The Lantern Bearers (book III) (3 page)

The man stepped forward, saluting. ‘A message for the Decurion Aquila, sir.’

Aquila nodded. ‘So—give it here.’ He took the tablet that the man held out, broke the sealing thread, and stepping into the light of the atrium doorway, opened the two wooden leaves and glanced hastily over the few words on the wax inside, then looked up. ‘Here’s an end to my two weeks’ leave, then. I’m recalled to duty.’ He swung round on the waiting Auxiliary. If it had been one of his own troop he might have asked unofficial questions, but the man was scarcely known to him. ‘Is your horse being seen to? Go and get a meal while I make ready to ride. Gwyna, feed him and bid Vran to have Lightfoot and the bay gelding ready to start in the half of an hour.’

‘Now I wonder, I wonder, what this may mean,’ his father said, very quietly, as the man tramped off after Gwyna.

No one answered as they moved into the atrium. The yellow radiance of the candles seemed very bright, harshly bright after the soft owl-light of the terrace outside. Aquila looked at Flavia, at his father, and knew that the same thought was in all three of them … Could it be that this was anything to do with the appeal to Aetius in Gaul? And if so, was its meaning good—or bad?

‘Need you go tonight?’ Flavia said. ‘Oh, need you go tonight, Aquila? You will get back no sooner in riding in the dark.’ She was still holding her almost completed banquet wreath, crushed and broken in her hand. It would never now be finished.

‘I can be at the next posting station before midnight,’ Aquila said, ‘ten miles on my way. Maybe I’ll get my leave again soon and be back for our banquet. Put me up some bread and cheese, while I collect my gear.’ He flung an arm round her thin, braced shoulders, and kissed her hurriedly, touched his silent father on the hand, and strode out towards the sleeping cell to collect his gear.

For Aquila, though he could not know it, the world had begun its falling to pieces.

T
WO
evenings later, Aquila and the Auxiliary were heading up the last mile of the Londinium road towards the grey fortress of Rutupiae that rose massive and menacing above the tawny levels, with all the lonely flatness of Tanatus Island spread beyond it: Rutupiae, fortress of the Saxon Shore, that had seen so much happen, that had known the last legion in Britain. And what now?

They clattered over the timber bridge that carried the road in through the dark, double-gate arch, answering the sentry’s challenge that rang hollow under the archway, and in the broad space below the stable rows Aquila handed over the army post-horse that he rode to his companion, and set out to report to the Commandant.

When he first reported at Rutupiae to join his troop, the great fortress, that had been built to house half a legion, and where now only a few companies of Marines and three troops of Auxiliary Horse rattled like dried peas in the emptiness, had seemed to him horribly desolate. But the hunting and wild-fowling were good, and he was a cheerful and easy-going lad who made friends easily with his own kind. And in the business of learning his job, and his growing pride in his troop, he had very soon ceased to notice the emptiness. But he was once again sharply conscious of it this evening as he threaded his way through the square-set alleys of the great fort, heading for the Praetorium. Perhaps it really was emptier than usual at this hour—though indeed there were sounds of something going on very urgently, down towards the Watergate and the harbour. A troop of horse trotted past him on their way up from stables; but otherwise he saw scarcely a living soul, until he came to the Praetorium buildings, passed the sentry at the head of the Commandant’s stairs, and stood before Titus Fulvius Callistus as he sat at his big writing-table, filling in the duty rotas for the day. At least that was just as usual, Aquila thought; but as he cast a passing glance at the papyrus sheets on the table, he realized that they weren’t the usual duty rotas at all, but lists and papers of some other kind.

‘Reporting back for duty, sir,’ Aquila said, with the informal salute demanded by the fact that he was still in civilian dress.

Callistus ticked something on his list, and looked up. He was a leathery little man with a piercing eye. ‘Ah, I hoped that you would be back tonight,’ he said, and ticked off three more items on his list. ‘Any idea why I recalled you?’

‘No, sir. Your messenger didn’t seem to know anything, and he wasn’t one of my men—didn’t care to ask him much.’

Callistus nodded towards the window. ‘Go and look out there.’

Aquila looked at him an instant, questioningly, then crossed to the high windows and stood looking out. From this room high in the Praetorium there was a clear view of the Watergate, and, between the jutting bastions of the Curtain Wall, a glimpse of the inner harbour and the roadstead beyond. One of the three-bank galleys—he thought it was the
Clytemnestra
—was made fast alongside the jetty, taking on board supplies; he could see the small, dark figures on the gangways. There was a swarming of men about the Watergate, stores and fodder and war supplies being brought down under the watchful eye of a Centurion of Marines. Felix, his particular friend, who commanded another troop of horse, was down there struggling to disentangle a mishap of some kind. He saw him waving his arms in his efforts, as though he were drowning. He heard a trumpet call, and beyond in the roadstead the other galleys lay at anchor, quiet above their broken reflections, yet clearly waiting to be away.

‘Looks like making ready for embarkation,’ he said.

‘Looks like what it is.’ Callistus laid down his pen and got up, and came across to join him in the window. ‘We are being withdrawn from Britain.’

For a moment Aquila could not make the words mean anything. They were so unbelievable that they were only sounds. And then their meaning came home to him, and he turned his head slowly, frowning, to look at the Commandant. ‘Did you say “withdrawn from Britain”, sir?’

‘Yes,’ Callistus said, ‘I did.’

‘But in Our Lord’s name, why?’

‘Question not the orders of the High Command. Possibly it is considered that our few companies and crews will die more serviceably under the walls of Rome the next time the barbarians choose to sack the city, than here in the mists of this forgotten province in the North.’

Forgotten province; yes, they were that all right, Aquila thought. They had their answer to that desperate appeal to Aetius, all the answer that they would ever have. He heard himself asking, ‘Is it a clean sweep? All the remaining garrisons?’

‘I imagine so, yes. Rome is scraping the lees from the bottom of the cask. We have been here four hundred years, and in three days we shall be gone.’

‘In three days,’ Aquila said. He felt that he was repeating things stupidly, but he felt stupid, dazed.

‘We sail on the third evening tide from now.’ Callistus turned back to his littered table. ‘And since that leaves little time for standing idle, go and get into uniform and take over your troop, Decurion.’

Still dazed, Aquila saluted and left the room, hurried down the stairway and across the parade-ground below the Pharos. The vast plinth, long as an eighty-oared galley and three times the height of a man, rose like an island in the empty space, and from it the great central tower sprang up, crested with its iron beacon brazier against the sky. A few shreds of marble facings, a few cracked marble columns upholding the roof of the covered ways for the fuel-carts, remained of the proud days, the days when it had stood shining in wrought bronze and worked marble here at the gateway to Britain, for a triumphal memorial to Rome’s conquest of the province. But they had used most of the broken marble for rubble when they built the great walls to keep the Saxons out. The tower rose up bare and starkly grey as a rock, with the seagulls rising and falling about it, the evening light on their wings. The light was beginning to fade; soon the beacon would be lit, and the night after it would be lit, and the night after that, and then there would be no more Rutupiae Light.

Aquila hurried on, across the parade-ground and up to his sleeping cell in the officers’ block. He changed into uniform, obscurely comforted by the familiar feel of leather tunic and iron cap and the weight of his long cavalry sword against his thigh, and went to take over command of his troop again.

Later, much later that night, he scratched a few hasty lines of farewell to his father. He knew that among the men in the great fort who must sail in three days’ time, many would be making frantic efforts to arrange for wives and children to follow them, for all men must know that now Britain was doomed. One or two of his own troop had already come to him for help and counsel; a young, worried trooper wanting to get his parents out to Gaul, an old one in tears for a wife who must be left behind… He had done what he could, but he felt so helpless. It was no good trying to do anything about his own family. Nothing, he knew, would shift his father from a post of duty, even though it was duty to a lost cause; and even if that had not been so, he would never have abandoned the farm and the farm-folk. And Flavia would remain with their father whatever came. So he wrote his letter, sending them his dear love, and promising Flavia her crimson slippers one day. He gave it to an orderly for dispatch, knowing that there would be no time for any farewell message to reach him in return, and lay down to catch a few hours’ sleep before he turned out at cockcrow to early Stables.

During the days that followed, Aquila seemed to be two people: one getting on with the business of making his troop ready for embarkation, the other all the while fighting a battle of divided loyalties within himself. It began after the letter to his father had gone, while he lay wakeful in the darkness with the sea sounding in his ears. One didn’t hear the sea much in the daytime, save when there was a storm, but at night it was always there, even in a flat calm, a faint, persistent wash of sound like the sea in a shell. It seemed to be out of that faint sea-wash in the silence that the knowledge came to him that he belonged to Britain. He had always belonged to Britain, but he hadn’t known it before, because he had never had to question it before. He knew it now.

It was not only because of Flavia and his father. Lying in the darkness with his arm over his eyes, he tried quite deliberately to thrust them from his mind, pretend that they did not exist. It made no difference; even without them, he still belonged to Britain. ‘How odd!’ he thought. ‘We of the Outposts, we speak of ourselves as Roman; we think of ourselves as Roman—with the surface of our minds—and underneath, it is like this.’ And they were sailing in three days’ time, less than three days, now.

And presently the three days had dwindled down to a few hours.

He longed to talk about it to Felix, good old Felix with whom he had so often gone wild-fowling on Tanatus Marshes. But he knew that Felix, who was also native born, though his roots were not struck so deeply in the province as Aquila’s were, would be having trouble enough of his own. Besides, something in him knew that this was one of those things that must be faced alone.

Only there seemed so little time to think, to be sure. And now the last feverish hours of getting the horses into the transports were over, and the men had been marched aboard while the brazen orders of the trumpets rang above the ordered tumult; and there was scarcely anything more to do. A flamed and feathered sunset was fading behind the Great Forest, and the tide was almost at the flood, running far up the creeks and inlets and winding waterways; and amid the last ordered coming and going, Aquila stood on the lifting deck of the
Clytemnestra
. The stern and mast-head lanterns were alight already, as the daylight dimmed, and any moment now the great fire-beacon on the crest of the Pharos should have sprung to life. But there would be no Rutupiae light tonight to guide the fleets of the Empire. The last of the Eagles were flying from Britain. Any moment now the trumpets would sound as the Commandant came down from the Watergate and stepped on board, and the landing-bridge would be raised, and the Hortator’s hammer would begin the steady, remorseless clack-clack-clack that beat out the time for the slaves on the rowing benches.

Aquila suddenly saw himself going to the Commandant in that last moment, laying his drawn sword at his feet, saying, ‘Sir, everything is in order. Now let me go.’ Would Callistus think that he was mad or hysterical? No, oddly enough—for there had never been a word between them save in the way of duty—he knew that Callistus would understand; but he knew also that Callistus would have no choice but to refuse. The choice was his. Quite clearly and coldly, in the still moment after the three days’ turmoil, he knew that he must make it alone.

He turned to his old, grey-whiskered optio beside him, who had taught him all that he knew of soldiering, all that he knew of the handling of a troop—he had been so proud of his troop—and gripped his leather-clad shoulder an instant.

‘God keep you, Aemilius. I’ll be back.’

He turned to the head of the landing-bridge and crossed over, quickly and openly as though in obedience to some last-moment order. No chance to bid good-bye to Felix, none to take leave of Nestor, his horse. He strode by the last remaining figures on the jetty, the native dockyard hands, no one particularly noticing him in the fading light, back through the Watergate into the desolate fort.

Everything in him felt bruised and bleeding. He had been bred a soldier, coming of a line of soldiers, and he was breaking faith with all the gods of his kind. Going ‘wilful missing’. The very words had the sorry sound of disgrace. He was failing the men of his own troop, which seemed to him in that moment a worse thing than all else. Yet he did not turn back again to the waiting galleys. He knew that what he was doing was a thing that you couldn’t judge for other people, only for yourself; and for himself, he did not know if it was the right thing, but he knew that it was the only thing.

He was scarcely aware of his direction, until he found himself at the foot of the Pharos. The ramp for the fuel-carts led steeply upward to the vast plinth, and at the head of it the mouth of the covered way gaped dark and empty in the gathering dusk. He mounted the ramp quickly and strode forward into the darkness. He was in the square hollowness of the tower foot where the fuel-carts were housed. The carts were there now, ranged side by side, mere blots of darkness in the lesser darkness. The dry, musty smell of baled straw was in his nostrils, and the sharp tang of pitch that had soaked into the stones of the walls. He turned to the narrow stairway that wound up the wall like the spiral twist of a snail shell, and began to climb.