The captured high priest of Zalmoxis, old Dicineus of the blue-fatted braids and the elegant tattoos curling into deep facial creases, whispered to the young ones how they were safe for the time being.
Dicineus, an advisor of their father's, understood the Roman speech and the Roman ways. Dicineus was the architect of the Daci Wolf's policy. It was also he who, with his family members and children, officiated in the sacrifice of Roman captives. He knew his days were numbered with his Roman captors. Zalmoxis now beckoned him too. Security for his own offspring was his immediate priority after attending to the Decebelus's progeny.
'My Lord and Lady, children of the Decebelus, I bring good news to you. Your fate is well favored. The Iron People's king, Caesar Trajan, has cast his grace upon you,' the old man rasped. 'You will not be sent to the Underworld to join your ancestors, as others of us may. You'll be taken under the protection of his commander and friend, the Roman general Publius Aelius Hadrianus, who is an important senator and praetor at Rome.'
'Tell me Priest Dicineus, who is this commander Hadrianus? Is he worthy of us?' the boy prince demanded of his aged advisor and tutor in the imperious style of a true aristocrat.
'You will shortly see, my Prince,' Dicineus replied with a deeply deferential bow to the seven-year old. 'But be assured, this is a gesture to your advantage and to your sister Estia's advantage. Take my advice, my child. Welcome this opportunity. See where it may lead. It has possibilities.'
Hadrian looked down upon Dromichaetes from his high seat. It was the very same throne from which Diurapneus, the boy's father, had until recently pronounced rule upon the Getae. With Dicineus as the translator, the Roman commander questioned the boy.
'Tell him to proclaim his pedigree, Priest. Let him tell me of his quality in his own words,' Hadrian instructed. He then sat back to observe the boy's responses and manner.
The muddied, soil-clothed, disheveled princeling stood steadily before his interrogator to call out in his reedy voice a well-rehearsed litany of names, titles, honorifics, and tribal clan relationships. He did it with shrill gusto. They were proclaimed in the hard guttural consonants of his native language in the proud manner the boy had heard his father declaim similar lists of honor.
'This boy has a noble's manner, Priest. He deserves watching, in more ways than one,' the Roman commander offered.
Hadrian was actually moved by the child's courage and dignity. He smiled at the miniature warrior standing before him and nodded approvingly to Dicineus.
'The lad, as a barbarian, possesses a paler skin than we Romans. I assume the tattoos on each cheek with three circles proclaim his supposed bloodline from your cruel god, yes?
He's also a hand or so taller than a seven year old of our Mediterranean world, even though generally you Dacians are not a physically imposing people. Your breeding, your diet, your angular bodily shape, your bad teeth, your lack of common cleanliness or baths, and your barbarous habits all lack the finesse of the Empire's subjects. Yet this wiry princeling displays promise of future merit.'
'I am pleased that my captor approves of the child,' Dicineus dissembled with much bowing. 'I too have children who carry my seed and the sacred blood of Zalmoxis. Perhaps I and my family have found favor in the commander's eyes as well? Children, at least, deserve to live.'
Hadrian smiled patiently but enigmatically.
'Begin the boy's instruction in spoken Latin. He is to be prepared for display at Caesar's victory Triumph at Rome.'
After the winter snows abated Prince Dromichaetes and Estia were brought from the rugged ranges of their homeland to the warmer climate of Italy far away to the south.
Princess Estia was taken one night into separate protection elsewhere, unexplained to the princeling. Her brother never saw her again and his pride demanded he wouldn't ask.
Now in his eighth year, Dromichaetes walked on his short child's legs behind Trajan's grand chariot with its spirited chargers along the Sacred Way of Rome. The emperor's Triumph paraded amid the raucous crowds of the great city.
The lad was awed at the spectacle of high stone structures, sweeping flights of staircases, wide avenues, marble columns, and whole buildings of red brick and white marble. It was so contrasting to the rough-cut stony ramparts, timbered palisades, or muddy daub and straw-roofed huts of his Dacia homeland.
He was chained in fine golden bonds to an officer's wrist. Two other aristocrat captives of the Getae were shackled in hard iron together. The traitor of the Dacians, Bicilis, once the king's best friend who turned to the Romans to reveal the hiding place of a vast treasure cleverly buried beneath a river's bed, along with Dicineus the priest, were tethered side-by-side for display to the city.
As Trajan's Triumph progressed through the avenues, arches, and circuses of the great city amid the roar of the crowds, the two tried to raise the boy's spirits with jokes and smiles and heroic bravado. His little legs tried to keep up with the officer's restrained pace. He stumbled to the flagstones again and again but scrambled nimbly to his feet each time. His wolf-fur cloak, tattoos, and blue-tinted braids conveyed to the Roman crowd's eyes a portrait of a typical barbarian enemy, but in amusingly miniature, unthreatening dimensions.
Following after the emperor's chariot marched cohorts of the Roman Legions of the Dacian campaign. Officers and troops of the fourteen Legions progressed proudly through the crowded Circus Maximus to the Sacred Way, past the high arches of the colossal Flavian Amphitheatre, and on to the ancient Forum, the official centre of the Empire.
They chanted ribald marching rhymes accusing their beloved emperor of lusty obscenities and vivid sexual excesses, the plausible priapic tokens of his proven gift for victory and booty. Their saucy limericks spared no reputed peccadillo.
The Legions were followed by fifty wagons of captured treasures or weapons and chained rows of captives. Ten thousand prisoners of fighting age shuffled sullen and subdued, tethered together in hemp and shackles, amid the catcalls of the plebs of Rome.
The cavalry captain Tiberius Claudius Maximus rode a charger holding the brine-pickled skull of the Decebelus aloft atop a pilum spear. An aide paraded with his severed right arm impaled on a captured wolf-tail lance. These crumbling remnants of the vanquished king were held high so Roman citizens could savor his defeat, witness his shame, and celebrate his submission to Rome's virile dominance. They shook rude gestures with their fists and shouted obscenities as the desiccated remains passed by.
Later when wine and feasting had loosened the city's manners, the pickled head was ceremoniously flung down the city's sacred staircase, the Scalae Gemoniae, as a formal insult from the Senate and People of Rome to a crushed enemy.
The skull lobbed and slipped and bounced down the majestic flight into a sewer's gutter at the bottom. Then it was cast into the turbulence of the River Tiber racing through embankments close by.
Dicineus and Bicilis were taken to the same staircase, pressed to their knees, and slowly garroted by sturdy men wielding thin nooses. Their broken bodies too were cast into the Tiber. The crowds and assembled patricians of Rome cheered themselves hoarse at their public humiliation.
But Dromichaetes was not harmed in the Triumph celebrations despite him being of the same blood as the enemy. Nevertheless the boy's declining status as a prince of the Getae was slowly becoming apparent to him. No one was bowing to him anymore.
Hadrian encouraged the boy to be receptive to friendliness. The lad learned quickly.
However, the young Wolf Warrior's names and titles were difficult to pronounce in Latin. Hadrian abbreviated the name into something more easily pronounced. Among the florid list of attributes Dromichaetes proclaimed in the Greek patois of his native tongue was the name for the Daci Tribes of his homeland. This word was 'Getae'. Hadrian identified these two repeated syllables in the staccato flow of consonants and gutturals babbled by the princeling but which no longer possessed any consequence in the new era ruled by Rome.
'Getae? Yes, so I will call you Geta,' he said with ready satisfaction to the child chained at his feet. 'You are of The Getae, so I will call you Geta.'
This leading senator, general, praetor, and tribune of Rome inaugurated his personal beckoning call for the stripling chained at his feet. It was to be 'Geta'. The list of privileges and distinctions forged in ancient wars by the boy's father and his father's fathers before him, were now compressed into these two tight syllables. Eventually Dromichaetes came to understand the symbolism perfectly.
But his oath to Zalmoxis on behalf of his father also continued to ring through his mind night-by-night, day- by-day, month-by-month. His father's shame was seared deep into his very heart.
