The Boat of Fate Read Free Page B

towers of stone blazing white under the brilliant sun, striding like the legs of giants into farthest distances.
    Such occasional outings were the highlights of my life. Sometimes I travelled with my mother; I remember particularly one visit we made to a race meeting in which my uncle was running several teams. I came home with a burning resolve, mercifully short-lived, to be a charioteer myself. Even today I can re-create that journey in my mind; the lurching of the carriage as its wheels crashed into pot-holes and bumped over ridges, the smell of horses and leather, the swirl and white billowing of the all-pervasive dust. And clearest of all my mother’s eyes, dark blue and lovely in the bright sunlight, as she listened gravely, despite the amusement she must have felt, to my grandiose plans.
    If my mother was one of the great influences of my life, Marcus was another. Old Marcus--I always thought of him as immensely ancient, though of course he was not--was a time-expired Legionary, a man who had seen service on half the borders of the Empire. His family hailed from the distant Province of Noricum, north of the Adriatic Sea. His father had been a schoolmaster and teacher of rhetoric, a poor man who to support his large family had been forced to apply for grants from the State. Aid had been given, but at a price. Marcus’ ambition had been to become an advocate; he had studied hard, and still retained a smattering of Greek. But at eighteen the Army claimed him; he was posted to Divitia, to the headquarters of the Second Italicans, to learn to be a soldier. His intelligence earned him rapid promotion; within ten years he had attained the rank of Tribune and was serving in Gaul, with the comitatus of the Caesar Julian.
    Marcus had never spent his Gallic donative. He showed me the coins one day, gleaming solidi of the Emperor Constantine; he kept them in a strong-box tethered to the wall of his room.
    He served my father as doorkeeper and general handyman. He had a little cubicle set next to the atrium, equipped in part as a workshop; you could rely on finding him there most times of the day, busy with the repair of domestic implements, harness, shoes. He was a man of most varied abilities, for he was also principal gardener to the household, and what he planted invariably seemed to thrive.
    In addition, he kept ferrets. He bought them from a Bithynian dealer who occasionally passed through the district; they were imported from Libya in considerable quantities to keep in check the little burrowing hares the countryfolk called peelers. At one time the bloodthirsty creatures lived in a range of hutches in the peristyle; but their stink eventually came to pervade the whole house and my father banished them to the stables a few yards along the street where he kept his horses. I learned early on to handle them, and was seldom bitten; one of my chief delights was to be allowed to ride out with Marcus, usually in the early morning, on his hunting expeditions. On a good day we would ride back to breakfast with our saddles hung with bulging sacks of game. The meat was a welcome addition to our household supplies, for it was often difficult for my father to collect the ration allowances due to him, while money was scarce and rapidly becoming scarcer. But what else could you expect, he would mutter, when the taxes levied from the country went it seemed to fight half the barbarians in the world?
    Usually when my lessons were over for the day I would slip through the atrium to Marcus’ workshop, sit and swing my legs on the bench and plague him for tales of Goths and Vandals and Alamanni, Persian Kings with silk and jewels and retinues of bare black slaves. Some of his best tales were of the vast, empty lands to the East; for he had followed Julian on his ill-fated expedition into Persia, fought in the great battle in front of Ctesiphon. The arms of the Empire were victorious; but no Roman ever entered that huge town. Instead the army