Claudius

XLIII

‘I am sorry for your loss.’

Rufus raised his head sharply and stared hard into Narcissus’s eyes. They were sitting in the Greek’s tent, which had been moved back among those set aside for Claudius’s closest aides.

‘Your son is well?’

‘He is well, but no thanks to you.’

Narcissus winced. He was forced to acknowledge that, this once, he had been wrong. He’d thought to spare them both a painful confrontation over Togodumnus’s brooch. If Ballan had retrieved it, Rufus would never have known. What was one more lost treasure in a camp full of thieves?

‘I should have realized Cogidubnus would seek the brooch out and that he would calculate you were the source of my knowledge. Owning it would have given him a hold over the Catuvellauni and the Trinovantes, perhaps the Dobunni too, and King Cogidubnus is an ambitious man. He has petitioned Claudius to create a new title — King of all the Britons, no less. Of the Druid’s movements I knew nothing. That was a lapse on my part, for which, I repeat, I am sorry.’

Rufus had a vision of Nuada’s predator’s eyes and shivered. Narcissus had recognized the power of the brooch’s symbolism, but he had scoffed at its so-called magic. Rufus was not so sure. He wondered at its potential in the hands of a woman like Boudicca. Perhaps it would have been safer with Caratacus. He said none of this. It didn’t matter any more. They were going home. Narcissus had just completed packing his effects when Rufus had arrived.

‘You have been a good soldier, Rufus. The Emperor wishes you to keep your Praetorian uniform, and creates you an honorary member of the Guard.’ The Greek reached inside the folds of his tunic and held out a small bronze plaque. ‘He also wants you to have this. He fulfils his promise.’

For a moment Rufus felt light-headed, and when he reached out his hand it was trembling. It was his manumission. He was free. ‘I…’

Narcissus held up a hand. ‘There is a condition.’

‘I…’

‘You must never return to Rome.’

It was as if the words were jumbled or spoken in a foreign language, the message was so improbable. ‘But why? I have never let him down. I belong with him. He-’ He stopped abruptly. ‘Who will look after Bersheba?’

Narcissus laid his hands on Rufus’s shoulders and forced him to look into his eyes. ‘That is the Emperor’s final gift to you and your son. Bersheba will remain here, in Britain, with you. You are free to come and go as you please in this land, but the legate has orders that you are to be kept on the ration strength as a soldier of the Twentieth. Bersheba too will retain her status, on condition that if she can be of use to the legion, you will provide her. You must understand, Rufus, that this is for the best. You have seen and heard too much for the Emperor to be comfortable in your presence.’

Rufus opened his mouth to protest, but the truth of what he was being told suddenly became clear. The Emperor’s gift wasn’t only freedom, it was life itself. How much easier to rid himself of this nuisance on the voyage back to Rome, with a knife in the back and a weighted sack into the depths? Who would miss a slave and his son?

Narcissus continued, his tone almost kindly. ‘You have two great assets. The first is your self. You are intelligent and hard-working and many a man has made his fortune on those qualities alone. Never underestimate your worth. The other is large and grey and cleverer than both of us put together. Use her well, and kindly, and you and Gaius need never go hungry.’ He smiled and turned to go, then hesitated as if he had changed his mind. ‘I almost forgot. Here is my gift.’

He held out two small leather bags. Rufus took them. They were heavy and he realized that they were familiar. Even Narcissus’s gifts were not what they seemed. The last time he had held the bags was when his friend Cornelius Aurius Fronto had shown them to him in Rome, promising him their contents would buy his freedom. Narcissus had claimed they were lost for ever.

On another day he would have been angry, but not this day.

He reached up to touch the lion’s tooth charm at his throat. It was time.

Claudius stared out over the stern of the galley from beneath the awning erected for him in the centre of the deck. The grey-green contours of the land stretched as far as he could see on either side of the same river that ran past the partially constructed fortress a dozen miles upstream at Camulodunum. Aulus Plautius had chosen the settlement as the site for a permanent base from which he would conquer the rest of the island, but Claudius had his own plans for the place. One day, the gods willing, it would be a city of stone — a monument to his victories.

The invasion of Britain had been a triumph of war and it would win him his own triumph when he returned to Rome. His messengers had already carried news of their Emperor’s glory to the capital. His rivals, Gallus, Galba, Asiaticus and the rest, had seethed and grumbled when they discovered word of the victory would reach home months before they would. They still had doubts, of course; Narcissus’s subterfuge had been too enormous, too blatant, to go entirely undetected. They would gossip and sneer at him among their own kind, but too late to do him any damage.

He shivered. The truth was that he was glad to be free of this island, with its damp and its fogs, its alien gods and its dangerous barbarian inhabitants. Each night he dreamed of the day he had led his legions into battle on the Emperor’s elephant and in the mornings he woke up sweating in fear. How could he have been such a fool? How could he have allowed his enthusiasm and his emotions to carry him on a surge of super-heated blood into the very heart of danger? He didn’t want to be brave. He wanted to be alive.

And he was alive — alive and returning home. To Rome. But here too was a contradiction. For in Rome Valeria Messalina awaited, and, no doubt, further tales of Valeria Messalina’s wrongdoings. There was a reckoning to be had there, but it was a reckoning he did not wish to face. He had already decided he would delay it until after his triumph. Let her enjoy her day in the sun when he was carried from the Campus Martius at the head of his soldiers, and on the Capitol where he would sacrifice to Jupiter in thanks for his victories. He let his imagination take him there. The cheering crowds and the chariot with its matched white horses, the great temple looming above him on its squat hill, the laurel crown above his head and the slave whispering again and again in his ear, ‘ Memento mori — Remember thou art mortal.’

Something flared on a hill inland and to the north of the river mouth. A fire of some sort. A party of woodworkers or some wicked barbarian rite? It didn’t matter. His time in Britain was past and he intended never to return. The soldiers and the bureaucrats could have it now. He had been on the island for all of sixteen days.

The little group on the hill stood mesmerized by the flames clawing their way into the bruised purple of the evening sky from Britte’s funeral pyre. Rufus tried not to see the cloth-wrapped bundle in the centre turn black and disintegrate as the west wind whipped the flames through the carefully stacked cords of pitch-soaked timber. A Gaulish trooper of her tribe had performed the rites as best he could, but for Rufus it was enough that she should know he was here, and had attempted to fulfil her wishes. When it was done, he would gather the ashes and, if the wind was still fair, let it carry what they contained of Britte to the land of her birth. Some instinct told him that she — or what she had been — was already gone.

A small hand gripped his, and he looked down to see Gaius staring into the fire with troubled eyes. They waited until the sky above and the far-off sea below were dusted with gold by the light of a harvest moon. When the last timbers of the pyre crashed down, sending a flurry of sparks into the heavens, Rufus finally turned away and led his son back down the hill. To a new life, in a conquered land, among a conquered people.