Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  The empire recovered. In Ravenna, a year later, the boy emperor, Honorius, was glad to hear that his agents had murdered his usurping British co-emperor. The Visigoths meanwhile had been paid and departed. It was time to mend what was left of the western empire again.

  But his plans did not include the return of the legions to Britannia. In fact, they did not include the island province at all.

  “Let them fend for themselves,” his harassed officials advised. “They stopped their taxes; they threw out the imperial servants. We have enough to do: let the British live beyond the sea.”

  The empire’s resources were overstretched. The northern island was too far away. For the first time in four centuries, Rome had to turn her back on the province of Britannia.

  Twenty years had passed since then: twenty years of waiting.

  At first it had seemed that little had changed. There were occasional raids from Saxon or Irish pirates. A party of bacaudae – landless peasants – had appeared in Sarum one day and burned down one of the barns; but Numincus the steward and some of the men had driven them off. It was more what had not happened that gave Constantius concern.

  There had been no new coins struck in the province. The trade with Gaul had grown slack. The ports with their warships were short of funds and so the island was poorly defended. The few remaining legionaries had not been paid and so they had turned to other occupations or left; Constantius had even heard of one selling himself into slavery. Finding that money was tight, he himself had been obliged to close the town house in Venta Belgarum which the family had maintained for generations. Others were doing the same and the town was falling into a poor state. It was as though a great wave of lassitude had covered the place, and each year matters grew worse.

  Then the rumours had reached him. A large Saxon raiding party, a fleet, was preparing to attack the defenceless island. At first he did not believe it.

  But the rumours grew. A merchant from London claimed that he had seen the preparations on a visit to the east; and suddenly the area was in a state of panic. The city of Calleva strengthened its walls and so did Venta Belgarum. More important, Calleva negotiated through the port of Londinium to obtain a contingent of German mercenaries to supplement their own half-trained militia. Venta tried to do the same.

  And that was where the quarrel with Petrus had begun.

  “Let me go to Venta and hire half a dozen of these mercenaries,” he had demanded. “We can quarter them at Sorviodunum. This place must be defended.”

  Constantius had refused. The boy had screamed at him. And now . . .

  It was time to pray. God would guide them. After he had prayed, he would be reconciled with his son.

  He did not know that it was already too late.

  His horse’s flanks were wet with lather. He had been riding hard, but now his destination was within sight.

  He had left the villa within minutes of the angry scene with his father and he had not stopped since. He had no doubt about the urgency of his mission, and that in carrying it out he was in the right. But then Petrus Porteus always believed he was in the right: it was his only fault.

  Before him, in the afternoon sun of an autumn day, lay the city of Venta Belgarum.

  It was a small town, set on a hump of ground, surrounded by a thick wall. A pair of squat, heavy round turrets faced with rough hewn stone flanked the gateway which had recently been narrowed as a safety measure, and frowned towards the western approach road. Behind them he could see the town’s red tiled roofs.

  Petrus urged his horse forward. His eager young face with its dark eyes was pale and tense with excitement. In a quick, nervous gesture, he pushed his hand back through his curly hair.

  It was this nervous intensity in all that he did which so often caused his wise and thoughtful mother to sigh, and which drove his father into his frequent spasms of rage.

  “Sometimes, Petrus,” Placidia would urge him, “one must compromise.” After all, she could reflect, her own less than happy marriage had consisted of little else for twenty years. But Petrus always looked at her blankly when she said this.

  “How?” he would ask, in perfect sincerity.

  Petrus did not despise compromise: it just never occurred to him.

  He urged his horse forward and minutes later was clattering through the gates.

  The town was quiet. It was as though half the population had gone indoors to sleep; but the people who were to be seen looked at him curiously. He noticed that the streets were in poor repair: the cobbles were loose, weeds were growing in places, and many of the houses, like the big Porteus town house, had been left empty and abandoned by their owners because they were too expensive to keep up. The Porteus house had stood in a small, paved square. He saw as he passed that someone had built a shack in the centre of it. The cobbles made a good floor; and since the council was more concerned with defence than anything else, no one had bothered to stop it. The forum was still well kept: a clean open space with handsome porticoed buildings round it and a column in the centre celebrating an almost forgotten triumph of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. He paused for a moment.

  “Where are the Germans?”

  A passer-by indicated the eastern gate.

  “Outside.”

  A group of men were strengthening the masonry of the gate as he rode through. Immediately outside stood a small cemetery: a Christian cemetery, he noticed, since the graves were laid neatly east to west. Beside it was the German mercenaries’ camp.

  They were striking to look at: huge, broad-shouldered men with hard, unshaven faces, cold blue eyes and long flaxen hair which they braided in pigtails. There appeared to be about fifty of them; they lounged in front of their tents and stared at him insolently as he dismounted.

  “Where’s your commander?” he asked. One of them jerked his thumb casually towards a tent in front of which a slightly older soldier was sitting with a small, dark man who looked like a merchant.

  They listened to him without comment as he explained what he wanted, and it was the merchant, obviously acting as their agent, who replied.

  “These men are for hire, young man; but the price is high.” He looked at the youth doubtfully.

  Petrus allowed himself a half smile. From his belt he pulled a small leather bag of coins. Unknown to Constantius, his mother had given them to him before he left. He poured out a dozen for the merchant to see, and as he did so, the man’s eyes opened wide with surprise. They were gold solidi, minted in the reign of Theodosius the Great, the century before. Coins like this were becoming rare on the island. The merchant’s tone altered.

  “For how long do you need the men?”

  It was hard to say: the Saxons might attack at any time.

  “Perhaps a year.”

  The merchant nodded thoughtfully and spoke a few words to the German in his own language. The German nodded and the merchant turned back to Petrus.

  “Pick your men,” he said.

  Early the following morning, Petrus, followed by six German warriors, rode out of the western gate of Venta Belgarum on to the road towards Sarum. There was a light mist over the ground.

  They were a strange sight: a pale young man on a handsome horse riding a little ahead of six huge Germans on ponies that seemed hardly large enough to bear them, and each leading a spare pony which carried their weapons and their baggage. One of the six was older – Petrus guessed he might be thirty – and spoke a little Latin; he had placed him in charge of the others.

  Just before they rode out of sight of the town, a thought occurred to Petrus, and turning his horse’s head, he halted. There was, he realised, something important that he must say.

  “At Sorviodunum,” he addressed them, “you will remember that I am your commander. You answer to me: no one else.” He paused, looking at them sternly. “I pay you,” he added.

  The six warriors stared at him, their faces expressionless. Finally, the oldest nodded slowly. He had understood.

  Satisfied,
Petrus motioned them to continue past him down the road. He thought he heard one of them laugh.

  He did not follow them at once, however, but remained there, gazing back at the town reflectively. Several minutes passed, but still the young man did not move, and an observer might then have noticed that a strange look had come over his nervous young face – half dreamy, half triumphant – and would have seen that his eyes were fixed on a point above the town.

  The sun was still crimson in the chilly morning sky. As it rose over Venta, it caught the tiled roofs and the grey walls, so that for a short time it seemed that the undistinguished little citadel was floating above the misty landscape. And it was now that Petrus spoke out loud words that would have astonished and horrified his father far more than the insults he had uttered in their quarrel the day before. The words came out like a prayer.

  “Helios, Helios, great Sun,” he murmured. “Jove – Apollo, king of all the gods: give strength to your servant.”

  For Petrus, son of a Christian household, was a secret pagan.

  He was not alone. All over the Roman world, there were many who openly or secretly followed pagan ways despite the fact that, for a century, the upstart Christian faith had been declared the official religion of the empire; and successive emperors had never succeeded in stamping them out.

  There were numerous cults: there were not only the observances of the ancient Roman gods, but also those of the Celts, the Saxons, the Goths and the many other peoples of the empire. There were the popular cults from the east with their strange rites, their mystical experiences and ecstatic states: one of these at least he knew well – the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis – for there were several temples to her on the island. More important was the old established freemasonry of the religion of Mithras the bull god, whose themes of self-discipline and sacrifice had made it popular with the army. Since the reign of Constantine the army had officially been Christian, but Petrus knew very well that his father’s faithful and longsuffering steward Numincus, himself the son of a centurion, worshipped Mithras in private, a fact which Constantius Porteus quietly overlooked. But there were other cults at Sarum that Constantius never guessed at. And these Petrus knew, because he practised them himself.

  It was a similar story all over the island. Only fifty miles west of Sarum, at Lydney on the banks of the great river Severn, a large new temple to the Celtic god Nodens had been re-opened only a generation before. Constantius had been outraged, but the temple had been popular and had received many endowments.

  For paganism still had many powerful friends. Had not the emperor Julian himself, that military genius, philosopher and visionary – who seventy years before, had crossed the skies of the empire in his three year reign like a meteor – had not Julian declared himself for the old Roman gods and tried unsuccessfully to restore them, in place of Christianity, to their rightful place in Rome? There were many besides Petrus to whom the gallant young pagan emperor was still a hero.

  Certainly many of the old senatorial families of Rome supported the ancient religion. The Christians, they had always claimed, put loyalty to their God before loyalty to Rome: but had not the great orator Cicero centuries earlier declared that the good patriot is promised a reward in heaven? What had become of the old values – the stoicism of the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius, the solid virtues of the Roman gentlemen who read the classics, consulted the haruspices and built shrines for their ancestors? All this the Christians claimed to despise. Was it not Christian emperors who had removed the most sacred symbol of the old pagan order, the altar of victory, from the senate house? And now Rome had fallen: it was hardly surprising.

  “The empire is ruled by upstart emperors, by Christians and barbarians,” the conservatives said. “And look at the chaos that has resulted.”

  This attitude was not only the prejudice of a few diehard Roman aristocrats. Petrus remembered well the attitude of his schoolmaster in Venta Belgarum, who had been a scholarly man and a discreet pagan all his life.

  “Christianity was a cult for slaves,” he exclaimed. “They say that of all the gods, only theirs is the true one: what arrogance! What proof have they for such a claim?”

  It was an argument which, when he brought it up at home, made his father explode; but the fact was that the blustering Constantius was never able to answer to his satisfaction.

  With his schoolmaster, however, he had enjoyed many arguments. Even now, he could hear the old man’s voice, demanding rhetorically: “Are we wiser than Plato and the other great philosophers of antiquity? Was Socrates, that seeker after truth, too proud to sacrifice a cock to Aesculapius before he died?”

  “But the Christians teach that there is a single all-powerful God behind the universe and that man has an immortal soul,” Petrus had challenged him. ‘Do you deny that?’

  “Why should we?” the scholar replied. “No one who has read and understood Plato would deny that there is a divine idea, an unknowable God behind the universe. As for immortality: each man has a soul which apprehends, though dimly, the divine intelligence: in that sense we may say that the soul reflects the divine and is immortal.”

  “And how should we act? The Christians say their morals are better.”

  “Virtue and contemplation purify the body and the mind and direct it towards the divine soul,” the old man replied calmly. “The pagan philosophers have taught this for centuries before the Christians existed.”

  “And the gods?” Petrus asked eagerly: “Apollo, Minerva, Mars . . .”

  “They are divine agents – attributes of the divine, which is infinite and includes all creation. When we worship the gods, we worship in them the divine idea. Why should we deny them?”

  “The Christians do.”

  “The Christians are fools,” the old man retorted angrily. “First they say that their God is the only god; then they claim that he became a man; then they dispute with one another endlessly about the interpretation of God’s nature – as if a man could comprehend such a mystery – and each party calls the other heretics: Arians, Catholics, Donatists, Manichees, Pelagians . . .” He shrugged contemptuously. “Argue with a Christian and you find a fanatic; read the classical philosophers and you will find reason, enlightenment . . .” He smiled wearily. “But don’t say I said so or I’ll lose my job.”

  It was an attractive philosophy: later ages would describe this abstract system as neo-Platonism. To Petrus it seemed to encompass everything: the civilisation of Greece, the virtue and grandeur of Rome; and as he thought of his Christian father’s morose inaction, he decided to rebel. Courage, stern patriotism, the old Roman code of honour – it seemed to him that these were the only qualities he admired; so he became a pagan convert.

  Now, as he looked back at the town where the old pagan had taught him, as he saw the roofs glinting in the sun, the top of the column erected in memory of Marcus Aurelius, the triangular pediment of the old temple, he cried out aloud:

  “I will restore Sorviodunum, and then this city to the gods.”

  They reached Sorviodunum at midday. Petrus had intended that the Germans should camp in the settlement in the valley where half a dozen families were still living in a group of small houses protected by a small wooden palisade. His idea was that they would fortify the place properly. But when the leader of the Germans saw it, he shook his head.

  “We’ll camp there,” he said, pointing up to the dune on the hill above. “Only place we can defend.”

  Petrus shrugged. “As you wish.”

  The dune had been almost deserted for generations. Although there was a cluster of huts just east of the entrance, the big circular space inside, with its high grassy wall, had been used by Numincus only as the estate’s cattle pen for some years.

  It had one occupant however, and as Petrus and his party entered, he shuffled forward from the small wooden house he occupied on the west side of the enclosure.

  “This is Tarquinus the cowherd,” Petrus explained.

&
nbsp; He was very old. His back was stooped, his face wizened like a nut and his thin grey hair lay in long strands down his back. But his cunning, narrow-set eyes, which gave him away at once as belonging to the clan still known in the area as the riverfolk, were as bright and keen as a young man’s. He had been widowed many years before, and as soon as his wife had died, he had abandoned his children and retired alone to the dune, where the Porteus family had decided to tolerate his presence. It was Tarquinus who, when Constantius in a fit of Christian piety had knocked down the little temple to the goddess Sulis that for centuries had stood beside the family villa, had quietly rescued the little stone figure, and built a modest shrine to house her beside his own shack in the dune. Although he was old now, the cowherd was greatly feared by many in the area, for he was skilled in the arts of magic.

  He glanced at the Germans.

  “You brought them.”

  Petrus nodded.

  “They’ll camp here. Keep an eye on them.”

  Tarquinus grinned contemptuously.

  “If they give any trouble, I’ll cut their throats when they’re asleep.”

  Petrus turned his horse.

  “My steward will see you’re fed,” he told the Germans.

  Then he moved towards the entrance, the cowherd shuffling beside him. Before leaving however he glanced down and enquired quietly:

  “We have an appointment tonight?”

  The old man nodded. “Everything is ready.”

  “Good, until tonight then.” And pleased with his work Petrus rode out of the dune towards the villa.

  On entering the villa, he sought out his mother.

  Placidia was sitting quietly with Numincus. She had grown fond of the stout little widower over the years, not only because of his loyalty to her, but because she recognised that in his quiet, modest way he was a man of talent.

  It was she who had taught the steward to read. Now, he not only ran the estate from day to day, but he drew up the accounts with her himself, accounts which for years Constantius had done little more than glance at. She would still try, from time to time, to interest her husband in the details of his own estate, but he would usually wave her away with the remark: “I know you and Numincus attend to all that.” Though whether it was pure lack of interest on his part, or whether there was resentment about Numincus’s role, she could never be sure.