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

by Colleen McCullough

  Gaius Fabius was sent with two legions to reinforce Rebilus and his two legions among the Pictones and the Andes, two tribes who had not suffered disastrously at Alesia, nor been in the forefront of resistance to Rome. But it seemed as if, one by one, all the peoples of Gaul determined on a dying gasp, perhaps thinking that Caesar’s army, after so many years of war, must surely be exhausted and losing interest. That it was not was manifest once again: twelve thousand Andeans died in one battle at a bridge over the Liger, others in more minor engagements.

  Which meant that slowly, surely, the area of Gaul still capable of fighting back was shrinking steadily southward and westward, into Aquitania. Where Lucterius was joined by Drappes of the Senones after his own people refused to shelter him.

  Of all the great enemy leaders, few were left. Gutruatus of the Carnutes was turned over to Caesar by his own people, too terrified of Roman reprisals to succor him. Because he had murdered Roman citizen civilians at Cenabum, his fate was not entirely in Caesar’s hands; a representative council from the army was also involved. Despite all Caesar’s arguments that Gutruatus should live to walk in his triumphal parade, the army got its way. Gutruatus was flogged and beheaded.

  Shortly after this, Commius encountered Gaius Volusenus Quadratus for the second time. While Caesar went south with the cavalry, Mark Antony was left in command of Belgica; he finished the Bellovaci completely, then went into camp at Nemetocenna in the lands of the Atrebates, Commius’s own people. Who were so afraid of further Roman attrition that they refused to have anything to do with Commius. Having met up with a band of like-minded German Sugambri, he sought refuge in brigandage and wreaked havoc among the Nervii, in no condition to resist. When Antony received a plea for help from the ever-loyal Vertico, he sent Volusenus and a very large troop of cavalry to Vertico’s assistance.

  Time had not diminished Volusenus’s hatred of Commius one little bit. Aware who was commanding the brigands, Volusenus set to work with enthusiastic savagery. Working systematically, he drove Commius and his Sugambri in the manner of a shepherd his sheep until finally they met. There ensued a hate-filled duel between the two men, who charged at each other with lances leveled. Commius won. Volusenus went down with Commius’s lance right through the middle of his thigh; the femur was in splinters, the flesh mangled, the nerves and blood vessels severed. Most of Commius’s men were killed, but Commius, on the fleetest horse, got clean away while attention was focused on the critically wounded Volusenus.

  Who was conveyed to Nemetocenna. Roman army surgeons were good; the leg was amputated above the wound, and Volusenus lived.

  Commius sent an envoy with a letter to see Mark Antony.

  Marcus Antonius, I now believe that Caesar had nothing to do with the treachery of that wolf’s-head Volusenus. But I have taken a vow never again to come into the presence of a Roman. The Tuatha have been good to me. They delivered my enemy to me, and I wounded him so badly he will lose his leg, if not his life. Honor is satisfied.

  But I am very tired. My own people are so afraid of Rome that they will give me neither food nor water nor roof over my head. Brigandage is an ignoble profession for a king. I just want to be left in peace. As hostage for my good behavior I offer you my children, five boys and two girls, not all by the same mother, but all Atrebatans, and all young enough to turn into good little Romans.

  I gave Caesar good service before Volusenus betrayed me. For that reason, I ask that you send me somewhere to live out the rest of my days without my needing to lift a sword again. Somewhere devoid of Romans.

  The letter appealed to Antony, who had a rather antique way of looking at bravery, service, the true warrior code. In his mind Commius was a Hector and Volusenus a Paris. What good would it do Rome or Caesar to kill Commius and drag him behind the victor’s chariot? Nor did he think Caesar would feel differently. He sent a letter to Commius together with his envoy.

  Commius, I accept your offer of hostages, for I deem you an honest and a wronged man. Your children will be drawn to the attention of Caesar himself. He will, I am sure, treat them as the children of a king.

  I hereby sentence you to exile in Britannia. How you get there is your concern, though I enclose a passport you may present at Itius or Gesoriacus. Britannia is a place you know well from your days of service to Caesar. I presume you have more friends than enemies there.

  So great is the length of Rome’s reach that I cannot think of anywhere else to send you. Rest assured you will see no Romans. Caesar detests the place. Vale.

  The last gasp of all happened at Uxellodunum, an oppidum belonging to the Cardurci.

  While Gaius Fabius marched off to finish reducing the Senones, Gaius Caninius Rebilus pushed on south toward Aquitania, knowing that reinforcements would soon arrive to swell his two legions; Fabius was to return the moment he was satisfied that the Senones were utterly cowed.

  Though both Drappes and Lucterius had led contingents in the army which came to relieve Alesia, they had not learned the futility of withstanding siege. Hearing of the Andean defeat and Rebilus’s approach, they shut themselves up inside Uxellodunum, an extremely lofty fortress town atop a hill rucked inside a loop of the river Oltis. Unfortunately it contained no water, but it did have two sources of water nearby, one from the Oltis itself, the other a permanent spring which gushed out of rocks immediately below the highest section of wall.

  Having only two legions, Rebilus when he arrived made no attempt to repeat Caesar’s tactics at Alesia; besides which, the Oltis, too strong to dam or divert, made circumvallation impossible. Rebilus contented himself with sitting down in three separate camps on ground high enough to ensure that a secret evacuation of the citadel could not succeed.

  What Alesia had taught Drappes and Lucterius was that a mountainous supply of food was essential to withstand a siege. Both men knew that Uxellodunum could not be taken by storm no matter how brilliant Caesar was, for the crag on which the stronghold stood was surrounded by other rock faces too difficult for troops to scale. Nor would a siege terrace like the one at Avaricum work; Uxellodunum’s walls were so high and so perilous to approach that no feat of awesome Roman engineering could hope to surmount them. Once ensured adequate food, Uxellodunum could wait out a siege which lasted until Caesar’s tenure as governor of the Gauls expired.

  Therefore food had to be found, and in enormous quantities. While Rebilus was making his camps, and well before he thought of additional fortifications, Lucterius and Drappes led two thousand men out of the citadel into the surrounding countryside. The Cardurci fell to with a will, gathering grain, salt pork, bacon, beans, chickpea, root vegetables and cages of chickens, ducks, geese. Cattle, pigs and sheep were rounded up. Unfortunately the chief crop the Cardurci grew was not an edible one; they were famous for their flax, and made the best linen outside of Egypt. Which necessitated incursions into the lands of the Petrocorii and other neighboring tribes. Who were not nearly as enthusiastic about donating food to Drappes and Lucterius as the Cardurci had been. What wasn’t given was taken, and when every mule and ox cart had been pressed into service, Drappes and Lucterius made for home.

  While this foraging expedition was going on, those warriors left behind made life very difficult for Rebilus; night after night they attacked one or another of his three camps, so craftily that Rebilus despaired of being able to finish any fortifications designed to constrain Uxellodunum more thoroughly.

  The huge food train returned and halted twelve miles short of Uxellodunum. There it camped under the command of Drappes, who was to stay with it and defend it against a Roman attack; then visitors from the citadel assured Drappes and Lucterius that the Romans were oblivious to its existence. The task of getting the food inside Uxellodunum devolved upon Lucterius, who knew the area intimately. No more carts, said Lucterius. The last miles would be on the backs of mules, and the final few hundred paces at dead of night as far as possible from any of the Roman camps.

  There were many forest paths between the
food train camp and the citadel; Lucterius led his contingent of mules as close as he dared and settled down to wait. Not until four hours after midnight did he move, and then with as much stealth as possible; the mules wore padded linen shoes over their hooves and were muzzled by men’s hands keeping their lips together. The degree of quietness was surprising, Lucterius confident. The sentries in the watchtowers of the nearest Roman camp—nearer, indeed, than Lucterius had wished—were bound to be dozing.

  But Roman sentries in watchtowers didn’t doze on duty. The punishment was death by bludgeoning, and inspections of the Watch were as ruthless as unheralded.

  Had there been wind or rain, Lucterius would have gotten away with it. But the night was so calm that the distant sound of the Oltis was clearly audible on this far side from it. So too were other, stranger noises clearly audible—clunks, scrapes, muffled whispers, swishes.

  “Wake the General,” said the chief of the Watch to one of his men, “and be a lot quieter than whatever’s going on out there.”

  Suspecting a surprise attack, Rebilus sent out scouts and mobilized with speed and silence. Just before dawn he pounced, so noiselessly that the food porters hardly knew what happened. Panicked, they chose to flee into Uxellodunum minus the mules; why Lucterius did not remained a mystery, for though he escaped into the surrounding forest, he made no attempt to get back to Drappes and tell him what had taken place.

  Rebilus learned of the location of the food train from a captured Cardurcan and sent his Germans after it. The Ubii horsemen were now accompanied by Ubii foot warriors, a lethal combination. Behind them, marching swiftly, came one of Rebilus’s two legions. The contest was no contest. Drappes and his men were taken prisoner, and all the food so painstakingly gathered fell into Roman hands.

  “And very glad I am of it!” said Rebilus the next day, shaking Fabius warmly by the hand. “There are two more legions to feed, yet we don’t have to forage for a thing.”

  “Let’s begin the blockade,” said Fabius.

  *

  When news of Rebilus’s stroke of good luck reached Caesar, he decided to push ahead with his cavalry, leaving Quintus Fufius Calenus to bring up two legions at ordinary marching pace.

  “For I don’t think,” said Caesar, “that Rebilus and Fabius stand in any danger. If you encounter any pockets of resistance on your way, Calenus, deal with them mercilessly. It’s time that Gaul put its head beneath the yoke for good and all.”

  He arrived at Uxellodunum to find the siege fortifications progressing nicely, though his advent came as something of a surprise; neither Rebilus nor Fabius had thought to see him there in person, but they seized him eagerly.

  “We’re neither of us engineers, and nor are the engineers with us worthy of the name,” said Fabius.

  “You want to cut off their water,” said Caesar.

  “I think we have to, Caesar. Otherwise we’re going to have to wait until starvation drives them out, and there’s every indication that they’re not short of food, despite Lucterius’s attempt to get more food inside.”

  “I agree, Fabius.”

  They were standing on a rocky outcrop with a full view of Uxellodunum’s water supply, the path down from the citadel to the river, and the spring. Rebilus and Fabius had already begun to deal with the path to the river, by posting archers where they could pick off the water carriers without being themselves picked off by archers or spearmen on the citadel walls.

  “Not enough,” said Caesar. “Move up the ballistae and shell the path with two-pounders. Also scorpions.”

  Which left Uxellodunum with the spring, a far more difficult task for the Romans; it lay just beneath the highest part of the citadel walls, and was accessed from a gate in the base of the walls immediately adjacent to the spring. Storming it was useless. The terrain was too rugged and the location such that it couldn’t be held by a cohort or two of troops, nor accommodate more.

  “I think we’re stuck,” said Fabius, sighing.

  Caesar grinned. “Nonsense! The first thing we do is build a ramp out of earth and stones from where we’re standing to that spot there, fifty paces from the spring. It’s all uphill, but it will give us a platform sixty feet higher than the ground we have at the moment. On the top of the ramp we build a siege tower ten storeys high. It will overlook the spring and enable the scorpions to shoot anyone trying to get water.”

  “During daytime,” Rebilus said despondently. “They’ll just visit the spring at night. Besides, our men doing the building will be shockingly exposed.”

  “That’s what mantlets are for, Rebilus, as you well know. The important thing,” Caesar said with a casual air, “is to make all this work look good. As if we mean it. That in turn means that the troops doing the work must believe I’m in earnest.” He paused, eyes on the spring, a noble cascade gushing out under pressure. “But,” he went on, “all of it is a smoke screen. I’ve seen many a spring of this kind before, especially in Anatolia. We mine it. It’s fed by a number of underground streams, from the size of it as many as ten or twelve. The sappers will begin to tunnel at once. Each feeder stream they encounter they’ll divert into the Oltis. How long the job will take I have no idea, but when every last feeder is diverted, the spring will dry up.”

  Fabius and Rebilus stared at him, awestruck.

  “Couldn’t we just mine it without the farce aboveground?”

  “And have them realize what we’re actually doing? There’s silver and copper mining all through this part of Gaul, Rebilus. I imagine the citadel contains men skilled in mining. And I don’t want a repeat of what happened when we besieged the Atuatuci—mines and countermines twisting around each other and running into each other like the burrowings of a squadron of demented moles. The mining here must be absolutely secret. The only ones among our men who will know of it are the sappers. That’s why the ramp and the siege tower have to look like very serious trouble for the defenders. I don’t like losing men—and we’ll endeavor not to—but I want this business finished, and finished soon,” said Caesar.

  So the ramp reared up the slope, then the siege tower began to rise. The startled and terrified inhabitants of Uxellodunum retaliated with spears, arrows, stones and fire missiles. When they finally realized the ultimate height of the tower, they came out of their gate and attacked in force. The fighting was fierce, for the Roman troops genuinely believed in the efficacy of what they were doing and defended their position strenuously. Soon the tower was on fire, and the mantlets and protective fortifications on either side of the ramp under severe threat.

  Because the front was so limited in extent, most of the Roman soldiers were uninvolved in the battle; they crowded as close as possible and cheered their comrades on, while the Cardurci inside the citadel lined its ramparts and cheered too. At the height of it Caesar hunted his spectator troops away, under orders to go elsewhere around the stronghold’s perimeter and create a huge noise, as if a full-scale attack were being mounted on all sides.

  The ruse worked. The Cardurci retired to deal with this new threat, which gave the Romans time to put the fires out.

  The ten-storey siege tower began to rise again, but it was never used; beneath the ground the mines had been creeping forward inexorably, and one by one the streams feeding the spring were diverted. At about the same moment as the tower might have been manned with artillery and put into commission, the magnificent spring giving Uxellodunum water dried up for the first time ever.

  It came as a bolt out of the clear sky, and something vital within the defenders died. For the message was implicit: the Tuatha had bowed down before the might of Rome, the Tuatha had deserted Gaul for love of Caesar. What was the use of fighting on, when even the Tuatha smiled on Caesar and the Romans?

  Uxellodunum surrendered.

  *

  The next morning Caesar called a council consisting of all the legates, prefects, military tribunes and centurions present to participate in Gaul’s last gasp. Including Aulus Hirtius, who had travele
d with the two legions Quintus Fufius Calenus brought after the assault on the spring began.

  “I’ll be brief,” he said, seated on his curule chair in full military dress, the ivory rod of his imperium lying up his right forearm. Perhaps it was the light in the citadel’s meeting hall, for it poured in through a great unshuttered aperture behind the five hundred assembled men and fell directly upon Caesar’s face. He was not yet fifty, but his long neck was deeply ringed with creases, though no sagging skin marred the purity of his jaw. Lines crossed his forehead, fanned out at the far edges of his eyes, carved fissures down either side of his nose, emphasized the high, sharply defined cheekbones by cleaving the skin of his face below them. On campaign he bothered not at all about his thinning hair, but today he had donned his Civic Crown of oak leaves because he wanted to set a mood of unassailable authority; when he entered a room wearing it, every person had to stand and applaud him—even Bibulus and Cato. Because of it he had entered the Senate at twenty years of age; because of it every soldier who ever served under him knew that Caesar had fought in the front line with sword and shield, though the men of his Gallic legions had seen him in the front line fighting with them on many occasions, didn’t need to be reminded.

  He looked desperately tired, but no man there mistook these signs for physical weariness; he was a superbly fit and enormously strong man. No, he was suffering a mental and emotional exhaustion; they all realized it. And wondered at it.

  “It is the end of September. Summer is with us,” he said in a clipped, terse accent which stripped the cadences in his exquisitely chosen Latin of any poetic intention, “and if this were two or three years ago, one would say that the war in Gaul was over at last. But all of us who sit here today know better. When will the people of Gallia Comata admit defeat? When will they settle down under the light hand of Roman supervision and admit that they are safe, protected, united as never before? Gaul is a bull whose eyes have been put out, but not its anger. It charges blindly time and time again, ruining itself on walls, rocks, trees. Growing steadily weaker, yet never growing calmer. Until in the end it must die, still dashing itself to pieces.”