Regina had grown to love the Wall. Of course it showed its age. Much of this old fortress had been demolished or abandoned, for much smaller units were stationed here now. And time had inevitably ravaged the great structure. Some of the repair work was visibly cruder than the fine work of earlier generations — in places the old stonework had even been patched up with turf and rubble. But the barbarians had always been pushed back, the Wall reoccupied, the damage by friend or foe repaired, and so it would always be. In the five years since Aetius had brought her here, enclosed by its massive stones, she had come to feel safe, protected by the Wall and the power and continuity it represented.
Conversely, though, she was prone to anxiety over the future. Overall there were far fewer soldiers in Britain than in the past, Aetius said: perhaps ten thousand now, compared to fifty thousand before the disastrous imperial adventure of Constantius, which had stripped Britain of its field troops. Two nights ago a red glow had been easily visible in the night sky to the east, and in the morning there was a great pall of smoke, coming from the direction of the next fortress to the east, Cilurnum. Troops had been dispatched there to find out what had happened, and hadn’t yet returned — or if they had, Aetius wasn’t saying so to her. Well, there was nothing she could do about that.
Regina shivered, and rubbed her arms to warm up. The Wall might be a safe place, but it was uncomfortable. The great masses of stone retained the cold all through the day. After five years here, though, she had gotten used to the brisk climate and needed nothing more to keep her warm but her thick woolen tunic. And she had learned never to complain about the rigors of life here, so stripped-down compared to life in the villa, which she still remembered brightly. She had no wish to be called a spoiled child again, even though she knew that as the granddaughter of the prefect she was given special privileges.
“… Ah,” Magnus said.
She walked back to him. “Don’t tell me you’ve moved at last, O Great General.”
“No. But your grandfather’s come out to play.” He pointed.
On the southern side of the Wall, Aetius had led his cohort out of the fortress and was drawing them up on parade. Aetius stood straight and tall, an example to his troops. But Regina understood how much effort that cost him, for at sixty-five years old he was plagued by arthritic pains.
The soldiers’ helmets and shields gleamed in the sun, and most of them wore the chill, expressionless bronze parade masks that had so terrified her when she first saw them. But their lines were ragged, with many gaps, and Aetius, waving his arms with exasperation, called out the names of the missing: “Marinus! Paternus! Andoc! Mavilodo! …”
Regina knew how infuriating Aetius found such ill discipline and lack of professionalism. Aetius had once served with the comitatensis forces, the highly mobile, well-equipped field army. Now he found himself the prefect of a cohort of the limitaneus, the static border army, and things were very different. These frontier troops had been on station here for generations. Indeed, nowadays most of them were drawn from the local people. According to Aetius, the limitaneus troops had become thoroughly indolent, even immoral. He raged at their habit of bringing actors, acrobats, and whores into the fortress itself, and their tendency to drink and even sleep when on watch.
All this was cause for concern, to say the least. Without a meaningful comitatensis in the country, these ragtag troops were all that stood between civilized Britain and the barbarians. And it was up to Aetius to hold them together.
Aetius consulted a clay tablet and called out a name. One unfortunate trooper stepped forward, a burly, harmless-looking man who didn’t look as if he could run a thousand paces, let alone fight off a barbarian horde.
“I was only drinking wine to wash down horehound to get rid of my cough, Prefect.”
“Do we not treat you well? Do you not enjoy medical attention even the citizens of Londinium would not be able to obtain? And is this how you repay us, by dereliction of duty?”
Regina knew that Aetius’s scolding was harder for the miscreant troopers to bear than the lashings that would follow. But now the fat soldier lifted up his arm and shook it, so his bronze purse rattled. “And is this how the Emperor repays me ? When was the last time you were paid, Prefect?”
Aetius drew himself up. “You are paid in kind. The temporary lack of coin—”
“I must still buy my clothes and my weapons, and bribe that old fool Percennius to give somebody else the latrine duty.” There was laughter at that. “And all for the privilege of waiting for a poke up the arse from some Pict’s wooden spear. Why do you think Paternus and the others have run off?”
Regina stared; she had never seen such defiance. She was uneasily reminded of how that farmer had stood up to her father.
But Aetius was not Marcus.
Aetius took a single step forward and slammed his gloved hand against the man’s temple. To the clang of bone on metal, the man fell sideways into the dirt. Grunting, he rolled on his back — and, Regina saw, he actually touched the hilt of the short sword at his waist. But Aetius stood over him, fists bunched, until he dropped his hand and looked away.
The rest of the troop stood utterly silent.
Aetius pointed at two of them. “You and you. Take him. A hundred strokes for drinking on guard, and a hundred more for what he has had to say today.”
The men didn’t move. Even from here Regina could feel the tension. If they were to disobey Aetius’s order now … She felt a hot flush in her belly, and wondered if that was fear.
The two troopers, with every show of insolent reluctance, moved to their fallen colleague. But move they did. Aetius stepped back to let the man stand. His arms held behind his back, he was walked toward the whipping post. The tension bled out of the scene. But Regina still felt that odd warmth at her center.
One of the troopers, glancing up, pointed at her. “Look! Septimius — look at that! The red rain has begun …” The other troopers looked up at Regina, and began to point and laugh. Aetius railed at them, but their discipline was gone now.
She felt heat burn in her cheeks. She had no idea what she had done.
Magnus was at her side. He put an arm around her and tried to pull her away. “Come now. Put my cloak around you. It’s all right.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. And then she felt warmth on her legs. She looked down and saw blood, dripping out from beneath her tunic. She looked up in horror. “Magnus! What’s happening to me? Am I dying?”
For all his strength he looked as uncertain and as weak as a child; he couldn’t meet her eyes. “Women’s matters,” he gasped.
Now the soldiers were catcalling. “I’ve waited all these years for you to blossom, little flower!” “Come sit on me, your old friend Septimius!” “No, me! Me first!” One of them had lifted his tunic to pull out his penis, like a floppy piece of rope that he shook at her.
Regina grabbed Magnus’s heavy, musty-smelling woolen cloak and wrapped it around her. Then she clambered down the ladder to the ground and ran over the vallum toward the settlement, hiding her face.
For all Aetius raged at them, the soldiers kept up the baffling, terrifying barrage.
In their five years together at the Wall, Aetius had tried to tell Regina something of the world beyond the Wall. “There’s been an awful lot of trouble for everybody. It all started the night the Rhine froze over, and the barbarians just walked into Gaul. But for Britain that wretch Constantius was the one who nailed down the coffin lid …”