Claudius (17 page)

XXV

The first lurch as she hit the slope almost pitched him straight into the river, but his hold on her harness was strong enough to keep him in his seat. Bersheba placed first one mighty pad and then the next into the water with barely a ripple, and Rufus breathed a sigh of relief. There was no steep drop off into the depths. The waters reached just above her knees.

Two more steps and they were on their way, the surface quickly rising until it reached her belly. Behind him, Rufus heard soft splashes and muffled gasps as the rafts and their escorts entered the river. Instantly, the cords tightened as the rafts were pulled downstream by the current. Rufus felt the elephant shift her weight to take the pressure and he heard the centurion cursing as he organized his men. He’d feared Bersheba might be disturbed by this unfamiliar task, but she accepted it in her usual unflustered fashion. When she had gone a dozen feet from the bank, the darkness folded around them like a cloak. At first, Rufus lost all sense of space and time in this impenetrable black prison, but the solid warmth of Bersheba beneath him helped steady his nerves. He could see nothing ahead, but, below him, the eternal, implacable flow of the water restored his sense of direction and he urged the elephant onward.

They were well into the crossing now and his sense of unease returned as the current grew stronger. The river rose until it reached Bersheba’s lower shoulders, forcing Rufus to bend his knees to keep his toes clear of the water. He grimaced as the force of the stream tugged at his sandals. They must have been a third of the way across when the elephant suddenly lurched to the right and Rufus cried out in alarm as the solid bulk beneath him took on a curious weightless quality. Bersheba had stumbled and lost her footing. He held his breath. If she didn’t regain it quickly they would be swept away. With one hand he grabbed for the lion’s tooth at his neck and he placed his destiny with the gods. If she had truly been out of her depth, they would have been doomed, but she had marched into a shallow depression in the river bottom, and her flailing feet quickly found the firm ground that allowed her to continue on her imperious way. Rufus bit his lip and breathed again.

With Bersheba steadied, he took the opportunity to look over his shoulder. It was clear the Batavians knew their business. The cords attaching the rafts to the elephant’s harness had been cut at different lengths, so a few feet separated each floating platform from the next, ensuring they didn’t become entangled. The rafts rode high in the water on their goatskin floats, keeping weapons, armour and clothing well clear of the surface. Each raft had the swimmers stationed on its downstream side, kicking upstream. In this way they stayed in a more or less direct line behind the elephant, eliminating the drag and allowing her to use all her strength to force her way forward through the relentless current. They were past halfway now and, in front of him, he could just make out the faint line that marked the far bank: a deeper dark against the old lead of the rain-saturated sky. He peered into the night, struggling to distinguish between what he was truly seeing and the optical tricks his eyes were playing on him. Where was it?

‘We sent a patrol across two nights ago. It was a risk, but a risk worth taking,’ Frontinus had explained before they reached the river. ‘They identified a landing place where the bank has eroded and the bottom slopes up to a gravel beach. It is perfect for our purposes. Behind the landing is a stand of tall trees. That is where you will see the sign.’

The sign was a white flash cut into the bark of one of the trees about halfway up its trunk. It had sounded entirely plausible when the auxiliary commander explained it, but now, in this stygian tomb, it was laughable. The only flashes he could see were the ones caused by his over-tired eyes. It was impossible. Eventually he stopped looking and placed his faith in Bersheba. She felt her way forward, one impassive, lumbering step at a time, instinctively finding the safest route to the bank. Slowly, the waters retreated down her flank and her speed increased. Rufus began to distinguish individual objects. Driftwood piled high where it had been deposited by some long-ago flood. The almost feminine undulations of a giant sandbank. The distinctive out-line of a tight-packed stand of trees taller than anything around them. A pale flash in the surrounding gloom.

Frontinus’s Batavians went into action even before Bersheba placed a foot on dry land. The rafts were dragged from the shallows on to the shore. Two men from each raft swiftly stripped off the oilskin covers and retrieved clothing, weapons and armour. Meanwhile, the two other auxiliaries ran into the nearby trees and firmly secured the long ropes the rafts had also carried.

They made the crossing six times in the next few hours. It was hard, gruelling work, but Bersheba never faltered, and, eventually, Frontinus was satisfied he had enough ropes to ferry his remaining force across without the elephant’s help. On the final trip, Rufus persuaded the Batavian to forgo the pleasures of a freezing swim and be carried across on Bersheba’s back. When they reached the bank, the auxiliary commander slid down the elephant’s side and stood listening, gauging from the sounds around him whether all was going to plan. Eventually he was satisfied and motioned Rufus to leave Bersheba and follow him.

‘Now we must wait. Time is short and we still have far to go, but I have my orders.’

The Batavians had created a wide perimeter around the landing ground, an unbroken half-circle of kneeling men staring into the dark from beneath the brims of their iron helmets. When they reached the picket line, Frontinus took his place just behind it, staring as hard as any of them. The prefect was clearly nervous and Rufus, who had thought him unflappable, decided that should make him nervous too. He fingered the hilt of his
gladius
and gained comfort from it, if not courage.

‘Listen.’ The urgent whisper came from a Batavian officer in the front line.

Frontinus’s eyes narrowed and his face took on a look of total concentration. Rufus listened too, straining his ears for any sound that was alien to the natural rhythm of the night. Even so, he saw them before he heard them. They came out of the darkness, a line of silent shadows that turned into solid, all too human figures as they approached. A hundred tall, moustached men, clad in trews and chequered shirts, well armed and moving with a disturbing sense of purpose. One of Frontinus’s men raised himself and lifted his spear to hurl it into the mass of enemy warriors.

‘Hold,’ Frontinus snarled. The approaching line halted within a few paces of the auxiliary troopers, and opened to allow a stocky figure to march to their front. Frontinus turned to Rufus. ‘The Greek who advises General Vespasian said you would recognize him.’

Rufus stared hard at the small man and nodded. He was just as Narcissus had described him two nights before: short, stout and full of his own importance.

‘Are we to scowl at each other all night, or may we go?’ Adminius, king of the Cantiaci, demanded. ‘Our enemies await us.’

XXVI

Caratacus stared into the darkness.

They were out there. He knew it as he knew the scent of his firstborn. A natural knowing made without effort or thought.

The three bridges were close now, almost to the point where the charging hordes who would thunder across at daylight could reach the shallows with their first leap. His best archers and spearmen had spent the last hours peppering the night with unaimed fire, rewarded occasionally by a loud splash or a shrill scream that testified to a legionary engineer who would not be alive to fight in the morning. He knew it wouldn’t stop them, didn’t intend it to. But they would expect it, and he was eager to give Plautius what he expected.

‘Epedos, you understand what you must do?’

The war chief of the Atrebates nodded gravely. All the kings of the united tribes of southern Britain had gathered on the whaleback hill overlooking the crossing point. ‘We wait until you have the enemy pinned against the river. They will be forced to deploy left and right, thinning their line. When they are at their weakest, we strike.’

Caratacus turned to Bodvoc, whose Regni warriors would man the British left flank alongside the Atrebates. ‘Remember that, Bodvoc. When your blood boils in the furnace of battle and the clash of iron calls you like a bed-ready maiden, you wait. You must not act without Epedos. This is our chance to crush them. Yours is the vital blow; you must strike it with all the force you have. And when the Romans are driven in chaos and confusion across our front, you, Lord Scarach, will fall upon them with your Durotriges, our Iceni friends and my Catuvellauni and Trinovantes, and it will be as a wolf falls upon an injured doe, swift and deadly.’

Scarach’s face split into a grin. ‘Hear that?’ He slapped his enormous son on the back. ‘Like a wolf. Booty and plunder and blood. And all before breakfast.’

‘And I?’ Togodumnus didn’t appreciate being left to last and his voice mirrored his petulance.

‘You, Togodumnus, will be the knife in the heart of the Roman attack; the anvil against which we destroy them for ever.’ Caratacus’s brother gave no sign of appreciating his flattery. ‘With Epedos and Bodvoc on their right, unbearable pressure on their centre and the river at their back, they will inevitably be forced to retire to the west. Then you kill them.’ He turned to the men on the hill, looking each in the eye in turn. ‘You kill them all. This is the day the Romans learn the true price of stealing our lands and enslaving our people. No slaves. No prisoners. Only souls for Taranis. The legions of Plautius must vanish into the mist as if they had never existed, so their fate is the stuff of Roman nightmares for fifty generations and more.’

‘Aye.’ A dozen voices sounded in unison.

Caratacus closed his eyes and allowed himself a vision of victory. He saw a river choked with Roman dead, running red with Roman blood. A Roman baggage train burning. A shining eagle trampled in the dirt. He thought of his wife Medb and the boy Tasciovanus. They would be proud. Then, with a pang of guilt, he remembered the day on the hill. And Cartimandua. Would she leave her mountain fastness to seek his forgiveness and an alliance, or wait until he inevitably made his way north to impose his overlordship on her Brigantes?

‘Yet these are Romans.’ His thoughts were interrupted by the quiet, life-weary voice of Antedios of the Iceni. ‘We have seen how the Romans can fight. They are both flexible and disciplined. What if . . . and I defer to your wisdom in this, Lord Caratacus . . . what if this Plautius does not see fit to stray meekly into your trap? What if he has a trap of his own?’

Caratacus felt the liquid ice in his guts as the question he had not dared ask himself was put into words, but when he replied his own voice was hard and unyielding. ‘Then, Antedios, we fight the Roman on his terms . . . and we win or we die.’

Five miles downstream Ballan rode westward along the riverbank to join his lord. He had been right, it had been a fool’s errand, but he didn’t grudge Caratacus his certainty. It was that kind of attention to detail that made the Catuvellauni a leader worth following. They had reached the high ground where the estuary met the sea just before last light. It wasn’t a hill, exactly – just a gentle elevation in the flat landscape – but there were signs that people had lived in this inhospitable, wind-scoured place; the rotting fallen timbers of a building and blackened stones that had once been part of a hearth were just visible among the tufted grass. From this platform they were able to see far along the coast to north and south, over the bog and marshland inhabited only by ducks, herons and frogs, and the mudflats that were just visible as the tide turned. Ballan saw nothing to fear. No war galleys or troop transports, not even the timbers of an ancient merchant ship that had fallen foul of this treacherous, ever-shifting coastline. When he was certain, sure enough even for Caratacus, he and his eight men turned their horses west. They could have made better time cutting inland, but the Iceni scout elected to follow the twisting river. If Caratacus believed there was even the slightest chance of a small enemy force crossing this far down he might as well check. They would still be back with the king by daylight.

Four hours later he was regretting his decision. In the darkness and the rain that now drifted down to soak their clothing he could barely see beyond his horse’s ears. The river was blanketed by swirling mist that men’s eyes turned into sprites and ghostly figures come to relieve a warrior of his soul. The ground beneath their feet was as treacherous as the shoals of the estuary, full of sink holes and soft spots, buried branches with spikes as sharp as any spear and gullies that could swallow a man and his horse.

Behind him, his men rode with their heads down, praying that Ballan would see sense and end their misery. He could feel their resentment and he grinned. He hadn’t proved to Caratacus that an Iceni was worthy of the position of chief scout by being sensible. He had proved it by doing the impossible. Again, and again and again. He had spent more time in enemy territory in the last month than he had by his own fire. When word of the Roman invasion was first brought by the refugees from the coast, whom had Caratacus dispatched to confirm it? Ballan. And when his lord had decided to see for himself, who had brought him by the secret ways and placed him so close he could almost smell his enemy? No, they would stick with their fool’s errand. Let his men curse him.

He wasn’t sure at first; how could a man be sure of anything on a night like this? They had just reached a point where the action of the river had taken a massive circular bite out of the soft material of the bank. It was nothing unusual, but it meant another half-hour detour and an extra element of care. If the river could undermine one piece of dirt it could undermine another, and a horseman had to be wary of ground that might fall away beneath him and pitch him straight into the water. Still, the cloud blanket seemed to be thinner, and there was even a glimmer of shadowy moon showing somewhere up there. At least they would have the illusion of light to ease their way. The rain continued to fall gently and the river mist was thick as his wife’s oatmeal porridge, but there was a hint of breeze that made it whirl and eddy in an ethereal imitation of the water it covered. He sighed and was about to turn and follow his men when he saw it.

It wasn’t a shape, nothing as substantial as that. Just a section of mist that was more . . . solid wasn’t the word. Perhaps there wasn’t one? He told himself it was only another eddy in the fog, but it awoke something in him. He felt a shiver run through his body, as if a dead man had just run cold fingers down his spine, and he stared harder, trying to understand what the mist was telling him. For a few more moments it was still just mist, and he thought he was imagining what he had or hadn’t seen; had or hadn’t sensed. Then the wind shifted again, and the vapour curtain was twitched aside, and he was more frightened than he had ever been in his life.

Romans. And they were walking on water.