The War at the Edge of the World (34 page)

‘Is that even possible?’ Castus had travelled most of that route himself when he had come to join the Sixth, and it had taken him nearly three months.

‘Seems so. He’s here now, anyway. And you know that quite a few in the army think that Constantine should have been made Caesar after the abdications? Apparently the mint in Alexandria had already started turning out
Constantinus Caesar
coins when they heard the news – they had to recall them and break the dies. These two Caesars we have now, what are they? Flavius Severus is a drunk and a gambler who can’t control himself, let alone the empire. Maximinus Daza’s a common soldier with no more experience of commanding armies than… well, than you!’

This time Castus really did step back, and gave his friend a hard appraising glare. Valens looked away, as if conscious that he had said too much.

‘Don’t tell me these things,’ Castus said, cold and level.

‘You’d hear the same in any officers’ mess, brother. Here, in Gaul – all across the empire, probably. If you weren’t too thickheaded to listen when you’re off duty you’d have heard much the same.’

‘But I don’t
want
to hear it!’

Politics, Castus thought, was a stinking mire. Nothing to do with him. The emperors were to be revered, whatever their personal failings. They were beyond mere men; the purple robe elevated them to stand beside the gods. It pained him – quite literally burned in his guts – that the circles of supreme power were just as foul with intrigue and suspicion as the mortal world far below. Because if the emperors could not be trusted, could not be wholeheartedly admired and obeyed, where was loyalty? Where was honour?

In his mind he heard the voice of the notary, Nigrinus, and his subtle threats and insinuations.
We make our own gods too, here on earth
. Then the panicked stammer of the renegade Decentius, just before Castus had killed him. Both men had been sucked into the intrigue: one prospered by it; one had died of it. The muck of politics was corrosive. It rotted morals; it made men weak and terrified, or turned them into monsters. Castus shuddered, hunched his shoulders, tried to ignore Valens’s disapproving stare.

They were passing beneath the north-west gate now. The sentries gave their salutes, and Castus remembered, with sudden start­ling clarity, the early dawn when he had ridden in through those gloomy arches with Marcellina. Barely three months ago, but it seemed like years. Valens was marching on, head down, and Castus took three long paces to catch up with him. They emerged from the dark tunnel beneath the gate into the sunlight, and turned left into the drill field.

‘There he is,’ Valens said, nodding away into the middle distance.

A crowd was gathered around the margins of the field, most of them soldiers and centurions. In the centre of the field straw bales had been set up for cavalry practice, and a troop of the Equites Mauri, light horsemen from North Africa, were wheeling and darting their javelins at the gallop. It was an impressive display, but the crowd was not watching the Mauri. Constantine, the emperor’s son, was riding with them. Mounted on a powerful grey mare, and dressed only in a quilted white linen corselet, he rode hard at the bales, flinging his javelins with great grunts of effort. Each one flew straight to the target, punching into the bale and hanging slack as Constantine spurred his horse away.

‘You brought me here to see this?’ Castus asked.

‘He comes down every afternoon. Sometimes with the Mauri, sometimes the Dalmatae or the Scutarii. Joins in their practice, at all arms. Quite a performer.’

‘Just for show, you think?’

‘Could be. Letting the army see who’s going to be leading them.’

They had dropped their voices again, as if by instinct.

‘The emperor leads the army,’ Castus said quietly. ‘Nobody else. This man’s just a tribune of the Protectores.’

‘The emperor is
sick
…’ Valens said, almost under his breath. ‘If we’re going to war in the spring we ought to know the facts, do you agree?’

‘I don’t care. All that matters is that we go. We have reason enough.’

‘Well, as to that,’ Valens said in a brisker tone, ‘it’s not exactly certain if we go or not… There are new detachments arriving from the German legions. The Eighth and the Twenty-Second. And two cohorts of the Second Augusta from the southern province are camped just south of the city, did you know that? The Sixth might just be left here in the spring after all, holding the fort.’

Castus frowned. Surely that could not happen? He remem­bered the emperor’s words, in the audience hall.
We need skilled men like you
– was that it? Not, surely not, just to work at training recruits at Eboracum either.

They walked back to barracks in silence.

Saturnalia, and the dark wintry streets of the fortress were loud with the noise of riotous celebration. Released for the period of the festival from the bounds of military disci­pline, the soldiers roared and laughed from the taverns and the baths’ porticos, rampaged around the colonnades, climbed onto pedestals naked, oblivious of the freezing drizzle, to yell bawdy songs at the moon.

Leaving the centurions’ messroom, where most of his fellow officers had barricaded themselves in for the night, Castus flung a common soldier’s cloak over his head and paced warily back towards the barracks. He had drunk a few cups of beer, and he was still alert but tired. Parties of men gathered on the street corners, fighting and singing. Now and again one of them recognised him – the cloak did little to hide his bulk – and flung a half-mocking salute. Castus stepped aside as a naked man wearing an ivy wreath came charging down the main street, riding bareback on a terrified cavalry horse, screaming, ‘
Io Saturnalia…!
’

Another few days and the celebrations would be done. Then it would be the Day of Sol Invictus, the birthday of the sun – by then the men would be sobered up, kit cleaned and polished, all of them dressed in their best clothes for the dawn parade to salute the rising sun. After more than two months of training, Castus was beginning to have a little more regard for the men of his century. Countless days on the drill field had battered the inert matter of their civilian selves into shape, at least to some small degree. Perhaps, he thought, by the spring they might be fit to call themselves soldiers.

Some of them were still causing problems, Castus thought as he turned into the barrack lines. Placidus, the burly Gaul from the Wall garrison, was one of them. A braggart and a borderline insubordinate. The scenery-painter Acranius had lived up to expectations, and contrived to get himself admitted to hospital three times already. But, despite his appearance, the schoolteacher Diogenes had proved surprisingly able. He stuck up for himself, had a tenacious sort of stamina, and gave a fearless performance on the drill field. His eccentricities were accepted now, even respected, by his comrades – but Castus still found him bafflingly peculiar…

As he moved towards his own quarters at the end of the block, Castus caught a movement in the darkness: two figures, heavily cloaked, standing in the doorway of his rooms. At once the lingering effects of the alcohol were gone. His hand went to his belt, but he had left his sword back in his quarters and had only his staff.

‘Who’s there?’ he said, clear and loud.

‘Centurion Castus,’ a woman’s voice said. ‘I’m sorry – I know it’s late. I hoped to find you at home.’

Castus recognised the voice at once, but could scarcely believe it. The second figure, a tall man, drew a lantern from under his cloak and uncovered the light.

‘Domina Marcellina,’ Castus said. ‘Why are you here? You shouldn’t have come – it’s Saturnalia. This is no place for you.’ He was pacing closer as he spoke. The man in the cloak was the big slave from the house.

‘I know… As I say, I’m sorry. But I wanted to see you.’

Castus unlocked the door and ushered them both inside. He lit the lamp in the vestibule as the two of them shed their cloaks, and the big slave squatted down at once just inside the door, with a heavy club across his knees.

‘I’m here without permission, you see,’ Marcellina was saying. ‘My brother and his tutor have forbidden me to leave the house, but they gave the slaves the night off duty, and I was able to persuade Buccus here to accompany me.’

Even so, Castus thought. It was less than a mile from her house to the barracks, but this was the rowdiest night of the year. Anything might have happened. He felt angry, but did not know why. Instead he went through into his private rooms, and Marcellina followed behind him.

‘I know this is… irregular,’ the girl said. She sounded unsure of herself. ‘But after you came to the house and I was forbidden to speak with you, I… What my brother said was unforgivable. His accusation that you had failed in your duty, I mean. His tutor put him up to it…’

Castus set the lamp down on the table and glanced around his quarters. Weapons and kit hung from nails on the walls; bowls were stacked on the table. Dirty boots and muddy tunics in a pile in the corner, and the tatty blanket that screened his sleeping alcove thrown back to reveal a mess of bedding. The whole place stank of stale clothing, lamp smoke and army life. Marcellina caught his look of dismay.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said with a slight smile. ‘We’ve both known worse.’

She seated herself on a stool beside the shuttered window. Now, for the first time, Castus looked at her properly. His memories of her were conflicted: the strange self-possessed child he had seen at her father’s house during the long march north, and the shocked and ragged fugitive she had later become. Now she was something more than both, it appeared: a grown woman, quietly confident and collected, dressed plainly in a dark wool gown. Only her pendant earrings and coral necklace showed that she came from wealth.

‘I wanted to thank you,’ she said. ‘In person, rather than by letter. I realise that you didn’t have to come back for me like that. You could have just left me at the villa. And you were… very brave too. I’m sure I wouldn’t have survived with­out your help.’

‘You were brave too,’ Castus told her. ‘Hanging onto the horse like that. I’d have jumped off if I was you.’

She smiled a little again. A slight twitch of her lips, but there was a sense of shared warmth in it.

‘I wanted to thank you as well for your… restraint,’ she said, and dropped her gaze as she noticed his jaw tightening. ‘You know what I mean, I’m sure,’ she said, almost stammering the words. ‘I was… in a state of distress when you found me. Not myself. I know I acted in an immodest way, and I’m sorry. I’m glad you acted with honour, and did not… take advantage of my situation.’

‘What did you
expect
?’ he asked, unable to keep the low anger from his voice. She was blushing, twisting the hem of her shawl in her hands, but when she looked up at him again he caught a glimmer of challenge in her eyes. A more knowing, adult glance. Once again he had that sense of physical clumsiness he had felt before with this woman.

‘You’re not the way you appear, are you?’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s not for me to say – I hardly know you… But you put on an act, I think. Always appearing the strong obedient soldier, unthinking. Like a dumb animal, almost…’

Castus rocked back against the table, trying not to frown too heavily.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ she went on quickly, ‘I don’t mean to offend you. It’s just… I don’t think you’re really like that, are you? You do it on purpose. You appear that way, so people underestimate you. I’m not very good at expressing myself…’

‘That makes two of us.’

She smiled at that. ‘You’re a good man, centurion. That’s all I’m trying to say.’

For a few moments they remained silent, each avoiding the other’s eye.

‘There’s something else.’ She looked up again. ‘A man came to the house, asking questions about you. He had two bodyguards with him – I think they were Praetorians.’

‘What sort of man?’ Castus asked warily. He already had a good idea of his identity.

‘Thin, dry-looking, the way he spoke was… not pleasant at all.’ Marcellina twitched her shoulders, uncomfortable with the memory. Castus started forward from the table.

‘He threatened you?’

‘No, no…’ she said, eyes wide at the sudden vehemence of his words. ‘He was not aggressive, but his questions were strange, his manner cold. He was asking about what had happened, after… after you found me at the villa. What you’d told me, and whether we’d discussed my father.’

Castus blanked his face, tried to keep his tone neutral. ‘What did you tell him?’ he asked her, aware of the tightness in his chest.

She shrugged. ‘I told him that I had been too discomfited by my experiences to notice anything of what was happening. Besides,’ she went on with a quiet smile, ‘why should I have paid any attention to you? You are just a simple soldier, after all.’

How much easier it would be if I were, Castus thought.

‘You did the right thing,’ he said. The idea that Nigrinus was still stalking around, that he had deliberately sought the girl out, both chilled and angered him. Marcellina too had been in danger, although she surely did not know it. But she was safe, they were both safe, for now at least; he eased out a held breath, unclenched his fists and smoothed his palms along the edge of the table.

‘What will you do now?’ he asked her.

‘Oh, my future has been decided,’ she said. ‘By my brother and his tutor between them. The house is being sold and we’re moving to the southern province. My engagement to my cousin Felicianus had been resumed, and we are to be married in the spring.’

Castus remembered her anger when she had spoken of this before, in the marsh hut. There was none of that now, just a calm, sad resignation. It was like duty, he supposed.

‘When are you going?’

‘In two days’ time. My brother wishes to leave the house as soon as possible – he dislikes the bad spirits there, he says. We’ll go to Danum first and spend the winter there. So we won’t meet again, I’m afraid.’

Castus felt a dull ache in his chest. He had almost entirely forgotten about this girl, or so he had thought. Certainly he had never considered that she might mean anything to him – just a civilian he had saved, a vow he had broken. The memory of her had stayed with him all this time, without his realising it. But it would be safer for her to be far away from Eboracum.