Burroughs, Edgar Rice - I Am A Barbarian Read online

  I Am A Barbarian

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Chapter I

  A.U.C.769 [A.D.16]

  MY FATHER was a rugged individualist. He was about as subservient to discipline as a brown bear in the rutting season, and as for tribute: Jove! His face turned purple under its blue paint when emissaries came from Tagulus to demand it. With a single stroke of his blade, he lopped off the head of one of them and then sent it back to Tagulus by the other, saying, "Here is the only tribute that the grandson of Cingetorix pays to his enemies." In his little world there were three scourges: Pestilence, Famine, and Father.

  What a man he was! I can see him now in his war chariot, lashing his horses toward the enemy, his skin stained blue, the hair of his wolf-skin tunic fluttering in the breeze, his great mustachios streaming out behind, his wolf-head helmet clamped low above his brow. Never forget, my son, that the blood of this proud barbarian flows in your veins.

  From the time I was eight I rode with him. When he and his warriors leaped out with their great swords among the enemy, I followed, so that if they were hard pressed they could leap to the pole and run back between the horses and thus regain the chariot. Then we would wheel and go racing away.

  My father was chief of a small tribe. He had, perhaps, a hundred fighting men, but with these he fought his way down from the north to the lush plains of Kent. Not that he particularly wished to go to Kent but that the more powerful tribes that he was constantly attacking chased him down.

  The first Cingetorix had been king of Kent; but one of his younger sons, the father of my father, had gone north to raid and loot; and he had done so well that he had remained there, more or less of a scourge upon the country which he afflicted. He was one of the reasons why Father was driven south; Father was the other one.

  We were not welcome in Kent. The inhabitants were most inhospitable, and we got word that Tagulus was coming down with an army of a thousand warriors to inquire why Father had lopped off the head of his emissary; so father decided to invade the Continent. He stole a couple of ships in the harbor at Dover and loaded us all aboard, warriors, women and children, and set out to conquer the Belgians.

  I think he had never heard, nor had I at that time, that Julius Caesar, in writing of the inhabitants of Gaul, had said: "Of all these, the Belgae are the bravest." Not that that would have made any difference to Father, perhaps; but it might have impelled him to greater caution in his campaign of conquest.

  But this is not the story of my father, though a fat volume of war, rapine, and murder could be written around the tumultuous years of his manhood. It is the story of Little Boots, as told by the slave who was attached to his imperial person from his fourth year until his death.

  Suffice it to say that my father did not conquer the Belgians. What was left of the tribe, and that was not much, the Belgians sold into slavery to the Chatti, a German tribe. The Germans are a very different people from us Britons. Like us, they are large men; but whereas we shave our entire bodies except our heads and upper lips, they are all covered with hair like animals. So densely are they covered with this matted mass that they always gave me the impression of peering out from ambush. Also, they stink. I am sure that not one of them has ever taken a bath for at least five generations back.

  We were house guests of the Chatti in their mud huts for but a brief period, although however brief, far too long, for we were not the only tenants of their mud huts. Besides the Chatti, there were other vermin, which crawled out of their hair and swarmed upon us, upon the assumption, I presume, that fresh pastures seem the greenest. It was during those days (and nights) that I acquired that violent dislike for Germans that I have never overcome, nor tried to.

  Then the Chatti were set upon and overwhelmed by Roman legions, and once again the grandson of Cingetorix and his family changed hands. The change was not for the worse, for the Romans were clean and they had food, being powerful enough to take it from one and sundry wherever they chanced to be.

  The Roman general into whose hands we had passed was named Germanicus. He was the nephew and adopted son of the Emperor Tiberius, and a grand fellow withal, but not much of a military phenomenon. He was also something of a weak sister at one minute and a bloody tyrant at the next, but I think his wife sicked him on to these latter extravagances. This Agrippina was a bitch.

  After our capture, we were taken to the camp of Germanicus, and he looked us over. He was greatly taken with the appearance of Father. "This," he said, pointing at him, "is a gift from the gods. He is going to be nothing less than a sensation when he is led through Rome in chains behind my chariot on the occasion of my triumph. I wish I had a couple of dozen more of him, for it is going to be too bad to have to mar the grandeur of the occasion with a lot of lousy Germans who look like gorillas and smell like mephitis. Send him and these others to Ravenna, and we shall pick them up on our way back to Rome."

  Agrippina was there, eyeing us down her long nose, and there was a little brat about four years old hanging onto her tunic. He was all tricked out in the uniform of a legionary, with tiny military sandals that laced well above his ankles. He kept casting a mean eye on me.

  I was standing close to my mother and my father, and we were all standing very straight and stiff as became Britons-no servile bending of the knee of the grandson of Cingetorix and his family.

  Suddenly the brat tugged at his mother's tunic and said, "I want," pointing at me. I was ten years old then, and, if I do say it myself, one of the finest-looking lads it has ever been my privilege to encounter.

  A centurion was about to lead us away, when Agrippina stopped him with an imperious gesture; and, believe me, you don't know what an imperious gesture is unless you have seen Agrippina unleash one.

  "Hold!" said Agrippina. "Caligula wishes the young barbarian. Take it away, burn that filthy wolf skin it is wearing, scrub it, and bring it to my tent."

  I saw my mother's lip tremble, but she kept her head up and looked straight to the front. Father didn't even flick an eyelash, and his great mustachios looked as fierce as ever. I never saw them again but once: that was in Rome. I never spoke with either of my parents again.

  I was now the slave of Little Boots, as the legionaries had named him because of the caligae that he wore. He was their darling, and I will say that at that time he was a very cute kid. They were so fond of him that a little later, when Agrippina was supposed to return to Rome because she was about to bring another nitwit into the world, the soldiers would not let Little Boots go with her; and Agrippina and Germanicus had to bow to their will.

  These Roman soldiers were not such a bad lot when you got to know them. The veterans were tough, and fine soldiers; but Germanicus had a lot of conscripts drafted from the slums of Rome and old soldiers who had been dragged from their farms. The former wished to get back to Rome, the latter back to their farms; and they all wanted money and loot. They were a spoiled lot; and the officers, all the way up to the commanding general, were afraid of them.

  Shortly after we were brought to the camp, four legions mutinied and demanded that Germanicus lead them back to Rome and dispute the throne with Tiberius, but Germanicus refused. Many of the veterans tried to play upon his sympathies by a display of infirmities of age. I saw one old fellow seize the hand of Germanicus as though to kiss it and then stick the general's fingers in his mouth to feel his toothless gums; another exposed his legs, crippled with rheumatism, while others uncovered their skinny shanks, shriveled from old age. The younger men milled around, blustering and threatening.

  Germanicus was a good soul, kindly and generous, but he was never cut out to command Roman legions. As I wa
tched him that day, I could not but visualize what Father would have done under like circumstances; he would have waded in singlehanded with that great sword of his and licked four legions or died in the attempt.

  But Germanicus pleaded. He tried to play upon their sympathies. It is hard to believe of one who might have expected someday to be emperor of Rome, but I was there and witnessed it with my own eyes and ears.

  "Rather will I die than forget my duty," he cried, and then he drew his sword. "Return to your duties, or I shall plunge this into my heart."

  Several soldiers threw their arms about him to prevent this, but others encouraged him contemptuously. "Go to it!" cried several, and one who had been a gladiator drew his own sword and offered it to Germanicus with a sneer. "Take this," he said. "You will find it sharper than your own!"

  Seeing that their general was making a damn fool of himself, Caius Caetronius and several other officers surrounded him and hurried him off to his tent.

  This was my introduction to the ruling family of Rome and the much vaunted Roman legions. Years of association with them have not tended to improve the opinion I then formed as a little boy of ten; in fact, quite the reverse.

  This is not the story of my father, neither is it a history of Rome; but I am constrained to mention a couple of incidents which helped to fix first impressions indelibly in the plastic mind of a boy. Germanicus had met with two serious defeats at the hands of the Germans; and to retrieve lost prestige he undertook another campaign, in fact two of them. In these he lost practically all of a large fleet of ships and fully half of his army; but he took a few poor villages; and, upon the strength of this, pompous boasts of his successes were relayed to Rome.

  The Emperor Tiberius, a great general himself, was also a wise old fox. He read between the lines; and to prevent Germanicus from losing the rest of his army, he recalled him to Rome to enjoy his triumph.

  For two small boys, the life in a Roman camp close beside a German forest was about as close an approximation of heaven as one may ever expect to attain on earth. It was a mysterious forest, dark and forbidding, in whose depths might lurk sprites and nymphs and demons and strange, wild beasts such as only a boy of ten can conjure irrefutably from the crystal-clear depths of a budding imagination.

  I knew our own oak forests of Briton, and I knew the names of the sprites and nymphs and demons who lived in them, though I had seen relatively few of these. But I had seen the great herds of wild swine, the wolves, the bears, and the red deer, and I had known of more than one hunter who had entered these forests and never returned. Yet the forests of Briton seemed friendly, like the fierce face of my father, because I knew them so well; but the German forest was different. However, I did not fear it, being, as I am, the son of my father and the great-grandson of Cingetorix, neither of whom ever knew fear.

  Be all that as it may, I did not enter the forest beside which we were camped, because they would not let me. And they would not let me because Little Boots would never let me out of his sight, and, naturally, they would not permit the four-year-old grandnephew of the emperor to expose his divine person to the attention of sprites and nymphs and demons, to say nothing of sundry savage and perpetually ravenous beasts. When I was quite certain that I could not obtain permission to enter the forest, I begged persistently to do so until Agrippina handed me one with the flat of her hand on the side of my head that sent me spinning. The result would have been little different had I been kicked by a mule, a beast of which Agrippina always reminded me.

  I have already mentioned my introduction to the lady. After I had been made to take a bath, which I did not need, being already fully as clean as the members of the imperial family, I was given sandals and a tunic which did not fit me, they having been designed for a legionary, and escorted back to the tent of Germanicus, from which rose screams and howls of a most astounding volume. Especially astounding were they when I discovered that they proceeded from the lungs of a four-year-old child.

  Agrippina met me at the entrance. "Come here, you nasty little barbarian," she commanded. Then she turned toward the interior of the tent. "Here he is," she snapped. "Now for the love of Jove, stop your bawling."

  At sight of me, Little Boots immediately stopped yelling and grinned at me. There was not a tear in his eye: he had just known how to get what he wanted, and I suppose he wanted me because there were no other children in the camp and he longed for a playfellow. There were some women in the camp but no other children that I ever saw. The women were quartered down below the lines where the cavalry horses and sumpter mules were tethered, and they were not allowed to move freely about the camp, nor were Little Boots and I permitted to approach that part of the camp. I did sneak down there once when Little Boots was taking a nap, but after I saw a number of the ladies and heard their conversation, I understood why they had been segregated.

  As any bright child would have done, I picked up the language of my captors quickly. I had to, for I heard nothing else. The first speeches that I heard and which in any way referred to me, I carried fairly well in my memory, so that I soon had the gist of them and was later able to render a rather free translation of them, which I have previously set down in these memoirs. Among the first words that I picked up (and what boy would not have?), were the robust oaths of the soldiers: within a week of my coming, I could curse like a legionary.

  All my life I had had a very good name of which I was quite proud, but Agrippina did not even inquire as to what it might be. No. After the custom of the Romans, she gave me a brand new name as they do to all slaves. She named me Britannicus Caligulae Servus. The Britannicus was given me either in derision or because of my origin: I neither knew nor cared. It was a fine, full sounding name, and I liked it. From the beginning, Little Boots called me Brit, and thenceforth I was Brit to him, the members of his household, his intimates, and my own friends; but not to Agrippina. To her I was Britannicus, that Vile Barbarian, or just plain Servus.

  I do not know why she took such a violent dislike to me, unless it was due to unconscious jealousy, aroused by the childish passion of Little Boots for me. She was a terrible woman: proud, arrogant, dictatorial, jealous, cruel. She looked with thinly veiled contempt, or with open contempt, upon all in whose veins did not flow the divine blood of the Julii; even thus upon her husband, who was of the Claudian branch of the family.

  Her pride in the Julian blood stemmed from the fact that the family was supposed to have descended directly from a goddess: Venus. But why that should have been anything to boast of, I do not know. Had I been descended from Venus, I should have kept the matter very quiet. She had been a notoriously loose woman, appallingly promiscuous. There was still another and more vital reason why I should never have announced the fact from the housetops: the moral turpitude and mental disorder of the line which was quite apparent even to many of the Julians. Julius Caesar was an epileptic; Agrippina's mother, Julia, was a notorious wanton and adulteress; so was Agrippina's sister, Julia; her brother, Agrippa Posthumus, was a madman; her other brothers, Caius and Lucius, were weak and sickly, dying young, the former insane before his death; and from my earliest experiences of the woman, I felt, even as a small boy, that she was mentally unbalanced: her appalling fits of rage, her total lack of ability to control her temper attested the fact.

  This, then, was the Julian line, worshipped as semidivine. The Claudians were only scrofulous.

  I have digressed from the story of Little Boots that I might roughly paint in a portion of the backdrop against which his short life was played. The first night that I spent in the Roman camp, I was sent off to sleep in a tent with other slaves, where I presently heard shrieks and screams coming from the general direction of the tents of Germanicus. They sounded somewhat as if a small child were being burnt at the stake.

  "That brat is at it again," grumbled one of the slaves.

  "What do you suppose he wants now?"

  "Probably the moon."

  "Well, that is about the only th
ing the old shewolf can't get him."

  Presently a slave came puffing to our tent. He looked in, and by the light of the small oil lamp that was burning, he finally espied me. "Come with me, slave," he said, although he was a slave himself just putting on airs.

  It was not the moon that Little Boots wished: it was I.

  Agrippina was furious. "Oh, there you are, you nasty little barbarian; and it's about time. You will sleep there," she pointed at a mattress that had been placed at the foot of Little Boot's cot.

  Little Boots stopped screaming and grinned at me. "Hello there, Brit!" he said drowsily and fell asleep. After that, I slept either at the foot of his bed or just outside his door until the day of his death.

  Never shall I forget that first night in the Roman camp on the Rhine. In all my ten years I had never seen a village which contained more than a couple of hundred souls, and here I was in a camp laid out with military precision, with streets and row upon row of tents, lighted by flaring torches, and containing fully seventy-five thousand men.

  As I lay at the foot of the cot of the little Caesar, my ears wide with wonder, I listened to the night sounds of a Roman camp: the sentries calling the hours; now the neighing of a horse at the picket line, and the thin laughter of women, far away; the attenuated notes of a lute, haunting, provocative, mysterious, coming wanly as though from a great distance, perhaps from the depths of the black and threatening forest my imagination would have it; raucous laughter, oaths, terrific quarreling from the tents of the legionaries; querulous nagging from the tent of Agrippina and Germanicus.

  The Romans are not a tall race-my father had towered above them-but their great numbers, their loud boastings, their terrific oaths metamorphosed them into giants in my small mind; and I lay on my mattress and trembled as I thought what my fate might be among them. Of them all, I thought, Agrippina was the most terrible. With far greater equanimity, I could have faced the seventy-five thousand legionaries. I was almost afraid then; but suddenly I recalled that I was the great-grandson of Cingetorix; and I was not afraid, even though I well knew that only the bawling of a small brat stood between me and sudden death. I was wondering if Little Boots would continue to bawl at just the correct psychological moments, when I fell asleep.