The Capricorn Bracelet Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  1. Death of a City AD 61

  2. Rome Builds a Wall AD 123

  3. Outpost Fortress AD 150

  4. Traprain Law AD 196

  5. Frontier Post AD 280

  6. The Eagles Fly South AD 383

  Background for these Stories

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also in Red Fox Classics

  Copyright

  About the Book

  From the fall of Londinium to the building of Hadrian’s Wall, and the final departure of the Romans from Britain . . .

  Rosemary Sutcliff’s absorbing collection of stories, set at the time of the Roman occupation of Britain, follows the fortunes of a family over three hundred years. All soldiers, they are linked by the Capricorn bracelet, first worn by the centurion Lucius for distinguished conduct, then handed down through the generations.

  1

  Death of a City AD 61

  THEY TELL ME that Londinium is rebuilt, fine and grand so that anyone who knew it in the old days would hardly know it again. But I shan’t go back to see. Isca Silurum is my city now, headquarters of the Second Augustan Legion. And anyway, looking back, it seems to me that Londinium in the old days was as fine as any city needs to be – oh, not as I saw it last, fire-blackened and stinking of death, but in the time before the Killer Queen came down on us: the time when I was a boy.

  It was a rich and busy merchant town already, with shipping coming and going up and down the broad river or lying alongside the crowded wharves and jetties. There was a great Forum where the markets were held and the people gathered on all kinds of public occasions; a basilica ran along one side of it, where the Magistrates met to govern the city. There were temples and bath houses and long straight streets where the noise of carts and hooves and chariots and feet went on all day and most of the night. It was a very new city, mind you; in fact, in places, it was still something of a shanty town, because we – the Romans, that is – had been less than twenty years in Britain.

  Our house was in the street of the Amber Dolphin, not far from the river. Just a small house, with a bay laurel bush for Apollo growing in the courtyard, and my father’s warehouse and cellars next door with their own gateway to the street. My father was a wine merchant, and as soon as I grew old enough to handle the mule, I was often given the task of taking wine up to the fort that guarded the town. He wanted me to have learned the family business from the bottom up, when the time came for me to take it over from him. It was a good idea – it’s always a good idea to know one’s business from the bottom up – but it didn’t work out quite as he expected, because those visits to the fort made me want to be a soldier and not a wine merchant at all.

  I kept my desire to myself for quite a while, for I knew what my father would think of it. And then, one evening when I was setting out the draughts board – my father liked me to play draughts with him sometimes after supper, when he was not too busy with his accounts – I simply came out with it, not even knowing that I was going to, until the thing was said and past unsaying again.

  Why that evening, and not any other, I’ll never know. My father had been talking a lot about the business over supper, but then he often did; and I don’t think I had even been up to the fort that day. But I suppose I was thinking about it and not attending properly to what I was doing, and that’s why I dropped one of the ivory pawns. It fell with a little sharp clatter on to the floor and rolled into a corner. I went after it and brought it back and set it down with enormous care exactly in the middle of its ebony square, and heard my own voice saying, ‘Father, I’ve no wish to come into the business. I am for joining the Eagles.’

  There was what seemed to be a very long silence, and a cart trundled past up the street from the docks, the mule driver swearing at his beast. Then my father said, ‘Most of us are for joining the Eagles, at thirteen.’

  ‘I’m nearly fourteen,’ I said quickly.

  ‘At nearly fourteen, then. It’s a thing one grows out of.’

  ‘It’s not like that; I shan’t grow out of it.’ I was trying desperately to make him understand, but my father and I were never very good at making each other understand. I could find only one argument that I thought might carry some weight with him. ‘Oh father, I’d make such a bad wine merchant, wanting all the time to be a soldier!’

  But it was no use. He only leaned back and looked at me, putting the tips of his fingers together, as he did when talking business to someone across the writing-table in his office. ‘We’ll have to risk that, won’t we? . . . My dear boy, the Legions are no life for anybody without wealth or influence to help them to the top. With all that I could give you of either, you might be a Centurion by the time you’re my age; you’d certainly never be anything more.’

  I said, ‘I wouldn’t want to be anything more. Centurion Gavrus up at the fort isn’t anything more – and he’s served in Gaul and Syria, and-and in Dacia where the riders train their horses so that they can jump them through a wall of fire. And he’s fought Nubian warriors on war elephants; and he’s got a long white scar all up his forearm – he showed me –’

  ‘Lucius!’ My father stopped me in full spate, making me suddenly feel as though I was about four again, instead of nearly fourteen.

  ‘Yes, father?’

  ‘I know how wonderful all these things sound. No doubt they would have sounded just as wonderful to me when I was your age. But there was a place waiting for me in my father’s business, and I went into it. And later I came out and opened the branch here in Britain, and settled down with your mother, the Shades be gentle to her! Now there’s a place waiting for you in the business; and believe me, Lucius, when you are my age, with a house and family of your own, you’ll be glad you took it, instead of being on garrison service in some plague-rotted camp at the other end of the Empire.’

  I looked at his face, in the light of the palm-oil lamp, and saw that it was pouchy and tired – the kind of face business men often get when they eat too much and work too hard but not with their bodies. And suddenly I was sorry for him. But for myself, I wanted all the more desperately to be a soldier.

  ‘So let me hear no more of this foolishness,’ he said.

  ‘But father –’

  ‘One more word, and I shall begin to doubt the wisdom of letting you go up to the fort at all.’

  ‘You couldn’t be so –’ I began; but I saw the look in his eye, and I knew that he could. So I swallowed the rest.

  ‘And now, shall we begin our game?’ he said quietly.

  So we played draughts. And I did not speak to my father again about joining the Eagles. Not that evening nor any other. Those visits to the fort meant too much to me to risk losing them. I just went on hoping, in my deepmost secret places, that one day something would happen, something, anything, so that I should be able to follow the Eagles instead of going into the place waiting for me in my father’s business.

  And the thing happened! Aye, it happened! But Name of Light! I never thought in those days what it would be!

  *

  It began the following year, with a rumour so small and seemingly unimportant that I can’t remember even how I first heard it. It was just that the King of the Iceni had died – I’d heard vaguely of the Iceni, a big warlike tribe whose territory was far off in the great flat lands to the north-east – and having no sons, had left his kingdom divided between his Queen and our Emperor. I suppose he thought it would get better protection from other tribes that way than just left to a woman’s rule. And better protection from Rome, too, may be. People laughed and said that the Emperor would have to turn horse-co
per, if he wanted to make any use of his legacy, because the Iceni were horse-breeders to a man, with all their wealth in their stockyards.

  And then there began to be other talk. I first heard it when I went with my father to the Bath House. All the men used to gather there as though it was a sort of club, and talk business and exchange news while they lay in the hot steam or strolled afterwards in the small colonnaded garden-court behind the cooling-off room. I’d only been into the plunge-bath and was out in the colonnade, sitting on the steps and waiting for my father to be ready to go home, when he and a couple of friends came strolling out into the evening sunshine. They were talking as they came, and so I missed the beginning of their discussion; but it wasn’t hard to guess what they were talking about.

  Kaeso the leather merchant said, ‘And so she’s giving trouble.’

  ‘One of those turbulent women,’ my father agreed. ‘I doubt if anything will make her see reason.’

  And Octavius Pudens, who dealt in worked silver and other precious things, shrugged his shoulders, ‘Well, what can you expect? She is of the Iceni. She and her people follow the old ways.’

  And then they had passed by, and two men came after them arguing loudly about the price of grain. And when they came back, the conversation had turned on to something quite different, and my father beckoned me to follow him, saying that it was time we were going home.

  I did not like to ask him the meaning of what I had overheard; after all, he and his friends had not been talking to me. But once home, I carried the matter to Cordaella our house-slave, who had brought me up since my mother died. She was British – I mean, still British, not British by birth but Roman by adoption like most of my father’s friends. She would know what they meant by ‘The Old Ways’.

  I found her in the kitchen, attending to the dish of milk-fed snails she was cleaning and fattening up for tomorrow’s dinner. And I could see by her face as soon as I asked her that she did know, and also that it was something she did not want to talk about. But I had learned long ago that if I did not clamour, but waited quietly and showed no signs of ever going away, she would generally tell me what I wanted to know in the end.

  There was a platter of little crisp honey cakes fresh from the hot charcoal on the cooking-hearth, and I took one, and sat myself on the corner of the table, eating it while I waited. Cordaella carefully tipped away the fouled milk in the snails’ dish, and poured in fresh.

  I helped myself to another honey cake and went on eating. Cordaella set the dish aside. Then she looked up, slowly. ‘Surely I know what they are, these “Old Ways”. Among the Iceni it is the Queen who holds the life of the tribe in her hands, not the King. Prasutagus only ruled the Horse People because he was husband to the Royal Woman of the Tribe. The Kingdom was not his to leave.’

  So that was it. It seemed a bit strange, just for the moment, but it was quite simple really. I nodded, still munching honey cake. ‘I can see why she’s angry, then. But I don’t see there’s much she can do about it.’

  ‘She can refuse to yield up what your people demand,’ Cordaella said.

  ‘I suppose she could try – that’s what they meant about her giving trouble. But Rome is stronger than she is.’ I still did not really understand.

  ‘Do you think so, little Roman fighting-cock?’ A strange half-smile that was like a shadow brushed across her face. ‘She is the Royal Woman. She is Epona the Mother of Foals, the Mother of All Things. She can raise the whole tribe.’

  ‘One tribe against all Rome?’ I said scornfully.

  ‘All Rome is not here in Britain.’ Suddenly Cordaella put her hands over her face, and her voice came like a stranger’s, wailingly behind her fingers. ‘Ayee! I see a red time coming!’

  For that one moment, I remember, it was as though everything turned strange, and a little chill wind blew out of nowhere; then she became the old everyday Cordaella again, and dropped her hands. ‘Na, na, I am a foolish old woman and I dream evil dreams. Go you and get ready for supper. I have put a clean tunic out for you.’

  And the world swung back with her to its everyday self and grew familiar again.

  But the Red Time came.

  Perhaps if our officials had had more understanding of what they did, the story might have had a different ending; but – well, there’s no denying that we Romans are not always very good at understanding the way that other people’s hearts and minds work within them. So the Queen of the Iceni was harshly treated. She was in debt to Roman money lenders, and they had orders to call in the debt, knowing that after a bad foaling season, she could not pay. Some say she was even struck across the face by a Roman Officer during a quarrel (some say flogged, but the other seems more likely), and she and her daughters were driven, like troublesome camp-followers, out of the Royal Town. And so the Red Time came.

  First we heard only rumours, washing and whispering to and fro through the city. And then the rumours hardened into news. The Iceni had swarmed out into revolt. The whole tribe was on the war-trail, with the Queen, Boudicca herself, leading them.

  I mind it was a beautiful end-of-summer day, the last time I took the wine-cart up to the fort. The sort of day when you couldn’t believe that all the world you knew was threatening to fall to pieces round your ears. . . . There had been a shower of rain in the night, just enough to lay the worst of the dust in the streets. And the swans were flying up-river. There were more people about even than usual; knots of them standing and talking with anxious faces at street corners; others had gathered around the temples or were drifting about not seeming quite sure where they were going or what they were going to do when they got there. And over everything, there was a feeling that was the beginning of fear, though it was not fear as yet. But still the sun shone, and the swans came with great slow wing-beats up-river.

  I delivered the wine – six tall jars of red Falernian, the wooden stoppers clay-stamped with my father’s own Capricorn seal, for it was good stuff meant for the officers’ table. And then, leaving the mule hitched to a ring in the cookhouse wall, I went in search of my friend, Centurion Gavrus, hoping that he would not be too busy to talk to me.

  I found him on his way to the gatehouse, where the great military road from the North came in. He grinned when he saw me, and checked, waiting for me to come up with him. ‘The Light of the Sun to you, young Lucius. You’re later than usual.’

  ‘The city is very crowded today, and it took a long while to get through,’ I told him. ‘Like an ants’ nest when you stir it up with a stick. It’s all this talk of the Iceni.’

  Gavrus gave a snort of laughter. ‘Civilians! They start squawking and running round in circles if one war-painted barbarian thumbs his nose at them from a week’s march away!’

  I was reassured by the scornful warmth of his laughter. ‘Then you don’t think anything – anything really bad will happen?’

  ‘Lord of Light! what should happen? The Ninth Legion are marching south from Lindum already; they’ll settle this Boudicca woman before she can do more than burn a couple of farms or drive off a few head of cattle.’

  And with the words scarcely out of his mouth, we heard it. Far off up the road, the sound of a spent horse ridden at full gallop.

  Gavrus’ head went up. On the instant he forgot my existence and became very much the Centurion on Duty, as he went striding off into the arched shadow of the gatehouse. I wanted to go after him like a terrier at his heels, but even having a Centurion for your friend didn’t make you free to get in the way of the Gate Guard. So I stood where I was in the sunlight, looking after him, and listening. My heart had begun to race in time with the drumming hooves, and my mouth felt very dry.

  From where I stood, I could not see, but I could hear all that passed in the gateway, thrown back hollow-sounding by the arched entrance. I heard men turning out from the guardroom, the rattle of their pilum butts grounded on the cobbles, the sharp sound of an order, and, behind all other sounds, sweeping nearer and nearer, the terrible uneven beat
of that spent and stumbling gallop. Then the horse was being reined in. I heard it sobbing for breath. I heard the sentry’s challenge: ‘Who comes?’

  And the rider’s answer – by his voice, he was as near to foundering as the beast he rode. ‘News – from Camulodunum – in Caesar’s name.’

  Then Gavrus’ voice, clipped and clear, ‘What news, that travels at such a pace?’

  ‘Death! It is the Iceni – They’ve burned Camulodunum – slaughtered every man, woman and child –’

  The last few words were growing blurred. Somebody said quickly, ‘Look out! Catch him!’ And then I thought from the sounds that the messenger must have pitched out of the saddle.

  Two days later we heard that the Ninth Legion, marching to head off the warhost, had been cut to pieces.

  That day the city seemed full of wailing, and people cried out in the open street: ‘The Gods have pity on us!’ And an old man sat on the steps of the rams’-head conduit in Water Street, rocking to and fro with dust on his head and crying out to the passers by: ‘The Gods have forsaken us! The Gods have forsaken us!’ until somebody hit him in the mouth to stop his raven’s croak.

  We all knew by then that our one hope was Suetonius Paulinus, the Governor General; he was in the far west with the Twentieth and the Fourteenth finishing off a campaign of his own when the trouble broke. If he could reach us in time, we might be saved; if not. . . . Daily and hourly we waited for news – from the west – from the north. And while we waited, Suetonius brought his two Legions all across Britain by forced marches, and got to us ahead of Boudicca and her hordes.

  Everyone was out in the streets to greet our Deliverer as he rode through the city with his escort to the Forum while his Legions waited outside the gates. I’d managed to get myself a good place on the roof of the Forum colonnade, over Bryn the sandal-maker’s shop, close up to the Basilica itself, where I could see and hear all that went on. The whole Forum was a sea of people. They crowded round his horse as he rode through, and pressed in on him from all sides as he swung down from the saddle and mounted the Basilica steps to where the Chief Magistrate waited to greet him. But the cheek-guards of his helmet were pushed back; those that got nearest to him said afterwards that his face killed all hope in them before he spoke a word.