The Lion and the Lark (2 page)

     Bronwen closed her eyes.  They were still here.  Despite the best efforts of her father and her brother Brettix and the rest of her tribe, the Roman overlords had not packed up and gone back to Italy.  The tribal raids had weakened, but not eliminated, the Roman presence in southern Britain, and the ten year scourge of foreign occupation seemed likely to continue indefinitely.

     Bronwen hated the Romans.  When she was just nine she had seen a Roman centurion violate her mother and then run her through with his spear, and she would never forget it.  She remembered the blood bubbling from her mother’s lips and her suddenly lifeless eyes, as well as the screams of terror, the fires and the looting, and the piles of inert bodies as the foreigners overran her village.  The invasionary force under Julius Caesar had conquered the southern tribes in record time, backed by superior weaponry and the element of surprise.  The Celts, torn by internecine warfare and unprepared to deal with the sudden onslaught of a well supplied and superbly trained invader, fell quickly.  But a foreign power always has difficulty holding onto territory which is separated by cultural differences as well as great distance.  Time had eroded the Roman hold on Bronwen’s native land but not the fierce resentment of the locals, who saw the dark eyed, dark haired invaders as a plague to be driven from the island.  Bronwen’s father Borrus thought of little else, and his children were very like him.  In the spring the Celts had hoped the Romans would be gone by the end of the summer, and had staged continuous raids on the thinning Italian troops to that end.  But it was now August, the month on the Roman calendar named for the current emperor, and the garrison had not been abandoned.  The Celts were low on weapons to continue the fight, and there were rumors that reinforcements were on the way from Rome shortly. 

     The Iceni hopes of freedom were at a low ebb.

     Bronwen stood up and shouldered her burden, grimacing as the water in one of the buckets splashed the hem of her homespun gown.  As she walked back home she made obeisance to the huge oak which had been split by lightning, a sign that it had been selected by the god Sucellus, the ‘good striker’, as an earthly residence for his spirit.  Villagers smiled and waved when she passed; as the king’s daughter Bronwen was well known and, more important, well liked.  Her mother was a revered memory, her brother Brettix the best hunter and fighter, her father a symbol of the Iceni refusal to succumb to the Romans.  Bronwen shared that same pride; she wanted to live and prosper in the age old traditions of her tribe, and she had inherited the inexhaustible tenacity which distinguished her people from every other enemy the Romans had vanquished.

     She entered the house and emptied her buckets into the water barrel near the door, noting that the bowl on the table was now empty.

     Her father must have come and gone while she was away.  Her brother rarely showed up before nightfall, off all day on young buck errands of his own, plotting Roman destruction and chasing nubile village girls into the long grass.

     She had the afternoon to herself.

     Bronwen sat and picked up the roll of thin Egyptian paper on which her father had been tallying the Iceni harvest.  Each family was required to surrender a quarter part of their yield to the Romans by the terms of the treaty which had been forced on them ten years earlier.  Bronwen had been helping her father with the task since she was twelve, and could now speak and write Latin, an ability none of the other villagers could boast.  She saw that the inventory was almost done and settled in to read it, her gorge rising as she saw how much of her tribe’s lifeblood was being sapped by the invaders, who had done nothing to earn it.

     They would pay, and soon.

     Claudius slumped into a chair in his study and clapped his hands for a slave.  Pollux, the Greek steward who had been promised freedom upon his fortieth birthday by Claudius’ father, appeared in the doorway.

     “Yes, Master?” Pollux inquired.

     “Wine,” Claudius said.  “Not the red, the golden Tuscany or the Orvieto from my  vineyard.”

     The slave bowed and withdrew, leaving Claudius to contemplate his fate.

     He felt like a guest in his own house; he was home so rarely that the property was left in the hands of his chief servants, Pollux and several old retainers who looked upon the Leonatus household as their own.  In truth the northern farms and vineyards ran themselves, he had little to do but go over the books twice a year.  His father had organized the estate very well and his methods were still followed.  But Claudius missed Rome; he missed the soft Italian nights and the bustle of the forum and this marble palace on the Palatine his grandfather had built during the glory days of the Republic.  However, with his parents gone and his wife and baby dead, the house had its sad memories too, and there was a time not so long ago when he had been very glad to leave it.

     He had visited Vespasia’s mausoleum that morning after leaving the Senate, staring a long time at the inscription, “
mater et filius
, ” mother and son.  His boy had outlived his mother by only a few days, and now they were buried together, joined for eternity as they had once been joined in life.  After that tragedy Claudius had thrown himself into his military career, happy to be sent to the far corners of the empire, but five years had finally made him weary of travel.  He was sick of foreign faces and customs and the babble of languages which sounded harshly on his ears after the pleasing fluidity of Latin.  After this campaign he hoped to go into the next phase of the preordained patrician career, politics.  He was well prepared to help govern the empire, since he had seen so much of it, and he had many ideas about how to improve Rome’s colonial rule.

     But first there was Britain.

     “Your wine, master,” Pollux said as he entered, handing Claudius a silver goblet brimming with amber liquid.  “Will you be dining this evening in the 
triclinium
?”

     “No, I have no guests tonight.  Tell Almeria that I will be served in here.”

     Pollux left, and Claudius rose to stand by the long window which afforded a view of his lush gardens.  Beyond the marble portico he could see the descending slope of the Palatine hill.  He had over an acre of property, a vast amount in crowded Rome’s best district, and he was always receiving offers to sell the house.  No one could understand why he hung onto it.  A man without a family didn’t need so many rooms, especially a man who didn’t entertain, since he was always out of the country on military campaigns.  But Claudius did not plan to be a tribune in Octavian’s army forever, and once he returned to Rome permanently he knew that his first task would be to find a wife. 

      Claudius sipped and sighed.  He could not seem to take action on that notion, which remained firmly lodged on some distant but vaguely beckoning horizon. 

     The memory of sweet Vespasia still lingered, driving him into the arms of camp followers and the
quadrantariae 
who hung about the forum after dark; he took advantage of any prospect which promised relief without entanglement.  But the faceless bodies of foreign women, and the painted whores who murmured delightedly over his muscular soldier’s body, left him feeling empty and alone.  Like all boys of privilege in late Republican Rome, he had had a Greek tutor when he was young, and the words of his old teacher often came back to haunt him: “that soul is barren which does not invest itself in love.”

     That was his problem; he didn’t love anybody.

     Claudius took a healthy slug of his wine and watched one of the house servants light the torches on the portico.  Beyond the porch was a large, flowering garden, hedged in and bisected with gravel paths, filled with alabaster statues, sparkling fountains, and ornamental trees.  In a small grove stood a likeness of the mother he had lost when he was four, her Etruscan features cast in flawless marble, one delicate hand upraised to touch the
diploidion
  draped over her shoulder.  He wondered what she would think of his single state.  Every wellborn Roman matron’s primary obligation was to guide her eldest son into an advantageous marriage and provide heirs for her husband’s line.

     So far, Claudius was the last of the Leonati.  He had failed miserably in his duty to enrich with children the noble house of his forefathers.  Not that he lacked for offers: he was handsome and wealthy, a celebrated veteran of the foreign wars which made heroes of victorious returning soldiers.  Just about every Senator and General and other prominent Roman had put forward a daughter for his consideration, a daughter happy to share her bed with a comely descendant of the Gracchi and her life with the inheritor of the Leonatus estate.  But somehow Claudius always balked, questioned and negotiated and delayed long enough to be sent off to Iberia or Sicily or Crete.  When he came back, the girl was usually married to somebody else.  Roman fathers were notoriously eager to make matches for their daughters before the bloom was off the rose; the average age for first motherhood was seventeen.  But in truth none of his prospective brides had stirred his blood the way Vespasia had when he first saw her. 

     And he was young yet, in no hurry.  It would happen.

     But in the meantime, he was alone.

     Claudius held the polished silver goblet up to the light, gazing at his distorted image on its surface.  The thick, wavy black hair curling back from his forehead now showed a few traces of gray; he would be white by fifty like his father, if he lived that long.  The strong nose, olive complexion, and full carved lips completed the picture, a picture which fully exemplified the standards of the day.  His look was as much Greek as Italian, a gift from distant maternal ancestors who had traveled to the mainland from Sardinia.  And he was tall for a Roman, an attribute which served an officer well, since he stood a head above the men he commanded and was easily spotted in the field.

     Unfortunately, this made him a target for the enemy too, and his many scars bore silent witness to the injuries he had sustained.

     “
Cena
, master,” Pollux said, entering the room with a tray inlaid with Nubian ebony.

     Claudius nodded and watched without interest as the servant set the meal on his desk.  There were slices of cold boar with apple and pear sauce, turbot and lampreys with pepper relish, salted herring with
garum
  and a carafe of alicant wine.  When Pollux had left Claudius sat in the carved chair his father had brought back from his Persian campaign, its brocaded back worked with golden thread in a complicated design of intertwined leaves and trailing vines.  Claudius selected a delicate piece of fish and looked around the room.

     Its many treasures offered a chronicle of his father’s travels with the Roman army.  Greek tapestries depicting mythical Theseus in a series of scenes with nymphs and shepherds, Parthian rugs, flowered Phoenician vases, painted urns from Numidia standing as high as a man’s waist, gilded candelabra wrought by the famous metalworkers of Thrace and Thessaly, all decorated the study.  Even the tiled floor had been assembled piece by piece into a costly mosaic portraying Romulus and Remus being nursed by the she-wolf.  The rest of the house was the same, all its appointments the best that money could buy, the spoils a ranking Roman officer commanded during a thirty year career which ended in Gaul.  The senior Leonatus had finally died of a wound sustained there seasons earlier, a lung puncture which made his breathing more and more difficult until it ceased entirely.  And now a lifetime of accumulated booty sat in his fine house, faithfully dusted by a team of servants, no comfort to the dead man who had carefully selected each piece.

     Claudius dropped the herring back onto his plate.  The prospect of leaving Rome again had put him in this reflective mood.  He didn’t normally indulge in ruminations about the past because he felt like the last leaf on the family tree.  His mother had died of the same affliction as his wife, puerperal fever, the scourge of Roman women, a third of whom died in childbirth.  And now that his father and younger brother were gone, the latter killed serving with Caesar in Cisalpine Gaul, everyone from his early life was dead.  Father, mother, brother, wife and child had all crossed the River Styx before him, and he had buried each one with a coin in the mouth for the ferryman.

     “Would you like something else, master?” Pollux said from the doorway, eyeing Claudius’ barely touched tray.  “Almeria has something special for dessert, honey cakes filled with gooseberries and crushed almonds from Judea.”

     Claudius shook his head.  “Just leave this here.  Maybe I’ll get hungry later.”

     Pollux bowed and disappeared, and Claudius stood again, annoyed with himself for becoming maudlin.  It served no purpose to review his losses.  He told himself again that he had plenty of time to start a new life. 

     And when he got back from Britain he planned to do just that.

     “You’re late,” Bronwen said to her brother, plunking a plate containing half a boiled fowl onto the table.  “Where have you been?”

     Brettix ignored her, straddling the oak bench before him and reaching for the round loaf of manchet bread sitting alone on a polished wooden platter. 

     “I asked you a question,” Bronwen said, ladling lentil soup flavored with woad into a bowl and placing it next to his plate.  She added a cup of
corma
, wheaten beer laced with honey, which Brettix seized and drank from immediately.