‘His nephew Vortrix, who is very young.’
‘He managed to take the kingship, sir.’
‘A tribal skirmish is not the same thing as a full-scale war. I wouldn’t worry greatly over this, Centurion. Rome is more than a match for a few tribes of barbarians. And the Brigantes have been peaceful for years.’
Justin forebore to point out that that was what Quintilius Varus had thought too, before he lost three Eagles to the Germans, and contented himself with saying that Rome and most of her forces seemed to be occupied elsewhere at the moment.
‘Very well, Centurion, I will look into it, if it will make you any happier,’ Metius Lupus sighed. ‘But undermanned as we are, I don’t propose to stir up trouble unnecessarily. We have managed to maintain peace thus far, you know.’
‘A rather precarious peace, it seems.’
‘It’s peace nonetheless,’ the Legate said with a certain amount of irritation. ‘Which, after all, is what we’re here for. We aren’t Claudius Caesar’s invasion force, you know.’
‘No, sir.’
‘Very well, Centurion, you may go. I am pleased that you should be so concerned, but now I have work to do. I must check these supply lists if they are to go out today, and Jupiter knows we’re going to need the extra grain this winter.’
Justin saluted and left. He vented his feelings somewhat by bumping into the clerk in the outer office and swearing at him. He then remarked that Vortrix the High King of the Brigantes had need of a record keeper and he had best get his application in before the rush, and stalked out.
The clerk, a mild young man with a squint, goggled after him for a moment, then shrugged and went back to work. The Legate discouraged any pauses in his activities.
Justin turned down the Via Praetoria and, with a word to the sentry on duty, started over the stone bridge into the town. He stopped midway out of sheer irritation to pitch a snowball against the icy surface of the river, but seeing two of his own men watching him with evident curiosity from the rampart, abandoned this undignified idea.
By the time he reached the Head of Neptune he had cooled down. He knew the Legate wasn’t going to pay the least attention to what he had told him, but they’d wear their armor out of fright for a while. And since improving the Legion’s attitude was probably next to impossible as long as it remained undermanned, as Licinius had said, he supposed it didn’t really matter. He remembered the detachments he had met on the road north last fall, going the other way. One of them had been from the Hispana. Probably from his own cohort. The gods knew it had been robbed of men at some point. Oh, what in Hades did he care anyway? He wasn’t going to be here any longer than he could help.
He called an order for a cup of wine to Gwytha and went into the storeroom, wondering what on earth the Emperor wanted with Parthia anyway.
Finn, who had sat up at the sound of his step, yelped joyfully and bounded over, leaping about Justin’s knees. Whitepaw wagged his tail in a friendly manner but stayed in his corner. Whitepaw was very much Licinius’s dog although, as Justin discovered, he made an exception for Gwytha.
‘Down!’ Justin said as the puppy bounced up in excitement and fell over his own feet into an empty bowl. Finn subsided and sat waving his plumed tail back and forth on the dirt floor. Justin knelt down and scratched his ears, pulling some strips of deer meat from a sack in his tunic. He put the greater part down for the puppy, but tossed a piece to Whitepaw, who regarded it suspiciously for a moment and then, apparently deciding that if Justin hunted with his master he was all right, ate hungrily.
Someone ducked under the leather curtain from the shop, and Justin looked up to see Gwytha standing in the doorway with a bowl in her hand.
‘I thought you would be in here,’ she said. ‘I put your wine on the corner table.’
She came and knelt down beside him, holding one hand out for the puppy to sniff. Finn, who had gulped down the last of the deer meat, put his black nose forward tentatively. Gwytha held her hand still and he sniffed it for a minute and then licked her fingers. Only then did she move to scratch his ears. Finn wagged his tail and butted against her knee.
‘You have a way with dogs,’ Justin said.
‘I grew up with the hounds in my father’s house,’ the girl said. ‘It is only knowing how to go slowly with them. Puppies are readier to make friends than grown dogs. It took me longer with Whitepaw. This will be a nice one – no, that is not for you.’ Finn had pushed an inquiring nose into the bowl she carried. ‘That is for Whitepaw. You have eaten, little pig. You can have some more later. Aeresius usually feeds them, but he’s out hunting. We thought we wouldn’t be crowded today, with it being so cold and everyone busy at the fort getting ready for the winter, and with what happened two days ago.’
‘You know about that?’
‘If you keep a wineshop you know everything that happens, from the business at the fort to the smith’s wife’s new baby.’ She paused a moment. ‘I’m sorry about Manlius. It’s in my mind that I wish I hadn’t boxed his ears.’
‘I expect he had it coming,’ Justin said.
‘All the same, I wish I hadn’t done it.’
She set the bowl down in front of Whitepaw and Justin followed her back into the shop, snapping his fingers for Finn to follow. He sat for a while over his wine, idly tapping the table with his ring, a twisted band of red gold, flat across the top and cut with a stag’s head. Finn turned round two or three times in the rushes on the floor and went to sleep with his head on Justin’s foot. It was still afternoon, and there was no one else in the shop. He watched Gwytha dusting the tables, her rounded figure jiggling attractively under her tunic. No luck there, probably, but he called out to her anyway.
‘Come and talk to me. I want company.’
She stared back at him, obviously deciding whether it had been a request or a command.
‘Please. I’ll start to talk to myself in a moment.’
Gwytha came and sat across the table, looking at him carefully. ‘You look like a mind with something bad on it,’ she commented finally.
‘I was cursing me for a fool, and the rest of the world to Hades,’ Justin said, with an honesty that surprised him. ‘Vortrix of the Brigantes along with it.’
‘He would rule it very well. He’s going to make a good king, is young Vortrix.’
‘Good for whom?’
‘For the Brigantes, of course,’ Gwytha said. ‘I only hope it doesn’t bring them something worse in the end. When Rome makes up her mind, she may come and leave the Brigantes with nothing but children and old women, as they did with my people.’
‘In the meantime, of course, the Brigantes may leave us with nothing but corpses,’ Justin pointed out, ‘as your people did to us.’ Boudicca of the Iceni had slaughtered a Legion and three cities before Rome brought her rebellion to a halt.
Gwytha looked at him sideways. ‘You forget I’m not a Roman.’
‘I’m sorry. I suppose you have little enough reason to love us. Was it a Roman who…?’
‘No, it was a Gaul,’ she said shortly, ‘who are kin to us.’
He looked at her dubiously, unsure how to react. ‘Was it very bad?’
‘I thought it bad at first, of course. I was only ten and I nearly died of fright and loneliness, but my first mistress was kind to me, and she had other slaves, and somehow the company made it more bearable. That was where I learned mathematics, and to write. She was a good woman, but old and extravagant, and when she died she was very much in debt, and we were sold to pay it. A magistrate from Venta Belgarum bought me then.’
‘What was he like?’
‘He was one of those Britons who become very Roman because it’s fashionable. It’s like that in the south, and all the Romans who settle in Britain find it fashionable to be very British. I hated him,’ she added, and Justin was startled at the venom in her tone. ‘Not because I was his slave – there is slavery among my own people. Because he was so busy with himself and what face he put to th
e world that he had no caring for anyone else. It was a pleasant enough house, but it is no enjoyment, I assure you, Centurion, to be a piece of machinery, kept running smoothly so it can work a loom and sing for the guests, and maybe sleep with them if the host feels generous.’ Justin caught a knife-edge of bitterness in her voice that chilled him to the bone.
‘I wasn’t alone,’ she added. ‘His wife hated him too. He died soon after, and she put up a stone for him. It said, ‘Here lies the body of Mutius Servianus. The gods be praised,’ which you could take any way you chose. I rather liked her.’
‘What happened then?’ It was a window on a world he had not encountered from that perspective before.
‘I was sold again. His wife moved to Aquae Sulis with only a few of her oldest slaves. She was careful to sell the rest of us to good masters, but mine got drunk one night and fell to dicing with Morgan the Trader.’ She laughed. ‘I learned later that no one should dice with Morgan the Trader. His fingers are too quick. He didn’t really want me, but I was the only stake my master could put up. And I was strong and a good worker, so he took me with him. I rather liked it, tramping all the length of Britain. But I didn’t like sleeping in the rain, and I have managing ways and too quick a tongue, so Morgan said. Poor Morgan. So he left me with Aeresius to pay a debt. I have been lucky, I think, all in all. Aeresius treats me more as his assistant than his slave. He would sell me my freedom, I think, if I asked him for it.’
‘And you haven’t? What of your own people?’
‘It’s been twelve years since I’ve been with my own people. They might take me back, I suppose, but it wouldn’t be as if I had never left. They have no love for the Roman, or anything the Roman has touched. If I had stayed with my clan I would have been married long ago, and have babes now.’ A soft, wistful note crept into her voice. ‘I’ve been too long with the Roman kind. What man of the Iceni would ask for me now?’
Justin was touched; although seeing the softness of her skin and the gloss of her hair, he wondered briefly how many other men there had been and whether Aeresius was one of them. It seemed likely enough, but he didn’t ask. ‘Have you never sent a message to tell your family it is well with you?’ he said instead.
‘No. My mother will have stopped grieving for me now and begun to forget that once she had another daughter at her hearth.’ The girl’s eyes were focused on a point somewhere beyond the far wall. ‘If I can never go back, it’s better they forget.’
Justin was silent, at a loss for anything to say which wouldn’t sound foolish and thoughtless.
Then Gwytha seemed to shake off her own mood and smiled at him. ‘If you are feeling sorry for me, Centurion, stop. It makes me uncomfortable. As long as we are exchanging stories, Aeresius said you were new to the Legion, and I haven’t seen you before. Where do you come from?’
‘Damn near everywhere,’ Justin said, relieved. ‘Hispania, originally, like the Legion. We lived at Tarraco while my father was stationed there. When he died – I was three, I think – my mother went to live at Antium where she could be comfortable and fashionable again. Antium’s rather like going to live at Aquae Sulis. Very civilized. Hispania might have been more fun to grow up in, but I liked Antium.’
‘I’ve always wondered what Rome was like,’ Gwytha said. ‘Where this new world has come from.’
‘Well, Antium isn’t Rome, though it’s near enough to it. My most vivid memory of it is shying a mud ball at a sparrow and getting a senator instead.’
Gwytha chuckled, a gurgling sound that seemed to roll back the years. ‘I set a snare once to trip a boy I didn’t like, and the priest set it off instead. I hid for days.’
‘Italy’s nice,’ Justin said, casting a baleful glance at the doorway, where a brisk wind was whipping flakes of snow in over the sill. ‘It’s the countryside I like. It’s all green and golden, with the warmth of the sun in it. People who’ve never been there go and goggle at the buildings in Rome and sit in the Circus Maximus and watch men and wild beasts slaughter each other, which you can see in any arena in the Empire, if you’ve a taste for it. I don’t.’
‘Aeresius told me that in Africa you—’
‘Never you mind what Aeresius told you. I’d like to know who told it to him. If it was Licinius, I’ll—’
‘Good stories have a way of getting around. And in any case, I asked Aeresius about you, so blame me. It wasn’t Licinius, I shouldn’t think. He doesn’t gossip.’
‘But you do. Still, it was my own fault, and I’d probably do it again,’ he added with the ghost of a grin.
‘Why? It was stupid the first time. If the centurion permits me to say so,’ she added hastily, seeing his expression.
Justin laughed. ‘You’d say so anyway. Morgan the Trader was right. Roma Dea, woman, I don’t know why. Because it seems to me better to get rid of irresponsibility in that way than in your duties with your Legion.’
‘You’re very serious about your Eagles, aren’t you?’ She looked at him curiously.
‘It’s the only life I know,’ Justin said.
‘Or want?’ she asked.
‘That too, I suppose.’ He tried to explain it. ‘I’m a Roman, and the Legions are Rome. More than anything else is, even the Senate, or the Emperor. The Senate is losing power, but you can go from one end of the Empire to the other on the roads the Legions built, and speak the same language all the way, the language the Legions brought with them. And lately the Emperors too come from the Legions.’
‘And what when there are no more Legions and no Rome?’
‘Oh, I know it will happen. There’s never been an empire yet that’s lasted forever. But the world is young for us yet. And then – then, someone will do it all again, I suppose.’
They sat for a moment, the old world and the new one, looking at each other in the lamplight. And then a group of cavalrymen burst laughing through the door, and the mood was broken. Gwytha rose and began to see to the business of the night, and Justin pulled his cloak around his ears and made his solitary way back over the bridge to the fort.
III
The Watcher
All that long winter, hunting parties went out again and again after meat, whenever the weather allowed. Justin saw to it that his men at least were armored and carried more than their hunting spears, a rule he enforced with a ruthlessness that seemed to be new to them. A spate of howling storms had almost completely blocked supply lines from the south, both by river and by the roads from Lindum and Mamucium. In every northern garrison the men were finding that they had to shift for themselves, and the sense of isolation did nothing for an already sagging morale. At least the attack on Manlius’s patrol seemed to have taught some of them caution.
The attack was not repeated. The Brigantes were busy finding meat for their own people and keeping the wolf guard round the lambing pens. The wolves were growing gaunt and unusually hungry, even for wolves.
A punitive expedition had been sent out from Eburacum to the villages of the closest clan, the most likely culprits in the attack, but they had simply evaporated into the hills, taking their families and livestock with them, and in this weather it had been impossible to do anything more than set the roof thatch in flames, hoping that the rebuilding would give them something to think about. The Brigantes were used to rebuilding. They had a long history of rebellion, broken only by occasional periods of peace under rulers of Rome’s choosing.
After that brief excitement, the Legion returned to winter drill, or mock engagements fought amid loud complaints in the stone arena outside the fortress walls. Justin was grimly determined that his men at least would not go soft over the winter, and by his constant presence he made it harder for them to indulge what appeared to be a universal aversion to hard labor. The wall repairs went on as well, and when the weather was impossible they checked and rationed supplies in the storerooms, took inventory, and made repairs in the armory, or saw to their own gear, which in wet weather required constant oiling and burnishing to keep i
t in shape. And one by one the great catapults were tested, taken down for overhauling, reset, and tested again. When this had been done, there was catapult practice, a nightmare way to spend the day when the wind had blown the covers off the great machines and the skeins were wet.
Over the whole fort there was a feeling of restlessness and boredom, of being hemmed in, despite the constant duties of the day. At night the wineshops and beer stalls did a lively business. When Licinius had had a particularly trying day at the hospital, or Justin had found yet another foundation put in wrong and his last transfer application had come back marked ‘try again,’ they would take the dogs out for an hour or so, near to the fort, and make up the dinner they had missed with a bowl of stew and a cup of hot wine at the Head of Neptune.
At night Gwytha would sometimes produce a harp and sing, mostly tunes of the Legion. She had a soft, pure alto voice that seemed to get at the heart of a song, and Justin remained curious about her. Aeresius, he had discovered through other channels, was not bedding her, preferring the lighter-hearted if more expensive company of Venus Julia’s ‘girls.’ (The standing joke held that Aeresius said Gwytha was bossy enough already.) But after that first talk of her early days, she had returned to her usual self-contained state. She was friendly enough, but it was as if she threw up her own defenses against the world. Justin had made a halfhearted pass at her once, mostly because she looked good in the lamplight and there wasn’t much else to do, and she clipped him across the ear and then resumed the conversation as if nothing had happened.
Justin had a philosophical attitude toward women, derived from being more attractive than he knew. When the mood struck him, he had discovered that he could generally find what he was looking for without much trouble, although it never occurred to him to wonder why. So he had simply shrugged his shoulders, rubbed his stinging ear, and proceeded to treat Gwytha with brotherly indifference.
He liked her, though; she was pleasant company. And the few times that she had let her defenses slip, he had got a glimpse of a world as harsh as any that he had ever known.
The Legions of the Mist Page 4