The Forging

"What is hammered in the dark comes out of the fire with an edge, and never forgives the hand that held the tongs."

A seed does not ask what it will become. It is buried in the earth, and the earth decides, and the rain and the frost and the long indifferent sun decide, and in the fullness of time a thing rises that its sower never meant, and cannot recall. So it was with the child sent south along the Appian Way in a basket of soiled linen. His mother believed that she was planting a sword. She was planting a mirror, and the day would come when it would turn its face upon her. But in those years the earth was still quiet, and the spring still green, and the gods, who are patient, had not yet begun to count.

…

The reports came on the Kalends of every month, and she read them standing up.

It was a discipline she had invented for herself in the first year, when the grief had been fresh and she had not trusted her own hands. A woman who reads a letter sitting down may weep over it; a woman who reads it standing keeps her back straight. So each month, when Quintus Aelius came to the library in the grey hour after the morning audience, bowing, hat in hand, with a flat leather satchel under his arm, Claudia rose from her chair behind the great cedar desk, took the folded tablets from his hand, and read them by the window with her shoulders square and her face smooth as a coin. She read them twice. She did not speak until she had finished. And when she had, she handed them back to him to be burned, and he burned them, in a little brass brazier she kept for the purpose, and the smoke went up through the open window and was lost in the noise of the Palatine.

They were not long. Gnaeus Rufus was not a man for rhetoric. He wrote in the plain, dogged, misspelled Latin of the legion camp, in a hand like a row of fence-posts, and what he wrote was always the same: the weight, the height, the state of the teeth, the bruises, the progress in the sword drill. He had not, in the nine years since the laundry cart rolled in through his gate, ever once asked a question about the child's parents. She had begun to suspect that he did not wish to know. He was a hard old soldier with a bad leg and a worse temper, a widower who had never had a son. The yearly bag of gold aurei had been quite sufficient to still his curiosity. And as for the boy, he wrote, in the clumsy second paragraph of the first report, on the occasion of the ninth day, when by custom a child was named:

I have called him Cassian. It is a name from the old country that was my father's. He is a good size and eats like a horse. He does not cry. When he is angry he goes quiet, which I do not like, and I have told the cook to watch him. There is a wooden thing sewn in his swaddling which I have not touched. You said to let him think it a toy. He has not let go of it since he could close his hand.

She had stood in the library, with the tablet trembling very slightly in her fingers, and read that last sentence over and over until the lines swam.

That was nine years ago.

…

He was seven when he won his first fight.

He was eight when he was taken from the nursery and sent to sleep in the barracks with the other foster-boys, a dozen sullen, scrapping, half-starved orphans of the legionary camp followers, who had been bound to Rufus for their keep and took out their misery on one another. By the winter of his ninth year the old trainer wrote that he had been put in the junior yard with a wooden sword, and that the boys had learned to leave him alone. By the spring of his tenth he had a nickname. The others called him the Moor, Rufus noted, with a coarse relish, because of his skin, which was the colour of a new saddle and burned black in summer; but the sergeants of the veterans' mess had begun to say something else, behind their cups. The Wolf's cub. They said it because he never made a sound.

There was a time in his eleventh year when he fought three boys in the courtyard at once. Rufus reported it with grim approval. The fight had started over a bowl of lentils. Two of the three had been much older, and bigger, and one of them had a knife. When the sergeants pulled them apart, the knife-bearer was lying in the dust with a broken nose, the second had two cracked ribs, and the third had run away screaming. The boy, Cassian, stood in the centre of the ring with a split lip and his fists still clenched, panting, bright-eyed, utterly calm. I asked him why he did not run, Rufus wrote, and he said, "They would only have followed." He is eleven years old.

She read the line and set the tablet down.

She stood at the window a long time, looking at the garden, at the pale rosebuds on the trellis and the gardeners raking the paths. Then she spoke, without turning.

"Tell Rufus to enter him for the legion school at Capua. Not in a year. Now. And that the master of arms is to be changed. I want him taught by someone who has actually killed."

"My lady," said Quintus, after a moment. His voice was very quiet. "He is a child."

"I am aware."

"He is eleven, my lady. Forgive me. I have known you since you were a girl. I have never presumed to question…"

"Then do not begin now, Quintus."

The freedman bowed his head. He did not argue. But when he had gone, and the brazier had burned down to a little heap of grey ash, Claudia stood on at the window, with her hand pressed flat against the cold glass, and asked herself the question that she had been refusing to ask for nine years.

What am I making?

She knew the answer. She had known it from the first night, when she had lain in the dark with her palm on her belly and added up the columns. A dark child in a Roman world was a target. He would be a target all his life: for the men who owned slaves, for the men who feared them, for the long cold sneer of a city that saw a face like his and thought, without needing to think, property. There was only one kind of man in that world who was never the prey. He was the man whom other men were afraid of. He was the strong one, the terrible one, the one who struck first. And she had resolved, with all the cold ferocity of a mother, that her son should never be anything else.

If he is soft he will be sold, she told herself. If he is gentle he will be killed. Let him be hard. Let him be a thing that cannot be broken.

It was a good argument. She had made it so many times that it had worn smooth.

It was not the only argument. There was another, deeper down, in the cold flat place where she kept the plans that she did not look at directly. It was a plan that had begun in the arena, at the foot of three marble steps, and had grown, year by year, as the old man at her side grew greyer and fatter and more cruel. It was a plan about a daughter in a silk-curtained nursery, who would one day be married to a man of power; about a great house with no son to inherit it; about a Senate seat, a name, a fortune, and a Roman army that did not ask where its commanders came from, so long as they won. It did not need a boy. It needed a weapon. And a weapon, to be useful, had to be forged.

He is yours, said the cold voice, quite gently. And he is also an instrument. You can no longer tell the two apart.

She pressed her forehead to the glass and closed her eyes.

…

She went to see him once.

It was a foolish thing, a risk she had promised herself she would never take, and she took it in the autumn of his twelfth year under the cover of a pilgrimage. The temple of Fortuna at Praeneste, she told her husband, who had grown so indifferent to her movements that he hardly looked up from his dinner. A week of prayer for another child. A woman of her years, she said, must turn to the gods. Servius had grunted. He was seventy-four, now, and his legs were failing him, and he took a sour satisfaction in her piety, which seemed to confirm that she too was growing old.

She never reached Praeneste.

The litter turned south at the third milestone. It was an ordinary litter, with plain curtains and eight Cappadocian bearers, none of whom had ever been told her real name, and it travelled for two days through the rolling plain of Latium with the sun hot on the leather roof. At the end of the second afternoon it halted on a low hill, in the shade of a grove of umbrella pines. Below the hill, a mile off across a patchwork of golden stubble fields, a long low building stood by a wall of ochre brick. A drilling-ground. A scatter of white dust. A hundred small figures wheeling in lines like starlings.

She parted the curtain by a finger's breadth.

It took her a long time to find him. The boys were all alike at that distance, brown legs and flailing arms, and she had never seen him; she had only the numbers in the reports, the weight and the height. But she was watching the way they moved, one body among many, and her eyes caught of their own accord on a boy in the third rank. Tall for his age. Long-limbed, narrow-hipped, with a stride that was not a boy's at all but something slower and smoother and more purposeful, a lion's walk, the loose rolling gait of a creature that has never needed to hurry. He carried his wooden sword low and easy, as though it were an extension of the arm. When the sergeant barked, he turned a half-beat before the others, as if he had seen it coming.

Jabari, she thought.

It struck her like a blow. Not the face, which she could not see; the walk. The set of the shoulders. The way the head came up, a fraction too high, as if listening to something at the far end of the world. It was exactly the way the man in the dungeon had lifted his eyes when she opened the gate. It was in his bones. It was in his blood. It had survived six thousand miles and nine years and every effort she had made to bury it, and here it was, unchanged, striding across a dust-yard in the afternoon sun with a toy sword in its hand.

She did not realize that she had stopped breathing.

Down in the yard, the drill dissolved into a ragged ring. A boy was being led out into the centre, a big sullen youth of sixteen with a shaved head and a scar on his chin, and across from him, with his wooden sword hanging loose, stood the tall one. The sergeant barked. There was a scuffle of feet, a flash of wood, a sound like the crack of a green branch. And a moment later the big boy was on his back in the dust, clutching his forearm and screaming, and the tall one was standing over him, completely still, looking down.

Claudia's hand rose to her mouth.

He did not gloat. He did not turn to the watching boys. He stood with the sword at his side and watched the other boy writhe, with the grave steady attention of a physician observing an experiment, and on his face there was no triumph, no pity, no anger. It was perfectly empty. As the sergeants came running, he lifted his head, slowly, and looked about him, across the yard, over the wall, and up the long gold slope of the hill.

He looked straight at the grove.

It was a mile away. It was impossible that he could see her. The curtain was a finger-width wide, and the shade of the pines lay dark and thick as velvet, and the litter was no more than a smudge among the trunks. But for a long, slow, suspended breath the boy stood quite motionless with his face turned up to the light, and she had the unmistakable, animal conviction that he knew exactly where she was.

Then the sergeant seized his arm. The moment broke. The boy let himself be led away.

Claudia let the curtain drop.

She sat in the swaying twilight of the litter, with her hands pressed tight between her knees, and did not weep. She had learned long ago that there was no use in it. She only said, after a time, to the bearer outside, in a voice she barely recognised, "Take me to Praeneste."

And they took her.

…

The rest of it she learned in pieces.

She learned that at thirteen he had been sent to fight in the amphitheatre at Capua, in the boys' bouts that preceded the great gladiatorial shows, and that the crowd had loved him. She learned that he could read Greek, and had a good head for numbers, and rode like a Parthian. She learned that he had once been caught in the stable at midnight, with a stolen sack of bread, feeding the dogs, and that when the sergeant had asked him what he thought he was doing, he had said, "They were hungry." She learned that he did not like to be touched. She learned that he was quiet in company and restless in solitude, and that on the night of every new moon he disappeared for an hour into the olive grove behind the barracks, and came back with a face that had been washed and a pair of eyes that no one could meet.

And she learned, on the first Kalends of his fifteenth year, in a note written with unusual haste, that the thing at his throat was not a toy.

He wears it on a cord now, Rufus wrote. He cut it free of the old swaddling himself, when he was seven or eight, with a kitchen knife, and has worn it ever since, tucked under his tunic. The other boys call it a charm. One of the older lads took it off him during a fight last spring, for a joke, and held it up. I have never seen anything like it. The boy did not shout. He did not even look angry. He just walked across the yard and took the lad by the wrist and broke it in two places, and took the thing back, and tied it on again, and went in to supper. He is fifteen. He has the shoulders of a man. I am telling you, mistress, as an old soldier, that I have trained eleven hundred fighting men in thirty years, and I have never trained one like him.

I think you should know that he is not afraid of anything. I do not say it as praise.

She read it standing, at the window, in the cold grey light of the winter morning. When she came to the end she read it again. Then she looked up, at the blank sky, and the bare black branches of the plane trees in the garden, and at her own pale reflection in the old glass, a tall slender woman of thirty-seven in a robe of dark blue wool, with a few fine threads of grey at the temple that she had stopped plucking out.

She did not smile. She had not smiled in a very long time.

"He has become what I asked for," she said aloud, to the empty library. "Gods help me. He has become exactly what I asked."

She did not hear the old servant, Lucrezia, standing quietly in the doorway with a tray, who had heard her speak and who turned, with a stifled sound, and went away without making a noise.