Dedalus remained mounted, facing forward until everyone except Cay and Uther had gone, and then he turned finally to them. "As officers, you two are permitted to use the baths here in the fort or to avail yourselves of the facilities down in the Villa Britannicus. That's where I'll be headed after I've made my patrol report to the Legate. By that time, of course, you two should be long departed and asleep. Use your day of rest well, cocks. Day after tomorrow, be outside my tent at dawn. Dismiss."
The two cousins saluted, then swung down from their mounts and led them away towards the stables, holding themselves rigidly upright until they were completely sure they were out of Dedalus's sight. As soon as they knew they were safe, Uther threw his arm around Cay's neck, pulling him down into a headlock, and swung him around in circles until both of them fell down at their horses' feet. The animals merely stood and blinked at them, offering no criticism, and for some reason both boys thought that was extremely humorous, so they laughed until their sides ached. Then when they had sobered slightly, they threw their arms around each other's shoulders and made their way to the stables, where contrary to all the rules of Camulod, they bribed one of the stableboys to feed and groom their mounts while they sneaked off to the bathhouse.
Chapter TWELVE
Exactly one year later, two days before the kalends, the first day of August in what Christians would call 419 Anno Domini, Uther Pendragon and Caius Merlyn Britannicus had almost completed their first and last jointly commanded patrol. By that stage of their training, they had successfully completed several perimeter patrols of the Colony lands and had then gone on to complete three far more extensive and demanding territorial patrols, which were expeditions undertaken by an entire cavalry division, a two-hundred-man grouping of five squadrons acting as one army unit. These territorial patrols swept out from Camulod every second month, alternating to cover all the lands to the north on one occasion in a twenty-mile- wide area extending as far as Aquae Sulis and Glevum, and all the territories to the south on the next, covering the same width of land and descending as far as the old legionary fortress of Isca. Uther and Cay had been twice to Isca in the south and once to Aquae Sulis and Glevum in the north within the previous eight months, on each occasion under the command of Dedalus, who had turned out—to their immense surprise—to be an excellent and supportive commander, an inspiring tutor with a keen sense of humour and a good friend, once they had convinced him that they were worth knowing. The two cousins were now on the last probationary phase of their training, in joint command this time of their fourth patrol in division strength, and only nominally under the supervision of Centurion Dedalus, who rode with them purely as an observer on this final occasion.
The patrol arrived at the northern end of their excursion in the town of Glevum. This was a river port built only a few miles upriver from the throat of the estuary that separated Cambria to the north from Cornwall to the south, spilling out into the western sea between Britain and the island of Eire, which the Romans had called Hibernia, the Winter Place, because of its seemingly permanent cloud cover and its rainy, blustery, damp-cold climate.
Glevum was greatly favoured by coastal traders because of its sheltered inland harbour and its close proximity to the sea. Because of that popularity, the town had grown immensely wealthy over the previous decades and centuries of Roman occupation, so that it boasted numerous public and civic buildings with fine marble pillars, ornate pediments and entire walls clad in sheets of the finest marble imported from across the seas. The town had also been the regional administrative centre with a permanently assigned garrison to reinforce the edicts of the governing bureaucrats, and for many years its population had flourished and expanded, been nurtured and nourished by the wealth of trading activities and been protected by the military strength of the resident garrison and the nearby military base at Corinium.
Since the departure of the Roman garrisons, however, less than two decades earlier, Glevum had degenerated rapidly, and its dissolution was plain to see in the dilapidated condition of the streets, where weeds grew between the cobblestones on the main thoroughfares and entire sections of the sophisticated system of stone-carved water conduits that had once served the residential needs of the citizens had been broken and left unrepaired.
The civic government established by the Romans continued for some time after the military withdrawals. But when the army left Glevum and every other town in Britain, the power to enforce the law went with it, and the entire country began to fall, ipso facto, into a condition of anarchy. It took some time after that, however, for the truth of the situation to be fully understood, because although the force behind the law had departed, the reputation of the law remained. For hundreds of years in Britain, the ordinary people had been conditioned to behave lawfully, respecting the traditions and the proscriptions set in place by the legal, military-backed authorities, and so they continued to do so for months, and in some instances for years, after the fact of law had broken down and ceased to exist. Only very gradually did it become clear that the government had become a toothless guard dog and that people could now behave with abandon and break long-standing laws with impunity because there was no organized force in existence to stop them or to punish them for their actions.
Many of the former Roman towns took steps to safeguard their own welfare by organizing their citizens into quasi-military defensive units, while those that had the wherewithal undertook to hire mercenaries, who then functioned as private armies, policing the towns that paid their way and nominally protecting them against incursions by organized bands of brigands and raiders. Inevitably, however, even in the most successful of those arrangements, the seeds of failure and dissolution had already been sown. Hiring mercenaries to protect wealthy communities was akin to hiring wolves to protect sheep, and so within the space of ten or fifteen years, the towns of Britain, with very few exceptions, began to be abandoned by their citizenry, even though most of those citizens had nowhere better to go. It would be less hazardous, most of them thought, to take their chances of survival in the open countryside or in the forests than to remain, like sacrificial cattle, in once- wealthy towns that were natural targets for thieves and raiders.
Somehow, against great odds, Glevum had contrived to be one of the few towns in the west to retain a few shreds of its original dignity and stability, and Dedalus had told Uther and Cay on their first visit that he suspected its continuing survival had much to do with the ongoing need for its port, docking facilities and warehouses. As long as there were trading ships still plying the sea routes and merchants waiting in places such as Glevum and elsewhere for those ships' cargoes, then an incentive would exist for men of wealth and strength to fortify and defend the ports that served their needs, even if that entailed supporting them from afar and at great cost. That belief was reinforced by the presence of a strong force of mercenaries in Glevum, a force that Dedalus said had been in residence there for more than eight years. These people worked most of the time as stevedores, loading and unloading the ships and barges that came into the harbour. They guarded the docks and warehouses and otherwise kept to themselves, by and large, living a self-contained existence with their own women and everything else they needed in a few of the large dockside warehouses that they had converted into living spaces. They seldom mixed with the citizens of Glevum, but they allowed the town's populace to go on about its business without interference from them.