Eagle in the Snow: A Novel of General Maximus and Rome's Last Stand

Fullofaudes said, “If they destroy us, then they will destroy the Second also. We stand or fall alone. Go back to your legate and tell him to hold Ratae and to keep contact with the Twentieth until he hears my news. If it is good I will send fresh instructions. If it is bad he must make his own.”

We went out against them the next day, and the enemy so out-numbered us that we could not count the odds. All day we fought and twice I saw a painted man on a white pony whom I knew, but I never had the chance to find out if indeed he had become a god. By nightfall we were beaten, Fullofaudes was dead with all his staff and the barbarians were in the streets of Eburacum. Our officers were dead too, so I took command and withdrew the Sixth down the road to Londinium, while Quintus screened us with the remnants of the cavalry. There we stayed, penned in like sheep behind the walls, and hoped that Rome would remember us.

All that autumn they ravaged the land. The Second fell back and held fast to Corinium, while the villas were sacked and the harvest rotted in the fields for lack of men to gather it. They took the grain from the barns and all the food that people had stored against the bad days. They took the cattle and the ponies as plunder and drove them north. Houses were stripped of their valuables and they killed all who protested at the theft. The roads were empty of traffic; there was no trade; and the towns, shut in upon themselves, began quietly to starve. And as always it was the women who suffered most. In the spring we had news that the barbarians were splitting up, that the war-bands were getting smaller and that many were beginning to move north again. The Picts began to quarrel with the Scotti and both, in turn, began to quarrel with the Saxons. When I heard that news I began, as out of a long darkness, to see a faint pin-prick of light that was the dawn of hope. They had made him a god but he had failed after all in his great purpose. The barbarian conspiracy was near its end.

And then, on a cold wet day when our food was nearly gone, we heard the news. The Count Theodosius had arrived. He had sailed with a fleet and an army all the way from Augusta Treverorum in Gaul. All the way down the Rhenus and across that cold sea they had rowed upon an emperor’s orders and made landfall at Rutupiae. We knew then that we were saved.

III

I HAD THOUGHT Aelia dead, but I wished to make certain. In the end I found her in a mean village outside Eburacum. She was very ill and they told me that she had been so for months. Her hair was streaked with grey and she looked thin and wasted. Her eyes reminded me of another’s. They were without hope. She would not speak to me; she turned her face to the wall and she cried. For three days it was like that, and then they told me what had been done to her, and I—I understood at last. When I came to her next and She turned away, I pulled her to me and I said those things that a man says to a woman whom he loves.

She wept. “I am ashamed,” she said. “I am so ashamed.” And then she added, wildly, “It is a punishment for all my sins.”

I did not feel like laughing. I said, “You are my wife, Aelia, and there is only shame if you do not live to keep me company.”

From that moment she began to get better. Later, because I was so thankful to have her back I made an offering to my God, and I sent for a vase of coloured glass from Colonia where they specialised in such things. It cost me a great deal of money, but she liked pretty things and was pleased with it when it came.

After Theodosius had settled the north and made terms with the Picts I went back to Borcovicum. Now there were great changes made. The administration was impoverished and our auxiliaries could not be paid. So Theodosius gave them land instead. Each man had his own patch and became a farmer, and lived with his family inside the camp; and the civilian settlements along the Vallum were abandoned. The Arcani were disbanded, and the long work of restoring our broken defences began. Quintus Veronius was made Praefectus of the Ala Petriana. He deserved the command (it had once been the post for the senior officer on the Wall) and it was his ambition to have a regiment of cavalry. But we both missed him for there were few enough people to talk to in our small world. Yet we had peace in the heather, and so the years went by.

One evening a lone horseman from Corstopitum rode up the track. It was Quintus Veronius. I was glad to see him but Aelia, whose face had shone like a candle when I cried his name, stopped smiling when she saw his face. He looked tired, strained and angry. “I have come from Eburacum,” he said. I am no longer in cimmand of the Ala Petriana. I dared to complain to Magnus Maximus, our beloved chief of staff, about the corruption of quartermasters and illegal profiteering in high places. So here I am, back at Vindolanda in disgrace.”

“And what else?” I asked.

He said, bleakly, “Our iron soldiers are made of iron no longer.”