Was it guilt that was causing his own nightmares too?
“I do not want to lose you,” he told her. “The nightmares will pass. Trust me.” But she shook her head and repeated: “I have sinned. Send me away or I shall not know any peace.”
For three days he hesitated. He was selfish. If she stayed, he told her, in time he would manumit her and she could become a free woman again. “Perhaps,” he suggested cleverly, “you will then be able to return to Judaea.” But the girl was past aid; she was no longer eating, and by the third day her condition had become so mournful, her weeping both day and night so pitiable, and her pleas to him so desperate that finally, in a fit of exasperation, he shouted:
“Very well, you shall be sold as a slave, if that is what your God demands! But your God is cruel.”
She shook her small head sadly once more and murmured: “He is just.”
The next day watched by Porteus with tears in his eyes, Numex led the girl down to the muddy forum and found a trader who was prepared to take her for a fair price; and whether it was because of the God Jahveh, or the spells of Maeve and her women, something that Numex and the cook had placed in the food, or simply the force of conscience, the affair of Porteus and the Hebrew girl was over. He did not see her again.
A few days later, Porteus returned to Sorviodunum. He was greeted warmly by his wife; he was relieved also that early that evening chief Tosutigus paid a visit to the villa to welcome his son-in-law home. The following morning, as he stood on the high wall of the dune beside the chief and gazed over the familiar rolling landscape where he had accomplished so much, Porteus realised somewhat to his own surprise that he had almost forgotten Marcus and Lydia, that he would soon forget the Hebrew girl and her demanding God, and that he was glad to be back at Sarum.
TWILIGHT
A.D. 427
Placidia said nothing. She felt tired and sad, but she knew she must not show it as she gazed at the angry scene before her. With such dangers on every side, must her little family still tear itself apart?
Her son Petrus had turned and was looking into her eyes for a sign of approval. She gave him none.
Her eyes: they at least were still beautiful: age did not change that. Fine, dark, they had been full of humour once; but now they were thoughtful, a little ironic, and resigned.
She was getting old – her husband often told her so; but still she moved with a stately grace, and the lines on her finely drawn face only added to its look of nobility. She wondered if they knew what strength was needed to keep up that graceful façade – of course not. It was the strength of a woman who knows her worth and who knows, also, that she is not appreciated by the only people she might have hoped would love her.
Yet she loved them. Petrus, her intense son, with her wonderful dark eyes but too little of her commonsense; Petrus, who thought that his quarrels with his father were for her sake, and who truly believed, in his self-centred way, that he loved her. Poor Constantius, her husband. He had already been waxing and polishing his horse’s leather harness for hours, just as he did nearly every day – as if it were important. He respected her – and hated her, because he could not respect himself. And faithful Numincus. The stocky steward with his big head and short fingered hands – he loved her, admired her; he would probably have laid down his life for her. She sighed. But what was the use of that?
These three were all she had. And now they were quarrelling again . . .
It was mid-afternoon and Constantius Porteus was drunk: not very drunk, but as drunk as he usually was by that time of the day.
He was also roaring: not because he was drunk – that usually made him subside into silence – but because he was angry. And did he not have reason to be?
In his hand he still held the leather harness he had been cleaning.
Through the mists caused by alcohol and rage that obscured his vision, he could still see the group in front of him well enough: Placidia, his stately, grey-haired wife who despised him; the squat, square form of Numincus his steward, who was now standing respectfully but protectively in front of her: the fool! And lastly his twenty-year-old brat of a son, who had just finished speaking.
It was on his son that his angry eyes were trying to focus. He would teach the boy a lesson.
“You whelp!” he bellowed.
The young man was looking at him steadily: Constantius was not certain what the expression was in his son’s large brown eyes – was it anger, contempt, fear? It did not matter.
“I’m master in this house,” he roared. “Paterfamilias. Not you.” Defiance. That was it. The short, intense young man with his dark curly hair and shining eyes was defying him. “I’ll have no Germans here,” he shouted. “This is a Christian house.”
“Then what will you do?” the young man hurled back at him instantly: “Nothing, as usual, I suppose – except get drunk and watch my mother being killed?”
Contempt was in every word. Constantius felt his face flush with rage. The mist in front of his eyes seemed to thicken into a red fog.
He opened his mouth to shout, but his brain refused to supply the right word. Then he remembered the harness. With a huge effort, he lunged towards his son, and swung it at him with all his force . . .
There was a loud crack as the leather made contact, followed by a gasp; at the same time he stumbled, almost falling on his knees. His face broke into a foolish grin. That had taught the boy a lesson!
His eyes were clearing. He stared at them in triumph.
Then he frowned.
Something was wrong. The boy was hurling himself towards him – but not from where he should have been – and his eyes were blazing not with hurt but with anger. Numincus’s face was red, his body was shaking, and his stubby hands were clenching and unclenching with fury; and Placidia his grey-haired wife was standing quite still with a huge red mark across her face. There was blood already starting to drip from her mouth.
How had he missed?
Petrus was almost upon him, fists raised to strike. Automatically he raised his arm to shield himself. His face winced, anticipating the falling blows.
“Stop!” Her voice was firm and commanding. Despite the searing pain, she felt a little flush of pride at her self-control.
There was a second’s pause. Constantius was still braced to receive the blows. He heard a cry of anguish from his son. What was happening?
Placidia’s voice again cut through the silence.
“Petrus. Leave us.”
“But look what he has done . . .” the young man protested furiously.
Mother and son faced each other. As Petrus looked at his mother’s face, all the rage and frustration of the last few months seemed to come together in his mind. Was his drunken father going to destroy her too? He felt a wave of compassion for her; he wanted to strike his father down.
Placidia saw it all, and knew that now, more than ever, she must uphold the last shreds of Constantius’s authority.
“Your father and I wish to be alone. Leave, Petrus.” He did not move. “At once.”
At moments of crisis her authority was still complete. Unwillingly, Petrus started to go.
“Numincus, tell my maid I need warm water. Go,” she added sharply, as the steward, too, seemed to hesitate.
They were alone. The shock of seeing his wife’s bleeding face had abruptly sobered Constantius. He felt his body sag with shame. He opened his mouth to speak, trying in his confused state to formulate some apology, but she cut him short.
“Your son is right,” she said quietly. “You must do something. Now leave me.”
He tried to make out the expression in her eyes. Did she feel nothing but contempt for him now? Was she rejecting him? He could not tell. She was staring past him, her face as rigid as a statue.
Humiliated, he moved slowly away through the house.
Yes, he thought, he must do something.
Left by herself, Placidia still did not give in to tears, she longed to weep. But she
wondered for how long this situation could go on.
Petrus, meanwhile, was preparing to leave the house.
The situation at Sarum was grave: there had been nothing like it in four centuries: forif the latest reports were right, the threatened invasion of barbarians might come at any time and destroy Sarum, the villa and the family. If the invaders came now there would be no Roman troops to oppose them, not even a local militia; and, worse for his conscience, Constantius had made no preparations to defend the place.
It was twenty years now since the legions had left the island. Each year he had been confident that things would get better, and that they would return. “Have faith,” he told Placidia and his son. He could see them in his mind’s eye – Christian legionaries marching to the aid of the Roman family at Sarum. But they never came.
Constantius Porteus was not only proud of being a Roman gentleman; he was also, like many of the landholding decurion class, a Christian too. For since the conversion of the great Emperor Constantine a hundred years before, the once despised and persecuted Christian sect had become the official religion of the empire and its army. To be sure, there were still in practice many followers of other cults, and of the old pagan deities too, but as far as Constantius was concerned, he and the emperor were Christian and that was what counted.
To be more precise, he was not simply a Christian but, like many others on the island, a follower of the British-born monk Pelagius, who had in recent years made a great stir in the Roman world. The Pelagians proudly distinguished themselves from other believers by declaring that each individual Christian must earn his way to heaven not only by faith but by his actions.
“God gives each man free will,” he explained it to Petrus. “And God watches our actions – for which we must answer. That’s what counts.”
Technically this was a heresy, but in Pelagius’s native land it was a popular one, and Constantius believed in it firmly.
And so when, that day, young Petrus had come out with his outrageous demand that, like some of the local towns, they should employ German heathens to defend this, a Christian villa, from attack, he had been deeply offended. Still more offensive were the taunts with which, in front of Placidia, the boy had accompanied his suggestions.
“You speak of Roman aid: but the legions have gone: the empire has deserted the island and they’ll never come back.” This was something Constantius could never bring himself to accept. “As for your solutions, follower of Pelagius, where is your God-given free will? Gone in drink. And what are your actions? There haven’t been any.” No son should speak to his father in such a way, he thought. Worst of all, in his heart of hearts, he knew the boy was right.
But now, as he made his way despondently through the quiet rooms of the house, Constantius still muttered defiantly:
“I’ll save my villa. My way.”
The villa of Constantius Porteus, though it was built on the same site, was a far more imposing structure than the one built by his ancestor Caius nearly four centuries before. There were eight large day rooms now, arranged around three sides of a square courtyard, with further wings to which a second storey had been added. There were extensive out-buildings behind the house which formed the home farm. Outside, the building was similarly constructed to the original – a stone base, wattled walls daubed with plaster on the upper storey, and a tiled roof; to one side the old walled garden had been kept; now it boasted beds of irises, poppies and sumptuous lilies, and – its greatest glory – a double line of rose trees down the centre. But inside, the building far surpassed the first and would have gratified every wish of old Tosutigus had he been able to see it. All traces of the original rustic farm were gone. Large, light and airy rooms led one into another. The floor of the entrance hall was made of a soft, pink marble imported from Italy two hundred years before and handsome pilasters of the same material with graceful ionic capitals framed each of the doorways leading out of it. All the main rooms had finely painted frescoes on their walls, some depicting Roman men and women in solemn, graceful attitudes, others with lively hunting scenes.
But the finest features of all were the magnificent mosaic floors, of which the family was rightly proud.
Constantius stood in the doorway of the largest room. The villa seemed very quiet. Placidia had retired with her maid to her room, and his son and the steward had disappeared. As he stood there, gazing into the room, his face softened.
On the floor, stretching for thirty feet, lay one of the villa’s two greatest tieasures. It was a mosaic depicting Orpheus in the happy days before his descent into the underworld to find his love Eurydice. He was picked out in brilliant reds, rich browns and seated in a graceful, somewhat wistful attitude, with his lyre resting on his knee. Around the figure of Orpheus, arranged in concentric circles, were panels of animals, trees and birds, especially featuring the handsome pheasants with their trailing feathers for which the first Porteus had made the estate famous.
It had been made by the great mosaic workshop of Corinium which lay some twenty miles north of Aquae Sulis, and it had been installed by Constantius’s great-grandfather just after the year 300. Its classical theme, with its pleasing allusions to the local flora and fauna was typical of the work which, for four, centuries, had adorned provincial homes of families like the Porteuses all over the empire. “It’s a Roman gentleman’s villa,” his father had always told him. “We’ve been here nearly four hundred years and I dare say we shall be here four hundred more.”
As he gazed at it now, a tear ran down his cheek. The thing was so beautiful; it represented all his Roman culture; he would not let it be destroyed.
It was time for him to pray.
For nearly four centuries Britain had been Roman. Only in the far north, beyond the Emperor Hadrian’s great wall, had the Picts and Scots avoided Roman rule. And for most of that time, the Porteus family at Sorviodunum had enjoyed the pleasant peace of the Roman provincial world. Ordinary freemen had become citizens. Local towns – places like Venta Belgarum in the east, Durnovaria to the south west and Calleva to the north – boasted not only forums and temples, but theatres and arenas too. The baths at Aquae Sulis had been rebuilt several times, each more grandiose than the last. And the Porteus family had always assumed that the Roman Empire would go on for ever.
As the centuries passed however, great strains developed in the empire. It had grown unwieldy; and even though it had been subdivided into four parts – two in the east and two in the west – it still proved difficult to govern. Many times there were rival emperors and civil wars, and the northern island of Britain, with its normal complement of three legions, had sometimes found itself drawn into these disputes, and suffered as a result.
But something else was happening to the Roman world. It was being invaded from the east.
The great barbarian invasions of Europe were a gradual process that began in the third century. Sometimes the newcomers arrived as mercenaries, or settlers; sometimes, like Attila and his Huns they descended like a plague, only to withdraw again. They came from the distant plains of Asia, from the Baltic and Scandinavia; they had names which were to become familiar in European history – Franks, Goths, Burgundians, Lombards, Thuringians, Vandals, Saxons – and no matter how the empire managed to absorb them, there always seemed to be more.
Slowly, very slowly, the mighty Roman Empire had begun to break up.
They were dangerous times, but through the last century the island of Britannia was still prosperous and defended. The legions were there; its towns had stout walls; its shores were defended from the raids of Saxon pirates by a fleet and by fortified ports.
But for how long?
It was probably inevitable that Britain would be separated from the empire; but it is also certain, and sometimes forgotten, that the islanders took every possible action, around the year 400, to break the bond themselves by a combination of greed and bad judgement.
The first action was a manoeuvre by the British legions. Seeing a
new emperor in Italy who was hardly more than a boy, they proclaimed one of their own commanders emperor and marched into Gaul to support him. In Italy, young Honorius was forced, for the time being, to accept this usurper as co-emperor. But the only result of this action for the island of Britannia was to leave it without its normal garrison, undefended.
Next, Burgundian and Saxon hordes crossed the Rhine and invaded Gaul, and the legions there lost control of the province. So now Britannia was isolated too.
It was exactly then that the British made their great mistake. They revolted, declared themselves independent from the empire, and threw out the imperial officials.
Constantius remembered it well. Like many of his class, he had approved of the move.
“Taxes have never been higher,” he told Placidia. “The decurions like me are hardest hit of all – because we have property, they want us to pay for town repairs, roads, defence, everything. And what are we getting in return? An ever increasing army of bureaucrats to be paid, and nothing more than a skeleton force of legionaries to defend us.”
And so the island had organised its own defence, paid no more taxes, and waited on events.
But nothing happened. For the moment the empire had neither time nor resources to concern itself with the island province that had revolted. There was no protest, no returning army, nothing: there was only silence.
And then, in the midst of these troubles, came news of something that for centuries had been unthinkable.
In 410, three months before Petrus was born, Alaric and his Visigoths sacked the imperial city of Rome.
The imperial city, the eternal city, the sacred symbol of Roman rule, had been humiliated by a force of landless barbarians because the city’s proud senators had refused to pay them protection money. Rome had fallen. The shock waves spread instantly to the most distant frontiers of the mighty empire, and it seemed to all men when they heard it, that an age, a world – indeed, civilisation itself – had come to an end.