by Manda Scott
“And why was this oath asked of you?”
“I have no idea.” He pushed on away from her, raising his hands to protect his face from the thorns. He lied, of course; he had a very good idea why it had been asked, the crux of which involved Theophilus and Xenophon, two Greek physicians who took their care of the soul as seriously as they did the healing of the body that clothed it. He did not share his thought.
Cygfa followed him along a path that was no path, stretching under the dragging brambles, kicking through thorns and nettle beds. Emerging, Valerius ran across the mud-greased stepping stones; a warriors’ challenge to reach the far bank without falling. Long ago, he had watched three other men run a rain-wet log across a river. Only one of them had fallen and he the one who mattered least.
Valerius reached the far bank with dry feet. Success rallied him. He said, “To find why the oath was asked, you would have to ask the emperor, who may be dead. Perhaps Dubornos can ask him for you. He seems to have friends amongst those who have already joined the gods. I do not.”
“No. In the realms of the dead, there are those who merely hate you and those who will wait for eternity to greet your death and avenge their own. Anyone can see it.”
“Indeed?” He heard his own voice brittle. “Are you a dreamer that you can see the souls of the dead?”
“Hardly. I don’t need to be. Any child can see those that circle you.”
He walked away, leaving her on the far bank with the stones ahead of her, and did not wait to see how she fared.
He came to the clearing alone. The rest of the group were ready and waiting. Cwmfen had Math bundled against her chest, ready to ride. The child was growing hair, fuzzily, and his eyes were less vacant. His mother had made good progress under Philonikos’ care; for the past three days, she had begun to take an active part in the journey where before she had lain in a wagon and all her strength had been taken simply to live.
Today, she had spread the fire and doused it, covering the ash with the turf cut the previous night and scattering old leaves over that. The centurion and his party might find their campsite, but only by diligent searching, and the very act of looking for it would lose them time. It might not matter when their destination was so obvious, but, again, there was a warrior’s integrity in concealment and none would willingly break it.
The men had been similarly busy; at the margins of the clearing, the horses were gathered and unhobbled. The wagon mules had been abandoned long since and a mare bought for Cwmfen so that all of them rode horses of good blood, but for Cunomar who had been given a small, cobby gelding. The child was there now, standing by his mount, breaking his fast with his father on the cold roasted saddle of a hare which Dubornos had caught the night before. The singer claimed to have sung it into his hand, a conceit Valerius did not believe. The man looked up and waved in ready friendship. Valerius stopped, staring, and then heard Cygfa’s soft tread behind him and the sibilant Ordovician greeting.
She would have walked past, but he intercepted her and, so that the others might hear, said, “We will reach Gesoriacum this afternoon. You will have to either unbraid your hair or cover it if you do not wish to be arrested for sedition. I suggest you take that seriously. Tomorrow is the Ides of October and the last chance for a ship to sail. If Claudius can live two more days, you will be safe and I can return to my unit. When I am free of this oath, we will see which side is stronger.”
Caradoc’s daughter grinned at him, baring her teeth as uncounted others had done on uncounted battlefields, and she spoke the words that every man and woman who had opposed him had said, in one form or another. “I will greet the day with delight. Your head will look good mounted on a spear at the roundhouse on Mona.”
Of all the things she had said that morning, Valerius considered that last most often in the long day’s ride towards the coast. In the days when he had been Bán of the Eceni, his people would not have kept the heads of their enemies as trophies. The bodies of even the most reviled foes had been given intact to the carrion eaters and the gods of the forest.
*
Gesoriacum, port and civic centre, had changed little in the sixteen years since the youthful Caligula had ordered the great pinnacle of the lighthouse built and sailed his flagship Euridyke out onto the ocean to accept Amminios’ surrender, claiming as he did so victory over both Neptune and Britannia.
For Valerius, return flayed to the white bone a mind already laid open by the journey. In Britannia, new memories overlaid the old and it was possible to forget what had been. Here, too much was too familiar. The land around the town was quieter than he had known it, lacking two legions camped on its margins, but the brisk, sharp smell of the sea made his eyes water as it had always done and brought on the vague nausea that had dogged his every voyage. The wind tore the words from his mouth and the circling seabirds cried with the voices of the dead and he was glad, then, that Cygfa could hear them as well as he could.
They reached the walls in the late afternoon, dipping down into the valley of a small stream and walking the horses up a meandering path to the southern gate. On the far side of the town, a fishing boat had put into the harbour, drawing its blizzard of screaming gulls behind. The noise of them was crippling. Valerius’ morning headache, lacking the medication of wine or Philonikos’ spirits, had increased with the passing miles so that, as they approached the town, he rode forward blindly, letting his mare pick her own route. His helmet bound tight along his brow, as if the metal had shrunk or his head swollen, and the pressure of it crushed his mind.
The sky was too bright. He looked down, focusing with pained clarity on the crushed grasses and small, withered autumn flowers that pricked the turf in pink and white. His mare had a white pastern on her left fore and the hoof beneath it was striped brown against amber. He was counting the stripes in his mind, repeating the numbers over and over in Gaulish, Thracian and Latin, trying not to be sick, when Caradoc, riding behind him, said, “They’ve kindled the lighthouse fires. Is that normal in daytime?”
What would you have done if—
“What? Where?”
“Behind and to the right.”
The nausea vanished. The pressure of his helmet became a necessary protection. Valerius looked up. From the platform of the lighthouse north and east of their position, buckets of pitch poured oiled black smoke up into the daytime sky, poisonous against high, drifting clouds.
“It’s the end of a signal chain.” He knew it in his gut. “They’ll be responding to another.” He looked around, cursing the sea and the gulls and his wine-deprived inattention, and saw what he should have done before. He thrust out an arm, pointing.
“There.”
Behind them, far back in the hills, a column of grey smoke slanted on an unfelt breeze. The canopy of the woodland nearly concealed it; had they been a mile further down in the valley, they would have been as blind to its presence as were the nine armoured men who rode out of the woodland on the far side of the stream and, as one, halted their horses and looked up to the column of smoke rising above the town.
Valerius felt ice ball in his chest. “Claudius is dead,” he said, and, with the same certainty, “Agrippina rules. We’re dead too if we stay in the open.” Cwmfen rode just behind him, the infant Math strapped to her chest. Her face was lined with pain and fatigue but he had seen it worse.
He asked, “Can you ride at the gallop?”
“If I have to.”
“You do.” He spun his horse and swept out his arm, taking them all in. “Ride for the south gate and follow me through the town. Anyone who lags behind will be left to Agrippina’s men. I wouldn’t expect them to be kind.”
Gesoriacum was crowded. It was not likely that the entire population had actually emptied onto the streets to impede their passage, it simply felt like it. The roads were narrower than Rome’s so that the litters of matrons paying afternoon visits to the villas of friends took the whole width from house front to house front and held up the men
on foot, dawdling, and the fisherfolk streaming to and from the harbour and the merchants and the stationary wagons—because Rome’s daytime ban on wheeled vehicles did not extend to the provinces—and the dogs and the children who ran for their mothers as the strangers on horseback passed through, uncivilly fast. They still cleared the way, tardily, but enough. On this last day, Valerius had taken time in mid-morning to shake out the uniform of the Urban Guard from his pack and don it over his travelling tunic. Even those who might have understood the meaning of the lighthouse fire would not risk offending an officer from Rome.
The town’s harbour was a small one, for all that it had seen half an invasion fleet depart a decade before. Warehouses, merchants’ stalls and fishers’ cottages crowded close up to the quayside with only a cobbled path to keep them from toppling forward into the water. A low stone wall projected out into the sea, studded with oak mooring posts. Three green-painted fishing boats ranged prow to stern along the left-hand side of it, each tilted seaward, their flaking keels resting on mud, straining against taut mooring ropes. On the right, a barnacled merchant ship lay similarly grounded. Valerius stared at it, cursing floridly in Thracian.
“The tide’s out. We can’t sail.” Caradoc was the seaman amongst them, but even Cunomar could have told that the ship was not going to sail this side of high tide. The child’s father dismounted and knelt on the rimed stone of the jetty, leaning down to study the clusters of bubbled weed and the wavering lines of molluscs. The sea rolled up and down at its leisure, in no hurry to rise or to fall.
Caradoc sat back on his heels. “It’s on the turn,” he said. “But the ships won’t be afloat before nightfall. No master in his right mind will sail before dawn. Agrippina’s men will be here long before then.”
They were here already. Far back on the southern edge of town, litter-bound matrons and dawdling men clucked and flustered a second time as another group of armed horsemen carved their way towards the harbour.
Valerius cursed viciously in three additional languages, then, “You need to get out of sight. When you’re safe, I’ll find the ship’s master. He’ll sail tonight if I have to hold a knife to his throat as he does it.”
Cwmfen said, “You’d see us all drown?”
“I’d see you half a mile offshore and out of reach of Marullus and his men. That much my oath requires. What happens to you after is not my concern. Come on.”
His horse’s feet skidded on mud as he turned. Momentarily, the slanting sun blinded him. He accepted with gratitude the god’s reminder of his promised success, so close now he could reach out and touch it. He did not doubt that Marullus would concede defeat as soon as the ship was safely offshore. A Father did not hold grudges against a son when he had lost a challenge in fair combat. In the meantime, action kept the ghosts at bay almost as well as wine.
He blinked and the sun was gone. On the quayside, a small crowd had gathered. Mucky-nosed children gawped openly at his armour. Valerius moved his hand to cover the mark of the red bull on his left shoulder and jerked his head at Caradoc who was staring into the crowd. “Mount, now, before you attract more attention. The Praetorians will pay for information. We should see there’s little to be had.”
He led them west and then east and then doubled back west again, threading his way into the poorest quarter, dismounting and leading the horses when the streets became too narrow to ride. They left them eventually in a cattle pen at a butcher’s, with the man paid enough to buy the promise of silence and scared into its certainty by the threat of the emperor’s displeasure and the more tangible danger of the decurion’s knife. Some men can threaten death with absolute authenticity; Valerius had found these last ten years that he was one of these.
The tavern to which he brought them was in an alleyway so narrow that the churned, dog-soiled mud of its floor never saw sunlight. Wedged in the gap between a tannery and a laundry, the inn made no effort to avoid the stench of either, or to pretend, as others might have done, that the fabric of the walls was anything but a fire trap, or that the beds had ever been free of lice.
The proprietor was a man of uncertain ancestry who called himself, with due irony, Fortunatus. Over the years, he had acquired the art of hazy recall in the identification of his clients. Rarely did a face stick in his mind and then only if the circumstances were unique. In his years of service, Fortunatus had only once before played host to a junior officer of the cavalry and then it had seemed accidental, the meanderings of a young man lost in search of himself, brought to wine for solace and, perhaps, repentance, and to this place above all others for its guaranteed anonymity. That man was older now, of higher rank, and if the hair was as black and the lean delicacy of his features as striking as they had been, the fires that fed his soul burned manifestly more harshly. Seeing him in the doorway, the proprietor breathed in danger much as his clients breathed the stench of stale urine and rotting skins and hated it with the same fervour.
“We need a room from now until dusk.”
The decurion’s voice was quiet and did not allow the possibility that he might be refused. The coins that spilled from his palm onto the noisome straw of the floor were worth more than the inn and its half-dozen boy-whores combined. His right hand, resting lightly on the hilt of his dagger, made the alternatives clear. Fortunatus was grossly obese, partly as a defence against clients’ knives; only the longest would reach any vital organ shielded by the layers of fat. He was considering his possible courses of action when the decurion raised one fine black brow and shifted his hand to his cavalry sword, which looked easily long enough to run through a horse and still spit the man behind it. The proprietor jerked his chin towards a curtained opening. At this time of day, his one room was always free.
The officer’s smile was charming and entirely unpleasant. “We are not here. You have neither seen us nor heard of us. If you value your life, you will remember that, as will the rest of your … staff. You will find us cheese, bread and olives that are fit to eat and a flagon of watered wine that a child can drink safely.”
The man had no sense of humour, clearly; no-one else could have said that last and kept a straight face. Fortunatus’ nod became a palsied bobbing of the head. Only after the curtain had dropped behind the woman bearing the infant did he find his girth was such that he could not stoop to fetch the coins on the floor and had to ask one of his ‘staff’ to find them for him.
He had not counted them as they fell. The urchin he had picked was one of the few with any intelligence which may have been a mistake; the lad handed up a handful of copper and silver, but no gold. Fortunatus had seen gold. He was reaching behind the bar for his whipping rod when a knife blade came from nowhere and hung horizontally in the air beneath his chin, cutting like a razor into the first row of jowls. He found himself frozen, too shocked even to sweat.
“How much for the boy?”
Fortunatus knew the decurion by the unnatural quiet of his voice. The man was just behind his shoulder, where either or both the knife and the cavalry sword could skewer him. If the curtain had moved, the tavern-master had not seen it, but clearly the officer was here and asking a question that any other client might ask. The boy had been beautiful once. His hair, although matted, was still so blond as to be almost white and his lowered brows failed to hide the strange blue gaze of the Belgae. He raised them now; he, too, had seen the colour of the officer’s money and was doing what he could to make himself presentable. In poor light, he might still be considered attractive. Fortunatus thought of a price and doubled it.
“Ten denarii?” A value greater than half a month’s legionary pay but less than he had seen dropped to the straw. He tried hard not to make it sound like a question but his voice betrayed him.
The decurion hissed nastily. The sharp edge of the knife shaved the skin over Fortunatus’ larynx. The humourless voice said, “Not for the afternoon. To keep. For life. How much?”
Fortunatus was sweating now. A river of scalding saltiness ran into his left
eye, stinging it so that he could not think. The knife-tip moved up to rest below that same eye. A single gold piece appeared in the air beside it, twin to the one that had been dropped on the floor. Or perhaps it was the same one and had never dropped. “I will give this to you and you will give me the boy. He is mine, now and for always. Is that clear?”
At last, a question Fortunatus could answer, which was good, because it took all his presence of mind not to nod. It mattered not to nod; the knife was too close to his eye to allow him to move unless he wanted to lose it.
“It’s clear,” he said.
“Thank you.” The knife was removed. Fortunatus allowed himself to breathe. The lethal voice said, “Every one of the adults in that room is armed. If they are disturbed, they are sworn to leave you dying, whatever else befalls them, and if they fail, I will find you and take vengeance. You will not enjoy that. Do we understand each other?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” The decurion turned to his new purchase. “You have a name?”
The lad was bright enough to understand that his entire life had just been altered for ever by a man who wielded a knife as if killing came without a second thought. He shook his head. His mouth flapped, but no sound came out.
“But you understand Latin.” The man smiled coldly. “Then you are Amminios. Remember that; it’s a name with a history and there are others who will know and admire it. Come with me. We have work to do.”
Fortunatus waited until the two shadows, man and boy, had passed beyond the exit to the alley before he sank down onto both knees and felt through the mouldering straw for the remaining coins. He found no gold piece.
The tavern was full when Valerius returned. He had bought a cloak and pulled it close to his uniform, hiding all but the shape of his cavalry sword, which ensured his safety. The Belgic urchin, who had not spoken the entire afternoon, waited at the alley’s mouth. He may have been voiceless, but he had eaten and drunk at the quayside, both with the desperation of the half-starved. Valerius had thought there was a possibility the lad might have run then, but fear of the consequences and lack of anywhere else to go kept him at heel like a beaten hound all the way back to the mouth of the passageway leading to the inn, through which nothing short of extreme violence would have made him pass.