‘Centurion, keep your men in line!’ Tribune Aurelius Jovianus of the Second was the appointed praepositus, commanding both legion detachments. He was supposed to be impartial.
‘Of course, dominus,’ Castus said, saluting as the tribune rode on by. He swatted at a couple of his men with his stick, and glowered at the soldiers of the Second lined up on the verge until they fell silent.
‘Smarten up,’ he said in a carrying rumble. ‘Double pace – let’s show these bastards what soldiers look like!’
His men needed no further encouragement.
Two days, then three days. The roads rolled out before them, spreading their web of gravel and churned mud across the plains of Belgica. Castus did not care for the look of this country: much of it was farmland, wide flat fields of wheat and barley. But much more was untended, waste acres that had not been ploughed for generations, now high with tangled weeds and scrub bushes. It gave the landscape a maudlin, sepulchral look under the heavy grey clouds.
‘The tragedy of Gaul,’ said the narrow-faced balding soldier marching beside him. Diogenes had been a schoolmaster before he had been recruited into the legion; Castus had recently promoted the rather unmilitary man to tesserarius, keeper of the watchwords, which granted him immunity from the more strenuous fatigue duties, and also perhaps excused some of his more unusual comments.
Castus gave a questioning grunt.
‘That used to be some of the finest arable land in the western provinces,’ Diogenes explained. ‘Then, about thirty years ago, in the time of the emperor Probus, barbarians invaded from across the Rhine. By the time the owners had got their peasants and slaves back to the land, they owed too much in tax arrears to afford to farm it. So they let it run to seed, claimed it wasn’t theirs.’
‘Stupid,’ Castus said. ‘So everybody loses?’
‘Indeed. And if anyone was tempted to try and cultivate it, you can bet that some good neighbour would be only too ready to inform on them to the tax officials. Once again, you see, centurion – the curse of private property!’
Castus had become accustomed to Diogenes’ strange views over the years, his philosophies. One of these was the idea that private property was the sole cause of the empire’s decline; if everything was owned by the emperor, Diogenes believed, all would be equitable. A situation which seemed to Castus very much like army life, which sadly was not a very good example of fairness.
‘But if we look just over there,’ Diogenes explained, with new enthusiasm, ‘we see the future of the Gallic provinces!’ He pointed away across the weed-grown scrub to a nearby field in cultivation. Rows of dark figures were at work, bending low over the crop.
‘Barbarians!’ Diogenes announced. ‘Prisoners, taken in war and settled here by the emperor. Probably Franks or Alamanni, I should think. They work the land for free, and send their sons for military service in our armies.’
‘And everybody wins?’ Castus said, sceptical. Surely the idea of surrendering large areas of Roman land to the barbarians could not be a good one, whoever they were supposedly working for? Was this really the future?
‘Perhaps, indeed,’ Diogenes went on, in a musing rhetorical tone Castus had learned to recognise, ‘those barbarians in the fields are the brothers of those we are now going to fight? Convenient, one might say! No doubt our enemies of tomorrow have done some terrible deed, to deserve the vengeance of empire?’
‘No doubt,’ Castus said in a tone that forbade further rhetoric. Diogenes was a strange sort of soldier, but he had proved himself brave, and tougher than he looked. Even so, there was a limit to how much Castus could take from him, and directly questioning the motives of the emperor and his army was pushing towards that limit fast. There had been enough of that sort of scepticism in Britain two years before, although all knew it was warranted. Diogenes, sensing the limit’s approach, wisely fell silent.
The column moved on, and the barbarian labourers stood for a time to watch the soldiers go by, before once more bending to their work.
On the evening of the fifth day, the twin legion detachments reached Bagacum, nexus of the road systems of northern Belgica.
Two hundred years before, in an excess of civic pride, the citizens of Bagacum had erected for their city a forum and basilica to rival anything north of the Alps. But those days of glory had long passed: Frankish raiders had sacked the city two or three times, and the grand forum was now surrounded by ramparts and bastions, a fortified redoubt and military supply depot for the army of the Rhine. The city itself had shrunk from its heyday, and the grid of brick streets had more abandoned than occupied buildings. The descendants of the proud decurions of ancient Bagacum now ran taverns and brothels for the soldiers that passed so frequently through the city. They knew all too well the rough tramping of hobnailed boots along their streets, and the favourite obscene songs of half a dozen different legions.
They also knew what happened when the army detachments came through: the legion’s billeting officers had arrived earlier that day, chalking their quotas on the doors of houses. A third of any requisitioned property must be given up for the accommodation of troops. Not surprising, Castus thought, that so many towns in northern Gaul seemed deserted when the army arrived. He had seen the same thing all across the empire.
Not that he was complaining; he had little use for the scruples of civilians. Besides, the legion mensores had done well for him: he was billeted with two other centurions in the upper rooms of a grain merchant’s house two blocks south-west of the old forum. Good rooms, comfortable beds, and the merchant had even instructed his slaves to feed the noble soldiers from his own larder, before departing for his house in the country.
‘If only all civilians were so prompt and generous,’ Valens said, propping his boots on the dining table, ‘a soldier’s life would be a lot less arduous!’
‘Arduous?’ Castus said, glancing up with a wry smile. ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word!’ He wiped a hunk of coarse bread around his earthenware bowl, scraping up the last of his meal of chopped olives in fish sauce.
‘Oh? All this marching up and down, risking blisters and cramps in the service of the emperor? Is that not arduous?’ Valens ran a chicken bone through his teeth, then tossed it over his shoulder and belched. ‘Anyway, at least I know how to spell arduous.’
The third man at the table, Rogatianus, a dark wiry soldier from north Africa, laughed down his nose. Castus just nodded, still smiling, trying not to blush. When he had first joined the Sixth Legion four years ago, he had been unable to read or write. Since then, in sporadic and entirely secret lessons with Diogenes the former teacher, Castus had picked up the rudiments of literacy. Valens still mocked him about it, slyly, although there was a rough affection in his humour. Not many men in the legion knew, after all.
Since birth, people had taken Castus for stupid. It had started with his own father, then almost every officer he had known and most of his fellow soldiers too. And most civilians assumed soldiers to be little better than brutal animals. It did not worry him unduly. Sometimes it suited him for people to think that way, to expect little of him beyond strength and loyalty. His appearance suggested it: the heavy torso, with the blunt, broken features and thick neck that had given him, in successive units, the inevitable nickname ‘Knucklehead’. But all the same, just occasionally, his lack of learning needled him. His ignorance of so much in the world, beyond the narrow regulated margins of army life. He had hoped that learning his letters might broaden his mind, but the stuff Diogenes tried to get him to read just baffled him. In fact, it had often occurred to Castus that if Diogenes had been such a good teacher, he would never have had to join the army…