The Centurions

by The Centurions (retail) (epub)

  “I’m quite certain Correus has both eyes wide open,” Appius said. “He may well do more to discourage your daughter than anyone.”

  “He had better,” Aemelius said. He stopped pacing and glared at Appius again. “Well, what now?”

  “Have a drink,” Appius said.

  * * *

  Correus sat with his arm around Aemelia while she wept into the shoulder of his tunic with all the desperation of fourteen years. He cast a brief, hunted look at the skies, wondering why the Lady Aphrodite should choose him to amuse herself with. “Little maid, you mustn’t marry anyone you don’t want to, but – they’ll never let you marry me!”

  She raised a tear-stained face to his, her eyes overflowing, and she looked so miserable that he hugged her to him. “You do like me?” she whispered.

  She was young and warm and she felt good in his arms. Through tears, her face had a wet-lily quality that caught at his heart. Correus realized that some part of him did like her very much, and he shifted uncomfortably. “Yes,” he whispered back, “I like you very much, but it won’t do, and it’s best not to think of what won’t do. I’ve learned that well enough,” he added grimly.

  “Correus…” She pushed her tangled dark curls back into some semblance of order and dried her eyes on the embroidered hem of her stole. “Correus… if you were Flavius, would you want to marry me?”

  If he were Flavius… if he were Flavius he would be away from here on his father’s business today, spending a pleasant lunch with the officer in charge of remounts at the cavalry training barracks outside the City.

  But Aemelia… with everything a man could want wrapped up in the soft yielding body cuddled in his arms… “If I were Flavius, I’d marry you in a minute.” Aemelia smiled, happy now, and he realized with regret he shouldn’t have said that. “Then we must wait, and when they see that we mean it… Julia says that your father is going to adopt you.”

  I hope he still is, after this, Correus thought bitterly. Aloud he said, “My father will give me his name, Aemelia. Only his name. He won’t give me Flavius’s inheritance, or his wife, and I wouldn’t take them. I am not Flavius.”

  “I know,” she said quietly. “You look like him, but you aren’t him. That’s why I love you, not him.” She touched his cheek with her hand. “Kiss me, Correus.”

  Like a fool he kissed her, feeling her mouth soft against his and her eager young body in his arms, and by the time he released her, he was shaking.

  Aemelia sighed and nestled into his shoulder. “It will be all right,” she said with quiet certainty, and there was no way on earth that he could explain to the innocence of fourteen the difference between love and desire.

  * * *

  Antonia, coming out into the colonnade, found a most unsettling tableau in the rose garden and sent a servant to inform Correus that his tutor required his presence – immediately.

  Correus received this summons with fervent gratitude, and fled. Antonia took his place.

  “Well, child,” she said, not without sympathy. “This is all very impossible, you know.”

  Aemelia sniffled but straightened up and bit back her tears with determination. She looked absurdly young – too young to have any sense, and Antonia said as much.

  “I am old enough to know what I want,” Aemelia said with dignity.

  “What we want, child, and what we owe our families and our position are very frequently not the same. You are a senator’s daughter. Your father would never let you throw yourself away on a slave-born man. And I may as well tell you right now that Appius will not permit it, either.”

  “That is what Correus said,” Aemelia began, “but—”

  “Correus is showing a great deal more sense than you. You may think that he is only being noble, but I think Correus knows very well what the circumstances are.”

  “He wants to marry me.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Antonia said with some asperity. “He’d be a fool if he didn’t. But he also knows he isn’t going to, and you can’t tell me he told you it was possible.”

  “N—no.”

  “Very well then, be sensible. Correus’s army pay would not be enough to provide you with even a proper house, and if you think either your father or his would part with a denarius to do so, you’ve been out in the sun too long.”

  “I can go with him. Plenty of women follow the army.”

  “Respectable ones don’t, not unless they’re senior officers’ wives; and I can tell you from experience that you wouldn’t like it even under those circumstances. What you’d face as the wife of a penniless soldier doesn’t even bear thinking about.”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Aemelia said. “I wouldn’t care where I lived as long as it was with him.”

  “You’d care, child,” Antonia said, looking at her delicate face and thinking of the dirt and heat and backbreaking weariness of travel on a provincial frontier. “And it would be far too late to change your mind. Now dry your eyes and come along to your father. You needn’t become betrothed to Flavius just yet, you know. Give it some time. But he is very fond of you, child. Indeed, I think you could wrap him about your finger, and that is more than most girls can expect when first they’re wed. You’ll find that affection grows slowly, from living together. And affection and respect last longer than romantic nonsense.”

  “But I don’t want to live with him,” Aemelia wailed. “How could I marry Flavius and see Correus all the time, knowing—” She stopped, hiccuping miserably, and Antonia looked thoughtful.

  When she had restored the unwilling Aemelia to her father, Antonia informed Appius that she wished to speak with him before the evening meal and then set out to assure her servants that so much as an allusion to the recent upheaval would bring instant banishment to the copper mines.

  But Helva had already wormed enough information out of the slave who had interrupted her son’s interview with Aemelia to fill her mind with visions of future comfort far beyond anything she had previously imagined. She found Correus in his own room with Forst, gloomily memorizing German verbs; she would set about bringing him around to the same view.

  “You may go,” she nodded to Forst, who looked inquiringly at Correus.

  “Forst, wait for me on the practice ground. I won’t be long.” The German shrugged and left. Correus gave his mother a harassed look. “If Philippos sees him idling about, it’ll get him in trouble with my father.”

  Helva found Forst of small importance and said so. “My dear one, things could not have come out better. Of course, you mustn’t say anything to your father until after the adoption, but if you can persuade little Aemelia to be patient—”

  “I imagine my father will have a great deal to say to me,” Correus said sarcastically.

  “Correus, how can you be so blind? This could mean everything for you.”

  “It could get me thrown out of this house!” Correus practically shouted. “I want you to keep your hands out of this, Mother. I mean it.”

  “Someone has to be clever for you,” Helva said, smiling, “since you won’t do it for yourself.”

  “You’re too damn clever to have good sense,” Correus said.

  “I’ve managed very well so far, thank you,” Helva snapped. “People in our position must play the dice as they fall, or get nothing. That child would drop into your arms if you so much as looked at her.”

  Correus snatched his good tunic off over his head and picked up the ragged one he used for practice. “I’m well aware of that,” he said, his voice muffled in its folds. “So I’m not going to look at her!” He stalked out the door.

  Behind him his mother’s voice said sweetly, like honeyed ice, “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like to look at her!”

  In the garden Correus picked up a fallen apricot and flung it viciously against the wall. His mother was right, he thought, sickened. It would be so easy to let Aemelia fall in his lap and claim, truthfully enough, that it hadn’t been his fault: Aemelia and everything th
at went with her, he added, for honesty’s sake… all the things that were Flavius’s by birthright.

  He took out his temper on the practice ground until Forst informed him that berserkers, while a useful force, were generally only useful once.

  Correus flung his practice sword down and looked as if he would like to stamp on it. Forst put on his granite face and just stood there until Correus began to feel sheepish. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve stuck a pitchfork into a hornets’ nest, although I didn’t mean to, and now I’m pursued by the consequences.” Forst looked as if he had understood one word in ten of Correus’s Latin, and Correus rephrased his explanation: “I’m in trouble.”

  “Ah. Not of your own making?”

  “No.”

  “Then you must…” Forst groped for a phrase, and then lapsed into German, “ride the waves.”

  Correus nodded to signify his understanding, and Forst gave him one of his infrequent smiles. “Good.” He clapped him on the shoulder. “And your German is improving.”

  Ride the waves. Forst had managed to ride the waves of his own circumstances, Correus thought as he watched the blond man pick up his shield and sparring sword and walk up the hill to the house, shield slung over his shoulder and back straight as if he were striding into his own hall. To have it all and then have it wrenched away was worse than having an ancient name and a post in the Centuriate handed to you on a gold plate. He could forgo Aemelia, he thought, and if he felt he couldn’t, he would talk to Forst again.

  He picked up his practice sword and worked the rest of his temper off on the straw men. On his way to the baths, he met the green-eyed kitchen maid Emer with a clean tunic draped over one freckled arm, and realized that it was still the women’s hour in the baths. He had once spent a pleasant evening in her arms in the hay fields at harvest time, and now she giggled and beckoned to him.

  “They’ve all bathed and gone,” Emer whispered. “Little mistress, and your mother, and the rest. I’m the only one left. I stayed late to help cook – I dropped a whole crock of cream and he was in a foul mood.” She gave him a mischievous smile. “The men won’t be coming to bathe for another half-hour.”

  The memory of Aemelia was still singing in his blood, overlaid with a memory of the kitchen maid’s tanned bare legs in the moonlight, and he caught the girl by the waist and pulled her into the bathhouse with him. A moment later he was pursuing her giggling form across the stone floor. Emer shucked off her tunic as she ran and he caught a flash of round bottom and flying red hair as she dived into the warm pool.

  “I’m not even clean yet,” he laughed, splashing in after her. Etiquette demanded that bathers rinse and scrape themselves clean with the wooden strigils hanging from hooks in the wall before entering the baths.

  The girl just laughed and dived under the water, pulling his legs out from under him so that he fell with a splash into her arms. Minutes later, they were rolling entwined on a towel on the edge of the pool, and the tension that Aemelia had left in him washed away.

  Correus was drying himself when Appius came in, followed by his body servant bearing towels and rubbing oil. Ordinarily he bathed in the private pool adjoining his bedchamber, but Antonia was using it at the moment, and after the upheavals of the morning he had decided to leave her in peace. Appius heard bare wet feet pattering away down the corridor and eyed his son speculatively but made no comment. If Correus was tumbling a servant girl in the bath, it seemed unlikely that he was eating his heart out for Aemelius’s daughter.

  “Good evening, sir.” Correus rubbed himself briskly with the towel and reached for his clean tunic, while the attendant divested Appius of his. The older man was still hard and muscular, his olive skin crisscrossed with the white scars of nearly forty years’ service with the Eagles. He sniffed the rubbing oil dubiously.

  “Damn it, you’ve got my wife’s. I’ll smell like a Syrian page boy if you rub me with that.”

  “Here, sir.” Correus held out his own unscented flask.

  “Thank you.” When the servant had rubbed and scraped him clean with the ivory strigil that hung from his waist, Appius nodded his dismissal. He dipped a toe gingerly into the hot pool and then sank contentedly into its steaming depths. “Ah… my bones ache like an old gladiator,” he said. “Too many miles on the march. Too many years behind a shield.” He watched as Correus knotted the girdle of his tunic. “Well, Aemelius’s child has stirred up the domestic waters,” he said. “As I have infinite faith in your good sense, I presume you did not help her come to this unfortunate notion.”

  “No, sir,” Correus said shortly.

  “As I said, I didn’t think so. All the same, you’ll have to tread carefully for a few weeks. I think it’s high time you took up a shield in the army.”

  Correus relaxed and gave his father a half-smile. “The moment you can arrange it, sir,” he said fervently.

  Appius smiled back, and affection lightened his usual sardonic expression. He made a shooing motion with his hand. “Go and get ready for dinner. I’m going to enjoy a soak before the rest come stampeding in. And Correus—” His son turned toward him inquiringly. “Tell your… uh, companion that she left her hairpins.”

  Correus snatched up the bronze pins and went away laughing. At the door he turned, fist to breast, to give his father a mock salute.

  The boy had an unnerving charm when he relaxed and let it show, Appius thought, his eyes still on the empty doorway. It was just as well that he was unlikely to be around Aemelia from now on.

  He soaked like a crocodile, eyes and nose barely above the water, while the kinks worked themselves out of his muscles. Then he gritted his teeth and took a dive for health’s sake in the cold pool.

  When he had dressed and strolled through the late-afternoon sunlight to the outer door of his study, he found his wife waiting for him, as he had expected.

  “I don’t blame Correus,” she said, “but he must be got away from Aemelia immediately.” Antonia beat around no bushes.

  Appius settled himself at his desk without comment.

  “Appius—”

  “I heard you, my dear, but I don’t know how you expect me to achieve that.”

  “The army, of course. The sooner you arrange a suitable posting, the better it will be. I’ve talked to the child, and I think that if she has a few weeks to get to know Flavius better without Correus under her nose, she may come around before Flavius leaves for his own posting.”

  “Let me make one thing crystal clear to you, my dear,” Appius said pleasantly. “I have not yet formally adopted Correus, because of your objections. But I have promised him the Centuriate. I am not suddenly going to hustle him off to the auxiliaries instead. If Correus is not to have the Centuriate, he stays here.”

  Antonia clenched her fists in irritation, but she didn’t reply. She knew her husband’s calm, pleasant look, and the flinty light in his eyes that went with it. In this mood Appius was as immovable as the Palatine Hill. And with Flavius in the Centuriate, posted to the gods knew where, and Correus idling about the estate under her feet, Aemelia would never show any sense. Antonia made a decision.

  “Very well, Appius,” she said abruptly, “you have won. I think you will regret it, but you have won.”

  * * *

  The gardens of the house of Appius blazed with light from an extravagant display of lamps on pillars along the walkways and suspended by chains from the vine-covered trellises. Each servant on the estate had been given a new set of clothes, and the statue of Athena wore a garland of roses in her hair. It was the eighteenth birthday of both young men and the formal adoption of Correus into the house of Appius Julianus.

  The garden was thronged with guests, the purple-bordered togas of the men setting off the bright finery of their wives and daughters. Carriages filled the drive between the fir trees, and servants bustled back and forth among them trying to keep the roadway clear. Plank tables had been set up on packing crates at the foot of the hill for the field slaves to
share in the holiday, and Appius had sent enough wine for their merrymaking to guarantee that each man would wield his hoe with a headache the next day. In the gardens, the house servants circulated with trays of hot food and iced fruit and saw that no guest’s wine cup remained empty.

  The air was heady with the scent of roses and jasmine, and a full moon rode low in the sky, mingling its light with the gold of the lamp glow. Correus stood apart, his back to a fig tree near the far wall, his face hidden in its shadows. He had already played his part, and his hands were still shaking from the moment when he had placed them between Appius’s and heard his father claim him and call him by the name Julianus.

  “You’re a bit too big to lift,” Appius had said, smiling – a Roman child was accounted legitimate only when its father had picked it up and held it. Instead, he put his arms around his son and kissed him. And then a slave had come forward with a toga edged with the purple of a knightly house, and Appius had taken it from him and draped it around Correus with his own hands.

  A cheer went up and someone handed Correus a silver beaker of wine. He drained it down amid shouts of “Vivat!” and “Salve!” and an enormous senator with a wreath over one eye hiccuped loudly and slapped him on the back. After that the party got into full swing. Appius was drawn off to talk politics with two of his cronies, and Correus drifted, bemused, through the throng until he fetched up under the fig tree. He was more than half-drunk, he thought. He had been too nervous to eat, and the wine had been unwatered. He shook his head and things came into focus somewhat.

  Under the statue of Athena, the poet Martial was declaiming a work in honor of the event to anyone who would listen. Martial could exhibit a biting wit, but tonight his efforts were entirely laudatory, and Correus thought that even the Lady of Wisdom looked bored. He suspected the poet was hoping for some largesse from Appius, for like many writers, Martial lived a good day’s march beyond his means and hovered permanently on the brink of debtor’s court.