I realized who the man was. It was the bastard from my father’s mine, the one missing half of one ear. I soon identified at least five others among the loaders who had been my father’s slaves. Somehow, they had ended up in the service of Marcus Valens. Of course, I was confused at first, but then the pieces of the puzzle began to come together, and I realized that I had been played for a fool. My initial impulse was to march over there and run each of them through, and force each one of the bastards to say my dead sister’s name before I cut off his head. And I came very close to doing just that. But then I stopped myself, realizing that such an act would get me ejected from the legion and quite possibly executed. If I were to die, Valens would have truly won. I forced myself to walk away, swearing that I would have my revenge someday, someday when I had the advantage. It was clear to me then that Valens had placed me in the legion in hopes that I would die of disease or on some distant battlefield, and he would be rid of the Domitius family once and for all. That was six years ago. It seems like ages.”
“But you are still alive, so this Valens must have grown impatient?” Gertrude asked.
“Perhaps. He is planning to have Caesar assassinated, let the army suffer a defeat, and then take control of it himself. He may have ambitions that go even beyond that. I believe I am merely a nuisance to him, an annoyance from his earlier days, and he just wants me out of the way.”
“Yes, Valens told my father that once he commands the Romans, he will leave our people in peace.”
“Your father’s a fool if he believes that.”
She looked somewhat displeased at the remark, but Lucius chose to press the issue anyway. His only chance of escape was to distract her, to instill doubt about her cause and the alliance her father had made with Valens.
“Do you know what the Romans do when one of their armies is defeated in battle?”
She looked at him suspiciously, but said nothing.
“They send more legions, and more legions, and as many as it takes until they win. And when they do, they wipe the offending nation from existence. Valens knows that. He’ll gather an army bigger than Caesar’s ever was, and then turn around and betray your father. He won’t have any choice. He’ll have to conquer the Belgae. The senate will demand it, no doubt prompted by his own cronies. He’ll do it just to improve his standing in Rome, regardless of the promises he made your father. Don’t you see? A man like that will stop at nothing. Your father, your people, are nothing but stepping stones on his quest for power.”
“Why do your people support such men? Why do they attack us?”
Lucius was taken aback at the question. “To stop the barbaric practices you yourself said were a disgrace, ma’am. You despise human sacrifice? So do the Romans. That kind of practice would certainly stop were you under Roman rule.”
“Yet I have heard that the Romans entertain themselves by watching wild animals feast on human flesh.”
“What? Oh, you mean the arena. Well, yes, but it’s not the same thing.”
Gertrude muttered something that sounded like a Belgic curse. She looked irritated, not at Lucius’s story, but at Lucius himself. She said something to Alain with many hand gestures and many sighs and much inflection in her voice.
“What did she say?” Lucius asked the boy, who seemed to have been affected by Lucius’s words, even though he still translated between them.
“It is
unwise to call her father a fool,” Alain said.
“Is that all? Surely, that’s not all she said,” Lucius said astonished. “The fate of her whole people are at stake and she’s worried I called her father a fool?”
“Fool!” Gertrude said in a sudden attempt at Gaulish. She rose from her seat and glared across the table at him. “Fool!” She said again. Then, in a huff, she stormed out of the hut, her face red with anger.
After several moments, Alain said, “You have upset her. All your talk of treason has upset her. You must learn better manners, Roman dog.”
Lucius eyed the boy, thinking of how much he would like to take the runt by the scruff of the neck and toss him out the window, but he remained calm and took a deep breath. He had to befriend Alain somehow, if he wished to escape, and the lad’s dogged devotion to his mistress was giving Lucius an idea of how he might do just that.
XVIII
Divitiacus rode north cautiously. He stayed off the path whenever possible to avoid being seen by any Nervii patrols, but, strangely, he had encountered none. He came to a river which he knew to be the Sabis, and swam his horse across the slow-moving stretch of icy water. Upon reaching the northern bank, he could not find the path again, but he kept heading northward, deeper into the Nervii countryside.
Having seldom been in the Nervii lands, and then only keeping to the roads, he was fairly certain that he was lost. He kept heading north because he knew the Nervii had a large oppidum there, but whether it was just up ahead, or still two days away, he could not tell. He knew that the main north-south road being used by the Roman army was east of his position, and he only knew this because he had not yet crossed it. The road might be far away by now, or it might be just beyond the next hill. He had no way of knowing, so he pressed on.
The forest and the surrounding hills seemed strangely quiet, especially if he was indeed as close to the main Nervii oppidum as he believed he was, and he proceeded with attentiveness.
Rome: Fury of the Legion (Sword of the Legion Series) Page 15