Island of Ghosts

by Gillian Bradshaw

  At this I was ashamed of myself. The bread choked me, and I tossed it aside. “My brothers,” I said, speaking now with the urgency of what I felt, “don’t you and the Romans conspire to make a Roman of me. I have tried to deal with them on their own terms, it’s true, but it’s only because they won’t listen to me otherwise, and we must make our voice heard. But you know what they say: di vide et impera. ” (And I said the words in the language to which they belonged.) “I know perfectly well that they think I’m the man they can use, the reasonable one, and they’ll make a tool of me if they can. Don’t help them by pushing all the reasoning, and all the bargaining, onto me.”

  Arshak stepped over to me and offered me his hand. “We will stand by you,” he promised solemnly. Gatalas nodded and followed him.

  I stood and took both hands in my own. The fear that had twisted in the back of my mind was out in the open now, and it was an immense relief to throw it off, and stand joined with my brother princes. “Thank you,” I told them. “We’ll all go and see the legate, then. But, Arshak, I think you should change your coat first.”

  He frowned. He took great pride in his coat, and was wearing it that day tossed loose over his shoulders and pinned. The scalps had been stitched on in a kind of pattern, with the lighter-colored ones making a stripe down the back and each arm, and the body in shades of black: the red wool of the coat’s fabric showed only at the cuffs. (I’d watched him carefully working out where he’d put Facilis’ scalp, if the gods were kind, and which others he’d move to make space for it.)

  “We want to ask the legate to give us our weapons back,” I said, when he was silent. “It’s not a good move to start by reminding him how many Romans we’ve killed with them.”

  Arshak sighed. “Very well! I’ll wear the other one. But I’d thought we would demand our weapons back, not ask for them.”

  I hesitated. “Do you want my advice?”

  “You know more about the legate than we do.”

  “Then we should ask first, and ask softly, before we demand. My impression of the legate is that he’s a proud man and a hard one, and doesn’t like to be corrected: if we demand, he may say no, simply to prove to us that he won’t be dictated to. Then if we refused to leave the city weaponless, even if he had to back down now, for lack of troops to put down a mutiny, he’d punish us later. He doesn’t like or trust us, and he’s accepted Facilis into his legion to advise him about us.”

  “What!” exclaimed Gatalas. “Facilis isn’t going back to Aquincum?”

  I told him about Facilis’ offer to the legate and its acceptance.

  “No wonder we haven’t been given our weapons back,” Arshak said thoughtfully. “Facilis has got at the legate. Well, I’m pleased he isn’t going safely home.” He smiled.

  I hated that smile. I wanted to ask Arshak to leave the centurion alone, say that the risk of trouble from killing the man far outweighed the pleasure of vengeance. But I knew Arshak would be offended if I did, so I said nothing.

  “How do you think we can get round this legate, then?”Gatalas asked, while Arshak fingered the place on his coat that he’d chosen before.

  “We go to him quietly, all three of us, and tell him that the men are upset because they expected to be given their weapons as soon as they had crossed the ocean. He may not even know that; he wasn’t at Aquincum. We tell him that it will damage their confidence in him if they don’t get the weapons, and that they’ll be suspicious of any promises that he might make in future.”

  “What confidence?” asked Gatalas.

  “The confidence we might have if he deals with us fairly. My brother, he’ll know that the men must believe that he means what he says, or there’s no reason for them to obey him. He knows he must give us our weapons sometime. We can pledge our honor that our people won’t do violence to any Roman on the way to Eburacum. If we phrase it tactfully, I think he’ll give in. Arshak, you know how it’s done-you did it yourself in Bononia.”

  “Not exactly this,”said Arshak. “But yes, near enough. Very well, we do it gently. In fact”-taking charge-“we don’t even go to him as though our first thought was to complain. We appear before him to greet him as our new commander, and to give him a gift. Romans love getting presents. What do we give him?”

  “A horse?” suggested Gatalas.

  “They don’t value them as much as we do,” I said. “A jewel?” My hand went involuntarily to the unpinned top of my coat.

  Arshak looked at me sideways. “What did you do with your coat pin?”

  “Gave it to Valerius Natalis, as you’ve guessed,” I replied-evenly, though I couldn’t yet bring myself to admit that Valerius Natalis had given me a slave. “He was very pleased with it.”

  Gatalas winced. “Did you have to give him a dragon?”

  “If it bought us one friend in the Roman camp, it was well given,” said Arshak. “If Natalis has a jewel, though, we don’t want to give the same to Priscus. I have a length of silk which I bought from a caravan from the East and took along for just this kind of thing. Would he like that, or would he think it was woman’s gear and be offended?”

  “He has a beautiful young wife,” I answered. “She’s influential too, or I’m much deceived. Give it to him, and mention her: that should be safe.”

  “We’ll bring only ten men each from our bodyguards,” Arshak went on, now in charge completely. “Enough to show that we’re persons of importance, but not enough to be interpreted as a threat of force. Very well. I’ll go fetch the silk and change my coat, and we can all collect our horses and our men. We’ll meet back here in a few minutes.”

  He strode off, and Gatalas started for his wagon, less quickly, and scowling: he disliked asking for what he thought he should demand. I ran my hands through my tangled hair and turned to the captain of my guard.

  “Leimanos, was there trouble over the milk?” I asked. “How much of it is there?”

  His eyebrows bobbed up, and he snorted with appreciation. He was a kinsman of mine, a lean brown man with eyes as blue as Arshak’s, loyal and hardworking: we’d ridden together since the battle where I’d killed my first man. “Enough for about twenty men in our dragon. The other companies got the same amount. I poured some for you, my prince, and told the men to be quiet until you’d drunk it and could say who got the rest.”

  “Good man. It’s to go to the men who are ill. If there’s anything left over when they’ve had their cups, make cheese.” I picked my own cup, which I hadn’t touched, off the step of the wagon. “Take this to whoever’s most ill.”

  Leimanos frowned. “The rest can go to the men who are ill. You drink that, my lord. You didn’t eat last night and you didn’t eat the bread this morning: you should at least drink that. And the other commanders drank milk. It’s true what you told them: you’re no less a prince than either of them, and it’s a disgrace to the dragon if you’re treated with less honor.”

  I drank down the milk. A company’s sense of its commander’s dignity ought to be treated with respect.

  Leimanos smiled with satisfaction. “Do you want me to take the first ten of the bodyguard and come with you to see the legate?”he asked.

  “No, stay and see to the milk,” I answered. “Tell Banadaspos and the second ten to get their horses. I’m going to dig out another coat pin and comb my hair.”

  “Yes, my prince.” Instead of going off obediently, however, he hesitated.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “Only that I’m glad you put that brace of eagles in their place,” he said vehemently. “They had no business thinking themselves better than you. They’ve been happy enough with the leather and the medicines and the food and the milk that you talked out of the Romans, to say nothing of their crossing the ocean safely instead of dying on Roman swords in Bononia-but their men have been whispering that you’re Romanizing, and they’ve let the whispers run.”

  “Ah. There’ll be more whispers to come, Leimanos,” I said, steeling myself. “T
here’s worse Romanizing that you don’t know yet. I accepted the gift of a slave, a scribe, from the procurator Natalis. I needed someone to write letters.”

  “My lord,” said Leimanos, “if you say you need a scribe, then you need one. No one who knows you, who’s followed you through the war, will talk of Romanizing. You are our prince”-and Leimanos came and touched my hand to his forehead-“and we say the gods favored us. I can speak for the whole dragon when I say that if you can deal with the Romans successfully, we’re glad of it. How would we live, otherwise?”

  “Thank you,” I said, liberated for the second time that morning. “I will see if I can’t get us back our weapons.”

  IV

  The meeting with the legate went well. Priscus was still staying at Natalis’ house, and we were admitted and ushered into the dining room as soon as we arrived. The legate had been working there with the three tribunes, but he rose and greeted us politely. Arshak, who could be very gracious and charming when he wanted to, made a little speech of greeting in return, saying we hoped and expected that our service under a nobleman as distinguished as Julius Priscus would bring us glory, and giving him the silk “as a token of our respect for you, my lord, in the hope that it will adorn your house and please your noble lady.” Aurelia Bodica was not in evidence, but it certainly pleased the legate. His heavy frown vanished and he looked almost genial.

  Arshak went on to mention the demand for the weapons with an air of embarrassment, as though he were faced with a problem he didn’t know how to resolve and was only turning to the legate for guidance. Gatalas chimed in with expressions of sympathy for the men’s fears, concern at the damage to their confidence in their new commander in chief, and guarantees that, if they were armed, they would not cause any problems. The legate began to frown again. Whatever arguments he’d heard against giving us our weapons back outside his own fortress had clearly been persuasive. But Arshak was persuasive too, and Priscus wavered visibly. Hurrying to catch the moment, I put in the other argument I’d thought of-that I’d planned to use the unloaded weapons wagons to carry a hundred barrels of salt beef, a hundredweight of oak staves, and two hundredweight of beech planking, none of which could easily be loaded onto horses, and that if we didn’t have the weapons wagons for them, we’d have to buy carts, which would put us over budget. That did it: Priscus agreed. “After all,” he said, “you were sent here as soldiers, not prisoners-and you can hardly sail yourselves back across the Channel. You swear to me that you’ll keep your men in order?”

  “On fire we swear it!” we exclaimed together, and stretched our right hands over the glowing coals of the brazier in the corner, set there to take the chill off the wet September air.

  It was agreed that the weapons would be distributed from the tribunal on the parade ground that afternoon, and we set off to give the good news to our men. Just as we were about to leave, Facilis came in.

  Arshak smiled at him. “I am pleased that you will still be with us, Flavius Facilis,” he said.

  “You still hope you can get a white neckpiece for your other coat, do you?” Facilis growled back. That was, in fact, exactly the place Arshak had been fingering.

  Arshak only smiled again, though his eyes glittered. “Remember that you followed us. We did not follow you. You chose our company. But now I must prepare my men to receive their weapons again.” He said it pointedly, to bait the centurion.

  “What?” demanded Facilis, rising to the bait, looking at Priscus in alarm. “I thought, sir, that you’d agreed-”

  “I hadn’t realized that the Sarmatians were counting on getting the weapons back as soon as they were this side of the Channel,” replied the legate impatiently. “If they were promised it, or even believed that they were promised it, it would damage the confidence they ought to have in their officers to make them wait. Besides, we need the weapons wagons for supplies.”

  Facilis looked furiously at me. “We need the wagons for supplies?”he asked. “So this was your idea, Ariantes. I should have guessed.”

  “Flavius Facilis,” I said, “you know we all wanted to have the weapons back now. We had to have them sometime. Since you must give, why not give gracefully?”

  “I don’t give anything gracefully to you,” he answered, and, under his breath, added, “You slippery bastard. The others would have asked for what they wanted straight-out, and been straight-out refused.”

  I shook my head and excused myself, and my brother commanders joined me. Just as we were mounting our horses, Lucius Javolenus Comittus ran out after us. “Hey! Wait a moment!” he shouted. When we paused, he trotted up grinning and out of breath.

  “I’ve been talking to the two other, uh, liaison officers,” he told us, “and we’d be very pleased if you could join us for dinner this evening. There’s a very good tavern by the harbor…”

  “It would please us better that you join us, instead,” said Arshak, smiling pleasantly. It was beneath his dignity to sit in Roman taverns by harbors, and Comittus had just plummeted in his opinion for suggesting it. “We can have a feast at the wagons, and you can meet the captains of our squadrons… the decurions, you’d call them, yes? I will have my men buy an ox to roast, and we will put up awnings against the rain.”

  “Yes,” said Comittus, in pleased surprise. “Excellent! I’ll bring some good wine. What time do you want us?”

  “Young idiot,” Arshak commented, when we were riding back to our wagons. “What do you suppose a ‘liaison officer’ does?”

  “It’s obvious,” said Gatalas. “He brings good wine to dinner parties and sits in taverns.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s a light yoke to bear,” Arshak observed. “He can sit in taverns, and I can forget about him. And we’ll get our weapons back!”

  “You spoke to the legate like a prince, Arshak,” I said warmly. “So sweet-tongued and respectful that he began to doubt Facilis’ judgment.”

  “I can fill my mouth with honey when I like,” agreed Arshak, grinning. “But it was that business you came up with that really tipped the balance. Where on earth did you learn that phrase-what was it? Above the bugget?”

  “Over budget,” I corrected. “A budget is a list of how much money you expect to spend on something. The scribe I was lent in Bononia used the term a lot.”

  “Scribes’ talk, money talk,” said Arshak, disdainfully. “And that legate listens to it! But I’m glad you learned it.”

  It would be better to announce my status as a slave-owner myself, rather than have someone else report it to my fellows behind my back. “It is useful,” I agreed. “Natalis gave me the scribe as a gift. If we need to write letters to the Romans, or read any letters they write, to us or about us, we will be able to.”

  The other two stared at me in shocked silence for a moment.

  “Where is this slave now, then?” asked Gatalas at last.

  “I sent him back to Bononia to say his good-byes. He should be here tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Ariantes…” Arshak began-then shook his head. “I can see it will be useful. To all of us. I would not keep a foreign slave in my wagon-but I can see it will be very useful, so how can I speak against it? You’ve proved the use of it already. This afternoon”-he stood up in the stirrups, stretching his arm-“this afternoon I will hold my spear again! And that is worth a few soft words to a legate!”

  The weapons were distributed from the tribunal under a steady drizzle. Priscus sat on a seat set up for him on the stone platform with a slave holding an awning over him, watching with his tribunes while we collected our things from the twenty wagons. The silk tails of our dragon standards hung down limply, dripping, and the horses tossed their heads unhappily as their hooves stuck in the churned-up mud. But for the men, it was a white day, a day of pure sun. The wagons had been loaded company by company, squadron by squadron, and they were unloaded in the same way. The orderly line of horsemen filed past, each collecting a sword, lance, bow case, and the oilskin-wrapped bundle that containe
d the armor for himself and his charger. Arshak’s men, first as ever, cantered off to the other end of the field to put the armor on as soon as they got it. Gatalas and his men armed closer to the tribunal; I was aware of them saddling and buckling as I waited with my men for our turn. The rasp of armor against armor, a sound that had once been as natural to me as breathing, sounded all over the field. I could see the Romans on the tribunal beginning to stare as the dragons of Sarmatian cavalry twisted into the glittering metal of their skin and came to life.

  It was my own dragon’s turn. First of my company, as befits a prince, I collected my own oilskin bundle, bow case, spear, sword: all the heavy illusion of invulnerability. I hefted the bundle of armor unhappily. I felt a strange grief to see it again.

  “Why put it on?” I asked Leimanos, who’d joined me, smiling over his own package of armor. “With this rain, it will just have to be taken off and dried and oiled thoroughly again tonight.”

  Leimanos looked shocked. “We must put it on, my lord!” he said. “The other dragons have. Besides, it’s been in the wagons for a couple of months, and it will need drying and oiling anyway, as well as wearing, to keep it supple.”

  I couldn’t shame my men by choosing to stay ingloriously disarmed beside the other commanders, and thus requiring them to do the same. I dismounted and began arming, and my hands remembered the old sequence of actions even though my mind was numb. Farna, my charger, a mare of the Parthian breed, stood patiently as I unsaddled her, only occasionally stamping her foot in protest at the rain. I tossed the armored blanket over her back and saddled her up again, clipping the blanket to the saddle and buckling it firmly across her chest and around her neck. Then came the chamfron, the horse’s head-guard with its delicate filigree bowls to protect her eyes, gold-chased bronze on scaled and painted leather. Next my own armor. I took off my coat and hung it on my saddle. First the leather trousers, heavily stitched with overlapping scales of gilded iron on the lower outside leg, but scaled more lightly farther up, and next to the horse. The three slashes on the left leg showed only on the inside, where the new piece of leather had been fitted in; the outside looked as polished, golden, and impenetrable as ever. Next the leather cuirass, scaled to give a double thickness overall. I pulled the wrist-guards over the backs of my hands, then picked up my coat, slung it over my shoulders, and pinned it: no reason to get the armor wetter than I needed to. I pulled on the helmet with the crest of crimson horsehair, hung the bow case on the left side of my saddle, slung my sword over my right shoulder, and mounted, slipping my spear into its holder by my right foot. Leimanos had armed more eagerly than I had and was finished already, but most of my men were still busy.