Hammer of Rome

by Douglas Jackson

  Rufus studied the patchwork of dull brown, with its spots of deeper green, curling blue snakes and jagged peaks that could only be mountains. ‘Yes,’ he said, as his mind worked out the symbols and their meaning. ‘I see it now.’ He pointed to a small square in the lower portion. ‘Brynmochdar.’ He nodded to himself and his finger travelled northward. ‘We followed the line of the mountains and turned west into the foothills following the path of the Brigante refugees to where they joined up with our horse thieves. Those fellows are cunning and tried to lead us astray more than once, but Gaius Rufus is too old and leery to be fooled by barbarian tricks. We stayed on their trail through what they call the Tinan Gap, here, to the very edge of Brigante country. Beyond it lies a softer land of rolling hills with fertile, well-watered valleys but few inhabitants because it is claimed by three or four tribes. Eventually there is a new barrier of more rugged hills, with steep scarps and narrow gullies that seldom feel the sun’s light.’

  ‘Ambush country.’ Naso sucked his teeth, remembering the long, bloody march on Mona.

  ‘Indeed, lord,’ Rufus agreed. ‘This is where I deemed it safer to leave the patrol. I forged ahead alone until my way was blocked by a hill fort that I judged as near impregnable as any of them is ever likely to be. Steep slopes on every side but one. I would judge it to be here.’ His finger traced a route through the hills to a point where they fell away to a river valley.

  ‘How far from the fort to this place?’ Valerius pointed to an odd formation of three hills cradled in the blue curve of a river in otherwise almost empty country.

  ‘It’s impossible to tell.’ Rufus gave him a shrewd look.

  ‘You’ll get to know it better before the spring. We all will.’

  ‘So that’s it.’ Naso grimaced. ‘I knew you must have a compelling reason to leave Londinium when the campaigning season was all but done.’

  ‘Governor Agricola has ordered that we push northwards and campaign through the winter,’ Valerius confirmed, ignoring the camp prefect’s incredulous grunt. ‘The Emperor has given him two more years to carry out the mission his father ordered.’

  ‘Impossible,’ Naso said. ‘We have little or no information about the lands of the far north. There was no guarantee we could succeed in four seasons, even five. Now he wants it done in three. And in winter? The men will freeze on the march or starve in camp. We’ll end up eating bloody snow and there’ll be no forage for the horses. How can we ask them to build marching camps when the ground is frozen solid as year-old opus signinum?’

  ‘It will be difficult,’ Valerius admitted. ‘But the governor recognizes that. That is why we will drive north through these hills before the first snows and build a new winter camp here,’ he pointed to the river that curled round the three hills, ‘at the river’s highest navigable point. Ships will be waiting off shore to carry enough supplies and forage to last us through the winter. From the camp we’ll launch fighting patrols into the territory of the Selgovae and the Votadini, burn their homes and supplies and weaken their ability to oppose us after the spring thaw.’

  ‘Fighting patrols.’ Naso didn’t hide his scorn. ‘In the snow?’

  ‘It will keep the men warm.’ Valerius allowed himself a wry smile. ‘And if the ground is too hard to dig banks and ditches we’ll build walls of snow instead.’

  ‘Madness.’

  ‘Orders,’ Valerius corrected him. ‘And the quicker we start the better it will be for all. I’ve requisitioned four hundred extra mules and a hundred ox carts from the Twentieth – yes, Quintus, only the Ninth and the Second are involved – so when we slight the camp we’ll carry the timbers with us.’

  ‘Very well, legate.’ Naso set off for the door. ‘I’ll brief the centurions immediately.’

  When they were alone, Valerius turned to Rufus. ‘You have nothing to say, scout?’

  ‘What more is there to say?’ The little man looked up from his place by the fire. ‘If we run out of ballista ammunition we can always throw snowballs at the Celts instead.’

  ‘Can it be done?’

  Rufus ran a hand through his beard and considered the map. ‘We’ll need to move fast. If we can get past the hill fort before the first snows.’

  ‘We will.’

  Rufus hesitated for a moment. ‘There is something else.’

  ‘What?’ Valerius’s voice was harsher than he intended, but he didn’t need another problem to add to his already mountainous pile.

  ‘Our Mithras-followers plan to initiate you into their number.’

  Valerius froze. Rufus was no follower of Mithras – his gods were the gods of Britannia, ethereal creatures of the land and the air around him – but of course he would know the men who were. He’d proved himself as brave as any man in the legion and the bull-slayer’s adepts recognized him as an equal. The pause gave Valerius time to reflect upon what was being offered. It was the greatest honour these men could do him. To become an adept of Mithras was to become part of a select brotherhood of warriors. Only the truly valorous who had proved their courage and risked death on the battlefield would be invited to go through the complex series of rituals and ordeals of the initiation ceremony. Even then, a single flinch would disqualify the initiate. To be asked was a testament of the Ninth’s finest soldiers’ trust in their legate. There was only one problem. He couldn’t accept.

  He turned to Rufus. ‘You must make it known that the invitation cannot be made,’ he told the scout. ‘Because it cannot be accepted.’

  Rufus looked stunned. ‘May I tell them why?’

  Valerius could have said that a legate could not be compromised by allying himself to a select handful of his men, or that the Emperor expected his generals’ first and only loyalty to be to him, but neither of those things would be true. ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘They must be satisfied with that.’

  Rufus hesitated a moment before giving a curt nod. As he left the tent Valerius heard him mutter: ‘I’d rather be caught crawling into a Caledonian camp than do this.’

  Why had he refused? A prudent officer fostered a good relationship with the Society of Mithras. His predecessor, Caristanius Fronto, had refused permission for the construction of a temple at Lindum dedicated to the bull-slayer. It had been part of the reason for the breakdown of his bond with his men. The rituals of the initiation ceremony were a secret defended by blood oath and curse, to be maintained on pain of death. Yet the ignorant would speculate and the jealous would deride or exaggerate. As time passed the truth became immersed in a fog of myth and legend, which suited the Mithras-followers just as well. But a man could not spend twenty years living among the toughest, bravest and best-disciplined soldiers in the Empire without learning something of the cult and its ceremonies.

  Valerius knew, for instance, courtesy of a man who’d spent a week in the valetudinarium dying of fever, of the pit where the initiate crouched as the highest-ranking adept cut the throat of a bull to saturate him in the animal’s blood. Half-heard gossip around a dozen different campfires told him that Shabolz, though a lowly trooper and a foreigner, was the Ninth’s highest-ranking Mithraist, a master of the cult’s deepest mysteries and probably the most respected man in the legion. And he knew of the moment in the ritual when the blindfolded, disorientated initiate, his mind reeling after two days without food and sleep, had a dagger placed in his hand, the point quivering with the movement of the flesh beneath, and was told, ‘A child lies beneath your blade; strike deep and quick.’

  In reality the child was no child, but a kid, its belly shaved to give the impression of human flesh, and the warm blood that spurted over the initiate’s fingers was goat’s blood. But that made no difference. The ritual required that the initiate believe he had killed a child to show his ruthless commitment to Mithras. Valerius had seen children die, on Mona and elsewhere. He’d heard his own men joke about exterminating vermin as they hunted them down and curse that they were harder to catch than the adults. But Gaius Valerius Verrens had never killed a
child. He could never kill a child in cold blood. Valerius paid as much attention to the gods as the next Roman. He made the libation to the kitchen god because it was expected of him. He left a coin at the crossroads during his wedding parade because that was the tradition. As a legate he had paid for sacrifices, but Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo had taught him to also pay for the correct outcome. A sensible man never dismissed or deprecated the gods, but neither did he depend upon their aid. A child lies beneath your blade; strike deep and quick. Valerius knew he would never obey that order even if he knew the flesh beneath his knife was destined for the pot. Not for any man. Not for a god.

  Not for Mithras.

  XV

  The six men sat against the walls of a barrack room close to the northern perimeter of the temporary fort at Brynmochdar. They were the legion’s best and they were of all ranks, but rank meant nothing here. From outside came the sounds of the fort being taken apart, but it had been arranged that this block would be the last to be demolished. For the moment they were silent, lost in their own thoughts. The only sound was the soft hiss of the sharpening stone Shabolz was working back and forth along the length of the gladius he held across his lap.

  This was a situation beyond their experience. They’d been certain Valerius would be unable to refuse the honour they sought to bestow upon him. Men had given up their lives to prove they were worthy of selection for the ordeals of Mithras.

  ‘We should unmake it,’ Honoratus, the legion’s eagle-bearer, said.

  Shabolz brought the blade up before his eyes and studied the bright iron, which had a peculiar blue sheen and took an edge like no other he’d ever known. It was a beautiful sword, the work of the legion’s most experienced armourer, and a masterpiece of his craft, created from three bars of the finest carbon-rich iron from the foundry. The blade shone in the lamplight, as long as a man’s arm from elbow to fingertip and with the triangular needle point that made something so beautiful astonishingly deadly. It had a hilt carved from antler, wrapped in soft leather held in place with gold wire for a more comfortable grip. The pommel was also gold, worked into the shape of a bull’s head. It was perfect. All it needed was the right man to wield it.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Shabolz conceded, continuing his study. To unmake it they’d bend the blade between two rocks, or, he mused, perhaps with this sword they’d somehow have to snap it. Then the two parts would be taken to a local shrine and either buried nearby or thrown into a pool to appease the gods. Mithras didn’t deal in trinkets like this. It would be a pity …

  One thing was certain. No other hand would wield it in battle.

  He shook his head. Fools that they were to have had the sword made before they were certain Gaius Valerius Verrens would accept their offer.

  ‘He should not have refused.’ The speaker was Clodius, a centurion of the elite First cohort, a man who had been inducted into the society after proving his courage with the Twentieth legion during Agricola’s first campaign against the Brigantes six years earlier. ‘It will bring even more misfortune on a legion already cursed with ill-luck.’

  ‘He didn’t refuse,’ Shabolz pointed out in his quiet voice. ‘He made it known the offer would not be accepted before it could be made. He has done nothing wrong. If anyone is to blame it is we for assuming he would wish to serve the god.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ the centurion persisted, ‘it is a slight, an insult both to the god and to us who follow him. And it shows an unexpected weakness in our commander.’

  ‘Not a weakness,’ another voice growled. Hilario, Shabolz’s fellow member of Valerius’s bodyguard, a huge man with a sullen brute’s face that disguised a sharp, if ponderous, intelligence. ‘A different kind of strength. If the legate felt unable to accept our offer then he had good reason for it.’

  Shabolz nodded agreement. ‘I feel no insult and I see no insult to the god. By letting it be known through Arafa that the offer should not be made he ensured that no offence could be taken.’

  ‘And the sword?’ Clodius demanded.

  Shabolz weighed the gladius in his hand. ‘I think we will keep it,’ he said, wrapping the blade and hilt in a piece of oiled leather that would protect it from damp and rust. ‘Who knows, perhaps we will find a use for it?’

  ‘No sign of them?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Gaius Rufus confirmed. ‘They’ll have scouts in the hills watching us, but their rearguard just melts away in front of us.’

  ‘I’d prefer it if the bastards fought.’ Valerius twitched his mount’s bridle and they walked their horses down the sloping path to the valley where the legion’s First cohort had halted to rest and replenish their water. Rain swept in chilled, misty waves from the north and every man except the scouts and the sentries huddled with their sodden cloaks over their heads. It had been like this for two days, progress frustratingly slow as the heavily laden ox wagons of the baggage train struggled through mud churned ankle deep by cavalry and infantry. Time was already against him. A mile lost today would contribute to an extra day’s march in the weeks ahead. Valerius had considered leaving his baggage train and forging ahead with the legion, but he knew that if winter came early their lives might depend on the timber carried by the carts. ‘They’ll never have a better opportunity. We’re strung out for miles and the baggage train wallows in the ooze like a drunken sow. Of course,’ he flicked beads of water from the brim of his helmet, ‘if they do, the cavalry will hunt them down and slaughter them before they can get into the hills.’

  ‘Calgacus knows that,’ Rufus grinned. ‘That’s why he won’t oblige you. Not until he reaches the hill fort.’

  ‘Why should he fight there and not here?’ Valerius wondered. ‘He saw what we did to the Brigantes at Brynmochdar. He must know that a few walls and ditches won’t stop us for long.’

  Rufus slid from his horse as they came to a bend in the river where floods had left a raised bank of sand. As Valerius joined him he cleared a wide area of debris and drew an elongated oval with his foot.

  ‘This isn’t Brynmochdar with its indefensible walls and scrapes of ditches.’ He picked up a piece of stick and drew three slashing strokes from south, east and west. ‘It doesn’t matter which direction you attack from, you’ll be faced with an ankle-breaking open slope that’ll sap your men’s strength while massive boulders thunder down to batter them to pulp. When the survivors reach the top they’ll have to fight their way through three lines of ditches filled with thorn bushes and stakes, cunningly positioned to allow the Celts to hurl spears into your ranks while you can’t reach them. By now your cohorts are broken up and bleeding, the final ditch is filled with your dead and dying and still you must scale a sheer rock face the height of three men with a defended palisade on top. Too high for your shield platform tricks. You’ll need ladders and plenty of them, but of course most of them will be lying broken on the slope and in the ditches. Calgacus knows he can’t stop you completely, but he can buy time. By now he’s wondering why you haven’t already gone into winter quarters. Every day you take to overcome the Fort of the Bronze Gates is a day closer to your being forced back south by the weather.’

  ‘I take it it’s called that for a reason.’

  ‘According to the locals it was previously named the Maw of Teutates because there was a superstition that anyone who entered uninvited was swallowed up by the god. More recently, Calgacus ordered his precious hoard of bronze be melted down and forged into plates to strengthen the gates.’

  ‘Still, a couple of centuries in testudo with a battering ram …’

  Rufus shook his head. ‘We once talked of a place called Maidun. Do you remember the gates?’

  ‘I remember them. Deep pits and false turns that led to nowhere but a cascade of flames or a volley of spears.’

  ‘Then you know what Calgacus has in wait for you.’

  Valerius pursed his lips. ‘Could we bypass it? Leave them to starve?’

  Rufus shrugged. ‘You would then have the choice of leaving half your force to k
eep the garrison caged inside or using the same number to secure the valleys and river crossings that would give them access to your supply lines.’

  ‘Then we attack.’ Valerius made his decision. ‘You say the northern slope is unclimbable?’

  ‘So sheer a child could protect that rampart.’

  ‘Then we attack from here, here and here.’ Valerius pointed to where Rufus had slashed the sand. ‘Two legionary cohorts and two of auxiliary infantry against each wall.’ His face twisted into a scowl as he imagined the bloody escalade. ‘That will leave four cohorts to exploit the breakthrough when it comes. We’ll take losses, perhaps heavy losses, but I see no other option. We have to get past the fort before the first snow. How long to get into position to attack, unseen by the garrison?’

  ‘Two days,’ Rufus said decisively. ‘But the Selgovae scouts …’

  ‘Every cavalry trooper who can sit a horse will scour the hills on either side of our advance. Two days. You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes, lord.’

  ‘Then we attack at dawn on the third. The gods willing we’ll be in winter quarters in another week.’

  ‘And Calgacus?’ Rufus touched the little charm at his neck.

  Valerius gave him a sour look. ‘Let us hope he decides to command the defence himself. It might cost us more men, but it would rid us of a permanent nuisance.’

  In the ghost hour before dawn Valerius stood with his command group and listened to the soft tramp of feet and the muffled jingle of metal as his legionary cohorts funnelled through the valley into their positions at the bottom of the ridge. Before them lay a steep climb of perhaps five hundred paces and he’d ordered their commanders to cover half that distance in the darkness at a silent crawl. Rufus had led them unerringly through the night, bypassing two palisaded defensive positions along the way.