This morning a small convoy of transports lay at anchor in midstream, their stocky shapes in marked contrast to the long, lean lines of the two naval galleys who were their escort; and the ordered bustle aboard both transports and galleys alike made it clear that they were sailing almost at once.
A group of men came out through the turreted river gate of the town, three of them in the bronze and crimson of the Legions, the rest clearly officials, and strolled down the jetty, talking together.
‘A very fine lot, this year,’ said a little plump man whose many-folded toga showed the purple stripe of a Magistrate. ‘Yes, I flatter myself, an unusually fine lot, especially our big tall lads of the Lower Province.’
‘Oh, of course, if size were the only thing that counted for the Eagles.’ The man in the gilded bronze of a Legate, pacing beside him, gave a sharp, snapping laugh. ‘No; far be it from me to set my stranger’s ignorance against your so many years’ experience of these provinces. I admit that on the parade-ground yesterday I was more impressed by the Upper Province drafts; but in that I may well have been influenced by the commonly held opinion that hillmen make the best soldiers, all the world over.’ He noticed, and did not care, that the Provincial Governor’s plump face looked like that of a baby who has been slapped without cause. He had spent all yesterday evening with the Governor, listening to his ceaseless self-congratulations on the infinite superiority of the Lower Province and everything in it; and had reached the stage where the man’s simplest remark annoyed him.
Behind them, he could hear the town waking to the new day. The sun was rising higher, drawing out the resiny sweetness of the pinewoods, and the light wind smelled warm and tangy, a forest wind. Cornelius Chlorus, the new Legate of the Second Augustan Legion, sniffed it, but without pleasure. He was tired of German forests; swampy, mist-shrouded, rain-drenched German forests. His mind went back over the long tour of inspection that had brought him all up the Limes and the Rhenus defences, in what seemed, looking back on it, to have been ceaseless rain. Three half-drowned months. Well, Jupiter be praised, they were over. Now he had only to pick up the new Rhenish drafts, and proceed with them to Britain, to take over his command. He had inspected the new drafts, and seen them marched aboard last evening; tall, raw-boned, barley-haired lads, mostly descended from the Legions—the Second among them—who had served here under Agrippa and Germanicus, and married wives and settled when their service was over. Now it was time that he went aboard himself.
As he reached the edge of the jetty, with his two young staff officers behind him, the trumpet sounded from one of the galleys, clear and sweet across the water. She had weighed anchor a short while before, and lay with her oars moving just sufficiently to keep her station against the current. Now her bow came round, the beat of her oars growing suddenly quick and purposeful as her rowers sent her speeding in towards the jetty. She was a low-set forty-oar galley, carrying her oars in a single tier—the towering triremes of the south would be useless in the steep northern seas—and for the first time, as he watched the lean, swift lines of her and the perfect precision with which her oars rose and fell, a gleam of pleasure showed in the hard face under the eagle-crested helmet of the Legate.
On she came at racing speed, the water curling back from her bow above the deadly underwater ram, the seamen and marines standing ready at their stations, the tall figure of the Master alone on her foredeck; on until it looked as though she must ram the jetty. Then, at seemingly the last instant, the Master’s hand flashed up. The gesture was echoed by the Hortator—the rowing master—seated at the break of the poop, and in perfect unison the oar-blades dropped, and held water.
‘Percol! You would expect her to rear like a horse!’ said one of the staff officers, in quick admiration, as the galley came to a shuddering halt amid a turmoil of white water.
‘Surely. The Master knows his job,’ nodded the Legate. The Master’s hand fell, and again the Hortator echoed the movement, this time with a sweeping gesture. Again the rowers bent to their oars; but now those on the steerboard side backed while those on the larboard gave way; and the galley came about in her own length. For the first time the Master’s voice sounded. ‘Way enough.’ The oars slid fore and aft, and she settled lightly, broadside on, to the fenders.
Seamen sprang to secure her, and to run out the boarding bridge, and the trumpeter stood ready to sound as the Legate stepped on board, while on the jetty the Legate himself, belatedly remembering his manners, had turned to take a courteous leave of the Provincial Governor and his officials. And on the crowded rowing-benches, the galley slaves dropped over their oars, motionless, as though they had no life save in rowing and when they ceased to row the life went out.
Sixth from the bow on the steerboard side, Beric sat slumped in his place like the rest.
It was almost two years since he came north with many others sentenced to the galleys, to fill the gaps in the Rhenus Fleet. He knew that, because it had been late spring when first he was shackled to the rowing-bench, and there had been another spring since then, and now it was spring again. The scent of the sun-warm pine-woods blowing down the little wind was not quite lost, even in the reek which rose from the close-packed rowing-benches of the Alcestis. Once—even last spring—it had stirred old longings in Beric and hurt him unbearably, but then he had been only a year with the galleys: now he had been two, and he was beyond the hurt of such things.
He scarcely ever thought of Lucilla now, nor of old Hippias, nor even of Gelert, his dog. He thought of Glaucus sometimes, because it was pleasant to hate; and he thought what a fool he had been to refuse Glaucus his help over the mare. What had possessed him to be such a fool? He could not remember, and he did not try. What did such things as thine and mine matter, after all? If you were stronger than your neighbour, you grabbed: it was as simple as that. He was not above stealing somebody’s share of the black beans and rotten dried figs and sour wine when the food came round—so long as Jason, his oar-mate, did not go short thereby. They all grabbed more than their share when they got the chance, for they were always hungry. At feeding time they would howl like dogs, Beric as loudly as any, baying for the black beans and sour wine passed round from bench to bench. Sometimes the rowers of three or four benches—more could not reach each other, because of their ankle-chains—would fight like dogs over the food, until parted like dogs by the Argus-eyed Overseer who strode whip in hand up and down the flying-deck between the benches.
Beric lifted his head a little, and looked aft towards the poop before which the Hortator sat at his sounding-table. He saw pair beyond pair of bowed backs, naked and gaunt, striped with scars of the whiplash. Lybian and Scythian, golden Greek and black Ethiopian, Jew and Goth and Gaul; the sweepings of the Empire, shackled like himself, each by an ankle to his bench and a wrist to his oar-mate. Some of them had been here when Beric was first chained among them; some were new-comers; there were always fresh slaves coming in to fill the places of those that wore out and died. You could often tell how long a slave had been at the oar by the look of him, not merely by the age and number of the scars on his back, nor by his gauntness, his cracked and blackened skin, and the depth of his shackle-galls, but by the gradual going out of everything behind his eyes, like the slow going out of a light. After a time, everything went out. Maybe it was better that way, better when one stopped thinking. It did not happen always; it had not happened to Beric, so far, and for good or ill, in some way that he did not understand, he knew that that was because of Jason.
On the jetty, the Legate was still taking an elaborate leave of the officials, while the galley waited with her boarding bridge run out and her seamen and marines drawn up in array. Well, so long as the waiting lasted, one did not have to row. The Legate could take all day and a hundred days over his farewells, for all Beric cared. Once he did come aboard there would be little enough rest for the rowers, until they brought him and his clean and beardless Tribunes to their journey’s end. For the first time Beric wonde
red where it was they were bound for, with the troop transports; but the question had no interest for him, and he let it fall.
Beside him, Jason gave a little strangled cough, and then was silent again. The overseer glanced towards him with a suggestive flick of the long lash he held. But Jason did not again mar the silence of the well-disciplined galley. Beric, with a sudden twinge of fear, moved his hand outward a little on the smooth oar-loom, and as though in reassurance, the gaunt hand of his oar-mate shifted to meet it. For an instant hand touched against hand in comradeship, and shifted apart again.
Jason had been there when Beric came. He was a Greek, and a painter. ‘When you have set the last touch to the last bright feather of your flying bird, and you step back to look, and say to your own heart “I have made a thing, and it is beautiful”, that is a fine time,’ he had told Beric, on the only occasion on which he had ever spoken of himself: ‘The finest time in life, except perhaps the moment when you come to your untouched wall, and the flying bird is still in your heart.’ He had come to Rome to make his fortune, but he had not made it, because Rome did not want the sort of frescoes he painted. ‘I could never paint a fat goddess on a cloud; I had sooner catch the whistling swiftness of wild geese overhead.’ He had lived wildly, and backed Leek Green at the Chariot Races when Scarlet had had all the luck. Finally he had been taken in payment for a debit, and sold into slavery. And when it had dawned on him that he was a slave, he had gone berserk, and attacked the man who had made him one. The man had been a Senator, and Jason had gone to the galleys.
For two years he and Beric had pulled at the same oar, up and down the Rhenus and along the North Sea shores. They had laboured and eaten and slept together, like a yoke of oxen which, once joined, labour and graze and lie down linked together by their yoke-chains, until one of them dies. It was very seldom that they could speak to each other. That brief, wordless contact of hand against hand on the oar-loom had to do instead; and it had come to do well enough.
All that seemed left to Beric of decency and faith and kindness was bound up in what he felt for the Greek beside him, and every time Jason gave that little exhausted cough, Beric suffered the same stab of fear.
But now at last the Legate was coming aboard, followed by his staff. The Master and the Centurion of Marines stepped stiffly forward to greet him at the head of the boarding bridge, the clashing Roman salute was exchanged, and the trumpet sang as he set foot on deck. From his place on the reeking rowing-benches Beric watched the little scene on the poop, the ordered movements, the fierce glint of gilded bronze and crimson horsehair in the morning sunlight, as though it were something happening in another world. The tall man with the eagle-crested helmet had turned to glance along the rowing-benches. ‘You have your rowers well trained,’ Beric heard him say to the Master. ‘I never saw the manoeuvre better carried out.’
He should have said that to Porcus, Beric thought, with a savage twist of the mouth. To Porcus, the Overseer, whose whiplash had given them their training: might his soul rot for it! He heard the crisp ring of orders, and the seamen ran to their new stations; the Hortator raised his hammer, and all along the benches the rowers tensed to their oars. ‘Let go’ and ‘Shove off’ came the orders, and the galley gave a little resilient shudder and swung out from the fenders as they were obeyed. ‘Clack!’ came the hammer on the sounding-table, and the forty long oars dipped as one.
The Legate on the poop turned and flung up an arm in final farewell to the knot of officials on the jetty, and the Governor, answering the gesture, called across the widening water: ‘Fair winds to Britain, Cornelius Chlorus!’
The words, meant for the Legate, came also to the straining rowers. Beric heard them with a sense of shock, as though the oar had bucked under his ribs. Fair winds to Britain! Fair winds home! Suddenly the longing for his own hills, which had dulled in him like so much beside, woke to a wild and frenzied beating, and the bitterness of despair rose in his throat and choked him. He came out of the blind moment to see his own hands and Jason’s on the swinging oar-loom, and the blue glint of the light on their irons.
The Alcestis was in her place now at the head of the little convoy, while her sister the Janiculum lay watchful at the tail; and all down the line the transports were weighing anchor, the brilliant sails unfurling to the light following breeze. Beric would have known when the Alcestis’s sail was set, even if he could not see the wind-filled curve of it bending to the low mast, orange-scarlet against the pine-woods and the milky sky; he would have known it by the sudden sense of increased purpose and buoyancy. He knew every mood and condition of the Alcestis by this time, as though she were a mare. Every sound of her, every sight and smell, every variation of her behaviour in different seas had entered into him and become part of himself; just as the feel of the oar that he and Jason had pulled for two years, the great firwood oar kept white with pumice stone and the wash of the seas, had become part of himself.
On the fore deck the fleet altar had been set up, and before it the Legate had made offerings to Neptune for a prosperous voyage, and the sharp sweetness of incense drifted down to the rowers from the altar behind them.
Now the voyage was begun in earnest; the marines and seamen who were not on duty had gone below, and the Legate and his staff had disappeared into the cabin under the poop. On the flying-deck between the banks of rowers, the Overseer had begun his ceaseless prowling to and fro, his narrow eyes alert for any excuse to use the long lash he handled with such skill. Every now and then he would find the excuse he sought, and the lash would flicker out like dark lightning, and some poor wretch would yelp with pain as it seared across his straining shoulders. The beat of the Hortator’s hammer setting the rowing pace when needful, the leathery creak of the oars working against their oaken thole-pins, the dip of the blades, and the slap and ripple of water along the galley’s sides; there were the sounds of the Alcestis under way. These, and the never-ceasing sob, rising and falling with the rhythm of the oars, ‘Huyha! Huyha!’ that rose from the lungs of her rowers.
All the long daylight hours it went on, the whiplash and the water-sounds and the sobbing breaths of the rowers, until night came, and the convoy anchored, until morning again made it possible to navigate the river-shoals. Four days the convoy worked slowly downstream, down from forest country into marsh; at last into the maze of waterways of the Rhenus delta, with its sudden mists, its shifting shoals and mud banks among which they must nose their way to the sound of the leadsman’s call, its swift and treacherous currents among low, marshy islands. And on the fifth evening they anchored off the last station of the Rhenus Fleet, a mere huddle of low timber buildings and a repair yard, sheltered by turf banks from the fury of wind and sea alike. And there the water-casks and wine-jars were replenished, and fresh meat brought on board.
On that last night there was meat even for the rowers, beside their usual black beans and sour wine. The Overseer and his Second brought it round in great baskets, and flung it to them, ragged lumps of it. It was half raw, it showed red and black in the lantern-light, and it stank; but they bayed for it like dogs.
Beric got a larger lump than most, but found to his disgust that more than half of it was bone. It was useless to protest. He tore off what flesh there was with his teeth, and swallowed it more or less whole, then looked round for any other fragment that might be torn from its rightful owner. As he did so, Jason produced his own share, scarcely touched, shielding it from the sight of the rest. ‘Take it,’ he said.
Beric’s hand went out involuntarily, then dropped back. ‘No, it is yours,’ he muttered.
‘I do not want it. I have dined over-well on black beans already.’ Jason’s voice still held a glint of the reckless laughter it must once have possessed.
‘Eat it quickly, or you will not have the chance.’
The other shook his head. ‘Truly I have no stomach for it. I cannot eat. I——’ His words ended in the little exhausted cough that his oar-mate had come to dread.
> Instantly Beric was kneeling over him. ‘Eat!’ he demanded roughly, the old fear leaping in his voice. ‘You must eat; it will give you strength.’ He took the lump of meat and hurriedly began to tear it into pieces. ‘Now—it will go down easier now.’ He thrust the first piece back on Jason, who took it without more protest, and made shift to swallow it, though with an effort.
But by that time their neighbours were awake to what was happening. ‘Nay, if his belly is too full, there be others still empty,’ said the guttural voice of the Hun who rowed at the next oar, and his eager hand came out to snatch.
Beric struck it away with a curse, and thrust more of the meat on Jason. ‘Eat again,’ he said urgently; and then, as another hand came out, flung its owner back with his shackled arm. ‘Oh, son of Set! Keep your filthy claws to yourself!’ And next instant a small snarling dog-fight was in being, as the rowers from the bench on either side flung themselves on Beric and Jason.
There came a rush of feet along the flying-deck, and the vicious crack of a whip. ‘Dogs! Vermin!’ Porcus shouted above the sudden uproar. ‘Spawn of Typhon! Off! Off, I say! Get back!’ Again and again the lash curled into their midst. Beric felt it sear like a hot iron across his shoulder as the fight fell sullenly apart, and he stumbled up to his knees.
He found himself staring up into the disdainful face of the Legate, who had evidently been drawn from his cabin by the noise. For a moment their eyes met, and then the Legate turned, and in his cool, impatient voice cut into the Overseer’s raging as he spoke to the Hortator who was also upon the scene. ‘Your cattle are unruly; you should not have given them meat, my friend.’
It was the Master’s voice that answered. ‘That was done by my orders, sir. Before a long trip such as lies ahead of us, meat is good for the rowers; it puts stomach into them.’