Shifting his gaze to a point closer by, Messicus let his eyes run along the wattled rooftops of a village huddled near the west ramparts of the fort. Smoke rose from about 50 huts and long, barracks-style buildings as women, many of whom were the common-law wives of enlisted men, lit morning fires.
Messicus could smell the day's rations--beef and barley--stewing in the pot with vegetables and seasoning, but to pick out this pleasant odor required him to ignore the stench reeking from a point right under his nose--the deep ditch surrounding the fort. Half-filled with a sluggish flow of water and some 10 feet deep, the ditch was primarily intended as a defensive earthwork. But as the village inn, the brothe, and the officers' guest lodge and their kitchens--as well as the tannery, the slaughterhouse, the glue-maker's premises and the butcher shop--all backed up onto the ditch, it became a convenient place to dump refuse of every description. Old shoes, offcuts from leather hides, dead dogs, used bedding and floor matting, broken cooking pots and crockery, spoiled food and the knackered carcasses of cattle, pigs, sheep and goats all piled up in the ditch, there to putrefy. Truly, mused Messicus, any traveler on the Stanegate Road would know that he was approaching the fort miles before it actually became visible.
The sharp sound of brazen trumpets drew Messicus's thoughts back to his duty. Instantly coming to stiff attention, he observed the return of the Commandant Flavius Cerialis and his hunting party. The quarry this day had been red deer, the European equivalent of American elk, and the chase had evidently been a long one: The dog-pack, tongues lolling, straggled far behind the mounted hunters. Even Cerialis's magnificent part-Oriental stallion--a gift to him from Neratius Marcellus, Governor of Britain--looked blown. But the wide-spreading rack of antlers sagging from beneath a leather tarp strapped over a stout pack-mule told Messicus that the hunt had nevertheless been successful: There would be venison in the officers' mess tonight.
Messicus knew that as summer turned to fall, Cerialis's quarry would shift from deer to wild boar. In winter it would be a campaign against the marauding wolf pack whose tracks could be seen in the snow, while in the spring it would be the daintier pleasures of hawking doves or netting swans.
Vindolanda's massive wooden gates creaked on their iron hinges as guards swung them wide to admit Cerialis and his attendants. Their horses' hoofs clattering on the stone-paved street, the riders advanced as far as the Commandant's residence. Brass bits and metal-studded leather harnesses jingled as the men dismounted, while the dogs, finally catching up, crowded around.
"Ho, Candidus," Messicus heard the commandant shout to a house-slave. "Go and find Alio, our regimental veterinarian, and bring him here; my horse has strained a leg in the exertions of the hunt. Brave boy," he said, turning to run his hand along the magnificent curving neck of the flame-red stallion, "like a good Roman soldier, you don't yield to anything."
