“You’re very silent, Lord Ariantes,” Bodica said at last. “You’ve said barely ten words together to me since Durovernum. Have I offended you?”
I bowed my head. “Not in the least, Lady. You have shown me much honor.”
“Are you keeping quiet, then, because you don’t like boasting? From all I’ve heard, you’ve done as much damage to your enemies as Lord Arshak, if not more.”
“Our brave raids against the enemy,” I said harshly, “provoked a terrible war in which our people suffered defeat. I see no point in boasting of it.”
The eager, satisfied, warlike look vanished from the faces of my listeners. The lady frowned; Gatalas became sullen; Arshak looked angry.
“I am proud to have fought for our people!” Arshak declared. “We were defeated, but we have never been conquered!”
The Romans didn’t want to conquer us, I thought. They had no way to govern a people without cities. If we hadn’t raided them, they would have kept the peace; because we had, they’d considered not conquest, but extermination. It was our own greed, for goods and for glory, that brought ruin on us, and that the ruin had not been greater was due as much to a Roman rebellion in the East as to our own courage. But I couldn’t say that to Arshak without offending him.
“What good does it do us to recall this now?” I said instead. “We have all sworn on fire to serve Rome, and if we remember how we fought her, it will only make it harder for us.”
“Is servitude what you want?” asked Bodica.
I had my answer to that this time. “Our heirs in our own country are free. For ourselves, it does not matter: we are dead men, all of us.”
“You don’t look dead to me,” commented Bodica, smiling again.
“We’re only dead in our own country,” replied Arshak, smiling back at her. “Here beyond the stream of Ocean, even Ariantes will have to come back to life in the end, little as he wishes to. Be gentle, Lady: he isn’t used to living with defeat. None of us are.”
“But why should you think that here beyond the ocean, freedom and glory have become luxuries you can’t afford?” Her smile was still directed at me, but her eyes had slid over to meet Arshak’s.
“I don’t,” said Arshak vehemently-and suddenly they were allies. A part of me cried out its agreement with them, and urged me to join them, to accept the hinted offer now, quickly, before it was too late. I think I would have if I’d had only myself to decide for, despite the oath I’d sworn at Aquincum. I had five hundred others, though, who would be bound by my agreement, and because of them I could not choose rashly. Besides, I had, still, the sense that we were being played upon. Bodica was no more a Sarmatian than Facilis was, and enmity to Rome did not make her our friend.
When Bodica had visited her temple I excused myself, saying that there ought to be at least one senior officer in the camp-though I left five men with her to make it clear that I was not afraid of the legate. The other five and I started back.
We weren’t used to cities. The narrow streets of close-set houses, crowding windowless over the road, confused us, and we wandered helplessly for a while, looking for some familiar landmark. I eventually stopped and asked a shopkeeper for directions to the bridge.
“You mean the bridge to Ladybank?” he asked.
“It is the one that crosses the Tamesis,” I replied.
“To Ladybank,” he agreed, nodding. “You go back down to the corner and turn right, then left, and it’ll be there in front of you.”
“I thank you.”
The shopkeeper looked up at me curiously as I gathered the reins again. “We call the other side Ladybank,” he told me. “On account of all the ladies hung up there when Queen Boudica sacked the city.”
I paused.
He nodded, pleased at seeing a foreigner suddenly so intent on his local knowledge. “You’re not from Britain, are you? You’ve heard of Queen Boudica?”
“A little.”
“You’ll have heard, then, that she sacked Londinium. Well, they say that when the old queen took the city, the men were already dead defending it, so she revenged herself on the women. She had the wives and daughters of the Roman citizens stripped, tortured, mutilated, and impaled along the bank there. So it’s been called Ladybank ever since.”
“I thank you,” I repeated. I nodded to him, and started in the direction he’d indicated.
Why, I wondered, had Aurelia Bodica left the cruel executions out of her hero tale and implied that the bodies were those of dead Roman officials? Because she admired her ancestress and believed no evil of her? Or because she knew that cruelty to defeated prisoners would offend her audience and lose their sympathy for the British cause?
We found the bridge, and I left it behind me with a sense of relief. The commandeered house was near the road, with the legionary tents pitched in a neat square in its stable yard; our own camp was behind. When I rode up to the road gate I found Facilis standing there fuming.
“Where are the others?” he demanded, “Where’s the lady Aurelia Julii? Why did you go into the city, may the gods destroy it?”
He must have deliberately decided to call her by her husband’s name; I’d heard nobody else use it. I told him where everyone was, and he swore again. “The lady’s husband offered her an escort this morning, a Roman escort. She said she had a headache and wanted to stay quietly in the house for the day! She’s left her little slave girl confined to the house in tears, and her driver sulking in the stables. May I perish if I know what she’s up to!”
I shrugged and gestured for my men to go on back to their wagons.
Facilis looked at them sourly as they jingled past. “She was parading you, I suppose, like a triumphant general,” he said. “I hope you enjoyed it.”
“I did not,” I replied. I sat for a moment looking down at Facilis. I had no love for the man, but he was shrewd and perceptive, a party to Roman debates from which I was excluded-and he plainly didn’t trust Aurelia Bodica any more than I did myself. “You think, then, that she is ‘up to’ something,” I said quietly.
Facilis let out a long breath through his nose. “I don’t say anything against a legate’s lady, Ariantes. Remember that.”
“Lucius Javolenus Comittus admires her greatly. The other two tribunes are… unhappy at the mention of her.”
“Afraid, you mean.” Facilis’ voice had dropped to a whisper now, and I had to pull my helmet off to hear him. “They, and most of the lads, are afraid of her. And I don’t quite know why.”
“Javolenus Comittus is a native Briton,” I said, slowly. “He is related to her. The others are of Italian descent.”
“And she’s a descendant of the native royalty.” Facilis glanced round, then came over and caught my stirrup. “May I perish, Ariantes, I don’t know Britain any better than you do. I’m a Pannonian and I’ve never been here before. There’s something going on, all right, underneath what they actually say and do, but I don’t understand it and I can’t make it out. The fact that she’s native royalty is part of it, but not all of it by any means. All the lads in the century here are British-born and most of them are from the northern tribes, the ones that have had risings a generation or two ago, but they’re good lads, loyal to the emperor. And they’re afraid of her.”
I dismounted and stood facing him, holding Farna’s bridle. “And my people?”
He gave a hiss between his teeth. “So you’ve seen it. Yes, she’s after you, all right. You in particular, but Arshak and Gatalas as well. She’s asked and asked about all of you. It could be innocent curiosity, but it isn’t.”
“In Britain, queens have led armies.”
“Just like Sarmatians. I’d feel pretty damned unhappy if a Sarmatian princess were married to a legate on the Danube. But it’s much more complicated here. On the Danube, we were on one side of the river and you were on the other, and we all knew who was who. Here everything’s all muddled up.”
“Southern tribesmen in togas,” I agreed, “and northerners, so you say, in strip armor.”
We looked at each other for a moment. “What do the other two think about the lady Aurelia Julii?” he asked.
