The Boat of Fate (3 page)

For one of them such prophecy came true. Marcus described it well; the bleak rumour running through the camp, from cohort to cohort, century to century. Julianus Augustus, ruler of the world, was no more. Once again the Empire was leaderless.

‘That was a time, my lad,’ Marcus would say. ‘That was a time, indeed….’

They picked another leader for themselves, out in the wastelands. ‘And why they chose him,’ said Marcus, ‘only the Gods can say. I shall never know.’ Jovianus, a well-meaning ass from the Corps of Protectores, signed away at a stroke the satrapies across the Tigris owned by Rome since the days of Diocletian; eight months later Jovianus too was gone. ‘They say it was natural causes,’ said Marcus grimly. ‘But I wouldn’t bank on that. There were enough at staff headquarters ready to spice his soup . . .’ The army, dispirited, made for home; and Valentinian, of whom I’ve already said more than enough, was finally elected with his brother at Nicaea. The pair proved little better; and had it not been for Theodosius, a modest landowner of Hispania, the Empire would have been laid in ruins there and then.

Marcus marched with his father, the Magister Militum who restored order to the restless Province of Britannia; he ended his service there, and married a Britannic wife. He was offered a sinecure, as a camp commander in charge of training limitanei, but he declined: he’d seen enough of soldiering and war. As gratuity he was given a house and allotment in the garrison town of Eburacum; five years later his wife was dead, and Marcus traded his land for mules and a waggon and headed south, crossing Gaul by slow stages to Hispania where he took service with my father. Behind him, Gaul and Britannia burst into rebellion again under Magnus Maximus; he shrugged it off, sitting in my father’s hall, stitching and hammering for his keep. ‘All I got from Rome,’ he would say, pointing, ‘is in that bloody box. That and a patch of cabbages, that weren’t worth the sweat I dropped on them...,’

But he was seldom bitter, at least with me; he taught me to throw the dice, the ivory cube and oblong every soldier carries, swig the sour wine he still insisted on drinking. My mother only half approved of his hold over me. Certainly it was from him I first caught my military enthusiasm, and formed the patently absurd resolve to be a soldier. Mastery of the Army, as Marcus himself pointed out, had long since been given over to barbarians. Duces, Magistri, Comites, all came now of Frankish or Scythian stock; and such men invariably promoted their relatives and tribespeople, over the heads of Romans bred and born. In any case, as the son of a Government official the armed forces were denied me. My father had already determined I should study law, from which beginning I might rise to be a civil administrator, a Praeses, Praefectus or even a Vicus in charge of a vast Diocese, for such posts were frequently given to candidates of equestrian rank.

All this meant nothing to me. Through my dreams ran a remorseless, endless thunder; the marching tramp of Legions. They poured past in majestic array, sunlight glinting from harness and shield and helmet, sword-hilt and javelin-point. Sometimes I myself was at their head; I rode a gilded chariot through the streets of Rome, a triumphator come to claim the honours that were his due. What Hadrian had done, I had done as well; secured the Empire, restored its ancient glory. Before me strode the Senate, resplendent in their official robes, the spoils and crowns of victory borne high in their train. Trumpeters cleared the way through the roaring mob; there were white bulls for sacrifice, and chanting priests to guard them; lictors with their wreathed bundles of rods, prisoners trudging bowed down in their chains. I stood stiffly in the chariot, bracing myself as its wheels crashed over the rutted flags, eyes staring straight ahead, face glowing behind its mask of scarlet paint. Folk I knew, the housepeople, Marcus, my own father and mother, cheered me from the streets. And the cocks would crow, across the roof-tops of Italica; I would sit up panting, seeing my own room in the first cool light of dawn.

I won no glories, at the age of nine. Instead, I went to school.

The change in my fortunes was abrupt; too abrupt by far for my taste. My father announced, one night at dinner, that the household could no longer afford the cost of a private tutor, and that in any case it would do me good to get out and about and mix more with my fellows. I was sent for the next morning and informed brusquely of my fate. My protests fell on deaf ears; I was dismissed with equal sharpness, and scurried to find Marcus. To my disgust, he was all in favour of the notion. I did extract a promise from him that if I made good progress with my books he would, with my father’s permission, take me hunting deer; and with that I had to be content. I even applied to Heraclites for sympathy; for though I had cursed him often enough, when he kept me at my books in spite of the sunlight pouring into the house, I had taken my first lessons from him and the Devil one knows is always preferable to Devils of the imagination. I, who had already in my mind conquered the world, felt a sharp reluctance to leave the four walls of my home.

The secondary school in Italica was run by one Gellius, a tall, lean and embittered Grammaticus whom I had seen often enough striding through the streets on his way to or from his place of torture. He was a bad man to cross, by all reports; free with his tongue, freer with the strap. However, my fate was obviously sealed; I set about packing my writing materials, pens and cases, paper, wax tablets and the rest, and started out on my first morning prepared to meet my doom, if need be, with all the stoic determination of my forefathers.

I think freedom is a condition only truly appreciated after it has once been lost. Certainly I had never realised until I was packed off to school what a comparatively untrammelled existence I had led. Gellius held court in rented premises above a laundry a few streets from my home. The room in which we worked was low-ceilinged and gloomy; fusty in winter, in summer unbearably hot. Diminutive windows, set close under the eaves, admitted little more than stray breaths of air, while to mitigate the sounds of commerce from below, the door was always kept firmly closed. Gellius sat at one end of the chamber on a heavy, straight-backed chair; the rest of us scratched away at a series of low benches, their surfaces deeply carved with initials and monograms. I generally tried to secure a place near the back of the class; for I was an inveterate dreamer, able to lose myself by the hour in watching the slow swirl of dust motes in the stray beams of sunlight that penetrated the place. That same sunlight lay across Italica; I would see, in my mind’s eye, the lush water-meadows beyond the town through which the Baetica flowed on its way to the sea, the lagoons and reedy marshes where the beavers made their homes. Till now, watching them had been one of my constant pleasures; if you sat still long enough, hidden among the tall, mysteriously rustling grasses, the little creatures would learn to ignore you, busying themselves with their complex works of engineering as though nobody was near. Now that pastime, along with many others, was denied me; instead I had to listen to Gellius’ rasping voice, puzzle my head over his endless, stupid exercises. The contrast was nearly too much to bear.

I suppose it was natural that I should soon fall foul of my new instructor. Gellius began to single me out, hurling awkward questions at me when he knew my attention had wandered, taking sardonic pleasure in picking what answers I managed to make to pieces. Nothing I had learned from Heraclites seemed to be correct; my mathematics, spelling and shorthand were appalling, while my classical knowledge was dubious in the extreme. I was detained night after night, to the unconcealed amusement of the rest of the class, while Gellius tried to din into me what he considered the elements of a sound education. Heraclites looked in from time to time to check on my progress; he did some work with Gellius, mainly in the higher sphere of rhetoric, in addition to his round of private tutorials. At first I was glad to see him, but I soon learned to dread his visits. The two savants were bound to disagree, usually violently and invariably on some minor point of principle; I suffered regardless of the outcome of these battles, as I remained a captive spectator throughout.

Undoubtedly, though, the worst aspect of the school was the stench from downstairs; for as well as cleaning clothes the shop undertook dyeing by the Tyrian method, in which large quantities of urine are employed to fix colour in the cloth. To this end stone tanks were placed outside in the street, passers-by being invited to contribute to stocks; in hot weather the vats stank abominably, the reek permeating the whole building. In addition a steady din rose from the place, the thudding and banging of clothes pounded in stone troughs, never-ending screeching of washerwomen, the clatter and grumble of a variety of machines; it all formed a weird accompaniment to the golden verses of Virgil, the meticulous phrasing of Quintilian. Under the circumstances I find it remarkable that I retained any feeling at all for our national heritage; for to this day, when confronted by one of Gellius’ favourite passages of Horace, there seems to rise from the pages not the glorious stream of images the poet would no doubt have me see, but that awesome reek of piss.

As I came to know my subjects better, and more importantly to understand the whims of my new instructor, I found life easier and began in fact to discover compensations. Gellius was of a strictly classical turn of mind; he only tolerated Quintilian as a fellow Ciceronian and would have nothing to do with the work of the modems, those Christian poets who had sprung up, as he put it, like pale weeds among fields of Roman wheat. In this at least I could follow him, Heraclites having been of very similar temper. I remember once the local Bishop, no doubt to improve our collective minds, loaned us a tract by Prudentius, a Tarraconensian much in vogue at the time. Gellius, in a mood of bitter humour, set us to extol the poet’s virtues as an exercise in rhetoric; I damned him instead, to my tutor’s ill-concealed delight, ending my address with the pious hope that he might one day be compelled to lick clean all the parchment he had spoiled. My speech, delivered stumblingly and in trepidation, proved the turning point of our relationship. Praise from Gellius was praise indeed, mainly because of its scarcity; I applied myself more enthusiastically to my studies, coming eventually to be considered something of a teacher’s pet. The envy of my schoolfellows meant very little to me, for despite my father’s hopes I had made no close friends of my own age. There seemed to be a queer, lonely streak in me; as an only child I had, of course, been forced back to a large extent on my own company, and I looked for nothing better now.

In the main, though, I got on well enough with the rest of my class, with one exception: Publius Aelius, as he styled himself. His parents owned the big Villa of Hadrian just outside the town, a fact he never allowed to be forgotten, though despite his airs he attended the same school as the rest of us. He was my elder, I suppose, by a couple of years, a tall, olive-skinned boy with black curly hair and smallish, restless dark eyes. From the first his attitude towards me had been condescending in the extreme; ‘Poor Sergius’ and ‘Young Sergius’ were phrases never far from his lips. I bore his ways without too much difficulty, as I was frankly unable to take his bombast seriously. As I rose in my tutor’s esteem, however, his attacks became more overt; till one day I realised, belatedly, that a dangerous situation had developed.

Gellius’ school breaking up for the day always produced an effect like the collapse of a small dam. Once released from our place of torture, the whole score of us would pour down the narrow, smelly stairs and race in a mob down the alley that ran alongside the building, each determined for some obscure reason to be first into the street. On this occasion somebody elbowed me heavily in the rush, knocking me off balance and sending me crashing into Publius. The books he was carrying flew in several directions, one ending up with a splash in a muddy puddle; next instant I had received a box on the ears that made my head ring. I straightened, eyes stinging and fists clenched. Publius had flushed a dark, brownish red. For a moment I thought he would fling himself at me; then he relaxed, turning away with a sneer. ‘Save your effort, young Sergius,’ he said. ‘When I deal with you, it won’t be with my hands.’ He stooped sullenly, began gathering up his scattered belongings.

I said angrily, ‘What do you mean? I’m sorry about the books. It was an accident.’

He looked up, his eyes malevolent. Between them projected what would in future years be a haughty beak of a nose. ‘You should be more careful,’ he said. ‘My father is already teaching me the use of the sword.’ He wiped a spoiled book on his tunic. ‘We come from a long line of soldiers,’ he said. ‘You are the son of a freedman and a runaway Celtic slave. I am descended from Hadrian.’

Despite my annoyance my brain worked quickly. Some of my father’s bitterest gibes had been directed at Publius’ family; he told them to Heraclites, who lost no time passing them on to me. ‘That would be difficult,’ I said, ‘seeing the Empress Sabrina habitually boasted of her infertility. Perhaps that relative of hers had something to do with you, though, between writing those lousy verses on the Sphinx.’

The sally, though geographically inaccurate, brought him to his feet. I thought for an instant he was going to attack me again, and stiffened to meet the onslaught; then he laughed, a little too loudly to be convincing. ‘Poor Sergius,’ he said. ‘I keep forgetting. You are still only a child, who cannot yet handle a sword without pricking himself. I don’t fight children.’ He turned on his heel, walked away with some dignity and was gone.

I made my way home in a somewhat chastened mood. I was still unsure how the situation had come about, but it seemed I had made a thoroughly unpleasant enemy, and some time in the future would have to play my part or bear the consequences of cowardice. Also my ear and cheek still burned a little; and when I thought back to Publius’ insults I felt my temper rise again. That night I sought Marcus in his room. I mooned about for a while, fiddling restlessly with this and that, till finally he told me curtly to find something useful to do or clear off and leave him in peace. I swallowed at that and said suddenly, ‘Marcus, will you make me a sword?’