I’d hit it. There was something about the legate’s lady that the other two tribunes disliked: they looked at me nervously. Comittus, however, beamed at me again. “She is, she is!” he exclaimed. “There’s not a woman in Britain to match her. Julius Priscus fell for her head over heels the moment he met her, and he’d tell you himself what an immense help she’s been to him, lucky man. You know, of course, that the legionary legate for Eburacum controls the civil administration of northern Britain as well as all its military affairs-” (we hadn’t) “well, Aurelia Bodica can sort out a lawsuit so quickly it makes you blink.”
“Yes,” said Severus, hurriedly-then, turning to Arshak, he said, “You are also descended from kings, aren’t you, Lord Arsacus?”
“My father is second in line to the crown,” replied Arshak proudly, which effectively silenced everyone else’s boasts about noble birth.
I lay awake for a while that night, trying to interpret what I’d heard. I had not thought about the natives of the province as a force distinct from the Romans who governed it. Victor, though, had sneered at Comittus as a Briton: there was some tension there. Aurelia Bodica was descended from two houses of native kings, and her position of influence made some of her husband’s junior officers uneasy. Who were we going to fight in the North? Facilis had expressed doubts that we would fight anyone: “What if it’s all patrols and guard duty?” he’d asked. That still meant that there was some force the Romans needed to guard against.
I had known nothing about Britain, and I was still trying to grasp how large the island was. All through the journey I’d believed that we were being sent there to prevent us from troubling the Romans, not because the Romans wanted us to deal with trouble from someone else. Priscus, though, had come to collect us with the assumption that we were something much closer to auxiliary troops, that he could appoint his own men to officer us and use us against Rome’s enemies. Facilis’ letter revealing how dangerous we could be had horrified him. From what I’d overheard in Bononia I knew that there were more Sarmatian troops to come. That did not suggest a province entirely at peace.
What were we going to do? The tribunes had said nothing whatever about that, almost certainly out of deliberate policy. Julius Priscus had carefully avoided showing us how many men he actually had in Dubris. At the tribunal he’d appeared with just the three tribunes and twenty of his dispatch riders: I guessed that Facilis had come on his own. Probably that meant the legate did not have many men with him. A handful of men from his legion, then, and fifteen hundred of us to move: he would certainly try to keep us ignorant, bewildered, and unsure of our directions, dependent upon himself and his officers not just for guidance but for the means of life. We had been given our weapons back-a thing I suspected the legate now regretted-but we were not Roman soldiers yet by any means. We were barbarians, and would be kept ignorant of everything we had no immediate need to know.
I could imagine the Romans busily writing letters at the naval base. Planning where we would go, how we would journey there, what we would eat on the way; alerting other troops to our movements in case there was trouble. I had no desire whatever to take advantage of the lack of guards, but I wanted some control over what was to be done with my friends, my followers, and myself.
The following day, when I’d checked that the wagons and horses were ready for the journey to Eburacum and that we were well provisioned, I took my horse, shooed off my bodyguard, and set out into the town looking for Lucius Javolenus Comittus.
I found him at his quarters in the naval base-a couple of small rooms at the end of one of the barracks blocks. He appeared himself at my knock, looking tousled, bad-tempered, and, when he saw me, surprised.
“Oh!” he said. “Lord Ariantes. Uh… I was just planning the itinerary for our troop.”
“That is what I have come about,” I replied. “May I speak with you, Lucius Javolenus?”
“Uh… yes, yes, of course! Come in out of the rain.”
I unsaddled and tethered my horse, and limped in. The room was stone and narrow; I disliked the cold, enclosed feel of it intensely. Comittus had moved a desk underneath the window, to get the light, and it was littered with parchment, tablets, and sheets of wood.
“Thank you for the dinner last night,” said Comittus.
“It was our pleasure. I have come, Lucius Javolenus, because I thought perhaps I could be of help. When my lord the procurator Natalis was trying to gather supplies for us, he allowed me to check his lists, and I found that he had much misjudged what was needed. He ordered wheat, and my men have complained at eating grain all the way from Aquincum. They are not used to it; it makes their teeth hurt, they say.”
“Oh!” Comittus exclaimed in alarm, and picked up one of the sets of tablets. “I’ve ordered it, too. Don’t you eat wheat at all?”
“Some, a little, to thicken a stew or make flat cakes. But in our own country we eat mostly meat-fresh and dried beef, mutton, and horsemeat-and milk and cheese from mares, sheep, and cattle. Now, I understand you do not eat horses or drink mare’s milk, but dried and salted beef is easily obtained, as is cheese. Would it be possible to replace a part of the order for wheat with orders for some of these things?”
We were soon going over what supplies would be collected where. Comittus made some effort to cloud the itinerary, and referred to “supply depot one, supply depot two,” and so on, but I gathered we would reach the provincial capital, Londinium, on the third day of the journey, pick up more supplies four days later somewhere to the north, and two days later again would be at a place called Lindum, which was Comittus’ home: Eburacum was three days’ ride north of that. “And there we will stop?” I asked.
“Well, not us,” he replied, “That is, we’ll stop briefly, but.. I wasn’t supposed to tell you this.”
“Why is it secret? Are we not meant to know that the three dragons will be split up?”
“Deae Matres! How did you know that?”
I was honestly surprised. “We have been sure from the beginning that we would be posted to different camps as soon as we arrived at our destination. All along you have feared to have too many of us together. When we left Aquincum there was some question whether our group was not too large to be safely contained on the journey.”
Comittus laughed. “So much for secrets!”
“That was not much of one,” I said. “Come, you are supposed to ‘advise’ me, or so you said. Can I not even know where I am to be posted?”
He laughed again. “Very well! You’d certainly know anyway in a few days’ time. You and I and our company will go on to Cilurnum, on the Wall; Gatalas’ dragon goes to Condercum, which is also on the Wall; and Arsacus’ stays in Eburacum.”
“What is this ‘Wall,’ then?”
Comittus pulled the sheet of parchment out from under the tablets and spread it on top of them. “Look,” he said, pointing, and I looked and saw a meaningless huddle of lines, with the tiny black scratches of writing scattered about them. “Here’s Eburacum,” he went on-and the lines resolved themselves into a map. I leaned over it, frowning and trying to make sense of it. My people use maps, but ours are only lines scrawled to show camps, landmarks, the sun’s position, and days’ riding; Roman maps are different.
“All this territory,” Comittus went on, spreading his hand upward from the blotch that was Eburacum, “belongs to the Brigantes. They’re a big tribe, a bit wild, sheepherders mostly, with some farmers. They’ve caused problems in the past-uprisings. The last was twenty-five years ago, but they’re still not entirely happy with being ruled by Rome-that’s the way the government in Londinium puts it. If you ask me, they’re just annoyed at having to take orders from a lot of southern tribesmen in togas. Anyhow, this”-he enclosed a similar area, above the territory of the Brigantes-“belongs to the Pictish tribes, the Selgovae, the Votadini, and the Novantae. Now, they are nothing but trouble. We pushed the frontier up to here”-he drew a line with his finger above the area he’d just shown me-“and put a line of forts through Pictish territory, but we had nothing but grief from it. They raided, they stole sheep, they sprung ambushes on the men that tried to get them back-and what’s worse, they feuded with the Brigantes behind our backs. So about twelve years ago we dropped the frontier back south to the old wall, the one built by the deified Hadrian, and recommissioned that. That’s the wall we’ll be keeping. It runs from here to here”-he spanned it with his fingers, a line between the Brigantes and the Picts-“with a castle for a few dozen men every mile, a major fort every six miles or so, and a great stone wall, bank, and ditch across every inch. We also have some advance forts beyond the wall, to keep the Picts in order, but they still raid the Brigantes. They think it’s a brave and daring thing to creep up to the Wall in the dead of night, murder the sentries, and slip into the South to steal the property of Romans.”