in jest, the veterans pushed toward me a half-grown Briton girl with her hands bound together.
“Here’s your share of the spoils,” they cried, “so that you won’t find life dull and leave us, brave child knight Minutus.”
I shouted furiously that I did not want to keep and feed a slave-girl, but the veterans were all innocence.
“If one of us takes her,” they said, “she’ll just cut his throat with a knife as soon as her hands are free. But you are a noble youth with fine manners and you can talk Greek. Perhaps she’ll like you better than us.”
They willingly promised to give me advice on how to train such a slave-girl. At first I must beat her morning and evening, on principle, just to tame her wild ways. They also gave me more experienced advice, but that I cannot put down on paper. When I roughly refused, they shook their heads and pretended to be sad.
“Then there’s nothing else for it but to sell her for next to nothing to the camp trader,” they said. “You can imagine what’ll happen to her then.”
I realized I should never forgive myself if I were the cause of this frightened child’s being trained with a stick as a camp whore. Reluctantly I agreed to take the girl as my share of the spoils. I drove the veterans out of my hut and sat with my hands on my knees, looking at her. She had smuts and bruises on her childish face and her red hair hung untidily over her forehead. She looked like one of the Britons’ colts as she peered at me from beneath her fringe.
I began to laugh, cut the rope around her wrists and told her to go and wash her face and plait her hair. She rubbed her swollen wrists and stared at me mistrustfully. Finally I went and fetched the engineer, who could speak a few words of the Iceni’s language. He laughed at my dilemma but remarked that the girl was at least healthy and had straight limbs. When she heard her own language, the girl seemed to gain courage. They talked animatedly for a while.
“She doesn’t want to wash, or comb her hair J explained the engineer, “because she suspects your intentions. If you touch her, she’ll kill you. She swears this in the name of the hare-goddess.”
I assured him that I had not the slightest intention of touching the girl. The engineer said that the most sensible thing to do would be to give her wine to drink because the uncivilized Britons were not used to wine and she would soon be drunk. Then I could do what I liked with her as long as I made sure that I did not get too drunk myself. Otherwise the girl might cut my throat when she sobered up. That was what happened to one of the legion’s tanners who had made the mistake of drinking together with an untamed British woman.
I repeated impatiently that I did not want to touch the girl. But the engineer insisted that it would be wisest if I kept the girl bound. Otherwise she would run away at the first opportunity.
“Nothing could be better,” I said. “Tell her that tonight I’ll go with her past the guards and set her free.”
The engineer shook his head and said that he had thought I was mad before, voluntarily joining in the work with the men, but he had not thought I was that mad. He spoke to the girl and then turned back to me.
“The girl doesn’t trust you,” he said. “She thinks that you’re taking her into the forest to get your own way. Even if she did escape from you, Britons from other tribes would capture her and hold her as a hostage as she doesn’t belong here. Her name is Lugunda.”
Then the engineer’s eyes began to glisten and he licked his lips as he looked at the girl.
“Look,” he said. “I’ll give you two silver pieces for the girl and then you’ll be rid of her.”
The girl saw the look and rushed up to me, grasping my arm as if I were the only security she had in the world. But at the same time she uttered a stream of her sibilant language. The engineer laughed loudly.
“She says, if you touch her without permission you will be reborn as a frog. Before then her tribesmen will come and cut out your stomach, pull out your intestines and stick a red-hot spear up your backside. It’d be wiser, I should think, if you sold her at a reasonable price to a more experienced man,”
For a moment I felt like giving the girl to the engineer for nothing, but then I again patiently assured her that I did not want to touch her. In fact I thought of treating her like a colt. They had their fringes combed and were given a blanket on their backs on cold nights. Old veterans used to relieve their boredom by keeping pets. The girl would be better than a dog because she could teach me the Britons’ language.
I do not know how the engineer interpreted my words, or if in fact he knew enough of the language to convey what I had said to the girl. I suspect that he told the girl that I was as unwilling to touch her as I would be to mate with a dog or a horse. Anyhow, she drew quickly away from me and began to splash her face with water from my wooden pail, to show she was neither a horse nor a dog.
I asked the engineer to leave and gave the girl some soap. She had never seen such a thing before, and to tell the truth, neither had I until I stayed the night in the Gallic town of Lutetia on the way to Britain and visited the wretched bathhouse there. It was on the anniversary of the day of my mother’s death and thus also my birthday. I was seventeen in Lutetia and no one congratulated me.
The thin slave in the bathhouse surprised me with the mild and cleansing soap he was using. It was quite a different feeling from being scoured with pumice. I remembered the money Tullia had given me and bought both the slave his freedom and his soap for three gold pieces. On the morning I left Lutetia, I gave him permission to call himself Minutius. The few pieces of soap I received in return, I kept well hidden when I realized that this new invention roused the contempt of the legionaries.
When I showed the girl how the soap should be used, she forgot her fear, washed herself and began to untangle her hair. I rubbed her swollen wrists with good ointment, and when I saw how badly her clothes had been torn by the thorns, I went to the trader for underclothes and a woolen cloak for her. After that she followed me everywhere like a faithful dog.
I soon noticed that it was easier for me to teach her Latin than for me to learn the barbarians’ language. During the long dark evenings by the fire, I also tried to teach her to read. But I did it just for my own amusement, by writing the letters in the sand and letting her copy them. The only books in the garrison were the centurion’s almanac and the trader’s Egyptian-Chaldaean book of dreams, so I very much regretted not bringing anything with me to read. Teaching Lugunda made up for some of this.
I endured with a laugh the stream of obscenities from the veterans regarding the girl in my hut, for they meant no harm. More likely they wondered what kind of witchcraft I had used to tame the girl so quickly. Of course, they thought I slept with her,” but in fact I did not touch the girl, although she was over thirteen years of age.
As the icy rain poured down and the even normally wretched roads were transformed into bottomless mud, and the puddles every morning were covered with a crisp layer of ice, life in the garrison became more and more static and monotonous. A couple of young Gauls who had enlisted in the legion to become Roman citizens by serving for thirty years, made a habit of slipping into my wooden hut when I was teaching Lugunda and watching with their mouths open and repeating aloud the Latin words. Before I knew what was happening, I was teaching them both Latin and how to write. Some knowledge of reading and writing is necessary for promotion in the legion, for no war can be waged without wax tablets.
It was while I was teaching like this that Vespasian surprised me in my turf-roofed hut when he came to inspect the garrison. As was his habit, he came unexpectedly and did not allow the duty guards to sound the alarm, for he liked to go around and see the camp as it was each day. He considered that in this way a commantler had a better picture of the morale of the legion than by a previously arranged tour.
I was reading aloud from the tattered Egyptian-Chaldaean book of dreams what it meant if one dreamed about hippopotamus, and I was pointing out each word in turn while Lugunda and the young Gauls put their heads together and stared at the book, repeating the Latin words after me. Vespasian laughed so much that he bent double and slapped his knees as the tears poured down his cheeks. We all nearly fainted with fright when he appeared so suddenly behind us. We sprang to attention and Lugunda hid herself behind my back. But from his laughter, I realized that Vespasian was not at all angry.
When he had at last collected himself, he looked sternly at us with a heavy frown. The upright posture and clean faces of the youngsters showed him that they were irreproachable soldiers. He said that he was pleased they wanted to learn Latin and to read rather than getting drunk in their spare time. Vespasian even lowered himself to tell us that he had seen a hippopotamus with his own eyes in the amphitheater in Rome at the time of Emperor Gaius, and he described how enormous the animal is. The Gauls naturally thought he was making it up and laughed shyly, but he was not offended and merely ordered them to get their equipment in readiness for inspection.
I respectfully asked him to step inside my hut and begged permission to offer him some wine. He assured me he would very much like to rest for a while, for he had finished his inspection and had set people to work everywhere. I found my father’s wooden goblet, which I thought my best drinking vessel, and Vespasian turned it
