Island of Ghosts (16 page)

“I would have thought that you would . . . like her better yourself, Flavius Facilis,” I finished instead. “Perhaps she is, as you say, trying to manage us.”

“Perhaps she is,” he agreed. “But I don’t believe that any more than you do. Maybe it’s just because I’m a stranger here, and notice things the others take for granted. And, I admit, there’s another reason, which is no reason at all to suspect a woman of . . . whatever. I don’t like the way she treats that little girl she has to do her hair. I could hear it, at Natalis’ house and here as well. ‘Please, my lady, I didn’t mean to, my lady, please, no, please . . .’ and the sound of the damned woman using the stick.”

“What had the girl done?” I asked, shocked.

“Nothing. Got a curl out of place when she did her mistress’s hair, or brought washing water that was cold. Crack, crack, crack, and the girl sobbing. Can’t be more than sixteen. I wouldn’t treat a healthy young recruit that way, let alone a skinny little girl—and one that’s pregnant too, by the look of her. It makes me sick. Where’s your slave?”

“You need not ask that now, Facilis, in the same breath,” I told him, in a low voice, beginning to be angry. “He is in Londinium, shopping and visiting friends.”

He looked at me a moment longer. “No,” he said, finally, “I shouldn’t have said that in the same breath. You wouldn’t hit a slave. Even that business in Budalia” (the rope and dagger incident) “shows that. You wouldn’t cut down a man that had dropped his sword and was using his shield as a stretcher for a wounded friend, either.”

“Who says that I have?” I demanded, now openly angry.

“No one. One of you bastards did—but I guess it wasn’t you.” He turned and stalked back toward the house, slashing at the weeds along the road with his vine-stalk baton.

I remounted Farna and cantered back to the wagons. Now I knew how his son had died. It was some relief to know that, after all, the killer had not been me.

Arshak and Gatalas returned from the city late in the afternoon. They were in a loud and exuberant mood, laughing with each other over the sights of Londinium and the charm of Aurelia Bodica. But Banadaspos, who was second in the bodyguard and who’d been in charge of the five men I’d left in the city, seemed annoyed about something. I asked him what had happened, and he shrugged and said they had simply escorted the lady around the shops. “She is a very lovely lady, the legate’s lady,” he said, “and from what I could understand, very clever as well. But she’s not good with horses.”

He himself was very good with horses, the best in the whole dragon. I’d taken him into my bodyguard because of his skill with them, although he was a commoner by birth, and made him second to Leimanos because of his intelligence, his loyalty, and because I liked him. “What do you mean?” I asked him.

He shrugged again. “That stallion she has for her chariot smelled a mare in the marketplace. It kept trying to get to her, neighing and kicking at the traces. Well, stallions will! But she lost her temper and took the whip to it, and dragged at the reins until its mouth was dripping with blood. She has a bit on that bridle like a steel trap. What is the point of treating an animal like that? Any of us could have brought it around for her if she’d let us. If she can’t manage a stallion, she ought to get a driver who can, or use a gelding or a mare. I tell you, my prince, I can’t bear to see a good horse mishandled, and in my opinion the other commanders shouldn’t have allowed her to do it.”

“I don’t think she likes admitting there’s something she can’t do,” I replied. “And she likes asking for help even less.”

“You’re undoubtedly right,” Banadaspos agreed at once. “But these Britons are all hopeless with horses.”

VI

E
UKAIRIOS  RETURNED  F R O M 
Londinium next morning, in a good blue tunic and a checked cloak fastened with a fine bronze pin; he looked much more respectable and seemed very much more cheerful. We struck camp and continued north toward Eburacum.

For all my forebodings, the journey passed peacefully. Shamed by Eukairios’ earnest attempts to learn Sarmatian, the bodyguard asked him to help them with their Latin—they all spoke the language a little, but none spoke it well. Every evening they would sit about the fire cross-legged, mending and cleaning their weapons and their armor, while the scribe pretended that they were visiting a dairy, or an armorer’s, or a horse trader’s, and got them to say the appropriate phrases. Before we reached Eburacum they had all forgiven him for being a blot on my reputation, and Banadaspos had grown sufficiently friendly to begin to teach him riding. Eukairios had no gift for it at all, and rather puzzled Banadaspos by the number of times he fell off.

At Eburacum, where we once again camped outside the city, a couple of my men did quarrel with a couple of Gatalas’, but they fought their duels quietly with blunted weapons, and a broken arm was the worst injury endured on either side. I managed to avoid any private meeting with the legate’s lady, and was relieved to escape her. She would remain in the fortress with her husband while I continued to my posting on the Wall.

Arshak was, predictably, furious when he understood that he and his company were to remain in Eburacum, particularly when he gathered that the greatest chance of action was farther north. But his liaison officer managed to soothe him with murmurs about a possible posting elsewhere, in time, and Bodica smiled at him, and in the end, even he accepted it quietly.

The division of our companies happened almost too casually, seeing that we’d journeyed so far together and were such a long way from home. “After all,” Gatalas and I said to Arshak, when we parted in Eburacum, “we’ll be only a few days’ ride to the north, and under the same commander in chief. We’ll meet often.”

“After all,” Gatalas and I said to each other, when we reached the supply base of Corstopitum a few days later, “we’ll be only a day’s ride from each other’s camps. We’ll have to meet for hunting trips, or let our dragons compete at mounted games.” And he and his dragon turned east to Condercum, while I and mine turned west toward Cilurnum, and I never saw him again.

It was just my own dragon and the two Roman officers, Comittus and Facilis, who trotted the last few miles along the old road from Corstopitum, late in the afternoon of a golden day of late September. We went up the valley of the Tinea River—pleasant, rolling country, with patches of woodland; the trees were beginning to turn, and the blackberries beside the road were ripe. Northward we would sometimes get a glimpse of the uplands of Caledonia, purple with heather and spotted with sheep; cattle and horses grazed contentedly on the richer grass of the valley. At the place where the Tinea forks, one branch running from west to east along the valley, and the other descending to it from the north, we turned northward from the old road toward the new military way, and almost at once came to the Wall. Three times the height of a man, built of a golden sandstone, it strode off east and west as far as we could see. It crossed the river on top of a bridge that was built of the same stone and ran directly into the walls of Cilurnum. I stopped, looking at the fort, and Comittus and Facilis, who were riding beside me on the road, stopped too. Behind us, the drummer gave the signal to halt.

“That’s the bathhouse,” said Comittus, pointing at a building just outside the fort by the river. He’d visited the place before. “It’s a good one. The water’s good at Cilurnum, too—there’s an aqueduct that carries it right through the camp from end to end, and flushes the latrines. And there’s a water mill under the bridge, which grinds all the grain for the fort . . .” He coughed. “If you want grain, that is.”

I nodded. My heart had risen at the sight of Cilurnum. The fort itself was the standard affair: a rectangular wall, four gates, watchtowers. I knew that inside it there would be the usual two main streets, the usual headquarters building and commandant’s house facing each other in the center, and the usual narrow barrack blocks laid out in neat grids. It was, I knew, more than half-empty. It had been manned by an auxiliary
ala
, the Second Asturian Horse, but most of them had been posted elsewhere, and there were only some five squadrons remaining. A village of the kind found around every Roman fort sprawled messily to the south. But the fort’s setting beside the shallow brown river was beautiful, and to its north there were meadows—lush, intensely green, dotted with large trees. “We can put the wagons there,” I said, pointing to them.

Comittus and Facilis both looked at me, Comittus in surprise and Facilis in exasperation. “You won’t need the wagons anymore,” Comittus told me. “You know yourself that all the letters have been written and everything’s arranged. The Second Asturian Horse have left plenty of space in the barracks for you and them both.”

“You’re going to have to start sleeping in houses sometime, Ariantes,” said Facilis. “We can’t have Roman auxiliaries parked in wagons behind their own fort. Particularly not on the wrong side of the Wall.”

I set my teeth, looking at the stone walls. I thought of sleeping in them, night after night. I thought of watching the seasons change, fixed in the same place, unmoving, buried like the dead. I had known that the Romans would expect us to follow their ways now, that they would ride us, as the saying is, with the curb bit and the iron bridle. Facilis was going to be in charge of the ordering of the camp, and the remaining Asturians were subordinate to Comittus. There were thousands of Roman troops in the region, more than enough to put down any mutiny. But this change was too great and too sudden, and as I looked from the walls back to my companions, I felt all at once certain that it was not something I had to bear. Comittus and Facilis might use force against us for many reasons—but this wasn’t one of them.

“Not tonight,” I said. “Not yet.” I snapped my fingers for the drummer to give the signal and started Farna forward again. The drums rattled, and the dragon began clattering and jingling after me.

“But . . . really . . . I mean . . .” said Comittus, spurring after us, “barracks are much more
comfortable . . .
”

They did not give up easily. We rode into the fort—we had to, to get to the fields, since the Wall cut us off from them. There the senior decurion of the remaining squadrons of the Second Asturian Horse came hurrying to meet us, followed by his men and most of the inhabitants of the village. (Despite their name, the Asturians were not from Asturica in Iberia; their
ala
had been raised there originally, but that had been a long time ago, and they themselves were mostly born in the village.) The decurion was a mournful-looking dark man of about my own age, named Gaius Flavinus Longus—I strongly suspected that “Longus” was a nickname, as he was one of the tallest and thinnest men I’d seen. Comittus and Facilis rushed the polite greetings and at once enlisted his help to explain to me why we couldn’t sleep in our wagons. He had put a considerable amount of work into getting the barracks ready for us, and argued more hotly than either of the others. I nodded, ignored them all, and took the men out the other gate of the fort into the fields. The three Roman officers, with most of the Asturians and villagers, followed us, exclaiming in amazement at our obstinate savagery.

“You bastards don’t even entrench!” Facilis shouted at me, while I held Farna in the place I’d chosen for the main fire and waved the wagons round. “Listen, Ariantes, you’ll have the damned villagers in and out of here every hour of the day and night, and half of them are thieves! And what are you going to do about latrines?”

“Lend us a few shovels, and we’ll dig a spur from the ones in the fort,” I replied, not looking at him.

“You’re entitled to the commandant’s house, you know,” Comittus coaxed. “At least, we could share it. It’s a big house, and it has a hypocaust and a private bath-house with a steam room, and the last man there put in a very fine floor on the dining room . . .”

“Comittus,” I said, “when I was in my own country and a prince, I did not have a big house with a mosaic floor. I do not need or want one now. Perhaps in the winter, if it is very cold, barracks and hypocausts may seem worthwhile. Not tonight.”

“May I perish!” exclaimed Longus, exasperated at seeing all his preparations for us laid waste. “What sort of people have they sent us?”

I looked at him. “They have sent you Sarmatians,” I told him. “We are accustomed to live in wagons.”

“They’ve sent us a pack of raving lunatics! Who else would prefer filthy carts to good stone barracks blocks? Oh,
now
I know what the problem is! You’ve mistaken Cilurnum for the madhouse you escaped from!”

The Asturians, and the villagers, laughed. My men heard it. They interpreted the comment to each other. I noticed Facilis’ face losing its red, swollen look as he became alarmed. He had called us similar things, and worse—but he was a senior officer, and knew exactly how far he could go, and in what circumstances. He would never have used language like that in front of an audience that understood.

I looked at Longus thoughtfully. He’d climbed onto his horse to greet us, and he was armed and wearing a shirt of mail. But he was off guard. “You should not insult us, Flavinus Longus,” I told him quietly. “Remember we must work together.” I raised my hand to keep my men still.

“I can say what I li—” began Longus.

Farna leapt sideways at a touch of my heel, and I swept my lance out and across to knock the decurion off his mount backwards. I turned my horse almost on top of him, and drove the point of the lance into the earth about two inches from his shoulder. By the time he’d recoiled from it, I had my sword out and at his throat. “No killing!” I shouted in Sarmatian. It had been sudden enough that the Asturians were all still gaping, and my men had not yet tried anything on their own. But I could hear the sound of the bows being strung behind me.

“You should not insult us,” I told Longus again. He looked up the sword blade into my eyes. His face had gone gray. “If you ask Marcus Flavius Facilis, he will tell you how we deal with those who insult us. You should not have said that, on first meeting us, in front of all your men and mine. It was foolish. But I am sure you would not have said it if you knew us better, and you regret it now.” I took my sword away from his throat and put it back in its sheath, then pulled my lance up and backed Farna away.