The Lion and the Lark Read online

  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.

  “I was trying out some new hunting trails up in the foothills,” Brettix said.

  That meant hanging around the Roman garrison, trying to pick up information and seeking ways to infiltrate it. Brettix and his friends were all budding spies.

  “Is the Roman troop strength increasing?” Bronwen asked him innocently.

  He shot her a dark look.

  Bronwen sat across from him and picked up her own cup of corma, sipping delicately. Her portion was diluted to the point of almost eradicating the alcohol. “The rumor is rampant that reinforcements will be arriving shortly.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear over the washtubs,” Brettix said scoffingly, cutting a wing from the carcass before him with a small dagger attached by a chain to his belt. In the flickering light from the tallow candles his set face seemed carved of stone.

  “If you don’t think it’s true why are you scouting the garrison every day?”

  Brettix dropped a naked bone onto his plate and eyed his sister balefully. “You just mind your own business.”

  “That is my business. We all want to get rid of the Romans, Brettix, you’re not fighting them alone. It might help if you talked to me about what you’re doing. I’m not an idiot, I’ll keep my mouth shut and maybe I can help you.”

  Brettix regarded her skeptically, his ice blue eyes the exact color of their father’s. His hair was lighter than hers, wheat blond without a trace of red, and he had the height and solid build of his warrior ancestors. Bronwen knew that he was the catch of the tribe, but she couldn’t help seeing him as her two year’s older brother who had bailed her out of many scrapes until he grew old enough to realize that he was a boy and also a king’s son. He was
therefore too exalted to play with a mere girl, and from then on he was lost to her, drawn into the world of masculine rituals from which she was excluded. But she was fond of the man he had become, for the treasured memory of the boy he had been.

  “If I need you, I’ll tell you,” he said shortly, reaching for the jug of corma.

  Bronwen pressed her lips together but said nothing.

  It was the same response she always got.

  “Where’s Father?” Brettix asked suddenly, swallowing.

  “He’s meeting with Scipio’s scribes, going over the final harvest accounts.”

  Brettix snorted in disgust.

  “You know he has to play that game until we see what their next move is,” Bronwen added.

  “They have to make it soon,” Brettix said musingly, as if talking to himself.

  “Why?” Bronwen asked carefully, shocked that he was suddenly admitting this, but aware that he was only doing so because she had already hinted that she knew.

  “In six weeks the seas will be too rough for them to make the crossing from Italy. They’re working feverishly in Rome right now, drawing up lists and readying the ships to send reinforcements here.”

  “And what are you going to do when they arrive?”

  His face closed and she knew that he would say nothing else.

  “Be careful, Brettix. Don’t underestimate these people, they’ve conquered every territory they’ve invaded,” Bronwen said.

  “I’m not underestimating them. But Scipio’s men are all homesick and bored and that’s nothing compared to how they’re going to feel once the snow flies.”

  “There will be more of them by winter, you just said so.”

  “Winter weather will help us. Snow obscures landmarks and cuts off previous routes. They don’t know these woods and we know every inch of them blindfolded. There are hundreds of spots to stage sneak attacks and catch them off guard.”

  “Is that what you’ve been practicing?” Bronwen asked.

  Brettix rose from the table and put his arm around his sister’s shoulders, surprising her with a kiss on the cheek.

  “Don’t worry about me. I know what I’m doing.” He picked up the quiver of arrows he had discarded on the floor and slung it over his arm, disappearing through the door and into the gathering dark.

  Bronwen looked after him worriedly. His courage bordered on recklessness, and he despised the Romans even more than she did.

  Where would his hatred lead him?

  Lucia Drucilla Scipio gazed down at the rolling fields leading away from the garrison. They were bright with moonlight, and she wished that she were riding her horse. But her father had left strict instructions that she was not to go out without a bodyguard, especially at night, and the troops were on maneuvers so there was no one to escort her. Scipio feared retaliation from the locals, kidnapping or worse, so she was never left alone when she was outside the house she shared with her mother and father on the garrison property. And now that her father had gone back to Rome, she was more closely guarded than ever, since all of his men lived in fear of a mishap with the Scipio daughter while the general was away.

  The capable Roman soldiers, accustomed to erecting and breaking camps overnight wherever they went, had built a Roman style house for the general’s family, the object being to make them feel at home in this hostile country. Scipio had brought his family with him to demonstrate that he was not afraid of the Britons and considered the area safe for his loved ones. This was a tactic which convinced nobody, since he also ordered a trench to be dug around the compound and a double guard on all shifts. Not one of the Romans wanted to be where they were. The soldiers were restive, Lucia was skittish, and her mother had been driven nearly mad with inactivity and isolation.

  Lady Scipio spent her days doing intricate needlework and drawing up lists of tasks for the native servants to perform. As a result her house was very clean and her linen suitable for framing, but she complained continually about the climate, the food, and the native language, which to her Roman ears sounded atonal and coarse. The locals made bad slaves because they were proud, independent and intractable, and they had no written language beyond ogham, a system of lines and dashes used for public inscriptions such as stele and gravestones. Their priests were Druids who engaged in human sacrifice and prayed to inanimate objects like trees and stones. To the refined general’s wife all of this meant that the Celts were one step above four legged creatures and she treated them accordingly.

  If Lucia heard her mother say one more word about the Brittani barbari she thought she would scream. She was not happy to be so far away from home either, but at least she could ride. The Romans were not horsemen, the Roman army had no cavalry, but the Celts were practically born on horseback, and Lucia had picked up her facility from them. Her mother didn’t like it but her father indulged her in the sport, aware that she needed to get out and away from his increasingly eccentric wife. And Lucia savored her last days of freedom, dreading the sentence of doom which awaited her upon her return to Rome.

  At 17, she was betrothed to a forty-five year old widower who had children older than herself. The arrangements had been made by her parents, the usual practice among the aristocracy, and she had nothing to say about it. The man in question was a wealthy aedile, or tax collector, a coveted position because skimming was customary and several terms in the post left its occupant set for life. He had agreed to wait for Lucia’s return from abroad to celebrate the nuptials, but his middle aged eagerness for his youthful bride set Lucia’s teeth on edge.

  Lucia didn’t care if Lucius Decimus Caracalla had gold plated fingernails; she wanted to marry him about as much as she wanted to enter the Vestal service and remain a virgin until her death. So while the green forests of Britain were hardly a refuge, she saw them in a light not perceived by her mother.

  Her time in them at least delayed her wedding.

  She turned from the battlements and nodded at the centurion on duty, who waved her toward the series of wooden steps leading to the ground. The man was a native of Tarsus who had earned his Roman citizenship through service in the army, and in the light from the torches set around the parapets Lucia could see the effects of a dozen foreign campaigns in his face.

  “I will walk you back to your house, Scipiana,” he said, following her. He spoke Latin with a heavy accent, which many years in the service of Rome had not managed to temper, and he limped from some old injury on a long ago martial field Lucia could not even imagine.

  As she turned to begin her descent Lucia saw a movement at the edge of her vision; she whirled just in time to see the figure step back into the shadows beyond the walls of the fort. She had a quick impression of height, and blond hair gleaming in the torchlight, before she could see nothing but the trees.

  “What is it, my lady?” the veteran asked quickly. “Did you see something?”

  Lucia hesitated, staring, then said, “No. It must have been an animal scuttling through the underbrush.”

  “Are you sure? Do you want me to take a look?” the soldier asked worriedly.

  “Don’t bother. It’s nothing.”

  She turned and went down the ladder, the centurion treading heavily after her, and when they reached the ground he said gruffly, “You really should stay in your house after dark. These people manage to sneak into the fort no matter how hard we try to keep them out, they’re like ferrets, and you’d be a prime target for them.”

  Lucia nodded wearily.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, not bothering to explain that she’d been driven outdoors by another one of her mother’s diatribes. She wanted to stay safely away until Lady Scipio was asleep.

  “Come along, now,” the centurion said. “It’s late.”

  Lucia trudged dutifully in his wake, wondering about the tall young man she had glimpsed ever so briefly, and why she hadn’t sicked the guards on him.

  Maybe she was getting as odd as her mother.

  Brettix r
emained flattened against a tree as the pounding of his heart slowed to normal. He didn’t know how he could have made such a mistake. He had memorized the location of every guard post along the Roman battlements, but suddenly two people had been where they weren’t supposed to be and he had almost been carne cane. Dogmeat.

  The girl had seen him. He was sure of it. For one transfixing moment he was certain that she would call out and he had frozen like a terrified rabbit. Then he had lunged for the dark and waited for the outcry, the surge of soldiers from the fort, the end of his life.

  Nothing happened.

  It had taken him two dozen heartbeats to realize that the girl was not going to betray him, and then he had risked a quick glimpse of the fortress wall.

  There was no one there.

  They were gone.

  He sighed and wiped his face with the edge of his flaxen sleeve, still trembling with reaction. The girl was Roman; she had the midnight hair, the arched nose, the draped garments of the Italian moneyed class.

  Why hadn’t she said anything?

  It was a mystery, but he wasn’t going to linger any longer to test his luck.

  His survey of the catapult and the weapons storehouses would have to wait for another night.

  Brettix took a deep breath and ran off through the trees.

  Chapter Two

  Mist swirled around the lead ship as land came into view, the pale dawn light giving the scene an ethereal cast. The shore was forested almost to the water’s edge, with trees and dense undergrowth so verdantly green that it looked almost blue. As Claudius and his lieutenant Ardus Ionus Cappius watched from the bow, an egret emerged from an oak grove and soared into flight, circling the landing area and then heading east.

  Ardus shivered. “It’s an omen,” he said darkly.

  Claudius shot him a withering glance. He respected the state religion and observed its forms, but he was not superstitious.