Then I looked round for more fighting, but it was as good as over.
Later, while the galleys were ferrying us across the river, I heard Decurian Rufus giving his account of things to the Trierarch and the Centurion of Marines. ‘They waited till nightfall, and then sent off two more men; I suppose to find out what had become of their herald. Curithir,’ he jerked his chin toward the small, dark shadow squatting at his side, ‘and a couple of my lads went after them, and made sure that they should not come back either. And the rest must have decided it wasn’t exactly healthy on these shores, and began making ready for sea. We waited as long as we could, and we were just going to have a try at settling them without your help –’
‘You’d not have stood much chance,’ said the Centurion.
‘No, I don’t suppose we should; but we could not just have sat there on our haunches, twiddling our thumbs, and watched them out to sea. Och, well! Before we had to put it to the test, we heard the look-out’s signal and knew that you were here.’
They landed us on the southern shore in the first light of a storm-spent dawn; and we were glad enough of the lift. It mightn’t have been exactly healthy for us either, trying to make our way back up-river to the crossing-place through Pictish territory; not after that night’s work! And we set off up Tavaside yet again – the three patrols of us this time, minus casualties – to pick up the horses. I had the great wolfskin bundled on my shoulder. Full of water it was, and weighed a goodish deal.
Decurian Rufus looked at it aside. ‘What in Mithras’s name have you got there?’
‘My wolfskin,’ I said. ‘A sea-wolfskin – off the Chief I killed.’
Curithir gave the soft quick laugh of his kind. ‘I saw him. Truly, they say the Frontier Wolves are all mad.’
Aye, that was a patrol worth remembering; and for more reasons than one! It was the first time the Saxon wind blew on our northern coasts. North and South and East, it blows upon them all nowadays, while the Scots come thrusting in from Hibernia across the Western sea. But none the less, for a little while, we had flung back the new danger.
And I had gained me my wolfskin cloak.
6
The Eagles Fly South AD 383
WHEN I WAS ten summers old, I found a bit of blue glass sticking out of the earth, where a badger had dug himself a new door-hole in the rough hummocky ground south of the fort. It was part of a bowl or jug, I suppose. When you looked through it, it made the whole world look blue and strange. I kept it for three days, and then exchanged it with another boy for a freshly cast viper’s skin that he had found close by. You never knew what you might find in that piece of rough ground.
Old Paulus, who had served the length and breadth of the Wall and its outposts, told me that there were hummocky patches south of every fort – the remains of towns that had been there when he was a young soldier. There used to be wine shops and bath-houses and market places, he said, and the temples of many Gods, all falling into ruin since the faith of the Christos became the official religion of the Empire; and the bothies where the soldiers lived with their women and children close under the fortress walls. The towns were all wrecked and burned down in the great Pictish Wars before I was born. And when the fighting was over, they were never rebuilt. Instead, the forts were patched up, and the people who were left alive moved inside them, and the wine shops and markets and married quarters sprang up again within the walls, so that every fort became a little walled town. My fort, my town, was Onnum, where the old North Road from Corstopitum goes through into nowhere. Old Paulus used to say that any Centurion of his day would weep to see the place now. It is in my mind that that is a thing old soldiers have been saying since the Legions first began; but it is in my mind also that this time maybe it was true.
‘Whole families and the family pig squatting in the granaries and the old stables,’ he would grumble, wagging his head, ‘half the Praetorium given over to stores, and an armoury where we used to house the Cohort Standards and the altars to the Gods.’ (Paulus was one of those, there were a good many in the army, who obeyed the Imperial orders about worshipping the Christos in public, but kept the old Gods in their hearts, and to him, the Sacellum where the standards were housed was also the place for their altars.)
But we liked things well enough as they were. My father was Number Three Centurion of a Spanish Cohort, but himself was born and bred north of the Wall, like most of our family since the Eagles flew north from Rome. And my mother was pure British, from the Dumnoni who have their hunting runs over to the north-west. For a long time I was the only young-one – there were two sons born after me but they both died – so my father and I were very much together, working in our field plots. The garrisons of all the forts farmed the land round about, holding it from the Government, in part return for military service. That was another thing Paulus didn’t like. He said a good soldier shouldn’t have time to be a farmer too. But I don’t know. . . . The Tribes were quiet in those days, and in a way, friendly, though it was a kind of armed friendliness. They needed us as much as we needed them, against the threat of the Sea Wolves and the Scots.
I remember one evening, it must have been around four years after I found the bit of blue glass, I came up from working on our field plot. It was a hot still day, which is a thing you don’t often get along the Wall, and at the sheltered end of the plot, where the land tipped southward, our bean rows were all in flower; it seemed as though life had always been as it was that day, and would go on being the same for ever. Paulus was sitting in the sun by the south gate – what they used to call the Praetorian Gate – mending a broken harness strap. He was past bearing arms or working in the fields, but he was good with his hands, and he hated having nothing to do, and so he was generally mending something for somebody.
I squatted down beside him to watch what he did: ‘That’s a neat mend. What news have you today?’
He spat out the leather thong that he had been softening between his toothless gums. ‘What makes you think that I have any? An old man sitting in the sun?’
‘You always gather all the news of the fort,’ I said. ‘Besides, it’s in your face.’
He said, ‘We have a new Emperor.’
‘East or West?’ I was not over-interested. We had split the Empire into two before I was born; and there was an Emperor in Rome and another in Constantinople, as well as two, one might call them Lieutenant Emperors, who had the title of Caesar, but were less important than the others. They were generally fighting among themselves, and it was all very complicated; in any case it seemed a long way off from the Wall.
‘Neither,’ he said, ‘an Emperor of Britain.’
That was quite a different thing! And it made a kind of jolt in the pit of my stomach. ‘Britain! Who?’
He knotted off the thong, and cut the end almost savagely. Then he said: ‘Maximus.’
I caught my breath. ‘Maximus? You mean – our General Maximus? The one father served under in the Pict War?’
‘I also, come to that.’
Suddenly, for a heart-beat of time, it seemed to me that all the colours of the evening were brighter than life; it was a moment of splendour that caught at my throat, and I wanted to shake the old man to make him feel it too. ‘An Emperor of our own! Paulus, you’re looking for all the world as though it were bad news!’
‘Am I?’ he grunted. ‘Och, well, I’ve seen Emperors come and go. They do it rather often nowadays. I’ve seen the roads they follow, and where the roads lead them. Maximus won’t be able to stop at Britain; the others will break him if he does. He’ll have to try for Gaul. And if he gets Gaul – he’ll try for Rome itself. And he’ll take troops out of Britain. They always take troops out of Britain. And every time the end is darkness.’
He began gathering his things together, and would not say any more, except that the sun was westering and the evening air was cold for old bones.
And sure enough, before many months had passed, we heard that our Emperor Maximus was sai
ling for Gaul and taking British troops with him. But they were not northern troops, and so none of that touched the Wall; and the beans ripened and we harvested the oats and barley; and the winter was a hard one and brought the wolves in close to the fort. From time to time we heard of attacks by the Sea Wolves as men called the Saxons, away down the eastern coasts of Britain. And the Commander of Onnum tightened up on discipline and ordered more arms drills and a constant watch kept on the signal stations from the South. So my father was kept busy, and more of the farm work than usual fell on my shoulders, while he attended to his Centurion’s duties. But truth to tell, none of it came as close to me as the fact that that summer my mother started another baby.
I was outraged! I remember standing and staring at her with startled disapproval when she told me.
‘But Mother, you’re old! I’m nearly fifteen!’
She looked up from the patch that she was putting into the shoulder of my father’s workaday cloak. ‘And, to be sure, that is a great age! I was not two years older when I started you!’
‘Everybody will laugh!’ I said, ‘and by the time he is old enough for the army, I shall be so far ahead I shall not even be able to help him.’
‘Will you be already a General? Or an Emperor, perhaps? Think what an Emperor could do for his fifteen-years-younger brother!’
‘Now you are laughing.’
‘Only because I’m happy,’ she said.
And I remembered the two brothers born after me, and did not say any more.
After a time I began to think that it might not be so bad – once he got past the wet and wailing stage. I saw myself teaching him how to use a sling and how to tickle for trout in the little burn that ran below the fort. But when the baby came, just at the time that the little cold primroses were opening in the sheltered hollows, it was a girl! It was funny, I’d never thought of that. I don’t think my mother had either. By my father seemed not ill-pleased.
One evening, when I’d come home from the fields to find supper not yet ready, and our quarters more than usually full of women – it’s often like that in a house where there’s a new baby, have you noticed? – I went up to the ramparts to while away the time until there should be something to eat. Officially, only the men on duty were supposed to go up there, but in truth, nobody took much notice, unless you got in the way of the sentries or started playing the fool with the great catapults.
On the ramparts there seemed always to be a wind, and you could look away and away – northward, over the heather country towards the land of the Picts, or southward, over more heather country, along what was left of the old military road, towards the great cities where I had never been and the fortresses of the Saxon shore. And east and west, you could follow the line of the Wall itself, looping and rising and dipping until it was lost in distance, along the high crests of the land. And as I looked eastward, I saw a little cloud of dust on the road that follows the Wall. It grew bigger, and I could make out a seed of darkness at its heart; and the seed of darkness grew to be a horse and rider travelling at full gallop.
I heard the trumpet sound, and saw the Optio of the Gate Guard, small-seeming as a games-piece at that distance, walk forward to meet the rider as he swept in through the shadowed archway and brought his horse to a trampling halt. The man dismounted heavily, as one that had ridden far as well as hard; and while somebody led his horse away, I watched him follow the Duty Centurion in the direction of the Commander’s quarters, until they were both hidden from me by the clutter of buildings between. And it was as small as pieces moving on a games-board, so small, you couldn’t think it really meant anything.
By dusk, the news was running through Onnum that the Emperor Maximus had landed at Segedunum to make an inspection of the Wall.
I met Paulus on my way home, and asked him the meaning of the news. ‘What’s bringing him back from Gaul, then? – It couldn’t really be just to inspect the Wall?’
‘Men,’ Paulus said. ‘To help him finish with the young Gratian. He’ll be wanting more men; they always do.’
In our quarters, late that night, while my mother sat spinning, and crooning to the girl-child beside the fire, I helped my father burnish his weapons and equipment – not that there was much need; he always kept his tack in full-dress order.
We had been working for a good while in silence. Most likely we were both busy with the same thought. At last I came out with it. ‘Paulus says that the Emperor has come back from Gaul because he needs more men.’
‘Paulus is probably right,’ said my father, breathing on his helmet and rubbing hard.
‘Men from the Wall?’ I said, after the silence had gone on for what seemed a long time.
‘Maybe.’
‘But the Wall garrisons are under-strength as it is.’
My father laid aside the helmet, and looked up, holding out his hand: ‘Here, give me that. By the Lord Mithras, have I never taught you how to burnish a sword blade?’
As I told you, we were all Christians when I was a boy, by order of the Emperor before the Emperor before the last one. But there were times when my father, like Paulus, turned back to old Gods with whom he was more at home. And when that happened, I knew that it was time for me to shut my mouth. So I shut it, and turned myself to polishing up the family bracelet – an old and much battered Distinguished Conduct bracelet of the Second Augustan Legion, that had belonged to some ancestor of ours, and been north of the Wall just about as long as we had. My father kept it with his own equipment, and always wore it on full-dress occasions, pushed up high under his sleeve so that it hardly showed – which was odd, when you come to think of it. . . .
Well, so Maximus came.
Officially it was called an Inspection, and it started that way – I watched from a distance, lying up on the south rampart, with most of the other boys of the fort. But, as soon as the Parade was over, it turned into something more like a riot, as his old soldiers broke ranks and came clamouring round him, shouting his name: ‘Maximus! Magnus Maximus! Where are the wine skins? How can we drink good luck to you, if you don’t bring us the wine? Maximus, do you remember the old war cry? How about it, General – when do we march on Rome?’
And that was the only sight I ever had of our Emperor: a big, square-cut man wearing a cloak of the Imperial Purple, and riding a tall roan horse, with a yelling mob of soldiers surging around him who looked as though they might have him out of the saddle at any moment. But he wasn’t the kind that comes out of the saddle easily; even at a distance I could see that. And it came to me suddenly, for the first time, that he was only just one man, and he had all our fates – ours on the Wall, and the fates of Britain and Gaul and maybe of Rome as well – tangled up with his own along with the reins in his bridle hand. And I was half-wild with excitement and half-cold afraid.
He stayed two days at Onnum, and then he moved on down the Wall. And after he was gone, my father came back to our quarters at the time of the evening meal.
He sat down and stretched his feet to the fire, for the spring chill was still in the air, though it was drawing on to summer. And he said: ‘Paulus was right. Our Emperor Maximus wants men.’
My mother looked up from the little hot loaves she was piling on to a platter, and said one word, very quietly: ‘You?’
‘Yes,’ my father said. ‘Four Centuries from Onnum; the Third among them. More than half the strength!’
My mother set the platter down. She had gone very white, and her eyes looked like dark holes in her face. ‘But – you?’
‘I am the Centurion of the Third Century,’ my father said simply.
I got up and left them, and went and lay on my stomach in the hummocky ground where once I had found my piece of blue glass that made all the world look strange. I did not want any supper, though I had been hungry enough a short while ago. Presently I heard footsteps brushing through the long grass, and someone sat down beside me. I rolled over, and it was my father, his face outlined darkly against the evening sk
y.
I began to pull up grass stems; I remember now the little sharp snapping sounds they made. ‘When do you leave?’
‘The third morning from now.’
I sat up quickly. ‘Let me come with you.’
‘No,’ he said, flatly and deliberately.
‘But –’ I began. He did not seem to hear me, only his own thoughts inside his head. ‘Why not?’
He heard that. ‘For one thing, you are too young.’
‘Among the Tribes, I’d count as a man by now.’
‘But among the Romans, and you are Roman, you are still too young for the army by two good years.’
‘In ordinary times, yes, but –’
‘But these are not ordinary times, exactly.’ He took me by the shoulders and looked at me very straightly; even in the fading light I could see something in his face, in his way of looking, that I had never seen before. ‘Lucian, I shall have my hands full in these next three days. We may not have much chance to speak together again; so listen to me now. I need you too much to take you with me. I need you here! Here, to look after your mother and the small-one, and the farm-holding, until I come back.’
‘If you come back,’ I said, desperately.
‘If Maximus fails, I think that none of us will come back. If that is the way it goes, then more than ever, I shall need you here. We have distant kinsfolk among the Votadini – bronzesmiths at Traprain Law; you have heard me speak of them. If I do not come back, take your mother and the small sister to them. I leave them in your keeping.’
We looked at each other long and long. And in the end I accepted the way that I knew the thing had to be. ‘Yes, Father.’