Tribune of the People

by Dan Wallace

  “What about Mancinus and the main force?”

  “The last I saw, they were heading into the woods to the south.”

  “What? Why? We almost topped their walls; we had them!”

  “I don’t know,” Sextus said, “after I heard the recall, then saw you up here, I rallied my men to your side.”

  “Curse the Fates, we need to get down from here and see what we can do at the camp. Ulpius and the other wounded are inside that palisade.”

  Sextus reached down his arm and Tiberius used it to swing himself up behind him. The eques reined his horse hard over and down the incline while shouting for his command to follow. The two men skittered down the steep slope, almost pitching over the horse’s head. The horse leaned back so much on its haunches trying to keep from falling that Tiberius’s sandals dragged on the muddy incline.

  Back down on level ground, they were surprised to find a legion formed into a square, pila at the ready, swords drawn in the interior lines. Tiberius quickly saw Casca and Shafat in position next to their standards, one facing the Numantine mountain again, the other fronting the Roman camp, Didius centered in the interior lines. Enemy horsemen rode between the Fifth’s first line and the palisade. The gates had been closed, the parapets now were manned by Numantines and other Arevaci warriors, catcalling down to the last of the Roman legions. The grim-faced legionaries heard screams within the compound and saw a yellow glow rising behind the camp walls.

  Tiberius didn’t wait any longer. He dropped from Sextus’s horse and started running toward the legion, barking as he loped, “Run off those Numantine dogs, Sextus, then cover our rear.”

  Sextus and the auxiliaries thundered off while Tiberius moved up to the Ninth.

  “Halt! Password!”

  “I’m your tribune and quaestor, soldier, open ranks.”

  The optio squinted, unsure, until Shafat whacked him out of the way with his vitus as he spat, “Tiberius Gracchus, you onion head.” He whipped around to attention, “Sir! Orders?”

  “Defensive column, Shafat. Quick-pace to the east woods.”

  Shafat raised his voice and spit out the command even as Casca approached.

  “We have to move, Casca,” Tiberius said, “before they come down from Numantia to join forces with the troops in our camp.”

  Tiberius looked at Casca intently, who nodded, his face drawn. Casca knew that, while his orders did not state so directly, Tiberius considered the skeleton legion inside the camp lost, including their old comrade Ulpius. “I’ll send for your mount, sir.”

  Tiberius walked before his horse slowly at the head of the column. They moved deep into the forest that grew up to the banks of the river flowing southeast from Numantia. No one knew its name, a tributary of the Durius, perhaps. Night had fallen at last, after another day full of attacks and ambushes by Numantine cavalry. They had been marching for a week, trying to find Mancinus and his missing army.

  They did their best to use the tactics that earlier had brought them safely to Malia. Traveling at night when they could, the Ninth hugged the high ground as much as possible, resting during the under forest when available. But in trailing the passage of Mancinus’s army, they frequently were forced to travel on lower ground, which invited fierce, slashing attacks by Numantine horsemen. Although most of the army’s auxiliaries had bolted with Mancinus, Sextus’s old company had followed him. They did their best to shadow the legion and managed to beat back every thrust by the hounding barbarians. Still, soldiers were struck down.

  The fallen wounded were quickly placed on stretchers in the middle of the column. The dead were left behind. Worse, on Mancinus’s trail they came across other fallen legionaries, some of them seemingly left behind before they had died. It was clear, the campaign had become a full-blown disaster, like so many before in cursed Hispania. Another Roman army had been defeated by the Numantines, and now they ran in full flight for their lives. Tiberius wondered if any of them would survive.

  On this day, the troops of the Ninth trudged through the muddy banks of the rivulet, taking their chances that the enemy cavalry wouldn’t find them. The rain resumed, a brutally cold downfall that soaked men and animals. The men ate what few grain cakes they had left in their kits while they marched, sharing with those who had none. Tiberius felt a continuous chill up his spine not only from the stinging rain. Again, he thought of Hannibal Barca’s brilliant stratagem at Trebia, and how he and his men had adapted it to surprise the Numantines on the Iberus. If they discovered the Ninth now, creeping along the river shore, they could just as easy annihilate them in the same fashion.

  But the legion needed some respite from the constant harassing attacks. Knowing this, Tiberius resisted every panicky impulse to rush his men again to higher, solid ground. Instead, he crept along with them, nerves strumming without relief. Eventually, they came upon a small knoll rising out of the riverbank that offered cover and a dry area for the exhausted legionaries to sleep. The centurions passed along orders for silence and no fires. They dared not construct fortifications, so they posted a perimeter of guards 300 feet out from the rest. Where there were any high trees, lithe velites slipped up and onto limbs with good vantage points for possible infiltration by Numantine scouts or assassins. After seeing that all of the men and beasts were bedded down, Tiberius picked a spot three-quarters up the hill facing away from the stream and toward the most likely point of attack and laid down on his cape. He used his ornate helmet as a pillow, and tried to sleep, which wouldn’t come. Instead, that terrible, endless day the week before ran through his head, again and again. They were on the verge of cracking the Numantine town fort when Mancinus abruptly abandoned the assault. Many a soldier had fallen in the retreat for no good reason. The men in the Roman camp had been slaughtered or enslaved, the supplies, wagons, livestock, all gone over to the Numantines. Worse of all, the army’s account ledgers had been in Tiberius’s camp tent. Now, they too were gone. All evidence of his forthright discipline in paying the men, procuring necessary supplies, and otherwise greasing the wheels of war for Mancinus’s army, was gone. Without proof of his scrupulous accounting, he could be called in front of the Senate for any number of trumped-up charges, especially by Rufus and his ilk. His career would be ruined, he thought. That is, if he survived. He hacked a rueful laugh, and quickly covered his mouth.

  Nothing moved. He could hear the deep breathing of the exhausted men, and the occasional ninny in the distance where Sextus had the mounts tethered. Tiberius knew that a large number of auxiliaries would be on duty through the night to keep them quiet. But a horse is an animal, and sometimes they called to each other. The beleaguered Romans could only hope that the Numantines assumed that any noise from a horse came from one of their own.

  The rain finally abated just before dawn. Small groups of men slipped down to the river to draw water, which they brought back to rest of the troops, parched from the forced march despite the drenching they’d endured. The horses slurped thirstily and noisily, which couldn’t be helped. The centurions and optios had the men up, ready to move on in the dark. They muffled weapons and animals and slowly began to ease their way off of the knoll back into the brush along the river. The sleep and water had revived them, but their stomachs still churned from hunger.

  By dawn, they came upon velite outposts from the main army. Tiberius saw fear jumping in the scouts’ eyes, and it was by the grace of Fortuna that they didn’t sounded an alarm or try to kill any of the Ninth’s men. As soon as they recognized their fellow soldiers, they almost swooned with relief, as though the arrival of another harried, worn legion would tip the balance and save them all. Tyros, thought Tiberius.

  “Where is the consul’s headquarters?” he asked.

  The velite pointed behind him, “Two miles back toward the river, in the center of a defense perimeter.”

  Tiberius nodded, turned to Casca and told him to form a square, and signaled to Sextus to accompany him. The eques passed on orders to Decimus, while Casca p
icked six seasoned men to act as their guard. Tiberius secured the password from the young velite, and they left.

  They worked their way through the brush and rushes near the river until they came upon a three-meter agger hastily thrown up in a long curve out from the bank of the Durius. The bank sloped down from a small string of heavily wooded hills that rose perhaps a mile from the river. Stakes spiked the agger at the top to form a makeshift castra, with sentries looking out between them. Tiberius saw no towers or any evidence of catapulta or other artillery. From the look of the soldiers on watch, they had no parapets to stand on behind the castra. In fact, he couldn’t see any gates anywhere along the line of defense. If they needed to evacuate the compound, it looked like they would have to climb over their own stakes. He shook his head in dismay.

  Casca called out the password, “Haven,” and they scrambled up to the top. A grizzled centurion of the Fifth named Gabinus greeted them, expressing particular warmth toward Casca, whom he knew from a previous campaign. As they talked, Gabinus led them down the side of the mound onto the makeshift parade ground. There were no tents, and the men huddled together under their cloaks, crowded into small groups around their standards in the sucking mud. To keep warm, they had started fires that smoked liberally from the green, scrubby cottonwood and evergreens the troops had stripped from the muck at the river’s edge. After a ten-minute walk, they saw Mancinus’s headquarters, a ragged collection of capes tied off to spears and standards, with the four legions’s eagles serving as the entranceway supports. The army’s tribunes, Horatius, Nicomedes, Secundus, and Cadmus, lounged in front of the shelter’s opening. Others stood or sat around them, though no one spoke. Instead, they waited while the officers passed around a wineskin. Tiberius approached them, and Horatius said, “Salve, Gracchus, back from the dead?”

  “Close enough. Where is the consul?”

  “Why, in his quarters, Quaestor, planning our next maneuver.”

  “I see it’s not vinegar in the skin, Horatius. Why don’t you give it to the physicians for the wounded?”

  “Wounded? I don’t see any wounded in this camp. Do you, Secundus? Nicomedes? How about you, Cadmus? No, there are no wounded here, Gracchus, just the walking dead.”

  Tiberius brushed past him, saying, “Take heart, Horatius. We’re not dead yet.”

  Hardy words, he thought, though he felt as black as a moonless night in his own heart, as black as Vulcan’s lair. An agitated slave ran past him as he stepped into the consul’s tent, ducking folds of the cloaks draped from the spear shafts. He worked his way through an improvised vestibulum into a round area just a few meters across. Mancinus sat on a low bed, apparently fashioned from bent, green wooden limbs with capes and linens stack on top. The consul wasn’t wearing his lorica, which hung from a tree-branch tripod. He wore only a scarlet-bordered white tunic turned grey with grime and sweat. Yet, to Tiberius’s amazement, he still wore his greaves above his sandals. Elbows on his knees and head held in his hands, Mancinus sat, staring at the ground. Eventually, he slowly looked up to see who had entered. He recognized Tiberius, then allowed his sight to fix upon the ground again.

  “Before I embarked on this campaign,” he said evenly, “before I’d even boarded my flagship at Ostia, I saw two serpents quickly slither up the gangplank onto the ship and disappear. Everyone stopped, my adjutants, guards, the tribunes, even Fabius. You should have seen the looks on their faces, shocked, utterly horrified by the omen.

  “So, what could I do? That sourpuss Horatius urged me to consult a soothsayer, and the others joined in. But I couldn’t do that, what would happen if the oracle said the entire campaign was ill-fated? The day it was to start, before I’d even left the shadow of Rome? No. I lifted my head and said, ‘No pair of wiggling worms will divert me from doing my duty for Rome, not even those the size of snakes.’ Then, I walked up and boarded the ship. My men followed.”

  He glanced up. “I’m not a fool, you know, tweaking the beards of the gods. I consulted secretly with a high priest. He told me I should have had auspices taken before I stepped onto that ship. I had the ship scoured to find those damn snakes, and nothing. Nothing! I moved my flag to another ship and sailed on that one until we reached Hispania. On land, I felt better. We didn’t lose a ship or a man on the voyage, so why would I worry? No matter, I sacrificed daily, generously, all the way to Malia. The campaign was going so well!” he cried out in a shout, pounding his knee with his fist. Then, he seemed to deflate again.

  “The gods punished me,” he said, “But what could I have done? Of course, I chose Rome before the gods.” He dropped his head again to gaze into the muddy floor.

  Tiberius stood still, controlling himself. Mancinus’s dark face, lean and brown with lines that usually made him look handsome and virile, now seemed creased, embittered if not petulant. Tiberius’s mind skipped to Claudia waiting for him to return, his children, perhaps a new one on the way, he might not know with no post for a month. Gaius, Appius, too, even Polydius and Phalea, all waited for him. His mother, for Jupiter’s sake. Now, it appeared that they waited in vain because of this man’s vanity, this self-pitying, patrician prig disaster of a man. Tiberius had the urge to brain him, except he couldn’t, not with the mothers and wives of the pedites and his other Roman legionaries pining for them to return. No, he thought, they could not give up without even an attempt to salvage the situation.

  “Consul, the campaign isn’t over. We still have more than four legions essentially intact. The Numantines and the rest of the Arevaci can’t stand against four Roman legions.”

  Mancinus lifted his eyes, looking incredulous. “Can’t stand against us? They won’t stand against us, they refuse to fight like real soldiers! Fight and run, fight and run, that’s all they do, until they wear us down, wear down the spirit. Then, when we’re stunned and vulnerable, they bide their time in their impenetrable fortress. At last, when we try to execute a strategic withdrawal, they nip at our heels and bite our flanks to bleed us into exhaustion. That’s why we can never vanquish Numantia, ours describes the fate of all the Roman armies that have faced that rock on a hill!”

  Tiberius clenched his teeth again to avoid blasting Mancinus with his sure knowledge that they’d had the walls won, the city in their grasp until the retreat had been ordered.

  “We can still defeat them, Consul, we have the army. It will be more difficult, now, since they’ve taken our camp, which we will first have to win back. But then we can start again, starve them out, or attack them after a siege has softened them up.”

  “No, we stand here.”

  Tiberius froze. “Here? Against the river?”

  “That’s right. Let them break their army on our defenses.”

  “But Consul, we have no provisions, the camp is barricaded by a dirt wall. How can we last if they simply decide to hem us in until we starve?”

  “We won’t starve, we can fish the river. We can send out silent patrols. The Numantine barbarians aren’t the only ones who can move with stealth. We’ll wait them out. Until they’re ready to fight like men, we’ll sit and wait.”

  Mancinus folded his arms and sat back on his bed to punctuate his resolve. Tiberius thought that he had gone completely mad.

  The slave who had run away before reentered the tent and headed directly to Mancinus’s lorica and began applying some kind of grease to its surface. He started polishing the little metal sculptures on the breastplate, cupids, Tiberius thought, with horses just above the abdomen. The smell of the grease seemed familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.

  “At last. That’s it, shine it up. I don’t want to look like a country thief when I step out to fight them. Shine it until it glows, so they know that it is a Roman consul who vanquishes them.”

  Tiberius recognized the odor, now, animal fat. From what animal? He couldn’t venture a guess.

  “Well, Gracchus, where’s your legion?”

  “Not far from here.”

  “Good. Then, you’ll
be bringing them into the camp. It’ll be cozy, but we’ll all make do, as Romans do.” He issued a vapid laugh.

  “You don’t think it will be too crowded, Consul? You have the better part of 20,000 men concentrated here. Perhaps it would be better if the Ninth found a position outside the palisade to ensure that the main force isn’t flanked.”

  “What’s the matter, Gracchus, your boys aren’t up to a fight?”

  Tiberius fought to hold himself in check, and Mancinus could see that he’d stung the quaestor tribune.

  “All right, hunt around for a better place. But don’t come weeping to me after you come up with nothing. You and your reluctant heroes will find themselves bedding down next to the entire army’s latrines.”

  “Yessir,” Tiberius said as he saluted, and left before the consul could change his mind.

  Outside the tent, he smelled more of the grease, cooking this time, making his stomach roil, but not from hunger.

  “Horatius, what is that smell?”

  “The latest in fine Roman rations, Gracchus, horsemeat. Faced with the choice of having a cavalry or feeding three legions, the great consul decided we didn’t need auxiliaries riding around anymore, since we will be defending this ground. Hungry?”

  “Not yet, Tribune.”

  He rounded up his contingent and made for the camp perimeter at the water’s edge. The late spring morning had brightened the riverbank beautifully, with delicate pale green folded leaves appearing as if out of thin air. For Tiberius and his small squad, however, it was a dangerous time. But he could not wait. They waded around the mounded walls and ran bent over to the nearest bushes outside of the earth fort. After reconnoitering, they began to work their way back to where they had left the Ninth.

  By sunset, they’d made it to the outpost guards. Quietly, they uttered the password and slipped in through the squared lines. Tiberius quickly gathered his centurions around him.

  “Make ready, we’re marching at nightfall.”