I leaned against a pear tree, staring out over the hazy yellow town, the past nine months washing over me like that foul, churning water from the not-so-Sacred Spring.
My eyes closed. Goddamn it. Thirty-four years old. I was thirty-four years old. I wasn’t going to give up yet.
* * *
Nones of September. Agricola’s finest hour. Last hour for thousands of Caledonii.
He conquered the island. Slaughtered the last army. Had gone farther than anyone ever expected-far enough to secure his fame and yet not far enough, maybe, to push the emperor to outright assassination. A delicate dance, with all the precision of a sacrifice.
A light flickered by the governor’s quarters, officers darting in and out. Agricola was moving the men out this morning, heading south to establish forts. He’d work his way slowly to Londinium, where he’d wait for the inevitable order from Domitian to return to Rome. Term complete.
I squinted at the small hill squatting peacefully on the plain. I thought of the men with families, the women and children, loaded into carts and crawling like ants on the surface. Three days ago.
Their horses got tangled up in the wagon leads, the cavalry hunting down the ones who fled. Painted warriors, scars and tattoos proud on their bodies, long swords and short shields useless and clumsy, running, shouting into the path of trained soldiers. All gone, dead. Last wild men of Britannia.
I closed my eyes. I could still hear the cries of the children when the survivors killed them afterward. Better dead than slaves, they thought. For the love of their children, they murdered them. For the love of his son, Agricola slaughtered the Caledonians.
* * *
May.
I’d done everything I could to save his son, everything I’d ever learned, or felt, or knew, or guessed. Not enough.
What about the tonic? Just to make him sleep-sleep was his only chance. Too much? A little saffron, enough to make him drowsy. As drowsy as I was. Up for three days straight, tried everything else. The little boy weaker and weaker, restless, unable to sleep. He’d die without sleep. I gave him the right amount. As soon as the crying stopped, and I heard his breath, even, peaceful, I got what rest I could, so I’d be ready for when he woke up.
Except he never woke up.
Domitia’s eyes, accusing, wild, asking the question, the same question I asked myself, over and over, every night. Could I have saved him if I’d been awake? My lullaby, my prayer, my reason. My excuse. Every night.
She screamed at me, beat my chest, called me a quack, a charlatan, broke down and locked herself in her room. Stayed there until the ship came.
Cleaner than the dazed look on her husband’s face. Not a word against me. No questions. Focused on his strategy. Left for the North the next week. His household-his namesake and heir, the boy he’d wanted all his life-gone. Nothing to lose.
He never blamed me. He channeled his energy into his last, supreme battle as governor, his final chance for glory. Glory didn’t die.
* * *
I watched the dawn shine over the plain. Four months of guilt? More like a lifetime.
It had gnawed my insides since I was ten. I thought I rid myself of it when I found Gywna. Thought I’d forgiven myself for not saving my mother. At the first real crisis, the first tragedy, I left my wife. Left her emotionally. Quit writing. Quit thinking. I withdrew from the woman I loved. My beautiful, oh, so beautiful wife. Gwyna.
I rode north with Agricola, sent a few pitiful scrawls with the governor’s messenger. Her responses were full of hurt. She didn’t know what the hell happened to me, what was devouring my gut every night, wanting to help and not knowing how. I didn’t tell her, either-I ignored her, punishing both of us for my failure.
Her responses became spare and lean. Finally stopped altogether. I withdrew into my nightmares, familiar, safe. Watched my mother get murdered every night. I dreamed about Gwyna, too-dying in childbirth, while I stood by, unable to save her.
Bilicho kept writing, thank God. He did what he could to keep some part of me from drifting too far off the edges of the maps. I was already at the edge of them all, staring at a plain littered with corpses. I thought about my mother, and what she would have wanted. What she would have said.
She told me something that September morning, a whispered southern wind blowing clouds across the bloody sky. Forgive yourself, Arcturus. For not being able to save every life you come across. For not being able to save the child. For being alive.
Simple words. I took a breath and filled my lungs. I was done with war. As much as I was done with the guilt. Finished with stitching up butchered men who’d butchered other men who couldn’t be stitched up. It was time for both of us, governor and doctor, to see what else Fortuna had in store.
Light was flooding the hills, and a fresh gust of wind blew down from the west.
* * *
I could hear Saturninus before I reached the tent. A loud roar rose from the governor’s quarters, and the heavy cloth shook with the sound. The flap belched open like a fat man’s mouth in a seaside bar. The tent fought to steady itself.
“Arcturus! Glad to see you’re still among the living!”
Saturninus’s expansive slap on my back rattled my teeth.
“I’ll be feeling that welcome all the way back to Londinium.”
His white teeth gleamed beneath the bushy black beard. Sometimes I thought Saturninus was part bear. Sometimes I thought he was a bear.
“You should be happy to get back home.” The elbow in my ribs emphasized what he meant. He recognized the look on my face. “What’s wrong? Trouble?”
“Nothing serious. I just need to get home.”
“Is your wife-”
“She’s fine.”
He stared at me, chewing his mustache. Respectful, but with the acknowledgment that I wasn’t fully Roman.
“Have all the scouts returned?”
He nodded. “No enemy movement anywhere. Everything’s nice and quiet. The general’s giving orders to the fleet to sail all the way around Britannia.”
“How is the general?”
“He’s all right, Arcturus. Knows he’s on the way out. Hell, we thought he was out last winter, and he might have been, if it hadn’t been for you. He hasn’t forgotten.”
“Neither have I.”
He knew what I meant and reached a paw out to pat my shoulder. “He’s in there now, with that scribe takin’ down everything about the battle. It’s for his son-in-law, Tacitus, fancies himself a historian.”
I didn’t much fancy Tacitus. Always creeping around, perpetual gloom hanging over his stooped shoulders like an undertaker at the Colosseum gates. I couldn’t help it if his wife tried to seduce me.
“The Battle of Mons Graupius. Not much of a mountain.”
“But a hell of a battle. Memorably fought on the day of Jupiter Stator, the Nones of September-”
“You mean the Nones of Germanicus, don’t you?”
Saturninus’s snort would have done credit to a three-ton bull. “That little jerk-off Domitian wouldn’t know what to do with a German if one pulled off his baby pants and tugged on his-”
“Arcturus!”
It was Agricola, calling me inside, but too late to prevent Saturninus from announcing to all and sundry what a German would find upon pulling down Domitian’s underwear. Someday that mouth of his would get him in serious trouble.
Soldiers scurried about with various orders. A small man with a pointed chin that matched his stylus was taking down notes in a minuscule hand. Whenever Agricola grunted, he hurriedly scrawled away. He looked like he’d be a friend of Tacitus.
“There you are. Where have you been keeping yourself?”
“Sorry to keep you waiting, sir. Saturninus was filling me in.”
“On what, I wonder? So long as he wasn’t filling you up.”
The scribe scribbled furiously over that one.