‘But these are not rebels, Brutus. These are loyalists – just merchants and farmers and metalworkers. These are the same people as sought our help against the rebels in the first place. Enslaving them actually endangers the peace rather than securing it. If news of this reaches other allied tribes, we could find them turning against us. So we’ll have to maintain Caesar’s fiction if we want to keep the Pax Romana. Hirtius was not happy about doing it; I could see that in his eyes.’
Brutus offered the cavalryman his flask and when declined, stoppered it and put it away. ‘Why would Caesar do that just for a few thousand slaves, given how many he’s already taken?’
Varus leaned forward and examined the map closely. After a moment he sat back and tapped with his finger in a small cluster of places around their current location.
‘What are those?’
‘Mining settlements,’ Brutus replied with a frown.
‘And they belong to this oppidum.’
‘There are plenty of iron and copper mining communities in easier places.’
‘Brutus, these are silver mines, I reckon. Or if not, this is a place where silver is worked. Took me a while to realise it, but I wondered why I recognised the name of the place. Argatomagon. Argat is a regional corruption. I’ve heard it as Argad and Argant and even Arganto. It means silver. Argatomagon – ‘silver market.’ Damn it, it’s surprisingly close to the Latin, and the soldiers are already calling the place Argentomagus in our own tongue. The place has made its name through silver.’
‘Seems a little…’ Brutus paused. ‘You’re right, though, aren’t you? This place was identified as the centre of the rebellion because that’s where Caesar wanted it to be. Then we can secure silver and worked metals. There’ll be a small fortune at stake here. By raising rebellion, the idiot Bituriges have enriched the general by a heavy margin.’
Varus sagged. ‘If I were a cynical man, I might even be given to wonder whether this entire rebellion was fostered as an excuse to wrest the mines from the Bituriges.’
‘Don’t even think of saying that again, even here and to me. Men with those kind of opinions have a very short career expectancy in the proconsul’s command. I see what you’re saying, and it all smacks very heavily of the same kind of manoeuvring that led Caesar to drive the Helvetii into Gaul eight years ago and start this whole thing in the first place. But the fact remains that it’s done and no good at all will come of speculating in public.’
He sighed. ‘Besides, you know the score here. Caesar has to completely pacify the place within the year before he returns for his consulship. He will need to take every sestertius he can out of this place if he wants to stand a chance of power against Pompey back in Rome. Caesar has plenty of friends in the city, but Pompey currently has all the real influence. The general will need to buy the goodwill of half the senators in Rome to get anywhere.’
‘And he will have to pay the honesta missio for his disbanding legions,’ Varus added.
‘Precisely. Settling the men in southern Gaul will cost a lot of money.’
‘Well,’ Varus stretched and rolled his head, listening to the clicks in his neck, ‘the Bituriges are back under Rome’s wing now. But there are more rebellious tribes than them. We need to keep our eyes open for trouble in the north, I reckon. The Belgae are overdue a grumble.’
Brutus chuckled. ‘You are such an optimist, Varus. It’s almost like having Fronto back in camp. You’ll be grumbling about women and getting soaked in wine next.’
‘Now that’s the best idea I’ve heard all week. Come on. Let’s go open an amphora and toast the Bituriges, unwitting bankers of Caesar’s career.’
Chapter Three
Fronto staggered from the doorway of the bath suite, his bare toes knuckling at the feel of the cold marble now he had moved out of the balneum with its heated floors. Massilia was still in the cold grip of winter and although it was more temperate down here on the southern coast than far to the north where the legions huddled in their camps, it still made for a damn cold floor in the mornings. For just a moment he reeled and had to lean on the doorframe for support. It was odd, really. He was feeling as weak and old as he had done five years ago, before his wife and the burly Masgava had helped him return to a level of health and fitness that belied his age. In truth he still was as fit as ever, despite home life having replaced the routine of the legion. But the endless nights of broken sleep were taking a heavy toll, beset by the most appalling dreams, and occasionally by the flailing feet of either Marcus or Lucius, who oft-times yelled in the night until Fronto relented and brought them into bed.
The former officer rubbed his tired, sore, red eyes and wandered over to the large bronze mirror, which had cost half a legionary’s yearly pay, but which Lucilia had pronounced a basic requirement of the villa, for it was unblemished and returned an almost perfect likeness of the viewer. Fronto’s hand strayed to his purse every time he walked past it.
A corpse looked back out of the mirror, and he almost shied away from the sight. The old man in the reflective surface had turned rather grey-haired since he last remembered and, though some of the reason was the fact that it was still wet from the bath, those once shiny dark locks were now unfashionably long and looking rather limp, like a Greek philosopher gone to seed. Though his eyes were dark pink, they were nicely offset by a pale waxy face and deep grey rings beneath each orbit. His chin was clean-shaven from the session in the baths, but rather than removing age-enhancing grey whiskers, the razor had merely revealed a lot more folds and wrinkles than he remembered having.
For the love of Aesculapius, he was looking old. And he knew that while some of it was age – he was approaching his fortieth summer – a lot more of it was his current lifestyle.
Lucilia had spent the winter concerned, but in her usual way she masked her worry by treating him like some sort of petulant in-patient. After these last few years, Fronto had become so used to her ways that he could decode her moods, for even when she seemed snippy, it was almost always a method of self-defence, protecting her heart from that which she feared. And he knew that generally the more crabby she got with him, the more concerned she was. But in recent weeks she had become disconcertingly caring and supportive, and that had almost chilled Fronto to the bone.
At her instigation, he had visited two of the best physicians in Massilia, and Greek physicians were the best in the world. Neither had managed to alleviate his troubles, but both had lightened his purse and had expressed their concerns over the effects that his many old healed wounds might still be having beneath the skin; and also at his ‘trick knee’. He had left both practices grumbling over the kind of people that failed to provide a solution to your problem but tried to raise more complications instead. When the second of the two had suggested that he might want to have a check-up in a rather personal area, Fronto had been grateful he wasn’t wearing his sword, else the physician might have been busy stitching up a hole in himself. The man had been busy warming his hands in preparation when Fronto left in a hurry.
Then there had been the apothecaries, two Greeks and one Jew, all of whom had once more emptied his purse in return for a small bag of what looked, smelled, and tasted like forest floor. Each of the three had done nothing to bring untroubled sleep. Indeed, the last of the three had added a fairly severe case of the ‘Saguntian Squits’ to the night-time upheaval.
Finally there had been the religious angle. Fronto had been reluctant to visit the temples for so many reasons he’d run out of fingers on which to count them. While he acknowledged the existence of the gods in the same way he acknowledge the existence of paving slabs, he generally paid them about the same level of devotion, barring his personal deities. His history with temples was not good. Almost every visit he had ever made to a temple had ended in disaster, carnage or embarrassment. Given the choice, he would take carnage any time. But on top of his general distrust of those men who felt so pious as to take up the priesthood as a career and a general wariness of gods themselves, the temples in Massilia were to the gods of the Greeks. It felt wrong to stroll up to the three great temples on their rocky heights and pray to Athena and Artemis instead of Minerva and Diana, although at least golden Apollo looked and sounded the same in this strangely hairy Greek world. In the end, he had foregone the three great temples of the city and, in the absence of any house of worship for his patron goddesses, had ended up in the small temple of Asklepios.