The Legions of the Mist

by Damion Hunter

  In the wet streets below the ramparts she paused and stared at an elaborately carved cradle outside a woodworker’s shop. But then it began to rain again, big fat drops that spattered on the ground, and the shopkeeper cursed and pulled his wares inside. She moved on, again taking stock of the Roman conquest as it appeared in these streets… the togaed officials of the city, the columns of the basilica, the steady rounds of the Watch, even the Roman ringlets adorning Venus Julia’s ‘girls’ who were gathered languidly under the portico of her establishment to watch the passing traffic and drum up a little business for a rainy afternoon. Gwytha fingered her own long braids… perhaps she would try that style. That ought to give Justin a shock.

  As she turned up the street toward their house, Januaria emerged from the doorway, hands on her hips and scouting the neighborhood for her wayward mistress.

  ‘There you are, my lady!’ She came galloping forward, a spare cloak under her arm. ‘You’re wet!’ she exclaimed indignantly, engulfing Gwytha in its folds. ‘Come in the house this minute before you catch a cold!’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Gwytha was laughing. ‘Only leave off wrapping me up like a bundle. I can’t see!’ She hurried into the house under Januaria’s protective wing, and was ushered firmly into the bedroom to strip off her wet tunic.

  ‘And your shift, my lady. You’re wet to the skin. What the centurion will say, I don’t know!’

  ‘I doubt that she dissolves in water,’ Justin observed mildly from his seat beside the brazier. ‘All the same, get into something dry and come sit by the fire with me.’

  Januaria bustled out to the kitchen to dry her wet clothes on the hearth, the grey and white cat leaping happily after the trailing end of the mantle. Gwytha slipped into a dry shift and, on impulse, got out her best tunic. She settled herself at the dressing table, unbraided her hair, and combed it up into a knot on her head. Then, remembering Licinius’s comment, she picked up the little pouch containing the stag’s-head eardrops.

  The last gesture made, she presented herself, combed and dried, to her husband.

  He blinked when he saw the eardrops, but he didn’t say anything, merely gesturing to the empty chair beside him.

  She plopped down in it and stuck her toes out to the heat of the brazier. ‘I’m sorry to be back so late. I hope I haven’t spoiled Januaria’s dinner.’

  ‘So far as I can tell, the only thing getting spoiled around here is me. Januaria stuffs me like a goose with the best cooking I’ve had since I joined the Army, and you go trudging around in the rain while I toast my toes by the fire. What were you up to, by the way?’

  Gwytha fidgeted with the folds of her tunic, then gave him a sideways look. ‘More than you’ll be liking, maybe.’

  He leaned forward, intent now, and a shadow of concern slid over his face. ‘You’re worried, aren’t you? Gwytha, I’m not going to bite you.’

  She looked rueful. ‘That’s what Licinius said. I wasn’t going to tell you yet, but he made me promise.’

  ‘What in Hades has Licinius got to do with anything? For the gods’ sake, Gwytha, get on with it, you’re giving me fits.’

  Gwytha took a deep breath. ‘I’m carrying your child,’ she said as fast as she could, and then sat back, the worst of the telling over.

  There was a moment’s silence. Justin ran a hand through his hair and looked around the room, apparently assimilating this new complication. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘we might have expected it. Under the circumstances.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t expect it!’ Gwytha was indignant. ‘And you needn’t laugh at me. It… just never occurred to me.’

  At this Justin began to laugh in earnest, his yellow eyes crinkled shut and one hard brown hand beating an exultant tattoo on the arm of his chair. Gwytha eyed him dubiously. ‘We shall never do anything like other people,’ he explained between shouts of laughter. ‘We might as well quit trying!’

  ‘Then you’re not upset?’

  ‘I’m in shock. But don’t worry, it’s very pleasant.’ Seeing the doubt still in her face, he sobered and pulled her gently onto his lap. ‘Indeed I am pleased,’ he whispered and his arms tightened about her shoulders. More and more this world became his own, he mused, unconsciously echoing Gwytha’s thought. Now he would have a child of this world. It seemed that, however unwillingly, he had come home.

  * * *

  Dear Mama,

  Justin wrote at his desk in the atrium while the nereids regarded him in arch flirtation from the wall,

  I have a piece of news for you which may not best please you, as I don’t fancy you’d counted on having to think of yourself as a grandmother for some years yet. All the same, you’d better brace yourself.

  We are going to have a child sometime in the end of October, or so Licinius says. And in case you’re wondering what the senior legionary surgeon is doing playing midwife, he vented his opinion long and loud on the subject of “old witches who couldn’t deliver a letter safely” and who treated complications by waving a dead chicken over their victim’s head. He then favored us with a wealth of statistics on the mortality rate for infants and mothers as a result of this barbarous attitude, and informed us that if he was in camp, he would deliver the child himself; and if he wasn’t, he would tell Januaria exactly what to do and put the fear of the gods in her to see that she did it.

  Licinius is ahead of his time, I fear. He talks of the medical profession reforming its entire attitude toward childbirth, and is laughed down heartily whenever he expounds on this notion. But I can’t help thinking of the two babes you lost before I was born, and the one you lost after, when we nearly lost you as well. No parent should have to live with that kind of grief unnecessarily. I am glad Gwytha will have Licinius to look after her.

  About Gwytha… when my posting here is over, or I have my next long leave, I would like to bring her to see you. I haven’t mentioned this to Gwytha yet, as I suspect she would dig in her heels against the idea as much as you would. But it would please me greatly to see the two of you friends. Moreover, I think it important for the family now, because of the babe.

  And now, some things I have not told Gwytha, although I am sure she knows them well enough… I know that my marriage has been a grief to you. It was, in a way, a grief to me at first… and also to Gwytha; put yourself, if you can, in her place, and I think you will see that. But lately things seem different, and I begin to feel that perhaps this marriage has brought me something I would not have found elsewhere. Perhaps it is this land, that I hated so bitterly at first, and which now seems more and more a part of me. Perhaps it is Gwytha herself, to whom I find myself drawn more strongly than I would have suspected. Perhaps it is the babe that binds the two of us together, me to her world and she to mine.

  I don’t really know… but unexpectedly, I find myself content. Knowing that you love me, I ask that you be content for me.

  Justin put down his pen and rested his chin in his hands. The late afternoon sun, making a rare appearance, sifted in through the window; he watched the dust specks dancing in it, and wondered when and how the change had begun to happen. In him, perhaps from the beginning, when he had found the idea of Gwytha as some stranger’s property unbearable. In Gwytha it had seemed to stem from the coming of the baby… but somehow there was more to it than that. At any rate, something had drawn the tension from the air, leaving them still in an awkward state, but with more comfort than he had known since Aeresius died.

  Finn, lying in companionable silence at his feet, lifted his head and scented the air, and Justin glanced out the window to see Januaria returning laden from her marketing. On her arm was a covered wicker basket, and from her other hand hung a string bag redolent of fish. Behind her pranced the grey and white cat, whiskers atwitch and eyes on the cloth-wrapped parcel in the bag. Finn heaved himself to his feet and Justin clutched at the inkpot and papers as the desk rocked with his passing… Finn never remembered that he was taller than that table. Justin was taking up his pen ag
ain when an eldritch howl split the air, echoed by cries of human indignation. He leapt to his feet and reached the kitchen door just in time to see a grey and white shape, teeth clenched in triumph on a fishhead, streak along the shelves, and Finn, lunging frantically in pursuit, bring down the flour bin.

  ‘Typhon take you!’ Januaria, emerging from the storeroom with a new broom, began to sweep clean, and the cat, sailing like a flying squirrel over Finn’s head, hit the floor and dived between Justin’s legs into the atrium. Justin prudently flattened himself against the doorpost as Finn hurtled by. The cat swarmed up the shuttles of Gwytha’s loom and stood swaying on the topmost bar, and Justin watched in paralyzed horror as Finn hurled himself after him, landing squarely on both cat and loom.

  Gwytha, sorting linens in the bedroom, turned around to see a cat fly by the doorway three feet off the ground, followed, as she watched in fascination, by her loom, which came shuddering down across the doorstep. An upheaval seemed to be taking place beneath the half-woven fabric on the frame, while Justin, across the room, was apparently having a fit of some kind. Gwytha dropped her linens in indignation as Finn heaved himself free of the loom, a square of weaving flying from his collar like a cavalry pennant. Cat and dog together flew out the open window and Gwytha, giving chase, collided with her husband in the doorway. Together they stumbled down the wet path, came afoul of a slippery stretch of mud, and fetched up against the trunk of the apple tree in whose topmost branches the grey and white cat was consuming the fish-head.

  Side by side in a mud puddle, they sat and looked at each other. ‘No, Finn, let him go,’ Justin said weakly to the dog still hopefully launching himself heavenward. ‘Gwytha, my dear, your loom… I am sorry… in fact I’m prostrate with apology.’ He touched his forehead to the ground, eastern fashion, at her feet.

  ‘Justin, get up, you’ll get mud in your hair.’

  ‘If you could have seen Januaria swinging at that cat with a broom… and you! Going down the path on your backside!’ Gwytha began to chuckle. ‘That wasn’t half the view we had of you, with your tunic up over your ears.’

  Suddenly they were clutching each other in laughter, while the muddy water soaked through their clothes and a passing nurse and her small charge regarded them from the garden gate.

  At last Justin stood up and pulled Gwytha to her feet, and Hilarion, strolling in some minutes later, found them helping Januaria restore order to the kitchen, where the remains of the fish, returned to its string bag, hung suspended from the ceiling. He cast a wary glance about the room.

  Justin and Gwytha exchanged looks and burst out laughing again, while Januaria explained with dignity the cause of their merriment. ‘And a fine sight they were, rolling about in the mud with that hulking great dog.’

  Gwytha grinned at him. ‘Januaria feels we’ve disgraced ourselves. And my poor loom…’

  The loom was standing again, but it listed drunkenly to the left. Hilarion ambled over to inspect it. ‘I wish I’d been here,’ he murmured appreciatively. ‘Where are the culprits?’

  ‘Making themselves scarce.’ Justin heaved a collection of broken crockery into the trash bin. ‘Let us retire to the atrium and leave Januaria her kitchen before she takes a broom to us.’

  Hilarion settled himself in a chair and stretched his legs out comfortably. He was obviously big with news.

  ‘Had you something particular on your mind,’ Justin inquired, ducking back to the kitchen for a jug of wine, ‘or were you just passing by?’

  ‘Just passing by,’ Hilarion grinned at him. ‘I’ll make myself scarce if you like.’

  ‘Certainly not.’ Gwytha drew up two more chairs.

  ‘You can help us throttle the cat,’ Justin added. ‘Have you come from camp?’

  ‘Mmm. Did you know the Governor’s coming out?’

  ‘I heard a story to that effect.’

  ‘Confirmed. He’ll be here next week. Full-scale parade and all the trimmings.’

  ‘And does this mean –’ Gwytha leaned forward to pour the wine ‘– that he will maybe be making some changes?’

  ‘More men, you mean?’ Hilarion was doubtful. ‘They’ve posted out some replacement cavalry. Not enough, though, and it’s heavy foot troops we really need. Still, I doubt he could send them if he wanted to. The south is undermanned as well, and with more cities to patrol.’

  ‘No, they’ll have to come from the Emperor,’ Justin said. ‘But all the same, we have to have them. This visit may be a step in that direction.’

  ‘Has he got enough influence to sway the Emperor, do you think?’ Hilarion asked.

  ‘I doubt anyone does, as long as the campaign in Parthia goes on. Still, we’ll plead our case and see what happens. Stay and eat with us, Hilarion, if you’ll excuse the fish.’

  * * *

  A brisk little wind was blowing as the Ninth Legion Hispana assembled on the parade ground, rank upon rank of scarlet helmet crests and burnished armor winking in the sun, ten cohorts strong, each man with sword and dagger in their sheaths and pilum held at attention. The breeze ruffled the horsehair crests and flicked at the hems of their cloaks, and tickled at noses that didn’t dare sneeze. It did, however, as Justin murmured to Lepidus, blow the flies away.

  Scrubbed and polished, he stood at the head of his cohort, the seahorse standard gleaming beside him. To either side of the Legion were ranged the Auxiliaries, dark-browed Syrian archers, and the cavalries of Spain and Gaul with their banners shivering in the breeze. And at the head of them all loomed the Eagle of the Ninth, silver wings swept back as if to lift upon the wind.

  There was a stirring about the commander’s platform, and then the trumpets sang out, the Optios saluted smartly, and Marcus Appius Bradua, Governor of Britain, marched up to the platform with the Legate of the Ninth.

  He raised his hand and the cheer went up, ragged at first, then gaining momentum; but always, Justin thought, listening, with an underlying current that echoed the dissatisfaction that lay beneath the polished bronze and brave show of the Ninth on parade. As the roaring died away, the trumpets sounded again and the whole Legion turned as one in parade formation, up, down, and around, coming back to rest with a flourish and the triumphant note of trumpets.

  Justin, keeping a wary eye on his cohort, saw that they kept pace well for the most part, stepping out the drill with precision. They were, he thought with some pride, a far cry from the cohort he had first taken over. A fumble and a wrong turn in one of the lead cohorts sent a ripple of confusion eddying around it, but their officer barked an order and the guilty century righted itself. ‘Someone’s for it,’ Lepidus murmured, making the precise quarter turn that signaled the second century of the Eighth Cohort to its closing formation.

  The Governor turned to congratulate the Legate, and the Legion passed in review before him and out through the parade ground gates. Gwytha, from her vantage point among the crowd, watched them go… first, the Eagle of the Hispana, frozen in flight above his gilded wreaths of honor, then the Primus Pilus at the head of the First, with all the bronze and scarlet glory of his cohort behind him. Familiar faces and strange ones, heads up and stern under their helmet rims… Favonius with the Third, polished and shining, swaggering a bit… the commander of the Fourth, the one that had fumbled during drill, looking surly… Martius at the head of the Sixth… then the Eighth, with Justin, yellow eyes shadowed by his helmet rim and nose jutting unmistakably from under it. This was where he belonged, she thought, watching them swing past… where her babe, too, would belong if it were a boy. Strange to think of watching a Roman son march out with a Roman Legion… The last of Justin’s cohort passed, and her attention was caught up by the Ninth Cohort, with Hilarion looking far older than the boy who had sat talking in the atrium last night, his freckled face made serious by a cohort commander’s helmet, his thin frame no longer gawky but dangerous in burnished steel.

  The Auxiliary cavalry clattered by, their horses full of bounce in the morning breeze, frisking behi
nd their standard-bearer. And the Army Medical Corps, Licinius with his junior surgeon and apprentices in full dress uniform. They looked as solemn as the rest, but she thought the senior surgeon winked at her as they passed. She stood watching until the last of the column had marched to the barracks, their solemnity decreasing with their distance from the parade ground and in anticipation of the games and celebration attendant on a Governor’s visit.

  Justin had drawn street patrol duty (consisting, as he said, of preventing the populace from murdering each other in sheer high spirits), but Licinius and Hilarion found her and took her off with them to watch the Governor’s procession to the arena and the games in his honor. They had changed out of their full dress kits and looked much their normal selves as they escorted her through the throng of mingled legionaries and townsfolk. Justin, on the other hand, posting his men along the opposite side of the street, was beginning to look exasperated. The Governor was taking his time and the crowd was getting restive with the exuberance of the first good celebration to come their way after a long, dull winter. The townsfolk had turned out in their festival best, and the merchants were doing a thriving business, hawking everything from hot pastries to cures for catarrh. Urchins with bunches of April flowers and trays of dried figs zigzagged through the spectators with pleas to ‘buy something for the lady.’ A strolling snake charmer, his unsavory pets stowed in a basket on his head, offered to perform for coins thrown his way, and Venus Julia’s girls, rigged out in their spring best, strolled giggling through the throng, making eyes at susceptible males. Hilarion, Justin noted, was buying his wife figs.

  There was a flurry of hoof beats and the first riders in the Governor’s escort appeared, troops from the Second Augusta and the Twentieth Valeria Victrix who had ridden north with him, followed by an honor guard of the Ninth. Governor Bradua, chatting amiably with Metius Lupus, rode in state behind them. He acknowledged the cheers of the crowd with a gentle wave of his hand. There was a stirring behind Justin as two young townsmen exchanged a rude joke. He fixed them with a firm eye and they looked abashed. Then from somewhere in the crowd a rock came flying over their heads and clattered at the feet of the Governor’s horse. The stallion leapt and curvetted, and the Legate, purple with fury, shouted an order to Justin. His men turned with leveled pilums against the crowd, and it lapsed into tense silence as the procession resumed its progress.