Claudius (7 page)

IX

‘So this is the great beast all the army has been boasting of. It is more fearsome even than I had imagined.’

Rufus turned, and discovered that the heavily accented Latin belonged to a tall man in the uniform of the
Ala Gallorum Indiana
, the Gaulish cavalry unit that had annihilated the barbarian attack a few days earlier. The cavalryman’s face was hidden behind the god-mask of an ornate parade helmet with horsehair plumes, which he must have donned for a ceremony earlier that day. Rufus knew that such helmets, cast from brass and iron, were only awarded to the squadron’s champions. He watched the soldier carefully remove the helmet’s visor, with its enigmatic all-seeing expression, to reveal handsome, weather-worn features. The visitor was clean-shaven, with penetrating brown eyes that radiated intelligence and a strong nose that had been badly broken at some point. The column had halted before a line of steep, tree-clad hills while the engineers of the leading legion, the Twentieth, cut a road that zig-zagged up the face of the slope. Normally, the army would have stopped for the day and set up camp, but the ground was rocky and gully-strewn, and provided a poor defensive position. Plautius planned to push beyond the obstacle and force the pace on the enemy.

Britte had wandered off with Gaius to a small stream within the defensive perimeter, where the little boy sat throwing stones into the burbling water while she stood and watched. Bersheba was hobbled among the supply carts, munching contentedly at a pile of hay. They were twenty paces from her, but Rufus could tell that, even at this distance, the Gaul was impressed by the elephant’s bulk.

‘It must be very fearsome in battle,’ the soldier continued. ‘I have heard of these things, heard that the . . . that we had tamed monsters and made them do our bidding, but I had never believed it till now. It must weigh more than twenty horses, and those tusks . . . I have faced charging boars the size of a small bullock, but I doubt that I would stand before this.’ He frowned. ‘Does the monster truly breathe fire?’

Rufus laughed. ‘There are times when her breath could knock you over at ten paces. But no, she does not breathe fire.’

‘I have heard that it requires a hundred prisoners each day to satisfy its hunger?’

Rufus saw the glint of humour in the cavalryman’s eyes, and grinned back. ‘She would eat from dawn until dusk, but a cartload of hay and a basket of red apples is her daily ration. We keep the prisoners for Britte, who is truly a man-eater.’

‘Britte? You have two of the monsters?’

Rufus laughed again. ‘No. Britte is nursemaid to my son.’ He pointed towards the stream, where the big slave girl and Gaius both now stood in the water. Britte held her skirts high to reveal calves almost as enormous as Bersheba’s. ‘She is one of your people, I think. You must stay and meet her. She has little opportunity to speak her own language.’

The Gaul smiled uncertainly. His expression changed as his eye was drawn to Gaius, whose high-pitched cries of pleasure rang clear to them. ‘I too have a son of similar age, though I see little enough of him these days. I envy you your good fortune . . .’

‘Rufus.’ He extended his hand and the Gaul took it, his grip strong and his palm calloused and horny. A warrior’s hand, hardened by constant practice with sword and spear. Rufus expected the man to reply with his own name, but instead he deftly turned the conversation back to Bersheba.

‘So, Rufus, keeper of the monster, your beast does not breathe fire and does not eat prisoners, yet it must be terrible in battle?’

Rufus thought for a moment. When Bersheba was in a temper she was a truly frightening sight, but battle? Gentle Bersheba whom he had seen pick up an egg and place it back in its nest with her trunk? Bersheba, whose mighty strength was equalled not only by her intelligence, but by her compassion? ‘She could be,’ he admitted. ‘But I doubt it is her natural state. I have heard of elephants bred to war, and truly they are terrible to behold. But they have been known to be driven mad by the noise and sound of battle, or by the pain of wounds, and they can be as dangerous to their allies as to their enemies.’

The Gaul gave a deep laugh. ‘I have known men like that.’

‘You did well the other day,’ Rufus said.

‘Well?’ The cavalryman sounded puzzled.

‘Against the barb—against the Britons. You and your comrades did terrible slaughter. I watched from the column. You probably saved Bersheba’s life.’

The trooper’s face turned serious and the humour died from his eyes. Rufus remembered his own feelings as he walked among the dead, and understood. When the battle-madness died and the glory faded, sometimes the reality was difficult to live with.

‘They were fools, to attack as they did.’

‘That is what Narcissus says.’

‘Nar-ciss-us?’ The name was obviously difficult for him, came out as a stumbling, fractured thing.

‘He is . . . my friend. He is an important man. He says if this Caratacus, the enemy war chief, is half the leader they say, he would never have ordered such a thing.’

‘I am sure he is right,’ the Gaul said with certainty, then returned to the subject of Bersheba. ‘You say she is not warlike, so why is she here, eating enough rations for a cavalry squadron?’

Rufus looked proudly towards Bersheba. ‘Because she is magnificent, because she gives our soldiers confidence, and because she is the Emperor’s elephant.’

‘The Emperor!’ The cavalryman gaped in surprise. ‘You have met the Emperor?’

‘Yes—’ Rufus was interrupted by a commotion behind him as Britte returned from the stream with Gaius. He turned at the sound of their voices. ‘Britte, this is one of your countrymen.’

The wet nurse’s broad face creased with puzzlement and he looked over his shoulder to find that the cavalryman had disappeared into the crowded ranks of the baggage slaves.

It took them two hours to climb the hill by the road the engineers had cut through the trees. By the time they broke for camp there were still four hours until dark but Rufus was exhausted. He felt slightly guilty that others would have to dig the defensive ditch and build the parapet, but all he wanted to do was wrap himself in his blanket and sleep until dawn.

‘You, elephant man!’

He looked up and his heart sank. One-toothed Paullus. Now he’d have to explain to the legionary about Narcissus’s intervention with the legate and his exemption from digging. But Paullus already knew.

‘Think you can sit back and get screwed while the rest of us work? Well, think again. Old Paullus has been ordered to put together a foraging detail, and guess what?’ The sneer on his tormentor’s face told Rufus everything he needed to know. Reluctantly, he rose to his feet.

‘I’m on it?’

Paullus grinned. ‘That’s right, fancy boy, and I’ll make sure that if there’s anything heavy to carry, you’ll be the one with the aching back. Want to do anything about it?’

Rufus thought for a moment. He could argue that the exemption from digging freed him from all fatigues, but that would only make Paullus more of an enemy than he already was. There was no point in arguing. He shook his head. The soldier grunted and marched him off to join a party of about twenty baggage slaves and a dozen bullock carts outside the main entrance of the camp. Paullus was in command of an escort composed of twenty-four soldiers from the Augusta’s sixth cohort, which was largely made up of fresh-faced young men recruited just before the invasion. He lined them up within sight of the grinning guards leaning on the parapet beside the gateway and stood with his legs slightly apart and his hands on his hips.

‘Right, I’m only going to say this once, so pin your ears back and listen. Our scouts have identified a village less than two miles from here where they reckon the Celts have a hidden store of food and grain. There are reports of a lot of coming and going between the huts and a wood a few hundred yards away. Whatever’s in that wood we take and bring back to the column.

‘Now, there shouldn’t be any trouble, because there are only a few old men, women and children in the village, this whole area is crawling with our cavalry and there’s been no sign of enemy activity, but . . .’ he gave the final word an emphasis that had the escort leaning forward to listen to his next words, ‘but if anything does happen, you know what to do. You, fat boy in the rear rank,’ he barked at a sturdy youngster in a helmet that was too large for him, ‘what is it you do if there’s trouble?’

The soldier blinked and swallowed nervously. ‘W-we converge on you in defensive formation, sir, and wait until help arrives.’

‘And why will help arrive? Help will arrive because there’s a squadron of cavalry within trumpet distance, which is why we have Julius, the cornicen, along for the ride. Or if the cavalry are as cloth-eared as you lot, we will always be within view of that.’ He pointed to a signal tower the engineers of the Second had constructed on a hill overlooking the marching camp. ‘And don’t call me sir, son. I’m just a lowly single-pay man who must have offended Mithras because he’s been dumped with the job of wet-nursing you. Right, let’s march, and no straggling. Keep a tight formation beside the wagons and your eyes open. We don’t expect trouble, but we’re ready for it. That’s why we’re the best.’

Rufus listened from his place on one of the bullock carts. Despite himself, he was impressed. Paullus might be a bully, but he knew his business. The unsprung wagons creaked in protest and their wooden wheels squealed as they lumbered into motion and moved across the rough ground away from the camp. At first, the soldiers seemed cheerful enough, but once they were out of sight of the palisade Rufus noticed the mood change. He felt it too, and understood it for what it was. They had all been part of the invasion column for so long that there was something unnatural about being detached from it. The landscape around, for as far as he could see, was gently rolling heath-land – rough grass with a few clumps of trees dotted here and there – yet it was strangely threatening. It was all very well to invade Britain at the centre of an army of forty thousand soldiers, but to be part of this isolated little convoy made each man acutely aware of his own vulnerability, as if he were walking naked down a busy street. Even Paullus had gone quiet.

They marched beneath the smoke-black underbelly of a carpet of cloud that extended from one horizon to the other. The atmosphere was warm, almost liquid, and thick with the buzz of tiny insects. Soon everyone in the column was brushing sweat from their eyes or dashing at invisible tormentors. A dozen soldiers marched on each side of the carts, with Paullus leading the way, uncomfortable in the saddle of a chestnut mare whose temperament appeared to match his own. The horse twisted and stuttered beneath the Roman, and from his place in the second cart Rufus could hear the patrol commander muttering under his breath. He decided this wasn’t the day to fall foul of the man and vowed to keep his mouth shut.

They were an hour into the march when Paullus noticed the first faint trace of white woodsmoke against the leaden clouds and halted the column at the base of a gentle rise. He called his section leaders to him and together they crawled to the top of the hill.

When they returned a few minutes later Paullus squatted over a patch of raw earth dug up by a fox or a badger, and used the tip of his sword to draw a rough map in the dirt. ‘The village is here, overlooking the stream.’ He sketched a tight circle beside a line which snaked from one side of the patch to the other. ‘And this,’ another larger circle on the far side of the snaking line, ‘is the wood where the cavalry reports they’ve stored their food. First section will come in from the east, second section from the west.’ He drew what looked like a bull’s horns converging beyond the village circle from right and left. ‘We’ll give you to the count of one hundred to get into position before we move in. They’ll try to run when they see us coming. Your job is to make sure no one escapes. Understood? Nobody escapes.’

When the two sections had moved off at the trot, Paullus formed up the wagons just below the brow of the hill. Rufus saw him frowning with concentration as he counted off the numbers in his head. Eventually he nodded to himself and clumsily remounted the mare.

‘March,’ he shouted, and the column moved off to bring Rome’s bounty to a village that had lived happily without it for a thousand years.

X

In truth, it wasn’t much of a village. When Rufus’s wagon crested the hill behind Paullus he counted a dozen large huts and assorted out-buildings scattered haphazardly over a piece of raised ground perhaps two hundred paces across, which was half encircled by a loop of the stream. To his right was a network of cultivated fields and hedged trackways. To his left, beyond the river, a forest of mixed ash, birch and scrub oak stretched far into the distance. As the carts trundled down the shallow slope towards the village there was a flurry of movement on the river side of the compound, followed by a shrill cry that might have come from a woman.

Paullus grunted: ‘At least someone’s doing their job.’ He urged his mount forward and the cornicen and the eight remaining legionaries jogged after him.

By the time Rufus and the other wagon drivers reached the huts the legionaries were methodically searching each house and stacking anything of value in front of Paullus. It was the first time Rufus had seen British buildings at close quarters. He was surprised at how sturdily constructed the roundhouses were. Long poles a foot in diameter formed the framework for the conical roof, which was covered by a thick thatch. The walls were of wattle, woven through upright wooden stakes, and the gaps filled with dried mud which made the houses weather- and windproof. They were each capable of housing an extended family of a dozen or more people and it was clear from their state of repair that this was a thriving community. Paullus looked at the pathetic booty of well-used copper pans, cracked wooden spoons and small heaps of powdery flour and shook his head.

‘This isn’t what we came for. You.’ He pointed at the driver of the first bullock cart. ‘You’re the one who can understand their gibberish?’ The man nodded nervously. ‘Come with me.’

The prisoners had been placed under guard outside the largest hut. There were nine of them, not counting the plump woman, who reminded Rufus a little of Britte, lying crumpled in a pool of blood with a look of mild irritation on her face and a large wound between her breasts. The others were three elderly men, probably not fit to carry a sword, four terrified children of indeterminate sex, and two younger women who stood weeping quietly and looked as if they expected to be raped at any moment.

‘Ask them where the rest of the villagers are.’

The wagon driver approached the tallest of the three men and put the question in a sing-song accent. The elder, who had lank, shoulder-length grey hair and wore a ragged tunic and long striped trews, kept his head bowed and refused to meet his interrogator’s eyes.

Paullus gave a thin smile. ‘Ask him where the food’s hidden.’

The wagon driver spoke again. Still the man would not meet his gaze, but this time he did answer, in the same lilting dialect. ‘He says there is no food. What we see here is all they have.’ He pointed to the little heap of plunder.

‘Ask him again. Tell him we’ll pay for it.’

The interpreter looked doubtful, but put the question to the old man, who looked up sharply and replied in a staccato burst. The interpreter shrugged. ‘He says they’ve been starving for days. They have no food.’

Paullus’s expression didn’t change. Wearing the same thin smile he marched up to the nearest woman and grabbed her by the left breast, making her gasp. ‘This one isn’t starving. Plenty of meat on her, and the other one, and the brats.’ He picked up the smallest child, a dirty-faced urchin with wide innocent eyes, and pinched his cheeks. ‘See, if it was starving, it would be skin and bone.’ Rufus didn’t notice him draw the dagger – no one did until its razor edge sliced across the little boy’s throat, flooding his tunic with blood. The child’s eyes opened wider still and his mouth gaped, but he was dead before he could even scream. Without a word, Paullus dropped the still twitching body to the ground.

For a moment the world stopped – Rufus would swear his heart did not beat – then pandemonium erupted as the two young women shrieked, the one Paullus had abused dropping to kneel by the dead child. The surviving children keened a single despairing wail and the tall elder launched himself at the Roman patrol leader, who kicked him contemptuously in the groin, and stood over his writhing body.

‘Now ask him where the food is hidden.’

The interpreter stared at him.

‘Ask him where the food is hidden,’ Paullus snarled.

The man complied, his voice shaking, but the only answer from the sprawled Briton was a glare of pure hatred.

Paullus shook his head as if the prisoner were a particularly clumsy recruit. ‘Never mind. We’ve got plenty of time. Get a nice fire going and we’ll see if Grandpa here is more talkative once he’s been warmed up a little.’ At his orders, two of the soldiers dragged the man into the hut and the other guards herded the surviving prisoners inside against one wall. ‘String him up from there.’ Paullus pointed to a beam about nine feet above the dirt floor. The prisoner struggled as he was stripped naked and had his hands and feet bound. He was thrown to the ground and when he looked up his eyes locked on Rufus’s. They were the eyes of a helpless, terrified old man and they were filled with a mute plea to save him from this undeserved torment. Rufus turned away, sick inside at his lack of courage, telling himself over and over that this was not his fight. One of the soldiers tied a longer rope round the man’s ankles and slung it across the beam, then he and his companion hauled on the rope until the Briton was suspended with his head three feet from the earth floor. Paullus nodded. ‘That will do.’

Meanwhile, two of the guards had gathered brushwood and set a large fire slightly to one side of where the old man hung. He was sobbing now, some prayer in his own language, and his teeth were clenched tight with the agony of the strain on his ankle joints. Rufus watched from the open doorway, his mind struggling to deal with what he was witnessing. The murder of the child had been so sudden it still seemed to him some kind of dream, but what was happening in front of him was undoubtedly real. The old man’s flesh was an unhealthy yellow-white and pinpoints of red covered his back where lice had recently fed. Fear had shrivelled his manhood and retracted it into his body.

Paullus drew his sword, then thought better of it and demanded one from the closest recruit. When the Roman plunged the blade into the heart of the fire, the soldier opened his mouth to protest, but the look in Paullus’s eyes silenced him. Paullus bent and gripped the suspended Briton by the hair so he was looking directly into his captive’s face. ‘Now, Grandpa, let’s continue our little chat.’ The old man gasped something unintelligible and spat in his face, but the Roman only laughed. ‘Give him a taste,’ he ordered.

One of the young legionaries pushed the dangling prisoner so that the momentum swung him directly over the fire. The old man writhed and twisted, desperately trying to keep his body away from the heat. But the flames sought him out, and the hut filled with the acrid stench of singeing hair as his head was surrounded by a halo of flame that flared and died in an instant, accompanied by a grating scream of agony.

Paullus reached for the sword resting in the fire, but drew his hand back sharply when he felt the heat radiating from the hilt. He noticed Rufus watching from the doorway and grinned. ‘You’d have liked that, elephant man. Old Paullus getting a bit of his own medicine.’ He used his still bloody dagger to cut a square of cloth from a blanket and wetted it in a stone trough set to one side of the room. Steam hissed from the cloth when he picked up the sword, its iron blade shimmering red. He turned to the hanging figure, whose blackened tufts of remaining hair still wafted smoke towards a hole in the centre of the roof. ‘Now let’s hear the old man sing.’

The suspended victim shook his head wildly and gibbered a high-pitched rush of words. Paullus looked towards the interpreter. ‘Is he going to talk?’

The man shook his head. ‘He says Esus will rot the eyeballs in your head and make you piss maggots.’

Paullus laughed and stepped forward with the glowing blade and brought the point slowly towards the powerless Briton’s left eye. A commotion behind him stayed his hand a fraction before the red-hot metal kissed the old man’s cringing flesh and the woman he had abused earlier burst between the guards and threw herself at his feet. He frowned. ‘What’s she saying?’

The interpreter listened to the sobbing woman for a few seconds. ‘Her name is Veleda. This man is her father. She begs you not to harm him. She says she’ll lead us to the grain and the fodder. It’s hidden in a clearing in the forest, enough to fill all our carts and more.’

Paullus looked thoughtful. He turned to the leader of the legionary guards, a pink-cheeked young man with a square jaw and a squint in one eye.

‘Agrippa, take the woman and the two old men, but bind them tight and keep a sword at their back. The others stay here. Tell her I’ll gut her father and the brats at the first sign of a trick.’ He waited until the interpreter had translated his words, then placed the sword a hair’s breadth from the old man’s wrinkled belly and looked hard at the woman. ‘Understand? I’ll gut him.’ She nodded sharply. ‘Take them away. Elephant man, you’re in charge of the slaves. I want every grain of wheat and wisp of hay, or you’ll answer to me.’

The legionary guards marched the woman and the two elders from the hut and Rufus turned to follow, calling to the other baggage slaves to bring the wagons across the river. As he walked from the doorway, he heard Paullus say conversationally: ‘Now, ask him about the gold.’

The screaming started before they reached the forest.

It wasn’t possible to take the carts into the trees. The villagers had been careful not to leave any marked tracks leading to the clearing where they had cached their precious supplies. Instead, they had created a dozen well-disguised paths that were scarcely wider than those trampled by foraging deer. It was along one of these that Veleda led them, with the point of Agrippa’s sword at her back. Trees and thorn bushes grew tight to the track, plucking at the tunics of soldier and slave alike. Above them, the leaf canopy created a barrier that trapped the steamy heat beneath it, making the atmosphere in the forest depths oppressive and almost unbreathable. If anything, the day had grown even more humid and Rufus thought he heard the rumble of thunder in the distance. Eventually, Veleda stopped and pointed to an impenetrable wall of foliage. Agrippa studied what she was indicating with a look of suspicion, his squint growing more pronounced with each passing second. ‘If this is some kind of trick . . .’

The British woman didn’t understand the words, but she shook her head and approached the spot she had indicated. As they drew closer, Rufus saw it was a wall of still growing trees and plants, closely woven and carefully chosen to exactly match the habitat around it. Beyond this slim natural curtain was a clearing that contained a dozen small, raised wooden huts, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be storehouses filled with sheaves of hay and sacks of wheat and barley.

‘They build them on stilts to keep out the damp from the earth and stop animals getting at the food. I’ve seen storage places just like it in Germania. There’s enough here to feed a cohort for a week,’ Agrippa said cheerfully.

Low earth mounds on the clearing floor covered pits containing different types of cereals and pulses, and Rufus ordered his fellow slaves to begin digging up the buried food stores. On the far side was a fenced stockade where a dozen small sheep with matted brown wool grazed in silence. Agrippa frowned when he saw them.

‘I don’t think we can take them with us. If we release them they’ll just scatter into the forest and the wolves will get them. We should leave them here and send back some cavalry and a stockman to drive them in.’

‘Paullus won’t be happy,’ Rufus pointed out.

Agrippa grinned. ‘Paullus is never happy. I thought you’d noticed that. We’ll need half a dozen trips to get all this to the wagons.’ He shouted to one of the other guards. ‘Cestus, the old men and the woman can still carry something with their hands tied. Get the buggers to work.’

The slaves were already heavily laden. Agrippa ordered them into line with one guard in the van, with Veleda, and another bringing up the rear. ‘We’ll leave a couple of people to keep digging up what’s in the pits. It shouldn’t take us long to get back to the village.’ Rufus nodded and picked up as many sacks as he could carry before following the Roman back into the trees. He felt a spot of cold liquid splash on to the bare flesh of his forearm, quickly followed by another, then a dozen more. In a moment, big droplets studded the earth of the clearing, lancing diagonally from the heavens and creating little brown pools in any indent or hollow. The noise of the rain hitting the leaves was so loud that Agrippa had to shout to make himself heard.

‘This cursed country. Quickly, now. We need to get this into the carts and covered or we’ll lose half of it.’ He sheathed his sword and picked up a sack under each arm before trotting off after the column of slaves and captives, leaving Rufus to make his own pace.

By now the deluge was so fierce the young slave had difficulty following the track. He concentrated on Agrippa’s retreating back and tried to keep his feet moving through the increasingly heavy tangle of wet grass. In the twilight world of the storm-darkened undergrowth, the trees and bushes seemed closer than before, the thorns longer and more persistent. The grasping stem of a dog rose obstructed him and he looked up to discover that Agrippa had disappeared. For a moment he feared he’d be trapped for ever in this frightening green jungle that threatened to bury him alive. Then, as suddenly as it began, the rain stopped, and it was as if a veil had been lifted from his eyes. He was no longer in a threatening, claustrophobic tunnel, just a pleasant green pathway. The thorn bushes were scattered with delicate pink flowers which the raindrops filled like tiny diamonds. He could hear a bird singing a sweet trilling melody, and the rhythmic tap-tap of individual drops falling from the canopy on to larger leaves below. And the sound of clashing metal. Metal? With a lurch his world turned upside down. Now the grass he’d been walking on was in front of his eyes, each individual blade etched sharp on his brain. For a second he was surprised. He must have tripped? Then the grass blurred, and faded, and his vision turned black as night, but not before his mind registered the leather-clad foot which planted itself an inch from his nose.