"Nobody did, but the paralysis wore off after a while." He shivered, and I noticed how cold the night had become. "Here," I said, "take my cloak. I have some extra gear and blankets with my horse, back there."
"Do you have any food? Real food, I mean?"
"Legion food. Dried meal and corn, nuts, raisins and dates. Some dried meat, lots of water I got earlier, and two skins of wine I was taking back with me."
"Thank the gods! You have a guest for supper."
Staying astride a camel was more easily said than done. It seemed to take years to reach the bottom of the hill where I had left my horse. We talked in quiet voices all the way back, for sound travels far on the desert at night, and I told him that I was on my way back to Britain to join the Twentieth Legion, the famed Valeria Victrix, my first posting in my homeland since joining the Eagle Standards some seven years earlier. He was interested in how I had managed to secure the transfer, and I pointed out that I had not had a major furlough in six years of frontier duty. That was all very well, he said, and I had certainly earned a long leave, but it hardly qualified me for intercontinental and inter-legion transfer. He was right, of course, and I felt no reluctance in telling him how I had managed to finagle it.
"I'm a centurion, Tribune. You know the breed. There's not much a centurion with seniority can't get, if he puts his mind to it. In my case, I was in a situation to perform a number of services for my commander. The kind of services he thought were worth rewarding."
He interrupted me, prompted, I would find out later, by the probity that was so much a part of his character. "I'm not sure I want to hear any more. It sounds to me as though the reward for you was a reward for himself, too. Safe back in Britain, you will be grateful, and unlikely to say anything that he could find embarrassing."
I caught his meaning and shook my head. "Not so, Tribune, with respect. There was nothing improper involved. My commander, the Legate Seneca, had a son who might have been a burden to him. I took the lad under. my wing and saw him properly fledged. That's all there was to it." He frowned. "Seneca? You are a friend of the Seneca’s?" I shook my head, bewildered at the sudden hostility in his voice. "No, Tribune, I'm just a simple centurion. The Legate asked me to keep an eye on his son and straighten him around; make a soldier out of him."
"And did you?"
"Yes, " I answered. "I did. He wasn't as difficult as he'd been made out to be. I just brought out the decency in him. The Legate was grateful, and here I am on my way home to Britain."
"Humph! You must be a man of great subtlety, to bring out the decency in a Seneca." His voice was heavy with irony and dislike. I felt a surge of anger.
"Well, Tribune," I snapped, "I grieve if I've offended you." He flipped his hand at me in an unmistakable order to be silent, and we continued for a while without speaking. When he spoke next, his voice was contrite.
"Forgive me, Centurion. I have no right to berate you, and no reason. You cannot be expected to choose your commanders. There has been a long and bitter enmity between my family and the House of Seneca. Blood has been spilled for it over the years, and there is no love at all between us, from one generation to the next."
There was nothing I could say to that. It was none of my affair, and I had no wish to be inquisitive. I accepted his words and passed no comment. After a time he spoke again.
"Home to Britain!" His voice sounded nostalgic. "All that greenery after all this sand. How much do you know about the Twentieth?" I shook my head. "Nothing, except that they're famous. They've been called the Valeria Victrix since the days of Julius Caesar, and their legionary fortress has been at Deva, in Cambria, since Agricola's campaign, about three hundred years ago. Apart from that, I only know I'm posted to the Second Millarian Cohort as replacement for its pilus prior. Apparently the man they had was killed and there's no one really qualified to replace him from the existing crew. They have an acting cohort commander in place until I get there." I grimaced to myself in the darkness. "Frankly, I'm not sure what that means, so I'm expecting the worst, in the hope that anything less than that will be bearable. The only other thing is that I've heard they're not currently stationed in Deva — the Second Cohort, I mean. They're in the north-east, at Eboracum."
"The Second of the Twentieth, eh?" Even in the dark, I could see the smile on his face as he shook his head.
"What's so funny? What are you smiling at?"
He was grinning strangely to himself. "I was just thinking about our circumstances here," he said. "You are here because of my enemy, even though indirectly, and you have saved my life. Yet your mode of address to me is decidedly lacking in military respect, and I'm not sure what I ought to do about it."
I stiffened at the censure in his voice. He was right, of course. I was only a centurion and he was a Military Tribune, and my deportment had not been militarily correct. But somehow, because of our circumstances, it had not seemed necessary to defer to him here in the middle of a desert when there were only the two of us around. Now it appeared that I had been wrong in my reading of the man. He was more of a martinet than I had thought. He must have read my mind, for he swung his camel right around close to mine, a broad smile on his face.
"Relax, Varrus. We're going to get along, you and I. This meeting was obviously fated. My name is Caius Britannicus. I, too, was on my way to Britain when I was taken. To the Second Cohort of the Twentieth Legion. I'm your new commanding officer. Haven't I got a right to wonder what I'm going to do about you?"
II
For a period of weeks after the trap in the mountain pass, my whole world existed only in terms of the pain of my wound. Even now it is hard to describe. As a veteran, and the bearer of many scars picked up over years of duty in some savage places, I had thought myself familiar with pain. I was wrong. This experience of muscle and tendons and sinew shattered by the ripping spike of a hard-swung axe taught me just how little I had known. The pain I lived with had a wide range of intensity and textures, and I experienced it as a spectrum of pulsating colours, ranging from blazing white to a dull, harsh, throbbing red.
Of all the torments I had to endure, the worst by far was caused by the natural, waste-producing functions of my own body. They became my most bitter and treacherous enemy, scourging me with unimaginable agonies each time I had to accommodate them. Mitros was gentle in his ministrations at such times, but not always sympathetic. On one occasion — he was in a particularly impatient mood — he told me brusquely that women endured far worse in childbirth and I should be grateful I was alive to feel pain. But it was only his skills and his magical opiates that saved my mind from breaking during that first month.
Pain, however, like everything else in life, is transient. I began to mend, gradually, day by day, heartbeat by heartbeat. A time came when I could lie still and feel — almost explore — my pain, without wanting to scream like a baby. And a day came, much later, when I could lie on my back and think about things other than how much I hurt. From that point on, I began to mend visibly, and to talk, and to think rationally again. I spent many silent hours reviewing and analyzing the affinity between Britannicus and me, and how it had developed and prospered after our meeting in Africa.