‘Message came for you earlier,’ the other centurion said, dropping onto a stool by the open window. Castus eased himself up, grunting, and heard his back click.
‘What was it?’
‘I don’t know, do I? It’s a written message… on a very nice quality tablet too.’
Castus winced, not just from the ache in his back. Valens knew well that Castus was unable to read, although neither man ever mentioned it. Sitting on the stool, he smiled slightly and fanned himself with the sealed wooden wafer.
‘Better read it to me,’ Castus muttered, pulling on his tunic. ‘You’re… closest to the light.’
Valens slid his thumb down the side of the tablet, breaking the wax seal, and then unfolded the two leaves.
‘Aelia Marcellina to Aurelius Castus, greetings,’ he read. He glanced up, his smile broadening, one eyebrow raised.
‘Just read it.’
Valens shrugged, went on. ‘If you are well I am well. I regret that our parting was abrupt, and I never had the… what does that say?… the opportunity to thank you for your assistance… Nice handwriting this girl’s got – she must have written it herself… Oh, don’t glare at me, brother! Very well… My recent circumstances have not allowed me to communicate, but if you have a moment spare of your duties tomorrow I would be pleased to receive you at my lodgings and render my thanks in person… She gives the address: the green portal, in the street of the glassblowers, left from the forum baths… Oh, there’s a postscript. If you still have my father’s signet ring I would be very grateful if you could return it…’
Valens turned the tablet over, holding it up to the light. ‘No sign of secret messages,’ he said. ‘No imprint of loving lips…’
Castus lobbed one of his boots across the room, and Valens dodged it.
In the autumn sunlight the city of Eboracum appeared a less desperate place than it had for a long time. The scars of war and plundering were everywhere, of course: blackened walls; broken timbers; shattered plaster. But the burnt debris had been cleared from the streets, the houses and shops patched up and reoccupied, and it was a living city once more, a place of civilisation rather than wreckage and despair.
It was Dies Solis, the Day of the Sun, and the men of the legion were allowed the afternoon free for the baths and kit repairs. Crossing the bridge from the fortress, Castus picked his way along the colonnades lining the main street of the city. Everywhere was activity: men unloading sacks and amphorae from wagons; men climbing scaffolding with hods of bricks or wet plaster. Anyone working in the building trade had been exempted from the military draft, and there were more than enough hands to help with the reconstruction. Merchants from southern Britain and Gaul had sent their barges up the river, bringing grain and wine and woollens, and luxury goods too. The space beneath the colonnades was crowded with flimsy stalls. Castus passed a herbalist’s and a shop selling hair tonics. The air smelled of cooking smoke and brick dust, cut wood and horse sweat.
There were plenty of soldiers in the streets too: many of the men of the field army had been billeted in the city, and all along the streets there were swaggering legionaries from the German detachments. Foreign troops too: bearded Alamanni with dyed red hair lingering outside the taverns and staring at the women; dark Mauretanians squatting around the public fountains. After centuries of slow provincial decay, Eboracum was once more looking like the vigorous frontier settlement it had been in the great days of the empire. And with the emperor himself in residence, it was also one of the centres of the Roman world.
Maybe it was just the sunshine, Castus thought, but being in the city raised his spirits more than anything else these last months. There was a sense of hope here, of pride and of activity. For all his instinctive dislike of civilians, it was good to see them putting their city back together again. He paused for a while in the forum, beside the blackened pillars of the temple of Neptune, and watched the huge temporary wagon park that filled the open space heaving with life.
The prospect of seeing Marcellina again perplexed him. He had been ready to assume her gone and put her from his mind completely. She had no connection to him, beyond the chance accidents of war that had thrown them, briefly, together. And how would she appear now, recovered from her ordeal, composed? Would she too blame him for what had happened? The note had given no clue. But beyond his misgivings, Castus knew that he wanted to see the girl, even if only once. The memory of her had haunted him for too long, the sense of things unspoken and unresolved, and now he needed to lay it to rest.
He found the address soon afterwards, without difficulty. It was only a hundred yards or so from the forum, down a narrow street past the baths: a large house with tall blank walls. The glassmaker’s shop opposite was still a gutted shell glittering with broken shards, but the green doors were hard to miss, standing between their tall masonry columns. Castus knocked, and then stepped back into the sunlight and waited.
A slot in the door opened, and an eye stared out, ringed by wrinkles.
‘Aurelius Castus, Centurion, Sixth Legion,’ Castus declared loudly. ‘Come to pay respects to the Domina Marcellina, as she requested.’
The slot closed, and Castus heard the thud of a bolt and the rattle of a chain. Then the door swung back, and he stepped in over the threshold.
Beyond the door was a large vestibule. The room still smelled strongly of stale urine, and there was a large black scar in one corner where a cooking fire had burned. The painted walls were scratched and gouged all over with crude Pictish-looking shapes that could have been drawings or words. The old door slave bobbed around Castus, staring at him.
‘The domina is… indisposed,’ he said. ‘But the dominus will receive you, with his guardian. Please… allow me to take your cloak.’
Further into the house there were more signs of the destruc shy;tion. The vestibule opened to a garden portico, but the pillars were pitted and chipped and the garden itself a rutted mess. It looked as if somebody had dug it up looking for buried valuables. The mosaic floor in the portico had been smashed too, apparently with a hammer. Castus rubbed his boot over what looked like a scrubbed bloodstain.
‘They killed the cook,’ the slave muttered. ‘Please – this way…’
The slave led Castus down a short passage from the portico to a room at the rear of the house. It must have been a pleasant chamber once – the walls painted with scenes of flowering shrubs and fruit trees. Castus remembered that this house had belonged to Marcellinus. He wondered whether the envoy had spent time in this room. He would not have liked the look of it now.
‘Greetings,’ said the boy in the embroidered robe sitting in the middle of the room. ‘Please sit. I am Aelius Sulpicianus, son of Aelius Marcellinus. We were expecting you.’
Castus lowered himself onto a flimsy-looking cane chair. The shutters were closed and the room was quite dim, but he could make out the features of the boy sitting before him. Something of his father, and of his sister too – the same delicate oval face, the same large dark eyes. He was about thirteen, Castus remembered.
‘This is my tutor, Aristides,’ the boy said, gesturing to the other man in the room, loitering on the couch. Aristides was bald shy;ing, with a sour mouth and a badgerish beard. Expensive rings on his fingers. Probably handy with a cane, Castus thought.
‘I got a letter from your sister,’ he said to the boy. ‘She asked me to visit her here.’
‘She wrote to you without the permission of the dominus Sulpicianus,’ the tutor said. ‘As Sulpicianus is now head of the family, this was an error.’ Clearly he was the one in charge here.