The Singing Sword

IX

Father,

Greetings from an errant son, whom you have probably consigned long since to perdition for a lack of filial attention, if you do not believe me already dead.

I am alive, healthy and well, and hope, with guilty optimism, that you are, too. How foolishly we treat the rushing passage of time! I deeply regret having permitted so many years to pass without making any serious attempt to write to you. I remember you telling me, on many occasions, how difficult it is to write down one's thoughts so that they reflect, accurately, one's feelings on any particular subject at any one time. Words, you told me, are but ungainly tools, ill suited to the use of serious, intelligent men. I have often recalled, with bitter irony, the scepticism with which I dismissed, in my youthful omniscience, the import of those words. I now know, as the result of many long hours of effort, how accurate your observations were.

This missive, which I must believe you will someday read, will no doubt impress you with its clarity and the apparent ease with which it has been written. Disabuse yourself of any misconception, Father; I am as awkward in my efforts to write today as ever I was. The letter you read now is no more than a painstaking copy of the last of many scribbled, much-altered, often-perspired-upon scraps of parchment and paper, laboured over on many a night by the agued fluttering of an almost lightless lamp.

I know you will have little need to be reminded of the discomforts involved in writing a letter on campaign. I have been on campaign endlessly now for years, ever since leaving Britain with Magnus Maximus, and throughout that time it has ever been too easy to find reasons for never having enough time to write. It has been several months since I decided to end that condition, and it has taken me until now to produce something I consider fit enough and substantial enough to send to you after so long a silence.

I am in Constantinople, serving on the personal staff of Flavius Stilicho, Count of the Domestics, Commander of the Emperor's Household Troops. You might be amused to know that I have met Theodosius now on several occasions and have endorsed, in my own mind, the verdict of Publius Varrus, who declared that Theodosius was, "for all his faults and personal shortcomings, " an able administrator and a fine soldier. In those days, Theodosius was Count of Britain. Now he is Emperor and still, again in Varrus's words, " a grandiloquent and pompous pain in the arse!" But he is, above all, an able Emperor and a notable judge of men...

That I can write such words in a letter will give you some idea of the import of my posting and the security we enjoy in our communications. All of that is due to the personality and influence of my commander, Flavins Stilicho. It is he whose privilege and personal seal attached hereto enable me to write my mind thus openly, and it is he who has finally made me wish to write to you, for many reasons, although mainly to tell you about Flavius Stilicho himself, and the privilege and honour I enjoy in being close to him.

Father, you would take Stilicho to your bosom! He is all that you hold honourable in the Roman tradition. He is half Vandal, his father a low-born captain of mercenaries. And yet, for all that, by the strength of his own intellect and the astounding abilities he has demonstrated in his short career

—

he is but twenty years of age, seven years younger than I!

—

he has completely won the affection and esteem of Theodosius and is married to the Emperor's favourite niece, Serena. She, too, fell victim to the charm of Stilicho.

If, as I suspect, you and Publius Varrus have just exchanged mutual snorts of "Nepotism and privilege!" you must withdraw them. I swear this is a man among men, for all his youth

—

a military genius on the level of Alexander.

I met him just over a year ago, in the late summer of the second year of Magnus's campaign in southern Gaul. Things had been going well for Magnus (as they still are, I hear) and we had won many victories against all sent against us. My own mind was not at peace, however, with the way the affairs of our army were developing; the Magnus I had known and admired in North Britain was neither the man nor the Emperor I followed now in Gaul. Greatness had worked great changes in him, and as far as I could see, none were improvements.

One afternoon, on a routine patrol ahead of the army, my party unexpectedly encountered a fair-sized group of the enemy, men and officers. We discovered them first, fortuitously, and I was able to entrap them. In the course of the fighting I found myself matched against a young tribune, barely out of boyhood, richly appointed and uniformed, who fought like a madman

—

a very skilled madman, be it said. Luck was with me. He slipped in the grass, and I had his life in my grasp and my sword at the ready. Thank God I could not bring myself to kill him at that moment! Telling him to live for another day, I clubbed him with the hilt of my sword and left him lying there. Moments later, we were surrounded and outnumbered by an army of newcomers sent, as I discovered later, to meet and escort the party we had attacked. I was taken prisoner with my entire force and brought to the camp of Proconsul Glaucius Mamilias. As you will have deduced, the boy I spared was Flavius Stilicho.

He sent for me later and questioned me closely. I felt, although I know not how to describe it, an affinity for the man, youth though he was. He told me he was just returned from Persia, from the Court of King Shapur III, where he had been the personal ambassador of Theodosius himself On his return to Constantinople he had been dispatched immediately to form some intelligent appraisal of the rebel Magnus and his

modus operandi,

and to divine a method of defeating him.

You may imagine my astonishment as I listened to him speak, although I must tell you it never crossed my mind to doubt him. The reverence in which he was held was all too apparent. The Proconsul himself deferred to this young man!

In short, Flavius Stilicho thanked me for his life and offered me manumission

—

for all my men — if I would serve with him and give him my allegiance. He assured me I could do so with honour, for he would require me neither to divulge information concerning Magnus's plans nor to bear arms against the soldiers among whom I had fought my way across Gaul. Father, I did not even hesitate before accepting his offer. I knew, somewhere in my soul, that I was born to fight beside this Flavius Stilicho. And I had decided long before then that I was unhappy in the ranks of Magnus Maximus. I chose to be Stilicho's man, and my soldiers all chose to follow me.

Since that day, I have not looked backward. Offered the chance to leave and wait for Stilicho elsewhere, far from Magnus, I chose to remain with him. Three months later we were in Asia Minor, and for the next nine months we went soldiering wherever Stilicho was needed. Then, three months ago, Theodosius promoted him to Commander of the Imperial Household Troops, and we have been in Constantinople ever since. I suspect we will not stay much longer. Stilicho lives on horseback and detests the confinement of a city, and besides, there are too many battles to be fought throughout the Empire.

My rank is now that of prefect. I am a cavalryman, and a cavalry man by conviction. But that is another story, and I am presently composing another letter

—

this one is already too long

—

in which I will tell you of the developments in Stilicho's mind, and in my own.

Farewell, Father.

My love to Aunt Luceiia, and to the tribe of small Varri who, I am sure, run all of your lives. I shall send this in care of Pontius Aulus Plautus, Publius Varrus's friend in Colchester, by military courier. He will see that it reaches you from there.

Your dutiful son, Picus

I read that first letter from Picus four times without pause, from start to finish, when Cay eventually passed it on to me. I had been awaiting it impatiently for a long time, schooling myself to be calm. Cay had received no fewer than fourteen letters in all, none of them short and none of them showing, externally, any sign of order, process or continuity. Picus stood revealed, by the end of all of them, as a highly conscientious and able correspondent, but an unthinking one in that he seldom gave any indication of the dates on which he was writing. In consequence, his father had to read all of his letters in random order as they came to hand, and only after that could he begin to place them in some kind of temporal progression.

He then extended to me the privilege of reading them as a series of consecutive observations. And they were fascinating. The first of them, of course, was probably the most moving of them all, emotionally. But the second amazed me, recalling to my mind instantly a comment, by our friend Alaric, to the effect that God has willed it that no great idea should ever occur to one man alone. When the truly great developments in mankind's progress appear, they always seem to appear simultaneously in many lands, promulgated by many intelligent and visionary people.

Greetings, Father,

Already, having completed the first step, it seems this writing task grows easier. I suppose that is due to the difficulties I had with my first attempt, when the array of subjects to refer to and deal with seemed endless. This letter, by comparison, is much simpler; it has but one major component.

Father, I wish to write to you of horses

—

horses, cavalry and the way in which a single man's perception of the importance of both may alter history. The man in question is, of course, Flavius Stilicho

—

nothing I write to you in future will be untouched by his influence, even should he die tomorrow, which the gods forbid!

I know you are aware of the debacle at Adrianople some years ago, in 376. That was the year I first joined the Eagles. Irrespective, however, of your own personal judgment on that affair, I have to regurgitate it here, since it has a direct bearing upon the entire tenor of this letter.

The officially sanctioned story of that fiasco, as I am sure you will recall, is that the Imperator Valens, co-Emperor at the time with Valentinian,

was careless and silly enough to march a consular army of eight legions

—

40,000 men!

—

through hostile territory without taking even the most elementary precautions. His army then, in extended line of march along a lakeside, was surprised by a migrating tribe of Ostrogoths who, being mounted on horseback for their journeying, seized the moment and the day by charging at Valens's host in an undisciplined but deadly, densely packed mob. Their concerted attack, completely unexpected, rolled Valens's extended legions up like a parchment scroll before they had time even to think of deploying into line of battle.

It was a fluke, we are told, one of those unforeseen and unforeseeable developments that, in war, must simply be accepted and accommodated.

Flavius Stilicho will have none of that. He asserts

—

and none who listen can argue against his thesis or his logic

—

that it is inconceivable that any haphazard attack by an undisciplined rabble, no matter how huge their numbers or how densely packed their mass, could totally demoralize and destroy an entire Roman consular army of 40,000 men, killing all of them, including an Emperor and his entire staff.

That such a thing happened is incontrovertible. How it happened, how it

could

happen, is a matter open to the wildest conjecture. How it is

likely

to have happened, however, is a conjecture that one might analyse quite pragmatically, and Stilicho has succinct ideas and opinions on that topic. From those ideas, and his deliberations concerning them, he has drawn a number of conclusions, and upon those conclusions he has constructed an amazing calendar of future events. Being privy to his thinking, and without any disloyalty or fear of being censured, I have decided to apprise you of Stilicho's thoughts, knowing that they will interest you both generally and specifically, and knowing also that the effort of detailing them for you will assist me personally in assimilating them.

His deliberations and his findings, stated categorically, follow, and I must inform you, regretfully, that the language and the clarity of thought are Stilicho's alone:

i

. Valens and his army, although culpable of dereliction by default, could not collectively have shown the degree of mindless, suicidal ineptitude so clearly alleged in the official version of the incident. Valens had superb generals, legates and distinguished senior officers attached to his staff. Even had Valens been patently insane on the level of a Nero or a Caligula, his commanders would still have retained their military competence and responsibility for the army.

ii

. Rome has conquered the world by the excellence of her legions, the greatest military force history has ever seen. Roman armies

—

Rome's foot-soldiers

—

have been invincible since the days of Gaius Marius and Julius Caesar; the only defeats sustained since then by Roman armies have been at the hands of other Roman armies.

iii

. The catastrophe at Adrianople, therefore, was epoch-making: the greatest defeat of a Roman army by a non-Roman force in more than half a millennium. To categorize it as anything other than an unfortunate and regrettable mischance would be an admission that the barbarian forces threatening the Empire are capable of repeating their performance at Adrianople whenever and wherever they please. Obviously, such an admission is officially beyond consideration. The capacity, therefore, to inflict such damage has been attributed to hazard and ill fortune

—

the fact that the barbarians simply happen to have been on horseback at the time of the incident, an eventuality unprecedented in the annals of Roman warfare.

iv

. Rome has never relied upon cavalry, other than for the provision of mobile screens of skirmishers and mounted archers to protect the legions while they deploy in line of battle. The cavalry function has always remained, more or less, in the hands of Rome's allies in Germany and Africa. To the Roman military mind, in fact, cavalry has always been deemed an inferior military presence, operating without the rigid discipline and training required by massed infantry formations. To this day, since the beginnings of Rome, there has always been something Jess than

Roman

about cavalry and cavalry troops.

Such are the findings of Flavius Stilicho; from them he has developed the following propositions:

v

. That any Roman worthy of the name will discern the four foregoing points for himself, after even the shortest period of analytical thought on the matter, and will accept the verity of the situation and the dominant peril it implies, namely:

vi

. That no Roman worthy of the name who has even the slightest knowledge of military matters can seriously doubt the existence of brilliant, clear-thinking generals, equally capable of analysis and action, in the territories of the barbarians. It follows logically and inevitably, therefore, that the action against Valens's army at Adrianople will be recognized by such men for what it was: an overwhelming victory against a supposedly invulnerable force, won by the simple expedient of falling upon the Roman cohorts with sufficient speed to ensnare them before they could deploy on their own ground and in their own battle lines, and then overwhelming them with a sheer mass of men and horseflesh. Granted that realization, at some time in the future, if not now, Adrianople will be emulated and repeated, and the day of the Roman legion

as it now exists

will be over.

That phrase, Father, "as it now exists," contains a seminal thought. Flavius Stilicho has the kind of mind that confronts potential disaster and circumvents it. His propositions continue:

vii

. That, accepting the inevitability of such a development, it is incumbent upon the senior legates of the imperial staff to begin immediately searching for effective means of precluding such a possibility, and to do so not by staring gape-mouthed into the future but by searching diligently in the past for an answer.

viii

. That the greatest military genius of ancient times was Alexander of Macedon, called The Great, who refined the heavy cavalry techniques of his father, Philip of Macedon, and used that heavy cavalry to conquer the world.

ix

. That since the cavalry in general use today consists of light skirmishers mounted on light horses, and the large, heavy horses used by Alexander and his troops are unknown in Roman military life, every effort should and must be made

—

immediately and without delay

—

to collect such horses, from wherever they may be found throughout the Empire, and to begin a program of breeding them selectively while training and equipping new, large bodies of troops to be the nucleus of a new form of warfare in the Roman world. And

—

x

. That within one decade, or two at the very most, fully 25 percent of the fighting strength of every imperial legion in the field should consist of such heavy, tightly disciplined, highly manoeuvrable cavalry.

Father, I had the privilege of being present when Stilicho outlined his findings, his conclusions, and his recommendations to the Emperor. Theodosius looked at him, frowning, and asked, "Do you really believe this ? " Stilicho merely inclined his head. "So be it, " said the Emperor. "Let it be done. " And the world as we know it

—

a thousand years of military history and tradition

—

changed.

This has been a long letter, Father, but I have enjoyed the writing of it, and I think I have but little now to add. I know you will give it serious thought, and I know you will see the portent of it. We began the task of conversion to cavalry that same night, although it has been largely a paper task to this point. I am embroiled in it, and already we make great progress. Our major difficulty has been finding men

—

officers senior enough and flexible enough in their thinking (strange how those two seldom go together) to envision what we are about to do.

I shall write again, as soon as I have substance to report. Take care of yourself, Father, and convey my respect and good wishes to all whom I hold dear.

Picus

"Strange how those two seldom go together..." It pleased me considerably that Picus should be so evidently the son of his father. That one little observation, whimsical and acerbic at the same time, demonstrated to me, more clearly than anything else I had read, that our boy had a pragmatic and slightly cynical head on his shoulders. Pragmatism is all very well on its own, I find, but it is too often humourless. When it is salted with a healthy and subtle hint of cynicism, however, the result is often humour, wit and irony. Those who possess such a blend of spices in their character are seldom boring.

I was rereading this second letter from Picus as I walked to a meeting with Victorex, our Master of Horse, and I was smiling at my thoughts as I turned into the huge yard that fronted the main stables. There I found a spectacle that made my smile even wider and my pleasure greater, and I stopped and leaned against a gatepost to watch what was happening.

Victorex, due mainly to his strange appearance and his almost complete disregard for the concerns of normal men and women (he was obsessed with things equine to the exclusion of all else), had made few real friends in our Colony, and he seemed more than content with that. He had, however, within a very short time of his arrival here made two staunch friends in the Villa Britannicus, both of whom shared his fierce love of horses and neither of whom seemed even slightly aware of the strangeness of his appearance.

The first of these was my daughter Veronica, and the other was my wife. Veronica, now a beautiful, vivacious ten-year-old, had been besotted with a love of horses ever since she was old enough to tell a horse from a puppy. Her mother, I later discovered, had had the same passion as a girl but had forgotten it, by and large, on entering womanhood. In the past few years, however, her childhood love had been rekindled in the heat of her daughter's enthusiasm, and since Victorex had arrived to take over our horse-breeding program, both of them had spent all of their free time with him and his horses.

Victorex blossomed under their concern and attentions. He was still as surly and ungracious as ever with ordinary mortals, utterly impatient with their trivial concerns, but he clearly considered my wife and daughter as possessing that extraordinary status enjoyed only by himself and his beloved charges. And thus, according them that recognition, he deferred to them in wondrous ways. His whole demeanour — his entire behaviour — had altered dramatically in the short months since his transfer to the villa. He now took trouble with his clothes and with his personal hygiene... matters that had seemed quite beneath him before the visits of Veronica and Luceiia became daily occurrences. It was true that he still slept in the stables, but he no longer smelled so pun-gently, so succinctly, of the stables.

Now I found him at the centre of his training circuit, pivoting slowly, holding the end of a long lead-rein attached to the bridle of a beautiful black pony that circled him at a pretty canter, bearing my daughter on its back. The child's face was glowing with pleasure, and the great slabs of Victorex's teeth were exposed in a huge grin as he shouted instructions to her. As I watched, she drew her legs up beneath her and pushed herself erect until she stood, perfectly balanced, on the pony's back, the reins held loosely in her left hand, her right held slightly out and away from her body. It was lovely to behold. Her movements, her control and her poise were so perfectly correct, so natural, that what I had seen, and the danger involved in it, became apparent to me only long afterward, by which time I knew that, had any real danger existed, Victorex would never have permitted the attempt. Knowing I was watching her, she made two complete circuits of the yard, then dropped back astride her mount and kneed him out of the circuit, directing him effortlessly to where I stood. She brought him to a halt and slipped lithely to the ground, where she hugged him briefly around the neck and then rushed to me, her eyes dancing with excitement. As I swept her up in a hug, she spoke into my ear.

"Daddy, isn't he beautiful? His name is Bucephalus, the same as Alexander the Great's horse, and Victorex says he's giving him to me for my very own. Isn't that wonderful?"

It was indeed, and surprising. Much as he loved his horses, Victorex owned none of them. They were communal property and therefore not his to dispose of. As I sniffed lovingly at the warm, clean scent of my daughter's hair before setting her down again, I was aware of Victorex approaching, his head cocked to the side as though listening. As he came, he gathered up the long lead-rein in loops, arranging them in his right hand. He read the expression on my face accurately and spoke to forestall me.

"Master Varrus." He nodded his greeting. "Beautiful day."

I returned his nod. "Victorex. That's what I was thinking, too, until I discovered that you had presented my daughter with a communal gift."

He frowned and shook his head, trying to stop me. Veronica took a step backwards and looked from me to Victorex, her face troubled.

"What's wrong, Daddy? What is a communal gift?"

Victorex answered her. "It's a gift from many people, Magpie."

Magpie? That was new to me, but I looked at my raven-haired, white-skinned child and saw the Tightness of it immediately. She was frowning, speaking directly to Victorex.

"But you said the gift was from you, to me."

"And so it is. Now take Bucephalus inside and rub him down. I have to speak with your father. And be sure you don't miss any part of him. He deserves the best you can give him."

"I know, and he shall have it, and he knows that, too. Don't you, boy?"

The pony whickered and nudged her with his muzzle and she laughed, although her expression was still slightly uncertain. "He knows I have some honey for him, but he doesn't know where it is. Will you still be here when I've finished, Daddy?"

I nodded to her. "Take your time. I have things to talk about with Victorex, but if we finish before you do, I'll wait for you and we'll walk home together."

Victorex and I watched her lead the pony away, and I found myself admiring the lithe grace of her and marvelling at how quickly she was growing.

"Bucephalus...beautiful pony," I said, finally, when she had disappeared inside the stables.

Victorex sniffed. I was not included among his elite, obviously. "You remember the stallion I went off to buy for Terra, the time we rode into Aquae together?" he said.

I turned to face him. "Yes."

"Well, I found it and bought it, but I found another horse, too — same place, same time. A brood mare, beautiful. She was for sale, so I bought her. With my own money. First horse I ever bought. But I fell in love with her."

It did not seem at all strange to me that he would phrase things that way.

"Where is she now?"

He nodded towards the stables. "In there, with the others." He cleared his throat. "Now, you take that li'l Bucephalus. That horse is perfect. Perfect shape, perfect colouring, perfect proportions, perfect temperament. That's a beautiful li'l horse. In fact, that li'l horse is perfect for anything you want it to do, 'cept work, or breeding. It's too damn small. An' yet it's perfect. An' it's perfectly useless, too, unless you happen to know a ten-year-old li'l girl who's perfectly suited to it." He sniffed again and I felt myself squirm inside. I knew what was coming now, and I felt small and mean-spirited as he continued.

"Now, thing is, I've been given a job to do, and I've been told to be ruthless. No room in this operation for extra passengers. If a horse can't work, an' can't be bred, I have to get rid of it, you follow me? That means kill it." He hawked and spat.

"I don't like killing horses. People I generally don't care about, but horses matter to me. Most of 'em are worth more'n most people. And I object most particularly to killing beautiful horses. The li'l horse wasn't mine, but Magpie had already fallen in love with it. How was I going to kill it now? So I traded my mare for the li'l fellow, and now he is mine, and nobody can tell me what to do with him, and I'm giving him to Magpie."

It was my turn now to clear my throat. I felt foolish and ungracious. "Forgive me, Victorex," I said. "I wronged you. I should have known better."

He laughed. "How? You don't know me at all, Master Varrus. In your place, I'd have thought the same thing. I just didn't want you upsetting Magpie."

"Magpie." I savoured the name; it was perfect, like the "li'l" horse — perfectly suited to my lovely daughter. "Where did that name come from?"

"Not me. That's what her friends call her, didn't you know? It's just about — "

"Perfect."

We both laughed. "Look," I said then, "at least let me reimburse you for your mare. It's not fair that you should lose your purchase price."

He looked at me with an expression of pure pleasure and his next words made him a third friend in the Villa Britannicus.

"Lose my price? Are you blind, Master Varrus? The happiness in that li'l girl's face has paid me ten times over already, an' I haven't even given her the horse yet! I don't want money, and what need do I have of a horse? I've got a hundred of them and I'm breeding more." He shook his head. "No, Master Varrus. You keep your money and just let me do what I want to do, the way I do it best. You love that li'l girl, I know you do, but I'm inclined to think of her as something very special too. And she's not afraid of me. That's worth a lot. You'd be amazed how many people think I'm mad, or dangerous."

I held out my hand. "Well, here's one who doesn't. Thank you. From now on, you run your stables as you see fit, and I'll be content if you simply keep me informed. My job is to train the men to ride your horses so together we can build something new in this country — the best men, mounted on the best horses anyone has ever seen. I know you won't tell me how to do my part, so I promise not to interfere with the way you do yours. Do we have a bargain?"

We had a bargain.

Some time later, walking back to the villa with Veronica, I asked her about her new name. It shamed me slightly that I had not been aware until now that she possessed one. I had been thinking of her all these years as my daughter, too blinded by my fatherly love to see that she was also a wholly formed little person with her own identity.

"So, young lady," I asked her, "how long have you been Magpie?"

"Oh, forever, Daddy. It used to be The Magpie, but it was shortened to simply Magpie a long time ago."

"And why The Magpie?"

"Because I'm all black and white and I like to wear green and my eyes are green and shiny, of course! And I was a terrible thief when I was little."

"A thief? What did you steal?"

"Oh, everything... at least, everything that was bright, or shiny and pretty, just like a real magpie. But I always gave the things back... most of the time because I had to."

"I see. I had no idea we had a thief in the family."

She smiled up at me and my heart swelled. "Well, not a real thief. I mean, not a robber or a brigand. I wouldn't steal money, and the things I stole were only mostly borrowed. You see, everybody knew when something pretty went missing just where it had gone. I could never really get away with anything."

"Did you try?"

"Try what? To get away with anything?" She paused, her brows wrinkled. "You mean did I ever really, really try to steal something?" She shook her head, dismissing the thought. "I don't think so, not really. I might have, when I was really tiny, I can't remember. But one day Mama came and took away one of my very favourite treasures — my most beautiful comb, with coloured glass in the handle. She just took it. She said she wanted it and she was keeping it. I was very angry, and later I was very sad. I really missed it..." Her voice died away, and she took my hand and pulled me to a stop, then made me squat down so that she could talk directly into my face. "And then, the next day, Mama gave me back my comb and told me that whenever I took something that belonged to someone else, I made them feel just as hurt and just as sad as she had made me." Her expression was very solemn and serious. "I never stole anything again, after that, and for the longest time I wouldn't even borrow anything from any of my friends, even with their permission."

She tugged my hand then, indicating that we should continue walking, and as we went she concluded, "They stopped calling me The Magpie, after that. But Magpie never went away, and I'm glad, because I like it. Of course, only my special friends call me that. Other people still call me Veronica."

I felt almost jealous — excluded. "I've never heard it before today," I said. "I suppose that means I'm not really a special friend..."

"Oh, Daddy!" She stopped again and looked at me with what I defined instantly as loving exasperation. "You're my father, for goodness' sake! You're my specialest friend, more than even Victorex. You can call me Magpie any time you like."

"Thank you, Magpie," I answered. "I will." I felt absolutely euphoric.

By the time Victorex had spent two years in his new position, he was heading up a self-sufficient operation with the sole purpose of breeding horses. He had five very happy stallions and upwards of seventy mares in various stages of pregnancy, plus a fair number of foals. He had already started weeding out his future breeding stock. Only two of the foals from that first crop, one of each sex, were judged by him to be worth keeping. The others were all marked as workhorses as soon as they were able to walk. Victorex estimated that by the end of ten years he would be starting to produce big, strong horses. In twenty years, he would be producing large numbers of them.

He knew what he was doing. We did not, so we left him to do it.

In the meantime, with those animals Victorex would allow me to use, I began working on new techniques of training and deploying mounted men. It sounded easy when we were talking about it, but making it work was another matter altogether.

I already had a central body of men trained to operate on horseback, the nucleus of my new force. Every trainee was an expert at vaulting onto a horse's back, fully equipped. This should have been an advantage, and it was, but only to a clearly delineated degree. Now all I had to do was to untrain these men, completely and absolutely. I had to make them forget everything they had been taught, except how to stay on a horse once they were mounted — and even that, I found, was easier to think about than to achieve.

The men I had to start retraining were bowmen, archers, light skirmishing troops. J was trying to change them into heavy cavalry. That meant that the light, leather armour they wore was no longer strong enough to do the job they would have to do. So, remove the light, leather armour and replace it with regulation iron or bronze helmet, breastplate and a heavy kilt of iron-studded leather. They were going to be in close combat with an enemy on foot; their most vulnerable parts, therefore, were their legs. So, replace bare legs and light sandals with metal greaves and armoured boots strong enough to withstand a sword thrust or the swing of an axe. I had now increased the weight of each man by about thirty pounds, overall.

In addition to all that extra weight, I also had to consider that the shields all horsemen then carried were small, flimsy affairs of toughened leather, suitable for deflecting a spent arrow or a thrown stone but of no value in stopping a heartily swung axe or a close-hurled arrow or spear. So, change the light shield for a heavy-duty, utilitarian shield suited specifically to a mounted man rather than a standing legionary.

Added to all of this, I had also to bear in mind the fact that we were breeding bigger horses. Not simply taller horses, but bigger horses.

In its simplest terms, the problem I was faced with came to this: I had to take ordinary men, used to performing the ordinary task of mounting a horse in a vaulting spring, load them down with an additional forty to fifty pounds of dead weight and ask them to hoist that up on to horses that were bigger, and wider, than any they had ever ridden before.

And that was just the start of it. I was also asking them to forget about all the advantages they had learned were associated with being mounted on a fast, high-strung animal who could respond to the sway of a body or the pressure of a knee and swing its rider out of danger immediately. Instead, I was asking each of them to make himself consciously, individually, an immobile brick, an unmanoeuvrable unit in a solid wall of living horseflesh. I was asking each of them to advance, revolve, change direction and generally perform as one inanimate part of a single, solid mechanism. A living unit. Not men, but a wall of horsemen. That meant that, in the last analysis, if Caius Britannicus or Publius Varrus were killed by a well-aimed or lucky arrow, he would be dead and gone, but his horse would continue to function as part of the striking force, held in position by its neighbours on both sides. Many of my men found that a chilling and unnatural thought. All of a sudden, in their eyes, riders had become expendable. The horse had become all-important.

That, of course, was nonsense. But in the beginning, at least, that is how they saw it, and that is the perception I found myself having to contend with.

I persevered with it, however, and soon found that there were some of my men who began to show clear leadership capabilities in the new techniques early in the process. Whenever I found one of these, I promoted him on the spot, thereby instituting, although I did not realize it at first, a whole new hierarchy of leaders — cavalry officers.

Nothing that changes the order of things as radically as we did happens overnight. The process I am describing here in a few words took years to achieve. Life in our little Colony meandered very quietly during those years, for the most part, with only an occasional reminder of the strife in the outside world penetrating to shadow our peace, in the form of reports by Alaric or one of his visiting priests on what was happening abroad. In this way we learned of the death of Valentinian, and of the rebellion of Eugenius, another would-be emperor thrown up from the ranks of the armies to challenge Theodosius. Theodosius, however, had Stilicho — ably assisted by our own Picus Britannicus — to take his part, and Eugenius was crushed by a mighty army assembled in the west.

Then, two years later, came the news that stunned us all, and, fittingly, we heard of it from Picus, whose letters were now arriving regularly.

Father, greetings,

This letter will reach you, I hope, ahead of the news it contains. I have been involved in what has been described by some people as a civil war between two of the strongest, most able men in the Empire, and the information I have to impart to you in this letter will, I have no doubt, amaze and trouble you. Theodosius is dead. He died tonight, less than an hour ago, and his death has plunged the Empire into a schism that will rock the world.

I have not mentioned this previously in any of my letters, but the meteoric career of Flavius Stilicho has been influenced, constrained and strangely paralleled, although to a far lesser extent in my judgment, by another Flavius

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one Flavius Rufinus, of whom I doubt you have ever heard. Flavius Stilicho and Flavius Rufinus have been rivals since the day young Stilicho made his first step towards prominence. Until then, Flavius Rufinus had enjoyed the full warmth of the Emperor's favour, unchallenged by anyone. Rufinus defined Stilicho as a rival immediately, and has since done everything in his power, short of declaring overt hostility, to thwart his progress. Recently, however, mere months ago, all of that changed. The rivalry between the two flared into open animosity and outright enmity, and Theodosius, astute and deft manipulator that he is, has been using this situation to his own unique advantage. This culminated in an imperial proclamation

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six days ago, as I write this

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that has exploded in the courtly Roman world like a thunderbolt.

As I am your son, I know you will forgive me, despite your interest and impatience, for playing the orator and deferring my announcement of the content of this proclamation until later. It is more important, I believe, that you first understand the background to the antipathy between the two Flavians.

The two are diametrically opposed in almost every aspect of their personalities, and there are some who argue that Flavius Rufinus is the better man. l am not an adherent to that belief, nor could I be, even were I to know Stilicho only by repute. Where Stilicho will grasp a new or alien concept almost before it is uttered, and be prepared to act upon it, Rufinus will labour hard and long to define and assimilate it. That exercise completed, however, Rufinus will act every bit as firmly and decisively as Stilicho... he will merely have allowed more time to elapse. Both men are natural leaders of immense ability, and each is idolized by the troops he commands; but where Stilicho is shrewd, deliberate, logical and painstaking in his dealings with everyone, regardless of rank, Rufinus is emotional, precipitate, illogical and impulsive. All other differences fall into insignificance, however, beside the fact that Flavius Stilicho possesses a deep and abiding sense of justice, and an innate humaneness

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attributes that simply do not exist in Flavius Rufinus.

It was this last, major difference that caused the open rift between the two, and although the details of the spark that caused the conflagration vary widely according to the source, there is enough of commonality among the stories to make eminent and acceptable sense.

Flavius Stilicho, as you know, is a Vandal by birth, his father a captain of Vandal mercenaries and his mother a Roman lady of impeccable ancestry. Flavius Rufinus is a Gaul, from the ancient territory known as Cisalpine Gaul. Stilicho absorbed his military knowledge from his father, originally, and began his career, for a very brief time, as a military tribune. Rufinus joined the Praetorians as a boy, while Stilicho was still a baby, and worked his way inexorably upward until he became the Praetorian prefect of Illyricum, on the northern Adriatic. The outstanding abilities of both men brought them early to the attention of Theodosius... in the case of Rufinus, long before Theodosius became Emperor.

The story goes that word reached Rufinus, about a year ago, that one garrison of mercenaries, ostensibly within his territorial jurisdiction, had mutinied and was holding the town it garrisoned, in open revolt against the Empire. The same story came to the attention of Flavius Stilicho more than a month later, but Stilicho's version

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which I read

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contained significant differences to the version reported by Rufinus. In the dispatch sent to Stilicho, by the personal hand of the district paymaster (this happened, by the way, on the Illyrican borderlands, an area plagued by infestations of bandits) he was informed that a local garrison, seconded from one of Stilicho's own legions, had been on duty without pay for almost two years. On three separate occasions, paymaster's trains, each one more heavily guarded than the one before, had been waylaid and destroyed before they could reach the garrison. The mercenaries had finally announced to the local authorities that, until they were paid in full, they would do no more soldiering, perform no military duties and permit no trade goods to leave the region. Stilicho reacted quickly, ordering the paymaster, no matter what the cost, to set this situation to rights and pay the garrison. Alas, he was too late.

The garrison, mercenaries as I have said, were Vandals, and the significance was not lost on Flavius Rufinus. He besieged the town, took possession of it and promptly slaughtered the entire garrison and populace, after which he razed the town, as an example, he said, to all potential mutineers and those who would abet them. Apparently unable to let pass the opportunity to humiliate his rival, he himself brought the word to Constantinople several months ago.

I was present in the audience chamber with Stilicho when Rufinus reported his actions to the Emperor, and it was the first word any of us had heard on the subject. Father, you could not imagine Stilicho's fury. I would never have believed him capable of such headlong, damn-the-consequences intensity of feeling, and I thought I knew him well. He had to be physically restrained from attacking Rufinus, in the presence of the Emperor himself! And even thus restrained, facing Theodosius's temper and his long-standing championship of Flavius Rufinus, and knowing his life to be hanging in the balance, Stilicho told Rufinus he was unfit to live and call himself a soldier, warning him moreover that when Rufinus died, it would be at Flavius Stilicho's hands, no matter who or what the instrument might be.

Of course, as you may imagine, the Emperor excoriated Stilicho, but a blind man could have seen that Theodosius enjoyed the confrontation! He sternly warned them both to keep themselves apart, under pain of his displeasure, and terminated the audience with no more than a mild censure of Rufinus for the atrocities that had enraged Stilicho.

Then, six days ago, His Imperial Astuteness made his proclamation. Theodosius had been unwell for months, though this was concealed from all but a few, and he was no longer a young man. But he was able, and he was cunning. He announced his partial abdication in favour of his twin sons, Honorius and Arcadius. The boys are mere infants, of course, far too young to rule. However, for the ultimate good of the Empire, Theodosius decreed that each twin would, upon his death, rule one half of the Empire, Honorius the western half, from Rome, and Arcadius the eastern half, from Constantinople. In their minority, the boys would be served, and the halves of Empire governed, by two Regents: Flavius Stilicho with Honorius in Rome, and Flavius Rufinus with Arcadius in Constantinople! In the meantime, until Stilicho and Rufinus could settle into the business of governing, Theodosius would continue to supervise the Empire at large.

What a mind, Father! At one step, Theodosius had preserved his sons' succession and doubled the Empire's chances of survival in the face of aggression, even though the doom-sayers immediately began bewailing the destruction of the Empire as men have known it. Neither Stilicho nor Rufinus will flag in their protection of their charges, and each will watch the other very closely. The Empire is in strong, but mutually inimical hands. Of course, Theodosius had no intention of dying so quickly. But die he has, and we must live now with the aftermath of his plotting.

I wish I could receive letters from you in return, but I must either ask you not to write or charge you to say nothing in your letters that might be construed by anyone as being treasonous or contumacious. The security I enjoy in my writings is now outgoing only. Anything coming to me must undergo close scrutiny by the enemies of Stilicho and his Western Empire.

Farewell. I will write again soon.

Picus