by Whyte, Jack
"Tressa!"
"Don't 'Tressa' me, Cay. I'm very serious." Though she spoke in a moderate tone, her disapproval seemed progressively louder to me as she continued. "Have you thought at all about my situation here? I am not your wife, not yet. I have no rights here in this place, and I won't permit you to act or speak as though I have, or should have, or might wish to have. I am your... companion, nothing more, your consort—though most folk here will simply say your mistress, which is true enough. But I won't be thought of as an upstart or a troublemaker, and I won't be made to look like one against my will. Do you hear me?"
"Yes, Tress, I hear you very well. So does Shelagh, in the wagon up ahead, I'm sure." I was amazed at what I had provoked with what I had taken to be a simple, truthful observation.
My quiet statement checked her, and she glanced quickly around her. "Was I being loud? I wasn't being loud."
"Well, not loud, perhaps, but vehement."
Her voice returned to its normal pitch. "Vehement? Does that mean firm? If it does then that's the way I feel. I don't want to be... that word... castellan, here. The thought of it is frightening, Cay. I know nothing about how to do such things. "
I slipped my arm about her shoulders. "I know that, Tress, I know. But you can learn, and you will, at your own pace. Ludmilla will teach you, you'll see. No need to take the task upon yourself today or even tomorrow or next week, my love. No one would ask that of you. You'll live with me, in my own house, and we'll be wed. And as my wife, you'll learn the running of the. place in due time, with ease and with Ludmilla's willing help. You'll see. Now hush you, here comes someone to meet us. "
Ahead, in the distance, I had seen bright colours and movement on the road from the main gates of the fort as a welcoming party headed down to greet us. Tressa looked and then stood up and climbed gracefully over the bench, disappearing into the body of the wagon beneath the leather canopy. She had time, I knew, to do what she needed to do, which was to make herself presentable according to her own criteria. The welcoming party would not reach us for some time yet.
I shifted into a more comfortable position on the bench beside Derek, who was gazing off to my right, towards the broad drilling plain, where several formations of cavalry had been wheeling and cantering as we emerged from the forest road. Now they were all motionless, their eyes on our approach. As I noticed their stillness, a distant voice rang out, loud and peremptory, and they surged into motion again, resuming their interrupted patterns.
"That's the campus, Derek, the drilling ground. It's been there since first we started building the fort above. No weed, no flower, no blade of grass ever had time to root itself here before some horse's hoof either trampled it flat or dug it up. In high summer, the dust of it never has a chance to settle. The fort is the centre of Camulod's defences, but the campus is the heart of its strength."
Derek did not address that directly. He simply muttered, 'This is a big place."
"Aye, it is. Much bigger than it was when I set out for Ravenglass, six years ago. That's Ambrose, at the head of the group, there. There's no mistaking him, is there?"
The welcoming party had reached the head of our procession, and were exchanging greetings with Philip, Falvo and Dominic, who rode at the point. I could see my brother pull his horse around in a rearing turn as he searched for me back among the wagons, and then he was cantering towards us, calling the occasional greeting to familiar faces as he passed. When he reached the first wagon, with Donuil and Shelagh on the driver's bench, he reined in his horse to exchange a few words with them.
As they spoke, Arthur came thundering up with his trio of friends, and then stopped, suddenly shy, waiting for his Uncle Ambrose to acknowledge him. Ambrose welcomed all four boys expansively, and then leaned forward in his saddle. He whispered something into Arthur's ear and then slapped the boy's mount on the rump, sending all four of the lads galloping off towards the distant fort. He watched them ride off, said something further to Donuil or Shelagh, then swung down to the ground and strode back to where we waited, his whole face alight in a great, beaming smile. I leaped down to meet him and we threw our arms about each other.
He pushed me back from him eventually, his hands grasping the points of my shoulders firmly, and looked into my eyes. "Welcome home, Brother," he said softly. "Your place awaits you, and everything is ready for your arrival." His smile broadened to a grin. "Your clothes, your proper clothes, are cleaned and dried and all laid out for you, and your armour is polished brighter than it has ever been. Time to wash out the drab brown from your hair and take your" place in Camulod again. The fanner Cay has no place here! This is Merlyn's home." He glanced up at the wagon. "Where is Tressa?" But then his eyes widened in surprise. "Derek of Ravenglass! Welcome to Camulod."
Tress now emerged from the rear of the wagon and stood, holding the edge of the bench and smiling down at Ambrose, her eyes wide and timid looking. He stepped forward and placed his foot on the hub of the lead wheel, then swung himself up to take her hand and kiss her cheek. "And you, too, Lady Tressa. We've looked for you this past week and more. Welcome. Ludmilla has been fretting, thinking that some ill might have befallen you along the way, but had we known King Derek himself rode with you, her mind would have been eased." Derek flushed and smiled at the words.
Ambrose perched on the end of the bench and spoke down to me, still holding Tressa's hand. "You've seen some changes here, eh, Brother? I promise you, there are more yet. But we'll talk of all that later. For now, we have to take you home and feed you. You must all be hungry and ready for a good, hot bath and a deep massage. After that, we will relax, drink a little mead, perhaps, and exchange idle talk in warmth and comfort. Tomorrow tonight, we'll feast and celebrate your coming, since everyone wants to join the celebration. The only place big enough to accommodate that gathering is the campus itself, and that will take the entire day to organize."
He turned to Tress again, raising her hand. "We regret the delay of an entire day when we should celebrate tonight, dear Tressa, but we have no other option. The campus is in daily use, since it's our only training ground. Tomorrow, therefore, will be a day of rest and preparation for the coming night. There are tents to put up, seats and tables to be put in place, fires to be built and cooking to be done. We have plenty of food, though. Hunting and fishing parties have been going out every day for the past week and more, so no one will go hungry. We have mountain stream salmon and river trout and saltwater fish to offer you, and we have venison, wild boar and fattened swine, goat flesh for those who like it—I do not—and an entire fat ox, well fed on grain and groomed for just this feast. What have I missed? Ah yes, the birds of the air! We have geese, swans and ducks, partridge and grouse and many smaller fowl. And in addition to all of that we have music, mummers, acrobats and wrestlers, and prodigious horsemanship, which we are ever eager to display. So, this afternoon, when you have bathed and rested for a while, we will show you our Colony, or as much as we may without tiring you. After that, your man and I must talk, at great and serious length, of many things, so I must ask you to be patient with my demands on him."
Tressa lowered her head in a gracious nod. "My man, sir, as you call him, came back to pursue his obligation to serve this Colony, not to please me. I am quite happy to be here with him and I've no doubt I shall find much to occupy me while he spends time with you."
I was smiling, proud of Tressa's self possession and amused and pleased by Ambrose's courteous reception. "Have we then so many things to talk about, Ambrose?"
"Oh, aye, Brother, I fear we have, and few of them are pleasant. But none of them are dire enough they cannot wait until tonight. You have been gone nigh on seven years while they were all agrowing, so a few more hours will make no massy difference to them. So come, let's move on, up to the fort. Merlyn, you take my horse and tell the other wagon drivers to follow us, while I stay here and talk with this beautiful woman and enjoy being conducted by a king. Derek, if you would, pull to the side of the road her
e on the right, and take us past this blockage. We'll lead the wagons separately up to the gates. The troopers will disperse down here when they're dismissed and we've no need to wait for them. "
Derek swung the lead horse out to pull the wagon forward as I began to pull myself up into the saddle of my brother's horse, thinking that I would find time in the course of the afternoon to ask at least a few of the questions he had postponed so lightly. I heard Ambrose calling to Donuil in the cart ahead, telling him to fall in behind our wagon. And now as I rode back and forth, marshalling the wagons of our train, I saw recognition in the faces of the people of Camulod as they saw me, mounted upon my brother's splendid horse, which alone informed them who I was.
The time that followed was hectic. Our return, as I should have anticipated, was seen as a cause for great rejoicing in a time when there was little else to celebrate. During the course of that day and the one that followed, I met and greeted everyone I knew in Camulod, together with a large number of people whom I did not know at all. Many of the latter were new officers, selected from the ranks of the new intakes assembled since my departure, and most of them seemed ludicrously young to me.
I spent the very first hour after my return, along with several of my travelling companions, exulting in the delights of Camulod's bathhouse and masseurs. Then, dressed in rich clothing for the first time in years and feeling like a new man, I was able to enjoy a light meal before being introduced to each of the new officers individually, with great solemnity, in a ceremony organized in advance by my brother and staged in the Officers' Tribunal. The Tribunal itself was an innovation, a new building erected against the postern wall of the fort for the dual purpose of serving regulatory tribunal requirements whenever necessary and housing the garrison officers in their off duty hours.
Accepting a suggestion from Ambrose, I contrived, throughout the course of that ceremony, to maintain an air of august gravity. As my brother had so wisely observed, although the men I was to meet were all unknown to me, I was known, by repute, to all of them. I soon discovered that my reputation had evidently grown to be far greater than I had thought it could be, and I had great difficulty, at first, in adjusting to that, once I had learned to recognize—and finally to accept—the look of awe they had, one and all, on meeting me.
I say I learned to accept it, because my first reaction to this uniform, awe stricken expression was to assume immediately that it sprang from the legendary exaggerations soldiers thrive upon, particularly when they want to impress recruits and newcomers with stories of their own veteran status. So my first urge was to challenge the look and dispel it, forcefully. Such unearned deference—for so I saw it—embarrassed me.
They came into my presence in unsmiling, sharply regimented groups, marching in perfect step under the watchful, disapproving eye of Tertius Lucca, our primus pilus, or Senior Soldier, and segregated into their groups by their cohortal designations: First Cavalry, First Scouting, First Infantry and so on, all the way through to Third Infantry. I realized only belatedly, after being introduced individually to the first group of nine of these earnest and deeply dutiful young men, that Ambrose had been prescient. I had been away from Camulod for a long time, and in my desire to be accepted again, I might easily have been overeager to ingratiate myself with these new, young and impressionable men. As it was, I maintained my dignity and my distance as a commander, speaking briefly but pleasantly with each new face and inquiring solicitously about the rank and station each one held, so that as the last group of them strode away after delivering a crisp salute in unison, Ambrose smiled at me.
"Now that was a tribunal reception worthy of an Imperial Legate. Well done, Brother. That leaves you to face only the new Councillors, for we have a few of those whom you have never met, and a few of the more prominently successful new Colonists—very few of those. It's difficult to be new, prominent and successful in our egalitarian Colony. That won't be until tomorrow, at the feast. Tonight, we dine in private, more or less informally, with our close friends and family. Ludmilla and I decided some time ago, presupposing your agreement, that we should hold that particular gathering down in the Villa Britannicus. The facilities there are much more suited to our needs for tonight, the kitchens are larger and more spacious. Besides, the old place doesn't get enough use nowadays. I mean, it's often used, but only as ancillary premises, if you see what I mean. It's finally complete again, you know, totally refurbished after the damage done to it in Lot's attack eleven years ago. It's exactly as it was before the family moved up here to live in the fort. Ludmilla would move back down again in an instant, but I believe my place is up here, in the centre of things" He paused, looking sideways at me. "You know, it has just occurred to me that you and Tress might enjoy living there, for a while, at least. What think you?"
Ambrose's suggestion intrigued me. Although I had been born in the Villa Britannicus, and had always loved the grand old house, I had never lived there. My grandfather had died there, brutally murdered, as had my mother, but that knowledge had never deterred me in my love for the place that had been our family home for generations. It was less than a mile from the fort, no great distance, and now, remembering Tressa's remarks from earlier that day, it occurred to me that it might be a perfect place for her to begin learning how to run a large household, free of the fear of countering Ludmilla's will.
"You know, that might be a splendid idea, Ambrose, and it would never have occurred to me. But it would have to be Tressa's decision. The sheer size of it might frighten her. She has never seen such a house, let alone lived in one. Derek's house is the finest in Ravenglass, and it's a hovel compared to the Villa. Anyway, let me mention it to her, after she's seen the place tonight and had a look at the way it is run. When are we to go down?"
"We have several hours to pass until dinner, but that will give us time to walk around the place and admire it. Our carpenters have done magnificent work on the interior, and so have some of our masons, on the inside as well as the outside walls. They've even restored some of the old mosaics that were damaged. You'll be impressed, I promise you. Let's go and find Derek and Donuil and the women, and we can all ride down together in one of the big wagons."
On the few occasions I was alone with Ambrose that day I tried to question him about conditions in Cambria and Northumbria, but he would have none of it. I made one more attempt to question him then as we set out, but he stopped me with a raised palm before I could really begin and pointed out to me that we did not have the time, right then, to discuss fully the matters that would have to be resolved. People were coming and going all around us, and we would be interrupted constantly, unless we made ourselves grossly discourteous to our Colony's new guests while we indulged ourselves in matters that could very easily wait until that night. He was right, of course, so I buried my impatience and resigned myself to making the best of the postponement.
Ambrose dispatched a soldier to the stables to arrange for one of the big, seat filled wagons to be prepared and placed at our disposal, and then we made our way directly to the former Varrus household, where We found our friends returning from a walk in the late afternoon sunlight. Seeing them approach from the far side of the central courtyard, I stopped by the three large slabs of slate stone sunk in the centre of the yard and waited for them to reach us. To Tress and Derek, I pointed out the graves of Caius Britannicus, Publius and Luceiia Varrus, and my own father, Picus Britannicus. These, I explained, had been the founders of Camulod, the progenitors of everything that flourished in the Colony today. I could think of no more to say, but I trusted that they would understand the import of these people in my life, and to what I saw as our shared future. Derek merely nodded and remained silent for a few moments, gazing down at the three stones, and then he straightened up and nodded again. I turned and led the group towards the stables and the waiting wagon.
Only nine of us rode down the hillside road to the Villa Britannicus on that first journey—the sightseers. I sat on the bench beside the dri
ver while the others, Tressa and Derek, Donuil and Shelagh, Rufio and Turga, and Ambrose and Ludmilla as our host and hostess, ranged themselves on the seats at our backs.
Ambrose explained that they had begun the refurbishing four years earlier, initially as a summer project aimed at instilling discipline in those young people of the Colony not yet old enough to take part in adult activities. That first summer had been dedicated to cleaning up the grounds and removing the rubble that remained from the damage caused in the raid years earlier, when Lot's soldiers had almost overrun the Villa in the first treacherous attack, the night my father was murdered in his bed. Many of the outbuildings, which had borne the brunt of the damage, had been refurbished after the war, but since the war itself had shifted most of the Colony's activities to the fort on the hilltop, the priorities governing the reclamation had been less urgent, and the task had not been carried out as thoroughly as it might have been. Walls and sometimes entire buildings had been reconstructed, for example, but the debris of the old walls had been left heaped in great piles of broken masonry scattered haphazardly about the perimeter. Organized groups of children, working under adult supervision, made short work of carting away the rubble and burying it beyond the grounds.
As the Colony had continue to grow, however, and the tempo of that growth increased, it had become inevitable that more and more effort should be poured into "the Villa Task, " as it soon became known, in the years that followed. Camulod was almost visibly beginning to bulge at its seams, and no one had yet thought to establish a second, ancillary garrison. From a mere beautification effort, the Villa Task quickly grew in importance to become a first priority endeavour; every possible resource at the Colony's disposal was being exploited to its maximum, and the Villa was one of the richest. Other villas existed within the colonial holdings— fourteen of them, in fact—and all of them were already being used to capacity. The Villa Britannicus, closest of all to the fort and the original home farm of the Colony, had become an anomaly, a spacious and gracious house lying, for all intents and purposes, untenanted.
