"Hmm." He sat staring at the wall opposite him for a count of ten, then pursed his lips and sucked air through them sharply. His decision was made.
"My family calls me Nero," he said. "Don't ask me why , because the reason is long lost, but that's my name." He leaned down to recover his cup of mead and sipped at it reflectively, clearly ordering his thoughts. Then, when he had satisfied himself that what he had to say was right, he began to speak, and I listened for the next quarter of an hour.
The story he told was much akin to ours in Camulod, but with several large and significant differences.
He came of a wealthy Roman-British family, the Appius clan, collectively called Niger for the blackness of their hair and eyes and the swarthiness of their skin. He was the firstborn of the fifth generation bred in Britain. Despite his youth, he was currently the paterfamilias, the senior surviving Appius following his father's recent death. His grandfather, he told me, had been dead these twenty years.
The Appius clan had settled enormous holdings more than a century earlier, in this fertile region to the north and east of Corinium. Their family lands, which had no name of their own, had lain close enough to Corinium for the town to be both the source of their supplies and the destination for their saleable crops, but they were, at the same time, far enough removed from the town that this business required a well regulated schedule of excursions. They were also far enough removed from the town, he added with some pride, to allow the Nigers to maintain a community that was uninfluenced by the urbanites of Corinium.
Then, with the departure of the legions four decades and more earlier, enormous changes had taken place. Their markets had disappeared within three years, because the fleets of seagoing vessels that had shipped their corn and oats no longer plied the dangerous waters off Britain, afraid of the pirates that had begun swarming everywhere even before the Navy had departed. The port towns themselves had quickly been deserted by the suddenly defenceless people who had lived in them for so long, secure in the Roman presence. Commerce vanished overnight. Money became worthless. Hunger soon became commonplace among those people who had neither the skills nor the wherewithal to produce their own food, and plunder and pillage became widespread in a region that had known only peaceful trade and amicable living for centuries.
The Niger community had had no long sighted Caius Britannicus to prepare it in advance for such catastrophe, and no Publius Varrus to supply its people with the tools they would require in order to survive in harsher times. In spite of that, however, they had managed to adapt very quickly to their new circumstances. Soldiers and tacticians they had aplenty, for the Niger family had served the Empire well for centuries. Nero's grandfather, accurately gauging the extent and ramifications of the earliest changes—a drastic decrease in the quantity of crops being planted and raised and an equally radical increase in the amount of work necessary to protect those crops against depredation—had quickly directed his now idle farmers to the reclamation and refurbishment of an ancient Roman encampment near the home farm. The camp, a long disused marching camp, was situated more than a mile from the nearest road and had lain abandoned for more than a hundred years and probably closer to two hundred, but its outlines were classical and clearly marked, and in its day it had offered ample, if Spartan, accommodations for a transient cohort of five hundred men. The Appius farmers, glad of a purpose and a clear objective once again, had had the place rebuilt and strongly fortified within the year.
Then, realizing the strength and safety offered by the refurbished fort, they had moved their families and dependants within their newly raised walls and redefined their arable holdings, arranging them so that every field they fanned was defensible and within easy reach. That meant abandoning many outlying fields, as we had done in Camulod at first, and clearing new lands from the forest around their new fort, so that their collective farms came to form a broad, irregular circle, the extent of which was determined by the distance a column of men could march to its defense within half a day. That, too, stirred memories in me, for until the development of our cavalry strength, we in Camulod had been bound by the same constraints.
Since then, their entire community had adapted constantly, making adjustments and accommodations for a host of circumstances and events. Where every man had initially been a fanner, all were now soldiers or, at the very least, fighters, able to defend themselves individually and capable of joining together to form a united front should the need arise. They did not all drill regularly, every day, in the way of traditional soldiers, Nero said, but they learned the techniques and disciplines appropriate to the weapons they had, sufficient to enable them to, fight together as a group.
I interrupted to ask how many men they had currently under arms. His response was that they had a central core of a round hundred men, and they went to great lengths to keep that number whole. This central cadre was tightly disciplined and close to professional in its capabilities, according to the senior soldier in their ranks, a grizzled veteran of seventy years who had seen service with the legions. Nero's father had commanded the cadre before his death. Now it was Nero's charge.
In addition to that hundred, he told me, they had a fluctuating strength of perhaps sixty more, who trained irregularly and individually, and who were nominally kept in reserve, their primary duty being to the fields of grain, rather than the field of war. I could see from his tiny smile that Nero was quite pleased with his analogy.
I nodded, waiting for him to continue, but he had evidently said all he intended to say.
"So how often are you called upon to fight?"
"Not often, thank God. We discovered long ago that a good show of force is often a sufficient deterrent. That's why we keep our hundred on their toes and disciplined. Ten ten-man squads look impressive, when they form up quickly and appear to know what they're about. Nine times out of ten the opposition simply drifts away, in search of easier conquest."
'Then I must ask you this: how came you to be alone when our men found you?"
Nero shrugged. "Mere accident. I was hunting, and when first I saw your men, I hid, more out of curiosity than fear. Uniformed horsemen was a phenomenon I'd never seen before."
"Are you saying that you hunt in armour? What in God's name were you hunting?"
This time he laughed aloud. "No, no! Truth told, I had words with my wife this morning and stormed out in a rage, with no thought of where I was going. I was wearing my armour at the time, because I had been drilling with my men, and I took my bow and arrows with me merely because I had been carrying them when I went home. Denalda was out of sorts and angry at me for something I had not done—are you married?"
I shook my head. "Not yet."
"Don't do it, ever. Anyway, I was fuming—wives have more power to reduce a man to gibbering than any enemy— and I walked heedlessly for miles, until the weight of my armour told me I was tiring and had been stupid. I sat down under a tree—this must have been shortly after noon—and while I was sitting there, I saw a stag entering the woods in the distance. I shrugged out of my armour, gratefully enough, took up my bow and arrows, and went hunting.
"About an hour later, perhaps more, I saw the first of your men riding through our fields. As I said, I grew curious, and so I watched them for a while, trying to discover whether or not they might be hostile. My intelligence told me they must be, but their demeanour—simply the way they were riding—indicated otherwise. After a time, I crept away to where I had left my armour and put it on again, thinking to return home and alert my people. Only moments after that, your men changed direction and came straight towards where I was sitting. I tried to hide. The rest you know."