Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [137]
It was everything Tosutigus had ever dreamed of, and more. With envy he followed the burly king through its rising halls and courtyards. In astonishment he looked at the mosaics that were beginning to adorn its floors: here a group of dolphins was depicted dancing around Neptune the sea god; elsewhere, a peacock strutted in a Roman garden. There were even windows with green translucent glass in them, shedding a cool light on the paved floors inside. It was a noble building, worthy, it seemed to him, of a Roman senator, and as he gazed at it he realised the vast gulf that separated his dream of power from the reality of the little mansio at Sorviodunum.
“This,” he thought, “this is Rome.”
He stayed there for two days. Cogidubnus thanked him for coming and gave him a small statuette of himself. Then he returned to Sarum. In the sixteen years that followed, Tosutigus lived quietly. When the rebel prince Caractacus fought his brave but useless rearguard action against the Romans in the south, he did not even bother to ask for help from the chief at Sarum. Cogidubnus had politely ignored him as irrelevant; the Durotriges remembered his name with contempt; but by everyone else he was almost forgotten – one of the many nameless, petty chiefs who existed in the island at this time.
The year after his visit to Cogidubnus, he had married. The girl was the third daughter of another minor chief of the Atrebates. This too, had not been without humiliation. The girl’s father was poor, and Tosutigus’s reputation with the Durotriges, although the two tribes had taken different sides, did not speak very well for him with the Atrebatic chief: he refused to give the girl a dowry. Tosutigus took her all the same: she was a striking, red-haired girl with a tempestuous temper, who had given him a daughter and lived six more years before suddenly falling sick one winter and dying.
He had not remarried. His marriage had not been especially happy. After his wife’s death he had contented himself with a woman he visited in Calleva from time to time, and his affections had centred on his daughter, Maeve, whom he adored and who looked strikingly like her mother. At forty, Tosutigus had become a quiet, middle-aged widower, somewhat withdrawn from the world, living on his estate in a provincial backwater.
The settlement was certainly nothing much to look at. Beside the dune, scarcely occupied now except for a few huts, and only used occasionally as a desultory market, the bare hard roads intersected and cut their lonely way across the empty ancient tracks and ridges. By the entrance on the eastern side there was a cluster of huts used by Balba and some of the weavers. Down in the valley below, the small settlement of Sorviodunum contained a well-run stables for the governor’s messengers, a small inn where travellers could rest, and a little group of store houses. It was presided over by three soldiers who had little to do and who would gather in the porch of the largest storehouse and play at dice by the hour. The only other regular visitor was a clerk from the procurator’s office who came only at intervals to supervise the imperial estate and arrange for the sale of the emperor’s grain at the end of the summer.
Yet Tosutigus had some reason to be contented. Sorviodunum was at peace; though some of the western chiefs used the Boudiccan revolt as an opportunity to rebel, Tosutigus took no part in it at all. And even if Sorviodunum remained no more than a staging post, the sporadic traffic through the place was important. From the south-west, by the new road through the land of the Durotriges, came the prized Kimmeridge