Island of Ghosts

by Gillian Bradshaw

  Even a joint command would end in disaster. Here I was, determined to safeguard my followers by keeping the peace with our Roman masters-and I ached to scalp the first Roman colleague I met. What would my officers do? Or my fellow commanders? I thought of Arshak and his coat of Roman scalps. This Comittus was as cheerful and bouncy as a puppy. Members of the equestrian order often begin their careers by serving as military tribunes on the staff of a legion. They don’t need any previous military experience, and I doubted Comittus had supplied any. He would manage Arshak about as well as the red-faced man had managed the white horse, and the result could easily be death and grief all round. Someone in Britain had miscalculated badly. Perhaps, like the procurator Valerius Natalis, they thought we were conquered barbarians.

  I found that my hand was on the hilt of my dagger, and I made myself rub it slowly, trying to banish the images of blood. “I think perhaps we had better have dinner together,” I said quietly. “Perhaps I might speak with your commanding officer, as well. What you have said…” I shook my head. “Javolenus Comittus, if you had said that to Arshak, that ‘I will be in command,’ I think he would have taken your life.”

  Comittus looked bewildered. The woman, Aurelia Bodica, smiled. “Is this… Arsacus… your commanding officer?” she asked.

  “He is my fellow officer, Lady,” I said, “but senior to me in honor, being of royal blood.”

  “Is he here in Dubris too? We hadn’t heard that any of your troops had even arrived in Bononia yet.”

  “We arrived in Bononia yesterday afternoon, Lady. The others are still there. I came over on my own this morning. The others will follow when I have told them all is well.”

  “I see.” She smiled again, very prettily this time. “I’d thought perhaps we could all have dinner together this evening, Sarmatian and Roman officers together, and you could explain to us how we should manage your troops. Instead, I’m afraid it will have to be you and four Roman legionary officers… What did you say your name was?”

  “Ariantes.”

  “ Lord Ariantes? I’m afraid I can’t even invite you to dine out, because my husband and I are also staying at Natalis’ house. But I hope you will share a meal with us, and I will invite the tribunes as well-I’m inviting you now, Lucius Javolenus! You can tell us all about your people’s customs and how we can avoid offending them.”

  I thanked her and agreed. Comittus thanked her too. She smiled again and said she would have to rush back to arrange the dinner party, wished me good health, and set off back up the road. Comittus collected the horse and followed her.

  My leg was still too painful to allow me to walk any distance. I limped back to the fountain and sat down on the rim. The curious crowd at last tired of gaping at me and began to take down the market stalls and pack up for the day; even the apple seller excused herself. I supposed that it was not really surprising that Bodica had guessed I was Sarmatian, given that she knew we were expected and I had mentioned Bononia. Yet I had felt something strange in that stare, and in the smile when I referred to Arshak killing the tribune. It unsettled me. I wondered how much authority she held. It was odd that Comittus had called her by her own names: she should have been Aurelia Julii, after her husband. Was it really so clear to everyone that she wasn’t Julius’ Aurelia, but her own? And the name itself was an odd one for a woman of rank. When they acquire Roman citizenship and Roman names, many people retain their own name as their last and take the family name of the Roman they received the citizenship from, often the emperor. The obvious “Aurelius” was the man I’d met at Aquincum, or perhaps his predecessor. But that would make the citizenship of Bodica’s family very recent, and she didn’t carry herself like an upstart. And even without that puzzle to trouble me, I was staggered at the task of trying to explain the Sarmatians to four Roman officers at a dinner party. If I couldn’t convince them to change their plans, though, there’d be a mutiny in Britain even if there wasn’t one in Bononia. I might even lead it myself. I could not — could not-yield command of my own men to some ignorant and inexperienced young Roman.

  The white horse trotted down the street again, this time pulling a flimsy little chariot of painted wood and leather. Bodica was sitting on the bench seat while a groom drove, and Comittus rode behind on a flashy but shallow-hocked black stallion. Bodica noticed me and waved as she went by, and Comittus turned his horse aside.

  “Is your leg really all right?” he asked, stopping in front of me. “If it isn’t, you can ride Thunder back to the base. Here, I’ll walk.” He slid off the black and offered me the bridle.

  I looked at him for a moment. I do not like borrowing anything, but I doubted that I could walk the distance without straining the wound, and I’d had enough trouble with it already. (Riding’s no strain. I have ridden while asleep.) “Thank you,” I said, and took the bridle.

  “I’ll give you a leg up…” he began-but I was on top of the horse by then. I checked how it was trained, remembering to use my knees in the Roman fashion, instead of my heels as I would with my own horses. Comittus looked as though he had expected to instruct me on the horse, but thought better of it. “Well,” he said, and swallowed. “If you want to ride him to Natalis’ house, just give him to one of the orderlies when you get there and tell them I’m in the north barrack block; they’ll return him.”

  I looked at him for another moment. It had been a kind gesture to offer me his horse. He’d been trying to make friends. “I do not know where Natalis’ house is,” I confessed. “I have not yet been there. If it is agreeable to you, Javolenus Comittus, perhaps you could walk with me and show me the way.”

  He brightened and agreed at once.

  “What did you mean when you said this Arsacus would kill me for saying I was in command?” he asked as soon as we set off.

  “Was it unclear?”

  “No, but… what’s wrong with saying it?”

  “Arshak’s troops are Arshak’s men. He is…” I groped for a Roman parallel. “He is their patron, they are his clients. Their families also were clients of his father, and his father before him. You are a Roman-until this summer, an enemy. How would your clients feel if things were reversed? If they were marched out into the plains among the Sarmatians, and then told that you, their patron, were no longer their patron, but that they must look instead to a Sarmatian prince who knew nothing of their ways and could not even speak their language? Would they not refuse? And Arshak is the nephew of a king, and will not want a Roman tribune to interfere with him. He is not a patient man.”

  “Oh. I hadn’t thought of it that way.” After a moment, he asked earnestly, “So what should we do?”

  “Could you not call yourself an adviser? Or a mediator? Or a… liaison officer, who speaks for the legate, but leaves the command to us?”

  “I could! That’s all I will be, really.” He began to brighten again. “That’s all right, then! Though I hope I’m not appointed to.. liaise with… this Arshak. If there are three troops of you, and he commands one while you command another, who commands the third?”

  “Gatalas. I do not know that you would find him easier to liaise with than Arshak, Javolenus Comittus.”

  “Call me Lucius. So if I’m lucky, I liaise with you.”

  “If you choose to view it that way.”

  “I do,” he announced, grinning.

  He was undoubtedly right to prefer me to Arshak or Gatalas. “How far is it to Eburacum?” I asked.

  He was perfectly happy to tell me about Eburacum and his journey from there, and did all the talking the rest of the way.

  Natalis’ house at the naval base in Dubris was even larger and finer than his house in Bononia. I slid off the horse, thanked my companion, and wished him good health-though I called him Lucius Javolenus, not Lucius. I couldn’t bring myself to use his first name alone, not while my mind still teased me with the image of his scalp hanging from my bridle. When he’d ridden off, I went in and introduced myself to the slaves.

&nb
sp; The dispatches I’d voyaged with had contained a letter about me to the steward of the house, and I’d been expected even before Bodica had appeared to arrange a dinner party for me: the slaves were polite, despite my smell of dirt and horses. I gave directions about the apples and remembered to ask for someone to go to the ship to explain to the captain why I wasn’t waiting there. The steward escorted me up the stairs to a bedroom overlooking the courtyard, murmuring that Lord Julius Priscus and his wife were expecting me in an hour, after I’d had time to wash, and would I like a bath?

  I wanted to clean myself, particularly if I was to dine with these important Romans, but the Roman custom of immersing oneself in hot water was still alarming to me. I asked about a steam bath, and was told that only the public baths, outside the base, were equipped for that. I settled for some oil, and cleaned myself as well as I could with that and a strigil. There was nothing I could do about my clothes; after the long journey, I didn’t have any clean ones, even in Bononia. I combed my hair and avoided the mirror on the bedroom table.

  There was still a long time before the dinner. I turned my attention to the room. It seemed very large to me-I had never actually slept in a house before. The walls had been covered with painted plaster, but at least the floor wasn’t stone, and had a carpet: it didn’t feel as much like a tomb as a room on the ground floor would have. I took the mattress off the bed and put it next to the window, draped a curtain to fill in some of the cavernous space, and hoped that it would feel enough like a wagon that I’d get some rest. Then I sat down on the mattress and put my head on my knees. I imagined what my men would do if they were told that they were to be commanded by a Roman. I imagined what the Romans would do to them afterward. I prayed to Marha, the Holy One, the god whom we worship above all other divinities, to open the ears of the Roman legate to my words and make him change his plans. The steward knocked at the door at the appointed time, and I limped apprehensively downstairs.

  Aurelia Bodica reclined on the middle couch with her husband, the legate Priscus, snaring the lamplight in the web of her hair. Priscus was considerably older than her, a thickset man in his late forties, very dark. (I later found out that his full name was Tiberius Claudius Decianus Murena Aufidius Julius Priscus. Important Romans collect names as Sarmatians collect scalps.) No one got up to greet me. Priscus and the two tribunes I had not met before looked at me as the procurator Natalis had, as though I were a dangerous animal; the wife of one of the tribunes, who sat with her husband, flinched when I came in and seemed afraid to look at me at all. Comittus gave me a smile of extreme embarrassment and looked nervously away.

  “So you’re Ariantes,” the legate said in a harsh voice, looking me up and down.

  “Greetings, Lord Julius Priscus,” I returned, now feeling quite dizzy with anxiety. “Greetings to you all.”

  He grunted, and nodded for the steward to begin serving the wine. The others were all reclining on their couches, the legate and his wife in the top place, the married tribune and his wife on the right, and the two others on the left. I did not know where to sit, so I remained standing. I sipped my wine when it was handed to me, wondering what they had heard to make them so disapproving. Then I noticed a letter lying on the table in front of the legate, and guessed that Facilis had sent it, and that it had been read aloud just before I came in.

  “Is it true,” growled Priscus, “that you’ve been telling Lucius Comittus that he should call himself a liaison officer to your troops, instead of a prefect?”

  “Yes,” I agreed. I repeated my explanation of why. Comittus gave me another nervous smile, then plucked up his courage and moved over on his couch, allowing me to sit down. I was glad to sit. My leg was aching.

  “And you’re threatening us with trouble if we don’t go along with this?” demanded Priscus when I’d finished. “You told Lucius that your friend Arsacus would kill him if he called himself commander?”

  “No, my lord,” I replied. “I am not threatening, but warning you of trouble. I should not have spoken as I did about Arshak; I cannot say for certain what he would or would not do-but I know our men would rebel. They are angry and afraid anyway. To them the ocean is the end of the world: I am here because they doubted there was anything beyond it, and were afraid of a Roman plot to drown them. A foreign commander could hardly escape offending them. I do not want problems any more than you do. It is my own people who would suffer most.”

  “We’ve been hearing about your own people,” said Priscus.

  “My lord,” I said, “if Flavius Facilis has written to you, I would ask you to remember that his son was killed in the war this last summer, and he is tormented with grief. His judgment of us is not altogether reasonable.”

  The shot went home. I could see them all realizing that Facilis had not written as a senior centurion handing over a charge, but as a man driven by passions like the rest of us, and that I’d known he hated us. They all relaxed a little.

  “So it’s not true,” said Priscus, “that this fellow Arshak has a coat stitched with Roman scalps?”

  I was silent a moment. “It is true,” I admitted.

  “And that he, and your other colleague Gatalas, made themselves bow cases from the skin of Romans they killed in battle?”

  “That is true, as well.”

  “And that you yourself,” Priscus demanded, glaring at me, “once killed a Roman centurion who tried to stop you when you were attacking Roman settlements in the province of Lower Pannonia-killed him with a rope and a dagger, cut off his head, and made his skull into a drinking cup, which you have to this day?”

  “I do not have it to this day,” I replied. “The man’s family came to me at Aquincum and I gave it to them for burial.”

  “But the rest of the story is true?”

  “Yes.”

  “I do not see how you can think yourself fit to be a Roman officer. Jupiter! You’re not fit to live!”

  “My lord,” I said tightly, “I have not observed that the Romans at war behave with decency and moderation. Perhaps you do not collect scalps, but you murder indiscriminately to injure your enemies, killing even young children. And I have heard Roman soldiers complaining at Sarmatian women, calling them vicious bitches because they took up arms to defend their babies, and had to be killed before they could be raped.” I had to stop for a moment. A shadow of the helpless rage I’d felt when I’d heard the complaint choked me. I managed to continue more calmly, “My lord, you yourself must have decorated men for their bravery in doing things in war which, if they had been done under other circumstances, you would have punished with death. What is the point of scratching old wounds? From my people’s point of view, we are dead, I and all my fellows. They have held funerals for us. Those who had wives now have widows, who are free to remarry as they please, and our property is divided among our heirs. What I or anyone else may have done in the past concerns no one now.”

  “On the contrary, Ariantes, it concerns me very much. How can I hand fifteen hundred Sarmatians their weapons, give command of them to men who drink from Roman skulls, and turn them loose in a Roman province?”

  “My lord, we have sworn oaths to the emperor. We cannot go home. I understand that Britain contains three legions and more auxiliaries than I could count, more than enough to destroy us. We must become Roman auxiliaries, or die. Do you mean to help us become auxiliaries, or to kill us?” I hesitated, then went on, deliberately, “The emperor was pleased to get us. Even when he thought of killing us all, he wanted cavalry like ours. I saw him at Aquincum when we rode in and surrendered. He was like a boy with a new horse. He would not be pleased with you, my lord, if you provoked trouble with us.”

  Priscus glared at me wordlessly, his jaw set and his nostrils white with anger.

  “Why did you use a rope and a dagger?” asked Aurelia Bodica, as though it were the obvious question. When I looked at her she gave me that same sweet, unsettling smile. “When you killed that centurion, I mean.”

  �
�I wished to match his own daring,” I answered, after a silence. She looked at me quizzically; the others stared with incomprehension and disgust, and I went on, reluctantly, “I had a hundred armored horsemen and three hundred mounted archers, and we had crossed the Danube to raid. We were driving off the flocks and the cattle from a settlement when a centurion came up with just one century and ten legionary dispatch riders, ninety men in all. I do not know whether he had thought we were fewer, or whether he had expected reinforcements to join him. My armored troops alone could have dealt with twice his numbers easily. But he shouted at us to return the beasts to their owners and leave Roman land at once, and I was astonished at his courage. I thought I would have no glory from the contest unless I could match such bravery. So I offered to fight him man to man, and made my men swear that if he killed me, they would not harm him, but leave, as he’d ordered. Then I got off my horse, put my weapons and armor aside, and came to fight him with a lasso and a dagger. He had his armor, javelin, and sword; he told me I was mad, and I told him he had no right to say so, and we both laughed. I spared his men when I’d killed him. I would not have taken his head as a trophy if I had not admired him.”

  I remembered riding back with the centurion’s head hanging from my saddle, absolutely drunk with glory, and my men laughing and shouting and singing. What an exploit! Worthy of songs, worthy of a hero! I had never been so proud of anything in my life. When I came home, to my own wagon, my men shouted out the story to my wife, Tirgatao, waving the skull-now scalped and cut in half and scraped clean to prepare it for use as a cup. Tirgatao took it and stared at it in amazement, then put it down and slapped me so hard I nearly fell over. Then she grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “Do you want to make me a widow?” she asked. “Don’t you want to live to see your son?”-she was seven months pregnant at the time. “I want my son to be proud of his father,” I told her, putting my arms around her. “Proud!” she shouted, putting hers around me and kissing me. “You lunatic! Oh, my dragon, my eagle, my golden hero! Don’t you ever do that again!” She was crying with pride and anger, and under both of them was love. And now I was one of the dead, and the story I had gloried in was told by the Romans to disgrace me.