Island of Ghosts (6 page)

There was still a long time before the dinner. I turned my attention to the room. It seemed very large to me—I had never actually slept in a house before. The walls had been covered with painted plaster, but at least the floor wasn’t stone, and had a carpet: it didn’t feel as much like a tomb as a room on the ground floor would have. I took the mattress off the bed and put it next to the window, draped a curtain to fill in some of the cavernous space, and hoped that it would feel enough like a wagon that I’d get some rest. Then I sat down on the mattress and put my head on my knees. I imagined what my men would do if they were told that they were to be commanded by a Roman. I imagined what the Romans would do to them afterward. I prayed to Marha, the Holy One, the god whom we worship above all other divinities, to open the ears of the Roman legate to my words and make him change his plans. The steward knocked at the door at the appointed time, and I limped apprehensively downstairs.

Aurelia Bodica reclined on the middle couch with her husband, the legate Priscus, snaring the lamplight in the web of her hair. Priscus was considerably older than her, a thickset man in his late forties, very dark. (I later found out that his full name was Tiberius Claudius Decianus Murena Aufidius Julius Priscus. Important Romans collect names as Sarmatians collect scalps.) No one got up to greet me. Priscus and the two tribunes I had not met before looked at me as the procurator Natalis had, as though I were a dangerous animal; the wife of one of the tribunes, who sat with her husband, flinched when I came in and seemed afraid to look at me at all. Comittus gave me a smile of extreme embarrassment and looked nervously away.

“So you’re Ariantes,” the legate said in a harsh voice, looking me up and down.

“Greetings, Lord Julius Priscus,” I returned, now feeling quite dizzy with anxiety. “Greetings to you all.”

He grunted, and nodded for the steward to begin serving the wine. The others were all reclining on their couches, the legate and his wife in the top place, the married tribune and his wife on the right, and the two others on the left. I did not know where to sit, so I remained standing. I sipped my wine when it was handed to me, wondering what they had heard to make them so disapproving. Then I noticed a letter lying on the table in front of the legate, and guessed that Facilis had sent it, and that it had been read aloud just before I came in.

“Is it true,” growled Priscus, “that you’ve been telling Lucius Comittus that he should call himself a liaison officer to your troops, instead of a prefect?”

“Yes,” I agreed. I repeated my explanation of why. Comittus gave me another nervous smile, then plucked up his courage and moved over on his couch, allowing me to sit down. I was glad to sit. My leg was aching.

“And you’re threatening us with trouble if we don’t go along with this?” demanded Priscus when I’d finished. “You told Lucius that your friend Arsacus would kill him if he called himself commander?”

“No, my lord,” I replied. “I am not threatening, but warning you of trouble. I should not have spoken as I did about Arshak; I cannot say for certain what he would or would not do—but I know our men would rebel. They are angry and afraid anyway. To them the ocean is the end of the world: I am here because they doubted there was anything beyond it, and were afraid of a Roman plot to drown them. A foreign commander could hardly escape offending them. I do not want problems any more than you do. It is my own people who would suffer most.”

“We’ve been hearing about your own people,” said Priscus.

“My lord,” I said, “if Flavius Facilis has written to you, I would ask you to remember that his son was killed in the war this last summer, and he is tormented with grief. His judgment of us is not altogether reasonable.”

The shot went home. I could see them all realizing that Facilis had not written as a senior centurion handing over a charge, but as a man driven by passions like the rest of us, and that I’d known he hated us. They all relaxed a little.

“So it’s not true,” said Priscus, “that this fellow Arshak has a coat stitched with Roman scalps?”

I was silent a moment. “It is true,” I admitted.

“And that he, and your other colleague Gatalas, made themselves bow cases from the skin of Romans they killed in battle?”

“That is true, as well.”

“And that you yourself,” Priscus demanded, glaring at me, “once killed a Roman centurion who tried to stop you when you were attacking Roman settlements in the province of Lower Pannonia—killed him with a rope and a dagger, cut off his head, and made his skull into a drinking cup, which you have to this day?”

“I do not have it to this day,” I replied. “The man’s family came to me at Aquincum and I gave it to them for burial.”

“But the rest of the story is true?”

“Yes.”

“I do not see how you can think yourself fit to be a Roman officer. Jupiter! You’re not fit to live!”

“My lord,” I said tightly, “I have not observed that the Romans at war behave with decency and moderation. Perhaps you do not collect scalps, but you murder indiscriminately to injure your enemies, killing even young children. And I have heard Roman soldiers complaining at Sarmatian women, calling them vicious bitches because they took up arms to defend their babies, and had to be killed before they could be raped.” I had to stop for a moment. A shadow of the helpless rage I’d felt when I’d heard the complaint choked me. I managed to continue more calmly, “My lord, you yourself must have decorated men for their bravery in doing things in war which, if they had been done under other circumstances, you would have punished with death. What is the point of scratching old wounds? From my people’s point of view, we are dead, I and all my fellows. They have held funerals for us. Those who had wives now have widows, who are free to remarry as they please, and our property is divided among our heirs. What I or anyone else may have done in the past concerns no one now.”

“On the contrary, Ariantes, it concerns me very much. How can I hand fifteen hundred Sarmatians their weapons, give command of them to men who drink from Roman skulls, and turn them loose in a Roman province?”

“My lord, we have sworn oaths to the emperor. We cannot go home. I understand that Britain contains three legions and more auxiliaries than I could count, more than enough to destroy us. We must become Roman auxiliaries, or die. Do you mean to help us become auxiliaries, or to kill us?” I hesitated, then went on, deliberately, “The emperor was pleased to get us. Even when he thought of killing us all, he wanted cavalry like ours. I saw him at Aquincum when we rode in and surrendered. He was like a boy with a new horse. He would not be pleased with you, my lord, if you provoked trouble with us.”

Priscus glared at me wordlessly, his jaw set and his nostrils white with anger.

“Why did you use a rope and a dagger?” asked Aurelia Bodica, as though it were the obvious question. When I looked at her she gave me that same sweet, unsettling smile. “When you killed that centurion, I mean.”

“I wished to match his own daring,” I answered, after a silence. She looked at me quizzically; the others stared with incomprehension and disgust, and I went on, reluctantly, “I had a hundred armored horsemen and three hundred mounted archers, and we had crossed the Danube to raid. We were driving off the flocks and the cattle from a settlement when a centurion came up with just one century and ten legionary dispatch riders, ninety men in all. I do not know whether he had thought we were fewer, or whether he had expected reinforcements to join him. My armored troops alone could have dealt with twice his numbers easily. But he shouted at us to return the beasts to their owners and leave Roman land at once, and I was astonished at his courage. I thought I would have no glory from the contest unless I could match such bravery. So I offered to fight him man to man, and made my men swear that if he killed me, they would not harm him, but leave, as he’d ordered. Then I got off my horse, put my weapons and armor aside, and came to fight him with a lasso and a dagger. He had his armor, javelin, and sword; he told me I was mad, and I told him he had no right to say so, and we both laughed. I spared his men when I’d killed him. I would not have taken his head as a trophy if I had not admired him.”

I remembered riding back with the centurion’s head hanging from my saddle, absolutely drunk with glory, and my men laughing and shouting and singing. What an exploit! Worthy of songs, worthy of a hero! I had never been so proud of anything in my life. When I came home, to my own wagon, my men shouted out the story to my wife, Tirgatao, waving the skull—now scalped and cut in half and scraped clean to prepare it for use as a cup. Tirgatao took it and stared at it in amazement, then put it down and slapped me so hard I nearly fell over. Then she grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “Do you want to make me a widow?” she asked. “Don’t you want to live to see your son?”—she was seven months pregnant at the time. “I want my son to be proud of his father,” I told her, putting my arms around her. “Proud!” she shouted, putting hers around me and kissing me. “You lunatic! Oh, my dragon, my eagle, my golden hero! Don’t you ever do that again!” She was crying with pride and anger, and under both of them was love. And now I was one of the dead, and the story I had gloried in was told by the Romans to disgrace me.

Though they thought the details less disgraceful than they’d expected. They’d obviously taken Facilis’ reference to rope and a dagger as some kind of Sarmatian torture, and now they were looking at me with puzzlement, rather than disgust.

“You don’t want your people to cause us trouble,” said Bodica. It wasn’t a question. The blue eyes studied me as they had before, dispassionately, assessingly.

“I do not want my men to get into trouble,” I agreed. “I want them to live. Enough have died this summer already.”

“Why were you buying them . . . apples?” Again the smile, sweet and unsettling. “It was apples you were buying in the market, wasn’t it, Lord Ariantes?”

That she asked that question then, after making sure I didn’t want trouble, made me think that she’d already guessed why I wanted the apples. I looked at Priscus: he was puzzled and irritated. He had not guessed. “When I go back,” I said slowly, wondering why she was trying to help me, “if I tell them that there is no trick, and that there really is an island of Britain here, they will believe me, but they will still be afraid. If I give them something from the island—if I give them apples, which they can see, and smell, and taste, and eat, and feed to their horses—then they will be confident. It will be much easier for them then.”

Bodica looked at her husband. “Tiberius,” she said softly, “he’d manage them much better than Lucius or Gaius or Marcus would.”

“I suppose so,” Priscus grunted, releasing whatever he’d intended to do with me, like a dog backing reluctantly away from a bone. “Very well, we won’t tinker with the command of the Sarmatian troops. We won’t make them proper auxiliary
alae
yet: they can be
numeri
, under their own native officers. You and your two friends, Ariantes, can command, and you three tribunes can call yourselves liaison officers and make sure the barbarians follow orders. We can work out the arrangements now.” He clapped his hands for the slaves to bring in the first course. “If there’s trouble, though,” he said, glaring at me over the boiled eggs in garlic, “and if you’re responsible, I’ll have you flogged to death. Now I’ll tell you exactly what’s required of you.”

When the wretched party ended and they stopped lecturing and interrogating and allowed me to crawl off to the bedroom, I stood for a minute looking out the window. My head was aching with anxieties and I was dizzy with the newness of it all. I remembered, with a stab of terror, how Natalis had wanted to deal with us. Find a reasonable Sarmatian commander, use him to divide and rule. Other Sarmatians had been reasonable and had ended up betraying their own kind. Was that what Aurelia Bodica wanted? And I realized what it was that I found so unsettling in her: that assessing stare, like a craftsman looking for a tool, and the craftsman’s smile at finding one. I was afraid—afraid of the island, of the Roman army, of the honor and passions of my own people, of the legate, his wife, and myself. But I felt, strangely, more awake than I had for a long time. I could see only the courtyard below, barred with lamplight, and hear only the sounds of the slaves cleaning the dining room and the other guests going to bed. But I could smell the sea. Gatalas’ fears had been all wrong: I was not going to come back a ghost. By passing the salt water, I was forced back into the world, painfully born into another life.

The next afternoon found me back in Bononia.

III

T
HE  APPLES   HELPED.
  I tossed them out as soon as the bireme docked in Bononia, the men passed them from hand to hand, examining them and tasting them, and when I rode back into the center of our camp and made a speech about Britain, they were ready to be convinced. Nonetheless, it was no easy job to tear ourselves loose from the land and set sail on the unfathomable water. I asked the procurator Natalis to allow us a day for preparation and prayer before embarking.

“Of course, Lord Ariantes,” he said, smiling benevolently. “Roman soldiers often want to purify themselves before a voyage, too. I’ve even seen Italians afraid to cross the ocean, and we often have trouble with the Pannonians and the easterners. Your people aren’t the only ones who think the world ends at the Channel. Do you need any cattle for the sacrifice?”

“We use horses,” I told him, and he offered to provide some.

Facilis apparently argued with him after I left, telling him that a delay would only give us more opportunity to mutiny, but, fortunately, Natalis didn’t listen to him. He was eager to help us. In Dubris I’d learned that he usually resided on the British side of the Channel, and had only based himself in Bononia to supervise us. He saw to it that we had proper food, access to water for washing and enough fuel, and medicines for sick men and sore-footed horses—all the things we’d missed on the journey. I began to realize how much we had endured before because Facilis was the only one responsible for us. Of course, perhaps a part of it was that I was willing to go and ask for what we needed, instead of drifting blindly in the nightmare—or enduring proudly and dreaming of revenge, like Arshak and Gatalas.