Eagle in the Snow Page 3

  We went out against them the next day, and the enemy so out-numbered us that we could not count the odds. All day we fought and twice I saw a painted man on a white pony whom I knew, but I never had the chance to find out if indeed he had become a god. By nightfall we were beaten, Fullofaudes was dead with all his staff and the barbarians were in the streets of Eburacum. Our officers were dead too, so I took command and withdrew the Sixth down the road to Londinium, while Quintus screened us with the remnants of the cavalry. There we stayed, penned in like sheep behind the walls, and hoped that Rome would remember us.

  All that autumn they ravaged the land. The Second fell back and held fast to Corinium, while the villas were sacked and the harvest rotted in the fields for lack of men to gather it. They took the grain from the barns and all the food that people had stored against the bad days. They took the cattle and the ponies as plunder and drove them north. Houses were stripped of their valuables and they killed all who protested at the theft. The roads were empty of traffic; there was no trade; and the towns, shut in upon themselves, began quietly to starve. And as always it was the women who suffered most. In the spring we had news that the barbarians were splitting up, that the war-bands were getting smaller and that many were beginning to move north again. The Picts began to quarrel with the Scotti and both, in turn, began to quarrel with the Saxons. When I heard that news I began, as out of a long darkness, to see a faint pin-prick of light that was the dawn of hope. They had made him a god but he had failed after all in his great purpose. The barbarian conspiracy was near its end.

  And then, on a cold wet day when our food was nearly gone, we heard the news. The Count Theodosius had arrived. He had sailed with a fleet and an army all the way from Augusta Treverorum in Gaul. All the way down the Rhenus and across that cold sea they had rowed upon an emperor’s orders and made landfall at Rutupiae. We knew then that we were saved.

  III

  I HAD THOUGHT Aelia dead, but I wished to make certain. In the end I found her in a mean village outside Eburacum. She was very ill and they told me that she had been so for months. Her hair was streaked with grey and she looked thin and wasted. Her eyes reminded me of another’s. They were without hope. She would not speak to me; she turned her face to the wall and she cried. For three days it was like that, and then they told me what had been done to her, and I—I understood at last. When I came to her next and She turned away, I pulled her to me and I said those things that a man says to a woman whom he loves.

  She wept. “I am ashamed,” she said. “I am so ashamed.” And then she added, wildly, “It is a punishment for all my sins.”

  I did not feel like laughing. I said, “You are my wife, Aelia, and there is only shame if you do not live to keep me company.”

  From that moment she began to get better. Later, because I was so thankful to have her back I made an offering to my God, and I sent for a vase of coloured glass from Colonia where they specialised in such things. It cost me a great deal of money, but she liked pretty things and was pleased with it when it came.

  After Theodosius had settled the north and made terms with the Picts I went back to Borcovicum. Now there were great changes made. The administration was impoverished and our auxiliaries could not be paid. So Theodosius gave them land instead. Each man had his own patch and became a farmer, and lived with his family inside the camp; and the civilian settlements along the Vallum were abandoned. The Arcani were disbanded, and the long work of restoring our broken defences began. Quintus Veronius was made Praefectus of the Ala Petriana. He deserved the command (it had once been the post for the senior officer on the Wall) and it was his ambition to have a regiment of cavalry. But we both missed him for there were few enough people to talk to in our small world. Yet we had peace in the heather, and so the years went by.

  One evening a lone horseman from Corstopitum rode up the track. It was Quintus Veronius. I was glad to see him but Aelia, whose face had shone like a candle when I cried his name, stopped smiling when she saw his face. He looked tired, strained and angry. “I have come from Eburacum,” he said. I am no longer in cimmand of the Ala Petriana. I dared to complain to Magnus Maximus, our beloved chief of staff, about the corruption of quartermasters and illegal profiteering in high places. So here I am, back at Vindolanda in disgrace.”

  “And what else?” I asked.

  He said, bleakly, “Our iron soldiers are made of iron no longer.”

  When he had finished talking everyone was silent, for there was nothing to say. There had been a great battle between the Army of the East and those of the Goths who had settled on the west bank of the Danubius. It had been fought at a place called Adrianopolis, of which I had never heard, and the whole of the Roman army had been engaged—and beaten. The barbarian hordes on their ponies had cut the legions into pieces, and the most disciplined and best equipped army in the world had been destroyed by a rabble of horsemen from the Steppes. The Emperor Valens, his generals, Trajan and Sebastianus, together with thirty-five tribunes, the prefects of a dozen regiments, the Master of Horse, the High Steward, and the entire staff—all lay dead on the field of battle; and with them two-thirds of the entire army.

  Forty thousand men had been killed in an afternoon.

  I could not believe it. It was so horrible, so unimaginable that for days I could not take it in. I accepted the facts; but I dared not interpret them; for to do so would have meant acknowledging what would be unbearable—that the civilised world could be destroyed.

  I stayed on the Wall in my overcrowded fort, an ageing tribune in charge of a rabble of men who scarcely deserved the name of regiment now. They were quiet years disturbed only by the news that Magnus Maximus had got himself proclaimed emperor. This made little difference to us, but when the troops in Gaul denounced the emperor Gratianus, Magnus Maximus saw that his chance had come—to try for two provinces instead of one. He raised troops wherever he could lay hands on them and stripped the Wall of its best men. In a week he undid the work of ten years and we were left naked to defend the frontier with our bare hands. When I, in my turn, received orders to send half my men, I would not do it. Together with Quintus I rode down to Eburacum, where I knew Maximus was, and asked to see him.

  “I have heard of you,” he said. “You bear my name. You served Fullofaudes and Theodosius well, but you do not wish to serve me. Give me a reason why I do not have you executed or broken?”

  “Because you cannot afford it,” I said. “Not one man can you afford to waste. I serve Rome as well as this island, and the safety of both depends on her frontiers.”

  “I am the Emperor.”

  “That is disputed by one emperor in Rome and by another in the east. I will believe it when they are dead.”

  “I shall not fail.”

  “Of course not. To you, Caesar, the throne; to us the war.”

  He tried hard to smile. “In my service you could have had a regiment, or perhaps a legion. You could have gone far.”

  “To my death in a Gaulish mist?”

  “You may do that yet when I return.”

  “When you return, Caesar, I shall be with my cohort on the Wall. Or dead under it.”

  He looked anxious then. “The Wall must be held,” he said.

  “It has never yet been taken by direct assault.” I looked at him and added, slowly, “Only by betrayal.”

  We returned to our forts. We had kept our men, but we were lucky to be alive.

  He failed, of course. He destroyed Gratianus, but the son of the man who had helped him to power proved another matter. And so Theodosius I became the last sole emperor of the Roman world, while we shivered in the rain and prayed that the Picts might leave us alone.

  Then one day a strange tribesman came to the north gate and said he wished to see me.

  “Well?” I asked. I was curious, for he wore the marks of the Epidoni of whom I had heard much but seen nothing.

  “I bear a message for the tribune of the Tungri.”

  “You may g
ive it to me then,” I said.

  “I have a friend who wishes to see you.”

  “Who is this friend without a name?”

  “I was to say that you would know him when you saw him.”

  “So.”

  “He is two days march to the north and waits upon the coast.”

  “And is that all you have to say?”

  “It is all I was told to say.”

  “It is a clumsy trap,” said Quintus. “Do not go.”

  I turned back to the dark man before me. “And if I do not go?”

  He looked disconcerted. “My friend told me to say—come for the sake of an old friendship.”

  I felt very cold. “I will come,” I said. “But not alone.”

  “My friend expected that. But you must carry a green branch or not come at all.”

  “It is agreed.”

  I took Quintus and twenty men from the fort. Quintus was quietly curious but he asked no questions. For two days we rode north along the old military road, built by Agricola, and then, with the wind in our faces we made towards the sea. It was very cold, but we came at last to a long beach of silver sand. The wind blew in the sharp grass and the sea birds walked among the wet flats, for it was low tide and the sea was calm. On the beach, among the tufted dunes, stood a small tent, and a wood fire burned smokily in front of it. Away to the right with its prow over the sand, lay a long narrow boat with a dragon head, the sails furled below the single mast. I left Quintus, and rode down to the sand with the guide trotting beside me. He had heard us coming for he came out of the tent and stood motionless, waiting for me as I rode forward, the green branch in my sword hand. I dismounted and walked towards him, and he to me. Both of us stopped when we were ten paces apart. Neither of us smiled or raised a hand in greeting. But I knew him still and I had a pain inside me for all that was past.

  “I have come as I promised.”

  “I knew you would.”

  He had not changed all that much. He wore the clothes of his adopted people, but there were no tattoo marks on his body that I could see. He was very thin and he was nervous, I think, because he could not keep his hands still, and his fingers played ceaselessly with the hilt of his dagger. There were lines upon his face and on his forehead, and there was a scar across his neck that had not been there before. But his eyes were no longer dead. He had the appearance of a man who was at the end of his strength.

  “What do you want of me?”

  He flinched at my tone. “I want only to ask you a question.”

  “You could have come to the Wall.”

  He half smiled. “I did that—once before. But you were not in a receiving mood on that occasion.”

  “Nor you in a forgiving one.”

  “That is in the past. If we talk of the past we shall only quarrel.”

  “I have no wish to quarrel. I would have killed you at Eburacum once, but there is peace here now.” I looked at him steadily. “The past is dead.”

  “You are well and happy?” he asked.

  “I am content. Few who serve Rome in these times can be happy.”

  “You are fortunate.”

  “If I am, then I work hard for my fortune.”

  “Yet you risked all when you spoke to Magnus Maximus thus.”

  I said, “How did you know that?”

  “If a rat squeaks on your Wall we hear it in those mountains.” He glanced behind him as he spoke. “For example, I can give you news from Mediolanum that you will find hard to bear. Your fanatical emperor has passed laws against those who do not worship his god. Sacrifices are not permitted and the temples are to be closed. Not even in the privacy of your home may you pray to the Immortal One.”

  I stared at him, speechless with shock.

  “It is true,” he said. “I would not joke on such a matter—not to any man. For those who do not profess his faith the road to high office in the empire is now barred for ever.” He paused. He said, coldly, “Were I still a Roman I swear I would not serve a man who passes such unjust laws.”

  I remained silent.

  He looked at my face, half stretched out his hand and then let it fall to his side. “Oh, Maximus, do not look like that. Though you walk through the seven gates of our faith, still you will not know which way the wind may blow you.”

  I said nothing and he stared at the ground with blank eyes. Then he looked up and tried to smile. “Will you drink with me? Just once, for the sake of forgotten things.”

  “Of course. Willingly and with all my heart.”

  He went into the tent and came out with an amphora and two drinking cups. “This came from a wrecked ship,” he said. “I kept it until now, thinking to drink it on some great occasion. I have not tasted your wine in years.”

  I poured the libation and said alone the words that we had been used to saying together in another life, while he watched without comment. It was like a dream, this meeting, and I wondered how it would end. I raised my cup and said to him, “May you be happy.”

  He half smiled. He said, “You have a wife and a home and a people: all the things you wanted except one. Is the dream good now that it has become reality?”

  “I like to think so.”

  “I had a dream, too, but it was conceived in hate.”

  “I know that.”

  “Is that why it failed, do you think?”

  “Perhaps. Yet it nearly succeeded. How did you do it?”

  He poured the dregs from his cup onto the sand and shaded his eyes. “By hard work.”

  I thought of all that it must have taken. The endless talks by smoky fires in rock-bound valleys that we had never seen; the ruthless patience required to smooth over jealousies and blood feuds that were old when Agricola built his forts; the sheer, hard, grinding work of welding tribes, clans and sects into an organised whole, equipped, prepared and willing to follow a single plan, to obey a single order and to strike the aimed blow in the right place at the right time.

  “No Roman could have done it.” I did not realise that I had spoken aloud.

  “But I share their blood.”

  “I had forgotten.”

  “Even that was not enough. Village after village would not have me. I was a stranger, an outcast, a man with no shadow. But one night I came to a secret place where the priests of the tribe celebrated their mystery. It was a night of storm and lightning; a night of great violence that would make even a Roman believe that the gods he had forsaken were angry with him. They saw the brand that you know upon my forehead, they saw my head with no hair, and they saw that I had the look of a man who has gazed into a great darkness. Their priests gave me food and shelter without a word, and in the morning they sent me the High-Priest’s daughter to be my servant. From her I learned that they believed I was a god.”

  He paused and looked up. “After that the work began that I had made my purpose.”

  I shivered.

  He said, “It is I who shiver now. I knew that we had failed even before we began. In that night of waiting, while I lay in the heather and looked at the walls of your fort, I had a great feeling of coldness inside me. For the first time since I had met the High-Priest’s daughter the warmth left me and I was cold again. I felt colder still when I stood triumphant inside your shattered walls. She was so far away. I knew then that I did not care whether I lived or died, whether I won or lost. I went on with my purpose but it had no meaning now, and when the tribes broke up to plunder and to quarrel I no longer cared.”

  He threw his cup onto the ground and tried to smile.

  I said, “And what do you do now?”

  “I have been waiting for that ship,” he said. “For five days I have been waiting.” He smiled with his teeth. “A man who fails is not popular. After it was over I crossed to Hibernia and lived there. But it was always damp and I was always so cold—here.” He touched his belt briefly. “In the end I returned to Caledonia. But I could not bear to go back to those mountains again and live alone, inside myself. So,
I set sail in a Saxon ship for a Saxon land. They are still my friends.” He spoke with a defiant pride. “Perhaps I shall find another purpose somewhere, some day, that will not break in my hands.”

  Above us a gull wheeled in the sky and cried shrilly; the guide sat motionless, cross-legged by the tent; and the sea rolled upon the beach. He put his hand to the mark on his forehead and said, “We both carry a burden upon our backs, but mine is heavy with things undone.”

  I could have cried out to him then and repeated the old offer of the villa in Gaul; but I knew that he would refuse. He had too much pride, too much bitterness, too much hate. There was so much between us that lay in a golden past and that we could not remember without intolerable pain. So I kept silent.

  He spoke to my guide, who answered him and nodded, pointing briefly at the tent. Then he turned to me, his face suddenly like stone.

  “When the tide turns I shall sail. But you must go now.”

  “You have not asked your question.”

  “I kept it till the last, hoping that I would not need to ask it.”

  “Do you need to?”

  “No. But I must ask it all the same.”

  I waited.

  He said, “What happened to her. What happened to my High-Priest’s daughter?”

  “She died.”

  “You killed her.”

  “Yes.”

  He said, “And for that I could kill you, even now, though you hold a green branch in your hand. But I will not. Instead I will give you a warning. Stay here where it is safe. Stay in this island which is now your home.”

  “Why?”

  “I cannot answer that, Maximus. But on the day that you become the father of your brother, and the sun stands in the sign of Capricorn, you will wish that you had stayed upon the Wall.”

  I shivered, not understanding what lay beneath the words I knew so well—I who had been present at his pain and his re-birth, as he had been at mine.

  “Shall I see you again, Julian?”