Reign of Iron (25 page)

“Hmmm,” said Caesar, treating Spring to a suspicious raise of an eyebrow. Other than that one look, he was a charming and attentive host. It was very difficult to reconcile him with the man who’d killed so many Gauls and was determined to massacre her countrymen.

She had vaguely planned on killing him at her wedding – she knew she ought to – but it looked like he knew it and there were always at least two people between him and her. Despite his smiles, she remembered, he had threatened to cut off her fingers, toes, feet and hands and dump her in the woods. She kept looking for an opening to grab a knife, dive across and finish him, but the opportunity never arose. If she was honest, although she definitely still wanted to kill him to stop the coming invasion, she also wanted to have at least a chance of getting away afterwards. There will be other opportunities, she told herself, not even half sure that it was true.

Caesar clapped his hands and decreed it was time for the ceremony. Ragnall asked Cicero to preside, which meant, he said, saying a few nice things.

They stood beneath a tree and Cicero spoke eloquently about the joys of marriage, about the island of Britain, including many of the things that Spring had told him earlier, remembered in perfect detail. He said that he believed the Roman way of life was the best possible, and that he hoped that Roman rule would bring all benefits of living like a Roman yet none of the potential horrors of conquest, and that Rome and Britain would be partners, rather than overlords and a subjugated population. Making these latter points, he looked pointedly at Caesar.

Ragnall and Spring said their vows to each other. They stuck pretty much to the standard British words since Ragnall was worried that Caesar understood more than he let on, but they omitted the words that would have made them husband and wife.

Spring found it odd, going through the ceremony with the kind, handsome Ragnall, surrounded by people who were happy, interesting and clever, even if one of them was a genocidal maniac. She’d never really thought about marriage, she’d just supposed it would happen one day, but she did realise that even if this wasn’t a real wedding, it was about as joyful a day as she could imagine.

After the ceremony, Caesar bade them all farewell and left, unassassinated. Quintus and Pomponia suddenly reappeared – Spring had thought they’d gone, since they’d missed the ceremony – and followed him out. Spring slipped away to walk in the gardens. Lovely as the others were, she wanted some time on her own. She hadn’t had much when Clodia appeared around a corner.

“There’s a big wasp on your left arm,” she said, looking Spring square in the eye.

Spring started and brushed at her arm. No wasp. She realised that Clodia had been talking in Latin and deliberately not looked at her arm so that Spring couldn’t use that as an excuse for her reaction. She raised her head slowly.

Clodia was grinning. She peered about herself to check they were alone, leant in and said, “I knew it! I was watching you when Cicero was blathering on. You understood every single word!”

Spring smiled sheepishly.

Clodia leant in further and Spring breathed in a noseful of her headily floral scent. “Don’t worry, I think that your secret is very funny and I’ll keep it for you. Just be more careful, not everyone’s as dumb as Caesar and his gang. Well, they’re not dumb, they’re very clever at analysing forests, just not so bright with trees, if you know what I mean. Like most men.”

Spring nodded.

“And look, I won’t speak any more Latin to you, but tell me one thing. Do you want Romans on your island?”

Spring looked around. They were alone. She beckoned Clodia further forward and whispered in her ear in Latin: “Please don’t take this as a personal slight, I think you and all the guests are delightful and I’m grateful that you came to see Ragnall and me married, but I’d rather be beaten with a shitty stick for eternity than see another legionary set foot on British soil.”

“Ha, ha! Magnificent! Your Latin is better than mine! By Venus, men are idiots. I like you very much, young Spring. It’s too dangerous for us to speak more, but I do wish you well.”

Clodia turned to go, then leant back in with a waft of perfume. “One more thing I have to know. This wedding’s a sham, right?”

“Yes, but Caesar will maim me and leave me to be eaten by wild animals if I don’t pretend to enjoy it.”

“I see.”

“But I am sort of enjoying it.”

“Good!”

And Clodia was gone.

Spring enjoyed the rest of the afternoon even more. They drank several amphoras of wine and ate roast boar which Ragnall had arranged to be cooked in the British way and everybody said was delicious. After the feast, Cornelia played the lyre and they all sang. Spring hummed the verses, but sang along to the choruses tunefully but in a tortured language that sometimes sounded a bit like Latin. Everyone thought this was very funny, including, apparently, Clodia. The woman was an excellent actress. Spring had worried that she might give her the odd knowing look or wink which Ragnall might ask about, but Clodia didn’t show the tiniest sign of having sussed Spring’s secret.

They sang and drank late into the night. At one point, pissed, she staggered into another part of the garden to see if Dug was around, but she couldn’t find him anywhere.

T
hey rode north through Italy, over cloudy mountains sodden, noisy and often beautiful with melting snow, and up through Gaul. The new Roman territory reminded Spring of parts of Britain after a ravishing by her father. The previous year’s harvest had been pitiful and people were starving. As they rode by, black-eyed beggars lifted their arms in wretched supplication and mothers held screaming babies aloft. The legionaries didn’t register their pathetic entreaties, but the endless miserable onslaught worked on Spring like a pilum twisting in her guts. She couldn’t do anything since she was chained and manacled all the time, so she asked Ragnall to give away three-quarters of their rations. He gave away half. One of her praetorian guards commanded him to stop. Caesar had ordered that nobody was to give food to Gauls. Ragnall told the man to fuck off and handed almost all of their next meal to beggars while the praetorian glowered at him. Spring was proud. He would be a good husband to someone one day, she thought, but never to her. Their marriage had been neither a proper British nor Roman wedding, plus it hadn’t been consummated which made it void in Roman eyes. You weren’t considered to be properly married in Rome until you’d had a child, which Spring found odd, but she was happy to go along with it. She and Ragnall were exactly as married as two bards who’d pretended to wed in a play.

Word in the army was that the harvest had failed due to drought, and everyone seemed to accept this. Their self-delusion was staggering. The harvest had failed because everyone had been busy fighting the Romans, because so many had died and been enslaved that there was nobody left to tend the fields, and because Caesar had stolen so much food for his huge army. Anyone over the age of five, surely, could see this, but the Romans genuinely didn’t seem to. “Terrible thing, drought,” they’d say when they passed another pile of dead Gaulish men, women, children and babies. The babies always made Spring cry, but she did her best to hide it.

She talked to Ragnall about the Roman delusion.

“The Roman invasion may have contributed a little to the lack of food,” he said, “but everything would have been fine if there hadn’t been a drought. You can hardly blame Caesar for the weather.”

“But there was no drought!” She shook her head.

“Really? Why would everyone say there was if there wasn’t? Or were you over here measuring rainfall?”

“You were in Gaul last year. Was it very dry?”

Ragnall hesitated. “I think it was a bit drier than normal, yes. Look, the Roman experts say there was a drought. That means there was a drought.”

She looked into his eyes. He really did seem to believe what he’d just said.

“What’s more,” he added, “in future, Roman farming means, storage practices and distribution methods – better roads, better carts, better planning – will mean that droughts won’t have this effect. People might go hungry for a moon or two but nobody will ever starve again. I can see why these piles of bodies make you sad – you haven’t seen real war like I have – but you can see them as a symbol of the old, bad Gaul dying. They’re like the dead flesh being eaten from a wound by maggots. Things will be much better from now on, as they will be in Roman Britain.”

“Ragnall, these people are dying now, in Roman Gaul. They’re not symbols.”

“Under the structures of old Gaul. It’ll take a year or two before Roman ways bed in properly. Then they will see the benefit.”

“The dead babies won’t.”

“They didn’t have lives worth living.”

There was no point screaming and her hands were tied so she couldn’t strangle him, so she clamped her lips shut and fumed. She was glad he wasn’t really her husband.

They journeyed on. Riding near them most days was Quintus Tullius Cicero. Despite having invited himself to their wedding, the old man didn’t acknowledge Spring or Ragnall but he did ogle her regularly, which was about as comfortable as being lowered naked into a bath full of sexually aggressive eels. The lecherous goat didn’t look nearly as grumpy as he had at the fake wedding because, Spring soon gleaned, his wife Pomponia had demanded to travel next to him with the legions, but Caesar himself had told her to get to the back of the marching order with the rest of the civilians. Quintus Cicero told the story to everyone who came close. His own wife being upbraided by the general was apparently the most excellent and funny thing that had ever happened. It did upset him, though, when people rode up and asked him about “Cicero”. They always meant his famous older brother, seeming to forget that it was his name, too. It obviously galled Quintus to be reminded regularly that there was only one notable Cicero and it wasn’t him. By the amount that it happened, she guessed that everyone knew this and enjoyed riling him.

Spring wondered who the civilians were that Quintus had mentioned and why they were following the army. She was waiting for Ragnall to tell her the story of Quintus’ wife so that she could ask about the civilians, but he didn’t, even though she knew he knew the story – he must have overheard it as many times as she had. In the end she asked him directly if he knew where Pomponia was and he pretended not to know. He was a strange one, Ragnall. He had committed the greatest treachery possible by betraying the land of his parents and he believed the wicked lies of the Romans, but he wasn’t one to pass on gossip. Luckily, one evening as they crossed a bridge that had been erected in a morning by the astonishingly efficient engineers, it began to rain and he said:

“I hope this rain doesn’t swell the river, for the sake of the following civilians.”

“What civilians?” she asked. “And can you pull my hood up for me, please? Or unchain me so that I can do it?”

He rode closer, so that their horses bumped, and pulled the leather hood of her riding cape – a present from the older, non-dickhead Cicero brother (the Real Cicero, as Spring called him in her mind) – up over her head and said: “There are thousands of them, following the army. Some are wives, girlfriends and families of the soldiers, engineers and others in the army, but most are chancers, hoping to make their fortune by following Caesar. I’ve heard that some are carrying their own ships, broken down in carts and ready to assemble at the Channel.”

“And you’re still happy to support this Roman invasion?”

“Of course.” There was no trace of doubt in his voice. “I’m stunned that you can’t see it, even though you’ve been to Rome. Roman culture has
so
much to give Britain.”

“These soldiers and your thousands of civilians don’t intend to give. They plan to take.”

Ragnall shook his head at her despairingly, then told her guards, in Latin, that he was riding on ahead and they should keep an eye on her.

When he was out of sight, she leapt off her horse and jogged along next to it, as she’d done all the way from Rome when he wasn’t watching.

The main talk on the march and in the nightly camps, other than the excitement of invading Britain, was about what a marvellous time it was to be a Roman. The world, apparently, was about to come fully under the heel of the Roman sandal and its wonderful new trio of heroes – Caesar, Crassus and Pompey. Crassus was heading east to invade Mesopotamia, Pompey was consolidating Iberia in the west – albeit from a command post in his country house just outside Rome – and Caesar had the biggest adventure of all, into the unknown wilds of Britain. When Ragnall wasn’t sulking about Spring’s latest accurate observation about the Romans, he translated all this for her.

“But how can they say Britain is unknown when half the slaves in Rome are British?” she asked.

“Nowhere near half.”

“A lot. Enough that they should definitely know a lot more about Britain.”

“I guess they’re not in the habit of conversing with their slaves.” And he headed off again, sulkwards.

They arrived at the huge Roman pre-invasion camp, a frighteningly regular city of prim tent rows and efficiently teeming industry spread across the well-drained former farmland of north-west Gaul. The four praetorians that had guarded Spring since her capture marched off to undertake more manful duties and were replaced by only two. Presumably they thought Spring less likely to escape, now that they were in a camp surrounded by nothing but Roman men for several miles. These two were much more friendly, albeit in the bluff, rude manner that passed for friendliness among soldiers. Unlike the other four, they actually bothered to introduce themselves by name – Tertius and Ferrandus. They did it by pointing at themselves and repeating their names loudly and carefully as if Spring were a stupid child or a clever animal, but she still appreciated it.

Despite Spring’s protests that she would love nothing more than a good walk after all that time on horseback, in fact he’d be cruel to deny her, Ragnall left her behind with Tertius and Ferrandus and headed for the coast. He was desperate for some time away from her incessant, wrongheaded prating.