B007IIXYQY EBOK (85 page)

When he made out the letters of the third name,
“Tertul”
—and
knew it must be Tertullus—he felt a cold hand close round his heart.

He quickly lit extra lamps to better see. Then he rubbed charcoal over the paper to highlight the indentations left by the quill. It meant he would have to destroy the book; he prayed time would elapse before Domitian noticed it was missing, which would reduce the possibility the theft would be connected with him. If not, he would have to contrive some excuse for its fate.

The first two names were those of Fabianus and Serenus, whose deaths he already counted gravely suspicious—and then that of Tertullus.

It seemed far too great a burden for coincidence that the first three men on this list were dead. Nevertheless, for long moments he fought the inevitable conclusion: that this was the impression of a letter directed to some accomplice, possibly Veiento or someone in the Guard, listing men who were to die.

He was suddenly certain not Veiento but Domitian himself had arranged for the incriminating speech to be found on Tertullus. He envisioned some anonymous ruffian enlisted for the task; doubtless the fellow brushed past Tertullus in a thick crowd and slipped the speech into the folds of his toga. The next two names were illegible to him. The last was
“Satur.”
Again he felt the touch of an icy hand.
Saturninus.
Who else?

The world seemed to melt in sadness and horror. This was the final betrayal, one that could not be overlooked. His thoughts flashed from Domitian’s occasional fits of guilt, seemingly so heartfelt, to this shameless, premeditated murder. It made no sense. How could two such diverse sentiments be contained within one mind?

He must be stopped. He must be stopped violently. We the living must arrange it before our own time comes
.

But what a task, one to make kings shy off.

It cannot be done without the aid of my peers—and if I approach the wrong man, my own life is done. It cannot be brought about without the support of the Senate and the Praetorian Guard. And most importantly it cannot be arranged without first selecting an heir all will agree upon—or the atrocities that followed Nero’s fall will be repeated and the world will once again erupt into civil war.

I will need at once to begin enlisting help.

Restlessly he paced, scarcely breathing; once he paused before the marble bust of his father that he had brought with him from Rome. On this night that worried, well-meaning face gave no comfort; the old man seemed to mock him for thinking he could bind a tyrant with reason.

The bust was still crowned with a garland of wildflowers, dried now, that he had placed there on his father’s birthday. Reverently he removed the garland, taking up the brown petals as they fell. He heard his father saying to him on that long-ago day when they were reunited,
“Learn to bend… or perish.”

Forgive me. I knew then I could not, nor would I ever.

His hand went to the amulet of earth at his throat, the sacred mold that had once restored him to his father. At the same time he looked into the twin flames of his lamp. After a few moments he felt a strong and steady upwelling of calm, a clarity of mind.

A year had elapsed between the first two deaths, he realized. Apparently Domitian was in no great hurry. He would have time to plan.

Here I am on the border of dark and light, the one check on a rational madman who painstakingly rewrites the laws with one hand while he murders in the dark with the other.

Domitian, tyrant and friend—how could you put this on me? You kept not one promise to me. I thought I could soften your blows. It seems I can, but then you turn about and strike another crueler one soon as I’ve turned round.

I’ve never seen a duty more clearly. You leave me no choice but to plan your death. And it shall be done if it takes years—I swear it on my father’s tomb.

CHAPTER XXIV

O
N THE FOLLOWING DAY
M
ARCUS
J
ULIANUS
crossed the Rhine bridge with an escort of ten cavalrymen and galloped northeast toward the line of battle, following the arrow-straight assault road cut by the Eighth Augusta. The drumming of hooves intensified his sense of urgency and his mind ran ahead of the horses as he considered whom he should approach first to lay the groundwork for conspiracy. But after an hour’s riding the forest’s regal peace quietly overwhelmed him, undermining rational thought, stirring old dreams. From the first he had allied himself with this land against his own people. The country about seemed almost feminine, and it seemed to mourn. The hips of gentle hills veiled modestly in mist, the sweep of changeable sky, had a proud, enigmatic beauty. The slender pines reached out piteously, begging help, struggling to claim his attention. There rose again that haunting feeling, elusive as ground mist, that something here was in need of his protection.

When their mounts were well lathered and began to tire, the road abruptly widened. A V-shaped trench and low palisade appeared at his right—part of the rectangular fortifications of the temporary legionary marching camp. Beyond, he caught sight of the neat, regular rows of the common soldiers’ goat-hide tents and at the camp’s center, the grander headquarters tent. On his left loomed a platform of logs topped with a haycock; here a bonfire could be lit in time of emergency. Ahead they heard volleys of sharp shouts, the cracking of axes into trees, the rustling rush of their falling. They passed mule-drawn carts loaded with turf-cutting tools and lines of soldiers carrying baskets of earth. At last the road stopped at a wall of soaring pines. Here two thousand men—approximately one third of the Eighth Legion—were set at various tasks, directed by twenty-four centurions on horseback. Working in full armor, helmets slung across their chests, some felled trees while others stood as sentries or guarded the baggage train; some rested while others dragged brush, stacking it to a man’s height at the roadside to act as a protective barrier in case of attack. Parties of cavalrymen attached to the legion moved through the trees, searching out ambushes and determining the lay of the land ahead. From somewhere came the sound of a rushing stream. Work progressed swiftly. Everywhere was a sense of taut expectancy—the air about him seemed ready to send lightning. Julianus was keenly aware of being at the edge of the world. The Chattians, unseen, were yet a powerful, brooding presence, looming high as the pines, waiting, watching.

Julianus suspected then that Domitian had a second, unspoken purpose for sending him here: The Emperor wanted him to view firsthand his success—to see the extent of the ground so swiftly taken, to appreciate the thoroughness of his strategy.

The legion’s First Centurion, Valerius Festus, rode to meet him; he was a roughened veteran of silent mien, with the look of one who was well-intentioned but inflexible, a man past middle years whose hair was flecked with iron gray. He was visibly unnerved by this unexpected arrival of so illustrious an emissary from the Emperor. Julianus swiftly made rounds of the camp, deliberating long over the catapults of various design mounted on their mule-drawn carts. Regulus, the legionary commander of whom Domitian was so suspicious, was not prepared to greet him. Julianus was given some hasty-sounding reason, but he saw wreaths cast on the ground and other evidence of minor celebration—a senior officer’s birthday, perhaps—and guessed Regulus was nursing himself back to health in the dark and quiet of his tent. Such petty infractions did not interest him. When he inquired why four cohorts were missing, he was told they were sent to aid the men of the Eleventh Claudia who were clearing a parallel assault road five miles to the west, where their progress had been slowed by a landfall. All seemed to have been carried out with predictable propriety, with permission obtained and documents signed. Generally all looked much as it should, though he knew he would have a difficult time convincing Domitian of this.

At the last he asked to be taken to the native hill fort. Valerius Festus rode with him through a quarter mile of forest and brush, then Julianus looked upward. The freshly destroyed Chattian hill fort lay in reproachful silence atop the Taunus crest, a blackened structure nearly camouflaged by pines.

He was seized unexpectedly with quiet horror. It was as though the crystal air purified perception and he was sharply aware that this was a place of final refuge, a scene of dark and barbarous tragedy.

“Was it taken without battle?” Julianus asked, realizing his tone was too hushed, as if he spoke near a tomb.

“Well, it was nothing I
would call battle,” Festus replied, concealing an expression of puzzlement. “A few females and their young had to be rooted out and destroyed, that was all.”

Julianus wheeled his horse about. “I’ll be back directly—I mean to have a look at it.”

“You mean to go alone?”
A look of sharp alarm came to Festus’ eyes. “That is unwise. There would be no way for me to guarantee your safety.”

“I’ll have to guarantee my own then.”

Before the First Centurion could raise another objection, Julianus urged his horse to a canter and started climbing the twisting path cut through scrub pine that led to the hill fort’s gate. He did not know why he felt so little fear; it was as though he shared some uncanny understanding with the enemy, as if their minds and his were somehow conjoined. For no reason he could name he touched the amulet of earth through the cloth of his tunic, haunted by an obscure sense it had somehow brought him to this place.

He felt he ascended into another world, a wise, old gentle one whose wisdom lay in its millennial patience. He felt the closeness of the
genius loci
itself—the spirit of the place. She was an ancient hag who was yet young, with sad, watery eyes and masses of grassy hair that never knew a comb, a being formed of earth and chill air. The wind was her garments whipping about exultantly, pulling him urgently one way then another, but it was also her ardent soul, animating the surface of waters, pooling in unknown valleys, lifting the swan, carrying the ashes of the dead, hurrying the rain, a wind never held and fouled by cities.

A goshawk shot up from behind the palisade of the fort and glided toward him silently with an occasional bat of a wing, a sentry of nature’s gods come to have a close look at him. He felt the
genius loci
accepted him.

As he came closer, he saw the palisade had half fallen in one place, hanging loose like flayed flesh. The gate had been forced by burning—legionary battering rams were of little use against the hill forts of the northern forests; the native forts’ earth-and-timber construction rendered them too resilient to be vulnerable to the heavy blows of a ram. Within, he heard a flapping of multitudes of wings as if in an aviary; the place was alive with many varieties of birds come to peck at the spilled grain streaming from a broken bin by the gate.

As always the dead nourish the living, he thought, filled with the sense he ascended not to a crushed enemy fort but to a temple of the mysteries, one immeasurably old, formed out of earth in some natural eruption, a place of the intersection of death and life. In seeking the mysteries we go underground or to the high places; is it, he wondered, because the vast stillness there leaves loud the rustle of spirits?

He rode through the gate, sensing injured presences crowding the air. He could see straight through the broken fort to the hazed, violet hills beyond. He saw at once no weapons were stockpiled here, and he had expected none. But Domitian had a greater enemy here: Nature itself with its rambling, rebellious growth would ever be troublesome to kings.

With a sure eye he appreciated the hill fort’s straightforward design, sadly aware this, to the world, was not architecture at all but the work of beasts, comparable to a bird’s nest or a beaver’s dam. Near the grain bin was a well, its source drained off by the Eighth Augusta’s engineers; about it the earth was packed hard where ring-dances had been performed.

A dark and terrible stench came with a shift in the wind. He looked toward a timber shelter at the back of the fort. In the sun-dappled gloom was a confusion of corpses—three women, a boy and an infant who had died clinging to one another. Nothing could prepare a man for the look of this, the boundless terror frozen in those faces, the mother’s stiff white hand still protectively round the child. The blood was black. Their eyes were open. He fought a need to close the eyes of the babe, to protect it from the sight of what it beheld at the last. Their weapons were a cookpot, still in the hand of one of the women, and a barrel stave. All had been efficiently gutted with the stabbing point of a legionary short sword.

He trembled, fearing the monstrousness of it would bring him to his knees. Nausea gripped him.

Most men would call this faintheartedness. I call it knowledge. It is my curse to know
what it is to be thought not human, to be thought a thing fit only for work or slaughter.

He had a desire not to leave this place; here he could let life unravel until he found its source. In such a place he could live as human creatures were meant to live, not immured behind wall upon wall with musty books that were copies of copies written by men who never saw the things of which they wrote. Every leaf about him seemed a volume in its niche, every trill of wind the voice of a philosophical teacher.