Wolves of Rome

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  ‘What is the reason for your coming?’ asked the sovereign.

  ‘I must arrange for a meeting between you and the legate of our legion, Terentius Niger. It will take place on neutral ground, at the clearing of the four oaks. Each of you will be escorted by a maximum of thirty men. You and the legate will be unarmed.’

  ‘Will my sons be present?’

  ‘Certainly. You must understand that they are being treated with all of the respect due their rank. What shall I tell the legate?’

  ‘That I accept,’ replied Sigmer in a low voice.

  Taurus mounted his horse and rode off with his escort.

  Sigmer lowered his head with a sigh.

  THE ENCOUNTER TOOK place as arranged two days later at mid-afternoon, at the clearing which took its name from four colossal trees that were probably centuries old. Sigmer was shaken at the sight of the hemp ropes binding the wrists of his two young sons to prevent their escape. The interpreter was ready, on his feet.

  ‘Is this how you treat my sons?’ Sigmer exclaimed. Ingmar laid a hand on his brother’s shoulder in warning.

  The legate advanced to the centre of the clearing, on his horse, and Sigmer did the same.

  The legate replied, ‘I’m sincerely sorry, but your princes mean too much to us. We cannot afford to untie them, under these circumstances.’

  ‘I am willing to pay any price to have them back,’ said Sigmer. ‘I will give you everything I own.’

  ‘I understand you, noble Sigmer. I would do the same in your place but I have no authority to negotiate a ransom. Caesar is very interested in meeting these young men and he wants them to experience Rome in all its greatness. He wants to meet them in person, you see. Rome needs a new generation of soldiers who will learn our ways and who can defend our world, and a new generation of commanders and also magistrates who can govern Roman Germania, when the moment arises.

  ‘They will be returned to you at some point, and you will be proud of them. You will see what a great advantage it is for you to respect the terms of our alliance. Your sons will not be hostages, but guests. You can believe me, Sigmer.’

  Not much remained to be said. It was clearly evident that, even if this man called Caesar had his plans for Wulf and Armin, the boys were hostages and if their father challenged the terms of his alliance with Rome in any way they would suffer the consequences. Sigmer had no alternative but to accept the conditions and renew his promise of loyalty.

  The meeting was over.

  ‘May I say goodbye to them?’ Sigmer asked the legate of the Eighteenth Augusta.

  Terentius Niger nodded. ‘Certainly.’

  Sigmer walked slowly towards his boys, who waited without moving, without displaying any emotion. His own face did not show any signs of turmoil, although his blue gaze went dark like a stormy sky.

  He stood in front of his sons, so close he could touch them. A shock seemed to run through his soul. Then he suddenly lifted his hand and slapped them violently, one after another. It was like slapping two trees. Neither one moved, nor changed expression, nor reacted in any way.

  ‘Now you know why, when I give you an order, you must obey.’

  The boys’ heads dropped before him. Sigmer touched the head of Armin, and then Wulf. ‘Farewell, my sons,’ he said. ‘Never forget who you are and who your father is.’

  He stood still, never taking his eyes off them, until they disappeared over the hill.

  Only in the deep of night, in the most complete solitude, did he weep.

  2

  SIGMER AND INGMAR turned north without ever looking back, without ever calling the boys by name. They were lost. Gone.

  They advanced in silence, the only sound coming from their horses’ snorting. They had nothing to say; there was no course of action to be discussed. They knew what they needed to know. Back at home they would take up their work, face their difficulties, nurse their troubles and their hidden wounds.

  The few times their eyes met they were inexpressive and cold. There were no messages, nor feelings, to communicate. Their forebears and now their people were accustomed to dealing with death and with life’s hardships, used to revealing nothing of what they felt inside. No laughter or tears. Because, every day and every night, they knew they had to survive the cold and the heat, the insects and wild animals, the pounding rains, the mud, the damp, the snow and the chill that sank into their bones.

  Sigmer did not relish the power he wielded. It was more of a burden to him, sometimes a curse. Women had filled up his life for a long time, but that changed when he married Siglinde, daughter of a Sicambri chieftain. With light blonde hair, and eyes the colour of the sky, Siglinde was like a forest spirit, delicate and ethereal. She was also very sensitive and did not always succeed well at hiding her most secret emotions.

  He loved her, in his own way, as one could love a bride in a marriage arranged for reasons of state. But she had given him two sons and now he was returning home with neither. Siglinde surely knew that children belong to their mothers only as long as they are small and helpless, like puppies. When they reach the threshold of adolescence and learn to reason and to speak for themselves, they are passed on to the father. It is he who decides their destiny, he who prepares them to live, and also to die.

  Of the two boys, it was more often Armin who sought his mother out; he was more like her and they shared the same disposition and sensitivity. He never missed saying good morning to her. He would bring her pretty blossoms at the beginning of spring and one day in May he brought her a gift: a little cage made with reeds that held a nightingale he had taken from its nest and raised. Its song was as intense and poignant as that of a poet but that was an illusion: in reality, it was an air of defiance. Sigmer knew she would miss Armin terribly.

  He knew that she would not react with screaming or crying. But her long silences cut as deeply as a blade.

  He thought he would have been more suited to a passionate, ardent, sensual woman. There was one, in particular, who had penetrated his heart like an enemy’s sword.

  It had been many years before. It was the night that Sigmer had dived into the Rhine from the eastern bank and attempted to swim across the great river. His aim was to reach the flagship of the Roman fleet, with General Drusus aboard, and kill him, to win the war with a single stroke.

  A fish had stopped him. It was a gigantic sheatfish, scraping up hard enough against his skin to make him bleed. He knew he was lost. Those repugnant creatures would be shortly coming at him from every direction, attracted by the odour of his blood, and they would devour him, ripping him to shreds. The chill of death sank into his bones and he realized that, as close as he was to the flagship, he would never board it, never reach the Roman side of the river. But just as his nostrils were filling with the stink of more of those huge muddy beasts, an arrow tore through the air dense with fog and sank into the monster’s body. Sigmer himself was pulled aboard the huge, gleaming battleship that smelled of pine and oak and tied to the mast, the trunk of an enormous larch tree.

  Whoever had let the arrow fly hadn’t killed the sheatfish to save Sigmer’s life but to open the way for a boat that was making its way by dint of its oars to the flagship. It bore a litter that was covered and shrouded, and pulled up alongside the larger vessel. The litter was hoisted onto the deck at the bow. From it emerged the most beautiful woman that Sigmer would ever see in his life, more captivating than any dream or imagining, more desirable than Freya, the goddess of love. She was Antonia, the young wife of General Drusus.

  He would learn that they had been married for a couple of years and that they loved each other so intensely that they couldn’t live apart for longer than the briefest of periods. All Drusus needed to do was send word and she would leave the comforts of her villa, face hardships and danger to be with him wherever he was.

  Her head was veiled when she stepped away from the litter but her body swayed under a light gown, blown by the evening breeze. Sigmer breathed in her scent when sh
e passed; he’d never experienced anything like it. No forest flower, no springtime zephyr was so magical, so pure. The women he’d known mostly smelled of the stables. The light fragrance of girlhood lingered with them for too short a season.

  Over the years he had often tried to understand what was in the scent that wafted in the air as that sublime creature went to meet her beloved spouse. Perhaps the fragrance of remote valleys, of salty shores, of honey and of lilies.

  One night he saw them, or rather their shadows, cast by the lamp light onto the fabric of their tent at the stern. Bodies clinging to one another in a delirium of love, mouths breathing into one another, lips burning. Sigmer felt hopelessly unhappy. He realized that, although he was a prince, the difference between their life and his own was so great that it could never be bridged. Sigmer dreamed of Antonia at times, dreamed that he could win her for himself as a spoil of war. The dream only made him feel bitter when he shook himself awake at dawn. He couldn’t begin to express the emptiness she had aroused in him; he didn’t even have the words.

  The Romans had rivers of words. The commander and his wife even had a poet on-board for the sole task of delighting them with his song. He was something like the bards of the Germanic peoples but his voice was lighter, while the stories that inspired him were more intense. He sang of emotion and the musicality of his words was fascinating. In just a few months, Sigmer began to understand the sounds of that language as the meaning of its words opened up to him, never to be forgotten.

  During his long stay on the flagship, he had to remind himself that it was he who’d swum across the gelid current of the Rhine with the intention of driving his dagger into Drusus’s heart and thus instantly winning the war for his people. Over the months, he began to feel something very different, something closely akin to friendship for the youth who was exactly the same age. He admired Drusus’s intelligence, his courage, and his ability to make thousands of men obey a single word from his mouth. His men thought of him as something close to a god.

  Time and time again, Sigmer had thought of escaping, but he never went ahead with it for one reason: because he knew he’d be robbed of the sight of Antonia. In the end he managed to break the spell and win back his freedom, so he could continue to fight for his people against the Romans and against General Drusus. And yet, in great secret, the two young men continued to meet up from time to time. They sat facing one another and talked. Actually, Sigmer would ask question after question and Drusus would talk about his world. His house in the countryside with a garden full of silver-fronded trees, his hunting dogs, a little lake where he could take his bride for a row under the summer moon.

  Even now, Sigmer still thought about those moments, of his secret talks with the commander of Rome’s Army of the North, of the sensation that they were peers thanks to the intimacy of their friendship and that he, too, was one of the most important men in the world.

  Now many things had changed and yet, when he felt sad or tired or incapable of making a decision, he went back to mulling over the days of his youth.

  He recalled the first time he realized that despite the enormous distance which separated Rome from his own nation, he was still a prisoner. The Roman fleet of the Rhine had sailed down the canal, which Drusus had built to join the bend of the great river with the northern lagoon. It was then that Sigmer realized that he knew things that the Roman general was completely unaware of, or that Drusus had never seen and may have only read about in books. Foremost among these was the great tide. One night the water withdrew by two hundred leagues or more, and all of the Roman ships ran aground in the mud. The Germanic army, who had been waiting in the coastal forests for such an opportunity, were ready to launch the attack and destroy them all at once with their flaming arrows.

  How could it be that Drusus did not seem worried? How could he not realize the huge danger he was in? He remained calm even as thousands of Germanic warriors began to leave the cover of the forest, brandishing bows dancing with flames.

  Yet Drusus was right to be calm for three reasons. The first was soon evident: a troop of Frisii horsemen raising lit torches in their left hands and steel swords in their right. It was with them that Drusus had entered into an alliance before he had set off with the fleet – a people who inhabited those lands and who now patrolled the coasts. They would be the bulwark between the ships beached like dying whales and the Germanic army lying in wait in the woods. From the bow of the flagship, Sigmer saw a snake of fire quickly spread across the beach from west to east.

  But the Germanic warriors instantly understood what was happening and they reacted, taking off at a gallop on their swift horses to take control of the beach in front of the Roman ships before the Frisii could manage to occupy it and cut off their attack.

  The second reason was that in the bilge of every ship was a machine run by four men which was designed to suck in water and shoot it back out through a fabric hose, in any direction. When the first incendiary arrows plunged into the resined wood, the crew turned their hoses towards the flames and put them out immediately. Sigmer had seen nothing like it his whole life.

  He understood the third reason when an artillery crew on the flagship, at a sign from General Drusus, removed the oilcloth covers from six big machines positioned at the bow, three on the left and three on the right. The men fed heavy iron bolts into the grooves, tightened the steel bands that primed the bows, took aim through the sights and fired them off one after another, at the centurion’s orders:

  ‘Prima, iacta! Secunda, iacta! Tertia, iacta! . . .’

  The bolts taking off with such deadly precision were like the one that had saved his life when the sheatfish in the Rhine was about to devour him. Where they landed they ripped through flesh, tore through trees, took off the heads of men and horses. From the ground, the Romans were invisible, unlike the Germanic warriors who could be seen clearly from the ship, riding white horses, holding torches and firing fiery arrows from bows. In no time, terrified, they were forced to retreat into the forest.

  The Frisii rode back and forth on the beach all night, torches held high to illuminate the banks. When the tide began to come in, the ships were set afloat as if nothing had ever happened and resumed their navigation towards the mouth of the Elbe, the river which would mark the new border of the Roman Empire.

  Once Sigmer actually asked Drusus why he would face such great danger, risk getting killed himself by spending nights out in the open, fighting on the front line and chancing wounds and disease, when he could have stayed in his own palace in the great marble city, or in his country house alongside his bride.

  Drusus had answered him: ‘To serve the State.’

  ‘And just what is the State?’ asked Sigmer again.

  ‘The State is everything for us. It encompasses our lives, our family and our people. If I fight on the banks of the Rhine, I’m defending my wife who lives in Rome, and my children, even if you have done nothing to harm me. Because if I don’t do it now, one day your horses’ hooves will trample the ashes of our marble city. One of our greatest poets has said so.

  ‘Serving the State is the greatest honour for us. Giving our life for the State is the most glorious fate. The emperor represents the State and every nod from him is law for us.’

  Sigmer remembered the conversation very well and he remembered that it was clear for him then why their relationship had continued for so many years: because that strange friendship overcame their differences of origin, tradition, language and blood.

  Drusus continued to fascinate him with the stories he told of his country. The miracle of how a village of huts – which were very similar to the ones the Germanics still lived in – had become the centre of almost the whole known world. The Empire of Rome contained two seas and was bordered by the two greatest rivers in the world, along with a third river, in the south, tens of thousands of leagues long and populated by monsters, that ran powerfully enough to fill the southern sea. And yet in that land it neither rained nor snow
ed; almost all of the territory was covered with burning sand and no one knew where all the water came from. This was the greatest mystery of that enigmatic land, whose inhabitants considered their river a god.

  Drusus himself had been given the task of moving the border of the Empire eastwards, past the Rhine, into the beyond, to the Elbe. It was the emperor who demanded it, the most powerful man in the world, the man whose wish was law.

  ‘Why?’ Sigmer had asked Drusus.

  ‘Because you Germanics are the only people remaining on the face of the earth who are worthy of being part of the Empire. First you will be our friends and our allies, and then you will become like us. You will live like us, fight in our army; you’ll become notables, commanders, magistrates. You will raise great cities, and with us you will build the roads that never end. The world cannot be Roman forever if you are not a part of it.’

  ‘But what if we don’t want to?’ asked Sigmer.

  Drusus stared at him with an almost incredulous expression, and then continued coldly: ‘Then it would be a battle to the last blood, as it was between us and the Celts two centuries ago. Every spring two consuls and four legions made their way up the valley of the Po River and took on the tribes of the Boii and the Senones. The Celts even look a lot like you do: blond with blue eyes, big builds. We crushed them, exterminated them. In the end they were on their knees, begging for mercy. We chased the survivors over the Alps, all the way back to their ancestral lands.

  ‘Is this what you want for your people, Sigmer? Be careful what you wish for. We were living in huts like yours eight centuries ago. But it could take you almost as long before you become like us, and maybe even then it won’t be enough.

  ‘If, instead, you join us, the wars will end, for centuries perhaps. Or, who can say . . . forever maybe.

  ‘We’ll cultivate art and law together. We’ll practise agriculture. The roads that never end will reach every village, even the most remote. We’ll build ships capable of navigating the ocean. The armies will serve only to protect the borders of our immense State and tend to order within. The Urbs – the city – will be the State and the State will be the world. And the world will be blond and dark. Can you understand, Sigmer? Do you understand me?’