by Manda Scott
Bán had despised Berikos as a weak-willed traitor but had not realized he was so hated by the Trinovantes. He wondered, then, if they mutilated the warriors whose land it was, what they might do to the Gauls, Batavians and Romans who had no right to set foot on it at all. He imagined Rufus dying the dreamer’s death and the thought made him ill.
“Did they find his body afterwards?” he asked.
“Skewered to a tree with his balls in his mouth and the hell-mark of the barbarians cut into his chest.” Civilis had been weeping; it showed in his eyes. “The fools sent out half a cohort in tens and twenties before they realized they were facing more than a handful of armed fanatics.”
“They’ll know it now.” Bán looked across the river. Warriors in uncountable numbers fought at the water’s edge, or took time further back to rest from recent fighting. Cloaks in colours he had never seen and whose meaning he had long forgotten mingled with the white of the Ordovices, the iron grey of Mona and the hated yellow of the Trinovantes. With a jolt, he saw that the western flank, beyond the grey, was solidly blue, the colour of the sky after rain. Pain crushed his chest, sucking his breath away. A moment later, he was made whole by the sight of one man with harvest-bright hair and a cloak of many colours who rode a flashy bay horse into the river and drew the other colours after him.
Civilis was looking where his eyes had been. He said carefully, “They are your people?”
“Yes. The ones in blue.” Bán was distant. The world had moved back a pace. Iccius was close to him for the first time since Amminios died. His father stood nearby, smiling. He could see through them both only with difficulty. To Civilis, he said, “The yellow are the Trinovantes, except the one in the patchwork cloak. That’s Caradoc. The black-haired giant in the yellow cloak with the sun hound on his shield is Togodubnos. If we kill them both, we have ripped out the beating heart of the Trinovantes. Our way will be clear to the dun.”
“Good. Then I think the Batavian horse warriors should be the ones to do the ripping. We have a score to settle with those two and it would sit badly if they were to be killed by someone else before we got there.”
Across the river, the patch-cloaked figure of Caradoc backed his horse out of the water and rode along the bank. Bán narrowed his eyes, seeing a thing and not believing it and then finding it was true. Carefully he said, “I can tell you who killed Rufus. Caradoc is riding his horse.”
“I know. He will die on my spear and his skull will adorn my belt even as his soul serves as slave to Rufus in the lands of the gods.” Civilis sounded too much like the Chatti. Grinning, he looked out across the water and sucked his breath through his teeth, speculatively. “That river,” he said, to no-one in particular. “Would you say it runs slower or faster than the Rhine?”
The push came in the late afternoon and was executed in classic style. Two cohorts of the IXth joined with fresh, unwearied men of the XIVth and XXth at the river’s edge and made a concerted effort to take the ford. In iron ranks, they stepped forward through the water, shields linked in an unyielding line. Warriors and legionaries fell in their dozens and were trampled into the riverbed. The bank on the far side, long since churned to red-stained slurry, began to slide out into the river, flushed by the flowing lifeblood.
The warriors of the Trinovantes took the brunt of the attack, hurling themselves in waves against the rock of Roman shields. The defenders had seen the two new legions and knew what they meant. It had not noticeably affected their courage. When the horns urged fresh cohorts into the line, extending it downstream into the deeper water, Caradoc led the mass of Catuvellauni and all the warriors of the eastern flank into the river to hold them. War horns brayed. Warriors howled their death-songs. Horses and hounds fought to kill. Legionaries screamed in triumph and in death. The crescendo of war rose to a climax and stayed there, painfully. When it could get no louder, when the horns were impossible to hear and commands were relayed solely by the waving of the standards, when every warrior of Togodubnos’s confederacy was committed to the river, Aulus Plautius, commander of the invasion forces, issued his second command.
The Batavians, as they had prayed, were the linchpin. Civilis had been given a woman of the Atrebates to lead him. Bán was seconded as interpreter. It was his first foray into battle for Rome and Corvus was nowhere near. He felt the absence as he might know the loss of a tooth, a nagging gap that came back whenever there was quiet.
There was no quiet once the signal came. The Atrebatan led them east along the riverbank, past the stumps of felled trees and into thorn-scrub that would have flayed the horses’ legs had the woman not known the route through. They rode in single file in silence—a full cohort of Batavians and one erstwhile Eceni warrior, now a citizen of Rome. The river bent to the north. They followed it round. The havoc of battle boiled behind them, the noise becoming no less with the distance.
“Here.” The woman pointed. “It widens and the flow is slower. Also, they will not see you. Go well and kill the Sun Hound’s whelps.”
Bán found himself redundant. Civilis had no need of an interpreter. The woman’s words could not have been more clear had she spoken in German. Joyfully, the Batavian hummed his war-song. Already he was counting the dead he would send after Rufus to be his servants in the other world. He turned in his saddle to check his weapons. His men did the same. The woman grinned and dissolved into the scrub.
“Here.” Civilis passed Bán a length of linen bandage. “Tie your sword in or you’ll lose it.”
“Thank you.” Bán watched a man looping the linen round his sword-hilt and then through his girth straps and copied him. Coming from the Rhine—and hating it—he had never asked the Crow to swim. The horse stared at the water and snored a warning.
Civilis dismounted. His horse, knowing what was coming, edged towards the water. He turned in the saddle, grinning. “Think you can do it?”
“Of course.” Caradoc was on the far bank; his warriors would be the first to face them. Nothing mattered but that Bán should be there to witness his death; it was part of the promise to Iccius and his father. And he was not going to be outdone by a German. He slid down from the saddle and tightened the girth. The Crow looked at him sideways, showing the white of his eye.
Men gathered in groups of ten along the water’s edge. Civilis raised his arm and dropped it, sharply. “Let’s go.”
In the last moment before he entered the water, Bán remembered Breaca and the river race. The river was warm and tasted of blood. It embraced him, womblike, and sucked him down. He sank and felt the Crow’s feet churn past his head and pushed himself upwards again. Somewhere, deep in his ears, he heard his mother singing. He broached the surface. The Crow swam with bared teeth. Foam fell from his muzzle and was swept away in strings on the current. Bán held on to his neck-strap and kicked with his outside leg. The far bank rose up to meet them.
“Mount. Don’t talk. Draw your weapon and follow me.”
Civilis was a changed man. His hair streamed down his back, held away from his face by the war knot above the right ear. He rode low in the saddle with his spear-tip trailing on the ground. The Batavian horses prowled like hounds. Crow danced on hooftip, snorting. Bán swore in three languages and calmed him. They followed the riverbank round the corner and emerged in sight of the battle. A thousand enemy warriors faced away from them, presenting their backs for the kill. Civilis fixed a linen strip to his spear-haft and raised it. At the command post on the opposite side, a standard dipped and waved and tilted twice to the west in reply. Civilis waved acknowledgement and turned to his men. The signal needed no translation; the legions at the ford were losing their battle but the IInd had crossed the river upstream and was in place in the west; it was the duty of the Batavians to draw as much attention away from them as possible.
Those were the orders but their hearts took it further. Beyond duty, the Batavians had a score to settle with Caradoc and the man rode in the van of the enemy, separated from the rearward lines by a tho
usand warriors or more. Whatever the courage and fighting skills of the Batavians, if they attacked from behind they would never see their prey; they needed a means to draw him round. Civilis’s smile was savage. He gave the hand signals they had agreed upon and added one that was new. Grinning, the men of his cohort swung away from the river towards the reserve lines of the enemy. In horror, Bán grabbed at Civilis as he went past.
“You can’t mean that.” His words were lost in the chaos. The Batavian bent and put his mouth to his ear.
“It’s necessary. If you can’t stomach it, go back. We don’t need you.”
“No, I’m staying. But I’ll not do that.”
“Suit yourself.” He was already gone, racing his mount to the horse lines. Bán watched until the killing began and then, retching, forced the Crow forward to join the rear of the milling cavalry. He had come to kill warriors, to avenge the deaths of his kin; nothing on earth would persuade him to take his revenge on their mounts.
The Batavians had no such scruples. A horse, when wounded, screams louder than any man. Forty horses with their tendons cut, their guts opened and their flanks carved to the bone screamed above the thunder of battle. Those not wounded panicked and broke their tethers. Some were unhobbled and able to run. The remainder broke their legs trying to do so and added to the noise. It would have been impossible not to hear it, not to feel sick at the sound. Bán leaned weakly on the Crow’s neck and spewed his guts on the ground. Even the Romans, labouring in the lines, paused to listen.
The effect on the defenders was shattering. First in ones and twos and then in hundreds, the mass of Silures, Durotriges and Ordovices, and finally Caradoc and his Catuvellauni, turned towards the sounds of slaughter coming from behind their lines. They hesitated, caught between the need to hold the ford and the equal need to meet the fresh invasion.
A cry went up in a different note. There were mares among the injured and some of them were pregnant. A Batavian warrior galloped the length of the horse lines with his spear held aloft, an unborn foal writhing mutely on the haft-head. He could have done no more damage if the dying beast had been a child. Calling down vengeance and death, the warriors of four tribes and a great wedge of the Trinovantes abandoned the battle at the river and kicked their battle mounts at the new enemy. The noise of their howling drowned that of the dying horses.
The Batavians numbered five hundred, a full cohort. The Britons outnumbered them hundreds to one. Caradoc pushed through, surrounded by the small knot of white-cloaked Ordovices that formed his honour guard, all picked from among his daughter’s relatives. Half of them were women and all had given birth to at least one child. The dead foal became their standard, stolen and desecrated by the enemy—an act of sacrilege for which there could only be one answer. They cut through until they reached it and took alive the man who had borne it aloft. His death, impaled on his own spear, was slower than any on the field that day and clearly visible to the invaders. The Batavians, seeing it, fought with the ferocity of cornered bears; the horse guard could have done no better. Still, they fell like dead trees in a storm. Two hundred and thirty Batavian warriors died in less time than they had taken to cross the river. The remainder, led by Civilis, fought a bloody retreat back to the water. There, seventy of them formed a rearguard while the rest gathered in groups to swim across.
Bán was amongst the last to leave. The Crow fought him all the way to the water. The colt had smelled the death of other horses and become impossible to handle, killing indiscriminately. At least one Batavian had died under the flailing feet before the rest learned that the safe place to be was behind him or far to the side. Even at the end, with the madness abating, none of them would swim beside him. Bán used the flat of his sword on the colt’s flanks and forced him into the water. The current caught them and spun them downstream. The horse struggled, thrashed and surged forward. Bán swam at his side, holding his sword in his right hand, letting the water wash it clean of blood and his own vomit and the screaming horror of sacrilege. The slaughter of the horses had numbed him to everything that had followed. He had killed his own kind and knew nothing of it. He had not seen Caradoc, except as a swirling mess of colour enclosed in a ring of lethal, screaming white. He had seen his enemy kill, but had not seen him die. His ghosts told him he had failed.
On the far bank, a Batavian hand thrust Bán into the saddle and the Crow, without intervention from its rider, followed Civilis as he led them back to their place in the lines. From there, dizzily, Bán made his way across the field behind the resting men of the XIVth to join the Ala V Gallorum who had gathered near the standard. Aulus Plautius was within sight, and Sentius Saturninus, who had led the southern landings. The legates and senior tribunes of each legion were gathered about them. Corvus sat his horse at the head of the cavalry, waiting. His face was pinched and white. They saluted, each according to his rank.
“You’re alive,” said Corvus.
“It seems so.”
“Caradoc lives.”
“I know. Civilis killed the horses.”
“It happens in war.”
“It should not. It goes against the gods.”
“Then the gods have spoken to tell us so. Look.”
The battlefield spread out before them like a drawing in sand. Bán had eyes only for the eastern side, where half a cohort of Batavians lay dead, their bodies already stripped of armour and weapons. One man stood rigidly upright, his helmet on the ground before him. From this distance, it was not possible to see if he still lived. A second, denser straggle of bodies was piled at the river’s edge where the rearguard had given their lives for their brothers. Bán reeled at the scale of the slaughter.
“We failed. I’m sorry.”
“No. You were only the diversion. It is the Second that has failed. They were a full legion and they should have broken through while you held the attention of Caradoc and his warriors.”
“What happened?”
“The Eceni and the warriors of Mona hold the western flank. They are as many as a legion, and as solid. Vespasian has failed.”
“The Eceni?” The words rang hollow in his ears. The rest washed over him, devoid of all meaning.
“Yes. I’m sorry. You should look, Bán. You can’t change it by hiding your eyes.”
Bán did not want to look. From the first sight of blue cloaks, his mind had erased for him the possibility of Eceni warriors killing and being killed, of Eceni dead left afterwards for the scavengers, of himself meeting a known face in battle. It took as great an effort of will as he had ever known to turn his head to the west, to look in detail at the upper fording place where the men of the IInd had crossed to the northern bank.
It was further away than he had imagined. At this distance, the thread of the river became a spill of molten iron in the low evening light. Figures massed and came apart and it was impossible to tell man from woman or adult from child. Only the legions were clear from their helmets and shields, and the solid wall of warriors that opposed them from their flowing cloaks—iron grey for Mona, blue for the Eceni and green striped with black for the Coritani. They fought as one body and the leading cohorts broke against them as a wave breaks on a cliff, losing men and making no headway. Then, as they watched, a mass of warriors in gorse-flower yellow galloped along the riverbank to fall on the legion from the rear.
“Gods, that’s Togodubnos. He’ll go through them like a knife.”
“No. They have seen him. Look.”
The IInd were seasoned fighters. Even as the first high note of the horn floated up above the battle, those watching saw the shimmer and break as every alternate man stepped out of the fighting line and turned back-to-back with his comrades to face the new enemy. It was a beautiful manoeuvre, executed well; shields linked and came up like the scales on a snake, swords and helmets dipped and flashed, and the new line took the shock of Togodubnos’s attack and held against it, shrinking only slightly in length as the living stepped sideways to close the gaps left by
the dead. The yellow-cloaked warriors fought in tight formation and the mark of the sun hound, yellow on white, showed even to those on the far side of the river. The losses were greater amongst the legionaries than the warriors.
Bán said, “Togodubnos won’t let up. They will carve them to pieces unless Plautius sends them reinforcements.”
“Which is why he is doing so.”
Even as they spoke, a standard swung from left to right and dipped down to the river. The four cohorts of the IXth that it commanded had been waiting for just such a signal. They surged forward to the water in a single block, crossing shoulder-deep to come up on the band of Trinovantes from behind. The warriors, finding themselves assailed from two sides by infantry, galloped along the riverbank, outpacing the enemy with ease.
The legionaries did not follow; their orders were otherwise. The ranks of the IInd stood ahead of them, every man exhausted. The IXth were fresh and eager to prove themselves. They formed rows behind their comrades and clashed their swords on their shields in readiness. Horns howled throughout the length of the IInd legion. To a man, the cohorts facing the bulk of the Eceni disengaged, stepped back and spread apart, each legionary a spear’s length from his neighbour. The horn sounded a second time and—raggedly, because manoeuvres executed in the push of battle rarely acquire the polish of the parade ground and the Eceni gave no quarter—the men of the IXth moved through the gaps between the lines to take up the van, closing ranks again in tight fighting formation. Behind them, the spent and battle-weary men of the IInd retreated in ordered blocks back to the river and began to cross in safety.
The fresh cohorts were outnumbered as greatly as those they were relieving, and the warriors they opposed had scented victory and drew strength from it. The fighting resumed with renewed ferocity. The band of Trinovantes that had attacked the rear circled back and came in along the riverbank, a wedge of yellow in a sea of grey and blue. A century of the IXth wheeled sideways to cut them off. The rest held their lines steady until the IInd had safely crossed, and began a slow-stepped retreat.