The Boat of Fate (4 page)

He put his work down, stared at me gravely in the lamplight. He said, ‘And why would you want a sword?’

I said primly, ‘To defend my honour.’

Marcus smiled at that, slowly. He said finally, ‘What’s wrong with your fists?’

I said, ‘I think it’s gone rather too far for that.’

He pursed his lips, frowned, whistled between his teeth. Then he rose and walked towards me, stood arms folded, looking down. He said slowly, ‘Caius, a sword is not a toy. Nor is it just a weapon. It’s like a badge, or the Standard a Legion carries in front of it. It tells other people something about you. It tells them you are no longer a boy, that you’re no longer looking for concessions. It tells them you think of yourself as a man, that you’re prepared to live in their world and bide by its rules. Once you take it in your hand, there’s no more backing down. You have to finish what you have begun.’

I felt rather annoyed at him. He seemed to be criticising me, though I wasn’t sure how or why. I said, ‘I have thought about all this, Marcus, and my mind is made up. I want a sword.’ He still waited, frowning, rubbing his lower lip with his finger. He said, ‘And would your mother approve of what you want to do?’

I said quickly, ‘She doesn’t know. You mustn’t tell her. Promise, Marcus.’ I hesitated. I said, ‘It’s partly for her sake anyway.’

He shook his head at that. He said, ‘Caius, Caius ...’ He turned away, abruptly; then he swung back. His face looked queer; angry, and dark. He said, ‘Very well. A sword you want, a sword you shall have. Come to me tomorrow evening. Wear an old tunic; I shall want you to work the bellows.’

He was as good as his word. I lit the forge and pumped while he banged and hammered, striking showers of sparks from a strip of glowing iron. Later, working under his direction with needle and waxed thread, I fashioned a scabbard for myself and a belt from which to hang it. Marcus made a hilt and cross-piece, tempered the blade and scoured it with sand; and finally, a few nights later, the work was done. I took the thing in my hand; a little bright heavy blade, tailored to my grip. I could scarcely believe it was mine.

‘Take it away,’ said Marcus gruffly. ‘Don’t wave it about in here. And mind you learn how to use it.’

At school things were getting better and better. Gellius, having detected at least the stirrings of a fellow spirit, thawed considerably, devoting more time to me than anybody else. The evening sessions still went on; but now they became a pleasure. The concentrated training in rhetoric improved both my diction and my memory; I bored and baffled Marcus by turns with classical dissertations till eventually the long-promised deerhunt took place.

It was an exciting affair. For weeks beforehand Marcus had me collect large feathers, as many as I could find. What use he would put them to he refused to say. We camped away from home for several nights, in a belt of woodland half a day’s ride north of Italica, where Marcus spent some time preparing a complicated and ingenious trap. The feathers, many of them dipped in bright dyes, were plaited into light ropes that he strung from a series of posts set between the trees. A tweak at one of them would set the feathers twirling and spinning for yards; deer, he assured me, would not cross the barriers, though they presented no real obstacle. The trap was funnel-shaped when he had finished it, a hundred yards or so across the mouth and tapering to a narrow corridor, in which he dug several pits. These he camouflaged with branches and dried grass; then came the ticklish business of the drive. He rounded up a handful of local peasantry, all of whom were more than ready to co-operate on the promise of fresh venison. The deer, pretty, dappled creatures with dark, sad eyes, were herded finally into the trap, where they were finished off brutally enough with clubs and stones. The last part of the process I found I couldn’t watch; I still had a lot to learn before I could become a soldier.

A few weeks afterwards my growing scholastic prowess came to my father’s ears. Gellius, like most teachers of rhetoric, was in the habit of holding public demonstrations, at many of which I had become has star attraction. On this particular occasion my exercise was to argue on Hadrian’s side in justification of his war against the Jews. It was a subject close to my heart; I had prepared my material well, and my impassioned pleading brought the house down. A couple of evenings later my father sent for me. He was sitting writing when I entered, and for some minutes continued to scratch away without acknowledging my presence. When he finally spoke I had a great surprise. He gave me, for my own, part of the
De Re Rustica
of Columella.

The gift was totally unexpected. I flushed with pleasure, and began to stammer out my thanks, but Father cut me short. It was then I first really sensed the gulf that existed between us. ‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ he said in his quiet, cold voice. ‘I’m rewarding you for your accomplishment as an orator, not your opinions as an historian. You speak very well; but for the rest, you deserve a thorough whipping.’

I flushed again, this time with annoyance, and would no doubt have embarked on a justification of my ideas if he hadn’t stopped me with a peremptory wave of his hand. ‘That’s enough,’ he said. ‘Go back to your room, Sergius. Don’t put your orator’s scarf on in here.’

The incident had one long-term result. From then on I was allowed the use of my father’s library on rare occasions, usually when he was away from home. His collection was extensive and he was himself the author of several treatises on public engineering as well as a history of Baetica that had enjoyed considerable popularity some years before. One wall of his study was lined with the shelves on which the books were kept, each in its wrapper of dyed parchment; to one side was his writing table, illuminated at night by a pendant many-spouted lamp. The air of the room was heavy with a combination of scents: gum, resin, the soot and wine dregs from which he made his ink, the cedar oil used to protect papyri from the ravages of insects. It was a pleasure to me, on those odd visits, just to take the books down and handle them, rolling and unrolling them on their rods of wood and bone, admiring the neatness of the columns of script, the edges of the leaves smoothed with pumice and stained with bright dyes. I glutted myself on the history of the Province; military history for the most part, the campaigns of Gnaeus Pompeius, Sulla and Aemilius Paullus, whom I privately believed to be my ancestor. I read his great speech from the Roman Rostra, and Hadrian’s exhortation at Tarraco. One day I would visit these places, walk in the footsteps of these famous men; even perhaps--for my ambition had revived--surpass them.

It was about this time that an incident took place that, looking back, I can see was to shape my entire life.

It happened on a bright day in early summer. I was on holiday, and had risen early hoping to persuade Marcus out on a ferreting expedition. But for once he was unco-operative; a great deal needed doing about the house and in any case, he said, an old wound was troubling him, a spear-thrust in the leg he’d received in the Persian war. He shooed me determinedly from his room, and I was left to my own resources.

The day was too fine to waste in reading or study. I considered going round to the stables to try to persuade my father’s groom to let me have one of the ponies, but it would have been a waste of time; I was still not considered old enough to stray too far on my own and Victor was under strict orders to that effect. My mother was in the kitchen supervising the preparation of a meal; the rich scent of boiling grape-juice mixed with the sharper tang of liquamen reducing in its earthen pots told me there would be visitors that night. I would not be missed for an hour or so; I slipped out by the servants’ entrance, gaining the alley that ran alongside the house. I paused long enough to bring old Zenobia from her den, clutching her enormous broom; my father had christened her that, after the fiery Queen of Palmyra who once caused a slight embarrassment to Roman arms. Then I set off jauntily for the market. At my hip, bumping my thigh as I walked, swung the little sword. I jogtrotted importantly, feeling the drag and bounce of the little weapon, very much a man.

As usual there was a great deal to see. Most of the shopkeepers were busy already, setting out their wares in stacks and piles; in the Street of the Wine-sellers a few early-morning drinkers lounged, cups in their hands, watching me incuriously as I passed. In the market I dodged round one of our housepeople, bargaining for a barrel of oysters. I ran on down the narrow street beyond, where the poorer folk and artisans lived, to the town wall and the west gate. It was hardly ever guarded; I passed through, dropping to a walk, followed the white paved road to where the first of the olive plantations began. Beyond, a mile or so from Italica, was a patch of uncultivated land, thick with saplings and tall weeds. I had played there often enough before; I could normally rely on being undisturbed.

None the less, the wood was full of enemies. The saplings were Goths and Alans, the weeds lurking Persians. I fell on them all, with wild war-whoops; not all of them in my native tongue, for years back Marcus had taught me the battle-cries of the German and British auxiliaries. The Persians fell most satisfyingly; the Goths were more resilient. In fact one of them resisted the sword so successfully as to cause a major burr in its edge. I was disappointed; I would have to wait now to catch Marcus in a good mood, and persuade him to beat it out for me.

I was tired by the time I reached the far end of the copse, and streaked with sweat. I rolled in the grass, lay face down, feeling the blood pound in my temples. I wondered whether to go back into town to the baths, and dismissed the idea. I would almost certainly be caught and scolded by one of the servants, and my day out spoiled. I got up and walked on again, to where the white walls of the Villa of Hadrian cast a pleasant shade.

It stood a little way back from the main road that ran west to Lusitania. It was an unusually fine house, built round three sides of a square; the fourth side, facing the road, consisted mainly of stables and buildings that housed farm implements and waggons. I hung about round the gateway, peering through at the neatly tended courtyard, till a surly slave shooed me off. I wandered on again, round the windowless walls of the place; beneath them, I was safe from observation.

Behind the house, some yards from its rear wall, stood a tall clump of trees. I lay down at the foot of one of them, on my back in the grass, holding the sword above me. I juggled with it, feeling how the weight balanced in its pointed tip bent my wrist forward and back. After a while I half closed my eyes, lay watching the odd clouds that crossed the deep blue sky. If I concentrated I could make it seem as if the clouds stood still and it was I, and the solid earth beneath me, that moved, bowling along majestically to an unknown destination. In time the insect-hum round me faded, and I began to doze.

I was roused by a hard kick on the shin. I sat up resentfully, still half asleep, shielding my eyes with my hand. Publius was standing over me. He was wearing a tunic of fine yellow linen; and his pointed-chinned face was alight with suspicion and dislike. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked arrogantly. ‘This is my father’s house, and this is private land. You have no business on it.’

I was annoyed by his attitude, and more by the kick on the shin; but I had no real wish to give offence. ‘I was playing,’ I said in a conciliatory tone. ‘I came through the wood.’

He ignored me. He had seen the sword that lay at my side; he smirked, and shoved it contemptuously with his foot.

‘What is this?’

‘You can see very well what it is,’ I said, getting angrier. ‘A sword.’

‘I see a toy,’ he said. He stooped quickly and snatched up the sword before I could stop him. He put it across his knee, and strained it. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It bends.’

‘Give that back!’

A tussle developed; I grappled with him, anger lending me strength, repossessed the sword and sat back panting.

‘Can you use it?’ he said indifferently. He picked a stem of grass and started nibbling it, spitting the pieces in the general direction of my feet and watching me all the while from the corners of his eyes.

I said, ‘Publius, don’t do that, please.’

He spat again. ‘Publius,’ he said mockingly, ‘don’t do that, please ...’ He sat back on his heels. ‘We could fight perhaps,’ he said, ‘if you weren’t a coward, and only armed with a toy.’

My mouth had become dry, as it always did when I was beside myself with rage, and the blood sang so loudly in my ears that the shrilling of insects round about sounded tiny and far-off. ‘We will fight,’ I said, ‘if you can find a toy of your own.’

An odd expression came over his face. He seemed to consider, narrowing his eyes slyly at me; then he smiled. He said, ‘Wait here,’ and ran back out of sight round the corner of the villa wall.

I waited, half-lying on the grass, plucking tufts of it in my rage and squashing the stems between my fingers. A few minutes later Publius was back. He was lugging a sword, its blade bright with rust. A Legionary sword.

For a moment I thought he wasn’t serious; then I saw his face. I got up slowly, my own anger all but stilled; and I think for the first time in my life I sincerely prayed. Not, oddly enough, to the God I had been taught to worship since my earliest days, but to that Shade that once had visited me, the Shade with the gentle voice and cold, shrewd eyes.

We stood facing each other a long time without speaking. Publius swallowed; and I tried to keep my arms from trembling. I couldn’t take my eyes off the sword he was holding. I realised, for the first time, that he was going to try to stick that pointed piece of steel inside me, right inside; and I was going to try to do the same to him.

He began stepping sideways, a pace at a time. I tried to turn with him, keeping my sword-tip up in front of my face. I knew now just what Marcus had meant; and that there was no drawing back. I wanted to be sick.

‘Now, Sergius,’ said Publius, ‘you don’t deserve it, but I’m going to give you one more chance. I know you’re afraid, so just throw your sword down on the grass, and go away. I promise you won’t be harmed.’