But whether he understood or not, of course, whether he wanted to go or not, he had no choice about making the journey.
And now they had new people to travel with, and that was another problem for Audax. The lady Aurelia rode with them, and sometimes Ulpius Cornelius too. The three of them, Thalius, Cornelius and Aurelia, would huddle in the back of the cart, whispering.
Audax, utterly dependent on their goodwill, was acutely sensitive to their moods. Thalius, overweight, fussy, clumsy, was a good man. Audax couldn't imagine him harming anybody on purpose. But he was vague. When he turned his attention on you, you could bask in his kindness, but then he would turn away, his head full of thinking, and he would forget you even existed. Thalius was all right, but he wasn't to be relied on.
As for Aurelia, she was an old woman with the body of a girl. Caked in creams, she trailed a cloud of stinks that made Audax's nose itch. She hadn't been unkind to him, that time when she had touched the tattoo on his back. But to her Audax was just a slave, no more than a bit of furniture, and just as easily disposed of. Audax understood this very well.
It was an attitude Ulpius Cornelius shared too. But sometimes Cornelius looked at Audax with a searching stare. Perhaps Cornelius was a 'dirty man', as the boys in the mine had called the men, slaves and overseers alike, who had used them. Perhaps he was working out how he could get Audax alone, or dreaming of what he would do if he could. But he made no approach to Audax. Tarcho was careful not to let Audax out of his sight.
All this discomfort was dwarfed by a deeper dread.
Audax had spent almost all his life in the mines, shut up in the dark. Before Thalius and Tarcho came he had had only broken memories of the wider world, relics of when he was very small. Now he was stuck out in the open, and he hated the vast pulsing of day and night. It seemed unnatural, somehow out of control.
Thalius ambitiously tried to explain to Audax the difference between 'finitude' and 'infinity'. Audax's deep confusion came from a life spent in the enclosed and finite, and now he was stranded in a world of openness without end. Audax dimly grasped these ideas. But he thought it just went to show that Thalius had never been a slave. Slaves understood infinity, even if they had no words for it, for slaves faced a lifetime of labour, of an utter lack of choice, without end. Servitude was infinity.
The one element in this huge open world of the outside that he felt drawn to was the sun. When the sky was clear the warmth of that great lamp in the sky sank deep into his bones and drew up his blood. Thalius gently explained to him that it was the sun that gave life to all things on earth, and that some people worshipped it as a god. Some believed it was a form of Thalius's own god, the Christ, who had also been a man. The sun reminded Audax of Tarcho, in his strength, his warmth, his patience. Audax imagined Thalius's Christ as a huge bearded soldier in the sky who smelled of sour German cabbage.
They stayed a couple of nights at a place called Eburacum. This was a city of massive walls and towers strung along a riverfront, looking down on the civilian town that huddled around it. A huge building loomed out of the centre of the town, visible for miles around. It was the Roman military headquarters, Tarcho said.
Founded as a legionary headquarters Eburacum had always been an important place. One emperor had died here: Severus, a century ago, after his campaigns in the Highlands, and after making Eburacum capital of one of his two British provinces. Since then the fortress and its walls had been rebuilt, massively. And another emperor had been created here, in Constantine, who had been proclaimed in that imposing headquarters building. Now Eburacum was the base of the military commander of the north, the Duke of the Britains.
But Thalius didn't like the place. 'With its aloofness and arrogance and monumental military architecture,' he said, 'it prefigures in stone the haughtiness of the absolute monarchy of the future.' Audax didn't think even Tarcho knew what he was talking about.
Travelling further north still they passed through more hilly country. The sky was huge and full of immense clouds. Somehow Audax found this wilder, more rugged landscape less intimidating than the crowded hills of the south. Thalius gently pointed out that this country was Brigantia, Audax's home. But none of Audax's ancestors had seen home for generations.
Tarcho grew more animated. He pointed out forts and camps and watchtowers that were part of a 'deep defence system', he said, reaching far back into the countryside south of the line of the Wall itself. And the land was studded by big blocks of greenery at the crowns of the hills and in the valleys. They were managed forests, planted especially to provide the Wall with timber for its baths and ovens. While the Wall was here to defend the country from the savages in the north, the country had to feed the Wall. Audax began to think of the Wall as a great ravenous beast, sucking the blood from a cowering land.
They arrived at last at a place called Banna, where there was a fort.
Before it reached the fort itself the road snaked through a patch of farmland owned by the fort-the 'soldiers' meadow', Tarcho called it-and the party crossed over a ditch clogged with weeds and stinking rubbish.
Then they passed through a kind of town, sprawling east and west along the road outside the fort walls. The roads were more like sheep tracks than Roman roads. The place was noisy, smelly, crowded. Some of the buildings were quite smart and built to square plans, but the rest were just shacks. Many of them had open fronts, and Audax peered into shops where metal was worked or cuts of meat were piled high. There were soldiers, dressed in military belts or bits of armour like Tarcho's. But there were plenty of women, and children ran everywhere, getting in the way of the horses. Audax liked it better than Camulodunum. It seemed a cheerful place. But Tarcho hurried him past the soldiers' taverns, gambling dens and brothels.
At last they approached a stone wall. This was the fort itself. The buildings of the scrubby town outside lapped right up to the wall. At the fort gate they had to pay a charge, and the carriage was searched for weapons.
Inside the fort Audax was overwhelmed by a stink of blood and smoke and piss. Tarcho told him it was always like this; the soldiers used their own urine to cure leather for their armour and harness gear. Though Aurelia and Cornelius pressed bits of perfumed cloth to their noses, Tarcho opened his chest and sniffed in the foul air through his big, black, snot-crusted nostrils. 'Home! Nothing like it.'
The buildings, of stone, mudbrick and wood, were a bit more orderly than outside, the narrow cobbled streets between them straighter. But you could see the buildings were old and much repaired. Audax thought two big buildings with two storeys and sparkling tiled roofs must be palaces. Tarcho said they were granaries, where the soldiers stored enough grain to feed them for weeks, in case the barbarians ever attacked. There were more soldiers, including a few who lounged at their posts on the walls. The troops here were a thousand-strong cohort of Dacian origin, Tarcho said, called 'Hadrian's Own'. But nowadays most of the soldiers, locally recruited, were British, not Dacian.
Aurelia, her cloak over her arm to keep it off the muddy ground, looked around at the shabby fort with disdain. 'So this is what has become of the mighty Roman legions!'
'There were never any legions posted here, madam,' Tarcho said. 'In fact strictly speaking there are no more legions nowadays…'
She shuddered. 'By Jupiter I wish I'd never come here. If this is all that stands between me and the barbarian hordes of the Highlands I'll never sleep soundly again.'
The party split up. Thalius, Aurelia and Cornelius were taken to the fort commander's quarters, a grand old stone building. Tarcho took Audax to a much smaller house of mudbrick and thatch, one of a block. The house belonged to a soldier, an old family friend of Tarcho's, and it was no barracks, as in former times, but a home. Tarcho's friend lived here with his wife, two young sons and a whole pack of eager dogs. Audax didn't know what to make of the noisy bedlam, and the dogs, used to control the slaves in the mine, terrified him. But Tarcho had a quiet word with the soldier's wife, and she made a fuss of Audax and fed him bread and beef, and Tarcho showed him her husband's curving Dacian sword, a falx, and he began to feel better.