Masters of Rome Boxset: First Man in Rome, the Grass Crown, Fortune's Favourites, Caesar's Women, Caesar

by Colleen McCullough

  “At dawn, lad, but they won’t find any of us alive to burn in their wicker cages. Kill the wounded, then come back to me. If you find any of our noncombatants or slaves, offer them a choice. Go now and try to get through to the Remi, or stay with us and die with us.”

  While the soldiers went to obey his orders, Gorgo took the silver Eagle and looked about him, eyes used to the darkness. Ah, there! He gouged out a long, pipelike trench in some soft, bloody ground and buried the Eagle, not very deeply. After which he heaved and hauled until the spot was under a pile of bodies, then sat on a rock and waited.

  At about the middle hour of the night, the surviving soldiers of the Thirteenth Legion killed themselves rather than live to be burned in wicker cages.

  *

  There were very few noncombatants or slaves left alive, for all of them had plucked swords and shields from dead legionaries and fought. But those who still lived were let through the enemy lines indifferently, with the result that Caesar got word of the fate of the Thirteenth late the following day.

  “Trebonius, look after things,” he said, clad in good plain steel armor, his scarlet general’s cloak tied to his shoulders.

  “Caesar, you can’t go unprotected!” Trebonius cried. “Take the Tenth; I’ll send for Marcus Crassus and the Eighth to hold Samarobriva.”

  “Ambiorix will be long gone,” said Caesar positively. “He knows a Roman relief force will appear, and he has no intention of imperiling his victory. I’ve sent to Dorix of the Remi to muster his men to arms. I won’t be unprotected.”

  Nor was he. When he reached the Sabis River some distance beyond its sources, Caesar met Dorix and ten thousand Remi cavalry. With Caesar rode a squadron of Aeduan cavalry and one of his crop of new legates, Publius Sulpicius Rufus.

  Rufus gasped in awe as they came over a rise and looked down on the massed Remi horsemen. “Jupiter, what a sight!”

  Caesar grunted. “Pretty to look at, aren’t they?”

  Remi shawls were checkered in brilliant blue and dull crimson with a thin yellow thread interwoven, and Remi trousers were the same; Remi shirts were dull crimson, Remi horse blankets brilliant blue.

  “I didn’t know the Gauls rode such handsome horses.”

  “They don’t,” said Caesar. “You’re looking at the Remi, who went into the business of breeding Italian and Spanish horses generations ago. That’s why they greeted my advent with glee and profuse protestations of friendship. They were finding it very hard to keep their horses—the other tribes were forever raiding their herds. Fighting back turned them into superb cavalrymen themselves, but they lost many horses nonetheless, and were forced to pen their breeding stallions inside veritable fortresses. They also border the Treveri, who lust after Remi mounts. To the Remi, I was a gift from the Gods—I meant Rome had come to stay in Gaul of the Long-hairs. Thus the Remi give me excellent cavalry, and as a thank-you I send Labienus to the Treveri to terrify them.”

  Sulpicius Rufus shivered; he knew exactly what Caesar meant, though he knew Labienus only through the stories forever circulating in Rome. “What’s wrong with Gallic horses?” he asked.

  “They’re not much bigger than ponies. The native stock if unmixed with other breeds is a pony. Very uncomfortable for men as tall as the Belgae.”

  Dorix rode up the hill to greet Caesar warmly, then swung his dish-faced, long-maned marca beside the General.

  “Where’s Ambiorix?” asked Caesar, who had preserved his calm and betrayed no sign of grief since getting the news.

  “Nowhere near the battlefield. My scouts report it’s quite deserted. I’ve brought slaves with me to burn and bury.”

  “Good man.”

  They camped that night and rode on in the morning.

  Ambiorix had taken his own dead; only Roman bodies lay in the defile. Dismounting, Caesar gestured that the Remi and his own squadron of cavalry should stay back. He walked forward with Sulpicius Rufus, and as he walked the tears began to run down his seamed face.

  They encountered the headless body of Sabinus first, unmistakable in its legate’s armor; he had been a smallish man, Cotta much larger.

  “Ambiorix has a Roman legate’s head to decorate his front door,” said Caesar, it seemed oblivious to his tears. “Well, he’ll have no joy from it.”

  Almost all the bodies were headless. The Eburones, like many of the Gallic tribes, Celtae as well as Belgae, took heads as battle trophies to adorn the door posts of their houses.

  “There are traders do an excellent business selling cedar resin to the Gauls,” said Caesar, still weeping silently.

  “Cedar resin?” asked Sulpicius Rufus, weeping too, and finding this dispassionate conversation bizarre.

  “To preserve the heads. The more heads a man has around his door, the greater his warrior status. Some are content to let them wear away to skulls, but the great nobles pickle their trophies in cedar resin. We’ll recognize Sabinus when we see him.”

  The sight of dead bodies and battlefields was not a new experience for Sulpicius Rufus, but his youthful campaigns had all been conducted in the East, where things were, he knew now, very different. Civilized. This was his first visit to Gaul, and he had arrived but two days before Caesar had ordered him to come on this journey into death.

  “Well, they weren’t massacred like helpless women,” said Caesar. “They put up a terrific fight.” He stopped suddenly.

  He had come to the place where the survivors had killed themselves, unmistakably; their heads remained on their shoulders and the Eburones had obviously steered a wide berth around them, perhaps frightened of that kind of courage, alien to their own kind. To die in battle was glorious. To die after it alone in the dark was horrifying.

  “Gorgo!” said Caesar, and broke down completely.

  He knelt beside the grizzled veteran and pulled the body into his arms, crouched there and put his cheek on the lifeless hair, keening and mourning. It had nothing to do with the deaths of his mother and daughter; this was the General grieving for his troops.

  Sulpicius Rufus moved onward, shaken because he could see now how young they had all been, most of them not yet shaving. Oh, what a business! His running eyes flicked from face to face, looking for some sign of life. And found it in the face of a senior centurion, hands still clasped around the handle of his sword, buried in his belly.

  “Caesar!” he shouted. “Caesar, there’s one alive!”

  And so they learned the story of Ambiorix, Sabinus, Cotta and Gorgo before the pilus prior centurion finally let go.

  Caesar’s tears hadn’t dried; he got to his feet.

  “There’s no Eagle,” he said, “but there should be. The Aquilifer threw it inside the defenses before he died.”

  “The Eburones will have taken it,” said Sulpicius Rufus. “They’ve left nothing unturned except those who killed themselves.”

  “Which Gorgo will have known. We’ll find it there.”

  Once the bodies alongside Gorgo were moved, they found the Thirteenth’s silver Eagle.

  “In all my long career as a soldier, Rufus, I’ve never seen a legion killed to the last man,” said Caesar as they turned to where Dorix and the Remi waited patiently. “I knew Sabinus was a puffed-up fool, but because he handled himself so well against Viridovix and the Venelli, I thought him competent. It was Cotta I didn’t think up to it.”

  “You weren’t to know,” said Sulpicius Rufus, at a loss for the right response.

  “No, I wasn’t. But not because of Sabinus. Because of Ambiorix. The Belgae have thrown up a formidable leader. He had to defeat me on his own in order to show the rest of them that he is capable of leading them. Right now he’ll be sniffing at the arses of the Treveri.”

  “What about the Nervii?”

  “They fight on foot, unusual for the Belgae. Ambiorix is a horse leader. That’s why he’ll be wooing the Treveri. Do you feel up to a long ride, Rufus?”

  Sulpicius Rufus blinked. “I don’t have your stamina in the saddle
, Caesar, but I’ll do whatever you require.”

  “Good. I must stay here to conduct the funeral rites for the Thirteenth, whose heads are missing and therefore cannot hold the coin to pay Charon. Luckily I’m Pontifex Maximus. I have the authority to draw up the necessary contracts with Jupiter Optimus Maximus and Pluto to pay Charon for all of them in one lump sum.”

  Completely understandable. The only Romans who were deprived of their heads under usual circumstances had also forfeited their Roman citizenship; to have no mouth in which to hold the coin to pay for the ferry ride across the river Styx meant that the dead man’s shade—not a soul but a mindless remnant of life—wandered the earth instead of the Underworld. Invisible demented, akin to the living demented who roamed from place to place being fed and clothed by the compassionate, but were never invited to stay and never knew the comfort of a home.

  “Take my squadron of cavalry and ride for Labienus,” Caesar said, pulling his handkerchief from under the armhole of his cuirass and wiping his eyes, blowing his nose. “He’s on the Mosa not far from Virodunum. Dorix will give you a couple of Remi as guides. Tell Labienus what happened here, and warn him to be very vigilant. And tell him”— Caesar drew a harsh breath—”tell him to give absolutely no quarter.”

  *

  Quintus Cicero knew nothing of the fate of Sabinus, Cotta and the Thirteenth. Camped among the Nervii without benefit of a fortress like Atuatuca, Cicero’s little brother and the Ninth Legion had made themselves as comfortable as possible in the midst of a flat, sleety expanse of pasture as far from the eaves of the forest as they could get, and well removed from the Mosa River.

  It wasn’t all bad. A stream ran through the camp, providing good fresh water where it entered and carrying the latrine sewage away as it chuckled, unfrozen, down to the distant Mosa. Of food they had plenty, and it was more varied than Quintus Cicero for one had expected after that gloomy council in Portus Itius. Wood for heating was not hard to come by, though the parties sent off to the forest to fetch it went heavily armed, stayed alert, and had a signal system in case they needed help.

  The best feature about this winter cantonment was the presence of a friendly village in close proximity; the local Nervian aristocrat, one Vertico, was strongly in favor of a Roman army in Belgica, for he believed that the Belgae had more chance of fending off the Germans if they were allied to Rome. This meant that he was anxious to help in whatever ways he could, and generous to a fault in the matter of women for the Roman troops. Provided a soldier was prepared to pay, women there were. Mouth rugging itself into a smile, Quintus Cicero closed a tolerant eye to all of this, contenting himself with writing to his big brother snug in Rome and wondering on the paper if he ought to demand a share of the commission Vertico undoubtedly extracted from his obliging females, whose ranks kept swelling as word of the largesse to be found in the Ninth’s camp spread far and wide.

  The Ninth was composed of genuine veterans, having been enlisted in Italian Gaul during the last five months of Caesar’s consulship; they had fought their way, they were fond of saying, from the Rhodanus River to Oceanus Atlanticus and from the Garumna in Aquitania to the mouth of the Mosa in Belgica. Despite which, they were all around an age of twenty-three, hard-bitten young men whom nothing frightened. Racially they were akin to the people they had been fighting for five years, for Caesar had culled them from the far side of the Padus River in Italian Gaul, where the people were the descendants of the Gauls who had fallen on Italia some centuries before. So they were on the tall side, fair or red of hair, and light-eyed. Not that this blood kinship had endeared the long-haired Gauls to them; they hated long-haired Gauls, Belgae or Celtae made no difference. Troops can live with respect for an enemy, but not with feelings of love or even pity. Hate is a mandatory emotion for good soldiering.

  But Quintus Cicero’s ignorance went further than oblivion about the fate of the Thirteenth; he also had absolutely no idea that Ambiorix was intriguing in the councils of the Nervii to see what damage he could do en route to his parley with the Treveri. Ambiorix’s lever was simple and extremely effective: once he learned that the Nervian women were hustling themselves off to earn some money (a substance to which they normally had little access) in the Ninth’s winter camp, stirring up the Nervii was easy.

  “Are you really content with dipping your wicks in some Roman soldier’s leavings?” he asked, blue eyes wide with astonishment. “Are your children really yours? Will they speak Nervian or Latin? Will they drink wine or beer? Will they smack their lips at the thought of butter on their bread, or hanker to soak it in olive oil? Will they listen to the lays of the Druids or prefer to see a Roman farce?”

  Several days of this saw Ambiorix a happy man. He then offered to see Quintus Cicero and play the same kind of trick on him as he had on Sabinus. But Quintus Cicero was no Sabinus; he wouldn’t even see Ambiorix’s ambassadors, and when they became insistent he answered dourly through a messenger that he wasn’t going to treat with any longhaired Gauls, no matter how highfalutin’ they were, so take yourselves off (actually not quite so delicately expressed) and leave me alone.

  “Real tactful,” said the primipilus centurion, Titus Pullo, grinning hugely.

  “Pah!” said Quintus Cicero, shifting his meager body on his ivory curule chair. “I’m here to do a job, not crawl up the arses of a lot of uppity savages. If they want to treat, they should go and see Caesar. It’s his job to put up with them, not mine.”

  “The interesting thing about Quintus Cicero,” said Pullo to his pilus prior confederate, Lucius Vorenus, “is that he can say things like that, then turn around and be as nice as a long swig of Falernian to Vertico— without ever seeing that there’s any inconsistency in his behavior.”

  “Well, he likes Vertico,” said Vorenus. “Therefore to him Vertico isn’t an uppity savage. Once you’re on Quintus Cicero’s list of friends, doesn’t matter who you are.”

  Which was more or less what Quintus Cicero was saying on paper to his big brother in Rome. They had corresponded for years, because all educated Romans wrote copiously to all other educated Romans. Even the rankers wrote home regularly to tell their families what life was like and what they’d been doing and what battles they’d fought and what the rest of their tent mates were like. A good number were literate upon enlistment, and those who were not discovered that some at least of winter in camp had to be spent in being tutored. Especially under generals like Caesar, who had sat and listened at Gaius Marius’s knee when a child and absorbed everything Marius had to say about everything. Including the usefulness of legionaries who could read and write.

  “It’s the lettered version of learning to swim,” Marius had mumbled through his twisted mouth. “Saves lives.”

  Odd, thought Quintus Cicero, that big brother Cicero grew more bearable in direct proportion to the amount of distance between them. From winter camp among the Nervii he seemed like a really ideal big brother, whereas when he was a short distance down the Via Tusculana— and likely to arrive on the doorstep unannounced—he was usually a pain in the podex, full of well-meaning advice Quintus just didn’t want to hear while Pomponia was shrilling in the other ear and he was busy walking the tightrope of being nice to Pomponia’s brother, Atticus, yet striving to be master in his own house.

  Not that every letter which arrived from Cicero wasn’t at least half full of advice, but among the Nervii that advice didn’t need to be taken or even listened to. Quintus had perfected the art of knowing the exact syllable which would introduce a sermon, and the exact syllable which would end it, so he just skipped those many sheets and read the interesting bits. Big brother Cicero was, of course, a shocking prude who had never dared to look beyond his fearsome wife, Terentia, since he had married her over twenty-five years ago. So anywhere in his vicinity Quintus had to be similarly abstemious. Among the Nervii, however, there was no one to see what little brother Quintus got up to. And little brother Quintus got up on every possible occasion. Belgic women we
re on the hefty side and could flatten you with one punch, but they all fought for the attentions of the dear little commander with the lovely manners and the gratifyingly open purse. After living with Pomponia (who could also flatten you with one punch), the Belgic women were an Elysian Field of uncomplicated pleasure.

  But for a day after the ambassadors from King Ambiorix had been sent away unseen and so impolitely, Quintus Cicero was conscious of a peculiar restlessness. Something was wrong; what, he didn’t know. Then his left thumb started pricking and tingling. He sent for Pullo and Vorenus.

  “We’re in for trouble,” he said, “and don’t bother asking me how I know, because I don’t know how I know. Let’s walk around the camp and see what we can do to shore up its defenses.”

  Pullo looked at Vorenus; then they both looked at Quintus Cicero with considerable respect.

  “Send someone to fetch Vertico—I need to see him.”

  That attended to, the three men and an escort of centurions set out to examine the camp with an unsparing eye.

  “More towers,” said Pullo. “We’ve got sixty, we need twice that many.”

  “I agree. And an extra ten feet of height on the walls.”

  “Do we throw up more earth or use logs?” asked Vorenus.

  “Logs. The ground’s full of water and freezing. Logs will be faster. We’ll simply jack the breastworks up another ten feet. Get the men felling trees at once. If we come under attack we won’t be able to get to the forest, so let’s do it now. Just fell ’em and drag ’em in. We can pretty them up here.”

  Off ran one of the centurions.

  “Put a lot more stakes in the bottom of the ditches,” said Vorenus, “since we can’t deepen ‘em.”

  “Definitely. How are we off for charcoal?”

  “We’ve got a bit, but not nearly enough if we want to harden sharpened points in slow fires beyond a couple of thousand,” said Pullo. “The trees will give us all the branches we’ll need.”

  “Then we’ll see how much charcoal Vertico can donate.” The commander pulled thoughtfully at his lower lip. “Siege spears.”