Hope of Earth (46 page)
Authors: Piers Anthony
As they approached, the king smiled. Then Aretania threw herself into her father’s arms. “Oh, Sire, you aren’t angry?”
“I am furious,” he-corrected her. “But not with my innocent daughter. That misbegotten oaf sought to have you killed, just to make an incestuous liaison with his slut of a niece! He will pay, I swear.”
“I feared I had failed you, Sire.”
“My favorite daughter never failed me.”
“I am your only daughter,” she reminded him, smiling. Then she burst into tears.
“I will not send you away from this city again,” he reassured her. “Foreign barbarians are not to be trusted.” He glanced again at Bry. “Now put this fetching young creature back into his natural attire. No man should have to endure what he has.”
“Being garbed as a woman?” she asked.
“No, suffering your company for three days.” Then he laughed again, so that they could be sure it was a joke.
King Aretas did indeed raise an army, and sent it toward Judea under the command of his generals. Herod sent his army to battle without taking personal command. In the engagement, some of Herod’s forces joined the Nabataeans, who won a resounding victory.
This had several consequences. The people of the scattered parts of Israel sought for some divine reason for their defeat, and remembered Herod’s prior crime against John the Baptist. The later Gospel writers then connected this somewhat anachronistically to the request of Herodias’s daughter Salome, who danced the Dance of the Veils and beguiled Herod to promise her anything. She asked for John’s head, because John had condemned her mother’s marriage as adulterous, Herodias still being married to Herod’s half-brother. It seems that incest—she was Herod’s niece—was not the issue. Surely John the Baptist would have condemned the marriage on similar grounds, had he been alive at the time.
Meanwhile, in history, the Emperor Tiberius of Rome was annoyed by the affront such a defeat meant to a Roman province. He sent Vitellius, his commander in Syria, to conquer Petra and bring Aretas’s head back to Rome. Vitellius set out at the head of two legions and their auxiliaries. He began his march through Judea, but was persuaded by priests to take an alternate route, because of all the religiously offensive graven images the Roman army carried. However, Vitellius himself accompanied Herod Antipas to Jerusalem, to offer sacrifices and take part in a religious festival that was about to begin.
According to legend, which may have been generated after the fact, when King Aretas learned of the approach of the Roman army, he consulted his diviners. They told him that it was impossible for the Romans to enter Petra, for one of the three rulers involved would die to prevent it. That is, he who gave the order for war, or he who marched to implement it, or he who defended against it.
Sure enough, Vitellius stayed at Jerusalem for three days. On the fourth day he received word that Emperor Tiberius had died. Thus bereft of the authority under which he marched, Vitellius ordered his army back to Syria and dispersed it to winter billets. Petra was saved. In another generation it would indeed be conquered by Rome, but not while Aretas ruled.
The legend of the gold and silver coins in the great urn exists among the Beduins today. It probably postdated the actual residence of the Nabataeans, but seems appropriate to the spirit of the time.
Q
UEEN
It is a common perception that the Roman Empire represented a bastion of civilization, in contrast to the barbarians surrounding it. This was not necessarily the case. Rome did possess resources and military capacity that were formidable, and it was these that normally carried the day, rather than any superiority of culture.
Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 and 54
B.C.
, but did not stay. Rome did not actually occupy Britain until the first century
A.D.
, taking over most of it in campaigns dating from
A.D.
43 to 84. But it was not an easy island to keep pacified, and even those regions nominally under Roman control could be restive. Roman arrogance and avarice hardly helped the situation.
The kingdom of the Iceni in southeast England rebelled against Rome, but was defeated. A new king, friendly to Rome, was installed, and for a dozen years the kingdom thrived. But in
A.D.
59 that king, Prasutagus, died, and things changed. In his will he left the kingdom to the emperor Nero and his own two daughters as co-heirs. He may have been trying to avoid strife, knowing that Rome could not be denied. But his caution was wasted. The Roman procurator, responsible for administration and collection of taxes, was greedy and corrupt even by the standards of those who supported Rome. He ruled that the country of the Iceni was wholly the property of the emperor, and that money given to the leaders of the Iceni had been a loan, not a grant, and was now due for repayment. This was of course not the understanding of the Iceni, and they resisted what seemed like a betrayal of prior understandings.
Meanwhile, the tribe immediately south of the Iceni, the Trinovantes, was chafing because for a decade retiring Roman legionnaires had been driving Britons off their lands and claiming their estates as land grants. The original landholders were being treated like prisoners and slaves. This was colonialism at its worst.
Rome had also issued an edict disarming the Celtic tribes. This was enforced in the client kingdoms as well, and was a further source of anger.
By
A.D.
60, relations throughout Britain were severely strained. Most of Rome’s British forces were tied down in Wales, where guerrilla attacks were chronic. It would have been a good time for Rome to tread softly. But the tyrannical procurator Catus Decianus had other ideas. He intended to show the difficult natives their place, once and for all.
“T
HIS IS MISCHIEF,” CENTURION ITTAI
said as he read the proclamation he had just received. “I shall have to try to reason with Decianus before he brings the whole Isle of Britain down about our ears.” He glanced at Lin. “Summon the family; we must have a conference.”
“Yes, sir,” Lin said, leaving the chamber. She didn’t know what was in the scroll, because it had been sealed, but she was sure that trouble was brewing.
First she found her closest brother, Bry. He was her age, twelve, for they were twins. They told each other everything, just as Ned and Jes did, though they did not yet have any secrets as great as those of their older siblings. Bry was in the garden, picking bugs off the cabbages.
“Big family meeting, right now,” she cried. “You fetch the men; I’ll fetch the women.”
“No, we’ll fetch together,” Bry said, standing and brushing off his shirt. “So you can tell me what this is all about.”
“It’s because of some official Roman letter Ittai got. A mounted messenger delivered it; I just showed him in to see Ittai. He says it’s mischief, and he’ll have to go to reason with them. That’s all I know.”
“Where’s the messenger?”
“Jes took him to the kitchen to feed him. He has to wait for Ittai’s response, so he can take it back.”
“Ittai’s treating his wife like a servant?” Bry asked with the hint of a sneer in his voice.
“He had to. She was male.” They both laughed, appreciating how Jes fooled visitors by acting like a boy. The not-so-long-married couple had been preparing to ride out around the estate when the messenger arrived.
“You know,” Bry said, “I’m glad she married him. We’d have been in trouble, otherwise.”
She nodded. Their family had fallen on lean times, and when their big brother Sam’s estate had been taken over by the conquering Romans, things had looked bleak indeed. But Jes had found Ittai, and gotten him to ask for this particular estate as his land grant. Because he was a prominent Citizen of Rome and a ranking military officer, with solid military credits, his wish had been granted without question. So he had come as the new owner, but instead of running them off or requiring them to serve him as slaves, he had simply asked for their loyalty. A loyalty he was prepared to return, as a family member. They had sized him up and quickly agreed. As a result, there were no Roman soldiers to enforce estate discipline; Flo and Dirk ran things as they always had. That left Ittai free to ride around with his wife, whom he clearly loved regardless of her dress, and to participate in Roman politics. When any Roman appeared, they all deferred in an obvious manner to the centurion, and indeed he was the head of this hierarchy, but there was no friction. They had nothing to fear from the Romans, in contrast to their neighbors, and Ittai’s connections and wealth brought them benefits they would otherwise have lacked. So Ittai was actually no liability; he was contributing in his fashion to the welfare of the family. Jes had not only gotten rid of their liability, Sam’s former wife Wona; Jes had become their salvation by marrying surprisingly and extremely well. She had seemed the least likely prospect for such a thing. That was part of what was in the centurion’s favor: he had recognized Jes’s worth, and accepted her as she was. A woman who liked looking like a man, at times, but who was very much female inside.
They arrived at the wall that Sam was constructing. There had been some depredations by wild pigs and so they were walling off this section, to protect their delicate vines. Snow was helping him, placing small stones in the chinks to hold the big ones in place. Sam liked this heavy work; it gave him brute exercise. Lin liked Snow; she was a nice person, and she shared this family’s propensity for a prominent defect: her body was lovely, but her face was downright homely. It was Lin’s hand rather than her face that was defective, but she related well.
“Family meeting,” Bry called as they approached. “Ittai thinks there’s going to be trouble.”
Snow grimaced. “We’ve seen enough of that already.” It was an understatement, for her own life; her entire village had been destroyed in a raid, and only Sam’s presence had saved her from death. Sam had unknowingly done himself a giant favor when he saved her. He had in effect exchanged a woman, who was ugly inside for one who was ugly of face, and became far happier.
They ran on to locate and notify Dirk and Flo, then found Ned. Before long all of them were assembled at the main house.
Ittai was quite serious. “The brute procurator is set to make an example of the Iceni,” he said. “He intends to cow them into complete submission by destroying their royal family in the course of the provincialization of the kingdom. Their queen Boudica will be demoted to servitude. I am directed to attend, as a gesture of Roman unity in this matter.”
Jes shook her head. “Queen Boudica will never submit to that. There’ll be rebellion if they try. The Iceni are fierce.”
The others nodded. Their own tribe, the Trinovantes, had had their brushes with their neighbors to the north, before the Roman conquest, and knew their mettle. There had been peace only because the Iceni had remained nominally independent as a client kingdom, with their own leadership in place. Roman support had enabled the Iceni to gain advantage over other neighbors and to prosper. But if the Romans now proposed to humiliate Boudica, the widow of their king, there would be mischief indeed.
“I shall try to persuade the procurator of the folly of this step,” Ittai said. “But he is a greedy and pig-headed man, and I fear I will not be successful. So while it would be a betrayal of my status as a Roman to suggest that any royal Iceni try to escape while they can, it may be that someone will convey some such warning to them.”
Lin saw Ned smile, and Jes, and then the others. Someone would certainly warn the queen of the Iceni, if she had not already gotten news.
“I must attend, but there is no reason to let the estate be idle,” Ittai continued. He glanced at Sam. “I trust you and Flo can handle things in my absence.” He always gave Sam nominal precedence in the family, though they all knew that it was Flo Sam listened to, and Dirk who made most of the decisions, after consulting with Ned.
“Yes,” Sam said.
“I think Bry and Lin should come with me, along with my wife, of course. But it is probably best to travel as a party of four males.”
Lin smiled. She could pretend to be a boy readily enough, as she had not yet flowered into a woman. She had done so before. She knew she would enjoy the adventure.
Ittai wrote out a message, rolled and sealed the scroll, and gave it to Lin to give to the messenger. They would set out on the next day, and be there by the end of the third day hence.
Lin was excited. She had never before been to the capital city of the Iceni. She knew that Bry was similarly thrilled. It should be a great adventure, even if they only tagged along to act as servants to Ittai and Jes.
“We’ll have to be the ones to warn the queen,” Bry said.
That was right, because most of the rest of the family wasn’t coming. That made it twice as exciting.
They rode out next day, all garbed as males, riding good horses. Ittai wore his centurion uniform, and looked very bold. He was retired, but Lin knew that no Roman ever retired completely; he could always be recalled to service in an emergency. As he had been, in effect, this time. He surely had not been required to attend just for his appearance; the procurator wanted a competent officer present, just in case the situation got complicated.