Адриан Голдсуорти: The Encircling Sea

It was not worth much, at least not to a Roman who could buy plenty of cheap jewellery, most of it brighter and more colourful. For a family who barely scraped along, it was a treasure. Ferox was not sure whether this made any claims of good luck associated with the trinket unlikely. Maybe their life would have been a lot worse without it. In his experience, bad as things were, they could usually be worse. They were a happy bunch in their way, and if a few of their children had perished that was a sorrow experienced by many and it did not haunt them. They had young Brigita, who might well organise them all and bring plenty. He chuckled aloud at the thought of what might have happened if she had gone north and been sold as a slave. Pity the family who bought her, for she would soon be running the place for their own good – like Philo, only a good deal more determined. Or they would have beaten her until she submitted. The smile went. At least he could be pleased that she was home – a real home, with her own family. He felt very alone.

Ferox had loved once, a woman with a dark beauty, and for a few months he felt as if he had had a home. She had picked out Philo at a slave market and he had bought the small boy to please her. Back then he did anything he could to please her. Then she had left, in the middle of the grim business when he was tasked with investigating the officers involved in the failed coup led by Saturninus against the late and unlamented Emperor Domitian. He had done his job, even though he soon realised that the men under suspicion were dying, whether or not he discovered evidence of their guilt. He drank, and was surely gloomy and difficult, but he did not think that that was the only reason why she left. There was something else, something from the past that she had made him promise never to ask about. She had gone without word, without a clue, leaving only Philo behind, his pitch-black hair and dark eyes reminders of hers. It had broken him and he had drunk even more heavily, and in the end they transferred him to Britannia and sent him to this nowhere place in the far north because no one else wanted him. The Silures were peaceful, his grandfather already dead from fever, and he no longer mattered politically. He was made regionarius of one of the least important bits of land in the empire and left to rot if that was what he wanted.

Then two years ago, he met her. It was on a day when he was too hungover to care much whether he lived or died, and he and Vindex had ridden to warn a coach and party of cavalry about an ambush. They were too late, but managed to rescue the lady and her maid who were riding in the carriage. The lady was Sulpicia Lepidina, wife of Cerialis, and he had begun by mistaking her for the slave. Somehow, they had all survived, and later he learned that the attackers were the Stallion’s men, wanting to take her and sacrifice her to make a great work of magic. Cerialis was from the royal line of the Batavians, which made her royal in their eyes, and so of greater value. He had saved her then, and then a second time when there was an attack in the fort itself. It was Samhain, the feast of the dead, when spirits from the Otherworld walked on the earth and the laws of life did not apply, and he had come to her then, found her, and they had made love.

On the Kalends of August the following year, the Lady Sulpicia Lepidina, femina clarissima , daughter of a former consul and wife to the prefect, gave birth to a son. Before she had whispered the news to him, he had known that the child was his. Publicly it did not matter, for Cerialis, who already had three children and so had met the laws set down by all the emperors since Augustus, had acknowledged the child as his, naming him Marcus Flavius Cerialis and accepting the substantial expense of paying for another son’s education and career.

He had rarely seen the lady since then, and never been alone with her, but he hoped that she sensed his joy and knew that he would protect her and their secret forever. The law was unlikely to be generous to him, for adultery was an offence against the Republic as well as the individual, threatening the family life on which the state depended. If discovered he would be dismissed from the army, perhaps even sent into exile on some bleak rock – that is if they could find one more out of the way than here. He might even be executed, for it was rumoured that Trajan’s views on such things were especially strict. None of that really mattered to him. Worse – far worse – was that she would be humiliated publicly, divorced and probably sent to a bleak rock of her own.

Ferox had a son he had glimpsed just twice, a boy he would never hold, probably never know, and certainly could never acknowledge or be acknowledged by and all the while he loved a woman who was married to another man and could never be his. For the moment his joy triumphed over his despair at the hopelessness of it all, but he worried that he was feeling the urge to start drinking again.

He clutched the blue stone tightly. Nine days after a boy was born Roman parents gave him the bulla , a gold charm worn around the neck until the boy became a man. The Silures did something similar ten days after birth, and they gave the child a stone or bead on a thread, much like this one. Ferox felt the smooth surface with his fingers and clutched it tight.

When Philo found him the next morning he was still somehow perched on the stool, body slumped forward onto the table. The slave sniffed, but there was no scent of beer or wine, or indeed any of the old signs he had not seen for well over a year. His master was clutching something in his hand so tightly that his knuckles were white.

HOW MUCH do you know about Hibernians?’ Crispinus asked him almost as soon as he came into the little room. Ferox had ridden to Vindolanda the next morning as instructed, arriving just before noon. He did not glimpse the prefect or his wife on his way through the fort, and felt the usual mix of relief and disappointment because he did not see her. A clerk at the principia sent him to one of the side chambers, where he found the tribune waiting.

‘A little, my lord,’ Ferox said. ‘I have never been to their island, but have met a few over the years, coming to raid, coming to trade or just running away from enemies at home. You recall the ones we met at Tincommius’ feast?’

Crispinus snapped his fingers. ‘I had half forgotten. They wore long tunics, did they not, instead of trousers like the rest of the…’ He trailed off.

‘I believe barbarians was the word you were looking for, my lord.’

‘I had also forgotten your refreshing impudence. And no, that is not what I was about to say. I was trying to remember whether or not I could describe the Venicones and Vacomagi as Caledonians, and indeed whether all might be termed Britons.’

‘Many Romans would, my lord.’

‘While others, including your good self, Titus Flavius Ferox, would know better and would not. Yet what would such a Roman say?’

‘He would assume that his listener had the wit to understand that all the peoples of these islands were different, just as there is no such thing as a typical Hibernian. They have their tribes and clans, many of them very different even to close neighbours. Language unites them and us up to a point, although sometimes it is hard to follow the different dialects.’ The tribune watched him in silence, so after a while he added a respectful, ‘my lord.’

‘It is not courtesy I am looking for, centurion, but enlightenment and understanding. You always remind me of an oracle, giving answers that are as precise as they are unhelpful, even misleading. And so, as with an oracle I suppose I must frame each question as precisely as a lawyer, but it would be nice if you trusted me.’ From their first encounter the tribune had time and again asked for trust, which made Ferox all the more reluctant to give it.