Hadrian's wall

IX

The villa of Quintus Maxus, the first private residence that Valeria's party was to rest at in Britannia, was three days' journey north of Londinium. The road they followed was, in the Roman manner, a spear shaft thrust across hill and dale that sliced through ancient property lines and bridged streams, bogs, and wooded gullies. The highway was well maintained near Londinium, its tight-fitting stones cushioned with gravel and its stout puncheons rumbling like a drum. Grassy margins were cleared to the distance of a bowshot to discourage brigands, and the cavalry escort rode there instead of on the highway, to save the hooves of their unshod horses. But the farther Valeria's escort ventured from the capital, the more indifferent maintenance became. Holes went unrepaired, gravel was scant, brush invaded the shoulders, and frost heaved the stones.

Money, Galba told her as the cart jounced. There was never enough.

Contrasting to this Latin precision were the walls that marked the boundaries of Briton farms. These surrendered to topography and curved along the undulating terrain with the organic symmetry of cells. The result was a honeycomb, cut by Roman roads like a knife.

As an official party the wedding entourage had right-of-way over all but military units or imperial messengers. Private travelers, peddlers, wool merchants, cattle drovers, pilgrims, and hay wagons moved to the grassy swale as Valeria's procession passed, eyes peeking curiously at the woman on the high seat in the column's middle.

A bright blue canopy shielded her from sun or rain, and a scarlet cloak was clasped round her neck. She sat straight, her dark hair lustrous at the margin of her hood, her eyes bright, her smile brave, her figure trim and rounded, her garments a display of Egyptian linens, Asian silks, and Roman embroideries. A senator's daughter! In rural Britannia, she was as exotic as a unicorn or giraffe. At Petrianis she'd be a kind of queen, she supposed. She smiled graciously and studied these people as they studied her, speculating on their quiet, secret lives. Did they envy her?

She looked forward to the hospitality of Quintus Maxus. She could learn from the province's aristocracy, and the manor owner would earn status by entertaining not just the future wife of a praefectus, but the daughter of a senator. His feast would be a display of his best because the. empire was unified by ten thousand complicated alliances, where advancement revolved around family, friends, clients, loyalty, and long-owed favor. Every invitation was calculated, and every acceptance was strategic.

Galba was taciturn on the road north, brooking no dissent and joined to his horse like a centaur, his belt of rings jingling on his hip. While command came easily to him, companionability did not. He'd answer when asked but otherwise offered little conversation. This reticence made Valeria more curious, not less, of course. There was a peculiar restlessness to him, she thought, which left him brooding and mysterious.

"I'm told you're a Thracian, tribune," she prompted once as his constant prowling back and forth past their procession brought him alongside.

He looked wary. It was bold for a woman to initiate conversation. "I was."

"A long way from home."

"No." He took a moment to elaborate. "The Wall is my home now. You're the one who's a long way away."

So to him she was the outsider. Interesting. "What's it like in Thrace?"

"I left twenty years ago."

"But surely you have memories." Even as she said it, she realized how difficult it was to picture Galba as a child.

"Thrace is grass. Horses thrive there."

"A beautiful place?"

"A poor one. A frontier, like where you're going."

"And you a frontiersman."

"So it would seem." He was looking straight ahead now, as if to glance at her might reveal weakness. Galba, she suspected, was a man terrified of weakness. Perhaps, like many strong men, he was terrified of women.

"But you're a Roman as well," she went on, trying to draw him out. If she could understand Galba, perhaps she could understand Britannia. If she was to prevail in this province, she had to learn its mood. As a girl her studies had included little of the geography taught to boys, but she'd always been curious. Sometimes as a child she had hidden behind the tapestries of her father's dining room and listened to the men shouting opinions about lands, wars, and treaties in places she could scarcely imagine. Now she was beginning to see them for herself.

"I'm a Roman soldier. I've never seen Rome."

So she had experience that he did not. "Do you wish to?"

He briefly met her gaze, and for just a moment his eyes betrayed a look of longing. For Rome? Home? Friendship? Then he turned away again. "I wanted to once. Now, I don't think so. Rome, I suspect, would disappoint me."

She tried to tease him. "I thought all roads led to Rome."

"My Rome is the border, lady. My ambition is the Petriana cavalry. It may seem modest to you, but it's all I have."

She understood his meaning instantly, and felt guilty. He was escorting the cause of his own demotion! "And my future husband now has command. You must resent us." Was he loyal? Could Marcus trust him?

"Duty must never be resented, lady." It was a rote response. "Besides, fortune turns many ways." Then he galloped ahead.

Sometimes, when they stopped for the night at the public mansiones spaced every twenty-five miles, she caught him eyeing her from a distance. Just why was unclear. She was used to having men look at her, and Galba occasionally let his gaze linger enough to reassure her that he wasn't immune to her beauty. Yet his look was more complicated than that. It was as if he hadn't yet made up his mind about her. She'd become confident she could read the mind of the boys she'd flirted with in Rome, outguessing their strategies and manipulating their longings. But she couldn't tell if this grizzled, powerful man was intrigued by her or annoyed, impressed by her rank or dismissive of her gender and youth.

"That's just the way of him," the soldier Titus told her. "He looks at everyone with the glint of a hawk and the guile of a merchant. He's the kind with little he needs saying and less need of what others say. Don't be insulted; he's that way with everybody."

"The silences make him more formidable, somehow."

"Don't think he doesn't know it, lady."

"But is he really as fearsome as he seems?"

"Have you seen the rings on his belt?"

She smiled. "I can always hear him coming, like little bells!"

"Those are trophies from the men he's killed."

She was shocked. "You're joking!"

"Forty of them. If you want to understand Galba, look at his waist."

The original Celtic tapestry of meandering pathways and undulating fields had been drawn by a culture with no need for highways or towns, its patchwork a dazzling green. Pastures and grain fields were interspersed with small orchards, vegetable gardens, and wooded coppices of alder and birch. Larger woodlots filled hollows and crowned hills. At the junction of fieldstone walls were Celtic farmsteads, a cluster of oval or rectangular stone corrals enclosing two or three round houses with peaked thatch roofs. Here lived patriarch and matron, children and grandchildren, uncles and cousins, maids and midwives, all coexisting with pigs, goats, a milk cow, dogs, chickens, geese, and rodents in a trampled world of straw, manure, and planted flowers. The grays and greens of their world were punctuated by bright banners at the doors and hoisted weavings on the rooftops, adding blossom to the breeze. Sometimes the Britons themselves donned rainbow colors like Roman entertainers, as if to combat their country's gloom. From a distance they reminded Valeria of butterflies flitting on a velvet meadow, the reds, blues, and yellows quickening her heart.

These free farmers occupied just part of the countryside, however. Debt, sickness, conquest, or opportunism had put other Britons under the thrall of larger landowners, producing plantations of up to a hundred slaves and tenant farmers that were governed by a Roman villa. The result was an archipelago of Italian order in a sea of Celtic primitivism, or so Clodius saw the pattern.

"What amazes me is that the advantages of Roman life haven't been more widely copied," he opined as they rode along. "It's one thing to know no better. Quite another to live next to a superior way of life and fail to improve yourself."

He might as well have been talking to his horse, for all the attention the other soldiers paid him, but Valeria was bored. "Improve how, dear Clodius? By losing your farm to a Roman estate?"

"By adopting modern comforts. A leakproof tile roof. Heat. Glass windows."

"And a barracks of troublesome slaves. Steep debt. Ceaseless taxes. Long days and worried nights."

"You're no doubt describing our next host, Valeria, and yet you'll enjoy his comforts."

"I will, but I'll not pass judgment on his Briton neighbors until I've met some of them, and learned their lives, and understood their contentment."

He snorted. "What you'll meet are mud and fleas."

"Better to scratch than have a closed mind."

He laughed. "You're a rare woman to have such wit!"

"And you're a rare man to listen to it," she gave him, which seemed to please the youth. At least he paid her attention. The other men kept careful distance, giving deference but never presuming familiarity. She was to be protected but not approached.

Clodius was isolated as well. The young tribune had been pegged by the soldiers as an aristocrat posted for seasoning, and thus an officer who'd yet to prove himself. The highborn Roman thought them crude, and they thought him priggish. So the aristocrat found himself befriending the dangerously disreputable Cassius.

The gladiator refused to be admired. "Don't flatter me, tribune. I entertained the mob, and they despised me for it. There's no glory in the arena, just blood, sand, and, if you're lucky like me, another form of slavery."

"Still," Clodius insisted, "you're an expert at fighting. What advice can you give?"

Cassius grunted. "Pain and fear are allies if you enlist them on your side. Strike first, without mercy, and you strike at the other man's will."

"Doesn't fairness demand that I give an opponent time to ready himself?"

"The graveyards are full of fair men."

As the party clipped north, the young woman counted the mile-posts in boredom and studied the countryside with genuine curiosity. Rome did not just govern, it transformed, the power of its ideas enforced not just with the sword but with engineering, architecture, and agronomy. As traditional as Celtic homesteads remained, there were also rectangular and ordered farms, trim Roman towns of white stucco and red tile roofs, walled army garrisons with a gate precisely positioned in each of the four directions, counting houses, signal towers, post stations, pottery factories, stone quarries, and iron forges. Smoke from Roman industry rose into a scrubbed blue sky, and horizontal waterwheels turned tirelessly in the spring freshets. This was the world her future husband had come to defend.

It was late afternoon of the third day when they gratefully turned from the main road to enjoy the hospitality of Quintus Maxus. At last, the comforts of a proper villa! They passed through a break in a dike and proceeded down a poplar-lined lane through a series of orderly fenced enclosures, each field, orchard, and granary a testament to their host's accumulated wealth and epicurean taste.

A stucco wall surrounded the villa proper, and when its gate swung wide, the garden drew a sigh of recognition from Valeria. Here were the familiar enclosing wings of a U-shaped house with garden and courtyard pool, roses and lilies, herbs and hedges, statues and stone benches. Under a shaded colonnade waited a somewhat portly Quintus, his head already reddened by the spring sun. Next to him was a regal and kindly looking woman who must be Calpurnia, Quintus's wife. "Come, shed your dust!" Quintus called jovially. "Fill your stomachs! Our home is yours, weary travelers!" The soldiers would have good beds this night, and all would use Quintus's baths, the women taking their turn after the men.

"It's Rome, even here at the edge of the empire," Valeria whispered to Savia.

"If the world is Roman, Rome is the world," came the proverbial reply.

"They have the taste of Italians!"

"Or at least their money."

The supper began at dusk. Quintus and his neighbor Glidas, a transplanted Gaul with dealings in both provinces, invited Clodius and Galba to join them on the dining couches. The matron Calpurnia and Valeria sat upright in chairs to one side as custom dictated, Calpurnia's sharp eye directing her slaves and the women entering and retreating from male conversation as was proper. The two ladies had become instant friends, Calpurnia eagerly dissecting the intricate braidwork of Valeria's hair because it mimicked the latest style of the empress, Valeria plying her hostess with countless questions about maintaining a household in Britannia. What foods did the province excel at? How best to keep warm through the seasons? How easy was it to import luxuries? What was the proper relationship between Roman master and Briton native? Did babes sicken unnaturally in the damp? How did highborn women keep in touch?

Oil lamps gave light and warmth to their gathering, and ironmullioned glass shut out the evening's chill. The floor, hollow underneath and heated by a stoked hypocaust fire, had mosaics the equal of Italy's. There were rich tapestries, Italian marbles, and the dining wall bore a splendid fresco of Roman ships plying the Hibernian Sea. Valeria could almost imagine herself enjoying a banquet at Capua, but the splendor also unexpectedly made her homesick. How big the world was!

They began with an appetizer of eggs, imported olives, oysters, early greens, and wintered apples. Quintus raised his wine cup. "An opinion on this vintage, please, my new friends! I seek sophisticated judgment!"

"Most satisfying," replied Clodius generously after sampling, as determined to be polite in upper-class surroundings as he was dismissive in lower. "As good as any in Italy."

Quintus beamed. "Would my lady agree?"

Valeria sipped judiciously. While wines tasted little different to her, the Britons seemed to think her opinion important. "Excellent, dear Quintus."

"How delighted I am to hear you say that! You, so recently arrived from Rome!" He turned to Galba. "And you, senior tribune?"

"You already have opinions."

"Yet you're a famous warrior! I want yours!"

"I'm a man of the hard ground and rude camp."

"Of experience and forthrightness!"

Galba regarded Quintus over his pewter cup with faint annoyance, his mouth a line at its rim. For a moment it seemed he wouldn't drink at all, and their host began to look anxious. Then Galba bolted it. The suddenness of his movement caught everyone by surprise; the man had the quickness of an animal.

They waited.

"Briton," he pronounced. He tapped his cup with his thumb, and a pretty slave poured more. The tribune let his forearm caress her thigh, and she glanced at the soldier with interest, a sudden fluidity to her hip.

Quintus's face fell. "It's that obvious?"

"And no insult. But yes, no honest man would mistake this taste for Italy's." He kept his gaze from Clodius.

Their host looked morose. "Indeed! It's too wet in Britannia, too wet and too cold. If you can delay your journey, I'd like to show you my vineyard. The mildew-"

"I'm a drinker, not a farmer."

"This is from your own vines?" Clodius interjected. "No, it's really quite fine, dear Quintus! As good as any!"

Quintus was dubious. "Do you really think so?"

"I must have a second cup!"

Now the flirtatious slave came to the junior tribune. As she poured, he murmured in her ear, the swell of her breasts revealed by her low tunic. Then she slipped away.

The young Roman drank again. "I'm impressed by your industry."

Their host shook his head. "We're trying, but life in Britannia is daunting. The weather is bad and the tax collectors worse. I caught one the other day using a grain measure marked with the wrong number. He blithely admitted fraud, took his rightful share without apology, and then got his bite by adding a surcharge for 'administrative necessities.' He laughed at me-me, Quintus Maxus!"

"Protest to higher authority."

"I do! I complain to the magistrate, and nothing comes of it. I write the governor and get no answer. I try to see the duke and am told he has no time. I swear, every man with an imperial commission does nothing but sell smoke. A good wine can allow a man to forget many troubles… but we can't even make good wine!" He turned to his friend. "Glidas-aren't you building a Christian chapel?"

"I am," the merchant allowed.

"You find Christian prayers effective?" Valeria asked politely.

"I find public office ruinous. They've tried to make me consularis, but then I'd be responsible for road repairs I can ill afford. A friend has taken holy orders to escape obligation. I'm considering the same."

"Yet not every man in the province is dishonest," Calpurnia protested.

"No," Quintus admitted, "but something's gone wrong with the vintage of our society in Britannia here, just like this wine. The sense of citizenship is fading. Rome seems more distant."

"It's really quite acceptable, dear Quintus," Valeria insisted politely.

"Britannia?"

"The wine."

They laughed. Valeria blushed.

"It smells of the Briton bog," their host mourned, hoping for contradiction. "It tastes like cabbage and peat. A pig would trade it for puddle water."

"Nonsense," Clodius said. "Don't pay attention to our dour critic from Thrace."

"The senior tribune was courageous in his honesty."

"Or mistaken in his palate. Have him taste again." The youth smiled encouragingly.

"I've no need to taste anything," Galba grunted. "I said what I think."

"I challenge a more careful test," Clodius insisted. "Prove the consistency of your judgment."

The senior tribune frowned, but the others looked expectant, and so he waved impatiently at the slave, who'd returned. She refilled his cup, once more seductively brushing against him. This time Galba didn't bolt his drink but sipped it and then politely put it down.

"Quintus, I never said it was bad. But Briton wine is Briton wine."

"I should burn my vines," their host mourned. "I should break my jars."

"Except," Clodius interrupted mildly, "our military expert has just sampled not your wine, dear Quintus, but a superb and expensive vintage that I brought from Italy."

"What?"

"I had the slave girl switch them."

"I don't understand."

"My point is that our senior tribune can't tell the difference."

The room was suddenly quiet.

"His opinion wasn't rude, but simply ignorant," Clodius blandly went on. "Your wine is quite good, Quintus. My apologies for our entire party."

Quintus looked alarmed. "I need no apology! I asked for an honest opinion!"

"You seek to embarrass me, boy?" Galba's voice rumbled like distant thunder.

"I seek the honesty you said you were giving."

Galba looked at Clodius in disbelief.

"Nor am I intimidated by your sullen scowls, tribune."

"Still," a flustered Quintus stammered, hoping to deflect what he feared might become a deadly quarrel, "I prefer imported to my own."

"Trade wheat for wine, then," Clodius said, as if he were governor. "Wool for linen. Lead for iron. Let every part of the empire concentrate on its strengths."

"And risk losing a year's cargo to storm or the next war," Glidas warned.

"What storm? What war?"

"The emperor is ailing. His heir is only eight years old. Wars of imperial succession are what I came from Gaul to escape."

"And escape you will. Imperial politics aren't decided in Britannia." Clodius didn't notice his own condescension.

"Constantine was proclaimed by his soldiers in Eburacum," their host reminded. "He went on to conquer the empire. And it's not that invading troops will come here. It's that Britannia's legionaries are drawn off to fight there, in Gaul and Iberia. And when they go, the Picts and the Scotti become restless. The Franks and Saxons raid."

"Raid where?" Valeria asked.

"The coast. Or the Wall, where you're going."

"By the gods, that's frightening talk for a woman betrothed!" Clodius objected.

"Yes, Quintus," Calpurnia scolded. "Frustration with your wine is no reason to threaten danger to a pretty bride. She'll be safer with the Petriana than in Rome."

Quintus looked embarrassed. The last thing he wanted to do was offend a senator's daughter. "Of course, of course. I exaggerate. It's just that Rome ignores our problems."

Valeria smiled in forgiveness. "The Roman energy you're seeking has come back in my Marcus," she promised.

"Well said! Every man should have such loyalty! And before you're even married!"

"The gods know that few men earn it after the wedding," Calpurnia said.

And with that they laughed, Quintus clapping for the main course in relief.

"Please, I don't intend to scare you, Valeria," their host went on. "This is a good place you've come to, and a good man too. I just talk without thinking at times."

"It's his most tedious habit," his wife said gently.

"But the barbarians are getting bolder and the garrisons weaker."

"The Wall stands," Clodius said grandly. "Sleep well behind it, Quintus."

"I appreciate your reassurance, young tribune. But I mean no disrespect when I point out that you've yet to serve in the north."

"True." Clodius speared a dumpling. "In military matters, as opposed to wine, I defer to our senior tribune." It was an attempt at truce.

Their host turned. "And you, Brassidias, who has served on the Wall: Are you as sure as your young officer here that the garrison can hold, should civil war break out?"

Galba had been speculatively eyeing the slave girl waiting in a corner. Her little conspiracy with Clodius had made him want to possess her even more. Now he turned reluctantly back. "For once I agree with the junior tribune," he said slowly. "The issue is never numbers, Quintus. It's fear, generated by Roman will."

"That's exactly what I'm questioning! Roman will!"

"No, you're questioning my will. And as long as I will it, no barbarian tribe will threaten Hadrian's Wall. My will creates their fear. My will sustains the empire."