Hawk

by George Green

  ‘Mummy, Daddy’s home!’

  ‘I would never have known.’ Antonia came through from the kitchen with a bowl of fruit and put it on the table. ‘Priscus, Diana. Stop killing your father and go and wash before supper.’

  The children looked down at him and he made a face at them behind their mother’s back. They ran howling from the room, pretending to be wolves.

  ‘Yes,’ she said with a smile, ‘they have indeed been like that all day, and where were you when I needed you?’

  He put an arm around her waist, sat down and pulled her onto his lap. She put an arm around his neck and looked at him with eyes that could see anywhere inside him that they wanted to. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you don’t ever want to have any more then?’

  ‘Do I want more children?’ Her face turned serious, as he had known it would. She always took questions seriously even when they were entirely frivolous. She pulled at her bottom lip with a slim thumb and forefinger. He would have teased her about the habit but was afraid that if he ever mentioned it she’d stop doing it. ‘I’m not exactly in a hurry, but I suppose if they came along I wouldn’t mind.’

  He pushed his face into the soft cleft between her shoulder and neck. She pulled his head back by the hair so that she could see his face. ‘You’re the one who is supposed to be working, why aren’t you tired?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘But you think you’re up to it?’

  ‘Keep up with you anyway.’

  ‘Think so?’

  ‘Know so.’

  ‘Want to bet?’

  He looked around. ‘Everything we own belongs to me. That’s what being married means. What would you bet with?’

  She gave him a hard look and then reached out to pick up a small pewter flask from a shelf. ‘See this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s full of oil.’

  ‘Oil and flask both belong to me.’

  ‘True. But irrelevant. You can keep the flask. Winners get the oil rubbed into them until there’s none left. Losers get to do the rubbing.’

  ‘Good bet,’ he said. ‘I might even lose deliberately.’

  She smiled. ‘I was rather counting on that.’

  The children came back into the room. They were like puppies, with only two speeds: flat out and sound asleep. They ate polenta and fruit, usually simultaneously, stuffing it into their mouths between and during excited reports of the day’s activity. Their parents had a system. Serpicus looked interested while Antonia kept pushing their hands towards their mouths. It was efficient, if noisy and messy.

  An hour later the children were in bed. They sat down to eat. Serpicus poured them both wine and told her about Blaesus and his proposal. He didn’t mention that Blaesus was effectively keeping them hostage. She knew what the situation was. She listened carefully and let him finish before speaking.

  ‘How long would you be away?’

  He shrugged. ‘Assuming no hold-ups beyond the usual, it’ll take two weeks to get the men together. Three days to Genoa, five more to the mountains, a week to cross them, then maybe three weeks’ march. Four days to rest and resupply, then return. We’ll be pulling a heavy cart on the way home, so maybe twice as long to get back to Genoa.’ She was silent for a few moments, and with her fingers she dipped between her breasts and pulled out the jagged-edged amulet that hung there on a thin silver chain. She rubbed it thoughtfully between forefinger and thumb. ‘Say about ten weeks?’

  ‘Assuming no hold-ups. Three months might be closer.’

  Serpicus knew that Antonia was the only woman he had ever been with who not only said she didn’t want him ever to lie to her, but meant it. Everyone says it, of course, but they don’t really mean it. Antonia meant it. There are worse reasons for marrying someone.

  She pondered for a while. He let her do it. Then she put a finger on the back of his hand. ‘Do you have a choice?’

  Another shrug. ‘Perhaps, in theory. But a lot of men have died recently testing that theory.’

  She nodded and looked at the wall, pursing her lips slightly. ‘I thought so. And might it be advantageous?’

  ‘We’ll probably get paid. I suppose it can’t do much harm to my prospects if I please the uncle of the most powerful man in Rome.’

  The same nod. He put a finger against her chin and turned her head back to look at him.

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘What? Being married to a rich and favoured businessman?’

  ‘Being alone. Saying goodbye.’

  ‘I’m working on not minding. A number of very expensive presents on your return will undoubtedly speed up the process.’

  She took his hand and stood up. He looked at her enquiringly.

  ‘You know you said there would be just one more trip?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is it?’

  ‘This is it.’ He hoped it was true.

  ‘Come on then,’ she said.

  ‘Where to?’

  She looked at him as if he was being stupid, which he supposed he was.

  ‘You’ve been away for weeks, and you’re going away again. How much explanation do you need?’

  * * *

  Later, when he was lying awake, looking at the ceiling, his thoughts a whirlpool, she pushed herself up on one elbow and looked down at him.

  ‘Are we in danger?’

  He opened his mouth to reassure her, and then shut it again on the lie.

  ‘I thought so,’ she said. Her finger drew a slow thoughtful circle on his chest. ‘He made you do it by threatening the children.’

  Serpicus looked at her directly. ‘Not quite as bad as that. It’s a business deal. You only came into the discussion when I asked him why he trusted me to deliver.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘You mean we’re a sort of insurance. Hostages.’ She tapped his chest with a fingernail. ‘So then I suppose, if you fail, for whatever reason, so long as Blaesus knows that you did your best, we needn’t worry.’

  ‘I…’ He didn’t know what to say. She put a finger on his lips.

  ‘I understand. You would travel to Hell if it protected the children, as I would. You will succeed, all will be well. But I still think we should make some arrangements, don’t you? Just in case. Then, if things don’t go according to plan, you can send us a message and we’ll leave the city before Blaesus finds out what’s happened.’

  Serpicus took her in his arms and held her close to him.

  ‘I could not bear the thought of anything happening to you,’ he said.

  She smiled. ‘Then make sure you bring that damned animal back.’

  * * *

  That night Serpicus lay awake until the shouts of the returning night-fishermen told him that dawn was close, and then rose without having slept at all.

  As he left the house he saw someone – a man by his height and dress – standing in a doorway some distance down the street. When he saw Serpicus he dropped his gaze to the ground and swung slowly out of sight. Serpicus walked briskly to the street corner, waited for five heartbeats and then looked back around it again. The man was in the same place, but he was visible and relaxed. Serpicus waited a short time. He saw the shutters on his house creak open and Antonia’s hands pushing them wide. The man faded into the doorway again.

  The house was being watched. The man hadn’t followed Serpicus, so it was his family, not him, that they wanted to keep under surveillance. He wasn’t going to be able to arrange for them to leave Rome easily.

  He spent most of the day talking to sailors, those who would pause to speak with him. The docks were a warren of furious activity. Serpicus asked about the revolt in the north, about which most of them appeared both ignorant and indifferent. They didn’t seem to think that a few uppity Germans would make much difference to someone travelling to Genoa. The one person Serpicus spoke to who professed to know what he was talking about, a captain of a large fishing boat, told him that prices were about to rise, the pirates were returning and no one knew how to
sail a boat properly any more.

  Late in the afternoon Serpicus went despondently to meet his partners. Blaesus had advanced him a small amount of money for expenses to keep them going while they planned the trip. So Brutus, Galba, Decius and Serpicus sat down with the expenses and split a jug of wine and tried to puzzle out how to do it. That didn’t work, so they wondered if the wine wasn’t strong enough for the job, and so they had another. That didn’t work very well either, but the ideas were coming faster, so they had another, sure that this time they’d find out what they wanted.

  The third jug was obviously a bad one. The ideas suddenly dried up, the sensible ones anyway, and all Brutus and Galba could think of was going to look for women. Decius was slumped with his mouth open, staring at the far wall as if trying to read something written in tiny letters.

  ‘No,’ Serpicus said, standing up and stabbing at the table with a forefinger in a fit of seriousness. ‘No women, not yet. This is business, not pleasure.’

  ‘But it might be just the sort of thing that, how shall I put it, releases the creative mind?’ said Galba.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Brutus. ‘I’ve always found it helps me concentrate better.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Serpicus said, still standing up but wondering how much authority he would forfeit by sitting down again, and wondering who the sensible person was who had apparently taken up residence inside him and was even now using his voice. ‘Women, yes, of course, always, eventually, soon. Just not yet. Tell me what to do to get this expedition off the ground and I’ll put enough of Blaesus’ ill-earned sesterces on this table to make sure that none of you can walk straight for a week afterwards. But until that’s settled, until we know what we’re going to do, no one is going anywhere.’

  ‘There’s an incentive,’ said Galba to Brutus without a trace of mockery.

  ‘True,’ said Brutus, equally seriously. Serpicus had their attention. They all sat down.

  ‘So,’ Serpicus said, filling up the cups. ‘Who do we know who would be good at putting an expedition together? We need someone who can train soldiers, and it’d help if he knows how to get those useless bastards on the dockside to do something other than scratch themselves and rob us blind.’

  Brutus scratched his chin. ‘He’d have to be a good organizer.’

  Galba nodded. ‘And we’d have to be able to trust him.’

  ‘He’d have to be available.’

  ‘Not much use to us if he’s not.’

  ‘Good at making people do what he wants.’

  ‘Good at fighting.’

  ‘Good at making decisions.’

  ‘Good at giving orders.’

  Serpicus put up an unsteady finger. ‘Good at taking orders too. He’s organizing everything but I’m still in charge.’

  ‘Right,’ said Brutus, looking at Galba while jerking a thumb at Serpicus. ‘He’ll have to be good at pretending to do what Alexander the Great here thinks should be done, while actually doing the opposite or we’ll be in serious trouble.’

  ‘And he needs to be available right now.’

  There was a slight pause, then Galba and Brutus looked at each other, nodded in unison, stood up, lifted their cups in a toast and drained them in a swallow each.

  ‘Obvious, really,’ said Brutus.

  ‘Don’t know why it took us so long to think of him,’ said Galba.

  They both stood up.

  ‘Come on then.’ Brutus patted Serpicus cheerfully on the head like an idiot child. ‘The girls will be getting bored waiting for us.’

  Serpicus shook his head in annoyance. ‘Not yet, I told you. We have to find someone to organize things first.’

  ‘Done,’ said Galba with a grin.

  Serpicus knew he had missed something. ‘Who?’

  They each put a hand under an armpit and lifted him off the chair. ‘You already know,’ said Brutus. ‘It’s obvious.’ They put him on his feet and brushed down his clothes with their hands. ‘Now, hold all your money tight in your hand and let’s go see if Ox has any lucky girls on his pay-roll that we haven’t made the acquaintance of yet.’

  Serpicus felt the sensible person who had been using his body shrug his shoulders and leave him to look for a better companion.

  ‘Who is it?’ he said, allowing himself to be propelled along the pavement. They patted him on the back in a reassuring fashion.

  ‘We’ll tell you in the morning. Everything will be fine, you’ll see.’

  * * *

  They had said everything would be fine. He had trusted them. They had lied to him. His head hurt, so everything wasn’t fine at all. And then they told him who they had in mind and things got much worse.

  ‘Severus?’ he said, sitting up. A wave of pain flooded through his eyes and into his head. ‘Are you both completely insane?’

  ‘Think about it,’ said Galba, kneeling on the floor at the end of the narrow trestle bed in the tiny courtyard that Serpicus used when he came home the worse for wear. Antonia didn’t mind him getting drunk once in a while, indeed it was almost expected on returning from a long trip, but had, long before and with her sweetest smile, made it plain that she wasn’t going to share her bed with an ‘odious grunting drooling farting belching lecherous pig’. Which, Serpicus had to admit, seemed fair enough.

  ‘I have thought,’ he said, carefully lying down flat on the mattress again. ‘It’s a terrible idea. The man’s a monster, a slave-driver.’

  Brutus leant forward, his face a parody of encouragement, the sort of face you’d use while persuading the village idiot to hand over the sharp-pointed knife before he hurts himself. ‘That’s the point. If we’re going to make a success of this we need a monster. And he’s only a slave-driver if he’s the centurion and you’re a legionary under him.’

  ‘Which we won’t be.’ Galba folded his arms on the bed and rested his chin on them. ‘Remember how they wanted to transfer him to the Seventeenth Legion? And how Lucius refused to let him go?’ He had his serious face on. ‘I know we all hated him, but he was the best centurion in the legion. And he could fight just about anyone and beat them.’

  They weren’t going to give up or go away. Serpicus sat up. ‘Isn’t this all rather a moot point? He’s in the army. He’s a lifer. He’ll die there.’

  They both shook their heads vigorously. Looking at them made Serpicus profoundly queasy. He couldn’t take any more. He held up his hands in defeat.

  ‘All right. He isn’t in the army. He’s perfect. You know everything. Fine. Get him, let’s talk to him.’

  Brutus stood up and went back to the doorway. He leant out and made a jerking movement with his head and then came back into the courtyard. Decius came in slowly after them, paler than ever and looking as if his eye-sockets were too small for his eyes.

  Followed by Severus.

  Serpicus sat up to attention in the bed, he couldn’t help it. Severus walked forward and saluted him. ‘Serpicus.’ The old man looked him up and down and Serpicus resisted the urge to pull the blanket over his stomach. ‘Good to see you again. I hear you have some men who need licking into shape.’

  Severus looked much the same – he was a bit more grizzled, his hair was thinner and what was left was a greyed silver, and there was a deep scar across his left forearm that Serpicus didn’t remember, but his body was every bit as rigid with authority as it had been. And whether he was still in the army or not he hadn’t put on weight or lost muscle. He was still a wall of a man, and he wanted to join them.

  Serpicus knew that Brutus and Galba were right. If anyone could get Blaesus’ men ready on time, Severus could.

  The old soldier looked around. ‘So. Who do I have to fuck to get a drink round here?’

  Antonia appeared at the door out to the courtyard. ‘Me, actually.’

  Serpicus groaned and pulled the blanket over his head.

  Chapter Twelve

  Later that day, after Serpicus had sweated his head clear at the baths, he and Severus went to the local trainin
g ground to meet Blaesus’ soldiers.

  The soldiers were the mixed bag Serpicus had anticipated, although to be fair Blaesus had sent more men than he promised. Serpicus watched as Severus got them into a ragged line and inspected them. Severus came over and stood beside him.

  ‘We need more men,’ he said quietly.

  Serpicus shrugged. ‘I agree, but we haven’t got any. How many of these can we use?’

  ‘I see how it is. We take any man who can walk without assistance.’ Severus shook his head in resignation, and went back to his inspection. It was plain that some of the men were long past their best days, and others had injuries that slowed them almost to uselessness. One man had scars on both hamstrings, the mark of a captive of the Parthians who had tried to escape. This suggested a good attitude, but he would never run again. Several of the other men looked surprisingly athletic. The army only got rid of fit men if they were cowards or criminals. That wasn’t necessarily a drawback. Serpicus had no problem with cowards. He was usually one himself. Animal trappers generally had a fairly relaxed attitude to criminality. It came with the trade.

  Severus walked up and down the line without changing expression. Serpicus wondered how many of the men knew him already.

  Over the next few days Severus put them to the test. He had a simple method for finding their suitability. He drilled the men until they were so tired that their limbs trembled with exhaustion and they could barely stand. Then he made them fight each other. With real swords – blunted ones admittedly, but proper metal, not the wooden gladius that legionaries used to train with. The only difference was that the swords had additional metal guards that covered the back of the hand, to protect the inexperienced swordsman from getting his fingers pulped before he had learnt to defend himself. The other advantage of a wooden gladius from a training point of view, apart from being difficult to kill someone with, was that the wood was hollowed out and filled with lead. After a few weeks of training with one of those, fighting with a real gladius felt like stabbing with a toothpick. Severus recognized the worth of that, so he had the armourer put an extra weight in the handle of each sword. Apart from that, the fight was for real. The clash of metal rang around the training ground.