Master and God (27 page)

If the men had realised how many years it would be, how many years before any chance of rescue, they would have given up. All that kept them going was that the Dacians neither killed them nor made slaves of them. Dark stories were told of Dacians sacrificing defeated enemies to their warrior gods and hanging up armour as trophies in trees; these Romans had lost their weapons and valuables but were spared. It had to mean they were hostages, and for hostages there must always be a glimmering mirage, that thin possibility which they must never see as false: belief in returning to safety one day.

Some died. There would be no return for them.

They were all going to die, of dirt, disease and dismal despair, unless someone made an effort to preserve their health and sanity. Vinius had realised this in the first weeks, around the time he slowly ceased feeling nothing but distraught over losing his centurion and the battle, the time when he knew he would have to start fighting for his own survival, which at least was what Gracilis would have done and what he would want Vinius to do.

The prisoners were an assortment from several legions. Numbers were few, though as time passed, Vinius picked up signals from occasional Dacians who did communicate; he suspected there were others held elsewhere. None in his group were officers. Vinius was the only Praetorian; moreover, he had been a centurion’s beneficarius. So, once he hauled himself out of his initial misery, he tried to pull everyone together. Vinius had to assume leadership. He must do what Gracilis would have done, what the mystic voice of Gracilis was even now instructing: rally them, keep up their spirits, drag them through this ordeal however long it lasted, find a way to co-exist with their captors, look for ways to escape but never try anything stupid.

They agreed. None had the energy to resent him; none wanted to take charge themselves. Anyway, he was a Guard – so they may as well let Vinius do it. If there was any trouble, he could take the blame.

‘Right. We have to take care of ourselves. Scrupulous hygiene, as far as we can manage –’ There were mountain streams and they were allowed to collect water. ‘Anything we can do to keep mentally alert. Just don’t ask me to tell you bedtime stories. Daily exercise.’ They did press-ups and lunges, and after some months acquired an extremely old, unwanted horse, too far gone even for eating, which they all learned to ride. The Dacians let them keep the horse because, as Vinius remarked, there was no way twenty-three of them were going to escape on him. It was like some horrible team-bonding task in the new recruits’ manual, something the old general Corbulo might have come up with:
get out of Dacia without being killed in the mountains, using only one arthritic horse, four billycans with holes in them and a set of panpipes
. . . The panpipes were whittled by Vinius; once he had finished, the others made it plain that, officer or not, he should refrain from playing them.

He knew how to make himself even more unpopular: ‘I expect you to be clean-living.’

‘What, no singing “The Girl I Kissed at Clusium” while we’re having a wank?’

‘That’s up to you. I meant no humming of “The Boy I Kissed at Colonia Agrippinensis” while you’re buggering your tent-mate for the ninety-fifth time.’

‘Ninety-five times! Do you think we’ll be here a whole month?’

Gaius Vinius feared they might be there forever. It was one of the burdens of office that he had to keep this thought to himself.

‘Sir, sir – is this the official new policy on wanking then?’

‘Senatorial edict, sunshine. Enacted in the consulship of two most noble wotsits with five hundred years of donkey dung on their fancy boots and so inbred they’ve got three heads, who voted in the Curia that anything is permitted if it’s exercise . . . Jupiter, I hope you horrible beggars know what I am rambling about, because mountain air makes me light-headed . . . There is to be no attempted conversation with the flower of Dacian womanhood, incidentally. We are in enough trouble.’

That last instruction was hardly needed. Dacian women wanted nothing to do with them. They had enough virile Dacian warriors at their disposal, or if they wanted variety, thrusting Suebi who only lived on horseback and in wagons, Sarmatians who tied their hair back in curious topknots, or even Scythians – those barbarians that even barbarians thought were scary wild men – who sometimes passed through for cosy tribal fraternisation and plotting against Rome.

Dacian adult men thought guarding foreigners far beneath them. This at first left the Roman prisoners in the care of a bunch of spotty, slouching youths, the lowest tranche of Dacian society. It was a first taste of power for the adolescents, who loved the excitement of beating up helpless victims for no reason.

Eventually Vinius had had enough of that, as well as the rain and snow, so in a spurt of energy he rounded up their tormentors, split them into teams, instructed them to bring him the head of a dead goat, and got them playing football like urchins in a Mediterranean back alley. This worked until the wrong team won, when the losers became sulky. The Roman prisoners consoled them by organising a pissing-up-a-door competition, a game in which the lads needed no education, though one giggling idiot must have let something slip because a few days later a group of infuriated mothers came from their village to screech blood-curdling insults and take their babies safely home.

The boys were replaced with apprentice warriors, who were bored but harmless.

‘If I’d known all it would take to get rid of the little bastards,’ said Vinius, ‘was to make their mothers think you lot were teaching them Greek gymnasium perversions, we’d have lost them bloody weeks ago.’ To a soldier who looked puzzled, he added, ‘Women think playing with your dingle-dangle makes you go blind.’

After a short pause, naturally someone asked him if that was how he lost his right eye, at which Vinius smiled patiently. As an officer he had a tolerance his old centurion would have despised. Still, Gracilis had always known, Vinius did everything his own way.

The soldiers went back to singing incorrigible ditties about persons they claimed to have kissed, and much else, in various towns of the Empire, with accompanying gestures according to taste. Vinius did not sing; he was too unhappy. But when he wanted a treat in the long cold nights, he lay on his back and allowed himself to remember his experience at Alba Longa with Flavia Lucilla in his arms. He understood his feelings now. She was in his blood and in his soul. Bored and bereft, he rationed the memory, as if fearful that each time he replayed the experience in his head, it would be subtly worn away. He could not bear it to fade.

To preserve that memory he varied the special reminiscence with other incidents. He liked recalling the evening he had taken Lucilla to eat at the bar down in Plum Street, after he found her crying when her sister died. The food place – the Pisces? Aquarius? – the Scallopshell – was local and convenient, not good, though not as grim as many on the streets of Rome. A dead fly floated in the gravy among his chicken dumplings. Despite her wan face over Lara, Lucilla had giggled, ‘Do you want to send it back? Why Vinius – are you hoping for a bigger fly in your next bowlful?’

A little joke, but one which now exquisitely cheered his bleak existence. Sometimes he imagined what he would have done or should have done, if he had realised at the time how he felt about her.

Go back and think: you would have told her. You would say you cared.

No. Alba would have been too soon. Take it slowly. Not the right moment.

Be realistic: for some men it is never the right moment. They expect the woman to discover for herself, winkle it out of her fellow, guess, deduce or decide, choose the occasion (too soon for him of course), then helpfully say the words for him.

Praetorians should have more gumption, Gaius.

I’m shy with women.

Don’t be an idiot.

He kept all these thoughts to himself, being the kind who needed privacy to stay sane.

As soldiers, most prisoners had reserves to see them through their exile. Some failed to cope, however, cracking up either slowly or very suddenly. Their isolation and interminable uncertainty broke them. There was no way to predict who would mentally collapse, old or young, tough or vulnerable. The others had to nurse their comrades when a breakdown happened. They lost a couple. One ran mad and threw himself off a crag, one simply pined away.

When these tragedies happened, the Dacians appeared indifferent, although Vinius noticed the quality of their food improved temporarily. Mainly they were fed on thin pottage and a little salty sheep’s cheese. During festivals, they were treated to spiced meatballs, which for the Romans led to inevitable periods sweating in a Dacian shit-house. They called these Mars’ Balls, which Vinius thought sounded like some sweet Saturnalia treat such as those his aunts and sisters-in-law carried around on trays at family parties . . .

One of the soldiers said that, according to Virgil, the god Mars was born among the Goths, or Dacians. Vinius replied straight-faced that he would make it his rule from now on never to be captured unless it was with someone who read literature. ‘
Aeneid
,’ the man came back at him sadly. ‘Book Three.’
Jupiter!

Once when they had all been sick, they were given some badly cured animal skins to help them keep warm. Someone was monitoring them, in a crude fashion. That made it worse in a way. They had not been forgotten. They were being stored in their run-down hutment like pieces of old fruit that no one cared for much, not allowed to rot, though not expected to be brought out except in an emergency.

Every New Year, Gaius lined up his men, delivered a sharp pep talk on being Romans, and made them take the Oath of Loyalty to the Emperor. He was to do that three times.

After Tapae a winter passed, during which they learned that they would shiver above the snowline for a hundred days a year. Another year went by with no change in their situation. This was to be a long haul, possibly forever. The prisoners discussed it endlessly. They had no way of knowing what happened in Rome.

Domitian spent a full year preparing his retaliation for the Tapae disaster, determined not to repeat the planning and reconnaissance failures that caused it. He was a man who constantly brooded. That helped get logistics right.

He mobilised troops from other provinces: Britain, Germany and Dalmatia. Although it caused controversy, he insisted that the legions in Britain had to withdraw from the north where there was too much demand on manpower in return for too little gain. The legions reluctantly pulled out of Caledonia, which Agricola had won such a short time previously, and the II Adiutrix was brought south to cover the Danube emergency. Domitian increased the legions stationed in Moesia from three to six. They carried out detailed reconnaissance. As he had planned, he rejigged the province, dividing it so there were two governors, who could concentrate their energies. Avid attention to revenge was his lifetime speciality. Doggedly, he refused to be hurried.

The prisoners did find out that the next year, their second in captivity, the Emperor at last sent a new army. It was led by Tettius Julianus; unlike the flighty Fuscus, he was an old-style general with a reputation for enforcing discipline. He advanced from Viminacium, crossed the Danube and invaded Dacia. As far as Vinius could glean, it sounded as if Julianus used the same route through the Transylvanian Iron Gates as his predecessor, which could have been equally disastrous. Warned by what happened to Fuscus, however, Julianus must have prepared tactically for an ambush. He was enticing Decebalus to repeat his previous moves.

This time fortunes were reversed. At the same place, again at Tapae, Tettius Julianus fought Decebalus, imposing defeat on him. The Dacian second-in-command, Veizinas, had to pretend to be dead in order to escape under cover of night. The Dacians were crushed – though not annihilated. Their Roman prisoners from the previous battle were kept alive but were abruptly moved to a two-storey tower in Sarmizegetusa. They were knocked about during the journey. The upsurge of vicious treatment helped Vinius deduce that Rome had had a success. But it also warned him: a Roman victory might put the prisoners-of-war in extreme danger.

They were not rescued, even if the Roman high command knew of their existence – which probably they did not. The advance by Julianus had taken time. After the second battle at Tapae, he decided it was unsafe to press on to Sarmizegetusa so late in the year. Struggling to get information, the prisoners could not argue with the strategy, however dearly they wanted to see Roman troops arriving. Lines of communication and supply back to Moesia would be under threat in winter. The approaches to the citadel were difficult. Large units would struggle in the hills, while smaller contingents would be prey to guerrilla attacks.

Their third dreary year of imprisonment began for Vinius and his companions.

The Dacian maids Vinius had warned the men to ignore were beginning to look as bright and beautiful as meadow orchids.

At this terrible moment, with help so close and yet hope so unreliable, near disaster struck. It happened on the Rhine. Antonius Saturninus, a man nobody had ever heard of and who could have slipped from history a complete unknown, made a surprise play for fame. He was Domitian’s appointee as governor of Upper Germany, once the base from which Vitellius, Vespasian’s rival, had launched his bid for supreme power. From the huge double legionary fort in Moguntiacum, Saturninus also declared himself emperor; he chose the first of January, the day on which he was supposed to give his troops the oath to Domitian. It was twenty years since Vitellius had seized the title; choosing the anniversary was a pointed attempt to oust the Flavian dynasty.

There was a murky conspiracy, one which would never be completely unravelled. There must certainly have been contact between Saturninus’ supporters in Germany and the elite at Rome, because only a madman would try to become emperor unless he believed his elevation would be well received. With a significant number of troops at his disposal and ample funding in the savings banks of two legions, Saturninus had precipitated a serious crisis. But his attempt was rushed, and some said that since he was openly homosexual he had prematurely reacted, or overreacted, to Domitian’s new morality laws.