Roma Mater (6 page)

As he re-entered the atrium, Gratillonius met his father coming from upstairs, and was especially filial in his
salutation. ‘Good morning,’ replied Marcus. ‘I hope you slept well. Your old bed is one thing I’ve managed to keep.’

Touched, Gaius gave him a close regard. The dawnlight showed a face and form resembling his own; but Marcus’s hair was grey, his countenance furrowed, the once powerful body gaunt and stoop-shouldered. Thank you, sir,’ Gaius said. ‘Could we talk today … privately?’

‘Of course. You’ll want a walk around the place anyway. First, though, our duties, and next our breakfast.’

They went forth together on to the verandah, sought its eastern end, lifted arms and voices to Mithras as the sun rose. It stirred Gaius more than rites in a temple commonly did. He paid his respects to the God and tried to live by the Law, because that was upright, soldierly, everything this man at his side – and this man’s stern father, once – had tried to make him become. But he was not fervent about it. Here, somehow, a feeling of sanctity took him, as if borne on those rays bestorming heaven. Tears stung his eyes. He told himself they must be due to the wind.

Everydayness came back. The men spoke little while they had their bread and cheese. Afterwards they dressed against the weather and left the house. ‘Let’s begin at the stable,’ Marcus suggested. ‘There’s a colt you’ll appreciate.’

Gaius looked about him more closely than yesterday. The house stood firm beneath its red-tiled roofs, and likewise did the farm buildings to either side, around a cobbled courtyard. But he saw where whitewash had flaked from walls, the cowpen and its barn gaped almost empty, a single youngster went to feed pigs and chickens where formerly the grounds had roared with life.

The wind shrilled and plucked at his cloak. He drew
the garment tight against those icy fingers. Northwards he saw the land roll in long curves to the woods where boys went – sometimes in defiance of orders from parents who feared Scoti might pounce from the river and seize them for slaves – and where Gwynmael the gamekeeper had taught him how to read a spoor and set a snare. Closer in, the acres were cleared, but most had gone back to grass and brush, still winter-sere, although quickened by the faintest breath of new green. Through an apple orchard he discerned a cultivated field, dark save where wind-ruffled rain puddles blinked in the sunshine. Rooks and starlings darted above, blacker yet. A hawk high overhead disdained to stoop on them. Its wings shimmered golden.

A thought struck Gaius. ‘I haven’t seen your steward, Artorius,’ he said. ‘Has he died?’

‘No – ’

‘Good. He used to tell me wonderful stories about his days as a legionary. That was what started me thinking I’d want to enlist, myself.’ Gaius forced a laugh. ‘After I did, I discovered what a liar he’d been, but no matter, he’s a grand old rogue.’

Too old. Nearly blind. I retired him. He’s moved in with a son of his.’

‘Um, who do you have now?’

Marcus shrugged. ‘Nobody. Can’t find a competent man and couldn’t afford him if I did. I’m my own steward. The villa’s no longer so big or busy that I can’t handle it.’

They neared the stable. A hound sprang forth, baying, until a word from Marcus brought it to heel. A white-haired man shuffled out behind the creature. He stopped short, blinked, squinted, and quickened his pace. ‘Why, bless my butt if that’s not the young master!’ he cried in Belgic dialect. ‘We’d heard you were coming, but I thank the Gods just the same. Welcome, lad, welcome!’

Gaius took a hand gnarled into a set of claws, regarded
a visage withered and well-nigh toothless, and remembered how Gwynmael had drifted like a shadow down forest paths till his bow twanged and the arrow found its mark. He hadn’t been nearly this aged three years ago. Well, Gaius thought with pain, you grow old, suddenly you can’t run fast enough, and Time the Hunter overtakes you in a pair of leaps. ‘Are you working here?’ he asked in the vernacular.

‘So ’tis, so ’tis. I’m no use any more for chasing off poachers or bringing back venison. But your dad’s a kindly sort and lets me pretend to earn my keep being his head groom. That’s easy, because except for a boy I’m the only groom, heh, heh. Not that I could’ve carried on in my real job after our woods got sold off.’ In his shock at hearing that, Gaius hardly noticed when Gwynmael fondled the hound’s ears and said, ‘Splendid dog, eh? Remember Brindle, what coursed the stags so well? Here’s a pup from the last: litter she bore. Too bad we can’t let this ‘un do what his blood meant him for.’ Taking the centurion’s elbow: ‘But come inside, young sir, come in and look at what we got in a stall. Juno foaled him last summer, and if he don’t live up to his promise, why, he’s the biggest braggart in horsedom.’

The stable was dim and warm, smelling sweetly of hay and animal, pungently of manure. Gaius stopped to stroke the two beasts he knew, mare and gelding – their noses were silk-soft, and Juno whickered for pleasure – before he went on to the stallion colt. That was indeed a superb creature, like a cross between flesh and wind. ‘Epona Herself ‘ud be glad to ride him when he’s full-grown,’ Gwynmael said. He had never made any bones about his devotion to the ancient Gods of the Belgae.

‘What sire?’ Gaius asked.

‘Commius’s prize stud,’ Marcus told him.

‘Really? Commius the senator? He must have charged you a pretty solidus.’

‘He did, but I should profit eventually. You see, I think I can fence in most of what land we have left, take out the scrub, sow pasturage, and breed horses. Blooded horses, for riding. Skilled help may not be too hard to come by in that business: veteran cavalrymen from the eastern provinces, especially, or their sons.’

‘But who could pay the price you’d have to set?’

‘The army. I may have swallowed the anchor, but I still get word from overseas, as far as Constantinople. Given the new Asiatic saddles, horsemen are the soldiers of the future. Cataphracts could roll the barbarians back – though we won’t get them in Britannia during my lifetime. However, I expect we’ll begin to see more and more cavalry in Gallia, and here I’ll be, prepared to export.’ Marcus’s smile turned grim. ‘Also, rich men everywhere will want fast mounts in case of raiders or uprisings.’

His moods gentled. He touched Gaius’s arm. ‘I’ll need this fellow for breeding,’ he murmured, ‘but I’ll set aside the best of his get for you.’

The son gulped. ‘Thank you,’ he said unsteadily. ‘I’m not sure whether – oh, we have to talk about all this.’

They went out and set off towards the Roman road. Little used, the wagon track alongside which they walked was not very muddy. Rounding the orchard, Gaius saw two men, no more, at work in the grainfield. They were ploughing with ards drawn by cows. Gaius halted. ‘Where’s the proper gear?’ he wondered.

‘Sold, like much else,’ Marcus replied.

Keen as its coulter there rose before Gaius the memory of a wheeled mouldboard plough and the mighty oxen that pulled it. Rage rose acid in his throat. ‘But this is wrong, wrong!’

‘Oh, the villa hasn’t enough land under cultivation to need better equipment.’

‘You’ve sold … still more? Besides the woods?’

‘Had to. They slapped an extra assessment on me for waterworks, after Tasciovanus went bankrupt, Laurentinus suicided, and Guennellius disappeared – ran off to Londinium and is hiding in its proletary, some say.’

‘Who bought your land?’

‘Commius. Who else?’

Fury lifted higher. Commius the gross, Commius the crooked, Commius the unmerciful squeezer of tenants, servants, slaves. Commius who bought his way to senatorial rank – everybody knew that was a question of bribing the right people – and thus escaped the burdens of the curials, Commius who thereupon had the gall to boast how public-spirited he was because he maintained a theatre, whose pornographic shows must swell business at the whorehouse everybody knew he owned –

‘Calm down,’ Marcus advised. ‘His sort, they come and go. Rome’s had them since first the Republic began to rot, if not earlier; but Rome endures, and that is what matters.’ When he grinned, his leathery face looked, briefly, wolfish. ‘In fact, last year, at a series of council meetings, I had the pleasure of frustrating him. He wanted to close our Mithraeum as the Emperor had decreed. I got my friends behind me and we agreed that if that was done, we’d see to it that his precious theatre was shut down too. Those plays pretend to show myths of the ancestors, you know, and we’d claim this made them not “educational displays” but pagan ceremonies. An Imperial inquiry would have turned up more about his affairs than he could well stand – investments in commerce and industry such as are forbidden a senator, for instance. He stopped calling for any religious prohibitions. It was marvellous, seeing him flush red and hearing
him gobble. The God does send His faithful a bit of fun once in a while.’

But the God’s faithful die or fall away, year after year, and ever fewer take their places, Gaius thought.

The sombreness dampened his wrath. ‘At least you’ve lowered your tax by selling off,’ he ventured, ‘and with this horse-breeding scheme you may win back to something better … for Lucius and the grandchildren he’ll give you.’

Marcus’s mouth drew tight. They trudged on in silence, except for the wind. Finally the father said, tonelessly, looking at the far hills: ‘No. I didn’t tell you earlier because it would have spoiled our evening. But Lucius has turned Christian. He’s studying under the bishop in Aquae Sulis, with the aim of becoming a churchman too. He talks about celibacy.’

Gaius’s feet jarred to rest. Emptiness grew from his heart until it engulfed him. ‘Not that,’ he whispered.

Marcus stopped likewise and squeezed his shoulder. ‘Well, well, don’t take it overly hard. I’ve learned to live with it. We’ve stayed on speaking terms, he and I. It
was
his mother’s religion, and is that of his sisters and their husbands and … Maximus, who cast back the wild men … I can’t blame him greatly. If he’d waited till I died, he’d have been trapped in the curial class himself. Taking Christian holy orders now is his way out of it.’

Out! thought Gaius. The army was another way, and he had chosen it, although that would not have been allowed if he were the older boy. Since Diocletianus, a son and heir must follow in his father’s occupation. The law was frequently evaded, but the curials – the landowners, merchants, producers, the moderately well-off – were usually too noticeable. Once it had been an honour to belong to their class. They were the councillors and magistrates; they did not endow the grandiose spectacles
that Caesars and senators and ambitious newly rich did, but they underwrote the useful public works. That had been long ago. The burdens remained; the means were gone.

‘I hoped to be free of it myself, you know,’ Marcus was saying. ‘That’s why I went into sea traffic. High profits for men who didn’t mind the risk. Your grandfather approved – and he was a man of duty if ever there was one – and got me started. But at last … well, you know. It had taken all my father’s influence, and a stiff bribe, to get permission for me to become a navicularius when I wasn’t the son of one. Then your uncle, my older brother, died, and the guild was only too happy to “regularize” my status. That laid this estate on me. It’s devoured everything I had.’

‘I do know. But I’ve never quite understood how.’

‘I didn’t explain because I didn’t want to whine at you, who were young and had neither gift nor wish for this kind of thing. I did have my good, quiet Lucius, who was supposed to inherit anyway. It’s the taxes and assessments. You’d think, as debased as the money is, coin wouldn’t be hard to find. But that’s not so, we’re more and more going over to barter, and meanwhile the Imperium wants its cash. The taxes in kind, they get higher all the time too, as the number of farmers shrinks. In my seafaring days I was a sharp bargainer, you may recall; but I don’t have Commius’s talent for grinding wealth out of the poor underneath me.’

Abruptly Marcus lifted his head, glanced at Gaius through crow’s-footed eyes, and laughed. He might almost have been standing at the prow of his ship as a gale blew up. ‘At ease, boy, at ease!’ he said. ‘You’re safe. The law will scarcely haul a battle-proven officer back to the farm, especially when you’re known to none less than Duke Maximus. He’ll probably get you senatorial
rank. As for this place, why, if my plan pays off, I should have a chance of joining forces with my sons-in-law after they inherit. Between us, we might yet put together a villa that will last.’

‘But if you fail to?’ Gaius breathed.

‘I won’t consider that till it’s upon me, which the God forbid. At worst, I’ll never do what too many broken curials have, slunk off under changed names and become underlings, even serfs. No, your old man will die a Gratillonius.’

‘I would help you if I could. I hope you know that, father. But … I’m bound afar, and what will happen to me I cannot foresee.’

‘Let’s go on,’ said Marcus. A while of walking passed until he remarked, ‘You’ve told me nothing but that you’re off to Gallia on a special mission for the Duke. Crossing the Channel before equinox – Did he give you the funds you’ll need to persuade a skipper to take you?’

Gaius smiled. ‘Better than that. A writ letting me commandeer a naval transport. And I mean to cross by the shortest way, from Dubris to Gesoriacum, where one can scarcely get lost in anything less than an oatmeal fog. Cutting out that hazard makes the added overland travel worthwhile.’

‘Then your march will take you through Londinium,’ said Marcus, also trying to lighten the mood. ‘Give the fleshpots a workout for me.’

Gaius shook his head. ‘We won’t stop after today, except for sleep. We’ve this breadth of Britannia to cross, and then it’s more than four hundred miles over Gallia, and … the task is urgent.’

Marcus squinted into the wind. Some distance off, Gaius’s legionaries had pitched their tents in a vacated field. That was all they had done, being too few for the labour of constructing a standard camp, but they had
done it properly. The leather was drawn so taut over poles and guys that the air got no purchase on it but must be content with flapping a banner.