“At the start,” he began, “it was a disaster. We marched into the wilds of Caledonia. Gods, that place is forsaken! Nothing but stinking marshes and biting insects, freezing cold winds and bleak stones, everything drab and the rain lashing down as if we were slaves under a whip. Yes, we got the Antonine Wall back, but at what cost?”
I flinched at the bitter fury in his voice.
“The Caledonians hid in the land they knew well and attacked us when we were least expecting it, vanishing away like ghosts before we could gather ourselves together to attack. We lost hundreds of men.”
“But how—?” This was not the story of victory I had expected.
He gestured impatiently.
“There are no roads up there, and the ground eats people up without warning. If there weren’t forests barring our way, there were freezing, treacherous rivers to bridge, and if there weren’t swamps, there were sheer cliffs with an evil slippery kind of gravel that tore men off balance and hurled them to their death on sharp rocks, like teeth. Then arrows would come whizzing out of nowhere, and you’d feel as powerless as a sitting duck waiting for the hunter to strike you down. Horrible!” He paused for breath and wiped a thin sweat from his forehead. I saw his hair was greyer than it had been and shot with silver, and a new pink scar lined his forearm. “But that wasn’t the worst of it. They put sheep and cattle in front of us, so the men, starving for some meat, would charge towards them to hunt them, become separated, and then be picked off by bands of warriors. When we found them, some were dead, some wounded, and the wounded we had to kill because we could do nothing for them, and if they had been captured alive it would have been the end for us. Our men were slaughtered.”
“But you took back the wall!” I cried out, shocked and eager to get some bit of hope back from what he had said. Half my mind was also racing on what this meant for Avitoria. Had the Caledonians been more successful than was rumoured? Could her parents still be alive?
“Yes, and took back the forts Julius Agricola built so many years ago – but at what cost?” he repeated. “And then the Emperor could go on no longer, even though he was being carried for most of the way in a litter, so we returned to Hadrian’s Wall, and Caracalla was sent to continue the conquest.”
I clutched the edge of my bed tightly. What he said next destroyed all my hopes for Avitoria.
“I would not have thought I could feel sorry for a barbarian,” my father went on in a low voice. “But the women and children did not have to be killed. They could have been sold as slaves. Caracalla murdered, looted, burned. . . everything. He did not hold the soldiers back; instead he urged them on. When we went after him, we found nothing, no movement in the whole country. Just columns of smoke from burning bone fires, hanging in the sky. You could smell it—” He broke off, and pushed a tear from his eye. It was the only time I had ever seen him shed a tear. He had not even wept for my mother. Whatever he had seen in the North, it had destroyed his spirit.
“Is the Emperor ill?” I managed to say.
But before he could answer, I heard soldiers calling him again. He jumped up and was gone without a word.
So began a day of restless sleeping, waking, constant whispering and angry hissed passwords in the passages. Caracalla’s and Geta’s men split off from each other, taking possession of different parts of the palace, and scowled at each other if they passed by chance. I did not leave the house; I did not dare leave my father alone. Every so often he came back to my room, threw himself on the bed and slept like the dead. I did not dare wake him. Everything had turned into a nightmare. Julia Domna I no longer saw at all.
It was dawn when I heard a hammering at my door. There was always someone awake at every time of day or night now, and I forced myself to get up from the chair where I was sleeping and answer it. A slave grumbled that there was someone asking for me at the street door.
“For you?” My father frowned. He accompanied me down the stairs.
To my shock, it was Arcturus. He looked pale and exhausted. Snow drifted down around him, making his hair seem grey.
“What are you doing here?” I blurted out.
“Theodora – she’s not well. She has been ill for days, but tonight it is much worse. We need a doctor.”
20.
A Pot of Poison
I turned to my father, wordlessly. He was the doctor, not me.
He was looking at Arcturus, and it was as if he was swiftly calculating in his mind his weight in gold, or his value. He asked him a few questions – not about Theodora, but about himself. Who was his father? Where was his farm? Arcturus answered, briefly and impatient.
“We have to hurry!” Arcturus blurted out finally. “Sir, we need your help. We can pay—”
My father smiled without humour.
“I have never taken a fee for treatment, but I cannot leave the Emperor.” He looked at me, then drew me to one side.
“Do you trust this young man?” he said quietly.
It was an odd question. I looked at him in surprise. “Of course,” I said without thinking.
My father nodded.
“Then you go.”
“Me?” I was shocked. “But I’m not a doctor.”
He was listening to raised voices from inside the palace, and what he heard seemed to make his mind up. He gripped my wrist so hard
