Island of Ghosts

by Gillian Bradshaw

  We weren’t used to cities. The narrow streets of close-set houses, crowding windowless over the road, confused us, and we wandered helplessly for a while, looking for some familiar landmark. I eventually stopped and asked a shopkeeper for directions to the bridge.

  “You mean the bridge to Ladybank?” he asked.

  “It is the one that crosses the Tamesis,” I replied.

  “To Ladybank,” he agreed, nodding. “You go back down to the corner and turn right, then left, and it’ll be there in front of you.”

  “I thank you.”

  The shopkeeper looked up at me curiously as I gathered the reins again. “We call the other side Ladybank,” he told me. “On account of all the ladies hung up there when Queen Boudica sacked the city.”

  I paused.

  He nodded, pleased at seeing a foreigner suddenly so intent on his local knowledge. “You’re not from Britain, are you? You’ve heard of Queen Boudica?”

  “A little.”

  “You’ll have heard, then, that she sacked Londinium. Well, they say that when the old queen took the city, the men were already dead defending it, so she revenged herself on the women. She had the wives and daughters of the Roman citizens stripped, tortured, mutilated, and impaled along the bank there. So it’s been called Ladybank ever since.”

  “I thank you,” I repeated. I nodded to him, and started in the direction he’d indicated.

  Why, I wondered, had Aurelia Bodica left the cruel executions out of her hero tale and implied that the bodies were those of dead Roman officials? Because she admired her ancestress and believed no evil of her? Or because she knew that cruelty to defeated prisoners would offend her audience and lose their sympathy for the British cause?

  We found the bridge, and I left it behind me with a sense of relief. The commandeered house was near the road, with the legionary tents pitched in a neat square in its stable yard; our own camp was behind. When I rode up to the road gate I found Facilis standing there fuming.

  “Where are the others?” he demanded, “Where’s the lady Aurelia Julii? Why did you go into the city, may the gods destroy it?”

  He must have deliberately decided to call her by her husband’s name; I’d heard nobody else use it. I told him where everyone was, and he swore again. “The lady’s husband offered her an escort this morning, a Roman escort. She said she had a headache and wanted to stay quietly in the house for the day! She’s left her little slave girl confined to the house in tears, and her driver sulking in the stables. May I perish if I know what she’s up to!”

  I shrugged and gestured for my men to go on back to their wagons.

  Facilis looked at them sourly as they jingled past. “She was parading you, I suppose, like a triumphant general,” he said. “I hope you enjoyed it.”

  “I did not,” I replied. I sat for a moment looking down at Facilis. I had no love for the man, but he was shrewd and perceptive, a party to Roman debates from which I was excluded-and he plainly didn’t trust Aurelia Bodica any more than I did myself. “You think, then, that she is ‘up to’ something,” I said quietly.

  Facilis let out a long breath through his nose. “I don’t say anything against a legate’s lady, Ariantes. Remember that.”

  “Lucius Javolenus Comittus admires her greatly. The other two tribunes are… unhappy at the mention of her.”

  “Afraid, you mean.” Facilis’ voice had dropped to a whisper now, and I had to pull my helmet off to hear him. “They, and most of the lads, are afraid of her. And I don’t quite know why.”

  “Javolenus Comittus is a native Briton,” I said, slowly. “He is related to her. The others are of Italian descent.”

  “And she’s a descendant of the native royalty.” Facilis glanced round, then came over and caught my stirrup. “May I perish, Ariantes, I don’t know Britain any better than you do. I’m a Pannonian and I’ve never been here before. There’s something going on, all right, underneath what they actually say and do, but I don’t understand it and I can’t make it out. The fact that she’s native royalty is part of it, but not all of it by any means. All the lads in the century here are British-born and most of them are from the northern tribes, the ones that have had risings a generation or two ago, but they’re good lads, loyal to the emperor. And they’re afraid of her.”

  I dismounted and stood facing him, holding Farna’s bridle. “And my people?”

  He gave a hiss between his teeth. “So you’ve seen it. Yes, she’s after you, all right. You in particular, but Arshak and Gatalas as well. She’s asked and asked about all of you. It could be innocent curiosity, but it isn’t.”

  “In Britain, queens have led armies.”

  “Just like Sarmatians. I’d feel pretty damned unhappy if a Sarmatian princess were married to a legate on the Danube. But it’s much more complicated here. On the Danube, we were on one side of the river and you were on the other, and we all knew who was who. Here everything’s all muddled up.”

  “Southern tribesmen in togas,” I agreed, “and northerners, so you say, in strip armor.”

  We looked at each other for a moment. “What do the other two think about the lady Aurelia Julii?” he asked.

  “They think she is a noble and beautiful lady, of royal blood, and they are pleased to find a commander’s wife suited to their own dignity. They are flattered at her attention.”

  “Arrogant bastards! Them and their damned ancestors!”

  I shook my head. “You should not say that to me, Flavius Facilis. It will…”

  He joined me on the end of the phrase. “… only make trouble! Very well, very well, you’re an aristocratic bastard yourself, and I’ll keep my plebeian mouth shut about your ancestors. At least you’ve got more sense than the rest of them.”

  “What does the legate think?” I asked. That was the real question.

  “Lord Julius Priscus is forty-two and a widower. He married the lady last year. He thinks she is wonderfully beautiful and the cleverest woman he’s ever met, and he thinks she’s after your lot to help him manage you. I don’t know. Perhaps she is. They were all shaken to hear the truth about Sarmatians, and they still don’t really believe it.” He stared at me for another moment, then said, “I’d have expected you to jump at what she’s offering, whatever it is. You’re no friend of Rome, and maybe here’s your chance to play ‘divide and rule’ for yourself.”

  “I have sworn oaths, Flavius Facilis. And…”

  And, and. And I didn’t like the woman. I couldn’t explain why, even to myself. I’d known her only a few days. But I did not like that assessing gaze and the probing questions, and liked them even less coupled with the sweet smiles and girlish enthusiasm, the delicate touch of her hand against my face. To my people, lying is worse than murder, and too much of what she did had the sweetly foul scent of deceit. It was unfair, perhaps, to regard her with so much suspicion. I had dug for information myself, of late, and taken advantage where I could, of Comittus, of Eukairios, of Natalis to some extent. But still, I wanted to keep myself and my people away from her.

  “I would have thought that you would… like her better yourself, Flavius Facilis,” I finished instead. “Perhaps she is, as you say, trying to manage us.”

  “Perhaps she is,” he agreed. “But I don’t believe that any more than you do. Maybe it’s just because I’m a stranger here, and notice things the others take for granted. And, I admit, there’s another reason, which is no reason at all to suspect a woman of… whatever. I don’t like the way she treats that little girl she has to do her hair. I could hear it, at Natalis’ house and here as well. ‘Please, my lady, I didn’t mean to, my lady, please, no, please…’ and the sound of the damned woman using the stick.”

  “What had the girl done?” I asked, shocked.

  “Nothing. Got a curl out of place when she did her mistress’s hair, or brought washing water that was cold. Crack, crack, crack, and the girl sobbing. Can’t be more than sixteen. I wouldn’t treat a healthy young recruit that
way, let alone a skinny little girl-and one that’s pregnant too, by the look of her. It makes me sick. Where’s your slave?”

  “You need not ask that now, Facilis, in the same breath,” I told him, in a low voice, beginning to be angry. “He is in Londinium, shopping and visiting friends.”

  He looked at me a moment longer. “No,” he said, finally, “I shouldn’t have said that in the same breath. You wouldn’t hit a slave. Even that business in Budalia” (the rope and dagger incident) “shows that. You wouldn’t cut down a man that had dropped his sword and was using his shield as a stretcher for a wounded friend, either.”

  “Who says that I have?” I demanded, now openly angry.

  “No one. One of you bastards did-but I guess it wasn’t you.” He turned and stalked back toward the house, slashing at the weeds along the road with his vine-stalk baton.

  I remounted Farna and cantered back to the wagons. Now I knew how his son had died. It was some relief to know that, after all, the killer had not been me.

  Arshak and Gatalas returned from the city late in the afternoon. They were in a loud and exuberant mood, laughing with each other over the sights of Londinium and the charm of Aurelia Bodica. But Banadaspos, who was second in the bodyguard and who’d been in charge of the five men I’d left in the city, seemed annoyed about something. I asked him what had happened, and he shrugged and said they had simply escorted the lady around the shops. “She is a very lovely lady, the legate’s lady,” he said, “and from what I could understand, very clever as well. But she’s not good with horses.”

  He himself was very good with horses, the best in the whole dragon. I’d taken him into my bodyguard because of his skill with them, although he was a commoner by birth, and made him second to Leimanos because of his intelligence, his loyalty, and because I liked him. “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  He shrugged again. “That stallion she has for her chariot smelled a mare in the marketplace. It kept trying to get to her, neighing and kicking at the traces. Well, stallions will! But she lost her temper and took the whip to it, and dragged at the reins until its mouth was dripping with blood. She has a bit on that bridle like a steel trap. What is the point of treating an animal like that? Any of us could have brought it around for her if she’d let us. If she can’t manage a stallion, she ought to get a driver who can, or use a gelding or a mare. I tell you, my prince, I can’t bear to see a good horse mishandled, and in my opinion the other commanders shouldn’t have allowed her to do it.”

  “I don’t think she likes admitting there’s something she can’t do,” I replied. “And she likes asking for help even less.”

  “You’re undoubtedly right,” Banadaspos agreed at once. “But these Britons are all hopeless with horses.”

  VI

  Eukairios returned from Londinium next morning, in a good blue tunic and a checked cloak fastened with a fine bronze pin; he looked much more respectable and seemed very much more cheerful. We struck camp and continued north toward Eburacum.

  For all my forebodings, the journey passed peacefully. Shamed by Eukairios’ earnest attempts to learn Sarmatian, the bodyguard asked him to help them with their Latin-they all spoke the language a little, but none spoke it well. Every evening they would sit about the fire cross-legged, mending and cleaning their weapons and their armor, while the scribe pretended that they were visiting a dairy, or an armorer’s, or a horse trader’s, and got them to say the appropriate phrases. Before we reached Eburacum they had all forgiven him for being a blot on my reputation, and Banadaspos had grown sufficiently friendly to begin to teach him riding. Eukairios had no gift for it at all, and rather puzzled Banadaspos by the number of times he fell off.

  At Eburacum, where we once again camped outside the city, a couple of my men did quarrel with a couple of Gatalas’, but they fought their duels quietly with blunted weapons, and a broken arm was the worst injury endured on either side. I managed to avoid any private meeting with the legate’s lady, and was relieved to escape her. She would remain in the fortress with her husband while I continued to my posting on the Wall.

  Arshak was, predictably, furious when he understood that he and his company were to remain in Eburacum, particularly when he gathered that the greatest chance of action was farther north. But his liaison officer managed to soothe him with murmurs about a possible posting elsewhere, in time, and Bodica smiled at him, and in the end, even he accepted it quietly.

  The division of our companies happened almost too casually, seeing that we’d journeyed so far together and were such a long way from home. “After all,” Gatalas and I said to Arshak, when we parted in Eburacum, “we’ll be only a few days’ ride to the north, and under the same commander in chief. We’ll meet often.”

  “After all,” Gatalas and I said to each other, when we reached the supply base of Corstopitum a few days later, “we’ll be only a day’s ride from each other’s camps. We’ll have to meet for hunting trips, or let our dragons compete at mounted games.” And he and his dragon turned east to Condercum, while I and mine turned west toward Cilurnum, and I never saw him again.

  It was just my own dragon and the two Roman officers, Comittus and Facilis, who trotted the last few miles along the old road from Corstopitum, late in the afternoon of a golden day of late September. We went up the valley of the Tinea River-pleasant, rolling country, with patches of woodland; the trees were beginning to turn, and the blackberries beside the road were ripe. Northward we would sometimes get a glimpse of the uplands of Caledonia, purple with heather and spotted with sheep; cattle and horses grazed contentedly on the richer grass of the valley. At the place where the Tinea forks, one branch running from west to east along the valley, and the other descending to it from the north, we turned northward from the old road toward the new military way, and almost at once came to the Wall. Three times the height of a man, built of a golden sandstone, it strode off east and west as far as we could see. It crossed the river on top of a bridge that was built of the same stone and ran directly into the walls of Cilurnum. I stopped, looking at the fort, and Comittus and Facilis, who were riding beside me on the road, stopped too. Behind us, the drummer gave the signal to halt.

  “That’s the bathhouse,” said Comittus, pointing at a building just outside the fort by the river. He’d visited the place before. “It’s a good one. The water’s good at Cilurnum, too-there’s an aqueduct that carries it right through the camp from end to end, and flushes the latrines. And there’s a water mill under the bridge, which grinds all the grain for the fort…” He coughed. “If you want grain, that is.”

  I nodded. My heart had risen at the sight of Cilurnum. The fort itself was the standard affair: a rectangular wall, four gates, watchtowers. I knew that inside it there would be the usual two main streets, the usual headquarters building and commandant’s house facing each other in the center, and the usual narrow barrack blocks laid out in neat grids. It was, I knew, more than half-empty. It had been manned by an auxiliary ala, the Second Asturian Horse, but most of them had been posted elsewhere, and there were only some five squadrons remaining. A village of the kind found around every Roman fort sprawled messily to the south. But the fort’s setting beside the shallow brown river was beautiful, and to its north there were meadows-lush, intensely green, dotted with large trees. “We can put the wagons there,” I said, pointing to them.

  Comittus and Facilis both looked at me, Comittus in surprise and Facilis in exasperation. “You won’t need the wagons anymore,” Comittus told me. “You know yourself that all the letters have been written and everything’s arranged. The Second Asturian Horse have left plenty of space in the barracks for you and them both.”

  “You’re going to have to start sleeping in houses sometime, Ariantes,” said Facilis. “We can’t have Roman auxiliaries parked in wagons behind their own fort. Particularly not on the wrong side of the Wall.”

  I set my teeth, looking at the stone walls. I thought of sleeping in them, night after night. I th
ought of watching the seasons change, fixed in the same place, unmoving, buried like the dead. I had known that the Romans would expect us to follow their ways now, that they would ride us, as the saying is, with the curb bit and the iron bridle. Facilis was going to be in charge of the ordering of the camp, and the remaining Asturians were subordinate to Comittus. There were thousands of Roman troops in the region, more than enough to put down any mutiny. But this change was too great and too sudden, and as I looked from the walls back to my companions, I felt all at once certain that it was not something I had to bear. Comittus and Facilis might use force against us for many reasons-but this wasn’t one of them.

  “Not tonight,” I said. “Not yet.” I snapped my fingers for the drummer to give the signal and started Farna forward again. The drums rattled, and the dragon began clattering and jingling after me.

  “But… really… I mean…” said Comittus, spurring after us, “barracks are much more comfortable… ”

  They did not give up easily. We rode into the fort-we had to, to get to the fields, since the Wall cut us off from them. There the senior decurion of the remaining squadrons of the Second Asturian Horse came hurrying to meet us, followed by his men and most of the inhabitants of the village. (Despite their name, the Asturians were not from Asturica in Iberia; their ala had been raised there originally, but that had been a long time ago, and they themselves were mostly born in the village.) The decurion was a mournful-looking dark man of about my own age, named Gaius Flavinus Longus-I strongly suspected that “Longus” was a nickname, as he was one of the tallest and thinnest men I’d seen. Comittus and Facilis rushed the polite greetings and at once enlisted his help to explain to me why we couldn’t sleep in our wagons. He had put a considerable amount of work into getting the barracks ready for us, and argued more hotly than either of the others. I nodded, ignored them all, and took the men out the other gate of the fort into the fields. The three Roman officers, with most of the Asturians and villagers, followed us, exclaiming in amazement at our obstinate savagery.