Ballista looked with particular disfavour at the group of officials around the eunuchs. At least two of these functionaries were bound to be frumentarii, imperial agents tasked with spying on him. Unless, of course, one or more of the frumentarii were hidden among the auxiliary soldiers. In an age of iron and rust, Roman emperors trusted no one. Once, long ago when they were young, Ballista and Gallienus had been held together at the imperial court as hostages for the good behaviour of their fathers. One father had been an important Roman senatorial governor, the other a barbarian war leader beyond the frontier. Ballista and Gallienus had become close, friends even, despite their origins — Gallienus had always been unconventional. But the elevation of the latter to the purple had banished such intimacy. Any trust that had survived had been killed when circumstances two years earlier had demanded Ballista himself briefly be acclaimed Augustus. That Ballista had set aside the purple in favour of Gallienus within days, and sent any number of letters containing oaths of loyalty since, had done nothing to revive it. Ballista realized he was lucky to be alive. So were all his familia, including his sons and wife.
‘I am still surprised that Polybius would run.’ Ballista spoke to no one in particular, more to take his mind off his wife and sons far away in Sicily than desiring an answer.
‘No mystery to it at all,’ Hordeonius the centurion said. He rapped his vine-staff of office on the deck in an assertive way.
Ballista came back to his surroundings. Vaguely aware of Wulfstan nearby in attendance, he had not really noticed the approach of the centurion, Maximus, Calgacus and Hippothous.
‘No point in asking, Dominus,’ Hordeonius said. His abrupt, overtly military style of speaking had almost driven out the last vestiges of a North African accent. ‘Slaves are all the same — unreliable, untrustworthy rubbish. Every one of the whiplings would run, if they had the courage. Worse than soldiers; they have to be kept down by fear. All slaves are the enemy. Only the shadow of the cross keeps them honest.’
What Ballista had seen of Hordeonius so far had not endeared him. The centurion was of medium height, broad and physically powerful, with a face that promised little understanding but limitless brutality. Hordeonius’s men saw him as a petty, short-tempered tyrant. He probably saw himself as an old-style centurion: let them hate as long as they fear.
‘Sure, you do like a generalization, Centurion,’ said Maximus. ‘Consider where they come from. Some are born to slavery, others poor, unwanted babies exposed on dungheaps and raised by heartless slavers for profit. Then there are criminals condemned to the mines and the like.’
‘It makes no odds, they are all rubbish,’ Hordeonius snapped. ‘Slavery makes its mark, and not just whips and brands. It deforms the soul of a man enslaved.’
‘Are you saying my soul is deformed?’ Maximus spoke quietly.
Ballista watched Hordeonius’s face. He could see the retorts rising up, nearly escaping the cage of his teeth.
‘I was taken in war. There was a ring of dead at my feet, when I was struck from behind.’
Ballista smiled. It was not how Maximus always told the story of the cattle raid in Hibernia. In more comic versions he was running away, sometimes caught with his trousers down on top of his enemy’s wife.
‘Slavery is nothing but a roll of the dice,’ Maximus concluded.
‘Not so, Marcus Clodius Maximus,’ Hippothous interjected. The Greek launched into a philosophical discourse. ‘What the world calls slavery and freedom are nothing of the sort; nothing but a legal fiction. True freedom, like true slavery, is in the soul. The soul of a good man can never be enslaved. The cynic Diogenes in fetters was a free man. The Great King of Persia, sat in pomp on the throne of the house of Sasan, is unfree if he is a slave to his irrational passions: lust, greed, anger.’
Again Hordeonius was silent. There was no love growing between the North African centurion and the familia of Ballista.
‘So, my dear Hibernian,’ Hippothous continued, ‘Marcus Clodius Ballista may have given you a papyrus roll, given you his praenomen and nomen, and with them Roman citizenship, but, I fear, you remain a slave — a slave to your bodily lusts, to endless amphorae of wine and cheap women.’
Maximus laughed. ‘And you? Are you not a slave to pretty boys? I have heard you howl in the baths at the sight of a nice arse. Given his good looks, Calgacus here has not slept at all since you joined the familia. Always expecting the invasion, he is. Did I tell you how in his youth, in the bloom of his beauty, he caused a riot in Athens? Very dedicated pederasts, the Athenians.’
As if stirred into action by the mention of his name, the elderly Caledonian spoke. ‘The slave Polybius ran from Panticapaeum because he tired of waiting for his freedom.’ Calgacus hawked and spat over the side of the ship. Then, in a muttering inflection, but at the same volume, he added, ‘Took you fucking long enough to free me, and the yappy Hibernian.’
Ballista became very aware of young Wulfstan at his shoulder, very aware of the tensions in even the happiest familia in a slaveowning society.
‘Company.’ The voice of the trierarch rang out.
Ahead, six ships with the distinctive double prows, fore and aft, of northern longships. They were pulling unhurried towards the trireme. The Goths were coming to them.
Not by choice, Calgacus had seen the world. He had been with Ballista in Rome, in Arelate, Nemausus and the other fine cities of Gallia Narbonensis, sojourned in Asia at Ephesus and Miletus, lived in Antioch, the metropolis of the east. By comparison, Tanais, most north-eastern of all Greek poleis, was a shite-hole. Calgacus’s eyesight was not what it had been. Others had spotted the low town before it swam in his vision out of the vast, swampy delta of the river from which it took its name.
First, the trireme pulled past an abandoned suburb. It was long abandoned. Trees grew through the remains of houses. What had been thoroughfares were blocked by mounds of rubbish overgrown with patches of marsh grass. The effect was of a juvenile deity’s rough plan of a mountain range, set aside through distraction.
The quay was of new, raw-cut timber; the ramshackle buildings behind the same. The smell of sawn wood mixed with mud, fish and an undertone of burning. Oddly, a huge hill of ash and debris demarcated the harbour from the town proper. Calgacus’s eyes, blurred in the spring sun, took it in as best they could, the mean scale of the place. No more than a couple of thousand inhabitants could huddle within its walls. A complete shite-hole.
As they walked up, Calgacus saw that the stone walls were cracked, leaning here and there, in places fallen altogether. Rubble half filled the defensive ditch. Urugundi guards stood, bored, at the fire-scorched gates. They waved them through.
Inside was worse. The street up to the agora had been cleared, but the lanes running off it were choked with the debris of collapsed houses. Fire-black beams poked up, mocking man’s transient endeavours. Thousands of tiny shards of amphorae crunched like snow underfoot. The town was deserted. The sack had been thorough and recent, no more than a few years.
The agora had been scoured clean. Traders had returned; a surprising number of them had set up stalls. They called their wares: oil and wine from the south, hides and slaves, honey and gold from the north. The council house had been repaired. Incongruously, instead of tiles, it had been given a roof of reeds. The Gothic guards at the door told them to wait outside the Bouleuterion. They waited. A gang of slaves — Greeks or Romans — was working to repair the gymnasium next door. They were overseen by an architect, who in turn was watched by a Goth.
Ballista stood, feet apart, leaning on the hilt of his scabbarded long sword, head down. Behind him, unconsciously in similar pose, stood Maximus and the Suanian Tarchon. The ruins all around, they looked like penitents of some strange, grim militant sect.