‘Ferradach, Lord of Six Hundred Spears,’ Julius Gavros made a slight bending of the head, ‘I bring you Ducenarius Alexios Flavius Aquila, who will command at Castellum after me.’ He spoke, like the Chieftain, in the British tongue, and though it was very different from the same tongue of the south, Alexios was relieved to find that he could understand most of what they said, as he bent his head in turn and followed Gavros to the hearth.
‘It is a shadow on my heart that the Old Wolf leaves us,’ said the Chieftain, as they settled themselves on the skincovered stools that seemed to have been set ready for them.
‘On the Old Wolf’s also,’ said Gavros. ‘But the Young Wolf will fill my place none so ill, when he has learned the way of it. Give him your help and counsel when he needs it, as you gave it to me when first I came this way.’
Ferradach Dhu turned his gaze full on Alexios for the first time. ‘He does not look to me to have the making of the Wolf-kind,’ he said candidly. ‘Too smooth. Too like the lily boys of the Governor’s staff who I saw in my youth when I took the horse draughts for the army south beyond the Wall. Nevertheless, I will do as my brother, the Old Wolf, asks.’ He turned and called behind him, ‘Shula, my son’s woman, bring here the Guest Cup.’
A girl rose from her seat below one of the small high windows where she had been stitching at the chequered lining of a cloak, and disappeared into some inner place, and in a little, returned with a bronze cup which she carried first to Alexios, being the stranger among them.
She spoke carefully in Latin, ‘Drink, and be welcome.’
And Alexios, rising to take the cup from her, answered in the tongue of the tribes, ‘Good fortune on the house, and on the woman of the house,’ and drank, and gave it back into her hands.
The Chieftain looked up quickly. ‘So-o! He knows our tongue and his manners, both – or did you teach him that?’
‘Not I.’ Gavros took the cup and spoke the words of courtesy in his turn. ‘He speaks it as well as you speak Latin when you choose.’
Ferradach Dhu raised shaggy brows at the newcomer. ‘How comes that about? You have not the look of the tribes in you.’
Alexios said with a flicker of laughter, ‘Maybe I take after the first of my line to come following the Eagles and strike his roots in Britain. He was from Etruria, and the men of those parts are narrow-built and dark. But I do not think he was a lily boy on any governor’s staff. I had a British grandmother, and my old nurse came to us through the slave market from Erin; and they both sang me the songs of their own people before ever I knew my father’s tongue. The speech of the Votadini sounds something strange to me, as mine must do to you, but time shall mend that, Lord of Six Hundred Spears.’
The girl had bought little hard apples, and barleycakes sweating with wild honey; and they sat eating and sharing the great Guest Cup between them; the two older men talking together as familiar friends. Alexios, feeling that he had given enough account of himself for good manners, sat silent, taking in his surroundings. He felt oddly detached from it all, as though he were not part of the scene himself but standing outside it and looking at it with interest like someone studying a wall-painting.
He was looking at the Hall of a Celtic Chief, at first sight almost untouched by Rome. Fine skins and woven hangings, their brilliant colours darkened by smoke, lined the walls behind the benches where the Hearth Companions would gather in the evening when the harper made his songs and the drink horns went round. The roof trees and the great tie-beams overhead were painted with strange interlacing spandrels of colour that seemed to echo the upward-eddying of the hearth smoke. There was a faint stable-smell about the place, and from beyond the hangings at the far end of the Hall came the stamp of a hoof, and the sound of a horse ruckling down its nose. There must be more space beyond there, and used as a stable. A man who had served with the Tenth at Beersheba had once told Alexios that the Desert People often kept their favourite horses in their own tents. Not only the Desert People, it seemed. The Master of the Hall leaned forward, and the beads of a great barbaric necklace of amber and twisted gold showed at the neck folds of his deerskin robe. But the girl, who had gone back to her stitching beneath the window, wore delicate gold drops in her ears such as Alexios’s own mother wore, and the window above her head had thick greenish glass in it like the windows of the Commander’s quarters back at Castellum. And though the bronze Guest Cup with its circling sun-dance patterns was of the tribes, the bowls in which she had brought the apples and honey-cakes were of fine red Samian ware, one with a pattern of struggling gladiators on it, one showing Dionysus strangling the pirate ship with vines growing up the mast while he turned the crew into dolphins. Even the Chieftain’s own cross-legged chair stood on finely carved antelope feet. The Hall of Ferradach Dhu, he decided, was a British chieftain’s hall and not a Roman villa-house only because the Lord of Six Hundred Spears deliberately chose to hold to the old ways. Probably there were many more of the same kind, up here in the wild lands, where the frontier ebbed and flowed like a tide, and the world of Rome seemed so very far away . . .
Behind the voices of the two men he caught the sound of horses’ hooves from the outside world. Two horses, drawing nearer, coming to a trampling halt, in some stable court, he supposed, at the back of the Hall. A little later voices sounded outside; both young, one light and hard, the other deeper and rough at the edges with anger.
‘Risk your own neck if you want to,’ the deeper voice was saying, ‘that is no reason to risk the neck of your horse!’
‘Why not, then?’ demanded the other. ‘I risk mine; why should he not be risking his?’
‘Because he has no choice.’
‘If he had, he would be choosing as I choose. Horses will always give me what I ask of them.’
‘Then have a care as to what you ask, little brother. You have come near to killing a good horse before now –’
The hanging at the far end of the Hall was swung aside and two young men came through in full quarrel, brighteyed and flushed with anger. But they broke off at sight of the two Roman officers by the hearth. Clearly, as with most brothers, quarrelling was a thing one did in private, and not before the outside world.
The girl under the window raised her head as they passed her, and a look like a touch went to and fro between her and the elder brother. Then she went on with her sewing. Ferradach looked up also as they came towards the fire. ‘Ah, you are here at last, my two fine sons. Did I not send you word, long since, that the Commander and the new Commander of Castellum rode this way?’
‘It was the day for backing the red stallion, my father,’ said the elder brother. ‘Our hands and heads were full, and the time ran swifter than we knew.’ He turned to Gavros, ‘Wolf Commander, we meant no discourtesy.’
The younger, speaking no word, sat down on the piled skins beside the hearth, and helped himself to a honeycake.
‘Nay now,’ Gavros said, ‘I did but come to take my leave of the Chief your father, and bring before him the man who comes after me.’ He gave a small gesture of the hand towards Alexios, making the introduction again, ‘Ducenarius Alexios Flavius Aquila.’
The younger brother took a long leisurely look at Alexios, and another bite of honeycake. ‘That’s a fine big name, but maybe you’ll grow to it in time,’ he said encouragingly, licking honey off his forefinger.
The Chief smiled, ‘He speaks our tongue.’
There was a moment’s surprised pause, and then the elder said, ‘Then Ducenarius Alexios Flavius Aquila, I will tell you in our tongue, that I am Cunorix, first son of the Chief here, and that this, with his manners forgotten and his mouth full of honeycake, is Connla, my brother.’
They looked at each other, the blue hearth smoke, sideways driven by a gust of wind from the door, fronding about them. Alexios saw that Cunorix was maybe his own age, and Connla a year or so younger. The first son short and strong-boned, with rough hair the russet brown of winter beech leaves, a straight-looking pair of eyes, a
mouth like a frog’s; a rather ugly young man, but the kind whose shield-shoulder you could rely on against your own in a scrap. The other, taller and slighter, with a mane of blazing copper hair, and skin that showed milky as a girl’s in the firelight, a reckless, laughing, wicked face. Life would never be dull in Connla’s company, Alexios thought, but relying on his shield-shoulder might be another matter.
Gavros and the Chieftain had returned to their own talk, and the three young men might have had the Hall to themselves.
Connla helped himself to a third honeycake, and said, ‘Would the new Commander be wanting a good hunting pony?’
‘Wanting, yes,’ Alexios said, ‘but the new Commander has a light purse at the moment. Ask that again when he has had time to save some pay.’
‘Aye me, that may be a long wait, I’m thinking.’
Alexios stiffened a little. He had already gathered that the pay of the Frontier Wolves was generally in arrears, but that was a matter for the Frontier Wolves.
Cunorix’s thick russet brows twitched together, and he cut in quickly, ‘Meanwhile, if the Commander wishes for a day’s hunting, when he has had time to draw breath and find his way about Castellum, it would be a simple thing to bring over a couple of hounds and a spare pony.’
‘And a wolf-spear,’ said Connla, nothing abashed, his eyes flickering over the dark green stuff of Alexios’s cloak.
‘I am thinking that I could come by a wolf-spear for myself,’ Alexios said. ‘For the day’s hunting, that is another matter, and when the day comes, I will gladly take you up on that offer.’
And both in the same instant the soldier and the Chieftain’s elder son leaned forward and struck hands like men sealing a bargain. Maybe a bargain that concerned more than a day’s hunting.
Alexios did not even notice that in that moment the long smoky Hall had ceased to be remotely interesting like a wall-painting, and had warmed out of its own shadows and become real about him.
But the last memory that Alexios brought away from that day’s courtesy visit to Ferradach, Lord of Six Hundred Spears, was an oddly chilling one.
For as he and Gavros rode down through the rath, the escort once more trotting behind them, a tall man in a dark hooded cloak turned to watch them go by. And Alexios, glancing under the hood, met a pair of eyes as brilliant as the Chieftain’s own, but with the brilliance of hate. He made a small gesture as though to spit on the ground at his feet, which for swiftness and venom was like the strike of a snake, then turned, swinging the dark folds of his cloak behind him, and strode away.
‘And who was that?’ Alexios asked, as they rode out between the rough stone gateposts, and across the causeway.
‘Morvidd, their holy man,’ Gavros said, without looking round.
‘He doesn’t seem to love us.’
‘The native oak priests have long memories, and few of them have much love for the forces of Rome, even now. Also, a year or two back, I had personal dealings with Morvidd after a bad harvest. He was demanding a human sacrifice, and I – reasoned with him.’
‘Reasoned?’ Alexios said.
‘I threatened him in the end with the full wrath of the Legions, and the pulling down of his sacred stones. He cannot have understood how little power I had to carry out any threat, for he went to a great deal of trouble to call down the wrath of his gods and put a death curse on me. But it must be that Mithras is stronger than Morvidd’s gods, for I did not drop dead as he bade me, though there was a thunderstorm. Therefore,’ Gavros gave a small crack of laughter, ‘Morvidd was made to look small in the eyes of Ferradach Dhu and his people. They don’t, I judge, give him as many of their best cattle as they used to do. He has suffered in purse and power, and if ever he gets the chance to do us harm, I daresay he will.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ said Alexios.
A silver-gilt gleam of evening sun had broken through the drifting clouds as they came down to the river ford below Castellum and splashed through; and beside the uphill track, the tall black stone had warmed into unsuspected colour, in the golden dappling of lichen on its weathered flank, and the silken gleam almost like the neck-feathers of a starling, on its poll that had been smoothed through the years by the touch of many hands. Gavros leaned from the saddle in passing and touched it; a light quick touch as though in greeting, as he had done when they set out at noon. And for a moment, Alexios riding behind him almost did the same. Almost but not quite. Gavros had been too long in the wilderness. As for himself, if he was going to rust out the rest of his days in this lost corner of the Empire, the time would come soon enough when he’d be touching bits of black stone with the best of them. But not yet! Great God Mithras, not just yet!
4 The New Commander
TWO MORNINGS LATER, having handed over the garrison and the keys of the pay-chest and as much knowledge of the job as he could in the short time at his disposal, Ducenarius Julius Gavros rode south.
Alexios, standing in the Praetorian gate to watch him away, was unpleasantly aware of panic rising in his belly as the outgoing Commander with his little escort topped the first lift of the moors and disappeared from view on the long road that led by the hearth-cold ruins of Trimontium, by the headquarters at Bremenium to Habitancum and the Wall. From now on, he was responsible for the outpost for, and for the Third Ordo, Frontier Scouts. Any decisions to be made would be for his making; nobody else in authority nearer than Bremenium, four days’ march away.
He turned from the gate, and met the eyes watching him; the eyes of the men on gate guard, the narrow half-amused gaze of Centenarius Hilarion. Surely they must see the dark tide of panic churning within him. He straightened his shoulders with that small tell-tale jerk, and walked straight through them, back to the Commander’s office in the Principia, and started checking the muster roll which had no need of checking. It was all he could think of to do, just at the moment.
Over the next few days, the fort itself began to wear less of a stranger’s face. The actual lay-out of course was familiar to him from the first, for the lay-out of every station of the Eagles was much the same, whether it was a mud-brick fort on the Nile or a stone one in the German forests, or a turf-and-timber outpost with stone-built gate-towers here on the old northern frontier. At least twice, since it was built by men of the Second Legion in Agricola’s day, Castellum had been abandoned to the wild, and then patched up again and re-occupied. The men who had served there when Severus was their Emperor would have blasphemed to see it now, the buildings heather-thatched where tiles had been; not a window with glass in it save for a few in the Principia and the old Commander’s house which now lodged all the officers together round its narrow courtyard; old grain-stores pulled down because with only half the garrison the place had been built for, there was no further need for them, and their stones used to block up half the arches of the gates. But the bones of the place were still recognizable for what they always had been. And along with the fort, Alexios grew familiar with the jetties and workshops and dilapidated store-sheds which shared with the bath-house the protection of bank and stockade beyond the north gate, and formed a kind of ghost port where the river looped out to join the salt waters of the estuary below the fortress bluff. Soon he could have found his way about Castellum blindfold, as he could have found his way through the pattern of the days that started with Cock-crow sounding from the signal tower, and ended with Late Rounds made by gleam of lantern-light from guard-post to guard-post, from barrack rows to horse-lines through the dark and the wind and often enough the rain; and all the complex routine that lay between. Fatigues and arms drill and stables, patrols out and in, the careful, endless listening to reports and deciding which needed to be sent back to Bremenium and which did not . . .
But the men of the garrison, the Frontier Wolves, still kept their strangers’ faces.
From Hilarion, his Senior Centenarius, he learned a good deal more than Julius Gavros had told him about them, beginning with the fact that the half-mad Emperor Caracalla had
taken a fancy to them and called them his wolves, more than a hundred years ago, and they had treasured their name and their reputation ever since.
‘We are the scum and the scrapings of the Empire,’ Hilarion explained one day early on, propping up the doorway of the little office beside the Sacellum. ‘They tipped out the garbage-bin of the Eagles to make us what we are. Oh yes, I know that for the most part we’re drawn from the Votadini and the tribes of the north-west, as Gavros will have told you, but that’s not the whole story. They send us up a draft from time to time to add variety to the mixture. Some of them are just hard cases, men who can’t take the discipline of the regular army and have made their own units too hot to hold them. Some are thieves – I don’t count horse-thieves, that’s a gentleman’s sport in these parts – but real undesirables, the kind that will pick a comrade’s pouch while the drink is in him. Don’t worry, you’ll not have to deal with them, the Ordo has its own ways of dealing with its own vermin.’ He saw Alexios’s face, and grinned. ‘Sometimes good comes out of evil, mind you. Once – oh long before my time, or my father’s if I’d ever had one – we had half a mutinous company of Syrian archers sent up to us. They brought their bows with them; those short composite bows, good for use on horseback; that’s why we’re all mounted archers now.’
For a sudden moment the silence prickled between them as it had done that first night of all. Then Alexios said, ‘And now you have me.’ And pushed aside the papers that he had been working on. ‘I regret that I am not half a company of mutinous Syrians. It’s hard to see what good can come out of evil in this case, isn’t it.’
‘Hard, but not impossible. You may have hidden talents – You’re the best swordsman we’ve seen on the practice ground in my time anyway.’
Hilarion abandoned the doorpost and came to lean his hands on the writing-table. He seldom stood upright when there was anything to lean on – and for a moment there was a flicker of something that might almost be friendliness in his tone. ‘No need to up with your hackles, Ducenarius Aquila, Sir. You should be very grateful to your noble uncle. If he had pulled a few more strings and got you into a respectable unit you’d have spent the rest of your days trying to live down that little episode on the Danubius. As it is, you’re among brothers.’