Ashes Under Uricon
Chapter 1. Identity (360)
By Mihangel
Haec dum vita volans agit,
Inrepsit subito canities seni
Oblitum veteris me Saliae consulis arguens:
Ex quo prima dies mihi
Quam multas hiemes volverit et rosas
Pratis post glaciem reddiderit, nix capitis probat.
Numquid talia proderunt
Carnis post obitum vel bona vel mala,
Cum iam, quidquid id est, quod fueram, mors aboleverit?
Life flitted by, old age crept on. Suddenly I was an old man, forgetful of how it all began. I was born when old Salia was consul, and my white hair tells how many winters have passed since then and how many times, after the frosts, flowers have re-decked the fields. What will all this mean, for good or ill, when my flesh is lifeless, when death has destroyed whatever I have been?
Prudentius, Preface
Boys of eleven rarely bother their heads with wondering who they are. But that is what I found myself doing, my very first day at Nonius' academy. Its atmosphere was sedate and intellectual, a far cry from my elementary school with its repetitive round of reading, writing and arithmetic, its harassed and impatient teacher, and his relentless use of the cane. Nonius, by contrast, entered the classroom with grave dignity. He reverently opened the great book upon his desk. He cast a slow and comprehensive eye over the twelve boys and five girls of his new intake as they sat silent and mildly scared in these strange surroundings. And then he read.
Vergil was new to me, and the Aeneid struck an instant spark in my receptive young soul. Never will I forget Nonius intoning its opening lines:
Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam fato profugus Lavinaque venit
Litora -- multum ille et terris iactatus et alto
Vi superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram.
Of arms I sing, and the man who first, fate-exiled from the land of Troy, reached Italy and the Latin shore; a man much buffeted on land and sea by the power of the gods, on account of ruthless Juno's unforgetting wrath.
Vergil was singing the glory of imperial Rome, and there and then his song enslaved me; not merely the sonorous language, not merely the stately rhythm, but the great unfolding story of Aeneas himself, the battered soldier who, carrying his aged father on his back, had from the flames of dying Troy led a despairing band of refugees to found a new nation in the west. Aeneas was a hero, the hero from whom Rome herself had sprung, and Vergil's epic rang in my ears like a battle cry. It was surely this, and the likes of this, that had inspired us to conquer the world. When school was over I avoided my friends and marched straight home, head high and patriotic blood pumping through my veins, proud to be a Roman.
But once home, as I passed the niche with its diminutive images of our household gods, Istopped, as I always did, to pay them my respects: Donnotarvus who looked after our cattle, cross-legged Cernunnos the guardian of the heads of men, the three Mothers representing fertility, sustenance and compassion, and the naive little Hooded Ones, the homely dwarves who stood for our family togetherness. Doubts, at that point, began to nibble at my new-found certainty. How did these very British beings square with the mighty gods of Olympus who had so buffeted Aeneas in his wanderings? Juno said nothing to me. I knew of course who she was -- the bitchy wife of Jupiter, the boss of the Roman pantheon -- and she was there in her official place in the Town Hall, honoured once a year in tedious civic ceremonial. She was a Roman formality, and she was not mine. Yet how could I feel Roman -- how could I be Roman -- without acknowledging her and her colleagues? I asked my own gods, and my mind began to clear.
I was not really Roman after all, was I? I was not one of the conquerors. I was British, and the British, in hard fact, were the conquered. The Romans were different from us. They were not our enemies, not now, though they had been long ago. But they were our masters. Benevolent they might generally be, but they were still our masters.
Their influence was all around. Latin was the invariable language of school, of literature, of the polite society to which we hardly belonged, of the army, of the law, of the government and its thousand bureaucratic tentacles which so infuriated my father. Latin spilled over into everyday life in all manner of details. In the wording on coins, for example -- DN CONSTANTIVS PF AVG, they said, 'Our Lord Constantius, dutiful, happy and august,' which one took with a sizeable pinch of salt. Or in dates -- I had been born on the sixth day before the Kalends of September in the consulship of Salia and Philippus, or (if you prefer) in the twelfth year of the same dutiful and happy Constantius, or (if you are pernickety) in the 1101st year since the founding of Rome.
But the fact that Roman practice pervaded our life did not make us Roman. We might know Latin, but we talked nothing but British among the family, and to our gods, and with our neighbours, and in the shops, and on the farm where some of the hands had no Latin at all. Never did I speak Latin to my friends, except for special effect. Sometimes we made a day of it and scampered the three miles to Virocodunum where, three full centuries before, our tribe of the Cornovii had made its last stand against the invaders. We would slog up the slope to the ramparts of the old hill-fort, and there we would play our war-games, childishly re-enacting the siege. Most of us preferred the role of Britons, dying in proud but vain defence of our freedom. But some were willing to act as Romans simply because they liked to be on the winning side. The Romans always won. That was what history decreed. Yet when an infant Roman soldier fell and grazed his knee, it was in British that he blubbered, and in British that his enemies comforted him.
Three centuries is a long time. We were Roman citizens now, all of us who were free-born. In our distant corner of the sprawling empire we were prospering, usually, in our quiet and modest way. We owed allegiance, usually, to the emperor in far-off Constantinople or Rome or wherever he happened to be. We paid our taxes to him, and in return he defended us against our enemies; or rather he was supposed to, but far from always did. Another of our war-games was to man the town's skimpy and half-rotten wooden palisade set on an earthen mound, local Britons shoulder to shoulder with a handful of Roman troops, fending off baying hordes of Irish barbarians who had outflanked the meagre coastal garrison and come marauding far inland. This game worried me. I could not readily cast myself as Irish, for the Irish were our present foes. But while I happily slaughtered Romans in make-belief at the hill-fort, I was uncomfortable at slaughtering Irish, even in make-belief, from the town walls. I was uncomfortable at calling them barbarians at all; for Bran was Irish, and Bran was not a barbarian. He was my friend.
More accurately, Bran was of Irish descent. His great-great-grandfather had been bought by my great-great-grandfather back in the days when Irish traders had ferried their own people over the sea to sell to us as slaves. The boot was now on the other foot, for the Irish in their marauding were enslaving many more of us than we of them. Of the current members of Bran's family, Tigernac ran the house and attended to my father, Roveta presided over the kitchen and looked after my mother, and their son Bran was my slave. Not my personal property -- I was still too young for that -- but for all practical purposes he was mine. He was three years older than me, tall, handsome, fair-haired and loose-limbed, and a very special companion. My relationship with my ordinary friends was straightforward, for we were equals. My relationship with Bran was different, for we were not equals, and we both knew it. But I made us as equal as I could. My father had made it quite plain, as far back as I could remember, that it is not a slave's fault that he is a slave. It is his misfortune. He is still a human being. And I took the advice to heart.
Pondering over my identity, that afternoon, saw me as far as the bath. There I found Bran coming up from the stoke-hole. He asked at once how my day had gone, and as I stripped and lay down for him to oil me I told him all that I had heard about the Aeneid, and recited what little I could remember. He understood my excitement. He was, for a slave, well-educated. He could read and write. His lessons had been paid for by my father, who had no truck with the philosophy of keeping slaves ignorant, and Bran's British and Latin were as good as mine. More than that; his forebears had passed down the Irish language and the Irish tales, so that he was trilingual. And he was sensitive and intelligent. He was well qualified to help in my perplexity.
"Bran," I said when we had progressed to the hot room and I was getting up a sweat. He had shed his tunic and was wearing only drawers and, as protection against the searingly hot floor, wooden-soled bath sandals. "Bran, what are you?"
Naive questions always made him tease me, which could be exasperating. I felt he was treating me as a brat; which no doubt I was.
"Your slave, master."
"Dammit, Bran, don't call me master. I've told you a thousand times. Call me Docco. And what I mean is, what do you feel you are? Irish? British? Roman?"
"I feel whatever you feel you are."
Despite my tender age, I thought I could understand. He did not know what answer I expected, and a slave, even a slave who is a friend, is anxious to avoid offence. But I persevered.
"But you must have your own ideas. Forget about me. If I died tomorrow, what would you feel?"
"Desolated."
Frustrating again. It was still not the sort of answer I was after. But he seemed to mean it. He did mean it. We were friends.
"Well, thanks. And I'd be desolated if you died. Of course I would. But would you feel more Irish if you didn't have me to bother about?"
He hesitated, at last giving it serious thought.
"No," he said. "I've never known anything but this." He waved his hand vaguely around. "I'd never want to go to Ireland. I doubt they'd understand my Irish, for a start. And life's so basic there, from all I hear. None of the comforts of Britain. Of Viroconium. Of this house. None of the . . . well, of the civilisation. And then the Irish are your enemies. Enemies of Britain, of Viroconium, of this house. I could never be your enemy. Are you ready to be scraped?"
I nodded and turned on to my front, and he got busy on my shoulders with his strigil. As he worked methodically down, I wondered -- it had never occurred to me before -- who scraped Bran in the bath. I must ask him, but not now. This conversation was too important.
"But if you went back to Ireland," I objected, "you'd have the freedom you don't have here. Wouldn't you swap our civilisation for that?"
He stopped scraping. "Freedom," he said softly, "is what you do with what's been done to you."
As I thought that over, Bran resumed his scraping. He had now reached my buttocks, and it suddenly struck me that he never oiled inside my crack, or opened it to scrape inside, as my other friends and I did to each other when we bathed together. That too had not occurred to me before.
"Did you know," he continued, "that three years ago, after my grandma died, your parents offered my parents their freedom?"
This was news to me, and very interesting. "No. I didn't. And they turned it down?"
"Yes. They chewed it over, and included me in their talk. They've met plenty of other people's slaves, they said -- not just slaves of Britons, but of Romans who're passing through -- and they know how well placed we are. They know that when they grow old you'll look after them, just as you did my grandparents, and theirs. If we stayed on in your service as paid servants we wouldn't be any better off, because you already give us all we need. And if my father took up some trade, life would be thick with uncertainties. Don't wriggle." He was scraping my feet, and tickling. "They appreciated your parents' offer. It was typical of them, they said. But they turned it down . . . There, that's your back done. Roll over."
I rolled over. By this stage of the proceedings, what with the sensuous stimulation of my skin, I usually had an erection. It had started a year or so before and, while it never embarrassed me a whit, at first it had embarrassed Bran, though by now he was used to it. But today our talk was too engrossing, and nothing stirred.
"But that was your parents' decision, really," I said. "Not yours. If you were offered your freedom, would you take it?"
"No." He was quite definite. "Not if it was just a reward for good service. As it was when it was offered to my parents."
Even I recognised, young though I was, that he had left something important unsaid. I was about to probe further, but he went on.
"You see, Docco, your life and mine . . . they're intertwined."
He wiped the gunge of sweat and dirt and oil off the strigil with a towel, and scraped carefully around my little tool and balls without touching them. He never touched them when oiling me, either.
"That's what I meant when I said that I feel I am whatever you are. And I reckon you're not Roman. Not wholly Roman, thank goodness. Partly, yes -- otherwise you wouldn't be having a bath like this. But you're more British than anything, whatever Vergil's been putting in your head. Did Nonius tell you who Vergil was writing for?"
I thought back and remembered it word for word.
"He said that he was writing for the Romans, at the beginning of the empire. But that what he wrote was a beacon to guide the ages to come. The voice not only of Rome but of all mankind."
"There you are, then. You're a Briton, basically, and therefore part of all mankind. Right, you're done." He had reached my ankles. "We'd better get a move on. Your father will be wanting his bath, and I've got to help in the kitchen."
I had a quick wallow in the hot tub to rinse off, and Bran dried me, followed me to my room to find me a clean tunic, and disappeared. For an hour I lay on my bed, thinking gratefully over what he had said, and speculatively over what he had not. Tomorrow, I reckoned, I had two very particular questions to put to him. Then an idea swam into my head, and I wandered along to the kitchen. Little did I know it, but that idea was to set my friendship with Bran on a new path.
Later, in the dining room, there were only my father and myself for dinner, for Mamma was poorly. She often was, these days. She had had a bad time, apparently, when I was born, and had nearly died. The midwife had told her that another child would certainly be her death, which was why I had no brothers or sisters; any more than Bran did. She had got over that, but for the last few years had been ailing with some other illness, nobody knew what.
Tad too asked how things had gone at school, and I told him what I had told Bran. He chuckled.
"Arma virumque cano! So Vergil made you feel proud and Roman?"
"Yes, very. But only for the time being. Then I began to feel more British than Roman. What do you feel you are, Tad?"
"The same, Docco. Exactly the same. People come in a whole range of types, you know. Like the colours in a rainbow, one shade merging into the next. If you take the full-blooded Roman as the red end, I'd say that we were nearer the other end. At blue, perhaps. We've adopted some of our masters' habits. Without them, we wouldn't have this." He tapped the jar of fish sauce with his knife. "Or this." He looked at the wine cup in his hand. "If it wasn't for them, we'd have nothing to drink but beer. But our cousins up in the mountains have precious little contact with the Romans, and they're still right at the violet end. No fish sauce. Nothing but beer."
"But why are we so different, Tad? I've never met a Roman, a real Roman. I mean, how are we different? Apart from language?"
"Well, we treat people differently, for a start. For instance, a Roman wife is very much under her husband's thumb. With us, husband and wife are equals. Do you reckon your Mamma's under my thumb?"
I grinned. "No!"
"I hope not. Nor me under hers, either. And Romans are rigid. They live by the rule-book. They put their own dignity above other people's. Real Romans, that is. I've met plenty of Gauls and Spaniards, say, who're more Roman than we are but are still fine and easy to get on with. But real Romans . . . not necessarily from Rome or even Italy, but people who subscribe to traditional Roman ways . . . well, I've never yet met one I really liked. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure there are good Romans, just as I know there are bad Britons. But I reckon the closer a Roman is to the red end, the colder he's likely to be. Harder. More unfeeling. The real Roman exploits people."
He interrupted himself to pick bones out of his salmon.
"Whereas we care, or we try to. We try to treat people as individuals. To respect their feelings, and their dignity. Take your own case. You'll come of age when you turn fourteen. If you were a girl you'd come of age at twelve. After that, boy or girl, you own your own property. After that, if I wallop you, you can take me to court. After that, you can leave home if you want -- I hope you won't, but you can. After that, your personal life is your own affair and you can marry without asking me.
"But if we were Romans, you'd be under my authority indefinitely, either until I died or I released you. In fact in strict law -- I think I'm right in this -- I could even kill you with impunity. You'd have no property rights. You'd need my permission to marry, and your wife would be under my authority, although you could have a mistress, or even several, and you could ditch them as you saw fit. But look at what British law says about that -- if a man sleeps for only three nights with a girl and then ditches her, he has to pay her compensation. Three oxen, I think it is. Don't forget that, Docco" -- he wagged a mock-serious finger at me -- "when you're old enough. So which of those approaches appeals to you?"
"Ours. No argument."
"Agreed. I'm not at all surprised you've fallen for Vergil. He's great stuff, so long as you keep him in context. Nor that you got flushed with Roman patriotism. But you've been pretty smart at recovering your Britishness. How come?"
"I talked to the household gods," I said, and saw approval in Tad's face. "And then I talked to Bran."
Bran had been in the dining room all along, waiting on us in his usual silence. Tad looked at him in approval too.
"Good for you both. Why do you take that line?" he asked Bran.
"Sir, because no Roman, from all I hear, would treat his slaves as you treat us."
"Thank you. Well, let's take that a step further. Today's a milestone for Docco, a special day. And so it's a special day for us too. First of all, Bran, would you give Docco some wine, please? Do you think it should be watered?"
"I think he could take it neat."
Bran was straight-faced. He knew my capacity, having often enough given me neat wine in the kitchen, surreptitiously.
"But in moderation," he added austerely.
"Very well then, neat but in moderation. Thank you. And now would you care to lie with us and join us with a cup of your own?"
"If you'd excuse me, sir, I'd rather not. I've already had wine this evening."
"And," I could not help interjecting, "a large cup of it, too." I was feeling happily mischievous.
"How do you know?" asked Tad, surprised.
"I waited on them in the kitchen while they ate."
Tad bellowed with laughter. Even Bran wore a broad grin, and I had a third question for him.
On the way to bed I passed the household shrine. The Romans were welcome to their own gods, so long as I had mine. I said my thank-you and left them two olives I had saved from dinner. Next morning the food would be gone. I used to think that the gods ate it. Nowadays I suspected that Roveta tidied it away when she did her housework, though I had never seen her at it.
That day -- those few days -- lie more than fifty years in the past. At various stages in my life I have relived them, before half-forgetting them again. My hair may now be white, but reliving them once more has brought the detail back as clear as if it were yesterday, for they were the time when I began to grow up, the time when my path through life began to be defined. What it will all mean, for good or ill, when death has destroyed whatever I have been, is more than I can say.
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