A Fragile Peace Read Online Free PDF

and he gracefully handed over my inheritance. By one of those connections that have the Fates roaring with laughter, Mullinus had bought my mother as a slave and had fallen in love with her. When I was a boy, she was enslaved by the same sea raiders who killed my father, but only after she had ensured my escape.
    I had met her years later but I was no longer the child who had run from slavery. My life as a soldier had hardened me. I felt little for her, and our reunion was not sentimental, on my part at least. In fact, I had only grimaced when word came five or so years ago that she had died of a fever. Some fools criticise me for it, but I have lost close comrades to death, disease and captivity and I have little room for grief any more. I’ll feast with them in Asgard, the gods willing, as I plan to die with a sword in my hand.
    Mullinus was standing before me and I tore myself away from my thoughts. Something about the trader was good, although I knew he put sand in his salt and water in his wine. After all, he was in business to make profits. “Are you prospering?” I asked, taking in his fine fur-trimmed robe and the thick gold chain at his throat.
    “I have made a few good decisions, lord,” he bowed. “Even a blind squirrel can sometimes find a nut.”
    I laughed and offered him wine. “Unlike the stuff you sold, it’s unwatered,” I said.
    He shook his head, ignoring the jest. “I have come on what may be an important matter,” he said.
    “Sit,” I said. Milo stood to leave, but Mullinus said:”Your son should also hear,” and the boy sat down again. The story Mullinus told made my heart freeze. A Hibernian trader who had raced from Dover, fleeing to his native isle had informed him of a plague outbreak in the south.
    “Whatever it is, it acts rapidly,” he said. “There are reports of people who go to bed healthy and who do not wake up the next dawn. The trader told me of a physician who went to attend a patient stricken with it, and the doctor died before the patient did, the next morning. I think it is like that great pestilence which struck during the time of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.”
    This, I knew had struck just over a century ago and took more lives than any war or epidemic ever recorded. Historians said that as many as one citizen in every ten across the empire had died in an incredible fury of fast-moving fevers. The deadly Antonine Plague was marked on its victims by its speed: most died within three days, and by hideous, unmistakable symptoms that included large, hard black buboes that rose and swelled in its victims’ crotches and armpits, inflicting incredible pain, fever and delirium.
    “In the days of Marcus Aurelius, they had the same bloody flux, the foul, stinking breath and the coughing of blood that is being seen in Dover,” said Mullinus, who clearly knew his medicine. “Their bodies were blistered with boils that were sometimes as big as apples, black, red and oozing blood. These are not symptoms of anything but death by deadly plague, and the Hibernian told me the men of Kent are fleeing anywhere they can.”
    The Celt who brought this news did well to race to put a sea between himself and the plague, I thought grimly. If it truly were the same pox that decimated Marcus Aurelius’ empire and had also claimed the life of the emperor Gothicus not 30 years ago, the British faced an invisible enemy more fearful and more deadly than any Saxon or Pict. How, I wondered, could we defeat this ghoul from the Underworld? I called a conclave. This was too important a matter for one man, however powerful an emperor, and I wanted every advice I could get..
    Soon, my officers, my wizard, my counselors and even a wretched creature who claimed to be a Christian prelate – by Mithras, how I longed for my warrior-bishop Candless’ council here – were present. I outlined the situation. They listened. I called up in myself all the virtues the Romans had inculcated in me. To be tough, to