He grimaced. "It's not the sort of thing I want to argue with my father over yet. I'm afraid I was using you as a sounding board. I'm sorry if I bored you."
"Bored me?" I laughed aloud. "Picus, I've seldom been so far from bored. I may have been out of my depth, but I wasn't bored for one second. Come on, let's get on our way. There is much that I haven't seen here, and I want to see it all before I leave for home."
He looked at me with a smile.
"Home? You mean the atmosphere of power here in Londinium does not enthrall you? You must run home to your provinces?"
"Aye," I said, "to your Aunt Luceiia, and I care not who knows it or would laugh at me for it."
"Uncle," Picus said, still smiling, "you will hear neither laughter nor criticism from me."
BOOK THREE- Genesis
XVII
A man can know no finer sensation than arriving home after an arduous and extended absence. We made excellent time on the road back from Londinium, jubilant as we were with the news of Stilicho's commission and confident of the triumphal welcome that lay ahead of us at the end of our journey. On the last stage, we had a choice of pressing on and arriving at the villa in the middle of the night or stopping to sleep under the forest trees and arriving home with the new day. We chose the latter, rising with the skylarks while the sky itself was still dark and moving on as soon as the light began to penetrate the forest, so that we came in sight of the Colony home farm just as the sun rose fully over it, and for the first time in my adult life I experienced the pleasure of a real homecoming.
High on the hill to the south-west, overlooking the villa and all the lands around, sat the still unfinished walls of our new fort, picked out clearly and burnished in the light of the new day. Gone was all sign of the forest that had burgeoned there for such a short time, and we felt good to know that never again would we feel a need to hide our achievements. Plautus, who had heard about the disguising of the hill and its fort, laid eyes on the site and promptly decided that we had gulled him. Now that he could see it for himself, he said, he refused to believe that we had ever been able to conceal it, and looking at the size of the hill and its crowning fort from this distance I could appreciate his scepticism. Caius and I merely smiled at each other and left him to believe what he would.
Caius nodded to the north, where cloud banks were rolling in. "It looks as though we barely beat the weather on the road. It will be pleasant to rest by a glowing fire tonight while the rain falls outside on other people." I agreed with him and we galloped the rest of the way, suddenly wild with impatience to be home.
Our welcome was chaotic and overwhelming. Luceiia wept openly with relief and love as she ran to meet me, uncaring who was watching. The feel of her body as she threw her arms around my neck and leaned into my embrace reminded me quite violently of the pleasures we had known after even brief separations in the young days of our marriage, and so total and insistently demanding was my own relief to see her again that, in spite of all the hubbub around us, I managed to spirit her away to our own room. There we tumbled each other hurriedly like a couple of spring colts, and yet thoroughly, too, like the well-accustomed partners we were. We rejoined the others later, hand in hand, flushed with our renewed knowledge of each other.
Everyone in the Colony had assembled in the grounds of the villa, and rumours of our journey and our adventures were on everybody's tongue. Variations on the story abounded so riotously that eventually Caius was forced to call everyone to attention and make an impromptu speech, telling the news of our official recognition as a colony and of the designation of our military resources as "irregular troops." There would be a full meeting of the Council the following day, he said, to discuss thoroughly the differences our new commission would make to all aspects of our future.
There was little work done on the Colony that day. It was a spontaneous holiday, and the midday meal developed into a major celebration that lasted well into the late afternoon, in spite of the rain that fell intermittently throughout the day. When darkness fell, the last, determined celebrants removed themselves indoors and lighted, it seemed, every lamp and candle in the Colony to accommodate their dancing, games and music. By the time Luceiia and I regained our bed, legitimately this time, we were both almost exhausted enough to fall asleep immediately, wrapped in each other's arms. Almost, but fortunately not quite exhausted enough.
The Council meeting scheduled for the following day did not begin until the tenth hour of the morning and it lasted for five hours. It was not an arduous meeting, for the items to be discussed were all positive and beneficent and the spirit of the Council members was light-hearted, but Caius was looking tired by the time we adjourned. I walked with him to his day-room, where he stopped and ran his hands fondly over one of the codexes that lay on his work-table, where he had left it before we set off to Londinium with Seneca.
"It is good to be home again, Publius," he said. "I think I will write for a while, before the light goes. My eyes are getting bad, you know. It hurts them now whenever I have to write by lamplight, and there was a time not long ago when I could write all night with only one lamp lit and never notice any strain at all."
"That can't be good for anybody's eyes, Caius," I told him. "I think it is a good idea to do it by daylight, if you have the time and the opportunity. Although why anybody would want to write as much as you do mystifies me." He looked at me and smiled, but said nothing. "What do you write, anyway?" I asked. "I mean, you have spent hours and hours writing every day now for years and yet you never show anyone what you've written ... At least, I don't think you do. Do you?"
His smile became wider. "No, Publius, as a matter of fact, no one has ever seen what I have written. No one has ever expressed any curiosity about it, except Luceiia. She knows what it is, although she has never read it. And she knows that when I die it will pass into her keeping."
"Well, do you mind my asking what it is?"
He smiled at me. "No, not at all, since it was you who inspired it."
I stared at him in amazement. "Me? What did I do?"
Caius laughed. "What, Publius? You do not even remember? You were irate with me for writing my military memoirs! Surely you recall that? You told me I should think of my own descendants and write for their guidance in future years." I vaguely remembered the occasion. "Anyway, that is what I have been writing ever since that day. It is a personal history of the growth of this Colony, set down for the entertainment, and perhaps the guidance, of those descendants of ours who might one day govern this place."
"A history? How do you do that?"
Caius shrugged his shoulders and grinned, in spite of his obvious tiredness. "Very simply," he said softly. "I have disciplined myself to set down, each day, the day's events."
"So it is a chronicle? Like Luscar's log of the Invasion campaign?"
"Mmm." The sound that came from his throat was high-pitched and suggested a negative. "Not quite, Publius, not quite ... More of a journal; less of a legal document. I add my own personal thoughts and observations. There are many of my opinions and thoughts mixed in with the events. As I said, it is a personal history, and sometimes almost embarrassingly egotistical."
"And is that why you have never shown it to anyone? Because it is so personal?"
"Partly." Again he smiled, a faint flicker of amusement, I felt, at his own assumption of importance in this writing endeavour. "Also, the fact remains that no one has ever asked me to show it to him."