Arthur Invictus

by Paul Bannister

  The losses were great on both sides, the emperor learned, frowning as he found that the garrison force from Nimes which had been first to encounter the Huns had been virtually annihilated as they were caught in line of march. The swift Hun cavalry had cut them to pieces before they could form proper ranks. The Alexandria legion, unwarned, had also blundered into the Huns and although it had inflicted heavy losses on the barbarians, had only been saved from total destruction by a sudden rainstorm that blinded both sides and allowed the Aegyptian troops to withdraw through boggy ground that frustrated the Hun horsemen. Now, it seemed that the opponents had retreated to lick their wounds. Neither force had reached Armorica’s sea mount capital and both sides had also lost the advantage of surprise for any attack on the place.

  “After this, Mons Tomba will be closed up tighter than a fish’s arse,” Maximian fumed. “We won’t be able to take the bolt hole from these federates now. And why did those clowns not co-join their forces before they met the Huns? Where did those Huns actually come from?” The aide, who had stayed tactfully silent, did not point out that his master had ordered the Nimes garrison to proceed at once and independent of the troops being shipped from Alexandria.

  Instead, he murmured that the Seventh Gemina, based in Iberia, in Leon, that is, lord, should be in place reasonably soon.

  “Get the tribunes in here,” Maximian ordered. “We have to move sooner than I wanted, before the Huns join these rebels.”

  By first light the next day, the legionaries were breaking camp. Their route was along the west bank of the Rhine on the fine military road that was their best frontier defence. They marched out of Mainz, heading south for Strasbourg, the eagles glinting in the sun’s first rays.

  Their nailed caligae marching boots crunched over the polygonal stones of black Eifel basalt as the legions covered their 40 miles daily, heading for Dijon, the town famous throughout the empire for mustardseed spices. The milestones ticked down the distances and commemorated Claudius, who remade or extended the highways, and who readied for his invasion of Britain by remaking the route from Cologne through Namur to the coastal citadel of Bononia.

  Over the swamplands of the Maas, the engineers had constructed the causeway and deep roadbed of the Via Mansuerisca that the troops called the Devil’s Causeway or the ‘Ironways’ for its black basalt surface, and the going was smooth and fast. Officers chided laggards that they were feeble women. The Tenth Legion, they reminded the men, had marched 1,000 miles from the Danube to the Narrow Sea under old Julius, and even the elephants and camels – used as surprise weapons – had tramped as far, all the way from Narbonne.

  Maximian considered elephants a less than perfect weapon that had often turned on their own troops, as the modus operandi was to enrage the beasts, then attempt to head it at the enemy lines. He had heard, he told his aide, that the elephant drivers carried a mallet and wood chisel. If the beast began inflicting damage on its own legionaries, he’d place the chisel between head and neck and kill the beast with one hard blow.

  “More elephants were killed by their own riders than ever were killed by the enemy,” he said.

  There were no exotic beasts on this campaign march, just plodding baggage animals and tired, weatherbeaten men. As the week slid by, the weather worsened. Unseasonable chills and heavy rain took a toll on the labouring infantrymen, each swaying along in step with his 80 lbs of kit and weaponry. The daily routine was about waking, breakfasting, breaking camp and being on the road soon after first light, to face nine hours of slogging marching under the stink of improperly cured leather.

  The men marched in rain with their shields held over their heads, and the elm or lime wood of the shields had to be protected with leather covers, or the watersoaked wood became unbearably heavy. In a constant downpour like the weather this week, even the leather failed to do its job, and marching was so miserable that even the post-meridian work of digging the ditches and latrines and knocking in the palisades for the overnight camp was a welcomed activity. It meant that soon hot food and blissful sleep would be the footsoldiers’ lot.

  Finally, the castrum of the crossroads fortress of Dijon came into view, and the weary Mules of Marius swayed through the great gates. Maximian was soon in conference with the garrison commander, the magister militum, whose scouts had been surveying the rebels’ camps.

  “They are a day’s march away, Caesar,” he said, “and they are holding a good defensible position in numbers.” Quickly, he sketched what Maximian mostly knew already, and the emperor made a swift decision.

  “Ready the men to move on at first light,” he ordered. “I want to be on these rebels before they know it.” So, in the darkness before dawn the next day, the grumbling, still-weary legionaires snatched a hasty breakfast of wheat pancakes, honey and cold pork, clattered into formation and were marching out through the west gate to find and confront the enemy.

  Chapter XXVI - Pressure

  And I knew that they were coming. Spies in the town had been well rewarded with silver, Guinevia had warned me that she saw much military activity in a crossroads town with a distinctive fortified castrum, and she had cast for auguries about the coming weeks. Meanwhile, I had not been idly waiting inside the hillfort.

  Our engineers and a corps of pioneers had been busy in the forest and in the two river valleys that defined the foot of the plateau. They had worked in the constant downpours, often knee or thigh-deep in mud, to prepare for the legions’ arrival, and I began to think there might be some small chance after all that we could hold off the enemy.

  “Our best hope is to exploit the Romans’ eagerness to close with us and crush us,” I told Grabelius, my cavalry commander. He looked drawn and weary and was limping even worse than I do, following a bad fall from a horse. I didn’t tell him that Guinevia’s god Ogmia, god of powerful words, had inspired my thinking.

  My small Druid had dreamed of her god’s direction, followed the sleep clues and found scrolls which detailed the Carthaginian Hannibal’s successful campaigns against the Romans centuries before.

  “Hannibal,” I said as if I had discovered this for myself, “used the Romans’ weaknesses against them. One, they were susceptible to cavalry,” Grabelius grimaced as he considered his own weakened force, “Two, they did not react well when the enemy advanced on them quickly; three, they were much less effective in difficult or heavily-covered terrain; they suffered their worst defeats from ambushes and lastly, their enemies benefitted from being able to retreat into forest land which not only concealed their movements but also made the Roman shield walls less effective.

  “The other thing she, er, I, found was that employing a wedge attack, which is their own tactic to break an enemy line, was highly effective against them, too.”

  My other tribune Quirinus had entered the chamber and heard the remarks.

  “We have had some success, lord,” he said, “with our attacks on their foraging parties.”

  “Excellent,” I said. Our scorched-earth plan must be working. The oncoming legions would be on skimpy rations since we had denuded the territory of grain and beasts - we had brought a great herd of cattle and sheep inside our hillfort, and our drovers had denied the invaders supplies by driving other beasts well out of range of the Roman forage parties.

  “Keep them under pressure, and we’ll add to that,” I said. “Grabelius, send out light cavalry to harass the legions as they march. I want them simmering with rage at us. Use your horse archers to pick off anyone you can. I want those legionaries to be as eager as possible to kill us.”

  The first part of the plan worked well. Maximian was splenetic at the best of times, but now he was infuriated by the constant harassment of arrows that whooshed from the trees, by the need for doubled and redoubled guards on their overnight camps, which even then did not prevent sentries from being found with their throats cut. Worse was the constant downpour that made even the smallest river crossing a tedious, even dangerous undertaking and turned tracks into su
cking wallows. These mudholes bogged down the supply carts and forced swearing artillery officers to leave behind the great siege engines, because they were too heavy to be moved through the mire. They would have to be brought along later, when more men and beasts were available and drier conditions applied. The frustrations meant that Maximian desperately wanted our blood, and soon.

  Spies and scouts reported that he could be seen driving himself and his men, riding his horse up and down the columns, urging, berating and demanding better of his mud-plastered men as they trudged through the slop and blinding rain.

  Mithras had not deserted me, for the Romans came to Alesia late on a chill, wet spring afternoon. The legionnaires were soaked, cold, tired and hungry, their equipment was mud-clogged and weighty. The leather covers of their elmwood shields had not withstood two weeks’ driving rain and the waterlogged scutae themselves were brutally heavy to hold high for protection. Even the archers, who stored their bowstrings under their helmets to keep them dry, did not pose their usual threat, as their soaked clothing chilled and slowed their reflexes and their numbed fingers made the release inexact.

  I sent out six centuries of men, a whole cohort, to sting the oncoming enemy with javelins and arrows, hoping to goad them into hasty action, then I looked again at our preparations.

  Our excellent defensive position at Alesia was on top of a long, narrow plateau shaped like the upturned hull of a longship. It was separated from similar, slightly lower uplands on the northeast and southwest by two steep river valleys. The ancients had seen its potential and over the centuries strong stone walls had been raised along the crest, the slopes groomed clear of vegetation, defensive gates and lower walls established, wells dug, a moat established and man traps laid in front of encircling ditches. Inside the summit wall were paddocks and byres for beasts, barracks and tent lines for humans and a collection of stores and buildings that housed everything from a forge to an armoury. It would require a long siege or a brutally bloody frontal attack to capture this fortress, but I was not readying to sit and wait out either.

  Our conclave of chieftains had discussed the steep and wooded slopes of the uplands that paralleled our rocky plateau’s flanks, slopes that ran down to the two small rivers which coursed around the long sides of the plateau and which had been joined, top and tail, to create a moat around the whole hill. Our pioneers had been working inside the treeline of those slopes, and they had also been working upstream, on one of the twin rivers where it flowed fast out of a small gorge.

  My thoughts were interrupted as the first of our cohort began to stream back down the northern valley. They struggled through the river and climbed the steep tracks through the palisades and gates to the fortress. Behind them, their comrades fought a rearguard action against the oncoming Romans, the last of them falling to the Roman archers as they crossed the river.

  The valley was filling fast with the enemy, who waded the river and began to form up on the narrow watermeadows under the flank of our hillfort. That was when the Franks released the first bombardment.

  Our pioneers had created wooden dams just below our first line of defences to hold large boulders quarried from the living rock of the plateau. At the command of a Frankish chieftain, the ropes that restrained the timber dams were cut, and an avalanche poured down on the unfortunates below, crippling many, killing some and forming another obstacle to those who were crossing the river.

  The legionnaires were pouring into the valley now, bloodlust up, but not so enraged that they wanted to risk our side of the river. They crowded the boggy watermeadows on the opposite side, in considerable disarray.

  “Auxiliaries, it seems to me,” said Quirinus disparagingly. We could see the crested helmets and red cloaks of officers who were attempting to create some order.

  Then more of our pioneers’ work was revealed: another set of avalanches poured down from the forested slopes behind the arriving troops. This time, the valley was truly a killing field. The bouncing, hurtling rocks smashed through the mob of soldiers, crushing, killing and causing panic that went on for long minutes as our task force high above them slashed the fibre ropes that held back the deadly rock piles. Some officers mustered units of men to climb into the deadly hail to combat the Franks above them who were releasing the missiles, but the slopes were too steep and long for them to capture or kill the attackers before the last avalanches had roared down, and the Franks slipped away.

  It took an hour and darkness was descending as the hungry, dispirited legionaries withdrew from the valley, taking their dead and wounded to safety away from the slopes under our fortress. Maximian’s commanders set up their marching camp upriver and the weary soldiers trudged back upstream to begin the work of digging ditches and erecting the palisade.

  As they did, the Celtic cavalry swept down on them from the forest where they too had been concealed. Bone-tired, half-frozen and half-starved, the softened border garrison auxiliaries of the Eighth Augusta were no match for the ferocious Celts, never formed ranks and were slaughtered in the ambush.

  It was full dark when the Celts scrambled their ponies up the hillfort track and trotted them to the cavalry lines on the plateau. I saw Davric, bloodied to the elbow, grinning widely in the firelight as he waved three new trophy heads.

  “Rode them under, Arthur!” he yelled. “We took no prisoners.” It was a good day.

  The next day, with rain still pounding down, our scouts saw that the Romans had discovered one of my secret weapons. I had ordered the larger of the nameless rivers that ringed the foot of our fortress dammed higher upstream, intending to release the flood when the Romans were attacking across it. They had killed our guard detachment, taken the dam, added to its height and put their own strong guard over it. Now the river flow was lessened, making it easier for them to cross downstream, although the constant rain did keep the flow quite rapid.

  The scouts also reported that Roman foraging patrols were having to go very far afield, but even so, were returning with little to show for it. The supply noose around Maximian’s neck was tightening. I ordered the last of our British regular cavalry out of the hillfort, to harass and intercept any supply column from the east. I also sent couriers to the Huns, who were far to the west, asking Busfeld and his fellow khans to come to face the Romans. It seemed obvious that Maximian and his starving troops could not settle for a long siege and would try to storm our fortress.

  I also ordered the cohorts’ quartermasters to break out as many dry tents and cloaks as they could, to replace our troops’ soaked ones, and approved quadrupling the amount of fuel we could use on warming fires. Additionally, the cooks were to slaughter and roast cattle, both to feed our men and keep them warm and, when the wind was right, to torment the starving Romans below us with the delicious scent of roasting meat.

  The Christians gave us their blessing and vows of unity before they left on a special mission. They held a vast religious ceremony to which they invited us all, pagans and believers alike. They gave us wine, which they assured us was god-blood, and we broke bread with them before we had another feast of roasted meats. In that torrential, unending rain, I wanted my men’s bellies to be full and their strength to be at its best. I also ordered an issue of olive oil and sheep’s wool lanolin to proof and lubricate the leather we wore under our armour and to keep our blade edges rust-free.

  By the fourth day, the Romans had established their marching camp straddling one of the twin rivers, not ideal, but the choice of level ground within range of our hillfort was extremely limited. Spies reported near-mutinous conditions among the miserable, fatigued, cold and hungry legionaries, who were agitating to march back east to an established castrum where they could regroup and obtain food and shelter.

  “Time for some shipyard magic to encourage them to go,” said Damonius, a battle-scarred centurion who had singlehandedly killed three Sarmatians at the battle for Londinium. The big man had developed an expertise in the use of a weapon called Byzantine Fire that Myrddin h
ad discovered.

  From fellow magi, the sorcerer had obtained the secret of combining rock oil with pitch, resin, the dangerous liquid called naptha, which caught fire so easily, quicklime, sulphur, saltpeter and nitre. This mix, heated and liquefied, could be pumped from pressurized siphons and, once ignited, was almost impossible to extinguish. It would burn even when floating on water.

  Damonius and his men, uncomfortable but protected inside an armour of talc and vinegar-soaked leather, had spread this war fire in devastating style across Maximian’s shipyard on the Scheldt, floating it in on the current, and spraying half-built vessels with the incendiary. Now, he wanted to do the same again.

  “The fools have camped on both sides of that small river,” he pointed out. “I could float tongues of flame down among their tent lines. Even if we don’t burn many of them, it will keep them awake all night.” Just that wakefulness would be useful, I felt. By all accounts the legionaries were fraying badly from the effects of the chilling rain, starvation and lack of rest. Damonius got his orders, and slipped away from the hillfort with a unit of soldiers and some carefully-muffled containers and hand pumps. He headed upstream of the enemy camp.

  That night, just before the sentries changed at the sixth hour, the river that flowed through the Roman tent lines burst into flame. Part of the palisade atop the rampart burned, too, but the main damage was to the legionaries’ sleep. They had very little that night. While their camp was lit up by the burning river, our archers stepped out of the forest two bowshots away, moved silently closer, and from the surrounding darkness poured volley after volley into the kicked-over beehive of frenzied activity that was the Roman camp. Every little, I felt, helped.

  Chapter XXVII - Bloodtide

  Maximian did not wait. Our needling jabs and thrusts and the pressure of his dwindling supplies had irritated the emperor beyond his limit and he threw his forces at my hillfort to seek a swift resolution. In Rome, Milan and Nicomedia, few would question the butcher’s bill, but all would query a defeat. The emperor had little choice. He could hardly march away because his men were weakened and starving, but he could throw his hungry wolves at the sheepfold, and he did. I was standing with Bishop Candless watching the long line of legionaries as they wound along the steep valley towards the foot of our stronghold.