‘Slavery is nothing but a roll of the dice,’ Maximus concluded.
‘Not so, Marcus Clodius Maximus,’ Hippothous interjected. The Greek launched into a philosophical discourse. ‘What the world calls slavery and freedom are nothing of the sort; nothing but a legal fiction. True freedom, like true slavery, is in the soul. The soul of a good man can never be enslaved. The cynic Diogenes in fetters was a free man. The Great King of Persia, sat in pomp on the throne of the house of Sasan, is unfree if he is a slave to his irrational passions: lust, greed, anger.’
Again Hordeonius was silent. There was no love growing between the North African centurion and the familia of Ballista.
‘So, my dear Hibernian,’ Hippothous continued, ‘Marcus Clodius Ballista may have given you a papyrus roll, given you his praenomen and nomen, and with them Roman citizenship, but, I fear, you remain a slave – a slave to your bodily lusts, to endless amphorae of wine and cheap women.’
Maximus laughed. ‘And you? Are you not a slave to pretty boys? I have heard you howl in the baths at the sight of a nice arse. Given his good looks, Calgacus here has not slept at all since you joined the familia. Always expecting the invasion, he is. Did I tell you how in his youth, in the bloom of his beauty, he caused a riot in Athens? Very dedicated pederasts, the Athenians.’
As if stirred into action by the mention of his name, the elderly Caledonian spoke. ‘The slave Polybius ran from Panticapaeum because he tired of waiting for his freedom.’ Calgacus hawked and spat over the side of the ship. Then, in a muttering inflection, but at the same volume, he added, ‘Took you fucking long enough to free me, and the yappy Hibernian.’
Ballista became very aware of young Wulfstan at his shoulder, very aware of the tensions in even the happiest familia in a slaveowning society.
‘Company.’ The voice of the trierarch rang out.
Ahead, six ships with the distinctive double prows, fore and aft, of northern longships. They were pulling unhurried towards the trireme. The Goths were coming to them.
Not by choice, Calgacus had seen the world. He had been with Ballista in Rome, in Arelate, Nemausus and the other fine cities of Gallia Narbonensis, sojourned in Asia at Ephesus and Miletus, lived in Antioch, the metropolis of the east. By comparison, Tanais, most north-eastern of all Greek poleis, was a shite-hole. Calgacus’s eyesight was not what it had been. Others had spotted the low town before it swam in his vision out of the vast, swampy delta of the river from which it took its name.
First, the trireme pulled past an abandoned suburb. It was long abandoned. Trees grew through the remains of houses. What had been thoroughfares were blocked by mounds of rubbish overgrown with patches of marsh grass. The effect was of a juvenile deity’s rough plan of a mountain range, set aside through distraction.
The quay was of new, raw-cut timber; the ramshackle buildings behind the same. The smell of sawn wood mixed with mud, fish and an undertone of burning. Oddly, a huge hill of ash and debris demarcated the harbour from the town proper. Calgacus’s eyes, blurred in the spring sun, took it in as best they could, the mean scale of the place. No more than a couple of thousand inhabitants could huddle within its walls. A complete shite-hole.
As they walked up, Calgacus saw that the stone walls were cracked, leaning here and there, in places fallen altogether. Rubble half filled the defensive ditch. Urugundi guards stood, bored, at the fire-scorched gates. They waved them through.
Inside was worse. The street up to the agora had been cleared, but the lanes running off it were choked with the debris of collapsed houses. Fire-black beams poked up, mocking man’s transient endeavours. Thousands of tiny shards of amphorae crunched like snow underfoot. The town was deserted. The sack had been thorough and recent, no more than a few years.
The agora had been scoured clean. Traders had returned; a surprising number of them had set up stalls. They called their wares: oil and wine from the south, hides and slaves, honey and gold from the north. The council house had been repaired. Incongruously, instead of tiles, it had been given a roof of reeds. The Gothic guards at the door told them to wait outside the Bouleuterion. They waited. A gang of slaves – Greeks or Romans – was working to repair the gymnasium next door. They were overseen by an architect, who in turn was watched by a Goth.
Ballista stood, feet apart, leaning on the hilt of his scabbarded long sword, head down. Behind him, unconsciously in similar pose, stood Maximus and the Suanian Tarchon. The ruins all around, they looked like penitents of some strange, grim militant sect.
As Calgacus regarded Ballista, he felt a not unfamiliar stab of jealousy. Ballista had been loved from birth. His mother, of course, but also a fierce pride and affection from his father. Isangrim, war leader of the Angles, had other, older children by other women. Politics, not desire nor love, dictated a man of his position in Germania would most likely marry more than once, sometimes concurrently. His relations had not been good with all his offspring, especially with his eldest son, Morcar. Ballista – Dernhelm, as he was called then – the solemn but affectionate, golden-haired child had been another chance, a chance to make things right.
Calgacus had never known his parents. He had been too young when the Angle slavers came. A faint, half-recalled woman’s face, a strange tugging at his memory with the smell of a peat fire, that was all he had of a childhood.
The Caledonian cuffed the jealousy down like an unruly dog. He had been with Ballista since the boy was little more than a babe in arms. The boy had suffered too. It was not Ballista’s fault, none of it. He had always done his best, tried to do the right thing – by the world, by Calgacus. They could not be closer. Once in a while, they talked openly. Usually, the grumbling on one side, the teasing on the other, both masked and expressed their strong affection. Calgacus loved the man he would always think of as a boy, and knew it was returned.
Calgacus wished he had not made the graceless comment on the boat about freedom. He had been thinking about Rebecca, the Jewish woman, a slave of Ballista’s wife in Sicily. Calgacus had grown close to her. He wanted her freedom; hers and Simon’s, the Jewish boy she had been bought to look after. If they returned from the grasslands, he would ask Ballista for her freedom, maybe marry her. Ballista would grant it, would feel guilty he had not offered it. Old as he was, Calgacus thought it would be good to have a son of his own. He grunted an obscenity. With luck the child would have her looks.
If they returned from the grasslands and the Heruli … The curse lay heavy on Ballista. Let him wander the face of the earth … among strange peoples, always in exile, homeless and hated. Not just on Ballista. Kill his sons … all those he loves. The Suanian Pythonissa was a hot bitch. You could not really blame Ballista for fucking her. But what a choice: a priestess dedicated to Hecate. Calgacus had no doubt the dark goddess of the underworld would heed her priestess. You could never tell how, but he had no doubt the curse would play out some way or another.
The time in the Caucasus the previous year had not been good, and not just because of the curse. For weeks, Calgacus had been besieged by a force of the nomadic Alani in a tiny stone tower, just a few paces across. There had been a few others in that close, evil confinement. Most had endured, the eunuch Mastabates, the young Angle slave Wulfstan among them. But it had done Hippothous no good. By the end, the Greek accensus’s interest in the nonsense he called something like ‘physiognomy’ had grown to an obsession. Endless drivel about the eyes as the windows of the soul, peering into your face, him watching you unnervingly in odd moments. It had nearly driven Calgacus mad. After but a few days, he would quite happily have killed the man.
Hippothous was not the only one the mountains had changed. Little Castricius had been away in Albania. The gods knew what had happened there, but he had returned altered. There had always been something about him, something secretive and dangerous. Some undisclosed crime had condemned him to the mines in his youth. Against the odds, he had survived, somehow in the face of the law joined the legions, and since ris
en to equestrian status and high command. He had always joked that the daemons of death were scared of him, that a good daemon watched over him. But now there was a repetition and an earnestness to these claims that was unsettling, that nodded towards madness.
A tall Goth, taller even than Ballista, walked out. He had long hair, and the muscles of his arms were hooped with finely wrought gold torques.
‘I am Peregrim, son of Ursio.’ He spoke the language of Germania. ‘If you are minded, the King of the Urugundi would talk to you now.’
It was dark inside the Bouleuterion. As his sight grew accustomed to it, Calgacus saw it was roughly square, stone benches running up into the gloom on the other three sides. It reminded him of the council house at Priene. But here there were not just a few Greeks in tunics. The benches were packed with armed Gothic warriors.
Halfway up the opposite side, the benches had been cut away. A large dark-wood throne sat there, two ravens carved on the back. On it sat Hisarna, son of Aoric, King of the Urugundi. He was a heavyset man, broad shouldered, in middle age. Across his knees rested a drawn sword; his father’s famous blade, Iron. The king’s name – Hisarna – meant the Iron One. He was a man to be reckoned with, this Woden-born ruler, as his father had been before him. Thirty years ago, the Urugundi had been no more than a comitatus of a dozen or so men who had wandered down from the north, practising brigandage and selling their swords for hire on the shores of Lake Maeotis and the banks of the Tanais. Led by Aoric then Hisarna, they had fought, schemed, negotiated and slaughtered their way to become one of the major groups in the loose Gothic confederation.
‘Dernhelm, son of Isangrim of the Angles, why are you here?’ Hisarna spoke in the language of the north. His voice was surprisingly gentle, melodious.
Ballista replied in Greek. ‘I am here as Marcus Clodius Ballista, envoy of the autokrator Publius Licinius Egnatius Gallienus Sebastos. My kyrios has charged me with ransoming prisoners from the Urugundi and the Heruli.’
Hisarna smiled, and continued in Germanic. ‘A thankless task in both parts. The Urugundi hold no prisoners from the empire. When my nephew Peregrim returned from the Aegean last year, outside Byzantium he allowed the official the Romans call the Procurator of the Hellespontine Provinces to ransom all those he had taken. Those Greeks and Romans who lived in Tanais now are my subjects by right of conquest.’
Ballista said nothing.
‘As for the Heruli, I wish you well trying to reason with Naulobates and his long-headed warriors.’
From the ranks of the Goths came a deep hooming sound of amusement.
Ballista switched to Germanic and spoke politely. ‘Then I would ask your permission to cross your lands, and try my luck with the Heruli.’
‘It shall be as you wish,’ Hisarna said. ‘It may be fortunate for you that you are a guest in my hall. There are men here known to you.’
Some Gothic warriors at Hisarna’s right hand stood. Calgacus saw both Ballista and Maximus stiffen. In the poor light, Calgacus did not recognize them.
Hisarna did not take his gaze from Ballista. ‘Videric, son of Fritigern of the Borani, also is my guest. No bloodfeud will be played out in my hall.’
Calgacus found he was gripping the hilt of his sword. Some years before, Ballista had killed the entire crew of a Borani longship. They would not surrender, so he killed them – shot them down with artillery from a distance, then, when they were past resistance, used the ram of a trireme to finish them off.
‘Videric and his men leave tomorrow,’ Hisarna said. ‘Dernhelm, your men and you will stay in one of my halls by the harbour, until boats are ready to take you up the Tanais river.’
Videric the Borani spoke, hatred tight in his voice. ‘I am a guest in the hall of Hisarna, and would not go against my host. It will not be here, but between me and the slave the Romans call Ballista there will be a reckoning. Let the high gods warlike Teiws and thundering Fairguneis bring the skalks Ballista before my sword.’
Ballista replied, almost wistfully, ‘Wherever you go, old enemies will find you.’
III
There was nothing to do but wait. Ballista did not much mind. It was an experience he knew well. Over the years, he had become used to its ways. Usually, he had been waiting for bad things to happen: for the centurion to take him as a hostage into the imperium, to be admitted into the pavilion of the emperor Maximinus Thrax, to be hauled before a murderous Hibernian chief with designs on the throne of the high kings of that island.
When he was young, he had not been good at waiting. Often, he had prayed to the gods to make it end, or, conversely, to postpone the approaching event indefinitely. In those days, he had had a child’s or young man’s belief that his life had a purpose and a goal; that its course could be determined by his will. He had seen it like the trajectory of an arrow. If he were not the bowman or the arrow itself, he was at least the breeze that could affect the arc and influence where the shaft fell. Forty-one winters on Middle Earth had disabused him of such juvenile fallacies. His life meandered. He went where he was sent. In Greek tragedy, the characters were playthings of the gods. He was at the whim of the yet more immanent gods who sat on the thrones of the Caesars. There was no point fighting. It was best to accept it, and wait.
There were worse places to wait. The hall was new-built, still clean, roomy enough for thirty-three men and two eunuchs. It reminded him of his father’s hall in Germania. There was little privacy, but Ballista knew his desire for it was unusual. The hall overlooked the harbour: both the trireme and the Gothic longships were gone. He watched the shallow draught merchant vessels come and go, listened to the scream of the gulls. Early the first morning, he sat looking at the mist coiling up from the broad, silty river. The trees on the far side grew straight out of the water. There were ducks and moorhens over there.
Later that first day, a Gothic priest came. The gudja was festooned with bracelets, his long hair braided with amulets and bones and other, unidentifiable things. He was followed by a quite exceptionally hideous old woman, hunched and filthy beyond description. The priest said his name was Vultuulf; much beyond that, he was not inclined to talk. He brought livestock for them – some chickens, two pigs and four sheep – and grain: wheat and rye.
By the second day, they had settled into routines to which their interests led them. The official staff, the herald and his like, kept to themselves; the interpreter apart even from them. The centurion drilled his men, stamping bad-temperedly along the quay. Maximus and Castricius each disappeared separately into the inhabited parts of the town, presumably searching for drink and women. Hippothous likewise, although Ballista assumed the human objects of his desire were different. The two eunuchs remained in the recesses of the hall, cloistered close together. Calgacus sat staring out at the river; Tarchon with him in companionable silence. The Suanian did not care to be far from one or other of Calgacus or Ballista since they had saved him from drowning in the Alontas river the year before. When drinking – for him a not uncommon activity – he was given to swearing blood-chilling oaths in very bad Greek concerning his readiness, eagerness even, to repay the debt by dying for them. All reckoned, Ballista thought he had a reasonable chance of it happening, probably quite soon, somewhere out on the Steppe.
Ballista ate, slept and read. There had been few books for sale in Panticapaeum – little enough of any luxury goods, although the eunuch Amantius had spent some of his almost certainly corruptly acquired money on a gilded brooch studded with sapphires and garnets. Of what books there had been, Castricius had bought all the epic poetry. Ballista did not mind. The northerner liked Homer and, last year, sailing the Kindly Sea, he had quite enjoyed listening to Apollonius of Rhodes being read to the elderly senator Felix, but, in general, more recent epic was not his choice. Ballista had purchased cheaply all of Sallust’s Histories and the Annals of Tacitus. He had finished the many rolls of the former during the winter. Now he was reading Tacitus’s account of the reign of Caligula. The hard-edge
d, practical pessimism of both authors appealed to him. Most human nature is weak, politics corrupt, freedom unattainable, libertas in fact no more than a word.
By the fifth morning, Ballista had had enough of waiting. He called Calgacus and Tarchon to him, and set out to see Hisarna. It had rained in the night. Little rivulets of milky water ran off the hill of ash before the town walls. It steamed slightly in the sun. The Urugundi guards at the gates seemed neither surprised nor interested to see them. At their appearance, however, one of them strolled off ahead of them into the town.
The agora was quieter than the first time. The slaves were still working on the gymnasium, but their efforts seemed desultory, unmotivated. There was no one outside the council house. The door was shut.
Ballista pushed it open, walked in. The big room was empty, the untenanted benches stretching up to the gloomy rafters. The throne of the Iron One was gone. Motes of dust turned slowly in the light from the door.
Ballista sat down, thinking. Calgacus sat next to him. Apparently unnerved by the emptiness, Tarchon prowled about, glaring into the shadows, as if expecting the apparition of a threat.
‘The Borani were here; now they and the Urugundi are gone,’ Ballista said.
‘Aye, it could signify something or nothing,’ Calgacus responded.
‘Bad feeling, Kyrios,’ Tarchon gravely announced. ‘Much malignity.’
With theatrical abruptness, a long shadow was thrown into the Bouleuterion. The gudja stood haloed in the doorway. The sunshine glinted in the things in his hair. The old woman was behind him.
‘Hisarna, son of Aoric, has gone,’ the priest said.
‘Where?’ Ballista asked.
‘To another place. The boats will come for you soon.’
‘When?’
‘Soon. You should go back to the hall.’
The Wolves of the North Page 3