RETRIBUTION

by Anthony Riches

  ‘A disaster, Centurion? Let’s hope not, for the sake of the tribe.’

  Both men turned at the sound of an unexpected voice, finding the leader of their tribe’s elders standing in the shadow of the command tent.

  ‘Draco? What are you doing here?’

  The older man stepped into the light, leaning, as he always did, on a sturdy wooden staff, limping from the wound that had invalided him out of his role commanding the Batavi cohorts a quarter of a century before.

  ‘You march in the morning, with orders to burn out the Roman fortress at Gelduba before they can re-occupy it, do you not?’

  Hramn nodded.

  ‘We do. But no assistance is required from the council of elders. And where we’re going there’s every chance of our bumping into a legion or two. It’ll be no place for—’

  ‘A cripple?’ Draco smiled lopsidedly. ‘Say it as you see it, Hramn, and so will I. And as to there being no assistance required, I’m afraid that’s not entirely true. Your uncle agreed with the council’s decision that it would be useful for a veteran officer to accompany the cohorts south this time, to provide you with any insights that come to mind in the event of there being a need to fight. You may recall that my limp was the result of wounds I incurred at the battle of the Medui river in Britannia? I believe that you were nine years of age at the time.’

  The prefect stared at him for a moment in silence, and Alcaeus tensed with the expectation of an explosion, but when he spoke his tone was one of reason rather than conflict.

  ‘And how could I refuse such valuable advice when you put it that way? You’re very welcome to ride along with us, Draco.’

  ‘Excellent. I’ll sleep here tonight, wrapped in my cloak just like I did in Britannia, so that I don’t miss the early morning start. Mind you, I’m not just here to provide you with the benefit of my experience. I’m also keen to have a look at the Roman camp before you set fire to it. Who knows what might have been left behind in their haste to evacuate the place, eh?’

  The Old Camp, Germania Inferior, January AD 70

  ‘It’s as if I’ve imagined the whole thing.’

  Marius looked out over the ground beyond the fortress’s walls, earth pockmarked by bootprints and mantraps frozen hard by the bitter cold that had fallen over the battlefield that surrounded the Old Camp, shaking his head in disbelief. Men of his Fifth Legion were standing guard along the wall’s length, combat veterans to a man who, only months before, had been inexperienced new recruits for the greater part, but who were now hard-eyed and pitiless soldiers who knew that they were fighting for their very lives. More than a few of them now bore the marks of bitter combat fought to the death along the walls from which they now stared out over the Batavi siegeworks, and Marius himself had been fortunate not to lose an eye in the desperate fight that had left his right eye socket bisected by a scar from temple to cheek.

  ‘Three months of siege. The battles to keep the Germans from overrunning us. The men we sacrificed to get the news of our position to Legatus Augusti Flaccus and persuade him to attack and relieve us. All so much straw on the wind. Because there they are again, camped around us as if they’d never been driven away.’

  His colleague Aquillius, senior centurion of what was left of the Fifteenth Legion after its systematic weakening by casualties, desertions and detachments sent south to fight in the civil war, shrugged, pulling his thick woollen cloak tighter about a heavily muscled body which he kept taut and ready for battle by means of a punishing daily routine of exercise.

  ‘We held them off for three months before we were relieved. We’ve been resupplied with food and bolt-thrower ammunition. So what’s to stop us holding them off for another three?’

  Marius turned and looked at him with the expression of a man who had long since become accustomed to his colleague’s blunt statements, no matter what the men around him believed, exasperation and a kind of fondness combined in his quizzical stare.

  ‘Three more months? With half the strength we had at the start of this siege three months ago?’

  He shook his head at the memory of the near panic-stricken flight of those men who could no longer stand the grinding mental pressure of being trapped in the fortress by such implacable enemies, hundreds of them having attached themselves to the two cohorts of the defenders’ legionaries who had, in a master stroke of irony, been conscripted into the army that had been supposed to rescue the Old Camp’s garrison at the end of the previous year.

  ‘Legatus Vocula might well have had logic on his side in leaving us here, and in taking a thousand of our best men with him when he marched south, but what logic it was that made you allow all those cowards to piss off with them and leave the rest of us to it still eludes me.’

  He turned and stared at his fellow senior centurion, but the big man shook his head dismissively,

  ‘I allowed a gang of ration thieves to leave the fortress, men whose contribution in a fight would have been little better than useless and whose departure will enable us to hold on for weeks longer. Besides, look out there and tell me what you see?’

  Marius shook his head.

  ‘I don’t need to look. I’d see a double line of fortification all the way round this fortress, dug out by the Batavians to keep us in and a relieving force out, and I’d see the smoke from the fires of the ten thousand men of the German tribes who’ve joined their leader Civilis in the hopes of razing this place to the ground.’

  The other man grinned.

  ‘There’s that. But I see something different. Look …’ He pointed at the ground beneath the twenty-foot-high walls. ‘Look down there and tell me what you see.’

  Marius raised a weary eyebrow and turned to do as he was bidden. The battered and pitted expanse of turf around the fortress was rimed with frost, but among the silver-edged blades of grass were glimpses of unnatural shapes, their lines and curves discoloured by rust and dried blood, weapons and shields that had belonged to men who had died in the fruitless attempts to overcome the Old Camp’s defences.

  ‘I see their discarded weapons rusting in the grass.’

  ‘Exactly. Weapons dropped by dead men. We must have killed five thousand of them, or close to it. There won’t be a single family in half a dozen tribes that hasn’t lost a man, that hasn’t dragged his rotting corpse from that ground for burning if they were lucky, or just never seen him again. They’ve tried three times to break us, and every time they tried we made them pay dearly for the effort. They won’t come at us again.’

  ‘You sound very sure about that.’

  Aquillius nodded.

  ‘I am. They’ll look to starve us out. After all, Vocula’s taken his legions back south and left us here to hold a symbol of Roman power he knew he couldn’t simply abandon to its destruction, so they can afford to take their time with us, like cats toying with a mouse. And let’s face it, they know that we’ll have to come out of our hole eventually, when we’re reduced to eating boot leather and grass.’

  ‘Vocula will come back for us. He promised Legatus Lupercus that much before he marched for Novaesium.’

  ‘Perhaps. But good intentions aren’t the same as the deed already being done. Here’s the legatus, you can ask him what he thinks.’

  Munius Lupercus was walking down the wall towards them, wearing the pre-occupied look of a man carrying the responsibility of commanding two legions trapped deep in enemy territory. His hair, which three months before had been dusted with grey at the temples, was now mostly shot through with silver, and his face was thinner and more deeply lined than before, the war wound carved into his left cheek when he was a young man more prominent against his sallow skin. Both men saluted as he reached them, and the legatus returned the gesture with a wry smile and a glance over the wall at the ruined and detritus-studded ground under the Old Camp’s walls.

  ‘Gentlemen. I presume you’re discussing how long we can hope to hold off the Germans now that we’ve been abandoned to our own devices once again?’<
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  Marius nodded.

  ‘My colleague is of the opinion that we can expect the enemy to be content with starving us out, whereas it’s my expectation that they’ll come at these walls again soon enough, when boredom gets the better of them.’

  Lupercus looked out across the encircling siegeworks that had been dug out and fortified by the Batavian regular troops who were the core of the rebel army.

  ‘My opinion tends towards that of your colleague, First Spear. But not because I believe that the Germans are capable of restraining themselves for long enough that we’ll run out of food and surrender as a stark alternative to starvation.’

  Marius frowned.

  ‘I don’t understand? If they haven’t got the patience to wait us out, what’s to stop them making another attempt at breaking in?’

  The legatus shrugged.

  ‘I’m no expert in matters of strategy, First Spear, I’m simply reflecting on something that my colleague Vocula said to me before he took his legions south along with those reinforcements he took from us, and the broken men who couldn’t restrain themselves from attaching themselves to his army without orders.’ He leaned on the wall, staring out to the fortress’s south. ‘We have a spy in the Batavian camp, gentlemen, someone so highly placed that he only risks sending us messages when the news involved is of the greatest importance. His last message to Legatus Augusti Flaccus, the news that there was an attack on their camp at Gelduba imminent, was a warning that gave Vocula just enough time to form a line outside his camp, and to hold their cohorts off until his reinforcements from Hispania made such a timely appearance in the enemy rear. But it was accompanied by another piece of information that was equally revealing. Perhaps more so.’

  The two centurions waited patiently while he thought for a moment.

  ‘The spy’s other revelation was that Civilis’s focus has changed. This is no longer simply a tribal revolt, gentlemen, a simple matter of the Batavians rebelling against Rome and needing to be put back in their place. Nor is it even just the wider German uprising, to which we represent the last flimsy resistance north of Novaesium. What’s at stake now is more than just Germania, gentlemen, because it seems that Gaul is dry tinder waiting for a spark. And Civilis plans to put a flame to that tinder, and summon a blaze that might result in our losing every scrap of territory we have north of the Alps. Don’t forget that it was a Gaulish revolt led by another tribal prince that resulted in Nero’s suicide, and which started the civil war that ended up with Vespasianus on the throne and four other emperors dead inside eighteen months.’

  ‘The Gauls? But surely …?’

  Marius fell silent at the look on his superior’s face.

  ‘Surely they’re too pacified to even consider rising up? I very much doubt it, First Spear, much as I wish for our sakes it was true, because if, or rather when it comes to pass, it will leave us far more isolated than we already are now.’ He smiled tiredly. ‘As the diligent pupil of a set of very thorough teachers, I read my history assiduously, and I was left in no doubt that it took a military genius like the Divine Julius to subjugate them, a man driven by dreams of glory and empire and gifted with abilities given to one man in every generation. The Gauls may have been softened by a century of imperial peace, but their royal families are still intact, just like the Batavians’, and, just like Civilis did in the days before his rebellion, those men dream of their former glories. If he’s successful in arguing for a Gallic uprising in support of his war, which is what our spy in the enemy camp tell us is his aim, then my colleague Vocula might find himself with more on his plate than the need to relieve this siege. So whilst our position here might result in an outcome so ugly that none of us wish to consider its implications, I don’t envy my colleague’s position, because if Gaul does rise against us he’ll find himself caught between two equally implacable enemies. His only hope, and ours too, is that Vespasianus can get half the empire’s legions marching north quickly enough to reach us before the inevitable happens. If he doesn’t we’re going to end up facing the stark choice of either taking the honourable way out of this life or surrendering to those barbarians suffering the wrath they bear for us. Speaking of which, First Spear Aquillius …’

  ‘Legatus.’

  The big man’s face was impassive, but Marius smiled at his back, knowing what was coming.

  ‘I hear that you’ve been hunting the Germans at night. They come out to search the battlefield for the lost possessions of the men we killed by the thousand when they attacked us, and you, it seems, have taken to climbing down a rope to join them. The rumour is that you’ve taken to carving an aquila into the foreheads of some of the men you catch, and then releasing them to bear that disfigurement for the rest of their lives.’

  Aquillius turned to look at Marius with a questioning expression, but his colleague shook his head dismissively, and Lupercus’s voice hardened.

  ‘Your colleague was appropriately tight-lipped on the subject, First Spear, but you can hardly expect such acts to remain unknown to me when your preferred means of calling for the rope to be thrown down to you when you’ve done with tormenting the locals is to bellow for it at the top of your voice, can you?’

  ‘No, Legatus.’

  ‘No indeed. And under the circumstances I’d be grateful if you could just control that urge to make every man for fifty miles terrified of you just a little better? Some time very soon we may find ourselves having to entrust our lives to those barbarians, and I’m fairly sure that the more of them you mutilate then the more of them are going to be baying for us to be handed to the worst of their priests. Do you take my point?’

  Aquillius nodded dourly.

  ‘Yes, Legatus.’

  ‘Perfect. Carry on, gentlemen.’

  Military camp outside Rome, January AD 70

  ‘Good morning, First Spear. Please do come in and take a seat.’

  Legatus Tiberius Pontius Longus waited behind his desk as his legion’s senior centurion marched briskly into his office, stamping to attention and saluting with a vigour bordering on violence.

  ‘First Spear Pugno. Please take a seat. Will you join me in a cup of wine?’

  The centurion sat stiffly facing his new senior officer and accepted the drink from the legatus’s servant, remaining silent until the slave had withdrawn from the office.

  ‘Thank you, Legatus.’ He sipped politely at the cup, the expression on his face immobile. ‘Very nice, thank you, sir.’

  The legatus played an appraising stare over him for a moment before speaking.

  ‘You have an interesting name, First Spear. You’re the first man I’ve ever met by the name of Pugno.’

  ‘Indeed, Legatus. It’s a Twenty-first Legion tradition for the new recruits to choose a name that they believe sums up their personality. The choice is theirs but whatever they choose they have to live up to. We use it as a means of encouragement in training, and we threaten to re-name men who fail to live up to their own expectations. When I joined the legion I asked what the Latin was for “fist”. And when they told me, I replied that that was the name I would fight under for Rome. My first centurion told me that I was arrogant, and that I’d soon regret taking a name that made such a target for every would-be hard man in the cohort. I proved him wrong quickly enough.’

  Longus smiled faintly.

  ‘I can just imagine. Well it’s good to meet you, Pugno. As an experienced legion commander I’m only too aware that while the duty of command is mine – and mine alone – the ways in which my legion will go about making my decisions into reality is very much dependent upon yourself. We are the two most important men in this legion, First Spear, and our working relationship will be of critical importance to our success in the coming war with the Batavians.’

  The centurion nodded dourly.

  ‘Indeed, Legatus. My relationship with your predecessor was a happy one, all in all. I was sorry to see him leave.’

  The senior officer nodded.

&nbs
p; ‘I enjoyed a similar cordiality with the senior centurion of my last command. I was legatus of the Third Gallica in Syria for three years.’

  Pugno inclined his head.

  ‘A good legion, Legatus, although the eastern legions are quite different from those raised north of the Alps. And very different to the Twenty-first.’

  The legatus smiled, leaning back in his chair.

  ‘I totally agree, there’s hardly a comparison to be made between them.’ He paused for a moment, allowing the man in front of him a small smile of superiority before delivering the throwaway comment’s punchline. ‘After all, the Third has never lost its eagle in battle, or surrendered to any enemy for that matter, indeed it was instrumental in our victory at the second battle of Cremona. Whereas the Twenty-first Rapax …’

  Pugno’s eyes narrowed as his superior’s barb sank deeply into a sense of pride that had already taken a beating in the previous weeks.

  ‘Our commander chose the wrong side, Legatus. It’s as simple as that.’

  Longus shrugged.

  ‘You’ll forgive me if I’m forced to inform you that that’s not the way things are being portrayed in Rome, First Spear? I tell you this in order that you have a clear understanding of the way this legion, and all the other legions from the German frontier, are being talked about elsewhere. The officers of the German legions, it is being said, put Vitellius on a throne of their own making – given the empire already had a perfectly serviceable emperor in the form of Galba, a man of unimpaired honour – purely in the hope of earning generous donatives from their own emperor in the not unlikely event that their seven legions, and the three from Britannia, were to triumph over Galba’s army. And when it all came to a head at the first battle of Cremona, after Otho had murdered Galba and taken his throne, gifting your rebellion at least a fig leaf of legitimacy, the Twenty-first Rapax, the legion with the proudest and the most bloodthirsty reputation on that battlefield was taught a salutary lesson by the newest legion in the entire empire.’