The Boat of Fate (2 page)

My earliest tutor was a Greek, from Alexandria. He remembered, as I suppose a Greek well might, the man most Romans had chosen to forget. His bust (and a statue of the Divine Antinoüs, who Heraclites told me was still worshipped in Egypt, where he met his end) adorned the little room, half study, half living-quarters, where I took my first lessons. Publius Aelius Hadrianus, builder of walls, who secured for the Empire a century of peace; the Antonine succession, blighted finally by the Divine Commodus. Hadrian himself, of course, was an Hispanian; more than that, he had been born in my own town, in the great white villa on the outskirts of Italica still owned, if their tale was to be believed, by his descendants. He had trodden the streets I walked, perhaps even thought the thoughts that at times thronged my brain. I would stare at his statue by the hour, in between wrestling with the outmoded Greek Heraclites would insist I learn; sometimes, left on my own, I would draw a footstool close, climb up to gaze into the Emperor’s dusty blind painted eyes. At such times it seemed the great soldier spoke to me; though only once he visited me in a dream.

My mother set great store by dreams; for once, when she herself was a child, she had seen a famous King with his winding sheet and coffin beside him, and what she prophesied had come to pass. So when I saw the night-shape I was more than usually ready to be impressed. In the dream I found my voice, asked quaveringly, then more firmly, ‘Who are you, sir?’ And the Shape--it was little more--laughed musically, though its voice when it answered was gentle and sad. ‘I am he whom you seek,’ it said. Then, cunningly, ‘The man from the Adriatic….’

At that a great joy seized me. I held my arms out, tears starting from my eyes; and the vision was gone, I lay in a room bright with moonlight and rich with the scents of flowers, hearing a night-bird cry and the echoes of my own wail. Till Calgaca came, and soothed; for she would suffer no serving maid to attend a child in nightmare. I remember the rustle of her robe, the strength and firm coolness of her arms. She brought me water, wiped my face and forehead, rearranged the covers of the bed; she sat with me till the lamp burned dim, its flame browning and flickering, and I fell into a dreamless sleep.

Such night alarms were not infrequent, for I was a nervous and excitable child. I think this was largely due to the remorseless faith of the housepeople in all things supernatural. The Christians, of course, had damned the whole pantheon of Roman Gods, translating their virtues and follies alike into devilish characteristics; and incidentally exhibiting more faith in the traditional deities of the Empire than the average enlightened Roman had shown for generations. In addition the rocks and soil of Hispania had produced their own rich crop of horrors; and nobody was better versed in such folklore than my old nurse Ursula. She was an extraordinary woman, tall and gaunt to the point of emaciation, with frizzy hair, an ugly, gentle face and the longest, flattest and boniest feet I think I have ever seen. Ursula was three-quarters Celt, and I’m inclined to think more than three-quarters mad. It was she who regaled me, usually at my own prompting, with tales of lemures and werewolves, vampires eating the noses of dead men; and there were old ladies who changed with the dusk into taloned birds, and a great Man who haunted the northern seas, reaching with his scaly arms to overturn the stoutest ship. So it came about, not unnaturally, that nursery bogies plagued me; Morphio with her loping donkey’s legs or Lamia, her belly swollen with a screaming, burning child. At such times Calgaca’s eyes would flash, the colour deepen in her cheeks; she would hold me against her breast and talk of strange people and plants and animals on the rim of the world till my eyelids drooped and the curtains stopped their stirring and whispering and the house was quiet. Sometimes she would send for Ursula, vowing to dismiss her from her service for filling my head with such unpleasant rubbish. Then the strange creature would snuffle and weep, clinging to my mother’s robe and swearing she would die before she injured me; and Calgaca would relent and dismiss her to the kitchen, where it took several draughts of unmixed local wine to restore her nerves. By which time, of course, she was usually in a condition to start again. I think, simple soul that she was, the old woman truly loved me; and those half-delicious terrors did no lasting harm.

My father had been born in Rome, to a middle-class equestrian family, though he emigrated to Hispania as a young man and remained there the rest of his fife. Why, I was never too sure; except that maybe he preferred to be headman of a village rather than second-in-command of an Empire. He held an important position in Baetica, as a Curator in charge of the public water supply. His duties frequently took him away from the town, so that during my early years I saw very little of him; if he was at home he would almost invariably be shut away in his study at the far end of the house. When he was working there at his ledgers and files, or reading in his extensive library, it was more than either my mother or the servants cared to do to interrupt him. He was a stocky, quietly spoken man, balding and with steady, piercing eyes; and that truly was almost all I knew of him. About the house he was always formally polite, although he was prone to bouts of bad temper, when he would curse with a violence that was truly terrifying. He was, before anything else, a figure of authority, and I was never able to feel really close to him. In any case, I was very little interested in his work, though I learned afterwards to value his skills more highly.

At rare intervals, when the mood took him, he would call me aside from my studies. Then as like as not he would endeavour to drive into my head some notion of the complexities behind this simple matter of piped water. His staff was divided into three sections, each of which was kept to strength, in theory at least, by levies supplied by the State; though with the constant demands of the Army taking priority manpower was usually woefully short. Also, of course, the edicts of successive Emperors binding humiliores ever more closely to their family trades had rendered free recruitment almost impossible, though there were men enough in Italica alone who would have been glad of the chance to draw the rations levied against the countryfolk in return for Government employment. But such requests might have to pass to the office of the Praefect of the Gauls himself, where after years in limbo they were likely enough to be turned down; and my father was reduced to bending the law, with the active assistance of the local authorities, none of whom fancied existence without those public services to which a lifetime as citizens of the Empire had accustomed them. Thus miners and peasants, as experts in handling soil, might be set to digging out blocked or damaged mains, stonemasons worked on clearing birds’ nests from the air vents of aqueducts; the labour shortage was largely overcome by such evasions, though the increased paperwork and the endless need for the invention of fresh euphemisms added lines to my father’s forehead, and a cutting edge to his naturally acrid tongue.

One of the motley labour forces thus formed travelled continuously repairing the channels of aqueducts, renewing the lining slabs where the endless rushing of water had worn them thin; another section maintained the fabric of the great arches that were built wherever the channels were forced, in their carefully-devised routes, to cross a valley; while a third gang was often to be seen in the streets of Italica itself, attending to the mains that ran beneath the pavements.

Where they entered towns the channels flowed into massive towers within which systems of overflowing tanks distributed water for domestic and public supply. In times of drought these regulating devices ensured that the street fountains were the first to cease to work; after that the public baths ran dry and finally it was the turn of private householders, most of whom were hard put to it to get by without their constant supply of piped water. In the south of the Province severe droughts were infrequent, though once the town baths of Italica were closed for several weeks. Everybody was surly and bad-tempered till the supply was restored; my father was surlier than the rest, having been called before the duovirs and formally admonished for his part in the general inconvenience. At such times he was apt to remember his breeding, muttering that it was no part of the function of a Roman to answer to a pack of indigenous tribesmen. There was in any case always a certain amount of bad blood between Government officials, who were exempt from curial duties, and the unfortunate town senates, who since Valentinian’s confiscation of the city taxes had been forced to dig deeper and deeper into their own pockets to meet their responsibilities.

Somewhat similar factors tended to sour my father’s relations with the Church. Members of the clergy were likewise free of the burden of the Curia; hard-pressed gentlemen in danger of civic responsibility still managed to acquire Holy Orders without divesting themselves of their estates, despite the array of legislation aimed at curbing the abuse. I remember the delight with which my father greeted Theodosius’ fulmination against such ordained curiales. He had been very much on his dignity with the local Bishop, whom he suspected of having acquired office for reasons far removed from altruism; for weeks after the injunction was published he would stop him in the street to enquire gravely after his health, and urge him to pray for the soul of an Emperor so patently in need of spiritual enlightenment.

The row in the Curia acted indirectly in my favour; for when the water-level was finally restored, my father, to ease his smarting dignity, set out on a tour of the district under his control, which he afterwards extended to take in the domains of his associates, some of whom he had not seen for years. For once I was allowed to go with him, and saw a great deal of the Province for the first time. We travelled finally to Segovia to view the great aqueduct there, which has the finest and longest span of arches in Hispania. I still remember my first glimpse of them, towers of stone blazing white under the brilliant sun, striding like the legs of giants into farthest distances.

Such occasional outings were the highlights of my life. Sometimes I travelled with my mother; I remember particularly one visit we made to a race meeting in which my uncle was running several teams. I came home with a burning resolve, mercifully short-lived, to be a charioteer myself. Even today I can re-create that journey in my mind; the lurching of the carriage as its wheels crashed into pot-holes and bumped over ridges, the smell of horses and leather, the swirl and white billowing of the all-pervasive dust. And clearest of all my mother’s eyes, dark blue and lovely in the bright sunlight, as she listened gravely, despite the amusement she must have felt, to my grandiose plans.

If my mother was one of the great influences of my life, Marcus was another. Old Marcus--I always thought of him as immensely ancient, though of course he was not--was a time-expired Legionary, a man who had seen service on half the borders of the Empire. His family hailed from the distant Province of Noricum, north of the Adriatic Sea. His father had been a schoolmaster and teacher of rhetoric, a poor man who to support his large family had been forced to apply for grants from the State. Aid had been given, but at a price. Marcus’ ambition had been to become an advocate; he had studied hard, and still retained a smattering of Greek. But at eighteen the Army claimed him; he was posted to Divitia, to the headquarters of the Second Italicans, to learn to be a soldier. His intelligence earned him rapid promotion; within ten years he had attained the rank of Tribune and was serving in Gaul, with the comitatus of the Caesar Julian.

Marcus had never spent his Gallic donative. He showed me the coins one day, gleaming solidi of the Emperor Constantine; he kept them in a strong-box tethered to the wall of his room.

He served my father as doorkeeper and general handyman. He had a little cubicle set next to the atrium, equipped in part as a workshop; you could rely on finding him there most times of the day, busy with the repair of domestic implements, harness, shoes. He was a man of most varied abilities, for he was also principal gardener to the household, and what he planted invariably seemed to thrive.

In addition, he kept ferrets. He bought them from a Bithynian dealer who occasionally passed through the district; they were imported from Libya in considerable quantities to keep in check the little burrowing hares the countryfolk called peelers. At one time the bloodthirsty creatures lived in a range of hutches in the peristyle; but their stink eventually came to pervade the whole house and my father banished them to the stables a few yards along the street where he kept his horses. I learned early on to handle them, and was seldom bitten; one of my chief delights was to be allowed to ride out with Marcus, usually in the early morning, on his hunting expeditions. On a good day we would ride back to breakfast with our saddles hung with bulging sacks of game. The meat was a welcome addition to our household supplies, for it was often difficult for my father to collect the ration allowances due to him, while money was scarce and rapidly becoming scarcer. But what else could you expect, he would mutter, when the taxes levied from the country went it seemed to fight half the barbarians in the world?

Usually when my lessons were over for the day I would slip through the atrium to Marcus’ workshop, sit and swing my legs on the bench and plague him for tales of Goths and Vandals and Alamanni, Persian Kings with silk and jewels and retinues of bare black slaves. Some of his best tales were of the vast, empty lands to the East; for he had followed Julian on his ill-fated expedition into Persia, fought in the great battle in front of Ctesiphon. The arms of the Empire were victorious; but no Roman ever entered that huge town. Instead the army swung unwillingly north, led by its pale-faced Emperor; for Julian the pagan had taken auguries, seen Death in the scattered guts and bones. ‘His mind wasn’t on it,’ Marcus would say. ‘You could tell….’ And his hands would still for a moment, his eyes narrow as he stared beyond the confines of the little room.

Seeing that vast army crawl day after day across the barren land; hearing the rumble of waggon wheels, the scuff and weary tramp of feet; and over and again the drum-roll of hooves, the cries of fear and rage and clatter of arms as the Persian cavalry swooped on flanks and rear. Man after man, Roman and barbarian alike, thudded to the ground, gasped his life out on the harsh earth; cairn after cairn was built, left for the jackals and buzzards and the endless droning wind. Till it seemed, to weary soldiers and a wearier King, that they were all cursed, that they would wander in a trackless waste for the rest of time.