The Eagles Conquest

Chapter Thirty-Two

'Where's your Carthaginian friend?' asked Macro. He was sitting with his feet up on his desk, admiring the view from his tent down to the river. The evening meal was finished and tiny insects swirled in the glimmering light. Macro slapped at his thigh and smiled as his lifted hand revealed a tiny red stain and the mangled smear of mosquito. 'Ha!'

'Nisus?' Cato looked up from the letter he was writing at his camp desk, pen poised above the grey terracotta pot of ink. 'Haven't seen him for days, sir.'

'Good riddance, I say. Trust me, lad. His kind are best avoided.'

'His kind?'

'You know, Carthaginians, Phoenicians and all those other shifty trading nations. Can't be trusted. Always looking for an angle.'

'Nisus seemed honest enough, sir.'

'Rubbish. He was after something. They all are. When he realised you had nothing he wanted, off he went.'

'I rather think he went off, as you put it, due to the nature of the conversation we had that night he cooked us a meal, sir.'

'Please yourself.' Macro shrugged, hand poised over another irritating insect weaving dangerously close to his arm. He slapped, missed, and the mosquito whirled away with a high-pitched whine. 'Bastard!' 'That's a bit strong, sir.'

'I was talking to a bug, not about your mate,' Macro replied testily, 'though one's as much of a nuisance as the other.'

'If you say so, sir.'

'I do, and now I think I need a little refreshment!' He rose to his feet and arched his back, hands on hips. 'We all sorted for the night?'

It was the century's turn for watch duty on the east wall; the recent battle losses meant that each watch had to stand for nearly twice the normal length of time. It was unfair but, as Cato had come to learn, fairness was not at the forefront of the military mind.

'Yes, sir, I've sent the rota up to headquarters and I'll make the rounds myself just to make sure.'

'Good, I don't want any of our lads trying to sneak a quick kip. We're low enough on numbers already, thanks to the locals. Can't afford to make matters worse by having any of them stoned to death.'

Cato nodded. Sleeping on sentry duty, like so many other active-service offences, carried the death penalty. The execution had to be performed by the comrades of the guilty man.

'Right then, if anyone needs me I'll be in the centurion's mess tent.' Cato watched him disappear into the gloom with a sprightly step, The centurions had managed to wangle a number of wine amphorae out of one of the transport ship captains. The consignment had been intended for a tribune of the Fourteenth, but the man had drowned one night when he had decided to go for a swim after far too much Falernian, and his new supply was snapped up before the slow-witted captain thought to return the cargo to its sender. Long before the Gaulish wine merchant received word that his customer was well past paying the bill, the wine would have been guzzled.

Left on his own, Cato hurried through the day's administration without any interruption and tidied the scrolls away. This was his chance for some peace and quiet. Much as he admired and liked his centurion, Macro was annoyingly sociable and insisted on conversation at the most inconvenient moments. So much so that Cato often found himself grinding his teeth in frustration while Macro prattled on in his soldierly manner.

Cato was painfully aware of how difficult it was for him to make small talk with his military comrades, even now after several months in the army. The easy masculine jocularity of the legionaries irritated him terribly. Crude, obvious and embarrassing, it was second nature to them, but he found it difficult to join in, not least because he feared that any attempt he made at the appropriate argot would be seen through in an instant. There was nothing worse, he reflected, than being caught out in a patronising attempt at slumming it with the common soldiery.

Cato occasionally tried to steer his conversation with Macro round to more stimulating matters. But the blank and sometimes annoyed expression that greeted his efforts quickly stilled his tongue. What Macro might lack in sophistication he made up for with generosity of spirit, courage, honesty and moral integrity, but right now Cato just wanted someone to talk to – someone like Nisus. He had enjoyed their fishing expedition, and had hoped to cultivate a real friendship with the Carthaginian. The surgeon's quiet sensitivity was a balm to the raw emotions grating inside him. But Nisus had been driven away by the blunt hostility of Macro. Worse, he seemed to be falling under the spell of Tribune Vitellius. So who could he unburden his feelings to now?

Cato wondered if the answer was to keep a diary and commit his troubles to paper. Better still, he would write to Lavinia and make the most of the tortured poet-philosopher role he had been using to impress her. As real as the traumatic experiences of battle had been for him, he was also analytical and intelligent enough to see them as being in some way instructive. They would confer on him a sense of enigmatic world-weariness that was sure to impress Lavinia.

Carefully spreading out a blank scroll with his forearm, Cato dipped his pen into the inkpot, wiped off the excess ink and placed the tip on the plain surface of the scroll. There was light enough to write by for a while yet before he would have to resort to the dull glow of the oil lamp, and he took time to order his thoughts carefully. The pen made contact with the scroll, and neatly scratched out the formal greeting:

The pen paused interminably as Cato faced the familiar challenge of the first sentence. He frowned with the effort of producing an opening line that would be impressive without being unnecessarily florid. A nip sentence would put Lavinia in the wrong frame of mind for what would follow. Conversely, an overly serious tone at the outset might be off-putting. He slapped the side of his head.

'Come on! Think!'

He glanced up to make sure he hadn't been overheard, and coloured as he met the twinkling eye of a passing legionary. Cato nodded back and smiled self-consciously before he charged the pen with ink and wrote the first sentence.

My darling, scarcely a spare moment goes by when I do not think of you.

Not bad, he reflected, and true in word, if not wholly in spirit. In the few moments when his life was not busy with some duty or other, he did indeed think of Lavinia. Especially that one time they had made love in Gesoriacum shortly before she had left for Rome with her mistress, Flavia.

He bent his head and continued. This time inspiration came easily, and his pen hurriedly scratched out the words that poured from his heart, flying back and forth between the inkpot and the scroll. He told Lavinia of the very personal way in which he loved her, of the passion that burned in his loins at the very thought of her, and of how every day marked one less before the next time they would be in each other's arms.

Cato paused to read over his work, grimacing here and there as his eyes froze on the odd glib phrase, cliche or clumsy expression. But overall he was pleased with the effect. Now he wanted to tell her his news. What he had been doing since they had parted. He wanted to unburden himself of all the terrible things he felt compelled to remember but could never make sense of. The guilt at the recall of a killing thrust, the stench of a battlefield two days later, the foul oily smoke of the funeral pyres blotting out the sun and choking the lungs of those caught downwind. The way blood and intestines glistened as they were spilled on a bright summer day.

Most of all he wanted to confess to the bowel-clenching terror he had felt as the transport had approached the screaming ranks of the Britons on the far side of the Tamesis. He wanted to tell someone how close he had come to cowering down in the scuppers and screaming out his refusal to take any more.

But just as he feared that his comrades would react with disgust and pity at his weakness, so he feared that Lavinia, too, would consider him less than a man. And conscious of his youth and lack of worldliness compared to the other men of the legion, he feared that she would despise him as a frightened little boy.

Dusk dimmed into night, lit only by the thin crescent of a waning moon, and finally Cato decided that he could not tell Lavinia any more than a bald outline of the battles he had fought in. He lit the lamp, and by its guttering glow he leaned over the scroll and briskly and simply described the progress of the campaign so far. He had nearly finished by the time Macro rolled in from the centurions' mess, swearing loudly as he stubbed his toe against a tent peg.

'Who the fuck put that there?' His anger only made his speech more slurred. He stumbled past Cato into the tent and collapsed heavily onto his camp bed, which in turn collapsed with a splintering crack. Cato raised his eyes and shook his head before wiping his pen and clearing his writing materials away.

'You all right, sir?'

'I'm far from all right! Bloody crap bed's croaked on me,' the centurion mumbled bitterly. 'Now fuck off and leave me alone.'

'Right you are, sir. Fuck off it is.' Cato smiled as he rose and ducked his head under the fringe of the awning. 'See you in the morning, sir.'

'In the morning, why not?' Macro replied absently as he struggled with his tunic, and then decided to give up, slumping down on the ruins of his camp bed. Then he lurched up on an elbow.

'Cato!' 'Sir?'

'we've orders to see the legate first thing tomorrow. Don't you go and forget, lad!'

'The legate?'

'Yes, the bloody legate. Now piss off and let me get some sleep.'