Island of Ghosts (4 page)

It didn’t, of course. It was accustomed to make the voyage every few days, and the crossing was a matter of such routine that the sailors found my fears ludicrous. (I was seasick, and they found that funny, too.) They sealed up the lower oar-ports when we were well out to sea to keep out the waves, pulled up a corner of the sail to hold a straight line against the wind, and galloped cheerfully over the salt water in less than five hours. It was still early afternoon when I saw Britain for the first time: a row of cliffs, white above a blue sea, and beyond them, green hills; then the city of Dubris, with its lighthouse overlooking the deep harbor, and its streets climbing up the steep hill behind. The bireme brailed up its sail, let out the lower bank of oars again, and splashed up to the quay amid the shrieking of seagulls and the shouting of men.

I sat in the stern watching even after the vessel had been made fast. The oarsmen gathered their packs and strode off to their barracks in the naval base, their oars slung over their shoulders; the captain and drummer collected the sacks of dispatches and came aft to talk to me.

“Lord Valerius Natalis has offered you the use of his own residence in Dubris tonight, Lord Ariantes,” the captain told me. (It took me a moment to remember that Valerius Natalis was the procurator’s name.) “If you like, I can show you where it is and introduce you to his slaves. Or, if you prefer, we can meet here this evening, after I’ve delivered these.” He hefted the sack of letters.

“I will meet you here later,” I said. He was pleased to be rid of the burden of a clumsy oaf like me, and went off without another look.

I sat by myself for some time after he’d gone. The water lapped against the dock, and the ship rocked gently, like a wagon in a wind. It was extraordinarily quiet—no sound of men or horses, no clattering of harness or weapons. I could not remember when I had last been alone.

After a while, I picked myself up and stepped hesitantly onto the gangplank. I could see the shadow of it falling through the shallow water, making it dark, and a school of small fish nibbling at the stones of the quay. I limped very slowly down the plank, stepped onto the quay—and stopped. I had set foot on Britain, the island that was to be prison or home—and the action seemed almost too simple for such a consequential thing. Was this really the invisible island beyond the world’s end, the island of ghosts we all feared so?

After a moment, I walked on down the docks, out of the naval base surrounding the harbor, and into the town. It felt very odd to go on foot—my people are accustomed to ride everywhere—but somehow the simplicity of it was right.

Narrow houses overlooked the paved street, some of timber and stucco, a few of stone. A tavern sign shaped like a ship swung above the door of one; it had glass windows on its lower floor, wicker interlace shutters above. A man sold fish from wooden tubs outside his shop. Two women talked by a public fountain, one of them holding a baby. A girl carried a bucket of water, her tongue between her teeth as she tried not to spill it. I walked slowly, trying to take it all in. The cool clear afternoon light was the first light on a new world.

The street opened into a marketplace where the region’s farmers had set up stalls. I limped slowly through the bustle and the cries, looking. Some of the people there, the wealthier ones, wore Roman dress of tunic and cloak, but most were clothed in what I presumed was the native fashion. The men wore trousers and sleeved tunics that came to the middle of their thighs, and the women wore longer tunics and shawls. Most of their clothing was made of plain gray-brown wool, but they had a fondness for checked cloaks, which they pinned on both shoulders. They were, I thought, on average a bit shorter than my own people, and a bit darker—not so many blond and red heads, though plenty of blue eyes. Their faces were different, too—rounder, wider about the eyes, without the high cheeks and long thin bones. The more Romanized men were short-haired and clean-shaven, the native men long-haired and bearded, like me. They looked at me as curiously as I looked at them, and I could feel them staring after me, trying to work out where I came from. I was not wearing Roman dress, of course. I had trousers like their own men, but a shirt and sleeved coat instead of the tunic and cloak. I was wearing the coat with the sleeves loose, since the day was warm, but I’d pinned it on my right shoulder, the opposite way from them, and I had a leather hat with a peak, while they were all bareheaded. I was obviously a foreigner and a barbarian—but I was also obviously wealthy. My clothes might have been dirty, but they had been dyed expensively red, decorated with gold beadwork and fastened with gold, and my dagger had a jeweled hilt. I was a contradiction. It was not surprising that they stared.

I paused to look at some sheep that were penned between three wicker hurdles. They were an unfamiliar breed, more lightly built than the ones I was used to: most were grayish brown, but a few, a longer-tailed, squarer sort, were white. I stopped for longer by a horse dealer. His horses were small shaggy animals with large heads and thin necks: I didn’t think much of them. But I noticed that they all wore iron shoes. My own people never trouble to shoe their horses—it’s unnecessary in a land without roads—and most of the auxiliary cavalry I’d met didn’t either. I’d seen horseshoes before, but never had a chance to inspect them. I went over to one of the horses, patted it, and knelt to check its hooves. Its owner came over and asked me a question in an unknown language.

“I am sorry, I do not understand you,” I said. “Do you speak Latin?”

“Indeed, man . . .” he said, then, correcting himself, “My lord, indeed I speak Latin. Are you interested in the beast? He’s a fine worker, pulls well at the plow or the cart, only four years old; you may have him for just thirty denarii.”

“How far can he go in a day?” I asked—the first question any Sarmatian asks when buying a horse.

The horse dealer stared at me. “Indeed, my lord, I don’t know.”

It shocked me almost to tears, and I had to look away and pretend to study the hoof again. I felt utterly foreign and alone. “How far can he go in a day?”—the question came from another world, a world where people lived in wagons and traveled from grazing ground to grazing ground, a world to which I could never return. Here the question was “Can he pull well at the plow?” and I wouldn’t even understand the qualities that answered it.

I put the horse’s foot down, stood, patted it on the shoulder. “Thank you,” I told the horse dealer, and limped off.

I stopped at a public fountain on the other side of the marketplace and had a drink of water. A fat woman selling apples offered me a cup to drink from. As I returned it, with thanks, I looked at the apples, which she had in a large wooden barrel. They were small and red. “How much are they?” I asked.

“I’d sell a basketful for a couple of eggs, my lord,” the woman replied, beaming, “but you may have one for nothing, seeing that you’re a foreign gentleman.” She handed me one. “Have you come from across the sea, my lord?”

Plainly she had a lively curiosity. I took a bite of the apple: it was sweet. “I have,” I told her, when I’d swallowed it, “and I have some fellows there. I would like to buy your apples to give to them, freewoman. Will you sell me the barrel full?”

“What? The whole barrel?”

“If it is agreeable to you.”

“Indeed, my lord! The whole barrel? Then you’d want the barrel, as well as the apples? That would be . . . let me see . . . You may have the apples for four asses, and another five for the barrel.”

I had some coins in a purse, and I dug nine coppers out. The woman looked at them and shook her head. “My lord!” she said. “These are sestertii!”

“Well, how many of them make up one as?” I asked.

She stared at me in amazement, then giggled. “My lord!” she cried. “There are two and a half asses to one sestertius! Where are you from, my lord?”

I set my teeth. I’d acquired the money on raids, and kept it in case I ever needed to do any trading with Romans: my own people don’t use it. Now I would have to learn what things cost. At least the apple seller hadn’t tried to cheat me. I gave her five of the sestertii.

“Only four, my lord, only four, and I owe you one as change!” she said, laughing and trying to give one back.

I shook my head. “The fifth is in thanks for your honesty. Will that buy the apples?”

“Indeed!” she said, beaming. “Will you bring a cart to collect them, my lord? Or should my man drop them off with you when he comes this evening?”

I hesitated. Should I send the apples to the procurator’s house or to the ship?

There was a sudden commotion from just up the street, and I looked up to see a white stallion trotting into the marketplace. I stopped worrying about the apples. This horse was altogether different from the sorry animals I’d looked at before. It was several hands higher, straight-backed and deep-chested, and moved with a light step. It was a fine horse. I had finer ones myself, even in Bononia, but I might have bargained to buy the animal in the days when I lived in my country and owned herds; I liked its hindquarters and the line of its neck. It had some harness on but no bridle, and it was clear from the shouting of the people around it that it had slipped its tether and was running loose. A young man in a fine cloak ran into the marketplace after it and stopped. “Oh, Deae Matres!” he groaned, seeing the stallion trotting away across the paving stones. “Fifteen denarii to the man who can catch that horse!” I watched to see how they would do it.

I never would have credited it: a whole marketplace of people, and no one knew how to catch a horse. They lunged at it, their cloaks flapping—and of course, it shied. They ran after it, and it snorted and laid back its ears. They yelled advice at each other, tried to grab its nose, tried to shoo it into a corner like a sheep, and it began to kick. The few, like the horse dealer, who had some notion of how to go about calming the animal were swamped in a crowd of eager helpers who threw the poor beast into a panic, and in a few minutes the stallion was reduced from alert interest into blind frenzy, rearing and lashing out at everything around it.

“Do you have a rope?” I asked my apple seller, who’d been watching the excitement with horrified delight.

She had a rope, and she handed it to me eagerly. I limped toward the stallion, making a lasso as I went. It was now bucking madly, striking sparks from the cobblestones, and the young man was wringing his hands.

I stopped about fifteen paces from the stallion and began swinging the lasso. The onlookers were now frankly running away from the horse instead of toward it, and it didn’t take me long to get a clear shot. I tossed the rope about the stallion’s neck; when it lunged away, I let it pull me a few steps, then drew the rope tight and began talking to it quietly. The horse stopped and stood still with its ears back, trembling. I walked forward very slowly, still speaking to it soothingly, until I was near enough to touch it. The ears flicked nervously forward as I ran my hand down the sweat-damp neck.

Then a large red-faced man gave a yell and lunged at the horse from the other side. “I’ve got him!” he shouted. And of course, the horse tried to bolt—toward me. I was knocked onto the pavement, and the horse stepped on me—and, worse luck, stepped exactly on my wounded leg. The pain was sudden and excruciating, and I screamed. A lifetime’s instinct made me lie still and let go of the rope—one doesn’t hold a frightened horse on top of oneself—and the horse clattered on over me. The red-faced man grabbed the rope, and then a dozen hands were clutching the horse and leading it away.

“I’ve got him!” shouted the red-faced man again. “I caught him!”

“You never did!” retorted my apple seller, bustling over. “The foreign gentleman caught him, we all saw that, and when you shoved your greedy hands in, you nearly lost him again. My lord, are you all right?”

I was lying on the ground clutching my leg. The apple seller bent over me and tried to pull me up, but the movement twisted my leg again and made me gasp with pain. The young man in the fine cloak dropped to his knees beside me. I noticed, for the first time, the narrow purple stripe on his tunic. “Deae Matres!” he exclaimed again. “I hope you’re not hurt. You practically saved my life, catching that animal. Did it kick you?”

I set my teeth and managed to sit up. “You can catch your own horse next time,” I said.

“It’s not my horse; it’s my commanding officer’s wife’s horse. If it had got hurt while I was in charge of it”—he whistled—“I might as well have resigned from the army at once. Priscus would never forgive me. By Maponus! Your leg’s bleeding.”

I looked: there was blood on my hands. The wound must have torn open. I let out my breath in a hiss.

The apple seller began to shout at the red-faced man in British. The red-faced man shouted back. I wanted to get away; I tried to climb to my feet, but when my weight came onto my injured leg, there was a spurt of such red-hot pain that I had to sit down again.

“Lie back, lie back,” said the young man, “Let me see your leg . . .” He began pulling the trouser leg up.

“No,” I said. “The horse caught an old wound. Leave it.”

He paid no attention whatsoever. “I know a bit of field surgery,” he told me. “My name’s Comittus, by the way, Lucius Javolenus Comittus, a tribune of the Sixth Legion . . . Hercules!” he’d shoved the trouser leg up above my knee, and seen the scars. There were three, one above the other, and since I’d only got them that summer, they were still red. To my relief, it was the top cut, the one just above my knee, that had broken open, and that only a little down half its length. The pain had been so hot I hadn’t been able to tell where it was. But the top cut had been the least serious of the three. It was the lowest slash that broke my shinbone.

“Lucius Javolenus?” came a woman’s voice. Comittus looked round quickly, and I looked too.

I guessed that this was his commanding officer’s wife, the owner of the horse. She was certainly a lady of some importance. Her fair hair was piled on her head in the kind of elaborate curls that require a trained slave to arrange them, and the cloak held modestly closed before her was of the most expensive kind, dyed a rich blue throughout, and bordered with patterned flowers. And despite the modesty, it was plain she was both young and beautiful. The rounded eyes were vividly, liquidly blue, an intensity of color I had never seen among the Romans before, though it’s not uncommon among my own people—Arshak’s eyes were much the same shade. The oddly familiar eyes stared into mine with impersonal curiosity. I did not look back at her gladly. Bad enough to look a fool; worse to look a fool in front of a beautiful woman.