Liberalis fairly glowed with pride at the compliment, but his place at Tabitha’s side was instantly usurped by the High Priest who pushed through to take step beside her. ‘It may also interest you, lady, to know it is the first public building constructed by Rome on this island. On the black day when the Iceni witch brought her rebels to our gates it provided a last refuge for the brave defenders of Colonia.’
‘And did it prove a sanctuary for them?’ Tabitha turned her head so she could see Valerius’s reaction.
‘Alas, no. In the end the doors gave way and the barbarians entered with fire and sword. There is a story of a single survivor, a child, but it is only that; a story. Most likely all died.’
Valerius saw his wife’s look and shrugged. Those who knew the truth of it were long gone. Old soldiers, like Cantaber, who had served with Suetonius Paulinus would be aware the governor had honoured him as the last of Colonia’s defenders, but not the details.
Inside the gates, a much more ordered Colonia than he remembered. The city had been the direct descendant of the original fortress built to guard the river crossing below, with barrack blocks converted into homes and shops and the principia and its environs acting as basilica and forum. All turned to ashes by Boudicca’s horde. Now the streets formed a uniform grid pattern and the buildings that lined the decumanus maximus were three and four storeys high with shops on the ground floor. The fruits of every trade seemed to be represented, from simple woven cloth to the finest worked gold, and no city of this size would be complete without the pisspot stink of the tannery and the dyeworks, or the bars whose customers helped provide the liquid so central to their craft.
At the first intersection, Valerius noticed that beyond the main street weed-infested gaps remained in the neat rows of buildings. He guessed they were remnants of Boudicca’s ravages. Even a generation on the ownership of townhouses and gardens would continue to be disputed amongst relatives, and if the records had burned with the rest of the town the provenance of some sites would be entirely unknown.
His step faltered as he had his first sight of a massive red-tiled roof that towered above the others to his left front. What had he expected? The temple had still stood, ravaged and fire-blackened, but as solid as ever, when he’d left Colonia for the last time, his vision blurred by Celtic potions, tears and pain. Boudicca would have ordered it torn down stone by stone, but the far greater loot of Londinium beckoned. No doubt whoever she’d left with the task had been lured by the scent of gold rather than staying and completing the thankless task of demolishing the temple. Now it appeared, a magnificent confection of shimmering white and ochre, the huge fluted columns exactly as Valerius remembered them and the great bronze door with its image of Sol Invictus polished to a golden sheen. A life-sized bronze statue of Claudius had stood at the top of the temple steps. The one that replaced it was double the size.
Tabitha moved closer to Valerius’s left side. He felt her hand touch his and realized that she’d sensed some of his apprehension. As they came closer he saw that the run-down buildings of the temple complex which had served as a bulwark against Boudicca’s forces had been replaced by an elegant roofed walkway. Opposite the entrance a field that had once held vegetable gardens was now occupied by the city’s basilica and forum. From between the basilica pillars several men dressed in togas watched the little procession approach.
How did a man’s defensive instincts work? Valerius would swear his old friend Serpentius could sense the position of his enemy even if he couldn’t see him. Valerius felt something similar now. The polite inspection from the temple steps wasn’t the only interest. At least one pair of eyes had a much more limited focus. They were intent only on one man.
‘Are you all right, Valerius?’ Tabitha whispered.
He used the question to casually look around, as if he was studying the basilica architecture. The usual mix of lawyers between cases, moneylenders and beggars. A few men seeking work and one or two women who could have been courtesans looking for trade, but he might be doing them an injustice. No one appeared to be overtly studying him.
But whoever he was he had a feeling someone was taking an unhealthy interest in Gaius Valerius Verrens.
XXVI
After the welcoming ceremonies, Claudius Gemellus led Valerius and Tabitha to a handsome townhouse in the centre of Colonia, close to where the original principia of the fortress had stood. It belonged to Liberalis, the head of the ordo, who had moved out with his family to an estate he owned on the slope on the far side of the river. From Gemellus’s description Valerius guessed the land had once been the property of Lucullus, a long dead Trinovante prince who had befriended him. Lucullus was also the father of Maeve, the Celtic girl he’d loved. Memories everywhere he turned.
‘I am honoured,’ he told Gemellus. ‘Please pass on my thanks to the duoviri.’ He turned to Felix, who accompanied them. ‘What arrangements have been made for my escort?’
‘The militia have a hall close by that they use for storing equipment and for exercises during the winter,’ Gemellus said. ‘Cantaber has had it cleared and procured sufficient cots. The amenities are basic, but …’
‘We’re soldiers, sir,’ Felix assured him. ‘Anywhere with a roof and four walls is a luxury to us.’
‘While we’re in Colonia we only need ten men on duty at any one time,’ Valerius told the escort commander. ‘With a guard of four on this house through the night and five to act as lictors on the morning of each court session.’
‘Of course, sir.’ The decurion saluted. ‘I will arrange it.’
‘And,’ Valerius had a sudden thought, ‘I’ll need Hilario with me in court.’ He saw Felix’s look of surprise. The surly trooper was the last person he would have chosen as a legal aide. ‘I’ll explain his duties tomorrow.’
Tabitha waited till they were alone. ‘Why Hilario?’ she asked.
‘You’ll find out tomorrow, just like everyone else.’ Valerius grinned.
She gave him a sideways look but didn’t press further. ‘What will you do now?’
‘I’d like to have shown you the city, but I need to talk to the local clerks about the cases I’ll be overseeing.’ He shrugged off his ceremonial toga and a servant handed him a lighter version, more suitable for working in. Tabitha helped him arrange the folds and tie the legate’s sash. ‘Hopefully it won’t take too long.’
A blur of movement erupted through the curtained doorway, skidded to a halt and bowed from the waist. Tabitha frowned. ‘Lucius, what have I told you about entering a room with decorum? What if your father and I had been entertaining guests?’
‘I apologize, Mother.’ Lucius dropped his head for a respectful second, only to raise it again with eyes blazing with excitement. ‘Didius took me to the market by the river. They had a pair of hunting dogs taller at the shoulder than Khamsin.’
‘Pfft.’ Tabitha blew out her cheeks. ‘And now you’re exaggerating.’
‘No, Mother,’ the boy pleaded.
‘It’s true,’ Valerius assured her, ruffling his son’s hair. ‘The deer hounds of Britannia are famous for their size, strength and stamina.’
‘Then you will take me to see them later.’
Valerius walked to the basilica surrounded by six of his escort, led by Shabolz. It was a busy hour on the decumanus maximus with carts unloading supplies to the shops and bars, and custom aplenty from the farmers and estate owners and their families who’d streamed into the city to see justice done at the courts. As the Emperor’s direct representative Valerius carried the authority to impose a sentence of death, and at least one of the cases he would oversee had the potential to produce an execution. Word had somehow spread that the legatus iuridicus was just the type of strict disciplinarian to exercise that authority. No one wanted to miss the sight of blood being spilled.
Many people turned to watch as the little procession of armoured men passed, but once more Valerius had the feeling of being the focus of a singular and very specific pair
of eyes. Shabolz must have sensed it too, because at a whispered order the escort moved closer and Valerius saw knuckles whiten as fingers tightened on sword hilts. He swept the street for the cause, but only a faint shadow in the mouth of an alley caused him any kind of unease and it vanished before he could alert Shabolz.
Gemellus awaited him outside the basilica and led him through the columned entrance and down three steps into the great pillared hall. It was here Valerius would hear cases deemed too sensitive or important for the local magistrates.
‘We will set up your chair next to the altar.’ Gemellus pointed to a raised dais where a statue of Jupiter stood beside a carved stone platform. A row of desks had been arranged to one side. ‘The court clerks,’ Gemellus confirmed. ‘With any pertinent evidence ready to hand. The complainants will be to your right front and the defendants on the left. The ordo, obviously, in a roped area and beyond them, behind a guard of local militia, the citizenry. Is there anything else you wish to know?’
‘How many cases will I be hearing?’
‘Four.’ He sounded apologetic. ‘There were originally only three, but a rather nasty and potentially inflammatory case came up after we petitioned the governor to convene a court here. The clerks will give you the details.’
A stairway led from an annexe to an upper floor and a well-lit office where four clerks sat at desks studying or copying documents. The men rose to their feet and bowed as Valerius entered, but he waved them back to their desks. Beside each lay a wooden chest part filled with scrolls and leather scroll cases. The chief clerk, a thin, balding man with stooped shoulders and ink-stained fingers, explained that the chests contained witness statements, evidence and the detailed claims and counterclaims of each side in a case.
‘But,’ he held up a piece of parchment, ‘we have prepared a condensed summary of each case to give you an outline of the charges and the arguments.’
‘I’m grateful,’ Valerius said with some feeling; it would have taken him weeks to read all the documents. ‘May I see them?’
‘Of course, lord.’
He went to a spare desk and sat down. The clerk brought him four sheets of parchment and placed them before him. He studied them one by one. The ruler of a sub-tribe of the Trinovante complained that a group of veterans had seized one of his estates and divided it up amongst themselves. The argument had been going on for some years and the case stood or fell on whether he could prove his claim that he’d supported Suetonius Paulinus during the Boudiccan rising. Agricola had given Valerius some of the background, along with the instruction that he wanted it decided once and for all. Next, an inheritance case that would be of little interest except that one of the parties had Imperial favour. A veteran accused of murdering his Trinovante neighbour in a dispute over water rights. This was the capital crime on the list. The late entry Gemellus had mentioned was actually a pre-trial hearing. A farmer claimed his neighbour’s son had kidnapped or murdered his wife. The case was complicated by the fact that there was no body, and, on first viewing, little evidence.
‘Have you decided the order of the cases?’ Valerius asked.
‘No, lord,’ the clerk said. ‘We thought you’d wish to decide yourself.’
Valerius nodded thoughtfully. ‘I’ll let you know tomorrow.’
He ordered two of the chests to be carried to the house and spent the next morning reading through the documents. At the sixth hour the atriensis announced the arrival of a young boy sent to guide Valerius to the militia meeting hall.
‘Find him something to eat while I change,’ he ordered.
The meeting hall was in a narrow street by the river behind the temple complex. Terentius Cantaber was waiting by the doorway, dressed in a formal toga and with a look of anticipation on his ruddy features. After the formal greetings he led Valerius inside and along a narrow corridor. A brightly coloured painting filled one wall and Valerius had a moment of recognition. He’d seen it before on a similar occasion years earlier, when he’d been introduced to Colonia’s ordo in an annexe of the temple complex. Divine Claudius accepting the surrender of ten British kings and one queen. The artist portrayed the Emperor as a tall, imposing man, standing on a gilded dais surrounded by his generals as the British rulers knelt before him. Valerius had a feeling something was different about this mural, but he couldn’t quite place what it was. He was still pondering the thought as they passed through a second door to be hit with a wall of sound. There must have been a hundred men seated at rough trestle tables, and as Valerius entered every one hammered at the boards with his pewter cup, setting up a clatter that was an assault on the ears. Cantaber paused to allow Valerius to take in the scene and the one-handed Roman found himself grinning at the red-faced mass of veterans. Here too the walls were painted, but these murals depicted a defeat, not a victory. Yet there was a glory in them that sent a shiver down Valerius’s spine. In one that filled the entire far wall, three sparse lines of soldiers in legionary gear stood in a grassy meadow confronted by thousands of Celtic warriors, with more swarming across the river in front of them from a great mass on the slope beyond. The accuracy of the depiction impressed Valerius, for not a man who witnessed it had survived – bar one. A few omissions. There were none of the fearsome war dogs or the chariots he remembered roving among the great horde. No flame-haired Boudicca with her malevolent presence driving her warriors forward. And, more surprisingly, no great mounds of writhing bodies on the bridge. By the time the rebels had crossed the river in force they had had to negotiate the dead and dying of a dozen previous assaults, spitted by the weighted javelins of the militia cohorts.
‘Legate?’
As the noise died away Valerius followed Cantaber to a table on a raised platform and the militia commander introduced him to his centurions before they sat down. Murmured conversation continued as the plates came and went carried by a stream of slaves. A simple gustus of fresh oysters accompanied by chopped lettuce, onion and beans. Roast chicken and vegetables for the main course and a secunda of preserved fruits. Wine, of course, in copious quantities, but Valerius sipped with abstemious restraint. As they ate Cantaber spoke of the changes he’d witnessed in Colonia since retiring ten years earlier to a farm south of the city. Fewer than half the number of ships now docked at the harbour downstream from the bridge. Bars that had depended on the sailors closed. Merchants were struggling to survive and threatening to move to Londinium.
‘The roads we built as legionaries are now the ropes that strangle us.’ He produced a bitter laugh. ‘From the port at Londinium you can have a cart load of amphorae in Venonis in just over ten days. From Colonia it takes eighteen. I doubt we would be little more than a market town were it not for the temple. They still come in their hundreds to sacrifice to the god and everyone must have somewhere to sleep and something to eat. It is the one thing Londinium cannot take away from us.’
The conversations around them grew louder with each cup of wine and when the last dish was cleared the militia tribune rose to his feet and called for silence. Valerius stifled a wry smile. Plainly, this was when he paid for his victuals.
Cantaber introduced Valerius by his various titles and continued: ‘We are fortunate to have a guest who knew Colonia as it once was. A man who fought shoulder to shoulder with our predecessors. What we know only as myth or legend or fireside tale, Gaius Valerius Verrens lived through. Sir, if it is not too much to ask, perhaps you might tell us of your part in the defence of Colonia?’
A great cry of ‘Yes’ went up from the veterans at the tables and the cups hammered on wood once more, only to fade away as Valerius rose to his feet and shook his head.
‘No, Terentius,’ he said, to groans of disappointment. ‘I will not speak of my part in Colonia’s defence. The true Heroes of Rome sit not at this table, but,’ he threw out an arm in a gesture Cicero would have been proud of, ‘are immortalized here on your walls. Marcus Quintus Falco led them and they died where they stood. I owe them my life.’ He told them how the me
n of the Colonia militia lay in the darkness and watched the firefly sparks of distant fires grow ever closer. The way the dawn broke to show not an army as the Romans knew it, but an entire people on the move. ‘We gave them the bridge,’ he continued, and a murmur went up as they imagined the sky above the narrow crossing filled with pila and the butcher’s block sound of the points striking home into flesh. They groaned as the Iceni champions inexorably began to swamp the defences, could almost feel the flanks of the militia lines bending back with the strain. Not a man present had not heard another soldier’s death cry. Not a man who didn’t know the gut-wrenching terror of the battle line.
‘And when all hope was lost with barely a man unwounded,’ Valerius continued, ‘I ordered the retreat. Falco turned to me. He said: “I fear that is an order I must disobey, tribune. We old men have walked as far as we intend to this day. We will stay where we stand and buy you what time we can.” It was the hardest decision of my life to give the order,’ he had to swallow to save from choking, ‘but to have done anything else would have been to squander their sacrifice. The survivors of the Londinium contingent formed testudo and retreated to the Temple of Claudius.’
They waited expectantly for more, but Valerius did not care to remember the events of the next three days. They had all heard the stories: how the defenders had held the complex walls until they were overwhelmed; how the last survivors had retreated into the temple building and barred themselves inside; and what their comrades in the Fourteenth had discovered when they retook the ruins of Colonia.
Glory of Rome: (Gaius Valerius Verrens 8) Page 22