by Dan Wallace
A loud commotion pulled Claudia out of her reverie. She tied up the letter and tucked it away in her gown as she arose and left for the vestibulum.
“Polydius! Get me a messenger!” Cornelia stood in the middle of the hall shouting, “Polydius!”
Claudia approached her and said, “What is it, Mother?”
“Your husband, my son! Look at this pathetic scrap! Two months he’s been gone, and he sends me this nine-stitch account! If he were here, I’d crown him with his own helmet! Polydius!” She turned to Philea, who had just emerged from the kitchen. “Philea, where in Hades is that Greek featherbrain?”
“Off shopping, Mistress. For tonight’s dinner.”
“Oh, for the love of―Philea, run next door and borrow a slave. Ask for a swift one to carry a message for me.”
“Yes, Mistress.” Philea quickly disappeared.
Claudia hadn’t seen her mother-in-law so exercised for a long time, since before Tiberius had left. Her emerald eyes cast even darker, and an extraordinary crimson color had crept up her throat, almost obscuring her famed ivory skin. Her eyes darted, too, Claudia noticed, a sign that she wasn’t agitated only out of anger. She was worried, too.
“Why are you so upset, Mother?”
“Read this and you’ll seen soon enough.”
Cornelia thrust a short piece of vellum toward Claudia. She took it and flattened it out between her hands.
Salve, Mother,
I miss you and the family very much. I hope you and the grandchildren are in good health and thrive. There is not much to report since I wrote you last. Our trip from Cosa to Tarraco was surprisingly and happily uneventful. We made record time with fair winds throughout the entire voyage. The centurions spent the time usefully, training the new legionaries in close maneuvers, which made sense since quarters on the galleys were quite constrained. When we arrived, the men were well along in the formation of solid maniples.
The former governor of Hispania Citerior welcomed me in Tarraco, though on the whole, I found him to be a disagreeable man. I was soon free of his company, however, since I was keen on marching the new legion to join with Mancinus before he reached Numantia. Fortuna favored us again, as we found him in two weeks at a small Arevaci stronghold called Malia. We made quick work of the town and intend to march on Numantia tomorrow. If the gods continue their good will, we might be finished with this campaign by the end of the month, two at the outside. I will be glad of that and eager to come back home to Rome as soon as possible.
Please give my love to all. I hope you stay well, Mother dear.
Your devoted son,
Tiberius
When she finished reading, Claudia drew her head back, surprised. She stuttered, “He doesn’t want you to worry, Mother, that’s why he’s brief.”
Cornelia looked at her with mild scorn and said, “I understand how he feels about me, but he’s not paying attention. I can be of some help to him here if he reports what’s going on.”
“Well, here, Mother, here’s his letter to Gaius. It’s much longer and details a battle at Malia.”
Cornelia whisked up the proffered letter, unrolled it, and read. Even as Claudia marveled at how fast she parsed the words, Cornelia crushed the scroll between her hands and pushed it back toward her daughter-in-law. “Heroics. A minor epic, devoid of any genuine information.”
The small woman turned to Philea, who had arrived while she was reading. “Did you bring me one?”
“Yes, Mistress, he’s here.” Philea stepped aside to reveal a dark, curly-haired youth in a simple tunic.
“What’s your name?” Cornelia said as more of a command rather than a question.
“Hermes, Mistress.”
“How appropriate. Do you know the Claudii house on the Palatine? Do you know where it is?”
“Yes, Mistress,” said the little boy.
“All right. Fly there and tell them that Matron Cornelia Scipio Africanus sent you. Tell them she wants at once the letter that her son Quaestor Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus sent to the Senator Appius Claudius Pulcher. Brook no delay, Hermes. Show them this if they balk.”
Cornelia pulled a gold chain from around her neck until an old ring appeared, bulky, its heavy gold dulled and dark from age. She draped it around the boy’s neck, where it hung down to his waist. “This is the signet ring of my dead husband Consul and Censor Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. That should get the letter from them in dark magic time. Bring me back that letter fast, and the ring, too, Hermes. Don’t be too fast for your own good.”
The boy ran off, and Cornelia paced. Claudia refolded Gaius’s letter and asked Philea to put it in his room. Then, she retired to Tiberius’s room to lie on his bed and dream of him.
Chapter 12. Appius’s Letter
Salve, Father Appius,
This letter tells you that I am alive for now. I trust this doesn’t sound too dramatic to you since it is a statement true of any soldier on campaign. But I must admit, there have been moments when I wondered if we would even make it to Numantia, never mind back to Rome. There are events I must relate to you in this letter, dear Father, that will give you pause about the outcome of this entire campaign. But you must know them, so I must write of them.
I last wrote you when we were embarking from Cosa to sail to Tarraco. This was the last peace that we have enjoyed since, though the men stayed on edge throughout the voyage. If they weren’t throwing up their grain or their vinegar, they stared wide-eyed at the waves, dreading to sight a coiled, fanged monster hiding behind the sea foam. Even the centurions kept looking over their shoulders for fear that a sea imp would fly by and snap them up. As for myself, I confess some queasiness in the stomach, though I’m not sure it wasn’t from the motion of the sea, perhaps eating some poorly dried fish, or bad humors in general.
But there was no time to pamper myself like a Rufus, we needed to whip the men into shape before we landed in Hispania. The centurions picked optios from the evocatis and had them swung over to other ships by rope lines, not an easy maneuver. The ship captains and sailors that we conscripted turned out to be exceptional, more favor from Fortuna. They managed the transfer of the optios with only one mishap. Two ships collided and the optio was killed, crushed between their hulls coming together. Both ships lost quite a few oars and incurred many injuries among their oars men. The ships themselves did not founder, however, and were repaired in short order. We held a service for the lost optio and burned incense to the gods. The smoke rose straight to the sky, and we cast his body to the sea with coins affixed to his eyes. I am not sure how he can cross the Styx while deep in the sea, but the gods seemed appeased. Our voyage continued apace, winds favorable all the way, and we lost not one of our fleet’s 100 ships.
The transferred optios were charged with forming lines for maniples, sorting out the young cubs from the scarred old lions, then putting them through their steps. With such a good cadre of immunes on board, I was willing to sacrifice pila to the sea to have the new men learn how to throw them correctly. The senior immune, however, a man named Titius, suggested tying fishing string to the end of the pilas so that they could be retrieved. He promised that any awkwardness created by the strings would soon be ironed out on land with a few days’ practice. The centurions agreed with him, so I let him have his head and the innovation worked perfectly.
This Titius, a brown toad of a man with razor-sharp eyes, strikes me as the kind who would think up such an ingenious scheme so that he and his comrades wouldn’t have to organize the manufacture of another 8,000 pilas to replace those lost at sea. His notion was extraordinary, god-like in inspiration. It wasn’t the last he came up with, either. He told me that he had in mind to create tiny ballistae that would be easier to carry around because of their smaller size and lighter weight. They could make many more of them, too, which would make them as effective, or more so, than full-size ballistae. He called them wasps because of their sting. Of course, I haven’t seen anything like them from him, yet.
In Tarraco, I met the retiring governor Marcus Popillius Laenas, a long-tongued creature of an entirely different order. Since I saw him last in Rome, Popillius has not changed an iota except perhaps to be even more unctuous and dangerous. I considered it our good luck that he would soon be departing Hispania for Rome. We did not dawdle in Tarraco, either, thank the gods, since my goal was to catch up with Mancinus before he began the final assault on Numantia. Popillius assured me that I was only two weeks behind Mancinus’s army, which would move slower due to its size and impedimenta. Of course, I was skeptical of any information from this odious man. Still, I had to shore up the men and myself with the possibility that he spoke the truth. With that good thought in mind, I charged the centurions to prepare the legion to march at once. They were to streamline our baggage impedimenta as much as possible to allow the utmost speed to catch up with Mancinus. Only necessary provisions and weapons of war would be acceptable. The men snapped to and proceeded to execute the order with single-minded purpose.
We left Tarraco after just a day, marching up the northwest side of the Iberus River, wagering that any chance of harassment might be less on this border of Hispania Citerior. We followed the Iberus banks as close as possible while still keeping to firm ground. As I’m sure you know, despite nearly a hundred years of pacification, the roads in Hispania range from the rudimentary to completely unformed. The terrain consists of relatively even plains vegetated with grasses, and scrub brush, intermingled with hearty woods, followed by more grass, brush, and woods, most of them near the river or around streams flowing into the mighty Iberus. One common trait marked this part of Hispania, no matter the seeming symmetry of the land. That is, as we marched, we climbed.
We tramped as fast as we could up toward Salduba, our friends, as you know, since the wars with Carthage. Once there, we intended to replenish our provisions and cross the Iberus at that point, knowing that the entire meseta leading up to Numantia would be completely hostile. Even so, it would take us some days to reach Salduba no matter how fast we moved or how much we lightened our kits. The last measure turned out to be my first mistake.
Spring must be beautiful in Rome, now. Plants must be spiraling their little, pointed green leaves out of the soft soil, stretching to Sol’s rays as if after a long nap. If you take a ride out to your country farm, I don’t doubt that you have to break out your old campaign boots to deal with the mud in the fields. Well, here on the rising tables of Hispania, spring is a different creature. Any ground out of the sun god’s path is still mostly cold and frozen unless you lie on it, hoping to rest. Only then does it melt, making repose a cold, wet affair. At night, though, there wasn’t much sleep because the temperature dropped off the end of the earth and the wind gods cried their pain. It was during these severe nights that I wished we had kept more cloaks and linens to keep us warm.
After the third day’s march, we halted to erect the camp as usual, and sent out the wood-gathering parties, ten men each. But they didn’t come back, not a man. That night, the men quivered from the cold, but also from the specters of those missing soldiers. We searched for them the next day, but found no one, nothing, not a body, not a trace.
At the end of that day, we sent out twice as many men in each party. This time, they came back, at least, those who could. Out of a hundred men, twenty-three returned, some impaled by arrows, others with ugly wounds from stones thrown by slings. One man came back with half his head crushed from the blow of some great cudgel. I mobilized a full cohort under Casca Naso’s command who, using one wounded survivor as a guide, retraced their route to the forest stand where they had gone to hunt firewood. In the grove, they found their corpses hanging from the trees, some with limbs removed, others their heads. Casca told me the poor soldier leading them back to the massacre dropped to his knees and cried out for his fallen friends. Working quickly, they retrieved the bodies, seventeen, and grabbed as much wood as they could, bringing all back directly to our camp. That night, the men warmed themselves for a short time over the flames of their fellow legionaries’s funeral pyres.
In the morning, the legion was assigned by cohorts to retrieve the remains of the other missing men. They loaded another fifty of their massacred tent mates onto the wagons. In just two days, our legion had lost more than 100 men without one enemy falling. I immediately called a halt to our march and ordered camp. The fossa was dug and the agger thrown up in no time, and as soon as I saw that the stakes were in place to secure the castra, I convened a meeting of the centurions, the auxiliary eques Sextus, that river wharf rat of an immune Titius, and even old Centurion Primus Sacerdus Quarto, since the recruits hold him in great respect, as do I. Then, I summoned the ambulatory survivors from the wood parties to report to us what happened.
Despite a chorus of inchoate, sometimes hysterical accounts, a basic pattern of the enemy attacks took shape. Men on horse appeared from nowhere on all sides, pounding directly through the ranks before our legionaries could reach for their pila, never mind throw them. Wielding long swords and light axes, the riders struck hard, cutting down almost half of our men in their first pass, while others positioned on the edge of the woods fired arrows and stones to cover their riders as they rode back. The horsemen then wheeled and charged again. Instead of riding directly at the remaining legionaries, however, who by then had formed a hurried front with spears extended, the attackers circled, slinging stones or casting their arrows from horseback. Their archers fired from high ground or tree limbs, shooting down into our men without hitting their cavalry. Finally, the surviving troops ran, and many of them were cut down from behind. As I wrote before, only a fraction from each party made it back to the legion.
We thanked these soldiers and ordered them back to the surgeon or to their tents if they were well enough. The officers in my tent looked grim. Shafat spoke first, saying that the attackers without question had been Arevaci, some probably Numantines themselves.
“This far from home and across the Iberus?” I asked, almost in disbelief.
“They ride, and they ride light, he said. Distance isn’t an impediment to them.”
Sextus spoke up, saying, “I thought that Mancinus’s auxiliaries would be keeping them busy.”
Shafat shook his head, his shining black ringlets turning back and forth. He said they most likely are harassing Mancinus, too. The Arevaci are a slippery lot, they can do much with just a few. Look at what they’ve done to our force in just two days.
“Now that we know their tactics, we can stop them, “Sextus said, “and defeat them.”
“They’ll change their tactics,” replied Shafat.
“Then, what do we do, Shafat?” asked Didius. “How do we protect our legion until we join Mancinus? Huddle together in some gigantic testudo all the way across the Iberus and clear to Numantia?”
“Impossible,” said Ulpius, “we’d never make it before winter. Then, what would we do?”
Casca raised his fist, and bellowed, “You jackasses! The Quaestor wants us to join the main army in days, not years! We cannot cringe like a tortoise because of a scroungy band of barbarians. We must kill them for massacring our comrades!”
And Shafat said, “True, Primus, but they are formidable foes. They come and go like foxes.”
“Then we must outfox them,” Sacerdus Quarto said.
Everyone looked at him in surprise. All of them had the same question plainly written on their faces, Father Appius, but were reluctant to ask it in deference to the
tall, old warrior. So, I asked. “How, Centurion Primus? How do we outfox the fox?”
“By setting a trap, of course, with a chicken as bait.” He said no more after that. He merely leaned on his staff and stared at me.
“Of course, Centurion Quarto,” I said, steady on his eyes, “Why didn’t we think of that?”
That evening, the men again ate cold gruel and slept as best they could in their thin cloaks. The farm boys that we had saved from the roads in Italia looked as though th
ey would shrivel up and blow away with the next gust. In the meantime, I poured over local maps with my officers, bent on setting that trap of Quarto’s. As you know, of course, the maps were horse dung, but Sextus and Casca had rounded up a few shepherds who helped us gain a better feel for the lay of the land. Recognizing that some might give us the wrong information deliberately, we asked all of them the same questions separately, and considered those answers that matched to be fairly accurate. They had another compelling reason for being forthcoming, Casca’s insistence that they accompany scouting parties to verify their descriptions while their families remained as guests of the Ninth until their return.
We learned from these sources that this part of Hispania is a riot of mismatched terrains, plains, rivers, hills, valleys, and mountains intermingled in some wicked stew cooked up by the impish spirits of the earth. After comparing the maps and the most common of the shepherds’ descriptions, we resolved upon a plan.
Sextus picked a small corps of his fastest auxiliaries and a local who said he could sit a horse. They left in the night, first walking their horses quietly out of camp, then riding close to tree cover to keep the moonlight, little as it was, from silhouetting them against the horizon. After they left, I ordered the centurions to ready for a quick break of camp before sunrise. Then, I ordered the annonae optio to bake two days’ worth of bread and distribute it to the men along with the same amount of water. Casca addressed the auxiliaries left behind by Sextus while the other centurions circulated among the rest of the men, quietly telling them what needed to be done before dawn.