Hero of Rome

XIV

Five days before the festival of Armilustrium, when his soldiers would hold the annual ceremony to purify their arms, Valerius received a surprise summons from the camp prefect of the Londinium garrison. Technically, he remained under the command of the Twentieth legion and the praefectus castrorum had no authority over himself or his troops. In reality he knew that with the governor immersed in preparations for the spring campaign the man was de facto commander of the south-east. He had a momentary panic that he was being posted home immediately, but quickly realized that order would have come in a simple dispatch.

He made preparations to leave at once, then changed his mind. He had more than one reason for making the trip. He made the short walk to Lucullus’s offices.

‘I am sorry you were inconvenienced.’

Lucullus looked up at the young tribune from the scroll he studied. For an unguarded moment his face was blank, before it automatically took on the fixed smile he wore as if it were part of a uniform.

‘On the contrary,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I apologize for being such a poor host. You were fortunate you did not have the oysters. They had been kept a day longer than was good for them — or for me. My factor’s back now bears the scars to ensure it will not happen again. It was kind of you to come here to enquire after my health.’ The last sentence held the slightest hint of a question.

‘You have been very kind to me,’ Valerius said obliquely. ‘But that was not the only reason for my visit. I must leave for Londinium tomorrow and I have a favour to ask. Part of my supplies — engineering equipment — has failed to arrive. I could send a letter, but it would only give birth to an extended family of paperwork. Would it be possible to hire another of your wagons? I know it is short notice, but I would happily pay a premium.’

‘Pah! Do not talk to me of premiums,’ the little Trinovante blustered. ‘For my friend Valerius there are only discounts. I will give you it at half rate, although, of course, you must provide an acknowledgement for the full amount. Your Roman auditors…’ He shook his head solemnly as if a visit from the auditor was like the arrival of the first plague spot.

Valerius reluctantly agreed to what he knew was tax fraud and arranged for Lunaris to collect the wagon, before turning the conversation to the true subject of his visit. ‘You very generously invited me to hunt over your land. At the time I was busy, but I would be honoured to take up your offer whenever it is convenient.’

Lucullus’s smile visibly transformed itself from lie to truth and he came round the table and clapped Valerius on the back. ‘Wonderful! Send word when you have fetched your shovels. I promised you good sport and you shall have it. There is a boar in the far wood who has been digging up my fields. My factor says he is as big as a pony. If he’s that big he can feed fifty people. We will have him on a spit in time for Samhain and feast till the sun comes up. I remember…’

He was still boasting of the beasts he had taken when Valerius left ten minutes later, but the young Roman could only think of one thing. He would see Maeve again. As he made his way back to the camp he felt someone fall into step beside him and he turned to find Petronius at his side.

‘Falco tells me you are doing business with our tame Briton. I hope he isn’t cheating you?’ The words were accompanied by a smile that suggested they were said in jest, but Valerius felt like a plump trout being tempted by a dangling worm. Somewhere in the sentence was a barbed hook.

‘Surely the quaestor would not allow such a thing?’ he replied guardedly. ‘In any case Falco tells me that you also do business with Lucullus.’ Falco had done no more than offer a hint, but Petronius was not the only one who could dangle a bait.

‘We have an arrangement,’ the lawyer admitted airily. ‘The Celt has his uses and we must at least be seen to try to make common cause with the natives. And if I benefit, does Colonia not also benefit to an even greater degree?’ The boast puzzled Valerius and it showed on his face. Petronius laughed. ‘You have not heard? Poor Lucullus. He talks much more than is good for him. How else would I know what the Celts from here to the River Abus are thinking and planning, who is happy with his lot and who is not?’

Valerius increased his pace. Clearly Colonia formed part of the great military and civilian spy network that blanketed southern Britain. One of the reasons Paulinus felt secure enough to launch an attack on the druids on Mona was that his spymasters had assured him no danger existed to his rear. In any case, how would the Empire decide whom to tax and by how much if they did not know to the last egg and the smallest bushel of corn what the British chieftains were worth. He doubted very much that Petronius was the intelligence mastermind he appeared to want him to think, but the quaestor was a hard man to shake off.

‘You have met his daughter?’

Valerius almost stopped, but that would have betrayed his interest. Maeve was his business and no one else’s. ‘His daughter?’

Petronius was amused. ‘The skinny, dark-haired one. She was with her father outside the temple.’

Skinny? Valerius shrugged and tried to give the impression that, to a soldier, one woman was very much like another. From the corner of his eye he caught Petronius giving him a sly glance.

‘But you must remember her? I believe someone — perhaps it was old Numidius, the engineer? Yes, I’m sure it was him — mentioned that you dined with the Briton and his friends only two days ago. Surely she must have been on hand? I’m surprised he hasn’t already tried to marry her off to you.’

This time Valerius did stop. He gave the quaestor a look that would have silenced any of his centurions, but Petronius only laughed.

‘Do not look so shocked, young man. You are unmarried and of means, and therefore eligible. You are a Roman citizen, which makes you doubly so. If you were the Emperor himself you could hardly make a finer catch for a Briton with ambitions beyond his status. Far better certainly than many he has tried to tempt her with. It is little wonder she had no interest in the attentions of some toothless farmer who still has the manners of the marching camp. But a young man of your lineage…’

‘I am here to do a job, sir,’ Valerius said stiffly. ‘Not to find a wife.’

‘Of course not,’ Petronius said sympathetically. ‘I merely thought to warn you, tribune. Your Briton is a cunning fox, and Lucullus more cunning than most. Do not be misled by that inane grin he wears: there is a mind behind it that could almost be Roman were it not that slyness must never be mistaken for intelligence nor playing the fool for wit. Still, you know of the trap now, and I doubt you will fall into it. I bid you a good day.’ He bowed and walked off in the direction of the Temple of Claudius.

The road between Colonia and Londinium was the most important in the province and Valerius made good time, assisted by the dispatches he carried and the military warrant which allowed him to change horses three times at state-run way stations. When he arrived at the city’s east gate, the guards directed him to an officers’ mansio where he could rest and wash off the accumulated dust and sweat of the journey.

Londinium, even more than Colonia, was a place of bare wooden beams, wet plaster, half-tiled roofs and piles of bricks. Streets echoed to the rattle of hammers as carpenters swarmed over the skeletal beginnings of public buildings, houses and apartment blocks. One stood out among the rest, a massive squat structure with a pillared entrance and two separate wings. It was still far from complete, but the guards surrounding the building indicated that the governor, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, had already taken up residence in his new palace. Like Colonia, the city had begun life as a fort protecting a river crossing; then, when the restrictions of Colonia’s river access became clear, protecting the port that was the driving force behind Londinium’s bustle of economic and commercial activity. The fort still remained, up by the wall on the high ground to the north-west, but the city’s heart was here in the ordered grid of streets by the river, and in particular on the main street between the Forum and the timber bridge linking the city to the communities which had already sprung up on the southern bank.

Valerius crossed the stream known as the Wall Brook and walked north towards the fort, where he knew the camp prefect had his headquarters. After presenting his orders at the gate, he expected a formal interview and was surprised to be ushered into a small room off the principia and offered wine. Two minutes later the prefect bustled in, throwing out a stream of orders over his shoulder. When the curtain closed behind him, he sat down with a sigh and poured himself a liberal cup and raised it in salute.

‘Health,’ he growled. ‘Though at your age you’ve still got it. After sixteen years in this swampland I have aches that will never leave me and I’m as stiff and creaky as a siege tower.’

Valerius warily acknowledged the exaggeration. Decimus Castus had been a soldier before he was born, had risen through the ranks and held every senior centurion’s post in the Ninth legion before being promoted again to his present position, where he outranked even senior tribunes with lines of senatorial relatives dating back to before Caesar. He answered only to his legate and to his governor. Normally he would still be with the Ninth at Lindum, but it was a measure of Londinium’s growing importance that the fort was under the authority of a battle-hardened veteran instead of the young auxiliary prefect who would normally command a post like this.

‘Wondering why I dragged you away from your bumps and bridges, eh?’ Castus beckoned Valerius forward to where a map lay pinned to a wooden frame. ‘You’re based in Colonia, here,’ he indicated, ‘with a full cohort and a complement of mounted scouts. I take it you’ve made contact with the prefect in charge of the auxiliary cavalry wing billeted to the south? Yes. Good. You’ll need to work closely with him.

‘Now, see here, here and here?’ He pointed to three positions marked across the centre of the map. ‘Just east of Pennocrucium, to the south of Ratae and about twenty miles from Durobrivae. We’ve had word of unusual activity in all these areas. Nothing solid. Nothing you can pin down, but, shall we say, a change of attitude among the natives. Notice the dates?’ Valerius looked more closely and saw each site was marked with a date about a week apart, with the latest three weeks before. ‘Now, governor Paulinus is not minded to take these reports seriously, and he’s probably right, but I’m old enough to remember what happened when we disarmed the tribes back in Scapula’s time. One minute they were quiet as dormice, the next they came screaming over the battlements like wolves. Never underestimate your Briton, young man. He can be subdued, but he’ll never be tamed. There’s a pattern to these changes that makes my old wounds itch.’ He waved a hand over the eastern sector of the map, as yet unmarked. ‘If that pattern continues, we’ll have word from around Lindum, where I’ve already asked the Ninth to quietly keep an eye on things, then further south-east, which brings us to the point. I want you to work with your cavalry commander to carry out aggressive patrols to the north and north-west of Colonia, with particular emphasis on the country where the boundaries of the Trinovantes, the Catuvellauni and the Iceni meet.’

‘The quaestor ’s opinion is that this area is quiet,’ Valerius ventured.

Castus grunted. ‘So I understand. The next thing you’ll be telling me is that the Celts enjoy being taxed and they think the price we pay them for corn is fair.’

Valerius smiled and resumed his study of the map. It seemed a small thing to be getting so exercised about. Still, Castus knew his business better than most. ‘Spies can be wrong,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll issue the order as soon as I return to Colonia. The cavalry commander, Bela, is a good man and his troops are keen.’

‘You should pay particular attention to the Iceni,’ Castus continued. ‘They’re our allies and old Prasutagus is on friendly terms with the governor, but that doesn’t make them any more trustworthy and it means we know less about them than we do the other tribes. It’s more difficult to spy on your friends than your enemies. Anything you can discover would be of help, but you’ll have to be subtle.’

When the interview was over Valerius walked the short distance to the quartermaster’s depot by the north gate. There, his business looked likely to take longer thanks to a clerk who insisted that a mistake wasn’t a mistake unless it was confirmed in writing and endorsed by three seals, and he wouldn’t budge on that even if it happened to be the governor at the other side of his desk. Fortunately, the clerk’s overseer was a decurion who had served with the Twentieth and recognized Valerius.

‘If the tribune says the shovels didn’t turn up, they didn’t turn up, and if the Twentieth needs shovels, the Twentieth gets shovels. Anything else you require, sir?’ he asked with a wink. Valerius left with an assurance that when his wagon arrived it would be loaded with a dozen shields and swords and fifty pila to replace those ‘lost’ during the summer, which would go some way to paying his debt to Falco.

Lunaris wasn’t likely to reach Londinium with the wagon until the next day, which gave him a night to kill. He didn’t want to be alone, but equally he didn’t want to be with the type of woman available to a soldier in a city like this. In fact, the only woman he wanted to be with was Maeve. Eventually, he settled for a night in the mansio drinking wine with a few fellow officers either passing through on their way to join a legion, or travelling back to Rome. It amused him to listen to the veterans’ hair-raising stories of the prowess of the Celtic warriors from the western tribes he had faced earlier in the year. He watched one of the younger newcomers grow paler and paler and finally took pity on the man.

‘I don’t believe they were actually seven feet tall,’ he whispered. ‘And they bleed just as easily as the next man. You have nothing to fear if you keep your shield up and your sword sharp.’

‘But do they truly burn their prisoners alive and eat their still beating hearts?’

He smiled. ‘Only in the north, and I believe your unit is in the west.’

‘They burn their prisoners in the west, too.’ The growl came from a rough-hewn centurion sitting by the fire in the corner of the room. ‘At least the druids do. But not for much longer. I was on the staff of the Fourteenth and we’re going to settle them for good. They think they’re safe on their little island but the only way they’ll leave it alive will be if they swim for it. We’ll be waiting to welcome them on the beach, then we’ll see who burns. Come the summer there won’t be a druid left in Britain, and good riddance to them.’

Valerius looked around to see who might be listening. Talk like this was universal among soldiers but hearing the man trumpet details of an impending military campaign made the hairs on the back of his neck rise. The servants in the mansio were all British slaves and he doubted they could be trusted. He had heard many stories about the druids’ merciless cruelty but beneath those stories lay an unlikely respect. These men, these priests, were the mortar which had bound the British tribes until Claudius had shattered their unity with a combination of military might and subterfuge. They might have been herded back on to their sacred island, but they were still organized. It wasn’t only Rome that had spies. He shot the centurion a warning look, but the man refused to be silenced.

‘Everyone knows, and why should they not?’ he said defiantly. ‘If the Britons fight, so much the better. The more of them who try to stop us, the more of the vermin we will kill.’

Valerius had a sudden image of a pair of fire-filled eyes and a flashing knife; a man who wanted to kill him more than he loved life itself.

‘What if there are too many of them for you to kill?’