by Manda Scott
A detachment of retired veterans, glorious in their old parade uniforms, marched onto the stage, turned about, drew their weapons in synchrony and, striking up and out, made an avenue of raised short swords. The tips clashed like cymbals as they came together, a counterpoint to the resonance of the stage. Through this avenue of violent brilliance, marching in slow time as if to a funeral, two of the governor’s personal guard escorted a prisoner, marked as different only by the chains on his wrists. In an act of calculated defiance, or of solidarity, the man was dressed in identical parade uniform to the veterans.
The effect was dramatic. Every step forward showed the prisoner as a man of courage who had served his god and his emperor with exceptional valour and who was now prepared to martyr himself for the sake of his governor. Ex-centurion Marcellus may not have had many friends, but there were plenty of men at whose side he had fought who resented his use as a political tool and did not wish to see him abandoned in extremis.
The Trinovantes in the audience had fewer scruples. Whatever their affection for Rome and its institutions, Marcellus had been universally loathed. A slow, low chatter spread around the arc of the theatre, approving the man’s status as prisoner, disapproving the sentiment of the veterans. Someone stamped a foot and the rhythm became, slowly, that of the Trinovante death song, an intricate patter of long and short beats that is learned from the cradle or not at all. Others took it up and the beat spread round the arc, a muted roll so that it might have come from drummers at the river, but that the rock of it rang through the benches as bodies moved to its sway.
The sound rose to a peak and then stopped, suddenly, and no-one could have said who had given the order. It was not an act of overt hostility; it could have been argued that they did the man great honour, but it had not felt honourable. Fear rippled belatedly round the theatre as those who had most to lose by the onset of reprisals realized what they had done and began to speak, too loudly and too late, to cover it. Presently, that, too, faded away.
Everything waited. If there had been birds perched on the high walls of the theatre, they would have held their breaths and stilled their flight and waited.
An order was given in Latin. The two junior officers of the guard brought their prisoner forward to the front edge of the stage. All three men saluted.
The governor stood to return their greeting. Nothing overt in his bearing changed but, in the silence that awaited his speech, three thousand men and women of the tribes, the waiting veterans and a dozen visiting officers were reminded that he had led two legions in a summer’s long campaign and that he knew exactly what it was to be a soldier in the field.
His voice had commanded armies in the chaos of war and the acoustics in the theatre were the best that his empire’s engineers could achieve, unmatched on any battlefield. When he spoke, it seemed to those on the furthest tiers as much as the front benches that he barely raised his voice and yet spoke directly to them.
“Marcellus, veteran of the legions, formerly centurion of the second cohort, the Ninth legion, recipient of three crowns for bravery in combat, you are accused of the murder of Rithicos, harness maker and tenant farmer on your land. Three witnesses have attested to this, two of them citizens, one a trusted tribesman. Your guilt is not in doubt. Sentence has been passed. You will die today, in the sight of those whom you have wronged. It is your right to speak before sentence is carried out. Do you wish to do so?”
“No. But I would show you who it is that you sentence so.”
The stage was Marcellus’ alone. For his last performance, his former comrades-in-arms gave him all the space he could need to enact his own drama. The ranks who had made his entrance avenue laid their naked blades in crossed pairs on the stage. From Breaca’s seat low down in the first rank of benches, they made a lake of sun-washed iron and it was hard to see beyond the brightness of it. From higher up the tiers they would be more symbolic, an array of battle weapons, made decorative for the purposes of peace.
Marcellus did not wait for silence to settle but simply, and without drama, bent at the waist, placed his palms on the floor and shrugged so that his mail shirt inverted and slid over his head; an armoured skin, shed in shining links.
The chime of iron striking iron rang on the resonant stage as the former centurion knelt and set the shirt straight as he might have done after a day’s campaign. Beneath, he wore a simple woollen tunic belted at the waist. This, too, he removed, folding it and laying it on the floor atop the mail. No-one moved to stop him.
The prisoner stood again and it seemed that he had spent a great deal of his life walking in sun without his tunic. He was no longer fit; his belly hung over his belt half the size of a pregnant woman, but he had not always been so. The scars on his chest were many and varied; through his years of service, he had met, and failed to avoid, sword and spear and arrow-head. The mark of the bull in the centre of his breastbone was old, the brand dulled with age. Its presence explained, perhaps, the leeway he had been given so far in his display.
Raising his arms, Marcellus began to turn a slow circle so that those with experience of battle—the governor, his officers, the warriors amongst the tribes—could see that he bore no scars on his back. He had never retreated or, in retreat, had never encountered those who could catch him. He would have preferred, doubtless, that they believed the former.
His circle was almost complete. The men on the stage with him had seen the long line beneath his left armpit and were remembering the day it was new, recalling the battles they had fought with Marcellus at their head. Only one of the officers of the guard saw the danger and he was too late to act. His shout served only to highlight the climax of the prisoner’s drama.
In the closing step of the circle, Marcellus flung himself down and sideways, stretching out flat to reach the line of crossed short swords lying forgotten on the stage. His open hand connected with the grip of the nearest, swinging it back in a practised move that brought him upright again, slightly breathless but armed in the company of fifteen men, only three of whom had the presence of mind to stoop and pick up their own weapons.
If the silence before had been polite, it was charged now with the slamming power of a lightning strike. Three thousand men and women each held their breath. Tribal warriors who had fought in battle reached for blades they were not permitted to carry and let their hands fall empty and useless at their sides. Breaca heard Corvus stand and begin to work his way between the seats and down the aisle. Two other officers of the legions did the same; these men were chosen for their ability to balance politics with war and to act appropriately. They could be trusted to contain this situation now.
Marcellus watched them come. Raising the blade, he saluted each one by name.
“Valerius Corvus: I will never forget your charge against the hill fort of the Durotriges. The god saw it on the day and will hear of it again from me. Cornelius Pulcher: I have heard of your actions against the warriors of the west. You will prevail in time, I am sure.” His sneer said otherwise. It fell away as he turned to face the last of the officers, an ageing, white-haired centurion of the IXth legion who looked easily old enough to have been pensioned as a veteran himself. To him, Marcellus bowed. “Rutilius Albinus, first father under the god. I will give him your greetings as I give you my honour, my oath and my life.”
Albinus, at least, saw what was coming. With a report like a thunder clap, he sheathed his own sword and raised his arm in salute at exactly the moment Marcellus reversed his grip on the hilt of his stolen blade and, without error or hesitation, thrust it home in his own chest, a hand’s breadth to the left of the bull god’s brand. With his last conscious movement, he tipped forward, so that he could have been said to have fallen on his sword and could go to his god with honour.
He was dead before the first of the officers on the stage reached him. They were slow, rendered sluggish by their own fear. Under some governors they would have replaced Marcellus on the cross for allowing a prisoner to escape his
own execution. The legions did not look favourably on men who failed in their duty.
The first of them knelt, his fingers laid flat against the great vessels of the prisoner’s neck, seeking signs of life that he would never find. Thinking himself useful, he pulled the blade from the lifeless chest and thereby released the ocean of blood waiting within. The oak stage soaked it up, hungrily. At the sight, the massed voice of the audience was released, creating its own sea of astonished sound.
The governor was not one who visited unnecessary death on his men. A brief move of his head caught the attention of the ageing centurion of the IXth. “Albinus? Your man, I believe. Please see to his removal. The veterans may wish to claim his body. They may do so.”
With practised alacrity, the old men on the stage formed an honour guard and removed the body of the man they had respected but not liked.
In death, Marcellus’ memory was transformed from a battle-hungry officer and drunken abuser of men to a hero who spoke his mind when all around him were silent. For now, he was simply a body who was leaking blood and ranker fluids across the governor’s new stage. The veterans made a litter of two shields and carried him away, doing what they could to minimize the mess. A servant in tribal dress returned shortly afterwards with sifted sand and poured it over, soaking up the worst of the excess. On the ground below, two others drew across a long rake and smoothed away the splashed debris from the deeper, paler sand that filled the semicircle between the front row of seats and the stage.
Breaca watched Corvus return to his seat. His face was closed to her but his eyes held a warning: There is more. Don’t relax yet. She lifted Graine onto her knee and said quietly, “I think there’s a break now. Do you need to go out?”
The girl shook her head. Breaca bent to kiss her and said, more softly, “Is this what you dreamed of that made Cunomar angry?”
“Not yet, but it was here, in this place.” She faltered. “It may not have been today.”
“Then we will watch and see. If anything bad begins to happen, will you let me know as soon as you see it?”
“I’ll try.”
If Graine did not need to go out, a great many of the adults who had drunk wine in the morning did. There was a shuffling and a changing of seats and men and women passed each other on the long stairs that led down the back of the theatre from the upper ranks of benches. Breaca held Graine and talked lightly of nothing to Cygfa while ’Tagos regaled the governor with his best tale of the boar hunt by which he and Dubornos had together celebrated their ascension to adulthood.
The governor, who had almost certainly heard the tale before, or others like it, evinced total absorption and only one watching him as closely as Breaca did could have seen the signal to the officers on the margins of the theatre that ordered the start of the next phase of the afternoon’s demonstration.
The ranks of benches were full again and settling. A horn called for quiet. The governor rose and stepped into the central area of freshly raked sand, as visible from the top tiers as any man on the stage. He had shed his cloak, leaving it on the seat when he rose so that his armour took the full glare of the afternoon sun and lit his face to a silvered gold. A dreamer, doing such a thing, would have known how to use the impact to bring the people closer to the gods. The governor of Britannia, being Roman, blinked firmly and set his face at a different angle to the glare.
“Warriors of the Trinovantes, of the Eceni, the Atrebates, the Belgae …”
The entire crowd gasped. He was not speaking Latin, that was the first surprise. In less than a year, he had learned a passable version of the Trinovante dialect that was familiar throughout the south-east, and he had called them warriors; that was the greater shock.
His smile encompassed them all. “Today we have seen that Roman justice is impartial, that it is the righteous arm of the distant emperor brought close. It protects the weak and restrains the over-strong, allowing all to prosper equally without fear of death or injury.
“And yet, for justice to work, the emperor’s laws must be scrupulously kept. We can be lenient in allowing any people to continue their ancient rites and ceremonies in peace. Our gods have no quarrel with your gods; in the heavens, all gods live together in mutual respect. Our laws have no quarrel with your laws save in the instance where the one overrides the other.”
He said it smoothly, so that only a churl could choose to take it as an insult: We own you; our laws have precedence over yours and the world is a better place because of it.
Holding her own mind still, that her eyes might not betray her, Breaca felt Graine slip off her knee.
The governor was not watching the movement of children. His gaze roamed over those whose lives had changed most and who still resented it: men amongst the Trinovantes who had been called to fund the temple to the Emperor Claudius and had been required, on occasion, to help with its building; warriors among the Cantiaci and the Coritani and the Catuvellauni who had fought against the legions and might take up arms again if they had a good enough reason; the Eceni, who had rebelled once, and might yet do so again.
Speaking most to them, he said, “Thus it is that when one is found flagrantly to be flouting the most basic of our laws—laws passed for the protection of all—then we must act with expedition and no compromise, as we did with ex-centurion Marcellus.”
A signal was given. The drums marked the arrival of a new prisoner. A door opened on the stage. The governor said, “Such a one has been found. He was captured in possession of a weapon of length and size forbidden under the law and, when challenged, he attacked our men, killing two and injuring one other so that he will never fight again. For either of these alone, he must die. For both together, he must face the harshest of penalties.”
His timing was perfect and must have been practised. His last words reached the top tiers as those sitting in them caught their first sight of the tribesman who had disregarded Roman law and been caught doing so. The prisoner could not walk unaided. Two fresh officers of the guard, older and more experienced than those who had gone before, manhandled him through the faun’s door onto the stage and held him upright, naked and bloody, in full view of the benches opposite. In the first shock of seeing him, all that anyone could have said was that he had resisted arrest, or been gratuitously beaten, or both.
One of the officers grabbed a handful of hair and forced the prisoner’s head up and it could be seen that his nose was broken, one eye was swollen to a pulped mess of ruddy purple, a sword cut ran the length of one forearm and a broken finger stuck out at a painful angle. The way his left arm clamped to his side suggested a second wound there, or bleeding inside. His breathing was ragged and he showed no sign that he knew where he was.
Breaca counted all these things first; the blink-fast assessment of the warrior in the field that seeks to find if the injured can fight on. This one would never fight again without urgent treatment and Rome did not waste the time of its field physicians on condemned prisoners. The best that could be said, then, was that, even nailed to wood, his death would not last beyond sundown.
A small, voiceless part of her celebrated his two kills and sought a dreamer who could, equally silently, begin the song of soul-parting for one about to die in battle. Graine was her only dreamer and she was no longer sitting on her lap or on the bench next to her.
Dragging her eyes away from the stage, Breaca searched for her daughter and found her sitting instead on Cunomar’s knee, her small hands clamped fiercely on his wrists, her face next to his, speaking intently, quietly, in a constant stream of instruction. To a stranger, possibly even to their stepfather, it was a continuation of the whispered secrets of earlier. To Breaca, shockingly, Graine was the only thing keeping Cunomar from attempted murder and a fate identical to that awaiting the youth on the stage, because it was a youth, not an older man, but a lad with short, wiry hair, sticky with his own and others’ blood; with brown skin that darkened too fast under the sun; with a fine scar running the length of his left a
rm from elbow to wrist, where Cunomar had landed a lucky sword cut before his soul-friend had learned properly how to defend himself.
“Eneit!”
The name broke from her, uncalled. The youth’s head turned stiffly and with difficulty; his hair was still held by the guard. He stared at Breaca with his one good eye and slowly, fuzzily, an understanding of where he was dawned on him. He opened his mouth and closed it again on the impossibility of speech. His eyes travelled along the benches seeking Cunomar and finding him. His smile was a private thing and carried all possible messages from apology to the joy of the warrior who has made his first kill in battle. Over them all was love and an abiding sorrow.
Without question, he was Eneit.
CHAPTER 17
BREACA ROSE IN HER CHAIR. CYGFA WRAPPED COOL FINGERS round her wrist and held her back. From behind, Corvus said, in quiet, forceful Eceni. “No. Think. There is nothing you can do.” From her right, the governor turned her way and said, “Do you know him?”
“Your honour, this is Eneit nic Lanis. He is Eceni, the son of a friend.”
They had the beginnings of friendship, she had felt it. His eyes reflected the same, and a moment’s indecision, then he said, “I’m sorry. Justice does not know the bounds of friendship. Marcellus, too, had those who cared for him. The youth must die; that is not in question.”
He had been a diplomat before and after he had been a general. In that last sentence was an opening. He had not said, “He must be crucified,” when it had clearly been planned.
From Cunomar’s lap, in the language of Mona, Graine said, “This is my dream. His death can be yours or theirs. You must decide.” She said it, lightly, in exactly the tone she had told her brother of the gift she had made of a horse to a nice man. The threading imperatives of a dreamer carried in other ways, beyond the words.
