Picus nodded and then glanced from Ullic to Uric. "What do you two think? Is Varrus right?"
Ullic held up his hands, palms outward, his expression one of entreaty and mingled fear and anger, and although it was clear that he was jesting it was equally clear that he was not speaking completely out of mockery.
"Leave me out of this, I want nothing to do with it! Why should I vote in favour of arming Romans better than ourselves? It might come back like a ghost to haunt me someday."
Uric watched his father in some awe, a smile in his eyes, but ventured nothing.
Picus turned back to me. "I will say nothing more on this now, Uncle, but I believe you are correct: this is a better weapon than anything we have, or are likely to have in the near future. I think I am duty-bound to give it to my armourers to play with. My men need this weapon in large numbers."
"So be it, Picus," I answered him. "You have talked yourself right into it, answered your own doubts. Now, let's get over to the house and try that jug of wine."
The wine was excellent, and by the time we saw the bottom of the jug, we had prepared a plan of action for the future that would see our combined forces — Ullic's, Picus's and our own colonists — working closely together in the coming months.
Ullic told us that he now had Cymric and four other bowyers working full-time at fabricating more of his great bows: a lighter, modified version of his original giant weapon, but still a mighty bow. He believed that the time would come when the Long Bow of Ullic, as he grandiloquently termed it, would become commonplace among his people. In the meantime, Uric, he had decided, would spend half of the year with us in the Colony, learning our tactics and the way we made war, and the other half teaching what he had learnt to his own people. Uric, however, was quick to point out that his mountain people were not the type that great cavalry troops were made from, nor were their horses. The Celts' mountain-ponies were admirably suited for their own terrain, but they offered little hope of organized weight of the kind we were developing in the Colony. And by the same token, he pointed out, our own great horses were simply too big and cumbersome to function satisfactorily in the mountains.
It was agreed, therefore, that Uric would study with us from a new viewpoint, that of a liaison officer who could combine the two methods of warfare, theirs and ours, to make the best use of both when both were needed together. But we all agreed, in a spirit that was only half jocular, that his first priority should be to sire a son — a living symbol of the bonds between our two peoples from this time on. Uric blushed crimson, but smiled and found the confidence to say shyly that he had already begun to work on the matter.
Picus was the one among us with the greatest problems. He was intensely frustrated by the role his troops were being forced to play in the north, along Hadrian's Wall. Picus felt, and correctly so, I believed, that he and his forces were being exploited, used as morale-builders for the garrisons up there in that inhospitable country. His troops were part of the forces of South Britain, headquartered in Londinium. He had been placed in a political crucible by requests from the military commander at Arboricum in North Britain for the specialized help of his mobile forces in dealing with marauding bands of infiltrators from above the Wall. These requests had come, in a highly concentrated form, at a time of relative quiet in the south, and against his own better judgment Picus had agreed to a temporary secondment to northern duty. He had then spent the ensuing three months gnashing his teeth in fury, galloping his men across the northern expanses of rock and moorland chasing small bands of marauding, fleet-footed Picts, while the solid barrier of the Wall itself prevented him from making what might have been a decisive impact by attacking into the enemy's territories.
He had been recalled, eventually, when the Saxons began making their annual springtime raids in the south, but it was his belief that the Wall in the north was doomed as a frontier. There were not enough men stationed up there to handle the kind of pressure the garrisons were being subjected to, and morale was lower than it had ever been. The soldiers on duty there knew that the Wall was far from impregnable; it had fallen back in '67 and had been breached to a lesser extent several times since then in several places. The garrison troops on the Wall felt they had been handed a useless and thankless task in defending it, and they knew that the seaborne raids to the south would continue to guarantee that they would receive no permanent reinforcements.
Even Stilicho's consular army of ten thousand men was of no help to them, for it was employed in strengthening the coastal areas, mainly along the Saxon Shore in the south-east, and in the east itself.
Picus would be returning to duty the following day, he informed us. He would go straight to Londinium and from there he expected to be dispatched directly to the south-east.
"Dispatched?" I asked him. "I thought you were your own commander?"
"I am, but where the raids are coming heaviest, there I go, most of the time at the request of military headquarters. It's a formality, Uncle Varrus. I'd be going there anyway."
"I have no doubt of that, but aren't you concerned that they might grow accustomed to directing you through these requests?"
He smiled at me, a very pleasing smile.
"Not really. If conflict ever should arise, I shall do what my mind — and my prime directive from my commander — tells me is correct, based upon the best input I can accumulate. After that they can all complain to Stilicho."
"I see," I said. "And you have no plans to return to the north?"
"None at all, unless the fates play me truly foul. You know, Uncle, it seems very strange, but the only person I ever knew who enjoyed northern Wall duty was Claudius Seneca."
"Seneca?" I could hear my own astonishment. "You jest, surely?"
But Picus was shaking his head. "I swear, Uncle, Seneca was like a different man up there. Even his soldiers noticed it. They would do anything he called on them to do, and he called on them to do things that he had never done before. Things I would never have expected him to do."
"Such as? Give me an instance."
"Well," he paused, but only for a fraction of a heartbeat, "he volunteered his troops and himself for night-pursuit duty, in foul weather, on several occasions. Believe that if you can. I had difficulty with it myself, and I was there."
I was gazing at him, open-mouthed.
"It is true, Uncle, I swear. Seneca behaved like a man. Like a professional soldier. Like a leader."
"Why, I wonder?"
"What?" Picus was blinking at me, not understanding my question.
"Why, I asked. Why would Seneca suddenly start acting like a responsible officer after so long?"
That, of course, was a question to which two honest, unimaginative soldiers like Picus and me could provide no answer, lacking the subtleties and insight of politically minded men. We pursued it no further, but each of us tucked it away in his head to study further at a later time.
Picus soon bade us farewell to return to the fort and check up on his men. His father walked with him to find his horse, and Ullic watched them both leave the villa with a curious expression on his face that I would have quizzed him about at any other time. The memory of what I had seen the day and the night before, however, was fresh enough in my mind to make me watch my tongue, and so I said nothing. Ullic, however, was under no constraints.
"He's a good man, that one."
"Who? Caius?"
"No, not Caius! Picus."
"Ah, Picus! Yes, he's one of the best. His father's son. Have you just realized that?"
Ullic threw me a look of disgust and spoke to me in the tones one reserves for dull children.