The Roman (17 page)

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could get rich in this country. In fact Rome�s money disappears as if into a bottomless pit, and Claudius has been forced to let me celebrate a triumph so that Rome will think that all is peaceful here. No one will ever make this country peaceful, for it is in a permanent state of turmoil, If one conquers one of their kings in honorable battle, another soon appears, caring for neither hostages nor treaties. Or else a neighboring tribe comes and captures the land we�ve conquered and slaughters our garrison troops. One can�t disarm them completely because they need their weapons to defend themselves against each other. I should have been glad to return without a triumph just to get out of this godforsaken country.� He grew serious and looked sternly at me. �Had rumor of a triumph already spread to Rome when you left,� he asked, �for a young knight like you voluntarily to offer to come here? I suppose you hope to share in the triumph with the minimum effort.� Indignantly I explained that I had heard nothing of any triumph. On the contrary, it was said in Rome that Claudius, out of sheer envy, would not allow any such thing for service in Britain because he himself had celebrated a triumph for quelling the Britons. �I have come to study the art of war under a famous commander,� I said. �1 was tired of the riding exercises in Rome.� �There are no glossy horses and silver shields here,� said Aulus briskly. �No hot baths or skilled masseurs either. There is nothing here but the war cries of blue-painted barbarians in the forests, daily fear of ambush, an eternally running cold, an incurable cough, and permanent homesickness.� And he was not exaggerating all that much, as I was to find out in the two years I spent in Britain. He kept me on his staff for a few days to have my descent confirmed, to hear the latest gossip from Rome and with the help of a relief map to teach me the shape of Britain and the positions of the legionary camps. He also gave me leather clothes, a horse, weapons, and some friendly advice. �Look after your horse well or the Britons will steal it,� he said. �They fight with chariots, so their horses are small and are not good for riding. As Roman war and politics here are based on our

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treaties with the British tribes, we also have several chariot auxiliaries. But never trust a Briton, and never turn your back on one. The Britons would like to have our large war-horses to start up their own cavalry. Claudius� victory here was due to his elephants, which the Britons had never seen before. The elephants tore up their wooden barricades and frightened their horses. But the Britons soon learned to aim at the elephants� eyes with their spears and to scorch them with burning torches. And the elephants could not stand the climate either. The last of them died of pneumonia a year ago. I�ll send you to Flavius Vespasian�s legion because he is my most experienced soldier and most trustworthy commander. He is dull but never loses his head. His descent is humble and his habits crude, but he is an honest man who thus will probably never rise to greater heights than that of legion commander. But you will learn the art of war from him, if that is what you want.� I met Flavius Vespasian on the shore of the flooded river Anton, where he had dispersed his legion over a wide area and had had wooden fortifications built far apart from each other. He was a man of about forty, powerfully built, his forehead broad and with good-natured lines around his stem mouth. And he was not so insignificant as one would have thought from Aulus Plautius� superior description. He liked to laugh loudly and also to joke about his own reverses, over which a weaker man might have despaired. His presence alone gave me a sense of security. He looked at me slyly. �Is fortune coming our way,� he said, �now that a young knight from Rome comes of his own free will to the damp dark forests of Britain? No, no, it�s not possible. Confess what you have done at once and what boyish pranks you have fled from into the protection of my legion�s Eagle, then we�ll get on better together.� When he had questioned me minutely on my family and friends in Rome, he said that I would be neither a credit to him nor the contrary. Good-natured as he was, he decided that I should gradually get used to the filth and crudity and trials of military life. At first he took me with him on one of his tours of inspection so that I should get to know the country, and he dictated to me his reports to Aulus Plautius because he himself was too lazy to write. When he had made sure I really could ride and did not trip

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over my sword, he handed me over to the legion�s engineer to learn how to build fortifications. Our isolated garrison did not even make up a full maniple. Some of us went hunting for provisions, others felled timber in the forest and a third contingent was building fortifications. Before leaving, Vespasian exhorted me to see that the men kept their weapons clean and that the guards were awake and not idle, for carelessness with weapons was the mother of all vice and weakened discipline. After a few days I grew tired of wandering about the camp, listening to the barefaced gibes of the old legionaries. I took an ax and began to fell trees in the forest. At the pile-driving, I too, with dirt in my eyes, took a hand at the rope and joined in the song. In the evenings I stood both the centurion and the engineer some wine, which one could buy at an outrageous price From the camp trader, but often I joined the scarred old under- officers around the campfire and shared theft porridge and salt meat. I grew stronger, coarser, cruder and I learned to swear, no longer minding about being asked how long I had been weaned. There were a score or so of cavalry men from Gaul attached to our garrison. When their commanding officer realized I was not competing for his command, he decided it was time for me to kill my first Briton, so he took me on a provisioning raid. After crossing the river, we rode a long way to a village where the inhabitants had complained that a neighboring tribe was threatening them. They had hidden their weapons, but the veterans, who had come after us on foot, were used to finding weapons in the earthen floors of the round huts and in the heaps of manure outside. After finding the weapons, they plundered the village of all the corn and some of the cattle and mercilessly killed the men who tried to defend their property, on the theory that Britons were not even any good as slaves. The women who had not had time to escape into the forest, they raped as a matter of course and with friendly laughter. This pointless destruction appalled me, but the commander just laughed and told me to calm down and be prepared. The demand [or protection was merely a customary trap as was proved by the weapons we had found. Nor was he lying, for at dusk a howling mob of blue-painted Britons attacked the village from all directions in the hope of surprising us.

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But we were on our guard and easily withstood the lightly armed barbarians who had no legionary shields with which to protect themselves. The veterans, who had the day before destroyed the village and whom I thought I should never forgive for the bloody deeds I had witnessed, enclosed me in their midst and protected me in the hand-to-hand fighting. When the Britons turned and fled, they left behind one of their warriors, who was wounded in the knee. He bellowed wildly, supporting himself on his leather shield and swinging his sword. The veterans opened their ranks, pushed me forward and shouted laughingly, �There�s one for you. Kill your Briton now, little friend.� It was easy to protect myself and kill the wounded man, despite his strength and his sword. But when I had finally cut his throat with my long sword and he lay dying on the ground with blood pouring from his body, I was forced to turn away and be sick Shame for my weakness drove me quickly back into the saddle to join the Gauls as they followed the fleeing Britons into the undergrowth until the trumpet recalled us. We left the village prepared for another attack by the Britons, for our centurion was convinced that the fighting was by no means over yet. We had a difficult journey ahead as we had to drive the cattle and carry the corn in baskets back to the garrison and at the same time ward off attacks from the Britons. I felt better when I had to defend myself and also ride to the assistance of others, but I did not think this was a particularly honorable way of waging war, When we finally re-crossed the river and had returned with our spoils to the protection of the fort, we had lost two men and a horse and had a number of wounded. Exhausted, I went to rest in my wooden hut with its earthen floor, but I kept waking and seemed still to be hearing the Britons� shrill war cries outside. The following day I did not feel the slightest desire to join in on the division of the spoils, but the cavalry commander jokingly boasted to everyone how I had distinguished myself and slashed around with my sword and bellowed with fear almost as loudly as the Britons. So I had the same right to the spoils as the others. Presumably in jest, the veterans pushed toward me a half-grown Briton girl with her hands bound together. �Here�s your share of the spoils,� they cried, �so that you won�t find life dull and leave us, brave child knight Minutus.�

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I shouted furiously that I did not want to keep and feed a slave- girl, but the veterans were all innocence. �If one of us takes her,� they said, she�ll just cut his throat with a knife as soon as her hands are free But you are a noble youth with fine manners and you can talk Greek. Perhaps she�ll like you better than us.� They willingly promised to give me advice on how to train such a slave-girl. At first I must beat her morning and evening, on principle, just to tame her wild ways. They also gave me more experienced advice, but that I cannot put down on paper. When I roughly refused, they shook their heads and pretended to be sad. �Then there�s nothing else for it but to sell her for next to nothing to the camp trader,� they said. �You can imagine what�ll happen to her then.� I realized I should never forgive myself if I were the cause of this frightened child�s being trained with a stick as a camp whore. Reluctantly I agreed to take the girl as my share of the spoils. I drove the veterans out of my hut and sat with my hands on my knees, looking at her. She had smuts and bruises on her childish face and her red hair hung untidily over her forehead. She looked like one of the Britons� colts as she peered at me from beneath her fringe. I began to laugh, cut the rope around her wrists and told her to go and wash her face and plait her hair. She rubbed her swollen wrists and stared at me mistrustfully. Finally I went and fetched the engineer, who could speak a few words of the Iceni�s language. he laughed at my dilemma but remarked that the girl was at least healthy and had straight limbs. When she heard her own language, (he girl seemed to gain courage. They talked animatedly for a while. �She doesn�t want to wash, or comb her hair,� explained the engineer, �because she suspects your intentions. If you touch her, she�ll kill you. She swears this in the name of the hare- goddess. I assured him that I had not the slightest intention of touching the girl. The engineer said that the most sensible thing to do would be to give her wine to drink because the uncivilized Britons were not used to wine and she would soon be drunk. Then I could

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do what I liked with her as long as I made sure that I did not get too drunk myself. Otherwise the girl might cut my throat when she sobered up. That was what happened to one of the legion�s tanners who had made the mistake of drinking together with an untamed British woman. I repeated impatiently that I did not want to touch the girl. But the engineer insisted that it would be wisest if I kept the girl bound. Otherwise she would run away at the first opportunity. �Nothing could be better,� I said. �Tell her that tonight I�ll go with her past the guards and set her free.� The engineer shook his head and said that he had thought I was mad before, voluntarily joining in the work with the men, but he had not thought I was that mad. He spoke to the girl and then turned back to me. �The girl doesn�t trust you,� he said. �She thinks that you�re taking her into the forest to get your own way. Even if she did escape from you, Britons from other tribes would capture her and hold her as a hostage as she doesn�t belong here. Her name is Lugunda.� Then the engineer�s eyes began to glisten and he licked his lips as he looked at the girl. �Look,� he said. �I�ll give you two silver pieces for the girl and then you�ll be rid of her.� The girl saw the look and rushed up to me, grasping my arm as if I were the only security she had in the world. But at the same time she uttered a stream of her sibilant language. The engineer laughed loudly. �She says, if you touch her without permission you will be reborn as a frog. Before then her tribesmen will come and cut out your stomach, pull out your intestines and stick a red-hot spear up your backside. It�d be wiser, I should think, if you sold her at a reasonable price to a more experienced man.� For a moment I felt like giving the girl to the engineer for nothing, but then I again patiently assured her that I did not want to touch her. In fact I thought of treating her like a colt. They had their fringes combed and were given a blanket on their backs on cold nights. Old veterans used to relieve their boredom by keeping pets. The girl would be better than a dog because she could teach me the Britons� language.

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I do not know how the engineer interpreted my words, or if in fact he knew enough of the language to convey what I had said to the girl. I suspect that he told the girl that I was as unwilling to touch her as I would be to mate with a dog or a horse. Anyhow, she drew quickly away from me and began to splash her face with water from my wooden pail, to show she was neither a horse nor a dog. I asked the engineer to leave and gave the girl some soap. She had never seen such a thing before, and to tell the truth, neither had I until I stayed the night in the Gallic town of Lutetia on the way to Britain and visited the wretched bathhouse there. It was on the anniversary of the day of my mother�s death and thus also my birthday. I was seventeen in Lutetia and no one congratulated me. The thin slave in the bathhouse surprised me with the mild and cleansing soap he was using. It was quite a different feeling from being scoured with pumice. I remembered the money Tullia had given me and bought both the slave his freedom and his soap for three gold pieces. On the morning I left Lutetia, I gave him permission to call himself Minutius. The few pieces of soap I received in return, I kept well hidden when I realized that this new invention roused the contempt of the legionaries. When I showed the girl how the soap should be used, she forgot her fear, washed herself and began to untangle her hair. I rubbed her swollen wrists with good ointment, and when I saw how badly her clothes had been torn by the thorns, I went to the trader for underclothes and a woolen cloak for her. After that she followed ne everywhere like a faithful dog. I soon noticed that it was easier for me to teach her Latin than for me to learn the barbarians� language. During the long dark evenings by the fire, I also tried to teach her to read. But I did it just for my own amusement, by writing the letters in the sand and letting her copy them. The only books in the garrison were the centurion�s almanac and the trader�s Egyptian-Chaldaean book of dreams, so I very much regretted not bringing anything with me to read. Teaching Lugunda made up for some of this. I endured with a laugh the stream of obscenities from the veterans regarding the girl in my hut, for they meant no harm.