The Sacrifice Stone (6 page)

She whimpered, instantly putting her hand to her mouth to suppress the sound. For God’s sake, stop being such a fool! It’s nothing sinister, probably just some innocent visitor who came in via another entrance, and —

There isn’t another entrance. And if he came in through the one down there, he’d have had to walk past me.

And he didn’t.

Go on? Go back?

She couldn’t decide — the man seemed to be both ahead and behind, tantalizingly keeping himself just too distant for her to get a fix on him, to bring him into the safe realms of the normal, the everyday ...

‘Damn you,’ she muttered, angry suddenly, ‘you’re not going to spook
me
!’

Walking fast, speeding up until she was all but running, she followed him.
Chased
him. On round the never-ending corner, on, on —

He was standing in the middle of the gallery right in front of her. Turned towards her, hands by his sides, relaxed as if he had nothing better to do than wait for her.

She skidded to a halt.

‘You — What do you want?’

She had intended to sound aggressive, but her words came out as a dry croak. She tried again.

‘You can’t ...’

He took a half-pace towards her, raising one hand slightly — in greeting? threatening her? — and she recoiled. His dark shape loomed before her, broader than he’d looked at a distance. He took another step. Then, for the small movement had brought him out of the deep shadow and into the failing daylight, she gasped.

And, spinning away from him, started running as hard as she could towards the entry booth and the blessed company of Joe and Adam.

For the man was dressed in a toga.

INTERLUDE

ARLES

AD 175

6

My name is Sergius Cornelius Aurelius, son of Marcus, of the tribe of Aniensis. I was born in the town of Aesis, on the east side of Italia, in the tenth year of the reign of the Emperor Hadrian.

My father came from a long line of worthy administrators — his elder brother, according to his own account, managed all by himself to keep cereal export from Gallia Narbonensis running smoothly. However, such a life was not to my father’s taste: he enlisted in the legions. After a career which was the usual army mixture of rare moments of dangerous excitement amid months of hard work and boredom, he retired and came home to Italia where he married my mother and begat me.

My father came out of the army with the rank of senior centurion. While it’s true that getting on in the legions depends to an extent on having friends in high places prepared to put in a good word for you, no man ever made
primus
pilus
unless he deserved it. My mother loved being married to an important man; in the small town where we lived, a retired officer of such seniority was a rarity. My father used to joke that she wouldn’t have given him a second glance if he’d been less than a centurion, and everyone except him knew quite well it was no joke.

There was no question of my having been forced into an army career: from the time I was old enough to wave a toy sword, it was the only thing I wanted to do. My father’s brother came to visit us when I was fifteen, and he spent one entire evening listing the delights of life as a senior administrator in Arelate.

‘We always need youngsters to train up,’ he said, picking a fig seed from between his front teeth. He glanced at me. ‘You could come and be my assistant, in a year or so. Your old uncle Titus would see you right, my boy.’ Phat! He spat the seed on to the floor.

I looked at my father to see if he was going to reply or wanted me to speak for myself. He smiled and nodded.

‘Thank you for your kind offer,’ I said politely. ‘But I’m going to join the army.’

He didn’t seem to have heard. We were treated to a further lecture on how wonderful it was to be him, until my little sister came in with a fresh jug of wine and diverted his attention.

As far as I can recall, that was the only time anyone suggested I should consider any other career.

I went into the Sixth, or Legio VI Victrix, to give the official title. It had been my father’s legion, but don’t go thinking that made life easy for me. Quite the opposite: the son of a senior centurion who turns up as a raw recruit in his father’s old legion has to go through a special sort of hell. Even now, aspects of what I experienced still make me wince. Suffice to say that I endured, and probably emerged the stronger. As they say, what doesn’t break me makes me.

Legionary recruits sign on for twenty-five years, which I can tell you is an eternity when you’re eighteen. To take our minds off the awful thought of the years stretching ahead, they kept us in a permanent state of exhaustion throughout our basic training. Four months of route marches, running and cross-country exercises with a sixty-pound pack on your back certainly makes you realize how unfit you are. And when they’d finished yelling at us to hurry up, we were letting the others down by being such sluggards, they started on weapons drill and taught us the hand-to-hand fighting that remains the legions’ most effective tactic. They yelled at us over that, too. And they taught us to swim. And how to march six abreast without anyone getting out of step. For the first few weeks with the unit, I can’t even remember crawling into my bed at night.

The Sixth was based in Britannia, in a fort to the north of that legendary land at a place called Eboracum. Not that I spent much time there — during my advanced training I’d learned camp construction, and I was sent up to work on renovating Hadrian’s Wall.

Have you ever been to Britannia? The south is quite pleasant — you get some sunshine, although nothing to compare with the Mediterranean — but the north is different. It rains. Sometimes it rains hard, great chill drops that sweep along on the wind and find every niche in your garments. And sometimes it’s a soft rain, more like a fine mist, so gentle that at first you hardly notice it. Then, three hours later, you wonder why your cloak feels so heavy and you realize it’s totally sodden with water. Mind you, a session in the bathhouse is all the more welcome when you’re soaked to the skin, cold and thoroughly miserable — the British may mock us for turning our forts into little Romes, as they say, but we make sure we don’t miss
all
our home comforts when we’re far away.

By the time I was up on the wall, any sense that we were pushing the frontiers of the Empire back into wild, unknown territory had all but gone. With one exception — and what an exception it was — my years up there were spent on the reconstruction work going on in the fort at Coriosopitum, which lies a few miles south of the wall. When Hadrian’s great project first got under way, they’d moved the army up from the old forts such as Coriosopitum into new accommodation right on the wall — you can see the sense of that — but later, when they got going on the Antonine Wall, suddenly Coriosopitum was right on the great route north, so we had to restore it. Believe me, sometimes it didn’t feel so much like restoring it as starting all over again.

My father had been on the wall before me. It was his last posting; he and the Sixth went fresh to Britannia with the Emperor himself, and didn’t my old father love to remind you. When I was little I’d badger him for tales of fighting, of days on the march and nights under the stars, but he’d just go on and on about how wonderful Hadrian had been, how he’d had this wide imaginative plan and brought it off, how nothing daunted him, how he’d improvise and surmount every crisis, etc., etc. Then he’d get going on the personal gossip — gods, he was worse than my mother and her friends when they got their heads together and started running down the neighbours. Father would repeat the old tales about Hadrian’s love for his Greek boy Antinous, and the tears would appear in his own eyes when he recalled the Emperor’s vast grief when the youth drowned in the river Nilus. Some grief it was, too; only an emperor has the wherewithal to build a city in memory of his beloved, and that’s what Hadrian did. There would be no point in trying to distract Father at this stage in his monologue: I’d resign myself and listen patiently while he described how the poor old Emperor’s life degenerated into illness and various unspecified diseases, and he’d drag up the soldiers’ speculation that Hadrian had grown his beard not to cover his scars but to conceal the ravages of sickness that were eating into his face.

So there I was twenty-three years later on the wall my father had helped to build — well, I don’t suppose he ever got his hands dirty, being rather too senior for that by then — and, instead of being able to draw on stirring tales of Father’s exploits, I’d stand up there in that dramatic landscape and picture a grieving old man scratching at his beard. Such is life — I suppose it was quite funny, really.

My father ended his military career up on the wall, I began mine. A man is, I suppose, most susceptible to impressions in his late teens and early twenties, which is perhaps why the things that happened to me there remain so vivid in my mind. I don’t know, though — they’d surely have been indelible whenever they happened. I learned to stand up for myself, to labour all day without complaint, to do my appointed tasks with such thoroughness that I could take a real pride in them. And all of this in a countryside so different from any I’d known before, one so wild, so desolately beautiful that, once I’d stopped moaning about the rain and the cold, I grew to love it as much as the small sun-bathed fields and vineyards of childhood.

I made my first true friends, and I met my first love. I was initiated into a new religion — Mithras the Unconquered was universally beloved throughout the army, and, once he had accepted my allegiance, I began to see why. I made my one bitter enemy — the only one I know about, anyway — and understood what it is to be hated and cursed. Or I thought I did: as it turned out, I hadn’t experienced the half of it. Then.

But enough of that. I was speaking of my friends and my first love, and in fact the one led to the other — in the greater freedom earned by advancing in my career, I started going out with my friends to the small settlement that had grown up around the fort, and we would spend our nights of leave in the ways you’d expect of soldiers far from home and starved of female company. Yes, of course I visited the whores — most of us did. If you were lucky, you could get a girl who made you laugh as well as satisfying your lust. If you were really lucky, you’d get one who fleetingly made you think she was enjoying it as much as you were.

But I didn’t meet Carmandua in a brothel; I’m quite sure her father and her brothers would have cut her throat if they’d even found her lurking in the street outside. Not that she ever would, she had better things to do with her time, as she used to say. I met her when I was in my mid twenties, when promotion had shot me up to the dizzy heights of a senior post on the commander’s staff and I no longer went out carousing on my rare leaves. She came from an important local family, and every last one of them let me know from the start that I was barely good enough for her. Gods, they were a touchy lot, those Brigantes, we needed all the diplomatic skills drilled into us to cope with them.

Roman legionaries weren’t allowed to marry until discharge, but since that was still thirteen years off when Carmandua decided she wanted to be a bride, we went through the form of ceremony used by her own people. I found that I was just as firmly married as if the Emperor Antoninus Pius himself had ordained it.

It was a year or so after we were married that I had my trouble. Perhaps that was why the marriage failed, I don’t know. But it seems likely; it was difficult enough to be the sort of husband she obviously wanted with my legionary duties to perform — and perform well at that, I wasn’t finished with promotion yet — without that other business. It gave me a guilty conscience, I suppose; although my logical mind accepted I’d done the right thing, a more emotional, susceptible part of me kept seeing that man die because I’d told the truth.

I think Carmandua found me distracted, and I imagine I appeared unloving. If I did, it was unintentional. I thought I did love her, although I’m not sure now that I knew the meaning of love then.

Anyway, lack of love or not, we had a son. He was the sort of boy I’d have ordered, if that were possible: gutsy, funny, sunny-natured yet with a stubborn, independent streak so broad that he and I came often to blows during his turbulent childhood. We called him Marcus, after my father — the old man would have appreciated his grandson. Carmandua and Marcus lived in a house in the settlement — a pretty decent house, too, I saw to that — and I spent what little time with them I could.

Marcus was twelve when I finally came out of the Legion. By then, he was the only good thing left in my marriage, and, although I went through the official Roman ceremony that made Carmandua my wife in the Empire’s eyes, it was really only for Marcus’s sake. She and I were at loggerheads as to what we should do next: I wanted to take my family back to Italia, where my money grant on quitting the army would enable me to build up my father’s farm into something even more prosperous. Carmandua, predictably, said she had been a wife and a mother for enough years in her own homeland to have got used to it and she didn’t want to go anywhere else.

It was stalemate. She didn’t want to leave, I couldn’t bear to stay on. It was partly my pride, I admit it — how would you feel if you had to go on living in a place where you’d been a senior officer, a man of importance, when now you’d been reduced to the status of just another citizen? Well, maybe you’re more tolerant than I am, but I had to go.

To her credit, Carmandua agreed to give Italia a try. It was a brave decision, to travel right across the Empire when to date she’d been no further than a score of miles from home, and I did my best to make the journey as smooth and as comfortable as I could. Still, she hated the sea trip — if it’s true that both Caesar’s and Claudius’s troops baulked at crossing the water from Gaul to Britannia, my poor wife was equally terrified at leaving her homeland and sailing into the unknown. Not so my son: his excitement conquered his seasickness, and he’d have sailed the ship himself if they’d let him.

I don’t want to dwell on our time in Italia. I’ll just say that, although the farm reached new heights within the first year and I could have been as happy there as it’s possible for a man to be, Carmandua didn’t settle. Never mind why — it’s too complicated anyway, and I, a mere man, can’t hope to understand how friction with her mother-in-law, lack of a common language with the local people and constant, unmitigating homesickness can make a woman so miserable. That’s what Carmandua said, anyway, although I think I did understand. Even though I didn’t love her, I felt very sorry for her.

I don’t know what we’d have done, for in the event no decision had to be taken. One bright day, when Marcus and I had gone walking in the hills, he climbed one tree too many — ‘I’m stuck, Dad!’, he shouted from the top of its slender trunk, laughing at his predicament.

‘Idiot! And just what would you have done if your father were not here to help, hmm?’ I replied, heaving myself up from lazing in the sun to get him down.

He made some daft joke about landing in trouble again for more ripped clothes, and we were still laughing when he missed his footing and fell. He broke his neck: he was dead before I got to him.

Carmandua went back to Britannia. For the first awful weeks our grief united us, but then its effect changed and it drove us apart. Bless her, she never blamed me — she knew Marcus as well as I did, perhaps better, and she was well aware of his adventurous nature that had never once paid any attention to ‘Be careful!’ I took her home to her own people, then I left; Britannia was too full of memories.