Eagle in the Snow (8 page)

“Explain what, man?”

“We come from Remi, excellency. We were told by the curator of the city that the noble emperor, Honorius, has need of men for the army. If we go to Italia to take up arms we shall receive money and, when the war is over, our freedom.”

I read the paper and passed it to Quintus who did not say a word. Now I understood Stilicho’s agitation that last night in my tent. Things must be desperate indeed for Honorius to make an offer that had never been made before by any emperor of Rome in all its history, save only Marcus Aurelius.

I smiled, and my cavalry sheathed their swords as though at a command.

“And what will you do when you have gained your freedom?”

“I shall buy a small farm, excellency, and if it prospers then I shall be able to afford slaves to work it instead of my family.”

I turned to watch them pass. As I did so I wondered how many of them would survive to enjoy the freedom of which they dreamed and which they, who had never known it, believed to be so wonderful.

A fortnight later we reached our destination and, leaving my legion to make camp outside the walls, I rode through the south gate into a city that was bigger and grander than any I had ever seen. I have often wondered since how it compared with Rome. The south and north gates, known familiarly to all legionaries as Romulus and Remus, were staggering in their size; over a hundred feet high as near as I could judge; their twin arches containing gates that three men, standing on each other’s shoulders, could not have seen over. Built of massive white sandstone blocks they were monuments that would endure for ever to the patience, industry and technical skill of the military engineers who had made them. Each had three upper floors around a square with a courtyard between the gates, and could house a cohort without difficulty. But they were more than gates: they were fortresses in which garrisons could still hold out even though the city itself had fallen.

The city was crowded and we trotted down the broad street with its shops, its fountains and its red sandstone buildings, across the forum, forcing a way through the crowds, the cattle, the ox-carts and the traders’ stalls, while the people stood back to gape at us as we passed. They looked clean and well-fed and smiling and I was glad at last to be in a town whose citizens had some heart in them. But I noticed a number of young men whose right hands were covered in bloody bandages, and this struck me as curious. I wondered if there had been rioting in the city when they heard of our coming. The army was never popular when it came to a city or a town. The people bitterly resented having troops billeted on them, but we were used to that. On down the road past abandoned temples, some half pulled down; children and dogs all over the arcaded pavements; and then right, towards the Basilica where the Curator and two officials of the governor’s staff were awaiting us. With them were the members of the Council: the civic magistrates, the quaestors responsible for finance, one or two senators (but that was only a term now for a man of wealth and dignity) and the minor officials in charge of docks, public buildings and the granaries, the factories and the aqueducts. In a group, to one side, formidable in their appearance, stood the christian bishop and his priests.

The Curator was a sharp-faced man named Artorius, about half my age, and with a nervous manner that concealed the efficiency with which he managed his own affairs. He apologised for the absence of the Praetor—the governor—who was on a visit to the Dux Belgicae in the north. He regretted, too, the absence of the Praefectus Praetorio of Gaul who must have been detained by pressure of work at Arelate, for he had promised to be here if he could. He himself had not, however, been warned of my coming, save by the arrival of my own advance party.

I was so tired that I scarcely heard him and, when the formalities had been concluded, moved on to the north gate, Romulus, which was to be my headquarters.

“Well?” said Quintus, unlacing his helmet in the large room on the second floor that I had decided would suit me best. “We are here. When do we start?”

“To-morrow.”

“I did not like that bishop.”

“Nor I. We shall have to be careful or we may offend him.”

“Pagans.”

“Of course.”

We both laughed.

“Must we start so soon?”

“Yes. The sooner the troops are split into their camps and at work, the better. If everything remains quiet they can be sent back to Treverorum on leave in groups.”

“Don’t you trust them any longer?” He glanced at me with a guarded expression on his face.

I hesitated. “They have not been paid in months and it will take time to get money out of this over-taxed province.”

“We have had no trouble so far. They were glad to leave Italia.”

“Yes. There, they were part of an army. Here, they are the army. Their sense of their own importance may swell if they have too much leisure.”

I leaned out of the window and watched the sentries of the auxilia leaning on their spears while the customs officials checked, with unusual thoroughness, a waggon train of supplies waiting to enter the city. The merchant owner was expostulating bitterly, both at the delay and at the charges he was expected to pay.

I turned my head. “It is odd that so many were absent whom I expected to meet here.”

“But their reasons were good.”

“Oh, yes, excellent. Our young Curator forgot to mention only what had kept the General of Gaul away.”

Quintus said reprovingly, “You mean the Magister Equitum per Gallias. He will be offended if you call him less.”

“They change the titles so often I find it hard to keep up with them.”

“He will have a good excuse, no doubt. Perhaps he was hurt boar hunting. It is a sport I believe he is keen on.”

“Perhaps.”

Quintus said anxiously, “Don’t look for trouble, Maximus. Except the governor, they are all appointments of Stilicho. We shall get all the help we need. I am certain of it.”

I frowned. I said, “I hope you are right.”

Later, we stood in the Cardo Maximus behind Romulus, watching the cavalry groom their horses while the stall-holders watched us with resentful curiosity.

“We shall have to move them to-morrow or the good citizens of this city will never forgive us.”

“Naturally.”

I turned and looked at Romulus. Through these gates, like a steel sword, slipped the great military road that ran to Moguntiacum, once the supply town for the abandoned Limes on the east bank of that river I now had to defend. There at Moguntiacum the road ended on a broken bridge. And beyond were the green woods, thick and impenetrable, wet with rain in winter and heavy with scent in summer, in whose shelter lived those peoples whom we of Rome had never conquered. This was the road down which Quinctilius Varus had gone to lead three legions to defeat and death in the Teutoburg forest. It was along this road that countless legates had marched at the head of their men on their way to the east and the barbarian darkness beyond. It was a road to nowhere.

The next day we rode round the city on a tour of inspection. As befitting the capital of a province that once had sheltered the emperors of Rome, it still bore the signs of great luxury and great wealth. But, even here, one could see and feel the marks of that decay which, like the rot-holes in a piece of wood, were eating the heart out of city life.

The town stood on the east bank of the Mosella, a wide, lazy river that crept indolently, like a snake in the summer sunlight, between steep banks and sheer cliffs until it joined the Rhenus. Outside the west gate, which was another Romulus in size, stood the bridge, and the road beyond coiled and shifted its way to Colonia, a small garrison town on the west bank of the Rhenus. Below the bridge there were docks and warehouses where, in the old days, the Rhenus fleet that escorted the troop transports on their long voyage to Britannia, would put in for repairs or lie up during the winter months when the loose ice that swept down the main river made navigation too dangerous for safety. Now, only a few merchant ships were tied up, loading their cargoes of wine, while the slim hulks of the warships rotted upon the hard till they were stripped bare by the poor in search of free timber for their fires.

“We could do with a fleet to patrol the river,” I said.

“They couldn’t build them in time.”

“No. But we might do something with the boats belonging to our fat merchant friends down there. One of the tribunes in the third cohort was on the Saxon Shore for a time. I forget his name—Gallus, yes that’s it. Get hold of him and put him in charge.”

I looked at the skyline. The city was hemmed in by hills on every side. Like a rabbit in a bear pit, I thought.

“Is it all like this?”

“Yes, sir,” said the decurion who had arrived the week before with the advance party. “The whole district is a mass of hills and tiny valleys. Most of them are only connected by straggling paths. Each valley has its own village. And that usually means only a cluster of timbered huts and a handful of goats.”

The hills were formidable, their lower slopes lined with vine orchards. Above the vines were outcrops of rock and thick scrub and above them, higher still, the hills were thick with trees, while forests of pine covered their rounded crests like the dark caps worn by Jewish traders.

“At least we shall not die thirsty,” said Quintus, carefully. He was thinking of the wine that was sold in fat barrels in the forum market and then sent by ox-cart to all the distant parts of Gaul.

“I shall want the legion to parade to-morrow in the Circus Maximus for their orders. It will impress the city. We shall need more horses. Some of ours are only fit as remounts.”

Quintus said, “Don’t worry about that. The Treveri are famous horse breeders. I met one this morning and he asked if I needed animals. I told him I had eighteen hundred and he grinned and said, ‘You have brought owls to Athens.’”

The decurion asked, “When will you see the officers?”

“At the third hour. I will give my orders then.”

The city walls stood nearly twenty-five feet high and were ten feet thick. Not even our Wall—the Wall of Hadrian—had been so great. I never heard of a city in my life that had walls like this. The limestone wall, supported at intervals by guard towers (there were forty-seven of them) had been badly damaged in the great disaster of 278 and the scars still showed. Great gaps that had been torn in the original stone were now filled in with crude messes of rubble taken from damaged buildings and then hastily cemented together.

We rode round on our tour of inspection and it was obvious at once that, massive as these fortifications were, the city was too large to defend without a larger force than I could afford to leave behind. I had no intention of being trapped within its walls. On the east side was the amphitheatre, sited between the walls, and capable of holding twenty thousand people at a popular show. It was regularly cursed by the christian priests as a place of abomination but, in this respect, so I was told, their views had little effect upon the passions of the populace. In addition to the amphitheatre entrance there was yet a fifth gate to the south-east, of the same size as the others and equally impressive in appearance.

On our return to Romulus we rode through the district where the majority of the temples had once stood; temples to Jupiter, to Victory, to Epona, to Diana and to other gods, many of them local deities of whom I had never heard. Some had been pulled down and christian churches erected in their place. Others had been abandoned and were slowly being stripped of their stone for the building of dwelling houses, while the bishop and the priests looked on and approved. Quintus and I looked at each other but said nothing. What was there to say? The great statue of Victory in Rome itself, which had been for six hundred years the very spirit of my people, had now been cast out and it was forbidden by imperial edict to worship in the old way, each man according to his own desires, each man following his own path to the heart of his existence. But I—I was too old to change. I, who had prayed to her god that she might live. I was a part of the old Rome, and I should be dead myself if I proved a bad general. Meanwhile the new Rome still had a use for me.

I had made a map in sand upon the floor and the officers of my legion, my tribunes and my centurions, stood round it in a half circle while I pointed with a long stick and told them what must be done.

“It is a triangle,” I said. “At the apex is this city which will be our supply base and my official headquarters, though I shall use it very little. The garrison will consist of two cohorts and a cavalry squadron. You, Flavius, will be in command and the auxiliaries, too, will take their orders from you. You will provide guards for all gates and flank towers, as well as the dockyards and public buildings. Gallus, I want you to take over the dockyard. You will be in charge of our fleet. I will discuss the details with you later. I intend to establish a river patrol which can check infiltration by boats or rafts and which can land patrols on the east bank of the Rhenus if need be.”

“How many ships, sir?” asked Gallus.

“Six. One for each fort.”

I went on to explain what I wanted and I was conscious, all the while that they listened intently, that they were waiting for something to happen. I looked at Quintus and I knew that he knew, too. I might guess at it but Quintus was in the secret.

At the end when they had asked their questions and I had answered them, the Chief Centurion stepped forward.

“May I speak, sir?”

“Yes, Aquila. You intend to anyway.”

“The men have not been paid—”

“I explained all that. Within two months at most they will have all their arrears.”

“It has been a long march from Italia, sir, and now they are to go straight into camp fortification work without leave.”

“They had six months, drinking themselves silly outside Ravenna and Ticinium.”

“They thought they were going home, sir.”

“Have they homes?” I asked. “They left wives and families in Britannia and they left wives and families in Italia. Which particular home do they want to go to now?”