by Jack Whyte
Within two more years, the Villa had been refitted and restored to much of its former beauty, and for a time it was used to house the garrison officers and their wives, and its walls had resounded for a time with the sounds of life. That same year, however, the garrison in Ilchester had been established, and the resultant exodus of more than a thousand souls and mouths from Camulod had eased tensions all around, permitting breathing space again, and time for reflection. At that juncture, Ambrose and Ludmilla had approached the Council to enlist its help in completing the Villa Task properly. The Council had concurred, and the fine finishing work had begun; the Villa Britannicus, already restored to soundness, was now returned, as Ambrose put it, to its former greatness.
Ambrose had not exaggerated. The Villa Britannicus looked better than I had ever seen it look before, and I took great pride in showing it to my guests. I was reminded of the description in my Uncle Varrus's writings of how he had first seen the place, and so I endeavoured to show it to them just as his future wife, Luceiia Britannicus, had shown it to Publius Varrus.
The entire house was laid out in the form of an enormous ‘H’ built on an east west axis, with the family living quarters closing off the open, western end to form an enclosed quadrangle. All four sides of the building facing into the courtyard of this quadrangle, I pointed out, were domestic buildings, originally built to house the serving staff and the domestic facilities, such as baths, laundry, kitchens, bakery, butchery, wine storage and the like. The main crossbar of the ‘H’ was pierced by an ornate, pillared portico that led onto a second, outer courtyard at the eastern end. The north and south wings held stables, livestock barns, cool rooms for long term food storage, a spacious carpentry shop with a cooperage attached, a pottery, a tannery, a roomy smithy with several forges and a large granary.
The entire Villa was two storeyed, and I pointed out that the ground floor walls surrounding the inner courtyard, the oldest part of the house, were enormously thick and built of huge, solid granite pebbles, smoothed and rounded on the outer surfaces, shaped around the edges to fit together and bonded with strong concrete. Above, on the upper level, the construction was similar, but the walls were less thick, the granite pebbles smaller, and the walls themselves were pierced by the shuttered, evenly spaced windows of the family's sleeping chambers, an innovation peculiar to this house and one which I had never seen repeated elsewhere. Beyond the portico, on the other hand, the extended walls flanking the outer courtyard were of timber framing and plaster mixed with broken flint.
I took delight in pointing out that all the buildings flanking the inner courtyard were entered from the courtyard, but all of those surrounding the outer one opened out into the fields surrounding the villa. Only four small doors permitted pedestrian access from these buildings into the outer yard. This was an innovation designed by Luceiia Britannicus herself when she had decided, long before she met Publius Varrus, to make the approach to the house more beautiful. She had closed up all of the entrances to the buildings around the outer yard and cut new ones in the former rear walls, and had then built a great, sweeping, semicircular road to the main portico, weaving her roadway in places to go around and among the twelve great trees that stood there: four oaks, three elms and five great, copper beech trees. She had then seeded the entire yard with grass and lavished attention on it, and when it had grown rich, she had planted formal gardens of flowers—roses, violets, pansies and poppies—among the trees.
Awe gave place immediately to open mouthed wonder from the moment I led my guests inside the house itself. I must admit that even I was stunned by the opulence that awaited us. When I was a boy, it was simply my grandfather's home, the house where I had been born and where no one really lived any longer. Today, I was seeing it through the eyes of others and comparing it with all the other houses I had ever seen. It was matchless.
The ground floor of the family quarters, where we began, had been accurately described by Uncle Varrus as palatial. Every room was differently floored. Those in the main rooms were mosaic, in a multitude of colours, depicting scenes from Greek myth and legend: Europa and the Bull, Theseus and the Minotaur of Crete, and Leda and the Swan. The lesser rooms on that floor were merely tessellated, the marble stones of their floors laid out in geometric shapes and patterns that dazzled the eyes with their brightness and colours. The triclinium, the great dining room where we would eat that night, was floored in large, lustrous squares of. dark-green marble alternating with flawless white, on which was an open sided arrangement of matched oaken dining tables that would seat upwards of sixty guests in comfort. The walls were panelled in sheets of pale-green and yellow marble so highly polished that the occupants of the room were reflected in them. Against the walls, ranked side by side, were deep shelved cabinets, some of them open fronted and others with doors, that held the family's wealth of plate and dinnerware. There were platters and bowls and serving dishes and utensils of gold and silver and copper and tin and bronze; exquisite and ancient Samian pottery, richly glazed and decorated; cups and beakers and vases of polished glass; and two enormous drinking cups of aurochs horn, polished and worn, glossy with age and ornamented with mounts of finely crafted gold.
Ludmilla had evidently decided to return these items to their proper place as part of the general refurbishment. I immediately wondered then if she would resent our presence in the house because of that. Had she intended to move her household here? And if so, would she then wish to reclaim the various pieces of plate and ornamentation?
Thinking that thought, and looking at my dear Tress gaping wide eyed at these treasures, a vision of my beloved Cassandra flashed into my mind, and I felt a momentary stirring of some ancient guilt. What would she think of this, I wondered, if she were looking down on me right now, and how would she feel about this young woman sharing my life and my possessions? And then the answer came to me as clearly as if Cassandra herself had spoken the words in my ear. Like Ludmilla, Cassandra would be glad for me, happy that I had found a woman to brighten my life as this one did. Left to my care alone, this villa would have continued to degenerate as it had for the past forty years and more. The scars it bore would have grown darker; the dust would have grown thick in its corners. Now, with Tressa, my life had changed, just as Ludmilla had brought life back to the Villa Britannicus itself.
I led the group up the double flight of wide, marble stairs to the family sleeping chambers on the upper floor. The entire upper storey was floored with thick, interlocking planks of solid pine, glazed with the patina of more than a hundred years of care. Each of the ten sleeping chambers there had its own window and was filled with spring sunlight at this hour of the afternoon. The windows were small, and covered with wooden shutters inside and out, the inner set fitted with adjustable slats that could be closed completely, or angled to permit light mid air to enter. The air circulating throughout the villa, I pointed out for the sole benefit of Tress, was uniformly warm, thanks to the heated air carried throughout by the hypocausts, hot air ducts fed by the furnace that burned constantly beneath the bathhouse and was refuelled twice each day. And the house had two sets of baths, one for the family and another for the household staff, each of them walled entirely with tiny, white, glazed tiles imported from beyond the seas when first the house was built.
We completed our tour with a visit to the facilities surrounding the interior courtyard, although the bustle of activity of the staff in the kitchens and bakery discouraged us from interrupting. Marco, the chief cook of Camulod's kitchens, whom I had known since he first apprenticed to my old friend Ludo thirty years before, greeted me warmly and was happy to make Tressa's acquaintance. Marco, as his mentor Ludo had been before him, was openly and unabashedly homosexual. He was gifted in the preparation of food of any kind, although his greatest talents were reserved for the preparation of pies and pastries. He paid Tress the signal honour of allowing her to taste and test one of his sauces, and rolled his eyes in delight when she moaned with the pleasure of it. The
n, graciously, he eased us out of his kitchen again, recommending the beauty of the inner courtyard and the afternoon.
The courtyard contained a garden—more of an orchard, really, with apple, pear, cherry and plum trees as well as vegetables and herbs. The earth in some of the beds was freshly turned, and the debris of winter had been swept up into neat piles in the comers of the two sections where the soil lay undisturbed.
When we had seen all there was to see there, I led the entire group, largely silent now and much subdued, back into the family living room. Ambrose's earlier suggestion of a cup of mead and a comfortable sprawl around a brazier now seemed like an excellent idea, and we passed the interval before dinner in pleasant, general conversation, most of it dedicated to admiration of the villa and the reclamation work done under the supervision of my brother and his wife.
I was happy to see that Tressa seemed at ease with Ambrose and Ludmilla. She sat listening closely, and on one occasion Ludmilla asked her something about the fabrics on the walls and chairs. Tressa brightened and launched immediately into a response that interested me not a whit and quickly lost me in a sea of feminine intricacies. Watching the two of them talking easily, however, I was relieved to know I had been right. These two would become close friends.
As the dinner hour approached, the others who would join us began to arrive from the fort, some of them in wagons and others, notably the officers of the former Mediobogdum garrison, on horseback. We had decided that, on this first evening of homecoming celebration, the boys and other children should be accommodated elsewhere, to allow their parents the unaccustomed luxury of being themselves for once, without fear of being overheard or interrupted at their meal. All the children, therefore, including the four boys who would have been mortified at that description, were being cared for by the household staff up on the hill. As each group arrived, Ambrose and Ludmilla welcomed them and Plato plied them all with wine, ale or mead, and they were soon absorbed into the ongoing conversations.
At one point, Shelagh approached and took me by the arm, smiling at Benedict, with whom I had been discussing something trivial, and leading me away to stand against a corner wall where she could talk with me alone. I was curious to know what had prompted this move, but for some time she spoke only of the afternoon's activities and the changes Ambrose and Ludmilla had effected in the old house. Finally, prompted by her evident unwillingness to say what was really on her mind, I asked her outright why she had taken me aside. She stilled, and then she smiled.
"Why should you even have to ask? Don't you think it possible I might have wished for a few moments alone with you, to thank you personally for this afternoon? You taught me more than I have ever known about this place."
I grinned right back at her. "Aye, of course, darling Shelagh, that's it. After all the years we've known each other with our gentle lusts and unfulfilled attraction, you've chosen today to declare your love, in full view of Tress, your husband, and our assembled friends. What's wrong, really? Something's troubling you."
"No, it's not troubling. Merely that... I had a dream last night, one of those strange ones, the first I've had in years."
I felt my heartbeat surge immediately and my breath grew tight in my chest. "What? What was it?"
She shook her head. "I saw you and Ambrose, side by side, in a strange place filled with swirling smoke. He stood above you, bare headed, the light from... from something... reflected in his hair. You sat huddled at his feet, your hair dull brown as now, your shoulders hunched. But then you sprang erect and into him, and the two of you became one, brilliant with light mid surrounded by swirling smoke..."
"What? I sprang into him, you said. I knocked him down?"
"No, you sprang into him... inside him. You lost yourself in him, and he in you. You became one. "
"Oh... What happened then?"
She shook her head. "Nothing. I woke up. That is all there was. "
I turned to look to where my brother stood laughing with Tress and Mark, our carpenter, and then I looked back at Shelagh, who stood watching me with no expression that I could define.
"Shelagh, that makes no sense to me at all. Does it to you?'
She shrugged. "No, but when did these dreams ever make sense? I know only that when they occur, I recognize them for what they are, and they always have meaning of some kind. But the thing I noticed most in there was the colour of your hair. Will you change it back to yellow, now that we've come homer'
"I expect so. I'll simply stop using the berry juice that stains it brown. You think that has import, my hair colour?"
"How would I know? It changes the look of you, but I've grown accustomed to it for years now. Anyway, you would look good even if you were bald. "
"Oh, would he, indeed? Should I be feeling jealousy here, you two' Donuil had approached silently while we were talking, holding a drink he had brought for Shelagh.
I turned to him, laughing, and told him we had been discussing the colour of my hair and what I should do to it now that I was home. He eyed my head and nodded sagely, then advised me to take his wife's advice and shave it all off.
We moved to join the others after that, and I forgot about Shelagh's dream for the time being, caught up in the general conversations that were swirling everywhere. On several occasions, some of the other men, most notably among our military contingent, attempted to bring up the subject of political affairs beyond our lands, but Ambrose would have none of that and made it abundantly clear that all information would be shared equally among everyone after he and I, as joint Commanders, had had the opportunity to meet and discuss it. None sought to argue against that, and the talk returned each time to more innocuous subjects.
By the time Plato summoned us to dinner in the triclinium, there were thirty of us present: all of the original party who had left Camulod six years before, save one and twelve new immigrants from Ravenglass, plus Ambrose and Ludmilla. And when we were assembled around the open sided square of tables Plato had arranged for us, before the first course was served, we drank together to the memory of our sole absentee, our dear friend Lucanus.
SIX
"So, here we are, alone at last." Ambrose lowered himself into an armchair, smiling, and pressed his hands into his face, squeezing his eyes and then drawing his fingers down to his chin, leaving white pressure marks that faded quickly. He opened his eyes wide and yawned. "Do you feel up to this? I don't, really. Dinner was too good, and I may have had too much wine. I'm stuffed like one of Marco's roasted fowl." He stretched mightily. "I had hoped to reach this point an hour and more ago. We have much to discuss."
"Aye, so you said this afternoon, when we arrived." I settled myself comfortably into my own chair, close by the brazier. "I don't know whether I'm any more fit than you are to talk long into the night. It seems like days since I last slept, and it's been weeks since I last slept in a bed. That's seductive. But I think we'd better make the most of this time, tonight. We may not have a better chance than this to say all that needs to be said."
Ambrose glanced at me quizzically. "You have things you wish to tell me, too?"
"I do, and perhaps we should deal with that first. My information is less urgent than yours, I suspect, but I think it is important. I'll keep it brief." I then launched into the tale of my interference in the affairs of Nero Niger and his Appius clan, and detailed my thoughts on how we might be able to develop a network of useful alliances with the common people around places like Corinium.
Ambrose listened carefully, and when I had finished speaking he nodded, his expression thoughtful. He then began firing rapid questions at me, all of them concerned with the implementation of my less than lucid plan and the methods I had conceived for making it a reality. I had the answers, incomplete and tentative as they were, at my fingertips, and he weighed each of them judiciously, sometimes reshaping or realigning the thrust of them but not once dismissing anything out of hand.
Within a remarkably short while, working in easy, intuitive
harmony, we had transformed my original, optimistic suggestions into a concrete and feasible campaign plan. We would put the proposal to the Council at the next meeting, and put the campaign into effect as soon as possible thereafter.
"Good," Ambrose said then, after we had both sat for a while in silence, pleased with what we had achieved. "Anything else?"
I shook my head. "No, that was all I had. Now what's going on in Cambria, and have you had any word of Vortigern?"
"No, no word of Vortigern, and too much word of Cambria. We're ready to go, you know. As soon as you're prepared. Within the week, if possible."
'To Cambria? In what kind of force?"
"One third. The First Legion—sounds grand, doesn't it? But what else could we call our groups? They're half the size of a legion—"
"I know, but probably three times as powerful. I've heard all about them from Benedict and the others. Tell me about this new Scouting Force you've organized."
For some time, Ambrose had been concerned about an inefficiency in the use of Camulod's fighting resources. Our entire way of life in Camulod was built around the breeding of horses for our cavalry, and our heavy cavalry mounts were our greatest pride. But not all of the enormous number of horses that we bred were large enough to meet our criteria for service. Camulodian cavalry was heavy cavalry, the only force of its kind in Britain, perhaps in the world, and only the largest animals could be strong enough to bear the weight of our heavily armoured troopers. That requirement had left us, over the years, with a large reserve of smaller but otherwise magnificent animals for which we had no purpose, apart from putting them to work in the fields, and the finest of those creatures, my brother had long thought, were going to waste.