by Paul Waters
Gratian soon finished his campaign, then Constans toured the province to receive the praise of the grateful citizens. The coastal fort at Richborough was repaired, and he ordered new ones to be built, in an impregnable line all along the eastern coast known as the Saxon Shore. In future the Saxons would have to take the forts before they could move inland; and the forts, it was said, could not be taken.
The Council commissioned a statue of Constans to stand in London’s forum, upon a plinth of polished red granite, in a place of honour outside the basilica, with an inscription proclaiming that he had saved the province. I should not mention this statue – they are common enough, after all – except that it never arrived. It was carved in Gaul, from finest Carrara marble. But the vessel appointed to ship it to Britain was caught in a storm and sank, a detail – or an omen – his advisers prudently kept from the superstitious emperor.
Meanwhile, at the home of Balbus, there was prosperity: he had negotiated a supply contract for the army. Lucretia bought herself a new dress – a cerise gossamer robe embroidered with bees and flowers – and invited her friends to a banquet.
One day during this time, returning with Ambitus from my uncle’s shop in the forum, we caught sight of the bishop, passing grandly along the far colonnade with his train of pale-faced acolytes. Lately he was everywhere, publicly calling himself a friend of the emperor.
‘See there,’ said Ambitus, following him with his eyes, ‘just like a fat goose with her chicks . . . you know where he was during the siege, don’t you?’
‘In hiding,’ I replied. ‘Everyone knows it.’
‘That’s not what he says now. He says he was praying night and day for the salvation of the city, and it is thanks to him and his god that the Saxons are gone.’
I laughed. ‘And who believes that?’
‘Constans, for one. Have you been to that side of town lately? He’s pulling down what’s left of the temple of Diana. You’d better take a last look; it’ll be gone before month’s end.’
‘So he’s got his cathedral at last.’
‘Well, so far he’s got a wasteland and a few broken columns; but all the Christians are crowing about it. I’m surprised your cousin didn’t tell you . . . isn’t that him there, behind the bishop?’
I glanced round. I had not noticed Albinus before, for he was dressed in coarse homespun, like a pauper, and his hood was pulled up. But I should have known his gangling walk anywhere.
We watched him pass along the colonnade, distaste showing on both our faces. Lately Albinus had become even harder to stomach than usual. While the Saxons had sat outside the walls, fear had cowed him. Now all his old traits had returned, made worse by his promotion in the bishop’s staff.
Ambitus turned to me. With sudden vehemence he cried, ‘I tell you, Drusus, I have had enough of this place! I want to find somewhere without Saxons, and there I shall become a rich man.’
I laughed. He was always so sure. With a grin I said, ‘Well, the Saxons are gone for good, so Balbus says.’
At this he threw up his eyes. ‘Oh, Balbus! He always thinks endless summer has come – until the next winter takes him by surprise. But the barbarians are like wolves around the camp fire, waiting in the shadows till the flame burns weak, and the guard nods off. Will he never see it?’
In late January the fine weather that had lasted all winter finally came to an end. The wind swung round to the north-east, and brought with it a biting cold.
With the destruction wrought by the Saxons, and the requisitions of Constans’s army, the supply of charcoal became scarce, for there is little woodland around the city. Balbus was better supplied than most; but even we went short, and what there was my aunt Lucretia kept for the house furnace, and the little embossed brazier in her room, which she always kept as warm as summer. Sericus caught a chill; a small matter, he said, and nothing to fuss over.
During February it went to his chest. By the time the first flower buds appeared on the damson tree outside my window, and the crocuses showed like a snowfall in the fields, he had taken to his bed.
I was asleep when he died. Claritas the housemaid shook me awake and led me by lamplight to where he lay, quiet at last. A learned man, he had spent his last years among people who despised him, and treated him like a common slave.
He was sixty-four.
With Sericus’s death my final link with home was broken. A terrible emptiness came over me. When I was not working, I idled away my time watching the game players under the arches by the theatre, or wandering among the market stalls and expensive shops in the forum colonnade. I went to the hippodrome to watch the chariot races, or walked out alone beyond the city walls.
I was like a man who has lost his path, but keeps on walking. The drunks, the gamblers, the street pedlars and old retired courtesans who hung about the taverns by the theatre started to know my face, and when I came they greeted me as one of their own. They were hard folk who found a living where they could, who could fall no further, except into death, if that was worse. They were a comfort to me.
At home I grew closed and taciturn, and for the first time there was justice in Lucretia’s words when she called me sullen and aggressive. I fell into street-fights. I came home scratched and bruised. Yet there was a yearning in my soul, for what I could not tell.
What preserved me – though I did not see it at the time – were the habits I had been bred to, which little by little had become part of my nature. I rose at cocklight still, and I exercised my body. I pored over Sericus’s old books; I clung to life.
Constans sailed away in triumph, conferring the title of count upon Gratian and leaving him behind to order the province.
With peace restored, people dug up the special places in their cellars, or lifted secret flagstones beneath the kitchen pots, or opened bricked-up niches in their walls, and took out the caskets and urns where they had hidden their savings. The smart shops in the forum grew busy; tools sounded from the workshops; the taverns and wineshops filled, and the whores around the dock bought themselves bright dresses for the summer.
One day Ambitus, emerging from an interview with Balbus, drew me aside and said with a grin, ‘Wish me well. I am away, at last.’
Gratian, he explained, had engaged my uncle to send one of his trading ships to Carthage, to collect the personal effects he had left at his house there. Ambitus was being sent as agent, to supervise this lucrative commission.
I congratulated him. It was what he had worked for.
When, a few days later, I arrived at the dock to see him off, I saw a shrunken old woman clutching at his hand. He pulled away embarrassed; but in a voice invested with more tenderness than I had ever heard from him he said, ‘Drusus, this is my mother.’
I greeted her civilly. She was shy and soft-spoken, full of emotion at the departure of her son, and reluctant to look at me, lest I see the moisture in her eyes. She was wearing a pretty new dress, with a necklace of coloured glass. The clothes did not suit her, being made for a younger figure; but I could tell she delighted in them.
Soon the pilot shouted orders to cast off. I stood with her on the quayside, waving to Ambitus.
I missed him when he was gone, though I scarcely admitted it, having persuaded myself I had no need of friends. So I busied myself with my own desultory affairs, and revelled in my solitude.
All about the city were unknown faces: soldiers from the new garrison; pompous imperial clerks in their coloured liveries; architects and surveyors from Italy and southern Gaul; officials of the civil service; staff of Count Gratian; and the slaves and retinue of all of these.
Gangs of the city poor were put to work clearing the moss and rampant ivy from the neglected walls; masons repointed the crumbling mortar; and Gratian added a new wing to the long-empty governor’s palace, where he had taken up residence.
One early morning, a few weeks after Ambitus had sailed, I made my way up to the great precinct in front of the temple of Diana, and watched with a few ot
hers – Christians, judging from their cheers – as the last of the mighty granite columns were torn down. The cheers were ugly; the columns had been built to last, and cost the demolishers some effort. Somehow, I was glad of that.
Already, all about the precinct, work had begun on the foundations of the bishop’s new cathedral. It would stand, so the triumphant Christians put about, for a thousand years.
Though she disapproved of the baths and the gymnasium, calling them sinful, Lucretia had allowed me to visit them so long as I took Sericus as chaperon. Now that he was dead I went alone, full of anger, defying her to forbid me.
We used to go to the fashionable bath-complex behind the forum, with its high vaulted ceilings and inlaid floors and long ornamental walkways. It was close to home, and considered respectable.
But, during my solitary wanderings, I had discovered another place, in the old part of the city, in the poor neighbourhood between the bishop’s residence and the fort, small and run-down, set back from the street under a squat red-painted porch.
It was a place that suited my grim mood. The only patrons were old men who had gone there since they were young, when the neighbourhood had been better. Now they went through habit, and to be with their friends. They sat in twos and threes in the old portico behind, or in the warm room where the heat was gentle, taking no notice of me.
As everyone knows, a youth at the baths can be the object of attention, much of it unwelcome; but here I could exercise in the quiet sand-court beneath the plane trees, undisturbed by anyone.
Until, that is, one afternoon in late spring.
I had arrived at my usual time. I paid the old attendant who sat in his cubby-hole in the vestibule. I stripped, and made my way barefoot over the tiles through to the sand-court at the back.
The old men were in their usual corner under the portico, their stools pulled up, bending over a game of dice. I greeted them, and they muttered back. Then, from behind, I heard the sound of cries and laughter.
I turned to look, and saw what I had come to regard as my private domain occupied by a group of young men, stripped down for exercise, wrestling and tumbling one another, darting and running between the trees of the surrounding gardens.
I glanced back at the old men.
‘From the fort,’ said one, raising his eyes with a look that said, ‘Something else to disturb our peace.’
Frowning I took up my hand-weights and went off to a sandy corner beside the wall, and soon, going through my movements, I had ceased to think of the strangers. It was a day of sun and passing showers. As I was finishing the rain came on. I was just about to go inside and clean off when I sensed movement behind me, and caught the rank smell of sweat in my nostrils. I swung round, and found myself staring into a gap-toothed ugly, grinning face. He must have crept up at me through the gardens.
The man turned to his friends with a harsh laugh, amused that he had startled me. He was thickset, like a wrestler. His chest and legs were shaggy with black sand-caked hair.
I glanced to the portico, but the dice-players had gone. Looking at him I said slowly, ‘You’re standing in my light.’
At this the grin dropped from his face. He took a deliberate step forward, blocking me.
‘Is that better?’ His Latin had the broad accent of Spain.
I ought to have left then. I was no weakling, but I was no match for such a brute. He was broad as an ox. His arms and thighs were knit with great coils of ugly muscle.
But my anger had risen. And so, instead, I locked my eyes on his and said, ‘Were you born stupid, my friend, or did the wet-nurse drop you on your head?’
I do not know where I got this from; I daresay I had picked it up from the drunks around the theatre. Somewhere behind I heard his friends slapping their thighs and guffawing. But the Spaniard did not laugh. He flinched as if he had been struck. His black eyes bulged and he jutted his jaw into my face. ‘Hey, pretty boy, didn’t your mother warn you not to come alone to places like this?’
‘Who said I’m alone?’ I answered. It was a cheap trick, but maybe he would believe me. I was starting to realize – too late – what I was getting into.
Up above, a sudden breeze shook the branches, scattering drops of cold water. My sweat was drying on me and I shivered. I thought: ‘Well Drusus, you have brought this on yourself, will you run now like a coward, or will you take a beating?’ Yet even as I thought, already I knew the answer, and there was a kind of rage and self-destructiveness in it.
I would not let this brute trample on my pride, whatever it cost me.
I took a step forward. Immediately his hand sprang out, barring my way. With the other he seized my bare shoulder and hauled me round to face him.
I shoved back, resisting; but I might as well have tried to shift the tree-trunk behind me. I watched him, searching his body with my eyes, waiting for the telltale pull of his muscles that would show he was about to strike.
He was strong, and could hurt me badly; I had not doubted it. But now it came to me that, though he was built like a plough-ox, he was as slow as one too.
With a wrestler’s move he flicked me round, trapping my head in an elbow-grip. I could feel his other hand snatching at my waist, trying to gain a hold around my midriff. I struggled and fought, and as I twisted, his seeking hand caught on the strap of my loincloth. He heaved, trying to lift me, but instead there was a tearing sound and my loincloth came away.
He hesitated, confused, staring at the piece of fabric as if some part of my body had been ripped off. Seeing my chance I squirmed and twisted, freed myself from his grip, and landed a heavy kick behind his knee. He yelled out and stumbled. Then, before he could regain his balance, I charged at him. He staggered, paused, tripped over his own thick calves, and with a cry of anger fell heavily backwards into a puddle of rainwater.
Once more his friends were whooping and laughing. But my eyes were on the Spaniard. He lay on the ground, propped on his elbows, glaring up at me. Fear had cleared my head. I thought to myself, ‘Time to run, before he breaks my back.’ But then he relaxed and fell back with a splash; and lying in the puddle like a vast hairy she-pig he let out a great hoarse laugh.
By now the others were around me, prancing about, slapping me on the back and shoulders, taking my hand and shaking it.
One of them, a sturdy youth with close-cropped hair and blue eyes, called through his laughter to the Spaniard, ‘Looks like you’ve met your match, Tascus. Now leave him be, you great oaf, and pick on men your own size.’ He turned to me with a smile and handed me my loincloth. ‘Take no notice of Tascus: he means no harm; he’s been cooped up too long in winter quarters.’
I took the cloth from him. It was rain-sodden and the strap was broken. I wrung it out and began trying to untwist it; then, feeling foolish, I shrugged and left it. ‘Are you soldiers?’ I asked.
‘Is it so obvious?’ Then, seeing me look uncertain, he said, ‘Yes, we are; my name’s Durano.’ He extended his hand, and after a moment I took it. His grip was strong and confident.
The others began walking off towards the portico. He gestured and said, ‘Are you coming to clean off?’
I glanced dubiously at the Spaniard. He was strutting up and down, fooling around and shadow-boxing.
‘Oh, don’t mind him. He wouldn’t have hurt you.’ He grinned, showing fine white teeth. ‘Anyway, you floored him, so I reckon you can look after yourself.’
‘I can,’ I said, giving him a serious nod. But then he caught my eye and smiled, and I could not help smiling back.
Later, sitting on the stone bench in the hot-room, he asked where my friends were. I told him that, in truth, I had come alone, adding, ‘I prefer it that way.’
‘Is that so?’
He nodded and frowned into the steam.
Across the room, opaque to my vision, the others were splashing water at one another. With a laugh Durano said, ‘They’re always like that – games and dares and playing the fool.’
‘But not
you?’
‘Sometimes. I have my moments.’
He dabbed the water with his foot and lapsed into silence. I could almost have supposed he was shy.
After a pause, for something to say, I asked when he had arrived in London, and he told me they had sailed with Constans from Gaul, having been called against all expectation from winter quarters. He had joined the army as a common soldier, he said, but his centurion had thought well of him, and now he had a company of his own.
Once again he fell silent; yet he kept taking glances at me and seemed eager to talk, so gesturing across the steam-haze I asked, ‘Are they your men?’
‘Them?’ He shook his head. ‘I know them from before, from my time as an infantryman. But now I head a band of raw recruits. It is better so: this lot know me too well. It’s not good to lead the same men you have served with in the ranks, especially when there’s discipline to be done.’
I nodded, as if I understood such things.
Later, when we were dressing, Tascus came up and slapped me hard on the back, and asked who it was had taught me how to fight.
‘No one,’ I said. ‘I learned it in the street.’ I said the trick I had used to trip him was the only one I knew. This amused him, and he shouted it out to the others, word for word, like the details of some comic story.
From across the room Durano, who was towelling his fuzz of hair, said, ‘Then come back tomorrow, and I’ll show you a few more tricks.’ He finished with the towel, screwed it into a ball, and tossed it into the wicker basket by the door.
‘Save your breath, Durano,’ said Tascus. ‘He’s too young for the likes of you. He’s afraid. He won’t come back.’
‘Afraid of what?’ I cried. I screwed up my own towel into a ball, and, taking careful aim, threw it into the basket on top of Durano’s. ‘I’ll be here tomorrow; be sure of it. And then I can throw you again.’
