The crystal cave - Mary Stewart [66]
This impression was fostered by the fact that the army was used as a foraging party for the town. Nothing was too simple or too rough for Ambrosius' men to undertake. Work which even my grandfather's rough-trained troops would have despised, these seasoned soldiers did as a matter of course. They brought in and stored wood in the town's yards. They dug and stored peat, and burned charcoal. They built and worked the smithies, making not only weapons of war, but tools for tilling and harvesting and building -- spades, ploughshares, axes, scythes. They could break horses, and herd and drive cattle as well as butcher them; they built carts; they could pitch and mount guard over a camp in two hours flat, and strike it in one hour less. There was a corps of engineers who had half a square mile of workshops, and could supply anything from a padlock to a troop-ship. They were fitting themselves, in short, for the task of landing blindfold in a strange country and maybe living off it and moving fast across it in all weathers. "For," said Ambrosius once to his officers in front of me, "it is only to fair-weather soldiers that war is a fair-weather game. I shall fight to win, and after I have won, to hold. And Britain is a big country; compared with her, this corner of Gaul is no more than a meadow. So, gentlemen, we fight through spring and summer, but we do not retire at the first October frost to rest and sharpen our swords again for spring. We fight on -- in snow, if we have to, in storm and frost and the wet mud of winter. And in all that weather and through all that time, we must eat, and fifteen thousand men must eat -- well."
Shortly after this, about a month after my arrival in Less Britain, my days of freedom ended. Ambrosius found me a tutor.
Belasius was very different from Galapas and from the gentle drunkard Demetrius, who had been my official tutor at home. He was a man in his prime who was one of the Count's "men of business" and seemed to be concerned with the estimating and accounting side of Ambrosius' affairs; he was by training a mathematician and astronomer. He was half Gallo-Roman half Sicilian, a tallish olive-faced man with long-lidded black eyes, a melancholy expression and a cruel mouth. He had an acid tongue and a sudden, vicious temper, but he was never capricious. I soon learned that the way to dodge his sarcasms and his heavy hand was to do my work quickly and well, and since this came easily to me and I enjoyed it, we soon understood one another, and got along tolerably well.
One afternoon towards the end of March we were working in my room in Ambrosius' house. Belasius had lodgings in the town, which he had been careful never to speak of, so I assumed he lived with some drab and was ashamed to risk my seeing her; he worked mainly in headquarters, but the offices near the treasury were always crowded with clerks and paymasters, so we held our daily tutorials in my room. This was not a large chamber, but to my eyes very well appointed, with a floor of red tiles locally made, carved fruitwood furniture, a bronze mirror, and a brazier and lamp that had come from Rome.
Today, the lamp was lit even in the afternoon, for the day was dark and overcast. Belasius was pleased with me; we were doing mathematics,