Traitor

by Geraint Jones

  ‘Yes, lord!’

  I pulled myself onto Ahren’s back as Vuk and his men followed the king in the direction of Bato’s men. The royal bodyguard was half what it had been at the beginning of the battle. The whole plain was a carpet of bodies and dying men. Thousands had died. Tens of thousands. It was impossible to move without standing on body or blood.

  I felt the eyes of the Romans on us as we rode away. They had drawn their ranks up in tight squares about their eagles, and around these bastions Bato’s men swirled like raging waters, hurling javelins and insults.

  Bato was not hard to find. He was a god of war atop his horse.

  His eyes were furious. ‘Pinnes! Why are your men falling back? We have them!’

  ‘We’ve killed thousands of them, Bato,’ the king’s face became that of the diplomat, not the warrior, ‘but we’ve lost surprise and momentum. We need to withdraw.’

  ‘I will not retreat! I will not retreat, do you hear me?’ Bato had eagle fever. I could see his eyes being drawn to those totems that he wished to take from Rome.

  ‘We are not retreating, Bato,’ Pinnes tried. ‘We are withdrawing. Look around you, my friend. We have slaughtered them, but the longer we stay here, the more men we lose.’ The king saw what was on the warlord’s mind. ‘Bato, are we fighting this war to win eagles, or freedom?’

  The Dalmatian’s face was livid and flushed. ‘They are one and the same!’

  ‘If we leave now,’ Pinnes tried, ‘we leave with the scent of victory in our nostrils. If we leave when the Romans make us…’ Morale would be shattered. Bato knew that. I could see it in his eyes.

  He wanted to fight, he wanted to kill, but the king’s words broke through, and Bato spat angrily.

  ‘By all the gods, Pinnes, we had them!’

  ‘We have killed many of them,’ the king replied evenly. ‘With a half-starved army we have killed them, Bato, but now,’ his voice became hard, ‘my army will withdraw. Will you come with us, Bato? Will you withdraw to fight another day, and win this war?’

  Bato’s thick shoulders sagged with disappointment. His words were low and wistful. ‘We almost had them,’ I thought I heard him say.

  Pinnes put his hand on the man’s arm. For a moment Bato looked like he would bite it off, but the king’s look steadied him. ‘We don’t need to beat them on the field, Bato, we just can’t lose. We have bloodied Rome, my friend! Weakened their eastern flank! Others will sense this blood and attack! We just need to hold out until they do, Bato. We don’t need to conquer Rome. We only need to outlast her.’

  The Dalmatian leader pulled away from Pinnes’s touch. His pride had been bloodied. ‘Order the withdrawal,’ he snarled at his lieutenants, then he turned his scowl back to Pinnes.

  ‘We could have had them.’

  The battle was over.

  Chapter 44

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ the king told me later that night, as the army drew breath on a hillside. ‘I couldn’t do it, Corvus: have my men die in a final stand. When you told me Bato had arrived, and we could break away, I knew that we had to come away from that field.’

  ‘It’s not over, lord.’ I took the wine that he handed me. ‘You still have almost forty thousand men here. Bato’s army is almost intact. And you have the mountains,’ I added, believing what the king had said to Bato. ‘If you hold out until one of Rome’s enemies strike, Tiberius will be forced to march away and make peace, just like he did with Marabodus and the Germans when this rebellion began here.’

  ‘I do not doubt the theory of that, Corvus,’ Pinnes confided in me, ‘I doubt the reality. As you say, we have a hundred thousand men under arms. More in garrisons throughout the region. How will I feed them, Corvus? How will I put food in my men’s bellies when Tiberius and his armies have cut my supply chains? When they have ravaged our valleys, and left them as scorched earth?’

  I said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  He was right.

  ‘A man can feed himself on hope for a while,’ the king went on, ‘but not for ever.’

  ‘An enemy may strike Rome this summer.’ And that was the truth. Few were the years that pass without rebellion or invasion. Borders were battlefields. Even conquered provinces could descend into chaos in days.

  ‘We needed to wipe out those legions,’ the king said quietly, ‘and we have not done so. We have mauled them, but the legion’s discipline kept the eagles upright.’

  ‘I heard that Bato’s men killed tribunes, and that other ranking officers fled.’ I told the king what he already knew from dispatch riders. ‘That will hurt Rome, lord. That will hurt her pride, and embolden her enemies.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, though I could tell that he did not believe it. ‘I should see to my men,’ he said then.

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  Pinnes put a hand on my shoulder to arrest my rise. ‘I will go alone.’

  I didn’t know how to take his words. Did he fear that his men still saw me as a Roman? The king sensed my bristling anger.

  ‘This isn’t about you, my friend,’ he assured me, his voice that of a man struggling to stay above the surface. ‘A king failed his people today, and he must answer to them alone.’

  Pinnes removed his hand from my shoulder, and then he was lost to the darkness.

  * * *

  We did not return to Mons Alma as victors, nor vanquished. How the army had fared depended on who you talked to. The Pannonians were rightly proud of their courage, and justly honoured by the deaths of their comrades, who took many of the legions’ own with them. The king’s scouts and spies estimated that we had destroyed half of Severus’s force of fifty thousand. Soldiers being soldiers, I believed that to be an exaggeration, but even so, we’d left at least fifteen thousand Romans dead on the battlefield, most of them killed in the moments where their own cavalry charged into their rear, and caused the chaos that Bato and his men had exploited.

  The cost to the Pannonians was over ten thousand dead and the same again wounded. Bato’s losses were half that. The hulking Dalmatian and his retinue had come with us to the mountain so that a council of war might be held in the king’s hall.

  It was a strange gathering. Usually after a fight men are either mournful or proud and boasting. Here those cheers were tempered with caution. Severus’s army was greatly weakened, but intact.

  ‘We should attack again,’ Bato told the assembled leaders, most of whom were still bloodied from the field. ‘Severus has to take his army along the Sava to Siscia. We can attack him again.’

  ‘We won’t get a second chance at surprise,’ King Pinnes said.

  ‘And whose fault is that?’ Bato snapped, and the Pannonians bristled at the tone. Only Ziva seemed unoffended by the Dalmatian’s vim. Unfortunately, he had survived the battle without a scratch.

  ‘I think what we’d like to know,’ a Pannonian commander spoke up, ‘is why we were forced to go into battle alone.’

  Several men raised their voices in support, and this time it was Bato who bristled. ‘You did not. We joined you.’

  ‘And you were supposed to join us earlier,’ the Pannonian pressed on, ‘and advance from the same direction. Why didn’t you?’

  Bato’s nostrils flared and his thick fingers flexed. Behind him, King Pinnes was seated, silent and calm.

  ‘We sent messengers,’ Bato said to all, his jaw proud.

  ‘We didn’t get them.’ This time it was Vuk that spoke.

  ‘Well that’s war, isn’t it?’ Bato snorted, then ran his eyes over the assembly. ‘Does any man here claim that the Dalmatian army are cowards?’

  ‘No one is saying that, Bato,’ the king said gently. ‘Pannonian and Dalmatian alike can be proud of themselves for what they did today, their leaders too.’

  Bato looked to the king, and dripped words that burned. ‘Well this leader wants to attack them in the valley, before they reach Siscia, and Tiberius. What says the leader of the Pannonians?’

  All eyes turned to
Pinnes. He remained seated.

  He remained calm.

  And he would remain in the mountains. ‘That is a battle I will not ask my men to fight.’

  Bato sneered in disgust, a gesture picked up by his subordinates. It only took one person to say it – ‘Coward’ – and then the room was ablaze with threat, Pannonian blood boiling at such an insult to their king.

  Pinnes stood. ‘Enough,’ he tried calmly. ‘Enough!’ he roared, the mask of the warrior flashing onto his face.

  Men fell silent.

  Instantly, Pinnes became calm. ‘Lord Bato, your men are yours to command. If you want to attack the Romans, then that is your decision.’

  A Pannonian commander could not help himself. ‘Maybe we’ll turn up halfway through, like you did,’ he taunted. With a look, Pinnes had Vuk throw the man out of the hall before Bato’s temper frayed further.

  ‘What’s done is done,’ the king spoke. ‘Let us not sully the memory of our fallen with such petty squabbles. We still have over a hundred thousand men between us. The Romans have the same, and I will not waste the blood of my people in open battle. We will fight from the mountains, my friends. We will launch raids. If we cannot gut the Roman army, then we will bleed it to death with a thousand cuts. We will make them terrified of their own shadows. We will have it that their men would rather desert than face us in our homeland. We will lure, we will trap, and we will ambush. We will fight with what we have, not what we wish that we had.’

  Pinnes looked into the face of every man. ‘We will not win our freedom in one glorious battle, my friends. We will win it over weeks, months and years. Years where our families will suffer, but their endurance will buy a lifetime of freedom. This is how my army will fight. This is how we will defeat Rome.’

  For a moment, Bato said nothing. His eyes were dark coals. ‘I will not hide like a rat,’ he said at last. ‘I will live, and I will die, as a man.’

  The Dalmatian leader turned and walked from the hall. His men left with him.

  Pinnes looked to Ziva.

  ‘Why didn’t he join us where he was supposed to?’

  ‘I don’t know, lord. I tried to persuade him, but he would not listen to reason.’

  The king gave his follower a fatherly smile. ‘I know you would have done your best, my friend. Go with Bato now. See if you can change his mind.’

  ‘I will not fail you again, lord,’ Ziva promised, and then he was gone.

  I looked around the hall. Pinnes’s words had roused the men, but Bato had taken the air with him. The king knew it.

  ‘There are many tribes represented here.’ His words were simple, strong and heartfelt. ‘The best of Pannonia. Tell me, men, did you give me licence to lead you because I offered victory, or because I promised glory?’

  ‘Victory,’ they said.

  ‘I did. I promised you victory, and if I must become a rat to keep my word, then so be it. I am Pinnes,’ he laughed, ‘king of the rodents!’

  His men laughed with him, their faith restored by confidence, and courage. Bato’s bad taste was gone.

  ‘Now,’ the king’s grin grew, ‘who would like to join me in getting drunk, and talking about how we killed the bastard Romans?’

  They cheered.

  They drank.

  They were his.

  And the war would drag on.

  Chapter 45

  King Pinnes began to break his army apart.

  He sent bodies of men to reinforce garrisons around the region. Soldiers to help man the walls that would surely be besieged when the Romans marched that summer. The burden of feeding those men would now fall on the towns that they marched to. Lean times were about to become leaner.

  Several flying columns of cavalry were sent east. Severus had marched west to Siscia, leaving the provinces of Thrace and Moesia with less protection. Their cities were safe behind strong walls, but their villages and farms were not. Pinnes would have his men raid them, and bring back what they could.

  Other, smaller warbands he sent west into the mountains, to narrow passes and defiles where a hundred men could hold a thousand for days. They were the screen that had to keep Tiberius and his army from marching into the hinterland, and to rebel-held towns and cities.

  The king was careful in his selection of these forces. He sent units of mixed tribes to hold mountains, and raid the east, and single tribe formations to man the walls of their hometowns. A tribe would fight to the death to secure its home, but leave its position if it meant the Roman army fell on a land that was not their own. The king knew his people, and balanced them. Who needed to be rested? Send them to a garrison. Who needed a taste of glory? Send them to raid. Who had patience? Send them to hold a mountain pass.

  King Pinnes was a juggler as much as he was a warrior. Battles were won by men, and every man was different. Pinnes had to recognise which was which, who was who, and act accordingly. Any man can swing a sword. Few can lead. Fewer still can lead well.

  I would be remaining at Mons Alma with the king. I could guess at the reason why.

  I was Corvus the Traitor. I was trusted by Pinnes, but what would happen to me if I was detached with a hundred men? Vuk and his bodyguard were fierce in their loyalty to the king, and I had not been threatened by them when we stole the coins, but what of the rank and file? What of Bato and his Dalmatians? I couldn’t kid myself. If Bato got his hands on me I was a dead man. Ziva too. While I remained in the camp I had a measure of safety.

  I had friends, too, and surviving the battle meant that I now had to face something equally daunting: apologising.

  I sought out Thumper, and found him on his way to the latrines. ‘Go away,’ he told me. ‘Let a man shit.’

  I would not, and followed him to the latrine pits, the smell hitting me so hard that my eyes crossed.

  ‘Corvus,’ Thumper said, as he undid his britches, ‘this is not the time.’

  ‘I came to say sorry.’

  ‘Well come and say it when I’m not about to shit myself!’

  I saw it, then. Humour in his eyes. Thumper wanted to mend the bridge between us as much as I did.

  ‘Accept my apology,’ I told him. ‘Or I’ll push you into the pit.’

  He laughed, called me a thrice cursed bastard, and accepted my terms.

  ‘I’ll wait for you in my tent,’ I told him.

  ‘Good. Go away, you pervert.’

  I waited a long time, and began to think that Thumper had either changed his mind, or had been called to some duty. When he finally arrived at my tent, he looked pale.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I will be when I stop shitting a river every day.’

  ‘You’re sick?’

  ‘No, Corvus, I’m shitting all day because I’m in peak health. Give me one of those scrolls of yours to wipe my arse on.’

  ‘Pinnes has them all,’ I lied.

  ‘I can see one there!’

  ‘It’s Cynbel’s,’ I told him in a tone that I hoped would end the conversation.

  ‘Cynbel would care about my arse,’ he muttered to himself. ‘How was the fight then?’

  There was a little resentment in the words. I couldn’t help the scowl that passed over my face.

  ‘Bloody,’ I told him.

  ‘I would have liked to have been there,’ he said firmly, and left the rest unsaid – next time, I will be.

  ‘There will be more war.’

  At that he nodded. ‘The king hasn’t sent any more troops to Seretium, yet. If he does, I was hoping you could pull your strings and get me there. Don’t look at me like that Corvus! I wasn’t angry with you because you pulled strings. I was angry that you did it without talking to me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You already said that while you watched me shit, remember? But yes, there will be more war, and I would like to see my boys.’

  ‘I’ll speak to the king.’

  ‘Oh to have friends in high places.’ He laughed. ‘You spoken to Miran yet, or a
re you using me for foreplay?’

  ‘I don’t know what to say to her,’ I said honestly, and his big beard shook with laughter.

  ‘Tell her you’re a dickhead!’

  ‘I was thinking I should tell her why I acted the way that I did.’

  Thumper looked at me in shock. ‘Are you bloody daft, lad? That’s not how you do it! You tell her you’re a stupid bloody arse with pig shit for brains, and you’re sorry. Gods, Corvus, have you ever met a woman? You don’t need to explain yourself. She doesn’t want to hear “why I was wrong.” She just wants to hear “I was wrong.” You need to grovel and wriggle like a worm. Explain yourself! Ha! You’re a comedian.’

  If that was true I didn’t feel very funny, but the presence of a friend was doing something to lift my spirits. It was a macabre thought, but there was a reassurance in knowing that I would have been missed if I had fallen in the battle.

  ‘Tell me about the bear again,’ I asked, repairing the bridge.

  Thumper smiled. ‘You should talk to Miran,’ he said instead. ‘Out of all the women in Pannonia, you have to go fall in love with one married to a noble in Bato’s army, you dickhead.’ His insult was warm and meant to put me at ease.

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘Of course it’s like that.’ My friend grinned. ‘I’ve had many children, and they all started with the look like you two give each other.’

  My eyes snapped to him, and the wise man chuckled. ‘Oh yes, Corvus, she had the look too.’ He pushed himself to his feet then. ‘I’m about to shit myself.’

  He was walking from the tent when I pushed out of the flap. ‘Here,’ I called after my friend, and tossed him a scroll. ‘I hate poetry. Wipe your arse with that.’

  Thumper caught it, and bowed in thanks.

  ‘Now go talk to Miran.’

  * * *

  I asked for Miran and her son in the crude wooden buildings where the hostages lived. That they were there was testament to the fact that King Pinnes’s alliance with Bato still stood. Word had come of the Dalmatian rebel movements. Rather than engage the Romans on his own, Bato had occupied the mountains a little to the north. I was glad to have learned that Ziva remained with him.