Sarum

  “This territory is being organised,” he told the young chief. “In view of your co-operation, the governor has decided to reward you.”

  At last. This was what he had been waiting for.

  “Which area am I to rule?” he asked eagerly.

  The swarthy man frowned. Whatever was this young Celt talking about? He took no notice and continued.

  “All the land of the Durotriges will remain under military occupation. Sorviodunum is excepted and will form part of the land for sixty miles to the east, which is to form a new client kingdom.”

  Tosutigus went pale. This was all the land that the Atrebates had occupied in their heyday; a huge and magnificent territory.

  “I am to rule all that?”

  The swarthy man paused.

  “Rule?” He decided he must have misunderstood the young native.

  Tosutigus shook his head in wonder. He had never dared to hope that his letter would have impressed the governor so much.

  It had not occurred to the swarthy Roman that Tosutigus expected to rule anything and even now he failed to realise the great delusion that still filled the young chief’s mind. He went on stolidly.

  “The new king of all the Atrebates is the chief Cogidubnus – he’s your king now. In recognition of your gift to the emperor, you are exempt during your lifetime from all taxes on your estates – both the annona and the poll tax.”

  Tosutigus stared at him, only gradually understanding what was being said. He had heard of Cogidubnus of course – a pro-Roman chief of the Atrebates with estates far away in the south east.

  “He is my king?”

  “Yes.”

  “What am I to rule then?”

  “Nothing.”

  He turned it over in his mind.

  “Is he a Roman citizen?”

  “The emperor has granted him citizenship.”

  “Am I?”

  “No.”

  “What am I then? What status have I?” he asked in sudden despair.

  “Peregrinus: a native.”

  “So, apart from the tax exemptions, that’s all I have?”

  “That’s all.”

  What Tosutigus should have realised was that the Romans were following their normal pattern in settling a new province, and that in fact they were dealing with him kindly.

  The governor was wisely maintaining a military zone in the territory of the troublesome Durotriges, and rewarding the Atrebates for their longstanding friendship by, at least temporarily, restoring their lands. This would leave the troops and administrators free to deal with the north and the west of the island where most of the tribes were yet to be conquered. At that moment, the legionaries were constructing the great road known as the Fosse Way that ran from the western part of the conquered Durotrigan lands in a north eastern diagonal across the whole of the southern half of the island. This formed the frontier from which they would advance. In time, both the client kingdom of the Atrebates and the military zone in the south west would disappear – though perhaps not for a generation. Then there would be provincial capitals, councils and native magistrates with the chance to obtain the coveted Roman citizenship. But not yet. To have excluded this obscure young chief from the military zone and to have given him generous tax exemptions was to treat him better than he had any right to hope.

  But still Tosutigus dreamed.

  It was the following year that he made the journey eastwards to pay his respects to Cogidubnus; and when he did so he received two more shocks.

  The new client kingdom of Cogidubnus was so large that it contained two provincial capitals, the northern one of which lay on the main road from Sorviodunum to Londinium. It was called Calleva Atrebatum.

  The first shock came when he saw it. He could have wept: for though only half built, Calleva was everything he had hoped Sorviodunum would be. It contained a forum, handsome buildings of wood, even a few of stone, and a generously proportioned network of streets covering many acres. But the king, he discovered, was not there. He was far away on the south coast and it was there, seven days later, that Cogidubnus and the chief from Sarum came face to face, and Tosutigus received the second blow.

  Tiberius Claudius Cogidubnus – he had wisely taken the emperor’s first names as his own as a mark of respect – was a large, powerfully built man, already middle-aged, with greying hair and glittering blue eyes. He had no particular interest in the young chief from the west of his territory, but greeted him courteously enough. His mind at that moment was principally occupied by the great building he had in hand. For on a splendid site near the sea the new king of the Atrebates was building a sumptuous villa.

  It was everything Tosutigus had ever dreamed of, and more. With envy he followed the burly king through its rising halls and courtyards. In astonishment he looked at the mosaics that were beginning to adorn its floors: here a group of dolphins was depicted dancing around Neptune the sea god; elsewhere, a peacock strutted in a Roman garden. There were even windows with green translucent glass in them, shedding a cool light on the paved floors inside. It was a noble building, worthy, it seemed to him, of a Roman senator, and as he gazed at it he realised the vast gulf that separated his dream of power from the reality of the little mansio at Sorviodunum.

  “This,” he thought, “this is Rome.”

  He stayed there for two days. Cogidubnus thanked him for coming and gave him a small statuette of himself. Then he returned to Sarum. In the sixteen years that followed, Tosutigus lived quietly. When the rebel prince Caractacus fought his brave but useless rearguard action against the Romans in the south, he did not even bother to ask for help from the chief at Sarum. Cogidubnus had politely ignored him as irrelevant; the Durotriges remembered his name with contempt; but by everyone else he was almost forgotten – one of the many nameless, petty chiefs who existed in the island at this time.

  The year after his visit to Cogidubnus, he had married. The girl was the third daughter of another minor chief of the Atrebates. This too, had not been without humiliation. The girl’s father was poor, and Tosutigus’s reputation with the Durotriges, although the two tribes had taken different sides, did not speak very well for him with the Atrebatic chief: he refused to give the girl a dowry. Tosutigus took her all the same: she was a striking, red-haired girl with a tempestuous temper, who had given him a daughter and lived six more years before suddenly falling sick one winter and dying.

  He had not remarried. His marriage had not been especially happy. After his wife’s death he had contented himself with a woman he visited in Calleva from time to time, and his affections had centred on his daughter, Maeve, whom he adored and who looked strikingly like her mother. At forty, Tosutigus had become a quiet, middle-aged widower, somewhat withdrawn from the world, living on his estate in a provincial backwater.

  The settlement was certainly nothing much to look at. Beside the dune, scarcely occupied now except for a few huts, and only used occasionally as a desultory market, the bare hard roads intersected and cut their lonely way across the empty ancient tracks and ridges. By the entrance on the eastern side there was a cluster of huts used by Balba and some of the weavers. Down in the valley below, the small settlement of Sorviodunum contained a well-run stables for the governor’s messengers, a small inn where travellers could rest, and a little group of store houses. It was presided over by three soldiers who had little to do and who would gather in the porch of the largest storehouse and play at dice by the hour. The only other regular visitor was a clerk from the procurator’s office who came only at intervals to supervise the imperial estate and arrange for the sale of the emperor’s grain at the end of the summer.

  Yet Tosutigus had some reason to be contented. Sorviodunum was at peace; though some of the western chiefs used the Boudiccan revolt as an opportunity to rebel, Tosutigus took no part in it at all. And even if Sorviodunum remained no more than a staging post, the sporadic traffic through the place was important. From the south-west, by the new road through the land of th
e Durotriges, came the prized Kimmeridge shale – a dark, lustrous stone that the Romans mined eagerly at the coast. A new road had also been built to the west and along this came lead from the mines in the western hills, bound for the growing towns of Calleva and Londinium, from which it might be shipped to Gaul and beyond.

  Moreover, the tax concessions given him had turned out to be worth more than he realised. At a time when land yielded the best return of any investment in the empire, the untaxed revenues from his estates over the years had made Tosutigus a rich man. In his farm, simple as it was, handsome firedogs of wrought iron decorated with gold stood before his hearth. His daughter Maeve wore armlets and anklets of gold, shale and amber. He ate off the finest red pottery from Arezzo and drank the best wines of Gaul. The family shrine contained ornaments of silver and gold.

  Above all, he had Maeve. She was already turning into a beautiful young woman, with her mother’s cascade of sumptuous red hair, flashing blue eyes and a blazing temper that, while he could still control her, caused him to laugh with delight. He had taught her what Roman ways he could but he had also spoiled her shamefully, allowing her to run wild, and swelling with pride at the easy way she had mastered every horse he had given her.

  “She’s both a son and a daughter to me,” he often thought. And whatever the deficiencies of her education in the new Roman world, she would more than make up for them by her dazzling looks and Celtic fire. He was sure of it.

  “You’ll marry a great chief – a prince,” he told her. “Nothing less will do.”

  But despite all these gifts, his spirit was still discontented. When any Roman official came through, he would hurry down to the staging post wearing his toga, suddenly as eager as he had been as a young man to impress them with his Roman ways. Not a year passed without his evolving some scheme to obtain citizenship, none of which ever succeeded. A month might go by when he would stay on his farm in the valley watching his sheep and cattle, and delight in the company of his wayward daughter; but before long he would wander up to the dune, stand on its overgrown walls, and stare over the high ground as his ancestors had done before him. And for some reason, whenever he did this, his dreams of glory would return as fresh and strong as they had been when he was a foolish young man of twenty.

  Despite his determination to succeed in the Roman world, the chief often spent long hours alone in the family shrine, endlessly inspecting the great sword of Coolin and turning over his grandfather’s horned helmet in his hands. Then he would kneel before the little figure of Nodens, his family’s protecting god and pray:

  “Make me worthy of my ancestors.”

  Once, when she was ten, he took Maeve to the deserted henge, and pointing to the huge sarsens, he told her:

  “Your ancestors built this place in a single day: they were giants, gods. Never forget that.”

  “Is that why I shall marry a prince?” she asked solemnly.

  “The descendants of Coolin the Warrior and the ancient house of Krona deserve nothing less,” he replied.

  To Porteus, as his small chestnut pony clattered towards the west, the broad, hard road to Sorviodunum seemed endless. It was the middle of a cool, grey day when he left the town by Calleva and the clouds had not lifted. Now, in the early evening, he was crossing the last ridge before reaching the place that was to be his new home.

  When he did so and saw the empty dune with the undistinguished little settlement below, his heart sank. On arrival, he discovered that the three legionaries in charge of the place had been warned of his arrival only the day before and it was obvious that they were not pleased to see him. They led him in silence to a two-roomed hut in one corner of the settlement which contained a couch, a camp stool, a table, a horsehair mattress and a single slave to attend to his needs.

  “This is all you have?” he asked irritably.

  The eldest soldier shrugged. He had never liked procurators or their staff.

  “See for yourself.” He indicated the little station with its mean huts, and the empty spaces around it. “There’s nothing else here.”

  The next morning Porteus inspected the place thoroughly. He saw the sweeping ridges where the small brown sheep grazed, noted the many little farmsteads and their patchwork of fields. He saw that the imperial estate was immense and valuable, and that little care had been taken to keep its huge tracts of land in good order. At the gates of the dune he met the squat figure of Balba and could not help drawing back at the pungent smell that emanated from him.

  When he had seen everything he drew his own grim conclusion.

  “It’s a backwater. If I stay here long I shall go mad.”

  When he returned to Sorviodunum, the legionaries told him he had a visitor.

  “The local chief,” they said.

  Tosutigus had taken off the paenula – the hooded cloak which was the everyday costume of most Celts – and had put on a toga, which had unfortunately become splashed with mud on the journey from his farm. He had shaved his beard, but not his flowing moustaches, now turning grey; and on his feet he wore stout boots. He presented a curious, but not undignified figure.

  But it was the figure beside him that Porteus was staring at: a radiant girl, dressed in a Celtic costume of green and blue, with the finest tresses of bright red hair that he had ever seen, falling almost to her waist, a pale skin that was lightly freckled, and sparkling blue eyes. She was, he guessed, about the same age as Lydia.

  “I am Tosutigus, chief of Sarum,” the old man greeted him solemnly. “And this is my daughter Maeve.”

  And to Porteus’s surprise, instead of modestly lowering her gaze as any Roman girl would do, the chief’s daughter stared brilliantly, straight into his eyes.

  When Tosutigus heard that a new Roman official was to be stationed at Sorviodunum, he had hurried down the valley to make a good impression; and within minutes he let the pleasant-looking young Roman understand that it was he who had given the estate to the Emperor Claudius, and reminded him that he was exempt from taxes on the lands that he still held.

  “And where have you come from? What position?” he asked.

  “From the governor’s staff,” Porteus replied. It was true, after all, and he had no wish to explain the circumstances that had brought him to Sorviodunum. Tosutigus was impressed. Could it be, at last, that he had been given a way to get the governor’s ear? Porteus, though he was aware of the effect of his words, was even more conscious of the fact that the girl, for reasons he could not guess at, was still staring fixedly into his eyes.

  Maeve was fifteen; and she had indeed good reason to stare at the young Roman with his curly black hair and gentle brown eyes: for she knew something about him that no one else did.

  Despite her father’s desire to be a Roman, Maeve had been brought up as a Celtic child, and after her mother’s death she had been allowed to run wild. The local women, the wives of Numex, Balba and others like them had taken care of her and whatever she knew about the adult world and her duties as a woman, she had learned from them. It was Maeve who carefully polished the sacred sword of Coolin and the heavy helmet in the family shrine; it was she who planted the little hedge of hawthorn near the house to ward off evil spirits. It was she who knew the story about the locality and her family: the talking head that prophesied to Coolin the Warrior, the raven that would circle the house three times when it was time for the head of the family to join the gods; and the branch of the nearby oak tree that would fall at the moment when he died – folk lore and legends that even Tosutigus often forgot. No one knew the woods and valleys better. She knew which clearings were sacred to the wood goddess Nemetona, which springs and streams were most favoured by Sulis the healing goddess; she knew that the swan flying low over the river might be the sun god in disguise, and must never be shot.

  “Wound a swan, and the sun will make you bleed for hurting him,” the women had told the child.

  She had been well trained in her household duties. Though the daughter of a chief, she was not
too proud to grind the corn herself by hand between the quernstones that the women still used, and her fingers were as deft as any on the big loom where the bright cloth was woven in the huts beside the dune.

  Her father had taught her a little Latin, which she could speak; but she could not read or write. And this was the sum total of her education.

  But she had recently reached an important time in her life; for she had decided it was time to find herself a husband.

  Just three weeks before the arrival of Porteus, when her monthly time was ending, she had gone alone to a little clearing in the woods where there was a spring sacred to Sulis, and there she had stripped naked and carefully washed herself in the spring. The water was cold and she shivered. But as she looked at her long strands of hair and inspected the taut, white lines of her body, she was pleased.

  “Good enough for any man,” she said softly. And now, she sensed, it was time to look for her husband.

  She had not told anyone about this little private rite, but when she came out of the woods she immediately began to count horses. For she had known ever since she was a child, that if a maiden counts horses at the start of her month, then the first man she sees after counting a hundred, will be her bridegroom.

  Three weeks went by. There were not many horses in Sarum, but from time to time they passed on the road. The evening before Porteus’s arrival, she had reached ninety-nine, and at the settlement she caught sight of his horse just before he walked round the corner of the stables to greet them.

  So he was the one! This was Maeve’s secret, and the reason why she stared at him so boldly and intently.

  “He is handsome,” she thought. “And young.” She could see herself on his arm.

  But now that the gods had given her a sign, what came next? How would the courtship take place? About this the fifteen-year-old girl was less sure.

  In the months that followed, Porteus buried himself in his work. The news from Londinium was conflicting. A commission of enquiry had arrived to investigate the conduct of the governor, and it seemed to be siding with the procurator; but then it departed and nothing more was heard.