Part 1
Seven Years Later
1
Eboracum, Northern Britannia, April AD 305
By the time the walls of the fortress appeared in the distance the mist was thickening into rain. The line of soldiers on the road, thirty-eight men of Legion VI Victrix, increased their pace.
‘Close up,’ their centurion called over his shoulder, smacking his palm with the short broad-headed staff that marked his rank. ‘Military step – let’s try and look like soldiers, not a gang of labourers!’
The men grinned mirthlessly. They could see the scaffolding along the wall near the gate, the figures of other soldiers working to repair the old fortifications. Their new centurion wanted to give a good impression to his colleagues. But they closed up anyway, dropping into the accustomed regular pace, muddied boots crunching on the gravelled road. Centurion Aurelius Castus was a hard bastard, and an ugly slab-faced brute of a Pannonian too, but in the months since he had joined them they had come, grudgingly, to respect him.
They had been out all day, repairing a flood-damaged cause shy;way on the Derventio road. All of them were tired and wet, hands blistered and legs aching from digging and shifting rocks and gravel. While the men of other centuries often marched out on work details carrying only their tools, Centurion Castus never allowed his men to leave the fortress without full kit. Each man, besides his mattock or muddied shovel, carried a sword and two light javelins, with a leather-covered shield slung on his back. They wore no armour or helmets – they were thankful for small mercies – but now as they marched they slung the tools and carried their shields and javelins instead. They were soldiers, they told themselves, not labourers.
The road ran straight, across a bridge and between the low warehouses towards the high double-arched gate of Eboracum fortress. Marching at the head of his men, Castus caught the smell of woodsmoke from the bath-house inside the walls. As his little half-century approached the scaffolding, some of the men up there called out to them – the usual obscene jokes.
‘Castus!’
He rotated his head on his thick neck. Valens, a fellow centurion of the Third Cohort, stood on the lowest platform of the scaffolding, overseeing his men. ‘Been admiring the British scenery again, have you?’
‘No scenery around here,’ Castus replied in a carrying growl. ‘That’s for civilised places. Out here on the edge of the world all you get’s mist and mud.’
Laughter from the men on the scaffolding. Valens, hang shy;ing from the wooden beams, called back as Castus passed through the gate. ‘The world has no edges, brother! It’s a sphere, as everyone knows. Or is this information not current in Pannonia?’
As his men filed into barracks after kit inspection, Castus pulled off his round woollen cap and tipped his head back into the ache of his shoulders. The rain was slackening, but he enjoyed the feel of the cool water on his face and scalp. He looked up into the sky, iron grey, darkening. A deep sigh ran through him. Every evening he felt this way. Every evening the same dull torpor settled over him.
Twelve years in the army, and I end up rotting in this place…
Twelve months before, he had still been a soldier of II Herculia. Getting promoted to centurion before the age of thirty was a rare honour, won in the campaign against the Carpi on the great plains north of the Danube. But promotion had meant transfer – not only out of the elite Herculiani, his home since he had joined the legions, but away from the Danubian provinces, where he had been born, and across half the empire to this dull backwater of a frontier.
Fate had directed it – so he told himself. But that was little consolation. VI Victrix was an old legion, based here at Eboracum for nearly two hundred years. Few of the men in the fortress had ever seen combat, although there were many among them with grey hair. Ever since he was sixteen, when he had run away from home to join the legions, Castus had wanted only to be a soldier in the army of Rome. So he was still, but this life – work details, route marches and paperwork, overseeing building and road-mending, ordering his men to cut wood for the baths or whitewash the charcoal to stop the locals from stealing it – did not seem much like soldiering.
Back in his own quarters at the end of the barrack block, he threw off his swordbelt and hung it from a hook on the wall. Dragging his mud-stained grey tunic off over his head, he flung it into a basket for the laundry slaves to collect. His left shoulder ached – even seven years after that wound at the battle of Oxsa, damp weather gave him the dulled memory of pain. He wheeled his arm, stretching the muscles until the ache faded. Slinging a rough woollen towel and a clean tunic over his shoulder, he walked out bare-chested in his boots and breeches, into the rain again, heading for the baths.
Eboracum had been here even before the Sixth Legion had arrived in Britain. Most of the present fortress, like its crumbling walls, had been built by the great Emperor Severus, although there were parts of it that dated back to the distant days of Hadrian. They were just names to Castus, but they had a ring of ancient glory about them. Back in those days, so he liked to believe, the Roman army had still been the force that had conquered the world. Now they did their best to hang on to what they had.
As he paced down the lane between the barracks and crossed the wide central avenue, Castus saw decaying walls, peeling plaster, buildings that had once housed cohorts now empty and abandoned. The legion had shrunk since the great days of Severus – the fortress had been built for six thousand legionaries and a couple of auxiliary cohorts, but now housed barely two-thirds that number. The century he commanded, still officially eighty men, boasted only sixty-nine at full strength.
But it was easy to grow despondent, and it was not in Castus’s nature to dwell on things that happened before he had been born. Let other men mumble about the past; he had known the might of a triumphant Roman army in the field, as he knew the great expanses of the empire, having marched back and forth from one border to the other. His experiences set him apart from the other men serving at Eboracum: few of them had even left Britain. They had been born here, sons of old soldiers of the legion, some going back generations. The distant affairs of empire, wars far away in the east or on the Danube, were as insubstantial to them as the mythic tales of Troy.
At first they had regarded Castus with suspicious awe, know shy;ing that he had marched with Galerius against the Persians, all the way to Ctesiphon and the ruins of Babylon. The torque he wore around his neck was a rare distinction, proof of his valour. Now they just joked about his background, and he had given up even mentioning the matter if he could avoid it. But he kept the memories to himself, to warm his blood in the cold and empty nights. A distant dream of heat and dust, the serrated shadows of the palm groves, the taste of fresh dates and wine, a girl he had known in Antioch, and another in Edessa… Above it all, the fury of battle and the triumph of victory.
Turning off the lane, Castus passed through the gate into the forecourt of the baths. Smoke swelled from the furnace room, beaten down by the persistent rain. Inside, the exercise hall was packed with noise, echoing under the high arched ceiling. Naked men ran laps, others squatted in groups playing dice or the twelve-lines game, and three or four leather balls were thudding between the walls. From the changing room Castus moved through the whooping mob in the cold plunge chamber and into the steam of the hot bath. Here and there one of his own men spotted him and touched a knuckle to his forehead in brief salute.
Stripped naked, he eased himself down into the hot water. The other bathers had moved aside to give him room: his bulk, the scars stippling his flesh, and the gold torque he still wore marked him out even for those who did not know his rank. Lounging in blissful solitude, he considered that he might have preferred the rough company of the common soldiers, but his promotion had also raised him above the pleasures of the crowd. A long soak, he thought, then a sweat, an oil and scrape, and a plunge in the cold bath to freshen up.