The Wolves of the North (4 page)

Ballista looked with particular disfavour at the group of officials around the eunuchs. At least two of these functionaries were bound to be
frumentarii
, imperial agents tasked with spying on him. Unless, of course, one or more of the
frumentarii
were hidden among the auxiliary soldiers. In an age of iron and rust, Roman emperors trusted no one. Once, long ago when they were young, Ballista and Gallienus had been held together at the imperial court as hostages for the good behaviour of their fathers. One father had been an important Roman senatorial governor, the other a barbarian war leader beyond the frontier. Ballista and Gallienus had become close, friends even, despite their origins – Gallienus had always been unconventional. But the elevation of the latter to the purple had banished such intimacy. Any trust that had survived had been killed when circumstances two years earlier had demanded Ballista himself briefly be acclaimed Augustus. That Ballista had set aside the purple in favour of Gallienus within days, and sent any number of letters containing oaths of loyalty since, had done nothing to revive it. Ballista
realized he was lucky to be alive. So were all his
familia
, including his sons and wife.

‘I am still surprised that Polybius would run.’ Ballista spoke to no one in particular, more to take his mind off his wife and sons far away in Sicily than desiring an answer.

‘No mystery to it at all,’ Hordeonius the centurion said. He rapped his vine-staff of office on the deck in an assertive way.

Ballista came back to his surroundings. Vaguely aware of Wulfstan nearby in attendance, he had not really noticed the approach of the centurion, Maximus, Calgacus and Hippothous.

‘No point in asking,
Dominus
,’ Hordeonius said. His abrupt, overtly military style of speaking had almost driven out the last vestiges of a North African accent. ‘Slaves are all the same – unreliable, untrustworthy rubbish. Every one of the whiplings would run, if they had the courage. Worse than soldiers; they have to be kept down by fear. All slaves are the enemy. Only the shadow of the cross keeps them honest.’

What Ballista had seen of Hordeonius so far had not endeared him. The centurion was of medium height, broad and physically powerful, with a face that promised little understanding but limitless brutality. Hordeonius’s men saw him as a petty, short-tempered tyrant. He probably saw himself as an old-style centurion: let them hate as long as they fear.

‘Sure, you do like a generalization, Centurion,’ said Maximus. ‘Consider where they come from. Some are born to slavery, others poor, unwanted babies exposed on dungheaps and raised by heartless slavers for profit. Then there are criminals condemned to the mines and the like.’

‘It makes no odds, they are all rubbish,’ Hordeonius snapped. ‘Slavery makes its mark, and not just whips and brands. It deforms the soul of a man enslaved.’

‘Are you saying my soul is deformed?’ Maximus spoke quietly.

Ballista watched Hordeonius’s face. He could see the retorts rising up, nearly escaping the cage of his teeth.

‘I was taken in war. There was a ring of dead at my feet, when I was struck from behind.’

Ballista smiled. It was not how Maximus always told the story of the cattle raid in Hibernia. In more comic versions he was running away, sometimes caught with his trousers down on top of his enemy’s wife.

‘Slavery is nothing but a roll of the dice,’ Maximus concluded.

‘Not so, Marcus Clodius Maximus,’ Hippothous interjected. The Greek launched into a philosophical discourse. ‘What the world calls slavery and freedom are nothing of the sort; nothing but a legal fiction. True freedom, like true slavery, is in the soul. The soul of a good man can never be enslaved. The cynic Diogenes in fetters was a free man. The Great King of Persia, sat in pomp on the throne of the house of Sasan, is unfree if he is a slave to his irrational passions: lust, greed, anger.’

Again Hordeonius was silent. There was no love growing between the North African centurion and the
familia
of Ballista.

‘So, my dear Hibernian,’ Hippothous continued, ‘Marcus Clodius Ballista may have given you a papyrus roll, given you his
praenomen
and
nomen
, and with them Roman citizenship, but, I fear, you remain a slave – a slave to your bodily lusts, to endless amphorae of wine and cheap women.’

Maximus laughed. ‘And you? Are you not a slave to pretty boys? I have heard you howl in the baths at the sight of a nice arse. Given his good looks, Calgacus here has not slept at all since you joined the
familia
. Always expecting the invasion, he is. Did I tell you how in his youth, in the bloom of his beauty, he caused a riot in Athens? Very dedicated pederasts, the Athenians.’

As if stirred into action by the mention of his name, the elderly Caledonian spoke. ‘The slave Polybius ran from Panticapaeum
because he tired of waiting for his freedom.’ Calgacus hawked and spat over the side of the ship. Then, in a muttering inflection, but at the same volume, he added, ‘Took you fucking long enough to free me, and the yappy Hibernian.’

Ballista became very aware of young Wulfstan at his shoulder, very aware of the tensions in even the happiest
familia
in a slaveowning society.

‘Company.’ The voice of the
trierarch
rang out.

Ahead, six ships with the distinctive double prows, fore and aft, of northern longships. They were pulling unhurried towards the
trireme
. The Goths were coming to them.

Not by choice, Calgacus had seen the world. He had been with Ballista in Rome, in Arelate, Nemausus and the other fine cities of Gallia Narbonensis, sojourned in Asia at Ephesus and Miletus, lived in Antioch, the metropolis of the east. By comparison, Tanais, most north-eastern of all Greek
poleis
, was a shite-hole. Calgacus’s eyesight was not what it had been. Others had spotted the low town before it swam in his vision out of the vast, swampy delta of the river from which it took its name.

First, the
trireme
pulled past an abandoned suburb. It was long abandoned. Trees grew through the remains of houses. What had been thoroughfares were blocked by mounds of rubbish overgrown with patches of marsh grass. The effect was of a juvenile deity’s rough plan of a mountain range, set aside through distraction.

The quay was of new, raw-cut timber; the ramshackle buildings behind the same. The smell of sawn wood mixed with mud, fish and an undertone of burning. Oddly, a huge hill of ash and debris demarcated the harbour from the town proper. Calgacus’s eyes, blurred in the spring sun, took it in as best they could, the mean scale of the place. No more than a couple of
thousand inhabitants could huddle within its walls. A complete shite-hole.

As they walked up, Calgacus saw that the stone walls were cracked, leaning here and there, in places fallen altogether. Rubble half filled the defensive ditch. Urugundi guards stood, bored, at the fire-scorched gates. They waved them through.

Inside was worse. The street up to the
agora
had been cleared, but the lanes running off it were choked with the debris of collapsed houses. Fire-black beams poked up, mocking man’s transient endeavours. Thousands of tiny shards of amphorae crunched like snow underfoot. The town was deserted. The sack had been thorough and recent, no more than a few years.

The
agora
had been scoured clean. Traders had returned; a surprising number of them had set up stalls. They called their wares: oil and wine from the south, hides and slaves, honey and gold from the north. The council house had been repaired. Incongruously, instead of tiles, it had been given a roof of reeds. The Gothic guards at the door told them to wait outside the
Bouleuterion
. They waited. A gang of slaves – Greeks or Romans – was working to repair the gymnasium next door. They were overseen by an architect, who in turn was watched by a Goth.

Ballista stood, feet apart, leaning on the hilt of his scabbarded long sword, head down. Behind him, unconsciously in similar pose, stood Maximus and the Suanian Tarchon. The ruins all around, they looked like penitents of some strange, grim militant sect.

As Calgacus regarded Ballista, he felt a not unfamiliar stab of jealousy. Ballista had been loved from birth. His mother, of course, but also a fierce pride and affection from his father. Isangrim, war leader of the Angles, had other, older children by other women. Politics, not desire nor love, dictated a man of his position in Germania would most likely marry more than once, sometimes concurrently. His relations had not been good with
all his offspring, especially with his eldest son, Morcar. Ballista – Dernhelm, as he was called then – the solemn but affectionate, golden-haired child had been another chance, a chance to make things right.

Calgacus had never known his parents. He had been too young when the Angle slavers came. A faint, half-recalled woman’s face, a strange tugging at his memory with the smell of a peat fire, that was all he had of a childhood.

The Caledonian cuffed the jealousy down like an unruly dog. He had been with Ballista since the boy was little more than a babe in arms. The boy had suffered too. It was not Ballista’s fault, none of it. He had always done his best, tried to do the right thing – by the world, by Calgacus. They could not be closer. Once in a while, they talked openly. Usually, the grumbling on one side, the teasing on the other, both masked and expressed their strong affection. Calgacus loved the man he would always think of as a boy, and knew it was returned.

Calgacus wished he had not made the graceless comment on the boat about freedom. He had been thinking about Rebecca, the Jewish woman, a slave of Ballista’s wife in Sicily. Calgacus had grown close to her. He wanted her freedom; hers and Simon’s, the Jewish boy she had been bought to look after. If they returned from the grasslands, he would ask Ballista for her freedom, maybe marry her. Ballista would grant it, would feel guilty he had not offered it. Old as he was, Calgacus thought it would be good to have a son of his own. He grunted an obscenity. With luck the child would have her looks.

If they returned from the grasslands and the Heruli … The curse lay heavy on Ballista.
Let him wander the face of the earth … among strange peoples, always
in exile, homeless and hated
. Not just on Ballista.
Kill his sons … all those he
loves
. The Suanian Pythonissa was a hot bitch. You could not really blame Ballista for fucking
her. But what a choice: a priestess dedicated to Hecate. Calgacus had no doubt the dark goddess of the underworld would heed her priestess. You could never tell how, but he had no doubt the curse would play out some way or another.

The time in the Caucasus the previous year had not been good, and not just because of the curse. For weeks, Calgacus had been besieged by a force of the nomadic Alani in a tiny stone tower, just a few paces across. There had been a few others in that close, evil confinement. Most had endured, the eunuch Mastabates, the young Angle slave Wulfstan among them. But it had done Hippothous no good. By the end, the Greek
accensus
’s interest in the nonsense he called something like ‘physiognomy’ had grown to an obsession. Endless drivel about the eyes as the windows of the soul, peering into your face, him watching you unnervingly in odd moments. It had nearly driven Calgacus mad. After but a few days, he would quite happily have killed the man.

Hippothous was not the only one the mountains had changed. Little Castricius had been away in Albania. The gods knew what had happened there, but he had returned altered. There had always been something about him, something secretive and dangerous. Some undisclosed crime had condemned him to the mines in his youth. Against the odds, he had survived, somehow in the face of the law joined the legions, and since risen to equestrian status and high command. He had always joked that the daemons of death were scared of him, that a good daemon watched over him. But now there was a repetition and an earnestness to these claims that was unsettling, that nodded towards madness.

A tall Goth, taller even than Ballista, walked out. He had long hair, and the muscles of his arms were hooped with finely wrought gold torques.

‘I am Peregrim, son of Ursio.’ He spoke the language of
Germania. ‘If you are minded, the King of the Urugundi would talk to you now.’

It was dark inside the
Bouleuterion
. As his sight grew accustomed to it, Calgacus saw it was roughly square, stone benches running up into the gloom on the other three sides. It reminded him of the council house at Priene. But here there were not just a few Greeks in tunics. The benches were packed with armed Gothic warriors.

Halfway up the opposite side, the benches had been cut away. A large dark-wood throne sat there, two ravens carved on the back. On it sat Hisarna, son of Aoric, King of the Urugundi. He was a heavyset man, broad shouldered, in middle age. Across his knees rested a drawn sword; his father’s famous blade,
Iron
. The king’s name – Hisarna – meant the Iron One. He was a man to be reckoned with, this Woden-born ruler, as his father had been before him. Thirty years ago, the Urugundi had been no more than a
comitatus
of a dozen or so men who had wandered down from the north, practising brigandage and selling their swords for hire on the shores of Lake Maeotis and the banks of the Tanais. Led by Aoric then Hisarna, they had fought, schemed, negotiated and slaughtered their way to become one of the major groups in the loose Gothic confederation.

‘Dernhelm, son of Isangrim of the Angles, why are you here?’ Hisarna spoke in the language of the north. His voice was surprisingly gentle, melodious.

Ballista replied in Greek. ‘I am here as Marcus Clodius Ballista, envoy of the
autokrator
Publius Licinius Egnatius Gallienus
Sebastos
. My
kyrios
has charged me with ransoming prisoners from the Urugundi and the Heruli.’

Hisarna smiled, and continued in Germanic. ‘A thankless task in both parts. The Urugundi hold no prisoners from the empire. When my nephew Peregrim returned from the Aegean last year,
outside Byzantium he allowed the official the Romans call the Procurator of the Hellespontine Provinces to ransom all those he had taken. Those Greeks and Romans who lived in Tanais now are my subjects by right of conquest.’