After he left, I waited for Helena to ask pertinent questions, but although he was her favourite and I knew she loved him dearly, for some reason she only wanted to involve herself with me.
I could have argued, but the girl was evidently set on hauling me off into a dark corner for a bout of something shameless, so rather than disappoint her I went along with it.
* * *
I had taken my mission as far as I could—and further than Vespasian had a right to expect, though I knew better than to persuade myself that that unreasonable tyrant would agree. The old miser expected to extract his full money’s worth before he let me home; I still had coercing Civilis on my rosta for one thing. But I had done well enough to earn my fee. My curly mop would not be welcome back on the Palatine until the last possible moment now that more than basic expenses would be called for from the Treasury.
For reasons of my own I was in no hurry to shift from here. Decisions were looming painfully, all the worse because I already knew what the answer had to be. Since she refused to make her own decisions, I had to force the right ones on Helena.
I pretended I was staying on at the fort to complete my report on the XIV. I made out that it was difficult. A credible plea. I hate reports. I was perfectly capable of producing it, but lacked the will to start.
I spent a lot of time in the tribune’s study chewing the end of a stylus while I watched Helena Justina playing draughts against herself. I wondered how long it would be before she realised I had noticed she was cheating. In the end I felt forced to mention it. She flounced off in a huff, which was annoying because I much preferred dreaming and watching her.
I struggled on. The stylus was a digit shorter now. Bits of soggy wood kept breaking off and splintering my tongue. As I spat them out I registered that my niece and her friend were hanging round the door engaged in secret whispering. There had been efforts at obvious mystery ever since I had arrived back. I was so bored with the report that this time I crept up, jumped out with a roar, and grabbed the pair of them. Then I dragged them into the study and sat them down, one on each knee.
“Now you’re captured. You’ll sit there until you tell nice Uncle Marcus why you keep peering round the architrave. Are you spying on me?”
At first it seemed like nothing. I was today’s suspect. They spent a lot of time playing at being informers. It was not a compliment; it was for the same reasons that Festus and I had always wanted to be rag-pickers: a dirty, disreputable existence, and our mother would have hated us doing it.
“But we’re not going to tell you anything we’ve seen!” Augustinilla boasted.
“Suits me. That saves me having to do anything about it.” She seemed satisfied. It fitted the family view that her sordid Uncle Marcus would sooner lie in bed all day than exert himself turning an honest denarius. I grinned evilly. “You’d have to be clever to produce anything useful. Most informers spend weeks on a stake-out and still never find out anything…”
I could see Pigtails feeling torn. Unlike my niece, she was clever enough to want to have her intelligence recognised—though not enough to hide it and make full use of her advantage. “Tell him about the boy with the arrows!” she burst out.
Something struck a chord. I was interested now, so I tried looking bored. Augustinilla dealt with that. She shook her head vigorously. I asked Arminia directly where they had seen this boy.
“Augusta Treverorum.”
I was shocked. “Whatever were you doing there?” My niece opened her mouth and pointed to a reddened hole where a tooth had been. “Stop fooling. I can see what you had for breakfast wriggling through your gut. Who had you gone to see?”
“Mars Lenus,” she informed me, as if talking to an idiot.
“Mars who?”
“Mars the Healer,” Arminia consented to explain.
This was hard work. I filled in some gaps myself: “Augustinilla had toothache—I remember that from before I went away.” The ladies looked unimpressed by this subtle reference to the forests full of fog and ferocious animals I had just endured. “So Helena Justina took you to a shrine—”
“The tooth fell out before we went,” Arminia told me with some disgust. “Helena made us go there anyway.”
“I wonder why that was.”
“To look around!” they chorused.
“Ah yes. How obvious! Did she see anything worthwhile?” No. Helena would have mentioned it, though she would not trouble me with news of a pointless trip. Not while I had my report to write. She regarded that as serious. “But you saw this boy?”
“He was shooting at us. He said we were Romans and he was in the Free Gallic Empire, with permission from his father to kill us dead. So then we knew,” Arminia said.
“Tell me, Arminia.”
“Who he was.” That was more than I knew. She whispered nervously, “The chieftain’s son. The one who shoots real prisoners!”
I resisted the urge to grab them closer protectively. These were two tough women; neither needed me. “I hope you ran away?”
“Of course,” Augustinilla scoffed. “We knew what to do. He was pathetic. We shook him off, then doubled back and followed him.”
They cackled with delight at the ease with which they had bamboozled him. No boy was safe with these young hags on his tail. In different ways, they were both destined to be man-eaters.
I let them see me swallow. “And then?”
“We saw the one-eyed man.”
“The man with the red beard. The beard that’s dyed,” the little flaxen treasure specified. Just in case I had not realised what completely brilliant sidekicks I had somehow attracted to work with me.
* * *
Helena said she would write my report.
“You know nothing about the subject!”
“So what? Most men who write reports know less. How about: ‘The Fourteenth Gemina Martia Victrix are a sound operative unit, but they need a firmer hand than they received from their recent command structure. The appointment of a new legate with strong supervisory talents will no doubt be a priority. The Fourteenth appear amenable to relocation in Germany on a permanent or semipermanent basis. This option enables closer control of them; it will also permit full exploitation of their considerable experience with Celtic peoples, which should be particularly appropriate in the delicate political climate that exists in the Rhenus corridor…’
“This is rubbish!” I interrupted.
“Exactly. Just what a secretariat wants to hear.”
I left her to it. She reckoned she could rattle off and stitch together several pages on the same pretentious lines by my return. Her handwriting was neater than mine too.
I would have liked to take Helena with me, but Augusta Treverorum was ninety miles away and I had to ride hard if I wanted to be back at Moguntiacum by the Emperor’s birthday and the coming parade.
A man needs a travelling companion, however, so I took someone else instead. Xanthus, who so loved to see the world, was the obvious candidate.
LXIII
Augusta Treverorum, capital of Belgica.
It had been founded by Augustus, who had taken an empty site at a strategic crossroads on the River Mosella and begun with a bridge, like any sensible man. His bridge was a decent affair, with seven pillars of ashlar set on piles. The whole structure was built on a massive scale because the river is changeable there. The town had been planned neatly. There were new vineyards struggling to establish themselves, as well as cereal crops, but the local economy thrived on two staples: ceramics and wool. The sheep supplied official mills that wove cloth for army uniforms, and the redware pots also went under contract to the legions. As a result, I was not surprised to find that the fat cats of Augusta Treverorum had managed to provide themselves with some of the largest and best-appointed villas I had seen since leaving Italy. This was a town that would attract the attentions of anyone who had learned to appreciate Roman life in its most civilised aspects (wealth and show). Someone like a high-ranking, Roman
ised Batavian, say.
The Temple of Mars Lenus honoured both our own god and his Celtic equivalent, Tiw. This was not Mars the warrior, but Mars the healer—a natural corollary, since the god of soldiers needs to mend their wounds also if he wants to bump them back into the battleline as soon as possible. Mars the god of youth (young spear fodder) was also represented.
The temple was the centre of a flourishing shrine for the sick. There was a high quota of slack taverns and sour-smelling rooms for hire, plus booths and bothies where sellers of trinkets and trifles were also grimly trying to get rich quick before their custom literally died. It had the usual depressing hangers-on selling votive models of every anatomical part from sexual organs (both sexes) to feet (left or right) and ears (indeterminate), plus the whole grasping range of apothecaries, quack dentists and doctors, dieticians, fortune-tellers, and money-changers. These characters all flocked to the shrine, feeding on hope and despair in equal measure while they raked in their usual sharp percentages. Occasionally I did spot somebody who was actually lame or ill, but they were encouraged to keep out of sight. Pale, sad faces are bad for trade.
Like all these places the turnover in shady entrepreneurs must be fast. People could come and go without much explanation. Few questions would be asked by those who preferred to remain unobtrusive themselves in case an official came round asking questions about licences. A man who wanted to hide could live among this shanty town more or less openly.
I never saw his son, the child with the arrows. It was just as well. I was intending to give him a thrashing, for not shooting straighter at my niece.
* * *
I found Julius Civilis looking like a man on his uppers, sitting on a stool at a shack outside town, whittling uneasily. He was keeping an eye out for trouble but he only had one eye to look out with. My informants had been efficient: I knew which dusty track he lived down, and I had a personal description. I circled round in the local fields and silently approached him on his blind side.
“The game’s up, Civilis!”
He spun round and saw me standing there. I took my sword out slowly and laid it on the ground between us. It served to establish a truce for us to talk. He must have guessed I still had my knife, and since Civilis had been a cavalry commander I had no doubt he was hung about with daggers for cutting stones out of hooves—or carving notches on imperial agents’ ribs. To catch me out he would have to be first into action, and quick with it; he looked too dispirited to try.
He was older than me. Taller and much more solid. Probably even more depressed than I was. He wore leather trousers to just below the knee and a cloak trimmed with strands of raddled fur. He was heavily scarred and moved stiffly, like a man who had fallen from a horse once too often. His missing eye looked as if it had been taken out by something like an artillery bolt, leaving a deep twisted seam. His good eye was sharply intelligent. He had a beard down to his cloak-brooch and long strands of wavy hair; both were red. Not the bold red I had been promising myself, but a sadder, more faded colour that seemed to mirror what was left of the rebel’s life. That too was showing grey at the roots.
He let me introduce myself. “So this is what it feels like meeting a footnote to history!”
“Less of the footnotes!” he growled. I found myself liking him. “What do you want?”
“Just passing through. I thought I’d look you up. Don’t be surprised. A child could find you here. In fact a child did—a mere eight-year-old, and not very bright, though she had help from a much cleverer Ubian. Worried?” I asked gently. “You know what it means. If a child can find you, so can any smouldering legionary whose mate you killed at Vetera. Or any disgruntled Batavian, come to that.”
Julius Civilis told me what he would like me to do with myself; it was wittily devised and succinctly phrased. “You say that in much the same terms as the famous Fourteenth Gemina, who also think I stink. Must be the Roman influence. Do you miss all that?”
“No,” he said, but jealously. “The Fourteenth? Those braggarts!” He himself had commanded an auxiliary detachment in Germany before he had tried for glory; he would have heard about their parent legion from his kinsmen in the eight famous Batavian cohorts who deserted. “I suppose we have to talk. Do you want the story of my life?”
He had the right background; this interview would be businesslike. I could have been dealing with one of our own. Well, I was really. “Sorry.” I hoped he could hear that my regret was genuine. I would have given a lot to hear the full story from the rebel’s own lips. “I’m due in Moguntiacum for the Emperor’s birthday parade. I’ve no time to listen to the drivel about twenty years in the Roman camps, then your only reward being Imperial suspicion and the threat of execution … Let’s get down to it, Civilis. You took the money. You enjoyed the life. You were grateful to be exempt from taxation and gain the benefits of a regular income and a structured career. If things had been different, you would have taken your discharge diploma and retired as a Roman citizen. Right up to the moment when Vespasian became Emperor you could have basked in his friendship and been a great force locally. You threw it away for a dream that became pointless. Now you’re stateless and hopeless too.”
“That’s pretty bilge! Have you finished?” His single eye regarded me with more good judgement than I liked.
“No, but you have. Events have passed you by, Civilis. I see here an exhausted man. You’re saddled with a large family; so am I. Now that your stand against fate is in tatters I can guess how you must be being nagged. You’re suffering earache as well as backache and heartache. You’re sick of trouble and tired of the campaign—”
“I’d do it again.”
“Oh I don’t doubt that. In your shoes, so would I. You saw a chance, and made the most of it. But the chance is over. Even Veleda accepts that.”
“Veleda?” He looked suspicious.
I said smoothly, “Imperial agents have just interviewed the lady in her signal-tower. Incidentally, my own view is we ought to charge her rent for that … She concedes the peace, Civilis.”
We both knew the Batavian’s independence movement was nothing without support from Free Germany and Gaul. Gaul had long been a lost cause for rebellion: too comfort-loving by half. Now Germany was opting out, too.
“So much for freedom!” murmured the red-haired man.
“Freedom to run wild, you mean? Sorry. I sound like every father there ever was berating a child who wants to stay out late in unsuitable company.”
“You can’t help that. Rome,” he replied drily, “is a paternalist society.” It felt strange to be addressed in refined, lightly satirical Latin by a man who looked as if he had spent a month huddled up against a gorse-bush on an open moor.
“Not always,” I confessed. “My father ran away from home and left the women to get on with it.”
“You should have been a Celt.”
“Then I’d be fighting with you.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for that, Falco. So it’s parole again?” He was referring to the times other emperors had pardoned him. I hoped he realised this emperor was here to stay. “What am I required to do?”
“You and your family will live in Augusta Treverorum at a fixed address. Protection will be arranged at first, though I reckon you should soon be assimilated into the local community.” I grinned. “I don’t feel Vespasian will want to offer you a new legionary command!” He was too old to care. “Apart from that, here comes somebody whom I asked to meet us specially…”
A familiar figure had approached, incongruous among the run-down hovels where Civilis had lain up. He had a haircut that shrieked quality, and unacceptable shrimp-pink shoes. Undeterred by his own dramatic turnout, he scrutinised Civilis with visible pity.
“Falco! Your friend has a florid crop of foliage disfiguring his pediment!”
I sighed. “This character has developed a putrid line of rhetoric since he met me … Julius Civilis, prince of Batavia, may I introduce to you Xanthus, one-time
barber to emperors—and the best barber on the Palatine at that. He has shaved Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and probably Titus Caesar, though he never reveals the names of current clients. He has something in common with Celts, I think; he collects celebrity heads. Xanthus,” I announced gently to the rebel chief with the ghastly locks, “has come to Augusta Treverorum all the way from Rome in order to give you a snappy trim and shave.”
LXIV
I managed to speak to Helena Justina during the parade. I hoped that in a public place politeness would oblige her to restrain her reaction to what I had in mind. Well, it was worth a try. I expected trouble anywhere I broached the tender issue. She would never like what I now had to say, even though I told myself she would have to accept that I was right.
The XIV had made it pretty plain that this, like everything else at Moguntiacum, would be their show. It was the usual tiresome business. Lack of cash and too much cynicism meant there were hardly ever decent spectacles, even in Rome. Here we were in Europe, and seventeen days into November was no time to be holding outdoor festivities. It ought to be a rule that no one can qualify for emperor unless they can claim a midsummer birthday. The only exemption might be for people born on the Aventine thirty years ago in March …
As I expected, both the crowd and the glitter were spread far too thinly; the weather was freezing; and the catering was terrible—where you could find any. The formalities took place on the parade-ground, which unlike a decent amphitheatre had no easy exit gates. The few women of Roman extraction who attended were of course subject to strict public conventions. Three of them, along with a couple of guests, had to sit on a dais wrapped in jewelled silks while twelve thousand hairy males stared at them pointedly. Nice work, if they liked it. I knew one lass who was hating it.
The event was due to last all day. I only felt obliged to stay for the presentation of the Hand. Once we had dealt with that, I intended to say my piece to Helena—assuming I could get near her—then slip away. Both legions were actually taking part, which slowed things to a leaden pace. Patterned marching, even by men in dress uniforms with helmet plumes, has never been my idea of stimulating theatre. The action drags, and the dialogue is terrible. The promoter here had even failed to provide an orchestra; all we had was military silver and brass. Seeing everything twice over so that both sets of troops could affirm their loyalty to the Emperor increased the tedium to torture. I had been miserable enough in the first place.
The Iron Hand of Mars Page 31