Letitia Coyne

B R I T A N N I A

‘LETITIA COYNE’

CHAPTER ONE PAGE 1

CHAPTER TWOPAGE 10

CHAPTER THREEPAGE 15

CHAPTER FOURPAGE 31

CHAPTER FIVEPAGE 41

CHAPTER SIXPAGE 48

CHAPTER SEVENPAGE 52

CHAPTER EIGHTPAGE 60

CHAPTER NINEPAGE 69

CHAPTER TENPAGE 81

CHAPTER ELEVENPAGE 95

CHAPTER TWELVEPAGE 107

CHAPTER THIRTEENPAGE 118

CHAPTER FOURTEENPAGE 131

CHAPTER FIFTEENPAGE 142

CHAPTER SIXTEENPAGE 151

CHAPTER SEVENTEENPAGE 166

GLOSSARYPAGE 179

All contents copyright (c)2006 by Author [per Letitia Coyne]. All rights reserved. This document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, only in entirety and unaltered. This document cannot be sold in any form except by the author, and no part may be used or reproduced without the prior written permission of the publisher.

© 2006

BRITANNIA 1

CHAPTER ONE.

GALLIA BELGICA AD77

Lyvia cast a long critical gaze over the bride. In a soft pale blue tunic, her hair parted and bound in knots of red muslin and her flammeum veiling her head, the girl was at least presentable. After all, she needed no status or breeding to fill the niche history would set for her. She would do well enough.

Maia rubbed at imagined stains on her palms. She had eaten little over the last few days and slept even less. Now her quaking knees woke tremors and aftershocks that rippled through her, prickling rashes of sweat and jostling her empty stomach.

But it was not from fear; she had no fear of a union with Cilo. She loved him dearly; as she had from the first day they met, as she had when they grew up together. As fearful reputation as he had as a soldier, she had known only his love, his protection and his ready laugh.

Neither was it from joy. As much as she loved him, it was as she had always known him. She loved him as her brother.

“Why are you just standing there, child?” Her stepmother’s words were, as always, like grinding ice; crisp, distinct, frigid.

Hesitant tears ran across her lower lashes and she blinked away their indecision. She wanted to say, ‘My mother should be here’, but this now passed for a mother’s love and warmth. These cold, vulturine features and this iceberg crack and sibilance were all the comfort she could call. “Has Cilo dressed?” she asked quietly.

“Of course. He and the lads are still celebrating the new vintage. If you aren’t soon ready there will be none left for the feast.”

That was unlikely. Lyvia had planned this day too well. Even its inauspicious coincidence with the festival of Vinalia Rustica had been slated well before the shocking news was broken to the bride.

Maia slipped on her russet sandals and tried again to straighten the knot at her waist. She needed to wash her hands again, but now there would be no more time. She gently lifted her hand wrought circlet of wild dianthus and amaranthus, setting it carefully so it held the veil in place over the massed intricacies of her hair. “Go on out, then,” she said. “I’m ready.”

Lyvia needed no second prompt. She swept from the room leaving small breezes to giggle in her perfumed wake.

Feeling carefully at her breast, Maia drew out a tiny leather pouch and held in her palm a small silver coin. Her mother had placed this same coin in her own shoe on the day she married Bassus. Maia had no clear recall of the custom or its meaning, she was too long away from her homeland, but it was a tie, a tiny gesture that brought her mother closer on this day of all days.

Lifting the long, narrow tunic out of the way, she slipped the little coin into her sandal under her heel and gathered herself to walk through the door into her wedding.

Cilo might have dressed formally at some time that morning, but the day’s celebrations left him more than moderately dishevelled.

There was never any chance he would tame the wild mass of jet curls that bunched around his ears and tumbled down the leather muscles of his ornamental cuirass. Dressed in uniform, although technically he was no longer a soldier, his beauty was breathtaking.

He stood as he saw his bride enter the hall. His full lips, for which he had long ago been named Cilo, parted as he smiled tight reassurance at her, and teeth as white as new chalk shone against his sun-brown skin. Unsought maturity shone from serious green eyes, and his forehead bunched under the weight of concerns too heavy for his years.

Maia froze on the spot in the doorway. Nothing would move. She felt fragile, her bonesbrittle, as if her dread had robbed her of some essential elasticity. Her feet seemed changed into the hard baked clay of the tiles. Then her trembling knees. Her hips.

All eyes came to her as an expectant hush drowned the room. She could see the faces; hard, earth-brown men in battle dress. Lyvia and Bassus too; he with a broad smile over many proud chins; her with the sharp efficiency of flesh that showed her meanness of spirit as clearly as his volume showed the generosity of his.

The rush of blood in her ears was deafening; her chest was tight as if her ribs were iron bands, cold and constricting. Her cheeks burned. A whimper escaped and she forced her sticky palms down her thigh, smoothing the soft flannel of her tunic.

Tiberia stood across the room at the low tableau, her broad smile pleading, willing Maia to step forward and take her place for the ceremony. A servant as pronuba, another of Lyvia’s slights, but not one Maia could take too much too heart. The old domestic was kind and warm, as matronly as anyone Maia had known.

Cilo stepped forward with his hand extended, encouraging her, as if his touch could somehow compensate for her deficiencies. Listing slightly to the left, he steadied himself on the edge of a table and walked to where she stood.

“You look beautiful.” He kissed the back of her fingers where the iron band of their engagement lay dark against her pale skin, and bowed his head, then brought his eyes up to hers, pleading. In the instant they held, Maia glimpsed torment as gaunt despair, then they fled under heavy lashes. Black curls shook away the moment of crisis and Maia drew a deep breath for them both as he led her toward the dais.

Given her chance at last, Tiberia seized their joined hands. Joy trembled through all the comfortable excesses of her aging frame and as carefully as her bursting joy permitted, she spoke her solemn words aloud. “Do you come willingly to your husband?” Her eyebrows leapt up her forehead and she bobbed her face at Maia in an exaggerated encouragement to speak.

Maia looked up at the man beside her. In Rome, in Pompeii, they would make mosaics to capture his beauty. He was glorious, godlike, and he held himself taut, his determined profile offering her neither explanation nor reassurance.

They had both come to this ceremony willingly and yet there was no mistaking the desperation that moved behind his eyes. If he had been presented other options, if choices were open to him that seemed riper with promise, she had been given no such license.

He was her only hope; and the knowledge that her husband came to her bleak and despondent, maybe even resentful, trampled the last embers of her courage into ash. It lay thick and bitter on her tongue, drying all her promises and her dreams. Slow breaths dragged into her chest. She could not have forced herself to run if there had been a sanctuary to find.

He was her only hope, and she was tethered to him there as surely as if the ring she wore was still the iron shackles of a slave. He was her rock, her only safe place. With her hand crushed into his by Tiberia’s eager claw, she spoke, “When and where you are Gaius, then and there I am Gaia.”

The matron of honour could control her delight no longer. Surging forward she deluged the couple, crushing Maia between the warmth of an old servant’s ample bosom and her husband’s hard leanness. Where her cheek pressed against his chest, a purple splash of the fine new wine darkened the leather so it seemed his heart was brimming overfull, or broken and bleeding.

Once free of the vice like grip of their pronuba, the couple found their seat before the tableau. Maia moved under a dry veil of grief. Her ears were red hot, burning with old shames, and a persistent hum droned the sounds from around her. Somewhere deep inside, her soul sang ancient keening songs in a language she could not quite recall. Against the quiet strength of her husband’s grip, she felt herself gently rocking.

The Auspex was an older man; Maia did not recall having seen his face in the days since the garrison had arrived. He wore the insignia of the XXth and his bearing was slow and deeply serious. He cleared his throat to hurry Tiberia from her place in the middle of the ceremony, then solemnly mumbled his way through the incantations to Jupiter. He offered the grain cakes, broke them and presented them to the bride and groom to eat.

From her fingers Cilo ate the offering and she from his, but when she searched his face for empathy, or some kind of vicarious fortitude, she saw only wine addled emotion which could have been pain, or humiliation.

He refused to meet her eyes, fixing his blurred vision on the Auspex as he brought out the Tabilae Nuptiales, and placed it before them to sign. Then in his beautiful hand, the script of a man destined to be senator, he crafted his name. Oppius Pompeius Bassus. Beside his words, she set the stylus, trying to breath calmly enough to settle her nerves and steady her trembling fingers, and wrote: Maia Pompeia. His wife, sempeternum.

When he brought his face to hers at last, his lovely, haunted eyes were brimming over. Something deep inside him gave way suddenly and he seemed to sag, then caught himself, smiled and squeezed her hand as he drew her to himself and kissed her lightly on the lips. So they marked their union in the silent wash of tears.

He smiled again, not at her but at the crowd. In an instant he remade himself and pulled her tight against his side. One strong arm rested on her shoulder; the other thrust high in the air in defiance or salute and raised a cheer that rang against the roof, as the witnesses crowded forward in celebration.

First to sign was not Lyvia or Bassus as she expected, but Gnaeus Julius Agricola, consul of Gallia Aquitania, Pontifex, Commander of Legio XXth Valeria Victrix, now to be Governor of Britannia. Cilo’s commanding officer.

Lyvia’s feast was as sumptuous as the provincial markets allowed; rich meats, peacocks and other game fowl, sucking pigs and the best of the autumn harvest. Some dignitaries had come down river from Lutetia; and the families of the freemen from around the villa, the farms and villages along the Seine valley; but soldiers far outnumbered the other guests.

Among them, Cilo seemed to rise above his sadness as the hours passed. At some critical point he had remained steadfast. He had chosen an obscure duty. He had chosen obedience and compliance. There would be other choices and consequences to deal with as this future traced its delicate omens on the air.

This future with sweet, shy, dutiful, beautiful Maia as his wife.

This future starting now, surrounded by those he loved, carousing loudly, feasting and singing as if each bird, each goblet, each song might be his last.

As the wedding reception progressed, Maia sat quietly alone, seeing little and caring less. Her ears and eyes turned inward on vague sinuous melodies. An eloquent lament threaded back through her memories, weaving the fabric of consciousness into something she could almost recall. The song she heard resembled pipes, soft, hollow, but as she traced its mournful harmonies, she recognized the haunting strains of the song. It was her mother’s fathomless grieving, and her own.

Her body made no real demands upon her attention and the irritation of the little silver coin was barely noticeable unless she stood. She drained her silver chalice of new vintage and refilled it, taking a seat at the side of the hall. On an empty stomach the reflective fog of the wine seemed to fuel the part of her mind that went questing after threadbare memories. It was comfortable, forgetful, soothing away hunger and easing stresses from her neck and shoulders. It helped her float toward the song, carried her back to another world, another life.

She could see her mother’s face on the day she married Bassus, speaking important truths about fate and happiness. About courage. She remembered standing between her stepbrothers, Appius and Oppius, feeling small and so exposed, but clutching tightly to hands that promised her protection.

So much was gone, but not her Cilo. Not the big brother who loved her, and sheltered her through losses too painful to bear. Not Cilo, surely he would never be ashamed of her.

Painfully, she forced her eyes to focus on the room around her, and sought his lovely face. Even among so many men he stood apart. Rapt in the excess of celebration, he could not hide the elemental feline grace of his movement, his lean muscularity. And more, Maia knew his heart and his courage.

It took courage to find joy in the rooms fate built around you. As much as it took courage for warriors to choose to tear walls down. She had courage enough to accept her only choice. If Cilo had other options, but he had chosen her, then he too would find joy in their union. She needed now to find the strength to stand beside him.

The night drew on and the time to form the Pompa, their procession to the marriage bed, came and went. Tiberia had been ordered back to the kitchens, and was clearing and serving still, so she had no matron to stand with her. That which should have been a mother was conspicuously elsewhere, intent on presenting Maia with her various humiliations, while she herself accomplished a masterpiece in colonial entertainment.

Alone then, she approached her husband. “Cilo, we have to go now. Some of the guests have already had to leave.”

“It’s Ok,” he pulled her against him, under his arm, as if she belonged there with his comrades, a miniature, or mascot for the troops. “There is plenty of time, angel. Here, have some wine.”

“No, no more wine.” She took the goblet he pushed into her hand. “Your commander has gone to the barracks, did you notice? That’s bad protocol, Cilo. If he goes, shouldn’t all these men go back to the barracks too?”

“He’s a good man. A fine man. And fair. He would never stop a wedding celebration. And I’m his tribune, he trusts my judgment.”

“But we have to go, don’t you see? Even if every other part of this celebration has been a mess, this we have to do. We have to light the white torches and make the procession. You know that.”

“A mess? This has been the best celebration, ever. Ever in the history of Rome. Our dearest stepmother has seen to that. Look at her over there, slithering around the guests.”

“Cilo, stop it! Not so loud, she’ll hear you.”

“Yes, she’ll hear me, and call up the Furies. Oh, too late. There’s one now.”

“Cilo!” Maia warned, uselessly.

“Serpent hair and eyes of blood, looks like her to me. What do you think?”

“Stop it. You’ll make trouble for us.”

“Trouble? My angel, you can’t guess at the trouble we are already in, you and I. Here, drink up. Toast our glorious future.” He wiped a finger down her cheek and the smile slid away from his lips. “You have no idea the price the fates demand. And that’s as it should be. Here, drink up.” He turned and laughed again with the men who crowded around him.

His weight was growing uncomfortable on her neck and reasoning with him was hopeless. She took a gulp of wine against the burning in her throat and kissed his chest. Then turning, slipped from under his arm, and trudged sadly to where a small group of guests was preparing to leave.