Do I sound unaccountably bitter? Perhaps, but I can account for the sentiment, I assure you. I mentioned this once. You may have forgotten, but I never shall. When I had first become a slave, dragged with Sulla’s army back from Athens, a boy of nineteen, it was in a tent just such as the one which I now called home where I had catered to every need, imaginable and unimaginable, of eight men indistinguishable from the thousands surrounding me now. I recoil as I remember their callous indifference to my suffering, their almost bored creativity as each day they subjected me to some new indignation. I served at their pleasure for over a year. The decades had helped me push those memories into a corner of my mind where I shuddered to look. There it was never quite dark, but always illuminated by the same dim, yellow light that filtered down through my tent’s hide to settle on my shoulders like a shroud. Now, they came again, bright and raw and new. Old friends.
I wrapped my sagum about me and burst through the tent flap to stand in the camp forum gulping the misty, bright air. It was clogged with the smells of wood, dirt, dust, horses, mules, and sweat. Perfume, compared to the rank, memory-laden air of my lodgings. A ride would do me good.
I looked behind my tent across the narrow aisle at the empty patch of meadow; Betto and Malchus had not yet arrived, but I had heard that they had made a safe crossing. The tent-mates originally assigned to their contubernium had not been as fortunate. Ridiculous as it sounds, I looked upon my friends’ survival as a special favor from the heavens to me. Malchus had a way of making me see through to the best outcome of any bad situation. I needed him now. And Betto’s whining was sheer entertainment, plain and simple. Some men use bravado to hide their fear; with Betto it was the opposite: strip away his complaining and superstitious caterwauling and you will never find a braver man. I mourned for the drowned men, but took great comfort from the knowledge that at least my friends, assigned by Crassus himself to the first century of the first cohort of the first legion would be nearby. But where was Livia?
There were no women in the army. You might find one or two in the arena, where survival depended on no skills other than your own, but here, in this machine of war where each part depended upon the other, no. No women.
Camp followers grew like a scruffy, wagging tail with each day’s march. In this quotidian, aberrant reflection of the legion’s art, a child’s grotesque imitation of its parent’s craft, you would find slaves of wealthy soldiers who could afford more than the one servant assigned to each contubernium, sellers of anything from blankets to good wine, and it was here you could also discover women in profusion. They might be merchants, selling fresh bread, their bodies, fish oil or cook pots. Or they might be “wives” of the men, who were not theoretically allowed to marry, though those were few, true and hardy to make this trip. But inside the camp itself, nary a one. Within our walls was precision, engineered and obsessive, everything in its place, each man accounted for. Give me the name of any soldier, his legion, cohort and century, and I could walk across our vast encampment of an evening and point to his tent with unerring regularity. The squalor and chaos of the army’s bustling town, reborn each night outside our walls, would give me greater challenge. When Octavius met up with us, that is where I would find Livia.
•••
That is not where I went now. I walked with contrived purpose down the length of the parade ground, past the rostrum where Crassus could address the assembled troops, past the tent where the standards were housed, past the sacrificial altar, down to the rear gate and the picket lines where I had left Apollo. Flags placed by the engineers who had arrived hours ago still marked the boundaries of the camp and also the location of the four gates. The ground had been leveled and cleared, the sod for the ramparts collected, and work by the legionaries not guarding the rest of us was proceeding with such orderliness and efficiency it surpassed even my own captious standards.
Since there were no enemies about, Crassus had allowed the trench around the camp to be dug to a depth of only three feet. The dirt was thrown inward to build the rampart, faced with sod and finished with logs. The palisade in this friendly territory was only five feet above the ground, its floor and outer wall bound with stakes carried by each legionary. It took these men a remarkably short three and a half hours to erect the entire encampment which, when complete, would house our abbreviated army of four legions plus auxiliaries. To make our evening’s home we stole from the landscape an enormous rectangle 1,300 by 1,800 feet, consuming over 50 acres. Each day. When the army was completely reassembled our encampment would grow to over 60 acres.
I found Apollo and told a stable boy to prepare him. Just as I was about to step up onto the mounting stool I overheard a voice from the palisade calling out to someone down the line. “Linus, you slug!” he shouted. “My dead grandmother would have those stakes tied off by now. Pretend there’s a five-story insula right across the street; it’s burning and any second a wall of fire is going to come crashing down on your head.” That voice! Like a saw pulling through wood, so familiar, but I could not place it. Until I heard the man say the word “fire.”
“Ludovicus?!”
The big man with the shaved head and eyes the color of rainwater on a stormy day turned in my direction. His skin was so darkly tanned he looked as if he’d already been to Parthia and back. He squinted, then recognition dawned and he shouted, “My favorite Greek! I heard you were here. Come on up, so I can see how bad you look. That’s an order!”
“Hah!” I called back, making my way up the planed logs that served as steps. “If I remember correctly, the last time we spoke it was you who were taking orders.” Then I lost my wind as Ludovicus grabbed my arm on the last plank and pulled me into what I have learned to call a “Roman crush.” All along the palisade legionaries of lower rank were tamping down dirt, laying boards or tying stakes. It seemed we were the only two at rest in the entire camp.
“Yes, but not from you! I see, stork, your ‘feathers’ have either fallen off or turned white.” I was elated to see him, but should I have been?
“What are you doing in uniform? You should have been pastured years ago.”
“They tried,” he said, twisting his features into a mask of rage, “but I made a face and the bull fainted.”
Ludovicus had been a freedman, part of the Crassus familia when I first came to the house. Over the years, he had been promoted from handyman to commander of Crassus' fire brigade, and together, we had “engineered” the acquisition of many buildings on behalf of our patron. Whenever a fire broke out, we would rush to the rescue, but only begin putting out the fire with our pumps and hoses when dominus himself had negotiated a purchase price a fraction of the value of the ruined property.