The day we watched the Roman column disappear into the mist
was the last time I saw my father for the next six months. During his
absence, life was chaotic; we seemed to be spending less and less time at our
villa in the country and more and more time at the town house, where the dark,
rainy, autumn afternoons edged slowly into winter, and were passed listening to my tutor’s tales of past
Roman emperors, and suffering his rebukes at my constant failures with the
Latin tongue.
I asked questions of my tutors, the servants, and the
soldiers who seemed to fill the streets during those months, and managed to
find out that my father was away visiting other leaders, trying to forge
alliances and organise defence against the rumours of barbarian attacks.
The servants assured me that everything would continue as it
had been before the Romans left, but the soldiers looked surly and edgy, and
spent longer than usual on the practice grounds outside the crumbling town walls. I spent
my lonely hours watching them, and then practising my own clumsy uncoordinated
thrusts and parries with the wooden sword and small shield father had given me
last Christmas, under the affectionate guidance of my war tutor, Crixus.
It was in the third month of my father’s absence that the
engineers arrived and the town guard, along with any man found idle, were put
to work building and rebuilding the delapidated walls. A new gate was made
and erected, solid oak twice as thick as the old gate, and a new, taller, watchtower was
built looking out over the forests that protected us from the coast.
In the fourth month, any pretence that we still lived in the
country villa was abandoned, along with my old life. I lived in the fortified town
now, it felt safe here, where the villa had come to feel isolated and exposed.
As I wandered through the streets during the late afternoons after my lessons I
looked upon the grim faces of citizen and soldier alike, and I knew the truth.
War was coming.
