Nobody Loves a Centurion (20 page)

“It has considerable bearing on the matter,” I said, looking serious and wise to cover my confusion.

“The Druids held it. It’s their custom. Gauls think writing is some sort of magic. For all they know, you hand them a papyrus with writing on it, you might be putting a curse on them. They think their Druids are proof against evil magic.”

“Do you know which Druid took charge of the pass?”

“It was the youngest one brought it to me for validation, but any of them might have presented it at the gate.”

“Are departing civilians allowed to use any of the gates?”

He shook his head. “Only the Porta Praetoria.”

“Who was the officer in charge of the Praetoria that night?”

He turned to the clerk. “Get the roster.”

The clerk wore armor, so he was another soldier pulling special duty. He didn’t bother to look for the roster. “It was the ninth night after the full moon, so it was the tribune of the Ninth Cohort.”

“That’s Publius Aurelius Cotta,” Paterculus informed me. “Another snot-nosed shavetail sent to plague my days.”

“Was he on the gate all night?”

Paterculus looked at me as if I had handed him a mortal insult. “No officer of the guard leaves his post unless properly relieved. If he does, by every god of the State I’ll see him beheaded in front of the whole army, no matter how ancient and illustrious his name is!” Obviously, I had trod on the sensitive corns of his authority.

“Very good, Prefect. Carry on.” I turned neatly and walked out of the tent. Behind me I fancied I could hear him fuming.

I pondered upon the minutiae of military practice as I went in search of Aurelius Cotta. Soldiers could blithely ignore the grossest acts of cruelty and depravity, yet grow infuriated over minuscule breaches of procedure and precedence. To an inspecting
centurion, a speck of rust on a sword blade or a dangling bootlace was exactly the same thing as a military defeat: It was something that shouldn’t happen and must be punished. He could work up precisely the same amount and degree of rage over each.

That same centurion could watch his soldiers sacking an enemy village, slaughtering and raping and destroying everything in sight, and it was “just the boys acting up a bit.” The fundamental difference between the military and the civilian mentality, I believe, is a totally divergent sense of proportion.

I found a gaggle of tribunes dicing their time away beneath a lean-to erected near the stables. As officers elected by the centuriate assembly, they had the privilege of bringing their own horses along on campaign, so they regarded the stables as part of their territory. Their current occupation was typical of tribunes, who usually lack for meaningful duties. Of soldiers generally, for that matter. I firmly believe that an army’s load could be lightened considerably just by getting rid of all the dice.

I walked up behind my cousin Lumpy and nudged him with my toe. “Where is that hundred you owe me?” It had become my invariable greeting.

“Do you think I’d be trying to win some drinking money if I was rich?” he grumbled. “Besides, no man who’s been given that German piece has any cause for complaint.”

“Tell you what,” I proposed. “Give me that hundred and you can have Molon.”

“I’ll trade you my horse and my personal slave for that German girl.”

“Your keen business acumen will bring credit to our family
yet. I’m looking for Aurelius Cotta. Has anybody seen him?”

One of the tribunes looked up from the bone cubes. “I saw him over by the armory a while ago.”

“Thanks.” I turned to go. Lumpy got up and began to walk along beside me.

“Listen, Decius,” he began, hesitantly, “I know Caesar appointed you investigator, but that was just a matter of form, don’t you think? Like when a praetor appoints an
index
for a case that’s really not important, but constitutional forms have to be followed?”

“Lumpy, I know that, in your tiresome way, you’re trying to say something. Why not just say it?”

“Decius, you’re building up a lot of bad feeling here, the way you’ve been interrogating officers and centurions like common felons. I think you had better back off and let those men take their punishment.”

I stopped and turned on him. “What is this to you?” I demanded.

“I am a Caecilius Metellus, too. Everything you do rubs off on me!”

“You’ll smell none the worse for it,” I said. “You can’t really care about this—you aren’t involved in any way. Did someone put you up to this? Someone involved in the activities of the night in question?”

“Nobody!” he said, but his eyes kept sliding away from mine as if he found my ears to be of some interest. “I’m just catching a lot of grief from the others because of the way you’re acting.”

I stepped close and stared him down. When his eyes dropped, I addressed him. “Lumpy, I had better not learn that
you are holding out on me. If the son of my old retainer is flogged to death with sticks because you withheld information from me, you’ll wish you’d gone with him.”

He laughed nervously. “Don’t get in such a state, Decius! We are family, after all. I’d never interfere with your duties, and if the boy is a client of the Caecilii, he deserves our help. I’m just asking you not to tread so heavily. You have a way of questioning people that infuriates these soldiers. They don’t care about birth and officeholding and education. They respect only a better soldier, and you aren’t that.”

“Just remember what I’ve told you.” I whirled and stalked off. There was some truth in what he said. This was not a good place to sling my arrogant weight around, but it is not easy to suppress fifty generations of breeding. And I knew perfectly well that he was not telling me the whole truth. Was anybody?

I found Cotta having an edge put on his sword. This was a sure sign of nerves. The armorer was doing a great business sharpening the weapons of the tribunes, as if they had much chance of using them. Youngsters going into their first campaign always do two things: they spend all day fussing over their weapons and all night making out their wills.

“A word with you, Publius Aurelius, if you don’t mind,” I said.

“Certainly,” he said, his eyes on the armorer’s hands. The man was working the edge of the sword in tiny circles on a very large whetstone set in a long, wooden box full of oil. His movements were slow and precise. The edge on a Roman sword is not so much ground as polished into the steel. With such an edge it takes amazingly little effort to inflict a horrendous wound.

“I think you can leave the man to his work,” I said. “He won’t fail you.”

“Oh, yes, of course.” He came away reluctantly. “How may I help you?”

“Paterculus tells me that you were officer in charge of the Porta Praetoria the night Titus Vinius was killed.”

“I had that duty.” His eyes slid back toward his sword.

“Publius, pay attention. The Gauls are a long way off and Caesar will be back with reinforcements long before they can attack.”

He looked shamefaced. “Sorry.”

“After the sundown trumpet sounded, did anyone pass through the Porta Praetoria?”

“About two hours after the trumpet sounded a party of locals presented a pass from the Proconsul, validated by the Prefect of the Camp, and I let them through.”

“Describe this party.”

He thought about it. “Well, the men were important, you could see that by the amount of gold jewelry they wore, and their horses were good ones. There were seven or eight of them, plus those three Druids who’ve been around the camp the last few days. It was one of the elder Druids who handed me the pass.” So Badraig hadn’t been designated as the writing handler.

“Describe the rest of the party.”

“There were a dozen or so guards. They were all armed in the Gallic style: longswords, narrow shields, no armor except a helmet or two. They were from the Province, though, you could tell that. They weren’t all painted up and spike-haired like the wild men.”

“Who else?” I asked.

He frowned, puzzled. “Well, there was nobody else. Just some slaves.”

“Describe the slaves.”

Now he looked at me as if I must be demented. “They just looked like slaves: dark clothes, some carrying loads, some leading pack animals or remounts. I didn’t pay much attention.” Reasonable enough: Who ever notices slaves?

“And did no one else leave through the Porta Praetoria after that party?”

“Not while I was on duty.”

I clapped him on the shoulder. “Thank you, Publius, you’ve been a great help. You can go back to your sword now.”

“Well—certainly. Any way I can be of assistance.” He obviously considered me a prize loon, but I was well satisfied. Another little piece of the puzzle had just been handed me and I walked away from him with a little more cheer in my heart.

Who ever pays attention to slaves? We live our lives surrounded by them and we act as if they are not there at all. Men will speak indiscreetly in their presence as if they did not have ears. Noble ladies who would never appear in public without shawls and veils, in their own homes will parade around naked in front of male slaves as if they were not men.

The high-born citizenry wear mostly finely woven white clothes with a touch of color here and there. The lower born wear the most colorful garments they can afford. Slaves wear dark, rough clothes.

Now I knew how Vinius had left the camp unnoticed. He had gone out with that pack of slaves. Dressed in that dark, coarse tunic, probably with a burden over his shoulders to further
hide his face, he had simply walked through, knowing nobody would notice.

So what had happened, out there on the heath? Not what he was expecting, that much was certain. Whatever game he had been playing for a year or more had backlashed him.

I wanted a few words with those Druids.

But it was late and I was hungry and I had no idea where the Druids might be. The Provincials with their land dispute were doubtless halfway back to Massilia by now. First things first.

Back at my tent, I dropped into my folding chair beneath the awning and pounded on the little table. “Hermes! Molon! Where is dinner?”

Hermes came out of the tent. “Aren’t you having dinner with the other officers anymore?”

“Labienus doesn’t keep as liberal a table as Caesar, and anyway, I’ve become the prize leper here.”

“Just like home, eh? I’ll find something.”

“Where is Molon? I have some questions for him.”

“You’ll find him behind the tent,” Hermes sneered. “Good luck with the questions.”

“What now?” I got up and walked around the tent. On the ground in back Molon lay, blissfully snoring away. He reeked of wine, and when I kicked him he just muttered and smacked his lips and made other, equally disgusting sounds. I went back in front and plopped back down.

“Did you know he was getting into the wine supply?” I demanded of Hermes.

“Of course I did. I told him to stop and he told me to mind my own business.”

“And you didn’t protect my wine? Where is your sense of duty?”

“Why should I? You can always buy more wine.”

“Remind me to flog him in the morning. I may flog you, too. Where is Freda? Has she failed me as well?”

“I am here,” she said, pushing past the tent flap. She carried a basket full of bread with pots of oil and honey.

“Well, at least you haven’t been into my wine supply.”

“I don’t drink wine,” she said, sliding the basket onto the table in front of me. She spoke as if this conferred upon her some sort of superiority.

“Are you Germans beer drinkers then?” I asked. I had tried the stuff in Egypt and found it to be perfectly horrible.

“Sometimes. But true warrior people don’t render themselves senseless.”

For some reason I was stung by this. “Drunk or sober, Romans are better than anyone else.” As if to prove this, I took a deep swallow from the cup Hermes had filled for me.

“You have never fought any real men,” she said. “Just Greeks and Spaniards and Gauls, worthless trash, the lot of them. When you meet German warriors in battle, it will be different.”

“For a slave woman you’ve gotten belligerent all of a sudden,” I protested. “Why this devotion to people who gave you to a Roman as a present?” I held out my cup for Hermes to refill.

“That was not my tribe,” she said, as if that made a difference.

“Better eat something before you soak up too much of this,” Hermes muttered as he poured.

“What is this, Saturnalia? That’s the only time slaves
get to lecture the master and if I have my dates straight it is still some months away!” Actually, I couldn’t even be sure of this. As
pontifex maximus
, Caesar had allowed our calendar to get so bolloxed up that any festival might drop in just about any time. “You two both shut up and let me eat in peace.” They kept a smug silence, for which I was only half grateful. It was getting so that they were about the only people in the camp willing to talk to me. I probably did drink too much.

Eventually, as some late trumpet calls sounded through the camp, I rose and Hermes helped me off with my gear. As I lurched into the tent, I called back over my shoulder. “Freda, come here. I want to talk with you.”

This time she was smiling as she came in. “Are you sure you are up to this?”

I sat and tugged off my boots. “I said talk, nothing else.”

“Naturally,” she said mockingly.

“I need information,” I began, determined to show her what a monument of self-control and rectitude I was. I fell back on the cot, my head landing with greater force than I had anticipated.

“Information. I see.”

“Yes. Information. To begin: What is your tribe?”

“The Batavi. We live far to the north, on the cold sea. You would think it cold, anyway. Romans are oversensitive to cold.”

“You are determined to provoke me. What brought you here, to become the property of Titus Vinius? I have heard Molon’s account but I want to hear your version.”

She sat on the cot beside me, unbidden. I let the minor insolence pass. She smelled unbelievably enticing.

“My tribe fought a great battle with the Suebi and I was captured. Cimberius, coking of the Suebi, chose me from among the spoils. He had first pick and I was by far the most desirable item there.” She certainly did not lack for self-regard. Casually, she rested a hand on my knee.