Like You'd Understand, Anyway

I was a firebrand as a brat, a world-beater. I was rambunctious. I was always losing a tooth to someone's fist. My father was then an auxilia conscripted in his twenty-first year in Tungria. Later, after his twenty-five year discharge, he was granted citizenship and the tria nomina: forename, family name, and surname. I was born in the settlement beside the cavalry fort at Cilurnum. My mother worked in a gambling establishment with an inscription above the door that read drink, have sex, and wash. My father called Cilurnum a roaring, rioting, cock-fighting, wolf-baiting, horse-riding town, and admired the cavalry. My mother became his camp wife and gave him three children: a sickly girl who died at birth, Chrauttius, and me. Chrauttius was older and stronger and beat me regularly until he died of pinkeye before coming of age. Our father was on a punitive raid against the Caledonii when it happened. He returned with a great suppurating wound across his bicep and had a fever for three days. When my mother wasn't at work in the gambling establishment, she attended him with an affectionate irritation. She dressed and bound his wound with such vigor that neighbors were required to hold him down while she flushed the cut with alcohol. His bellows filled our ears. When he was recovered he brooded about his elder son. “Look at him,” he said to my mother, indicating me.

“Look at him yourself,” she told him back.

He had a particular way he favored of being pleasured which required someone to hold his legs down while the woman sat astride him. Usually my mother's sister assisted, but during his fever she feared for her own children, so I was conscripted to sit on his knees. I'd been on the earth for eight summers at that point, and I was frightened. At first I faced my mother but when she asked me to turn the other way, I held my father's ankles and pitched and bucked before he kicked me onto the floor.

At the start of my eighteenth summer I armed myself with a letter of introduction from him to one of his friends still serving with the Tungrian cohort. My father's command of the language was by no means perfect, and since my mother had had the foresight to secure me a tutor for Latin and figures, I helped him with it. Annius to Priscus, his old messmate, greetings. I recommend to you a worthy man … and so on. I've since read thousands.

I then presented myself for my interview held on the authority of the governor. Though I had no citizenship, an exception was made for the son of a serving soldier, and I was given the domicile castris and enrolled in the tribe of Pollia. Three different examiners were required to sign off on a provisional acceptance before I received my advance of pay and was posted to my unit. Attention was paid to my height, physical capacity, mental alertness, and most especially my skill in writing and arithmetic. A number of offices in the legion required men of good education, since the details of duties, parade states, and pay were entered daily in the ledgers, with as much care, I was told, as were revenue records by the civil authorities.

Thus I was posted to my century, and my name entered on the rolls. I trained for two summers in marching, physical stamina, swimming, weapons, and field service, so that when I finished I might sit at my stool and generate mounds of papyrus and birch-bark, like an insanely busy and ceaselessly twitching insect.

I have a cold in my nose.

We're so undermanned that during outbreaks of additional sickness, detachments from the Ninth Legion are dispatched for short periods to reinforce our windblown little tract. And there are other auxilaries manning the wall on either side of us. Asturians, Batavians, and Sabines to our east, and Frisiavones, Dalmatians, and Nervii to the west.

My father's agitating to be put back on active duty. He's discovered the considerable difference between the standard of living possible on an officer's pay as opposed to a veteran's retirement pension. He's tried to grow figs and sweet chestnuts on his little farm, with a spectacular lack of success. He claims he's as healthy as ever and beats his chest with his fist and forearm to prove it. He's not. The recruiting officers laugh in his face. Old friends beg to be left alone. He's asked me to intercede for him, as he interceded for me. He believes I have special influence with the garrison commander. “Oh, let him join up and march around until he falls over,” my mother tells me, exasperated.