Arthur Britannicus (7 page)

Finally, a summons came and his indecision was ended.  The Greek physician brought the news, hurrying into Carausius’ room off the central courtyard. “A courier, a courier from Rome, for you,” he gasped excitedly. The man, whose dusty face was streaked with sweat runnels, was also striped with his mount’s dried spume and stank of leather and horse urine. The small red leather cylinder he handed to the Briton was tied and wax-sealed.  Carausius had heard in the barracks of such missives in such containers. It was a message from the emperor himself. He unfastened the binding, extracted the single sheet inside and read it quickly. It contained a single, terse command. Carausius was ordered to Rome. The new soldier-emperor Carus Persicus wanted him there, no reason given. 

VIII. Rome

Carausius knew of Marcus Aurelius Carus Augustus, called Persicus. He was no hanger and flogger, just a pig-headed boar of a man who didn’t put up with Rome’s nancified politicians and their ways. The troops liked the no-nonsense soldier and forgave him his violent temper, and in return, he paid attention to the footsloggers and their pay and conditions. They remembered how he’d drowned a military cook in a cauldron of his own foul stew after he found that the man had been selling fresh supplies and instead was serving condemned meat to the troops. The soldiers also spoke admiringly of Carus’ personal courage and immense strength. One much-told tale recounted how, enraged during a wrestling match when his opponent squeezed his nut sack, he’d knocked out the man’s teeth and beaten his face to pulp before kicking him unconscious.  You knew where you stood with a man like that, the soldiers agreed.

Rome hailed him, too, because he had brilliantly defeated a huge Persian army in an action that pushed them back across the Tigris for generations. Carus had destroyed the entire Persian cavalry and brought thousands of them to Rome as slaves, earning himself his ‘Persicus’ title. Now, the emperor had taken notice of a lowly tribune and summoned him to court.

The injured Briton did what he’d sworn on his army Sacramentum; he obeyed his emperor, and he went to Rome.

The city, with its 2,000 private homes and 46,000 tenement buildings packed like rookeries that overflowed its centre, was jaw-droppingly magnificent. Carausius remembered his boyhood visits to Eboracum in faraway Britannia and how he’d marvelled at the governor’s palace and the treasurer’s house there, but compared to these mighty temples, public buildings and homes, they were puny, provincial cottages. Every citizen’s home, it seemed, was a palace, and the palaces themselves were beyond belief.

With a day to wait before his audience, Carausius seized his chance to view Rome. Slaves were summoned to carry the wounded Briton in a litter, and he toured the city, awestruck and gaping at the magnificence.  Every street was paved, every public building was faced with polished limestone or marble and glinting in gold leaf. Drinking fountains stood on the street corners, statues of the great and good adorned the plazas where conjurers and acrobats, each with a small placard announcing the name of the sponsor who’d paid for his efforts - and Carausius knew enough to recognize some of the names as those of politicians eager for votes - entertained the passing throngs of busy citizens.

Nearby, on a smooth clay court, a group of men were playing a spirited game of bowls, throwing stone spheres at a small target ball, while their idling slaves sat in the shade, gossiping and watching the passing scene. A water deliveryman rumbled by with his cart full of dripping amphorae, a drover herded several pigs to market; a stone mason, dusty and muscled, strode by with his apprentice at his heels while a scribe hunched over his little table to write a passionate love letter on behalf of his client, an unlettered farmer who had a cage of songbirds at his feet, ready for sale. A baker hawked his bread, shouting that it had the best bran content in Rome and that he also had a fresh batch especially baked to be eaten with oysters. Then he called his new boast: his just-baked batch infused with fennel would give a customer the courage of a gladiator. It was a claim ignored by a poulterer who was struggling with a handcart on which he’d piled perilously high several crates of squawking chickens.

In this plaza, a fishmonger newly arrived from the great aquaria on the fifth floor of Trajan’s Market had brought live carp in a bucket to the caretaker whose sole task was to guard a sculpture of the emperor Julius.  If the statue could talk, Carausius mused to himself, it would have been appalled at the noise. The great Caesar himself had had once proposed banning chariots from the city centre because of the racket made by their iron-rimmed wheels, and though the narrow, smelly streets were well-padded thanks to the muffling qualities of horse dung, the clatter was still considerable.

In the open plaza, shaded by Julius’ statue, and across from a goldsmith’s storefront where two muscular slaves stood guard and warily watched passers-by, a barber was shaving a client. He was stroking his blade with care, and the client’s cheek bulged where the barber had put a small apple into the man’s cheek to stretch the skin smooth. Carausius had heard that the last client of the day got to eat the apple, too, but he wasn’t sure about the truth of that, or even if anybody would want to. More palatable were the offerings of a score of food vendors who hawked cooked chicken and sausages, olives, cheeses and fruit to the parade of pedestrians thronging by, and the soldier sniffed appreciatively at the tempting odours of the foodstuffs.

The throngs themselves were nothing to sniff at, thought Carausius, mentally telling himself not to gape as he eyed the spectrum of humanity. In this city of a million people, capital of the world, were to be found members of every known race. Glossy black Nubians and olive-skinned Assyrians jostled pale-haired Scandinavian mariners; narrow-eyed Huns from the Great Plains beyond Germania strode by ringletted Egyptian astrologers with their elaborately-bound beards, a bearded Syrian played his odd, transverse-stringed harp; sleek Persian traders in bright silks muttered secretively to each other. A knot of elegant, fashionable matrons with elaborately-piled hair, dyed red with beechwood ashes or gold with saffron, all of it modestly draped under the hood of a palla, chatted animatedly through rouged lips while attentive slaves held parasols to screen their mistresses’ lily complexions.

Rome’s politicians paraded themselves in togas dazzlingly whitened with chalk to stand out from the crowd’s dingier garments and here and there, slaves pushed wheeled cages as they delivered exotic animals recently arrived from Africa and India. Most, like the two Caledonian bears Carausius spotted, were destined for the bloodied sand of the arena, a few would become household adornments of the ultra-wealthy.

As usual, the street was crowded and noisome, stinking from the sewage in the drains and cacophonous with the shouts of vendors and pedestrians, the clatter of hooves and the rumble of the iron-clad chariot wheels.

Many in the crowds were purposeful scholars who hurried heedless past the glowing charcoal braziers of the food vendors. They ignored, too, the poultry and game hawkers and the tavern where men lolled over watered wine and a graffiti artist was defacing a wall with libels about his former lover. The academics were on their way to the great library, which was open from the first hour until the sixth. Carausius watched and marvelled. His eyes lit on the less purposeful in the throng, the matrons and their slaves. Those colourful, attractive Roman ladies wandered leisurely through the rows of awning-protected shops that were a part of the vast bath complex built by the tyrant Caracalla, the emperor they called the Enemy of Mankind, although people seemed to enjoy the facility he’d built.

It was a place to linger, a natatorium where as many as 1,600 bathers could enjoy the temperature-controlled pools at one time, and emerge refreshed and cleansed to browse an array of displays of all the goods of the empire. The tribune’s eyes were everywhere, taking it in. The place was a wonder, and he’d heard that some nobleman called Maximian planned an even greater and more sumptuous water palace. The man must have some fabulous wealth to go with an ego to match, he thought.

Carausius absently brushed away a swarm of the flies that plagued the city. His attention was on a Bactrian camel being led through the street until he spotted a woman walking unshaded by her attendant slaves and looked twice. Blonde, she wore a blue linen shift, and a fine wool cloak thrown back from the amber and silver brooch that clasped it at her shoulder. An alert sounded in his head and the Briton did a double-take. The brooch was similar to the one his father Aulus had worn nearly two decades before, the symbol of his nobleman’s status. Carausius’ breath caught and he urged his slaves after her.

Sucia Silvestria was a Romano-British trader’s young widow who had maintained her late husband’s lucrative links with Rome and this day was enjoying the results of her efforts. She was shopping.  Carausius had spotted her on her way to visit an Arab trader who had travelled the western half of the Silk Routes to bring exotic satins, silks, musk and spices to the marketplace of the rulers of the world.  The tribune’s hurrying litter bearers caught sight of her as she turned onto the smooth flagstoned plaza that fronted the huge complex of the baths. Carausius urged the bearers on as they pushed through the crowds, and at last he came alongside Sucia.  

On impulse, he addressed her in British, not Latin.  “Wait, please, my lady,” he said. Sucia turned, startled to hear her native tongue after so many weeks. She had recently made the long journey from Britain, braving the pirates of the Narrow Sea, descending the Loire and the Rhone rivers to the southern port of Massalia then shipping by galley to Ostia, sea gate to Rome. In all that time she had heard Latin, Greek and Gaulish, but only her personal slaves could converse in the language with which she was most comfortable.  “You are British?” she asked the thick-necked, bearded military man with the bandaged cheek, who was so incongruously sitting in a litter. “Lady,” Carausius said, struggling to stand and bow, “I am so born, but it is a long time since I was there, and my command of my own language may be clumsy.”

The pair waved their slaves aside and sat on a marble bench, out of the flow of foot traffic, content to talk comfortably.  Carausius diffidently indicated the amber and silver brooch at her shoulder. “My father had such a badge,” he said quietly. Sucia heard the longing in the burly man’s voice. She nodded and, encouraged, Carausius’ sudden loneliness and sense of loss of his homeland caused him to indulge in an unusual opening of his heart. “I miss Britain,” he said simply. “I remember it only from the days when I was a boy, but it seems every day was summer, every place was green and fresh, with fields of honey-scented clover and trees burdened with apples that were warm from the sun. It seems like a faraway dream, when I had my brothers and my mother there and I was not concerned with war and hurt and killing.”

Sucia was touched, and she wove magic for the big soldier, spinning her words into a blanket of comfort and nostalgia as she spoke of their homeland, and how it was not just a faraway island in the northern mists, but was indeed a green and pleasant place. She told her own story, of losing her husband but keeping his trading business, she detailed how she had brought four couples of prized British hunting dogs to Rome, as well as a consignment of fine wool garments, Baltic amber and a quantity of jet mined from the north eastern coastal cliffs near Carausius’ old home.  She did not mention the high-value goods she kept safely hidden: the blue crystal mined in the limestone peak country of central Britain, or the precious, prized sun stones that seemed to split the light and show sailors the way in sea fogs. These, she traded from Icelanders, just as she acquired mussel pearls from blue-tattooed natives of Britain’s lake land. The lake stones were exactly like those in the pearl-studded breast plate which Julius Caesar had brought back to votive at the temple of Venus.

Responding to Sucia’s interested
questions, Carausius outlined his military career, his wounds and now, his summons to the imperial court.  “I have no real idea what the emperor wants with me, but as he’s just back from campaigning in the same part of the world as me, I expect it’s military matters,” he confided.  Unseen by either of them, a white rat crouched in a shady corner, quietly watching, its glittering eyes fixed on Carausius. It was a portent he would have been comforted to know about the next day, when he limped hesitantly into the imperial palace.

The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Carus Augustus, called Persicus, was a career cavalryman and former commander of the Praetorian Guard who couldn’t stand bullshit. When Carausius, patched and battered, hobbled painfully into his vast reception hall, the emperor roared at his praetorians to get the man a stool at once; couldn’t they see he was a fucking hero and had half his foot missing?  “I’m a donkey walloper myself, don’t care for that marching stuff, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been in more tight places than a shepherd’s arm”, he bellowed at the new tribune cheerfully. He stepped off the dais where an artist had been painting his portrait.  He took off the cap that covered his bald head, wiped his greasy hands carelessly on his fine tunic, ridding himself of the remains of the roast chicken and truffles he’d been eating, and came halfway down the room to sit next to the wounded Briton.

“They tell me you’re called The Bear,” he said. “To you, I’m Persicus, so we are just soldiers together. Now, relax and be welcome. That fellow’s painting my grave portrait,” he said cheerfully. “I’m going with the new fashion, and getting buried, not climbing onto a pyre like the old Romans. My tomb will be right outside the gates where everyone will remember me. They won’t let even the emperor be buried inside the city walls, you know. Anyway, when I’m dead and in my very handsome stone coffin, they’ll put this picture over my face so everyone in future will know what I looked like.

“My wife’s had about five marble wigs made so they can keep her statue looking fashionable. At least, portraits are easier, though I’ve had four made already, didn’t like any of them, or the damn artists. These two-beer queers know
nothing, I don’t know why I don’t pack them all off to the Danube to be useful for once. I should put them with the army and let them learn a thing or two. Now, tell me about those Saxons and what’s happening in your sector of the frontier.”

Over the next hour, as Carausius told of his legion’s daily trials and routines, Carus pumped the tribune for details about the troops’ morale, equipment and supplies. The Briton, who always made his soldiers’ welfare a priority, complained about the quality of the food he’d been obliged to give to his men. “Sir, I wouldn’t give some of it to a hungry dog. I’m speaking of filthy green pork and rancid cooking oil that would poison you.”  Carus frowned. “We had problems with some of these provender merchants and their nasty little practices of providing stuff that should have been condemned,” he growled, “but after I had a crooked quartermaster or two and a few bent suppliers crucified, the quality suddenly improved. I’ll get a tribune onto that matter today and there will be a few more executions if what you report is still going on. Have you had any problems with supplies from the north?”