The Far Arena (36 page)

‘I
had a bit of Latin. Rusty, but I
can revive it.'

'Perhaps you're right. I just didn't think of Americans, especially Americans from your part of the country, with a background in Latin. But isn't this a wonderful day, nevertheless?'

It was 8 p.m., outside it was especially black, darkness even shrouding the stars.

'It's night,' said Lew.

'No, only here, only briefly, but somewhere it is as bright as yesterday on the sun porch when you could not focus it was so bright. The darker the night, the brighter the sun shines on the other side of the world.'

'Yes, ma'am,' said Lew McCardle, for the first time in his life actively putting Texas in his voice. 'You sure do say some mighty pretty things.'

'Prettier because they are true,' said Sister Olav.

'Dern tootin',' said Lew and gave a big old wink.

Petrovitch was too deeply depressed for a drink. Besides, he had hidden the little boy who pissed Ballantine scotch because he didn't want Sister Olav to see it in his office.

'What's the matter now, Semyon?'

'The lab report came back about what our patient vomited up.' 'What? What's so bad about what's in him? Did you find out it was Coca-Cola?' 'Worse.'

'What could be worse?'

'Poison. Someone poisoned him. He vomited up an extremely effective poison.'

I deserve to die. I deserve to be eaten. Let the barbarians feast. Why do they wait? Has a life in the wilderness taught them to, tame their hunger? Have they dined on Tribune Macer yet?

Demosthenes and Plutarch are safe. But the manner they died was their punishment for loyalty to a fool. A barbarian in black, like some Eastern magician or some sneak thief in the night, assures me not to worry. She hovers over me, huge head and ugly grin and grunting the language as though she heard it in some cage in Rome.

Let her eat. I will join Demosthenes and Plutarch. She has a black hood. Macer the tribune had a red hood. I had been sure I would be able to work something with the cohort. Many of the men had been the worst bribe-takers in the city, which was probably why Domitian wanted them out.

Macer was a stocky man of light brown hair and weak nose who exposed himself to the sun whenever possible to make himself appear more Roman. His tonsor scraped his face clean every morning, and every morning he sacrificed to the gods, including Domitian.

We marched north, to the sound of floggings and men with heavier packs. I should have suspected where we were going because of the size of the escort - a full cohort - and the heavy baggage, which I overheard one of the legionnaires say contained heavy furs. One of the men stole a fur, tried to
sell it, and was ex
ecuted before the cohort drew up in ranks.

Macer marched the fat off the cohort. He marched the wine out of them. He marched the whining out of them until one day, when cracking along at its regulation legion pace before the mountains that separated us from Gaul, he drew the cohort into a parade formation and he addressed them.

⁴
You have called me Vercingetorix, after the leader of the Gauls defeated and long dead. And by that you mean, away from my hearing, that I am more Gaul than Roman. But let me tell you, I have been twenty-two years as a legionnaire in the Twentieth Rapax, that legion which sweeps all before it. You have heard of it back in Rome. When his divinity told me I would be transferred from the Rapax, I wept. When I saw whom I would lead, I laughed. But after these recent days, on the march with you, I now salute you, most Roman of them all. I will this day, by my hand, and by the authority invested in me by our divinity, the spirit of the senate and people of Rome, present you with your standards.'

The standards had the usual eagle of Rome above them, and the abbreviation SPQR, which stood for the senate and people of Rome, and beneath them the head of Domitian. The cohort would be called Domitian's own.

Men who had once owned brothels and would set fire to a man's house for a fee cheered these hunks of iron atop poles. By common knowledge it took fourteen years to make a legion, but Macer had these men believing themselves legionnaires in twenty-two days.

We were hitting the regulation legionnaire thirty miles a day even through the mountain passes. Still the furs were not unpacked. I walked now with a loose chain around my neck behind an ass with my spatha strapped to it along with the small shield. The heavy brown tunic had itched at first, but by now I felt nothing.

Here in the provinces, I could see the reason for Roman power, hidden in the centre of that power itself. Roads. Roads of stone, marked roads, levelled roads. Romans built roads everywhere. Port to city. City to cities. Arteries of an empire. Other peoples might have one or two roads to their capital that lazed where oxen had chosen to walk before. Romans sighted and levelled where the engineers decided.

Into Gaul we marched and then east towards the borders of the empire. We camped the last night in civilization at a garrison on the border. That night, even I had wine.

Heavy bags and barley were loaded into carts, the men mumbling that when this went there would be only meat. Meat for who knew how long.

An old barbarian woman, living with the garrison as a slave to a centurion, told fortunes, but the men were warned not to ask her. Naturally, after this warning she did a wonderful business, but it stopped when she predicted nothing anyone wanted to hear. Then they paid her to predict for the unclean thing, which referred to me. She threw her bones, with hands scarcely more than the bones she read. She threw them many times, each time seeming most confused. She confessed an inability to read my future, and the legionnaires of Domitian's own said it proved the charge of maiestas was true because the gods refused me a future.

The next morning we went east into the wilds of Germany where there were no roads but paths, and every night the cohort would build a moat and wall from the bountiful forests of this uncivilized region. Without mileposts I could not count the distance. Even away from senate decree, the Roman legionnaire honoured his word. None talked to me or mentioned my name.

A large German band came upon us, and Macer had the cohort fortify a hill. We waited there a week until the band, like some herd with little patience, moved off. When the sun was on my right in the morning three days in a row, I knew we were march Lag north. With the cold, I saw the reason for the large carts of impedimenta. Furs and leathers for the feet and body and head. So many furs that this cohort now looked like barbarians themselves from a distance, if one did not realize they all had the same regulation pilum and scutum and short sword.

It was here in the first frosts that I noticed an uneasiness come upon our columns. And I overheard men talking about the horrors of the barbarians, as though in Rome they did not have the arenas. Now I saw them draw lots for those who would comprise the small bands that went before us so that we should not be trapped by sudden assaults.

It was here that Macer made a mistake. A small group of the cohort that had gone before disappeared and finally was found, its bones stripped of flesh, its furs and weapons gone. They had been eaten, and several legs had been left smouldering over charcoals when the barbarians were surprised by the full column. Macer allowed the entire cohort to march past without burial or ode. He should have stopped the column and made a great speech about the courage and discipline of the legionnaires, and said that here, in the unknown wilds of most barbaric Germany, these men, who had gone before, represented that courage and that discipline far greater than any legion marching in triumph across the pleasant and paved Appian Way. He should have made these deaths seem significant and worthy. He did not.

Undoubtedly afraid himself, he let each man nurse his fears privately as we all walked by. That night, the moat was not fully dug nor were the walls set deeply into the ground, and men talked to me for the first time since the senate decree. It was no use telling them there was no difference between funeral pyres with trumpets and priests and answering a barbarian's hunger.

I told them they were superior to the barbarian as long as they remembered their training. I told them I had fought barbarians, and they were but children to men who let their logic rule.

They answered that the very pale yellow-haired ones could not be felled by the pilum because of their size and their inability to feel pain.

I told them the pilum used in waves had conquered the world.

They said a barbarian when hungry would eat his own arms. I told them that a long time ago this was thought of Aetheops, too. because their skin was black, and this was found to be not so.

They said barbarians were especially fond of the hearts of young virgin girls, and that they would go insane over the liver of a Roman baby.

I tried to speak to Macer, but he himself held true to the senate decree. He would not talk to me. I wanted to tell him the men were stripping their minds of armour.

A young barbarian boy had been caught outside the camp, and, like wolves, the legionnaires fell upon him, cutting out his liver and trampling it. During that night, as the cohort became a mob, I found out none of the men or centurions knew where they were going or my destination. Snows came that night, white as hell and cold.

One of the poorly planted walls caved in. The men did not form for march nor would they draw lots to precede the column. Macer spent the morning threatening crucifixion and decimation - the killing of every tenth man to restore discipline.

We were all lucky he did not get himself murdered by these actions. Lucky for the men, because without a leader - no matter how inept - they were nothing more than frightened children with overgrown muscles. Many went to the wine that morning.

I could have left the camp then, but my destination would only have been a barbarian's belly. And it occurred to me I might live through this if I were cautious. The barbarians were around us shortly, in great mobs, with furs and hair so light and skin so pale it looked as though the dead had come to collect our bones. Some legionnaires tried to form a maniple. Knowing their plight they now looked to Macer, but, even as they formed, the barbarians with their women and children became numerous and their grunts and growls filled the hills like a storm building.

We were, in any way I could divine, dead anyhow, so I took a short sword and had someone wrap my left hand in leather with a piece of iron strapping, and I went outside the little log walls and stamped out a circle in the snow. My arena weapons were unwieldy in the cold. I made laughing gestures at the barbarians in the hills. I beckoned for company. It took a while, but a large one with his hair like snow and the sun wild on his face and body, huge in muscles, ran down at me with a club the size of a good sapling.

There was little skill needed and absolutely no subtlety or misdirection. I skewered it as it went by, making an explosion in the snow, screaming its last and spreading its blood like a child attempting to make a picture with its hands. I signalled for two, and two came down with many cheers from the hills. Instead of pinning me between them, they crossed into each other with a bang and fumbled around on their knees. I finished them.

Thereupon I made a speech to the barbarians in the hills. Of course, it was not meant for them since they undoubtedly understood nothing I said. It was for the legionnaires. And I demanded to know how they, the barbarians, dared entertain thoughts of meeting Roman steel on any equality. I told them to get other tribes, for they represented barely a morning's entertainment for a Roman cohort. I said the men needed greater training, and they would grow fat on this garbage that surrounded them now. Look well, for behind the logs of your forest set in order behind a moat are not men who hide behind walls, but use these walls to keep out your smells. Look well, for you see before you the greatest military blessings of all times, past and future: Roman legionnaires. Invincible. Men of iron.

Cheers came from the camp, and the log walls came down, and there was the cohort in battle order. Macer had good timing. The barbarians charged full from the hills now, but the spirit was with the cohort. The barbarians left many dead. During the battle, I stayed inside the lines of men, always being the farthest from the fight.

In the goodwill of a victory, I suggested we all march now back to civilization, perhaps even Greece where I would make every one of them rich. They had more than served Rome so far. But Macer, expressing grief, said he was Roman and under orders, the most noble thing being the following of those orders when, in all likelihood, no one would appreciate their success or even know about them. Nor could I turn the men against him as we marched north every day, into heavier snows and the colder weather. Macer wisely kept to himself, the only one who knew where we were.

But he did speak to me and confided that I had not saved Publius that day in which the city went to flame. It seemed long ago because life here required so much thinking, I could not dwell on Rome, but on what was at hand.