“It can’t be done by land.” Frontinus jabbed a finger at the map.
“We’ve a base at Moridunum,” Longinus said. “And all winter we’ve had scouts and sympathizers in most of the coastal villages between.”
Frontinus nodded. “There are places to beach a force here and here.” He jabbed two fingers at river mouths opening to good harbor, between the Silure fortress at Porth Cerrig and the Roman base at Moridunum. “And good routes into the uplands. If we scattered the main war band, we could tie the country into a net through those river valleys.”
“I’ve got two cohorts and most of my auxiliaries carrying Second Adiutrix standards, playing hide-and-seek with the Ordovices,” the legate of the Twentieth Legion said. The rest of his men were crowded into Isca with the Second Augusta. “If they can keep Cadal thinking he’s got the Adiutrix on his tail, he may think twice about moving south. I wish we had the Adiutrix, though. I take it they’re still in Eburacum?”
“Yes, and I’m not going to budge them,” Frontinus said. “They’re needed there as much to put some backbone into the Ninth as to keep watch on the Brigantes.” He drummed his fingers on the desk and shouted over his shoulder for the optio in the next room to bring them some wine. “Mutiny’s a contagion,” he said when the optio had gone. “I want it stamped into the ground before I let the Ninth loose on their own again. And I would be most displeased” – he looked at each commander in turn – “if the emperor got wind of it.”
“Would he break the legion, do you think?” Longinus asked. Vespasian had cashiered four German legions for the same crime.
“He might,” Frontinus said, “and I wouldn’t give a damn, if I thought he’d replace it.”
The legates nodded. The Ninth Legion was needed, rotten or not, because there wasn’t another to put in its place. So now they were shy the Second Adiutrix into the bargain.
They sailed a week later. A detachment of the Second Augusta went north by land through the Isca Valley to make a pincer around the bulk of the Silure strongholds, with the troops based at Moridunum as the second arm. The rest of the Second plus the Twentieth went by water to drive northward up from the coastal plain.
The Silures watched the troop transports and the lean, menacing shapes of the war galleys that escorted them as the Roman fleet sailed under their noses past the cliffs of Porth Cerrig. And Cadal of the Ordovices sent a message by way of the Druids that the Romans were baying outside his own holds: He would come to their aid if he could.
Troops and horses, bag and baggage were unloaded at the river mouths, a spreading tide of gold and scarlet, spiked with the waving standards of cohort and century and the great, gilded Eagles of two legions. The coastal villages offered no resistance, the sympathizers in hopes of being left alone and the others because they had fled westward to Bendigeid or north into the craggy strongholds of the Black Mountains. In return, the Romans paid scant attention to the native settlements. They marched around or over them as their path chanced, striking quickly for the wide, open reaches of the uplands. Bendigeid’s main war band had pulled back from Porth Cerrig before the Romans could trap it between themselves and the sea. Now it was lairing somewhere in the uplands.
* * *
“What are they doing now? Why won’t they tell us anything?” Ygerna paced up and down beside the baggage wagons like a penned fox while the Dobunni woman sat on a camp stool placidly patching a shoe. She had been through enough wars, both before and after the Romans came, to know that no one ever explained anything. They just did it, and afterwards there was a new master.
“Hard to say, missy,” a mule driver said. He was eating an apple. Probably stolen from some village they had passed through, Ygerna thought irritably. “But they’ll tell us to move out fast enough if there’s any trouble.”
They were camped on a high plateau two days’ march from the coast. Or at least she thought it was. They had doubled back so often, it was hard to be sure. But they had hunted down Bendigeid’s war band – or maybe he had hunted them down. And now they were fighting, the king’s warriors and the Romans she had watched marching in squares on the drill field.
She tried to picture them in her mind – her uncle’s warriors, bright and fierce behind their paint, dark hair flying free, the chariots sweeping across the open ground in a glorious mass of color – fine, fresh paint and gold and silver trappings, the ponies freshly groomed and some of them with their hooves gilded. And the men behind them singing a battle music, the triumphant challenge of a thousand voices while the chariots’ wheels set the ground to shaking. But their faces wouldn’t come, they were gone away somewhere behind the paint, and she couldn’t remember any of them. I can’t see them! she thought, panicked. The king’s, Llywarch’s, even her mother’s face was cloudy now. It was the Roman faces, kindly or cruel, that came easily to her now. They were out there, beyond the baggage wagons and the rear guard, where they wouldn’t let her go, fighting her people with machines that shot bolts through walls.
* * *
It was like every battle he had ever fought – and like none before. They always were. The British chariots came in a wave across the high moor, their drivers howling like wolves on the hunt. The first time he saw a British chariot line, Correus had understood what Julius Caesar’s men must have felt when they made their first foray into Britain more than a hundred years ago. Now they no longer brought his heart up in his throat, for he knew how easily that chariot line could break against a Roman shield wall. But there were thousands of them, far more than the Roman numbers. A legion at full strength numbered only five thousand, plus auxiliaries, and the governor had part of the Twentieth Legion off to the north, keeping Cadal pinned down.
The chariots swept into the auxiliaries of the Romans’ front line, and the auxiliaries countered with a rain of thrown pilums and then locked up behind their shields to be buffeted slowly backward until the momentum of the chariots was broken from its first wild rush to a massed tangle of wheels and horses where the scythes in the hub sockets were as deadly to the chariot ponies as to the enemy. The trumpets sang out, and the two legions moved in to pin the Britons before they could swing away again for another strike.
This was the point of “marching in squares,” Correus thought as the Ninth Cohort of the Second Legion Augusta moved into place with oiled precision. This was the shield of Rome and the reason a Roman army could wipe the ground with an enemy twice its strength. The governor could detach and shift any segment of his army that he so chose with a single trumpet call, while the Britons, once the first charge was launched, were almost uncontrollable.
Bendigeid knew it, and knew that without Cadal’s war band, a battle in the open with the Romans was going to be chancy. But they still had the strength of numbers, and if they could break the Roman governor’s main army, it could turn the tide.
In the end he had had no choice. While he waited for Cadal’s message, the Romans made a forced march through the uplands, and there was no other way but to fight. There were too many of them to take refuge in the Black Mountain holdings and not eat them bare in a week’s time. And if they split up with the Romans so close on their heels, they would be too easily hunted down. The war band turned and fought.
Bendigeid’s tribesmen fought as the Celts had always fought, fiercely, with a bravery often beyond their strength, and the hero’s place went afterward to the man who led the charge, sword swinging and black hair flying free, a taunt to his enemies to take his head if they could. After the first charge they seemed to rise up from the ground, tattooed with the patterns of their clan and tribe, many of them naked except for short fighting kilts, their throats and arms ringed with gold. Correus saw one of his own men go down, and a Briton bent and lifted him by his helmet rim and cut his head off with a single sword stroke. The helmet strap came open, and the head fell out of the helmet at his feet.
There was a scream from the legionaries, and three of them broke forward. One caught the Briton from behind by h
is long hair while the others ran him through.
“You are Romans!” Correus shouted. “Get back in line!” Another trumpet sounded, and the whole cohort moved up, hacking their way forward. Two of the avenging legionaries pulled back among their mates, but the Britons caught the third, and a warrior with ochre paint in his hair lifted a bloody object and waved it above his head.
“Beasts!” The Ninth Cohort’s standard bearer choked on the word. “They’re animals!”
Correus swung his sword and a moment’s space opened up between his line and the chaos of the battle. He turned around to face his own men in a fury. “I’ll put a pilum through the next man who breaks ranks! Hit them, damn it, and keep your formation!”
The cohort surged forward behind him, driving slantwise to the British advance, with Vindex’s Tenth Cohort to their left and the Eighth behind and to their right.
Something was moving. The battle had a different feel to it, and the British chariots were beginning to untangle themselves and turn for the rear. Correus thought of the governor and the legate Domitius Longinus, who would be perched on respective vantage points from which the legions and their cohorts could be moved like the sections of a chorus on a stage. They would view the battle as a pattern, see each strength and weakness as the opposing lines hurled themselves against each other. But into the middle of it, a man could only see the men to left and right of him, and the enemy before, and over all he could smell a stench that would be nearly unbearable on a hot day.
The trumpets called again, insistently, and Correus pulled his men around him and drove them forward to make the point of a wedge, with the cohorts to either side forming the sloping sides. They hammered it into the British flank, and the Britons began to turn. Just for a moment he felt something wrong, a shift in the momentum, and he looked frantically for the trouble. To his right the Eighth Cohort’s standard wavered and then righted itself, and the wedge moved on. But there was a lightness on the right side now, a feeling of something not in control. Correus swore. If the right didn’t hold, the Britons would push back through it, out of the circle into which the Romans were gradually drawing them.
The Eighth Cohort standard-bearer would be shield to shield with the Eighth Cohort commander, Correus knew, just as his standard-bearer was at his own elbow. And the cohort wouldn’t rock like that just for the loss of the standard-bearer. The Eighth Cohort’s second-in-command was back with the baggage, Correus remembered, with a torn ligament. If the commander were down…
The right rocked again, still fighting tenaciously, but beginning to lose formation. He had maybe thirty seconds to make up his mind.
“Get Octavius up here!” Correus shouted at his optio.
He gave the cohort to Octavius, gritted his teeth, and plunged back through his own lines. If the commander were down… if the commander weren’t down, the commander could, and probably would, try to get Correus bounced down the ranks to latrine orderly. But something had to shore up the right before the Britons found the hole and went through it. He fell over the twisted wreckage of a chariot with a catapult bolt embedded in it – the Romans had used them to deadly effect while the armies were still separated enough to be sure of their aim – and came up with the front line of the Eighth.
The gilded wreath-and-hand standard of the cohort was still upright, held aloft by its original bearer in his lionskin hood. The shield line was still together, but there were gaps in it, the men from the rear moving too slowly to fill the slot each time the Britons broke an opening in it. There was no sign of an officer – any officer – anywhere.
“Close up!” Correus shouted in his best parade-ground voice. “Close up and hit them! Put your backs in it!”
The standard-bearer jerked his head around. He gave a shout and waved the standard, and the cohort began to pull together.
“Where’s your commander? Where’s Centurion Albinus?”
“Dead, sir,” the standard-bearer shouted back over the noise.
“And your third? There are four more centurions in his cohort, damn it, where are they?”
“How should I know? Was you wantin’ me to go and look for them?”
There was a limit to what any man’s nerves would take, and the standard-bearer was obviously already well past his, left alone in charge of four hundred and eighty men he couldn’t control. Correus saved his speech regarding respect for officers for later.
“All right, let’s go! Roll ’em up!” They couldn’t hear him, most of them, but the men in the front could see him, a tall unmistakable figure in a cohort commander’s crest, and it put new heart in them, and the ones behind picked it up. The cohort moved out, and suddenly it was easy as the Britons found the last hole stopped up. They were falling back quickly now, and ahead to the left his own cohort and Vindex’s were driving the wedge clean through, splitting the war band in half. Octavius seemed to have a good hold on the Ninth, and it was too late to go back now. Correus took the Eighth Cohort through the broken ranks of the Britons at a trot and wheeled them around to keep the split halves from rejoining.
With slightly less than two legions, they had smashed a good half of Bendigeid’s main war band and scattered the rest to the four winds. By the time the Silures could recover, the first strings in the net would be knotted.
* * *
When the dead had been buried and the cohort commanders, led by Aulus Carus, the primus pilus, had made their own prayers for Centurion Albinus, Domitius Longinus called Correus into the Principia tent and gave him the cohort.
“The Eighth, sir?”
Longinus gave him a look of elaborate patience. “The one you took it upon yourself to steal this afternoon. I’ve no replacement for Albinus, and I want some backbone knocked into his juniors. They should have taken over after their commander’s death. There’s no excuse for your even having to think about taking that cohort over in the middle of a battle. Kindly explain that to them and that it will be a long time before they are considered for promotion to anything higher than cavalry vet. In the meantime, I’m giving the Ninth to young Octavius. He did well enough with them last summer. You might tell him that if I’m sufficiently impressed, I’ll make it permanent at the end of the season.”
“Thank you, sir.” Correus saluted and left in haste. Somehow a compliment from Domitius Longinus always left him with the underlying sensation of having been chewed out.
He passed the legate’s words on to Octavius and, somewhat more gently, to the four juniors of the Eighth Cohort. He had talked briefly to the Eighth’s second-in-command, who looked likely to be invalided out permanently, and had learned from him that the late Albinus had discouraged any responsibility or action whatsoever on the part of his subordinates. He’d break them of that in a hurry, Correus thought.
His tent was up, and Julius, now restored to his service from his errand in Rome, had scrounged a meal from somewhere and laid it out as appetizingly as possible, with a cup of wine beside it, on the camp desk. Correus shed his helmet and bolted the food, which was all it deserved, and looked wistfully at the bed, neatly arranged by Julius with a pillow and a clean blanket.
“Have you seen Ygerna?”
“Off orderin’ someone around, I expect,” Julius said sourly, “like she was Cleopatra.” He had a low opinion of Ygerna’s general usefulness in the scheme of things and an even lower opinion of her haughty attitude toward himself.
Correus chuckled. “I’d better go check up on her. You were no prize yourself at her age,” he added. He gave Julius a speaking look, and Julius subsided. He had been such a chronic troublemaker and runaway that he had been publicly labeled as such in the slave market before he had come into the centurion’s service.
“I had some cause,” Julius ventured.
Correus nodded. “So does Ygerna.”
Julius snorted and began to polish the centurion’s helmet. It struck him that being a royal princess, even a hostage one, had it all over being a slave. He didn’t expect anyone had ever be
aten Ygerna.
* * *
Correus found her sitting cross-legged on top of her folded tent in a baggage wagon, eating her dinner and making a face at the dried meat and barley bannock that had been the rations for the past few days. They would stay here while the wounded rested and the scouts went out, and the legions were already half dug in, with the ditch and wall up and the rope corrals laid out for the cavalry mounts and the baggage mules. Ygerna sat chewing silently and watched the camp grow up around her. The cat, an old traveler, was asleep on a rolled-up rug, and the Dobunni woman was sweeping bare a patch of ground for a floor and grumbling because there was no one to help her set up the tent. Ygerna flicked an eye in Correus’s direction and continued to eat.
He leaned his arms on the side of the wagon. “Are you even remotely glad to see I’m still alive?”
“I am not glad to be left sitting here in a mule cart with nothing but swill to eat and no one to tell me what is happening. Make one of your Eagle men put my tent up.”
Correus reached up and lifted her down from the wagon, and she kicked him. “You have the temper of a fiend.”
He shouted at a passing legionary – not his own – and browbeat him into setting up the tent.
“Why are you mad?” he inquired.
“I am not mad,” Ygerna said with dignity. “I have sat here all day and no one will answer any questions. I don’t know why your governor-chieftain has taken me here, because he hasn’t even looked at me. He just told the mule-drivers to watch me. I am not a mule. Also, I wish to relieve myself.”
Correus chuckled. He looked around. A small stream ran through a corner of the camp, the water peaty and sour, but usable. Upstream a clump of windblown scrub grew beside it. It was dusk. He took her outside the walls and solemnly stood guard while she went behind the scrub.
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