Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [129]
Porteus opened his mouth to protest, but then said nothing. This was his first mission, and if he started arguing with the governor he could be sure it would also be his last. He prepared to leave at once.
They reached the place ten days later: Porteus, the eighty men, and a stocky, elderly centurion, who had served under Suetonius several times before, and who hated natives.
“Hammer them. It’s the only thing,” he told Porteus.
“Suetonius – he knows what he’s about.”
It was a dreary spot. Like many of the north western settlements at that time, it was poor; the tribe had been forced to abandon their earthwork, which was more a corral than a defensive fortress, and to rebuild their tribal centre at some distance from it. This was what Porteus found: an untidy clutter of huts, a small round shrine, two cattle pens each containing a small collection of thin, long-haired beasts, and a dozen small fields of barley on the hillsides. On the open ground above, however, there were many flocks of small, squat sheep who roamed over a large area. He toured the entire place carefully. The population was not large: at the centre, some five hundred people huddled together; in the foothills around, another two hundred lived in widely scattered homesteads. They were unlike those stout, thatched round houses with their wattle palisades and rich fields of corn that he had encountered all over the south: these were stone hovels, dug into the ground on windy hillsides, relics of an earlier age. The natives watched the progress of the legionaries silently. At the end of his inspection, Porteus confronted the chief – an elderly grey-haired man with a heavy woollen cloak over his shoulders. He stood in front of a gaggle of his people and stared at the Romans insolently. Porteus addressed him sharply.
“You have not paid the annona you were assessed last year.” This was the corn levy used to feed the army. The chief did not reply but shrugged. “You have not paid the tributum soli, or the tributum capitis – your land tax or the poll tax,” Porteus went on. “Why not?”
The chief regarded him dully. Finally he spoke.
“With what?”
“You have barley, cattle, sheep,” Porteus replied firmly.
“We cannot pay. You can see for yourself, Roman. Your emperor is too greedy,” the man replied.
“There’s no statue to the divine emperor anywhere in the settlement,” the centurion grumbled at his side. “And their shrine is to some native god we can’t recognise.”
This too was a serious matter. It was the policy of Rome to discover the characteristics of the gods the natives worshipped and to join them to whichever seemed the closest of the vast pantheon of Roman gods. In this way, the provinces passed easily into Roman forms of worship without abandoning their own ancestral gods. It was a practical compromise which usually worked; as long as they abandoned the cursed Druid sect and paid due respect to the divine emperor they were left alone. But the curious hooded figure that the centurion had found in the little shrine, who held a snake in one hand and a raven in the other, did not seem to be identifiable with any Roman deity.
“These ones are trouble,” he muttered. “We’d do better to burn the whole place down.”
But Porteus shook his head. It seemed pointless to destroy these miserable folk. He was also concerned to see that the taxes they had been assessed by the procurator Decius were obviously too high: for they amounted to more than half the cattle in the pens, and to two thirds of all the barley.
“I shall have their taxes reassessed,” he stated. “For the moment we shall take ten cattle, and one wagon of grain.”
“That’s letting them off lightly,” complained the centurion.
“They must pay it at once,” Porteus continued. And turning to the old chief he announced: “We shall take taxes from you now, but new assessments will be made in the future – less high than these, and those you must pay promptly.”
“Take the ten cattle,” Porteus said to the centurion, and the Roman legionaries