Island of Ghosts Read Free Page A

courtyard so as to keep my smell of horses and camp dirt out of the house. The courtyard was colonnaded and paved with flagstones; a few bushes of rosemary straggled from terracotta pots. There was lamplight in the glass windows and a smell of cooking. I sat down in the shelter of the colonnade and waited, resting my head on my knees and rubbing my stiff leg.
    “If it were up to me, sir,” came Facilis’ voice from behind me, “I’d have killed them all before they ever left Aquincum.”
    That made me raise my head. A shuttered window on the courtyard had been pushed open, and the procurator was standing in a cloud of lamplight, looking out at the night. Facilis must have stood behind him. I remained where I was, in the shadow of the colonnade, and listened.
    “But the emperor wants them alive,” Facilis went on, “so it’s my job to make sure they get to Britain that way. Sir, he appointed me himself. I’m Pannonian by birth, and I know the Sarmatians. He knew he could trust me to make sure of them.”
    “You haven’t said anything to me that indicates there’s the slightest reason for concern,” the procurator replied irritably. “I know that the emperor put you in charge of them, Marcus Flavius, but he put me in charge of the British fleet. I can use my own judgment about how to get these barbarians across the Channel, and it seems to me that if I go clapping chains on their leaders, the men will be sure to mutiny.” (In the back of my mind I made a note that, although Facilis called him dominus , “sir,” he addressed Facilis by his first two names, informally: he spoke with the confidence of noble birth and high rank, and the centurion was forced to honor that.)
    “You don’t know anything about them!” Facilis said. “You seem to think they’re like the Gauls or the Germans, nice safe conquered barbarians, who’ll more or less do as they’re told if you treat them kindly! Sarmatians are different. They’ve taken it into their heads that we’ve tricked them and mean to murder them, and they’ll try to hit us hard while we’re not looking. I’d stake my sword on it they’ve managed to hide some weapons in those wagons, for all our precautions, and they’re sitting about their fires now plotting how to kill us.”
    He was perfectly correct on that.
    “Really!” exclaimed the procurator in disgust, turning away from the window. “I seem to recall hearing that our invincible emperor did conquer them, by the favor of the immortal gods.”
    “His ‘Thundering Victory,’ ” Facilis answered, in a tone of equal disgust. “Yes. I was there. But maybe you haven’t heard the details of what came before that victory. They’d been raiding us for years—they thought it was a brave and manly thing to slip across the Danube with a troop of cavalry and steal the flocks and property of Romans, killing anyone who got in their way. They weren’t afraid of us in the least. The cities cried out to the emperor as the raids got worse and worse, and the emperor decided to settle the Sarmatians for good. For a year we fought. We caught a raiding party on the Danube in the winter, and fought a battle actually on the ice of the river—but that only meant that the next raiding parties were bigger. We negotiated and got nowhere, and at last we set off to conquer the Sarmatians, with all the Danube legions, detachments from all the western legions and some of the eastern ones, more auxiliaries than I could count, and the emperor himself as commander. Twice the number of their army, at least; three, four times their number. We marched out into the plains—and found no one. You can’t besiege their cities, because they don’t have any; you can’t burn their crops to force them to give battle, because they don’t have any of those, either. They keep herds and live in wagons.
    “We had reports, though, that their king was in the northeast of the country, and his army with him, so we marched on. And when