17
It had rained all day and now there was snow again. ‘Crapping caryatids!’ groaned Gaius Vinius. ‘I have had enough of this.’
Vinius, not dead. Vinius, utterly depressed and irritable.
His head hurt. The ache was at last diminishing slightly, so he thought he would escape brain damage, although when he first regained consciousness he had self-diagnosed, in the absence of any medical aid, that he had suffered concussion and permanent harm was possible. More likely, he would simply go mad trying to endure life as a captive. The boredom and claustrophobia were dire.
What in the world could be worse than to be stuck in an isolated mountain-girt, barbarian land on the wrong side of the frontier, a thousand miles from home, never knowing if or when they might be released, or whether anybody of their own even knew they were there?
They thought nobody did know.
The prisoners taken at Tapae, a mere handful of Roman survivors, had been picked up and transferred in crude carts to a half-deserted citadel whose name they were not told. They were dumped in a dilapidated compound on a small hillside terrace, over twenty men crammed into space once built for one family. Their shelter comprised a couple of clay-floored rotten wattle huts that were too grim even to be pigsties, though their stink was distinctly animal. This was to be their home indefinitely.
If the men had realised how many years it would be, how many years before any chance of rescue, they would have given up. All that kept them going was that the Dacians neither killed them nor made slaves of them. Dark stories were told of Dacians sacrificing defeated enemies to their warrior gods and hanging up armour as trophies in trees; these Romans had lost their weapons and valuables but were spared. It had to mean they were hostages, and for hostages there must always be a glimmering mirage, that thin possibility which they must never see as false: belief in returning to safety one day.
Some died. There would be no return for them.
They were all going to die, of dirt, disease and dismal despair, unless someone made an effort to preserve their health and sanity. Vinius had realised this in the first weeks, around the time he slowly ceased feeling nothing but distraught over losing his centurion and the battle, the time when he knew he would have to start fighting for his own survival, which at least was what Gracilis would have done and what he would want Vinius to do.
The prisoners were an assortment from several legions. Numbers were few, though as time passed, Vinius picked up signals from occasional Dacians who did communicate; he suspected there were others held elsewhere. None in his group were officers. Vinius was the only Praetorian; moreover, he had been a centurion’s beneficarius. So, once he hauled himself out of his initial misery, he tried to pull everyone together. Vinius had to assume leadership. He must do what Gracilis would have done, what the mystic voice of Gracilis was even now instructing: rally them, keep up their spirits, drag them through this ordeal however long it lasted, find a way to co-exist with their captors, look for ways to escape but never try anything stupid.
They agreed. None had the energy to resent him; none wanted to take charge themselves. Anyway, he was a Guard — so they may as well let Vinius do it. If there was any trouble, he could take the blame.
‘Right. We have to take care of ourselves. Scrupulous hygiene, as far as we can manage — ’ There were mountain streams and they were allowed to collect water. ‘Anything we can do to keep mentally alert. Just don’t ask me to tell you bedtime stories. Daily exercise.’ They did press-ups and lunges, and after some months acquired an extremely old, unwanted horse, too far gone even for eating, which they all learned to ride. The Dacians let them keep the horse because, as Vinius remarked, there was no way twenty-three of them were going to escape on him. It was like some horrible team-bonding task in the new recruits’ manual, something the old general Corbulo might have come up with: get out of Dacia without being killed in the mountains, using only one arthritic horse, four billycans with holes in them and a set of panpipes… The panpipes were whittled by Vinius; once he had finished, the others made it plain that, officer or not, he should refrain from playing them.
He knew how to make himself even more unpopular: ‘I expect you to be clean-living.’
‘What, no singing “The Girl I Kissed at Clusium” while we’re having a wank?’
‘That’s up to you. I meant no humming of “The Boy I Kissed at Colonia Agrippinensis” while you’re buggering your tent-mate for the ninety-fifth time.’
‘Ninety-five times! Do you think we’ll be here a whole month?’
Gaius Vinius feared they might be there forever. It was one of the burdens of office that he had to keep this thought to himself.
‘Sir, sir — is this the official new policy on wanking then?’
‘Senatorial edict, sunshine. Enacted in the consulship of two most noble wotsits with five hundred years of donkey dung on their fancy boots and so inbred they’ve got three heads, who voted in the Curia that anything is permitted if it’s exercise… Jupiter, I hope you horrible beggars know what I am rambling about, because mountain air makes me light-headed… There is to be no attempted conversation with the flower of Dacian womanhood, incidentally. We are in enough trouble.’
That last instruction was hardly needed. Dacian women wanted nothing to do with them. They had enough virile Dacian warriors at their disposal, or if they wanted variety, thrusting Suebi who only lived on horseback and in wagons, Sarmatians who tied their hair back in curious topknots, or even Scythians — those barbarians that even barbarians thought were scary wild men — who sometimes passed through for cosy tribal fraternisation and plotting against Rome.
Dacian adult men thought guarding foreigners far beneath them. This at first left the Roman prisoners in the care of a bunch of spotty, slouching youths, the lowest tranche of Dacian society. It was a first taste of power for the adolescents, who loved the excitement of beating up helpless victims for no reason.
Eventually Vinius had had enough of that, as well as the rain and snow, so in a spurt of energy he rounded up their tormentors, split them into teams, instructed them to bring him the head of a dead goat, and got them playing football like urchins in a Mediterranean back alley. This worked until the wrong team won, when the losers became sulky. The Roman prisoners consoled them by organising a pissing-up-a-door competition, a game in which the lads needed no education, though one giggling idiot must have let something slip because a few days later a group of infuriated mothers came from their village to screech blood-curdling insults and take their babies safely home.
The boys were replaced with apprentice warriors, who were bored but harmless.
‘If I’d known all it would take to get rid of the little bastards,’ said Vinius, ‘was to make their mothers think you lot were teaching them Greek gymnasium perversions, we’d have lost them bloody weeks ago.’ To a soldier who looked puzzled, he added, ‘Women think playing with your dingle-dangle makes you go blind.’
After a short pause, naturally someone asked him if that was how he lost his right eye, at which Vinius smiled patiently. As an officer he had a tolerance his old centurion would have despised. Still, Gracilis had always known, Vinius did everything his own way.
The soldiers went back to singing incorrigible ditties about persons they claimed to have kissed, and much else, in various towns of the Empire, with accompanying gestures according to taste. Vinius did not sing; he was too unhappy. But when he wanted a treat in the long cold nights, he lay on his back and allowed himself to remember his experience at Alba Longa with Flavia Lucilla in his arms. He understood his feelings now. She was in his blood and in his soul. Bored and bereft, he rationed the memory, as if fearful that each time he replayed the experience in his head, it would be subtly worn away. He could not bear it to fade.