The Unquiet Shore by Francis Hagan

Author:Francis Hagan [Hagan, Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Published: 2019-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

The day wore on and the Barcarii of the First Maniple slowly finished off their munera aboard the assault craft. The oars were replaced back into their slots while the leather of the sails were hauled in and wrapped carefully about the yard-arm as the latter was stowed lengthways along the narrow decking. The dark green-blue paint of the hulls gleamed now in the low afternoon light. Nearby, the Sagitta rode high at the jetty looking as if she had only recently been commissioned into the navy of Rome. Her two great eyes painted at the prow on either side of the ramming embolos gleamed with a threatening lustre now and seemed to ward away any who dared challenge the Liburnian galley.

A heavy silence descended on the dock and jetties then as the afternoon settled over Rerigonium. It was a silence which was exacerbated by the emptiness of the settlement now that most of its inhabitants had moved eastwards up onto the high moors. Once the work on the ships had been finished and the milites and the Barcarii dismissed save for a guard detail, that emptiness became painfully evident. Rerigonium was an abandoned place populated only by the screech of the gulls overhead and the odd yapping of a dog scavenging through the piles of refuse nearby. The waters of the Sinus were high now and slapped against the wood piles of the jetties and the floating round-houses in a manner which only reinforced that silence.

To Flavius Sabinus, the stillness of that afternoon, its emptiness and silence, only aggravated his mood. The words of the Biarchus still rankled in him. Araxes had sensed the mood and had attempted to lighten it but he had just shrugged him aside and muttered something about waiting until the Novantae returned. Gallo and Aelian had drifted back to the long shed which was their billet now, leaving him alone. Twice he had inspected the guard detail about the docks which had been allocated to them, berating one Barcarius for the rust on his helmet and another for the loose iron tip on his spear. A third inspection would have been ridiculous and so he had fought the urge to distract himself and instead dismissed his escort and wandered a little away from the docks and up into the edge of that silence and emptiness.

Rerigonium stood before him, denuded of life, desolate almost - and he saw now how truly ruinous it was. Gallo had told him back at Arbeia that he thought the ‘Novantae’ meant ‘the New People’ in the old Celtic tongue - that these Novantae were interlopers who had been brought in to settle this land generations ago after its ancient inhabitants had been vanquished or driven away into exile. Veleda had intimated the same thing. Rerigonium, then, was something these Novantae had built to consolidate their hold on this new land; to claim it as theirs. As he stood there with the afternoon settling heavily over the place, he saw

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