Arthur Britannicus (10 page)

XII
. Bononia

The years had been kind to the escaped slave Mullinus. He had used the heavy purse of gold he found in a murdered man’s cloak and had prospered. Able to read and to write clumsily but effectively, he had a business as an accounts keeper and administrator. His clients were the wealthy traders who were based in the Belgic crossroads town of Hadrian’s Market, where the mighty Rhine and Meuse rivers served as highways for troops and commerce, faster routes even than the great Roman roads that crossed the continent. With the unrest beyond the Rhine, the constant flow of troops through the market town to the frontier made for good business. 

Mullinus was prominent in the town, especially in the taverns, where his trademark heavy amber and silver-spiral brooch that pinned his cloak back from his tunic often attracted jocular remarks about ‘lord’ or ‘baron.’ People trusted the fellow because of his good nature and open, almost simple looks, and he took full advantage in his dealings.  In a decade or so, he’d come to own several taverns that sold watered wine and filched army provisions at great profit. He also ran a discreet whorehouse that serviced only officers and the wealthier merchants, and he did a brisk trade fencing pirated goods brought to him by the corsairs who infested the seas from the Gallic Narrows out to the great Atlanticus.  He was a success, he’d worked diligently and now, suddenly, the hard-nosed trader was unable to concentrate on his business. He was smitten by a woman.

Mullinus had spent years indulging his appetites on slave girls or on some of the professional whores who worked to keep his income rolling in, but had never formed an emotional attachment of any depth. This woman was different. He’d noticed her as she shopped the market food stalls for her mistress, a handsome, auburn-haired slave of full figure and flashing smile. “Good teeth and tits,” he professionally appraised her.  Attracted, he edged closer as she dropped several loaves of bread into her basket.  “Is that fresh?” he murmured, pretending interest. The woman looked up and Mullinus melted. “Still warm, lord,” she said.

He loved the timbre of her voice, and his ear caught the unexpected accent. Eagerly, he said in British: ’Are you from Britannia?” She stayed mute, staring at his cloak brooch. The colour ebbed from her face but she had enough self-control to murmur a polite response. 
Mullinus had just met the widow of the true owner of the brooch. Two thunderbolts from the gods had struck at one time. One hit Clinia as she saw her dead husband’s unmistakable badge of office, the other skewered Mullinus as he fell in love.

The next stage, buying Clinia from her shipwright master was not easy, as he knew the slave’s value from sampling her charms, and he also recognized how much her fellow Briton wanted her, but Mullinus was a skilled negotiator and owned a long purse. The matter took two weeks before the trader took Clinia to his villa and showed her the room that would be hers. “You will not be a slave, but my mistress,” he informed her.

Clinia gasped as she entered her new quarters. Mullinus’ servants had laid out fresh clothes and sandals for her. A young slave girl stood waiting by the dressing table, where perfumes, an ivory comb and some scented oil were arrayed next to a bowl of fresh flowers and a glass jug of Rhenish wine. “This is not Massalia, where women are forbidden to drink wine,” Mullinus smiled. “This is your home. Please me, and you will be its mistress. Abigail here will bathe you and arrange your hair, then she will bring you to me.”  The woman who had once been chatelaine with good lands on the coast of Britain felt tears well in her eyes as she was again treated with respect. She said humbly, “You will be my lord, and I shall come willingly to your bed.”

It was the beginning of a period of great happiness for them both, but it was still several long weeks before Clinia finally could ask her lover where he had obtained the great brooch that had once been symbol of her husband’s power.  As he told the tale of fleeing from a ship brawl with the enveloping cloak hiding him, Clinia realized that the raider Filwen must be dead. How else would the wolf fur cloak she bitterly remembered, and her husband’s badge of office,
have come into the hands of two common sailors? But still she did not know the fates of her twin sons, or of Carausius, her little boy. She had spent the past years as a slave to a shipwright as he carried on his trade in the northern islands of Frisia. The twins and her young son could be anywhere. She was not to know that the twins were under close guard in the very town where she now lived, or that her son Caros was an important soldier in Gaul. “Do you know, lord, how I can find my children?” she asked humbly. “I shall find them,” Mullinus said grandly. “I have experience of investigating facts.”

A few hundred miles to the west, Carausius was on investigations of his own, as he inspected his new command. The recently-appointed legate of two near-complete legions was touring his headquarters fortress of Bononia, on the Gallic coast. He’d come there a few months before, after missing Gracilis and the twins at Massalia. A ship’s pilot in the harbour there had reported seeing identical twin slaves going aboard
a Rhone barge just days before the legate showed up at the dockside, and Carausius knew he’d lost that chance to reunite with his brothers. In time, he thought, Mithras will bring me to them. First, he had pressing military matters to attend, and right now, he had a parade to inspect.

The big, bearded man with the scarred, broken face and distinct limp wore his white and purple-striped robes well and the troops lined for inspection regarded him with a mix of fear and admiration. Already, in the first few months of possessing his cudgel of office, he’d comprehensively crushed two uprisings of the rebellious Gauls, keeping busy his executioner, a lean, blue-eyed man with a leathery face and southern drawl who would never say where he was born except vaguely that it was ‘down in the south a good bit.’

Davius Perseqius Ansonii saw his duty as carnifex was to keep the Roman Peace by making an example of those who broke it, and crucifixion was a fine way to command people’s attention. He carried out other forms of execution, too, because the magistrates said crucifixion was too harsh for Roman citizens, though Davius had topped a few that way. Strangulation or being bled out through a slit throat was the privileged mode of exit for citizens, and the nobles had it even easier, merely getting their heads lopped off, he mused. In the early days, though, the mad and bad were simply launched off the Tarpeian Rock, an 80 foot cliff on Rome’s Palatine Hill. It was a second-rate spectacle, too brief in Davius’ view. Hanging a felon out on a cross for a day or two really pushed the point home better, he thought. You had to let the punters tremble to see what was in store if they got out of line: hours and hours of agony, not a few seconds’ flight and a messy landing. His job took skill, it wasn’t literally a pushover. He smiled at his own wit.

Davius had dodged his new legate’s parade, and was sitting in a harbour front wine shop, talking about his profession with several off-duty sailors of the Classis Britannica, Rome’s British Fleet. “We’re getting soft,” he said. “In the old days, it wasn’t just murderers and traitors who got the push, anyone who was badly deformed or mad was regarded as having been cursed by the gods, and he went off the rock, too. Now, I just top rebels, criminal slaves and the occasional poor bastard who knifed someone when he was drunk.” 

He took a pull at the watered wine and considered his first meeting with the new legate. He’d been called into the great man’s presence and found Carausius studying the returns that detailed the numbers of executions. “There are a lot of these,” the big, bear-like admiral said mildly.

“I hope there were none of my soldiers among them. Are you a man who likes his work too much?” Davius stiffened.

“All were ordered, lord,” he said.

“So many?” persisted Carausius.

“They’re Bagaudae, lord, just scum,” said Davius. “They’ll never like us, but they can fear and respect us. You need to keep a boot on their necks or they’ll take advantage.” The carnifex was not to know it, but his few words influenced the legate considerably.

Carausius had considered his options. Popularity was not one of his priorities. He knew his soldiers admired and even liked him, and he had
an affection for them, having lived life as a walkalot when he was younger. He had no fears of losing the loyalty of his men, but he was unsure about handling civilians. Better, he felt, to be feared than to lose his grip now he was here in his new command. He would follow the crucifixioner’s principle and scourge the bandits. Law-abiding citizens need fear nothing from him, but he resolved to go on to make a terrible example of lawbreakers.

In the tavern where he was dodging the column, unaware of how his offhand remarks had affected his commander, Davius faced the mariners’ questions about what it was like to be crucified.  “Well, it’s probably better than being hung upside down and sawn in half. That hurts a lot, because the brain gets enough blood to keep you alive until the saw finally gets well into your chest,” he declared.  “It’s a lot slower than being burned to death, but that hurts quite a bit, too. If you keep the fire down around the perp’s legs and feet, it can take a good while before the flames get to the head. You’d be surprised how much blood comes out, it hisses in the flames.  A good carnifex can keep them alive a long time. You make the fire take the perp’s calves, thighs and hands first, then the torso and finally the face goes up before they die of shock or blood loss. You don’t want the fire to be too high too soon or they just suffocate. Do it right and being burned at the stake can take a couple of
hours.”

The old executioners, he said, put a flammable tunic on the condemned, and lit it. The good emperor Hadrian had ordered a rabbi who defied his edicts to be burned with a pad of wet wool on his chest, to prolong his punishment.  “Some old Greek had a brass bull made so he could put the perp inside it, on the fire,” the executioner recalled. “It was fitted out so the screams came through the bull’s mouth and sounded like the beast was roaring. The fellow who made it asked the tyrant for his pay, and got more than he wanted. He became the bull’s first occupant.” 

But crucifixion, that’s what you do, isn’t it? asked the sailors, refilling Davius’ wooden wine cup.  “Now, that’s an art,” he said.  “It’s really all about humiliation. You want to shame them. Even old Cicero called it the most cruel and disgusting death, and it’s really for slaves, rebels, people like that, enemies of the state. You flog them first, to get the blood flowing.  I use a scourge that has bits of metal in the thongs, to strip off the flesh. It weakens them. Then you fasten them to the crosspiece and make them carry it to where they’re going to hang around. We have some permanent uprights here, down by the docks, and in Rome they have quite a few outside the Esquiline Gate, near Nero’s house.  Old Nero, he liked to have the Jesus followers crucified, did for thousands of them and at night he had their bodies set on fire to provide illumination.”

“Anyway,” Davius continued, “You fasten them to the crosspiece, nailing is better than tying, though nails cost money. Then you march them to the uprights and hoist the crosspiece into place.   The executioner paused. “Remember, keep the nails straight so you can use them again later. If you’re not tying the perp’s arms to the crosspiece, but want to nail him up, you get long spikes, about seven inches, and angle each in through the crease under the fat part of the thumb and up through the wrist where there’s a little tunnel. Then you haul the crosspiece up the vertical and fix it.  You can also nail the perps through the forearms; that works, too.  As for fastening the feet, mostly, I nail their heels to the sides of the post. Don’t forget first to run the nail through a little piece of wood before you knock it through the heel, so they can’t tear the foot free.”

“I sometimes put a little shelf as a footrest on the upright, to take the weight and keep them alive longer, but some people prefer a small seat about halfway. If you do that, you can put a spike on it; it sticks up their rectum or vagina and adds to their fun. As a kindness, I sometimes make women condemned face the upright so they get full pleasure from that spike. After all, it’s their last screw.” He paused again for a swig of his drink, then resumed, enjoying the familiar, horrified attention.

Crucifixes, he explained, came in various styles, the most commonly used being the Tau, which was shaped like a capital T and had no vertical above the crosspiece, as the so-called Latin crucifix did. There were X and Y shaped crucifixes, or sometimes the executioner’s team would simply use a tree. The upright of the Tau had a squared end that slotted into a matching hole on the underside of the crosspiece, and after the condemned had been fastened to it, it was a simple matter to hoist man and crosspiece up as a unit onto the stake.

“It just makes sense, it’s efficient. Fastening a perp to the complete crucifix and then having to haul the whole thing upright and drop it into a post hole with him nailed in place is heavy work,” said the executioner, musing “I’ve never favoured those Latin crosses.”  He paused again, eyeing his rapt audience who, open-mouthed, were soaking in the gory details.

The most efficient way to carry out a swift execution, Davius said, was to fasten the perp’s arms above his head, then nail down the feet so he couldn’t raise himself up to breathe. Fastened in that way, the condemned usually died within an hour or so, suffocated. It was not,
he said, a technique he used often because the whole point was to inflict suffering and shame, and an hour’s worth was not much punishment, eh?