Arthur Imperator (18 page)
Authors: Paul Bannister
Far
out in the Atlanticus, storm winds were brewing howling fury and thundering waves which they threw against the high grey battlement cliffs of Moher in western Hibernia. The gale shrieked across the arrays of vast green rollers that pounded the sea rocks of the peninsula of the Dumnonii and drove those walls of water, foam-flecked and awesome in their battering power, towards the Severn Sea.
The
same blasting storm that was racing the Roman fleet along the rocky north coast of the peninsula and into the mouth of the Severn was also piling up tall, pyramid-shaped mountains of saltwater behind the fleet, where terrified, vomiting soldiers who were so much helpless cargo could only watch as the cursing sailors fought to keep clear of the destructive claws of the shore. A few of the fleet did fall away and were smashed into flotsam and bloodless corpses on that shore, but most passed between the breakwater islands of Steep Holm and Flat Holm in safety. Even in those more sheltered waters, the pitching from the vicious seas was so fierce, and the fleet scudded along at such breakneck pace from the powerful following gale that no commander, determined as he might be, could even consider turning for the shore.
Guinevia knew it. She was standing on a stone bridge over the Severn that ran from a gravel terrace on one side of the river to the fortress on the other that stood above the flood plain at Gloucester. Above her bowed head was a small vapour cloud. Behind her closed lids she was fiercely focused, viewing the onrushing fleet whose energies were coming to her through the water. She knew she had to do something, and she did what she knew best. She called on her goddess, on Myrddin’s help and on Myrddin’s gods.
The
Druid was an adept of the sea god Manannan mac Lir, an elemental and powerful Celtic deity who was familiar to the sorceress. In her mentor Myrddin’s name, she implored Manannan’s help. Almost at once, the wind rose and began to whip her hair and cloak, streaming them behind her like banners.
Without
conscious knowledge, she dimly understood what was being placed in her mind. She grasped that the estuary of the river is so shaped that it funnels the tide into an increasingly narrow channel, one that begins five miles wide, but narrows to less than one hundred paces. Even as the inflowing tide is squeezed by the compressing banks, the river bed also rises, creating a tidal range that is the second highest anywhere in the world.
This
March day saw a thousand-year confluence of events that spelled utter disaster for any craft caught in the estuary. It was the time of the vernal equinox, the year’s highest tide. It was also the day of a new moon, which threw its extra gravitational pull into the equation and tilted an ocean to slop against Britain. Then there was the vast storm pounding in from the Atlanticus, which came from the exact southwest direction that could cause most damage. It provided a gale-driven blast to push up huge slabs of water into some of the world’s biggest ocean waves. The perfect storm of highest tide, gravitational pull, huge winds, and a great mass of racing waters all combined, then was forced into a funnel-shaped channel. In minutes, it jetted a towering surge wave inland at incredible speed. Caught in that torrent was a flimsy Roman fleet manned by seasick, terrified sailors.
The
Romans were being carried like flotsam on the surge of the tide, racing past the low shoreline, afraid or unable to turn for the pitiful shelter of the land by the force of the gale-driven saltwater torrent. The tide which 260 times a year runs at the speed of a cantering horse, was now pouring in faster than any horse could ever attain and the steersmen were no more able to control their vessels than a child could control a paper boat on a raging mountain stream.
Guinevia
had no knowledge of that, but she did know that Manannan would want a price for his help. She stumbled from the bridge, holding onto the parapet against the blast. Her soldiers were circled around uneasily, well aware of the meaning of the uncanny vapour cloud that had not been whipped away by the wind, and shuffling to avoid catching the eye of the sorceress. Guinevia caught at her flying cloak and wrapped it around her slender self. She scanned the area and found a strangely exhilarated Caria watching from the shelter of the trunk of a big elm.
“Did
you call this in by magic?” the Hibernian asked, eyes sparkling.
“I
did,” said Guinevia shortly, adding: “but it might not be enough.”
Caria
eyed her speculatively. “Can I help in your magic?” she said.
“Possibly,”
Guinevia said slowly, “possibly, you could be the most important element of it.”
It
took several minutes for the Druid sorceress to explain matters, but Caria was calm. “We Celts do not die,” she said with dignity. “We go on to the feasting halls of Tir na Nog, and maybe one day we come back for a short time, but to cross the bridge of swords in honour would be a splendid thing. I am not so attached to this existence anyway.”
Guinevia
looked at her thoughtfully. “If I sacrifice you to Manannan, who is the gatekeeper to the next world, you will feel just a little pain and you will go in glory. However, there are very few sacrifices who immolate themselves willingly. If you chose to go to Manannan by your own hand, he would take you as his honoured bride and as one of his queens, for you would be a rare and wonderful creature in his Tir na Nog, the place beyond the setting sun.”
Caria
drew herself up to her own small height, a proud and courageous figure. “If I do this, will the bards sing of me?” she said simply. Guinevia nodded. Caria looked at her again and said with the faintest quaver in her voice. “Would you hold my hand while I do it?”
At
that moment, the howl of the wind halted abruptly and the silence was so complete that the two women heard twigs fall to the ground from the winter-bare trees. “That is Manannan’s answer,” said Guinevia gently. “I will hold your hand on the knife, and he will wait for you with his arms wide.”
The
girl bowed her head, and her response came in a whisper. “Then we should do it.”
The
blast began again as the women stepped from the shelter of the trees and struggled against the wind to the centre of the bridge arch. Even as they watched it, the water level was rising fast, pushing against the piers, threatening to swamp the banks. “It will not be long now,” Guinevia whispered into Caria’s ear. “Stand here, put your hands on the parapet and lean forward a little.” The girl obeyed, her lips white and moving soundlessly. “Don’t be afraid, it will be like a nettle sting, no more,” said the Druid.
She
reached under her cloak and extracted a bone-handled knife with a slender, leaf-shaped blade, and positioned herself behind the Hibernian. “They won’t be angry with me for pretending to be a sorceress, will they?” Caria asked anxiously.
“They’ll
be amused that you fooled those stupid men, my darling,” said Guinevia, putting the bone of the knife handle into the girl’s hand and wrapping her own hand over it. “Her fingers are small, like a child’s,” she thought sadly. She raised the blade to the girl’s neck. “Are you ready?” Caria nodded, wordless.
“Look
down the river, see how fast the tide is…” and Guinevia abruptly drew both the knife and the girl’s unresisting hand sharply across her throat, pulling towards herself hard and deep. She felt the scrape as the slender, sharp blade touched the spine, the suck and cling as the muscles held the blade for a moment. The girl’s head lolled alarmingly and a gush of blood jetted out over the stonework and into the turbulent, foaming river, a momentary blur of pink, then once more sliding green and white.
Guinevia,
her hand, wrist and forearm bright crimson with the oxygen-rich arterial blood, unwrapped her arms from their affectionate embrace of the body and gently tilted the girl forward. She slid over the parapet headfirst and fell the few short feet to the water that was rising greedily to take her.
Guinevia
nodded. A tear glistened at her eye and her arms slumped by her sides, the knife dangling. “Go,” she said, “Go to Manannan mac Lir, gatekeeper between worlds. The feasting at Tir na Nog waits for you. Be at peace, lovely Caria. You are no more a slave, you are a queen now, and the bards will sing of you often.”
Far
down the surging, boiling tideway, a luminous green shape stirred under the distorting mantle of the ocean. A giant man shape, it seemed possessed of long hair that waved like seaweed, ridged rocky arms and rounded shoulders like barnacle-crusted coastal boulders, and a torso rippled like the hard sand on a wide northern beach. The shape seemed to push at the waves above it, and a boiling, surging wall of water that was crested with a thick cap of white foam rose up.
The
tidal bore raced into the Severn estuary at better than the speed of a galloping horse. As it went east, it speed never lessened, but its height increasingly towered over the land. The backwash from the confining banks surged behind the first torrent to form five or six stacked waves and soon the last rollers were four or five times the height of a man. And, the tumbling, roaring green and white wall thundered down on the Roman fleet.
An
archer saw it first. He raised his head from retching helplessly over the stern and saw the ranked, stacked waves hurling themselves towards his ship. His shouts did little good. The wall towered over the galley, crashed it end over end, and drove it, ram first, into the sea bed. One after the other, the Roman flotilla was swamped, crushed and battered under in the grinding, pounding churn of those huge waves. Some went to the river bed, some were hurled ashore in splinters, and the tidal wave swept through the snaking bends of the river, carrying everything before it.
Most
of the men who died never knew how it happened. In one moment, they were racing upriver, the next, their ship was upended, toppled, speared into the sea bed, into a riverbank, into another ship. Soldiers armed and armoured for battle had no hope of surviving in that chaotic maelstrom of churning green water, but some few did, and were washed ashore pounded and weak, either to be killed or to be enslaved.
Guinevia
still stood on the bridge arch. She reached under her cloak to the leather bag she had slung over her shoulder. From it she took a rounded, linen-wrapped bundle and unfolded the cloth. Inside was the girl’s sad collection of divining tools: a few neck bones and an old skull. The sorceress cupped it in her hands, kissed it gently and extended her arms out above the racing water. The skull made hardly a splash, and the Druid walked away. She was a hundred paces from the bridge, on the gravel ledge high above the river when the racing tidal wave thrashed against the bridge, washed over the parapet, and greedily took with it the last traces of the blood of the girl who had sacrificed herself.
Something
resounded in Guinevia’s soul, a sense of great peace, and far to the west, under a heaving green mantle of salt water, a luminous figure welcomed a small, pale blonde girl to joyous life in a world beyond this one.
Maximian never knew it, but he landed his expedition on the exact beach near Deal that Gaius Julius Caesar had used three and a half centuries before. Unlike Julius, the current Emperor of the West arrived unopposed. No howling, blue-painted Britons, no spear-throwing cavalry charges, no struggling ashore encumbered, against nimble foes.
Maximian’s
ships deployed neatly, ground ashore gently on the flat, open strand and had a beach head established and military screen thrown out wide within an hour or two, all without sight of opposition other than a handful of pony soldiers viewing from a distance. They would, he knew, take word to Arthur, but the landing, the critical part of an invasion, was going smoothly, and the Serb was unflustered. He began moving centuries of men off the beach and onto the hinterland downs, sent out horse-mounted scouts and watched approvingly as his beachmasters efficiently supervised the offloading of the supplies and impedimenta.
The
first British cavalry arrived on the downs at dawn the next day. They were too late. The Romans were already well established, and quickly drove them off before they began a disciplined advance on Dover, an easy two hour march away. There, Arthur’s admiral Grimr had just returned from a patrol to the west, and was hastily moving elements of his fleet out of the harbour. He knew the fort could not resist the landed legions and he had no intention of allowing his precious ships to be captured, but he did have a plan.
As
the Romans moved west, Grimr’s squadron bypassed them on the strait and sailed east to the landing ground. The Suehan found a collection of British troops gathered in a standoff with the small force that was guarding the beached barges and galleys and in a quickly-arranged joint operation, swooped in to burn the grounded fleet while the foot soldiers fought the ship guards. By the afternoon, the Romans, for better or worse, could no longer retreat and sail away, at least until a new fleet arrived from Gaul.
Meanwhile,
the Romans took Dover.
Like
the admiral Grimr, the small garrison inside the old fort realized that the legions would quickly overpower them, and most simply melted away from the walls and fled west, heading for the fleet’s main base at Port Chester. Dover’s commander, a silver-haired old soldier wounded at Dungeness, stayed with his post, watched the legionaries march in and was crucified on the lighthouse that overlooked the straits. He was relatively fortunate. Other defenders were skinned alive and salted, several were roasted above a pit fire. It was notice that the invaders would tolerate no resistance and wanted full cooperation with their demands for tribute and supplies. The farm folk hastened in with their waggons loaded.
Maximian
spent several days regrouping and listening to the news of his scouts and spies. He had lost his fleet, but he had a harbour, he had an undamaged force on shore and he had an open road to Londinium.
I woke in my palace in the capital with a sore head and bleary eyes. We had celebrated our ambush of the enemy fleet too well and thoughtlessly. I should have been readying for the attack that would come in six days’ time, not drinking wine with the troops. I was dunking my head under the water spigot in the courtyard when the first courier arrived, spattered with horse spume and mud. The worst news. The Romans were ashore in force at Deal.
It
was the beginning of weeks of a long nightmare. I raced my cavalry towards Dover and lost a tenth of them in a single ambush. Our infantry fared no better against the armoured legions and we fought a bitter rearguard action for days and days as we retreated step by bloodied step down the stones of Watling Street to Londinium. We conceded Richborough and Canterbury and the forefoot of Britain, fought off frenzied flanking attacks through the hills of the North Downs, and we lost a bloody night skirmish at the Medway River but were not yet overrun. Time and again, as we fell back on Londinium we were forced to leave our dead and wounded behind us to the Romans’ limited mercy. That more than anything destroyed my men’s morale and caused our already-depleted army to shrink even more as soldiers abandoned their weapons and their comrades and ran for their homes.
Finally,
we retreated across the bridge to the city at the Walbrook and burned it behind us. A courageous cavalry decurion called Celvinius and a squad of the Chevron elite stayed at the south end of the span and held off the Romans’ furious attacks until we had burned it beyond repair. We knew we could not hold out indefinitely, but I resolved to make the best fist of it until we could raise reinforcements from the British tribes.
We
tried to reinforce the city walls. They might have been good enough to hold off a Saxon horde, but they would be insufficient against a disciplined Roman siege. We made the two public baths along the riverfront into strongpoints and turned the Mithraeum into a hospital. We tore down buildings for fabric to reinforce the Ludgate and its bridge over the Fleet, just below Holborn hill. We added to the defences at the Newgate and its nearby temple, closed down the Cripplegate, the Moorgate, Ealdgate and the Billingsgate and we blocked the Dowgate on the river front.
Soon,
the only entrance to the city was by the stout Aldersgate and Bishopsgate portals on the east hill, which we left open to traffic to encourage the civilian populace to leave. Those gates could be sealed at short notice, and we also needed them to bring in cattle and supplies from the country against the inevitable siege. The prisoners we had taken in the action on the Thames, some hundreds of them, we penned near the cemetery northeast of the city wall. I mentally shrugged. If they escaped, they would be in poor shape anyway, of little use as soldiers. I was not going to risk having them inside the city walls in case of an escape and uprising.
I
ordered the Langbourne and Sherbourne streams dammed to provide us with water to fight fires but left the Walbrook alone, as its flow was sufficient for an emergency water supply and many of the townsfolk relied on it for their own needs. I also ordered all shipping away from the Pool. The smaller craft I sent upstream, the larger had orders to try to escape the estuary and turn south into the Narrow Sea. They would sail west for Portus Chester, where Grimr’s fleet was stationed, along with the depleted legion brought down from Caerleon. I held little hope that they could pass the Romans at the Medway, but it was a chance and I did not want them where they could be used as convenient pontoons to throw an army across the Thames at Londinium. That jogged my memory, and I ordered burned our own makeshift pontoon bridge at Till’s burh.
In
due course, Maximian and his army arrived on the south bank, though the numbers made me suspect he had split his forces and some were attempting to cross the river elsewhere. They camped directly across the Thames, just outside the South Wark and established an advance guard in public buildings along Watling Street and Eormen Way, in full sight of our city wall across the river. And they began to build a bridge.
Their
engineers chose a spot upstream of the old bridge, and began by protecting it from anything we could send downriver by setting pilings into the riverbed and floating a log boom across much of the flow to catch anything destructive. Then, instead of driving the bridge pilings straight down, they rammed their great baulks of timber at an angle against the current, employing it to give the structure more strength, fastened the whole thing together and finally laid a wooden roadbed across its top.
The
project was almost finished in two weeks, a tribute to their engineers and industry, as we bombarded them where we could with missiles. We built outworks where they had to come ashore, full knowing that once they did, we would be overwhelmed in a matter of hours. I spent those two sleepless weeks limping from place to place, for I had been wounded again during our retreat from Dover, encouraging, ordering, chivvying and praising our troops, who were exhausted. It was all wasted effort.
Maximian
coordinated his attacks. The first came from the east, down the Viginal Way and through the burial grounds, where they instantly released the prisoners and attacked our wall. Later I learned that the traitor Allectus had crossed the Thames near its mouth and sailed into Colchester, where he made a pact with the Saxon warlord Skegga, who was still encamped there, waiting for reinforcements from the Rhine.
In
return for assurances that they would be left in peace when the Romans had reconquered Britain, Skegga’s men used their longships to ferry a considerable Roman force across the Thames. That force then marched on Londinium. As they approached the capital, Maximian ordered the new bridge to be finished, and hurled suicide squads across it. In an hour’s fighting, they cleared away our emplacements and were under Londinium’s western walls, too. Then, with both banks of the Thames secured and bridged, they set about reducing our defences.
The
Emperor of the West was an experienced and skilled soldier, and he knew about siege tactics, but he was eager to see my head on a pole, so he risked a frontal assault behind a firestorm. His ballistae threw blazing material over the western walls that were furthest from our water supplies, and his troops controlled the Fleet River access that was so vital against a fire. In a day, we were in desperate condition. More of my men were pulling down buildings to make firebreaks than were manning the walls, and we were hugely outnumbered in any case.
The
Romans rolled a heavy-timbered roof forward against the Ludgate as protection against the rocks we dropped from above, and began swinging an iron-headed ram at the small wicket set into the city gate. No wood could resist that for long, and as the postern cracked and fell, their ballistae fired heavy iron bolts through the creaking gap, smashing aside the brave soldiers who filled it. I ran clumsily to rally troops to the breach, but already their axe men were hacking at the rest of the splintered gate. A dozen Romans died in the breach, but twice as many Britons pooled their blood on the stones with that of their dead enemies.
The
gate fell inwards with a shattering crash and an armoured wall was through in testudo formation, shields held above and around to protect the soldiers like a tortoise shell. Then the street fighting began and flowed west to east. It trapped most of our garrison where they would die, in the forum by the basilica on the east hill. I hacked my way with Exalter northwest, grimly amused to find myself in a moment of quiet leaning panting on my sword by the Cripplegate. My mutilated foot hurt like hell, the arrow that had caught my left armpit in the fighting at the Medway had left that side of my body feeling crippled, too.
Five
of my house guards, Chevrons all of them, were with me and the phalanx of legionaries we had been battling as we retreated were halted warily 30 yards distant, possibly hoping for archers to take on the unenviable task of finishing us. Somebody whistled, and I peered through the smoke at that unlikely sound in a battle. It was the familiar figure of Cragus Grabelius, one of my tribunes, and commander of the cavalry. He looked battered and smoke-blackened but seemed in control. He was standing just inside the big gate, which was still fast and undamaged, but whose small wicket gaped open. Cragus was gesturing urgently. I realized he was not in sight of the legionaries, growled a command at my Chevrons to hold them, and limped to him.
“Outside,”
he said. “Outside, lord. I have horses.” I stooped and peered through the small gate. A miracle. A troop of British heavy cavalry was there, dragoons who fought on foot or on horse, the soldiers quieting their mounts, which were shying at the smoke and sounds of crashing conflict. There, saddled and bridled, stamped Corvus my war horse, and Nonios his stablemate, a horse named for Pluto, two black Frisian stallions held at their heads by a trooper. Never have I seen such a welcome sight. I stepped back inside the wicket and gestured to the Chevrons.
“Back
here, slowly, then run!” I shouted in the British language to confound the Romans. “Don’t let the bastards see you hurry.” Cragus assessed the retreating line of men.
“I
have four spare remounts,” he said coolly. “One of them will have to double up.”
We
slipped through the wicket, barred it with a baulk of timber and bought time enough to ride away towards the shelter of the cloaking forest. The only incident was encountering two legionaries who may have defected to find loot, but we killed them and rode on. I was surprised to see the decurion Celvinius in that skirmish. I later found that he had survived his heroic defence of the bridge to swim back across the Thames and rejoin the garrison, and I resolved to promote him for gallantry. We crossed the Ty burn and joined the Praetorian Way, headed for Silchester and the safety of its oppidum’s walls. The legionary foot soldiers we sighted as we rode wanted nothing to do with heavy cavalry, nor did we especially wish to join in more combat. I was a fugitive now, not a triumphant lord of war and Imperator. My empire was slipping away.
