That, however, is the pessimistic view. The other side of the medallion presents a different face. At the conclusion of my term of office, I will be free to retire with full military and civil honours to the province of my choice
—
to return home, in other words
—
with all the pecuniary stipends concomitant with senatorial and consular rank. That means, dear friend, that at the age of fifty I will be a retired landowner, and wealthy enough to indulge my whims and realize my dreams. Remember my request of you!
Another advantage, I am told, of proconsular status is that I may transport my family and keep them with me in comfort and luxury. I am still unconvinced of the wisdom of such a course, but Heraclita is adamant. She is tired of staying behind, an uncomplaining victim of the military life, and she believes it will be good for my son Picus to see Rome, Africa and the Emperor's Court at Byzantium. (Constantinople is too new a name for such an old city!) I find myself inclined to bow to her wishes in this, in spite of what a small voice tells me is my better judgment. Should you have reason to travel to the west while we are gone, you will be welcome in my villa, close to Aquae Sulis. It will be tended in our absence by my brother-in-law, Quintus Varo. You will find him amiable and a useful friend, should you have need of one. He owns the villa next to mine and our lands are contiguous. I have told him of you. He will make you welcome, as will my own sister, Luceiia, who was married to his wife's brother.
I have written these lines mindful of my promise to visit you soon. Alas, it will be longer than we could have anticipated. Keep my news word safe for me, and find me a skystone while I am gone.
Your friend ever, Britannicus
Proconsul of Numidia! I was elated for him, and at the same time worried by his accurate diagnosis of the problems that would face him there. However, I was confident, overall, that he would do well. I reread his letter several times then, thinking that five years without seeing him would be a long and lonely time. He and I had been comrades now for longer than that, and these past two years were the only time we had been parted. Five years! My natural pride and pleasure at the honour done my friend gave way to despondency, and I found myself staring sightlessly at Bishop Alaric's Celtic scrolls. I started to eat the food I had prepared for myself but it tasted like sawdust, and even Equus's ale was flavourless. Thoroughly depressed, I threw on my cloak and set out to find Plautus, to drown my sorrow with him in a tavern.
XII
There was a spirit of resurgence, of renewed optimism in Britain in the years that followed Theodosius's campaign against the invaders, and Equus and I profited handsomely by it. Our business grew rapidly; we had to more than double the size of our premises, and hire new workers regularly. By the end of our fifth year of operations, we had four apprentices, one of whom was Equus's own oldest son, Lannius, and six smiths in addition to ourselves. Equus had shown a natural aptitude for running our affairs, maintaining a tight but flexible production schedule and handling the day-to-day administration. My major function was how finding new contracts for our services and, maintaining cordial relationships with our existing customers, the major one being the army of occupation. Life had been good to us.
My friendship with Alaric, Bishop of Verulamium, had deepened so much over the years that I had come to regard him as I did Equus and Plautus, almost as a brother. I seldom thought of him as a man of God, except when the work I did for him reminded me of his calling. The first cross I made for him had been exactly what he wanted, and in the making of it I had fallen in love with silver, taking great pleasure in the working of it — its ductility, its purity, its texture and its lustrous richness. It was a love that did not detract from my love of iron, but rather reflected it, for only in the polished newness of silver could I find a resemblance to the brilliance of my skystone dagger.
Plautus, showing the real mind that lay beneath his abrasive, rude-tongued public persona, took great pleasure in my silverwork and believed the tale of the skystone without reservation. He, too, asked me whether there might be other such stones lying around, and received the same response that I had given Britannicus. Undeterred, Plautus took a pragmatic approach. Without giving any reasons for his demand, he ordered his patrols to ask questions everywhere they went about strange noises, explosions, falling stones and the like, whether they occurred day or night. In response, we heard some outlandish reports, two of which took Plautus and me off together in the hopes of finding another skystone. In one spot we found a massive oak tree, long dead, sundered by some cataclysmic force in the distant past, and in the other no more than an enormous pile of jagged rocks that had split from a high cliff and obliterated a valley at the foot of it. Plautus's orders stood, however, and the inquiries continued, for which I was grateful.
On a warm evening, in the spring of my sixth year in Colchester, I sat alone in the small garden at the rear of my house, examining the latest in a series of silver crosses I had made for Alaric and waiting for Equus and Plautus to arrive for dinner. My crosses were growing more and more artistic, and this one was certainly unique. I was not quite sure whether I liked it at all, now that it was finished.
I had taken a fancy the previous year to combine the cross upon which Christ had died with the other symbol of his degradation, the crown of thorns thrust on his head by his Roman tormentors. The end result had been a beautiful but quite impractical piece, for the tines of the realistic silver thorns caught so often and so badly on the clothing of the wearer that the thing could not be worn at all. It was decorative, but useless, so I had melted it again to reuse the silver. Now, months later, I was looking at its successor. I had represented the crown this time as a plain, wide circle of silver, cut into quadrants by the arms and uprights of the cross, and into the circle I had engraved a graphic representation of the interwoven thorns, using an adaptation of the stylized bramble work so common in Celtic art. To balance the centrality of the circle, I had then widened the extensions of the cross into wedge shapes. The effect was different from anything I had seen before, but, as its creator, I could only hope that Alaric would like it. I was prepared to let my own judgment wait upon his. As I sat there musing, the sky, which had clouded over unnoticed by me, opened suddenly in a torrential downpour. I scrambled to the door and stopped under the eaves to watch the effect of the heavy rain on the growing things in the garden. The weight of it was so great that the young, new flowers reeled beneath it, flattened to the ground. I stayed there until its force abated, and then I remained there, staring at something I had seen before. It was something anomalous that had nagged at me in an undefined way for all the time that I had lived in the house since my return, yet something I had never really paid proper attention to. It was one of a pair of military pikes that my grandfather had nailed diagonally to opposite walls of the garden for decoration. Looking at them now, their rusted heads streaming with rainwater, I had a flash of recognition. They were very old and rusted; at least, the heads were very old. The shafts looked comparatively new. By rights, these pike-heads should have been with all the other old weapons in my grandfather's collection, protected from further deterioration. Why, then, were they here, out in the open, exposed to the weather, mounted as useless, almost frivolous decorations on a wall?
My skin broke into goose-flesh as I realized that they must be there for a purpose, for I suddenly knew beyond a doubt that it was totally out of character for my grandfather to treat old weapons this way. But for what purpose? I knew only that it concerned me — that it had to concern me. There was no other explanation possible.