Marilyn Todd: Stone Cold

'Jupiter, Juno and Mars! Are you deaf, man?'

She'd barely reached the end of the bridge and he was behind her.

'I cannot leave you unaccompanied, my lady. Who knows what danger might-'

'Junius,' she hissed, 'if you move so much as one inch from this spot, I'll guzzle your gizzards with gravy.'

You couldn't fault him as a bodyguard, she supposed, sweeping beyond the elegant limestone buildings fronted by shops that sold everything from potions to padlocks to peas into an unstructured tumble of thatched roundhouses and wooden shacks along the river. The boy had muscles of steel, was a dab hand with the sword and his knowledge of this guttural tongue was proving invaluable on this trip. It was just that Claudia's own shadow rarely stuck that close, and every time she turned his gaze was clinging tighter than limpets to a rock in a storm. At the corner, where a coppersmith in red check pantaloons was attempting to hammer flat a large sheet of twisted metal, Claudia glanced over her shoulder. Good. Junius might be fidgeting with his dagger and looking for all the world like he'd swallowed a wasp, but it was more than his life was worth to move from that bridge. Turning away from the river, she ducked down an alley fragrant with cooking smells. Here, women sang lilting songs as they draped laundry over wickerwork frames while others chopped herbs with their babies strapped to their backs.

'Ze lady would take a leetle 'oney cake, yes?'

'Certainly,' she told the vendor, whisking it out of his hand.

Vaguely, she was aware of someone being cursed loudly in the Gaulish language and thought she heard the words 'theeving beetch' shouted in her direction, but the honey cake was warm and distracting, and, besides, there were more pressing things on Claudia's mind.

Her father, for one.

Wiping the soft yellow crumbs from her mouth, her mind travelled back to the last time she'd seen him. Even though she was just ten years old the memory was vivid, and, although his features had blurred with the passage of time, she could, when she closed her eyes at night, still feel his whiskery cheeks against hers, and smell the masculine scent of his clothes.

Each year it was the same. At the start of the campaign season, he'd march off behind the legions with the rest of the camp followers, and she would wave and wave until her little arms ached and the army was reduced to a dusty dot on the horizon. Then, in October, he'd trudge home again, tired and weary, but not so exhausted that he and her mother wouldn't spend the whole winter fighting, before he packed his bags again the following spring.

Every year, except the year when Claudia turned ten. That March, her father set off — to Aquitania, as it happened — only this time he never came home.

Perhaps it was plunging from sunshine to shade in the wooded enclave that was the leatherworkers' quarter, but suddenly her step faltered and the honey cake turned to ash on her tongue. Darker memories flooded back. Of her mother, drunk as usual, reeling from one office in Rome to another, trying to find out why her man hadn't returned with the legion and what compensation they were going to pay her. The soldiers' jeers echoed for years in Claudia's head and, young as she was then, the implication had been obvious.

But had her father really had it to here with the nagging, the insults and the flying crockery and opted for a fresh start in the newly created town of Santonum? He hadn't been killed in combat, that's for sure, because Claudia remembered with humiliating clarity her mother's slurred screeching outside the tribune's office about how her man's name had still been on the lists for rations until the legion moved out, so why the eff couldn't the effing bureaucrats keep track of their own effing people?

Sadly, she realized, he could have gone missing for any number of reasons. He might have died from injuries that, as he was a lowly orderly, would not have been recorded in military logs. He could have caught a fever, picked up dysentery, fallen victim to snakebite, even sustained something like a head injury from a fall which had blanked out his memory. It happens. But for Claudia the itch of uncertainty needed a scratch that was long overdue. She had to know whether he was alive or dead to fill in the missing gaps of her childhood — except the past was proving hard to dig, and for reasons she could not have imagined.

Mice, mould, floods indeed! Rome, dammit, was covering something up, but it only needed a quick skim through the history books to remember that Rome had erected a stone wall once before! On that particular occasion, they walled off the entire toe of Italy in an attempt to starve Spartacus and his rebel slaves into submission. Unfortunately, in doing so, they'd overlooked the little matter of Spartacus being a gladiator whose very training encouraged him to think laterally and play dirty, rather than a soldier who employed the more traditional rules of combat. As Spartacus had marched his rebel army north in triumph, Rome had been left with an awful lot of egg on its face.

All Claudia needed to do was visit the chicken house while the hens were still laying…!

At midday, the tavern was bursting with men clad in plaid pantaloons tucked into soft ankle boots knocking back goblets of ale that spilled over with foam and wolfing down bowls of steaming dark stew that reflected the bountiful forests which encircled this town. To their welcoming grins, she slipped into a seat by the door, while in the corner a boy whistled a tune on a cheap wooden flute and his friend beat time on a coney skin stretched over a hoop. But even as Claudia's toe began to tap to the jig, she was aware that whilst the majority of Santons had adapted to life under the eagle with cheerful enthusiasm there were plenty about who had not.

Old memories die hard.

Grudges linger from one generation to the next.

Today the tribes might be allies, indebted to the troops who patrolled their borders and kept the roads and waterways free of bandits, and delighted that another army was daft enough to fight their wars for them, leaving foreign sons, not their own, mourned. But, forty years earlier, these same people had resisted invasion with a ferocity that Rome had not envisaged. First they slaughtered the men sent to conquer them — a whole army including their legate — then they routed the legionaries sent by Julius Caesar to avenge them. Oh, yes. The Santons were a force to be reckoned with.

But times change. Leaders change. Politics invariably follow.

One of the first acts instigated by the young Augustus after being crowned Emperor was to expand the trade links between Lyons and the town of Burdigala, on the Jirond estuary. Being expert potters, stonemasons and metalworkers in their own right, the Santons suddenly found huge markets opening up — and at profits they'd never dreamed of. Loyalties switched in a flash, and when the Emperor finally declared Santonum the capital of the new Province of Aquitania, the resulting rash of aqueducts, theatres, bath houses and temples bestowed on them such a sense of superiority over their fellow Aquitans that they actually saw this as liberty rather than conquest.

On the other hand, there are always those who relish the taste of sour grapes. Maybe someone who begrudged the ten per cent tax he was forced to pay Rome (and never mind that he recouped more than that in his profits). Or the bigot who felt Gauls oughtn't to trade with outsiders and were diluting the pedigree by intermarriage. But before Claudia had a chance to identify a suitably embittered tribesman among the tavern's patrons, the proprietor came bustling in.

Of a certain age, well-rounded and with merry green eyes, she had a bosom that could balance a tray of sweetmeats without spillage, and she was followed inside by a man whose purple striped tunic proclaimed him a Roman of equestrian rank. Right now, the Roman was attempting to sell her his horse.