Claudius (21 page)

XXXIII

Caratacus’s brain felt as if it were about to explode. How could one man cope with so many different problems? How could a single mind deal with the myriad divergent dilemmas created by an army on the brink of defeat? Had he underestimated the threat to his right flank, from where Nuada had failed to return with word of Togodumnus’s position? He had been betrayed by Epedos, that was clear, but who else was about to betray him? He had been certain the left flank could be held – now he was certain Bodvoc would be overwhelmed unless he was given aid. He tried to feel the ebb and flow of the battle around him, but there was only chaos. His people were dying and he was helpless.

‘Lord?’ Ballan’s voice pierced his despair. ‘Lord, you must act. There is still time.’

He blinked and his mind cleared. He saw Ballan staring at him. Saw the trust in the Iceni’s eyes. Beyond him, Scarach stood with his enormous son, waiting. There was still a chance. One chance.

‘Lord Scarach, take your Durotriges, the Trinovantes and the lesser tribes. Join with Bodvoc and smash the forces facing him. One attack. Every man you can gather on the way.’ Scarach stared at him.

He had been waiting all day for a fight and at last he was going to get one. And what a fight. But he understood the implications of Caratacus’s order.

‘That will leave you with—’

‘I know. It is the only way.’

The Durotrige hesitated; did his honour require a refusal? He saw the certainty in Caratacus’s eyes and knew it did not. He nodded and turned away, shouting his orders, but Caratacus had one final instruction. ‘Scarach, you must control your forces. Don’t let them off the leash. When it is done bring them back here. I promise I will leave you more Romans to kill.’

Scarach laughed. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll keep my dogs to heel. We’ll rip a few Roman faces off and slaughter so many of the bastards they won’t stop running until they reach the ocean. I’ll leave Bodvoc to clean up like the housewife he is and then come back and show you how it’s done.’

With a last salute the king of the Durotriges ran from the hill and Caratacus again turned his attention to the legionaries pouring from the three narrow bridges. There were hundreds now, already linking the three bridgeheads into a single entity. Soon there would be thousands. His strategy had failed. There was no question of sucking Plautius into a trap, for the trap was already sprung. He must stop the three legions where they were and buy time for Scarach to defeat the force on his left.

He waved his war chiefs forward. It was now or never.

‘Catuvellauni!’ he roared. ‘Attack. Kill them! Kill them all!’

The vast warrior host had been waiting in the lee of the hill since long before sunrise, tormented by and taking casualties from the catapult missiles landing in their midst. Caratacus had dispersed them as widely as he dared, but rocks the size of a bull’s head bounced and skipped and ricocheted over the hard ground, turning men to red ruin in an instant, removing arms and legs and heads. But the British warriors knew nothing of their king’s despair. They had not fought, so they did not consider defeat. They knew the Romans were on the other side of the slope with their backs to the river. The invaders. The enemy. The Catuvellauni were blood-crazed and battle-ready and they charged with all the unstoppable power of a mountain avalanche.

With a surge of pride, Caratacus watched them as they breasted the hilltop in one screaming mass and accelerated down the slope with their fearsome champions in the lead, leaping ahead, tall and powerful and showing their contempt for the enemy by their nakedness. He felt his heart lurch when they reached the bottom of the shallow slope and slowed in a gigantic splash of disturbed water, all their momentum lost in an instant. He had known it would happen. How could he not? The water-filled bog which had been such a key part of his strategy was now the bane of his own people. It was they who were forced to struggle through the glutinous, feet-deep mud to reach the enemy. Moving towards the river, they didn’t have to fear the underwater obstacles he had placed to delay the Romans still further, but the slow-moving mass trapped in the swamp was a target even a blind legionary couldn’t miss.

His eye was drawn to a warrior in the forefront of the British assault. The man was a giant and Caratacus recognized him as Arven, champion of one of the clans who made up the Catuvellauni. Even from a hundred paces away on the hilltop he could see the man’s muscles bulge as he forced his way through the thigh-deep water. He looked magnificent. Immortal. Mighty Arven was screaming defiance at the Romans forming up by the river when his abdomen sprouted six feet of wood and metal. He stopped abruptly, before folding, almost gently, into the bog to be trampled deep into the mud by those following. He was the first of many. Caratacus saw water stained with blood indeed, but it was not the blood of his enemies.

He wanted to turn away, but he forced himself to watch the suffering of the Catuvellauni. This was his responsibility, no one else’s. His plan, that now depended on ten thousand of Britain’s finest warriors throwing themselves to their deaths against the spears and the swords of three Roman legions. Could he have done anything else? Did he expect anything else? The answer to both questions was no. How he wished it were otherwise. When he had sent the Durotriges to aid Bodvoc, he had known the only way to slow the main attack would be with the flesh and bone of his own people. He felt a twitch in his cheek, just below his left eye, and gritted his teeth. He would not weep.

Something had changed, he realized. When the fighting began he had been surrounded by his aides and his under-chiefs and those who wished to supplant them in the hierarchy of the tribe; each more eager than the one before to give him advice or offer unlikely support. Now he found himself alone in the centre of a ring of men who looked at him with either fear or compassion, as if he were suffering from some contagious disease. Even his personal bodyguard kept a respectful distance.

He knew what it was. They could scent defeat. He came to a decision.

‘Ballan.’ The squat Iceni scuttled to his side. ‘You have eaten and rested?’

Ballan nodded. Caratacus knew it was a lie, but exhaustion and hunger were minor privations on this day of days. He dropped his voice. ‘I wish you to return to the encampment and gather the women and the children, the sick and the old, and furnish them with enough supplies to reach Scarach’s fortress at Mai-den.’ Ballan’s eyes widened and he opened his mouth, but Caratacus silenced him with a shake of the head. ‘Your scouts will provide an escort. The day may yet be won, or it may be lost. If we are victorious I will send a rider after you. If not . . .’ He didn’t have to complete the sentence. If not . . . it would not matter, because he would be dead.

Ballan knew better than to argue. He left without another word and Caratacus turned his attention once more to the bridges, fearful of what he would see. But an unfamiliar feeling caught his chest as his eyes roved over the battle below. Hope. The three landing areas between the river and the swamp were so crammed with legionaries they barely had room to swing their spear arms. All along the Roman line a huge press of British warriors was hacking and cutting in a bid to breach the wall of shields that protected the bridgeheads. The flow of Plautius’s men over each bridge had slowed to a crawl and the far ends were crowded with units waiting their turn to cross. It was working. The sacrifice of the Catuvellauni was not in vain.

By now Bodvoc and Scarach would have destroyed the threat to the army’s left. Soon he would recall the Durotriges and together they and the Catuvellauni would throw the Romans back into the river. He began to make his plans for the attack that would finish the Romans once and for all.

A wail of dismay broke his train of thought. As calmly as he could manage he walked to the rear of the hill, where he could look down upon the British encampments. He would have expected chaos where Ballan was organizing the army’s followers for the journey to Mai-den, but this was different. Hundreds – no –
thousands
of men were streaming from the east through the huts and the horse lines, singly and in small groups, occasionally in larger, more disciplined units. He recognized the insignia of the Durotriges, the Regni and the Iceni among them. He knew what he was seeing. A retreating army. A defeated army.

He ordered up the leader of his bodyguard. ‘Bring me someone who can tell me what has happened. I must know. Go now, and return quickly.’ Was that urgency in his voice, or panic? He shook his head wearily. It didn’t matter. He returned to the river side of the low hill and looked down to where the Catuvellauni were still fighting and dying. Still managing to pin the Romans in place against the river as he’d asked them to do. Should he withdraw them? Could he withdraw them?

‘Lord?’ The guard held a shaking figure by the arm, a young boy not yet out of his teens. The youth had lost his sword and shield, but was unwounded. It was very obvious he thought he was going to be killed. Caratacus gave a sign and the boy was released and fell to his knees, where he began to babble incomprehensibly. Caratacus laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. ‘Enough. Take a deep breath and tell me what happened. What of King Scarach and King Bodvoc?’

The boy went quiet and his chest rose and fell as he did as he was ordered. When he had recovered sufficiently he looked up, his eyes still clouded with fear. ‘King Bodvoc was holding the Romans when we reached him, lord, though he had lost many warriors and we were only just in time. Scarach of the Durotriges led us, and ordered an immediate attack, because the Romans were as hard-pressed as the Regni who faced them.’

‘Your tribe?’

‘The Parisii, lord,’ the boy said, his voice shaking with pride. ‘We were in the forefront of the fighting. Three times we charged, and three times they held. But their line buckled and was close to breaking. One more charge, Lord Scarach said, and he was right. One more charge and we would have sent them fleeing from the field and such slaughter we would have done, but . . .’ His voice faded and his head dropped. Caratacus lifted his chin and looked into his eyes.

‘I need to hear it all, lad. All.’

‘When we were massing for the final attack a great force of cavalry and infantry smashed into our flank. Where they came from none knew, for it seemed every Roman was needed to hold what they had. But they came, and with such power they cut us almost in two, and as they came the general commanding the legion to our front ordered them to attack. They should not have had the strength.’ The boy’s voice was bewildered, as if he had been cheated in a game of touch rather than being part of a routed army.

‘Yet they did,’ Caratacus said gently. ‘And you ran.’ He could see it in his head. The Roman general had chosen his moment with the utmost precision. He had husbanded his forces as Bodvoc and Scarach flayed his front line, had probably been tempted to reinforce his men as they suffered and died, but had never given in to that temptation.

That was a measure of the general he was. And at the moment the British believed he was beaten he had launched a flanking movement that had torn his attackers in two and, in the same instant, thrown everything he had into an all-out assault that had spread panic and dismay among the undisciplined warriors facing him.

And they ran.

It was over.

He didn’t need to withdraw his Catuvellauni. Word of defeat, or the scent of it, had already reached them and they were conducting a fighting retreat back up the hill with the Romans growing bolder and more numerous on the north bank with every passing second. He reached for his sword and felt it, heavy and comfortable, in his hand. Not the toy ceremonial sword – some Roman would no doubt find that when the huts were looted and take it as a trophy – but his killing sword; the sword he had been itching to wield all day. But it was a commander’s duty to command, not fight. And a commander’s duty to die with his men when the dying needed to be done. Strange that, with everything lost, he felt clean and free for the first time today. Or perhaps not so strange.

He walked through the running men down the slope towards the Romans.

XXXIV

As Caratacus succumbed to the despair of defeat, a mile to his west the sullen mass of Britons confronting Frontinus had been motionless for so long that he dared to hope they had given up. It was Rufus who shouted a warning that told him what he had always known. They were coming again. The Batavian commander drew his sword, reminding himself to mend the new nicks that marred its razor edge, then remembering he probably wouldn’t have to. He took a deep breath.

‘Prepare to receive the enemy.’

His calm voice was echoed along the line by the few surviving officers. Three hundred shields were raised as one and three hundred swords came free of their scabbards in a ragged parody of the nervetingling song the two thousand had created earlier.

Rufus saw the British advance from high on Bersheba’s back. It was obvious they were weary, and some were reluctant, the fire in their blood extinguished by the carnage they’d witnessed, allowing themselves to drift behind the main force of attackers. But there were still thousands of them and they knew how close they were to winning.

Frontinus had used the lull to send out foragers to collect what they could from the heaped British dead, and now the most able-bodied of the wounded were frantically straightening the metal points of throwing spears and handing them forward to their comrades in the line. The Britons were just beyond the mound of their fallen when the shape of the attack changed. A group of forty warriors, champions all, sprinted ahead of the main force and formed an unconscious imitation of the Roman wedges that had destroyed the last cohesion of the ambushers in the battle of the valley. Frontinus screamed a warning, but his men had no time to react. The arrowhead of charging warriors hit the pitifully thin Roman line like a battering ram and Rufus saw the exhausted Batavian defenders smashed aside, opening a gap that was an invitation to the thousands of warriors following behind.

‘Rufus!’ He heard Frontinus’s shout, but he didn’t need it. He was already urging Bersheba forward past the Batavian officer into the gap. He could feel the fear and the anger in the elephant and she flared her ears and raised her trunk and gave an almighty roar of fury that split the skies. The first Britons saw her come and recoiled in terror before the enormous grey monster that was the stuff of their worst nightmares. But behind them came Nuada and Togodumnus, and neither was daunted by the elephant’s power.

‘Kill the beast,’ Togodumnus screamed as he sped forward with a long spear in one hand and a sword in the other.

‘Kill the beast.’ Nuada echoed the cry, and by some trickery or piece of magic a flaming torch appeared in his hand. He thrust the brand into Bersheba’s face and now it was the elephant who recoiled, squealing as she lifted her head to expose the loose skin of her throat to the point of Togodumnus’s spear. The movement threw Rufus off balance and he felt himself being pitched over Bersheba’s shoulder, but even as he fell he still had the presence of mind to draw the short sword at his belt. Every fibre of Togodumnus’s being was centred on the elephant and he barely noticed the sprawling bundle that landed off to his side. With a cry of triumph, the Dobunni king dropped his sword and raised the spear in both hands to thrust the lethal, leaf-shaped point with all his strength into the soft flesh of Bersheba’s neck.

To Togodumnus, it was the merest glint at the corner of his vision, but Nuada saw it come and he cried a warning that was a heartbeat too late. Rufus had launched his
gladius
overhand with the timing of an athlete and the sure eye of a warrior. It was one of the crude arena tricks Cupido had taught him, but it saved Bersheba’s life. The needle-tipped iron took Caratacus’s brother in the left side of the chest, piercing flesh and bone and heart muscle. Togodumnus felt the breath knocked from his lungs in the same moment he screamed his victory cry. He was surprised when he found himself staring up at a pure blue sky; more surprised still when his mouth filled with liquid and he began to drown in his own blood. He cawed once, like a hungry crow, before he slipped into the eternal darkness of the Otherworld.

Rufus gripped the hilt of the sword in both hands and it came clear from Togodumnus’s lifeless flesh with an obscene sucking sound. Their king was dead and the warriors of the Dobunni were stunned by the loss, but Bersheba was still the only thing holding the gap in the Roman line and Nuada the Druid screamed at them to avenge their leader. He advanced towards the elephant across the dead and dying of both sides, with the sinister bear claw held out before him as he chanted the incantations that would bring his god to his aid.

Rufus didn’t know whether it was the power of the words or the sight of the man who had been within a second of sending him to a fiery death, but he felt himself suddenly gripped by a numbing paralysis. Bersheba shifted uneasily beside him. For a moment there was nothing on the battlefield but the three of them. No Dobunni warriors. No Batavian defenders. No heroes or cowards. No dead. No living. Just man, and beast, and the Druid. Nuada looked him square in the face and smiled as he saw his enemy quail.

The Druid’s amber eyes, which reminded so many men of a stooping falcon, glittered with hatred, but, in a moment of revelation, Rufus looked into them and saw not a hawk but the memory of a saviour. He heard the earth-shaking roar of a male lion in his head and his hand automatically sought the worn charm at his neck. In that instant his strength returned and Nuada’s spell was broken. The high priest felt the moment too and frowned in puzzlement.

‘You have no hold over me, Druid,’ Rufus cried in a voice distorted with contempt. ‘Go back to the black pit you came from and take your dogs with you.’

In the same instant there was a blood-chilling howl from the left and a new army fell from the tree-cloaked heights there. Adminius and the Cantiaci had come to the battle. The traitor king had watched as the drama was fought out below him. More than once he had been tempted to leave the Romans to their doom, but always something had made him stay. Now he sensed victory and loot the way a soaring buzzard senses the stink of a rotting carcass.

The Dobunni saw them come and ran. With a final venomous curse at Rufus, Nuada ran with them.

Two miles downstream Caratacus waited at the foot of the low hill above the river and watched the disciplined lines of legionaries wading towards him through the flooded lagoon he had created. There was nothing to slow them but mud and the floating corpses of dead Catuvellauni warriors. The traps he had set had all been trampled by his own advance. The army that should have been waiting to slaughter them was gone, scattered like autumn leaves in a sudden gale. Only his small rearguard stood between the legions and the retreating British tribes. Here they would stand, and here they would fall, and he would fall with them. He had failed, and he knew that in failing he had condemned his country and its people to Roman domination and all that meant. Death, for some, certainly. Slavery for more. What wealth they had would be taken to fill Roman coffers and what honour they retained would be trampled beneath Roman feet. But not his honour. His honour would die here with him and he would feast with his fallen warriors – like brave Arven – in the halls of the Otherworld.

He felt a firm hand grip his shoulder, and shrugged it off.

‘Leave me,’ he snarled, half turning and surprised to see Ballan, and behind him the men of the royal bodyguard. ‘You had your orders. Your place is protecting the women and children.’

‘No, lord, my place is with you, and your place is with your people.’ The Iceni’s voice was hard-edged with urgency. ‘Don’t you understand, lord? You are Britain’s hope. Without you they are nothing. With you, they will fight.’ Caratacus shook his head. No, they wouldn’t fight. They were defeated and demoralized. Their fighting days were done. Ballan persisted. ‘Yes. They will fight because you are there to lead them.’ He pointed to the crest of the hill behind them. ‘Twenty thousand warriors and more are waiting for your call. Yes, they are beaten and, yes, they will need time to recover their strength and their courage, but they will fight. Throw your life away in some pointless gesture and you are betraying them and every one who fell today. Those men died for you. Live for them.’

The Iceni’s words were echoed by the captain of the rearguard. ‘He is right. Go, lord. Do not let our sacrifice be in vain.’

Caratacus bowed his head. He didn’t have the strength to suffer this again. Wouldn’t. But neither did he have the strength to resist the hands that pulled him away from the advancing Romans and back up the whaleback hill towards the encampments. He stopped just once, and forced himself to look down over the battlefield that should have been Plautius’s bane, but instead had become his own and that of his people. The long lines of armour-clad legionaries were halfway across the shallow lagoon now, advancing with dogged, purposeful steps towards the rearguard. Behind them, the flooded plain was dotted with British dead, while, at the river’s edge, the three Roman bridgeheads were linked by a pale rampart of Catuvellauni flesh. Beyond that, the Tamesa flowed on, unmoved and unhindered, except by the narrow bridges that dissected its broad waters and still carried the last elements of the three legions across to the north bank. ‘Lord!’ He heard the concern in Ballan’s voice, knew he was endangering them all, but knew also there was one last thing he must do. His eye was drawn to the brightly coloured cloth pavilion where he knew Plautius had watched the battle. He tried to stretch his mind across the gap, to seek out what he did not want to know, but what he must endure. For if his warriors had suffered the spears of his enemy, surely he could suffer his enemy’s scorn? Yet, as he stood there on that field of blood, he realized that the man who directed this terrible killing machine had already forgotten the name of Caratacus of the Catuvellauni. And that was worse than any insult.

He allowed himself to be led in a dream through the chaos of defeat. Among the huts of the encampment a hundred small battles were being fought between the retreating Britons and the victorious legionaries of the Second Augusta. A hundred small tragedies played out.

Not every legionary had pursued the fleeing tribesmen, and it was clear that if they had stood and fought, the remnants of the Regni, the Durotriges and the Iceni could have comfortably kept the Romans at bay to cover the retreat of their women and children. But defeat drives logic from a man’s head and those who had lived through the carnage of the day’s fighting had only one thought: survive. An auxiliary cavalryman who should have stayed with his unit speared a fleeing British chief in the spine with a roar of triumph, but a second later he was hauled from the saddle by a dozen of his victim’s tribesmen and butchered among the obscene filth of a latrine area. Moments later, muffled screams attracted Ballan’s attention to a scattered clump of rowan trees beside their path between two encampments. He knew he didn’t have time to investigate, but an image of his woman and the bastard children he affected to despise convinced him he must. Two Romans were holding down a Catuvellauni maid of about fourteen, while a third humped and bucked between her legs. Without a word, he cut the rapist’s throat and Caratacus’s royal bodyguard chopped the accomplices to pieces as they screamed for a mercy they knew would never be forthcoming. One of the guards took the girl by the arm, but she slipped from his grasp and ran, screaming, into the chaos and the confusion. Men on both sides who showed no inclination to fight simply ignored each other. Two Romans entered one hut looking for plunder, while five paces away a British family gathered what they could for the long retreat. One of the Romans threw a British child a loaf of bread and the boy’s father nodded his thanks as they departed. A few paces ahead, Ballan found his way blocked by twenty surviving champions of Bodvoc’s Regni involved in a savage little battle against a similar number of legionaries from the élite first cohort of the Second Augusta, whom they had faced in the morning. The two sides stopped hacking at each other long enough to allow Caratacus and his bodyguard to pass before resuming their personal war.

They had almost reached the horse lines when Caratacus halted. ‘Wait here,’ he told Ballan, and walked over to the group who had caught his attention.

Scarach of the Durotriges was a warrior feared in battle and a ruler who would bend the knee before no man. But he was a father too. Now he knelt at the centre of his royal guard, head down over the still body of his giant son. As Caratacus drew closer he could see the king’s shoulders shuddering, shaken by grief that was torn from him in great heart-bursting sobs. He almost turned away. No man should see a friend like this. But just as Ballan had shown him his duty, Caratacus required Scarach to do his.

Two of the warriors lifted their spears to stop him, but a third ordered them to allow him to pass and he stood over the weeping Durotrige. The boy’s face – what was his name? Keryg? Yes, Keryg – was marble white, but otherwise unmarked, and he might have been sleeping. He was bare to the waist and Caratacus could see no wounds on his torso. It was a few seconds before he realized what had killed Scarach’s son. There was a small nick just below his right ear where an arrow had sliced through his flesh. It wasn’t a deep wound, but deep enough. It had cut through the big artery in Keryg’s neck. Caratacus had seen such wounds before. A man just bled, and bled, and bled, until he could bleed no more. He touched Scarach on the shoulder. ‘Lord Scarach?’

The king turned to look up at him, his eyes wet and red-rimmed, and Caratacus could see that the front of his tunic was black with the dried blood that also covered his arms to the elbow. He imagined the awful minutes as Scarach had fought to save his firstborn, the terrible, certain knowledge that it was all in vain, and the final moment when the light faded in the boy’s eyes. He made his voice hard, knowing that sympathy was the last thing this broken man needed. ‘Your son is dead, but others live. You have a duty to them.’

At first, Scarach stared at him, unseeing, but gradually recognition dawned. ‘It is finished,’ he said bleakly. ‘Do not talk to me of duty. My only duty is to give my son an honoured resting place.’