The Grass Crown (64 page)

Plotius strolled down to the stream south of the bridge, wanting to find a vantage point from which he could watch those fine stout fellows making the bridge timbers jingle and shudder as they jogged across. The river was up and roaring, but—due to the fact that Plotius had deliberately made for a small promontory jutting into the straight course of the stream—on the south side of the land where he stood there was a little bay full of eddies and bodies. At first he registered the bodies idly, not comprehending, then stared with growing horror. They were the bodies of soldiers! Two or three dozen of them! And judging from the plumes on their helmets, they were Roman.

He ran at once for Marius, who took one look and understood.

“Lupus,” he said grimly. “He’s been brought to battle on the far side of his bridge. Here, help me.”

Plotius scrambled down the bank in Marius’s wake and assisted him to bring one of the bodies in against the shore, where Marius turned it over and gazed down into the chalk-white, terrified face.

“It happened yesterday,” he said, and let the body go. “I’d like to stop and attend to these poor fellows, but there isn’t the time, Aulus Plotius. Assemble the troops on the far side of the bridge in battle marching order. I’ll address them the moment you’re ready. And make it quick! I’d say the Italians don’t know we’re here. So we might have a chance to make up for this in a small way.”

Publius Vettius Scato, leading two legions of Marsi, had left the vicinity of Aesernia a month before. He headed for Alba Fucentia to find Quintus Poppaedius Silo, who was besieging that Latin Rights city, strongly fortified and determined to hold out. Silo himself had elected to remain within Marsic territory to keep the war effort at its peak, but intelligence had long informed him that the Romans were training troops at Carseoli and Varia.

“Go and have a look,” he said to Scato.

Encountering Praesenteius and his Paeligni near Antinum, he received a full report upon the rout of Perperna in the western pass; Praesenteius was going east again to donate his spoils to the Paeligni recruitment campaign. Scato went west and did precisely what Marius had guessed a canny Italian would do; he put long-sighted men on top of the ridge beyond the eastern side of the Velinus. In the meantime he built a camp on the east bank of the river halfway between the two bridges, and was just beginning to think he ought to penetrate closer to Carseoli when a messenger came running in to tell him there was a Roman army crossing the more southerly of the two bridges.

With incredulous delight Scato himself watched Lupus get his soldiers from one side of the river to the other, committing every mistake possible. Before they even approached the bridge he allowed them to break ranks, and left them to mill in disorder on the far bank after they crossed. Lupus’s own energies were devoted to the baggage train; he was standing at the bridge clad only in a tunic when Scato and the Marsi fell upon his army. Eight thousand Roman legionaries died upon the field, including Publius Rutilius Lupus and his legate, Marcus Valerius Messala. Perhaps two thousand managed to escape by dragging the ox-wagons off the bridge, shedding their mail-shirts, helmets and swords, and running for Carseoli. It was the eleventh day of June.

The battle—if such it could be called—took place in the late afternoon. Scato decided to stay where he was rather than send his men back to their camp for the night. At dawn on the morrow they would commence to pick the corpses clean, pile up the naked bodies and burn them, drive the abandoned ox-wagons and mule-carts across to the eastern bank. They would undoubtedly contain wheat and other rations. They would also do to carry the captured armaments. A wonderful haul! Beating Romans, Scato thought complacently, was as easy as beating a baby. They didn’t even know how to protect themselves when on maneuvers in enemy country! And that was very odd. How had they ever managed to conquer half the world and keep the other half in a perpetual dither?

He was about to find out. Marius was on the move, and it was Scato’s turn to be attacked with his own men in complete disorder.

Marius had encountered the Marsic camp first, utterly deserted. He romped through it taking everything it contained—baggage, food aplenty, money aplenty too. But not in a disorderly fashion. Rather, he left most of his noncombatants behind to do the gathering up and sorting out, while he pressed on with his legions. At about noon he reached yesterday’s battlefield to find the Marsic troops going about stripping the armor from corpses.

“Oh, very nice!” he roared to Aulus Plotius. “My men are blooded in the best way—a rout! Gives them all sorts of confidence! They’re veterans before they know it!”

It was indeed a rout. Scato took to his heels into the mountains leaving two thousand Marsic dead behind him as well as everything he owned. But the honors, Marius thought grimly, had still to be awarded to the Italians, who had had by far the best of things in terms of soldier dead. All those months of recruiting and training gone for nothing. Eight thousand good men dead because—as seemed inevitable—they were led by a fool.

They found the bodies of Lupus and Messala by the bridge.

“I’m sorry for Marcus Valerius; I think he would have turned out well,” said Marius to Plotius. “But I am profoundly glad that Fortune saw fit to turn her face away from Lupus! If he had lived, we’d lose yet more men.”

To which there was no reply. Plotius made none.

Marius sent the bodies of the consul and his legate back to Rome under the escort of his only cavalry squadron, his letter of explanation traveling with the cortege. Time, thought Gaius Marius sourly, that Rome was given a thorough fright. Otherwise no one living there was going to believe there really was a war going on in Italy—and no one would believe the Italians were formidable.

Scaurus Princeps Senatus sent two replies, one on behalf of the Senate, the other on his own behalf.

I am truly sorry the official report says what it does, Gaius Marius. It was not my doing, I can assure you. But the trouble is, old man, that I just do not have the necessary reserves of energy one needs to swing a body of three hundred men around single-handedly. I did it over twenty years ago in the matter of Jugurtha—but it is the last twenty years are the ones which count. Not that there are three hundred in the Senate these days. More like one hundred. Those senators under thirty-five are all doing some sort of military service—and so are quite a few of the ancients, including a certain fellow named Gaius Marius.

When your little funeral train arrived in Rome it created a sensation. The whole city fell about screaming and tearing out hunks of hair, not to mention lacerating its breast. All of a sudden, the war was real. Perhaps nothing else could have taught them that particular lesson. Morale plummeted. In an instant, in less time than it takes a bolt of lightning to strike. Until the body of the consul arrived in the Forum, I think everyone in Rome—including senators and knights!—regarded this war as a sinecure. But there lay Lupus, stone dead, killed by an Italian on a battlefield not more than a few miles from Rome herself. A frightful instant, that one when we spilled out of the Curia Hostilia and stood gaping at Lupus and Messala—did you tell the escort to uncover them before they reached the Forum? I’ll bet you did!

Anyway, all Rome has gone into mourning, it’s dark and dreary clothes wherever you go. All men left in the Senate are wearing the sagum instead of the toga, and a knight’s narrow stripe on their tunics rather than the latus clavus. The curule magistrates have doffed their insignia of office, even to sitting on plain wooden stools in the Curia and on their tribunals. Sumptuary laws are being hinted at regarding purple and pepper and panoply. From total unconcern Rome has gone to the opposite extreme. Everywhere I go, people are audibly wondering if we are actually going to lose?

As you will see, the official reply is upon two separate matters. The first I personally deplore, but I was howled down in the name of “national emergency.” To wit: in future all and any war casualties from the lowest ranker to the general will be given a funeral and all possible obsequies in the field. No one is to be returned to Rome for fear of what it might do to morale. Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish! But they wanted it so.

The second is far worse, Gaius Marius. Knowing you, you have taken this to read ahead of officialdom. So I had better tell you without further ado that the House refused to give you the supreme command. They didn’t precisely pass you over—that they weren’t quite courageous enough to do. Instead, they have given the command jointly to you and Caepio. A more asinine, stupid, futile decision they could not possibly have made. Even to have appointed Caepio above you on his own would have been smarter. But I suppose you will deal with it in your own inimitable way.

Oh, I was angry! But the trouble is that those who are left in the House are by and large the dried-up, rattly bits of shit hanging around the sheep’s arse. The decent wool is in the field—or else, like me, had a job to do in Rome—but there are only a handful of us compared to the rattly bits. At the moment I feel as if I am quite superfluous. Philippus is running the place. Can you truly imagine that? It was bad enough having to deal with him as consul in those awful days leading up to the murder of Marcus Livius, but now he’s worse. And the knights in the Comitia eat out of his greasy palm. I wrote to Lucius Julius asking that he return to Rome and pick a consul suffectus in place of Lupus, but he wrote back saying we’d have to muddle along as we were because he’s too tied up to leave Campania for so much as one day. I do what I can, but I tell you, Gaius Marius, I am getting very old.

Of course Caepio will be insufferable when he hears the news. I have tried to arrange the couriers so that you know ahead of him. It will give you time to decide how you will handle him when he struts up to peacock in front of you. I can only offer you one piece of advice. Deal with it your own way.

But in the end Fortune dealt with it—brilliantly, finally, ironically. Caepio accepted his joint command with extreme confidence, as he had beaten back a raiding legion of Marsi at Varia while Marius had been dealing with Scato along the river Velinus. Equating this small success with Marius’s victory, he notified the Senate that he had won the first victory of the war, as it had happened on the tenth day of June, whereas Marius’s victory was two days later. And in between there had been an appalling defeat, for which Caepio managed to blame Marius rather than Lupus.

To his chagrin, Marius seemed not to care who got the credit or what Caepio wanted in Varia. When Caepio directed him to return to Carseoli, Marius ignored him. He had taken over Scato’s camp along the Velinus, fortified it heavily, and put every man he had at his disposal into it, there to drill and re-drill his troops while the days dripped on and Caepio chafed at being denied the chance to invade the lands of the Marsi. As well as inheriting what men of Lupus’s had survived, some five cohorts, Marius had two thirds of the six thousand men who had fled from Praesenteius in the western pass; he had now re-equipped the lot. Which gave him a total of three over-strength legions. Before he moved an inch, he said by letter, they would be ready to his satisfaction, not some cretin’s who didn’t know his vanguard from his wings.

Caepio had about a legion and a half of troops which he had redistributed to form two under-strength units, and was not confident enough to move at all. So while Marius relentlessly drilled his men miles away to the northeast, Caepio sat in Varia and fumed. June turned into Quinctilis and still Marius drilled his men, still Caepio sat in Varia and fumed. Like Lupus before him, a good deal of Caepio’s time was occupied in writing complaining letters to the Senate, where Scaurus and Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus and Quintus Mucius Scaevola and a few other stalwarts kept the slavering Lucius Marcius Philippus at bay every time he proposed that Gaius Marius be stripped of his command.

About the middle of Quinctilis, Caepio received a visitor. None other than Quintus Poppaedius Silo of the Marsi.

Silo arrived in Caepio’s camp with two terrified-looking slaves, one heavily laden donkey, and two babies, apparently twins. Summoned, Caepio strolled out into the camp forum, where Silo stood wearing full armor, his little entourage behind him. The babes, held by the female slave, were wrapped in purple blankets embroidered with gold.

When he saw Caepio, Silo’s face lit up. “Quintus Servilius, how good it is to see you!” he cried, walking forward with his right hand outstretched.

Conscious that they were the center of much attention, Caepio drew himself up haughtily and ignored the hand.

“What do you want?” he asked disdainfully.

Silo dropped his hand, managing to make the gesture independent and free from humiliation. “I seek Rome’s shelter and protection,” he said, “and for the sake of Marcus Livius Drusus, I preferred to give myself up to you rather than to Gaius Marius.”

Mollified a little by this reply—and consumed with curiosity besides—Caepio hesitated. “Why do you need Rome’s protection?” he asked, eyes moving from Silo to the purple-wrapped babes, then to the male slave and his charge, the overloaded donkey.

“As you know, Quintus Servilius, the Marsi gave Rome a formal declaration of war,” said Silo. “What you do not know is that it was thanks to the Marsi that the Italian nations delayed their offensive for so long after that declaration of war. In the councils in Corfinium—the city now called Italica—I kept pleading for time and secretly hoping that no blows would be struck. For I regard this war as pointless, hideous, wasteful. Italy cannot beat Rome! Some among the council began to accuse me of harboring Roman sympathies, which I denied. Then Publius Vettius Scato—my own praetor!—came back to Corfinium after his clash with Lupus the consul and his subsequent clash with Gaius Marius. Whereupon the whole thing came to boiling point. Scato accused me of collusion with Gaius Marius, and everyone believed him. Suddenly I found myself an outcast. That I was not killed in Corfinium was due to the size of the jury—all five hundred Italian councillors. While they deliberated I left the city and hurried to my own city of Marruvium. I reached it ahead of pursuit—but with Scato leading the hunt, I knew I wouldn’t be safe among the Marsi. So I took my twin sons, Italicus and Marsicus, and decided to flee to Rome for protection.”