The Centurions

by The Centurions (retail) (epub)

  Helva patted his hand with ostentatious deference. “Well, of course, dear, if that’s what you want. Come and tell me about the army.” She sighed reminiscently. “Appius always used to tell me about the army. Of course, I never understood half of it, but I always used to listen. It gave him so much pleasure.”

  In spite of himself Correus chuckled at her frankness, and began to tell her about the Rhenus frontier.

  * * *

  Dinner was… interesting. That was the only word Correus could think of that covered everything. Paulinus and Appius seemed to be trying to find out something from each other, but Correus couldn’t tell what, and he wasn’t dead sure they knew, either. There were a good many names dropped, some famous, some that Correus had never heard before. He had the feeling that they brought out each name like a piece on a game board and set it there to see the other’s reaction.

  Flavius carried on most of his conversation with his mother, filling her in on the news since his last letter and restraining himself admirably from any comment on his half-brother’s household at Argentoratum. That Flavius had mentioned it to his father, Correus was certain, but so had he himself in a letter. There wasn’t anything wrong with it; he just didn’t care to figure as the center of dining-table jokes. Tonight, however, on his home ground, Flavius seemed less inclined to dig at his half-brother. He leaned across the corner of the table and laid a hand on his mother’s.

  “Lovely to shake the bog out of my hair and see you again, love.” He smiled at her affectionately.

  “And my cook, no doubt,” Antonia said in teasing tones, and smiled back at him.

  The cook had given his all for their homecoming dinner, and Flavius happily took a bite of custard. “Eggs,” he said. “And cream. Glorious. I shall eat until they have to put new rivets in my lorica.”

  “Can they do that?” Julia asked curiously.

  “Not very easily,” Correus said. “Simpler to chase us around the parade ground until we sweat it off.”

  “Would they really?”

  “They’d love to,” he said, thinking of Drillmaster Mucius. “Fortunately there’s no amount of weight that you could put on in a month that two weeks of army cooking wouldn’t take off again.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure,” Julia said, watching them eat ravenously. “What do they feed you in Germany?”

  “Swill.”

  “Pine cones.”

  “Fish heads.”

  “Mud pies.”

  “In other words, plain but serviceable food, child,” Appius said with a smile. “In any case, it seems to have agreed with you two. You both look remarkably fit.”

  “It’s the uniforms,” Julia said irrepressibly. “Tell me, sir” – she honored Paulinus with the courtesy due an older gentleman and he smiled ruefully to himself – “is that the sort of fare you had on the frontier?”

  “Well, not exactly,” Paulinus said. “A civilian has more options.”

  “He has a servant that steals chickens,” Correus explained.

  When the slaves began to clear the table, the ladies rose and left the men to their wine. It was time Julia was in bed, Antonia said firmly, and she herself had a full day tomorrow. Paulinus had always found it odd that a woman with hundreds of slaves could find the running of her household a full-time occupation, but his own mother always had, and obviously Lady Antonia did. He supposed that just seeing that the slaves kept working was work in itself. Julia gave Paulinus a smile – less shy now – as they left, and he smiled back at her. A thoroughly nice child. When the ladies had left them, the wine steward’s boy brought up more wine, and the men settled down to talk about the Rhenus frontier again. His host might have welcomed a retirement from active service, Paulinus thought – unlike many generals, Appius had retired voluntarily – but it was plain that the army still held the closest place to his heart.

  When he had gleaned as much information as his sons could supply, Appius in turn gave them his own advice on the handling of men and the tactics of emergency. Their year’s campaign gave his words new meaning. Paulinus maintained an expression of polite interest, watched the mosaic lobsters scuttle across the floor, and kept both ears open wide.

  “As you have both discovered by now,” Appius was saying, “you won’t always have some commander above you to say when to jump, or how far. Plenty of fast decisions by junior officers have won battles.” Or lost them. But he didn’t say that, thinking of Flavius’s unhappy description of his trapped century in his first real battle. The boy had been so transparently worried his father was going to be angry with him that Appius hadn’t found the heart to be. Flavius had leaped gratefully, and with a plainly genuine interest, into discussing affairs of the estate, Appius’s spurious reason for their private conversation. He must learn to command, Appius thought dismally. He’s got to. And he’s my son, so why can’t he? Correus had learned it, but there wasn’t Persephone’s chance in Hades of Flavius learning anything from Correus, even if Correus were willing to teach him – and now he wasn’t sure about that, either. But he was sure he had made a mistake when he forced that promise from Correus. On that disturbing thought, he changed the subject.

  For politeness’ sake, he asked Paulinus if he wished for company that night, and if there was a particular girl he fancied – if she was the agreeable sort, he would arrange it.

  Paulinus declined, equally politely. He wasn’t inclined toward casual lovemaking unless the girl really took his breath away. It didn’t seem tactful to say that the only woman in Appius’s household who had done that was Correus’s mother. And even if her position were different, he thought, remembering Correus’s story and Julia’s comments, he’d as soon bed a barracuda. Appius Julianus must be a singularly strong-minded man to handle Helva.

  No similar offer was made to Flavius and Correus. They would know where to find a girl if they wanted one.

  Paulinus seemed perfectly content to talk provincial politics with Appius for the rest of the evening, so Correus excused himself to go and pay his respects to Thais and any other of his old tutors as were still awake in the servants’ wing. After a moment Flavius followed him.

  Thais was placidly setting neat stitches in a piece of green silk for the hem of one of Julia’s gowns – an embroidered border of red apples. She set it aside when she saw them in the doorway and tried to hug them both at once. She came barely up to their collarbones, and they laughed and scooped her up in a chair formed of their interlocked hands and carried her triumphantly around the room.

  “Put me down, Master Flavius, Master Correus, do! What Philippos would say if he saw you—”

  “He’d be right scandalized,” a voice said from the corner, “but can you see old Philippos coming into your chambers at this time o’ night? That’d twist his dignity even more.” The voice spoke with obvious affection, and Correus looked over his shoulder to find Forst sitting on a stool, his large, callused hands delicately sorting embroidery silks into varying shades of red and peach. Correus set Thais down with a bit of a thump, smacked her on the bottom, and then stood docilely while she boxed his ears in return. He tried not to look surprised. Bereft of someone to mother, Thais had apparently picked on the unlikely person of the German, and Forst seemed to be blossoming remarkably under this treatment. At any rate, his Latin had.

  The German stood up to make his obeisance to Correus and Flavius, then arranged the silks carefully in Thais’s workbox. He kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll be off now, Granny. You’ll be wanting to talk, and I want to have a look at that new mare that’s near foaling.”

  When they had told Thais the latest news and allowed her to exclaim over how much they had grown and to ply them with honeycakes that she had sent a maid scurrying off to the kitchen for, Correus strolled down to the horse barns for want of anything else to do. Alan and Diulius and the weapons master, Sabinus, would probably be in bed. He could see them in the morning. It was a fine night for winter, crisp and cold with a black glassy sky strewn with
stars. A faint odor of manure and warm horse drifted up from the barns, familiar and homey.

  There was a lamp hanging from a peg by one of the loose boxes, and inside Correus found Forst, flat out in the straw with a laboring chestnut mare whose breath came in heaving gasps as she struggled to push the foal out. Forst’s arms were slick and bloody to the shoulder and he was breathing heavily.

  “It’s her first,” he said, looking up as Correus’s shadow fell across the straw. “I had to turn it, but I think we’re all right now.”

  As he spoke, the red mare gave one last shuddering contraction and two tiny hooves poked out. Forst gave them a gentle tug as Correus knelt down by the mare’s head and told her softly what a fine lady she was. Her foam-flecked head subsided a little under his soothing hands, and after a moment a small wet nose followed the front hooves, and then the foal slid suddenly out into the straw.

  The mare scrabbled with her forelegs to shift herself around and sniff at her offspring, while Forst pulled the afterbirth away and Correus cleared the mucus out of the foal’s nose and mouth and rubbed the small body down with a feedsack. He was black, with four white boots and a white splash down his nose, as if someone had dribbled paint on it. The mare heaved herself to her feet and nuzzled gently at the colt, blowing her breath out her nose in an encouraging sound. After a few minutes the colt gathered his spidery legs under him and lurched to his feet, uncertainly, like a man on stilts. But he made unerringly for the mare’s swollen teats and in another minute he was sucking away, his stubby brush of a tail switching briskly back and forth.

  Correus and Forst stood in the loose-box door and regarded him with satisfaction.

  “Thank you,” Forst said. “I thought she might foal tonight and I didn’t want to stir up Alan if I could help it He’s been ill, and he needs to sleep.”

  “Nothing serious, I hope?”

  “Just age.” Forst smiled. “And the notion that he could go chase down a loose horse in a rainstorm and not pay for it.”

  There was something odd about Forst… different. For a moment Correus couldn’t put his finger on it, and then he realized that it was the fact that Forst was not sounding different. He spoke like a ten years’ servant on the estate, not the new-captured, rebellious fighter that Correus remembered.

  Forst caught the master’s son looking at him strangely, and he shrugged his shoulders. “It pays to… adapt, lord, I find.” He pulled the bottom half of the loose-box door closed and leaned on it to watch the colt. “He’ll do well enough now. He’s one of Orion’s get and they’re all as tough as bears from the day they’re foaled.”

  “Forst—” The coiled knot of pale hair at the side of his head, the bristling mustache, the carefully clipped beard were all still at odds with the matter-of-fact Latin voice. The last time Correus had seen that knotted hair was over the edge of a painted shield, with a spear behind it.

  “Lord?”

  “Forst, are you all right here now? I’ve been fighting your own folk for the last year, you know. Would you rather I went away?”

  Forst sighed and some of the careful glaze slipped away. “No, lord. As I told you, I learn to adapt. Mostly that’s been Granny Thais. It’s none so bad, having someone to… cosset you. I near died of loneliness before old Granny took me under her wing.” Forst paused and Correus realized with a slight shock that Forst was not much older than he was.

  “No, lord,” Forst said again, “don’t go. If you can spare the time, tell me how it is with my people.”

  Correus turned a pair of empty feed buckets upside down on the wooden aisle that ran the length of the barn between the double row of loose boxes and, for the third time that day, began to explain the chancy war on the Rhenus frontier that year.

  Forst listened in silence, but as Correus spoke, the layers of Thais’s “cosseting” slipped away one by one until the man who crouched on the upturned feed bucket merged slowly into the grim warrior who had given Correus his first taste of fighting a German long sword. Forst’s adaptation to Rome ran only deep enough to preserve his sanity; no deeper.

  They talked until the faint, deceitful light of false dawn began to show outside the stable doorway, and then they walked up the frostbitten road to the great house together while the chestnut mare and the black colt snored softly, curled around each other in the warm straw of the loose box.

  * * *

  In the morning, Correus paid his duty to Sabinus, declined a session on the practice field on the grounds that he had fought more than he wanted to lately, and went off to find Alan and Diulius and the horses.

  Alan was still in bed and Antonia herself was applying a hot poultice to his chest. Correus told him about the red mare’s foal – a colt, and maybe even good enough to keep for breeding – and gave him the polished wooden riding crop with the white horsetail end that he had bought in the Argentoratum market.

  Diulius he found schooling a new chariot pair around the track. He speedily sweet-talked the chariot master into letting him try them out. It was all very uncomplicated, he thought, pulling off his helmet and letting the wind whip his hair back while Diulius scowled at him from across the training track. He needed a few uncomplicated pleasures before he coped with the complication that was even now awaiting him at the house – Aemelia, come ostensibly to visit Julia, encouraged by her father to spend some time with Flavius, and threatened by her father with horrible consequences if she so much as batted an eyelash at Correus.

  * * *

  Aemelia… Correus stood in his chamber and peered into the plain wood-framed mirror that hung on one wall. A trio of plump ladies in improbably diaphanous gowns cavorted around the frame, painted into the plaster on the wall; they gave him the come-hither over bare, dimpled shoulders. He had ducked in the back gate and soaked off the smell of hot horse in the baths. He then scurried for his own room, avoiding the chatting quartet who could be seen through the atrium doorway, soaking up the winter sun and the heat which ran through the hypocaust channels under the floor. He was going to have to come out sometime, he thought disgustedly. He couldn’t spend the next month hiding under the bed frame like a turtle. Aemelia had looked cheerful and polite, making small talk with Julia, Paulinus, and Flavius, but she had been craning her pretty head around like an owl, all too plainly looking for someone – and that someone was Correus.

  He regarded his aquiline reflection in the mirror and pulled the neck of his scarlet tunic straight, knotting his scarf carefully above it. The tunic was freshly cleaned and pressed by Antonia’s admirable staff, and his belt buckle gleamed with new polish, setting off the insigne of the Eighth Augusta. Correus felt like putting his armor on, to give him a helmet to hide under. He picked up a fine-toothed bone comb and began trying to make his hair lie flat. It needed cutting. He would have to have Appius’s barber do something with it before he left, or Messala Cominius would trot him off to the legionary barbers and they would shave his head for him, so as not to have to bother again for six months.

  He laid the comb down and peered at himself in the mirror. What in Aphrodite’s name did the girl want with him? He looked enough like Flavius to be his twin. So why him and not Flavius? Correus thought of a few of the reasons why he could want Aemelia, if he gave them half a chance – beginning with the soft warm feel of her body pressed up to his in the rose garden. It would be so easy to want Aemelia… Correus made a face at himself in the mirror and thought that he should have gone and woken up red-haired Emer last night. That would have taken the edge off his unwillingly amorous mood. It was a shame he couldn’t have brought Freita home with him. That would disillusion Aemelia in a hurry, since she would be incapable of imagining any other reason for his having bought the woman except the obvious one.

  Freita… Correus sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands, which made his hair stand up on end again. Typhon take the woman! He missed her. She might even have been able to give him some idea of how to cope with Aemelia. Freita had a way of seeing through peopl
e to their core. He cursed again as the thought of Freita set a chain of unwelcome emotions running through him. Not even the presence of Aemelia could stir him as the mere thought of the pale German witch did. He flung himself down on the bed, feeling sulky and childish. He would take a nap, and maybe when he woke up, Aemelia would be gone and Emer would be handy. But he didn’t sleep, and every time the darkness came close it dissolved into a pair of sea-green eyes and a cloud of gold hair.

  He managed to avoid Aemelia for that day, and a night spent in red-haired Emer’s arms took the edge off his physical craving. But it did precious little for the rest of his troubles, and his frame of mind was not improved when Appius requested his presence in the study a few days later.

  Trotting gloomily and obediently along the colonnade toward his father’s private lair, Correus winced as he caught sight of Aemelia and Antonia in earnest conversation in the atrium. He had returned home from a grim and bloody campaign feeling that now he was a man, and childhood only a distant, misty memory of innocent days that would never come again. But the longer he spent in his father’s presence, the more the blood and the high, fierce mood that was the frontier washed away, until now he would not have been surprised if some figure of authority suddenly appeared before him to order him off to school and ask him what he thought he was doing dressed up as an army officer. Maturity, it seemed, was relative.

  * * *

  Antonia, in the atrium, was trying to pound much the same thought into her prospective daughter-in-law’s head.

  “My dear child…” Antonia schooled her face into its usual placid, well-bred expression, but with difficulty. “Have you ever had a career soldier in your family?”

  “Well, certainly. My uncle and—”