She tugged my hand then, indicating that we should continue walking, and as we went she concluded, "They stopped calling me The Magpie, after that. But Magpie never went away, and I'm glad, because I like it. Of course, only my special friends call me that. Other people still call me Veronica."
I felt almost jealous — excluded. "I've never heard it before today," I said. "I suppose that means I'm not really a special friend..."
"Oh, Daddy!" She stopped again and looked at me with what I defined instantly as loving exasperation. "You're my father, for goodness' sake! You're my specialest friend, more than even Victorex. You can call me Magpie any time you like."
"Thank you, Magpie," I answered. "I will." I felt absolutely euphoric.
By the time Victorex had spent two years in his new position, he was heading up a self-sufficient operation with the sole purpose of breeding horses. He had five very happy stallions and upwards of seventy mares in various stages of pregnancy, plus a fair number of foals. He had already started weeding out his future breeding stock. Only two of the foals from that first crop, one of each sex, were judged by him to be worth keeping. The others were all marked as workhorses as soon as they were able to walk. Victorex estimated that by the end of ten years he would be starting to produce big, strong horses. In twenty years, he would be producing large numbers of them.
He knew what he was doing. We did not, so we left him to do it.
In the meantime, with those animals Victorex would allow me to use, I began working on new techniques of training and deploying mounted men. It sounded easy when we were talking about it, but making it work was another matter altogether.
I already had a central body of men trained to operate on horseback, the nucleus of my new force. Every trainee was an expert at vaulting onto a horse's back, fully equipped. This should have been an advantage, and it was, but only to a clearly delineated degree. Now all I had to do was to untrain these men, completely and absolutely. I had to make them forget everything they had been taught, except how to stay on a horse once they were mounted — and even that, I found, was easier to think about than to achieve.
The men I had to start retraining were bowmen, archers, light skirmishing troops. J was trying to change them into heavy cavalry. That meant that the light, leather armour they wore was no longer strong enough to do the job they would have to do. So, remove the light, leather armour and replace it with regulation iron or bronze helmet, breastplate and a heavy kilt of iron-studded leather. They were going to be in close combat with an enemy on foot; their most vulnerable parts, therefore, were their legs. So, replace bare legs and light sandals with metal greaves and armoured boots strong enough to withstand a sword thrust or the swing of an axe. I had now increased the weight of each man by about thirty pounds, overall.
In addition to all that extra weight, I also had to consider that the shields all horsemen then carried were small, flimsy affairs of toughened leather, suitable for deflecting a spent arrow or a thrown stone but of no value in stopping a heartily swung axe or a close-hurled arrow or spear. So, change the light shield for a heavy-duty, utilitarian shield suited specifically to a mounted man rather than a standing legionary.
Added to all of this, I had also to bear in mind the fact that we were breeding bigger horses. Not simply taller horses, but bigger horses.
In its simplest terms, the problem I was faced with came to this: I had to take ordinary men, used to performing the ordinary task of mounting a horse in a vaulting spring, load them down with an additional forty to fifty pounds of dead weight and ask them to hoist that up on to horses that were bigger, and wider, than any they had ever ridden before.
And that was just the start of it. I was also asking them to forget about all the advantages they had learned were associated with being mounted on a fast, high-strung animal who could respond to the sway of a body or the pressure of a knee and swing its rider out of danger immediately. Instead, I was asking each of them to make himself consciously, individually, an immobile brick, an unmanoeuvrable unit in a solid wall of living horseflesh. I was asking each of them to advance, revolve, change direction and generally perform as one inanimate part of a single, solid mechanism. A living unit. Not men, but a wall of horsemen. That meant that, in the last analysis, if Caius Britannicus or Publius Varrus were killed by a well-aimed or lucky arrow, he would be dead and gone, but his horse would continue to function as part of the striking force, held in position by its neighbours on both sides. Many of my men found that a chilling and unnatural thought. All of a sudden, in their eyes, riders had become expendable. The horse had become all-important.
That, of course, was nonsense. But in the beginning, at least, that is how they saw it, and that is the perception I found myself having to contend with.
I persevered with it, however, and soon found that there were some of my men who began to show clear leadership capabilities in the new techniques early in the process. Whenever I found one of these, I promoted him on the spot, thereby instituting, although I did not realize it at first, a whole new hierarchy of leaders — cavalry officers.
Nothing that changes the order of things as radically as we did happens overnight. The process I am describing here in a few words took years to achieve. Life in our little Colony meandered very quietly during those years, for the most part, with only an occasional reminder of the strife in the outside world penetrating to shadow our peace, in the form of reports by Alaric or one of his visiting priests on what was happening abroad. In this way we learned of the death of Valentinian, and of the rebellion of Eugenius, another would-be emperor thrown up from the ranks of the armies to challenge Theodosius. Theodosius, however, had Stilicho — ably assisted by our own Picus Britannicus — to take his part, and Eugenius was crushed by a mighty army assembled in the west.
Then, two years later, came the news that stunned us all, and, fittingly, we heard of it from Picus, whose letters were now arriving regularly.
Father, greetings,
This letter will reach you, I hope, ahead of the news it contains. I have been involved in what has been described by some people as a civil war between two of the strongest, most able men in the Empire, and the information I have to impart to you in this letter will, I have no doubt, amaze and trouble you. Theodosius is dead. He died tonight, less than an hour ago, and his death has plunged the Empire into a schism that will rock the world.
I have not mentioned this previously in any of my letters, but the meteoric career of Flavius Stilicho has been influenced, constrained and strangely paralleled, although to a far lesser extent in my judgment, by another Flavius
—
one Flavius Rufinus, of whom I doubt you have ever heard. Flavius Stilicho and Flavius Rufinus have been rivals since the day young Stilicho made his first step towards prominence. Until then, Flavius Rufinus had enjoyed the full warmth of the Emperor's favour, unchallenged by anyone. Rufinus defined Stilicho as a rival immediately, and has since done everything in his power, short of declaring overt hostility, to thwart his progress. Recently, however, mere months ago, all of that changed. The rivalry between the two flared into open animosity and outright enmity, and Theodosius, astute and deft manipulator that he is, has been using this situation to his own unique advantage. This culminated in an imperial proclamation