Barbarian Princess

by Barbarian Princess (retail) (epub)

  Outside the cavalry quarters, Flavius paused to extract a stylus and a smoothing tool from his saddlebags. When he presented his orders to the decurion in charge, they called for the full troop of thirty.

  The galley nosed her way down Sabrina Mouth and into the channel, which divided Silure lands from the settled towns of the southeast. West of the Silures were the Demetae and Governor Frontinus had decided on a punitive strike against the latter as the first move of his campaign in West Britain. It would both show the Britons the error of assassination and give the governor another base from which to strike at Bendigeid’s Silures. The galley that moved in his wake was sluggish (horse transport facilities did not make for a fast ship), but it was faster than a fleet, and by the time they rounded a jutting promontory into the bay of the Tuvius, they were not more than a day behind. Flavius was perfectly prepared to fix his orders once more and order the captain of the galley to wait there for him, but Frontinus’s ships lay beached along the mouth of the Tuvius, and there was a sizable camp left guarding them. He would have little enough trouble getting back.

  The troop horses clattered down the gangway into shallow water, and the sailors gave the lightened galley a shove back out into the river. The captain backed his oars and put her about – the tide was just on the turn.

  “Good luck, sir!” he shouted, raising a hand as the oars dipped and pulled.

  Flavius swung into the saddle with the cavalry troop behind him as the centurion of the beach camp came forward to investigate. He proved more astute than his fellow in Glevum, raised his eyebrows when he saw the orders, and gestured with his vine staff to a roadway that paralleled the river mouth northward and had obviously been under heavy traffic that day.

  “They’re only about a half-day’s foot march ahead of you,” he said, “and the Demetae have bolted for the high country so far as we can tell. You shouldn’t have any trouble. Just as well to have a little insurance though,” he added with a grin at the cavalry troopers.

  Flavius cast a thoughtful look at the wide beach, spreading upward to low pastureland and woods, and the new road snaking through it. “Just so.” He lifted his vine staff. “All right, ride!”

  * * *

  The road was really a native trackway leading northward from the natural harbor of the Tuvius, through a wide, flat valley of bog and water meadows yellow with flowers, to the high blue uplands where the native tribes would have their defensive holdings. The army had followed the trackway clear of the bog lands and then swung out cross-country when the way had moved into the trees. It was easy going through the gentle slopes, and leveling trees took time.

  But their passing had stirred a current in the scattered woods that could still be felt. The wild things were only beginning to come blinking out of their burrows, and the birds were an unsettled hubbub that crossed and recrossed their usual territory, hesitant to land where the many-legged thing had passed.

  Now as Flavius and his cavalry troop passed in the army’s wake, the woods stirred gently once again. And another two-legged wild thing crouched at the forest’s edge and peered out through a screen of wild grasses. Romans! He took a deep breath and wriggled deeper into the grass. He was only fourteen, with long, dark hair pulled into two braids and a thin, tanned body covered only with a brown tunic. A light throwing spear lay in the grass beside him, and there was a dagger in his belt.

  These Romans were following the army’s tracks, and as they branched off from the road (Flavius didn’t fancy those trees, either) and swung wide around the green swell of a low hill, for a moment they were riding straight at him. The boy parted the long grass carefully and began to count. It was the first time he had seen Romans close up, and a ripple of fear went down his back. More than twenty horsemen in long, scale armor and red and yellow trappings, and another in their midst with different armor and the sideways red crest that he knew meant an officer of the legions. They halted briefly as one of the riders gestured with his crop away up the valley, and the man in the officer’s helmet pulled it off for a moment and ran his hand through his dark hair. The boy narrowed his eyes and gave the officer’s olive-skinned, aquiline face a long look until he pulled his helmet back on and the horsemen whirled and were gone away up the valley, riding hard. The boy hesitated when the Romans were out of sight. He was one of many sent to watch and keep still when the Roman ships were sighted off the coast, and the report of a handful of horsemen was not important enough to call him back to the war band. But there was something important about a man who rode at a gallop with a heavy escort behind the main army. The boy stood, picked up his spear, and trotted into the trees where a hidden deer trail ran upward, away from the river. They would fight soon, he thought, excitement beginning to outweigh fear, and he would become a man at the next Spring-Fire. A man’s place was with other men when his tribe fought. If the chieftain believed him, it might be allowed, and then he would carry a spear with the war band while the other boys were still skulking in the trees.

  * * *

  The Second Legion was camped on the north bank of the river where it first widened to the sea, on rising ground above the water meadow. There had been a village there when the Romans marched in, locally known as Dun Mori, the sea hold, but it had been hastily abandoned and now its huts and two large halls were leveled, and what stone there had been in its walls was being rolled into the camp’s fortifications. Scouts had fanned out to the north and east and were already beginning to come back.

  “They’re not as far away as we thought, sir. But they won’t have had time to gather in the whole tribe. Not unless they’ve been waiting for us.”

  Frontinus shook his head. “Not likely. They wouldn’t have expected our arrival until they saw the galleys. No, I expect they’ll try to hit us with what they’ve got while we’re busy digging in, and hope for surprise.”

  The scout grinned. “We gonna give ’em one, sir?”

  “Oh, I think so. I don’t take kindly to being murdered in my bed.” He turned to Domitius Longinus beside him. “I think two-thirds of our force, in that wood there, should do the trick. Your choice of troops and deployment, of course.”

  Longinus raised his legate’s staff and touched it to his helmet rim. “As it happens, I had, uh, considered the matter already.”

  “Had you? I rather thought you would have.”

  * * *

  It was hot, the sultry afternoon heat of summer, even in the trees, and the hidden cohorts could feel the sweat beginning to run down the backs of their necks and soak the padding in their helmets. They twitched with discomfort, but there was no sound other than a hissed order from a centurion to “put your helmet on, you fool!”

  Above them the two generals sat side by side on their mounts in a vantage point screened by trees from the approaching Britons but with a clear view of the camp below, where the soldiers were apparently working unarmored on the ditch and walls, turning up unsavory debris from what had been the village rubbish heap. From the woods directly below the generals’ aerie, they could catch the faint gleam of burnished iron and a quick flash of sunlight on the bronze standards of cohort and century.

  Suddenly Longinus narrowed his eyes. “Look there, sir.”

  A cavalry troop was riding at full gallop up the track from the coast, and as they watched, the horsemen drew rein at the outer ditch, and a man in a centurion’s crest slid from his mount as the centurion of the ditch crew heaved himself up out of the half-dug outer lines.

  “Get that man up here!” Frontinus snapped. “And it had better be good.”

  His optio nodded and ran, half sliding down the steep hillside. He didn’t suppose it was, though; nobody brought good news at a dead gallop through hostile country. At the foot of the hill he slithered to a halt and pulled off his neck scarf, waving it over his head in the signal code used on the watchtowers. He hoped to Jupiter someone saw him. He didn’t much want to be caught in the open when the Britons got there. Yes, a man on the wall had seen him. He waved back
and then ran for the gate where the cavalry troop was still standing. There was a brief conference, and someone took up the cavalry pennon and waved again. The troopers trotted through the open gateway and moved out of sight behind a line of tents while the lone centurion kicked his horse into a gallop across the open meadow.

  The nearest cohort in the woods watched curiously, and the commander raised his hand for silence. Then he, too, narrowed his eyes at the oncoming horseman. There was something about the way he rode…

  Flavius! Correus caught the word back before he called his brother’s name out loud. Flavius rode by without seeing him and dismounted to lead his horse up the steep hillside after the optio.

  “What is it, sir?” his own optio whispered.

  “I don’t know. That’s – a Lindum officer. I… don’t know.”

  A sound cut sharply through the still, hot air, the distant bay of a war horn, and there was the tremor of hoof-beats on the ground.

  The men in the trees sank back into shadow, and there was utter stillness as the leading edge of the Demetae war host came into view at the end of the long valley which skirted the wooded hill to join the wide water meadow of the Tuvius.

  “Steady.”

  The chariots of the Britons thundered by, light, whippy, wicker things sprung with leather that seemed to have a life of their own. They were close enough for the hidden soldiers to see the faces of their drivers, young men mostly, each with a warrior beside him. The chariots were brightly painted, and they and the ponies’ harnesses were strung with bronze and enameled bosses and, here and there, the glint of gold. Knife blades were socketed in the hubs of the spinning wheels, barely visible as they swept past. The drivers and their warriors were painted like fiends from hell, bright daubs of blue and ochre and red clay, and their long hair hung loose behind them, an invitation to each man’s enemy to take his head if he could.

  “Mithras god,” the optio whispered.

  Correus shook his head. “See, there aren’t so many of them after all,” he said as the last chariot swept by, followed by the foot fighters running hard at the ponies’ heels. “They’re chancing our not being ready.”

  As the chariots swept across the open meadow, the leisurely work of the ditch crews halted, and there was a scarlet ripple of movement as each man pulled off the outer tunic which had masked his armor. His helmet, shield, and pilum lay neatly stacked at his feet. Behind the line of tents Flavius’s cavalry escort swung into formation.

  “Might as well make ourselves useful,” the decurion grinned.

  Frontinus nodded to the trumpeter beside him, and the baying of the war horns was answered by the high sweet notes of the Advance.

  “Now!” Each commander spoke to the standard-bearer beside him, and the bulk of the legion poured out from the trees at the war band’s rear while the hidden cavalry drove hard out of their own concealment into the left flank.

  “We’ve got ’em!” Correus shouted, excitement rising in his voice. Now he was back to what he knew, back to what he was good for, and the depression of the past days parted like a cloud. Afterward he would be sick, as he always was after a battle, but now was his chance for a fine red revenge on the tribe that had murdered his Freita. He ran with the rest of his legion, with the men of his cohort to either side of him, through what had once been the bean fields of Dun Mori, and the straggling rear of the British warriors stumbled and fell under a rain of flung pilums. In the front, the three cohorts of the ditch crew came out of the ground fully armed like the soldiers sown from dragon’s teeth, and the leading edge of the Britons’ advance went down in a tangle of screaming horses and broken chariots.

  The Britons knew they were trapped, and after that it was only a matter of holding them to kill as many as possible before they could turn and flee.

  Correus and his cohort moved in with the rest in relentless slaughter while the air grew heavy with the scent of blood and thick with dust from the furrowed ground. He stabbed with his short sword and moved forward as another man went down, stabbed and moved forward. It was merciless execution of a trapped enemy, but he didn’t care. Every man who went down under his sword was the shadow with the knife in the camp at Isca.

  The Britons were giving way, pulling back on their right flank where the Roman defenses were least, and Correus moved his men up to try to hold them. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a mounted officer flash by, riding hard for a point on the right. As the Britons spilled out through the only remaining gap, he saw a foot fighter, no more than a boy, shout something at two horsemen mounted on ponies cut loose from a broken chariot, and they wheeled into the Roman rider’s path with two more behind them.

  “Flavius!” This time he shouted it aloud. The Britons were on him, and the boy’s knife sank into the horse’s belly and the beast and its rider went down together.

  Correus began to swing his first century out toward them, but the way was blocked first by a tangle of cavalry and loose horses caught up in their charge, and then by a detachment of Vindex’s Tenth Cohort sent up to close the gap. The chance was gone. To move his men now would open up another escape hole for the Britons, and every man let go today could cost someone’s life later in the taking. He had a cohort to command, and a position to hold, and for them he was losing his brother as he had lost his wife. The old rivalries didn’t matter; Flavius was the other half of himself, a mirror image that was blood of his blood. And he had sworn to their father…

  Something in him snapped like an overtaut bow. The battle drew away like a tide going out, leaving a harsh light like a bright mist in its wake. He saw only Flavius’s face – his own face, their father’s face – lying in the hot grass with a spear through his throat. He didn’t see the spear that sang past his right ear, taking the cheekguard of his helmet with it, or the jagged rock buried in the grass that rushed up to meet him as another spear thudded hard into his shield, and he fell.

  IV The Face in the Mirror

  They found him, when the last of the Britons had fled or been slaughtered, with Octavius, his second-in-command, still standing over him, dizzy and bleeding from a wound of his own.

  Octavius was hustled off to the hospital tent, and they were left to puzzle over his commander. There was no visible wound, but he was out cold, so they carried him back and left him with the walking wounded until the surgeons should have time to deal with him. By that time he was partly awake and raving.

  Silanus took a look at the bruise behind his ear and snapped out an order to the nearest orderly.

  “Get him inside, and don’t bounce him around any more than you can help. And for the gods’ sakes get that lorica off him!”

  The orderlies stripped him of his armor and put him into one of the camp beds set up on the dirt floor of the hospital tent. The Roman losses had been slight, but there were always some, and the atmosphere was ghastly with the smell of blood and vomit and the vinegar and wine used to wash out wounds or provide the wounded with courage for what had to be done. Silanus, in a canvas apron smeared with blood, bent over Correus’s cot and gently touched the bruise behind his ear. There were only a few drops of blood where the jagged point of the rock had abraded the skin, but beneath it was an ominous swelling.

  “Damn! I hate head wounds.” Correus’s eyes flicked open and then closed again, and Silanus pulled the lids back to look closely.

  “Flavius…” It was barely a whisper. “Flavius… Father, I promised…” His eyes came open again, and he tried to sit up. “No! Hold, damn you! We have a line to hold!” They wrestled him back to the cot, and his eyes looked frantically at Silanus. “Hold… He’s my brother… steady now, and hold them… Flavius… I can’t do both…”

  Silanus knelt to catch the words which had sunk to a whisper again, and then turned to an orderly. “Get the governor.”

  “Governor Frontinus?”

  “No, you ass, the governor of Egypt. Move!”

  “I, uh… he’ll be busy, sir. Won’t he?” the orderly asked nerv
ously.

  “Yes, I expect he will be,” Silanus said with elaborate patience. “Now go and get him.”

  The orderly departed in search of Frontinus, composing his message in his mind, so as to make it clear to that terrifying man that he was only the unwilling bearer of the request which had originated with the senior surgeon.

  The governor, with Domitius Longinus, tracked down inspecting the fortifications that were already beginning to rise again, was predictably testy at the interruption, but when he heard that it was the senior surgeon who was asking, he nodded. “Silanus doesn’t get hysterical,” he said to Longinus. “I’ll be back as quickly as I can. We’re going to have to work fast, after what young Julianus told us.”

  His eyes met the legate’s for a moment, and Longinus nodded. He made no comment, but the same thought was in both their minds. Mutiny. Each felt a brief wave of horror and compassion for the commanders of that cursed legion and the souls of its executed officers. And each felt a cold hand on his neck at the thought of the slaughter it could spark.

  In the hospital tent, he found Silanus working over a cavalry man with a shattered knee. The man’s face was white with pain, but his eyes were clouded with the opium Silanus had given him to dull both pain and knowledge. “He’ll live,” the surgeon said in a low voice, as he led the governor to the other side of the tent. “He may even keep his leg, but he’ll never carry a spear in the cavalry again.”

  The governor sighed. That could be worse than death for a young soldier invalided out with the criminally small pension that the Senate allowed those deemed Unfit-for-Service. I’m too old for a field command, he thought suddenly. When this is over I shall go and build waterways. Aloud he said, “What do you need, Silanus?”

  The surgeon led him to Correus’s cot. “I want you to hear something.”