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

We attended the games and I shared the seats of honour with Septimus and his family. Of our previous meeting we did not speak; politeness alone made the occasion endurable. He behaved towards me, throughout, with all the dignity and good manners of a senator who has been advised by his emperor to open his veins in hot water. And yet, curious as it seemed afterwards, once, during the chariot races between the Reds and the Whites, our common enthusiasm for the sport made a bridge between us, and, for a short while, we were almost friends. This, in its way, was remarkable, for friends and families were split in their allegiance to the teams, quite as fiercely as over the Blues and Greens of Constantinopolis. The games were a great success and put the populace in a high good humour. All the seats were sold out; Artorius made a series of lucky bets and won much money; Quintus enjoyed the animal fights and thought them superior to the ones he had seen in Hispania; while the gladiatorial fights were, very properly, fought to the death. I had the rare experience, however, of giving the wooden foil to a gladiator who had gained the crowd’s approval; and his face, when I handed it to him, haunted me for days afterwards.

Only the Bishop did not share the general festivity. When I met him a day or so later, his face was pinker than usual. He had the look of a man who does not enjoy the martyrdom of unpopularity.

On our last day I went to the baths and had my hair dyed. It was silver all over now and I think the troops knew, to judge by the nickname that they had given me. But I did not care. What were their opinions to me? In the afternoon Quintus went to the deserted Temple of Epona, while I sat in the back room of a merchant’s shop and haggled over the price of a flask of perfume for Rando’s daughter. Afterwards I rode in search of my friend. I tied my horse beside his and then sat down upon a block of fallen stone. The sun shone strongly upon the red and grey of the buildings, and the entrance to the temple was shadowed in darkness. No-one came here now and I had the whole square to myself. The sky was very blue, I remember, and the trees stood silent, their once dark leaves already turned a rich brown. Once it had seemed as though they would live for ever; now they were dying after so short a life, and would soon crumble into dust. A lizard ran across the paving and concealed itself in the tufts of grass that thrust themselves upwards between the cracks, its small body heaving, as though it found the heat too much at that time of the year. I unpinned my cloak and shut my eyes, and felt the sun upon my face. I thought, for a moment or two, of the bustle in the offices of the Basilica, and of the legion in its earth and timber forts, and of all the work that awaited me when I returned. Suddenly, I felt very old and very tired. I thought of the villa at Arelate and of the pool in which I had swum as a boy. I thought of the plans we had made, my wife and I. There had been that winter when it was very cold and we had spent the evenings planning a new and proper home in the forest of Anderida. She had sat by the fire, spinning, while I drew the outlines of the new house with a stick of charcoal upon the back of a duty list. We had argued about the size of the rooms and how many we should need. Quintus had joined us, one night, and we had laughed and joked over the wine. That was the night she had washed her hair, and she sat by the fire, drying it and listening to our talk. There had to be a special room for him, I insisted, so that he would come to visit us often; and Quintus had agreed, and they had looked at each other and smiled.

I opened my eyes and stared up at the sky. There were so many questions that I had wanted to ask; so many that I had never dared to ask. I never would ask them now. I shut them from my mind. They were the bad things, about which I could do nothing. It was better, I thought, to remember the happy times instead. Perhaps, when all this was over, we would buy a villa still, and farm it, and Quintus would breed horses, and I would write that military history that had been in my mind all these years. And in the evenings we would sit before the fire and drink wine and remind ourselves of the old days. So I sat there, blinking in the sun, and I was just an old man, dreaming foolish dreams.

When I looked up again, Quintus was standing over me. He saw the flask at my side, and laughed. “It is not for yourself, I hope. I remember your remarks, once, about perfumed tribunes. You kicked the fellow out.”

“I did,” I said, amiably. We walked in the sunlight to where our horses stood, and I turned to ask him something, and then stopped. He looked back at me in silence, his face quite calm and wonderfully relaxed except for the eyes. He had that look that I remembered seeing once before, when he had been made a present of a fine foal. Perhaps Aelia had known it also. But now, he had been to the Temple.