The Capricorn Bracelet Read online

  I mind coming up with him one day, standing straddle-legged and head back beside one of the big cranes, watching it as it hoisted the squared blocks of stone to the top of the Wall, where the course-setters waited to receive them and set them in position.

  ‘Truly, this is a marvel, this great hoisting-wheel, when one looks at it closely,’ he said. ‘It is small wonder that the Romans, who can make such things, are the masters of the world and of all ignorant barbarians such as we.’

  ‘Small wonder indeed,’ Felix said. ‘But let us agree that you are looking at it somewhat too closely. You see that block of stone swinging up there? If the rope slips, you are going to be not only one ignorant but one very dead barbarian.’

  Conn made his eyes wide and innocent. ‘But assuredly no rope made fast by the Romans would ever slip.’

  ‘Assuredly not,’ Felix said. ‘But come now and show us what beasts you have brought with you this time.’

  He took us across to where half-a-dozen ponies were tethered, rumps turned to the fine rain that was beginning to drive from the south-west. ‘I have a red mare – here – sure-footed as a mountain stag, if my Lord is interested.’

  Felix walked all round the mare, slowly, wrinkling his nose. ‘Hmm,’ he said at last. ‘Better try selling her to the Centurion Lucius. He doesn’t know as much about horseflesh as I do.’

  I was rubbing the mare’s nose. I could see that she was inclined to be hammer-headed, but she was sound enough in most ways. But on a junior Centurion’s pay, you don’t buy a second pony that you don’t really need. ‘Thanks, no,’ I said. ‘From the look of her, I’d say you’re needing to get fresh blood to improve the breed.’

  Conn was righteously indignant. ‘Can I help it that you Romans come and build a wall right across –’

  ‘Right across your raiding grounds,’ I said. ‘Oh yes, we all know that you used to spend half your time raiding into the Brigantian runs.’ I gave the mare a final pat on her nose. ‘But they spent the other half raiding into yours, remember.’

  Conn said regretfully, ‘It kept the young men fit for the war-trail. Aiee! – those were good days; the Wall has spoiled many things.’

  Felix gave a splutter of laughter. ‘Why, you wicked old horse-thief!’

  And then the trumpet sounded for watch setting, and I had to hurry, for I was due back on duty.

  But I wish I knew if it was that small exchange over the red mare that first put the devilry into his head – a sort of challenge – or whether it was there already. I hope it was there already. But no one can ever know now. . . .

  The next evening, Frontinus rode in on one of his visits of inspection. And a foul evening it was, too, with half a gale from the south-west driving grey swathes of rain across the moors, the sort of weather when you can’t see a Pictish war-band half a bow-shot away. (Not that you ever see a Pictish war-band anyway, until it’s on top of you!)

  The only bright spot anywhere was that Sextus, one of the Senior Centurions, had been out hunting a few days since, and the stag he had killed was just ripe for eating, so there would be a good supper in Mess that night.

  But I did not eat in Mess that night. I was Duty Centurion. When you’re Duty Centurion for the night, you spend a good deal of it doing rounds; and, in between whiles, you sit with your drawn sword on the table before you, in the little lighted room – the Sacellam we call it – where the Cohort Standard and the pay chest are housed; and you eat your supper there too, in solitary state. Well, so. I did First Rounds, and ate my solitary share of Sextus’ kill, and began to write up the reports and such that always fall to the Duty Centurion’s lot.

  Except for the pacing steps of the sentry that came and went along the colonnade outside, there was nothing to be heard but the wind and the rain. I might have been alone in a dead fort, with nothing moving, save the ghosts when the draughts set the lamp-flame jumping. And then the trumpet sounded for the second watch of the night, and I turned the hourglass, and presently it was time for Second Rounds.

  I got up and slammed my sword into its sheath, flung on my cloak, and went out. The wind and rain swooped into my face as I slammed the Sacellam door behind me, and passed the sentry outside. Night Rounds, especially in rough weather, have a strangeness about them, a great loneliness, that is in some way akin to the loneliness of the Mysteries. Indeed I have felt much the same thing in the Bull Cave during the Raising Ceremony, as though one had come to some borderland between this world and another; but one is not sure whether it is oneself or the sentries challenging out of the stormy darkness, who are the ghosts.

  I made my way from guardpoint to guardpoint, sentry post to sentry post; at each one, the alert movement of a shadow in the night, the sound of a pilum butt grounded in salute.

  ‘Who comes?’

  ‘Duty Centurion. All’s well?’

  ‘All’s well, Sir.’

  And the exchange of the password for the night.

  And then on again, to the next point, and the next, and the next.

  Lastly, that night, huddling my cloak round my ears, I made my way out along the line of the Wall towards the bridge. The blockhouse was not properly finished yet, but we kept a guard there, because the iron grills for closing the space under the bridge were not yet fixed, and until that was done it was a weak place in the defences. The blockhouse made a square of blackness against the shifting lesser dark of the river and the storm-drenched night. There was a glimmer of torchlight from an open doorway, and again the sentry’s challenge.

  ‘Who comes?’

  ‘Duty Centurion. All’s well?’

  I shouldered in for a few moments’ shelter by the fire. The blockhouse was a shell of warmth and light, the dark and the storm pressing in on all sides.

  ‘What a night!’ someone said.

  ‘It certainly isn’t the kind you’d expect to find anyone abroad on – except maybe the Wild Hunt.’

  And at that very instant, between gust and gust of the wind, we heard the high protesting squeal of a scared horse, coming as it seemed from almost under our feet.

  In the torchlit guard-post men looked at each other in a split moment of utter stillness lapped round by the tumult of the storm. Then the sentry was in the doorway. ‘Horses, Sir – under the bridge.’

  I nodded: ‘After me, all of you – quick.’

  Then we were outside and crouching in the lea of the blockhouse wall, with the steep drop of the bank below us, and the water running yeasty under the bridge. And against the yeastiness of the water, half-blinded as I was by the rain, I could just make out a movement of dark shapes. There was a splashing and a trampling of horses, and a muffled curse. I drew the Optio back to the corner of the block-house. ‘Ulpius, get back to the fort, and report horse-raiders trying to break through under the bridge. Trumpeter sound the alarm! The rest of you, out swords and follow me!’

  And as the trumpet brayed, the high notes teased out and flung away by the wind, we went plunging down to the attack. The raiders met us at the water’s edge. We fought among the storm-lashed alders on the bank; we fought in the water itself, the horses swirling and plunging about us before they broke away. It was a small, vicious struggle, confused as a fight in the ragged end of a dream: a flurry of slash and stab in the dark. I was caught in a tangle of blows with somebody, a black shadow like all the rest, until a gleam of light from the block-house showed me his face for an instant as we reeled to and fro. And it was Conn!

  I shouted, ‘Conn! You!’

  And he laughed, and shouted back: ‘Did you not say we needed fresh blood to improve the breed?’ His blade slashed past my cheek and turned on my shoulder-piece (the metal had to be beaten out afterward, and I carried the mark for many a long day) and he slipped in the mud, and my point took him under the collarbone as he went down.

  That was pretty near the end of it.

  They might have got through, if that one horse hadn’t taken fright and squealed. As it was, well, the Quarter Guard was down to our
help and the thing was over before it was well begun. And our lads were rounding up the scattered horses, and Conn and a couple more of the tribesmen were sprawled dead on the river bank, and the rest had got away.

  I heard the voice of the Senior Centurion somewhere, lifted above the storm. ‘Let them go, we’ve got the horses.’

  But I didn’t take much notice. I was squatting close under the blockhouse wall, where there was a little shelter from the wind and rain, with the Chief Engineer propped against my knee. Someone had brought a torch, and we could see that there wasn’t anything to be done. He’d taken a stab wound between the ribs – he had no harness on, no protection but his leather tunic, just as he’d come from the Mess table – and was bubbling blood with every breath he drew.

  ‘Gods!’ someone said. ‘It’s Frontinus!’

  I nodded.

  ‘What in the name of the Black One did the old fool want to get mixed up in this lot for?’

  Frontinus looked up at us with a flicker of humour. ‘Would you have – had me sit on my rump in the – fort, while a mob of misbegotten horse-thieves cut the picket lines and – broke out through – my Wall?’

  ‘Your Wall!’ I said furiously. I think I was weeping.

  ‘My Wall.’ Frontinus’ voice was going, and I had to bend close to catch what he said above the tumult of the storm. ‘Someone else will – have to finish it. But – it will be a good wall – all the same!’ He tried to laugh. ‘Ah, now, never look so woebegone! Better this way than – slowly – rusting out at Aquae Sulis – after all!’

  He gave a small wet choking sound, and his head fell sideways against my shoulder.

  I laid him down and got to my feet. I gave the necessary orders, and by and by I went back to the Sacellam, and fell to cleaning my sword, which was red when I laid it on the table.

  We finished building the wall Hadrian had ordered, but under a new Engineer. I don’t suppose many people remember Frontinus now, except those of us who served under him, and our ranks are thinning as the years go by. But his Wall will stand while Rome lasts. Maybe longer!

  Felix and me? Felix has done well. He’s praefect of an Egyptian Legion, these days. I’ve never got beyond Senior Centurion. Lacked ambition, I suppose, like my grandfather. Besides, I married a British girl, and lost the taste for marching around the Empire in search of glory.

  3

  Outpost Fortress AD 150

  LET ME PRESENT myself: another Lucius Calpurnius, another of us following the Eagles. But I’m the first of us to do so on horseback instead of on foot. When you have the kind of short bow-legs that look as though you’d been born on a horse, to join the Cavalry seems the obvious thing to do.

  I almost was born on a horse. At least, I was astride one before I could walk steadily without clinging to my nurse’s finger. My father bred good horses on our farm in Southern Gaul. He was invalided out of the army with an arm crushed in a catapult accident before I was born, and settled in my mother’s country. So I was born and bred in the South, and my trees were the pine and olive, and my sea the Mediterranean, and I never saw Britain until I was posted to Trimontium, away north of Hadrian’s Wall, to take over the lead of a troop of Dacian Cavalry. It’s odd the way we keep on coming back to Britain, in our family. We mostly serve here at one time or another, and some of us settle here when we retire – if we live long enough to retire and settle anywhere – and those of us who go elsewhere mostly send our sons back in our stead. I had a British grandmother.

  The day my posting came through, my father sent for me to his study. And when I went in to him, he was standing at his writing-table, holding the family bracelet, turning it in his good hand and looking at it as though it was something he had never seen before. It’s just an ordinary silver military bracelet embossed with the Capricorn badge of the Second Legion, the kind of thing they hand out for distinguished conduct, but of an outdated pattern. It was earned on one of Agricola’s Caledonian Campaigns by the first of our family to follow the Eagles, and, for some unknown reason, it wasn’t buried with him in the usual way. It’s been a family treasure ever since.

  My father was never one to waste words in leading up to anything. He looked up as I entered, and held it out to me: ‘Ah, Lucius, I think the time has come when you should take charge of this.’

  I stood and looked from his face to the Capricorn bracelet and back again, too surprised for the moment to make any move. ‘Our bracelet? But why, Father?’

  ‘You’re my eldest son, and it will be yours after me in any case,’ he said. ‘But since you are going back to Britain, and up North, beyond the Wall at that, it seems to me right and fitting that you should have it now, to take with you.’

  ‘I’m in no hurry, Sir,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait.’

  ‘Until it comes to you in my will? No, it’s time it saw active service again. I used to wear it when I was a young man, for – oh, I don’t know, for luck, I suppose. At all events, I wasn’t wearing it on the day the catapult keeled over on to me. Pushed well up under the sleeve of one’s tunic, it doesn’t show.’

  I still hesitated. And he smiled, a smile of the eyes that barely touched his mouth. ‘Take it – with my love.’

  So I took it (the silver was warm where he’d been holding it) and sprang it on to my arm, pushing it high up under the sleeve of my tunic. The silver band had been forced open, making it too big to wear in the usual place on one’s wrist; it was odd that I had never thought about that before. The bracelet felt good, from the first. The right feeling of something that belongs.

  Something over six weeks later, I stood facing my new Cohort Commander across another writing-table, in his quarters in Trimontium that the British call ‘The Place of Three Hills’.

  He was sitting forward with his arms folded on the table, and surveying me in a way that made me want to scuffle my feet; it was so obvious that he was coolly taking my measure while he talked. He said: ‘The Seventh are a fine troop, and if you can earn their trust and their respect, they’ll follow you through fire and flood, but you’re not going to have an easy time of it meanwhile.’

  ‘Sir?’ I said.

  ‘They’re a fine troop, as I said, but they’re renowned for being difficult to handle, and they had great personal loyalty to Valarius, their last Decurian.’

  ‘What happened to him, Sir?’ I asked, rather anxiously. It seemed to me this might have a good deal of bearing on my chances with the Seventh. If I was taking the place of a man transferred under a cloud – anything of that sort. . . .

  ‘He died of fever.’

  ‘At least, they can’t hold me accountable for that, Sir,’ I said hopefully.

  ‘When you have lived in this unjust world as long as I have,’ said the Commander, ‘you will have learned that it is quite surprising, the things that one man – still more a group of men – can hold another accountable for. Furthermore, it so happens that until now, the Seventh have always had a Dacian leader. They’re going to give a rough ride to any officer following Valarius, but especially to one who isn’t from Dacia!’

  ‘I’ll do my best, Sir,’ I said.

  ‘Naturally.’ He unfolded his arms and took up one of the muster rolls lying on the table, to show that the interview was over. ‘Good luck to you, Decurian.’

  ‘Thank you, Sir,’ I said, and gave him my best salute, though he wasn’t looking. As I turned and marched out past the sentry on the door, I was thinking that by the sound of things, I was going to need it. I thought also, half laughing at myself, half in earnest, that I was glad my father had given me the family bracelet, after all.

  Once you know the pattern of garrison life in one corner of the Empire, you know it in all the corners there are, from a mud fort on the Nile to the big Northern Frontier Outpost of Trimontium. It’s a four-square life, ruled by the trumpets sounding for watch setting, for meal times, Lights Out and Cock-Crow, a constant succession of patrols out and in, camp fatigues, parade-ground bashing, weapon-practice – and, by way o
f a change, escort duty with the supply train, or turning out a guard of honour for some visiting general. Not often much fighting, except in some newly formed outpost, but always enough chance of it to keep one’s sword sitting loose in its sheath. . . .

  The fort itself follows much the same pattern from end to end of the Empire, too – the same four gates, and two straight streets, with the Praetorium, the official buildings and officers’ quarters, where they cross each other in the middle. The same lines of workshops and store-sheds, armouries and barrack rows, and the horse lines if it’s a cavalry fort.

  Trimontium is a double fort, infantry and cavalry: a regular legionary cohort, and the Dacians.

  I fitted into the life of the fort easily enough. But number Seven Troop! At first, before I had had time to get the ‘feel’ of things, I thought all was well there, too; and it took me a few days to learn my mistake! Well, I couldn’t complain that the Commander hadn’t warned me. Oh, they didn’t disobey orders! – well, no more than all soldiers do if they get the chance. They carried out their camp duties as efficiently as any other troop of the Cohort, and they were good enough on patrol. (We did a lot of patrol work, keeping an eye on the country round.) No, they specialized in Respectful Hostility. They were experts at it. Never anything you could lay a finger on. They would talk among themselves in the tongue of their own tribe, whenever they knew that I was within hearing; and when I spoke to them in Latin, which they spoke and understood as well as I did, they gazed at me with blank faces, and asked, ‘Will you to say again, Sir – slowly, please.’

  They called me ‘Sir’ with just a shade too much respect to ring true, and they looked at me with something shut behind their eyes, and I never knew if I would be able to rely on them in any kind of tight corner. They took very good care that I should not, very good care that I should not know anything about them at all, even whether they were going at any moment to blossom into open warfare.