Arthur Invictus

by Paul Bannister

  We moved through the rolling, forested hills without hindrance, and we avoided going close to any major settlements. I had no desire to alert the Romans to our presence, reasoning that they would expect us to have slipped away from Gaul and back to Britain after the shipyard raid. Several days’ cautious travel, always keeping the Meuse river at our right hand, brought us to the citadel of Vallis, an ancient stronghold on one of the highest points of the region.

  The Romans had once occupied it, but had moved to their Germania Inferior capital on the Rhine at Colonia and the place was now the citadel of the Belgic king Stelamann. He was a tall individual made even taller by the way he, like his warriors, used white lime to make his hair into a ferocious spiked mane. He sported a long, drooping moustache and his face and bare chest were covered in circular, flowing tattoos. At his belt, he invariably carried a long leaf-shaped dagger, and he wore tartan trews over soft leather riding boots, for he was a fine horseman.

  Stelamann greeted me with suspicion, but his attitude softened after an exchange of compliments and mutual admiration of each other’s swords, for his sword rivalled my Exalter as a graceful example of craftsmanship. The Celts, I knew, had made their weaponry some of the best in the world.

  Stelamann was a vassal king of the Romans, but seemed open to other suggestions, and after I had described our destruction of Maximian’s shipyard, was eager to see a demonstration of Byzantine Fire. Although we had abandoned the stirrup pumps, we had some of the mix with us, and demonstrated it by hurling a pot full from the battlements, which excited the king considerably. He made me promise to give him the formula, and his queen Martha, a literate Morini from the region around my lost stronghold of Bononia, was able to write down what parts of the mix I could recall.

  It interested me to see that for all the finely-made swords of his nobles, the ordinary soldiers were armed only with a spear and dagger, and had very little in the way of armour, although they did have shields for defensive purposes. King Stelamann shrugged away my questions about armour. His smiths, he said, had developed good chain mail, but his warriors preferred to fight “like men,” which appeared to be bare-chested or even naked, covered in blue woad and screaming intimidating war cries.

  I deduced that they relied for success on their ferocity and some excellent light cavalry, and when I questioned the king about catapults, siege engines or siege towers, he shrugged again. His warriors disdained sieges and would storm anything head-on, he boasted.

  Cautiously, I approached the idea of action against the Romans. I told him how I had defeated the Roman fleet, and twice now had burned Maximian’s invasion barges. I recounted the epic battle on the shingle of Dungeness, and his eyes sparkled at the description of our use of war chariots, for they were a famous Celtic battle weapon in ages past.

  Those chariots in our blood-soaked clash on the Cantian shingle drove the enemy away for several years, and I had executed the Caesar who led the legions, I told the king, but Maximian had invaded again. Although we destroyed two of their fleets, some legions got ashore, and the Romans had driven us back to Londinium and destroyed my capital. The king nodded. He knew the power of the legions. He also appreciated how lucky I had been to escape them alive, as they had been recalled from the siege in which I had been trapped.

  Sometimes, I said wryly, it is better to be lucky than good. Again the king nodded. The old pagan had not kept his throne without luck, and he appreciated that the gods favoured some people more than others. So, when I broached the subject of allying my forces with his and those of other Belgic or Gallic rulers, he did not flinch. He wanted to know specifics of numbers, weapons, gold, timings. I told him frankly that my own forces at present would not be enough, but I was planning to raise a second, Christian army to swell our ranks.

  “We have the weapons and an elite corps of trained men. We need more numbers, and the Christians can give us those. They have already had some training, but elected not to fight when they found we were not battling the Romans who threatened their religion,” I explained. “Now, I believe we can rally them in enough numbers to come here and help you throw off the Romans, especially as they are so busily engaged with the Alemanni and others across the Rhine.”

  King Stelamann nodded. “You would profit from our shed blood,” he said. “If together we defeated the emperor Maximian, you could then retreat to your island and let us face him alone when he has recovered.”

  “This I would not do,” I said, and I used the icon I knew would convince him. I took from the leather pouch where I kept it the great silver and amber brooch of a British jarl. “This you will know is my kingly crown,” I told him. “I am a lord of the British in my own right as well as an emperor by conquest. My word as your cousin is that I will always support you. If Maximian ever defeats you, he will next come to defeat me, too. We cannot let the legions battle us one by one, we must all face them, united. We must hang together or we certainly will hang separately.”

  The king chewed at the end of his moustache. “I need to hear what are the auguries,” he said abruptly. “Get my seer to me.” Shortly, a small flaxen-haired woman in a scholar’s grey gown walked into the chamber. Incongruously, she was carrying a half-full wineskin.

  “I am Danutaryl,” she said, inclining her head to me. She looked curiously at my jarl’s badge of office. “I was born near the trade route, the Amber Road, where that stone is carried from the northern seas to Italia,” she said. “I have seen much amber, and that specimen is a king’s ornament.”

  She turned to Stelamann, almost insolently casual to her king. “You want auguries, I suppose?” He grunted, but she continued before he could respond. “I heard a raven croaking as I came here. It was on my right. This is a good omen, and last night, I dreamed of Hermes, another, very good omen. Did you, king, dream of anything?”

  He shuffled as he sat. “I did,” he said. “I dreamed that I hunted a gazelle and a hare, but they were too swift. My hunt failed.”

  The seer shook her head. “No failure, king,” she declared. “The gazelle is symbol of a journey. If it is weak or feeble, the way forward will be a hard one. If the gazelle is strong and swift, so will the future be easy. The hare is a mystic symbol of Luna the moon and is good fortune. These are good auguries. Do you have something significant in the near future?”

  The king looked at me. “I am going to Armorica,” I said. “It will be an important journey for us both.”

  “And it will be a successful mission,” the seer said firmly. She turned to Stelamann. “King, you have your answer. The gods are with you, and as Hermes is the gods’ own messenger, the emissary of transitions, I think your endeavours are well blessed.” She smiled, gestured with her wineskin and walked calmly out of the chamber. I looked at the king and we nodded to each other, in satisfaction.

  That night, we feasted on wild boar in King Stelamann’s hall, whose roof timbers I noted were decorated with the pitch-covered heads of his enemies. We had a pact. Now we had to recruit more Celts, Belgae, Franks and Gauls and we could push the Romans back to their own lands. We needed the Christians, too, I thought gloomily. Lots of them.

  A few days later, I sent Grimr and half our force back to the coast to retrieve our sunken, hidden ship and return to Britain. I would take the other half of our company with me on a river voyage across Gaul to Armorica. That is the land of the Veneti and Pictones, a coastal land in western and northern Gaul. The kingdom is large, and includes the southerly Aquitania, so the whole monarchy extends from the shores of the Narrow Sea right down the western coast of Gaul to the mountains that separate it from Hispania. I know its coastal regions especially well, as it had been territory scoured by the Bagaudae pirates and bandits I had once suppressed for Rome.

  Now I was going there to raise an army of those same bandits to battle their Italian masters. The Fates who spin the threads that create the weft and warp of our lives must have chortled at how things had changed for me.

  Before I left, I h
ad encouraging news. Stelamann had sent out his tabellari messengers to his fellow monarchs, outlining our proposed alliance and calling for a convocation. Now a tabellarius had arrived, bringing word that another potential ally was already at the Seine river in Gaul.

  A powerful Hun warlord khan called Busfeld had separated from his Ostrogoth allies with whom, in an uneasy alliance he had forced crossings of both the Volga and the Don in the eastern reaches of Germania. The other tribes were aiming for the riches of Milan and Cisalpine Gaul, but the Huns opted to go north for Celtica, and had crossed the river barriers of the Rhine, Moselle, Meuse and now, the Seine, where they were possibly preparing winter quarters, and for now at least, halting their advance west.

  Rivers that defeated other armies were never an obstacle to the Huns. Every warrior carried inflatable skins on which he could float, or would swim his horse across even the greatest width of water. If it was a whole horde of nomads, not just fighting men, they simply built rafts to carry their wagons or heavy equipment across a water barrier and continued their unstoppable progress.

  Now, the rumour was that Khan Busfeld was planning to sweep south across the Pyrenees into Iberia next spring. This, for me, was a wonderful opportunity. The Caesars would be torn. The Romans were attempting to suppress barbarians on the Rhine and Danube and now, in their rear Milan, the city in which Maximian himself maintained his chief palace was under threat from the Ostrogoths. I knew I should hasten to find Busfeld and bring him into our unlikely alliance so we could meet the emperor with only part of his forces, on Gallic soil.

  Chapter XII - Huns

  Our journey across Gaul was as the augur had predicted, swift and smooth. This was because we covered much of the distance on the vast rivers of that territory. We used the Meuse until it closed on the Marne, portaged our two galleys on commandeered farm wagons, then sailed the Marne right down to the Seine.

  We saw the smoke from the cookfires of Busfeld’s army from 15 miles away, so many were there of the Huns, and after sending an emissary ahead to announce our intentions and identity, we made our approach openly, in full daylight. Busfeld responded by dispatching a party of horsemen to escort us into the camp, a directive conveyed to me in crude Latin by the cavalry commander.

  I eyed the escort curiously. They were short, stocky Asiatics, swarthy and with thin beards. They had small eyes, flat noses and savage, weathered faces. Huns practised cranial deformation, shaping their skulls with flat boards to elongate their heads and inspire fear, and most of our cavalry guides had such misshapen skulls. Many of them also carried multiple scars on their faces. I later learned that they slashed their own flesh when mourning a dead leader or comrade, to weep blood instead of salt tears.

  The horsemen’s equipment was unimpressive. They wore pointed caps, baggy leggings made from goat or deerskin and tunics of linen or rodent pelts. Much of their clothing seemed to be disintegrating and looked to be held together only by the embroidery and small coloured stone beads that adorned it. In cold weather, they wore felt or fur great coats, and often smeared their faces thickly with animal fat as protection from the cold or wet.

  For weapons, they carried reflex compound bows made of wood, bone and sinew that were almost as tall as they and that could kill at 200 paces or more. I noted that some of their arrowheads were not metal, but were shaped from animal bone or horn. The warriors all wore a large curved dagger horizontally across the belly, and carried an iron sword, long, straight and double-edged, hung vertically from the belt.

  Elite soldiers ornamented their sword hilts and bow staves with gold, and adorned their horse trappings lavishly. I saw that they all rode with careless ease, had full-foot leather-covered wooden stirrups, which gave them a steady platform from which to fight or fire their arrows and were so much in tune with their steeds that I wondered if they were the real half-horse, half-man centaurs of legend.

  Their horses, bred for endurance, were hairy little mounts with wide hooves and long heads, bushy tails and extravagant manes. They could live on the thinnest forage, and were trained to slash with their hooves or bite with their big yellow teeth, on command.

  In battle, the Huns wore metal-framed conical leather helmets with a forepeak and several layers of body armour of hard leather that was reinforced with sewn-on bone plaques. They used short lances and also carried lassos with which they could rope an enemy out of his ranks and drag him helpless to be slaughtered.

  The horsemen escorted us through penned herds of cattle, sheep and goats, past endless horse lines of small, neat-footed ponies and through their sprawling, stinking camp to a curious large round tent made from skins. There was no guard at the entrance, I noted.

  Inside was Khan Busfeld, seated and eating something greasy from a small cauldron. He was dressed like his men, in baggy deerhide leggings, leather jerkin and soft horseman’s boots too fragile for marching. He sported a thin beard that failed to cover his facial scars and wore a nondescript pointed felt cap above his shoulder-length hair. His status showed only when you noticed the impressively large garnet and gold armband above his elbow and the elaborately-gilded Scythian bow slung over his chair. He nodded to me, grunting, and I saw his eyes flicker appraisingly over my segmentata armour and other war trappings and take in my height as I towered over his stocky, short-statured men.

  He himself was an impressive size and we looked at each other eye to eye when he stood. He gestured hospitably to the pot of food. “Mutton with mint,” he said in passable Latin. “Excellent stew. Lord Imperator Arthur of Britain, you must try some.”

  I refused the meat, but accepted the hospitality. Our parley did not take long, and was devoid of the finer points of diplomacy. We consumed two skins of wine, and we understood each other. I told him of my battles with the Romans; he told me of a great Hunnic victory over them at a place called Hadrianapolis.

  The Roman general there had miscalculated the strength of the Goth cavalry, part of whom were away foraging, had marched his men for seven hours to confront the enemy, and had attacked precipitately. The assault foundered and broke on the Huns’ defensive wagon circle and the barbarian cavalry archers, returning, routed the exhausted Romans.

  Some 15,000 Romans were killed or captured, including Maximian’s own imperial guard, and the barbarians’ way lay open to Illyrica and Cisalpine Gaul. Busfeld detached his Huns from the Ostrogoth and Vandal horde he mistrusted and moved further north, aiming for the rich pickings of Gallia Comata, the ‘Long-haired Gaul’ of the Belgic low countries, Armorica and Aquitania.

  I met Busfeld with his horde of Huns and Burgundians alongside the wide Seine river just before he moved west to lay siege to the rich city of Aureleanum. We talked of an alliance with the Franks, Gauls, and others against the Romans and he wondered aloud what tribute I would be paying him. That made me bristle, then laugh aloud.

  “You have no room left in your overloaded plunder train for a few ingots of British gold,” I told him, “but in friendship, I will give you a fine horse and two couples of the best hunting dogs.”

  Busfeld stared at me coldly and it took a deliberate effort to restrain my hand from reaching for Exalter’s hilt. Then he laughed, grabbed me by the shoulders and said: ”British hunting dogs, only British ones!”

  I made a mental note to send a messenger to my contact in Britain, Sucia Silvestria, who bred the world’s best hounds, to ship some to Gaul. Quite how she’d get them to a Hun warlord busy devastating the country, I did not know, and the same went for shipping a Frisian stallion to him from those northern islands. Sometimes, the details of a pact can be difficult. I learned later that Khan Busfeld never got the animals. Before he could receive them, he died of a nosebleed. Ironically it was on his wedding night.

  That was in the future. Two days after sharing wine with him, I was leading my small troop, mounted on horses that were a parting gift from the khan. We were trotting west across Gaul and into Armorica.

  Chapter XIII - Emiculea

  Queen
Emiculea Reatina, ruler of the Kingdom by the Sea, received us in her airy palace of Mons Tumba, a dazzling structure atop a sea mount surrounded by wide tidal flats. “I dreamed that you were coming,” she said simply. “The Druid Guinevia came to me as I slept, to tell me.”

  I started at the mention of my lover’s name. “How is she? And our son?”

  Emiculea gestured. “Arthur, I do not know. She seemed strained. She wanted to tell me of your approach. I sense that she wanted to send you a message, as I would have been warned of your arrival anyway.”

  Obvious enough, I felt, as the only way to her citadel that was capital of Armorica and the adjoining land of Aquitania, too, was across a sea-washed causeway that was under surging tides half the time. Her kingdom was ancient, vast and wealthy and had close connection with Britain through Celtic heritage, trade and language. In fact, I had a fair claim to the queen’s throne through my father’s jarldom and as Imperator of Britain, but she viewed me with a calm that told me she knew I had not come to pursue that ambition. I asked her for discretion, and she assured me there were no loose tongues in her citadel, no spying eyes to bring down the Romans on me, and on her people.

  The widowed queen, slight and dark, had held her position since her husband’s death not just as incumbent ruler of the Veneti, Pictones and Osismi who populated the rocky western lands, but as a powerful Christian monarch who had encouraged a group of hermits, followers of the teachings of Benedict of Nursia, to establish a monastery on her island capital.

  This public display of Christianity had garnered her huge support from one of the continent’s largest populations of Jesus followers, and I hoped to recruit them for my campaign against the Romans who persecuted their faith. I told her of my devout Bishop Candless, who even now was taking the gospel of holy war around Britain’s Christian temples - she frowned and I hastily corrected myself. “Churches,” I said.