“Our loud friend is wasting his time.” There was a footstep on the grass and Flavius drifted up, goblet in hand. “My father… our father,” he corrected himself carefully, “is solving the problems of the Empire with Julius Agricola. Or arguing tactics. They couldn’t seem to make up their minds about which one when I left.” He peered into his wine cup. “Empty,” he said with sorrow. “Good stuff, this.”
He was obviously very drunk indeed, and Correus put out a steadying hand. “Here, sit down a minute, or you won’t last the evening.”
“’S all right,” Flavius said. “’S your evening. Welcome, brother.” He raised his goblet. “Think I’ll find some more of this. Drink your health some more. I wanted to talk to Aemelia,” he added, “but I couldn’t find her.” He eyed Correus.
“That’s odd,” Correus said. “I haven’t seen her either,” he added deliberately.
Flavius nodded and wandered away, and Correus leaned back against his tree. He saw Antonia on the walkway and decided that he ought to go and make his peace with her. He straightened his toga and hoped he didn’t look as drunk as Flavius. As he approached, Helva tripped by in a flutter of pale silk. She bowed politely to Antonia, but satisfaction radiated from every pore and she was dripping with half the contents of her jewel box.
“I’ve spoken to the cook about more pastries,” Helva said complacently, “and we’ve almost run out of wine. Philippos should have the steward bring some more up from the cellars, I think.”
“By all means,” Antonia said.
“I’ll tell him,” Helva said. “It would be such a pity to run short tonight of all nights.” She gave Correus a fond smile and trotted off down the walk, pausing as she went to greet Appius’s guests in proprietary fashion.
Correus winced and wished he had stayed under his fig tree, but it was too late.
Antonia regarded Helva’s retreating figure with compressed lips. To have that doxy whipped would be beneath Antonia’s dignity, but Cybele! she would enjoy it. Still, she turned to Correus with a friendly face. The adoption being done, Antonia would make the best of it. The truth was she liked the boy and wished him well in every way, insofar as his well-being took nothing from Flavius.
Correus bowed, a tall grave figure in a toga. Grown, she thought; they are grown up. Mother-of-All, they are men now!
“I hope I’m restored to your good graces.”
“My dear, you were never out of them. But you must realize that this nonsense of Aemelia’s cannot be permitted.”
“I wouldn’t try,” he said, and she smiled and patted his arm. Put firmly in my place, he thought when she had gone. His adoption by Appius had extended the boundaries of that place somewhat, but not to the extent that he might tread on Flavius’s land.
A servant passed by with a wine jug and a tray of cups, and Correus exchanged the silver beaker for a shallower cup of red-brown Samian ware. If he let them keep refilling that beaker he’d be as drunk as a maenad. He looked up and was unnerved to see Aemelia with Julia, some ten paces away. Julia had found the recent to-do over Aemelia’s marriage most exciting and was entirely in sympathy with her friend. Aemelia looked quickly over her shoulder for her mother, and then at Correus. Feeling like a beast, he pretended he hadn’t seen her. By the far wall near the niche which housed the statue of Priapus, caretaker of the garden, his father was talking with a younger man in the parade uniform of a legionary legate, and Correus took refuge with them. The fertility god, guardian of all growing things, Priapus stood saucily with member erect and seemed to wink at him. “Mind your own business,” Correus murmured respectfully to the little god. It was always unwise to upset Priapus, but Correus felt he could do without his intervention just now.
His father presented him to the other man, Julius Agricola, legate of the Twentieth Legion in Britain, and recently returned to Rome on the Emperor’s business. Agricola was barely into his thirties, but he already had the reputation of a man who got things done, a commander who could be sent where there was trouble. He came of a senatorial family and had succeeded to his present command through a course of political offices, rather than a series of lesser commands as Appius had done, but his love was for the army. He had played a part in putting Vespasian on the throne, and had been sent to Britain to take over a legion that was reported to be bordering on rebellion. Agricola, by means best known to himself, had straightened out his mutinous troops in record time and then preserved the honor of his legion by reporting to the Emperor that he had found them loyal from the first. Vespasian didn’t believe him, of course, but he was more than happy to have the appearance of unity preserved.
Agricola greeted Correus with genuine interest and nodded approvingly when Appius told him that he was shortly to take a post in the Centuriate.
“I can think of no better career for a son of Appius,” he said. “I have long been an admirer of your father, even if we don’t see eye to eye on the uses of cavalry.”
Appius laughed. “New wars beget new strategy, but I prefer arguing tactics to talking politics with old Quintilius, from whom we are hiding now, or listening to Martial hiccup his way through an endless paean to my family name.”
“All the same, sir,” Agricola said, “you’re really going to have to go and listen to him or he’ll never shut up. With all due respect to your family name, I prefer his satires to his tributes.”
“So do I,” Appius sighed. “Very well, I shall steel myself. Correus, there’s no reason you should share this dread fate unless you wish to.”
“Thank you, sir. I don’t at all wish to,” Correus said. “Perhaps you’ll recite it to me later,” he added with a sadistic grin.
“Insolent puppy.” Appius put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Go and enjoy yourself. This is a night for the young.”
Correus watched them walk away, the legate’s uniform a spot of martial color among the white togas of the guests; then he looked about for some company. He could see Flavius under the lamplit trellis in raucous conversation with a trio of friends. An ivy wreath hung precariously over one ear and he was reciting a bawdy verse about the quaestor from Paestum. It would probably be wise to avoid Flavius this evening, and Correus couldn’t think of anyone else he really wanted to talk to. The sound of pipes and a cithara drifted up from the hay fields. They were his people too, Correus thought, as much as the patrician gathering in the gardens, and he felt the need to make a leave-taking with them. He returned to his fig tree, where he had hung his own wreath among the branches. Most of the older generation had scorned wreaths as a frivolous adornment best suited to young people, and Correus had soon taken his own off; it had made him feel silly. Now he retrieved it and set it carefully on his hair. He winked back at Priapus as he passed, and slipped out through the back gate.
A path of stair-stepped stones led around the walls and through the terraced kitchen gardens that were fragrant with herbs and new onions. At the edge of the hay fields, a line of dancers swayed within a torch ring to the lively sound of the pipes. A dark-haired girl accompanied them on the cithara, and Correus could see Forst sitting cross-legged on the edge of the circle, slapping out the beat on a leather drum. Wine cups of the cheap African pottery ware used in the slaves’ hall circulated freely, as did the beer brewed on the estate by the Gaulish and German slaves for their own use. Someone put a mug of beer in his hand, a heady dark brew for which Correus admitted an unpatrician fondness, and he took a deep gulp. Another man slapped him on the back and kissed him heartily on both cheeks. A number of the house servants had joined in the merrymaking by this time, and Correus had played among the field slaves in his childhood, learning to speak to most of them in their own tongue by the time he was ten. Now they made him welcome without question. He was one of their own, and they rejoiced in his good fortune with a pride and affection that suddenly felt very dear to him.
The dancers, seeing his face in the torchlight, called out to him, and Correus laughed and ran out to join them, catching on to the fl
ying tail of the dance, beer mug still in hand.
The leader was a burly Greek of peasant birth who had first educated Correus in the colorful distinctions between the Greek of tutors and the Greek of the slave hall. As Correus joined the dance, he laughed and stepped up the pace, sending the dancers’ feet leaping and flying, to spill the young master’s beer for him. Correus laughed back and handed the mug to a girl among the spectators. He kicked off his sandals between steps, then unwound his toga with his free hand, dropping it behind him in the trampled grass. Dancing in his tunic as the line flew past the girl again, he retrieved his beer mug, raising it defiantly above his head. There were shouts of encouragement as the music rose to a crescendo and the dance ended with a stamp and a flourish, and Correus stood panting with his wreath over one eye, making a show of finishing the beer.
A plump, graying woman who had been Flavius’s nurse and his own in their childhood was shaking out his discarded toga and folding it, and he dropped a kiss on the back of her neck.
“I’ll just put this where you won’t be ruining it your first night to wear it, Master Correus,” she said severely.
“Thank you, Thais,” he said, hugging her, and her expression softened.
“You never did have any sense,” she said lovingly. “Well, go on then and enjoy yourself, but you mustn’t stay too long. Your place is up at the house now.”
Correus took a deep breath of the warm night air and watched the moon, riding fat and contented above the hill. “Not tonight,” he said. “Tonight I’m going to dance in the hay.”
Thais snorted. “Roll in the hay, more likely, you young scapegrace. Well, you’ll have little enough chance to play the fool in the army. I suppose you might as well do it tonight.”
Correus laughed and refilled his beer mug from a cask on the table, nodding at Alan and Diulius as he passed. They had no real place among the gathering at the great house and had come to the hay fields to drink among their own kind. Of the upper staff of the household, only Sabinus felt comfortable mingling with the guests, but he was a Roman and freeborn, and that made a difference.
The dark-haired girl picked up the cithara once more and began to sing. It was a haunting, plaintive melody of a people who once were kings in their land and now were gone forever, and the shouting and laughter died down as the servants of Appius gathered about her to listen. Correus picked up his beer and went with them. For tonight, these were his people. And if red-haired Emer were to come and smile at him, he thought, watching the moon sink down over the hill, he might well make Thais’s prediction come true. She danced past him, laughing over her shoulder, because the thought was so plain on his face.
* * *
Two days later, with the few personal belongings he would need in the training barracks at Rome slung in saddlebags behind him, Correus sat astride a sorrel named Antaeus. The color of a new-minted gold piece, the horse was his father’s parting gift to him. Flavius sat beside him on the fine bay he had put through its paces on the day, which now seemed so far distant, when Appius had first told them they would go together into the Centuriate.
A light breeze ruffled the horses’ manes, and the two brothers looked at each other and smiled. It was a new adventure, the end of childhood, and they faced it with more warmth between them than they had felt since that long-ago time when they first knew that each possessed the thing the other yearned for.
Not even the memory of the last interview with his father could dim Correus’s excitement, although it gnawed at the back of his mind like an oracle dimly understood, a feeling of something wrong that had no words.
Appius had called Correus into his study on their last evening at home, kissed him, given him a sum of money for his first six months’ allowance and the promise of the horse Antaeus; then he sat down behind his desk and looked across it at Correus with eyes dark and serious.
“I have given you my name,” Appius said, “and a place in the Centuriate, because you are worthy of them, and because I love you greatly. And now there is one thing I want from you in return.”
“Of course,” Correus said. He would have promised Appius the moon just then.
“I love both my sons,” Appius said, and there was a faint note of sadness in his voice. “I have watched you both as you grew to manhood, and it is in my heart, although I have never said this, that of the two, you are the stronger. Perhaps it is as well. Flavius’s place is made for him in the world, and you will have to fight for yours. I don’t know. I do know that he needs you, and that it will be bad for him to know that. But it is necessary that you know it.”
“What would you have me do?” Correus asked.
“I want you to stay by him, give him the love you would give me, forgive him when… he finds it hard to love you. You are the stronger and you must promise me.”
And in the end Correus had promised, because it was Appius who asked it. He wondered whether he had the strength to keep that promise.
Now Appius stood at the gates with Antonia beside him and Helva two paces away, to bid their sons farewell and the gods’ speed. The household staff had turned out as well and lined the carriage road under the fir trees. They, too, called their farewells as the horses passed, and Emer, when Philippos’s back was turned, blew a kiss to Correus.
It was early morning but the sun was already white and hot against the sky. With Flavius beside him, Correus heeled the sorrel’s flank and put his horse’s head east, on the road that ran arrow-straight toward the heart of the world: Rome.
IV Centurion
The main camp of the Praetorian Guard – the home guard of Rome and the Emperor’s personal troops – was an imposing compound located outside the northeast wall of the City. It was here that Correus, Flavius, and forty-five other hopeful candidates for the Centuriate took their military oath, said brief prayers to any gods handy, and listened to a burly centurion with a voice like a crocodile inform them sadistically that their young lives were now in his hands. “In six months you’ll be officers and men, or you’ll go home to mama in a litter. I do hope as that’s clear?”
“Yes, sir!” the ones who were quicker on the uptake responded with enthusiasm, while a junior drillmaster prodded the laggards in the back with his vine staff to get the point across.
“All right now. My name’s Mucius, and to you that’s gonna be Centurion Mucius, sir. And bein’ as you’re all gentlemen’s sons, I’m gonna call you ‘Centurion, sir’ too, but don’t you get to takin’ it serious.”
Mucius, they learned later, had risen from the ranks to become centurion in one of the regular legions and been given a post in the Praetorians as a reward for a career that was still legendary. For ten years, he had been drill-master to candidates hoping for direct commission to the Centuriate, and there were senior officers in a number of legions who still recalled him with a shudder. Final authority over the Centuriate candidates lay with the camp prefect, Pertinax Aquila, but it was Mucius who made his hand felt through the six months of their training.
They were paraded first past the camp surgeon, an elderly man with a beady and intelligent eye that belied his habit of conversing with himself when annoyed. He ordered them to strip, inspected each for any obvious deformities, and marked every man’s height on a wooden slate, turning away one who came in an inch too short.
“I’m sorry about it, lad,” he said, not unsympathetically, “but you could have come by a measuring stick at home, you know, and found out without taking up our time. You might make a good soldier, but you know the rules, and I can’t bend ’em.”
The rest he marched out to the exercise ground, and he stood while, five at a time, they ran briskly around its track, clad only in their tunics, to the accompanying catcalls of the guardsmen lounging nearby.
“Hai, Ogulnius, did you ever see such a sorry lot? I’ll give you a penny to the commander’s best horse not a one of ’em makes it two months!”
“Aye for sure,” his companion drawled lazily, “the Emperor must
be hard up for spear fodder when he starts in recruitin’ babes off their mammies’ laps.”
“Nah then,” a third man put in. “They’re a present to the king of the Germans. To play with, like.”
Two of the much-tried candidates turned with raised fists to dispute the point. “Get back in line!” the surgeon bellowed. “You will have to put up with a lot worse, so get used to it!” As the panting runners finished their lap, he put his ear to the chest of each and made notations next to their names on his slate. One man he dismissed immediately, and one he sent back for another lap, accepting him grudgingly at the end of it.
“You’ll do, I think, but I want you to check in with me once a week while you’re training. If you make it through this, I daresay you’ll make it through anything else the army hands you.”
The candidate nodded and the surgeon turned to the other man. “It gives me no pleasure to certify a good man unfit for service,” he said gently, seeing the boy’s downcast face. “Somebody thinks a fair amount of you or you wouldn’t have been recommended here. But if you still want the army, you might consider the medical corps. We’ve always a need for good officers there, and you’re not at death’s door, you know. I’m just not sure you’d hold up on a forced march and a battle at the end of it, and that makes you a danger to yourself and your men.”
“I—I don’t know, sir. I’ll think about it.” The boy turned and walked off, disconsolate.
“Mucius!” the old surgeon yelled, and the other candidates blinked in surprise as the drillmaster stepped up and saluted with a flourish. “Go and talk to him, and put a little tact into it. I want that one for my corps. All right, next!”
Part of the last group circling the track, Flavius stared straight ahead as he ran, ignoring the comments of their unwelcome audience. Correus followed suit until, halfway around, he realized that in six months he would outrank his tormentor. Begin as you mean to go on. He could almost hear Appius say it. Catching a German accent, he gave the man a leering smile and shouted something back. The guardsman started for him with a bellow, but was pulled back to his place by two of his fellows. Correus ran on, chuckling. Flavius dropped back until he was abreast of him.
The Centurions Page 7