They walked back through the moonlit streets of Argentoratum, with the fallen dry leaves scudding before them in the wind. It came down from the mountains with a smell of snow in it.
“The Frost-Folks’ breath,” Freita said, lifting her face to it. “Wolf winter. It will seem odd not to worry about the lambing this year.”
Correus moved closer and put his cloak around her. “You can worry about Julius instead,” he said. “The little devil stole three apples off the grocer’s cart yesterday and I had to pay his way out of it.”
Freita laughed again and didn’t seem to notice his arm around her. “He won’t do it again,” she said. “It’s only that we didn’t tell him not to.”
Paulinus and Silvanus had dropped a few paces behind, and Paulinus looked at them thoughtfully. “D’you know,” he said quietly, “if they could just forget who they are, they’d do well enough.”
Silvanus shook his head. “Easier to make that nag into a Lyxian temple horse, I expect.”
XVI The Arena
The watcher in the woods crept closer, silently, then crouched in the shadows to watch the men sent here to watch him. The dawn light had begun to run silver along the meadow he had passed through, but here in the black woods the dying fire still glowed red in the darkness. The men sleeping around it began to stir, and he waited patiently until they should wake. Men who were surprised often came up with a dagger in hand.
* * *
“Well, here’s a piece of luck,” Messala Cominius said as Correus turned through the door of his office and saluted. “We’ve got our very own spy. Came in this morning with two of the frontier scouts. The legate’s, and would you go and speak German at him?”
Correus groaned. “I’m due for leave, sir. Don’t tell me he’s going to cancel it. We’re almost packed.”
“Depends on what our spy has to say, I expect,” Cominius said. “I didn’t know you were so anxious for three months in your brother’s company.”
“I had hoped it might mend some fences,” Correus said.
Cominius nodded. “Understandable. Well, I’ll do what I can, but we need our frontier scouts out sticking their long noses in the Germans’ business, not hanging around camp playing interpreter when there are others like yourself who speak German.” There was no question of using a native interpreter; not if the legate really had latched on to a spy out of Nyallshold.
The German proved to be a Black Forest man, disgruntled with his people’s losses to the Romans and chafing under the Semnones’ rule. His name was Ingald.
“Look you, Commander,” the German said as Correus translated, “you want peace on your frontier, and I want my lands back. I would sooner hold them under Rome than not at all.” He smiled, a pleasant open smile. “I am a practical man.”
Legate Rufinus snorted. “Your lands?”
“I would have been chieftain after Arngunn,” Ingald said. “I am of the Kindred of the Nicretes. Give me my tribe again and the overlordship of the other tribes, and I will hold your frontier for you.”
“Three of those tribes have already sworn to Rome,” the legate said. “And the others are… not troublesome to us just now.”
“Sworn and unsworn and sworn again,” the German said shrewdly. “Gunnar and Runolf would swear to the Dark Ones if it would gain them six gold pieces each. And the Hermanduri will go with the stronger force, as ever.”
“And that is Rome,” the legate said. “Frankly I don’t see much use for you.” The German had already confirmed the one vital point, he thought: Nyall had got out of Jorunnshold alive. Rufinus’s expression registered studied disinterest.
“What if Nyall should take the war trail again?” the German said.
The legate became more disinterested than ever. “Will he?” he inquired politely, arranging the loops of his purple sash of office to his satisfaction. “And with whose warriors?”
The German hesitated. “Not as yet,” he said at last, smoothly. “But without me, how will you be knowing when?”
“I doubt this man knows, either,” Correus added to the legate in Latin, when he had finished translating. “If I were Nyall I wouldn’t tell this one what time I was going to eat dinner.”
Calpurnius Rufinus gave the German a long, hard look from beneath his eagle-crested helmet, until the German’s handsome, smiling face lost some of its blandness. The legate didn’t like traitors, even those on the other side; but Rome made use of what fell to her hand. “Just so,” he said. “Without you I won’t be knowing. And that makes you useful to me in Nyallshold at the moment. If Nyall doesn’t have you killed, and you bring me something worth the hearing, then we will talk about your lands.”
The German seemed about to protest, but after a long look at Calpurnius Rufinus’s face, he closed his mouth again. The legate’s meaning had been plain in his voice even without the translation, and having his words repeated in a Semnone accent gave them a double edge of menace. If he didn’t get the legate what he wanted, the commander of the Eagles wouldn’t hesitate to sell him where it would do the most good: back into the Semnones’ hands, to turn Nyall suspicious of all his men. And he would do it as ruthlessly as he himself had been prepared to sell Nyall. He had hold of a sword by the blade now, he thought. It might still be turned where he wanted it, but he would need to move carefully. His face grew blank and pleasant again as he gave the commander his agreement.
The legate spat on the wooden floor when the German had been escorted out. “I want a bath,” he said, and stalked to the doorway.
Correus watched him, surprised. There was something in the German’s smooth, handsome face that had made him feel unclean also, but somehow he hadn’t expected the legate to react the same way.
Calpurnius Rufinus turned back at the doorway. “Yes, I use ’em, Centurion, but I don’t like ’em. Go and take your leave. I doubt he’ll come out of his hole again until spring.”
* * *
Correus didn’t mention the interview to Freita when he went to the house to leave her money to see her and Julius through his absence. He would have liked to ask her what she thought. Freita seemed a good judge of men. Except, he corrected himself ruefully, for her blindness to his own qualities. But even in a Roman gown, poring over Paulinus’s ink drawings of that shining, marble city, she was still a German, and she had known Nyall. He had a feeling that anyone who had known Nyall would love or hate him, with not much space in between. “I don’t know enough to help you, or hurt Nyall,” she had said. Best to see that this remained the case with him as well.
She was sitting in the chair with her slippered feet on the hearthstone. Lying on a couch made her go to sleep, she said. The sheaf of Paulinus’s drawings was spread out in her lap, and she was biting at the nail of one finger, while Julius, with a patronizing air, pointed out the buildings to her.
“That’s the Basilica Julia, where the law courts are. And that one’s the Temple of the Divine Claudius.”
“How do you know so much about Rome, young one?” Correus asked.
“I was born there,” Julius said.
“How did you end up in Germany?” Correus realized a little guiltily that he had never even bothered to ask the boy where he came from.
“There’s not a lot to do in Rome for my kind,” Julius said. “Except wait for the grain dole and the free games. And drink in between times. I expect the price my father got for me let him drink a few months longer. It’s killed him by now, most like,” he added with an acid tinge in his voice. He was clean, his hair cut properly, and his pointed face had lost the fear that Correus had first seen in it. He looked much as he must have before he had been sold, Correus thought. Julius was a street urchin, a true child of the City, wary and suspicious, but ready to make the most of anything the Fates should see fit to pass his way. Old beyond their years, the street children made bad slaves, he remembered someone saying. Flavius, he thought.
Julius seemed to read his thoughts. “I haven’t run away yet, have I?” he as
ked defiantly. “I wouldn’t either, if you took me to Rome with you.” A hopeful look, which Correus thought for a moment was mirrored in Freita’s face.
“No, I don’t expect you would, but I can’t do it,” he said firmly. “I need you here to look after things.” To look after Freita, whom Correus certainly couldn’t take with him. He had a brief mental vision of himself arriving home, trailing his ill-assorted household after him. He might be his own master in the army, but in Rome he was Appius’s son.
“How do you know I won’t run away while you’re gone?” Freita inquired.
“Because you don’t have any place to go,” he said, and then feeling that he had been brutal, he sat down on the floor by her chair and took her hands in his. She was still wearing her hair pinned up, he saw, and noticed also with some amusement that she had altered the gown she had worn to the inn into a plainer style. “Look, child, don’t do anything foolish. I can’t go if I spend the whole time worrying about you, and I must go. My father expects it.”
“You love him, don’t you?” she said. “Even after – Julius, go and feed Aeshma, please. Give him some grain. I rode him hard today.”
Julius departed, with an inquisitive backward glance, and Freita turned back to Correus. She didn’t pull her hands away, but let them rest in his. The cat leaped into her lap with a soft purr, scattering the drawings, and Correus moved one hand to scratch its ears.
“Yes, I do love him,” he said. “Even after a childhood as a slave, if that’s what you mean. My father did everything he could for me. More than most would have done.”
“I suppose slavery seems not so terrible if you are born to it,” Freita said.
“Wrong,” he said. He turned away from her to look into the fire. It had snowed that morning, the first snow of winter, and the air was clammy. “I doubt I’ll ever outrun mine.”
“Oh, yes. I was forgetting why you bought me.” She pulled her hands away, and he caught them back.
“Freita, don’t. Whatever my reason for buying you, I thought we had become friends in a way. Don’t back off from me again.” His dark eyes were serious, and she looked at them warily. The cat butted its head against his hand impatiently, and he absently scratched the gray ears, still holding Freita’s green tide-pool eyes with his. He could drown in those eyes… easily. He put his hand in the gold hair and pulled her head down to his and kissed her. She never moved. It was the first time he had touched her since that night in the tent when he had been half drunk with anger and fatigue; all the longing she had stirred in him then blazed up again like a fire. He pulled back, shaken, and stood up.
Then he was gone. Freita sat watching as the door swung shut. After a while she got up and tried to explain to Julius that it wasn’t that the centurion didn’t trust him… that wasn’t the trouble…
* * *
They rode out an hour later through the powder of new snow – Correus, Flavius, and Paulinus, who had decided only that morning to accompany them. Business in Rome, Paulinus said briefly, and Correus thought again of the Imperial Post permit, and the bland-faced man of the Nicretes he had questioned in the legate’s office in the Principia. Bericus and Tullius rode behind them, leaving Dog howling indignantly in a kennel in Argentoratum.
They went by road this time, traveling light and moving fast. It was more than eight hundred miles to Rome, and an officer could use up his long leave just getting there if he were too particular about his comfort on the way. The road skirted along the Rhenus, dived through a short tunnel, and emerged at Augusta Raurica, the oldest of the Rhenus settlements and the upriver terminus for the Rhenus fleet. From there they turned southward over the windy rock-cut Alpine pass that led south to Mediolanum and thence to Genua and the Via Aurelia to Rome. Paulinus produced another invaluable permit that got them rooms in the Imperial way stations a day’s march apart along the pass. Correus and Flavius looked at their friend with raised eyebrows, but kept quiet and enjoyed their good fortune. They had been bitten by bedbugs and had slept with one hand on their packs and the other on their daggers when staying in the common inns between Rome and the Rhenus a year ago.
The road was well traveled by couriers, troops, and civilians hastening to outrun the coming winter before the passes would be closed with snow. Correus had drawn Freita a rough map of the Empire and its roads, and she had opened her green eyes wide in patent disbelief. He wished he could have brought her with him to see the stone-paved road that snaked its way across mountains that had once been thought an impassable barrier. Banked at each turn, the road was wide enough for wheeled traffic to pass, and the milestones spelled out the distance to cities on its route, with the name of the legion that had built it and the emperor who had commanded it. Roman roads and the soldiers who laid their stones built the Roman Empire. Drawing Antaeus up at the height of the pass to see the road spilling away behind and before him, Correus thought the road might explain Romans to Freita better than most things could.
Flavius shouted to him to move, it was getting dark; and he turned Antaeus’s head down the switchback slope. It was snowing again, lightly but steadily, and ahead the light of a way station shone warmly. He prodded Antaeus with his heel, the road forgotten save as a means to dinner and, if they were lucky, a bath.
The journey took them the best part of a month, although once out of the mountains and into the Po Valley above Mediolanum the road was straight and fast and the weather warmer. Winter came later and with a gentler hand to Italy than to the forests of the Rhenus or the ragged peaks of the Alps. Correus was grateful for the presence of Paulinus and his hulking servant, cheerful travelers both. He had been dreading a month’s close company with his brother, and the companionship of the others seemed to draw Flavius out of his brooding silence. Or perhaps it was the prospect of a stay in Rome. Flavius loved Rome and was at home in the City in a way in which Correus would never be. The crowds, the smell, the festivals, and the games were excitement to him, a heady pleasure after a year on the frontier. For Correus, somehow, it was the frontier that had become home. Only Appius Julianus drew him to Rome again.
For both, the journey home was pure tedium, a month in the saddle with nothing to do but watch the road roll out ahead of them. Even the countryside was drab and bare with the beginning of winter.
They arrived in the City tired, travel-stained, and screaming from boredom. They stopped at an inn called the Shield and Pilum, with a centurion’s helmet painted on the signboard, on the theory that if it catered to army officers it probably wouldn’t be overpriced. They took two rooms, one for Paulinus and Tullius, and one for Correus and Flavius, with a bed on the floor for Bericus. The rooms were comfortable enough, with floors of plain stone, overlaid with bright rugs in an outlandish pattern, probably brought by the innkeeper from wherever it was that he had served his military tour. The beds were straw-stuffed but smelled fresh and seemed to be free of any unwelcome occupants. A plump girl with a cheerful face and a grubby apron brought them jugs of water to wash in. She looked the two brothers up and down in obvious admiration, and made it quite plain that should either of them require company for the night, hers was available.
The invitation was repeated as they finished a meal of hot stew and bread in the dining hall.
“My dear fellow,” Flavius said gravely when she had cleared away the bowls and disappeared into the kitchen with a wriggle of her backside, “don’t let me stand in your way.”
“On the contrary,” Correus said, equally solemn, “I feel sure that it is you she longs for. I wouldn’t dream of interfering.”
“Or we could always send her Bericus,” Flavius murmured. “He doesn’t get much fun.” He tilted his head back to catch the reaction of Bericus, who stood behind his master’s chair.
Poor Bericus looked so appalled that both brothers chuckled and assured him that they would do no such thing. Correus and Flavius went up to bed in reasonable charity with each other. They planned to sleep as long as possible and then spend a day or two d
oing the town and shaking the frontier out of their brains before they pushed on for their father’s estate.
Tullius, who had been watching this exchange, rose quietly and prowled off into the kitchen, where he met with a good reception. The girl would have preferred one of the handsome centurions who looked so much alike (or even both of them), but Tullius was, after all, one of her own kind. He might even pay her more.
Paulinus left his servant to his own devices and took himself off to his own room to write in his private journal before he slept. There had been little chance in the crowded way stations on the road, and there were things he wished to set down while they were still fresh in his mind.
A wearisome journey, but still the best and fastest road to the City from any place of power. Germany becomes more unmanageable by the minute. Sending more troops there would threaten Vespasian’s security by strengthening commanders on the Rhenus, and the Senate wants peace at home. Not enough troops on the Rhenus, and that river will go up in fire again. The Emperor picks his commanders carefully, but there’s always a doubt. No man wears his ambition branded on his forehead. Even my friend Correus, who is so loyal that he frets himself half into a fever if any two loyalties conflict, is beginning to understand the power that the command of armed men brings with it. And power breeds temptation, even for those loyal to the Emperor. The feeling that an emperor is blundering has provoked good men to rebellion before. Vespasian himself, for instance. In this case, though, I don’t think Vespasian has much choice but to reinforce the Rhenus, and someone, it seems, has told him so – someone with a louder voice than mine. New detachments came through this summer, while I sat in Argentoratum counting cracks in the plaster. Legate Rufinus was most forceful in his wish for my absence. Occasionally lying low becomes a necessity.
Odd letter from my revered uncle on the heels of those reinforcements. He had personally delivered the letters I sent on to Appius. Correus has invited me to spend part of my stay here in his father’s house, and I think I will. Tomorrow I dine with Uncle Gentilius, a polite round of sparring and innuendo. Following another appointment in the morning with the man in charge. In between I will take in the games with Correus and Flavius. Not my idea of entertainment as a rule, and Correus does not wish to go either, but he is going anyway because his brother wants to and he is still trying to be friends. Have the suspicion that Correus would prefer to haul off and slug Flavius, which wouldn’t solve anything but would certainly relieve his feelings. I shall attend in my dual role of nursemaid and peacemaker, and take along my sketchbook. I have a lovely satirical painting in mind, composed of the vulpine faces of the crowd encircling the tiny figures of the poor doomed souls below. Nasty, so I shan’t show it to Correus’s Freita, who is only just beginning to like us. When we get back to the frontier I am going to paint something on the walls of that dreary little house for her. That’s no occupation for a gentleman, my uncle Gentilius would say, but so few of my occupations are.
The Centurions Page 31