The Great Revolt

by S. J. A. Turney

  The Gaulish army had lost in that instant.

  The force that had been pushing to cross the north rampart of Mons Rea disintegrated, fleeing wherever they could. It took a matter of heartbeats for word of the cavalry onslaught to reach those in the thick of it. The men outside the camp on the periphery of the battle turned and fled, heedless of the dangers all around them, desperate to be away from the scene and making for the reserve camp on the hill.

  The Germans were enjoying themselves, and every scene of their enjoyment threatened to make Varus’ gorge rise. Gulping in a bloody breath, the commander fought the urge to vomit and tried to move out to the open, away from the carnage and the charnel mess. Sigeric was in the way. The Roman officer couldn’t even see the rest of his cavalry, though he was sure they were now committed, adding to the destruction. He tried to push his way past Sigeric, trying not to notice what the big man was doing to a shrieking Gaul.

  A thrumming noise almost escaped his attention and he didn’t know whether to shout his thanks or simply throw up as Sigeric held out part of a Gaul and used it as a shield to stop the arrow that had been hurtling at Varus, the missile thudding into the meat with an unpleasant noise.

  Varus rode away from the slaughter, his face white as a fresh toga.

  * * * * *

  Molacos the huntsman lowered his bow. Another Roman officer he’d almost had, but the huge brute accompanying the man had stopped the arrow. The Cadurci hunter had dithered for half a heartbeat, wondering whether to try again, but what had been a raging battle was now turning into a slaughter. He was a hunter - a man of skill and finesse - not a meat-sack warrior. Thick battle was not his forte. He would have left the fight even were his people winning, but that was clearly no longer the case. The day was all but lost as the sun’s lowest arc touched the western hill. Time to find Lucterius. Molacos had managed to break out of Alesia, cross the inner wall at that broken gate, and slip through the northern rampart once the line had collapsed and the fighting had spread everywhere. Now he was free.

  Ignoring the fighting going on around him, he slipped the Roman bow he’d picked up from a supply spot in the camp over his shoulder and instead drew his knife. He turned to head into the sunset, only to find a dismounted Roman cavalryman, shieldless and out of breath, in front of him. The Roman looked as surprised at the sudden meeting as he, and Molacos raised his knife even as the Roman brought his sword round to bear. The hunter was faster and much more accurate, though, his knife hitting the roman in the chin, the point jabbing up and through the mouth, into the brain and killing him.

  But the cavalryman’s blow had begun and death would not slow the momentum.

  The Roman sword smashed across Molacos’ face, sending him blind with blood and a shockwave of agony through his head. Desperate suddenly to be away from this nightmare, Molacos staggered, his face burning, blinking and hoping not to die.

  Gradually, as he moved into the growing shadows away from the melee, the blood slick cleared from his eyes and he could see a little. Only one eye seemed to be working properly, and his left hand side was a vague pink-grey blur of liquid. His hand probed his face as he moved and he realised quickly that it was ruined. He’d never been pretty, and he knew that, but he recognised with equal certainty that he had been made hideous this day.

  Cursing the world, and war, and Rome - mostly Rome - Molacos staggered off into the evening, searching for his master.

  * * * * *

  Cavarinos blinked.

  His world hurt. His head felt as though horses had ridden across it.

  Where was he?

  He tried to rise, but his body appeared not to be working. His limbs felt like lead. It took him a long moment of realisation to figure out that he was beneath something. Several somethings, in fact.

  He was at the bottom of a pile of bodies.

  His head truly hurt, and he could feel the sharp pains of innumerable cuts and minor wounds across his body as he tried to free himself from the pile. An image struck him. A big, dark-skinned fist with knuckles like ox-shoulders coming for him. Fronto’s man. Memory flooded into him along with the endless pains. He knew he should feel angry, or glad, or indignant, or vengeful, or at least something. All he felt was tired.

  After what felt like an hour of heaving and pushing, accompanied by the snapping of already-dead bones, Cavarinos extricated himself from the pile to discover that the sun had set. The inky purple of evening was cast above him, and the sounds of battle had gone.

  It was over. How had they fared?

  With difficulty - and apparently an arrow in the calf, which burned like crazy - Cavarinos hauled himself upright. A few tired-looking Romans lined the walls nearby, which answered his question eloquently.

  That was it, then. He knew as well as anyone that the besieged army didn’t have another fight left in them. The battle was over. The war was over. His eyes scanned the land around him and he had to blink away the pain as his leg almost gave under him. Lights were winking into existence up at the oppidum. Some of the army had escaped there then, so that would be his destination. To starve or surrender or just charge to his doom with the rest of them as whoever now led the rebels decided.

  The arrow had only cut through his flesh, scraping bone but leaving the muscle intact, and he found he could walk with a small amount of pain and difficulty. He reached down and snapped the shaft, drawing it out with a whimper of pain and then binding his leg with a dirty rag torn from one of the numerous bodies in the gateway. The Romans weren’t watching him here. How would he flee? His hand reached up and he found the somehow comforting shape of Fortuna still at his neck. He gripped it tight as he stepped out from the bodies and limped and staggered through the gate, having to use the timbers to support himself.

  Then he was out into the evening and the open grass, strewn with hundreds and hundreds of his countrymen. It was a soul-destroying sight. So much Gallic life spent on this one day in pursuit of a dream that had now evaporated as the tribes woke from their blissful fantasies to find the Roman boot on their throat with more weight than ever.

  Over. He turned to look at the Romans on the wall. The artillery was unmanned. None of the few soldiers seemed to have a bow or pilum. They mostly leaned on the fence as though they had survived a trip through Hades, which perhaps they had.

  And so, seemingly, had he. He heard one of the Romans call to another, and they were pointing at him. Cavarinos turned his back on them. If he was going to die, watching it coming would make no difference. But no pilum came, nor arrow, nor bullet as he staggered painfully back across the ground and up the slope to the oppidum and to the last night of the rebellion, as he saw it.

  Tonight, the war was over.

  Perhaps tomorrow the peace could begin?

  * * * * *

  Fronto stood with half a dozen fellow officers, his singulares - both intact and wounded - gathered around him. Everyone looked equally exhausted. He had gone back to the gate as soon as the fighting was completely done and he’d had the leisure to do so, but could find no sign of Cavarinos. That might be a good sign, but there were enough unrecognisable bodies - and body parts - that he couldn’t be sure.

  And now Antonius was passing around the wine that he could only have had on him, somewhere at his belt, even during the nightmare of the fight at the northern wall. Every man drank deep, and some poor soldier that Antonius had grabbed as he passed was even now hunting all the camp’s supplies for more.

  ‘Tonight, my friends, I intend to get drunk,’ Caesar’s second grinned.

  ‘That’ll be a feat. Two years now of downing your own bodyweight in wine and I’ve never seen you manage to get properly bollocksed yet!’

  Antonius laughed lightly. ‘I save the silly stuff for the girls, Fronto. Men drink like men.’

  The officers fell silent as they watched a small party approach in the gloom of the evening, their features only coming clear as they passed into the torchlight. Labienus, still caked in gore, was accompany
ing a party of legionaries as they hauled some Gallic noble, his arms bound behind his back and a horizontal pole beneath his arms keeping him upright.

  ‘Looks important,’ Fronto noted.

  Labienus nodded. ‘Vergasillaunus, apparently. The rebel king’s cousin who led the attack on the north wall. Caesar will want to meet him, I’m sure.’

  ‘We didn’t get the king, then?’

  ‘They say he got away back up to Alesia. Varus and his men have pursued the relief army back up to their hill, but gave off the chase at the bottom of the slope where the treeline stopped them. Not much chance of them managing something like that again, though.’

  No, Fronto thought with a sigh of relief.

  My last battle…

  Chapter 25

  Lucterius staggered between the scrub bushes in the last purple glow of evening, his horse long gone - dead on the field from a Roman spear point. Like so many of the relief force’s cavalry, he had ended up fleeing the fight in the chaos that had ensued following the rout at Mons Rea, though most of the rest had still been mounted. The news of the disaster had come through quickly to the attack on the plain, though in truth the situation had already been obvious, since the debacle could be seen easily enough from the flat lands.

  Vergasillaunus’ force had been on the cusp of completely overrunning the Roman camp when they had been hit from behind by a cavalry force that had changed the entire fight. For a while, he had not understood how a single cavalry unit - no matter how large - could have changed things so quickly and thoroughly, but someone had mentioned the Germans, and Lucterius had remembered that horrendous force with a shudder. He’d pictured the head-takers ploughing into the rear ranks of the Gallic force and the reason for the rout had immediately become clear.

  Still, he’d hoped that Vergasillaunus had enough control and influence to pull victory from the jaws of defeat. After the shock of the attack had died down the Gallic leader should have been able to rally his men - Lucterius had tried the same on the plains - but it seemed that Vergasillaunus had gone and no one else had the strength of character to pull things together. Without that man leading the reserve army, control had devolved to each tribe’s commander and none had the seniority to lead the others. So inevitably the rout had become flight and death and chaos. And because the Mons Rea collapse could not be halted, Lucterius could not persuade the commanders in his own force to hold and keep fighting.

  The entire battle stuttered to a halt and became a chaotic debacle on all three fronts, the failure of the critical Mons Rea attack leading to the collapse of the others. As Lucterius’ own troops fled the field, he’d seen across the Roman defences and noticed the first of the Oppidum’s force fleeing back up the slope to Alesia. No hope of success remained. Despite the fact that the Gallic forces still outnumbered the Romans, and had better access to supplies, the battle was lost.

  The Romans had been relentless. A larger force of cavalry from inside the camp had joined up with that Germanic surprise attack and between them the entire Roman mounted contingent had harried the Gallic reserve from the field, killing hundreds as they fled. Many of Lucterius’ force escaped to the relief camp before the Romans reached them, but the Cadurci leader himself was among the last, attempting to rally a lost cause, and the Romans had caught him in the open with a few of his best men. He’d lost his horse and the enemy had presumed him dead in the press. He’d had to wait until the Romans had pulled back to their fortifications before rising and dragging himself from the plains and back across the miles to the relief force’s camp on foot.

  With a defeated sigh, he began the long climb up the slope, struggling to make out his path in the inky darkness. All was not lost. He would rally the leaders of the reserve army. They might be reluctant still - now more so than ever - but the fact remained that they outnumbered the Romans in total, were still in a better situation for provisions, and they had so nearly won the day. One more fight. The Romans couldn’t take that punishment again, and he knew it. They’d emptied their camps to fight that battle and they couldn’t do it again. They didn’t have the men, the supplies, the defences or the heart any more. One more fight and the tribes could still win it.

  Lucterius’ bowels almost gave way as something landed on his shoulder suddenly. He turned, his hand reaching for the sword that wasn’t there, lost somewhere out on the plain. The thing behind him was a creature from nightmare and his heart thundered icy blood round his body. One white eye stared out of a face like chopped meat, the other orb pink and bulging. The mouth was a slanted grinning maw of…

  With cold shock he realised that the mouth was not ruined. It had always looked like that, even before… this… had happened to the rest of the face.

  ‘Molacos?’

  ‘My king.’ The hunter’s voice came out as a hoarse, metallic rasp, like a saw trying to cut through iron, which send a shudder up Lucterius’ spine. What had happened to the man’s face?

  ‘Have we lost?’ Lucterius asked in little more than a whisper, unable to take his eyes from the dreadful ruin of his second in command.

  ‘Never,’ gurgled Molacos. ‘Rome cannot stand. Rome will pay.’

  Lucterius nodded. ‘There are healers at the camp. They…’ It seemed a pointless platitude. If the man had survived to flee the field like this then he would live, but no healer short of the gods themselves could fix that face.

  Molacos’ one good eye burned with baleful fire, and Lucterius shuddered. ‘Come. Let us turn this disaster around.’

  Wearily, the two men clambered up the mile-long slope to the camp of the reserves, now missing a third of its original occupants but still a powerful, if tired and disconsolate, army. They were not even questioned by guards at the camp’s edge as they moved in among the blazing fires, though every warrior they came across, old and young, hale and wounded, turned his face away from Molacos in horror.

  Half an hour after they had met on the lowest slope of the hill, the two Cadurci stumbled into the camp of the commanders, where Vergasillaunus had held court with the other leaders these past days. It came as no surprise to see Commius of the Atrebates, former friend of Caesar, sitting in Vergasillaunus’ chair. A number of familiar faces were absent.

  ‘The Cadurci hero returns,’ sneered Commius. ‘And he brings monsters to our table.’

  There was no reaction from Molacos, for which Lucterius was glad. This was a delicate moment. If he was to bring the army and the war back from the brink, it would be no good launching accusations and insults around. Political. That was what he needed to be.

  ‘The army has lost its heart,’ he said carefully.

  ‘The army has lost a war,’ snapped Commius in reply.

  ‘Not so,’ Lucterius said clearly but calmly. ‘We lost a battle. The war goes on. Vercingetorix is still in Alesia. The Romans are still trapped in their forts. We still outnumber them. We are one step away from victory, as we were yesterday, though now it is a shorter step.’

  Commius rolled his eyes. ‘Your problem, Lucterius, is that you are a fanatic. You never know when to stop.’

  ‘And you,’ Lucterius snapped, losing his temper despite his oath not to, ‘are a Roman pet and a coward.’

  Commius rose from his seat slowly, glaring at the Cadurci.

  ‘I will not have you scourged and beaten from the camp for that, in memory of the brave fight you just led on the plains and the fact that you were seen to be the last to flee. But do not push me further. Now that Vercingetorix’s little boy has gone, I am in command here.’

  ‘Then while you’re standing and not on your fat arse, get among the tribes and rouse their spirits. Tell them that all is not lost. Remind them that we outnumber the Romans and we can still win.’

  ‘You are a fool, Lucterius. We have lost. It is time to lick our wounds and move out of Caesar’s vengeful eye.’

  Lucterius stared. ‘You cannot seriously be suggesting that the army flee?’

  ‘Not flight, Lucterius. Simply returning
to our cities and farms to take up our lives once again and hope that Caesar will be satisfied with the blood of those trapped in the oppidum and leave us to our peace.’

  Lucterius took an angry step forward, the hideous monster Molacos at his shoulder, and several Atrebate warriors moved close to Commius, protectively.

  ‘If you flee then you ruin our chances for good. We have Caesar trapped and fighting for his life. His army cannot repeat what happened today. But if we leave, then he can resupply, feed his men, and will burn Alesia clear of all life. The war will go on either way, but it can either be ended here with relative ease, or it must be prosecuted elsewhere with a great deal more difficulty and uncertainty. Do not waste the only true opportunity we may ever have!’

  Commius slowly sank back to his seat.

  ‘This is over, Lucterius. Take your Cadurci and go home. At sunrise this army disbands.’

  The Cadurci chieftain stared at his opponent, and his eyes did a circuit, raking across every other noble and chief at the fire. None of them, barring the leader of the Senones - Drapes, his name was - would meet his belligerent gaze. They were beaten. Lucterius felt the bottom fall out of his world. Nothing he could do would persuade these men. Perhaps if he’d been the first to speak to them after the fight there would have been a chance, but they’d had hours of maudlin talk from Commius now and saw only failure and capitulation.

  ‘This is not over, Commius. As long as one Cadurci draws breath, the war will go on.’

  ‘Then you are a fool, Lucterius, and within a season your tribe will be but a memory.’

  ‘A memory of glory and defiance, rather than treachery, cowardice and surrender,’ spat Lucterius, turning and stomping away from the fire, the ruined Molacos at his side. He had made it perhaps twenty paces from the fire before he became aware of another figure falling in at his other side. He glanced across to see Drapes of the Senones with a thoughtful look on his face.