Island of Ghosts (15 page)

“Your husband’s anger does not concern
me
, anyway,” Arshak told her. “I am pleased to escort such a noble and beautiful lady, and I wish to see the city myself. Ariantes and Gatalas will remain here to look after the men, yes?”

“No,” said Gatalas, “I will come too. I will leave Parspanakos” (the captain of his bodyguard) “in charge of the dragon, and I will take ten men.”

I hesitated. I did not want to go into Londinium: I’d never liked cities, I didn’t want to leave my followers unsupervised, and I’d resolved to avoid Aurelia Bodica. On the other hand, she thought I was afraid. Besides, if I didn’t go and the other princes did, their troops would have yet another thing to hurl in the faces of my men—particularly after Aurelia Bodica’s comment. “I will come as well, then,” I said. “I do not wish to fail in the respect due to a legate’s lady.”

“Of course,” she said, tossing her head. “So I shall ride into Londinium with three princes of the Sarmatians to escort me, one of them the nephew of a king! There are not many women can boast of that!”

So we all accompanied the legate’s lady to Londinium, each of us with ten men from our bodyguard. Aurelia Bodica wanted to visit a temple and she wanted to go shopping. She had the length of silk Arshak had given her husband, and she wanted some of it unraveled and rewoven with linen thread, so that it would go further: Londinium, apparently, was the best place in Britain to have this done. She chatted pleasantly as we approached the city, about this, about the shops and the temples—but as we came up to the bridge that crosses the Tamesis River into the city, the talk became more serious.

“Londinium,” she said, stopping her chariot just before the long wooden span and gesturing at the city beyond—the quays with the ships drawn up to them, the warehouses, the house roofs huddled behind. Across the river and to our left was a larger building with an elaborate facade. “That’s the governor’s palace,” Bodica said, pointing to it. “Tiberius will be there now.”She shook the reins and started the chariot forward again. “But you can’t see the bridge from the palace. All the windows look inward. Very Roman, I think, to study your own imported magnificence rather than the circumstances of the province around you. Look there!”

She pointed along our bank of the river, to our left. There was a cross fixed in the mud by the waterside, with a tattered mass of flesh and bone sagging from it. A few birds fluttered about it, pecking.

“They often leave the bodies of criminals there,” Bodica told us. “As a warning. You can’t see them from the governor’s palace, either. When my ancestress, the queen of the Iceni, sacked Londinium, she hung up the bodies of . . . Roman nobles . . . along the same bank. Hundreds of bodies.”

Arshak’s face sharpened. “She sacked the Roman capital, this queen? She had many followers?”

“Oh, very many! In those days the whole island longed to throw off the Roman yoke and live free under its own kings and queens. We were a race of noble warriors then, like your own people.” As we rode into Londinium she recounted the story of Queen Boudica of the Iceni: how an unjust Roman official had ordered her to be flogged and her daughters raped; how she’d raised the South against the Romans and sacked the two greatest cities; how finally she had been defeated in a fierce battle; how she’d taken poison rather than grace a Roman triumph. It was a tale of courage and desperate heroism, and I was moved by it despite myself.

“That was a long time ago,” Bodica finished quietly. “More than a century now. The British horse has been broken to the yoke now, and pulls the cart quietly—except in the North, where it still frets a little. I expect that, in time, your own people will be yoked beside it.”

We all stiffened at that. “Our people have never been conquered!” Arshak said fiercely.

“But you’re here,”she pointed out—sadly.

“We are the price our people paid for a truce. My uncle is still king of the Sarmatians. The emperor hates him, but the emperor had to make terms with him nonetheless. Our nation is noble, not one of slaves.”

Bodica bowed her golden head. “At times,” she whispered, “I wish my own people could say the same.”

Her voice was soft and sad—but there was a look in her eyes that contradicted that softness. It was like that of a wrestler who’s found his opponent’s weakness. Arshak noticed nothing: he was plainly enjoying himself. As we rode off the bridge into the city, the citizens did indeed run out into the street to stare at us, and he preened himself in their gaze. Bodica began to ask him about his own battles against the Romans, and soon the talk was of struggles and scalping. Gatalas was less happy, but largely because he had fewer scalps to boast of. I was not happy at all. My old distrust was back, stronger than ever, and I wanted only to get away.

“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.

W
H E N   B O D I C A   H A D 
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.

“They think she is a noble and beautiful lady, of royal blood, and they are pleased to find a commander’s wife suited to their own dignity. They are flattered at her attention.”

“Arrogant bastards! Them and their damned ancestors!”

I shook my head. “You should not say that to me, Flavius Facilis. It will . . .”

He joined me on the end of the phrase. “. . . only make trouble! Very well, very well, you’re an aristocratic bastard yourself, and I’ll keep my plebeian mouth shut about your ancestors. At least you’ve got more sense than the rest of them.”

“What does the legate think?” I asked. That was the real question.

“Lord Julius Priscus is forty-two and a widower. He married the lady last year. He thinks she is wonderfully beautiful and the cleverest woman he’s ever met, and he thinks she’s after your lot to help him manage you. I don’t know. Perhaps she is. They were all shaken to hear the truth about Sarmatians, and they still don’t really believe it.” He stared at me for another moment, then said, “I’d have expected you to jump at what she’s offering, whatever it is. You’re no friend of Rome, and maybe here’s your chance to play ‘divide and rule’ for yourself.”

“I have sworn oaths, Flavius Facilis. And . . .”

And, and. And I didn’t like the woman. I couldn’t explain why, even to myself. I’d known her only a few days. But I did not like that assessing gaze and the probing questions, and liked them even less coupled with the sweet smiles and girlish enthusiasm, the delicate touch of her hand against my face. To my people, lying is worse than murder, and too much of what she did had the sweetly foul scent of deceit. It was unfair, perhaps, to regard her with so much suspicion. I had dug for information myself, of late, and taken advantage where I could, of Comittus, of Eukairios, of Natalis to some extent. But still, I wanted to keep myself and my people away from her.