The meeting with the legate went well. Priscus was still staying at Natalis’ house, and we were admitted and ushered into the dining room as soon as we arrived. The legate had been working there with the three tribunes, but he rose and greeted us politely. Arshak, who could be very gracious and charming when he wanted to, made a little speech of greeting in return, saying we hoped and expected that our service under a nobleman as distinguished as Julius Priscus would bring us glory, and giving him the silk “as a token of our respect for you, my lord, in the hope that it will adorn your house and please your noble lady.” Aurelia Bodica was not in evidence, but it certainly pleased the legate. His heavy frown vanished and he looked almost genial.
Arshak went on to mention the demand for the weapons with an air of embarrassment, as though he were faced with a problem he didn’t know how to resolve and was only turning to the legate for guidance. Gatalas chimed in with expressions of sympathy for the men’s fears, concern at the damage to their confidence in their new commander in chief, and guarantees that, if they were armed, they would not cause any problems. The legate began to frown again. Whatever arguments he’d heard against giving us our weapons back outside his own fortress had clearly been persuasive. But Arshak was persuasive too, and Priscus wavered visibly. Hurrying to catch the moment, I put in the other argument I’d thought of-that I’d planned to use the unloaded weapons wagons to carry a hundred barrels of salt beef, a hundredweight of oak staves, and two hundredweight of beech planking, none of which could easily be loaded onto horses, and that if we didn’t have the weapons wagons for them, we’d have to buy carts, which would put us over budget. That did it: Priscus agreed. “After all,” he said, “you were sent here as soldiers, not prisoners-and you can hardly sail yourselves back across the Channel. You swear to me that you’ll keep your men in order?”
“On fire we swear it!” we exclaimed together, and stretched our right hands over the glowing coals of the brazier in the corner, set there to take the chill off the wet September air.
It was agreed that the weapons would be distributed from the tribunal on the parade ground that afternoon, and we set off to give the good news to our men. Just as we were about to leave, Facilis came in.
Arshak smiled at him. “I am pleased that you will still be with us, Flavius Facilis,” he said.
“You still hope you can get a white neckpiece for your other coat, do you?” Facilis growled back. That was, in fact, exactly the place Arshak had been fingering.
Arshak only smiled again, though his eyes glittered. “Remember that you followed us. We did not follow you. You chose our company. But now I must prepare my men to receive their weapons again.” He said it pointedly, to bait the centurion.
“What?” demanded Facilis, rising to the bait, looking at Priscus in alarm. “I thought, sir, that you’d agreed-”
“I hadn’t realized that the Sarmatians were counting on getting the weapons back as soon as they were this side of the Channel,” replied the legate impatiently. “If they were promised it, or even believed that they were promised it, it would damage the confidence they ought to have in their officers to make them wait. Besides, we need the weapons wagons for supplies.”
Facilis looked furiously at me. “We need the wagons for supplies?”he asked. “So this was your idea, Ariantes. I should have guessed.”
“Flavius Facilis,” I said, “you know we all wanted to have the weapons back now. We had to have them sometime. Since you must give, why not give gracefully?”
“I don’t give anything gracefully to you,” he answered, and, under his breath, added, “You slippery bastard. The others would have asked for what they wanted straight-out, and been straight-out refused.”
I shook my head and excused myself, and my brother commanders joined me. Just as we were mounting our horses, Lucius Javolenus Comittus ran out after us. “Hey! Wait a moment!” he shouted. When we paused, he trotted up grinning and out of breath.
“I’ve been talking to the two other, uh, liaison officers,” he told us, “and we’d be very pleased if you could join us for dinner this evening. There’s a very good tavern by the harbor…”
“It would please us better that you join us, instead,” said Arshak, smiling pleasantly. It was beneath his dignity to sit in Roman taverns by harbors, and Comittus had just plummeted in his opinion for suggesting it. “We can have a feast at the wagons, and you can meet the captains of our squadrons… the decurions, you’d call them, yes? I will have my men buy an ox to roast, and we will put up awnings against the rain.”
“Yes,” said Comittus, in pleased surprise. “Excellent! I’ll bring some good wine. What time do you want us?”
“Young idiot,” Arshak commented, when we were riding back to our wagons. “What do you suppose a ‘liaison officer’ does?”
“It’s obvious,” said Gatalas. “He brings good wine to dinner parties and sits in taverns.”
“Well, I suppose that’s a light yoke to bear,” Arshak observed. “He can sit in taverns, and I can forget about him. And we’ll get our weapons back!”
“You spoke to the legate like a prince, Arshak,” I said warmly. “So sweet-tongued and respectful that he began to doubt Facilis’ judgment.”
“I can fill my mouth with honey when I like,” agreed Arshak, grinning. “But it was that business you came up with that really tipped the balance. Where on earth did you learn that phrase-what was it? Above the bugget?”
“Over budget,” I corrected. “A budget is a list of how much money you expect to spend on something. The scribe I was lent in Bononia used the term a lot.”
“Scribes’ talk, money talk,” said Arshak, disdainfully. “And that legate listens to it! But I’m glad you learned it.”
It would be better to announce my status as a slave-owner myself, rather than have someone else report it to my fellows behind my back. “It is useful,” I agreed. “Natalis gave me the scribe as a gift. If we need to write letters to the Romans, or read any letters they write, to us or about us, we will be able to.”
The other two stared at me in shocked silence for a moment.
“Where is this slave now, then?” asked Gatalas at last.
“I sent him back to Bononia to say his good-byes. He should be here tomorrow afternoon.”
“Ariantes…” Arshak began-then shook his head. “I can see it will be useful. To all of us. I would not keep a foreign slave in my wagon-but I can see it will be very useful, so how can I speak against it? You’ve proved the use of it already. This afternoon”-he stood up in the stirrups, stretching his arm-“this afternoon I will hold my spear again! And that is worth a few soft words to a legate!”
The weapons were distributed from the tribunal under a steady drizzle. Priscus sat on a seat set up for him on the stone platform with a slave holding an awning over him, watching with his tribunes while we collected our things from the twenty wagons. The silk tails of our dragon standards hung down limply, dripping, and the horses tossed their heads unhappily as their hooves stuck in the churned-up mud. But for the men, it was a white day, a day of pure sun. The wagons had been loaded company by company, squadron by squadron, and they were unloaded in the same way. The orderly line of horsemen filed past, each collecting a sword, lance, bow case, and the oilskin-wrapped bundle that contained the armor for himself and his charger. Arshak’s men, first as ever, cantered off to the other end of the field to put the armor on as soon as they got it. Gatalas and his men armed closer to the tribunal; I was aware of them saddling and buckling as I waited with my men for our turn. The rasp of armor against armor, a sound that had once been as natural to me as breathing, sounded all over the field. I could see the Romans on the tribunal beginning to stare as the dragons of Sarmatian cavalry twisted into the glittering metal of their skin and came to life.
It was my own dragon’s turn. First of my company, as befits a prince, I collected my own oilskin bundle, bow case, spear, sword: all the heavy illusion of invulnerability. I hefted the bundle of armor unhappily. I felt a strange grief to see it again.
“Why put it on?” I asked Leimanos, who’d joined me, smiling over his own package of armor. “With this rain, it will just have to be taken off and dried and oiled thoroughly again tonight.”
Leimanos looked shocked. “We must put it on, my lord!” he said. “The other dragons have. Besides, it’s been in the wagons for a couple of months, and it will need drying and oiling anyway, as well as wearing, to keep it supple.”
I couldn’t shame my men by choosing to stay ingloriously disarmed beside the other commanders, and thus requiring them to do the same. I dismounted and began arming, and my hands remembered the old sequence of actions even though my mind was numb. Farna, my charger, a mare of the Parthian breed, stood patiently as I unsaddled her, only occasionally stamping her foot in protest at the rain. I tossed the armored blanket over her back and saddled her up again, clipping the blanket to the saddle and buckling it firmly across her chest and around her neck. Then came the chamfron, the horse’s head-guard with its delicate filigree bowls to protect her eyes, gold-chased bronze on scaled and painted leather. Next my own armor. I took off my coat and hung it on my saddle. First the leather trousers, heavily stitched with overlapping scales of gilded iron on the lower outside leg, but scaled more lightly farther up, and next to the horse. The three slashes on the left leg showed only on the inside, where the new piece of leather had been fitted in; the outside looked as polished, golden, and impenetrable as ever. Next the leather cuirass, scaled to give a double thickness overall. I pulled the wrist-guards over the backs of my hands, then picked up my coat, slung it over my shoulders, and pinned it: no reason to get the armor wetter than I needed to. I pulled on the helmet with the crest of crimson horsehair, hung the bow case on the left side of my saddle, slung my sword over my right shoulder, and mounted, slipping my spear into its holder by my right foot. Leimanos had armed more eagerly than I had and was finished already, but most of my men were still busy.
Over the rasp of armor came a roll of kettle drums, and then a roar of hoofbeats. Arshak came galloping up from the far end of the ground at the head of all his company. His armor was gilded, like mine, and, like me, he was wearing a coat over it-but his was the coat of scalps, and he had his lance lowered and his long sword drawn in his hand. The red crest of his helmet tossed; the tail of the standard behind billowed and twisted in the wind, and over the hooves and the drums we could hear the hissing boom of wind in the golden mouth of the dragon. I’d forgotten the terror of it, and the magnificence. The drumbeat altered; the squadrons divided, one going left and the next right, then right and left, spreading out across the field, encircling it in a ring of iron. Arshak and his bodyguard came straight on toward the stone platform where the legate was sitting, and the legate stood up and looked as though he wanted to turn and run.
I started Farna towards them at a gallop, cursing inwardly. I was quite certain that Arshak was only showing off-but the legate didn’t know that.
Luckily, Priscus didn’t jump off the tribunal in a panic, and Arshak reined in immediately before him, making his white Parthian rear up and tear the air. As soon as the horse’s forelegs touched the ground again, Arshak kicked his feet out of the stirrups and jumped up to stand balanced on the saddle, his eyes almost level with those of the legate. He swept off his scaled cap, bowing his sleek fair head to Priscus, and laid his sword at the legate’s feet. “Arshak son of Sauromates,” he said, “scepter-holder, azatan, prince-commander of the second dragon of the Iazyges of the Sarmatians, at your service, my lord Julius Priscus.”
Priscus let out his breath a bit unsteadily. He bent and picked up the sword. “Thank you,” he said.
Arshak grinned. I’d forgotten how he was, how he could be-his revelry in his own splendor, his power and strength. He’d undone all his good work of the morning, swaggering before the legate in his coat of scalps, but my own heart leapt at the sight of his arrogant grace. “Show me an enemy, my lord,” he declared, “and I will bring you his head before the sun is down.”
“There are no enemies of Rome here in Dubris,” Priscus answered. Slowly he reversed the sword’s hilt and offered it back to Arshak. “Keep this dry, and use it only when you’re told to.”
Arshak grinned again. He slid the sword back into its sheath, pulled his helmet on, dropped easily back into the saddle, saluted, and galloped off. Priscus let out his breath again and sat down.
I turned Farna quietly and started back to my own troop. A stone wall ran from the base of the tribunal along the edge of the field, and as I passed the far end of it, I noticed the carriage on the road behind, and the white stallion yoked between the shafts. I recognized the horse, and because of that, recognized the legate’s wife, peering through the carriage window with her cloak over her head to keep out the rain. From the way she held her head, her eyes were still fixed on Arshak.
“What are you doing over here, Ariantes?” came Facilis’ voice. “It is Ariantes inside that armor, isn’t it?”
I turned back to see the centurion standing at the end of the wall, where the stone gave some shelter from the rain. I did not like to explain that I’d come over in case the legate needed reassuring about Arshak, and I tried to think of a convincing excuse. Facilis, however, went on before I could come up with one. “You thought you might tell the lord legate that Arshak’s not as dangerous as he looks, did you? Too late. Anyone can see that he is.”
“Arshak will keep his oath,” I replied. “He will fight as well for Rome as he did against her.”
“And if all there is for him to do in the North is patrols and guard duty, with no fighting?” asked Facilis. “What will he do then? He has to fight someone. He might need to mend his coat.”
There was no point in talking to the man. I started Farna on without saying anything.
“Will you stand up in the saddle as well, and offer your sword to the legate?” Facilis jeered as I went past. “Or is your leg too stiff to let you? Tell me, did you ever succeed in killing the brave man that chopped it?”
I stopped Farna and looked at him. For a moment I felt like contesting Arshak’s right to the centurion’s scalp. But a commander shouldn’t think with his dagger. “Why do you want there to be trouble with us?” I asked.
“Because if we have the trouble out now and break you, you won’t make trouble later, when we’re off our guard,” he said vehemently. “There are Roman lives at stake. I’m quite clear about that.”
“Clearer about it than we are,” I told him. “There does not have to be trouble. Peace will take work, yes. It will take great care, delicacy, close attention. But it is possible. We are willing to serve the emperor if we are not forced to betray the customs of our own people. You do not help. If one of my men had heard you say that, he might have killed you where you stand. Then he would die himself, for defending my honor. Is it just, Facilis? We are both servants of Rome now, or trying to be.”
“And why should you want peace?” Facilis asked bitterly.
“Because I am sick of war,” I said-and the strange grief I had felt when I held my armor again snapped suddenly clear.
He looked at me in open disbelief. “You? A Sarmatian?”
“I. A Sarmatian. And you, a Roman, you still love it?” I set my heels to Farna and sent her flying down the field without waiting for response.
I cursed him silently as I led my dragon in front of the legate and offered him my sword-without standing in the saddle. As so often, the centurion had been right as far as he went-and then completely wrong. Mine is not a peace-loving nation, and if I had told my own men that I was sick of war, they would have stared in dismay and begged me not to talk like a coward. And yet, anyone can tire of death and killing. I saw now that I was so tired of it that I dismayed myself.
At the dinner with the tribunes that evening, the talk was all of arms and armor and horses. It was friendly, though.
We’d made awnings of brushwood about the main campfire, covering them with straw, which was abundant in the surrounding countryside since the harvest was just in. With more straw on the ground to keep it dry underfoot, and rugs and cushions brought from the wagons, we were able to make ourselves and our guests comfortable. I’d arranged for fresh meat for all the men while I was in Bononia, and Arshak had purchased an ox in the marketplace for the officers, together with good Roman bread, apples, carrots and leeks, fresh cheese, and a kind of sweet made from nuts roasted with honey. One of the tribunes brought a scented oil, with which the Romans like to anoint themselves at banquets, and Comittus brought some wine, as he’d promised. I fetched the set of gold drinking cups from my wagon and we drank some wine and ate some cheese while we waited for the ox to finish roasting, the Sarmatians sitting cross-legged, and the Romans reclining against bales of straw. None of the tribunes commented on the fact that the drinking cups were of Roman design. Perhaps they thought I’d bought them.
We introduced our squadron captains to the tribunes, and received in return the important information that the eldest of the three men, the married one, Marcus Vibullus Severus, was assigned to Arshak; the second, Gaius Valerius Victor, to Gatalas; and Lucius Javolenus Comittus to me. Comittus smiled at me when he announced this. I was pleased as well. Severus seemed a more serious and responsible man than his younger colleague, and might do better with Arshak. Though Comittus had won back some esteem from my brother princes during the dinner-largely by admiring our weapons and our horses.
“I never realized what ‘armored cavalry’ meant until today!” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “By Andate! You hardly look human in all that gear. I’m not surprised that no one’s ever beaten you on a field where you could use the horses.”
Arshak smiled and rubbed the hilt of his sword. “We are the best cavalry in the world,” he said complacently. He and Gatalas were still wearing their armor. I’d taken mine off, and told one of my bodyguard to see to it when he’d finished oiling his own.
“How strong is that armor?” asked Severus. “Is it as good as plate?”
In answer, Gatalas held out his arm in front of Severus; the tribune tapped it, then fingered the scales, and the other two picked themselves up to examine it as well. “Two layers deep?” they asked. “What about the men who have horn for the scales, instead of iron? How does that compare?” “How long does it last?” “How long does it take to make?” “Will it turn a sword?” Gatalas and Arshak smiled, preening themselves, and boasted of their armor’s strength.
I watched them irritably. “A direct blow from a good sword will cut through it,” I said, and at once regretted it. They all looked at my leg. I was sitting with the bad knee up in front of me because it still hurt to cross it.
“The man that hit your leg was Dacian, yes?” said Gatalas. We were speaking Latin, and he was less fluent than Arshak or myself. “He used one of the long swords with two hands.”
Arshak’s eyes glittered. He lifted his own two hands above his head, and brought an imaginary sword down on my leg, whack, whack, whack. I’d been warned by his eyes, and managed not to flinch. The gesture was not one of serious malice-but he wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been annoyed at my admission that the armor was not impenetrable. “It was almost an axe,” Arshak said, abandoning his imaginary sword again. “And even so, Ariantes, without your armor, you would have lost your leg. A man in this armor is almost impossible to wound.”
I remembered lying in the mud with the Dacian hacking at me. Arshak still believed in his invulnerability. That is the problem with armored cavalry; that had been the problem for all our people. If we’d believed we could lose a war with the Romans, we never would have started one. “A long spear, used as a pike or a lance, can go through it, too,” I said, stubbornly. “And a catapult bolt. And an arrow from a Hunnish bow.”
“But it’s very good armor,” Severus said, tactfully closing the subject. “I suppose, though, that you need a big horse to carry it all.”
So we talked horses for a bit-the Romans were immensely impressed by the Parthian horses in particular-and then got onto hunting, and thus to shooting, and bows, and lances, and war. I said very little; my leg ached and I was tired. We ate the roast ox, and the carrots and leeks that had been used for stuffing the meat, and drank some more wine. The rain hissed in the fire.
“The thing that amazes me,” said Comittus, as we started on the nuts and apples, “is how much the way your troops are organized resembles the way ours are.”
“Like a legion?” asked Arshak, expressionlessly. He was sneering at Comittus, though the other man didn’t realize it. A Sarmatian dragon has almost nothing in common with a Roman legion.
“No, no, like an ala of auxiliary cavalry,” replied Comittus, again showing himself less foolish than he first appeared. “Your ‘dragons’ have five hundred men; our quingenary alae have five hundred men. You divide the men into squadrons of thirty; we divide them into turmae of thirty. You have squadron captains, we have decurions. It’s exactly the same. Did you copy us or did we copy you?”
“I’ll bet we both copied the Parthians,” said Severus. “They use heavy cavalry arranged in ‘dragons,’ too. I read about it in a book. And the Sarmatians used to live in the East, near Parthia.”
“In the days of Queen Tirgatao,” said Arshak, “we fought both the Parthians and the Romans, or so the songs say.”
I looked away. I did not like to hear my wife’s name spoken, even when the person meant was the queen she’d been named after.
“What happened?” asked Comittus, with interest.
“She led her people to victory, and died winning it.”
“Do even your women fight wars?” asked Severus.
“Not now,” Arshak answered. “But in the days of our grandfathers’ grandmothers, yes. There are many songs of the warrior queens. In those days a woman could not marry unless she had killed an enemy of her tribe.” He shrugged. “It was easier for her to do it then, I think. People used less armor. Most women can ride and shoot with the bow, and I think that in those days that was all that was needed.”
“Queens have led armies in Britain, too,” said Comittus. “Cartimandua of the Brigantes, Boudica of the Iceni…”
“Bodica?” I said, beginning to pay attention again. “Like the legate’s wife?”
“Yes,” said Comittus, beaming at me. “And in fact, Aurelia Bodica is related to Queen Boudica, on her mother’s side, through the royal family of the Coritani. The sister of King Prasutagus of the Iceni married-”
The third tribune, Gaius Valerius Victor, sniggered. He was older than Comittus, but he’d been hitting the wine harder, and was now slightly drunk. “Hear our Brittuncu lus on the royalty of the tribes! Sitting around a campfire’s gone to your head, Comittus: you’re raving in the poetry of your ancestors.”
Comittus went red. Brittunculus: little Briton, a diminutive that oozed contempt. “You’ve got no right to use that word to me, Gaius,” he said. “You’re British yourself; your family’s lived in Verulamium for generations.”
“Yes, but my great-great-grandfather was a veteran of the army of the deified Claudius, not a Coritanic tribesman who used to paint himself blue!”
“My ancestors were kings!” replied Comittus, starting up.
“That’s enough!” rapped Severus, glaring at both of them, and both fell silent and remembered us. We were all looking at them with blank, remote expressions and expecting the two to duel. No Sarmatian would have spoken so insultingly to another man’s face unless he meant to fight him-and no Sarmatian accepted an insult to his ancestors peaceably. The fire hissed and spluttered as the silence dragged. Comittus reclined again, blinking angrily, and we realized that nothing was going to happen.
“You are a descendant of kings?” asked Arshak, to break the stillness. “And this lady also, the wife of my lord the legate?”
“Well-Aurelia Bodica is,” Comittus said, still unhappy. “Her father is a descendant of the kings of the Regni, and her mother, of the Coritani. My family are related to her mother’s. You probably noticed I have a British name.”
We had not noticed, of course, and I wasn’t even sure which of his names was the British one, except that it couldn’t be Lucius.
“These… Coritani, Regni, Iceni… they are tribes?” asked Arshak.
“Native British tribes,” supplied Severus. “Britain used to be divided into a number of different tribal kingdoms. A few tribal organizations are still used for administrative purposes, but otherwise none of them count for much.”
“We also have tribes,” said Arshak, “but I think ours are greater. We Iazyges hold all the land between the Danube and Tisza beneath our spears, and we count for much even with your emperor. We are all Iazyges here-except Ariantes’ Roxalani. And it is because you share family with this lady, Lucius Javolenus, that you come to be a tribune?”
“Well-yes.”
Victor was scowling again, and Severus looked uneasy. There was something about this topic that bothered them-presumably the same thing that had caused the squabble a moment before, and not the fact that Comittus had won his place through patronage, as the Romans take that for granted. I tested it, cautiously. “The lady Aurelia Bodica seemed to me very wise and perceptive,” I said.
I’d hit it. There was something about the legate’s lady that the other two tribunes disliked: they looked at me nervously. Comittus, however, beamed at me again. “She is, she is!” he exclaimed. “There’s not a woman in Britain to match her. Julius Priscus fell for her head over heels the moment he met her, and he’d tell you himself what an immense help she’s been to him, lucky man. You know, of course, that the legionary legate for Eburacum controls the civil administration of northern Britain as well as all its military affairs-” (we hadn’t) “well, Aurelia Bodica can sort out a lawsuit so quickly it makes you blink.”
“Yes,” said Severus, hurriedly-then, turning to Arshak, he said, “You are also descended from kings, aren’t you, Lord Arsacus?”
“My father is second in line to the crown,” replied Arshak proudly, which effectively silenced everyone else’s boasts about noble birth.
I lay awake for a while that night, trying to interpret what I’d heard. I had not thought about the natives of the province as a force distinct from the Romans who governed it. Victor, though, had sneered at Comittus as a Briton: there was some tension there. Aurelia Bodica was descended from two houses of native kings, and her position of influence made some of her husband’s junior officers uneasy. Who were we going to fight in the North? Facilis had expressed doubts that we would fight anyone: “What if it’s all patrols and guard duty?” he’d asked. That still meant that there was some force the Romans needed to guard against.
I had known nothing about Britain, and I was still trying to grasp how large the island was. All through the journey I’d believed that we were being sent there to prevent us from troubling the Romans, not because the Romans wanted us to deal with trouble from someone else. Priscus, though, had come to collect us with the assumption that we were something much closer to auxiliary troops, that he could appoint his own men to officer us and use us against Rome’s enemies. Facilis’ letter revealing how dangerous we could be had horrified him. From what I’d overheard in Bononia I knew that there were more Sarmatian troops to come. That did not suggest a province entirely at peace.
What were we going to do? The tribunes had said nothing whatever about that, almost certainly out of deliberate policy. Julius Priscus had carefully avoided showing us how many men he actually had in Dubris. At the tribunal he’d appeared with just the three tribunes and twenty of his dispatch riders: I guessed that Facilis had come on his own. Probably that meant the legate did not have many men with him. A handful of men from his legion, then, and fifteen hundred of us to move: he would certainly try to keep us ignorant, bewildered, and unsure of our directions, dependent upon himself and his officers not just for guidance but for the means of life. We had been given our weapons back-a thing I suspected the legate now regretted-but we were not Roman soldiers yet by any means. We were barbarians, and would be kept ignorant of everything we had no immediate need to know.
I could imagine the Romans busily writing letters at the naval base. Planning where we would go, how we would journey there, what we would eat on the way; alerting other troops to our movements in case there was trouble. I had no desire whatever to take advantage of the lack of guards, but I wanted some control over what was to be done with my friends, my followers, and myself.
The following day, when I’d checked that the wagons and horses were ready for the journey to Eburacum and that we were well provisioned, I took my horse, shooed off my bodyguard, and set out into the town looking for Lucius Javolenus Comittus.
I found him at his quarters in the naval base-a couple of small rooms at the end of one of the barracks blocks. He appeared himself at my knock, looking tousled, bad-tempered, and, when he saw me, surprised.
“Oh!” he said. “Lord Ariantes. Uh… I was just planning the itinerary for our troop.”
“That is what I have come about,” I replied. “May I speak with you, Lucius Javolenus?”
“Uh… yes, yes, of course! Come in out of the rain.”
I unsaddled and tethered my horse, and limped in. The room was stone and narrow; I disliked the cold, enclosed feel of it intensely. Comittus had moved a desk underneath the window, to get the light, and it was littered with parchment, tablets, and sheets of wood.
“Thank you for the dinner last night,” said Comittus.
“It was our pleasure. I have come, Lucius Javolenus, because I thought perhaps I could be of help. When my lord the procurator Natalis was trying to gather supplies for us, he allowed me to check his lists, and I found that he had much misjudged what was needed. He ordered wheat, and my men have complained at eating grain all the way from Aquincum. They are not used to it; it makes their teeth hurt, they say.”
“Oh!” Comittus exclaimed in alarm, and picked up one of the sets of tablets. “I’ve ordered it, too. Don’t you eat wheat at all?”
“Some, a little, to thicken a stew or make flat cakes. But in our own country we eat mostly meat-fresh and dried beef, mutton, and horsemeat-and milk and cheese from mares, sheep, and cattle. Now, I understand you do not eat horses or drink mare’s milk, but dried and salted beef is easily obtained, as is cheese. Would it be possible to replace a part of the order for wheat with orders for some of these things?”
We were soon going over what supplies would be collected where. Comittus made some effort to cloud the itinerary, and referred to “supply depot one, supply depot two,” and so on, but I gathered we would reach the provincial capital, Londinium, on the third day of the journey, pick up more supplies four days later somewhere to the north, and two days later again would be at a place called Lindum, which was Comittus’ home: Eburacum was three days’ ride north of that. “And there we will stop?” I asked.
“Well, not us,” he replied, “That is, we’ll stop briefly, but.. I wasn’t supposed to tell you this.”
“Why is it secret? Are we not meant to know that the three dragons will be split up?”
“Deae Matres! How did you know that?”
I was honestly surprised. “We have been sure from the beginning that we would be posted to different camps as soon as we arrived at our destination. All along you have feared to have too many of us together. When we left Aquincum there was some question whether our group was not too large to be safely contained on the journey.”
Comittus laughed. “So much for secrets!”
“That was not much of one,” I said. “Come, you are supposed to ‘advise’ me, or so you said. Can I not even know where I am to be posted?”
He laughed again. “Very well! You’d certainly know anyway in a few days’ time. You and I and our company will go on to Cilurnum, on the Wall; Gatalas’ dragon goes to Condercum, which is also on the Wall; and Arsacus’ stays in Eburacum.”
“What is this ‘Wall,’ then?”
Comittus pulled the sheet of parchment out from under the tablets and spread it on top of them. “Look,” he said, pointing, and I looked and saw a meaningless huddle of lines, with the tiny black scratches of writing scattered about them. “Here’s Eburacum,” he went on-and the lines resolved themselves into a map. I leaned over it, frowning and trying to make sense of it. My people use maps, but ours are only lines scrawled to show camps, landmarks, the sun’s position, and days’ riding; Roman maps are different.
“All this territory,” Comittus went on, spreading his hand upward from the blotch that was Eburacum, “belongs to the Brigantes. They’re a big tribe, a bit wild, sheepherders mostly, with some farmers. They’ve caused problems in the past-uprisings. The last was twenty-five years ago, but they’re still not entirely happy with being ruled by Rome-that’s the way the government in Londinium puts it. If you ask me, they’re just annoyed at having to take orders from a lot of southern tribesmen in togas. Anyhow, this”-he enclosed a similar area, above the territory of the Brigantes-“belongs to the Pictish tribes, the Selgovae, the Votadini, and the Novantae. Now, they are nothing but trouble. We pushed the frontier up to here”-he drew a line with his finger above the area he’d just shown me-“and put a line of forts through Pictish territory, but we had nothing but grief from it. They raided, they stole sheep, they sprung ambushes on the men that tried to get them back-and what’s worse, they feuded with the Brigantes behind our backs. So about twelve years ago we dropped the frontier back south to the old wall, the one built by the deified Hadrian, and recommissioned that. That’s the wall we’ll be keeping. It runs from here to here”-he spanned it with his fingers, a line between the Brigantes and the Picts-“with a castle for a few dozen men every mile, a major fort every six miles or so, and a great stone wall, bank, and ditch across every inch. We also have some advance forts beyond the wall, to keep the Picts in order, but they still raid the Brigantes. They think it’s a brave and daring thing to creep up to the Wall in the dead of night, murder the sentries, and slip into the South to steal the property of Romans.”
“They could not bring cattle across a wall in the dead of night,” I said.
“They can get sheep over, though,” said Comittus, “and anything else movable. And slaves.”
I’d forgotten about slaves, of course; I’d never taken any on my own raids across Roman borders.
“They’re allowed through at the forts,” Comittus went on. “They can go to markets in the South, provided they leave their weapons behind and pay a toll. But the raiders have often slipped back through with returning market-goers, hiding their weapons and passing off stolen property as their own. And sometimes the raiders are killed, and that makes trouble, too, because their relatives to the north think we owe them the blood price for the dead. Every now and then there’s a big raid, organized from a mixture of greed and vengefulness, and then troops have to be rushed from all over the Wall to deal with it. That’s why we were so pleased to get heavy cavalry. A few of you could deal with a fairly big raid, and you can move fast. Whenever anything happens, the troops at Eburacum are always too far away.”
“Then you should not keep Arshak at Eburacum.”
“Well…” Comittus said, and coughed with embarrassment.
I looked away from the map. “You mean by that, that Arshak should not have changed his coat yesterday afternoon.”
“Well… yes,” Comittus said, and suddenly gave me a confidential grin.
I looked at the map again, and drew my finger along the line of the Wall. The situation did not seem as bloody as I’d feared in the darkness of the night before. And Arshak might fret angrily in a legionary fortress, but even he would hardly start a mutiny there for lack of bloodshed. “What is this place Cilurnum like?” I asked.
There was a stamp of feet outside and we both looked up to see Flavius Facilis glaring at us red-faced through the window. Absurdly, we both gave a guilty start, like two small boys caught by their father using his bow case to carry frogs.
“Julius Priscus wanted to see you, Tribune,” grated Facilis. “We’re all comparing notes on the itinerary.”
Comittus hurriedly picked up his tablets and went to the door. I followed him.
“He didn’t ask to see you, Ariantes,” Facilis told me, “and I don’t think the tribune did, either.”
“He was giving me advice on what supplies to order,” said Comittus defensively.
“He was digging for information,” corrected Facilis. “Why else would he be slipping in here quietly and leaving his bodyguard behind?”
“Why should I not know things that concern my company?” I asked. “We are soldiers, not prisoners, as the legate himself said. And I thought, Flavius Facilis, that some advice on supplies was needed. I have nineteen men too ill to ride and a whole dragon complaining of sore teeth, to say nothing of nearly thirteen hundred horses with sore feet, because we were not supplied with what we needed on the way from Aquincum.”
I expected an angry response to this. Instead, Facilis looked at me for a long minute, and then declared, “The legate said almost exactly the same thing to me yesterday. There are times, Ariantes, when you’re just like a Roman. What do your men think of it?”
I picked my saddle up from the porch and went to my horse. “I have asked you not to insult me,” I said, putting the saddle on the animal’s back. The shaft had struck flesh, and I was angry.
He gave a snort. “Very well. You want to give your advice to the legate, then?”
“Would I be heard?” I asked bitterly.
“Yes. If you confine yourself to supplies.”
I stopped buckling the saddle.
“Yes, you bastard, he’ll hear you!” Facilis shouted. “He wants you in Eburacum in good shape and ready to fight. He’s keeping me to balance your crew, but he’ll listen to you sooner. Come now, and he’ll probably send you off to arrange your damned supplies-with me to write the letters for you, since he knows I’ll keep my mouth more tightly closed than the tribune.”
“And you would be willing to write the letters for me?” I asked.
He was silent for a moment, still red in the face, still swollen. But his look was one of exasperation with himself, rather than of rage. “Yes,” he said at last. “Yes, I’ll have to work with you, won’t I? You’re going to be here, and you’re going to be sending letters anyway, as soon as you’ve collected that scribe Natalis gave you. And I’m going to be camp prefect in Cilurnum. I can hardly go on hating you. Why should I wear out my heart?”
I began unsaddling my horse again. “We’re not obliged to like each other,” I remarked.
He snorted. “And a good thing, too.”