The Boat of Fate (5 page)

I swallowed, and said nothing.

‘Come on,’ said my enemy. ‘I shan’t think any the worse for it. I don’t expect you to know much about fighting; after all, your father is only an inspector of drains.’

I charged.

My first rush, compounded as it was of fear and desperation, nearly took him by surprise. The swords clashed; the heavier weapon, sliding down my blade, bent the guard, trapping my fingers painfully. Instantly, the rage was back. I circled, heart thudding, watching his eyes. He feinted, stepped back, feinted again and swung the sword two-handed. I caught the blow; and the weakened cross-piece gave way, flying across the grass. The blade edge, red and serried, buried itself thirstily in my hand.

The world seemed to stand quite still. I looked down. I felt no pain; but my little finger, split from the rest, hung uselessly from my palm, and blood was dribbling brightly. I reached across, shaking, to press the wound with my fingers. The blood coursed instantly to my elbow, splashing on the grass at my feet.

My adversary’s face was chalk-white, but his eyes were glowing at the sight. ‘Fight,’ he said, ‘little freedman’s son.’ I raised my weapon somehow, made to run at him; and my sight flickered, fast as the flapping wing of a bird. Earth and grass rose to meet me, and I fell forward into night.

I opened my eyes, expecting to see above me a gulf of sky. Instead there was a pale, plain ceiling; the ceiling of my room.

I tried to move my arm. Pain came at once, increased to a confused burning. I closed my eyes, groped cautiously with my left hand. My right arm lay at my side, the hand swathed in bandages from wrist to fingertips. I tried to lift it. It wouldn’t move; it was as if I was paralysed. I cried out and tried to sit up. A spasm of giddiness seized me; I fell back, afraid I might faint again, and lay still a while.

The light was dimmer when I woke, and my mother was in the room. I spoke to her. She ignored me. I spoke again, louder, wondering if my voice had failed as well. She paused at that, glancing up with the oddest look of startled pain before stooping to busy herself with the bedclothes. Something in her expression quelled me, so that I didn’t speak any more; and she left the room without answering me. When she had gone I lay quiet, puzzling my sluggish brain. Her face haunted me; the stillness of it, the eyes huge in the lamplight. Like another face, half seen, more than half forgotten. Never before had she refused to come to me; I fretted with the memory, trying to understand.

The room was dark before I thought of the deerhunt. The first tears trickled instantly, salty and hot; then I was sobbing to myself, bitterly and in silence.

There had been a doe at the end who had struggled partially from one of the steep-sided pits. As she scrabbled and fought for purchase a beater, beside himself with excitement, rushed forward, brought a rock down crushingly on her skull. She turned her head to him then, as if questioning mutely why it had been necessary to cause her so much pain; so that his arm faltered for an instant before the stone fell again and she slid quietly back into the earth. I was undoubtedly overwrought; but it seemed my mother’s face had been the face of the deer.

A fever came, and ebbed. Braziers were burned in the room, filling it with bitter smoke. Calgaca fed me broth, carefully, propping me upright so I could eat. She changed my dressings, always with her lips compressed into a rigid line. Once, when she turned away, I saw the sheen of tears on her cheek. I lifted my wrist, supporting it with my other hand. I saw my little finger thrust up stiffly now, out of line with the rest; at its base was the curving dark edge of the wound, surrounded by inflammation and areas of wrinkled dead skin. Calgaca applied herbs, and a balm with a stinging scent. I tried to move the finger. I could not; the attempt merely started bright forked pains.

The pain too passed, by degrees. I lay a week or more, in a cold dream of my own. The housepeople brought me my food; nobody else troubled me, or came near. Through the doorway of the room I could see a corner of the peristyle, a wedge of blue sky across which billowed majestic silver clouds. Noises reached me from the rest of the house; the clattering of utensils, voices raised in laughter, argument. My ears recorded the sounds indifferently.

Finally I could stand my solitude no longer. I rose shakily, dressed and went in search of Marcus.

I found him as usual in his room, shaping the handle of a scythe. He stared at me for a moment when I entered then went on patiently scraping, whistling tunelessly between his teeth.

‘Marcus,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to talk to you.’

He said calmly, ‘Nobody’s stopping you.’

I opened my mouth, shut it, tried to think. Then it all came with a rush. ‘They all hate me. My mother hates me. They’re all laughing at me. Because I was a coward. I wish I’d died, I don’t know what to do.’ I clenched my fists; and to my horror and disgust, my eyes once more started swimming with tears.

Marcus put down the spokeshave he had been using, released the work from the cramp. He said, ‘Your mother doesn’t hate you. She’s merely put you away from her. Which, perhaps, is not before time.’ He squinted along the beautiful curve of the haft, nodded, and placed it to one side.

I said dully, ‘I wish I were dead. Please help me, Marcus. What am I to do?’

He grunted. ‘On the subject of cowardice,’ he said, ‘you were defeated by superior force. Not particularly smart, maybe; but cowardly? I wouldn’t have said so.’

I said, ‘I lost my sword. All because of the blood.’

He stared at me, and sighed. Then he turned away, drawing his key ring from his finger. Above the bench, built into the corner of the little room, was a stout cupboard of unpainted wood. I had never seen it open. He unlocked it, swung the door ajar; and I caught my breath. The light gleamed on leather and steel; on the trappings of a soldier, of the army of everlasting Rome.

He took the heavy sword down in its scabbard, pulled the blade clear of the sheath. I flinched at the sound it made. He turned with it in his hand; and this was no toy, no old blade dull with rust, but a live thing, bright and polished and terribly keen. He held it upright, the hilt between his palms, and thought for a moment. ‘Answer me a riddle,’ he said. ‘When a great fire burns, in the forest, what do people do?’

I said, ‘I don’t know.’ My new fancy toy of rhetoric had completely failed me.

‘They light other fires,’ said Marcus. ‘And these lesser fires burn back towards the greater till both are spent. Do you understand?’

I shook my head, tiredly.

‘Fear is like a fire,’ said Marcus. ‘Something bright and crackling, that can burn a man to a husk. I’ve felt it, times enough; but never so sharply, and never so hot, as the day I first saw my own blood running on the ground.’

I looked up sharply, wondering. The notion that Marcus could ever have been afraid of anything had never occurred to me; it seemed impossible.

‘I made a vow that day,’ he said. ‘I swore that whatever happened, I would shed no more. And I found a lesser fire to burn away the great fire in my brain.’ He took my wrist, drew it towards him and closed my fingers on the sword-hilt. ‘Touch it,’ he said. ‘Hold it firmly now. Feel its weight. How it balances. Never be afraid of a sword again.’

He left me then, came back with a tray on which stood bread, a bowl of soup and a flask of his famous tart wine. He said, ‘You did well to come to me. I was hoping you would. Tomorrow I’ll start you on some decent training. Now wipe your nose, and get some food into you. If I catch you snivelling again I’m going to kick your backside round the entire circuit of the town walls of Italica.’

It was only that night, lying in the dark remembering what he had said, I realised that though the things he had warned me of had come to pass as he expected, there had been no word of blame. I don’t think I ever loved anybody as much as I loved Marcus then.

And now I must span years, in which my life and schooling in Italica went on; rich years, I see now, while I grew from childhood to my first strength. Under Marcus I learned a soldier isn’t made in a few days, or even months. I had dreamed myself a Caesar, dreamed the spoils and glories; what I hadn’t dreamed was the sweat, the tedium, the endless repetition and disappointment of the training he gave me. Most days, sometime or other, we would ride out of Italica to our practice ground, a glade in the spinney in which I’d played that fateful morning. My targets were stakes hammered into the ground; he would keep me in play an hour or more, till my muscles sang and my whole body ached. He gave his praise grudgingly; I learned to put my heart and soul into the work, and every last ounce of my strength. ‘When the steel’s in your hand,’ he would say time and again, ‘it’s no good looking for quarter. Only one thing matters; to stay alive .. .’

His first concern was for my grip, for the injured finger never regained its use, and any backhand stroke tended to flip the sword up out of my hand. He devised a special hilt for me finally, angled slightly to the blade and with a curved tailpiece that fitted snugly in my palm. He had other tricks, too many to recall. Once he asked me, casually, whether I felt my strength had improved. I answered smugly enough that I could fight for half a day and not feel tired. He gave one of those humourless little smiles of his, and said no more; for the next practice he tied slabs of lead to my shield and blade, and I found just what it cost to make a thoughtless boast. Another time I confided to him that were I to meet my enemy again I felt sure I could beat him. He said nothing in reply, but I should have been warned by the expression on his face. Next time we fought he changed his tactics, barging me violently and hooking a foot behind my ankle. I landed sprawling; before I could roll aside the tip of his sword had kissed me lightly on belly and throat. ‘It’s not the man that’s worse than you that you must look to,’ he said savagely. ‘It’s the man that’s better....’ After that it was practice with the stakes again; he wouldn’t deign to fight me till I had once more been reduced to a true appreciation of my worth.

Marcus always brought to practice a bottle of his sour wine; we would share it when training was through, sitting side by side, while he sketched points of tactics with the tip of his sword, dredged up some anecdote from his seemingly endless supply to illustrate a point he’d made. Other times he would discuss the styles of fighting of barbarians, frequently as we worked. ‘Your Libyan,’ he would say, ‘won’t stand unless he’s three or four to one. Don’t let that bother you. He’ll come at you bollock-naked anyway, not even a shield; just a bit of cloth wrapped round his arm. He carries one light spear; when he’s cast he’ll turn and run. A German’s a very different proposition. He’ll barge you, try and get you off your feet; and that bloody little sacred dagger he always carries’ll be in your gut before you’ve got time to blink. Come into him hard, shoulder and shield; and use the point. Always the point. Shield up, keep it up, and thrust. Into me now. The point, and again. Give me the point ...’

Sometimes I worked with the trident and javelin to improve my balance and eye, but always we returned to the sword. Hour after hour, day after day; till one day I disarmed my instructor, sending his blade spinning to the ground. He straightened then, and laughed loud and long. When he had finished he shook his head. ‘There’ll be no more lessons, Caius,’ he said. ‘Only practice. I’ve taught you all I can. Except one thing.’ He drove his shield edge suddenly and violently at my stomach. I sat down with a thump, winded; when I looked up the tip of my own sword was pointed unwaveringly between my eyes.

‘That’s my final warning to you,’ said Marcus gruffly. ‘Never trust an unarmed man ...’

It was only afterwards, riding back to Italica in the mellow sunlight of a summer evening, that the true significance of what he had said dawned on me. I glanced across at him, sitting his horse easily at my side; but his brown, keen face was remote and composed. He had given himself unstintingly; now his task was through. And it seemed another phase of life had ended for me before I could realise its passing. For years the daily practising had been an end in itself, something I had grown to do instinctively and automatically; now, abruptly, the future yawned blank as that first day at school. I was seventeen, tall for a Roman, strong well beyond my years; and the time had come to put what I had learned to a use. I remembered something Marcus had said once, about sand never running upwards; how both men and nations must go on, looking to the future and never standing still.

The time was coming when I was to wish with all my heart I could conjure the sun back up from the western sea; for my mother was pregnant again.

While I worked to fit myself for my chosen career, great changes were taking place in the West. I was thirteen when Magnus Maximus, for so long a thorn in the side of the Imperial Government, finally rode to meet his fate, invading Italia with a horde of foederate barbarians stiffened by regular troops drawn from Hispania, Britannia and Gaul. Defeated in pitched battle by Theodosius, he finally surrendered at Aquileia and was summarily executed. For a time the Empire breathed easier.

Yet the position of Theodosius himself was still delicate. Latium and many of the Provinces recognised the legal rights of the House of Velentinian; the Augusta Velentina, ruling for her son, was still a voice in world affairs, while her Magister Militum, Arbogast, was both powerful and feared. Theodosius, whose weakness had never been better shown than by his initial recognition of Maximus as Augustus, took the opportunity presented by the crisis to strengthen his position in the West. For three seasons his vast field army policed Gaul; but early in the summer of my seventeenth year news reached Baetica that the Legions were once more on the move. The Emperor was retiring on Constantinopolis, which city his son Arcadius had been controlling in his absence.

My father put his head in his hands when he heard, and swore with startling fluency. ‘It’s incredible,’ he said. ‘Absolutely bloody incredible.’

A weed was growing between two of the flagstones; I kicked at it idly, swinging my feet.