“Noble youth of Luca,” Servius called out as he stepped forward, “friends, brothers of the wine-cup, greet our Lucius, returned from the ice, snow and sudden death of the German border.”
They greeted him with a cheer and cleared a space for him in the centre of the party. No-one made room for Otto who found himself a seat on an unoccupied bench at the edge of the canopy. The girls passed with their wine jugs, laughing as they pushed away the interfering hands of the partygoers sliding up their thighs or squeezing their breasts. Sometimes one would throw some crystals on one of the braziers and a perfumed smoke arose from it with a hiss and crackle. The hours passed. The drinkers became more raucous. Some vomited in dark corners, wiped their mouths, staggered back into the light and shouted for more wine. Otto noticed that one after another of the young men would disappear into the house for several minutes then return looking sheepish or proudly muttering comments to their friends.
Servius was drunk but that had not blunted his malicious streak. He had been throwing surreptitious glances at Otto sitting sober and aloof for some while. He called a serving girl over to him.
“Fetch your mistress,” he demanded.
She went into the house and came back with an older woman, dark, slight and richly dressed, with eyes like two jet beads. He spoke to her, she nodded and disappeared. Servius wandered over to Lucius, sat beside him and put one arm around his shoulders.
“Lucius, my oldest friend, I apologise.”
“For what?” Lucius asked blearily in his half drunken state.
“For getting off on the wrong foot with Otto, that tame German of yours. In fact, if you don’t mind, I’d like to make it up to him.”
“Decent of you… take it kindly,” Lucius slurred.
Servius smirked and rose to his feet, walking over to Otto.
“For the sake of Lucius…Boxer… we must be friends so I’ve arranged a pleasant surprise for you. Come with me.”
Otto looked suspiciously over at Lucius who noticed, smiled and raised his wine cup. Otto took that as assent, not realizing that Lucius was so far gone in drink he was doing the same to anyone who caught his eye. He followed Servius into the house.
“This beauty is Calypso” he said, introducing Otto to the mistress of the garden.
“Hello, my handsome hero,” she purred at him taking one of his hands and leading him to a small door. “There’s a special treat waiting for you inside.”
With that, she opened the door and pushed him in the small of his back. He took an involuntary step forward. The door closed behind him. The room in which he found himself was small but well-lit, the walls painted with scenes of half-men, half-goats pursuing naked women through a forest. There was a bed and a padded chair. There was a girl; a girl with her hair parted in the middle and falling in two thick blond braids to her waist. She too was naked apart from a belt of some sort of animal skin around her waist. Her breasts were high and small, immature, and if she had yet grown any pubic hair it had been completely removed. Her long, slender legs made her tall, above Otto’s shoulder. She looked at him with blue eyes almost as pale as his own.
Otto was appalled.
“Maiden, what are you doing here?” he asked in his native language.
“Maiden?” I was taken by the Romans when I was ten and put to work here at the age of twelve. What sort of “maiden” has been used by men who prefer children to women? You are of the Suevi?”
“I am.”
“Then shame on you for coming to a place like this. At least I was forced…”
The door burst open and Servius fell into the room two others half drunken youths. He took in the scene and was suddenly angry. In revenge for the incident with the wet cloak he had planned to stripe Otto’s naked backside as he lay on top of the girl. He dropped the garden-cane he had been holding behind his back to the floor.
“What are you talking about in that jabber of yours? You’re supposed to be warming her up for me. Thought I’d show what Romans do to Germans. We fuck ‘em, fuck ‘em all because that’s all you’re good for,” Servius told him.
He slid around Otto and shoved the girl down onto the bed. She bent her knees and opened her legs as he fumbled at his loin cloth.
“Go on, Servius, give her a right seeing to,” one of his friends sneered.
As Otto turned away, he looked right into her eyes and saw there was nothing there; no pain, no hope, no spark of life. Her soul had been slowly and agonizingly destroyed.
Calypso was waiting for him in the corridor.
“Looking on not to your taste then?” She said, “Still Master Servius is getting his money’s worth.”
“Men pay you to lie with these girls?” he asked in disbelief.
Calypso threw her head back and laughed stridently. He caught a waft of foul breath and saw the blackened, rotten teeth at the back of her mouth. He shuddered.
“Of course, they do. This is a brothel, that’s what it’s for.”
“Then I will buy her.”
Calypso laughed again, briefly.
“She’s already paid for.”
“No, I mean I will buy her from you.”
“Oh, fallen in love, have we?” her eyes glittered at the possibility of making big money. “So, what’s your offer?”
“I have two hundred Denarii….”
She put a hand on his arm and shook her head. “Stop there. She earns me more than three times that in a year. She’s fourteen now and she’s got at least another two years in her, maybe more, her being a big strong one, before she’s too used up and I have to sell her down the market.” She fell back a little at the baleful glare on his face but recovered her bravado. “No, sonny, it seems to me that none of this is for you. My advice is; go home and don’t think of coming back ‘cos you won’t be let in. I can see trouble coming a mile off and you’re it.”
Otto knocked on the inner door and was admitted to the entrance cubicle. He picked up his cloak and his dagger was returned.
“Nice knife that, where’d you get it?”
“It was a gift from my First Spear Centurion.”
“I thought the other bloke said you was a German noble,” he said suspiciously.
“Auxiliary I expect, mate,” his colleague explained. “They have a lot of them in the cavalry.”
Otto squatted beside the wall with the group of boys waiting to light their torches and see their employers back home through the dark streets. Eventually Servius and Lucius came out into the cold night air. Otto was pleased to see that Servius had vomited stale wine down the front of his tunic and would be forced to walk all the way, wet and stinking.
Lucius did not appear until noon the next day. He was pale and red-eyed. He refused food but drank jug after jug of water before vanishing into the hot room of the bathhouse for two hours to sweat the alcohol out of his system. Later, sitting with Otto and his father in his study, he still looked a little fragile but his eyes were no longer blood-shot and his headache had mercifully subsided.
“By the way,” Vitius asked, “whatever happened to that slave I gave you? Atrexes wasn’t that his name?”
Lucius looked uncomfortable and avoided his father’s eye.
“He didn’t work out. I had to let him go,” he mumbled after a pause.
“Let him go in far Germany? I wonder what happened to him…”
“I don’t exactly know,” Lucius said truthfully but not wanting to pursue the topic.
“I do,” Otto intervened. “He tried to dishonour me, to use me as a wife. His manhood was cut off, stuffed in his mouth and then he was drowned.”
There was a long moment of shocked silence. Lucius had never heard these details before. Vitius was horrified at Otto’s casual tone of voice.
“You did that to him?” he gasped.
“No, not me; I just stabbed him through the face with a stylus. It was the cavalrymen who finished him. They took it as an insult to all Germans because Boxer had accepted me as his companion.” He
looked very hard at Lucius. “Any disrespect shown to me should be a matter for Lucius to deal with but they took it out of his hands. Any disrespect from anyone,” he repeated for emphasis. “Like last night….”
Lucius groaned.
“Oh please, Otto, no: I don’t remember much about it after the first hour. If I did or said anything to upset you, I’m sorry. Don’t blame me, blame the wine.”
Otto smiled and nodded his head. He was now sure that Servius’ crude and cruel mockery had not been done with the knowledge or connivance of Lucius, which greatly relieved his mind. But he did not forget the cane. He had guessed how Servius had planned to use it on him.
Chapter 18
Otto accompanied Lucius on several more social outings but he made sure he was always cautious, always sober. He never could never work out exactly why Servius had been so determined to humiliate him on that first night so if Servius was present, Otto stayed outside with the boys who carried the torches, no matter how long he had to wait. Lucius took less and less pleasure in nights spent drinking with his old friends as time went by. After the initial excitement of seeing them all again, he quickly realized they had nothing but school days in common. He thought they had never quite grown up. They thought he was too rigid and reserved. He had become a soldier; hardened by exposure to strict discipline and frequent scenes of violence. They were the sons of prosperous provincial officials as they had always been. Nothing had changed for them. It sometimes made Lucius feel a little lonely and when he did, he turned to Otto for comradeship.
When Lucius was called on to appear in front of the magistrate because some soldier on leave had broken the law, it was always done with full military ceremony. Lucius and Otto rode into the square in their best uniforms attended by the delighted stable boy who always received a tip from Otto for holding the horses.
“You give him too much,” Lucius complained.
“It is the duty of a warrior to be generous to those who serve him,” Otto told him with a shrug.
They went into the magistrate’s office and court with much saluting, thumping of boots on his prized floor (which made him shudder) and clashing of armour and weapons. The cases were petty for the most part. Drunken fights or property damages which were settled by monetary compensation if the soldier had provoked the incident, if not, they were dismissed out of hand. One crime was serious. A soldier had attempted to rape a woman in the backyard of a bakery. Her husband, the baker, had heard her screams and ran through the shop in time to save her but took a fair bit of punishment in the ensuing fight.
The accused legionary stood with a smug look on his face while he listened to the evidence being given against him. He looked sideways at the tribune standing to attention beside him and was sure the officer would tell these civilians where to get off. He was wrong. In the iron grip of Otto, he was frogmarched to the garrison headquarters with the baker, his wife and the magistrate following on. The magistrate’s clerk carrying a wax tablet and stylus to take notes for the official record completed the small procession. Lucius explained the matter to Centurion Massus who led them into the guardroom. The prisoner’s tunic was ripped away and he was made to kneel, arms outstretched, with a burly soldier hanging on to each of his wrists. Lucius and the optio acting as guard commander consulted.
“How many, sir?” asked Massus.
Lucius was not entirely sure. “Enough to give out a strong message that honest women are to be left alone, but not enough to make him unfit for service.”
“Fair enough,” he said and took an expert look at the man’s back and shoulders. “Twenty it is then. I’ll keep the count.”
He nodded at the soldiers who took a firmer grip. “One!” he bellowed and his vine-staff swished down and scored a diagonal red line across the prisoner’s white skin. He worked methodically, alternating his blows to right and left so that they left a neat herring bone pattern from shoulders to hips. The guilty man remained silent as the first few blows thudded into his flesh but he began to groan aloud as more and more rained down. Once the count had reached ten the centurion began at the top again but reversing the angles of his strokes. Blood began to well up at the intersection of the welts. The clatter as the clerk fainted and dropped his writing materials did not distract him from his precise work.
“Twenty and all done, sir,” he said at last. “Leave him to me, we’ll get the medical orderly to have a look at him and send him home tomorrow, if that’s agreeable.”
Lucius turned to the baker’s wife and pointed at the battered soldier slumped on the floor.
“Madam, he has been punished, are you satisfied with the penalty he has suffered?”
She said that she was and so was her husband in answer to the same question. A large lump was coming up on the back of the unconscious clerk’s head where it had bounced off the tiles. So, as a matter of courtesy, Otto carried him back to his master’s office where he was laid on a couch in a side room to recover.
“Thank you, Tribune Longius. Justice has been quickly and fairly done, I do believe. This sort of distasteful crime can lead to rioting if it is not handled properly,” the magistrate said, shaking Lucius’ hand
“Only doing my duty, sir,” Lucius replied.
“You may be surprised to know the number of officers who would have turned a blind-eye. The military have difficulty in telling the difference between civilians and the enemy at times, my compliments to your noble family.”
A tremor went through him as he heard hobnailed boots stamping down on his polished floor as Otto and Lucius threw their farewell salutes and performed a smart about-turn.
Even in what was to Otto the balmiest winter he had ever known the days shortened and grew colder with more frequent and prolonged rain until late December arrived. One morning he got up and threw his tunic on to go over to the bathhouse when he saw Janus wearing his clothes back to front.
“Io Saturnalia” the porter shouted across the garden.
Otto felt his spirits sink. “Io Saturnalia!” they all called out as he came into breakfast. He grunted something in reply. Pinerus sat in his master’s place while Sabina and Vitius served him. Poppaea came to the table with her brother’s helmet on her head. It kept falling forward over her eyes and the whole family laughed each time. Otto excused himself and left the room as soon as possible. This was only the beginning.
Visits were exchanged with all the neighbours every afternoon. Torches on poles were thrust into the ground and illuminated the garden for the incessant flow of noisy guests until late into the night. They were often bizarrely dressed and behaved absurdly. Normally dignified fathers of families appeared wearing necklaces of old shoes, prim wives and mothers sported hats from which strings of vegetables dangled. They gave each other useless gifts; a brush with no bristles, a spoon with holes drilled through the bowl. The offerings were received with elaborate courtesy, as if they had been things of beauty or value. Strolling entertainers; jugglers and acrobats were invited in to perform and then went around demanding money from the spectators. Servius arrived with half a dozen musicians in tow. A pantomime was performed in the square. A woman wearing only a string between her legs cavorted lewdly with a man who had a huge stage penis tied to his hips. From time to time he walked to the front of the stage and waggled it at the audience who went into shrieks of laughter and catcalls. There was some sort of plot to the play but no-one paid much attention to it. Otto kept out of the way as much as he could but it was impossible to avoid everyone. The festival seemed interminable but at last it wound down and he was left with a small clay pig and a pair of women’s shoes with no heels he had been given as mementos.
He had now lived in the Roman world for eighteen months. At first, he had not been able to see past the invincible legions that had swept away the tribes of Gaul and converted everything to the Roman view of how the world should be ordered. Now, he thought he knew them well. They were not the supermen he had believed them to be. Individually, they were no better
than anyone else. He was no longer overawed. He was growing in experience as well as age and gaining the confidence of early maturity. He was beginning to feel that his opinions mattered and the urge to speak out.
At dinner on the last night of Saturnalia, the family ate together served by Pinerus and the maids in the usual way. The days of frolic and misrule had exhausted everyone and all seemed happy to return to their normal routine. The food was leftovers; half an ox tongue pickled in brine, sliced, cold black pudding, smoked fish and the inevitable garum for which Otto never developed a taste. Poppaea kept hiding yawns behind her hand, Sabina was wearing more make-up than usual to hide the puffiness around her eyes but both Lucius and Vitius had dark half-circles below theirs. Too many late nights, too much rich food and far too much wine had taken their toll. Only Aelia was serenely untouched.
“Well, Otto what did you think of your first Saturnalia?” she asked.
“It isn’t my first; that was last year in the legion camp.”
“And did you enjoy it?”
“No,” he said and added no more.
The family were surprised into silence by his abrupt tone to Aelia. He had always shown her courtesy and obviously had a lot of respect for her.
“Oh, I don’t believe you,” Poppaea chimed in naively. “Everyone loves Saturnalia.”
“I don’t,” Otto replied. It would have been better if he had let her remark pass.
“Why is that?” Vitius demanded.
“I don’t want to say.”
Perhaps it was because he was tired or a little liverish that Vitius became irritated and pressed the point.
“Since you are under my roof as a guest of my son, I feel that I am entitled to an answer.”
Knight of Rome Part I Page 19