Deva Tales Read online

  Deva Tales

  By S.J.A. Turney

  DIS MANIBUS (to the memory of)

  Gnaeus Julius Agricola,

  cornerstone of Roman Britain

  I would like to thank those people instrumental in turning Deva Tales from a rough manuscript into a polished work. Jenny and Lilian for their editing. The reenactors of Deva Victrix whose ancient lives are retold herein.

  Cover design by Dave Slaney.

  Published in this format 2017 by Park in the Past

  Copyright - S.J.A. Turney

  First Edition

  The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The Year of the Consulship of Fulvus and Atratinus,

  842 Ad Urbe Condita

  (89 A.D.)

  All about us is the song of battle. A melody of steel on iron, of bronze on wood. It is hard to imagine what the world had been like before the symphony of death. It is all-encompassing. It’s like being thrown into a freezing lake with your armour on and told to swim for it or you die.

  And we would be dead.

  If it weren’t for those hours at the palus, hammering chips out of the timber post, or standing in a field hurling javelins at a badly-painted wooden barbarian, or running around a meadow until our feet were sore, making sure that it became second nature where we ran, where we dropped to one knee, where our shields interlocked, we would all be dead already. Discipline and training is what keeps us alive. It is what keeps us alive to the very end.

  And we are close to the very end.

  A dozen that I know and as many again that I don’t.

  Those are all who stand in the way.

  Perhaps it is time to backtrack from this bloody and violent mess in which we find ourselves and to try and explain how this came about, for one day someone might ask that very question. Well, chronologically, I suppose it starts with me and while I may have only the smaller part to tell in this tale, it is I telling it, and so I fear I should start with myself:

  1. THE RECRUIT

  Gaius Licinius Scriptor.

  Go on. You’ll not be the first people to take the piss.

  That’s posh for a common soldier. A noble connection like the Licinii? And Scriptor? What’s a lad like that doing stomping in line with a name like that?

  Well let me deal with that issue first. Yes, I am of good Roman blood, not a Briton or one of the seemingly endless collection of Germanics that sprout up across the empire wherever swords are bared. My father, in fact, is a member of the ordo – the ruling council – of Verulamium in the south; the most Roman of all towns in this damp isle, even after the bitch Boudicca burned it down and it had to be rebuilt from the ground up. And as his progeny, one might expect me to take up the position of a military officer at some point, in order to help me climb the career ladder. Or one might, if they did not know that my mother was not my father’s wife; that I was whelped in some backstreet caupona in Verulamium to a woman of low virtue but high price.

  Yes. I was illegitimate. And I would likely still be there, scrubbing the floors of that same caupona had my father and his wife not finally decided that the Gods were not going to gift them with legitimate children. I have no idea what he had to do to get her to agree to my adoption, but agree she did. And so last year, my father drew up the official papers and logged them with the authorities in Verulamium and Gaius the kitchen boy became Gaius Licinius Scriptor, son of a city councillor. His one proviso, though, was that I toughen up, serve my empire well, and learn what it means to carry the weight of such a name.

  And that is pretty much the wording he used in the letter he sent to the headquarters of the Twentieth Legion in which he had once served as a tribune. No such glittering path for me, of course. He had proved his lineage by being born. I had to earn mine.

  I had an unusually long probatio period of three weeks and a little more. That’s the time the legion keeps you under tight control and away from anything pointy while they check into your background and make sure you’re a legitimate Roman, a valid enlistment. Well, obviously in my case, that took some investigating, since it had only been months since I was mopping up the filth on the floor of a less-than-reputable establishment back in Verulamium.

  I will always remember that probatio as one of the worst periods in my life. Three weeks I was in Deva – the great fortress of the Twentieth that was some fifteen years old now and gifted them by the hand of the Second when they left a couple of years previously. Three weeks of being considered an unsafe bet. Of being eyed carefully as a potentially non-viable recruit. As time passed so did the rumour grow throughout the fortress that I was actually an illegitimate Briton being passed off as a Roman by some southern noble for his own amusement.

  You can imagine my time there.

  Despite still being probatio, no officer will ever watch a man stand idle, and so while still unable to acquire a weapon and wearing only a basic tunic, unbelted and below the knee like a civilian, I was assigned to the century of one ‘Ocratius’ – a hard taskmaster for certain. Those who deigned to talk to me in those first weeks, including the young recruit Fatalis, assured me that he was firm but fair. All I ever saw was firm at that time, though I now know him to be a man of unrivalled honour. But then…

  With almost half the legion’s manpower in the northern wilds under Governor Lucullus, building forts to keep the freshly defeated Caledonii under control, Ocratius worked us hard, and me most of all, for in his eyes I was still a waster of a civilian. I emptied latrines, butchered cattle for the mess, swept the floors and mopped them, painted walls and polished metalwork. Really, my life was remarkably similar to back home in that dirty caupona. I gathered that we were expecting a visit from Procurator Severus – the second most powerful man in the province – within the month, and so the whole of Deva was being scrubbed to shiny brightness.

  In addition to the centurion, of course, I got to know my fellow recruits. Twelve of us, filtered into two new companies – contubernia – of men, along with four men recently returned from the sick lists to make up the numbers. There were mostly good lads, of course, but it’s hard not to focus on the negative. Especially when the negative was Trucido.

  Aulus Trucido was not a new recruit. He had been in the legion’s hospital for two months following a leg injury sustained in a private fracas that had seen the man lose his preferred immune status, dropped back down into the ranks among the new recruits. Aulus Trucido was a senseless and violent man with all the mental agility of a leg of lamb and all the glittering personality of one of the turds I fished from the latrine floors on a morning when I cleaned them up.

  He had a wide, flat face with a broken nose and small, piggy eyes beneath an overhanging brow topped with wild black hair. I know – it sounds like I’m deliberately caricaturing him as a thug, but if you’d ever met him, you’d know I was erring on the side of kindness. He looked like a thousand pound ox had walked across his face and then backed up for another go.

  It began small.

  I had been sitting in the latrines, my drape-like tunic bunched up on my knees, quietly contemplating matters in one of the few places where Ocratius couldn’t find me and give me another onerous chore – the centurion used the officers’ latrine. I’d been just about finished when in walked Trucido. I suppose I was still relatively innocent at that point and no alarms went off as I sat there, despite
the fact that Trucido wore his usual ‘hungry predator’ expression, and the two other occupants swiftly finished up and left. I sat there and nodded a polite greeting to him. And then, calmly, with a grin of malice, he reached down and picked up my sponge-stick – the ones we use for wiping our arses – and walked out with it, muttering something about ‘natives’.

  Uncomfortable and inconvenient. That was all.

  So I let it pass. Besides, what was I going to do? Yes I could read and write and even had a little command of Greek, but Trucido was a practised brute while I still had the physique of a scullery boy, albeit with mastery over the common broom. I tried to make nothing of it.

  Then, at the end of my first week at Deva, the bastard’s campaign of interference stepped up a level. I had just put away my ubiquitous broom and was making my way to the barracks where we recruits would have our meal. Up in the retentura – the northern end of the fortress – I passed between two of the long barrack blocks and turned the corner towards my own door and walked face first into a punch that carried the weight of a cart horse.

  I missed my meal that night, for I was found unconscious an hour later outside the barracks with a huge red welt on my face in the shape of Sicilia. There were no witnesses, and I never saw the punch coming, nor who delivered it, but even had I not caught sight of the red marks on Trucido’s knuckles the next morning, I would have known it was him. And the way he grinned at me…

  I couldn’t take it to the authorities, of course. Not because of the lack of evidence, though that would certainly have been an issue. No. Because to do such a thing would sign my death warrant. At the moment it was just Trucido – though no one actually stood up for me, I noticed – but if I told tales on one of our own, the number of my enemies would grow daily. It had happened back at Mons Graupius to a legionary called Celer, and he was still largely distrusted half a decade on. So I suffered, and I glowered.

  Three days I had to sleep on my left side because of the painful bruising.

  And then, towards the end of my second week I staggered in, tired and bleary from a late session of scrubbing and polishing the benches in the legion workshops. I crossed the room in the dark, trying not to be overcome by the noise of the other seven occupants farting and snoring, and hauled myself up onto my top bunk only to come face to face in the extreme dimness with a turd sitting on my blankets.

  I knew, of course, whose it was. What I couldn’t fathom was the logistics of the unpleasant prank. I slept on the floor that night, wrapped in my cloak, until it was light enough to clean up and wash my bed clothes.

  None of the others had seen a thing, of course.

  Then, on the day after the festival of Fors Fortuna, we finally had a break from the routine. Since confirmation of my legitimacy still had not arrived, it was common practice for me to do menial chores while the rest of the recruits trained. But on that glorious sunny morning, Centurion Ocratius told the optio that he wouldn’t have me shirking real exercise forever, and I was taken out for the run.

  It wasn’t a full-kit route march, but a twenty mile run in expedite – light kit – and with a borrowed belt for me to hoist up my tunic. Clearly the centurion thought it to be gruelling but, to be honest, after two weeks of polishing benches and mopping shit, the run was quite literally a breath of fresh air.

  Don’t get me wrong. It was exhausting. I have never run more than a mile or two in my life, and I was fairly sure my legs were going to fall off about halfway through. But it was training, like a real soldier, and in the sun and the fresh air, out across the river and southwest towards the low range of hills there that bordered the wild lands of the Deceangli. We could see the tell-tale camps of mining concerns on the hills there, dangerously close to the native tribes, really. Indeed, one of the braver recruits enquired of the optio why the miners would dare to carry out their work in such an area – the Deceangli had officially been pacified for around forty years, yet they produced bandits and roving killers at a surprising rate for a settled tribe. The optio gave us all a strange look and nodded towards a small plateau overlooking a shimmering pond, ringed by higher hills and swarming with honking and trilling cranes.

  ‘Make the most of this easy duty, lads. See those two hills up there? The one on the left was a fort at the edge of Deceangli lands and the other of the Ordovices. It’s been dangerous around here for a long time now. Tribune Longus has posted the next month’s duty assignments, and in the next few weeks you and around half our century will be spending your time building a fortlet here to protect the local miners, then a signal station up on one of those hills that can stay in contact with Deva. Place will be safe enough with a few days of hard work from you lot.’

  How prophetic that run was.

  But seeing the fortlet site for the first time was not the only noteworthy event on that damn run. As we rounded the pond and began to turn northwards again, the optio began running us through our marching orders, calling us first into single file, and then double, then four and back to one and so on. The shorter ones – myself included – were moved to the front in preparation for future shield manoeuvres and given our permanent position. And that left me at the front right point of the column, running at an exhausting pace directly behind the optio.

  At first I had no idea what happened, but it didn’t take long to figure it out. Barely had I stumbled and slammed into the back of the optio’s legs before I caught sight of Trucido out of my swivelling panicked eye and realised he had deliberately trodden on the heel of my boot. It was masterfully done. A little higher and he’d have left painful evidence in the flesh of my leg. But no – he’d tripped me straight into the optio, who disappeared under me with a squawk, at full speed. The unit peeled off around us and came to a halt, managing not to collapse on top of us.

  I rose, stuttering out apologies, and attempted to reach down and help the officer to his feet. The optio simply batted my hand away as though it were a bothersome moth and rose, his eyes fiery. I felt my bowels loosen under that look. Trucido had contrived to be behind the optio and facing me, and grinned with open amusement as the optio stood and unleashed a torrent of invective the likes of which I had never before heard. My ancestry was called into question as well as possible familial relations with a number of beasts known for their clumsiness. I stood and took it. The truth would sound feeble and I knew it. And still, I could see at last a few of the others’ faces showing their disapproval at the thug. This was going a little too far for most of them.

  We ran back to Deva, where I spent the next five days suborned to the cavalry unit, mucking out the stable of Defluxio – their oldest, sickest horse – who couldn’t even flick his tail without suffering mind-numbing diarrhoea. It was the culmination of the misery of those first three weeks. Even when, the day after, Trucido managed to land another hidden punch on me in the night, it was nothing compared to cleaning up after Defluxio. The optio had meted out his worst punishment.

  I thought things would change, then. To be quite honest, I had been about to give up and run away. It was not officially desertion, because I was still probatio and not yet entered on the legion’s rolls. But the morning I had reached breaking point, finally the news came.

  My father had supplied the appropriate legal documents and I was to be a legionary. Official, at last. Having been busy sweeping a floor when the others had been accepted, I had not seen the ceremony. I was led – me, alone! – by Centurion Ocratius into the hallowed heart of the fortress. The headquarters building was huge and as we crossed the courtyard to enter, I could see a statue of the Emperor Domitian as well as another I took to be the current governor – Lucullus – though I was later informed was actually Agricola, who remained something of a father figure for the legion. It seemed that in these days, following so swift on the revolt of the German Governor Saturninus, it was thought imprudent to venerate current governors in the legions’ fortresses.

  We entered the long hall with its decorative floor and I was brought to the aede
s chapel, where the legion’s standards rested safe with the eagle and the image of the emperor. Veterans stood on guard to either side of the shrine. There, before the eagle and the emperor both, I was administered the oath and I became a soldier of Rome, for good or for ill.

  I was surprised when, as the optio escorted me back out, instead of heading straight for the stores, we made for the baths and he gave me a small flask of wine – barely watered, too. He simply urged me to drink it all down. I did so, happy to be the recipient of such generosity from a man like the optio. I had cause to curse his name to Pluto a quarter of an hour later when, barely numbed by the wine, the legion’s tattooist put the XXvv of the legion and the sign of the boar on my upper arm.

  Then, when I came back from the baths, whimpering, bleeding and sore, the optio took me to the stores and I received my kit for which I would be paying with part of my wages from now until the distant future.

  I was a legionary.

  I got home to find a new turd in my bunk.

  Nothing had changed.

  Then the next morning, training began in earnest. I was hurried through twice as many sessions as the rest, released from my usual onerous cleaning jobs in order to allow me to catch up and fall in line with my peers. As I’ve said, I’ve not the natural physique of a warrior – my family has naturally developed over the centuries to the perfect shape for a council man – invariably spherical. But I am a quick learner and bright, and my peers had been held back slightly due to a couple of the men still learning their basic letters and by Trucido’s sagging brain. By the end of an intensive three day regime, I was almost as good as the others, despite their three week lead on me.