Read Online Attila by Ross Laidlaw - Free Book Online

Ducenarius.’
    â€˜Good,’ said Proximo. ‘So, nothing bothering anyone?’
    Collective head-shaking and muttered denials.
    â€˜Liars,’ said Proximo cheerfully. ‘Touch your toes, soldier,’ he commanded the one who had spoken up. Looking puzzled, the man complied, whereupon Proximo delivered a smart tap on the buttocks with his vine-branch staff. The youth emitted a muffled yelp of pain.
    â€˜Thought so: saddle sores,’ pronounced Proximo. Most recruits in the early stages of learning to ride acquired raw coin-shaped patches from chafing of the skin. He looked round the room. ‘Come on, admit it, you’ve all got ’em.’ No one disagreeing, he went on, ‘Axle-grease, that’s the thing. You’ll also need
femenalia
– drawers – to keep the stuff in place. Any of the Berber women who hang around the fort’ll run you up a pair. You won’t be needing them for long, just till your bums harden up.’
    â€˜But . . . wearing drawers,’ one anxious recruit objected, ‘isn’t that against regulations?’
    â€˜It is lad, it is,’ purred Proximo, adding with simulated fierceness, ‘And if I find any of you wearing them you’ll be on a charge so fast Mercury couldn’t catch you. But then,’ he continued in his normal voice, ‘unlike “Cedo Alteram”, whom you’ve no doubt heard of, I don’t carry a mirror on the end of a stick when I take parade, so I’m hardly going to know, am I?’
    In the ambience of relaxed banter that followed, the
ducenarius
found himself fielding questions about conditions of service,donatives, the prospect of action, and their legendary supreme commander, the Count of Africa, famed as much for his strict impartial justice as for his feats of arms.
    â€˜Is it true he killed Athaulf, Galla Placidia’s first husband?’
    â€˜Half-killed, I’d say. He severely wounded Athaulf when the Goths attacked Massilia. 7 But Athaulf recovered, much to Placidia’s relief – devoted to her man, was the Augusta.’
    â€˜But he did kill a soldier accused of adultery with a civilian’s wife?’ pressed one trooper hopefully.’ 8
    â€˜Now that one
is
true,’ Proximo confirmed. ‘But you don’t want to hear about it. Oh, you do, do you?’
    It was noon before they sighted camp, a neat grid of the leather tents known as
papiliones
, ‘butterflies’, each holding eight soldiers. All around rolled a bleak landscape of undulating plains, sparsely clothed with esparto grass, thistles, and asphodel. To the north rose the wall of the bare, gullied Capsa Mountains. Southwards, shimmering mirages floated above the sparkling salt crust of the Shott el-Gharsa, one of the chain of salt lakes demarcating the limit of Roman rule. The lakes fringed the Great Sand Sea, which was traversed only by caravans bringing gold, slaves, and ivory across five hundred leagues of desert from the lands of the black men.
    The camp was a temporary mobile settlement, erected at one of the stopping-points on Boniface’s annual tour of what had become almost a personal fiefdom, rather than the Roman provinces of Africa Proconsularis and Byzacena. He had come to the decision that these peregrinations were a useful reminder to the local populace that Rome still had a mailed fist and was prepared to use it to maintain order and justice – Roman justice, not the primitive ‘eye for an eye’ code that prevailed beyond the frontier. Though officially ‘Roman’ for the past two hundred years, the natives were still tribesmen at heart. They were apt to become slack and unruly unless kept in check, witness the present unrest caused by the Donatists, a militant anti-Catholic sect guiltyof whipping up tribal sentiment among the peasants (many of whom had Punic blood) against their Roman masters.
    Boniface thought longingly of the bath and clean