The General

"Every empire is a house with a locked room in it, and the master of the house is the one who keeps the key."

The legions came to the Campus Martius at dawn, and the dust of their marching hung over the Tiber like a golden fog.

It was the spring of the following year, and the whole city had come out to see them. They lined the Via Flaminia in their thousands, on rooftops and balconies and the branches of the plane trees, shopkeepers with their aprons still on, children perched on their fathers' shoulders, old soldiers in faded tunics weeping openly into their beards. For three miles the road was a river of bronze. Cohort after cohort tramped past in perfect step, their red shields locked, their eagles blazing, their polished helmets throwing back the sun in a thousand points of fire, and over the grinding thunder of the hobnailed boots rose a single sound, rhythmic and enormous, rolling from rank to rank like the voice of the sea.

"Cas-si-an! Cas-si-an! Cas-si-an!"

Claudia sat in the stands among the wives of the senators, under a canopy of purple silk, and listened to her son's name.

She had expected to feel triumph. She had expected, perhaps, relief. In the sleepless nights of the winter, as the dispatches came in from the northern frontier one after another by galloping courier, each one longer and more breathless than the last, she had thought of this morning as one thinks of a harbour. But now it had come, and she sat quite motionless in her gown of imperial purple with her hands clasped in her lap, and what she felt was a vast, hollow, ringing quiet, as though she had stepped into a temple after the god had left it.

He rode at the head of the column.

He was nineteen years old. He wore a cuirass of gilded bronze moulded to the shape of a god's chest, and a crimson cloak that fell in heavy folds across the haunches of a great white stallion, and a plain iron helmet with a red horsehair crest. His face, under the helmet, was still and calm and burned by the northern sun to the colour of old oak, and the white scar along his jaw had paled with the winter. He did not look at the cheering crowd. He rode with the reins slack in his left hand and his right resting easily on his thigh, with the same lazy, rolling, immensely confident ease that she had once seen in a drill-yard, and the people, who had never in their lives seen anything like him, roared themselves hoarse.

She knew the story by heart. All Rome did.

Eleven months earlier, in the first week of the campaigning season, the tribes of Pannonia had risen. It had been a savage, sudden, shrewdly planned revolt, with fifty thousand warriors pouring down the passes of the Alps in the dead of winter, and the Governor's three legions had been trapped in their camp on the Save with their supply lines cut and their commanders arguing about who should surrender first. Rome had panicked. The Emperor, an ancient, palsied, nervous man who had not left the Palatine in three years, had summoned the Senate and wept. And the Tullo widow, sitting in her curtained gallery above the Curia with her face veiled and her hands folded, had leaned over to General Marcus and murmured a single name in his ear.

They had sent the boy because there was no one else.

He had been a tribune of the Fourth for eleven weeks. He had a single legion, and eight hundred cavalry, and a month. And in thirty-one days he had crossed the Alps by a shepherd's track that no army had ever used, fallen on the rear of the rebel camp at midnight in a blizzard, burned their wagons, scattered their horses, and driven fifty thousand screaming barbarians into the freezing river like cattle. It was said that he had not slept for four days. It was said that he had led the final charge himself, in the front rank, without a helmet, with a sword in each hand. And it was said, in the whispers of the camp, that when the surrendering chieftains had been brought to him in chains at the end of it, he had looked at them for a long time, and said nothing, and then ordered every captive officer put to the sword before the assembled army, one at a time, over the space of a morning, so that no man in Pannonia should ever again think of lifting a spear against Rome.

She had heard that, too. She had said nothing. She had folded the dispatch very carefully, and put it in the fire.

He is not afraid of anything, Rufus had written, many years before. I do not say it as praise.

…

They gave him the eagles at noon.

It was done on the broad green plain beside the river, before the whole assembled army and the Senate and the people of Rome, in a ceremony as old as the Republic. The ancient Emperor, borne on a litter, trembling and half asleep, was lifted to the dais. A herald read the decree. The Senate, by a unanimous vote, had conferred upon Gaius Claudius Cassianus the rank of legate and the command of the Third and Fourth and Eleventh legions, with their auxiliaries and cavalry, some twenty-four thousand men, and the title of Dux of the Southern Frontier, which made him the first soldier since Scipio to hold such power at the age of nineteen. He knelt. The old man's palsied hand laid the gold wreath on his brow. The crowd screamed.

And in the stands, among the wives of the nobility, Livia stood up and waved.

She waved with both arms over her head, like a child, in her pale green gown and her shining hair, laughing, glowing, quite beside herself, and Cassian, kneeling before the Emperor with the laurel on his temples and his helmet in his hand, turned his head. His eyes found her across three hundred yards of people. And Claudia saw the hard, scarred, weathered face of the young general break open, for the space of a breath, into a smile of such undefended and unguarded joy that it seemed to take ten years from him.

She looked away.

They were happy. That was the thing she had not foreseen, in all her cold, careful, glittering arithmetic. It was an accident of the heart, a mistake in the calculation, and she had watched it grow over the last twelve months with a feeling that was partly bewilderment and partly awe. He wrote to Livia every night from the northern camp, long letters in a large awkward hand, and Livia read them aloud at breakfast with her cheeks pink, and wrote back at twice the length. When he came home on leave in the winter she had run out to meet him barefoot in the snow. They did not quarrel. They sat together in the evenings on the terrace, he with his arm round her shoulder, she with her head against his chest, and talked in low voices of nothing at all. She had taught him to laugh. He had taught her to ride. And on the one occasion when Claudia, passing along the colonnade, had chanced to look into their bedchamber, she had seen the great fierce young general asleep on his back with one arm flung across the pillow and his wife curled against his side, her golden head tucked under his chin, and the half-sun lying on his bare chest in the grey light of the dawn.

Let it be real, she had thought, standing in the doorway. If it must be a lie, let it be one that does them good.

It was not a wish a rational woman should make. It was not a wish that belonged in the ledger. She made it anyway, and drew the door softly shut.

…

By the summer, the Palatine was hers.

It had happened so quietly that few people could have said when it began. The old Emperor was dying, slowly and by inches, in a room full of physicians and incense. His heirs were boys. His ministers were old men who feared one another more than they feared Rome. And into this soft rotting darkness, with the legions of the south behind her, and the Senate eating from her hand, and a dozen of the richest families of the city bound to her by debt and fear and fondness, there had stepped a slender woman of forty-one in a gown of deep violet, with a quiet voice and a pair of brown eyes that never seemed to blink.

She took no title. She never would. The Roman mind could not have borne it. A woman might be a mother, a wife, a guardian, a friend; she could not be a ruler. But the councils began to take place in the Tullo villa, in the library, in the long cool afternoon hours, and the great men of Rome came there by twos and threes with their scrolls under their arms and their faces carefully blank, and waited in the atrium to be admitted. She received them behind a screen. They did not see her face. They heard a voice, light and clear and utterly composed, asking questions, one after another, with a patience that was somehow worse than anger. They left sweating. They said, to each other in the street, that it was as though the Fates themselves had learned to talk.

The soldiers had a name for her. It was whispered first in the camps of the north, and spread, as such things do, from one watch-fire to the next, until it reached the barracks of the City Cohorts and the stalls of the Forum. They called her Mater Legionum. The Mother of the Legions.

She hated it. She did not say so.

…

In the evenings, when the last petitioner had gone and the lamps had been lit, Claudia sometimes went down to the cellars.

She went alone. She took no lamp. She knew the way by heart, down the narrow stair with its worn stone treads, past the empty wine-vaults and the oil-jars, along the sloping passage at the end of which a heavy iron gate stood closed. It was black with age. The lock was red with rust. Behind it lay the old dungeon, the cold bare cells with their rings of iron in the walls and their smell of ancient damp, and beyond that the arena where the lions had once been fed, now empty and silted with the dust of eighteen years. She had never gone in. She had had the place locked on the morning of Servius's funeral, and the key hung on a ribbon in her jewel-box. She had told herself a hundred times that she meant to have it filled in, the cells knocked down, the arena paved, the whole foul place made a cistern or a garden.

She had never been able to give the order.

She stood before the gate, as she was standing now, in the dark, with her fingertips against the cold metal, and did not know what it was she was waiting for. A voice, perhaps. A footfall. A gleam of lamplight on a pair of black eyes. She had been foolish for years, in this one thing. She stood there for a long time, in the mouldering silence, and then she went back up the stairs.

…

The courier came in the middle of the victory banquet.

It was a night in late June, close and breathless and thick with the scent of jasmine, and the Tullo villa blazed with light. The great hall was packed. Senators in their purple and generals in their gilded breastplates lay on the couches along the walls, laughing, quarrelling, calling for wine; at the high table, in the place of honour, sat the young general in a plain white tunic, with his wife at his side and the gold wreath of Pannonia on the cloth before him, looking like a man who would rather have been anywhere else. Claudia sat on his left. A poet was reciting. The slaves moved to and fro with their silver ewers, and over it all hung the sweet heavy murmur of triumph.

A commotion at the door made her look up.

A man was coming up the hall between the couches, a travel-stained man in the leather coat of the imperial post, with sweat running down his face and dust caked into his eyebrows. He had ridden a hundred and twenty miles that day. He was holding a scroll-case in both hands, and he walked like a sleeper, with a dreadful rigid unsteadiness, and when he reached the high table he dropped on one knee and thrust the case out in front of him as though it were red-hot.

"From the governor of Carthage," he gasped. "For the lady Tullo. And the general."

The talk died.

Claudia took the case. She broke the seal herself, and drew out the scroll, a long close-written sheet in a cramped and hasty clerk's hand, and read it by the light of the lamp, line by line, while the whole hall watched her face.

It was a short letter. It said that the Roman colonies on the southern coast of Africa had been attacked, without warning, in six places at once. It said that the garrisons at Leptis and Thapsus had been wiped out to the last man. It said that the tribes of the desert, the Nasamones and the Garamantes and the nomads of the Great Sand, who had for two hundred years been at feud with each other and with the world, had suddenly and unaccountably put aside their quarrels and marched together under a single banner. And it said that the whole of this strange army, forty thousand riders and twice as many on foot, obeyed the commands of one man. He was a king, or a god, or a devil, the governor wrote; no one knew. He had no name that Roman tongues could pronounce. His own people called him by a word meaning the Sun that Rises Twice.

The soldiers are calling him the Tyrant of the South, the letter ended. They say that he has sworn to burn Rome to the ground.

She read it a second time.

The silence in the hall had become absolute. She could hear the hissing of the lamps. At her side, she felt Cassian turn his head, and felt the sudden dark alertness of him, the stillness of a hunting animal that has caught a scent on the wind. A hundred faces were turned toward her. A hundred cups had stopped halfway to their mouths.

And Claudia Marcellina, folding the scroll with perfectly steady fingers, rose to her feet and said in her clear, soft, carrying voice: "My lords, I think we shall not be needing the poet. Please. Be seated. We have work to do."

No one saw the little muscle that moved in her throat. No one saw her left hand, hidden in the folds of her gown, close slowly over a place where something used to hang on a silver chain. Only the young general at her side, who looked at her sidelong with those black Kavanu eyes, thought for an instant that he saw a shadow cross his guardian's face, and wondered, as he reached for his sword-belt, what it was that she had seen in the word Sun.