Hadrian's wall (6 page)

"Yes, I am interviewing him next. And this soldier Titus. They are waiting while I finish with you."

She looks at me. "Please, master, I've answered everything you've asked. Will you not take pity on me?"

"And do what?"

"Get me out of my cell."

"I'll speak to the commander about moving you because you've been useful. But I'm not ready to make a decision on your permanent fate. I'm speaking to many people."

She looks at me levelly. "In the end you'll want me with you."

I mistake this for further seduction. "In my bed?"

"No, in the wood, where Valeria has gone. Where you'll have to go too."

The villa of Quintus Maxus, the first private residence that Valeria's party was to rest at in Britannia, was three days' journey north of Londinium. The road they followed was, in the Roman manner, a spear shaft thrust across hill and dale that sliced through ancient property lines and bridged streams, bogs, and wooded gullies. The highway was well maintained near Londinium, its tight-fitting stones cushioned with gravel and its stout puncheons rumbling like a drum. Grassy margins were cleared to the distance of a bowshot to discourage brigands, and the cavalry escort rode there instead of on the highway, to save the hooves of their unshod horses. But the farther Valeria's escort ventured from the capital, the more indifferent maintenance became. Holes went unrepaired, gravel was scant, brush invaded the shoulders, and frost heaved the stones.

Money, Galba told her as the cart jounced. There was never enough.

Contrasting to this Latin precision were the walls that marked the boundaries of Briton farms. These surrendered to topography and curved along the undulating terrain with the organic symmetry of cells. The result was a honeycomb, cut by Roman roads like a knife.

As an official party the wedding entourage had right-of-way over all but military units or imperial messengers. Private travelers, peddlers, wool merchants, cattle drovers, pilgrims, and hay wagons moved to the grassy swale as Valeria's procession passed, eyes peeking curiously at the woman on the high seat in the column's middle.

A bright blue canopy shielded her from sun or rain, and a scarlet cloak was clasped round her neck. She sat straight, her dark hair lustrous at the margin of her hood, her eyes bright, her smile brave, her figure trim and rounded, her garments a display of Egyptian linens, Asian silks, and Roman embroideries. A senator's daughter! In rural Britannia, she was as exotic as a unicorn or giraffe. At Petrianis she'd be a kind of queen, she supposed. She smiled graciously and studied these people as they studied her, speculating on their quiet, secret lives. Did they envy her?

She looked forward to the hospitality of Quintus Maxus. She could learn from the province's aristocracy, and the manor owner would earn status by entertaining not just the future wife of a praefectus, but the daughter of a senator. His feast would be a display of his best because the. empire was unified by ten thousand complicated alliances, where advancement revolved around family, friends, clients, loyalty, and long-owed favor. Every invitation was calculated, and every acceptance was strategic.

Galba was taciturn on the road north, brooking no dissent and joined to his horse like a centaur, his belt of rings jingling on his hip. While command came easily to him, companionability did not. He'd answer when asked but otherwise offered little conversation. This reticence made Valeria more curious, not less, of course. There was a peculiar restlessness to him, she thought, which left him brooding and mysterious.

"I'm told you're a Thracian, tribune," she prompted once as his constant prowling back and forth past their procession brought him alongside.

He looked wary. It was bold for a woman to initiate conversation. "I was."

"A long way from home."

"No." He took a moment to elaborate. "The Wall is my home now. You're the one who's a long way away."

So to him she was the outsider. Interesting. "What's it like in Thrace?"

"I left twenty years ago."

"But surely you have memories." Even as she said it, she realized how difficult it was to picture Galba as a child.

"Thrace is grass. Horses thrive there."

"A beautiful place?"

"A poor one. A frontier, like where you're going."

"And you a frontiersman."

"So it would seem." He was looking straight ahead now, as if to glance at her might reveal weakness. Galba, she suspected, was a man terrified of weakness. Perhaps, like many strong men, he was terrified of women.

"But you're a Roman as well," she went on, trying to draw him out. If she could understand Galba, perhaps she could understand Britannia. If she was to prevail in this province, she had to learn its mood. As a girl her studies had included little of the geography taught to boys, but she'd always been curious. Sometimes as a child she had hidden behind the tapestries of her father's dining room and listened to the men shouting opinions about lands, wars, and treaties in places she could scarcely imagine. Now she was beginning to see them for herself.

"I'm a Roman soldier. I've never seen Rome."

So she had experience that he did not. "Do you wish to?"

He briefly met her gaze, and for just a moment his eyes betrayed a look of longing. For Rome? Home? Friendship? Then he turned away again. "I wanted to once. Now, I don't think so. Rome, I suspect, would disappoint me."

She tried to tease him. "I thought all roads led to Rome."

"My Rome is the border, lady. My ambition is the Petriana cavalry. It may seem modest to you, but it's all I have."

She understood his meaning instantly, and felt guilty. He was escorting the cause of his own demotion! "And my future husband now has command. You must resent us." Was he loyal? Could Marcus trust him?

"Duty must never be resented, lady." It was a rote response. "Besides, fortune turns many ways." Then he galloped ahead.

Sometimes, when they stopped for the night at the public mansiones spaced every twenty-five miles, she caught him eyeing her from a distance. Just why was unclear. She was used to having men look at her, and Galba occasionally let his gaze linger enough to reassure her that he wasn't immune to her beauty. Yet his look was more complicated than that. It was as if he hadn't yet made up his mind about her. She'd become confident she could read the mind of the boys she'd flirted with in Rome, outguessing their strategies and manipulating their longings. But she couldn't tell if this grizzled, powerful man was intrigued by her or annoyed, impressed by her rank or dismissive of her gender and youth.

"That's just the way of him," the soldier Titus told her. "He looks at everyone with the glint of a hawk and the guile of a merchant. He's the kind with little he needs saying and less need of what others say. Don't be insulted; he's that way with everybody."

"The silences make him more formidable, somehow."

"Don't think he doesn't know it, lady."

"But is he really as fearsome as he seems?"

"Have you seen the rings on his belt?"

She smiled. "I can always hear him coming, like little bells!"

"Those are trophies from the men he's killed."

She was shocked. "You're joking!"

"Forty of them. If you want to understand Galba, look at his waist."

The original Celtic tapestry of meandering pathways and undulating fields had been drawn by a culture with no need for highways or towns, its patchwork a dazzling green. Pastures and grain fields were interspersed with small orchards, vegetable gardens, and wooded coppices of alder and birch. Larger woodlots filled hollows and crowned hills. At the junction of fieldstone walls were Celtic farmsteads, a cluster of oval or rectangular stone corrals enclosing two or three round houses with peaked thatch roofs. Here lived patriarch and matron, children and grandchildren, uncles and cousins, maids and midwives, all coexisting with pigs, goats, a milk cow, dogs, chickens, geese, and rodents in a trampled world of straw, manure, and planted flowers. The grays and greens of their world were punctuated by bright banners at the doors and hoisted weavings on the rooftops, adding blossom to the breeze. Sometimes the Britons themselves donned rainbow colors like Roman entertainers, as if to combat their country's gloom. From a distance they reminded Valeria of butterflies flitting on a velvet meadow, the reds, blues, and yellows quickening her heart.

These free farmers occupied just part of the countryside, however. Debt, sickness, conquest, or opportunism had put other Britons under the thrall of larger landowners, producing plantations of up to a hundred slaves and tenant farmers that were governed by a Roman villa. The result was an archipelago of Italian order in a sea of Celtic primitivism, or so Clodius saw the pattern.

"What amazes me is that the advantages of Roman life haven't been more widely copied," he opined as they rode along. "It's one thing to know no better. Quite another to live next to a superior way of life and fail to improve yourself."

He might as well have been talking to his horse, for all the attention the other soldiers paid him, but Valeria was bored. "Improve how, dear Clodius? By losing your farm to a Roman estate?"

"By adopting modern comforts. A leakproof tile roof. Heat. Glass windows."

"And a barracks of troublesome slaves. Steep debt. Ceaseless taxes. Long days and worried nights."

"You're no doubt describing our next host, Valeria, and yet you'll enjoy his comforts."

"I will, but I'll not pass judgment on his Briton neighbors until I've met some of them, and learned their lives, and understood their contentment."

He snorted. "What you'll meet are mud and fleas."

"Better to scratch than have a closed mind."

He laughed. "You're a rare woman to have such wit!"

"And you're a rare man to listen to it," she gave him, which seemed to please the youth. At least he paid her attention. The other men kept careful distance, giving deference but never presuming familiarity. She was to be protected but not approached.

Clodius was isolated as well. The young tribune had been pegged by the soldiers as an aristocrat posted for seasoning, and thus an officer who'd yet to prove himself. The highborn Roman thought them crude, and they thought him priggish. So the aristocrat found himself befriending the dangerously disreputable Cassius.

The gladiator refused to be admired. "Don't flatter me, tribune. I entertained the mob, and they despised me for it. There's no glory in the arena, just blood, sand, and, if you're lucky like me, another form of slavery."

"Still," Clodius insisted, "you're an expert at fighting. What advice can you give?"

Cassius grunted. "Pain and fear are allies if you enlist them on your side. Strike first, without mercy, and you strike at the other man's will."

"Doesn't fairness demand that I give an opponent time to ready himself?"

"The graveyards are full of fair men."

As the party clipped north, the young woman counted the mile-posts in boredom and studied the countryside with genuine curiosity. Rome did not just govern, it transformed, the power of its ideas enforced not just with the sword but with engineering, architecture, and agronomy. As traditional as Celtic homesteads remained, there were also rectangular and ordered farms, trim Roman towns of white stucco and red tile roofs, walled army garrisons with a gate precisely positioned in each of the four directions, counting houses, signal towers, post stations, pottery factories, stone quarries, and iron forges. Smoke from Roman industry rose into a scrubbed blue sky, and horizontal waterwheels turned tirelessly in the spring freshets. This was the world her future husband had come to defend.

It was late afternoon of the third day when they gratefully turned from the main road to enjoy the hospitality of Quintus Maxus. At last, the comforts of a proper villa! They passed through a break in a dike and proceeded down a poplar-lined lane through a series of orderly fenced enclosures, each field, orchard, and granary a testament to their host's accumulated wealth and epicurean taste.

A stucco wall surrounded the villa proper, and when its gate swung wide, the garden drew a sigh of recognition from Valeria. Here were the familiar enclosing wings of a U-shaped house with garden and courtyard pool, roses and lilies, herbs and hedges, statues and stone benches. Under a shaded colonnade waited a somewhat portly Quintus, his head already reddened by the spring sun. Next to him was a regal and kindly looking woman who must be Calpurnia, Quintus's wife. "Come, shed your dust!" Quintus called jovially. "Fill your stomachs! Our home is yours, weary travelers!" The soldiers would have good beds this night, and all would use Quintus's baths, the women taking their turn after the men.

"It's Rome, even here at the edge of the empire," Valeria whispered to Savia.

"If the world is Roman, Rome is the world," came the proverbial reply.

"They have the taste of Italians!"

"Or at least their money."

The supper began at dusk. Quintus and his neighbor Glidas, a transplanted Gaul with dealings in both provinces, invited Clodius and Galba to join them on the dining couches. The matron Calpurnia and Valeria sat upright in chairs to one side as custom dictated, Calpurnia's sharp eye directing her slaves and the women entering and retreating from male conversation as was proper. The two ladies had become instant friends, Calpurnia eagerly dissecting the intricate braidwork of Valeria's hair because it mimicked the latest style of the empress, Valeria plying her hostess with countless questions about maintaining a household in Britannia. What foods did the province excel at? How best to keep warm through the seasons? How easy was it to import luxuries? What was the proper relationship between Roman master and Briton native? Did babes sicken unnaturally in the damp? How did highborn women keep in touch?

Oil lamps gave light and warmth to their gathering, and ironmullioned glass shut out the evening's chill. The floor, hollow underneath and heated by a stoked hypocaust fire, had mosaics the equal of Italy's. There were rich tapestries, Italian marbles, and the dining wall bore a splendid fresco of Roman ships plying the Hibernian Sea. Valeria could almost imagine herself enjoying a banquet at Capua, but the splendor also unexpectedly made her homesick. How big the world was!

They began with an appetizer of eggs, imported olives, oysters, early greens, and wintered apples. Quintus raised his wine cup. "An opinion on this vintage, please, my new friends! I seek sophisticated judgment!"

"Most satisfying," replied Clodius generously after sampling, as determined to be polite in upper-class surroundings as he was dismissive in lower. "As good as any in Italy."

Quintus beamed. "Would my lady agree?"