Dreaming the Eagle (41 page)

‘Maybe.’

‘Who is coming that you are needed in the kitchens?’

He knew the answer. Iccius’ reticence had told him. By asking, he held it at bay that moment longer. Then Iccius said, ‘Amminios is on his way down from Noviodunum with the horses. The visiting prefect - the Roman officer who is buying them - is invited to dinner. He has ordered that we both be in the serving party.’

‘Gods, no.’ It was Amminios’ favourite game, to show off his ‘barbarian savages, tamed to domestic service’. Ban’s head swam and the visions came back, stronger. Dead Iccius stood in front of him, more vividly than the Iccius he held alive in his arms. In Eceni, so the others could not understand, he said, ‘I will kill him.’

He had said it before, and had meant it then, too. Just as last time, Iccius’ vast blue eyes looked up into his. Tears floated on the rims. ‘Then you must swear to kill me first. Ban, please, swear it.’

The child was close to panic. His fingers gripped with the desperation of one dangling over an abyss. Ban held him tightly until he felt a small grunt of pain. When he let go, Iccius said again, ‘Do you swear it? Swear you will kill me. You must!’

‘No.’ He pressed gently over the bruised ribs, trying to ease away the hurt. ‘I could never kill you, you know that.’ He bit his lip. The visions pressed closer, asking for blood. They would not leave unless he gave them something. He said, ‘I swear not to kill Amminios while you live. Will that do?’

There were no words, but it seemed that it would. The hands relaxed their grip on his shoulder and the moment passed. They had walked this circle so often before. If Amminios were to die and there was the slightest shadow of suspicion that his death was not a natural one, every slave in the house would be tortured for information and then crucified, up to and including Braxus. It was the law. In the days after Iccius’ gelding, when it had seemed he might not survive, Ban had stood beneath a full moon and sworn to his ghosts and to Nemain that he would kill Amminios and live long enough afterwards to see the Thracian nailed to the wood. Braxus, somehow, had known it and had ridden the three miles to town himself to bring back the healer to see that the boy lived. She had worked well and the wounds had healed cleanly, but Iccius’ soul had fled and only half of it had come back to live amongst them after.

Ban hugged him again, more peacefully. ‘It is better for you when Amminios is here,’ he said. ‘Braxus will leave you alone and there will be more horses to care for. We can spend the days in the stables and forget about everyone else. Come on. If we are up first, we can let the horses out into the paddocks. It’s always good to watch.’

The morning foreshadowed the rest of the day. The clear skies of dawn clouded over early and the fresh breeze brought a light drizzle that strengthened later to stinging rain. Even so, the horses were at their best. It was a year after his capture before Ban realized that Amminios had taken every word of their conversation on horse breeding and was making it happen. The red Thessalian mare and the dun colt, now grown to adulthood, had formed the foundation of the new stud. The mare had thrown three foals since the landing. The first - the one she had been carrying when they were captured - had not been the white-headed colt of Ban’s dream but it was breathtakingly beautiful none the less. Its hide was perfectly black, streaked at irregular intervals with long, lean patches of white, like liquid moonlight poured on polished jet. Its conformation was close to perfect; the chest was wide between the forelegs to give good space for the heart and lungs, and when it stood its legs were clean-boned and straight with a perfect angle at hock and stifle. It was born in a thunderstorm on the night of the full moon and Ban had felt the gods gather to watch as he had sat in the pouring rain and given the colt its first lick of salt from his hand.

Milo, the stud manager, had not found the new colt beautiful. Milo was Italian, from one of the northern provinces far from Rome, and in his world piebald horses were a bane, a sign of the gods’ impending wrath. He had brought the killing hammer with him on his second round of the morning and it was only the unexpected arrival of Amminios - who had liked the colt’s colouring and seen the promise in its lines - that had stopped him from crushing the newborn skull to pulp.

Milo had nursed his resentment and, when the time came for weaning, had ordered the colt north to Amminios’ second farm at Noviodunum. Ban, bereft, had begged to go with him. Amminios’ refusal had prompted the third and final attempt to escape. News had come afterwards that Milo had recalled the foal, intending to have him slain, but Amminios had forbidden the waste of his future racehorse. The weanling had continued its journey north and there had been no news of it since.

The stud had grown steadily since then. Now in its third year, it boasted two hundred breeding mares with eight stud horses, all in use. The young stock from the last season’s breeding were close to weaning and Ban watched them as a falcon watches her chicks as they balance on the nest’s edge. The red mare’s most recent colt was his most difficult charge. It was a dark, solid chestnut with a white flash between its eyes, too heavy in the bone to be perfect but with the prospect of carrying more weight than its dam when it was older. The problem was one of temperament. The mare’s first two foals had been sharp, as their mother was, but not mean. This one was savage and fought for the sake of it. In the paddocks, it bullied the other foals. In the barns, it struck without warning at those set to handle it. The sire had been Amminios’ choice - he had taken to the good bone and had ignored the wall eye and the vicious temper. Ban had spoken once against it and not wasted his breath after that. He spoke as little as he could to Amminios and only on the topic of horses. They made his life bearable. Were it not for the stud, he would have been harvesting corn or driving bullocks behind a plough. In the worst event, he would have been digging rock for the widening of the road that stretched south from the town towards Lugdunum. The slaves who worked on the chain gangs lived in hell, taking comfort only in the knowledge that they would die before the season’s end. In his bleakest moments, when death seemed a welcome release, the ghost that came most often to Ban was the old elder grandmother, the one he had feared most, cackling a reminder that life could always be worse.

He was carrying water to the troughs in the weanling paddock when he heard Iccius’ cry. The boy was at the barn grooming threeyear-olds for sale. At first Ban thought that the impossible had happened and Iccius had been kicked. That would have turned a bad day into a disaster - even the chestnut with the evil temper had not yet tried to kick Iccius. The second cry was shorter and more despairing and he heard his name couched within it, in Eceni. He threw the water into the trough, dropped the buckets and ran.

It was warm and dry in the barn. The rain had damped the dust and the horses were eating new season’s hay. The air smelled of their breath, sharpened by the wet of their coats. The nearest was a black colt. His hide had been polished until it reflected points of light from the harness mounts hung on the wall.

Iccius stood in a corner, holding a grooming brush, his face awash with terror. Over him stood Godomo, the southern Gaulish freedman who acted as secretary for Amminios and had charge of the farm in his absence. He was a long, servile lizard of a man with one leg shorter than the other and a testicle missing so that he bore a grudge against every whole man who crossed his path. Iccius, who was no longer whole, was his favourite plaything.

‘You will go,’ he said. ‘Braxus commands it.’ His voice had the high pitch and taunt of a starling.

Iccius pressed himself into the brick of the wall. ‘I can’t! I won’t do it. You can’t make me.’

Only one thing aroused in him this level of terror, made him lose his mind to the extent that he would say something so stupid.

Ban stepped in front of him before he could repeat the calumny. To Godomo, he said, ‘It’s the hypocaust, isn’t it? You can’t make him go in there again. It’s not safe.’

‘Ah, the shadow’s shadow.’ The lizard smile stretched far under his cheekbones. Loose strings of saliva threaded the corners. He stepped sideways, back into the line of Iccius’ frozen stare. ‘It’s as safe as it needs to be. The master requires that the baths be working by this evening., It is up to us to make it so. The flue is not drawing air and the fires will not take. There may be an obstruction in the hypocaust.’

‘Then send someone in who knows what they’re doing. Iccius hasn’t the first idea.’

‘Did I just hear you offer to take his place?’

Ban would have done it. The thought of crawling into the blackness with no air and old insects biting at his hands filled him with terror as great as the boy’s, but for Iccius’ sake he would have tried his best. ‘I tried before, in the spring,’ he said. ‘I am too big.’

‘Shame.’ Godomo had known that. He had been there to watch.

‘Then it will have to be the little catamite, who fits. I will count to three. If he is not on his way to the hypocaust by the third count, I will call Braxus.’ He leered. Braxus was his best and only weapon. ‘One …’

They ran together. Braxus was waiting for them at the side of the baths. The entrance to the hypocaust was a small gap an arm’s length across and half as much high, blackened with soot and grime. The walls above it were of thin marble, poorly cut and badly fixed to the stone behind. Up above, weak roof tiles clattered under the rain. Already, they showed cracks at their fixings. In the first frosts of winter, they would shatter.

The whole structure of the baths was a disaster and had clearly been going to be so from the start. The problem was that Amminios trusted Godomo. The lizard-man stood straighter in his master’s presence and his voice was firmer. Moreover, once in a while, at clear cost to himself, he told the truth. Thus, in Amminios’ absence he had been entrusted with the supervision of the project; had been left to handle the budget, which was barely adequate, and had failed signally to restrain himself from creaming off the better portion. The surveyor had followed his lead, and the architect who claimed to be from Rome itself but was not, and the engineers he brought in from the town to ensure the building was up to the highest standard. Every one of them had taken his cut and what was left had not been enough to pay for the materials, never mind the men to build it. Ban himself had been drafted in to help construct the tiled pillars of the hypocaust and lay the floor across them, and the fact that it was the first building work he had ever done, and the first under-floor heating system he had ever seen in his life, had not been considered a handicap.

It should have been. Ban’s part of the floor remained solid; he had the wit to understand what was required of him and a pride that would not let him finish a job badly. Others were less scrupulous, or less competent, and the place had been barely six months from opening when a series of pillars beneath the caldarium had fractured and the floor had subsided. That was when Ban had tried to crawl in to the hypocaust to see the extent of the damage and had failed to worm his way through the gaps between the remaining pillars. Iccius, being smaller, had succeeded.

He was still small enough and there was no question but that he would be sent again; Braxus would do it for spite, whether it was needed or not. The doubt lay in the danger, in how much of the floor had fallen and how much was left to go. Ban ran round to the front door and let himself in.

Inside, every surface shouted colour. There had never been a question of affording mosaic, but the one place Godomo had spent his full allocation was on the glazes for the floor tiles and the artist who had painted the ceilings and walls. The man had worked without pause through the whole of May and the result was considered tasteful to Roman eyes. In the hallway, dolphins in shining turquoise sported with blonde, fair-skinned nymphs with rose-red nipples and gold leaf on their fingertips. Elsewhere, the gods became men, or vice versa. Jupiter became a red-haired Trinovantian, reclining on a couch. Dark-haired, pale-skinned Minerva waited on his bidding. On another wall, a hook-nosed Pan played pipes before a gaggle of blue-eyed virgins. The god’s eyes were pale yellow, like a hawk’s.

Ban pushed through a curtain to the steam room. Here, heroes rode in painted chariots under a citron sun. On the longest wall, Alexander of Macedon grew from his shining, golden childhood to become the armed god-man who tamed the world. In this, the artist had taken other liberties with history: the golden boy-child dancing in the Dionysian groves of his mother was classically Greek, but as he grew older his hair darkened and his features changed until the adult, the world’s greatest general and builder of empires, bore the straggling straw-coloured hair, bulging eyes and weak chin of Gaius, son of Germanicus, for the past three years Emperor of Rome.

The caldarium was musty and damp and a film of early mould spattered the lower walls, staining the yellow of Alexander’s desert sand. Warped benches in white beech lined the walls. Ban followed the line of them to the south-western corner. The last time the floor had collapsed, the first warning sign had been cracks in the plaster between the tiles there. The builder called in to do the repairs had done a good job but he had said more than once that it would have been necessary to demolish the lot and start again to do it properly. He had pointed out the paucity of the foundations and the impossibility of making the pillars of the hypocaust stand firm on weak earth. His prediction, made in Godomo’s hearing, was that the repairs would break down before winter.

He had been right. A single crack, half a finger’s width across, ran in a jagged line from one wall across the corner to the other. Ban traced it with his finger, then prised loose a chunk of plaster at the angle of the floor and the wall to reveal the greater crack beneath it. The floor curtain whispered and booted feet trod heavily the tiling behind him. He turned to see Braxus standing on the threshold, watching. If the overseer had not already noticed the crack, he could not avoid it now. Ban pointed. The Thracian nodded, turned on his heel and strode back out into the rain.