“What did you say to him?”
“I called him the son of six fathers,” Correus said mildly. “I thought he mightn’t like it. Forst tells me the Germans are very one-way about their women.” Germans from the Roman side of the Rhenus frontier had often been recruited into the City guard, especially during the anarchy of the Civil Wars three years earlier. Those who had walked carefully had managed to remain there when Vespasian took the purple.
“Well, that was stupid,” Flavius said. “Now he’ll try to take your head off.”
“He can try,” Correus said.
They halted, sweating but breathing lightly, before the camp surgeon. “Well, you two are in better shape than most,” he said approvingly as he came to them. He studied their faces. “Brothers, I think.”
“Uh… yes,” Flavius said.
The surgeon made two marks on his slate, lifting an eyebrow as he came to their names. Appius Julianus – that explained it. “I met your father once. Fine man. Hell of a reputation to have to drag around after you, though. Don’t make too much of it or they’ll run you ragged just to see if they can.”
His inspection completed, the surgeon turned back those he had passed to Centurion Mucius, who marched them at a fast trot back to the training barracks. There the camp barber awaited them to deal with any man whose hair, in the opinion of Centurion Mucius, exceeded regulation length. Most did. Correus and Flavius soon found themselves shorn like a pair of sheep, their hair reduced to the army standard of one inch.
“I’d tell you how funny you look,” Flavius said moodily, “except that I expect I look the same.”
The next stop was the supply shed, where they were unceremoniously stripped again and issued standard army tunics of lightweight scarlet wool, a heavier tunic for cold weather, neck scarf, hobnailed sandals, and a heavy military cloak, also in scarlet as befitted their theoretical rank. Clad in light tunic and sandals, they were lined up and trooped off to the armorer, where they were loaded down with an unwieldy collection of pilum, sword, dagger, sword belt, shield, and, finally, armor: iron greaves for the lower legs, helmet with the red fanwise crest of a centurion, and leather harness tunic with skirt and sleeves of red-dyed leather strips, over which went the body armor – a lorica of segmented plates. Parade armor, Mucius informed them, would be issued at such time as they could be paraded as a unit without embarrassing him.
Carrying their acquisitions, the candidates trooped back to barracks again, praying fervently not to drop anything. Beds were assigned, rules were explained (“Anything you ain’t been ordered to do is against orders!”), and they were promptly hustled into full kit, which, it seemed to Correus, never came off again for the next week. In full gear, they ran, marched, drilled, climbed ropes, walls, and ladders; they saluted each other, they saluted the prefect and the junior drillmaster, they saluted everything in sight, and once, out of habit, they saluted a red-cloaked wagon driver, who fell off his seat laughing.
They memorized the organization of a legion above and below their own rank, from the lowliest enlisted legionary up through the extra-pay men – trumpeters, armorers, and the standard-bearers who carried the cohort and century standards and the great gilded Eagle that was each legion’s pride. Above these were the numerous optios, a combination of clerk, second-in-command, and general aide; one was assigned to assist each officer from the rank of junior centurion up. In their hands the daily routine of the camp rolled smoothly on, and a headquarters optio was a force to be reckoned with.
Next was the rank of centurion, the backbone of the army at every level, from junior centurions with a century of eighty men in their command, through the cohort commanders with six centuries in their charge and five junior centurions below them, to the primus pilus, commander of the First Cohort and second-in-command of the legion. On his way to the exalted post of primus pilus a centurion could expect to receive command of several cohorts, from the lowest, the Tenth, on up. He might also find himself in command of smaller outpost forts or be posted with the fleet or the auxiliaries. Beyond the rank of primus pilus he might be named camp prefect of a legionary fort under the legion’s commander, the legate. Legates and military governors were generally senatorial posts, but an exceptional career officer could aspire to those as well. Appius Julianus had done it. Most direct-commissioned centurions never went beyond cohort or frontier-fort command, and men promoted to centurion from the ranks never got that far. But greater things were possible and each candidate, studying the table of ranks and striving to remember whether a junior surgeon outranked a senior optio or vice versa, paused to picture himself in the gilded breastplate and eagle-crested helmet of a legionary legate, commander of ten cohorts and all he surveyed.
The tribune, although technically superior in rank to any centurion, was regarded with mild scorn. The tribunes were young men of senatorial rank, doing their required short term with the army before embarking on a political career. The Centuriate candidates considered themselves career men, doing the real work while former tribunes argued about that work in the Senate back in Rome.
These lordly visions ceased abruptly with the end of the brief study time allotted them, and Centurion Mucius returned the candidates to reality with a rag and a jar of metal polish.
They polished lorica, helmet, greaves, pilum points, and, as mounted officers and gentlemen, their horses’ accoutrements as well. A single speck of rust brought punishment drill, the offending candidate forced to run three times around the training track, holding the substandard object at arm’s length (no easy task if it happened to be his lorica) and yelling “Rust!” at the top of his voice with every step.
The riding instructor, an ex-cavalry commander named Rufus, proved only slightly more benign than Centurion Mucius. The legions were infantry, but an officer and a gentleman rode a horse. And if he didn’t, he did by the time Decurion Rufus was through with him. On their first day they found their mounts led out fitted up with a light bridle and nothing else.
“All right, gentlemen, knot your reins, cross your arms on your chest, and hit those jumps!”
They made a terrifying circuit of the training ring, most flying off at the first jump. Only Correus, Flavius, and six others made it all the way around, whereupon for their pains, Decurion Rufus had them do it again so the rest could watch. It was a drastic method, but by the end of two weeks each man could take the jumps bareback, arms crossed and praying, and come around still on his horse.
They learned to vault onto horseback and to mount and dismount fully armed, with shield, from either side. And the man whose horse wouldn’t stand for that got to spend his off-duty hours retraining him.
They attacked posts with wooden swords from behind wicker shields, both of twice the standard weight, and learned to shoot a bow and use a sling on the theory that an officer should be able to do anything that anyone under his command could – and better. They learned to build a marching camp in one day, complete with ditch and wall, and then tear it down again; and twice a week Mucius trotted them through the streets of Rome to the icy waters of the Tiber for a swimming lesson. They ate ravenously anything that was put before them – standard army fare of dried meat or fish, eggs, bread, olives, and a routine-issue wine that Flavius said would make a wonderful bronze polish. At night they fell into bed like so many corpses and slept until a bugler blew unwelcome reveille at first light of dawn.
As the camp surgeon had predicted, Mucius ran the sons of Appius Julianus harder than most, but for all the candidates the first two months were undiluted hell. Generally at the top of the class – their father’s training had stood them in good stead – the brothers slogged through it. But Correus could tell by looking at Flavius that he loathed those training months with a silent hatred that went bone deep. As for Correus, he loved it. Even through the aching muscles and blistered feet, and the occasional comments of fellow candidates who counted him a lowborn upstart and made it known, he loved it.
This was home, he thought,
standing on the parade ground at evening worship in the long shadow of the cohort standards. He saluted the standards and felt the same tug of loyalty that he knew Appius had felt when he had first stood there. This was the real Rome, the Army of the Eagles who had built their roads across half the world and taken Rome with them as they went. And in the shadow of those standards, Correus found more sense of belonging than he had ever achieved in his father’s house. Had Appius known that, he wondered, when he had given him the Centuriate?
* * *
After two months Mucius presented them with their parade uniforms (“Terrific,” someone murmured, “something else to polish”), marking them for the envious eyes of newer recruits as candidates who had successfully passed the first stage of their training. They numbered only thirty-four now, having lost ten more who resigned in the first weeks, and an eleventh who had been pulled by the surgeon for a bad knee that showed up on a march. They learned that the boy who had been dropped on the first day had indeed gone to the medical corps and passed the tests for apprentice surgeon.
For the successful, the training was now no less rigorous, but it did grow more interesting, as the interminable drills and marches slackened off to make way for classes in organization and administration, in military law, tactics, and the command of men. An officer from the corps of engineers instructed, them in bridge and road construction, and they learned how to build siege towers and ramps, and how to take down, reassemble, and fire the catapults – from the light bolt-shooting scorpions to the great stone-throwers. Their instructor for this last was a wiry artilleryman with three fingers missing who informed them solemnly that catapults “was tricksy,” and then set his terrified novices to practice on them.
They held their first full-scale parade under the stern eye of the camp prefect, Pertinax Aquila. Parade armor consisted of a cuirass of bronze scale over skirt and sleeves of white leather strips fringed in gold. The greaves were silvered and embossed with a vine pattern, and over the cuirass they wore a leather harness with a silver roundel bearing the V-shaped centurion’s insigne. The parade harness would also carry military decorations if and as they were won; and the candidates looked enviously at the tall figure of Pertinax Aquila, resplendent with three rows of awards and two silver-and-gold Valorous Conduct torques gleaming above them. In place of a helmet he wore a gilded wreath of oak leaves which Correus realized with awe was a corona civica, awarded only to a man who had saved the life of a fellow citizen under the most dangerous of circumstances.
The prefect lifted his hand to Mucius, who signaled a trumpeter. The horn sang out and the ranks of candidates parted with precision to pass in review, their scarlet pennant snapping in the breeze before them and every bronze scale gleaming. The quick parade step and the intricate maneuvers were almost second nature now, and they completed the drill perfectly while Mucius held his breath.
That night they were considerably startled by the appearance of an optio, a staff aide, delivering a ration of good wine “with Prefect Aquila’s compliments, gentlemen. And Centurion Mucius says don’t let it go to your heads.”
“We’re in!” someone shouted. “We’re gonna make it!” He raised his cup and took a deep drink.
A black-haired boy jumped up on a clothes chest, his mailed sandals stamping out a little dance step. “To the Centuriate, brothers,” he said, laughing. “May we all live through it!”
Flavius raised his own cup, his dark angular face losing some of the tension of the parade. “To the Centuriate,” he said, and drank.
The wine went around again and they filled their cups happily. Correus stood up as if to say something when another man, with a pale, blue-eyed face that was beginning to get flushed, glared at him belligerently. “Hey you, Julianus Minor, why aren’t you drinking?”
“Pipe down and I’ll tell you,” Correus said mildly.
“Don’t use that tone to me – freedman!”
“You’re drunk, Marcus,” Flavius said. “Stop it.”
The other turned to Flavius with an unpleasant smile. “Fuckin’ adopted freedman. You said it yourself. No business in the Centuriate,” he added.
The others sat in uncomfortable silence while Flavius reddened. “Marcus, be quiet,” he said again.
Correus slammed his empty cup down on a bench. “I can defend myself – brother!” he snapped. “As for you, Marcus, drink up and keep quiet or I’ll put a pilum down your throat!” He went to his cot and lay down, face up.
Someone dragged Marcus away to the far end of the barracks, and the others returned self-consciously to their wine. After a moment Flavius got up and went over to Correus.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “What I said to Marcus… I—I didn’t mean it the way he said it.”
“I know how you meant it,” Correus said, his lips tight. “So don’t worry about it.”
“I’m sorry,” Flavius said again, embarrassed. “I—” He looked desperately for some change of subject, cursing the devils that had prompted him to spout off about his half-brother to Marcus – and those devils that had let Correus find out about it. “Uh, why weren’t you drinking?” he asked finally.
“I don’t like being seasick,” Correus said obscurely, and turned on his side, his back to the room.
* * *
The literal and figurative meanings of Mucius’s warning, as well as the wisdom of Correus’s abstinence, were brought home to all of them the next morning as Mucius informed them with ill-suppressed amusement that a training ship of the fleet was in port and they would be marines for the next few days.
The training ship was a trireme, the Tyche, and for this expedition she had been given a slightly shorthanded crew of mixed seamen and marines. The Centuriate candidates discovered to their horror that they were to fill the empty oar slots on the first day out.
The Tyche bobbed like a water bug next to the grain ships, her deadly underwater ram barely visible below the surface and her oars drawn in. Correus and the others marched up the boarding ramp in full kit to be met by a bored-looking naval officer who gave them a casual salute and told them to strip down to their tunics.
“You can’t command a warship, gentlemen, until you know what makes her move, and when there’s any maneuvering to be done, it’s done by the strength of some sailor’s arm, as you’ll discover.” He nodded at a seaman beside him. “Take ’em below, but spread ’em out, mind, so they can get the hang of it from the lads next to ’em. And have ’em sit tight till we’re clear in the river. I don’t want a lot of broken oars.”
They followed the seaman unsteadily. The ship was hardly moving, but there was a queer unstable feel to the deck as if it might suddenly lurch out from under them. Most had done enough traveling to have taken ship from time to time, but their expressions said plainly that they had not enjoyed it. Below, the oars were arranged on three levels, one man to each oar, and their escort indicated to each the seaman whose place he would take. Flavius shot Correus a furious glance as he climbed past him to the mid-level and sat next to a blond young seaman in a green naval tunic. The previous night, with Correus firmly pretending to be asleep, Flavius had drowned his irritation and embarrassment in a wine jug and now his head pounded like an anvil and the gentle rocking of the ship set his stomach crawling up his rib cage.
Most of the others looked as if they felt much the same, and a seaman near the bow of the galley could be heard telling the pale-faced boy, Marcus, who had baited Correus, “Heave up your breakfast on my oar bench, and I’ll heave you overboard!”
“Tyche, hah!” someone else grumbled, and then made a little gesture of apology to the goddess of good fortune, the galley’s namesake.
At a signal from the commander, the hortator in the stern tapped his mallet twice and the oars were run out through the oarlocks. The hortator set a slow, steady beat on the sounding block and the rowers bent to their oars. Those on the port side gave way, while the starboard oars backed, and the Tyche came about into the river. She turned her nose sea
ward, toward the port of Ostia, twenty miles downstream, growing livelier and more buoyant as the sail was sheeted home. Correus could see the wind-filled crimson curve of it above him, marked with the great black eagle of the fleet. After the ship had made its way clear of the heaviest of the river traffic that put in daily to the Tiber docks, the thirty-four seamen picked for tutors slid over on their oar benches and showed their reluctant pupils how to grip the oars and pull in unison so that one hundred seventy oars dipped as one to the hortator’s mallet.
The clean, spacious oar benches of a naval galley were a far cry from the cramped and stinking quarters occupied by the slaves of a merchant ship (rowers in a fighting galley were also soldiers and proud of it). But it was backbreaking work, and the great oars were heavy and unwieldy so that a mistake could easily cost a broken rib. As the galley slid past the marshy coastal plains below the City, the newcomers felt the strain in their arms, even while heading downstream, and long before they reached the salt pans along the shore above Ostia harbor, their muscles ached like fire and their hands were blistered raw.
The seamen regarded them tolerantly enough, with only an occasional smirk to show their amusement at the sight of thirty-four fledgling centurions sweating like oxen at the oars and often catching a handle in the teeth on the upstroke.
“Try to hear the beat with your back and arms, not just in your head,” the seaman beside Correus advised. “The rhythm’s got to get into you, like.”
Correus nodded and ducked his head to wipe his brow on his tunic sleeve, almost catching himself in the eye with the oar as he did so.
“And don’t do that,” the seaman added with a grin. “Here.” He wore a strip of linen tied around his head to keep sweat from his eyes, and he unknotted Correus’s scarf and tied it for him in a similar fashion.
The Centurions Page 8