by Paul Waters
I glanced across at Marcellus. He did not notice me. His eyes were fixed on the shrine, where the small clay figures of the household gods stood wreathed in wisps of fragrant smoke. His face was calm and intent, his mind dwelling upon some private place, beyond my reach. He could not have looked more beautiful.
Next day, having some estate business to attend to, he went off early with Tyronius the bailiff. I had intended to go out riding alone; but as I was dressing a servant tapped on the door and announced that Marcellus’s mother wished to see me.
‘What, are you sure?’ I said, looking at him with surprise and some alarm. Always, when I had visited before, she had kept to her own suite of rooms in the far wing of that vast house. It had become a thing I noticed; for though Marcellus had said it was nothing, and that she was always so, I had supposed, as one does, that she had some objection to me.
Now I asked myself why it was she had waited until now, when Marcellus was absent, to summon me.
She was sitting on a white-cushioned couch beside a small bronze statue of a naked youth, a fine-faced woman with bound-up hair and clear eyes. She wore a long gathered dress of silk embroidered with blue twining roses, and on her breast a delicate necklace of antique silver. She looked like something precious and fragile and rare, like the elegant polished furniture around her.
‘Please sit,’ she said, indicating with a graceful movement a chair with turned legs and ivory inlay. ‘How glad I am to meet you at last. Will you take wine? . . . No? Nor shall I.’
Her voice was measured and precise. She spoke quietly; but there was nothing weak about her. She enquired, in a studied yet desultory way, about my journey and my life. She listened with distant courtesy. Then she said, ‘Now tell me of Marcellus.’ It was an easy question, yet I felt the muscles in my stomach tighten.
I said, ‘He is well enough, madam. He has gone out with Tyronius; but he will be back in the afternoon.’
She gave me a look that said, ‘Do not treat me like a fool; I could ask him myself, if it were only his health and whereabouts that concerned me.’ Then she said, ‘He is last of the line.’
I nodded and said, ‘Yes, madam.’
There was a silence.
‘You see him more than any other. You know his friends in the city. Tell me, when do you suppose he will marry?’
Her eyes, so disconcertingly like his, fixed on me, waiting. I felt rough and crude beside her; I knew my cheeks were reddening and cursed inwardly, wondering what she would read into it.
‘I cannot tell,’ I said. ‘I expect he will choose when he is ready.’
She was not to be fobbed off. With a voice like crystal she said, ‘You are his closest friend. That is what he says. You can encourage him to do what is his duty, or’ – and here she paused until I looked up into her face – ‘or you can cause him to forget it. It would be a comfort to me to think I had your support.’
Our eyes locked then, like two men looking across their shields in battle. She had sprung her trap. I wondered how much she knew.
I said, ‘It is for Marcellus to choose his wife, not me. Yes, I am his friend; and I shall support him whatever he decides, and whomever he chooses.’
She regarded me coolly, not with anger, but with a vague look of surprise, like a fastidious-mannered woman in whose presence some coarse utterance has been made. She let the awkward silence grow; and I sat in my chair, resisting the urge to look away.
I knew she had drawn me onto what was, for me, dangerous unsure ground, and though I had spoken truly, I had not spoken what lay within my heart, and I was sure my feelings were written on my face. I waited. I had wanted more than anything for her not to dislike me. But I saw she had planned this meeting, every word of it, intending, if I had given the answers she sought, to suborn me into whatever scheme she had in mind for her son. The price of her liking was too high. I held my tongue, and set my mouth firm.
‘I see,’ she said eventually. With a hint of a sigh – more a gesture than a sound – she looked away and allowed her eyes to dwell on the delicate epicene statue. I understood that the interview, or what mattered of it, was at an end. But she did not dismiss me there and then; her manners, which were faultless, would not have permitted it. And so, with a faint smile, she changed the subject, and talked for a while of I know not what – polite commonplaces: the servants; the winter weather; her friends in the city I had not met and, as she must surely have known, should never meet. But all I heard, in all these words, was the message she intended to convey, which was that I had failed her. It was subtle; expertly done. And brutal.
When, soon after, I had taken my leave, and was crossing the sea of shining floor to the door, her voice sounded behind me.
‘Drusus.’
I turned. It was the first time she had used my name.
‘Madam?’
‘Time steals up upon us all.’
‘Yes.’
‘It carries what we love away when we least expect it. My son has his responsibilities, which are greater than you or me. I hope you will never forget that.’
‘No, madam. I will not forget.’
I walked back along the gilded panelled corridor, angry at my own awkwardness, and angry too that she had tried to draw me into her schemes. Did she, coming from such a family, really have so little regard for my own honour that she thought she would succeed? She must have calculated that I would tell Marcellus. I tried to work out whether – and how – this could be part of her intention. But here I could not see clearly, and in the end I decided to say nothing.
But later that day, when he had returned and we were lounging in the baths (the only truly warm place in the house, for the hypocaust had never been properly repaired), Marcellus said after a period of silence, ‘What did she want?’
I was lying naked on the wide ledge. He was sitting beside me, with one leg propped up. A shaft of diffused light, entering from a small misted window, illuminated his upper body.
I glanced up and our eyes met.
‘No matter,’ he said crossly. ‘What does she ever want!’
He rose and went to where the water was trickling from a wrought bronze spout into the marble tank, and frowned down at the mobile surface of the pool.
I said, ‘She seems in a hurry to marry you off.’
‘Oh, you noticed. Since I was a boy she has talked of nothing else. Whenever she hears of some well-born eligible girl she questions me, and arranges visits, and goes through months of silent regret if it comes to nothing. Even before I knew what a wife was, she was telling me I should have one. You’d think there was nothing else in the world to do but marry.’
‘And will you?’ I asked, after a pause.
‘I daresay, when I am ready.’ And then, ‘Girls one can take or leave, but a wife is another matter.’
‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘it is what mothers think about.’
‘Is that what you suppose?’
But then his face changed and he looked quickly up. ‘Forgive me, Drusus; I did not mean it like that. I have no cause to be angry with you.’
He came padding back across the wet floor and pulled himself up onto the ledge, sitting close. I studied his body beside me – the contours of the muscles in his thigh, the arch of his broad well-formed foot, the little track of chestnut hair that ran down from his stomach to his groin. I felt the stirring of desire, and thought again of the meeting with his mother. Had she divined, with a mother’s instinct, the feelings I kept buried in my private heart? It seemed to me she had. I wondered if she had guessed, too, that there was much more I wished for than I was getting.
But that was my business. In love, her son was never furtive, never ashamed; but it was as though other things were more important. This I accepted, because I had confronted him with my need, and because of the god, and because I must. Nothing comes for nothing. I had known that from the start. I could not tell what he sacrificed. If now an offering was demanded of me too, I gave it willingly.
W
hatever I hoped, the time was not now; and, I knew with a pang of regret, that time might never come. I would live with it. In moments of clarity, I knew I needed some things more. What I had, even with its frustrations, was far more precious than what I missed; and I dimly perceived that these two parts – the gain and the loss – were elements of one whole, a contrary tension, like the prongs of a bow or a lyre.
Like a man who impales himself on his own sword I said, ‘I told her I would support you, whatever wife you choose. You know that. But it is for you to choose, not me.’
He nodded to himself, and a frowning half-realized gratitude showed on his troubled face. He put his hand on my shoulder, and let it rest there.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘At least you understand.’
I said no more. I lay on the warm ledge, feeling his fingers absently tracing the lines of the muscles in my upper back, reflecting that in this one matter, perhaps, was the tender place in the armour of his pride, which even he did not see. I could exploit it if I chose. But that was not the way of friendship, or of love.
For a while after, we did not speak. The only sound was the water trickling from the spout, and the beating of my own heart, which I alone could hear.
Eventually, rousing himself from his thoughts, he shifted and said, ‘She must not interfere between you and me. She must understand that. I shall decide for myself when I am ready.’
Overnight the snow came down, and we woke next day to high wisps of cirrus cloud and a covering of blue-white over the land. The farm-hands’ children were out with the first light, throwing snowballs and sculpting statues out of the ice. The bailiff Tyronius shook his head and went off to inspect the vines, complaining that each winter was colder than the last, and one day Britain would not support vine-growing at all. But Marcellus and I ran out and slid about with the children, pelting one another and laughing and falling.
The gods bring us signs, and the ones that come unbidden are the truest. Once, in the midst of our horsing-about, when Marcellus had wrestled me to the ground and held me pinned, he stooped down and with sudden seriousness kissed me on the mouth. Then a snowball thrown by one of the children burst on his shoulder, scattering us both with snow. The moment passed, and he leapt up with a laughing cry and gave chase.
I climbed to my feet, dusting myself off, feeling the knowledge in my body even before it reached my mind. And then something, like the touch of an unseen hand on my shoulder, made me glance round, up at the high windows on the second storey behind the balustrade.
Even as I looked I knew already what I should find. I glimpsed her only for a moment, before she turned away.
I shivered and pulled my cloak around me, suddenly aware of the cold.
It was a trading ship from Gaul, an unremarkable old merchantman with some nondescript cargo, that brought the news of Mursa.
‘Mursa?’ people asked. But they learned the name soon enough. It was the place where Magnentius confronted the army of Constantius, and was defeated.
At first we heard no more than the bare fact, and there were many who refused to believe it. Everyone knew Constantius had lost his nerve, everyone knew he was suing for the most convenient treaty he could manage. He was a coward at heart, a Roman who had become corrupted by the beguiling luxuries of the East, a perfumed tyrant grown soft and timid.
But then the details began to arrive, and it could no longer be denied. Magnentius had been laying siege to the city of Mursa, in Pannonia. Early one morning Constantius’s army had appeared over the hills, and Magnentius, seeing at last his chance for a decisive battle, abandoned the siege and lined up his troops across the plain.
The fighting raged all day. The line strained, then collapsed. There was a general slaughter, and by nightfall forty thousand men had died. Defeated, Magnentius fled with the remnants of his men, casting away his symbols of office in his haste, escaping west over the Alps. Only the onset of winter, which comes early in the high passes, protected him from pursuit.
But that winter Constantius did not sit idle. His diplomats plied the sea between Pannonia and Italy, making contacts, giving promises, greasing palms. The cities of Italy held their fingers to the wind, and, sensing its direction, one after another they closed their gates to Magnentius.
The weeks passed. Spring came. Aquinus spent all of his time in London, at the request of the magistrates, who needed his advice. I was at the London house with Marcellus one day when he returned from the basilica after one such meeting. He was not a man to make a show of his feelings, but even before he spoke I saw the set of his chin, and the hollow look in his eyes. Old attentive Clemens had seen it too. He was as much a friend as a servant; and now, without being asked, he hurried off to the kitchens and returned with a steaming posset in a covered earthenware bowl, fussing like a nursemaid, telling him to sit and rest and drink before it was cold.
‘Yes, yes; in a moment,’ said Aquinus, waving him away; and then, turning to me and Marcellus, ‘Constantius has done the unthinkable. He has invited the barbarians into Gaul. Worse than that, he has bribed them to come. Think of it! An emperor of Rome paying his enemies to plunder his own people. The barbarians must think he has lost his mind.’
‘Then they are right,’ said Marcellus.
Decentius, Magnentius’s younger brother, was still at the western capital of Trier on the German frontier. He had fought back the barbarians with whatever forces he could muster; but the main army was far off to the south with Magnentius, guarding the passes against Constantius’s invasion, which everyone knew must soon come.
‘Does he suppose,’ said Aquinus, ‘that the barbarians will return meekly across the Rhine when he bids them? They will pick Gaul clean. They will leave nothing but a wasteland.’
The posset, I noticed, was trembling in his hand. He set it down on the table and frowned at it.
‘What do Gennadius and the magistrates say?’ asked Marcellus. ‘What will they do now?’
Aquinus gave a shrug. ‘They wait on events, as usual. In this case, though, they can do little else.’
‘And Constantius’s army? Is there still no news?’
‘None. He proceeds with careful steps. But he will come.’
‘Oh, sir!’ cried Clemens, taking advantage of the pause. ‘Will you drink, or must I spoon it to you?’
In the days that followed, each new ship brought bad news. Magnentius’s troops, realizing their homes were threatened by the Germans, began to slip away, just as Constantius had intended. We even lost men from the city fort, whose families were in Gaul. Then came news that Magnentius had offered to resign the purple. It was Trebius at the fort who told me this, having got it from his own Gallic legate.
‘It is a surrender,’ he said, shaking his head.
But it was a surrender with terms; terms which Constantius rejected. Instead he issued a proclamation pardoning all those who had sided with Magnentius and guaranteeing their safety.
But for Magnentius himself there would be no pardon.
Soon after, Constantius landed an army in Spain. It marched north towards Lyons; at the same time, in a pincer movement, his legions swept down through the Alpine passes from Italy into Gaul. Magnentius marched up into the highlands to cut them off. The armies met at a place called Mount Seleucus.
Today everyone knows the name. It is the place where the pride of the western armies was annihilated. Deserted by his bodyguards, and guessing at the fearful tortures Constantius would inflict on him, Magnentius fell on his sword. Shortly after, when the news reached Trier, his brother Decentius hanged himself.
In London there was gloom. A prickling stillness settled upon the city. It was as if men trod quietly, hoping to avert the omens.
I had no time to dwell on it, for it was sailing season, and with Gaul in chaos the Saxons would know there could be no relief for Britain if they came. We doubled the watch on the shore-forts, and posted lookouts on the approaches. But that year we saw no Saxons on the grey, turbulent sea. The danger lay wi
thin, where we were not looking.
At the fort in London, it seemed everyone knew a family who had lost a father or a son at Mount Seleucus, or at Mursa. Wives came to the fort gates, tearing at their clothes and raising their children in their arms, crying out to know who would feed them with their husbands gone. In the end Trebius ordered the guards to keep them off. But they sat outside the walls, and their shrill laments echoed across the parade-ground, like some monstrous birdsong.
Constantius spent that winter in Arles – and his terrible revenge began. He had promised a pardon to Magnentius’s supporters; now, with his victory secure, he broke his word and had them rounded up, tortured, and put to death. He behaved not as the liberator he claimed to be, but as a conqueror.
Only one man remained untouched amid the general sorrow: Bishop Pulcher. He strutted about the city like a peacock, accompanied by ruffian acolytes who pushed the citizens aside to let him pass. One might have supposed he had defeated Magnentius himself.
One morning a man came to me at the fort, bringing a note from Aquinus.
I went at once, and found him in his courtyard among the herb pots.
‘I have just had word,’ he said, ‘Constantius is sending Flavius Martinus as governor. I knew him once, you may recall. He comes from a good family.’
‘Yes sir,’ I said. ‘I remember. He served Constans.’
‘Well, yes; that is true. But he is humane and decent; there is hope with such a man. I had feared worse, after what Constantius has done to Gaul.’
TEN
I STOOD ON THE QUAYSIDE, turned out in my bronze cuirass and red-plumed helmet, standing in a line with my fellow tribunes from the fort. Trebius, in his commander’s insignia, waited at the front, his eyes on the cutter as it manoeuvred alongside. The black oars plashed and paused as the pilot called out instructions. From the masthead Constantius’s purple and gold banner with its dragon symbol curled in the breeze.
