The legate grunted.
‘I am sure I have no need to remind my lord that all three places were razed to the ground by Boudicca.’
Ferox wondered whether the wooden top of the chair was going to snap. After a moment, Neratius Marcellus managed a smile. ‘Indeed you do not. Thank you for expressing your concerns with such rare frankness. I should not detain you any longer, procurator.’
Fuscus stood up. He could only have been a few inches taller than the legate. That did not reduce the sense of immense physical power about the man. ‘Thank you for your time, my lord. I shall report that matters are in your safe hands.’
The legate’s smile became broader. ‘That is kind.’
‘Please know that I am sincere in my belief that there is considerable discontent throughout much of Britannia at present. The tribes complain of debt and struggle to pay their taxes.’
‘Which I am sure are collected with the utmost tact and kindness by your staff, who do everything in their power to make the burden as light as possible.’
Neratius Marcellus watched the procurator swagger across the polished plank floor. ‘Fat-arsed little shit,’ he muttered once the doors had closed behind the procurator and his attendants. ‘Hopefully one of you has news for me that will help roast the little pimp over a fire. No? Nothing?’ He sighed. ‘To business then.’
Crispinus gave a full report about the fires, by the end of which the legate was more himself, walking up and down as he interrupted with short, always pertinent, questions. Ferox went next, prompting amusement as well as interest in his description of the fight.
‘Somebody wants you dead! Splendid, splendid.’ The legate stopped pacing to roar with laughter. ‘Then we must be doing something right!’
At the end Ovidius repeated what was known about Domitius. ‘Very little, I am afraid. He appears to be an eques from Gaul, has considerable funds, interests in many businesses, is very free making loans, and brings impressive letters of recommendation with him. He has not been in Londinium long, but some of the merchants say they have run into him in other towns in the last month or so. Perhaps he is the Domitius whom Ferox heard about at Vindolanda. Perhaps not. Most likely he is the agent of a senator or senators, doing their work. The priests claim to be unable to remember the names on the letters he carried. One suspects all are in his debt in one way or another, and of course he is not yet openly accused of anything.’
‘Facts, gentlemen, facts are what we need. All of this merely assures us that we are right to be suspicious. There is some connection, I am sure, between all or most of what has happened and we need to understand it. But where are the facts?’ He stopped mid-stride and spun around. ‘How goes the search in our archives?’
‘I believed that I was onto something, but am not now so sure,’ Ovidius began, running a hand through the remnants of his hair as he scratched his head. ‘The Emperor Claudius sent a cloak to the temple set up in his honour in Colonia Camulodunum. Not only had he worn it in his triumph over Britannia, but it had been worn by Pompey Magnus in one of his triumphs. He brought it back from Asia and it was said to have once belonged to Alexander. For a while I thought it might have been our cloak, but the trail ran cold, as I believe you trackers say.’ He smiled at Ferox, who for the first time smiled in return.
‘It is our cloak. Kopros told me that it was rescued from Camulodunum before it fell to the rebels and eventually taken to the temple here. He only knew that it once belonged to the divine Claudius.’
‘The cloak of Alexander!’ Neratius Marcellus was grinning like a schoolboy given a tray of sweet cakes. ‘Here of all places. Shame it would be sacrilege to wear it.’
‘Who would know?’ Ovidius asked, but was silenced by the look of the legate. ‘Pity.’
Neratius Marcellus walked slowly to the chair and sat down. It was almost as if he was proving his self control to his own satisfaction. ‘A better question would be whether or not this Acco would know of Alexander?’
Ferox rubbed his chin, a scab from the night before feeling very large. ‘Probably.’
‘But would he value something the king of Macedon had possessed? Or the Emperor Claudius, for that matter.’
‘Hard to say. Perhaps.’
‘Well, earn your pay, and work it out. It is time you went back to the archives. You too, old friend.’
The old man stopped halfway towards the door and turned back. ‘Do I get paid as well?’
‘Only by my continuing patience, and I dread to think how much that costs. Now leave us. We must now consider again the question of Brigantia, and who will rule there. I understand you have an idea, nephew. Out with it, man.’
‘It occurred to me that the choice may be genuine after all…’ Ferox and Ovidius were outside and the double doors closed behind them before he could hear any more.
‘That is not a decision I envy making,’ the old man said as they walked down one of the long corridors. ‘To choose whether brother or sister should become high king – or high queen, I suppose, of one of the most populous tribes on this island. You have met Claudia, I believe.’
‘Claudia Enica? I have.’
Ovidius peered up at him. ‘Your silence speaks volumes. I take it you were not too impressed. Have you met her brother?’
Ferox shook his head.
‘He has charm, some intelligence, considerably more confidence, but his judgement…’
‘Enough eloquence, too little wisdom?’
‘Sallust? You continue to surprise me. Whether or not he is a Catiline, I do not know, but there are some people I find I just cannot trust, even when I do not really know them.’
‘You are turning barbarian in your old age, my lord, to trust instincts over reason.’
‘Oh I do hope so,’ Ovidius said happily. ‘Let us just put it this way. When you meet the brother, your esteem for the sister tends to grow. Sometimes I wonder whether she is a great loss to the theatre.’
Ferox wondered whether the mime was more fitting, with its dances and simple stories.
XI
The morning passed slowly, sitting on an uncomfortable stool in the archives, his sides, arms and back aching, sifting through the tablets brought by the clerk, who was enjoying himself.
‘Thought you might like these,’ he would say, ‘once you have finished with that lot.’ Soon there were stacks of tablets neatly laid out on and underneath the table, awaiting his attention. Ferox ploughed on, hour after hour, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. It was amazing just how dull reports written weeks or even days either side of battles and other great moments often were. That was the army for you, and sometimes he wondered whether its real purpose was to create these mountains of records, a task occasionally interrupted by having to fight someone.
By noon he was hungry. An hour later he was hungry, in some pain and fed up. Then he saw a simple entry in a strength return which the overeager exactus had brought him after a foolish comment about that being the last place to look.
escort to Prasto28 including 2 centurions
He glanced at the top of the page. This was an entry in the return for Cohors IV Batavorum on the Ides of August in the consulship of Nero and Cossus Cornelius Lentulus. It was an odd thought that only in military archives did no one bother to erase the name of an emperor whose memory had been formally damned by the Senate. The army needed to keep its records straight and clear, politics or no politics.
Prasto? He had seen the name before, noted it as odd, but passed on without thinking any more about it. It was Celtic, and likely enough he was a Briton, but that was too early for Britons to be serving in the army, especially in a rank that warranted an escort. Two centurions was a lot for so few soldiers, but twenty-eight was more than most of the procurator’s staff or other officials would get.
Ferox realised that he was drumming his fingers on the table. He had heard the name before somewhere. It was not common. Then he remembered a boy a few years older than him at his grandfather’s dun
all those years ago. A lean, fair-haired youth taken as a captive on a raid and raised as one of their own. He never quite fitted in among the dark Silures, but was always willing to follow someone else’s lead and beat up anyone who was smaller. In one of his visits, Acco the druid had dubbed the lad Prasto and the name had stuck. His grandfather used to make a sign to ward off evil whenever he heard the name spoken, but Acco was Acco, even then when he could not really have been so ancient. He had heard whispers, no more, about a druid who had aided the Romans.
‘Fetch me back the returns for ala Petriana for the same year,’ he said to the exactus. ‘And of all the Thracian cohortes equitatae for the consulship of Novius Priscus and Commodus.’ The clerk limped away, a happy expression on his face as he carried tablets to re-shelve and went in search of more.
Ferox was close to giving up when he found another mention of Prasto, this time given twenty horsemen from an ala as escort. After a while he found the name again, in the first year of Agricola’s term as legate, when he fought the Ordovices and crossed to Mona. A Prasto was there, guarded by a decurion from a mixed cohort and seventeen troopers.
‘Have you a fresh tablet?’ he asked the clerk. Surprisingly in this building packed with documents, a blank writing tablet took a while to be found, and Ferox was toying with the idea of warming his stylus and melting the wax on the book he was using to make notes. Just then the clerk returned, with a folding page, slightly battered on the edge, but good enough. Ferox wrote a note to Ovidius, explaining what he had found and asking him to search in the reports of Suetonius Paulinus and Agricola for mentions of a Prasto, perhaps a renegade druid. Slipping the exactus the price of another few drinks for carrying this to the old man, Ferox got up. If he did not hurry now he would be late.
It took a while to get anywhere in Londinium, at least in the daytime. In Rome there were more people, ten or even twenty times more, but the main streets were wider and there were more restrictions on where stallholders could set up. Today was a market day, even busier than usual, as some of the harvests had only just come in. The stalls overflowed with vegetables, sacks of grain, and cages with poultry squawking or hares staring round-eyed through the bars. The larger livestock were in pens, and he avoided the streets behind the basilica where they were being auctioned, but the signs of their passage were everywhere, the earth of the alleys and side streets churned up into clinging mud, and great piles of dung even on the main roads. Today, Londinium smelled like a farmyard, and he wondered if that would make Vindex feel more at home. The scout kept complaining about the reek of the town, so Ferox had told him and the others that he would take them all to a bath-house later today. Much to his surprise, they had agreed.
The exactus had told him about a short cut through the courtyard of the basilica, and Ferox found it, for the moment leaving behind the shouts of the market traders and replacing them with the shouts of petitioners and the grander merchants, yelling at each other. He had never fully understood how commerce functioned, but it clearly required a lot of shouting regardless of the scale. Up on his tribunal, under a canopy in case the weather turned poor, he saw a stone-faced Neratius Marcellus, sitting on his chair of office, listening to a tall, lanky man making a speech. No doubt he was asking for some favour or other, and had dressed up in a toga for the occasion, although he was clearly unfamiliar with the garment because twice it slipped off his left arm.
Ferox went through an arch into one of the halls, then out towards the main entrance. In the shadows by the gate he saw the short red hair of Arviragus, talking to a tubby figure in a dark tunic and Greek cloak. As he passed he recognised Vegetus, the freedman whose cart had been attacked by Rufus and the others what seemed like an age ago in another land. A big slave cleared a path through the crowd, and he glimpsed the stocky figure of the procurator joining the two men.
The house was on one of the hills, some way back from the river. There was more space up here, where the air was a little clearer, and the houses were big and surrounded by substantial, well, groomed gardens, some containing big trees whose leaves were just beginning to turn brown. Ferox was trying to get more sense of the layout of the town, so took a route he had not used before and soon got lost. Streets that appeared straight never quite seemed to lead where he expected, and so many of the buildings looked alike. There was less noise here, and the roads less muddied by wheels and hoofs, but the belief that if he kept climbing he was going in the wrong direction soon proved false when he reached the top of the wrong hill, occupied by a few workshops and some larger fields and open spaces. He gave up and asked the way, and ten minutes later was in the right place.
A slave he did not know answered his knocking, but as he was led into the house he saw a maid he knew, and as he was led through into an inner garden heard the familiar raised voices of the children at play. When excited, young Brocchus had a shriek as shrill as any girl’s, while Cerialis’ oldest son was given to loud howls of uncontrollable laughter. They were playing catch, dropping more than they took, the younger ones bustling around their feet, and they all sent up a delighted cry when they saw Ferox, and then threw the ball at him. He caught it, pretended that the force sent him staggering back and spun around before finally slumping to the ground. In a moment the children were battling each other to climb all over him. His bruises and broken ribs complained, but Ferox did not really mind.
‘You are a bad influence, Flavius Ferox,’ Sulpicia Lepidina said.
‘Atrocious,’ Claudia Severa agreed, looking up a moment from her knitting. The two friends sat in high-backed chairs. In front of them, Marcus rolled and gurgled to himself on a spread blanket.
‘Men are just children at heart,’ Claudia Enica declared. She sat a little apart, under a parasol held by a slave, even though that side of the garden was shaded by the buildings. She was carding wool, working with two boards, but not putting in enough effort to achieve very much. Once again she was in silk, this time coloured sea green, and matching stockings showed through the patterned tops of her shoes.
‘Of course they are, my dear,’ Sulpicia Lepidina explained, ‘that is why we let them have their politics and their wars to keep them amused, while we get on with the important things in life.’
Enica struggled to free the carding combs, which had become stuck fast. ‘That does not sound very fair,’ she said, pressing her teeth against her lower lip as she tried to pull them apart.
‘It isn’t, dear.’ The other Claudia spoke in a stage whisper. ‘So we have to be careful not to let them know.’
The red-headed Brigantian chattered away, frowning as she battled with the wooden combs. Ferox did not really listen, for it was talk of clothes and colours and jewellery, subjects on which he had few opinions. Apart from that, the children were trying to roll him across the grass, and he pretended to resist, while helping them in their task. While they drew back and gathered their forces, he undid the clasp on his belt so that in the next roll it came free and he left it and his weapons behind. Much to his surprise, it was obvious that the friendship between the three women was genuine, however unlikely. Sulpicia Lepidina had a sharp, incisive mind, and if Claudia Severa was not the brightest, she was nobody’s fool, and yet they chuckled and smiled at the rapid flow of trivial conversation pouring from their companion.
‘Away from the water!’ Claudia Severa barked the command as forcefully as any centurion, and Ferox realised that he was getting close to the edge of a sunken pond. ‘You have all got soaked once already today, and that is quite enough. Leave our guest alone.’
‘Yes, the poor fellow was attacked by a lion yesterday,’ Sulpicia Lepidina said. ‘We don’t want you finishing him off! Now help him up.’
Ferox wondered how she had heard about that, and guessed that Crispinus had called. The children took his arms and he started to sit up and then roared like a lion and pulled them down onto him again amid plenty of giggling and shrieks of delight.
‘You really are worse than they are.’ S
ulpicia Lepidina had walked to stand over him, arms on her hips as she smiled down at them. She was in pale blue, a colour she often wore, and with her golden hair she was like the serene statue of a goddess. His fevered dream flashed into his mind, and part of him wanted to pull her down as well. Instead he eased the children off and sat up.
‘I try my best, lady.’ Little Flavia was sticking her tongue out at him. He cupped his hands around his mouth and roared again.
Enica was shaking her head. ‘And the emperor pays you a generous wage. Extraordinary.’
‘He does indeed, and it is worth every last coin.’ Claudia Severa came alongside her friend and grabbed the little girl by the arm. She grinned at Ferox. ‘Looks really can be deceiving.’
‘That’s true,’ the Brigantian allowed. ‘One of my tutors once said that I would grow up to be wise like a philosopher.’ She sniffed back a laugh. ‘Silly old fool.’
Sulpicia Lepidina had grabbed the smaller Flavius, but turned. ‘There’s still time, my dear, if you ever do grow up.’
‘Oh, I hope not!’
The mothers led the children away, asking Enica to watch the baby for a moment, and leaving a slave woman, waiting discreetly in the shadows in case there was need. ‘Perhaps you can take care of our guest for a few moments? We shall not be long, but these urchins need to be cleaned and prepared for their meal,’ Claudia Severa said.
Enica finally abandoned her combs and dropped them on the sleeping Achilles. He stirred, and when his mistress gave a flicking gesture with one hand he scampered away.
‘Well, centurion, how shall I take care of you?’ She stood, the silk dress shimmering with every movement. It was high necked, with short sleeves and although it hinted at the outlines of her figure, it was nowhere near as sheer as the dresses that had caused such a scandal in Nero’s day. Her hair was carefully arranged, if a little less ornately than when he had last seen her and apart from a pair of small earrings and a couple of rings she wore no other ornament.
Brigantia Page 13
