The Amber Road

by Harry Sidebottom

  It was hard to imagine there was much to envy here, certainly nothing about either the looks or characters of Ballista’s three companions. They were all naked in the pool. The scar where the end of Maximus’s nose should have been gleamed white through the steam. His small eyes were screwed shut against the pain of his hangover. If anything stirred behind them, most likely it involved some unfeasible combination of women, alcohol, cannabis and extreme violence. Castricius moved an arm now and then, but the lined, pointed features of his face remained in repose. The little Roman was not one to be afraid of supernatural threats. He never tired of recounting the power of the daemon that always accompanied him; the very daemons of death were terrified of the two of them. His looks were equally unprepossessing, but Tarchon the Suanian was a different case. Thermae were still strange to him. Perhaps it was some perception of threat – physical or mental, human or daemonic – or merely the unaccustomed proximity of naked men, but there was no relaxation in the tribesman from the Caucasus. He shifted this way and that, trying not to brush his legs against those of the others. Continually, he peered around into the shadows. Ballista felt a surge of affection for all three, even as the loss of Calgacus pierced him yet again.

  Following Tarchon’s gaze, Ballista doubted the thermae themselves could induce much envy. An old-style moralist who inveighed against the luxuries of contemporary bathing would find little for complaint. The hot room was small, dark and dingy. There appeared to be mould on the ceiling. Apart from the caldarium, there was only a changing room. A cold plunge pool had been wedged in a corner of the apodyterium. The four of them were the only bathers, yet it was still cramped. It was as well they had not brought a single slave with them. The baths in Ballista’s home in Sicily were bigger and better equipped.

  In his tired and weakened state, the thought of home threatened to overwhelm him. He wanted nothing more than to be with his boys, with Julia. He loved the villa high on the cliffs of Tauromenium, loved sitting in the shaded garden looking down at sun shining on the Bay of Naxos. But was it really home? The villa had come with Julia as part of her dowry. It had been in her family for generations. Ballista had added his own touches to it; some trophies and weapons hanging on walls, an expanded library, the odd work of art. But it was not his in the way it was Julia’s, in the way it was his sons’. They had always known it. For him it was a brief sunlit interlude. It had been years since he had been there. The place had assumed a mythical status, like Alfheim or the Islands of the Blessed.

  The sweat was stinging his eyes. He rubbed it away, along with his maudlin thoughts. There was no point in dwelling on Tauromenium now. He was bound for the far north, Angeln, his original home, and there were no bathhouses there. A line of Tacitus came into his mind. The Britons rushing to embrace togas and baths; mistaking those signs of servitude for humanitas. In which case, his journey should be a flight from slavery into freedom. Somehow he doubted it.

  A man moved quietly past the dwarf into the room. There was no sound of clogs protecting his feet from the heated floor. In his hand there was a gleam of metal. The water erupted as Tarchon surged up out of the pool. Ballista slipped and struggled to his feet. Maximus and Castricius were up, knives magicked out of their towels.

  The newcomer screamed as Tarchon slammed him against the wall. A bucket rolled away and a strigil scraped across the tiles. Tarchon had his hands around the man’s throat.

  ‘No!’ Ballista shouted. ‘Leave him. It is just a bath attendant.’

  The slave fled when Tarchon let him go.

  Ballista smiled at the Suanian. ‘You were quick, but more killings would not be good. We still have the two dead sailors from the waterside hanging over us.’

  The drinking had to stop, the guilt reined in, discipline reasserted. Ballista knew he and his familia were a danger to themselves as well as any who crossed their path. This had to stop.

  IV

  Olbia

  Aulus Voconius Zeno, Vir Perfectissimus, special envoy to the far north of the Augustus Gallienus, Pius, Fortunate and Invincible, sat in the seat of honour, such as it was, in the council house of the city of Olbia. Light came from the open door and windows. There was no glass in the windows. Obviously, the building, high on the acropolis, had once been the praetorium of a Roman army unit. The Boule must have moved into the officer’s quarters when, after the disaster at Abritus thirteen years before, the new emperor Gallus had withdrawn the troops from the north of the Euxine. By the look of it, the council had spent nothing on repairs or decorations since.

  The meeting had been in session for an hour or more. A lifelong career in imperial service had equipped Zeno with deep reserves of patience. After lengthy prayers to the gods, a magistrate titled the agoranomos had taken the floor, and showed no signs yet of relinquishing it. First he had set out, in bad Greek and exhaustive detail, the grain shortage afflicting the town. The public granaries were virtually empty, prices rising steeply; there were dark rumours of hoarding and profiteering. A citizen of Olbia now resident in Byzantium had donated a shipload of wheat. The Boule had decided to recommend the assembly vote this man a statue at public expense. Given the straitened circumstances of city finances, an old statue should be rededicated. Despite this godlike generosity, the agoranomos had continued, much more was needed. With no overt reluctance, two councillors had announced they would provide grain from their private stores. More fulsome praise had followed, and two more forgotten benefactors of an earlier age lost the dedications on their statues.

  The agoranomos now was talking about temple treasures. Zeno’s thoughts drifted towards the baths and dinner. At least one of the baths was still operative, diminutive and foul though it was, and he had instructed one of his boys to buy oysters and bream. Seafood was wonderfully cheap in this backwater compared with Byzantium, let alone Rome. Raised voices with uncouth accents brought him back. Apparently, the previous year the Boule had authorized the priests of Apollo to pawn some sacred vessels of gold. The foreigner who held them was threatening to take them abroad and melt them down. The somewhat acrimonious apportioning of blame continued for some time, growing steadily more heated, until the first archon Callistratus announced he would reclaim them with his own money. The loan would be for a year, interest free. The members of the Boule then had to endure Callistratus launching into an extempore oration on homonoia; did they not realize civic harmony was the greatest treasure a polis could possess?

  There were only twenty members of the Boule. Zeno studied them. They were all dressed in native style: embroidered Sarmatian tunics and trousers, small black cloaks, long swords on their hips. Zeno thought of the story of Scyles in Herodotus. Scyles had been king of the nomadic Scythians in these parts, but his mother had been a Greek woman. She had taught him that language, and brought him up to love all things Hellenic. When Scyles had come to Olbia he had left his army outside the walls and entered the gates alone. Inside, Scyles had changed his Scythian clothes for Greek. He had a home in the city, in which he kept a woman he treated as his wife. Maybe they had children; Herodotus did not say. Each time, he had stayed for a month or more. This state of affairs had persisted for a number of years. In the end a citizen of Olbia had told the Scythians, who could say for what motive. Rejected by his people, hunted and finally betrayed, Scyles was decapitated.

  Looking at the councillors of Olbia, Zeno thought the cultural influences now ran strongly the other way. They had done so for a long time. The citizens of Olbia had been wearing nomad garb over a hundred and fifty years before when the philosopher Dio of Prusa had come to the town. Yet Dio had judged them Hellenic, had found merit in them. They were brave, knew Homer by heart, some of them loved Plato, and – always an important factor with Dio – they had listened to his philosophizing and honoured him. Dio had been a slippery man, often saying more or less than was true about himself and others. Zeno knew one thing which Dio had suppressed about the Olbians. Many of them carried barbarian names, like this agoranomos Dadag, or
Padag, whatever he was called.

  At long, long last the Greek magistrate with the Sarmatian or Persian name ceased talking. The floor was taken by the strategos in charge of the defence of the city. The name of this one was entirely Roman. Marcus Galerius Montanus Proculus, like many in the Boule, was clean-shaven. Zeno smiled at the recollection of Dio claiming only one man in the whole town had shaved – in flattery of the Romans; and all his fellow citizens had reviled him for it. Maybe fashions had changed, or maybe again Dio had played with the truth. Many intellectuals were not to be trusted.

  Montanus told another story of woe. A group of slaves had run. They had stolen a boat and made their way to somewhere called Hylaea. Evidently, this place was nearby, somewhere in the great marshy estuary where the rivers Hypanis and Borysthenes came together. There were altars and sacred groves there, which the slaves had violated. The heavily wooded terrain was blamed for the failure of the Olbian militia under Montanus to kill, capture or dislodge them. Lately, the runaways had turned to piracy.

  Zeno was wondering if he needed to relieve himself, when he realized he was being directly addressed. So there was a reason beyond the killings in the waterfront bar why his presence had been requested. Montanus was claiming a providential deity had sent an imperial warship and its forty crew to aid the city in this trial.

  In the hush, Zeno got slowly to his feet, walked the three paces to the centre of the shabby room. He looked at Montanus, then at the floor, furrowing his brow, nodding thoughtfully. He did not care much for modern sophists – much preferring a recitation of Homer – but he had attended enough of their display oratory to learn a trick or two. He let time pass before looking up sharply, as if his weighty deliberations had reached some inescapable conclusion.

  ‘It is a grave situation, and my heart urges me to help.’ Again Zeno paused, the very image of philanthropy wrestling with duty. ‘Yet in all conscience, I cannot. I have the honour to be charged with a mission by the most noble Augustus himself. To delay would amount to disobeying imperial mandata.’

  There were loud mutterings about the triviality of his task. Some, perfectly audible, questioned what type of emperor concerned himself with amber ornaments over the wellbeing of his subjects. One called out Gallienus’s infamous line on being informed of the revolt of Postumus in Gaul: Can the Res Publica be safe without Atrebatic cloaks?

  ‘It must be remembered, failure to carry out imperial orders is nothing less than maiestas.’

  At the Latin word for treason, the Boule became very quiet.

  ‘As I understand, the city of Olbia falls under the military competence of the governor of Moesia Inferior, and you should apply to him.’ Zeno resumed his seat. Whenever possible, pass responsibility. All he had said was true, as far as it went, and this backwater meant nothing to him.

  The councillors fell to wrangling about what measures, if any, they could take about the slaves.

  Gods below, thought Zeno, it was hard to imagine Olbia was once a powerful city that had defied Alexander the Great, defeated an army of thirty thousand men and killed his governor of Thrace. Now what sort of polis hoped one river patrol boat and forty men would bring them salvation? Was Olbia a Hellenic polis at all?

  To take his mind off his growing need to urinate, Zeno turned over the question in his head. What made a polis? An urban centre, buildings of course; Olbia had these, if in a much reduced state. Certain institutions were vital: magistrates, council, assembly. The latter had been mentioned. Zeno wondered what it was like, given the Boule seemed just to consist of four or five rich men who dominated the magistracies and some fifteen others who lacked the means or initiative to leave this beleaguered outpost. Then there was culture. Did the Olbians possess paideia? It was true they worshipped the traditional Greek gods, among them Zeus, Apollo and Demeter. Zeno had witnessed no barbaric religious practices. They spoke Greek, if with bad pronunciation and strange word order. Wearing Sarmatian clothes could be dismissed as a thing of no importance. But blood will out. Some philosophers might argue that a man of any race could become Greek if he adopted Hellenic paideia. Zeno did not agree. These Olbians were descended from waves of nomadic horsemen. Their names gave them away: Padag, Dadag, the names of dogs or slaves. They could never be truly Greek. Zeno himself was born in the heart of the Peloponnese, in Arcadia, under the sheer peak of Cyllene. He would remain a Hellene, even if he lived alone in a hut on the side of a remote mountain, cut off from men and gods, never speaking his native tongue.

  Callistratus brought the debate about the slaves to an end by volunteering to equip and serve on an embassy to the governor of Moesia Inferior. The first archon moved on to raise matters he described of the utmost importance. This spring the king of the Gothic Tervingi had not appeared with his men on the borders to demand his customary gifts. The councillors called out like a disturbed flock of birds. Zeno, his bladder ever more urgent, could not see the cause of their alarm. Surely given the impecunious state of their civic treasury they should welcome the absence of the Goth?

  There was more, Callistratus continued. Word had come downriver that the Castle of Achilles, the most northerly fortified settlement on the right bank of the Hypanis, was deserted; the half-Greek inhabitants had fled. Zeno nearly snorted with derision. Who were these Olbians to judge others half-Greek?

  What was he doing in this barbarous place? How had it come to this? Four years before, he, Aulus Voconius Zeno, Vir Perfectissimus, had been governor of Cilicia. In the revolt of Macrianus and Quietus, he had remained loyal. Although unable to defend his province, his fides – and his devotion to paideia – had been rewarded by Gallienus with the post of a Studiis at the imperial court. Zeno had carried out his duties with diligence, searching out the texts Gallienus wished to read and the intellectuals he wanted to talk to, discussing them with him. He had spoken out in the consilium with the freedom of speech expected of a friend of the emperor, always arguing for the traditions of Rome. Despite it all, last year he had been dismissed, sent away to the Ister as deputy to the senator Sabinillus on a diplomatic mission to turn the tribes of the Carpi, Gepidae and Tervingi against each other. Of course the attempt had failed. Yet – and here he could barely stomach his bitterness – Sabinillus had been summoned back to court, while he had been ordered to undertake this most likely equally hopeless and certainly far more dangerous embassy.

  Zeno had had enough of this; his bladder could take no more. On the point of leaving, he was addressed by Callistratus.

  ‘Vir Perfectissimus, those under your command have committed public affray. Two men are dead. What –’

  Zeno cut him off. ‘All the men involved, the killers and the victims, are under military law. It is of no concern to the polis.’ He stood. ‘Now, if you will excuse me.’

  Sat on the latrine, relief flooding through him, Zeno thought about the impression he had made on the Boule of Olbia. Pompous, abrupt, even rude; a typical, arrogant imperial functionary employed on a trivial errand. Perhaps they would change their minds, if he were able to reveal the real intention behind his journey to the north. Although the odds against its success were long, even to try to bring the tribes around the Suebian Sea ruled by the Angles back into allegiance to the rightful emperor Gallienus, to break their recent alliance with the pretender Postumus and once again to turn their ships against the coasts he tyrannized, was a noble undertaking.

  As he dried his hands, Zeno wondered if, should they know it, the members of the Boule would also appreciate the irony that one of the killers he had just removed from their justice was the very man who had driven him from his province of Cilicia. Zeno despised all barbarians, but there was a special place in his animosity for Marcus Clodius Ballista.

  Germania Inferior

  Marcus Cassianus Latinius Postumus Augustus, Pius Felix, Invictus, Pontifex Maximus, Germanicus Maximus sat perfectly still on the raised throne in the great apse of the Basilica of Colonia Agrippinensis. The five years he had worn the purple had inculc
ated in him one of the vital skills of an emperor, the ability to sit motionless, alert yet remote, godlike in his imperturbability, while men made speeches.

  It was the same the imperium over. In a sense, Postumus thought, it was not men under arms, not money and materials, not even ties of amicitia that held the Res Publica together, but men delivering and listening to formal, public orations. By their mere presence they pledged allegiance to a specific regime, more generally to a way of doing things, to an ideal of humanitas, to Rome itself. Yet the Gauls who formed the core of his breakaway regime were particularly addicted to rhetoric. They were as fond of verbosity as the Greeks. His son, Postumus Iunior, was as bad as any. Educated by the finest, and most expensive, rhetors in Augustodunum, Lugdunum and Massilia, left to his own devices the boy did nothing but scribble and declaim speeches for imaginary law suits. His Controversiae were said to show skill. Postumus was no judge of such things. He had sent the boy away south to act as Tribune of the Vocontii. It was a minor administrative post, but Censor, the governor of Narbonensis, would make sure he applied himself. It was necessary he acquire proficiency in governance: one day the youth would be Caesar.

  ‘To proffer advice on an emperor’s duties might be a noble enterprise, but it would be a heavy responsibility verging on insolence, whereas to praise an excellent ruler and thereby shine a beacon on the path posterity should follow would be equally effective without appearing presumptuous, as the excellent senator from Comum once said to the best of emperors Trajan.’