Hero of Rome

by Douglas Jackson

  Petronius smiled. ‘I underestimated you, Valerius. I believed you were another of those haughty young aristocrats merely using the legion as a stepping stone to greater things.’ He raised a hand. ‘Do not be insulted; after all, I was one myself. But I saw you and your men fight against impossible odds today and you are a true soldier; a warrior and a leader. It was a remarkable action which cost our rebel queen dear. I doubt she will rest until she burns you out of your lair.’

  ‘The Ninth—’

  ‘That is why I called you,’ Petronius interrupted. ‘The papers in these chests could be very valuable to her. Intelligence sources and lists of friends of Rome, some of whom are not what the Britons believe. They would be in great danger if the boxes survive and we are taken. Of course, if the Ninth legion is truly coming to our rescue, I need not be concerned.’ There was a question in the last statement, but Valerius looked at the girl and hesitated.

  ‘I have no secrets from Mena,’ the quaestor assured him. ‘She is the reason I am here.’ He saw Valerius’s startled look and gave a tired smile. ‘I met her mother four months before I was due to return to Rome following the invasion. She was a Trinovante; Lucullus’s sister, in fact. When we found she was with child, I discovered to my surprise that I had a greater duty.’

  That word duty again. Valerius found himself torn between admiration and contempt for Petronius. It was difficult to believe that behind the cold and calculating bureaucrat was a lover who had given up his career so that he could be a father to a native girl. Yet this was the same Petronius who had deprived Falco of the arms he so desperately needed.

  ‘Destroy them,’ he said quietly. ‘Destroy the papers.’

  For a moment Petronius’s face lost its urbane certainty. ‘Your legionary?’

  ‘If he escaped, Messor will ensure the story of Colonia’s last stand is known, but beyond that … The door may last until morning, or it may not. Even if he reaches the Ninth I doubt they will be able to fight their way to us in time.’

  Petronius smiled sadly at his daughter, and reached for her hand. ‘Thank you,’ he said, but Valerius wasn’t sure who the words were intended for. He stood up and walked back to his place beside the door, where the base was now clearly glowing.

  ‘Water,’ he ordered, more brusquely than he had intended. His admission to Petronius was the first time he had allowed himself to acknowledge that all hope was gone.

  It must have been close to midnight when the fire outside the door was doused. Valerius saw the tense, white faces as everyone in the chamber waited for the first crash of the battering ram and prayed the seasoned oak would hold once more. But the crash didn’t come. Instead, a few moments later they heard the sharper rap of a heavy hammer accompanied by a scream that froze the blood of every man, woman and child in the Temple of Claudius. When Valerius put his ear to the door he heard the sound of muffled laughter and a rasping, agonized breathing. The hammer struck again, followed by the scream, and he had to take a step back because he feared the agony of the tortured soul on the other side of the oak would unman him.

  Messor. Poor brave Pipefish, who had endured the suffocating hell of the hypocaust only to be taken when he must have been almost clear.

  The second scream was replaced by the child-like pleading of a man tested beyond endurance. The pleas drew Valerius back to the door but he could think of no words of solace, nothing that would reach beyond the barrier of pain to the young soldier he had sent to his death. What could he say? That he wished he could take his place? That he wished it was he who prayed for his mother, and to be released from his agony? He leaned his head against the solid comfort of the wood and prayed in his turn for Messor’s easy death. When the smoke began billowing into the chamber and the glow beneath the door resumed he knew beyond a doubt that the gods no longer existed, not for him, not for Messor, not for anyone inside this temple to a false god. That was when they realized that the first screams hadn’t really been screams at all.

  In the hours that followed, the walls of the chamber seemed to close in and conditions became even more intolerable. The very air, thick with smoke and the stench of roasting flesh, involuntary shit, days-old sweat, and the unique, rancid scent of human fear, grated on the throat as if it were something solid. The latrine area had long since overflowed and those sunk deepest in the lethargy that accompanies lost hope were content to lie in their own waste with their children sobbing beside them. The certainty of death affected people in different ways. Many simply succumbed to despair, but for others, Valerius among them, it had a curiously liberating effect. Ordinary concerns were no longer of consequence. When he thought of Rome and his father and the cousin who would inherit everything that should be his, it was in the abstract, as if he were a third party looking in on all the pointless drama. Even Maeve had faded to a vague, beautiful memory; a kind of comforting presence who would see him safely to the other side.

  Petronius had brought writing materials along with his papers and Valerius spent two hours composing a report of Colonia’s defence and the courage of the city’s militia, of Lunaris’s unflinching bravery, Paulus’s heroics and Messor’s final sacrifice. When he completed the final line, he read it over: We live on in the hope of rescue and in the knowledge that the Temple of Claudius must be defended to the last breath. He shook his head. It hardly captured the moment, but by now the words were blurring together and his exhausted mind demanded only rest. He wrapped the scroll tight around his knife, crawled to the hole in the floor and threw it as far into the recesses as possible. When he’d completed the task he puzzled over the rebel attack on the rear of the compound that had broken the defence. It should have been impossible, but plainly was not. He thought he understood how it happened, but not why. But it didn’t matter now. Nothing did.

  Maeve’s face swam into his mind as he slumped into a delirious sleep and he woke trembling, uncertain of the hour or even where he was. Eventually, parched-mouthed and with a pounding head, he roused himself enough to order Lunaris to issue a ration of water, but the legionary shook his head. The last amphora was empty.

  Thirst affected the old and the young most of all. For hours, Numidius rocked back and forth on his haunches, moaning pathetically, accompanied by a wailing of babes in arms that cut the air like a knife-edge scraped on a brick. Sometime in the night Corvinus’s wife capitulated to the cumulative torture of her baby’s cries and held him so tight to her breast that the child suffocated. When she discovered the boy was dead she stood in the middle of the room, still holding his lifeless body, and howled like a wolf. Eventually, Corvinus took her gently by the arm and, speaking soothingly to her, ushered her to a dark corner where he cut her throat, then lay down beside the still warm corpses, opened his wrists and slowly bled to death.

  Valerius watched the tragic drama unfold and was surprised how little it affected him. Perhaps his mind had been overwhelmed by all that had gone before and all that was undoubtedly to come. Could a man’s stock of emotions be used up in the way he had seen a brave man run out of courage? Corvinus might have been his friend; he remembered how proud the armourer had been of the golden boar amulet he had produced for Maeve, and the good grace with which he gave Lunaris his lesson in humility. He had never truly believed the goldsmith was a coward. Corvinus had betrayed the men he had served with for half a lifetime to protect his wife and child. But did that make him a better man or a worse?

  ‘Valerius!’ He pushed himself to his feet to answer Lunaris’s call. A large area in the centre of the door glowed bright red in the dark and flames had begun eating through the gap between the two oak panels. The bar which had saved them for so long was charred black. One blow from the ram would clearly smash it in two.

  ‘Ready yourselves,’ he said solemnly.

  Lunaris’s eyes shone from his blackened face like twin beacons, red-rimmed and raw from his constant vigil. But Valerius saw something in them – not a message, not a belief. A quality? – he would never have understood if h
e didn’t know it was mirrored in his own. The ability to die without regret: to savour those final moments as a warrior, in the knowledge that you were surrounded by other warriors. He remembered a piece of graffiti he’d once seen on the walls of a gladiator school – A sword in my hand and a friend by my side – and for the first time realized its true meaning.

  ‘It could have been different,’ he said. ‘You could have been a hero on Mona and I could be drinking wine in Rome.’

  Lunaris looked into the orange-tainted darkness around him. ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

  Valerius took a deep breath to stifle the thing welling up inside him and nodded to Lunaris to rouse the surviving legionaries. He stripped off his armour and laid it carefully beside his helmet. The others followed suit. No protection on earth would save them now. They would fight to the end, but better a fatal wound and a quick death than being captured by Boudicca’s rebels. Messor’s screams still rang in their ears and not one among them intended to share his fate. Like them all, Valerius had considered killing himself to ensure it didn’t happen. But he was a soldier, and soldiers didn’t die like sheep, and now, as he stood among them, he knew he had made the right choice. He lined them up in two ranks and made a play of tugging at sword belts and chiding them for their unwashed uniforms. As he did, he took each of them by the hand and their lean, savage faces grinned back at him, teeth shining in the darkness, and he felt the pride well up inside him.

  ‘It has been an honour to serve with you,’ he said.

  They cheered him: a hoarse ‘hurrah’ from throats cracked with thirst that echoed from the walls of the chamber and startled the civilians lying in their subdued huddles. He felt a boiling surge of emotion and he loved them for it. The anticipation of battle beat like a giant drum on his ears. If a man had to die he could not die in better company. A figure stepped to his side and he turned to find Petronius with a naked sword in his hand, the blade bright with blood.

  ‘I could not let them take her,’ he choked, and Valerius nodded.

  The door exploded inward in a shower of sparks and flame followed instantly by a howling wave of warriors. Valerius killed the first man with a single thrust but the sword blades and the spear points were too many to resist and they came at him from every angle in a flurry of bright metal. He heard Petronius’s death cry at his side as a blade hammered his ribs. Roaring with pain and mad with fear and rage he smashed his sword hilt into a screaming, wild-eyed face. The blow left his right side open and, as he backswung in an attempt to parry a blur of metal that hacked at his eyes, he knew he was an instant too slow. A lightning flash of brilliant colours exploded in his head and he felt himself tumbling into the darkness. Death reached out to him and he welcomed it. The last thing he remembered was a face from his worst nightmares.

  XXXVIII

  The face that greeted him in Elysium was different. He knew it must be Elysium because it existed in a constant haze where pain was only a distant memory and soft hands soothed his brow and washed his body. Elysium came and went, but the face remained. Just occasionally earthly matters invaded the idyll that was the afterlife, a gnawing sense of responsibility or an unaccountable sadness, but they were small intrusions and always the face would be there to make them go away. Time in Elysium was an irrelevance and the body’s needs an illusion. It existed, and Valerius existed within it.

  His first indication that Elysium might not be permanent came in a voice from the darkness in a language he knew but didn’t understand. And a name that was his own name. The voice was a rumbling, fractured thing and it was accompanied by a sensation alien to the ‘happy fields’ of the afterlife. Fear. It opened a door through which images marched like the dazzling flashes from the spear points of a distant legion. He saw savage, pitiless faces. A woman crouched and weeping over the body of a dead husband. Swords that rose and fell with merciless precision. And blood. Rivers of blood. Lakes of blood. Blood spattered across a wall, and blood that poured down the steps of a great temple. Screams echoed in his head and though he knew they were his own screams he couldn’t stifle them.

  ‘Valerius.’ The name again, but this time it was another voice, accompanied by the touch of a gentle hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes and for the first time the face appeared in sharp focus. Something metallic was put to his mouth and a pleasant liquid ran down his throat. Just before he lost consciousness he remembered her name.

  Maeve.

  For a time it became difficult to distinguish where dream ended and reality began. Once, he heard a strange whistling sound and woke to find a hooded figure watching over him with a morbid, threatening presence and he knew he must be back in the Otherworld. On another occasion he felt a sharp pain as he fought for his life in a congested chamber, but moments later opened his eyes to find himself staring through a window at familiar stars, in a room that smelled of old smoke and had scorch marks on the limewashed walls.

  He knew he was alive the next time he came awake because the stars were in the same place and he could see a tall, slim figure with a mane of dark hair silhouetted against them. ‘Maeve?’ The name came out as a growl from a week-old puppy.

  She didn’t move and at first he feared it was another dream, but eventually she turned and moonlight part illuminated her face. She had changed, he saw immediately. His unconscious mind had painted her as she once was, but hunger and grief had melted the flesh from her bones. Now, dark shadows and deep hollows stood out in sharp contrast against the milky paleness of her skin, highlighting each plane and giving her the forbidding, unsmiling appearance of a much older woman. She is still beautiful, he thought, but beautiful in a different way: the way a fine sword can be both beautiful and dangerous.

  He lay on a hard wooden bed with a mildewed blanket of rough wool pulled up to his neck and he didn’t realize how weak he’d become until he tried to raise himself. His bandaged head throbbed as if it were about to burst open and every limb weighed more than he could lift. She noticed his struggles and quickly crossed the room to pour liquid from an earthenware jug into a cup. But when she raised the cup to his lips he caught the scent of the herb-infused beer Cearan had given him in the wood and he knew instinctively that this was what had kept him asleep.

  He turned his head to one side. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘Tell me.’

  A veil fell over her eyes and at first he thought she was going to refuse him, but after a moment’s hesitation she began to talk quietly, her eyes fixed on some distant point beyond the window.

  She told how Boudicca had ridden south at the head of an army thirty thousand strong, burning and slaughtering anything in her path which was tainted by contact with the despised Romans, and how their ranks had been swelled by warrior bands from the Catuvellauni and Trinovante. ‘Each fought to outdo the other in their prowess on the battlefield and in their cruelty, for each felt they had suffered most at the hands of your people,’ Maeve explained, as if it somehow excused the excesses: the impalings and the burnings and the rapes.

  Of all Roman works, the Temple of Claudius symbolized the shame of occupation and Boudicca had used that symbol to fan the flames of her followers’ hatred into an inferno of unthinking and unquestioning rage. ‘She ordered them to desecrate the god’s image and pull down the temple, stone by stone, and cast it into the river. It is an abomination on this land, she told them, and we will wipe it from memory as we will wipe the Romans from memory.’

  When they reached the slope north of Colonia and looked down upon the pathetic force facing them, Boudicca’s warriors had laughed at the prospect of meeting the old men of the militia. Others, more experienced in war, counselled caution, but it was the young men who prevailed. So Boudicca had sent them over the bridge to their deaths.

  ‘Three thousand killed and three thousand more with wounds that will keep them from the fight for many weeks,’ Maeve lamented. ‘They were the mightiest champions of the three tribes and she can ill afford their loss.’

  By the time Bo
udicca reached the temple she expected to see it in flames and the statues toppled. She raged and tore her hair and demanded that it be taken by nightfall and destroyed by dawn. But the Romans in the temple denied her for two more days and, frustrated, she had led her army towards Londinium before she could witness its destruction.

  ‘You know the rest,’ Maeve said. ‘They spared none.’

  He had many questions, but none stayed in his mind long enough to form completely. In the end he realized there was only one thing he truly needed to know.

  ‘Why do I live when everyone else died?’

  Maeve gave him a strange, fey look and he became aware of a third presence in the room. A hooded figure rose from the shadows close to the door and limped towards the bed. Valerius recognized it from his dreams and felt a shiver run through him. The hood fell slowly back and he looked into the face of a monster.

  Crespo’s sword had taken Cearan high on the left side of his forehead, splitting scalp and skull before it cut diagonally across his face. The force of the blow destroyed the left eye socket and turned the eye into a red pulp that was like looking into the mouth of a volcano. Relentlessly, the sword’s edge had carved through the bridge of the Iceni’s elegant nose, shattering bone and cartilage and leaving a gaping pink-lipped cavity through which his breath whistled noisily. Finally the blade stripped the flesh from his upper right lip and removed three teeth before breaking his lower jaw, which now hung unnaturally low, giving his face a permanent sideways tilt. The result was an abomination of the human visage. When he spoke, it was in the British tongue and only the left side of his mouth moved, so the words emerged as a guttural, unintelligible mumble that still managed to convey the force of his anger. Maeve translated the words for Valerius.

  ‘He has vowed that your language will never cross his lips again and he wishes you to know first that you are his enemy, to the death.’ She hesitated as Cearan continued. ‘When Boudicca offered you half of her kingdom, you took it all. When she offered you peace, you brought swords. You have killed his wife and his sons, ruined his tribe and defiled its women.’