Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [173]
He had left the villa within minutes of the angry scene with his father and he had not stopped since. He had no doubt about the urgency of his mission, and that in carrying it out he was in the right. But then Petrus Porteus always believed he was in the right: it was his only fault.
Before him, in the afternoon sun of an autumn day, lay the city of Venta Belgarum.
It was a small town, set on a hump of ground, surrounded by a thick wall. A pair of squat, heavy round turrets faced with rough hewn stone flanked the gateway which had recently been narrowed as a safety measure, and frowned towards the western approach road. Behind them he could see the town’s red tiled roofs.
Petrus urged his horse forward. His eager young face with its dark eyes was pale and tense with excitement. In a quick, nervous gesture, he pushed his hand back through his curly hair.
It was this nervous intensity in all that he did which so often caused his wise and thoughtful mother to sigh, and which drove his father into his frequent spasms of rage.
“Sometimes, Petrus,” Placidia would urge him, “one must compromise.” After all, she could reflect, her own less than happy marriage had consisted of little else for twenty years. But Petrus always looked at her blankly when she said this.
“How?” he would ask, in perfect sincerity.
Petrus did not despise compromise: it just never occurred to him.
He urged his horse forward and minutes later was clattering through the gates.
The town was quiet. It was as though half the population had gone indoors to sleep; but the people who were to be seen looked at him curiously. He noticed that the streets were in poor repair: the cobbles were loose, weeds were growing in places, and many of the houses, like the big Porteus town house, had been left empty and abandoned by their owners because they were too expensive to keep up. The Porteus house had stood in a small, paved square. He saw as he passed that someone had built a shack in the centre of it. The cobbles made a good floor; and since the council was more concerned with defence than anything else, no one had bothered to stop it. The forum was still well kept: a clean open space with handsome porticoed buildings round it and a column in the centre celebrating an almost forgotten triumph of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. He paused for a moment.
“Where are the Germans?”
A passer-by indicated the eastern gate.
“Outside.”
A group of men were strengthening the masonry of the gate as he rode through. Immediately outside stood a small cemetery: a Christian cemetery, he noticed, since the graves were laid neatly east to west. Beside it was the German mercenaries’ camp.
They were striking to look at: huge, broad-shouldered men with hard, unshaven faces, cold blue eyes and long flaxen hair which they braided in pigtails. There appeared to be about fifty of them; they lounged in front of their tents and stared at him insolently as he dismounted.
“Where’s your commander?” he asked. One of them jerked his thumb casually towards a tent in front of which a slightly older soldier was sitting with a small, dark man who looked like a merchant.
They listened to him without comment as he explained what he wanted, and it was the merchant, obviously acting as their agent, who replied.
“These men are for hire, young man; but the price is high.” He looked at the youth doubtfully.
Petrus allowed himself a half smile. From his belt he pulled a small leather bag of coins. Unknown to Constantius, his mother had given them to him before he left. He poured out a dozen for the merchant to see, and as he did so, the man’s eyes opened wide with surprise. They were gold solidi, minted in the reign of Theodosius the Great, the century before. Coins like this were becoming rare on the island. The merchant’s tone altered.
“For how long do you need the men?”
It was hard to say: the Saxons might attack at any time.
“Perhaps a year.”
The merchant nodded thoughtfully and spoke a few words to the German in his own language. The German nodded and the merchant turned back to Petrus.