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B R I T A N N I A
‘LETITIA COYNE’
CHAPTER ONE
PAGE 1
CHAPTER TWO
PAGE 10
CHAPTER THREE
PAGE 15
CHAPTER FOUR
PAGE 31
CHAPTER FIVE
PAGE 41
CHAPTER SIX
PAGE 48
CHAPTER SEVEN
PAGE 52
CHAPTER EIGHT
PAGE 60
CHAPTER NINE
PAGE 69
CHAPTER TEN
PAGE 81
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PAGE 95
CHAPTER TWELVE
PAGE 107
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
PAGE 118
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PAGE 131
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PAGE 142
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
PAGE 151
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
PAGE 166
GLOSSARY
PAGE 179
All contents copyright (c)2006 by Author [per Letitia Coyne]. All rights reserved.
This document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, only in entirety and unaltered.
This document cannot be sold in any form except by the author, and no part may be used or
reproduced without the prior written permission of the publisher.
© 2006
BRITANNIA 1
CHAPTER ONE.
GALLIA BELGICA AD77
Lyvia cast a long critical gaze over the bride. In a soft pale blue tunic, her hair
parted and bound in knots of red muslin and her
flammeum
veiling her head, the girl was
at least presentable. After all, she needed no status or breeding to fill the niche history
would set for her. She would do well enough.
Maia rubbed at imagined stains on her palms. She had eaten little over the last
few days and slept even less. Now her quaking knees woke tremors and aftershocks that
rippled through her, prickling rashes of sweat and jostling her empty stomach.
But it was not from fear; she had no fear of a union with Cilo. She loved him
dearly; as she had from the first day they met, as she had when they grew up together. As
fearful reputation as he had as a soldier, she had known only his love, his protection and
his ready laugh.
Neither was it from joy. As much as she loved him, it was as she had always
known him. She loved him as her brother.
“Why are you just standing there, child?” Her stepmother’s words were, as
always, like grinding ice; crisp, distinct, frigid.
Hesitant tears ran across her lower lashes and she blinked away their indecision.
She wanted to say, ‘My mother should be here’, but this now passed for a mother’s love
and warmth. These cold, vulturine features and this iceberg crack and sibilance were all
the comfort she could call. “Has Cilo dressed?” she asked quietly.
“Of course. He and the lads are still celebrating the new vintage. If you aren’t
soon ready there will be none left for the feast.”
That was unlikely. Lyvia had planned this day too well. Even its inauspicious
coincidence with the festival of Vinalia Rustica had been slated well before the shocking
news was broken to the bride.
Maia slipped on her russet sandals and tried again to straighten the knot at her
waist. She needed to wash her hands again, but now there would be no more time. She
gently lifted her hand wrought circlet of wild dianthus and amaranthus, setting it carefully
so it held the veil in place over the massed intricacies of her hair. “Go on out, then,” she
said. “I’m ready.”
Lyvia needed no second prompt. She swept from the room leaving small breezes
to giggle in her perfumed wake.
Feeling carefully at her breast, Maia drew out a tiny leather pouch and held in her
palm a small silver coin. Her mother had placed this same coin in her own shoe on the
BRITANNIA 2
day she married Bassus. Maia had no clear recall of the custom or its meaning, she was
too long away from her homeland, but it was a tie, a tiny gesture that brought her mother
closer on this day of all days.
Lifting the long, narrow tunic out of the way, she slipped the little coin into her
sandal under her heel and gathered herself to walk through the door into her wedding.
Cilo might have dressed formally at some time that morning, but the day’s
celebrations left him more than moderately dishevelled.
There was never any chance he would tame the wild mass of jet curls that
bunched around his ears and tumbled down the leather muscles of his ornamental cuirass.
Dressed in uniform, although technically he was no longer a soldier, his beauty was
breathtaking.
He stood as he saw his bride enter the hall. His full lips, for which he had long
ago been named Cilo, parted as he smiled tight reassurance at her, and teeth as white as
new chalk shone against his sun-brown skin. Unsought maturity shone from serious
green eyes, and his forehead bunched under the weight of concerns too heavy for his
years.
Maia froze on the spot in the doorway. Nothing would move. She felt fragile, her
bones brittle, as if her dread had robbed her of some essential elasticity. Her feet seemed
changed into the hard baked clay of the tiles. Then her trembling knees. Her hips.
All eyes came to her as an expectant hush drowned the room. She could see the
faces; hard, earth-brown men in battle dress. Lyvia and Bassus too; he with a broad smile
over many proud chins; her with the sharp efficiency of flesh that showed her meanness
of spirit as clearly as his volume showed the generosity of his.
The rush of blood in her ears was deafening; her chest was tight as if her ribs were
iron bands, cold and constricting. Her cheeks burned. A whimper escaped and she forced
her sticky palms down her thigh, smoothing the soft flannel of her tunic.
Tiberia stood across the room at the low tableau, her broad smile pleading, willing
Maia to step forward and take her place for the ceremony. A servant as
pronuba
, another
of Lyvia’s slights, but not one Maia could take too much too heart. The old domestic was
kind and warm, as matronly as anyone Maia had known.
Cilo stepped forward with his hand extended, encouraging her, as if his touch
could somehow compensate for her deficiencies. Listing slightly to the left, he steadied
himself on the edge of a table and walked to where she stood.
“You look beautiful.” He kissed the back of her fingers where the iron band of
their engagement lay dark against her pale skin, and bowed his head, then brought his
eyes up to hers, pleading. In the instant they held, Maia glimpsed torment as gaunt
despair, then they fled under heavy lashes. Black curls shook away the moment of crisis
and Maia drew a deep breath for them both as he led her toward the dais.
Given her chance at last, Tiberia seized their joined hands. Joy trembled through
all the comfortable excesses of her aging frame and as carefully as her bursting joy
permitted, she spoke her solemn words aloud. “Do you come willingly to your
husband?” Her eyebrows leapt up her forehead and she bobbed her face at Maia in an
exaggerated encouragement to speak.
Maia looked up at the man beside her. In Rome, in Pompeii, they would make
mosaics to capture his beauty. He was glorious, godlike, and he held himself taut, his
determined profile offering her neither explanation nor reassurance.
BRITANNIA 3
They had both come to this ceremony willingly and yet there was no mistaking
the desperation that moved behind his eyes. If he had been presented other options, if
choices were open to him that seemed riper with promise, she had been given no such
license.
He was her only hope; and the knowledge that her husband came to her bleak and
despondent, maybe even resentful, trampled the last embers of her courage into ash. It
lay thick and bitter on her tongue, drying all her promises and her dreams. Slow breaths
dragged into her chest. She could not have forced herself to run if there had been a
sanctuary to find.
He was her only hope, and she was tethered to him there as surely as if the ring
she wore was still the iron shackles of a slave. He was her rock, her only safe place.
With her hand crushed into his by Tiberia’s eager claw, she spoke, “When and where you
are Gaius, then and there I am Gaia.”
The matron of honour could control her delight no longer. Surging forward she
deluged the couple, crushing Maia between the warmth of an old servant’s ample bosom
and her husband’s hard leanness. Where her cheek pressed against his chest, a purple
splash of the fine new wine darkened the leather so it seemed his heart was brimming
overfull, or broken and bleeding.
Once free of the vice like grip of their
pronuba
, the couple found their seat before
the tableau. Maia moved under a dry veil of grief. Her ears were red hot, burning with
old shames, and a persistent hum droned the sounds from around her. Somewhere deep
inside, her soul sang ancient keening songs in a language she could not quite recall.
Against the quiet strength of her husband’s grip, she felt herself gently rocking.
The Auspex was an older man; Maia did not recall having seen his face in the
days since the garrison had arrived. He wore the insignia of the XXth and his bearing
was slow and deeply serious. He cleared his throat to hurry Tiberia from her place in the
middle of the ceremony, then solemnly mumbled his way through the incantations to
Jupiter. He offered the grain cakes, broke them and presented them to the bride and
groom to eat.
From her fingers Cilo ate the offering and she from his, but when she searched his
face for empathy, or some kind of vicarious fortitude, she saw only wine addled emotion
which could have been pain, or humiliation.
He refused to meet her eyes, fixing his blurred vision on the Auspex as he brought
out the
Tabilae Nuptiales
, and placed it before them to sign. Then in his beautiful hand,
the script of a man destined to be senator, he crafted his name. Oppius Pompeius Bassus.
Beside his words, she set the stylus, trying to breath calmly enough to settle her nerves
and steady her trembling fingers, and wrote: Maia Pompeia. His wife,
sempeternum
.
When he brought his face to hers at last, his lovely, haunted eyes were brimming
over. Something deep inside him gave way suddenly and he seemed to sag, then caught
himself, smiled and squeezed her hand as he drew her to himself and kissed her lightly on
the lips. So they marked their union in the silent wash of tears.
He smiled again, not at her but at the crowd. In an instant he remade himself and
pulled her tight against his side. One strong arm rested on her shoulder; the other thrust
high in the air in defiance or salute and raised a cheer that rang against the roof, as the
witnesses crowded forward in celebration.
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