I grinned at him. "I am. These, and as many others as I can get orders for. That is my business."
Poor Cicero was out of his aristocratic depth. He looked at Trifax.
"What do you think, Trifax?"
Trifax was as blunt as a rusty dagger. "Don't have to think, General. This sword is flawless. If I could get my own people to turn these out, I'd be a happy man. But I can't. I'll buy as many of these as I can requisition. Lucullus?"
The paymaster shrugged his patrician shoulders. "I only pay the money. I'll take your word on the quality, although for once I can see it for myself.
" He looked at me. "Quality taken for granted, Publius, what about quantity? Can you produce enough of these to justify the paperwork?"
"If you want a hundred a day, starting tomorrow, no, I can't. If, on the other hand, your expectations are reasonable and your settlement of accounts prompt, I'll keep you supplied with weapons of that quality."
"Be specific. As you are set up now, how many of these could you turn out in a week?"
"Right now, two a day. Within a month, eight a day. I can expand to meet your needs with no loss in quality if, as I say, you pay me promptly. Expansion costs money."
He nodded. "We pay promptly. What about the smiths' guild? You have their approval?"
"For what? I belong to no guild."
"Oh! I see. That could be awkward."
I frowned. "How? I don't see what you mean."
He cleared his throat. "The law, Publius. We are required by law to deal only with civil suppliers who are in good standing with their guilds."
"Horse turds for that!" I stood up, sudden anger welling in my throat.
"You must excuse me, gentlemen. I seem to have been wasting your time. I belong to no guild, as I have said. Nor did my grandfather. I didn't need the approval of the smiths' guild to lay my balls on the line for the Empire and I'll be damned if I'll ask their approval to earn my bread."
"Sit down, Publius." Cicero's voice was bland. He spoke directly to his paymaster. "Are you serious? You mean we cannot buy Varrus's swords because he does not belong to some ridiculous civilian tradesmen's organization?"
Lucullus cleared his throat again. "That is the law, General."
"How do we get around it?"
"We cannot, General."
"And horse turds for that, too!" The profanity sounded strange, uttered in Cicero's cultured tones. "I want Varrus's swords for my men. Are you telling me I cannot have them?"
Poor Lucullus was looking very uncomfortable. "No, General, not I. All such contracts have to be arranged through the office of the Procurator."
"Ahh! The office of the Procurator. I begin to see. No doubt the Procurator's 'department' gains a commission on the services involved?" A short pause, then, "Yes, General."
"How much?"
"Ten to fifteen percent, depending on the size of the contract."
"Blatant theft." Cicero turned to me. "Publius, if our excellent Lucullus here can find a way around this nonsense, legally of course, would you be prepared to surrender the required per centum 'tax' to the Procurator?" I was smiling now. "Of course, General. I'd be happy to." Particularly since we had not yet negotiated my price, which I had just raised by 20 percent.
"Excellent! Lucullus, can that be arranged?"
Lucullus was no fool; he looked at me and smiled a tiny smile. "I'm sure it can, General."
"Wonderful. By the way, Lucullus, that reminds me. When must we submit our budget to the Procurator?"
"Next month, General." His expression tacitly added, "As you well know."
"Well, Publius Varrus, it's good to know we will be well armed and well supplied in future. A jug of wine would be appropriate now, I believe."
My feet hardly touched the ground on the way home that night, and within the month we had an iron-bound contract to supply arms to the local garrison.
VII
It was on Midsummer's Day that I finally allowed myself to open my grandfather's treasures and gloat over them. I had waited, month after impatient month, until I felt that I had earned myself the reward of spending time to examine these wonders that were now legally and rightfully mine.
From the way I have been speaking of treasures, anyone reading this will probably have imagined a hoard of coins and jewels. That is not quite correct. My grandfather had been an armourer — a master sword-maker and also an earnest historian and student of weapons and weaponry. During his early years with the legions, he had picked up several assorted examples of the armourer's craft and the metalsmith's art that had caused him excitement and given him great pleasure. In later years, while he served as armourer to the various legions stationed in Britain, he had encouraged legionaries to pick up other examples for him. The end result of forty years of this was a collection of antique and esoteric weapons the like of which existed nowhere else that I knew of. These were my grandfather's treasures, each individually wrapped in protective cloth and many stored in cases that he had made specifically to house them. Every piece was accompanied by a scroll outlining the history of the item as far as it was known by the old man. Where the history of the piece was obscure, he consulted all available sources and made some very shrewd guesses.
Some of the shapes I remembered from boyhood, and I felt like a boy again as I opened them one by one. There was one particular piece that chilled me to my bones with awe. It was a face-protector of dull, black iron, shaped to fit the forehead and muzzle of a horse, with flared eye-protectors. It had been crudely decorated with a drawing of a mounted man charging with a long, heavy spear balanced over his shoulder, and beneath the drawing, the Greek word meaning "companions." The lover of history in me had to swallow hard as I looked at this piece of armour, because I knew it had protected one of the horses of the Companions, the hand-picked friends of the King, who had ridden into battle at the side of Philip of Macedon and later with his son the great Alexander, fully seven hundred years before I had been born. The Companions! How often had I dreamed of them as a boy, imagining myself winning glory under the greatest military commander of ancient times.
To keep company with the faceplate, there was the badly rusted remnant of a sarissa, the sixteen-foot-long spear carried by the Macedonian cavalry. It had a long cross-piece attached below the blade, presumably to stop the entire spear from going through the body of whoever was skewered, and to give the rider at least a chance of pulling it out again as he galloped past his victim. My grandfather had really studied this weapon in his youth. Like the one in the drawing on the horse's faceplate, the sarissa was carried point down, the shaft over the rider's shoulder, and was used with a downward thrust. It was originally left in the body of the first victim, and the rest of the fighting was done with swords. The victorious cavalry — Alexander's cavalry were always victorious — would return later to collect their sarissas from the bodies of the men they had slain in their charge. The cross-piece, added later, meant they then had a chance of retaining the spear for a second victim. In a large, long case that I remembered well, there was a collection of original Roman pila, the fighting spears of the ancient legions. Seven feet long, the shaft of these original spears was of wood for half its length, the other half being a metal rod with a wicked head. Embedded in an enemy.
's shield, the rod, of soft iron, would bend, and the cumbersome weight of the thing dragged at the shield until it became useless to the man trying to shelter behind it.
Another carefully wrapped package contained the great African bow that I had marvelled over as a child. It was composed of alternating layers of wood, animal horn and sinew, and it was truly a mighty weapon the like of which had never been seen in this part of the world. I laid it aside for closer examination later.