Master and God (20 page)

‘Fifteen. She was fifteen years older than me.’

‘When did she marry Junius? He’s a horror, by the way.’

‘When I was a baby, I think. Very young – too young. She married and she moved away. So I never really knew Lara during my childhood.’

‘While you were being brought up by her mother, Lachne.’

‘
My
mother! How do you remember her name?’

‘You told me, at the station house. The day the big fire started. Most vigiles remember that day all too well . . . When did Flavia Lachne become a freedwoman?’

‘Soon after I was born. She must have been thirty; those are the rules. Flavia Domitilla granted her freedom – or perhaps Mother had to pay for her manumission; she never said. One thing she was very proud of, Lara told me, was that she managed to save enough of a nest-egg to buy freedom for Lara and me.’

‘But at the time when you must have been conceived, both Lachne and Lara were still slaves?’

‘I suppose so.’ Lucilla was too intrigued to object to these questions, though she felt uneasy.

‘Let me guess – Lara was sunny in temperament, pretty, a very appealing young girl?’

‘Yes. You met her. You just saw her daughters. Our mother was good-looking too. Lara must always have been beautiful. Vinius, what is your point?’

‘Think, Lucilla.’

Consciously or subconsciously, Lucilla resisted what he wanted her to see.

Vinius left the suggestion, temporarily. He picked up her beaker and shared out between them what remained in the wine flask. He tilted his cup, saluting her, and waited. Vigiles interrogations had made him a patient man. ‘Sweetheart, it happens.’

‘What happens?’

‘Slavegirls are seduced when very young.’

‘You are beginning to offend me.’

‘Don’t be silly.’ His motives were good, in his opinion, so Vinius pressed on. ‘Lara meant so much to you and she obviously cared very dearly for you – even a stranger could see that. I just wondered if you ever thought of the possibility that Lara, and not Lachne, might have been your real mother?’

Lucilla had never imagined this.

Once before, at the vigiles station house, Gaius Vinius had said something that disturbed her family ties. Now he was doing it again. He knew life. He knew people. He picked up clues from nowhere and analysed them forensically; he shook out the truth like moths from an old cloak. As soon as he made the suggestion, Lucilla felt it was probable. Many things became clear. Lachne’s occasional air of resentment; Lara being kept out of sight during Lucilla’s childhood; Lara’s tender reception of Lucilla after Lachne died . . .

It must have been agreed that Lachne would bring up Lucilla so Lara could marry and have a life – if marriage to seedy Junius, with its endless pregnancies, could be called life. It was respectable, and less precarious than Lachne’s own existence relying on a series of lovers, but had Lachne later regretted what happened to her elder daughter? Lucilla remembered Lachne speaking sourly of Lara’s family arrangements.

‘Don’t be upset,’ Vinius soothed her. ‘I only wish I had thought of saying something when Lara was alive, so you could have asked her . . . This would not be unique, you know. Mothers do step in to help very young daughters in that predicament.’

‘Oh history had repeated itself,’ agreed Lucilla in a dull voice. ‘Lachne bore Lara at an even younger age. The same, presumably: a slavegirl seduced, whether she wanted it or not.’

Lara’s and Lucilla’s father could even be the same man, Vinius thought; he was too considerate to say so. ‘Forgive me for speaking?’

‘I suppose so.’

Vinius let a little lightness into his voice and did, finally, tease her: ‘After all, I am your guardian.’

Lucilla gave him the dirty look he wanted, burying her nose in her wine beaker. Vinius smiled slightly.

After a moment, Lucilla let herself smile too.

This was dangerous. Assuming responsibility for a woman in trouble was something Gaius Vinius had never done. His own wives, except his first and youngest, barely needed him for emotional support. What they wanted was his money and the social status of marriage, especially marriage to a Praetorian. He was pretty sure that Verania required him to be faithful yet herself strayed. She had never sought his advice, offered advice to him, nor wanted consolation of any sort. Keeping their distance suited both of them.

A quiet voice in his head warned him to watch out.

Then again, he rather enjoyed the warm feeling he experienced when this vulnerable soul looked to him for help. A vulnerable soul with melting brown eyes and – he let himself notice as she reclined in dappled sunshine – an inviting body.

I don’t suppose if I stayed here tonight, you would sleep with me?

Get lost, Vinius!

When she seemed composed, Vinius left Lucilla to herself. Though she bore no grudge for his raising the subject, he saw she wanted to think about her mother and sister in solitude. Her family connections were so very few, and now they all needed to be reconsidered.

He had intended to visit his wife that evening. But Verania was like a jealous dog or cat; she would smell other people on him and their aura would make her sulk. Their relationship was sketchy, yet any hint that he had other interests inflamed her. Even the touch of melancholia that crept over him when he left Plum Street was liable to drizzle into Verania’s mind and affect her as if he had committed some act of blistering disloyalty. When in fact (Vinius convinced himself) all he had done was a kindness to someone.

As he neared the Market of Livia, within reach of their apartment, he changed his mind abruptly. An insistent voice urged him to return to Plum Street. But Vinius turned his steps up along the ancient Servian Walls and returned via the Viminal Gate to the Praetorian Camp.

I
n Sarmizegetusa the balance of power shifted.

In
where
?

Sarmizegetusa Regia, the royal citadel of the Dacians, lay four thousand feet up in the Carpathian Mountains, the hub of a string of powerful fortresses from which Dacia would wage war upon the Romans and their emperors for the next thirty years. The very fact that the name of their citadel was a tongue-twisting hexasyllable indicated the Dacians’ attitude to the outside world. They were a warrior people. They did not give a toss.

Sarmizegetusa had a military purpose but was also a political and religious centre of greater sophistication than enemies might suppose. Its people, who mined for gold, silver, iron and salt, had long been wealthy and had a very high standard of living. On a daunting approach road, which climbed steeply through leaf-littered woods where exquisitely cold mountain streams rattled over pebbles, no milestones signed the citadel. Sarmizegetusa was too long to carve on a stone. If you had a right to go there, you would know where it was. If not, then keep out.

The heartland of Dacia was a remote area that would one day be called Transylvania, almost entirely surrounded by the crescent of the forbidding Carpathians. This heart-stirring enclave was a mix of striking crags, rolling meadows, delightful forests, fast rivers and scenic plains. There were alluring volcanic lakes, wild bogs and mysterious caves. Wildlife teemed in bounding abundance, with every kind of creature from bears, boars, lynxes and wolves, various deer and chamois. Fish filled the brooks, lakes and rivers. Fabulous butterflies roamed over hay meadows. Wild flowers crowded everywhere. Eagles slowly soared above. Nobody gave a second thought to the odd vampire bat.

A few forbidding routes led in from the exterior over high, well-guarded mountain passes. It was hostile terrain, especially in winter, when all strategists agreed that approaches should be tackled only in dire necessity, or for a very dubious advantage of surprise. A winter invasion would certainly be a surprise – because it would be madness.

In the interior were impregnable hilltop fortresses, plus an old royal city and others no one else had ever heard of, of which the capital was the most magnificent. Any Dacian might well believe that all roads led to Sarmizegetusa. Though not snappy in any language, it had a certain portentous quality, whereas ‘all roads lead to Rome’ can sound by comparison like a line in a comedy musical.

At Sarmizegetusa, the four-sided fortress crowning the hill was guarded by massive masonry, enormous blocks that were known as Dacian Walls, with monumental gates. As a military building it was equal to any Greek acropolis, on a scale with the Cyclopian Walls of ancient Mycenae, though a Dacian engineer would claim they had better setting-out and better-dressed masonry. Dacian Walls were tremendous structures, with a double skin of stonework that was bonded with timbers and a hard-packed earth and rubble core. Outside the fortress, civilian areas occupied a hundred or so great man-made terraces to east and west. Their buildings were sophisticated, often polygonal or circular, created with great precision. There were domestic compounds, workshops, stores and warehouses. Water was pumped through a sophisticated system, with ceramic pipes feeding the homes of the well-born. The citadel had all the accoutrements of a thriving population who benefited from a rich economy.

The ancient Dacian language was spoken all over central Europe, used commercially and politically by many other tribes. Dacians were masters of ethics, philosophy and science, including physics and astronomy; they toyed with Egyptian divination; they had contact with Greeks. With their spirits lifted by their beautiful country – and boosted by their enormous wealth – the Dacians were famously religious. At Sarmizegetusa they had created a sanctuary where a great sun disc showed their mastery of their own solar calendar while a combined stone- and wood-henge allowed them to honour the winter solstice, winters there being bone-hard. Long, dark nights of yearning for the sun’s renewal gave them, like all northern people, morose tendencies.

They lived at the crossroads of central Europe. Their choice, therefore, was either to be downtrodden by everyone who passed through, or fight them. They took the latter course. Dacians had no reputation for diffidence.

From the Roman point of view, Dacia had been quiescent for a hundred years after a king called Burebista was quashed by the Emperor Augustus. For the Dacians, Burebista was never quashed and would remain a mythical ideal. He was killed off by jealous aristocrats of his own nation, a local difficulty which was a mere kink in history. For them, it had no bearing on Dacia’s potential as a world power.

One of King Burebista’s measures, it was said, was to uproot Dacian vineyards and persuade his warriors to stop drinking the robust red wines of their homeland. These wines may provide a clue to why Dacian pre-eminence had been slow in coming. And why, after the vines were replanted, Dacian fortunes slumped again for a long time.

Under King Burebista, Dacian territorial influence had extended to its widest, from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, and from the Balkans to Bohemia, always with Transylvania as its political core. Burebista had consolidated the Dacian tribes including the influential Getae, or Goths, who had made their mark in the past and would do so again. However, he made the mistake of siding with Pompey against Julius Caesar. This alienated not just Caesar but his gut-wrenchingly ambitious young successor, Augustus, who invaded Dacia intent on diminishing its status. Before he arrived, however, Burebista was killed. The coalition disintegrated into ineffective warring factions. For a century afterwards, Dacians held a truce with Rome, which meant they took any money Rome offered and in return were thoroughly unreliable allies.

Assassinating their leader was an error, yet one from which it was possible to learn. In the opinion of the Dacian who would become known as Decebalus, quiescence to Rome had endured long enough. This man began establishing himself around the time of the Roman Flavians. There was absolutely no question that he was persuasive and intelligent. Like many heroes he must have been aware of his own potential from an early age, taking up the burden of becoming great, always a lonely destiny but much better than no destiny at all.

He was a commanding figure. Thickset and jowly, he wore traditional Dacian costume which, unlike Mediterranean dress, was designed for warmth: full-length woollen trousers gathered in at the ankle, a long, long-sleeved tunic, a short cloak with fringed or furred edges, caught on one shoulder with a massive brooch. His romping curls were topped with a cap, its long peak turned over to provide an extra insulating air pocket. Unlike the Emperor Domitian, Decebalus had no problem with middle-aged baldness and also boasted a rampant curly beard. Totemic carvings of him, hewn from bedrock on Dacian approach roads, showed a heavily pugnacious face.

The Romans were so indifferent to anyone they called a barbarian, they were unclear whether this man’s name was Duras, or Diurpaneus, or whether the original Diurpaneus was the same person as the later Decebalus, or was a king who abdicated his leadership to Decebalus because he was the better warrior. Diurpaneus/Decebalus did not care what the Romans called him; he knew who he was.

He knew a lot about Rome too. He listened; he talked to those passing through; he observed. He knew as much about what the Romans were doing on the Rhine and the Danube as they did, more than most citizens of their empire, whose ill-informed commentators saw him as a shadowy forest-dweller, whose nation existed solely to be overrun by Rome.

He nursed another dream. Other than the fact ‘Roman Empire’ was easier to enunciate, there was no reason why Europe should be rich pickings for fish-eating, olive-oily, beardless, bare-legged southerners, most of whom could not ride a horse. As he planned to combine the Dacians into one force (no easy task) it seemed feasible that under decent leadership (his, for instance), a ‘Sarmizegetusan Empire’ should arise instead, of equal significance to anything Roman, though admittedly a tad trickier to say.

For over ten years, Diurpaneus had watched the strategic adjustments on what the Romans thought was their frontier. They held the west, temporarily perhaps, but in central Europe the geography was dominated by two enormous rivers. The Rhine ran north-south through Germany. Its eastern forests were sparsely populated and comparatively peaceful. The Danube, an even longer watercourse, started north of the Alps, not twenty miles from the Rhine in Raetia, which left a narrow corridor through which migrating peoples could emerge on a millennial east-to-west cycle without getting their feet wet. The Danube ran east across Raetia and Noricum, before it plunged almost directly south into the heart of Pannonia, increasing in power, then heading east again across the top of Moesia until its many branches poured their waters through a mesh of channels into the Black Sea. For Rome, that was the end of the world. A place to exile poets. A fate far worse than death.