Eagle in the Snow by Wallace Breem Page A

the last and highest of the forts to which I was to send a cohort, would pass through the town from time to time.
    It all reminded me strongly of Corstopitum as I had last seen it. It was very depressing.
    “The old camp is too far back,” I said to Quintus. “I want another built, here on the bank to the left of the bridge. My men are going to have to kill wet barbarians, not dry ones.”
    He said cautiously, “That will mean taking over a part of the town. We shall be popular.”
    “They will get used to it. I want the ground cleared north of the road between the present camp and the river. We shall need, approximately, six acres. The cavalry—the majority of them anyway—will have to be housed on the old camp site.
    The river at this point was about seven hundred and fifty yards across and it flowed more swiftly than any river I had ever seen. In the middle there were two long narrow islands, as flat as sword blades, and the lower end of the northern one was submerged in summer. They were thickly wooded and uninhabited, providing only a refuge for occasional outlaws from the communities on both banks. A third island, also long and thin, passed close to the west bank and sheltered the harbour from the force of the main channel. From the town walls we could see the broken bridge that jutted out forlornly over the water as far as the third pile. “What about that?” said Quintus. “Do we get it mended?”
    I shook my head. “No.”
    Across the river lay the ruins of the bridge-head camp that had once protected the settlement and the villas that had sprung up round the baths at Aquae Mattiacae. My father, I remembered, had always sworn that it was the hot springs there that had cured the injury done to his leg by an Aleman spear when he was a young man. And even in his later years he always insisted that its waters would have been better for his rheumatism than the baths at Aquae Sulis. The camp had been abandoned, finally, when the Alemanni sacked Moguntiacum in the year that my Theodosius came to our aid. It was unlikely that anything was left of the baths or the settlement now.
    Quintus said stubbornly, “We could repair it. A useful thing, I would suggest, to have a toe-hold on the east side.”
    I screwed up my eyes against the glare. “I’ll think about that one,” I said. “The important thing is to get ourselves established here first.”
    That first evening I walked out through the river gate and down the bank to where the bridge stood. I walked out on to the broken planks and stared at the remaining piles, stretched out to the further shore, stepping stones for some giant in a child’s story. Patches of mist drifted above the swirling water. I threw a stick into the current and was amazed at the speed with which it was taken away. Barbatio explained to me that a little way upstream from the bridge the river Moenus flowed into the Rhenus. “That’s the division, sir, between the Alemanni and the Burgundians. The Burgundians’ western frontier lies between here and Confluentes where the Franks take over.”
    “Are their frontiers firm ones?”
    “No, not really, sir. It depends who is on top at the moment.”
    “Well, what’s the position now?”
    “You see those escarpments, sir, down-river on the east bank. Well, all the country behind that, extending from this town to Bingium, is disputed. At the moment it’s held by a Frankish clan who guard the right bank for us in return for subsidies.”
    “You mean Roman silver; and they stay loyal just so long as the bribe is sufficiently heavy?”
    He looked startled. “Yes, sir.”
    It was getting cold now and I shivered, staring hard at the east bank. That bank there—on that my father had once walked in civilian dress and bearing no arms. But I, if I walked on it, would risk death as an enemy. In my father’s time we had owned it with as much certainty and as little doubt as we had the crumbling city of which I was now governor.
    Quintus