Arthur Britannicus (21 page)

The infantry climbing the collapsed tower were at the parapet, almost unnoticed in the dust and chaos. The officer jumped down into the courtyard and led them at the dead run for the inside of the gate. Several went down under defenders’ arrows, but the rest were flanking the gate defenders, swinging and stabbing in a bloodlust frenzy. It took only moments for the resistance to melt away. Some defenders ran, a few dropped their weapons and tried to surrender, but were cut down where they cowered. The red-cloaked officer and three of his men heaved at the locking bar, pulling it loose. The wrecked gate was pushed open from outside, and the slaughter, screaming and horror began.

Domnal and Mael had never trained as soldiers although they had lived active, often hard, lives for a long time as slaves. They were strong men, but they were into their years and their foot speed had long passed. They were not fighters, they were not fleet-footed runners, and they were doomed. Squads of Romans systematically scouring the town had trapped them as they tried to cross the east wall, and now they were squatting under guard in the open forum with hundreds more townspeople, waiting dully to see what the conquerors would do.

King Mosae had been recognized when his body slaves put up resistance, and he was taken alive. He had been beaten and raggedly castrated, and was presently manacled naked to the outside wall of the Temple of Mars where passing soldiers jeered and spat at him.  Smoke was billowing across the marketplace and a centurion with a file of infantry began pulling men out of the crowd of captives in the forum for a crew to create a firebreak.

“Get over there, you’ll be tearing down houses,” he ordered them. The twins were selected, the centurion’s eyes narrowing as he saw their similarity. The prisoners were marched rapidly through the paved streets and ordered to strip the reed thatch from a row of low houses before sparks could ignite them. Soon, half a hundred men were ripping and tearing at the buildings to make the firebreak. Mael was working alongside his brother and saw a chance. “When I tell you, drop through the roof,” he whispered. He watched, could see no soldier observing them and hissed the command.

Domnal vanished, his twin took another swift scan and followed him. In the disorder of the smoke and destruction, it was the work of moments to climb through the window hole at the side of the house, crouch, and slip into the next street unseen. The twins worked their way cautiously west, staying close to the fires and the concealing smoke, until they cleared the wall and ditch. Then it was a matter of walking coolly across open ground, hoping to avoid a challenge.

The Fates’ good fortune was with them. The soldiers were too occupied with fighting the fires that threatened their loot, as well as doing some freelance pillaging for themselves. By the minute, more captives were being herded into the forum, and a couple of men walking openly across the deserted siege lines were of no great interest. The twins turned aside before they reached the impedimenta, where they correctly anticipated that a rear-guard would be on the lookout for thieves.  By nightfall, they had reached the forests to the west. If they had known it, they were following closely in their brother’s limping footsteps.

King Mosae was in torment. He had been stripped, crudely emasculated, flogged brutally,
then crucified. The Romans had driven iron nails through his forearms and both heels, and hoisted him on a cross high on the ramparts of his own palace, so he could be seen from a distance. Maximian’s tribune Flavius had delayed feeding the king to the pigs, and had ordered the flogging and crucifixion to force from him where Carausius was hidden. Mosae badly wanted to reveal the whereabouts of the fugitive, but he simply did not know, and he’d not been able to convince Flavius of that truth. He’d tried, but the Roman was disbelieving. Now, the king was suffering agonies.

Each time he tried to ease the brutal pain in his feet by letting his arms
take the weight, his chest was compressed and he began to suffocate.  When he pushed down against the long nails that ran through his heels and into the sides of the upright of the cross, the agony in his feet and legs was like fire. The muscles of his back were torn and weeping blood, the white of his ribs showed through where the metal tips of the flagellum had ripped away the flesh during his whipping. He groaned and moved his head from side to side and the infantryman posted to keep the onlookers from helping him glanced up. “He won’t last another half day,” the soldier thought.  “If the pigs want him alive, we’ll have to get him down soon.”

Inside the smoke-reeking tower of the keep, which had escaped major damage in the fires that swept the citadel, Flavius was speaking to his father in law and commander.  “Mosae really doesn’t know, lord,” he told Maximian nervously, “and I’m fairly sure Carausius is not in the town.”  “Did you get his brothers?” the Caesar demanded, knowing the answer. “We’re still searching through the captives, lord,” Flavius evaded. Maximian turned away in disgust. He’d wasted too much time in this place to capture Carausius, and the bastard wasn’t to be found. These muttonheads couldn’t even find a pair of twins among the captives. This could seriously damage his chances of being promoted to Augustus, if his senior emperor was displeased with his failure.

“Take a hundred of the strongest-looking captives and decimate them. Make their own comrades kill each tenth man. Then ask them where Carausius is. If they won’t tell you, decimate the survivors and ask again. Keep doing it until you find out.”  “Yes, Caesar,” said Flavius, ‘but why the strongest?”

“Because, idiot, they’re the ones who’ll give us the most trouble as slaves.”

The butchery continued as the dying king hung above his conquered citadel, and Maximian strolled down to the forum to look over the captive women. He pointed to a white-faced girl of about 14, to a pretty, Jewish seamstress who was twisting her hands and nervously biting her lip, and to an expensively-robed young matron who was holding her child. “Take those three to my quarters, strip and wash them,” he ordered an archer. “Get them properly clean. I’ll be there when I’ve had a drink. Kill the brat if that one resists at all.” He stepped close to the seamstress, fondled her buttocks and sniffed at her hair as the woman stood silent and trembling. Maximian leaned even closer and murmured into her ear: “Don’t worry about what will be going into your mouth. It isn’t pork.”

The man for whom his former hosts were dying because they did not know where he was, had crossed the River Scheldt hanging onto the tails of his two big dogs, and came out of the forests at the great Roman road to Bononia. He turned north. He knew that every 15 miles or so there would be a way station mansio of four or five rooms with a bath house, a facility built for officials travelling on government business. There, he could hope to bluff or bribe his way onto horseback and move faster and with less pain.

Carausius was in luck. Two miles along the Via Agrippa, he came to a way station. The administrator looked askance at the limping, dirtied soldier with the two panting hounds at his heel until he heard the man’s story of being beset by bandits as he came from the siege. The big man’s natural authority, gold piece and demand for a remount all worked, and the emperor was on his way, knowing life would be easier at the next mansio when he would have a horse to exchange. In a day or so, with luck, he could be in Bononia, with his legions, his sorceress and his crown.

The twins had much less luck. They were across a clearing in the forest when they were spotted by an outlaw. He’d heard a stag belling his rutting challenge and had been moving with extreme care to find the creature and shoot it, when the twins came into his view. The ruffian saw their dirtied, expensive clothes and smelled money. What went on in the forest was nobody’s business, he thought. He quietly stood two arrows upright in the loam at his feet, then notched a third on his bowstring and drew it back to his ear. The twins never had a chance. The poacher’s three-bladed iron broad-head sliced through Mael’s throat, dropping him to the ground in a choking gush of blood. Domnal, three paces ahead, turned at the smacking wet sound and stepped back to his fallen brother.

He dropped to his knees, disbelieving the sight, and on an instinct, had half-turned towards the bowman, pointing at him, hand outstretched in a silent motion to stop the death he knew was coming, when the second arrow, swiftly reloaded,  struck him in the armpit. The impact knocked him sideways but he struggled to his feet. He was facing the archer when the third arrow hammered into the Briton’s eye socket, burst through his brain and left a hand’s width of arrowhead and shaft protruding from the back of his skull. He was dead even before he slumped to the ground, where his face, part-buried in the leaf mould, seemed to have a puzzled expression.

The outlaw ran to check the two bodies, and empty their purses. He growled irritably when he found they had almost nothing of value but their clothes and swore to
himself at the problem he now had, of recovering his arrow from this fellow’s skull.

XXVI
. Aemelius

Forum Hadriani was bustling with activity. The Belgic town was crowded, but its shipyard was frantic with activity, with all manner of men bustling, fetching and carrying. There were slaves moving timbers, carpenters sawing and shaping ships’ spars and ribs, and ropemakers working in their narrow ropewalks to twist hemp into the long lengths needed to run smooth and unspliced through pulleys and blocks. Smoke billowed where half-naked smiths glistened with sweat as they pumped bellows to blow charcoal to glowing heat and forge red-hot iron into blades and armour, barrel hoops, bolts and nails. Sail makers sat cross-legged like tailors to work their awls or stood over vast tables using cutting tools to shape wide spreads of canvas. Elsewhere, sweating riggers hauled upright then stepped ships’ masts, anxious sea captains viewed the progress critically, and list-bearing chandlers bustled to bring equipment and the thousand and one tools and fittings needed to create just one seaworthy vessel. 

The warship hulls were especially difficult to build, needing oak-built bows reinforced with bands of iron or brass, and double-planked hulls caulked with linen or animal hair before all was sealed with pitch. Then the whole hull had to be enveloped in lead sheeting carefully nailed with small copper fasteners that would not rust away, and everything, hull building, rigging, provisioning and arming, was done at forced, urgent pace.

The emperor wanted an armada to invade Britain and destroy the stolen fleet, and he wanted it before the winter storms came that would pin his squadrons in harbour for months.  He needed hundreds of flat-bottomed invasion barges and he needed to man them.  Those thousands of men would require feeding and clothing, and specialist clothing at that. They would require supplies of grain to make bread, and cattle, sheep and pigs to provision them now and after the invasion. It would call for salt, wine and beer, olive oil, fish sauce and fresh greens. The quartermasters demanded iron hoops and staves for the barrels to store those supplies, draft animals to move them, warehouses to store them, and men to tally and guard the food,  for the preparations had to be plentiful for a campaign that might take months. 

Maximian had his own priorities, of timber and pitch for the ships, steel for the weapons, cordage, leather, wool, canvas and iron for the men, their ships and their tents. The demands were endless. There were barracks and store rooms to be built, latrines to be dug and dumps of food and fuel created.  Over it all, the officers had to drill and discipline their men, some of
them raw recruits freshly marched in from the corners of the empire, an unpromising lot of untutored yokels awed and gaping at the novel sights, sounds and smells.

So the shipwrights worked frantically, recruits were drilled, stores gathered, barracks built and reinforcements brought in by road and river. A procession of ox carts dragged by lowing cattle trundled into the Forum, some loaded high with grain, others bringing reeking piles of leather from the tanneries downstream. Shepherds mustered a bleating flock destined for the slaughterhouse as a half-legion of auxiliaries from faraway Macedonia, dusty and thirsty from the day’s march, tramped into town under the arch and square twin towers of the north gate.

They passed two Thracian shipmasters who eyed their old rivals warily but the mercenaries didn’t notice. The soldiers’ eyes were searching eagerly under the principal street’s cloisters for the taverns and whorehouses they’d visit once the centurion fell them out.  The concubine Laurea, wrapped in a russet-hued cloak that owed its colour to dye made from ironstone, watched from a window to assess the officers who marched at the head of the column. Black-bearded, olive-skinned Greeks; she’d heard they all liked boys best, but surely there were some among those handsome men who’d pay for her ash blonde assets, and not just for the dominatrix play-acting, either.

She was tiring of the middle-aged, portly Roman officers who were her chief clients. These Greeks had bodies like gods, she thought. Maybe she could pretend to be a boy? Two houses further along the street, the pederast trader Gracilis, who had returned home from Britain gratefully still in possession of his head,
was also assessing the incoming troops. They’d want boys, he thought, it was the Greek disease. There would be profit in them, not like the money he’d made off those slave twins, but good profits nonetheless.

The twins were in Maximian’s mind, too. The Augustus had ordered him to bring them in with Carausius, and he hated to fail. All three had vanished. The Briton had escaped him, he knew. His spies in Bononia had reported Carausius’ safe return there, along with the upstart’s actions in ordering most of his fleet to transfer across the strait to Dover, and his further, lavish spending of coin to recruit more mercenaries. Readying for me, the Caesar thought sourly. He’d need plenty of bullion for that.
But those twins? There were no reports of them in Bononia, there had been no sightings of them anywhere and they were not among the dead at the sack of King Mosae’s citadel. It was irritating, and he’d have to report failure to the Augustus but he had to focus on having this fleet built, and go through the tedious business of manning it with proper sailors, not Roman mariners who had few real sailing skills. He’d have to scour the slave pens for Greeks and Spaniards and Egyptians, he supposed, and he’d send word to the Roman governors in places like North Africa to find mariners for him. He called for Flavius and gave him some new orders.

Carausius, too, had his headaches. News had come from Britain that the Picts had broken their treaty and were rampaging through the border country, burning and looting, and his stretched-thin forces were having a hard time attempting to contain them. It wasn’t much better in Gaul. Maximian’s troops had re-taken Rouen and its mint. Fortunately, spies had brought warning to Allectus, who’d decamped by the river just hours before the Romans arrived. He’d had time to empty the mint, loading ingots of bullion and a new supply of coins onto several swift cargo vessels and sailing away, but the city was now lost.  In the west, Spanish and Frankish bandits were roaming the land, causing more problems. About the only good news on that front was that the British fleet had managed to get the Narrow Sea’s piracy problem mostly under control, so at least the emperor could concentrate his naval forces on readying for the threat from the flotilla Maximian was building.

The Briton had tried a couple of sallies at the shipyards, hoping to destroy the Romans’ part-built fleet, but had been driven off by the shore batteries that commanded the entrances. He’d probably have to wait until Maximian sailed, and fight his battles at sea. A bustle at the west gate attracted his attention, and he saw that a courier had arrived on horseback. The news he brought required prompt action. Bandits and a strong force of deserters from Maximian’s legions were making major trouble along the coastlands of Gaul. He’d have to confront them before his small garrisons were ousted from the ports, which could lead to losing command of the Narrow Sea. Carausius called for his new aide, Aemilius, who’d once been a young recruit with him. His previous captain, Lycaon was either a slave or rotting on a Belgian crucifix, he supposed, taken captive or killed when King Mosae’s citadel fell. He wondered again what had happened to the twins. Probably enslaved once more, or maybe they too were crucifix decorations. Certainly, Maximian wouldn’t have been merciful. He sighed at having to deliver the news to their mother, then brought himself back to the present. Aemilius was waiting for orders and the emperor mentally shrugged. There was nothing he could do for his brothers right now, he thought, pragmatically.

Scouts reported that a force of Bagudae bandits were camped with their wagons kraaled in a semi-orderly manner on both sides of a broad river and, to judge by the wagon ruts on either bank of it, they were protecting a ford. The spies reported the bandits at around 600 men, a manageable number for Carausius’ two centuries of disciplined troops and squadron of equestrians. The scouts also reported that they’d ridden both upstream and down, but had found no traces of another ford for some miles. The emperor nodded. The bandits probably
had some locals in their ranks, and knew what they were doing. Camped as they were, they could use the river as protection if attacked from either direction, simply by retreating across the ford, which would be relatively easy to defend.

Carausius elected to camp for the night where he was, to rest his march-weary men and give him time to survey the killing field for himself. “Set up camp on that hill with quadruple sentries and put outposts there and there,” pointing, “so we have no surprises. And, I want a strong guard posted outside each gate.”  In a few hours, while the emperor rode out to view the enemy, the ditch was dug, the rampart built, the palisade and sentry path were in place and most of the tents had been pitched in the usual places inside the temporary fort. Carausius and his entourage arrived at a low hilltop half a mile from the enemy.

The bandits must have some military leadership, he thought as he viewed their position; the camp was well established. They’d dug some defensive ditches and had circled their supply wagons to provide cover from archers. They didn’t seem to have any cavalry, though. Carausius had heard from several drovers brought in by his scouts that the brigands were led by a couple of landowners who’d been crushed by taxes and the theft of their lands by predatory lawmakers in Rome. He thought sourly that they should have sided with him against Rome instead of causing him all this trouble, but whatever their cause, he couldn’t tolerate them doing the any more damage.

Axis sniffed at the air and growled; Javelin stiffened. Carausius paid attention to his two big dogs, and scanned the bandit camp to see what had caught their attention. There was a wagon set off by itself and a pack of dogs was chained along a picket line from it.  “War dogs, lord,” said Aemilius quietly. “They could be a problem.” The emperor grunted. The bandits were copying the tactics of the Romans. They liked to break the enemy ranks with half-starved, ferocious fighting dogs.

A favourite technique was to strap a container of burning oil to the leather-clad dog’s back and send him into the enemy lines, where he’d especially disrupt the cavalry horses. Or, they’d send in whole attack formations of big mastiffs wearing armour that sprouted sharp blades and knife points.  Some dogs were even trained to attack the bellies or hamstrings of horses, to bring down the riders.

The troops hated the dogs, the biggest of which, the Molossian, was supposed to have descended from mastiffs which had mated with tigers. These ‘Samson Dogs’ needed two or three handlers to hold them, and when one launched itself at an infantryman with its great spiked collar and sharp-bladed ankle rings, the soldier was in real danger of being disembowelled.  Carausius nodded at his aide’s remark, then turned and unexpectedly
grinned at him. “Here’s something for you,” he said, “that shows the power of learning. Guinevia told me she had read of war dogs in ancient Persia, and she told me of a plan to deal with them. This is what you must do…”

The British emperor’s troops stayed in camp for two days. The bandits sent spies to survey them, and the British scouts in turn watched their enemies, reporting that some had melted away during the night but there were still about 500 of the raiders, drinking and preparing their weapons. Carausius inspected the camp with his tribunes Quirinus and Cragus Grabelius, pausing to gesture at a grindstone on which the soldiers were sharpening their blades. “A Persian invention,” he said. “You make the wheel spin with that crank. It’s faster and gives a better edge than the old greased and sanded strickle stick.” 

Cragus, who came from Lycia, legendary home of the fire breathing female Chimerae, was making a small joke about the sparks that flew from the blade being sharpened when the trio were accosted by the baggage master. “Caesar,” he saluted the emperor, “am I to be responsible for all these scratching mongrels that Aemilius keeps bringing in? I don’t know how I can transport them.”

Carausius shook his head. “They won’t be a problem after tomorrow. Just live with it for now, and keep the flea-ridden things away from my tent. Now, gentlemen,” he turned to his tribunes, “let’s see how the stores situation is being managed.”

The wolf light of a dull dawn had broken, Carausius’ troops were formed in battle array, the emperor was in full war gear, and he rode his big Frisian horse down the armoured lines. He wore his golden crown of courage around the eagle-crested cavalryman’s parade helmet, a crest he’d once used to break a Saxon warrior’s nose, stunning him before administering the fatal sword thrust.  This day, Carausius had thrown back his imperial purple cloak, fastened with the massive silver and amber badge of a British warlord, and displayed his gleaming hooped armour. He punched the sky with his sword Exalter to emphasize the words he delivered in a parade ground below.

“I want these bastards ground into offal,” he said. “I don’t want to have the bother of crucifying them. They’re not soldiers, and they don’t have proper weapons. It will be like fighting nine year old girls, and you will crush them. When you’re ordered, and not before, launch the javelins and the darts. At my command, and in an orderly manner, move forward in wedge formation. Use your shield bosses to knock them down when we get close,
then finish them off with your sword. Thrust, don’t slash. That’s the killing stroke, and remember that the point beats the edge. Above all, keep moving forward. If your man isn’t dead, stamp on his dirty black head as you go over him. The next rank will kill him. Stick together in formation, and you’re unbeatable. One last thing: we don’t stop to plunder. Do this as I tell you, and we will have everything.”