The Centurions

by The Centurions (retail) (epub)

  “No,” he said quietly. “You would end up as my mother has. You think you won’t, but things… wear you down, and after a while there is nothing left. I won’t go into eternity with that on my soul. Not when I have come so close to walking that same road myself.”

  She didn’t answer, and finally he got up and put his hands on her shoulders, speaking to the back of her head. She flinched again, but didn’t pull away. “You must hate me greatly, I suppose; me and all my kind. But you have no choice. I do own you, whether either of us likes it or not. Learn to live with that for now, and you will go free one day, Freita, when it is possible. I promise you that.”

  “The Roman-kind have made many promises, and mostly the words blow away in the wind.” Her voice was clear and bitter, but she knew that he would not make her that kind of promise. That made things even worse, for she had nothing left to hate; and it was hate that she lived on now. Her shoulders slumped, as if she gave up all at once. “Free…” She said the word dully. “I suppose one can learn to bear anything… for that.”

  “I did,” he said.

  He took his hands from her shoulders, and she turned and followed him back to the horses.

  * * *

  The fort on the Nicer, and its sister forts, were finished at summer’s end. The auxiliary garrisons moved in, and the Eighth Legion moved out for Argentoratum and winter quarters.

  Freita rode the gray at the rear among the other soldiers’ servants, carrying Baucis, complaining in a covered basket, and leading Antaeus. She had made no mention of that last ride in the wood, but Correus saw that the faint, dawning easiness between them was gone. In the weeks of her captivity, Freita had hugged her hatred to her as a balance point in an overturned world. Now he had taken that from her by a kindness, and in return she adopted an aloof kindness of her own. She mended his clothes and took a polishing rag to his lorica like a body servant. When he protested that that was not necessary, she snapped, “At least you will have some value for your money!”

  Correus, who was beginning to understand, made no further protest. His mouth twisted. It seemed he had the choice of being hated for making a slave of her or hated for pity. There was no middle ground. Worse yet, if his conscience spoke loudly for pity, his body had other ideas. She still drew him, waking an aching hunger that he pushed angrily to the back of his mind.

  She wore the earrings he had bought her, but steadfastly refused any other adornment, including new clothes, until he finally shouted at her that she was not going back to Argentoratum in a hopsack riding dress or a whore’s gown. Thereafter she shrugged irritatingly and wore what he told her to.

  The only time they did not rub each other raw was when he taught her Latin. He discovered that she had as quick an ear for speech as he did. It was when she asked him why his German had the accent of the Semnones that it occurred to him that she had lived among them. After that he plied her with so many questions about Nyall and his tribe that she asked sarcastically if he thought the Semnones were going to come leaping out of the bushes like elf-folk to rescue her.

  Correus shook his head. “Not to rescue you. And not this soon.” She glared at him, but that was all he would say.

  The legion made Argentoratum at the start of the fall wine-making, clattering over the Rhenus bridge while the river traffic scooted by below. Freita, used only to the rafts and small dugout craft of the tribes, watched the ships with a wide-eyed curiosity that she tried to hide from Correus. He saw his men to their barracks and came back across the bridge to her, while the baggage wagons and the rear guard were still crossing. With winter supplies being laid in all along its length, the Rhenus was thicker with traffic than usual, and the dock below the river gate was mobbed.

  He pointed out to Freita the long, lean patrol galleys with their black eagles spread-winged on crimson sails, and the fatter bulk of the cargo ships. Roman maritime law wisely specified that a merchantman must be at least one-third as wide as it was long, so that the sleeker patrol craft could outrun them for cargo inspection. Smuggling was a constant problem, and an enterprising trader in a fast ship saw no reason to pay Caesar his due if he could help it. There was also the matter of smuggled weapons, for which a subject people contemplating rebellion would pay well, especially among the metal-poor tribes on the German frontier.

  On the jetty, sacks of grain were being unloaded from one ship, and clay amphorae used to transport oil, wine, and olives were being carried from the hold of a second. A pile of dried branches lay to one side, to be burned, and fresh ones would be cut to cushion the return cargo.

  Argentoratum had turned out in force to welcome the legion home, in the hope that a summer’s campaign had raised a thirst for the wares that the marketplace could offer. A milling crowd of women were also there to welcome back their men, and so was the Argentoratum magistrate, plump and important in his official robes. Aeshma began to dance nervously as they came off the bridge, and Correus took his bridle while he pushed his way through the crowd. Technically the soldiers were not allowed to marry while they were in service, but as their wives and children would be made legitimate on their discharge, few bothered to heed this regulation. Only officers were allowed to drag women along with them on campaign, at their own expense, and that was frowned upon. Crassus got away with it because he was a tribune, and Labienus because his fat and homely woman helped in the hospital. Freita would have to stay behind when the legion marched out again in the spring.

  Paulinus was waiting for them, lounging in front of the newly built basilica. Correus greeted him with relief. He had sent a message ahead to him, hoping that he would still be at Argentoratum, and asked him to find some sort of housing in the town for Freita. Something cheap, he had added in a harassed postscript that had made Paulinus smile. He could imagine what old Calpurnius Rufinus had stuck him for in payment for his German beauty. What he couldn’t figure out was why his friend had bought her in the first place, and his freckled nose twitched with interest as Correus presented the girl to him. She had a wicker basket on the saddle before her, from which an infuriated rumbling could be heard.

  Paulinus bowed as gravely as he would have to a senator’s wife, and greeted her in German while Freita watched him with her usual suspicion. It certainly wasn’t for a slave that he bought her, Paulinus thought, watching Correus hand her down carefully from Aeshma’s back outside the small timber house near the edge of the town. And Correus was a career officer. He wasn’t likely to go throwing his heart after a barbarian beauty on a moment’s acquaintance. Paulinus remained alert and puzzled.

  His curiosity was unabated when Silvanus appeared as they were inspecting the house – no more than a one-room hut, really, but plastered inside, and clean enough. Freita gave Silvanus a cheeky and unslavelike smile in greeting and chuckled at his description of the riotous indignation of one of his men upon discovering that his woman had borne, in his absence, a baby that showed every sign of paternity other than his. Correus watched this interchange gloomily as the cat twined itself about his legs.

  When Silvanus took his departure, Paulinus followed him, and after asking the centurion a few direct questions, a certain amount of light began to dawn. Paulinus turned back to the house with a worried expression, and Silvanus nodded.

  “Damn fool,” Silvanus said. “She’s not thanking him for it.”

  Paulinus doubted that Correus was thanking himself, either, when they went to the slave market in Argentoratum the next day. Correus’s face was white as they inspected the rows of huddled, miserable figures chained to rings in the floor, most with bare, white-chalked feet marking them as new slaves of foreign birth, their eyes listless in the hot stink of the sale room, or wide and terrified as the slave master dragged them forward for inspection. Buying Freita had been one thing. To buy a slave deliberately from this animal pen was another, but he had no choice. The nightmare logistics of transporting horse, cat, woman, and tent from the Nicer Valley to Argentoratum were still vivid in his mind, and Messa
la Cominius had told him bluntly that if he didn’t buy another slave to cope with his newly acquired encumbrances, he would have to sell them. Reluctantly, Correus agreed.

  Now he stood with gritted teeth while the slave master presented his wares for the centurion’s inspection.

  “Now this one—” He brought a slim, dark youth forward. “This one is a real find, and cheap at the price. He plays the flute and dances, and even speaks some Greek. He has never run away, and is only being sold because his master – for your ear alone, you understand, he is an important man – has found himself in debt. But the centurion may be happy to reap the reward of such improvidence.”

  “I don’t want to be entertained,” Correus said shortly, “and I haven’t much money. I want someone who can handle a jumpy horse and do some work. No more.”

  The slave master sighed. The only groom among his wares was a habitual troublemaker, and by law he was marked as such. There were stiff penalties for falsifying a slave’s history. He wasn’t going to be able to pry much out of this centurion for him. The slave master clapped his hands and one of his men dragged the boy forward.

  He was not more than thirteen, with a thin, pinched face and a cap of mousy hair that needed washing. A tag with a sale number was pinned to his ragged tunic and the notation beneath it said simply, “Fugitivus” – a chronic runaway.

  “Oh, come now,” Paulinus said as the slave master held up the boy’s arms to show that they were strong and wiry in spite of his small size. “My friend is looking for help with his household, not five hundred sesterces’ worth of trouble.”

  “Five hundred sesterces?” The slave master was horrified, deliberately misunderstanding. “I would have to charge much more than that for a strong boy like this.”

  “He’d be expensive at any price,” Paulinus said.

  The boy’s eyes shifted between them, sullen and wary. So far life had shown him no great kindness, and there was no reason to think that this dark-eyed centurion offered hope of anything more than another master who would beat him.

  “Just a minute,” Correus said. “Come here.” The slave boy sidled up to him. “You know horses?”

  “Yes,” the boy muttered, amending it belatedly to “Yes, lord,” as the slave master kicked him.

  “And like them better than men, I expect,” Correus said. “Why did you run away?”

  “Because I was frightened. I was not so old then as I am now,” he added pathetically.

  “Was that the only time?”

  The boy looked at Correus. The centurion didn’t seem to be going to hit him. “No.”

  “And the next time?”

  “Because they beat me, to make sure that I wouldn’t run away.”

  Correus turned to the slave master. “I will give you seven hundred fifty sesterces for him and not a penny more.”

  “But, lord—” The slave master spread his grubby hands wide in the gesture of a man much misunderstood. “It is not possible. I have spent that much on his keep alone.”

  Correus looked at the boy’s thin arms. “I doubt it. Have you had any other offers for him?”

  “There is a lady, lord, who needs a small dancing boy to fill her troupe. She comes this very afternoon to see him,” he added triumphantly.

  Correus turned away. “Good. Then you may sell him to her.”

  Even under his chains, the boy moved as if tensed for flight.

  “Lord, wait! Perhaps – a thousand sesterces, only because I have so great a respect for our defenders here. For you, only a thousand.”

  “I haven’t got a thousand. Eight hundred. No more.” His expression said plainly that he would go no higher.

  The slave master sighed. The lady was mythical, as Correus knew. “Very well,” he said grumpily. “Eight hundred.” He hoped the brat ran away the first day.

  Paulinus’s expression said that he considered that prospect only too likely.

  The slave master struck the chains from the boy’s leg, and Correus bent down and looked the child in the eye. “Now then. You belong to me, and I do not beat people. You will have enough to eat and a decent place to sleep, and a household and a very troublesome horse to look after. Probably more troublesome than you are. So you will have to be more grown up than you really are, and there will be no more running away. Is this all very clear?”

  The boy nodded, obviously reserving judgment.

  “Very well, then.” Correus turned away without waiting to see that the boy followed him.

  Paulinus trailed behind them, watching his friend’s straight back and the ragged urchin scrambling suddenly after him. One day Correus would learn that such was the way of the world, and cease to break his heart over it.

  They made their way through the bustling marketplace and then down a dusty side street with the boy still hurrying to match Correus’s brisk military stride. Freita was kneeling by the hearth combing out her wet hair when they came through the door. She peered up through its damp curtain, looked at the boy, and burst into laughter.

  “So you… you have bought me a protector… to guard me from bandits, no doubt!” She stood up, shaking her hair back and towering over the boy like a statue of Juno beside a midget.

  “Shut up,” Correus said good-humoredly, pleased enough to see her lose some of her stiffness with him.

  The boy bristled. It was plain that he spoke some German. “Is this blond witch yours also, lord?”

  “She is,” Correus said, trying not to laugh as Freita regarded the child indignantly. “And you will refer to her as ‘mistress’ or ‘my lady’ or she will turn you over her knee. Now what is your name?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the boy said, still glaring at Freita. “They always give me a new one. The last one was just ‘Servus,’” he said, his mouth twisting.

  “Why?”

  “They don’t think my name is suitable.” He was plainly quoting.

  “What is it?”

  “Julius. But it is my name, truly.”

  “An ancient name of much distinction, and highly unsuitable,” Correus agreed. “But if that is your name, that is what you are to be called. And this lady is called Freita, but not by you.”

  “And what is it that I am to do here, lord?”

  “See to the house, and the horse stabled at the back, and run errands and whatever else the lady wishes. And she will not laugh at you anymore” – he gave Freita a steely glance – “if you will not call her a witch again.”

  “Very well. If you say I mustn’t.”

  “I do,” Correus assured him solemnly.

  Paulinus had retired to a chair in the corner and appeared to be having hysterics. Freita caught his eye and relented.

  “Come along, O my protector.” She pointed at the little alcove which was curtained off at one end of the room. A trail of wet footprints still ran from the curtain to the seat by the hearth.

  “Where?” Julius dug in his heels with dawning suspicion.

  “Yes,” Correus said, divining her intentions. “Definitely a bath. You may buy a new tunic afterward,” he added as Julius howled in protest.

  Freita trapped one grimy hand in hers. “I can carry you, you know.” She pulled him, still fighting, back behind the curtain and stripped him ruthlessly, but her face softened as she saw the still-raw scars on his back.

  “Who did this to you?”

  “I don’t remember,” Julius said sullenly. “They all do.”

  Freita glanced at the curtain with an odd expression. “This one won’t,” she said. “And I’ll not laugh anymore, either.”

  XIV Harvestnight

  A struggling band of horsemen made its way along a forest trail where fallen leaves rustled golden under their feet. They were lean, grim-faced men who rode with backs slumped and hands fallen low, as if they had only the strength to keep themselves in the saddle, and no more. As they wound out of the wood and into a clearing at the foot of a hill, a child playing in the leaves alongside the track jumped up and ran fo
r the walled holding that stood ahead on the hillcrest.

  They were no more than halfway to the holding when the log gates swung open and a crowd of men and women came hurrying down the track to meet them. The lead rider raised his dark head and pushed his weary horse forward. His blue-and-green shield thumped against his knee where his arm hung loose at his side, and he straightened it carefully.

  “I’ll take that, lord,” a small boy panted, outdistancing the rest to hurl himself practically under the horse’s feet. Kari nodded and handed the shield to him, and the boy clutched it to himself importantly, chattering as he trotted alongside the horse: “We had given up looking for you, and the chieftain almost made the Death Song. Are you truly all right, and have you brought your harp back with you?”

  “That will do, youngling.” Kari slipped from his horse as Nyall came up beside them. “Yes, I have brought her, and if you give my shield to a friend, you may carry her, very carefully, to the hall for me.” He handed the boy the deerskin harp bag from his back. “And bring the other boys to see to my men.”

  The boy ran off and Kari turned slowly to Nyall. The chieftain’s eyes were pinched and worried, older than they had been.

  “He’s right,” Nyall said. “We nearly keened you.” He put out a hand and gripped Kari’s arm hard. “Brother, I am glad to have you back.”

  “I was not… sure that I would find you, either,” Kari said. They stood and looked at each other for a long moment before they turned and walked together through the gate.

  The stumbling horses and their weary riders followed, and the women of the hold clustered around them, faces alight or bereft as each searched the horsemen for the face that mattered most. Nyall’s mother, Morgian, sent thralls scurrying for food and to take the horses. They were all her people to care for now, the Black Forest men as well as the Semnone warriors, but she looked for no one among them. The face that she wanted would not ride home.

  Nyall drew Kari away with him into his own chambers, and shouted for someone to bring food.