Seditio

SEDITIO

Mike C. Bishop

THE ARMATVRA PRESS

Copyright Mike C. Bishop 2006, 2012 writing as C.M.E. Gray

First published in 2006 in Great Britain as Usipi: the Quest for Home

Revised edition 2012

Published by The Armatura Press at Smashwords

ISBN 978-0-9570261-2-4 (.mobi format)

ISBN 978-0-9570261-3-1 (.epub format)

Designed and typeset at The Armatura Press by M.C. Bishop

www.armatura.co.uk

Cover design by Kurvenkampf

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For Rosemary

Contents

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Epilogue

Historical Note

Glossary

Prologue

O nauis, referent in mare te novi fluctus! o quid agis?

O ship, fresh squalls blow you back out to sea! O what will you do?

Q. Horatius Flaccus, Carminum 1.14.1–2

This is indeed unprecedented: I watch as a young slave ushers an old man into the large cool audience chamber, bright summer sunlight pouring in through the doorway from the lobby like water into a rammed ship. The light splashes onto walls decorated with gaudy painted plaster of small mythological scenes contained within frames, magically hanging amongst a laboured two-dimensional architectural commonplace. The gods, goddesses, and heroes always seem gawky and self-conscious to me, their fading tans highlighted by bold (and rather crude) strokes of lighter colour. Their sad, wild eyes appeal to the onlooker: ‘Let us out!’ Here and there, amongst the columns, pilasters, and architraves, little birds peep out from behind undernourished tendrils or peck at berries (or are they supposed to be grapes?).

He is strangely familiar.

At one end of this room, the most powerful Roman in the province of Germania Inferior sits idly picking his nose. The slave bows and then moves silently away, passing me without so much as a glance (it would be unforgivable) as he does so, closing the double doors behind him as he goes, damming the stream of light. The noise of his departure briefly echoes around the room, bouncing off the now darkened walls. What light remains leaks in through the clerestory windows. Aulus Platorius Nepos stares carefully at the new arrival for the space of only a few heartbeats and then speaks. ‘Thank you for coming.’

The old man, who has been idly examining the painted walls and marble veneers, directs his gaze at the other. ‘I was not aware that I had a choice’, he says, ‘for your slave pointedly, and – it has to be said – rather pompously, informed me that the legatus Augusti pro praetore wished to speak with me. Surely, I reasoned, that is like saying the Emperor himself is requesting my presence.’

‘You could be forgiven for thinking so’, says Platorius, failing to detect the sarcasm, ‘but you must understand that I did not ask you here in any sort of official capacity’.

‘Oh?’ The old man neither sounds nor looks particularly interested. I vaguely recognise his face, but it is his manner that seems most singular. There is a poise to him that is still evident, despite his slightly stooped frame.

‘My reasons are largely personal,’ continues Platorius. ‘Partly historical research, as I shall explain later, but also to see if you ... well, if you really existed. I have heard tales, but never been sure whether to believe them or not’.

The old man looks thoughtfully at the floor and raises his bushy grey eyebrows slightly. ‘To see if I exist, eh? That’s a strange demand to make of an ex-slave. What sparks your interest in me, a humble German, my Lord?’

‘Tales, German; tales told in taverns over mugs of ale and cups of mulled wine; fantastic stories which have reached my ears.’

‘It is unwise to believe every story you hear. The Romans have always been too quick to listen to what others told them.’

‘That is a failing?’ asks Platorius.

‘It is a fact, my Lord’.

The Roman clearly senses that this is not going to be as easy as he had hoped and tries a different approach. ‘You are the last, are you not?’

‘The last what, my Lord?’

‘Come now, do not play coy with me!’ A note of irritation is now apparent in Platorius’ voice. ‘Mutiny!’ he continues, almost hissing the word. ‘The voyage; eating your comrades to stay alive; the shipwreck: have you forgotten?’

A chill scampers up my back and makes the hairs on my neck stand on end. Guiltily, I quickly glance around to see if anybody has noticed. Now, indeed, I remember; for this is my story as much as it is his, and he is certainly not the last.

The old man narrows his eyes a little, staring at a point on the mosaic floor several paces in front of him, where a tessellated lion sinks its teeth into the throat of a helpless stag.

‘Why the silence?’ insists Platorius.

‘My Lord,’ the German begins slowly, as if unsure of the correct phraseology for what he wants to say. ‘I do not know why you wish me to talk about it to you. Over the years, I have told my tale to many people, young and old, Roman and German, and all have wanted to hear it for a reason. What drives your curiosity?’

‘I told you. Historical research.’

‘I have lost count how many historians have scribbled my story onto papyrus or scratched notes onto wax writing tablets. They invariably alter it in some way, but nevertheless the essence of the tale is usually there somewhere. You could easily read one of those.’

He has told many; I, on the other hand, none. Nobody. I thought it was to be my secret, to take with me to my grave.

‘I do not wish to read a book about it. I want to hear it in your own words.’ I recognise that tone: Platorius is beginning to sound frustrated.

The old man regards him silently for a moment, then, looking away, nods once. ‘Very well, I will do it, but not here.’

‘Where then?’

The old man shrugs. ‘Be at the tavern by the north gate at the ninth hour’.

You expect me to come to a tavern?’ asks Platorius slightly incredulously.

‘You wish to hear my story?’ The tone is mocking, but lightly so. The Roman hesitates and then nods agreement. ‘Then be there. If you are frightened of an old man, then bring a bodyguard. It will be unnecessary, although I do not for one instant suppose you will believe me.’

Platorius Nepos thinks for a moment, noisily stroking the stubble on his chin (he is beginning a beard again). ‘Alright’, he says with finality, ‘you may go now. I shall consider your offer’.

The German turns noiselessly, opens one of the doors, and disappears. Platorius sits down on a stool in the corner of the large room and very deliberately places his elbows on his knees and his chin within his cupped hands. The legs of the stool are hinged and crossed X-fashion, and are joined by decorated bars. Pressing the heel of his left palm to the side of his nose, he unblocks his free nostril with a liquid snort.

He turns to me. ‘You, whatever your name is ...’

‘Hermes, my lord.’

‘Yes, yes, Hermes, I knew that, of course I did. You’re a scribe, aren’t you? I’ll need you to come with me to take a record.’

‘Of course, my lord.’ As if I have a choice!

***

It is night in my beloved, beautiful city of Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensis (known simply as Colonia to its inhabitants) and the dark air is, as usual, moist with the presence of the river. Founded many years ago as a centre of Romanisation on the German frontier, the city has gradually embedded its roots in the landscape, nestling into the sediments of a great river basin. Its predecessor, a sprawling native settlement, is long forgotten and we, its present inhabitants – despite the fact that many would protest that they are Germans and speak the tongue – would not be without baths and roads and all the other trappings of civilisation. Necessity breeds short memories. ‘You do not need Italian blood to be a Roman’, we are all thinking.

This evening, the streets of the city are summer-dusty. On a corner, near the double-portalled north gate of Colonia, there is a small tavern. Large jars are set into a stone-topped counter at the front of the establishment, and during the day these are used for selling hot and cold drinks to passers-by, but now this area is deserted and all activity is centred further back, amidst a smoke-hazed room dimly lit by guttering oil lamps on the walls and equipped with bare trestle tables and wooden benches. The sound of exercising tongues rises in a crescendo of cackle, voice competing against voice as each participant attempts to direct the conversation along their own favoured line.

At the doorway to the tavern stands the old man, stooping slightly, looking disinterestedly at the road in front of him. He is wrapped in a cloak against the damp air, and he stands almost completely still. I in turn stand in the shadows of a portico just across the street, watching him; he cannot see me, but I see him clearly enough. Will he remember Hermes? I doubt it.

Soon, two figures turn the corner of the block and stride towards him along the street, their hobnailed boots crunching faintly on the tamped gravel road surface. The old man does not look up, even as they draw closer. Each of the two newcomers is wrapped in a large, hooded military cape. One of them, the slightly smaller figure, is Platorius. The other looks around cautiously, but with no hint of fear. I emerge from the shadows and stride purposefully across the street to join them. Platorius hears me coming and, barely looking round, explains my arrival to our host with a simple ‘He’s with me.’

‘In here’, says the German, gesturing inside the tavern with a sweep of an arm that sends his cloak billowing. But we wait for him to lead the way and then follow him in to a table in a corner, well away from the raucous crowd, who now seem to be engaged in a lively disagreement over something or other. The old man sits carefully and gestures the barman to come over, which he does.

‘Four please’, he says in German and the landlord nods. We sit in silence, my two companions evidently uneasy. A slave brings over the drinks and then, once the tankards have been placed before us, the old man begins to speak. As he does so, the two Romans stare uncertainly into their drinks, as if unsure what to do with them.

‘Historical research, my Lord.’

‘What of it?’ says Platorius without taking his eyes from the cup, for it is now evident that a small but significant amount of spiralling flotsam can be discerned on the surface.

‘You told me that you would explain the historical research that sends you to me for tales of the distant past’.

‘I will make it worth your while, do not fear, old man’.

‘That is not the answer to my question, my Lord. Why should I tell you anything if you cannot be honest with me?’

‘Because you’ll ...’ growls Platorius’ bodyguard rather loudly, his hand moving to the hilt of his sword, hidden by his cloak.

Platorius, makes a slight gesture with his hand to still him, glancing around anxiously as he does so. ‘No, Postumus, he is right. I did promise.’ He pauses, gathering his thoughts, and then continues. ‘My purpose is two-fold. First, I am writing a history of the wars in northern Britannia and the –’ he hesitates for a mere beat, just long enough for it to be detectable ‘– incident you were involved in will naturally merit a brief comment.’

‘Very brief, I’m sure’ says the German with a hint of a smile.

Platorius ignores this and carries on. ‘Second, because you may have information that will be of use to the army in future campaigns in the region.’

The old man does not look convinced; then, unintentionally, I briefly catch his eye and I am almost sure I see the merest glimmer of recognition. I look down again quickly in order not to betray myself, but I feel a curious ache in my left shoulder. ‘Your reasons sound plausible, legatus, but not very likely.’ He shrugs, then continues, ‘Nevertheless, I will tell you the story as I have always told it. What you get from it is your own affair.’

The old man carefully lifts his tankard and takes a swig. He lets out a satisfied grunt and, licking his lips, he leans back against the wall and closes his eyes. The two Romans, still hooded, look at each other, apparently uncertain as to whether the German is about to fall asleep.

After a painfully long pause, he begins to speak quietly.

One

metus ac terror sunt infirma uincla caritatis

Fear and terror are feeble bonds of attachment

P. Cornelius Tacitus, Agricola 32

So far as campaigning weather in Caledonia went, it did not get much better than this and was quite capable of being far worse with little notice. Above them, the early-morning sky was an expansive and lustrous blue. Small grey-bottomed white clouds, bustling eastwards in orderly lines like determined sheep, marked the passage of a stiff breeze. Their crisp shadows scurried urgently across the hills and glens below, cast by a bright, keen-eyed sun which already bore a comforting warmth to it (although the previous night could scarcely have been thought cold).

In front of them, in the middle distance, a Roman camp squatted at the head of a small sea loch, in a valley slung between heather-clad hills. The camp itself sat solid and confident, four-square upon the earth, an alien presence in a landscape largely untouched by man. In form, it was a rectangle with rounded corners, its ramparts reddish-brown with stacked newly-dug turf and crowned by a raw palisade of sharpened stakes. A defensive ditch had wrapped itself tail-like around the camp, helping form the impression of an open wound on this otherwise tranquil landscape. Behind the ramparts, and around virtually the whole circumference of the camp, field bread ovens smoked untidily, imitating the more profuse emissions from a workshop nearer the centre of the settlement. The messy pall of smoke from these various sources hung as if draped over the camp, only rising imperceptibly, before being snatched away and hurried off inland by the impatient westerly wind once it reached the hilltops.

Our observers on one of the hills that overlooked, but did not dominate, this temporary city were all too familiar with the characteristic rows of leather tents within, mostly oriented north to south, their layout mimicking barrack blocks in the more permanent forts of the Romans. Two main gravel roads sliced across the camp; one ran from the north gate to the south, whilst another could be traced from the east gate; they met near the centre of the establishment, where one large tent and an open space with its rostrum constituted the headquarters, a place of assembly and a focus for the rituals of men. Formed from so transient a set of components, the camp would soon have vanished, were it not for those humans contained within it. Like blood through arteries, they traversed the highways and byways, performing the myriad tasks allotted to them. They cleaned out the ditch, trimmed the grass on the rampart, and repaired the tent guy-ropes wherever necessary. No weed was allowed the opportunity to grow, for this rectangular patch with rounded corners was effectively sterilised by the presence, indeed that very movement, of humans. Ironically, whilst they may have thought the camp served them, the observer would have noted, perhaps with a curious inclination of the head and a slight furrowing of the brow, how the reality was that they served it.

The other animals in the area were by now well aware that there was a gathering of these human predators in the vicinity and all but the very unwise had soon come to avoid that part of the seaweed-fringed loch shore. True, seals occasionally bobbed in the water, like bald-headed, big-eyed old men, curious to see what was going on; whilst (even less frequently) golden eagles overflew the camp, scraping their lonely cry from the bare rocks on the hillside above them, in the hope that some tasty morsels might be left unattended, scraps of food consigned to the midden, or small preoccupied mammals disturbed by the movements of humankind. Soaring, searching, casting between thermals in the valleys and the lift running up the windward slopes, their wingtip feathers stretched out like the fingertips of a man, they were at a loss to understand the reactions of the humans below them, and they usually soon tired of their fruitless quest. Eagles were not born with the knowledge that they were regarded as sacred birds by the Romans, and they equally could conceive of no reason why these humans should act in any way other than that normally evident: if you are sacred, it is difficult to imagine what it is like not to be so.

From the eagle’s vantage point (wings shackled to the horizon, head searching from side to side), tiny figures dotted the inside of the camp, moving about in orderly little groups, or, less deliberately, in ones or twos. Sometimes a horseman would pass out through one of the gates and head off either inland or to one of the groups of pickets posted around the promontories overlooking the site.

Our four men belonged to one of these outpost details, situated to the east in a saddle between two low hills, and they paid little mind to passing eagles. They had the benefit of a fine prospect across the camp and along the loch towards the place where, were it not for a protruding headland, it would meet the open sea. In the other direction, a reasonable view was afforded to the point where one of the watch towers’ signal fires would appear in time of trouble. The two hills themselves were fairly uninteresting, cloaked mainly in the subtle mauve of heather, and kilted with verdant bracken, a sight scarcely likely to inspire feelings of admiration in the heart of a German warrior drafted into the service of the Roman army.

From one particularly large stand of ferns, there emerged a man, wiping his hands carefully on a moist clump of vivid green sphagnum moss which he casually discarded before hitching up his breeches and tying his belt.

In his mid-twenties, his pale brown hair showed signs of having recently been cut with less regard to fashion than military dicta, but his erratic hairstyle was less striking than his face. Blue eyes the colour of that early summer morning sky looked sceptically out from either side of a large but not quite Roman nose, which in turn towered over a small, narrow-lipped mouth, scarcely concealed by several days’ growth of beard. His forehead was already marked by lines, giving the impression that he frowned a lot, but there was little now by way of a frown to be found in the eyes. The man walked purposefully, if not particularly quickly, over to his three companions, who stood leaning on spears and oval shields. His progress crushed the occasional bog myrtle plant, releasing a pungent aroma of lemon, a fragrance familiar to many legionaries, yet unknown to Germans, who just thought of it as bog myrtle.

The man threw himself down on a patch of close-cropped grass; it was fragrant and springy, harbouring both clover and daisies, and it felt good.

‘This is so boring: there are no words boring enough capable of describing just how boring this is. Roman soldiers seem to do nothing save sit around doing nothing’, he said in German. ‘It’s not as if we ever see anything worth reporting. Even if we did, could we be sure that it was worth making a fuss about?’

To the knowledgeable, particularly the well-travelled and sharp of ear, the speaker’s dialect might be placed somewhere in the region of the lower Rhineland and may even have betrayed itself as being akin to the tongue of those great warriors, the Chatti, themselves no great friends of Rome.

‘There’s little doubt that this is a waste of time’, sympathised one of the standing men, although without much conviction, ‘but then this whole business of marching around, digging camps, guarding them, then knocking them down before marching off and building another one strikes the average sane man as bizarre’.

The second speaker looked wistfully into the distant hills and sighed. ‘I wish we could at least join the hunting parties, but only the legionarii get sent on those. I think we are all bored now.’

The supine figure hauled himself up on his elbows, screwing up his eyes a little against the glare of the sun.

‘Hunting. Now there’s a thought. I miss hunting – but not as much as being able to get up whenever I want to, go for a walk in the woods, and perhaps scare a Chattan or two before the sun goes down’.

There were general noises of agreement and a chuckle or two at his last point. The speaker pursed his lips.

‘I could grope a girl or two, get my ear clipped for my trouble, and then go and get devoutly drunk in the evening in the feast hall.’ He looked round at the faces of the others; each was lost in his own little dream of what had been or what might be. ‘It’s no use’, he added finally, ‘we’ve got to get ourselves out of this’.

‘Forget it, Quintus,’ said one of the others, ‘we agreed not to talk about this again. We can do nothing to change things.’

‘Agreed? You mean you told me not to mention it again’ said the reclining figure contemptuously, ‘but if we do nothing then we just go on suffering, day in day out, and nothing gets any better!’

He paused for effect before adding quietly and deliberately ‘and my name is Durio, not Quintus. Why use these stupid Roman names? They don’t belong to us, we weren’t born with them. They take us away from our people, give us new names, and make us speak Latin – what a stupid language!’

Silence descended upon the party, and the blue-eyed man who preferred to be called Durio lay back and watched the clouds passing over his head. Without looking, he picked a long stem of grass and stuck it between his teeth, sucking at it thoughtfully.

‘It’s all very well for you, little clouds, you’re free to do what you want and go where you please,’ he mused dramatically, ‘and you don’t have to do what you’re told by a bunch of ignorant hairy-arsed Gauls who’ve convinced themselves that they have become Romans.’

Then he frowned a strange frown, for there was a hint of a smile about it, because he realised that he was wrong, the instant the words had left from his lips: clouds are driven by winds sent by the gods. Perhaps it was all a matter of waiting for the wind to veer. Yes, he liked the sound of that. He also liked the fact that the clouds were heading eastwards, towards Germania, where he now longed to be.

One of the standing figures crouched down, still holding his spear and shield and spoke directly to Durio. He was not so much accompanied as surrounded by a smell of sweat and leather, the two mingling to form a very individual fragrance, but one which many warriors bore proudly.

‘I, Fersomeris, say that you, Durio, are a fool and a dreamer. We can no longer afford to think in terms of freedom. We are not like the birds,’ he said, nodding towards a gull soaring far out over the loch, ‘we cannot take flight when we decide we have had enough’.

Fersomeris was fond of wise observations of this kind and it was, Durio felt, one of his less endearing characteristics. A large man, although by no means a giant, his physique owed less to fat than to muscle. He sported a small white vertical scar on his left cheek just below the eye, a relic of a relished combat fought long ago, against a foe whose proficiency usually varied according to how much Fersomeris had drunk at the time of retelling the tale. At a different time, in a different place, he had the sort of face that would be described