The Boat of Fate by Keith Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

come to put what I had learned to a use. I remembered something Marcus had said once, about sand never running upwards; how both men and nations must go on, looking to the future and never standing still.
    The time was coming when I was to wish with all my heart I could conjure the sun back up from the western sea; for my mother was pregnant again.
     

Chapter Three
     
    While I worked to fit myself for my chosen career, great changes were taking place in the West. I was thirteen when Magnus Maximus, for so long a thorn in the side of the Imperial Government, finally rode to meet his fate, invading Italia with a horde of foederate barbarians stiffened by regular troops drawn from Hispania, Britannia and Gaul. Defeated in pitched battle by Theodosius, he finally surrendered at Aquileia and was summarily executed. For a time the Empire breathed easier.
    Yet the position of Theodosius himself was still delicate. Latium and many of the Provinces recognised the legal rights of the House of Velentinian; the Augusta Velentina, ruling for her son, was still a voice in world affairs, while her Magister Militum, Arbogast, was both powerful and feared. Theodosius, whose weakness had never been better shown than by his initial recognition of Maximus as Augustus, took the opportunity presented by the crisis to strengthen his position in the West. For three seasons his vast field army policed Gaul; but early in the summer of my seventeenth year news reached Baetica that the Legions were once more on the move. The Emperor was retiring on Constantinopolis, which city his son Arcadius had been controlling in his absence.
    My father put his head in his hands when he heard, and swore with startling fluency. ‘It’s incredible,’ he said. ‘Absolutely bloody incredible.’
    A weed was growing between two of the flagstones; I kicked at it idly, swinging my feet.
    ‘What does it mean?’ I asked.
    ‘What does it mean?’ said my father. ‘It means just this. Theodosius had the chance to clear things up for good and he let it slip through his fingers. Arbogast is a barbarian. He can’t be trusted; and that the Augustus knows as well as anybody.’ He swore again. ‘He should have destroyed him,’ he snarled, totally forgetting his vaunted liberality. ‘And if necessary, young Velentinian and his mother as well. This is what comes of bloody religion.’
    I said, ‘What’s religion got to do with it?’
    He favoured me with a steely glare. ‘What I shall never understand,’ he said, ‘is why this education of yours has failed to instil the slightest awareness of what’s going on in the world about you. Theodosius was taken seriously ill, years ago; he thought he was going to die, and had himself baptised. Since then he’s surrounded himself with an entire corps of Bishops, all prating on Heaven, Hell and this sin, that and the other; and it’s them he listens to rather than his military advisers or his own common sense. We haven’t heard the last of that clan of Pannonian misfits, not by a long chalk. You mark my words.’
    His face altered.
    ‘But I forget myself,’ he said viciously. ‘Politics have always been a little too mundane for your taste, haven’t they?’
    I stared at him, finding no answer. I saw the balding head, the lined face, the cold, angry eyes; and I realised I had grown farther from him with every year that had passed.
    I got up and wandered off to find Calgaca.
    Over the years my relationship with my mother had undergone a subtle change. After the initial shock of my injury, when I had been carried home unconscious and smothered with blood, it seemed a deeper bond had grown between us.
    True, the old days were gone for good; I no longer expected Calgaca to come running if I cried out in the night, those things were ended. But instead, as she recovered from the strange grief that had oppressed her, she began to treat me more as an equal. I would sit with her by the hour, often at night after the lamps had