Jack Whyte - The Singing Sword

VII

Lignus the carpenter had his moment of public infamy at the third hour of the following afternoon, when he was arraigned and brought before the full tribunal of the Colony Britannicus, held erect between two soldiers who were as big as he was. His head was almost entirely swathed in bandages and it was obvious to everyone assembled in the main courtyard of the villa — and the crowd included every man, woman and child in the Colony — that he was in great pain. His suffering brought him little pity, however, for his only son still lay comatose in the villa's sick bay, and the spectacle of his bruised and abused wife and pregnant and beaten daughters had scandalized the entire community.

The justice dispensed to him was swift and quickly summarized: In that he was responsible for brutalizing and savagely beating his own son, crippling him and leaving him in a condition closer to death than life, and in continuing danger of suffering death from the abuses he had undergone; and in that he physically chained, constrained and incestuously impregnated one of his own daughters and cohabited incestuously with the other against the laws of God and man; and in that his actions and the consequences of those actions occasioned a conflagration that endangered and might have affected the entire Colony, he, Lignus the carpenter, was proscribed and banished from the lands entailed by the Colony under penalty of instant death, to be executed immediately upon his being discovered in future within the bourn of the Colony or any of the lands owned by or attached to it. His wife and daughters were absolved of any guilt or willing complicity in his atrocious conduct and were offered the option of remaining in the Colony and living by what work would be provided for them after his departure. They accepted the offer without hesitation.

There was a corollary to this verdict, however, made in recognition of the fact that the man was physically unable to travel at the time of sentence. He was to be lodged, under guard, within the Colony for a maximum of twenty-one days, or until Cletus the physician pronounced him fit to travel, whichever should be shorter. After that he would be escorted to the boundary of the Colony by the high road to Aquae Sulis and there cast out.

The entire tribunal lasted less than half an hour, and it was a fitting end to a day that had seen some miraculous advances in the method of government of our Colony.

The Plenary Council had convened at the tenth hour, as scheduled. By then, the word had gone out among the members who had not been present the night before, and the new ideas had fallen on fertile ground. It seemed there were very few councillors who had not been reflecting, with varying degrees of worry, on the worsening situation in the town and cities of south-west Britain. In a fiery two-hour session, the councillors unanimously and immediately endorsed the initial decisions reached the previous night at the impromptu session. It took longer, however, for them to agree in principle to an analysis and examination of Caius's suggestion that the Council be expanded and altered to include the guidance and counsel of women in specific areas, mainly affecting the morale, governance and well-being of the colonists and their domestic conditions. This was a chewy mouthful for the councillors to swallow, but the majority ended up admitting that, if the guiding principles of such involvement were well thought out and disciplined, and properly administered, the idea could have much merit. Luceiia and three other women were elected by the councillors to consult with the Plenary Council on how these matters might be conceived and achieved.

The assembled colonists, for their part, roared their approval of every suggestion put forward by the Council that day, and when Cletus delivered a report on the status of the boy Simeon, who was still unconscious, a silence filled with sympathy fell on the crowd and lasted for a long moment. When the public meeting was finally adjourned after the tribunal, very few people left the gathering place. Everyone wanted to talk about what had happened and what had been resolved during the day, and soon fires were being lit and food prepared, and the activities of the day took on a holiday atmosphere that lasted well into the evening.

Young Simeon regained consciousness just before sunset, to everyone's relief and great pleasure, most particularly his mother's, and Cletus ventured a qualified prognosis of eventual recovery, although the lad's broken leg was so badly smashed that he would probably hobble worse than I did for the rest of his life. That night, after a late supper, while Luceiia was supervising the bedtime of the eldest of our brood, Caius and I sat in companionable silence on either side of a blazing fire in his study. He was reading a letter that had arrived the day before from our friend Bishop Alaric, who was in Verulamium. I was mulling over the thoughts that had occurred to me after reading the same missive. Alaric had written about the latest escalation of enemy raids on all sides of the country. In what appeared to be a general response to an abrupt curtailment of the flow of funds from the Imperial Exchequer, he informed us, the Colonial High Command in South Britain had been recently forced, yet again, to cut back drastically on its policing duties. The news, while not surprising, had angered me. This nonsense of troop withdrawals and reallocations had been going on for several years now, and we were well aware of it. It was no secret that the garrisons had been pulled out of many of the minor forts, and we knew that, in spite of bureaucratic protestations of "interim measures only, pending the return of victorious forces from the continent," these moves were permanent.

From my own, personal perspective, the worst thing about all of that — apart from the legal ramifications of the loss of the punitive arm of the law, which had been causing us so much concern — was that many of these supposedly minor forts were strategically located and essential to the defence of outlying areas of the country. When the soldiers were withdrawn from these, there was nothing to prevent incursions by pirates and marauders.

The most glaring example of this we had seen was the closure of the main fort at Cicutio, in south-central Cambria, and the withdrawal of troops from Dolocauthi, to the north-west. Dolocauthi was the biggest gold mine in the Western Empire, and when the troops were withdrawn from there, the word spread quickly. A line of forts, joined by a high-quality road along the south side of the Cambrian peninsula, was still being maintained, to keep the seaborne Scots from Dolocauthi, but it was a poor second-best to a strong, garrisoned fort on the spot.

Dolocauthi itself did not interest me personally and would not had it been a thousand times bigger, but it had come to symbolize two things: the stupidity of the High Command, who decided in the first place to withdraw the garrison without shutting down the mines — no doubt seeking to placate carping, middle-level government officials — and the colossal stupidity of the Hibernian Scots, who knew no difference between a gold mine and an iron-ore pit.

Caius put down Alaric's letter and sighed, moving the taper back to the centre of his table. I watched him for a few moments before breaking in on his thoughts.

"What are you thinking about?"

"Oh, I don't know. Alaric's letter depresses me. I was thinking of garrisons, and the lack of them. For all the good it seems to do nowadays, my friend, the Garrison of Britain might as well not be here. Never enough men in any one place, and never enough time to arrive at where they ought to be before it's too late." He paused. "You know, Publius, there is something I've been meaning to ask you about for some time. Do you remember the horse you brought back from Glevum?"