Please Don’t Get Comfortable

The best part of reading more than one book at any period of time is finding the connections among them. It is a conversation, and like most conversations, paying attention is important, because if you do, you’ll likely find answers to questions you never knew you had.

Last night, I wiped tears from my eyes as I turned from the last page of Sword at Sunset, back to the first, to remember how I had started my journey with Artos the Bear, but it hadn’t really been the start of my journey with him. For that, I’d have to go back to a different book, so I did.

The world is a better place with the stories of Rosemary Sutcliff in it. One of the fringe benefits of homeschooling my kids has been the discovery of Sutcliff’s books. My kids and I have read many of them, and I am always looking to add more to my life. The Eagle of the Ninth, a historical novel written for the younger set about the famed Roman legion lost in Britannia, was my introduction to Sutcliff, and it sparked in me a fascination for a historical period I knew, at the time, almost nothing about. There are people in the world who dislike historical fiction because “you can’t know what’s true and what’s not.” Some have no great love for nonfictional history, either, because, once again, how is one to know what’s true and what’s not? I figure that, no matter the genre, bias will be there, so instead of letting it stop me from collecting knowledge, I let it guide me. What’s more, I understand that truth and facts are seldom the same.

Back to Sutcliff: after The Eagle of the Ninth, I moved onto The Silver Branch, a sort of follow-up to Eagle, but one that was set a generation or two later. The Lantern Bearers is the third book in what can loosely be termed a “trilogy,” once again, taking place a generation or two beyond the setting of the previous book. It was The Lantern Bearers that gave me my first glimpse of Artos the Bear. Last night, I picked it up again and have already been rewarded for my efforts.

Young Aquila, a soldier in the Auxiliary Cavalry—native soldiers loyal to Rome, working to protect civilization from Barbarian raids after the legions left the island—has just returned home to the hills of Britain, as he has been granted a short leave from his assignment at Rutupiae, on the coast. Chatting with his father and his sister, we learn about the tenor of the times:

“The farm looks good to me,” Aquila said, and added with perhaps a little too much vehemence, “It looks so sure—as though it had been here as long as the downs have been here, and must last as long as the downs remain.”

“I wonder,” their father said, suddenly grave, “I wonder how long it will last—just how long any of this life that we know will last.”

Aquila shifted abruptly. “Oh, I know … But the worst never seems to happen.” Yet the worst happened to Tiberius last year, said something in his mind, and he hurried on, as much to silence it as anything else: “When Vortigern called in that Saxon war band and settled them in the old Iceni territory to hold off the Picts, five—no, six years ago, everyone wagged their head and said it was the end of Britain. They said it was calling the wolf in over the threshold, but Hengest and his crew haven’t done so badly. Settled quite peacefully, seemingly; and they have held off the Picts and left us free to concentrate what Auxiliaries we still have along the Saxon shore to hold off their pirate brothers. Maybe Vortigern wasn’t such a fool after all.”

“Do you really think that?” his father said very quietly, and his fingers checked on Margarita’s ears.

“It is what quite a lot of the others at Rutupiae think.”

“The temper of the Eagles has changed since my day. Do you think it?”

There was a moment’s silence and then Aquila said, “No, I suppose not, really. But it is more comfortable to think that way.”

“Rome has done too much of thinking what is comfortable,” his father said.

Indeed, getting comfortable can be dangerous, and soon enough, Rome’s taciturnity led to its downfall. Does such a message get through to us, here, in the 21^st century? Are enough of us aware that letting our guard down lets in those who would prefer to have us as willing slaves rather than fellow citizens? Yesterday, on Twitter, I shared a video of a man in a mask with a lint roller in his hand standing outside the entrance of a building. As one person after another approached the entrance, all dutifully wearing their own masks, the man with the roller asked each, in turn, to spread out their arms like wings. One after another did so and allowed a stranger with no badge, no uniform, nothing signifying that he was there in any sort of official capacity to run a lint roller over their bodies as if he were checking for something metallic—no questions asked.