rooting among the trees for acorns.
Quintus and I went to the baths and listened sleepily to the gossip, while the attendants rubbed us with oil. The price of wine had gone up, the promised corn from Britannia had not arrived, and the merchants who owned the granaries and the senators who owned land were charging high prices for their poor crops. Honorius was blamed bitterly for his edict permitting slaves to join the army; the Praefectus Praetorio had issued an order forbidding citizens without passes from entering Gaul; and a certain actress had scandalised the respectable in the city by the number and rapidity of her lovers, and the priests had been joyously denouncing her from the steps of their churches for the past month. The Bishop, too, was in the news. He had made himself unpopular by granting sanctuary to an escaped slave who had killed his master; and he refused to give him up, despite the pressure of those civil authorities responsible for maintaining order. Conversation everywhere, however, always turned to one topic in the end: the games that Julianus Septimus was providing in the amphitheatre and the arena in ten days time, to celebrate the coming marriage of his eldest son’s daughter to a young man from a wealthy family in Remi. The Bishop might not approve (of what did he approve?) but his influence was not strong enough to halt the wishes of the man who had recently, and tactfully, contributed so much to his great cathedral. There would be fights between gladiators brought from Arelate, wild animals from Mauretania, and chariot races between drivers who had competed at Rome. The games were to last five days, and I received an invitation from the Curator to preside over them, much to my surprise. I thanked him and—a happy thought this—told him there would be a tax on all tickets sold, the proceeds to go towards the legion’s war-chest. If Septimus was prepared to spend so much money—the lions alone were costing one hundred and fifty thousand denarii each—then we were certainly entitled to our share of the profits.
Quintus spent a lot of time down by the docks with Gallus and Flavius. I thought at first it was a new ship they were interested in, but I went down there myself one morning and found them busy with the blacksmith and a model oar, the blade of which was tipped with iron along its edges.
Quintus said, “If the water begins to freeze it might be just possible to break the ice with oars; but they would need to be strengthened.”
“What about the boat? That would need protection also.”
“We have thought of that, too. What we need is a metal shield on the bow.” Flavius grinned. “The general and I have the ideas. Gallus sees if they can be put into practice.”
At a banquet one evening Quintus struck up a friendship over the wine with a fat man who bred horses, and whenever he disappeared after that I knew he was over at the fat man’s estates, giving them a hand in the breaking-in of the horses.
He was still urging me to make use of our bridge. “I can commandeer fifteen transports,” he said. “And we can get more from Confluentes and Borbetomagus.”
“You need sixty to carry a legion.”
“All right, sixty then. There will be no need to fear our being trapped on the wrong bank if there are boats to take us off, and the bridge is burned.” He knew my obsessive fear at having no secure line of retreat.
I said again, “They know just how weak we are.”
“They only guess, and you only guess that they guess. You cannot be sure.”
“Do you want me to lose Gaul in an afternoon?”
He took my arm. “Upon the Wall you used to spend your evenings studying the campaigns of great soldiers.”
“Yes,” I said. “Sertorius, Lucullus and Pompey, though he came to a harsh end.”
“Caesar too.” He smiled. “You used to tell me that his successes were due to speed and surprise. He exploited the weaknesses of his enemies.”
I said, wearily, “I am not Caesar.”
“He fought against odds as great.”
“The people he fought were not as well armed, nor as well equipped, nor as well led as these. And he was never reduced to only one legion.”
“We have my cavalry which makes us two, if I am any judge of soldiers.”
I hesitated.
“If Marcomir had been supported by sufficient horse he could have destroyed Respendial that day.” It was true.
“Very well,” I said. “I will try it if you wish. But we will do it my way and not yours. I need more cavalry. Get me another thousand and I will fight.”
“I shall have to call upon the auxiliary alae then,” he said cautiously. “They are not as well trained as I would like.”
I laughed. “When they are ready, Quintus, then let me know.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I will hold you to that.”
We attended the games and I shared the seats of honour with Septimus and his family. Of our previous meeting we did not speak; politeness alone made the occasion endurable. He behaved towards me, throughout, with all the dignity and good manners of a senator who has been advised by his emperor to open his veins in hot water. And yet, curious as it seemed afterwards, once, during the chariot races between the Reds and the Whites, our common enthusiasm for the sport made a bridge between us, and, for a short while, we were almost friends. This, in its way, was remarkable, for friends and families were split in their allegiance to the teams, quite as fiercely as over the Blues and Greens of Constantinopolis. The games were a great success and put the populace in a high good humour. All the seats were sold out; Artorius made a series of lucky bets and won much money; Quintus enjoyed the animal fights and thought them superior to the ones he had seen in Hispania; while the gladiatorial fights were, very properly, fought to the death. I had the rare experience, however, of giving the wooden foil to a gladiator who had gained the crowd’s approval; and his face, when I handed it to him, haunted me for days afterwards.
Only the Bishop did not share the general festivity. When I met him a day or so later, his face was pinker than usual. He had the look of a man who does not enjoy the martyrdom of unpopularity.
On our last day I went to the baths and had my hair dyed. It was silver all over now and I think the troops knew, to judge by the nickname that they had given me. But I did not care. What were their opinions to me? In the afternoon Quintus went to the deserted Temple of Epona, while I sat in the back room of a merchant’s shop and haggled over the price of a flask of perfume for Rando’s daughter. Afterwards I rode in search of my friend. I tied my horse beside his and then sat down upon a block of fallen stone. The sun shone strongly upon the red and grey of the buildings, and the entrance to the temple was shadowed in darkness. No-one came here now and I had the whole square to myself. The sky was very blue, I remember, and the trees stood silent, their once dark leaves already turned a rich brown. Once it had seemed as though they would live for ever; now they were dying after so short a life, and would soon crumble into dust. A lizard ran across the paving and concealed itself in the tufts of grass that thrust themselves upwards between the cracks, its small body heaving, as though it found the heat too much at that time of the year. I unpinned my cloak and shut my eyes, and felt the sun upon my face. I thought, for a moment or two, of the bustle in the offices of the Basilica, and of the legion in its earth and timber forts, and of all the work that awaited me when I returned. Suddenly, I felt very old and very tired. I thought of the villa at Arelate and of the pool in which I had swum as a boy. I thought of the plans we had made, my wife and I. There had been that winter when it was very cold and we had spent the evenings planning a new and proper home in the forest of Anderida. She had sat by the fire, spinning, while I drew the outlines of the new house with a stick of charcoal upon the back of a duty list. We had argued about the size of the rooms and how many we should need. Quintus had joined us, one night, and we had laughed and joked over the wine. That was the night she had washed her hair, and she sat by the fire, drying it and listening to our talk. There had to be a special room for him, I insisted, so that he would come to visit us often; and Quintus had agreed, and they had looked at each other and smiled.
I opened my eyes and stared up at the sky. There were so many questions that I had wanted to ask; so many that I had never dared to ask. I never would ask them now. I shut them from my mind. They were the bad things, about which I could do nothing. It was better, I thought, to remember the happy times instead. Perhaps, when all this was over, we would buy a villa still, and farm it, and Quintus would breed horses, and I would write that military history that had been in my mind all these years. And in the evenings we would sit before the fire and drink wine and remind ourselves of the old days. So I sat there, blinking in the sun, and I was just an old man, dreaming foolish dreams.
