Britannia: Part I: The Wall

by Richard Denham

  They had met one raiding party shortly before Saturnalia, in what may have been the last of the season before the weather closed in and they had routed them, hacking men down as they fled and hanging two or three, their bodies left to rot in the wind as food for the carrion crows. Most of the booty they carried was returned to grateful villagers and owners of villas, but that took time and Theodosius had people to deal with all that. He himself rode back to the warmth of the palace he had made his own.

  At Verulamium, they had never heard of Valentinus. Theodosius and Stephanus rode their horses splashing through the marshes there to find the Londinium gate strong and well-fortified, with ballistae primed and ready. The theatre was doing a thriving business and would the son of the Comes Rei Militaris care to see a play? They were putting Aristophanes Frogs on that week – you know, the naughty one? Of course, it would all be done in the best possible taste, in especial honour of the son of the Comes Rei Militaris.

  All was quiet, too, at Calleva Atrebatum, its mighty walls intact and patrolled by a vexillation of the II Augusta. There were rumours of raids further west, but these had been small, apparently, and of no consequence. The garrison commander there assured them he was ready for Valentinus, if indeed the man was real. He had started to believe he was just a figment of some mad barbarians’ imagination. The local priest here had been about to start divine service and would the great Theodosius care to attend? He would and while Stephanus and his barbarians waited outside, the son of the Comes Rei Militaris communed with his god.

  Camulodunum, the colony of the deified Claudius, had little to fear from the land and everything from the sea. If the Saxons struck, as rumour had it they were striking along the coast of Gaul, then the town could expect to see some action. And it had seen action before. The old temple of Claudius, now turned into a fortress, had witnessed the slaughter of civilians in the attack on it by Boudicca of the red hair, in the dark early days when the eagle standards were rammed into the granite of Britannia and no one felt safe. Some of the more sensitive souls who strolled the wall-walks at night swore they heard sobbing from the crypt far below them, as if the ghosts of the long-departed still sang to them from the stones.

  Leocadius had ridden out with the younger Theodosius twice, trotting on his expensive imported Arab past the trudging, cursing pedes. There was a time when this would have been the height of his ambition – a tribune’s rank in the army he had joined as a pedes. Most men spent all their lives as pedes; a few made semisallis; a select minority circitor and, the impossible dream, centurion, primus pilus. Nobody rose from the bottom to tribune. The Wall had done that for him, he reflected more than once, as he twisted the black ring on his finger. But somehow, it was not enough. He was bored and restless, tired of supervising building work and the odd ride out into the country, chasing a will o’ the wisp. There had to be more to life.

  She was walking in the palace garden when he saw her and he had not seen her for a while. Snow lay on the ground and the fountains had frozen. Julia’s father was not a happy man. Having shown true Roman hospitality to the Theodosii last summer, the arrogant bastards had moved in. They had generously allowed him to stay but the consul’s quarters now were just that – a quarter of the palace he had once filled entirely. So he increasingly spent his time in his apartments at the basilica. That was probably just as well; it meant that his appalling wife was not likely to see the procession of girls who trooped in most nights for his delectation and delight.

  ‘Julia,’ Leocadius whispered, appearing out of nowhere under an archway. ‘How are you?’ Before she could stop him, he had taken her hand and kissed it, ‘I was hoping to have seen you at the Saturnalia feasts.’

  ‘I wasn’t allowed,’ she told him, blushing at his touch despite herself. ‘Papa is watching.’

  Leocadius took her gently by the arm and tucked her away out of the sight of the house’s upper window. ‘What, now you mean?’ He could not see anybody.

  ‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Not now. He’s at the basilica.’

  ‘And your mother?’ the tribune wondered. Julia’s mother was like a Pictish battleaxe, beautiful enough on the outside but hard as iron and with a tongue as sharp.

  ‘She’s here, upstairs,’ Julia told him. She folded her arms and gave him a wry smile. ‘Why are you asking?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ Leocadius hedged. ‘Just wanted to pay my respects.’

  ‘Come on, then,’ and she screwed up her courage and took him by the hand.

  ‘Er … on second thoughts, I have to get back. Duty and all that.’

  ‘When will I see you again?’ she asked. Although Leocadius was blissfully unaware of it, Julia Longinus had made it her business over the last few weeks to be anywhere she thought he might be – the barracks, the basilica, the area along the river where they were building the wall. She had not seen him in any of those places.

  ‘Whenever your mama or papa allows it,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t tease me,’ she frowned. The girl was seventeen, but in many ways was still a child. ‘Mama will never allow it unless there are at least thirty people in the room. And Papa won't even concede that. The laws of the deified Constantine …’

  ‘… have long been ignored,’ he smiled. ‘Anyway, those laws are about rape.’ He looked at her with her suddenly downcast eyes, ‘And I don’t intend to rape you,’ he said. She almost looked disappointed. He half turned, as if to go, then suddenly swung back and kissed her hard on the mouth, pressing himself against her under the trail of ivy from the arch. She struggled at first, beating her little fists on his shoulders and back. Leocadius had been this way before, albeit not with this girl and he knew all the signs. Anyone who wanted to fight him off could do so. They could grab his hair, jab a finger in his eye, knee him in the balls. Julia did none of these things. He felt her lips soften and a little furtive tongue slide around his. When they came up for air she was breathing hard, her heart thumping in her chest.

  ‘Tonight,’ he whispered, already hard under his tunic. ‘What time does everybody go to bed?’

  ‘That depends,’ she breathed, eagerly planning the taking of her virginity. ‘Papa and the Count often stay up talking. His stairway leads past my room.’

  ‘Servants?’ he checked.

  She smiled coyly. ‘Deaf, blind and dumb,’ she trilled. ‘As all good slaves should be.’

  He laughed. ‘Two by the candle, then,’ he said and patted her belly under her cloak. ‘Keep warm for me.’ And he was gone.

  There was a sharp frost again that night, sparkling on the snow that already lay thick on the ridge-tiles of Londinium’s houses. The odd dog barked in the distance and along the Walbrook a rowing boat banged against its moorings as the little stream trickled past. The governor’s palace stood square against the river, candles still gleaming in its upstairs windows.

  Vitalis leaned his back against the building on the street corner. The tabernae were empty now, the cold having driven everybody home. Only the most determined or the most hopeless drunk wandered the night in search of Bacchus, muttering to themselves in their double darkness.

  ‘Hero of the Wall,’ a quiet voice said in the shadows. Vitalis stood upright, his dagger at easy reach in the folds of his cloak. ‘Are you ready yet to meet the god of the midnight?’ Decius Critus opened the fur-edged cloak he was wearing and let Vitalis see his robes underneath. They were strange and eastern, with silk embroidery and gold thread. A bull with huge horns worked in silver stared at the tribune from the man’s chest.

  ‘Yes,’ Vitalis said. ‘I am ready.’

  Decius Critus was half a head shorter than Vitalis but he was square and solid and moved silently over the stones. In other times, with other men, Critus would have blindfolded the tribune before leading him through the maze of alleyways. But this man was different; this man he could trust. Vitalis could see the lights of the camp in the far distance, the pin-pricks of fire moving along the ramparts as the guards patrolled, looking
out over the sleeping city and the dark forests to the north.

  Critus came to a wall at the end of one particularly dark passageway and he tapped on a low door. A grille in the timber slid open with a squeal of iron and a face peered out. ‘God of the midnight,’ Critus whispered and the door edged open. He went inside, motioning Vitalis to follow him. The tribune had seen a Mithraeum before, but nothing like this one. It was arched over the roof with black stones and columns supported it with vine leaves intermingled with ivy, all carved from granite. ‘We saved what we could from the last temple,’ Critus told him.

  An attendant emerged from the shadows, his shaved head wrapped round with a silk turban and for all it was as cold as the grave in here, wore only a loincloth.

  ‘Prepare him,’ Critus said and slipped away through a slit in the wall. The attendant said nothing. That was because he had no tongue and whatever secrets this place held would die with him. He unbuckled Vitalis’ cloak and laid it on a bench to one side of the room. Then he unfastened his tunic and pulled it over his head. Finally he knelt to remove his subligaculum, leaving Vitalis naked. The attendant dipped his hand into the pitcher at his side and with practised fingers he ran oil over Vitalis’ body, his shoulders and back, his arms and legs until he glistened like a gladiator. As this process had begun he had shivered with the cold, his skin like that of a goose hanging in the marketplace, but now he felt warm and almost glowing from within.

  The attendant bowed and held out a hand to indicate the way that Vitalis was to go. He walked into a chamber, as high as a man and half as high again. Pillars like those in the atrium held the curved ceiling and stars sparkled there, lit by candles in a small chamber overhead. There was a wall facing him and he had to turn left. Steps led down into a pit, perhaps ten feet long and three feet wide. Like a coffin for a pair of lovers.

  He knew what was expected of him and he lay down. Three figures appeared, one on each side of the pit and the other at the end nearest his feet. This one was Critus, but Critus transformed. The robes were still there, glowing in the sharp candlelight, but on his head was the massive mask of a bull, its eyes like rolling fire, its horns curved and deadly.

  ‘Are you, Vitalis Celatius, ready to embrace the Lord Mithras and receive his kiss?’

  ‘I am,’ Vitalis said.

  ‘Cautes, torch bearer of the chamber,’ Critus said. The figure on Vitalis’ left took one pace forward. He too wore the robes of a priest and the head of a bull, the horns twisted and crooked. He held up a pitcher. ‘The first kiss,’ he said, his voice booming in the bull mask. He threw the jug’s contents over Vitalis and blood sprayed over his head, chest and arms. The blood was warm and smelt of salty death and the initiate fought down the urge to gag.

  ‘Cautopates,’ Critus said, ‘torch bearer of the chamber.’ The third figure stepped forward, this time on Vitalis’ right. The same robes, the same mask, the same pitcher. ‘The second kiss,’ the man thundered, his voice booming off the walls of the eerie chamber. And the blood rained down on Vitalis, trickling off his face around his neck and over his shoulders to drip into the bottom of the pit.

  ‘Come,’ Critus said as the torch-bearers turned away. ‘Prepare to receive the third kiss.’

  Vitalis stood up, the warm blood beading on his oiled skin and running in rivulets down his naked body. He climbed the steps again and followed Critus around the wall into the main chamber. The torch-bearers had taken their places under the stone carvings of the minor gods they represented, Cautes and Cautopates, handsome young men in Phrygian caps and clothes from Pontus Euxinus. Between these statues, a large stone disc was lit from behind by candles that shone through the shafts of the stone to flicker and move on the other walls. In front of the disc, as strangely attired as the torch-bearers, Mithras himself, with smouldering eyes and long, hanging hair was drawing his stone blade across the stone throat of a stone bull.

  ‘Mithras,’ Critus intoned, ‘God of the morning.’

  ‘God of the morning,’ the others echoed, Vitalis too.

  ‘Receive this soul of a soldier,’ Critus went on. ‘He has carried the sword and the spear. He will bear witness for you. He will withstand the pain.’ He nodded, the bull’s head lowering towards Vitalis who knelt and bowed his head.

  The torch-bearers left their altar places and stood behind Vitalis, one to the left and one to the right. From under their robes, each of them pulled a short whip, of the kind they kept discipline with in the legions, barbed with sharp pieces of bone.

  ‘I will withstand the pain,’ Vitalis promised and licked his lips in a vain attempt to get ready. He only tasted blood and would soon taste more. He tensed as he heard Cautes’ whip snake through the dense air of the temple, lashing across his left shoulder. His flesh was still quivering from that when Cautopates lashed him with a second, cutting diagonally across the first. Vitalis was still kneeling upright as the third blow hit and the fourth. Each one drove his body further forward until the pain of his knees against the cold, hard stone was almost as bad as the pain in his back. The blood trails of the bull were lost now in the fresh spurts of Vitalis’ own and he grunted as he lost count of the blows he received. They had reached an almost hypnotic rhythm, like slow and agonising heart beats, like the fluttering pulse of a dying man.

  Throughout it all, Critus was chanting, the low murmurings of the god of the bull, accepting this new sacrifice in the cave of the Mithraeum. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the beating stopped and Vitalis knelt there, trembling with the shock and the pain. He straightened and that move was agony as his shredded flesh shifted position with the flexing muscles beneath. He held out his arms, running with blood and oil and looked up as well as he could at Mithras on his altar. The god and the bull wobbled through his tears.

  ‘I have withstood the pain,’ he mumbled and was vaguely aware of Critus standing in front of him. All three of the priests had blood trickling from the necks of their masks, one of those clever little tricks of conjurers, staining their robes as they folded away the whips in their sleeves.

  ‘Welcome,’ Critus said. ‘Welcome, child of the darkness.’

  And Vitalis did not remember any more.

  It was rather like that for Leocadius. One minute he was thrusting himself on top of the girl, listening to her feverish gasps turning into grunts and feeling her raking his arms with her long nails. Then he erupted and heard her scream as he slowed down and flopped beside her.

  For a moment the chamber was silent, with just slight breathing in the darkness. Then Leocadius let out a sigh that turned into a laugh. ‘I thought you said you hadn’t done this before,’ he said.

  ‘You didn’t believe that, surely?’ she giggled.

  He turned to her. ‘No, of course not,’ he said. ‘It’s every man’s dream, really, I suppose. To find a virgin who goes like a wild ass.’

  ‘I’ll be a virgin for you whenever you like,’ she purred, fumbling for his manhood again.

  ‘Yes,’ he laughed. ‘But I certainly won't believe you next time. What would your mama say?’

  She turned to him and leaned up on one elbow. ‘She would say, “Is he up for doing it twice, Honoria? You know how I like these big Roman boys”.’

  They laughed together. ‘And then there’s your papa,’ he said. ‘What would his observations be, I wonder, if he could see us together now?’

  ‘I have no idea who my father was,’ she told him, ‘which makes me a bit of a bastard. Just like you, Leo. Now, less talk and more action.’ And it was her turn to straddle him.

  The Paulinus Hupo who visited consul Julius Longinus by day was a general dealer. He never came alone but always with other traders and merchants, usually in some boring enclave with the Ordo. After all, there were regulations. There were weights and measures, cargo manifests, the providing of water, the public baths. It was all up for discussion. And it went on and on.

  The Paulinus Hupo who came by night however was a different matter. He came alone or sometimes w
ith a girl for Longinus to look over. Nowadays, he came to the basilica, to the consul’s private apartments there because the Theodosii had all but taken over the governor’s palace and that meant that Longinus often had to be in the room only two away from his wife.

  ‘I am a little concerned, Paulinus,’ the consul said, waiting while the slave Albinus, keeper of secrets, poured them both a goblet of wine.

  ‘In what way?’ Hupo asked. He had grown his hair back now, as befitted one of the leading lights of the town but he always kept his dagger to hand, just in case. ‘How’s that, by the way?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘The wine. I’ve just acquired a few amphorae of the stuff. From Gallia Lugdunensi. I think it could catch on.’

  ‘It could,’ Longinus savoured it. ‘It could. No, things generally are getting a little awkward. The Count is breathing down my neck about refortification and that snotty boy of his …’

  ‘Little Theo?’ Hupo sneered. ‘What a charmer. Chip off the old block.’

  ‘The hell he is,’ Longinus growled. ‘He’s taking too healthy an interest in accounts. Specifically, my accounts.’

  ‘Well,’ Hupo yawned. ‘Nothing untoward there, surely. You’ve got more clerks and accountants than I’ve got fingers in pies.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but this is a cutthroat world, Paulinus. I don’t have to tell you that. I just wish the bastards would bugger off and I can have my palace back.’

  ‘Any chance of that?’ Hupo asked.

  The consul shrugged. ‘It all depends on this Valentinus and his bloody conspiracy.’

  ‘Valentinus?’ Hupo raised an eyebrow.

  Longinus checked the corners of the room to make sure they were alone. ‘You know he’s sent me what amounts to a threatening letter, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I heard.’

  ‘Well, there you are. One minute, for us, it’s business as usual. The next we’re going up in flames like a second Troy.’

  ‘There’s no chance of that,’ Hupo said.