The Noise of War

by Vincent B Davis II

  5

  Scroll V

  Kalends of November 650 ab urbe condita

  They were in Nursia’s market when I found them. Mother was inspecting the fish someone had caught earlier that day in the spring outside Nursia. My sister-in-law Volesa stood behind her, holding up her hem to avoid collecting mud, a jug of water balanced beneath her arm. Clinging to her other hand was her son, Gavius. He walked properly, like a little man. His father would have been so proud.

  I pulled off my hood and tried to collect my thoughts. I watched them for some time from a distance, knowing that as soon as they saw me, their lives would be changed forever. They would know that one of us had lived and the other had died.

  “Welcome home, soldier. Can I interest you in some turnips? Fresh and cheap, best price in Nursia!” a merchant said, heckling me. At this, Mother and Volesa turned and saw me.

  Mother burst into tears at first sight. Volesa collapsed, the jug of water shattering beside her and mud splattering across her dress. Mother sprinted toward me and fell into my arms, her legs no longer able to support her.

  “Oh, Quintus. Oh, Quintus.” She wept into my shoulder. I kissed her head but could say nothing. Gavius tried to help his mother up as I lifted the face of my own mother. Her lips quivered as she touched my face. “Your eye. Your eye,” she repeated, running her fingers over the frayed thread of my eye patch.

  “I’m home, Mother,” I said, my voice quivering.

  Ignoring the villagers who had gathered around us and were whispering about what might have caused the scene, I made my way to Volesa and tried to help her to her feet. She pulled away from me as violently as if I were infected with the plague. She crawled away for a moment before making it to her feet. The shimmer in her eyes held not just sadness but bitter despair, and a loathing for the world that had taken her husband away.

  Gavius only looked at me, startled and in shock. When I approached again, he backed away as well and hid behind his mother’s dress.

  “He died bravely, Volesa,” I said, my voice cracking. She wept harder still when she heard these words, but she had already known the truth. After news of the battle had traveled throughout Italy, they had probably assumed my brother and I were both dead—and seeing me alive confirmed that at least one of us was. We would have returned together otherwise.

  Arrea helped bear my mother’s weight, her knees unable to maintain it themselves.

  “Let’s go home,” I said. There was no use in allowing all of Nursia to see our torment. The last time I’d returned home, I had delivered a speech preaching the virtues of hope and perseverance. It had paid off for the city, as the grain provided by our new patron, Gaius Marius, had begun to flow amply. But anyone who looked at me long enough would be able to tell I had very little hope left. Scrofa had said I still had some, but I wasn’t certain he was right. Perhaps I only hoped he was.

  Back in our home, Lucius’s younger brother, Aius, and I helped the ladies onto a couch in the triclinium.

  Looking at Mother, I could tell she had so many questions to ask, but the words caught in her throat. Perhaps she feared the answers.

  “This is Arrea. I found her in Gaul, and she has been very good to me. She’ll be staying here with you, and I trust you’ll be good to her,” I said as Arrea sat beside my mother on the couch. I wanted to tell them how deeply I loved her and how she had nursed me back from the grave, but speaking of romance seemed wrong as Volesa stared with cold eyes at the dusty mosaic beneath her.

  “But where, where will you go?” Mother asked, her lips beginning to tremor again.

  “I must return to Gaul. The war is not over.” I spoke as firmly as I could manage. Mother nodded reluctantly but I could tell she had finally realized we no longer had any control of our fates. “Rome is on the brink of destruction, and I cannot leave the Colors until the battle is won,” I said, reaching across to my mother and placing a hand on hers. She shivered as if she were cold, and Aius ran his hands over her arms.

  “Titus died well, then?” Volesa asked, all of her tears now dried and her face blank and emotionless. Gavius sat beside her and rested his head on her breast, not seeming to comprehend what was happening. How could he miss a father he had never known?

  “He did. He died with his men on the field of Arausio, fighting until his last breath.”

  “And you saw this?” Volesa asked, making eye contact for the first time.

  “I did.”

  “And you did nothing to save him?” Her voice teemed with anger.

  “I did all that I could.”

  “But you’re still alive,” Volesa said. Mother turned to her and shook her head, trying to dissuade her from continuing. But the words had already been spoken, and they could not be taken back.

  “I did. I held him in my arms as he bled, and he demanded that I live. He wanted to ensure that someone would be able to take care of Mother, and you…and Gavius,” I said.

  Volesa said nothing but lowered her gaze to the boy clutching to her and ruffled his hair.

  “Believe me, Volesa, if I could trade places with him, I would. If it were I who died, and he had lived, things would be much easier for you now, I’m sure.”

  Mother clutched my hands harder, hoping to save herself from more of my poignant words.

  “But I cannot. I have lived,” I continued. “As much as that fact has haunted me since I awoke in a daze a week later, with only one eye left in my head, and a few hemina of blood left in my body… I can do nothing to change it.”

  “Quintus, stop now. There is no use in—” Mother started.

  “No. Let me say my piece. I’ve practiced it and dreaded it more than I can articulate since the moment Titus breathed his last breath. I am all that this family has now, and I’ll do my best to live in such a way that justifies the sacrifice that he made.” I stood and paced around the triclinium. I couldn’t bear to meet the gaze of anyone present.

  Aius kissed my mother’s head and whispered something in her ear as she wept softly.

  “I prepared your favorite,” she said, reaching toward me with a bowl in her trembling hands.

  I stared but didn’t accept it. I wasn’t worthy of my mother’s meals while Titus was dead. Volesa had made it clear she would have preferred if we both had died.

  “Please,” Mother said.

  “It’s very good, brother,” Aius said, the only one attempting to smile.

  I took the bowl and immediately smelled the rich spices of garum. My mother’s dip had once been my favorite dish, to be certain.

  I grabbed a loaf of bread and broke it, extending it first to Arrea, who shook her head. Her face was noble and calm, but I could see that she was broken over our family’s pain as well.

  I dipped the bread in the garum but was barely able to stomach it. I had to tighten my stomach to keep from vomiting on the floor of my ancestral home.

  “It’s very good,” I said, my voice barely audible.

  Mother looked at me with pink-rimmed eyes. She had so many questions, but it was clear she could voice none of them. No mother should have to mourn their child. But she wasn’t alone. Ninety thousand other Roman mothers fruitlessly waited for the return of their sons.

  I’d meant what I had said—I truly would have traded places with my brother. If I could change it, if the gods would have granted me this strange request, I would have accepted it without blinking my eye. My brother was a Roman hero of the old breed. He would have lived well, he would have rendered Rome safe and protected, and even after he removed his helm, he would have served Rome in whatever capacity available to him. But who was I but the little brother of a once-great man?

  I made my way to my childhood bedroom. The walls and tables were still adorned with the trivial adornments of adolescence. The room felt very strange to me now. It was more foreign than my tent in Gaul.

  I approached the dresser to the right of my bed. Atop it sat several wax figurines. A few elephants, a handful of chariots, and then
Scipio and Hannibal themselves. Only a handful of years before I left for Rome I had sat outside under our oldest oak tree and played with them. But it felt like a different lifetime, one where I possessed such imagination and zeal for adventure, and the belief that there was glory in warfare.

  On the other side of the bed was the altar to our household gods, exactly how I left it. Mother and I once prayed fervently every morning, and I recalled approaching it in solitude many times thereafter, tearfully begging my father for guidance. It had been so long since those coals had been kindled. Perhaps that’s why my father no longer offered his guidance to me, because I had not been asking him for it.

  “Are you hungry? I could prepare something more hardy.” Mother approached behind me and placed her delicate hands on my shoulders.

  “No…I haven’t been able to stomach much food lately. Soldiers are easily sated anyway. Just make sure Arrea eats,” I said without turning to my mother. “I’ve dragged that poor girl all over the Gaul and now into Italy, and she’s only seen death and destruction as a result.”

  “And she’s followed you willingly?” Mother asked. Her question was in part rhetorical, but she was still trying to determine who this man before her was. Perhaps her son was not quite how she remembered him.

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Well, then, you have nothing to apologize for.”

  “She must curse the day the gods led me into her home,” I said, sitting down on the corner of my childhood bed.

  Mother sat beside me, neither confirming nor denying my claims.

  “Will you marry Volesa? Will you accept Gavius as your son?” she asked after a moment. I hadn’t even dared to consider it in the last months. Titus had mentioned it as he lay dying in my arms, but my mind had obviously been elsewhere. “Her father may ask for the return of her dowry,” she continued.

  “He wouldn’t.” I turned to mother with clinched fists. I would kill the man myself if he were so cruel.

  “It’s his legal right. He’ll have to take her back into his home and find another suitor. He made an investment in the future of his daughter, and that investment is now destroyed… They were married less than the five years required by custom, so it’s his right to ask for the return of her dowery.”

  “How could a man be so selfish?”

  “You have obviously not met Volesa’s father,” Mother said, shaking her head.

  “I’ll do it. But not for her father. I’ll do it because it was Titus’s last wish.”

  Mother leaned over and placed her head on my shoulder.

  My heart raced, and my fingers twitched as I considered the look I’d see in Arrea’s eyes when I told her about what must be done.

  “How are the horses?” I said, trying to distract myself.

  “If you won’t eat, then you should rest. We’ll talk of such things later.” She kissed my head and turned to leave.

  I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Sleep was a most unwelcome idea, for I could foresee the contents of my dreams.

  Hours later, when the house had stilled and everyone had gone to bed, I rose and went into the tablinum, the office where my father had once helped lead our village. More importantly, the place where I had sat on my father’s lap and listened to him reading the ancient words of Stoic philosophers, where he taught me to be a man. I poured cup after cup of wine for myself, running my fingers over the scrolls in my father’s library but not daring to read a word. In the dim flicker of the tablinum candelabrum, I sat in silence and tried to quiet my thoughts.

  I spotted the bust of my father in the corner of the room. Such a fine piece of art would have been rare in most homes, but my father had influenced many and was loved by all. The sculptor had once been crushed under crippling debt, and my father had helped him out of it. The bust was a gift of gratitude.

  The lines of his face were etched to perfection, every inch revealing nobility and poise. It was cast at the height of my father’s strength and vigor, but it was exactly how I remembered him, even at his dying breath. I considered what a bust of myself might look like, with a grotesque bundle of pink scar tissue for an eye and the sad wrinkles of a man who looked far older than he ought to.

  And then, in my drunken stupor, my thoughts carried me to places a sober mind would never venture. I became angry at the man who was sculpted like a god before me. It was a true likeness, not cast in vain or in ego, but he was so admirable there, frozen in eternal strength.

  I was angry with him first because, as I slumped into his chair, which was still worn from the endless hours he had once sat there, I considered how his teaching had left me unprepared for a tragedy like Arausio. It was so easy to remain a Stoic when nothing was wrong, but something told me that my father would have known how to handle all this. And Titus too. But I, I had not the slightest clue. It had always seemed so easy for him to know what was right and then do it. Why had I not inherited his strength? Why was it given to the son who had died and not the one who had lived?

  Then I was angry at him for leaving me when I still had so much to learn, angry that I could no longer ask him questions and hear his calm, calculated reply. And finally, I simply missed the man, and I wondered if he would see me as a coward as others did if he were still around to make such a judgement.

  “You need to sleep, Quintus,” Arrea said from the doorway.

  “You should already be sleeping, dear,” I said, rubbing my eye to ensure that she wasn’t in my imagination.

  “As should you.” She approached my father’s desk and looked around the room. “I’ve never seen an Italian home. It’s quite different than a Gallic hut.”

  “Much good it has done us,” I said.

  “Let us go to sleep,” she said, her voice soothing enough that, for a brief moment, my heart slowed and my mind eased.

  “Can I have you tonight?” I said, winging an arm around Arrea’s shoulders and allowing her to lead me.

  She giggled as I stumbled. Despite her incomprehensible misfortunes in life, suffering had not broken her.

  “Why don’t we just focus first on getting you into bed.”

  “Will you hold me, at least?” I asked, with far more vulnerability than I was accustomed to, but wine has a habit of forcing honesty to the surface.

  At length she nodded, then helped me to my room as I swayed from the effects of the wine and fatigue. I fell into slumber the moment my head hit the pillow. But she did as she promised, and held me as I shook with the fever of my dreams.

  My temples were pulsating when I woke, and my mouth was as dry as the Egyptian desert.

  “Feeling the effects now, aren’t you?” Arrea smiled as she heard my groaning.

  “I feel like I’ve had a fight with a Minotaur. And lost,” I said, smacking my gums and trying to generate some moisture.

  “I’ve not seen you drink that much wine since…well, ever really.”

  I exhaled. “Yesterday was difficult. I indulged to ease the pain, but I’m afraid it’s only compounded.” I rolled out of bed and for the first time realized I was drenched in sweat. I sauntered over to an amphora of wine near the doorway to my bedroom.

  “Well hold on, now, what are you doing?” Arrea asked playfully.

  “Just one cup to set me up. I’m afraid it’s the only thing that will keep me out of bed today.” I took one sip and vomited into a plant in the atrium.

  She was shaking her head and wore a spiteful grin.

  “Quintus Sertorius, you’re a smarter man than that.”

  “I’m not so sure about that anymore,” I said, breathing heavily and blinking the moisture from my eye.

  I sat at the foot of my bed and tried to keep myself from lying back. As my mind returned to me, I recalled the conversation I needed to have with Arrea, and it wasn’t going to be pleasant. But the waiting was worse, so I decided to hesitate no longer.

  “We need to talk, love,” I said, swiveling to see her with my good eye.

  She stood and walked
over to me, gracefully sitting across my lap. She wrapped an arm around my neck and laid her cheek against my sweaty head.

  “Gods, your breath smells awful!” She laughed.

  “Gerrae, I wonder why!” I tickled her ribs for a moment but then sobered as I remembered the topic at hand. “We need to talk, Arrea,” I said again.

  She pulled her head away from mine and stared me in the eye. “Well, go on, then, soldier. I’m ready for it,” she said.

  “I might have to marry another.” The words shook as they poured from my mouth.

  She remained still. Nothing was heard stirring in the house. The world had careened to a halt.

  At length she stood and turned away from me, and my arms reached out for her to return.

  “You either do or you don’t, Quintus. Not might.” Her voice was calm but firm.

  “I do,” I said, my gaze shifting to my feet.

  “It’s not someone, it’s who.”

  “Volesa. My brother’s wife. It’s my duty. It’s custom. I…I…I don’t want to, Arrea.”

  For a brief moment, her head sunk and her shoulders slumped. She looked at the ground away from me and thought for a moment.

  Although my romantic escapades were quite few in number and in length, I knew that every lover I’d ever had previously would have reacted in one of two ways: run out screaming, or turn and scream at me.

  Arrea did neither.

  She knelt beside me. Her eyes weren’t wet, but they weren’t empty either. I was unsure what they were saying.

  “Quintus, I’m ashamed to say this. But there was a time when you were wounded that I had hoped you wouldn’t recover. In quiet and selfish moments, I had wished that you might always remain that way, not able to go very far. That you’d always have to rely on me.”

  “Arrea—” She lifted a finger to silence me, and then clutched my fingers in her silk hands.

  “From the moment you stumbled into my master’s hut, I wanted to be with you. I wanted to feel the stubble of your beard against my cheek, watch you sleep, taste your breath…” She looked down and exhaled. “I wanted you to stay wounded because I knew that your duty would one day take you away from me.”