Dreaming the Eagle (57 page)

The men of the legions had seen the danger. The XIVth were fastest to respond but even the probationaries were dashing for their weapons. Ban hesitated, wanting to go to the Crow, but there were tales of what happened to men who deserted in the face of the enemy and he would not have it said he showed fear in the first attack. In any case, the Crow, of all horses, could look after itself.

He was halfway across the parade ground when the horn sounded from the riverside; a long, sighing note with another just after. He sprinted on, trying to remember whether the command to charge had that second shorter note beyond it or if what he had heard was, instead, the order to regroup on the standard. He was at the gates when it sounded again, louder, and the actions of the men around him told him all he needed to know. He clung to the gatepost, doubled up and panting and struggling for breath to speak.

‘He’s stopping us? We’re not to go out to help?’

He asked it of the air and the gods because he had thought Galba neither a coward nor a traitor, but the command did not make sense. Perulla the centurion answered.

‘That’s the “hold firm” they’re sounding. If you want to hear it as the charge, you’re welcome. Myself, I think we should hold firm exactly where we are.’

The centurion was not a tall man - the Romans never were - but he was broad and he wore his parade ground armour as if born to it, the mail shirt long ago moulded to his shoulders and back, wearing thin beneath the arms and in the folds above the belt. He stood upright between the gateposts with his left hand on Ban’s shoulder and his right arm thrust across the opening so that none of his charges, turned dull-witted by the war howl or the promise of action, might throw themselves out.

None of them did. They gathered in a ball behind him instead, crunched together, swaying. Ban was at the head, the unvoted spokesman. ‘What do we do?’ he asked.

Perulla smiled, dryly. It was the first time Ban had seen him do so.

‘You should go to that bloody horse of yours and see if you can shut it up before Gaius orders its throat cut. After that, I think perhaps we might get ourselves in a line and march over to hold firm by the governor’s residence. If we get a move on, we’ll be in place in time to hail our emperor’s courageous victory when he returns from his battle.’

It was Civilis.

Word spread quietly and with care amongst those who had stood along the length of the via principalis and burst their lungs shouting ‘Gaius Germanicus! Gaius Germanicus!’ as their emperor rode past. It filtered down as a disbelieving snigger from the stone-built dormitories of the XIVth to the half-finished wooden huts of the probationaries, gathering credence as it went. Ban was in the remount lines, making the most of the quiet time to settle the Crow. He heard the whisper and chose not to believe it. Rufus arrived to lean on the stone manger at the head of the stall and put him right.

‘Of course it was Civilis. Who else would it be? Not even the Chatti are howling mad enough to cross the river in broad daylight when every sentry’s on knife-edge in case Gaius walks past and finds him asleep on the job. It’s why they stood down the horse guard - half of them are Batavians. They’d have recognized their own kin and pulled away. The Praetorians have had their brains addled by the river; they’d fight their own sisters if the lasses turned up with red hair and swords in their hands. All they needed was the boy at the head cursing them for cowards and they waded in as if their lives depended on it.’

‘Did they kill him?’

‘Civilis? Don’t be daft. He led them a dance up the river, tripped a couple of their horses and dived back into the water with his men. Praetorians don’t swim and the emperor wouldn’t let them try. He had them decorate a few trees to mark the location of his victory the way Caesar did in the old days and rode back in triumph. You know the rest.’

He did. Ban had been one of the many strung along the length of the main street bursting his lungs as the emperor rode past. The euphoria of it had caught him in spite of himself and he had found he wanted to believe that some kind of battle had happened and the enemy had been routed. The reality left him with a sour taste in his mouth.

He turned his attention back to the Crow. There was no knowing why the colt had become so angry but, with time and quiet and no people to harass it, the beast had calmed. Ban took a chance and lifted one hind foot that had seemed hot in the morning. A bruise showed on the sole near the point of the frog. He reached in his belt for a hoof knife and pared away a sliver of horn. Rufus chattered on, talking nonsense about the Chatti and the horse guard and Civilis, who was now, apparently, going to be made prefect of his own Batavian cohort on the strength of his ‘services to the emperor’.

Ban spat onto the sole and rubbed the horn clean with his thumb. The bruise was an old one, nearly grown out, and the heat he had felt, if it had ever been real, had gone. He dropped the foot and eased himself upright, stretching the knots from his spine. The Crow fly-kicked and he dodged without thinking. It was part of the way they were together. He gathered the hoof knives and grooming brushes and, with Rufus, began to walk back up the horse lines towards the camp. He had grown over the winter, and was almost as tall as the Gaul. Walking beside him, he was pleased with the difference. If Rufus noticed, he said nothing and they crossed the empty parade ground in silence.

It was not yet evening. The sun slanted from the west, casting long shadows across the packed earth. Ban pushed open the gates to the compound and stood back to let the Gaul go in ahead of him, asking, as he did so, the question that had been burning in his mind since the imperial visit began. ‘Do you think we’ll go to war? Perulla was saying he thought it would happen this summer; that if Galba could promise to secure the frontier against the Chatti, Gaius would build a fleet and sail for Brit—’

He stopped because Rufus had stopped, and Rufus had stopped because Perulla was waiting on the other side of the gate, with Civilis and a trio of the emperor’s horse guard behind him. Ban tasted bile in the back of his throat.

Perulla stepped forward. He raised his right hand in a salute that made no sense.

‘Ban son of Eburovic? Hostage of the Eceni?’

Ban felt the air leave him. Not since Cunobelin’s dun had he been so addressed, and never in Latin. Rufus jabbed an elbow at his arm. He nodded. His voice was lost.

‘Your presence is required by the emperor.’

‘Now?’

‘Immediately.’

The horse guard flanked him. He no longer felt himself tall.

Until that moment, he had believed Amminios’ new bath house to be the epitome of Roman ostentation. Then he stepped through the doors of the governor’s residence at Moguntiacum and his memories fell to dust. He walked too fast down wide, airy corridors, past unblemished marble and skin-smooth plaster, treading on sweeping, lyrical mosaics. Amminios had done his best to ape his adopted culture and fallen so very short. He had aspired to display his wealth and had, instead, displayed its absence. Here, in Galba’s mansion, restraint was everything, fuelled by wealth beyond measure. It showed in every perfect line and arch, in the marble busts of the ancestors settled in their alcoves and the single springing athlete in bronze. Colour was used with subtle elegance; the floor mosaics mingled fluid blues and greys and aquamarines so that Ban walked on running water with Neptune at its heart. On the walls above, a single narrow-banded frieze ran at head height along the length of the corridor. Achilles slew Hector, Scipio vanquished Hannibal, Octavian destroyed Antonius. They passed one after the other in flashes, separated by the heads of the guards.

They came to a double door of yew, carved with the pegasus and boar locked together, symbols of the XIVth and XXth legions. The guards halted, not quite in step. The tribune of the Praetorian Guard saluted. Nobody spoke. Ban might have thought himself suddenly deaf but for the trickle of water from a fountain somewhere close by and the cackle of two cockerels fighting in the world beyond the walls.

The tribune knocked once. The door swung open. The room beyond was quite different from those through which they had passed. Restraint had been abandoned in favour of an opulence Amminios would have recognized. Silks in scarlet and gold adorned the walls. The fountain Ban had heard from outside sang in the far corner, playing water onto golden dolphins. A dais had been raised on the northern wall and the chair standing on it had lions carved into the arm rests and an eagle above the back.

The emperor wore purple and the cuirass of gold with scenes of Alexander’s victories in relief across it. Eight men of the Praetorian Guard, in scarlet and polished armour, stood in pairs on either side. Other men, not in armour, stood ready to take notes. One, with the look of a Greek, was permitted to sit. Behind them, Galba stood below the emperor’s right hand and to his left, still and tense, stood Corvus.

They brought Ban to the foot of the dais, so that he would have to crane his neck upwards if he wished to see Gaius properly. Noone had ever schooled him in the manners of address to an emperor, or even whether it was permitted to look him in the eye. Ban gazed at the legs of the chair. They ended in carved leopard’s feet, with the claws extended. He did not look up.

‘This is the Briton? The hostage who would fight for Caesar, as the Gauls did for our honoured ancestor of that name?’ The voice was deeper and less brittle than his reputation suggested, more the adult than the spoiled child.

Corvus answered him. ‘My lord, yes. He is of the Eceni, who hold land to the north of that held by the late Cunobelinos.’

The emperor was familiar, it seemed, with the politics of Britannia. He raised a brow and nodded. ‘His name?’

‘My lord, he has no Roman name as yet; it will be given only when he receives his posting. In his own land, he is called Ban, which means white in the tongue of Hibernia, the island where he was conceived. His mother had a dream of a white-headed horse on the night of his birth and he was named for it.’

Ban stared at the leopard’s feet. In his head, he counted the toes over and again. In all of his life, he had heard his mother’s birth-dream related only twice: once to himself in the summer after Hail was born and he had his own horsedream, and then again by the first elder grandmother, shortly before she died. Only Macha could have told Corvus. Or perhaps Luain mac Calma, who knew too much and spoke too freely … Hibernia, where he was conceived … His mother had not told him that. He searched for Iccius to ask if it was true and failed to find him. A stranger’s voice washed over him.

‘… Does he not hear? Or perhaps he does not understand? Tell me he speaks Latin. It is enough that we recruit barbarians into our forces. I will not have it if they do not speak a civilized language.’

‘My lord, he understands—’

‘I speak Latin.’ Ban raised his head and looked into the stone-still face of Galba, governor of Upper Germany, whose eyes, famously, were of a blue to match the mosaic of his floors. Beside the governor, Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, Emperor of Rome and all its provinces, sighed through pinched nostrils and snapped his fingers, and Ban felt his head turn to the sound as a hound to its master’s whistle so that, whether it was permitted or not, he stared up into the dense, clouded gaze of the emperor.

‘White. Very good, for one so black.’ There was amusement there, and so much more. The eyes and the voice and the light, curving smile all spoke differently. Ban watched the eyes with their promise of death and let the voice sweep past. ‘They tell me you are a prince among your people. Is that true?’

He felt the fraction of Corvus’ nod and said, ‘My lord, it is almost true. My sister was firstborn of the royal line.’ He could have said, I once thought I would be warrior to her dreamer, but it would have made no sense here. ‘We do not accord ourselves princes as Rome does. I would have been a warrior in my sister’s war host, and perhaps if I had daughters and the other branches of the royal line were to wither, one of them would take her place.’

‘A warrior. Indeed.’ The eyes flayed his mind. Pain sat at the seat of them, as well as murder. Ban could feel the colours of it, and the pressure behind his own eyes. It was said this man had been a hero, much beloved of his people until an illness struck him down and he became a tyrant. One could imagine what such pain as this, if it were constant, might do to one already drunk on too much power.

His brows were gold, paler than his hair. They arched with practised precision, fair warning of a change in temper. He licked his lips, leaving them too red. With shock, Ban realized they were painted. The emperor asked, ‘Have you won honours in battle?’

‘My lord, I have fought only one battle and I was taken … hostage at the height of it. Before that, I killed two men in fair combat and it was witnessed by my sister. Were she not dead, she would attest to it.’

‘And you would become a warrior for Rome?’

‘My lord, yes. It is an honourable choice.’

The emperor laughed. Half a heartbeat behind, Galba, Corvus and the attending clerks laughed with him. The Greek - if rumour was correct, he was a freedman of Tiberius’, passed on to his successor - leaned forward and whispered in the ear of his liege. The emperor nodded and flicked his hand. Whatever had been said was already decided, but the man was a favourite to be indulged in public, not dismissed. The cavernous eyes narrowed. They drew the life from those they touched, leech-like. Ban, who had thought himself already a husk, felt himself become feather-light under their gaze. The painted lips smiled, thinly.

‘We, too, were held hostage, in this very country, by men of the First and Twentieth. In time, they will pay for their temerity, but it made of us a warrior. Thus we look favourably on your path of honour, for we know, as you do not, that service in the armies of Rome is the greatest honour available to any man, and that soon the opportunities to win praise in battle will be manifold. Already those who fight to preserve us have been rewarded. You may have heard of our skirmish yesterday …’ He paused, giving Ban time to nod and those others around him to make gestures of awe and mild reproof at a famous victory reduced to a skirmish. Throughout the room, men who had risked their lives in real battles murmured their approval.