Ashes Under Uricon

Chapter 5. Turbulence (362-3)

By Mihangel

Sed ubi sexto illo et decimo anno interposito otio ex necessitate domestica feriatus ab omni schola cum parentibus esse coepi, excesserunt caput meum vepres libidinum, et nulla erat eradicans manus. Quin immo ubi me ille pater in balneis vidit pubescentem et inquieta indutum adulescentia, quasi iam ex hoc in nepotes gestiret, gaudens matri indicavit.

But when I had turned fifteen, family finances being short, I left school altogether and lived at home with little to do. The briars of lust grew rank over my head, and there was no hand to weed them out. Indeed, when my father caught sight of me in the baths, adorned with incipient pubic hair and an adolescent excitement, he happily reported it to my mother as if it had set him longing for grandchildren.

St Augustine, Confession

If I continue in such detail, this book will take another ten years to write and five to read. From now on I must pick out the highlights and concentrate upon them alone.

The following six months passed without major incident. The Irish were reported to be roaming the western sea and plundering remote spots, but they launched no major raid. The Christians in Viroconium were sulky and subdued, and the temples of Cernunnos and Donnotarvus were given face-lifts. And I turned fourteen. Officially I became a man, although physically I still had far to go. I was now my own master and answerable for my own misdeeds. No longer could Tad wallop me: not that he often had. More importantly, I could now own property, and Bran was transferred to me. It was a formality, but one we both appreciated. And, while it was still a hypothetical matter, I could form whatever liaisons I wished.

A further year passed. Julian, we heard, was about to launch an all-out attack on Persia. At school we had now been through the whole of Vergil three times, read all of Sallust and portions of Terence and Cicero and Ovid, studied grammar exhaustively, and done a fair amount of composition of our own. Bran had long been the star pupil, but he was now the oldest, and Nonius, having taught him for three years free of charge, regretfully announced that enough was enough. And as for me, I was growing fast, not only in height but in other departments as well.

It was my fifteenth birthday, the very day, which ushered in a time of turbulence that changed my life for ever. I was with Tad, modestly celebrating at the tavern by the Town Hall, when a dusty courier galloped in from Corinium. His news, having travelled by relay from the other end of the world, was already two months old, but it was appalling. Our Emperor Julian had been killed in battle in Persia and replaced by some Christian nonentity named Jovian, who had promptly bought the Persians off with humiliating concessions. Pagans moped, Christians danced in the streets, the council went into immediate session, and my birthday was ruined. A few days later a more personal disaster struck.

The councillors -- all the landowners with property above a certain value -- not only supervised municipal services but, as often as not, funded them as well. Three of them, for instance, were responsible for collecting the poll tax and land tax. The total collected from the civitas in theory matched the quota demanded by the state. Occasionally it did. Even more occasionally, in good years, there was a surplus. This the collectors could keep, because in bad years (and most years were bad) a deficit was likely for which they were personally liable. The state also decreed what slice of the total -- usually slender -- went into the provincial exchequer at Corinium, and what slice -- usually nothing -- went into the civitas coffers at Viroconium. To make matters more awkward, the land taxes had to be paid in kind, not in cash, and it fell to the collectors to transport the grain and livestock and horses direct to the forts to supply the troops. Viroconium therefore had a massive storehouse whence the grain was carted in dribs and drabs, alongside animals on the hoof, to Deva and the forts deep in the mountains, as far even as Segontium which was five days away.

Other councillors were in charge of other services -- of the water supply, for instance, of roads and streets throughout the civitas, or of heating and maintaining the public baths. These they paid for out of their own pockets unless, abnormally, there was any money left in the coffers. Small wonder that people tried to evade their duties, but they were inescapable: once a councillor, you were a councillor for life and your eldest son willy-nilly succeeded you.

Tad was a councillor, as our ancestors had been for generations, and his job was Procurator of Mines, in charge of all the metal workings and salt-pans in the civitas and answerable to the provincial Count of the Mines at Corinium. The state demanded an annual quota from him too. In a good year, this was met by the income from the sale of minerals less the costs of production and transport. In a bad year it was not. The major local metal was silver-bearing lead. The silver, which belonged to the state, was separated and Tad took it in his saddlebag on his regular visits to Corinium. The lead he sold as best he could. Because most of Britain was supplied by other districts, this usually meant boating it down the Sabrina and then shipping it to Gaul. The lead merchants there paid for it on delivery, in coin which was brought back by the ship's captain who deposited it, minus the cost of freight, with Tad's banker in Corinium. If a cargo failed to arrive there was a gaping hole in Tad's accounts which he had to make good himself.

This was what befell, that sorry autumn. A large shipload failed to arrive. Nobody ever discovered its fate. Worst of all, the Irish presence at sea had sent premiums sky-high and it was not insured.

Our loss inspired the bishop, we were told, to preach a sermon in his little church on the theme of God punishing unbelievers. Our better friends and neighbours were sympathetic and supportive, but they could not plug the gap in Tad's accounts.

"You can't win," said Tad dismally when all hope had gone. "Pay exorbitant premiums, the books don't balance, and you have to fork out. Risk it without insurance, the ship goes down, and you have to fork out."

It had happened before, but not this badly.

"And on top of that, the tax demand's gone up again. It's double what it was when I was a boy. I'm sorry, Docco. We'll have to cut back. For a start, I'll lay off some of the hands at the farm, at least for the winter when there's not so much to do, though I don't like laying people off when it's hard to find other work. Then there's our bath at home, which eats fuel. We'll fire it up only once a week. On other days it'll be cheaper to pay at the public baths. Another thing's your schooling. I'm afraid that'll have to stop. But I fancy you've learned most of what you'll ever learn from Nonius, and now that Bran's not going there any more . . ."

He was right. Although Nonius had done me proud, I would shed few tears at leaving now. But one thing I had to make sure of.

"Tad, you're not thinking of selling Bran, are you? Or Tigernac and Roveta?"

"By Cernunnos, no! Bran's not mine to sell, anyway. He's yours, even if I pay for his upkeep. And selling his parents is the last thing I'll do. But there'll have to be some rearrangement of duties . . . And then there's you, Docco. You're your own master now, and you can leave home if you want, though I don't know what you'd live off. But I hope you'll stay and help out."

"Of course I'll stay, Tad. What sort of son would walk out now? But what's best for me to do?"

"I'm not going to last for ever. One day the farm will be yours, and one day you'll be Procurator of Mines. Your best move would be to learn the ropes at both, and as you learn, lend a hand at this and that. And if Bran learns with you, he'll be able to help when the time comes."

So it was that Tad arranged for Bran and me to stay some days with Tappo, the manager of the lead mines above Onna, a day's ride to the west. He was a freedman who lived in a comfortable house down by a river, below the workings which stretched for miles along the slopes of the hills above.

"You've not seen a mine before?" he asked over dinner the first evening. "Then you're in for a shock. At most other mines you'd be shocked even worse. They're rough places, and rough treatment's the norm. Very rough. Like at the lead mines up at Salicinum which are run by the military from Deva because there's no civitas there to organise them. But here we're as considerate as we can be. Your father," he nodded at me, "insists on that, and having been a slave myself I appreciate it. We've got three sorts of worker here. One lot are hired labourers, mostly from the mountains and probably on the run from some vendetta, though we don't ask questions. Then there are the convicts, who're the only ones who have to be shackled, with warders keeping an eye on them. The last lot are slaves, all of them Irishmen captured while raiding."

"If they're not shackled," I asked, "don't they run away?"

"Not very often. Where would they run to?" Tappo looked at Bran. "You're Irish too, aren't you? And a slave. Why don't you run away?"

Bran merely nodded gently.

Over the next few days Tappo showed us round. For prospecting, long ditches fed upland water into reservoirs. From a safe distance we watched a dam being deliberately breached to release a torrent of water down the hillside. Heather and bracken, soil and stones, were tossed aside to expose the bedrock, over which men then crawled looking for veins of ore. If a promising one was found, they would work away at it and if necessary follow it underground. Armed with lamps, we were taken into such a mine, down a steep and narrow chasm into infernal gloom.

"Facilis descensus Averno," said Bran, shuddering. "Easy is the way down into hell."

"Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, hic labor est," I replied. "But to retrace one's steps and escape to the air above, that's the hard work."

Far below, in one branch of the tunnel where they had lost the vein, men were piling brushwood against the rock and setting it alight. We retreated, and the way up was indeed harder than the way down. Smoke billowed out behind us, and after a while the men went back to fling buckets of water on the hot face. It sizzled and crackled, and they set to work on the cracks to prise more rock away. Down another branch the lode was good and the ore glinted silver even in the feeble light. We followed a string of carriers up again to the surface, where they emptied their baskets on the ground. More men, attacking the chunks of rock with sledgehammers, gradually reduced them to powder which they shovelled on to gently sloping boards. Water was trickling down them, washing away the lighter grains of waste and leaving behind a layer of heavy particles of lead, which was carefully brushed off and dried for smelting.

The furnaces were simple. A large bowl of clay was piled with charcoal and powdered ore, set alight, and covered with a dome of turves. Two men pumped air in with huge bellows, and after a while molten lead trickled out of a spout into a mould.

"This is the worst job," Tappo remarked. "It's the fumes. They're poisonous. They won't affect you because you're only breathing them for an hour or so. But a year at this, and you're dead. So we rotate the workers."

Then the silver was separated from the lead in another furnace floored with bone ash. The bones were supplied in prodigious quantities by the Viroconium slaughterhouses to be calcined into ash, which absorbed the molten lead but not the silver. We saw a furnace being broken open, and there, resting on the spongy grey mass, was a palm-sized blob of gleaming silver. Tappo took immediate charge of it, and the lead residue was re-smelted and cast into clay moulds with crude lettering inside, so that when the pigs had cooled and been turned out they proclaimed CIV. CORN. ONN. EXARG: 'civitas of the Cornovii, from Onna, desilvered.' In this form they were carted to Tad's warehouse in Viroconium. Councillors had the right to requisition transport as well as labour for civic duties, provided they paid a fair wage.

Bran and I could barely lift a pig between us.

"Why don't you make them smaller?" we asked.

"The lighter they are," was the answer, "the easier to pilfer."

The workers, as Tappo had said, were varied and their labours hard. But they were treated with evident consideration and their compound -- barrack block, baths, kitchen and stables around a courtyard -- was almost palatial. Bran talked to the Irish slaves in Irish, and found to his delight that they understood each other perfectly well.

From Onna we went north for a few days at the copper mines on Croucodunum. Here the set-up was similar, except that the ore was worked off natural caves and everything was more spacious. The furnaces were more elaborate and permanent, since copper melts at a higher temperature, and the end product was small round ingots which were boated, along with lime for building, down a tributary to the Sabrina. From there we returned to Viroconium and were introduced to Tad's part-time secretary in the council offices and to the system of wage-paying, accounting, and organising transport. Our initiation into the mysteries of mining had been an eye-opener.

After a day or two's break, it was the farm's turn. Here I was more at home, having been out to it often enough in the past, for it was only half an hour's walk away. It was large. We normally ran about four hundred head of cattle, fifty sheep and a few goats, as well as some horses. Ulcagnus the bailiff was in charge, living with his family in a simple little house on the site. He was a stolid and unimaginative man, but steady and reliable if you allowed him time. In the past there had been a sizeable labour force of hired hands who mostly lived in even smaller houses beside Ulcagnus'. From them I had already picked up the rudiments of livestock management. From an early age I had milked cows. I had herded them. I had helped make cheese. I had watched with interest the bulls mounting the cows and the rams the ewes. I had marvelled at the birth of calves and lambs and in due course had, with revulsion, deprived some of their manhood. I had been sickened when in winter the wolves came down from the hills and left half-eaten carcasses behind.

We also grew most of our own hay, and in summer I had raked and turned and stacked. I used to envy the skill of the mowers and admire the design of their scythes, wonderfully long and slender in the blade; but I was forbidden to try my hand until I was at least as tall as the blade was long, which was well over four and a half feet. At last, a few summers before, I had reached this mark and learned how to swing the great thing without chopping off my legs. And we grew a few fields of wheat, and in spring I had ploughed and sown and at harvest reaped and threshed. But what I had learned nothing of was the necessary but more tedious side of running an estate, the maintenance of the buildings, the buying and selling of animals and fodder, the payment of wages, the keeping of accounts.

We now put in a spell at the farm, walking out in the morning and returning home at night. All but five of the hands had been laid off. This mattered the less now that there was little to do beyond milking the few cows still in milk. Even the paperwork, at this time of year, was light.

"O fortunatos nimium sua si bona norunt agricolas!" I remarked to Bran, "Farmers! All too fortunate, if only they recognised their blessings!"

Words of ill omen, perhaps. There came a prolonged and early spell of frosts, and the grass died down. There was enough for the sheep and goats and horses, though they needed guarding against wolves, but the cattle were brought into the barns. There they had to be fed on hay and mucked out, which much increased the workload.

Then, out of the blue in the middle of November, a number of cows sickened and died. Tad was almost beside himself with worry, for the cattle were his working capital. Once again, when word got around, some Christians went so far as to gloat. Their God, they said, was taking further vengeance on the ungodly. We did not believe that for a moment. But it is all too easy to blame the gods for visiting troubles upon mortals, and in his anxiety even Tad wondered.

"All right," he said heavily. "It's our land. But it doesn't belong to us. We belong to the land. And if we're not in harmony with it, it punishes us, because the gods and the land are the one and the same. Yet I can't think that we've offended Donnotarvus. We've done no different this year from our usual. No changes, except the usual turnover of livestock. So far our cattle have thrived and sold for good prices, and we've duly thanked him. It's hard to imagine that he's brought this on us." He sighed. "It may be pure chance. It may come to nothing. And whatever happens, we have to take the rough with the smooth."

But over the next two days more and more cows died. Disaster stared us in the face and Ulcagnus was utterly perplexed. But Donnotarvus in his kindness showed us the solution. On the third day a pattern began to emerge, and the answer became blindingly obvious. The livestock in the fields were unaffected. The few cows in two remote barns, fed from their own haylofts, were still perfectly healthy. Most of the cattle were in the central barns, fed from the central hay stores, and most of them were already sick.

"Ulcagnus!" I said. "It must be the hay! Where did this lot come from?"

"Methianus the dealer. I don't know where he got it from. I bought it, forty waggon loads of it, soon after the frosts began but before the price went up, because it looked as if our own hay wasn't going to see us through. Hay . . ." He scratched his head. "Yes, you may be right. If the hay's the problem, then it's probably got ragwort in. It's hard to tell it from other weeds once it's dried. But it's deadly poisonous."

"Ragwort? That yellow stuff? Is there any cure?"

"No, none. If there's plenty of good grass around, cattle won't touch growing ragwort. It tastes bitter. But if it's dried they don't notice it. And once they've eaten it they're doomed."

"But whoever made the hay must have known there was ragwort in it. To sell it is simply criminal."

I felt like rushing off there and then to beard Methianus, but this was too weighty a matter for a boy. I reported at once to Tad, who went himself to Methianus, who said that he had forgotten where that batch of hay came from. So much passed through his hands . . .

Then, as we helplessly watched our own cows dying -- in the end we lost three hundred, and all of our bulls -- we heard that cattle were also dying on Totovallus' farm on the other side of town. His hay too, it transpired, had come from Methianus. Then we heard that some of Bishop Viventius' cattle were dying. His bailiff, when questioned, said that his hay was his own and that he had sold many loads of it to Methianus.

At that, Tad and Totovallus filed a lawsuit against the bishop. It would ordinarily have taken months to meander through the courts, but because Tad was a councillor and well respected, and because he was facing immediate ruin, the two magistrates were sympathetic and heard the case in double-quick time. The bishop claimed the privilege of trial before an ecclesiastical court, which in a criminal case was allowable, but this was a civil dispute and the magistrates rejected his claim. His bailiff admitted to no practical knowledge of farming; the bishop had given him the job as a member of his congregation. Three slaves who had made the hay testified that the field had been thick with ragwort but, being slaves, they had not dared to question their orders. With no fuss at all the magistrates found in favour of Tad and Totovallus. Viventius was responsible for his bailiff's negligence and was to pay compensation, to the full market value of the dead cattle and the poisoned hay.

He could have appealed to the governor in Corinium but, grumbling bitterly, he paid up. He was far from being a pauper. And we had already recouped some losses. Although our three hundred carcasses would have flooded the market, we had sold a fair number to the butcher who assured us that, apart from the liver, such meat was not tainted. We had given some to friends and salted down more for ourselves. At the turn of the year, therefore, things looked very much brighter, and for the winter solstice celebrations the infected hay made a fine bonfire.

"Well, we're safe now," I said to Bran as we watched the roaring flames. "Non insueta gravis temptabunt pabula fetas. No strange plants shall tempt the pregnant ewes."

But by this time our intended two weeks at the farm had turned into eight.

Those months saw one other trouble. Mamma had a cousin who was a clerk in the Town Hall. So too was his son Mattonius. That was the law. In the trades and professions, sons had to follow fathers, nobody could change occupation, nobody could move away. Once a clerk in Viroconium, always a clerk in Viroconium. Mattonius had been heard in the tavern unwisely ranting about the injustice of it and talking about absconding in search of a better job elsewhere. Next day he was arrested and was seen no more. His relatives appealed for help to the governor, who ultimately replied that he had no jurisdiction over the secret service. And that was that, another cloud to darken our life.

So much for family turbulence. What, meanwhile, of my own? Bran had proved right. I bloomed, as he put it, at a later age than he had done, and it was only during this autumn and winter that I developed fast. I was shooting up, body hair was growing, and by the end of the year my voice was cracking. It was a confusing period, and not merely on account of our family troubles.

Bran still spent much of the time with me. We were together at the mines and the farm where he was his usual ever-present support. But we now had much less leisure, and our regular daily bath was no more. At Onna we used our host's bath, but in a hurry to be in time for dinner after a long day out. From the farm we returned too late for the public baths, which closed at sunset, and most days we had to make do with chilly sluicing at the spout. But once a week, when our own bath was fired up, we still bathed together, we still oiled and scraped each other, and we still sported erections together. But never did we do anything about them, at least in each other's presence. Bran had warned me, as I saw it, not to take advantage of him. I had promised, and I respected him far too highly to contemplate breaking my promise. But that did not stop me lusting for him.

With my blooming, as he had foretold, came desire, and Bran was very desirable. Eighteen years old, six feet tall, a hero's face -- it was his that my imagination put on Aeneas -- and a hero's body. How could I not lust? It was in lusting for him, that autumn, that I first made seed. The experience was every bit as intense as I had deduced from his demonstration, and I was proud as I told him about it next morning: about the simple fact, not who the object of my lust had been. He congratulated me, but changed the subject. He never did talk about such things these days. Occasionally I saw him with young fellow-slaves, and he frequently disappeared on his evenings off. I drew my own conclusions, and never probed. He had his own life, and every right to it. Nor did he probe about mine. In truth, we were drawing a little apart. There were no ructions, no squabbles, no disagreements. He was still my good companion. But no longer was he quite so close a friend.

By midwinter the affair of the cattle was over. Tad was grateful for my support in resolving it, and declared that I deserved a holiday. But he asked punctiliously if he could borrow Bran for a while. Ulcagnus' present concern was to buy replacement cattle, which would take him the length and breadth of the civitas. Given the shortage of hired hands at the farm, someone else was needed to drive the new cows home. I was therefore left to my own devices, and for weeks I rarely set eyes on Bran. Because decently leisurely baths had long been in short supply, I spent almost every afternoon at the town baths.

These were of course vastly larger than our modest little suite at home, and with a far wider range of facilities -- a dressing room with lockers for clothes, an exercise yard for opening the pores, a cool room, a warm room, a hot dry room and a hot steamy room, and hot and cold plunge baths. For oiling and scraping you took your own slave, or for an extra fee hired an attendant, or had a friend do it for you. The baths were as much for socialising as for getting clean. They were always busy. And they were always noisy, with exercisers grunting as they heaved their weights, know-alls shouting out the latest small-town gossip, rowdy argumentative types, angry bathers whose clothes had been stolen, whining thieves caught red-handed, the opera star who loved the sound of his own voice, the splash and the howl of the man leaping into the ice-cold pool.

It was fun there. And there, quite often, I met up again with my former friends whom I had hardly seen for months. And especially I met up with Amminus . . .

Amminus, the younger son of another councillor, was a cheerful and mischievous lad a little ahead of me in physical development, and together we talked and sweated and laughed and scraped. He was also a little ahead of me in desire. One afternoon, as I scraped him, he sprang an erection, and inevitably I followed suit. It had never happened to me in the public baths before. At home it was one thing. In full view of hundreds it was another, for there was some code of modesty. I hastily tied a towel round my waist and Amminus rolled over on to his face. But as I re-scraped his back which I had already scraped, Amminus turned our talk in a new direction. He had not yet had it, but he wanted it. Did I? Um, yes, at last I wanted it too. What about tonight, then? Yes, tonight. We waited until we were decent enough to rinse off before dressing and going our separate ways. When I arrived home, Tad was waiting for me.

"Docco," he said. "It's time we had a talk."

I could guess the subject. It did not in the least perturb me. People were open about such things. In those days.

"I was watching you at the baths just now," he said. "And Amminus too. And I saw a very cheering sight. One that all fathers look forward to, but don't often see in public. It's nothing to be in the least ashamed of, but convention says that these things should be kept behind closed doors. So I was glad to see you both hide it at quickly as you could. May I ask, are you taking this further, the two of you?"

"Yes, Tad. He's coming round here tonight after dinner, if that's all right."

"No problem. I'll tell Mamma and Tigernac that you're not to be disturbed. I've been wondering when this might happen. Is it your first time?"

"Yes."

"And it won't be your last. Be considerate, Docco. Always be considerate. And when you get round to a girl, make sure it's her safe period. Good luck to you. Oh, and Docco . . . one day you'll marry and settle down and have children, I hope. And once that happens, I hope you'll be faithful. But until then . . ."

Tad smiled reminiscently.

"I was pretty wild in my youth, you know. But ever since I married your Mamma I've been faithful to her. Totally faithful. It's the best way. So sow your wild oats early, Docco. Get them out of your system."

"Thanks, Tad."

Over dinner, Mamma smiled at me and I thought I saw pride in her eyes. Then Amminus arrived and I took him to my room. We started simply, and for a while things went well, very well. We undressed, and for a while we kissed inexpertly and stroked each other. Amminus soon began to writhe.

"Oh gods, Docco! Suck me off! Quick!"

I was myself in an agony of expectation. I had not realised that one could be so hard that it hurt. Nor had either of us realised, then, that we could suck each other off at the same time. But Amminus was my friend, he had asked first, and I must not let him down. I took him in my mouth, and bobbed up and down, and fondled his balls, until, after a surprisingly short time, he moaned and climaxed. As he recovered he grinned up at me.

"Gods! I never knew it could be like that! Thanks, Docco! Your turn now. Suck or fuck?"

I had no hesitation. "Fuck." This was what I had dreamed of, and my cock felt as if it was bursting out of its skin.

He lay on his back, legs raised, and I knelt and lined up. But this was a more adventurous exercise, and technical difficulties arose. We were both virgins and, although we knew the theory, the practice did not prove easy. For all my eagerness, I could not get it in, and I was hurting Amminus considerably when there was a perfunctory knock on the door and Bran walked in. There was nothing in the least abnormal about that; but I was not expecting him that night.

I saw the look of shock on his face, followed by a great crimson blush as he apologised and went out. But before long he opened the door a crack and slid a jar of oil through the gap.

"Docco," he said from outside, in a taut voice, "use plenty of this. And get him to push out hard, as if he was crapping."

The door closed again. We followed his advice, and it worked. And Bran's long-ago verdict also proved correct: ecstasy was the only word.