The Capricorn Bracelet Read online

  The crowd quietened as the Chief Magistrate held up his hand for silence, and I could hear every word. ‘Sir, on behalf of myself and my fellow magistrates, and the Citizens of Londinium, I greet you and give thanks to the Most High Gods that you are come to our deliverance.’

  Suetonius, beside him at the head of the Basilica steps, turned a little, to include the crowd in what he had to say. ‘Magistrates and all people of Londinium, you must keep your greetings and your thanks; there is no time nor place for them here. I had hoped indeed to come to your deliverance. But I come only to bid you save yourselves as best you may. I cannot remain here to protect the City.’

  I remember there was a moment of stunned silence all through that great crowd. Such a silence that, lost and lonely in it, I could hear the gulls crying down at the fish quay. And then the Chief Magistrate began, ‘Sir – you cannot mean –’

  Suetonius overrode him and the cries of protest that had begun to break out from that sea of people. His voice sounded hoarse and strained, but there was no yielding in it. ‘The Ninth Legion is all but destroyed. Those that follow me now are more than two-thirds of the troops left in Britain. If I allow them to be penned up here, while we defend one city, the whole of Britain will go up in flames!’

  The crowd were in an uproar now, pleading, cursing, praying. Just below me a woman screamed, her voice shrill and harsh above the tumult, ‘General, for pity’s sake –’

  Suetonius heard her too, and glanced that way. ‘I cannot afford pity. I need every trained man that I can lay my hands on; even the garrison of the fort I must take from you. The only advice I can give you is to get out of the City.’ I saw how he was holding the whole crowd with his eyes, that tall, dusty man. ‘Abandon your goods and gear; scatter as far and as fast as you can. Seek what shelter the forest can give you. I can give you none.’ And then above the dreadful voice of the crowd, he cried out like a man in great pain and in a kind of fury: ‘Do you think this is easy for me? A decision lightly taken? No more! In the name of all the Gods, no more!’

  His staff officers closed round him, his escort thrusting back the people as he went heavily down the steps. Behind him he left the Magistrates looking oddly pitiful, as though they had been stuffed with sawdust, and some of the sawdust had leaked away. He remounted his horse, and then he was gone, forcing his way out from all the crying and the praying, and taking our last hope with him.

  I dropped from the roof and made my way out through the rear of the sandal-maker’s shop, and home by back ways. It was no good looking for my father in that crowd. All I could do was to go home and wait for him. I waited for what seemed a long time, sitting on the low wall of the little colonnade, and watching a pied wagtail darting after flies across the courtyard, and listening to the sounds that came in from the city. They were sounds of hurry and alarm, feet and cart-wheels and horses’ hooves, all making one way, towards the river. The narrow timber bridge would be choked, and the boatmen would be able to ask any price they liked. But looking back, I doubt if they found much safety in the country round, those people who fled the city; for when the time came, the Iceni were everywhere for a while. . . .

  My father came at last. I heard his footsteps across the atrium, and got up and turned to face him. And as he came out into the last of the sunlight, I remember noticing – it was an odd thing to notice at such a time – that his face looked harder and less pouchy than usual. He said: ‘The news has just come in; they have burned Verulamium.’

  I knew the place by name. It was on the great North road, nearer than Camulodunum. Our turn next, then. Outside, in the street, a trickle of people were still going by towards the river. We both heard them, standing there while the wagtail darted after flies on the sun-warmed roof and the familiar world crumbled and crumbled away. I didn’t ask the question that was in my mind. But my father answered it as though I had.

  ‘For myself, no. Everything I have, everything I am, is in this city; and even if I could, I’m too old to start all over again. I shall stay, and help to save Londinium if I can, and go down with it if I can’t. But you – you’re only a boy, Lucius; all your life in front of you. Get away if you can, and take my blessing with you.’

  ‘I’m near enough a man to be able to use a spear,’ I said. ‘The Magistrates will give me a spear. I’ll stay with you, Father.’

  He stood looking at me a moment in silence, then nodded. ‘They are opening the Armoury now; we’d best be getting up to the fort.’

  ‘Not without warm cloaks,’ said Cordaella’s voice behind me, and when I turned round she was standing in the kitchen doorway. ‘You will have a cold night’s watch, I am thinking, for the wind has an edge to it, once the sun is down. Also, I have put some food together for you.’

  I was so used to doing what Cordaella told me that I went to my sleeping cubicle without another word, and dragged my rough winter cloak out of the clothes’ chest, and thrust the small native dagger that was my greatest treasure into my belt; and came out into the colonnade again. My father was already there, his cloak flung across one shoulder, and, a few moments later, Cordaella appeared from the kitchen with the food, bundled in a cloth. She put it into the hand my father held out for it, and I noticed that she did not bend her head in the accustomed way, but looked him full in the face as she did so, like a free woman.

  I think a lot of slaves had run away by that time, but not Cordaella. I’ve wondered since, why not. I suppose she loved us, and it was as simple as that. . . . I suppose she had been a slave so long that there was no one else. . . .

  I kissed her goodbye, and she put her hands on either side of my face and kissed me back. I knew I’d not be seeing her again – or our house. I remember taking a last look round our little courtyard, and noticing that the bay laurel looked as though it needed watering.

  And then I went with my father up to the fort. I had never in all my life felt so close to him as I did that evening. It was another beautiful evening, the dregs of the sun westering up-river and the little chill wind that was rising brushing up the leaves of the poplars in the forecourt of the great temple to Diana until they showed moon silver. The whole city was at its fairest – I have noticed more than once, since then, that things sometimes have a special shine about them, just before they come to an end, like – oh, like something painted and garlanded for sacrifice. There were still a few people here and there making for the river, but most of those who were going had already gone; and the rest were heading, like us, for the fort.

  The Magistrates were gathered there, and the Armoury had been opened. We received our few orders, and the weapons, left behind by the garrison, were given out to those of us who had none of our own. I remember the cold bright thrill that ran through me when I came forward to receive my spear. Such a child I still was, for all my talk of being a man! And before full darkness came down, we were in our places at the City gates and along the walls – wooden palisades they were in that first Londinium.

  My father and I were among the main force set to guard the North Gate, not the one that came in through the fort, but the City Gate next to it, where the chief weight of the attack would most likely fall. I remember it as though it was something that happened an hour ago; men sitting and standing around the newly lit watch fires, leaning on their spears, and the flame-light on the waiting faces, merchant, goldsmith, baker, beggar. Behind us the City sounded empty. The women and children and any man too old or sick to be on the walls were huddled indoors or had crawled in to whatever hiding places they could find. Somewhere a dog barked and barked, and its barking became a howl. It might have been already a dead city.

  And next day Boudicca and the warhost of the Iceni came down upon us.

  Almost all that one ever knows of a battle – unless one is a general with a convenient hillock to watch from – is confusion and turmoil and the man at each shoulder and the man at the other end of your spear, who means to kill you if you cannot first kill him. That, and the smell of blood at the ba
ck of one’s nose. So it was with me, that first fight of all. Just at first it was only the noise: the braying of British warhorns and the nearing thunder of hooves and chariot wheels and nothing to see but the blank gate timbers before my face. Then there came a rush of feet and a great shouting, and the first crash of the attack like a breaking wave set the gate timbers shuddering. My belly clenched itself and my hand was sticky on the spear butt. And then there was smoke everywhere, and red mares’ tails of flame came leaping the stockades. ‘Firebrands!’ someone shouted. ‘’Ware firebrands!’

  It had been a dry season – did I not say? – and the timbers of gates and palisades went roaring up like brushwood at summer’s end, and everywhere the tribesmen came yelling in through the blazing gaps. We had built barricades behind the gates, but they couldn’t last long. My father went down beside me, choking, with a tribesman’s spear in his throat; and the British chariots were thundering over the blackened wreckage. . . .

  I’ve seen my fair share of fighting since then, but it’s still that fight I dream of, when I eat too many radishes for supper. Only it was not a fight, it was a bloody massacre. They had scythe blades on the wheel hubs of their chariots; and where the chariots went, they cut red swathes. . . . But mostly, after the first rush, they did their slaughtering on foot. I was forced back, with a handful of others, down the main street – I do not know how any of us lived long enough to be forced back so far – right to the portico steps of the Temple of Diana. All Londinium was burning round me. I saw a face that was all eyes and snarling mouth; I saw the flame-light in the eyes and on the blade of an upraised sword; I saw a blackness laced with red, and heard between me and the roar of fighting, a high, sweet, terrible ringing in my head that ended in a crash of silence.

  When I came back to myself again, everything was dark – no, grey, dawn grey – and the red flamelight was all sunk away. Even the looting and smashing and tearing apart must have been over; all about me was the silence of death. I thought at first that I was dead too; but when I tried to move, the pain in my head told me that I was not. I managed to get a hand up, and felt the dry blood clotted on my forehead. People were lying on top of me, all – very dead. I suppose that’s what had saved me. It took me a while to struggle to my knees and then to my feet, but I managed it at last. And I was alive – just! – and I had only one thought in my swimming head: to get out of that dreadful dead city.

  Somehow I found myself back at the North Gate – or rather, at the place where the North Gate had been. It was piled with hacked and hideous dead. I did not stop to look for my father’s body among the rest. It would have been no use. I just crawled over them and kept on going. Outside the gate, I took the road to the North. Suetonius and the Legions had gone that way before the coming of the Killer Queen. And I followed the Legions; I followed Centurion Gavrus, I suppose. It seemed the only thing to do.

  The countryside must have been swarming with raiding parties of the Iceni. I didn’t know; I didn’t even think about it. I lost the road and wandered pretty much in a circle. I didn’t know that either. But truly the Fates must have meant that I should not die young for the next night, still, as I now know, within a few miles of Londinium, I came upon the Legions – just saw the red flicker of watch fires and blundered into one of their pickets.

  A voice growled at me out of the darkness, and the firelight caught a levelled spear-blade in a way that brought the last moments of Londinium screaming back around my ears. ‘Halt! Who comes?’

  My head was swimming, and when I tried to get out the words I wanted, my tongue felt made of wool. I managed a sort of mumble, ‘Centurion – Gavrus.’

  ‘You’re no Centurion,’ the man said. I tried again.

  ‘I want – Centurion Gavrus – Londinium Garrison.’

  ‘Londinium –’ he began; and then as I started to go at the knees, ‘Here – hold up, lad!’

  An arm out of nowhere grabbed me, and another voice shouted, ‘Sir!’

  And I heard quick footsteps, and a clipped voice said: ‘What is it, sentry?’

  ‘This boy, Sir, asking for Centurion Gavrus of the Londinium Garrison.’

  The officer said: ‘And in pretty poor shape, too, by the look of him.’

  His voice echoed in my ears, and went away into the strange high singing that I had heard before; and there was a sort of blink in time, and it was Centurion Gavrus bending over me, by the light of a spitting furze branch that somebody had pulled from the nearest fire. ‘Yes, I know him,’ he was saying. ‘His father is – was – a wine merchant in Londinium.’

  I let out a kind of croak as my head began to clear, and he bent closer: ‘Lucius!’

  ‘Londinium’s dead,’ I mumbled. ‘My father’s dead – everybody’s dead.’

  ‘Gods!’ somebody said. They sounded sickened, but not surprised.

  ‘So I’ve – come to join the Legions, please Gavrus.’

  He had an arm round me, helping me to my feet. ‘Time enough to talk of that later. The thing now is to get that gash in your head seen to. Steady! Steady, it’s all right. . . .’

  And that’s all I remember for a while.

  That was the night before the Killer Queen turned to fight. Suetonius Paulinus had chosen his place for bringing her to battle – only, like Londinium, it wasn’t a battle, it was a massacre, but turned the other way round. The Iceni were over-confident. They must have felt that with their Goddess-Queen to lead them they could not fail; for I heard afterwards that they even drew up their supply wagons directly behind their own battle-mass, cutting off all hope of retreat if they should be forced back. And they were forced back – broken and driven back and cut to pieces against the wall of their own wagons.

  The revolt was finished, and the Queen took poison rather than fall alive into our hands. Maybe she was wise.

  Not that I saw anything of all that. I was lying in the back of one of our own supply wagons, with a bandaged head, not taking very much interest in anything just then.

  Afterwards I served as a mule-driver with the baggage train for a couple of years until I was old enough for the Legions. My father was perfectly right: I never rose beyond Centurion. But I’ve served under the finest General that the Roman Army has spawned in a hundred years, and I’ve a Distinguished Conduct bracelet to show for it, as well as a few scars – funny about that bracelet! The Second Augustan was my Legion, and our badge is a Capricorn, so the bracelet shows much the same device as my father used for sealing his wine jars. I’d never even thought of that – the badge, I mean – when I joined the Legion; it was just that it was the nearest, and Gavrus was serving with it at the time. (Centuripns move about quite a bit once they get to Cohort rank.) But after the Legate had sprung the award on to my wrist, I went and sacrificed a cock to the Gods of the Underworld, for my father; I felt him again, for that moment, very near, as on the evening before Londinium fell.

  Well, I always wanted to follow the Eagles instead of going into the wine trade. But dear Gods! I never thought how it would come about!

  2

  Rome Builds a Wall AD 123

  LUCIUS CALPURNIUS, SENIOR Centurion of the Sixth Victrix, that’s me. Lucius after my grandfather, who was the first of our family to follow the Eagles. His father was a wine merchant in Londinium, killed when Boudicca and her tribesmen sacked the city. My grandfather – he was only a boy at the time – escaped somehow, and hitched himself on to the nearest Legion (you know the rag-tag and bobtail that every Legion trails behind it). And, as soon as he was old enough, he joined up properly, in the Second Augustan. He served with Agricola on his great Caledonian Campaigns, and won himself a military bracelet for distinguished conduct: bringing off an ambushed patrol more or less in one piece and getting them back to the main body of the Legion. His most treasured possession, that bracelet was; but not for the obvious reason. He told me once that a Capricorn was his father’s personal device, which he used for sealing the necks of his wine jars. And so, though this he never told me in
so many words, I think he felt the broad silver band with its embossed Augustan Capricorn to be some kind of link with his father. A family thing as well as a military one.

  At all events, when he came to die, he didn’t have it buried with him according to the usual custom, but left it to me, my own father, his son, being already dead. So, it’s mine now, and when my time comes, I shall hand it on to my son after me.

  My grandfather and I were always good friends, and I remember well how, when I was a boy and eager for stories as most boys are, he used to tell me about those Northern Campaigns. Very bitter, he used to get, about the way Agricola was recalled to Rome with his work half done. ‘We could have set our frontier on the Northernmost seashore,’ he used to say. ‘Nothing beyond it to the world’s end. A frontier that would have been safe for all time. As it is, what have we?’ And he’d start to rub his left thigh in the way that he had, where an old spear wound still ached when the wind was in the East. ‘A handful of frontier forts strung out into the wilderness on supply lines so long and thin that they could be cut any dark night by three men and a boy with a dream and a blunt sword between them. Might as well build a wall across from Luguvallium to Segedunum and cut our losses north of it.’

  Well, we’ve not cut our losses, we still hold our garrisons in Lowland Caledonia, though we had to let the Highland forts go. But after that last rising, when the whole of the North went up in flames and the re-formed Ninth Legion was lost without trace, we did build our wall.

  Hadrian’s Wall they call it now, because it was on the Emperor Hadrian’s orders that it was built. Eighty-odd miles from coast to coast across the North of Britain. Seventeen forts, with mile-castles and signal towers between, and the Wall itself, striding along the high ground, stringing them all together into one great frontier line.