‘Why are we in dispute?’
That got a humourless laugh. ‘Nature makes us so.’
‘Before I hand you on, Ohannes, know I will come by tomorrow to see how you are faring.’
‘For which I thank you.’
The introductions to the curator passed off without trouble and Ohannes was shown to their shared accommodation and he and Flavius said their farewells. Stood outside the tent, wondering if he was doing his friend right, he heard Ohannes introducing himself to those he would work with and he seemed easy with it, bringing home again that he had lived, since probably he was Flavius’s own age, a transient life. Was that now his lot?
His next port of call was to seek out Apollonia, sure he caught a sight of Timon disappearing at his approach. If she was glad to see him it did not show, which he put down to shyness, and when he asked if she could walk with him it seemed that she was reluctant to oblige. While he could think of many reasons why that might be, the one that did not occur was that she did not like him and with much effort he slowly broke down her resolve and she finally spoke a little.
Flavius feared he was interrogating her, but without him posing questions there was only silence. She came from a village he had never heard of, and asked about the province it was in she had no idea. Prior to this campaign, in which Timon hoped to make money from the army by washing and mending clothes – not that he toiled himself – she had never been more than five hundred paces from their hut.
Age? She had no idea and if he put her near his own, then Flavius could not be sure so unrevealing was her clothing. When she began to seek to count on her fingers, Flavius noticed how raw were her hands, reddened from the work Timon had her along to do, washing for small payments. In normal circumstances he might have told her all about himself, but the residual reserve he had formed around his identity he kept to, for it made no difference to her who he was.
In the end they just sat for a while, he feeling as tongue-tied as she, which had never been the case with girls at home, where he and his friends had moved on from taunting them to seeking to impress them; it had not, in his case, gone as far as any kind of intimate physical contact, though others had boasted of matters he could only imagine.
‘Timon has left you be?’ he asked and she nodded. ‘Your mama too?’
That suddenly animated Apollonia; she looked right at him, clear fear in her open-wide blue eyes. ‘She is terrified of what he will do.’
‘But I have let it be known what he will face if he harms you.’
‘And how long will you be present to protect us?’
‘As long as is needed,’ he lied.
Flavius realised, with a sinking feeling, that armies form and armies disband, with the elements dispersing, and that would apply as much to camp followers as soldiers. Unless he was present permanently, Timon would have his way.
‘You must not worry,’ he added, lifting her unresisting hand and kissing it, aware that the touch of her skin was affecting more than his fingertips, which had him shift uncomfortably. ‘I will take care of you.’
That was a statement he later lived to deeply regret.
The man from the disbanded contubernium joined at dawn and the words used about new comrades being stiff was borne out by his cold reception. Named Baccuda he was a fellow with no real jaw and protruding upper teeth who proved, on further acquaintance, to be a real dimwit. Any question posed to him took an age to elicit an answer so Flavius gave up seeking to establish from where he had come and what was his fighting background, given there was no time for lengthy interrogation.
They were on the move again, now marching through a string of hamlets edged by tilled fields, or those given over to pasture and full of sheep and oxen, produce that fed the great beast of Constantinople. Halfway through the day the blue of the Sea of Marmara became visible to their right, sparkling in the sunshine with many a sail, some red, most a dull brown, dotting the ocean, either beating up to the port city or sailing away on a firm breeze.
The barbarian foederati were, as usual, to the fore of the host, ready to do battle, even if those scouting ahead could espy no enemies waiting to contest the ground before them, news that rippled through the marching columns. The emperor was, it seemed, content to rely on his walls, for if he had any soldiers they had been withdrawn into the city, which sent a plain sign that God was on their side.
There was, it was assumed, one more temporary camp to make, the last, everyone hoped, before they could settle into something more permanent, which would see those with an eye for a bit of coin setting up shops and taverns at which the troops could take their ease and also their pleasures, be they alimentary or carnal – another fact of campaigning never mentioned in the histories and one Flavius only knew because it was being discussed and anticipated.
As promised, he went to visit Ohannes, to find him aching as much from felling timber as he would have done from marching, only in different places, a fact he made plain to Flavius in no uncertain terms. When the youngster led him away from his part of the camp he followed, producing a litany of moans to let it be laid down, and no dispute about it, that he was a fighter not a saw man.
Flavius spotted a little copse of trees, an area outside the lines of campfires, seemingly deserted, and indicated that was where they should go to talk.
‘I have seen enough wood for a lifetime this very day.’
‘Oblige me, Ohannes.’
Which he reluctantly did. They stopped on the edge, where there was enough starlight with which to see each other, and when Flavius issued an apology, that engendered another litany of complaint, which he had to stop quite brusquely.
‘My friend, it was done for a purpose, so please be quiet and let me explain.’ That got a grunt and a far from happy one. ‘What chance do you think you would have of getting away from here as a member of our contubernium?’
‘Get away from here?’
‘You have a sharp mind, old friend, so I ask you to think on what might have been my motives for arranging your present posting ? one, I might add, I had to pay a bribe to secure.’
The wait for an answer was long, evidence that Ohannes was thinking it through. ‘Do I sense it was not just to get me out from under your feet?’
‘You are halfway to the truth.’
‘Not much good when only you know the other half.’
‘I have a task I would like you to perform, though I cannot command it and would not even if I had the right.’ Ohannes did not respond, leading to an extended silence that forced Flavius to continue. ‘I want you to leave Vitalian’s army.’
‘To which there would be a purpose?’
‘I must go on to Constantinople and I have no idea, even if I can succeed in what I need to do, how long that will take and, while I am engaged in that, how my mother will act if I do not go to her and there is no message to say why.’
‘Which you could have asked for before you had me shifted.’
‘But …’
Ohannes came out with a definite chortle, as he hit on the conclusion. ‘Had I left prior it would have been desertion, for which I could have been strung up if caught and you would have felt the hurt of a proper lash. This way I can go and you are not at risk.’
‘Forgive me if I misled you.’
Not the truth, really; Flavius had worried that a man who could not stop referring to him as ‘master’ might, if included in his thinking, say something to render it impossible; better Ohannes only find out now why he had chosen to act so.
‘You’re a sly one and no mistake, Master Flavius.’
Was that admiration or astonishment? Hard to tell.
‘If you go missing from the forestarii it will not rebound on me, and added to that it has to be easier to go missing from a forest than a march on the Via Gemina. I want you to slip away and go to my mother to tell her in what I am engaged.’