‘Colonia is where they took this from me.’ He raised the wooden fist. Tabitha knew he’d lost his right hand in battle, but she’d never asked for more detail. The oak replacement was part of him and that was all she cared about. ‘I’d spent the winter there, but I was in Londinium preparing to return to Rome when word came of the rising. Because I knew the area, the governor appointed me to command the reinforcements for the local militia.’
‘How many were you?’ she asked.
‘Two hundred: auxiliaries, men on leave and a few of my comrades come to say goodbye.’
‘And Boudicca?’
‘They say seventy thousand, but I didn’t count them,’ he said.
They heard a child’s delighted laughter and Lucius flew past on Khamsin, closely pursued by Didius, trying desperately not to catch him. Tabitha watched them with a mother’s smile, then turned to look her husband in the eye. ‘Yet you survived.’
‘I survived, by Fortuna’s intervention.’
‘Tell me.’
So he did. How the civilian inhabitants of Colonia had been herded together into a convoy destined for the supposed sanctuary of Londinium. The anguish when the bloodied remnants of the Thracian escort returned to report ambush and massacre. A long night of waiting, punctuated by what appeared to be fireflies on the opposite slope. Knowing the fireflies were actually burning villas and farms. And in the first light of dawn, accompanied by the sound of a million bees, Boudicca’s horde, tribes and sub-tribes and clans, countless thousands that stretched to the horizon.
‘We fought them, and we fought them again as they forced their way across a bridge of their own dead. Iceni and Catuvellauni champions naked but for sword and spear, who feared nothing but dishonour. The veterans of the Colonia militia, old men,’ a bitter laugh escaped his throat as he realized it, ‘not much older than I am now. Falco and his men were the true heroes of Colonia. They fought like lions until they were slain where they stood. They saved us.’
Tabitha reached out to take his hand, understanding the anguish the words were causing him and the bloody reality that lay behind them. Men like Didius’s grandfather, worn down and finally overwhelmed by the merciless Iceni rebels, torn by swords or transfixed by spears. And at the centre of it all, surrounded by horror, her kind, caring husband. Now she understood the tortured cries that sometimes punctuated his sleep and the names that populated his noisy dreams. The names of long dead comrades. ‘They held the Iceni until we, the supposed true soldiers, formed testudo and managed to reach the last refuge: the Temple of Claudius. For three days we held out in the heat and the stink, our tongues cleaved to our palates by thirst, before the door burned through and they came with fire and sword.’
‘But you survived,’ she repeated, but now there was awe in her voice, and the pain etched on his face made her want to weep.
‘I survived,’ he agreed. ‘But I will speak of it no more.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Tabitha said. ‘If it causes you so much anguish, why return?’
He stared at her. ‘Because unless a man can face the ghosts of his past he is not the man he hopes he is.’
They halted at a village Didius named as Durolitum where they watered the horses and the inhabitants emerged from their mud and wattle houses to gawp at the carriage. A woman approached Felix and offered bread and wine, but would take no payment for it. When he shared it with the escort later, Valerius, who had drunk the worst tavern piss known to man, thought his throat was on fire and had to drink a whole water skin before he could speak again. That night they crammed into the mansio outside the walls of the fort at Caesaromagus, the midway point between Colonia and Londinium.
In the room he shared with Tabitha and Lucius, Valerius struggled to find sleep, his mind spinning with memories and half-memories and images that couldn’t be memories at all because he was viewing the events from inside another mind. He must have dozed off eventually because he opened his eyes to find Tabitha leaning over him in the gloom and the sound of movement outside the room.
‘You had a poor night of it, my husband.’ She smoothed a wisp of damp hair from his forehead.
‘Just dreams. After this,’ he held up the mottled purple stump of his right wrist, ‘I had them every night for two years. It took a Judaean called Petrus to convince me that it wasn’t self-pity that caused them but guilt at surviving when everyone else didn’t. When I understood that, the dreams stopped.’
Tabitha reached over, picked up the clay bottle of oil that was never far from Valerius’s bedside and poured a little on to her fingers. She took the stump in both hands and rubbed the oil gently into the puckered skin covering the bone of his wrist and then moved upwards along his arm. The sensuousness of her touch made something that might have been humiliating seem almost erotic. He smiled and she sat back and studied him without stopping the movement of her hands.
‘It always surprises me that it doesn’t hurt,’ she said. ‘You can see how the shock of the blow has travelled upwards, causing bruises on the skin, but ones which never go away.’
He handed her the oak fist on its stock of thrice-tanned leather and she slipped it over the wrist until it was firmly in place before knotting the leather thongs.
‘I don’t remember the pain so much as the sense of loss; the feeling of not being a whole man.’ He shrugged. ‘I was delirious for days after the temple fell.’
‘So it didn’t happen in the battle?’
Valerius shook his head. ‘They said my hand was the price I must pay them for saving my life.’
‘They?’
‘It’s a long story. For another day.’
She took him in her arms and laid her head on his shoulder.
‘Can I go and see Didius?’
‘We’ll see to the horses first.’ Valerius slipped out of bed as he answered Lucius, all but forgotten on a couch in the corner of the room. He pulled his tunic over his head as his son struggled into his clothes. ‘I’ll send Vacia with more water,’ he told Tabitha.
When he pulled back the curtain the outer area of the mansio was already abuzz with activity. Some of the men had been able to cram three to each of the small rooms that opened off the main courtyard, but other members of the escort had been forced to sleep in the stables. Now they sat in their tunics in any space they could find, polishing mail and helmets and all the dozens of minor pieces of horse brass that were part of a cavalryman’s equipment. Didius put down the strip of leather he’d been oiling and looked up with a smile.
‘I’ll take Lucius to feed the horses, lord.’ He got to his feet and the boy ran to him. ‘Remember, Lucius, not too much or they’ll get too fat and you can’t have a fat cavalry horse …’
‘And not too little or they won’t be able to carry a fat cavalryman in full armour.’
Valerius watched them go with a glow of pride. He saw Felix watching him. ‘You’re keeping them busy.’ He gestured to the men around them as they rubbed until the iron shone, laughing as they worked and occasionally stopping for a drink of small beer from a leather mug, or to cram a bite of bread into their mouths.
‘I don’t need to keep them busy. All I did was remind them that Colonia is an old soldiers’ town and some of the reception committee will be legionary veterans. They’re determined to do themselves justice.’ He grinned. ‘And you, of course, legate.’
‘And they don’t mind that they’ll have to do it all again when it gets covered in dust before we reach Colonia?’
‘No, sir. They’re soldiers; all they know is it beats digging ditches.’
Valerius saw Ceris sitting beside a pile of equipment polishing a bronze pendant from a piece of horse harness. ‘Where’s Florus, decurion?’
Felix pursed his lips and studied a point beyond Valerius’s shoulder. ‘Foraging, legate. He saw some apple trees by the road on the way here.’
Valerius had seen them too: the ordered rows of an orchard, the fruit just coming to ripeness. He sighed. ‘He can’t just help
himself. Ceris?’
‘Yes, lord?’
‘Get Marius to give you enough money for two sacks of apples from the ration fund and find Florus before he ends up on the point of some farmer’s pitchfork.’
‘Yes, lord.’ She dashed off to find the duplicarius.
‘And tell him we’ll be in the saddle before the hour’s up!’
It was another of those soft, sunlit days that made Britannia a place worth fighting for: feathery white clouds drifting across a sky of eggshell blue, the dew clinging to spiders’ webs in the hedgerows shining like minuscule gemstones, and the fields and forests a patchwork of so many greens it was difficult to tell where the one ended and the next began. Agricola had offered the use of a guide, but Valerius had travelled the road between Colonia and Londinium a dozen times, and where he threatened to go wrong Didius was always on hand to point them in the right direction. They stopped short of Colonia around midday to wash off the dust of the journey in a narrow stream. Valerius changed into his ceremonial toga in the carriage, with Tabitha fussing at him to ensure the legate’s knot was perfectly tied. The escort fitted bright red horsehair plumes to their helmets and gave their equipment a last polish.
‘Shabolz,’ Valerius said. ‘Take one man and ride to Colonia and give them warning of our coming. We’ll wait here for your return.’
XXV
Colonia had learned its lesson even if Londinium had not. As he approached the city through the avenue of tombs on the western road the first thing Valerius noticed was the substantial defensive wall that surrounded the town. He’d seen higher – it was nothing to compare with Jerusalem or even Placentia – but it could only be scaled by long ladders or siege machines and no native assault would ever carry it. Lookout posts dotted the stone battlements every two hundred feet. Two more towers, circular and much more substantial, flanked the great double-arched gate at the head of the long street of suburban houses, shops and workshops which were much as Valerius remembered. The fact that the gate had survived intact astonished him: it had been as much a symbol of the old Colonia as the Temple of Claudius, and a similar focus for Boudicca’s wrath. Away to his left, where the ground sloped towards the river, columns of smoke rose from blacksmiths’ forges, iron furnaces and pottery kilns in a workers’ settlement.
A welcoming party stood outside the gate and Valerius was thrust back in an instant to the day he’d brought his pathetic little band to reinforce Colonia’s veterans. The city’s leaders had been waiting for him in precisely the same position: Petronius, the long-nosed quaestor; old Falco, commander of the militia; Agrippa the temple keeper; Numidius, the engineer who had built it; and Corvinus the goldsmith and militia armourer. The memory sent an involuntary shiver down his spine and he fought to control his emotions. They’d welcomed him with a fanfare of horns and drums that had died away slowly as they’d realized how few he’d brought. What could two hundred do against the tens of thousands marauding south towards them?
Slowly the small crowd became individuals and he automatically scanned their number seeking a familiar face, cursing himself for a fool as he did so because of course they were all dead. Claudius Gemellus, the official who’d been sent to escort him, whispered indistinct names in his ear as they approached so he could respond accordingly. Julius Liberalis, head of the ordo, someone Florentius, the quaestor, Terentius Cantaber, tribune commanding the Colonia militia, the High Priest, name unintelligible, but Roman of course. They would never dare give that financially onerous position to a native again. The names meant nothing and the faces blurred into each other. He had to blink before his vision returned. No native chieftains, as there once would have been; Suetonius Paulinus’s great purge had seen to that. It was only now he noticed the walls were lined with people, curious families come to take the measure of the fleeting visitor who held the power of life and death over them.
An honour guard of militia had formed up on either side of the road. Much better equipped than in Falco’s day, but the same grizzled, alert features and determined expressions. Their armour and weapons glittered like bullion in the sunshine and he saw that it wasn’t just his escort who wanted to prove a point today. He met them eye to eye and the veterans returned his look in a certain way – something beyond respect – and he realized they knew. Gemellus might be unaware of his visitor’s pedigree, he couldn’t see beyond the legate’s sash, but these men were aware of his history.
Valerius dismounted and handed his reins to Cornelius Felix. Liberalis and Florentius stepped out to meet him, with Cantaber, in militia uniform, and the High Priest a little behind. Liberalis, of medium height and running to fat, had the air of a successful merchant, but Valerius knew that, like many of these men, he would be a former legionary.
With the sparse strands of his pale gold hair flickering in the breeze, the head of the ordo pulled a scroll from his sleeve and began to read in a hurried, monotonous drone.
‘The people of Colonia Claudia Victricensis welcome the distinguished legatus iuridicus Gaius Valerius Verrens, Hero of Rome and bearer of the Corona Aurea, holder of senatorial honours and direct representative of Titus Caesar Flavius Vespasianus Augustus …’
A long oration followed in which Liberalis imparted his detailed and firmly held views on the role of justice in a fledgling community surrounded by potential enemies, the history of Colonia’s mercantile classes since what he termed ‘the revival’, and, with a hopeful mention of Valerius’s close connection to the governor, the iniquitous benefits awarded to that nest of thieves and rogues on the Tamesa (a hint only, not a direct accusation), and the need for a fairer spread of subsidies to allow Colonia to resume its rightful position as Britannia’s pre-eminent trading port, as befitted the home of the cult of Divine Claudius. Oh, and the transfer of one of the bureaucratic arms of government from Londinium would help too.
Valerius maintained a fixed smile as Liberalis murmured on. He allowed his attention to wander as the horses fidgeted and shook their manes, rattling their metal harness decorations and pawing at the ground. An unlikely pause and he realized his host had ended his peroration and was studying him with a look of hopeful enquiry.
Valerius thanked him for his kind words in equally courteous terms, and made a speech of his own as memorable for its brevity as its content. He pledged to bring the ordo’s concerns to the ear of those who needed to hear them – nods of approval all round – and ended by complimenting Liberalis on the improvements made to Colonia since his last visit, a sentiment met with blank looks apart from the militia officer who responded with a grave nod of the head.
Liberalis introduced him to the procurator, a man as dull and humourless as the tax returns he spent his day sorting. The High Priest was less arrogant than most of his kind and greeted Valerius civilly. Terentius Cantaber, the militia commander, didn’t hide his delight at being introduced.
‘I remember you well from the battle when we finished them for good and all, sir,’ he said softly. ‘Everyone was talking about the only man to survive the defence of Colonia. I was a centurion then and you were younger and a lot paler, if I may say so, after what you’d been through. You were on the general’s staff just behind the Fourteenth and I must have walked within three feet of you bringing the reserves forward. It’s good to see you again.’
‘And you, tribune.’ Valerius smiled. ‘It seems a long time ago now and, as I remember, it wasn’t quite the finish.’
‘No, sir, you have the right of it. But it was the last of the proper soldiering. The rest, and let’s not be coy about it, was just butchery.’
Proper soldiering? Perhaps the first quarter of that long day when they held the line, but butchery described the rest well enough. Valerius hadn’t taken part in the fighting, but he’d witnessed Boudicca’s last battle. Legionaries with sword arms bloody up to their armpits and so exhausted or sickened by the killing that their officers had to beat them into continuing, while their defeated victims waited like sheep for slaughter. So many that
he guessed their weathered bones still lay where they died. All but one.
A face flashed into his head, startlingly clear for the first time in almost two decades. Maeve, the Trinovante girl he had loved and lost. He had wanted to show Maeve the glory of Rome, but all he’d done was drive her into the arms of Boudicca, another disaffected Briton who had lost everything. Astonishingly, he’d found her among the countless dead, her long chestnut hair fluttering like a fallen banner beneath an overturned cart. With the help of two legionaries he’d buried her beneath an oak tree.
‘What?’
‘I asked if you would honour us with your presence at the banquet tomorrow, legate. The court will not convene until the day after at the earliest. We hold it every year to honour the men who fell in defence of Colonia. Attendance has fallen over the last couple of years, but when they heard you would be visiting the city every man wanted to be there. We had to draw lots to decide.’
Valerius was ready to decline. The last thing he needed was to spend time with a hundred drunk, maudlin former soldiers reminiscing about the glories of the long years in uniform that had actually been purgatory at the time. But the words that emerged were: ‘I’d be very pleased to, tribune.’
Why? Valerius had learned long since not to go on a mission or plan an attack without the best possible intelligence of the potential difficulties ahead. He had the bare, bureaucratic bones of the two most complex cases he would preside over in Colonia’s basilica, but little sense of the undercurrents that had brought them about, or the personalities involved. Here was an opportunity to gently probe men at the very heart of the community and gain an insight untainted by favouritism, flattery or bias.
A moment of comedy worthy of Plautus. Tabitha’s coach proved too wide to fit through the double-arched gate. Consternation on every hand until Valerius returned to help his wife from the carriage. Liberalis was full of apology; she should be carried to the east gate which was much wider. But Tabitha silenced him with a smile. ‘I will happily walk, sir, the better to see the wonders of your beautiful city. They say the Temple of Claudius is the finest building in Britannia.’
Glory of Rome: (Gaius Valerius Verrens 8) Page 21