Dreaming the Eagle (60 page)

Ban clung to the forward rail and watched the tilting line of the horizon and the seagulls drifting sideways over the bow-foam. The whipcrack of canvas tugged at his mind, rekindling memories that were best forgotten. He was alone, at least. That much was good. They had wanted him to stay below deck with the emperor and his guard, but the rolling motion had caught at his gut as soon as they left the shelter of the port and he had been excused to take the air on deck.

The ship made good headway. Gesoriacum faded back into the fog that had shrouded it since they arrived. Gesoriacum: refuge for fishermen and traders who braved the encircling Ocean to reach the barbarian lands beyond, or were about to do so; resting place for merchants with cavalcades of mules and armed guards and amphorae of wine and olives and fish sauce and pottery packed in straw, for traders of men or horses and those who would buy from them; and now, with all the pomp and terror and lip-wetting avarice it brought, site of the emperor’s northernmost visitation.

News of Gaius’ imminent arrival, accompanied by the XIV th and II nd legions, with attendant cavalry and auxiliary cohorts, had wrought its customary panic. Given little warning, the citizens of Gesoriacum had not had time to build a palace, or even a new baths. The artisans and architects had devoted their limited time and boundless energies to creating living quarters fit for a god on earth, and then, more problematically, to the new quay and the lighthouse that the god required to be built, the one for his trireme, the other to light the ship back to harbour should the inevitable coastal fog hamper her safe return. They had achieved the quay but the lighthouse was still under construction when Gaius arrived. Two men took ship and fled across the Ocean to the barbarian lands beyond rather than be held accountable for this failure.

A prefect of the navy was summoned immediately and his sailors completed the construction. Under their ministrations, the tower gave light on the second evening after Gaius’ arrival. The emperor’s ship Euridyke, one of the fastest in the Roman navy, sailed out of port two days later. The emperor, one understood, had business that could not be kept waiting.

Ban held on to the bow rail and did not think about the emperor’s business. It was enough simply to ride the ship and not fall. He had fallen more than once on the journey westward from the Rhine until, in the end, Theophilus had ordered him down from the brown mare and into a litter. For five days he had been fed peas and dried figs and made to drink infusions of centaury until he had tipped the last beaker of it away and said that henbane would be better for the fever and he could find it himself - and had gone out at dawn in strange country, found it and been proved right. Theophilus had regarded him differently after that. He began to ask questions that were not exclusively clinical and to provide answers that went deeper than ‘your wound is healing too slowly’.

In honesty, his wound was not healing at all. They changed the dressings twice a day and each time the old ones came away soaked in a stinking yellow-green matter that sputtered on the fire and turned the air bad. The pain ground at him, wearing him down. It is one thing not to care for life but another to be held within it, unable to think clearly past a nagging, knifing ache. They were two days short of Gesoriacum, with the inland gulls already following their wagon train and the salt-sweet scent of seaweed and beached shellfish tainting the air, when Ban took the doctor’s three-legged stool and the iron probe and set both by Theophilus’ fire and said, ‘The bone fragment between the two breaks is going bad. You’ll have to take it out or I’ll be taking space in your sickbed for ever.’

The physician had peered at him through the lingering smoke of his evening meal. ‘So you have decided that you are not the walking dead after all? You have come to claim life?’

‘No. I have simply come to claim freedom from your infirmary.’

‘So?’ Theophilus’ eyes were grey, red-rimmed with smoke. ‘It’s a start, at least. When you wish fully to claim life, you must let me know; it’s something I would not wish to miss.’ He stood, stiffly, favouring his left knee. ‘Get me some water and a boiling pan. And call your friends. This will take more than the two of us.’

The pain of the surgery was greater than anything he had ever known, including Braxus’ brand. Civilis had been there to help hold him, and Rufus; one on either arm. Corvus had come at the end and held his head so he didn’t knock Theophilus’ arm while he was trying to remove the piece of bone. In the beginning, they gave him wood to bite on but he broke it and so they put a wad of leather between his teeth instead and showed him the marks on it afterwards. Theophilus had stitched the wound with linen thread, leaving a wad of boiled cotton inside. When he took that out, on the first day in the new quarters, it was blood that soaked it, not infection.

He had healed more quickly after that, although his legs were still weak. On the day before the ocean voyage, they had let him visit the Crow and the colt had not kicked him. He had inspected the sword-cuts on its shoulder and washed them with rosemary water and the beast had done little more than lay back its ears.

Later that evening he had been summoned before the emperor, who had bestowed the medallion and the citizenship and the place in Corvus’ cavalry wing as he had promised and had explained what was required in return, the last element of which was entirely unexpected but should probably not have been so. Fever and fear of the coming day had kept Ban from sleep all that night. In the morning, he had prayed to Iccius and then his mother for a means to escape what was asked of him but neither had come. Standing now under the lash of the sea and the wind, exhaustion dragged at him more than the pain or the nausea. He ached for a return to the river. He had been immune to fear then, or had believed himself so.

‘You don’t have to do this.’

Corvus had come up behind him, the sound of his footsteps lost in the oarsmen’s chant. The prefect braced his arms on the bow rail and narrowed his eyes against the wind. A greening bruise discoloured his jaw where a Chatti blade had struck his helmet flaps; his left arm bore another where the shield had been smashed back by the force of a blow. To balance them, his hair was newly trimmed and he wore the medallion of valour that had been the personal gift of the emperor following his actions in the attack. Ban wore its twin, hung on a thong from his neck and hidden, temporarily, beneath his tunic.

Corvus turned sideways to the rail, appraising. Since the battle, he had never been far away, nor left it long between visits. More than Theophilus, he knew the black pit into which Ban had fallen. Unlike the doctor, he chose to ignore it and deal instead with the necessities of life and the small hooks of challenge and friendship that would lead Ban back into living. Ban had not engaged with any enthusiasm but it had been impossible fully to resist. Then he had been given new orders by the emperor and the upsurge of fear had destroyed in moments the patient work of half a month. He could hide it from Theophilus, but not from Corvus. Nor, particularly, did he want to.

The grey eyes narrowed. ‘Look at you. You have a fever, anyone can see it. You should have stayed ashore, and failing that you should be below decks in the care of the physician.’

‘You think so?’ Ban wisped a grin. ‘I had peas and lentils for dinner last night - Theophilus’ remedy for the convalescent. It would be colourful were I to spew it on the walls, but I’m not certain it would make me more popular. Anyway, can you imagine what it would do to the crew? You know what it’s like when you’re living on a diet of fish and one man chucks it back - all the rest catch the smell and their stomachs rebel in sympathy. The emperor would have me flayed alive for turning his prize battleship into a two-man rowing boat with its own vomitorium.’

‘You know what I mean.’ Corvus was not in the mood to be diverted. He frowned into the horizon. ‘You could have told him you weren’t fit. You still could.’

‘You tell him for me. I’ll come and weep at your crucifixion.’ Ban spat. The wind caught it and smeared his face. He wiped himself dry with his sleeve. ‘Forget it. It’s not as bad as you think. The Ban who was enslaved is not the Ban who woke in your tent in Durocortorum, and that one is different again from the one who has been dragged back to life by Theophilus. Besides, you forget. I am not Ban. From last night, I am Julius Valerius.’ He tried to smile, but the wind had numbed his cheeks and it was enough to move his lips to speak. He shook his head and turned back to the rail. ‘Go back down below. You have a speech to make. You should be practising it.’

Corvus said nothing. His eyes roamed empty space beyond the bow where grey sea and grey sky merged on the grey horizon. The gulls were a sound without shape. Ban tapped the Roman’s shoulder and pointed over the shield-side rail. ‘You’re looking the wrong way. It’s over there. We are making our own wind. The other ship is under sail and must travel at the behest of the gods.’

The merchantman they sought was close enough to show her markings. She tacked sharply and wallowed in the apex of the turn. Her single square sail flapped and bellied in the wind, filling to show the image of the war eagle freshly painted across it. As she came about, the yellow eye and the painted beak showed on her prow.

Three more turns brought her within hailing distance of the trireme. The prefect who had completed the lighthouse had the Euridyke’s command. His grandfather had been a Phoenician slave in Augustus’ navy at Actium. His father had been granted Roman citizenship on completion of his service to the navy of Tiberius. It was the grandson’s intention that he live long enough in the favour of the newest emperor to sire the sons who might follow in the family fortunes. He stood amidships, watching the approaching sail, and issued orders with a calm that quelled the fomenting panic on his ship.

Commands were shouted between one ship and the next and the merchantman changed her angle to the wind and slowed. Men moved on her deck, hauling in the sail. A single man stood at the bow, where he had been all along. His shield boss caught the flat light from the sea and made it gold. His yellow cloak buffeted the changing wind. Straw-red hair, one shade darker than the Batavians’, flagged out above it. Behind Ban, on the Euridyke’s upper deck, the tone of the oarsmen’s pipe changed and was echoed on the decks below. At a single high blast, the shield-side rowers lifted their sweeps from the water. Eighty-five oars rode high, dripping foam onto the sea, then plunged in again at a harder angle. On the sword side, the great beams swept wide. At the stern, the steersman threw his full weight on the oar. Ban felt the deck swoop beneath his feet as the ship leaned into the turn. His stomach followed. He reached out and gripped Corvus’ arm.

‘Go down and put on your good cloak. Tell His Excellency that the Chieftain of all Britannia awaits his pleasure.’

‘Are you coming?’

‘I’ll be in the right place when he wants me.’

The Chieftain of all Britannia. Amminios, son of Cunobelin, brother to Togodubnos and Caradoc, recent owner of two slaves and a pied colt, stood in the prow of his merchantman, watching as the Euridyke came alongside. Under the Phoenician’s direction, the oarsmen shipped their oars on the shield side and the two ships came together, gunwales kissing as lightly as men could make them.

The captain of the merchantman stood by with a rope. One of the Euridyke’s men, a Hibernian who spoke Gaulish with a flat, southern dialect, shouted at him to stand clear but either the man’s accent was too thick or the master was too overwhelmed by his first sight of the emperor to take notice. He stood in the same spot, gaping, and only a lifetime of rapid reflexes caused him to step smartly sideways as the plank dropped from the trireme fell forward onto his ship. Even so, the edge of it caught him on the shoulder and the bronze spike on the end that smashed into his deck nearly cost him a foot.

He was a big man, as were all ship’s masters, and there was no doubt that he had a comprehensive command of seafaring vernacular. He had taken breath to air it when he remembered in whose company he stood. He stopped, suddenly, his mouth flapping. His gaze skipped from the wreck of his deck to the person of His Imperial Majesty, cloaked in scarlet and wearing, ludicrously, a cuirass of solid gold.

The emperor smiled. He glanced sideways at his escort. ‘The captain takes issue with our first corvus. We believe his sponsor will take more issue with the next.’

The men of the escort laughed, as men will laugh who have been ordered to wear full armour aboard ship in mid-ocean and who have heard the man who gave that command make a jest. Corvus, who was wearing his own newly silvered cuirass beneath his cloak, smiled tightly. Ban had decided long ago that he was not going to laugh at jokes he did not understand. He kept his eyes on the master of the merchant ship and said nothing.

The emperor had a way of reading men. He gestured expansively to Corvus. ‘Our new citizen does not understand the source of our levity. You should explain to him.’

‘My lord, of course. Forgive me.’ The prefect turned with a care he never showed on land. In formal Gaulish, he said, ‘The boarding plank is known as a corvus for the spike at the end which impales enemy ships as a raven’s beak impales carrion flesh. It was used as far back as the first Punic wars and recently to great effect by the deified Augustus as a means by which legionaries from one ship could march across and give battle on another.’

Ban nodded, to show he had listened and understood. He said nothing. His whole attention was fixed on the bow of the other ship.

The emperor was in buoyant mood. ‘It is an outmoded means of naval warfare, as our naval prefect will inform you if you give him time. Still, we believe that in this instance it serves to anchor our ship securely to the enemy’s, and it will embolden those who feel themselves at risk on the high seas, allowing them to cross from the one ship to the other in safety.’

Gaius looked around him. His escort stared fixedly ahead. No order had been given to cross to the other ship and they would not march a step without one. It was Amminios who made the move. One could imagine that he had always been good at sea; from early childhood he must have made the crossing regularly between his father’s court and his mother’s holdings in Gaul. He sprang down from the foredeck of his ship and leaped lightly onto the bridging plank. By accident or design, a space had grown between the ships before the corvus fixed them, leaving a spear’s length of dead water that sucked and gurgled beneath. Amminios wore no armour, but his sword alone would have dragged him under were he to fall.