The Emperor's Games

by The Emperor's Games (retail) (epub)

  The Romans had drawn their lines up across the widest stretch of the valley floor now, the auxiliaries to the fore with the scarlet weight of the legionary troops behind them, studded with the golden standards of cohort and century, and the great Eagles of the legions. The cavalry was forming up on the wings, but the wings ran right up onto the mountains’ slope, and the cavalry ponies, not bred to these hills as the Germans’ were, were finding it tricky going already.

  Marbod’s men, blue and red and ocher with war paint, their wild hair streaming out behind them, were tangled now with the auxiliaries of the front lines. They were naked from the waist up, many of them, save for the dark iron collars and the paint, and they fought with a fine red fury. The auxiliaries were beginning to buckle under their onslaught when the Roman trumpets sounded again. The auxiliaries fell back through the opened ranks of the waiting legions, and Marbod’s men howled after them.

  Ranvig’s horses came down the last of the slope on their haunches, the loose pebbles from some long-dead streambed rattling under their hooves and the Semnone foot fighters at their heels. The ridge above them was bare of men. As the legionaries flung their pilums into the mass of Marbod’s warriors, Ranvig’s war host swept around the Roman cavalry and into the Roman flank.

  * * *

  There was blood in the air already, along with the worse smells of battle, men who had vomited or lost control of their bowels. Ygerna had smelled it before, and she thought sickly of the destruction that that smell meant and went on laying out bandages. Labienus, the chief field surgeon, a lean, plain-faced man in his forties, had set up his hospital tent among the baggage wagons, and already the wounded were being brought to the rear. Auxiliaries, mostly, but Ygerna knew that the Romans always began a battle with their auxiliaries. The men from the legions would come in soon enough.

  Cottia and a surgeon’s orderly were struggling to unfold the camp beds and laying out canvas on the dirt floor for the men the beds wouldn’t hold. Labienus, in a bloody apron, was using a deep, cup-shaped spoon with a hole in the bottom to pull a barbed spearhead out of a man’s shoulder while a junior surgeon held him to the table. Cottia had a white line around her mouth, but she worked grimly and cuffed the orderly indignantly when he looked at the writhing auxiliaryman and stopped to retch.

  The wounded were coming faster now, faster than Labienus and the legionary surgeons and their juniors could deal with them. The orderlies laid the least desperate of them on the canvas and heaved the worst onto the surgery tables almost before the last man had been moved.

  “Go and help Labienus,” a junior surgeon panted, taking Ygerna’s arm with a bloody hand and pointing her in the right direction. He didn’t stop to ask if she could stand it, and with gritted teeth she told herself that she could. The junior surgeon disappeared somewhere into the chaos and the, animal moaning that came from the men on the floor.

  Labienus was pulling long splinters of what might have been the man’s own shield from the red wreckage of an arm, and with a lurch in her stomach Ygerna saw that the man’s belt buckle bore the Capricorn badge of the Fourteenth Gemina. She thought at first that he was unconscious, but then the man’s eyes opened in narrow slits, frantic with pain. Labienus shoved a clay cup in her hand.

  “Lift his head and get as much of this down him as you can.” He had a pair of bronze forceps in one hand and a probe in the other, but Ygerna looked at the arm and knew that that wouldn’t be the end of it. It was smashed above the elbow, and splinters of bone stuck up whitely among the wooden ones.

  She slipped an arm behind the man’s head and held the cup to his lips. “Drink this, it will make you better.” She didn’t know what was in it.

  The man choked and gagged, but he got most of it down and his eyes began to dull. “No…” he whispered, and she saw with horror that Labienus had a saw in his hand.

  “What is happening?” she asked, partly to distract him from the terror that still came through the cloudy veil of the drug and partly because he came from Correus’s legion.

  “Spearmen…” he whispered. “Germans…” and she realized that he didn’t know. To a legionary in the line, there was no pattern to the battle but his own three feet of space. He gagged again and heaved on the table, and Ygerna heard the sick grinding sound of the bone saw. She put her hands on his shoulders and held him down and put her face close to his so that he would look at her and not at Labienus.

  * * *

  “Hold them!” Correus shouted. “For Rome! For your Eagle! Push!” A legate’s place was at the center of his men or with the generals on some vantage point, with a courier to send his orders, not in the front line where death was the likeliest prize. But the Fourteenth Gemina was a legion too newly disciplined for that, so Correus was in the forefront with the Eagle-bearer beside him, cursing them, cajoling them, screaming himself into hoarseness at them, over the screams of the wounded and the wild howling of the Germans. A German spearman staggered toward him, and Correus pulled Antaeus up on his haunches a split second too late. The spear cut a gash along the horse’s shoulder, and Antaeus screamed and lashed out with iron-shod hooves. The German fell back with a ruined face, and Correus swore. A Roman short sword was no use on horseback, but if he got down, his men couldn’t see him, and that was the point. “Give me that!” Correus dropped his useless sword as a legionary caught the German’s spear and tossed it up. It was a war spear, long, heavy, barbed at the end, with a bloody collar of speckled feathers around the shaft. Correus had learned to use one when he was eighteen. From Forst. He swung Antaeus around and drove the blade into a snarling German face. Blood welled up to cover the blue and ocher paint and the dark iron ring around the German’s neck.

  Marbod’s men came on, like hunting wolves over the bodies of their dead. The Romans met them, still wedged solidly across the valley mouth, but the torn bodies of the Roman dead were growing, and the wounded who could not fall back were trampled underfoot. On the left flank, the Roman lines had begun to cave in a little on the center, jamming those behind them more solidly together, and the cavalry, on horses less adaptable to the steep terrain, were pushing gallantly against Ranvig’s host, with bad results.

  The emperor Domitian and his generals, on a slight rise above the right flank, watched the pattern of the battle while the emperor slammed his fist into the purple silk of his saddlecloth. “That is more men than you thought, Rufus!”

  “There is also bad weather coming, and the emperor wishes to conclude the campaign this season,” Rufus said. “Another ground would have been more favorable, but time was important. As we discussed.”

  “Marbod’s men aren’t rested,” Julius Frontinus said. “Ours are. That will tell, sir, in the end.”

  “And so will bad judgment when the Senate counts our losses!” Domitian snapped. He wanted a triumph, not a Pyrrhic victory and a slaughter.

  Rufus and the chief of Engineers glanced at each other and kept their thoughts to themselves. It had been at Domitian’s insistence that they had pushed for a conclusion before winter. There were beginning to be loud noises in Rome that this campaign grew too costly, that the emperor was not the warrior his father and his brother had been. Domitian needed a clean, decisive victory – quickly.

  * * *

  Wherever they could stand clear and fight, the Romans cut down the German host, but it was like wading through heavy sand or waist-high water. There wasn’t enough room, and the Germans still loped howling into the front ranks. The front ranks began to thin. For each man killed, another moved up from the press at the rear, but the dead were growing. Still, there was a limit to Marbod’s men, and the warriors in his host had been lost from his control almost from the start. They threw themselves at the Romans like berserkers, and like berserkers they went to Valhalla by the thousands.

  The air had grown thick and oppressive under lowering clouds, and the light was gray with the coming dusk when the last remnants of Marbod’s war host wavered. The Roman lines surged forward over
them. Those who had been battling the men of Ranvig’s host, who had slashed their way through the Roman cavalry to hammer at the infantry’s flank all day, braced for one last charge. They were bone weary, spitting blood, their breath coming in gasps, but they would have to do it alone. If they sank under Ranvig’s charge, the front lines would never be able to turn in time to stop him. They raised their shields for one last push, one last time, and then halted, puzzled – because the Germans were gone.

  Correus, whose Fourteenth Legion had swung around from the front to try to reinforce the faltering flank, halted his men, also. The Semnones had pulled back as suddenly as they had come, their hill-bred ponies scrambling up the slope, with only the ragged remnants of the Roman cavalry stumbling after them. Ranvig must have drawn off his foot-fighters first – it was only horsemen that streamed away up the hillside. Correus’s weary, heavily armored legion and the legions of the flank would only waste their time and lives on that hill. Almost as soon as he gave the order, a trumpet sounded the “Hold” to echo it and the scattered cavalry turned back as well. The sky above was dark with boiling rain clouds as well as the growing dusk. It was too late to chase the Germans tonight.

  Mithras god. Too late forever, maybe. Strung out along the ridgetop, opening their ranks to let Ranvig’s fleeing horsemen through, were spears and men unending, a black line that stretched the length of the valley and back into the dusk.

  The general had seen them, too. The trumpets called “Regroup” and the footsore legions stumbled to their places, but the Germans didn’t move. Then, while Correus watched from Antaeus’s back, his mouth dry and every limb aching, the low sun broke through the cloud just once behind the ridge. A single horseman moved from Ranvig’s lines and raised his shield and spear, black against the sun. The men on the ridge turned around, and, while the Romans watched them uncomprehending, they walked away into the dusk, and the horseman turned and followed them.

  * * *

  “They’re gone, sir.” Quintus saluted and staggered slightly.

  “Sit down, man,” Correus said. “What do you mean they’re gone?” He had counted his dead and seen the wounded sent back to the rear, and now he was sitting on a rock under a tent flap, trying to start a fire in the rain.

  “Where’s your optio?” Quintus said disapprovingly. He sat down and began to poke twigs in the fire. “They’re gone. Gone clean out of the territory by the look of it. Not a smell of them, and the scouts say they’re still traveling. I don’t get it, but the gods be thanked anyway. We couldn’t have fought another like this one today.”

  “Out of the—?” Suddenly Correus began to laugh. The ground was getting soft in the rain, and one of the tent poles shifted and a corner of the flap came down, but Correus didn’t seem to notice it. Quintus watched him nervously as Correus sat there while his fire went out and the rain ran down his collar, and laughed.

  The army had buried its dead by lantern light and tipped the Germans, of whom there were many, into a common pit in the rain-soaked ground. The Agri Decumates belonged to Rome. In the morning the weary men of the legions would parade by the graves of their dead in the shadow of their standards, and the commanders would call out the names while the emperor intoned the Prayer for the Slain. The emperor would send his dispatches back to Rome, and the Senate would vote him a triumph.

  Ranvig of the Semnones had not wasted the year that he had spent playing at treaties with the emperor of the Romans. He knew Domitian now. Knew what he wanted from this campaign and had given it to him. And if the warning not to take more than had been given had been somewhat pointed, neither the emperor nor his generals would mention that in Rome.

  Ranvig had never meant to hold the Agri Decumates. He had thrown Marbod of the Chatti and the troublemakers from his own tribe to the Romans to let the Romans’ emperor take the land in the way that would best please him: with a great battle, and a fine victory, and the robes of a triumphant general. And then there had been the warning: No farther. No farther if the emperor wishes to keep his triumph. Beyond the Agri Decumates, on the borders of the Suevi lands, they would be waiting, in case the emperor should be so foolish as not to listen.

  He would listen, Correus thought. He laughed again, noiselessly now, half bitterly, at himself earnestly counseling Ranvig not to take on Rome. There was still something missing, some last piece of Ranvig’s game to be played, but it would come. He was as sure of that as he was that Ranvig had won. As sure as the dead men in their grave in the driving rain.

  Quintus brought him his dinner, hard wheat biscuit and bacon, camp rations, with olives and wine from the officers’ mess, and he was eating it when Ygerna picked her way through the muddy camp with a lantern in her hand.

  “You are alive,” she observed. “And you are sitting in a tent and swilling wine, while I have been wondering if you were dead.”

  Quintus eyed her warily and backed out of the tent. Correus put his wine down and held his arms out to her. “Flavius was here. I asked him to find you. Didn’t he?”

  “In this?” They had camped where they had fought, in the churned ground of the valley, and rain was sheeting down outside the tent. She set the lantern down, and he saw that her gown was soaked in blood under the mud and water.

  “What have you been doing?”

  “Helping Labienus to cut a man’s arm off,” she said shortly.

  “Dear gods.” He put his arms around her, and she buried her face in his chest.

  Epilogue

  Spring, and the trees along the Rhenus budded into green bloom. It was pretty country in the spring, Correus thought, but he wasn’t terribly surprised to find that he would be leaving it. There was trouble on the Danuvius now, and he couldn’t sorrow over much, because trouble always meant promotions, and his had taken the form of the command of a Danuvius fort. Not a legionary fort, but a fort all his own, and a good step up. If there was a good war, he might have his legion before a year was out.

  He wasn’t going to put it that way to Ygerna, he thought, with his orders tucked into the palm of his hand. Ygerna was pregnant again and was going to have to go back to Rome. He would miss her desperately, but he wasn’t going to let her have a baby on the frontier, not after the hard time she had had with Eilenn. At that, he was happier than Flavius, who had lost his last babe, and been told by his wife’s physician that if he fathered more children on her, he would run the risk of losing her too.

  The house in the Moguntiacum civil quarter seemed to be very full of people when he got there. He was not surprised to see Lucius Paulinus, who had kept his promise and stayed in Germany to make his peace with Domitian; but judging by the amount of baggage heaped on a mule cart outside, and in the green-tiled atrium, Julia had arrived, as well.

  She threw herself at Correus, and he grinned and kissed her, and then looked quickly at Ygerna to see how the land lay. Ygerna had a grim look in her eye, and Julia’s face was flushed and rebellious. The air between them crackled.

  “Mama! I have found three frogs in the garden!” Felix hurtled through the door, and the frogs, which he appeared to have brought with him, bounced wildly across the tiles.

  Ygerna caught him by the wrist. “Frogs are not for the house. And the cat will catch them and eat them. Very likely on my bed.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  She looked at him sternly. Then they both giggled.

  Julia stiffened. She looked at Felix unhappily. He was bigger. And he loved Ygerna. He hadn’t even seen her.

  Ygerna took a deep breath. She shoved Felix gently away from her. “Your aunt Julia is here.”

  He swung around, and his green eyes lit up like the sun on seawater. In a moment Julia was staggering back against the atrium wall with Felix in her arms. Her eyes met Ygerna’s over his head.

  “He does not forget you,” Ygerna said. “Must it be one or the other?”

  Correus and Lucius looked jumpily from one wife to the next, but after a long moment, Julia shook her head. “No. It would see
m not.” A frog hopped onto her big toe, and hopped off again, startled. She began to laugh.

  * * *

  “I can travel with Lucius and Julia,” Ygerna said chattily, “so you can take Eumenes with you.” She perched on the end of the bed and watched him pack. Correus decided that if he lived to be as old as his father, he would probably never understand women, so he would give up trying now. “But I am coming to the Danuvius when the baby is born,” Ygerna said. She looked interested. “Julia says it is wild country, wilder than the Rhenus.”

  “Getting that way,” Correus said.

  “Why are they sending you there?”

  “The Dacians are looking too busy across the Danuvius.” Correus slung a tattered copy of Julius Caesar’s memoirs into the trunk, with the head and broken-off shaft of a German spear. A bedraggled collar of feathers hung around its neck. “We are being sent to look back at them.”

  Ygerna eyed the spear. “What is that?”

  “Souvenir,” Correus said shortly. “A reminder not to underestimate the enemy. I took it away from one of Marbod’s men.”

  “Did you underestimate Marbod?”

  “No, he underestimated Ranvig. And so did we.”

  Ygerna yawned. “You can explain that to me when I get to the Danuvius.” She curled herself up on the end of the bed. She seemed to want to sleep all the time. It must be the child. “If you stay long enough for me to catch up to you.”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t worry about that,” Correus said. “This is going to take a while.” And it wouldn’t be long before half the legions in Germany were following him, he thought. Dacia was just the place Ranvig would pick if he could order up a new war for Rome. Far enough away to take the emperor’s mind off Germany and just in the right spot to make the German legions the most likely reinforcements.