He glanced around, immediately miserable again. 'It ran away.'
Someone laughed. A sharp glance from Marcus silenced it. Then the praefectus glanced again at the woman behind him. 'Go to the cart and repair your clothing.' It wasn't a suggestion, it was an order. She slipped off the horse's rump and went to Savia, who'd retrieved Valeria's cloak and now bundled her in it.
'And for the sake of Mars, find something to bandage your throat, tribune,' Marcus growled. 'You're dripping like a gutter.' Clodius retreated to comply.
There was noise, a crash of branches, and Galba and his troopers came bursting out, horses lathered, men cut from vine and twig, their leader furious and frustrated, glancing at Valeria with disbelief. He saluted. 'No sign of them, praefectus.'
'No sign?' Marcus looked at one of the mounts. Titus was sitting behind a trooper with a rope bound around his wrists, face turned away. 'Who's that man there?'
'One of mine, ambushed. We found him unconscious and bound.'
'And these brigands? Are they smoke that vanishes?'
'They're quick, and they know this wood, I think. Every trail and every hole.' Galba looked at Valeria again. 'My apologies, praefectus. I thought us almost home and had orders to collect those remounts. If I'd insisted your lady stay with me-'
'It was my decision to hurry, not Galba's,' Valeria corrected. 'Nor Clodius, nor Titus. I simply yearned to see you and insisted on the quickest way.'
Marcus scowled. 'Yet all of you were surprised. And if Galba hadn't met my exercise near the Wall and told me you were near, we might not have rescued you at all.'
'Fortune played with us this day,' the senior tribune observed grimly. 'Ill and then good. If gods exist, then perhaps they're at war with each other.'
'It was the one true God who saved us,' Savia spoke up. 'I was praying.'
Marcus ignored this. 'But why Valeria?'
'For ransom,' Galba said. 'A wealthy husband-to-be, a senator's daughter. I wouldn't have thought any man so bold or foolish, but this rogue must be both.'
The praetor nodded glumly. It was no secret in the province that his family was rich. Every man credited it for Marcus's appointment to the Petriana. 'Galba, how far did you hunt?'
'No more than a quarter mile.'
'Then we'll run them down yet.' Marcus turned to the troop of cavalry behind him. 'Decurion! Half to the right, half to the left! Now, into the trees! Find them!'
The Roman horse plunged gamely into the forest, but it was hard going. The animals stumbled on the uneven ground, branches swatted at the rider's helmets, and brush caught on weapons. They looked, and sweated, for hours, but had no better luck than Galba had. The Celts had disappeared like mist before the sun.
The bodyguard Cassius, gladiator and slave, had disappeared with them.
XIII
If all the spectacles of human existence, a wedding is the most public and private of ceremonial contracts. It is that rare moment in Roman life where a display of affection is allowed and even encouraged, and yet the true emotions of the principals remain hidden behind a veil of ritual and revelry. A Roman wedding is always a mixture of love, strategy, breeding, and money, and a Roman marriage is a mysterious combination of companionship, alliance, selfishness, and separation. No outsider can understand its complexities. As for sex, well, that is always simpler with one's slaves.
Yet it seems that if Valeria is to be fully understood, then her relationship to her new husband is crucial to that understanding. Perhaps this makes me a voyeur, but I'm a voyeur in quest not of sexual titillation but of high truth: the political consequences of betrothal. At least that's my justification. I'll confide in these private pages that it's the unraveling of the human heart, not the frailties of empire, that really sustains my odyssey. So I'm human. What of it?
My informants in this matter are two. Valeria's handmaid Savia was as shamelessly curious as I am, and eventually won from her mistress a bride's assessment. Savia comes back to my interrogation chamber in a mood of tentative triumph, sensing how necessary she's become to my investigation. She still hopes I'll buy her. She tells much of what I am about to relate.
The other that I interview is the centurion Lucius Falco, the veteran who fought with Galba. He lent his modest villa for the wedding and became a temporary confidant of Marcus. There's some interesting nobility to this soldier, I sense, a quiet belief in happiness and justice that some would judge admirable. Others, naive.
There is no requirement in Roman law for a wedding ceremony, of course. Even custom often dispenses with formal ritual. Yet Falco tells me that he and his wife were eager for the union to be formalized in their home, located near the fort of the Petriana on Hadrian's Wall.
'Why?' I ask him, to judge the honesty of an answer I already know. Like the other soldiers I'm interviewing, Falco is a practical and stoic man, his military bearing giving him dignity and his legionary ancestry giving him pride. Of mixed Roman and Briton blood, he is the son of a son of a son of soldiers of the Sixth Victrix-each generation following the next into the legion as the army strains to maintain its numbers, each retiree adding to the estate his family has established in the lee of the Wall. This history gives him a sophistication I can make use of; he understands the mix of dependency and resentment that swirls on both sides of the barrier. He knows how permeable a Roman border can be.
'My wife urged that we host it in order to be polite,' he replies to my question. 'Lucinda is sympathetic to officers' wives on the Wall. It's a male world, lonely for highborn women, with brides strung out along eighty miles of stone and mortar. And a wedding is as daunting for a maiden as it's longed for.'
Not as candid an answer as I would like. 'You'd also attain social prestige by hosting the wedding of a commanding officer,' I suggest.
He shrugs. 'Undeniably. My family's house has been pressed into duty for generations. We've given shelter to the good and the bad: to inspectors like you, to military contractors, to magistrates, to generals, and to their wives, mistresses, and courtesans. It's the Bite.'
The Bite, I know, is what soldiers such as Falco pay their commanders to be kept at the Wall and not sent overseas. The bribes also buy leave to tend to crops and animals. Playing host to the parasites of officialdom is a way for an officer to ingratiate himself.
'You didn't resent this new commander?'
'I had good relations with Galba and expected the same with Marcus.'
'You didn't have to choose between them?'
'I try to stay on good terms with everyone. A man advances only as fast as his friends allow it.'
'I appreciate your candor.'
He smiles. 'Lucinda had another motive. She said cavalrymen have the patience of a battering ram and the delicacy of an elephant. She wanted to befriend Marcus's new wife and give her encouragement.'
'You agreed?'
He laughs. 'I complained how much it was going to cost!'
'Yet the wedding was an investment.'
'Luanda told me Marcus might ride to my rescue one day. I told her that on the night in question, Marcus would be too busy riding his new bride!'
'And her response to that?'
'She hit me with a spoon.'
I shift restlessly, considering how to get to what I really want. 'Your wife is not highborn herself is she?'
For the first time Falco looks at me warily, as if I might know more than he assumed. To judge what my informants tell me, I have to know something of who they are, so I ask ahead. 'She's a freedwoman,' he says. 'My first wife died, and Lucinda was my closest slave. We fell in love…'
'Not so extraordinary these days. A love match, I mean.'
'I consider myself a lucky man.'
