After Rome (30 page)

“Where will we get seed for an orchard?” a man wanted to know.

A woman protested, “I have never milked a cow in my life!”

Another pinched her nose with her fingers. “Pigs. How very disgusting. What do you think we are, peasants?”

“We are now,” Regina said in a voice that brooked no argument. “But at least we're
living
peasants. If we want to go on living we need to make intelligent plans.”

Reluctantly they gathered around Cadogan and watched as a sooty stick traced the outlines of their future. Barns and sheds and workshops and storehouses. Livestock pens. Pits for tanning leather. Pits for burning charcoal.

“You are talking about a large expenditure here,” a man warned. “Who is going to pay for the cows and pigs and oxen and plowshares? Unless I am mistaken, not all of us got out of the city with our money.”

There was a rumble of agreement. No one wanted to admit they had any money with them.

Including Cadogan.

Why does everything come down to money? he wondered. Is that our heritage from Rome? If so, it's a blighted heritage.

I know the people who followed me from Viroconium. Some have been guests in my father's house. Others have appeared before Vintrex in his official capacity. I can't help knowing aspects of their lives that they would not like to have made public, and there's not a man among them of whom I could say with certitude: He would not steal my money if he knew where it was.

Sometime during a sleepless night—and Cadogan was growing used to sleepless nights—a solution came to him. There was one person whose money no one would dare to steal.

In the morning he explained the idea to Vintrex, who roused enough from his torpor to listen. Cadogan was pleasantly surprised when his father approved. “You want to tell our friends that I am lending them money to buy what they need? I had no idea you were so clever, Cadogan. How can I object, since you will not really be using my money anyway, but your own. I assume you have it here someplace?”

“I have enough here, yes.”

“You were always financially prudent, whatever your other failings,” Vintrex said. “Of course you learned it from me.” The old man's rheumy eyes gleamed with a telltale smugness. Cadogan knew that expression of old. His father used to wear it after he had been with Gwladys.

When he had a chance to speak with Esoros alone, Cadogan asked, “Does my father have money hidden away that no one else knows about?”

The steward's face was a closed book. “My lord Vintrex does not tell me everything.”

“But you are privy to his personal finances. Is that not one of the responsibilities of a steward?”

“Are you questioning my ability to discharge my responsibilities?”

The steward was deflecting and Cadogan knew it. The man's refusal to answer was an answer in itself. “I would not insult you so,” Cadogan said politely. Leaving Esoros and the fort behind, he walked out into the forest. The trees.

Thinking, in peace among the trees.

In the dying years of the empire unscrupulous officials stole everything that was loose. My father proved he had no scruples when he seduced his brother's wife. If he did amass a dishonest fortune in those days, he would have been far too clever to keep it at home. But where then? Not in the city, where everyone knew everyone else's business.

A place like this, perhaps. Remote but not too remote.

Before they quarreled, my uncle's country estate would have been the perfect hiding place.

Suddenly Cadogan smiled.

Dinas has been roaming the countryside for years, sniffing out buried treasure. Suppose the first hoard he discovered had belonged to the chief magistrate of Viroconium?

The irony was delicious to contemplate.

*   *   *

Cadogan asked Godubnus to accompany him when he went to purchase livestock. The ironmaster, who had lived outside the walls and was never a citizen of Viroconium, was easier to trust than the urbanites. He was rough and ready and spoke his mind, but Cadogan was almost certain he did not say one thing and mean another.

Still, one could not be too careful.

The day before they were to set out Cadogan waited until the others had left the fort, then quietly barred the door. Using one of the andirons, he pried up a hearthstone. Beneath it was only innocent earth, as blank as a baby's face. Anyone else would have put the stone down again. Cadogan used the sharpest point on the andiron to scratch a hole in the earth, into which he thrust two fingers and a thumb. He felt around until he caught hold of a tightly woven string. A little twitch; a firm tug …

The carefully prepared soil fell away to partially reveal a sheet of scratched and battered tin the length of a man's forearm. An abandoned object of no value. Lying flat on the floor, Cadogan ran his fingers along one edge of the sheet until he found a tiny catch. A flick of his forefinger and the catch released. The tin lid opened wide on concealed hinges, revealing a hidden vault containing a timber box bound with iron.

He sat up long enough to brush himself off, then knelt and reached down with both hands. It took considerable strength to open the chest that contained his personal fortune: a gleaming hoard of gold and silver coins, most of them Roman, enough to support a man for several lifetimes. In the world as it had been.

In that world Cadogan had prepared his treasury carefully, still trusting—almost trusting—that such precautions would be unnecessary.

Now he knew that no precautions would be enough.

The following morning he met Godubnus and Trebellos at the edge of the forest. Both men had packs strapped to their backs. “I thought we'd need an extra pair of hands,” Godubnus explained, indicating his companion. “Did you say we're going to a market a half day's walk from here?”

“A fair up in the hills,” Cadogan corrected, “and if we're fortunate we'll ride back. I hope to purchase a couple of horses, an ox and a milk cow to start with.”

Godubnus turned to Trebellos. “You can ride the cow,” he told the Silurian.

Twice a year, in the spring and the autumn, a great fair was held at major crossroads in the hills. The purpose of the fair was to attract people from afar to purchase local produce, and to bring items for sale that were not available in the area. It was also a wonderful opportunity for a festival.

When farmers drove their animals a long distance to sell them they hoped to get a good price, so they brought their best livestock. If Cadogan was going to find a replacement for his stolen horse, the fair would be the place. Unless, by some miracle, he might find the mare herself.

Perhaps the barbarians didn't eat her after all.

Before they set out the three men armed themselves from the ironmaster's supply of weapons. Godubnus took an axe, plus four knives of various sizes that he thrust through his belt. “You bristle like a hedgehog,” Pamilia teased him. An unsuspected sense of humor was beginning to surface in the shy, quiet young woman.

The Silurian's weapon of choice was a butcher's cleaver capable of dismembering an ox, which he strapped to the pack on his back.

Cadogan chose a knife long enough to qualify as a shortsword. “Kill a man with one thrust to the belly, that will,” Godubnus assured him.

“I don't want to kill anyone. I actually don't like to fight.”

“You had better get over that,” said the ironmaster.

“I'm hoping these weapons will be deterrents if we run into any trouble.”

“The only way to avoid
that,
” Karantec remarked, “would be to stay right here. But then we wouldn't have any livestock.”

“So sooner or later we would starve to death,” Nassos added helpfully.

The entire population of their little settlement gathered to see them off. Smiling and waving; anxious and worried and trying not to show it.

The youngest children cried.

Cadogan and his companions had to walk for several miles to reach the road that led to the fair in the hills. There were no signposts to guide them, no landmark features. Only moorland and woodland and bog. Wind-ruffled grass, smell of pines, hum of insects. Spring pregnant with the summer to come. “I know the way,” Cadogan told the other two, “because I often went to this fair as a boy. My uncle used to breed fine horses. If he took some to the fair to sell, my cousin and I rode them for him.”

“So you're an equestrian!” Trebellos exclaimed.

“Hardly that. An equestrian was a knight; an officer entitled by birth or appointment to ride a horse in the service of the emperor. I just enjoyed riding. My uncle liked me because I wasn't always trying to show off the way my cousin did. Dinas could have a horse in a lather before he got out of the stable yard.” Cadogan gave a reminiscent smile. “In my memory of those days at the fair, the sun was always shining. When I sat on a horse and the crowds looked up at me I felt ten feet tall.”

The other two made no comment. There was no response to such unimaginable privilege, so casually voiced.

The hills rolled on and on like a green sea, climbing toward a particularly dense belt of forest. After they entered its cold shade the little party stopped to catch their breath. Godubnus said, “Are you sure we're still going the right way, Cadogan?”

“See where the moss is growing on those tree trunks? That's the north side, and we're headed north.”

“How do you know about moss?”

Cadogan laughed. “You would be surprised what I've learned since I left Viroconium.”

“Do you never regret it?”

“Leaving the city? No,” Cadogan lied.

“It was either a very brave or a very foolhardy thing to do,” the ironmaster said. “You had everything a man could want there.”

Cadogan decided it would be a good idea to be frank about the situation. Starting a new life together, they would learn about one another anyway. “What I had was a father who demanded total control,” he told Godubnus. “He had a hundred sayings he kept hammering into us. ‘Duty above all else,' ‘Compromise is cowardice,' ‘Absolute obedience is the most noble virtue.' We were expected to live by those aphorisms every day of our lives. The smallest misstep resulted in a furious tirade. He was as stern with us as he was with the miscreants who appeared before him in his office as chief magistrate.

“My mother suffered him in silence for the most part, though I recall a few times when she tried to stand up to him—usually in defense of one of her children. Father insulted and humiliated her until she backed down. At last my sisters escaped the old tyrant by marrying, but the only way I could escape him was by running away.”

“The chief magistrate doesn't seem like a tyrant to me.”

“That's because you're not his son. Besides, he's ill.”

“And you feel sorry for him,” Godubnus guessed.

“Perhaps I do. Sorry for him and for myself. Running away didn't do any good, I'm stuck with him now in spite of it.”

“I don't know if we ever escape anything,” said Godubnus. “Our fate is our fate.”

“Are you sure? My cousin Dinas would argue the point with you. He thinks we have a right, almost an obligation, to take our lives into our own hands and shape them for ourselves.”

The ironmaster looked skeptical. “You believe that?”

“I would like to believe it. My cousin certainly does.”

Trebellos said, “Your cousin must be a heathen, then.”

Cadogan laughed.

When at last they came to the road they sought, it was not a road in the Roman sense at all. A wide, weed-fringed, foot-beaten trail through the forest, deeply rutted with cart tracks, never straight because it followed the contours of the land, consisting of numerous curves and bends that could conceal an ambush-in-waiting.

As he walked Cadogan heard again the voice of Dinas: “Life is the sun and the stars, the wolves howling and the rain lashing and the thrill of danger around every bend.” And what was the rest of it? Ah yes. “You will die in the end anyway, we all do.”

Is that the secret of courage, then? Accepting you are going to die no matter what, so you might as well take a risk? If it's as simple as that I might as well have gone with Dinas.

But if I had, what would have happened to the people I brought away from Viroconium? What will happen to them anyhow?

How can one ever
know
when making a decision? Or is every decision as potentially dangerous as the forest, dark and full of violence. The smallest mischoice could lead to …

I wish I didn't have to think.

Look at Godubnus and Trebellos. Striding along without a serious thought in their heads. I'm sure they don't ask themselves questions they can't answer. They simply accept whatever the day brings. How I envy their simplicity! Lucius Plautius would call it wisdom.

Is this constant turmoil in my mind a legacy of my Roman education? I wonder … unlike the Greeks, the Romans sought knowledge but not wisdom. Then, as if knowledge were quantifiable and their stores were complete, they abandoned any interest in intellectual pursuits and devoted themselves to the search for material wealth and the prizes of conquest. Like Dinas.

Perhaps they were right. In seeking wisdom I've discovered my own ignorance. If I had the chance to …

Cadogan's thoughts were interrupted by a shout from Trebellos. “I think I see a banner through the trees!”

The three men began to trot forward.

In a valley surrounded by hills, the fair was spread out like a handful of colored baubles thrown into someone's lap. For a moment Cadogan felt the thrill of excitement he had known as a boy. The tents and banners of the various clan chieftains, the swirling throng of ordinary people dressed in their finest, the herds and flocks and whinnying and bellowing, the giddy shriek of children and warm laughter of women, the racecourse marked off in the grass, the whole brilliant panorama of tribal society come together to buy and sell, to compete and make wagers, to lust and love and fight and befriend. To celebrate life.