The King's Cavalry (11 page)

XVII - Mosaic

Guinevia’s psychic antennae were quivering. She had sent out her thoughts and communicated with her mentor, the sorcerer Myrddin, to tell him how he might begin to seek the all-important Torc of Caratacus, and this day she registered a summons that resonated in her mind. Myrddin wanted her back in Britain and she knew with every fibre of her soul that it was urgent. That afternoon, she was aboard a trader’s blunt-bowed vessel and heading for Dover. Four days later, she was in a speedy raeda carriage and clattering under the south gate’s arch of the castrum at Deva. Myrddin was standing in the courtyard, calmly waiting and watching. He had made the short journey from Yr Wyddfa in full knowledge that she would hear his telepathic message and would respond at once, for he had much to tell her.

The sorcerer took his time. He waited until Guinevia’s maid had washed and fed the travel-weary Druidess, then settled her comfortably near the fire in Arthur’s chamber overlooking the harbour pool of the Dee.

Myrddin began pacing back and forth, eyes closed, as he began his account. “The gods of Britain loosened their hold on our country four or five centuries ago, and this allowed the rapacious Romans to invade and take over our land,” he began.

“The Druids who formed the bridge between the people and their gods had long warned that this might happen if we did not pay suitable tribute of worship and sacrifice but kings and their people who were more concerned with their own activities and pleasures relegated the Druids to roles as mere seers and judges and turned away from oak-worship and the cult of the mistletoe.”

Guinevia shifted uneasily. As an adept who had almost completed her two decades of Druidical study, she was one of the elite few empowered to cut the mysterious mistletoe with an iron blade. The plant that lived halfway between earth and heaven and contained the essence of male gods was so sacred that even casual mention of it bordered on blasphemy.

Myrddin was still speaking. “The Romans understood the importance of communication between gods and men, so set about destroying Britain’s go-betweens, and the Druids retreated to the isle of Mona, off the coast of Wales. Meanwhile, the invaders and their war elephants crushed the British, including the great king Caratacus, who was defeated at Caer Caradoc, then was handed over by Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes to be taken in chains to Rome.”

Caratacus, Myrddin explained, wore the symbol of Britain’s highest king, a neck torc of solid gold with a bull’s head adorning each end of the open circlet. When he realised that his battle was lost, he had hidden the treasure in the entrails of a dead war horse, where it was later retrieved and kept safe for any successor.

“Next to wear the Torc of Caratacus was the warrior king Calgacus. He too was defeated by the Romans, and the
torc was smuggled from the battlefield and hidden by Druids. First it was buried under a standing stone on the isle of Mona, later it was transferred for greater safety to Iona, in the western sea islands of Pictland, whose rocks are the oldest in the world and are a place of communion with both the Underworld and Tír na nÓg,” the sorcerer told Guinevia.

The hiding place was betrayed by the exiled Irish prince Tuathal, and the Roman general Agricola scooped up the
torc as a spoil of war when he went to Pictland and subdued the natives.

Myrddin paused in his pacing to stare into fire’s flames. “I was allowed to visit the land of the dead, and the shades of Caratacus and Calgacus were among those who gave me the knowledge I sought,” he told the attentive Guinevia. “I asked, no, in fact I commanded them to tell me what would most please the lost gods of Britain, what would persuade them to return.”

“The Torc of Caratacus, the greatest treasure of Britain,” murmured Guinevia. “I know. It would knock on the hearts of the gods.”

“You sent me knowledge of its hiding place,” said Myrddin. “You sent me the message to seek a farmer’s bull in his floor.”

The sorcerer turned to face his pupil. “Agricola means ‘farmer’ in Latin. The farmer’s bull can only refer to the torc. What is the floor?” Guinevia shook her head.

“The message to me was:
‘The son of no father and a king who is false to his god will recover a Druid’s treasure to mollify Britain’s deities. Seek a farmer’s bull in his floor.’”

Myrddin snorted. “I am the son of no father, I was spawned by a demon on a princess. Arthur is the false king – he is a follower of Mithras and Thor, but he carries the insignia of the Christians on his shield. The treasure is the
torc. So what is the floor?”

Guinevia did not even raise her head. She spoke to the ground. “The floor is what he walked upon.”

Myrddin nodded slowly. “We should go where Agricola walked. We should go to his palace in Eboracum, his garrison town. I think he left the torc behind him when he left Britain. If we visit where he walked, we might uncover the next stage of this search.”

Three days later, their carriage rolled over the river bridge and between the square towers that guarded the western gatehouse of Eboracum. Within the hour, the necromancer and his adept were walking through the governor’s empty palace, every sense alert. Guinevia saw it first.

“That mosaic,” she said, “is wrong.” She was gesturing at a long, narrow floor mosaic that ran the length of a corridor which led to the governor’s quarters. The mosaic was composed of six panels, five of which portrayed a Roman deity, the sixth a curious picture of a castellated wall.

“What is wrong with it?” asked Myrddin. Guinevia grasped his elbow.

“Look at the sequence,” she said. “First is Acca, then Vulturnus, then the wall picture, then Pomona, Flora and Ceres.” Myrddin grunted.

“Don’t you see?” said Guinevia. “They’re the goddesses of the seasons: Acca for winter; Pomona for autumn, then Flora, spring and Ceres, summer. But they’re out of order. Mosaics often have the four seasons, but always the way they follow each other through the year. It would bring down terrible fortune to mix them. This is a deliberate error, a message.”

“Who’s the winged man?” asked Myrddin.

“That’s Vulturnus, god of the east wind,” said Guinevia. Myrddin studied the panels.

“He’s facing the image of the castellated wall,” he said.

The
Druids looked again at that panel. At its top, Sol shone his rays. One lanced through a keyhole-like archer’s slit below the castellations, and sent a clear sunbeam onto a round, grid-like object.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” said Guinevia, her intuitive mind flashing through the clues set in the tiny tesserae of the mosaic. “Vulturnus tells us the sun is in the east, so it’s dawn. The rays shine through some kind of spy hole in the eastern fortifications and light up whatever that grid thing is inside the wall. Or outside, if that’s the case.”

Myrddin was nettled at having to have something explained to him. “The grid thing as you call it is probably an access to something below ground with bars covering it. Standard sort of thing in a fortified place, which the castellations and arrow slits tell us this is. We just need to walk around the walls here and we’ll find that barred circular object.”

After a long day pacing the walls of Eboracum over and again, the duo admitted failure. “It isn’t here,” Guinevia said firmly. “It has to be somewhere else, maybe in Rome. Or,” she added in another intuitive flash, “in Chester, in Agricola’s war camp.”

The next morning, the necromancer and his adept were in their carriage again, and heading for the Nont Sarah road over the Pennine backbone of Britain. They were in quest of an ancient treasure that could restore the country to the favour of its gods, unknowing that their king, by his actions was doing the exact opposite.

XVIII - Fireball

Our host of men and beasts made an impressive sight, stretching for miles along the stones of the Via Aemilia as we headed southeast to the Adriaticus Sea. We were some 30,000 strong, men, horses, war engines, a great impedimenta train and a horde of camp followers all stepping along the consul’s road. This great procession moved along the coast road, the glittering, inviting sea at our left, the tawny hills of Umbria, which Roman administrators prosaically labelled ‘Region Six,’ on our right.

Constantine opted to split the long procession for the final push across the centre of Italia. We would move quicker in two streams than in one extra-long file on a single road, so the advance guard took the more northerly Flaminian Way while the latter part of the trudging horde, among which we trotted our big horses, carried on south down the coast to cross the peninsula on the old salt road across the mountains. These two routes ran more or less parallel until they joined just north of Rome. Our orders were to rendezvous with the rest of the army well north of Rome, along the Via Salaria if we met resistance. If not, we should proceed to where the Viae Flaminia, Cassia, Clodia and Veientana all met. It was the gods’ will that we British cavalry were sent on the most southerly route, and it gave us the opportunity to be as close to a miracle as ever we could wish.

Our part of the army train was headed by a large contingent of African heavy spearmen and Andalusian slingers. We did have a screen of light cavalry out ahead and on the flanks but all our spies told us that Maxentius had gathered his forces inside Rome’s walls, so my offer to take our heavy horses on a scouting loop to the south was designed more to give us a break from the monotony of the march than for any real tactical reason.

My Sarmatians, natural horsemen, were delighted. They had been fretting at having to pace slowly with the infantry, and the chance to canter their big horses was more than welcomed. I noted approvingly how the stocky little men in their shabby rat-fur vests which seemed held together mostly by embroidery and coloured stone beads had lavished gold ornamentation on their horse trappings. The riders might look shabby, but their steeds had been groomed to near-perfection, their manes and tails braided and how every carefully-trimmed hoof shone with oil.

So it was that we cantered into the territory of the Abruzzi, glad to be free of the dust of the oxcarts and the constant importuning of the beggars who trailed the army. We were approaching the hilltop oppidum of L’Aquila. It was a late October afternoon and I was mindful that we had delayed setting up camp, but we were getting close to Rome and I wanted to make good progress.

At the moment the gods spoke, I had just twisted in the saddle, looking back to see how our formation was holding, when a blast of sound hit me. It was as palpable as a wool blanket thrown over my head, a great thundering uproar that was like a thousand simultaneous rock avalanches. An instant after it struck, a furnace blast of heat washed over us all, causing the horses to skitter and rear.

From the north came a huge ball of light, growing larger by the eyeblink. It left a trail of fire behind it, a great swathe of flame across the sky, dazzling and blinding to see. The roaring grew worse, thundering right overhead, the sort of noise an oxcart makes as it rumbles over a wooden bridge above you, but many, many times louder and it was accompanied by a sharp tearing noise like a vast sheet of linen being ripped. A second blast of scorching heat swept across us.

Horses were screaming in panic, rearing and throwing their riders, men were crouching on the ground, arms held across their faces in a fearful show of protection from the fiery god who was riding across the sky. I found myself waving my great sword
, Exalter, at the fireball as it rumbled and whooshed over our heads. It seemed close enough to touch, and even my battle-trained Corvus was pirouetting and dancing on his hind legs, so disturbing was it all.

The trees around us were shaking, their leaves falling,
curled brown to the ground, which itself seemed to shiver. The fireball was racing away now but its long trail of smoke, flame and sulphurous stench stayed with us as the rumbling, crashing noise began to lessen.

The wide streak of fiery smoke led over a range of hills to the south, disappearing seconds before an earth-shaking crash that actually threw some standing men to the ground. A vast booming noise washed over us, and I felt my ribcage vibrate with the sound, then came a lightning flash of pure white light, so strong all colour vanished from the world and everything seemed black.

Matters for me were going as they do in battle. I seemed to have time to view and consider everything as if it were happening slowly, and I was absorbed, curious and able to take in even small details. I dispassionately viewed a man who poked his fingers into his ears to shut out the noise, noted another who was face down, drumming his toes into the grass in panic.

The searing light was followed by a superheated blast of air from the direction in which the fireball had vanished. It felt like the opening of some giant blacksmith’s forge. The heat came at us in a gale, scorching my eyelids and lips, and making my ears pop with a wave of pressure, but I could not turn away, I had to watch.

Such a sight came next! The gods sent a wide pillar of fire to rise straight from the land to the heavens, and it blossomed and curled over in a billowing shape like a rounded tree, or a mushroom’s cap. Corvus was bucking and kicking and I had to slip from his back and turn my attention to him for a moment, so when I looked back the explosion was a roiling, churning thundercloud with lightning flashes flickering within it, lighting the interior in an awesome display of the gods’ power.

We stood, holding our horses’ heads, soothing them, shaken as we were, struck dumb and fearful at this display of the gods’ powers. Then, even as the pillar of white smoke boiled upwards, a deep silence fell. There was no birdsong, no lambs calling for their mothers, no cattle lowing. Utter silence filled the wide valley where we stood and made us all wonder if we really had experienced such ominous power and noise. We were all shaken into stillness, not even the wind stirred, and over the hills we watched the boiling, rising cloud flickering with lightning, all in silence.

I estimated the distance of the star’s strike at 20 Roman miles from us, but had no real means of knowing. I did not send riders to investigate, as we had to ready for a battle. Later I heard that a whole village in the local municipium of Superaequum had vanished and a large crater with many smaller ones around it had formed and was slowly filling with groundwater to make a new lake. The gods had sent fire and water to earth, on a great wind. All four elements, I noted, to cause the deaths of Romans. This was a serious sign, a celestial watershed for Rome. I only hoped it would be a positive one for us.

*

Only a short march away from Arthur, Constantine had witnessed the celestial display and was preparing to tell his troops what to think. The emperor had established his staging ground along the Via Flaminia at Malborghetto, close to where the consul’s road crossed the Tiber on the Milvian Bridge. This crossing was three miles outside Rome, a secondary rendezvous he had agreed with his commanders after splitting his forces to move them more quickly across the breadth of Italy.

Couriers went out to the elements of his army that had not yet arrived at the staging area, carrying the same message: “Maxentius has come out from behind the walls of Aurelian. We cannot meet on the Rome side of the Tiber. Approach along the Via Aurelia to join up at the first alternate rendezvous and make all speed.”

The message had been sent just an hour before the skies erupted in the huge fireball that shook all of central Italy, and that cataclysm had the army shaken and nervous. What did it mean? Was this the end of the world? Were the gods – or God – angry at their temerity? Once the great thunder died away and the stunned silence that followed it was broken, the men gathered in groups, muttering and anxious. Constantine seized his opportunity. “Muster as many men as we have here. I will speak to them all,” he commanded.

Tribunes, prefects and centurions hurried to assemble the troops, stationed shouters at intervals to relay to the rear ranks what the emperor was saying and hastily assembled a platform on top of an oxcart so everyone could see their commander. A few hundred were detailed to make other preparations, and received specific instructions involving limestone and oxen. In an hour, all was ready, and although troops were still tramping in, dusty and hot from their forced-pace journey, Constantine chose not to wait. He ordered his orator Gallus to stand aside, he would deliver this crucial message himself.

The emperor ascended the impromptu podium in full panoply of plumed helmet, breastplate and imperial purple cloak, and began his delivery. Constantine, blunt soldier, shrewd politician, wasted no time on preliminaries.

“Last night,” he declared in his harsh, parade ground bellow, “I made sacrifice and prayed to be told the will of God in our endeavours. I asked for a sign, I asked for guidance and I asked to be told His wishes. This I requested most humbly, so I would know how to save the lives of our soldiers in our just and Christian cause. I prayed that we would not have to shed even our enemies’ blood and that every single one of our army would be kept safe.”

The emperor paused for a long half-minute, silently scanning the anxious faces that looked up at him. No sound was heard, the ranks were entranced, even scared.

“God,” he bellowed, “heard my prayers and has answered them.”

“First, He sent me a vision, and told me of matters which I should know. Then, as He had promised, He sent us all a great sign. Just now, we all saw that message that crossed the skies, that undeniable missive straight from heaven, and because God had instructed me to look at His message, I gazed at the sun. God’s word was written over the skies. Some of you may also have seen what I was told to look for. Above the sun was a great blazing cross of light and written there were the words ‘
In
hoc
signo
vinces
.’”

Again, the emperor paused. The voices of the relay shouters died away. Constantine bawled a mighty shout that needed no relaying, all present heard his claim: “God spoke and sent us His word written in the sky: ‘Through this sign, you shall conquer!’ We cannot lose. God is with us!”

“This,” he told the open-mouthed legionaries who stared at him in wonder, “is the promise of our God. We will all mark our shields with that cross from the sky, we will muster our forces in His name and we will have Rome at our feet before the sun sets tomorrow. This,” and his voice went up to a tremendous bellow once again: “Is God’s promise. We are going to win. God is with us!”

The ranks exploded in noise. The legions, reassured by their emperor, pounded each other on the back and shoulders and cheered themselves hoarse. Constantine, his throat raw, turned away to cough unheard in the uproar. He gestured to the nearest officer. “Get these fellows painting their shields white with lime, then put a cross on there. Oxblood will do, or anything red. Just get it done. I want thousands of men with red and white markings on their gear when we take the field tomorrow.” He coughed again, and said savagely:
“And fetch me some wine for this damned throat.”