Betrayal: The Centurions I

by Riches, Anthony

  Kivilaz waved a dismissive hand.

  ‘That’s easy. To show us that they know they’re our masters. If my guardsmen resist my arrest they’ll send the Old Camp legions to teach us a lesson, slaughter anyone that puts up a fight, burn the place to the ground and do whatever else they think would teach us a lesson. Those legionaries out there will have one eye to their rear all the way back to Vetera, terrified that the tribe might decide to rise and liberate me, but we all know that would be stupidity of the highest order. I’ll just have to go with them, and hope that this man Vitellius isn’t simply planning to slap his buttocks at Rome and have me killed to bolster his popularity with the legions.’ He stood, stretching his powerful frame. ‘No, this isn’t the right time to be standing up to Rome. I’ll just have to hope that I live long enough to see a time that is.’

  Marius looked back down the road behind his century, drawing an amused glance from the prisoner walking easily beside him. He had agreed that there was no need to restrain Civilis, given the peaceable way that the Batavi prince had surrendered himself to their custody and Batavi had easily kept up with the century’s marching pace for the whole of the previous day’s twenty-mile march. The men posted to watch him, with dire warnings as to what would befall them if he were to slip away under cover of darkness, had nothing more to report at dawn than that the prisoner had enjoyed an apparently untroubled sleep, which was more than Marius could say for himself.

  ‘Still wondering if my people are going to realise what a travesty of justice you’re committing here, and hunt you down, are you, Centurion?’

  The Roman looked at him levelly for a moment before speaking, evidently deciding what degree of openness to share with the Batavi noble.

  ‘I didn’t think your people would accept this as easily as seems to be the case.’

  Civilis shrugged equably.

  ‘My people are a loyal part of the empire. We have a legion’s strength serving with you, men your own generals have called the best and bravest of your allies. We conquered Britannia for you, and we defeated the Iceni tribe for you. We can swim rivers in full armour, and deal a battlefield death blow where no fight is expected, as we did at the Medui river in the reign of the emperor Claudius. And as for me, I fought at the Medui when I was not much older than these men behind us. I gave twenty-five years of my life to Rome.’

  Marius inclined his head in respect, waiting for the Batavi to continue, and Kivilaz looked at him with a questioning expression.

  ‘And yet the loyalty in this relationship all seems to be going in one direction, that’s what you’re thinking now, isn’t it? Devoted service, wounds, watching friends die for the empire, all for nothing now I’m arrested once again, to be imprisoned and face the same tired old charges that neither side can prove or disprove. To find my fate once again hanging on the opinion of a single man at whose whim I can either be freed or sent to my death. So how do I remain so good-tempered?’

  He walked in silence for a moment, waiting for Marius to respond, and after a moment the Roman pointed at his face.

  ‘How did you lose the eye?’

  Kivilaz smiled, putting a finger to the empty socket.

  ‘This? This was the price I paid for fighting in the battle that consigned that mad bitch Boudicca to history. That was a day to have lived through, Centurion, a battle that they’ll still be talking about a hundred years from now, a single day that saw the Iceni tribe beaten to their knees by a force a tenth of their size. They dared us to attack them, once we had them run to earth, taking up a position between two forests and arraying themselves in depth with their women behind them. Idiots. Anyone with the smallest military experience could have told them that they had effectively cut off all of their routes of retreat and denied most of their men the opportunity to fight.’

  Marius nodded.

  ‘It sounds like it. Any army that had to retreat into a forest will come out the other side of the trees as a collection of individuals, no longer an army. What was their frontage?’

  Kivilaz looked up for a moment, recalling the memory.

  ‘Four hundred paces.’

  The Roman winced.

  ‘Just wide enough for a legion strength unit to deploy ten deep, rotating the front rank to present fresh spear arms while the barbarians would have been too tightly packed to fight back effectively. It was a slaughter, I presume?’

  Kivilaz nodded.

  ‘It was. I lost the eye in the aftermath, when one of their women came out from beneath the cart she was hiding under, got inside my sword’s length and went for me like a wild cat. Fair exchange, I suppose, my eye for her life, she got her claws into me just as I put my dagger into her. So that’s how I lost the eye, Centurion. And you’re right, of course, by rights I should be furious to once again find myself the prisoner of men determined to see me dead for a crime that no man can prove I committed. But …’

  He fell silent, and Marius waited for a moment before prompting him.

  ‘But?’

  Kivilaz grinned.

  ‘Nobody lives for ever, Centurion. Not you, not me. So if your masters in the Old Camp choke me to death this evening, half an hour after we reach the fortress, I’ll be no more dead than if I die in my bed thirty years from now, ringed by my family when I finally go to meet my ancestors. It’s a matter of when, and how, but not if. So let’s go and play this game of yours, and see where all our whens and hows end up, shall we?’

  4

  The Winter Camp, Germania Superior, January AD 69

  ‘Fourth Legion!’

  An instant later the other senior centurion standing out in front of the two legions paraded in the chilly dawn of a New Year’s Day, the morning sullen and overcast beneath an iron-grey sky, barked out his own challenge to the ranks of men stretching out into the mist before him.

  ‘Twenty-Second Legion!’

  Their voices cracked out across the parade ground as one in a whiplash command that echoed back an instant later from the walls of the fortress where both legions were garrisoned.

  ‘Atten-tion!’

  Ten thousand legionaries snapped into the brace position, their precision enough to warm the heart of the hardest-eyed centurion, standing perfectly still in the cold silence that followed. Centurion Secundus, standing before his senior centurion along with the legion’s other eight cohort commanders, nodded his head in approval of the rigid discipline being observed by the men paraded behind him, respectful of the warning he had issued to his brother officers that what they were about to do required them to be on otherwise perfect behaviour. Where usually the occasional man would have coughed, or broken wind, perhaps muttered an insult or greeting to another within earshot of a harsh whisper, the silence was total, palpably expectant to a man who knew what to listen for.

  Secundus was arrayed in his ceremonial finery, as was every officer on parade for this most affirming day of the year for an empire whose very foundations were sunk deep into the bedrock of the legions that guarded every frontier. Each one subtly different in tradition and make-up, all were charged with being perpetually vigilant, and totally loyal to one man above all others, their princeps, the man who ordered the Roman world and made the decisions on which their futures hung. Across the empire’s far-flung expanse men like them would be standing to attention on parade grounds separated by distances that might take half a year’s march to traverse, but whose intent and ceremonies were identical, carefully choreographed over years of planning and practice so that nothing could go wrong in this defining moment of an imperial year.

  At dawn on New Year’s Day, 821 years after the founding of the city of Rome, the moment had come for the empire’s legions to swear the sacramentum, the oath of undying loyalty to emperor and empire, to promise to follow and obey him, to protect Rome against threats from either within or without, and if need be to lay down their lives in defence of the sprawling edifice that he ruled in their name. But today would be different. Where their sister legion the Twen
ty-Second was at best indifferent and at worst hostile to Galba’s seizure of power, the officers and men of the Fourth Macedonica were seething with fury on the subject, and the lid was about to come off that bubbling pot of rage.

  From his place at the front of the legion Secundus could see the army’s new legatus augusti, Hordeonius Flaccus and his two legion legati looking out across the ranks of soldiers from their elevated position on the raised wooden tribunal, which had been erected the day before to enable them to look over the veritable hedge of the two formations’ standards that were paraded between them and the soldiers, positioned so that when a man swore loyalty to the emperor he also pledged his fealty to the standards that he would fight for in battle. Before them stood the two legions’ standard bearers, the cold wind that was blowing across the parade ground ruffling their fur capes. Soldiers selected for their imposing size and martial prowess, who knew that they were expected to fight and die for the gold and gilt images and symbols they carried, bearskins complete with the animals’ heads were affixed to their helmets to make them even taller and give them some of the same elemental terror that the tribes across the river used to their advantage on the field of battle. A pair of gold eagles took pride of place in the thicket of standards in the firm grips of the aquilifers, each with an image of the emperor presented to their right on a standard carried by an imaginifer alongside them, gold-plated masks that had been hurriedly fashioned in Galba’s image and rushed to the empire’s frontier fortresses to replace those of Nero. On each eagle’s left a vexillarius proudly carried the lovingly embroidered square banner that would take the place of the eagle when, as frequently happened, a vexillation of several cohorts was detached under the command of a senior officer to perform a task that did not require the legion’s full strength, their bright red backgrounds decorated with capricorns and, in the Fourth’s case, as a legion founded by Julius Caesar, a bull. Clustered around them were the standards of each legion’s sixty centuries, topped by the image of an open hand that symbolised the oath the legionaries were about to swear, the signifers who bore them all similarly clad in heavy bearskins and shieldless, depending on the men of their centuries to protect them in battle with their lives if need be. The final detail was an imposing life-sized bust of the new emperor, standing on a tall stone plinth to raise the head and shoulders to the same height that would have been the case were Galba present to witness the ceremony.

  Secundus watched and waited as Flaccus nodded his satisfaction with their commands’ taut discipline to the legion commanders who flanked him, pitching his voice to be heard by the standard bearers in the certain knowledge that every word would be reported back to the soldiers with whom they lived.

  ‘A fine turn out, gentlemen, you and your officers are to be congratulated! We will proceed with the sacramentum and then go for a well-earned breakfast!’

  A few men tittered at the statement, loudly enough for the portly senior officer to have caught the trailing edge of their cruel humour, and for a moment he stared out across the ranks of men, then shook his head to dismiss the idea of his being shown any disrespect on such an auspicious day. He stepped forward to the platform’s edge, raising a scroll whose wording he knew by rote but which nevertheless had to be displayed to the men of the fortress as an essential part of the ceremony. In the event of any one of them being deemed to be in breach of the oath, the scroll could thereby be opened in front of him and the accusation made that he was in breach of the solemn promise he had made under the eyes of the gods on the first day of the year. But as he opened his mouth to start the ceremony, a single voice shouted one word from the mass of men standing before him, a word that froze him to the spot and left his jaw hanging open. Secundus closed his eyes for a moment as his colleague Julius bellowed the one word that had been agreed would be the signal that would start their resistance to the pretender Galba’s rule.

  ‘No!’

  An awestruck silence hung over the parade ground for a moment, as ten thousand legionaries and their officers considered the unthinkable heresy, when another officer’s voice was raised in agreement.

  ‘We’re not swearing loyalty to the usurper Galba! Give us Verginius Rufus!’

  The reference to the army’s former commander could hardly have come as a surprise to Flaccus, given that the men of the Winter Camp had done their very best to persuade Verginius Rufus to declare himself emperor on the news of Nero’s death. Their acclamations had been rebuffed by the man’s steadfast and, to Secundus’s mind, entirely honourable refusal to accept the accolade, a denial of their attempts to make him emperor that had only made the legions’ centurions desire for his rule that much stronger, turning away their protestations of his suitability to rule with the blunt statement that it was for the senate to make an emperor, and not a matter for a mere legatus, no matter how august he might seem. But the carefully planned outbursts had rocked the ordered world in which they all lived to its very foundations. Looking to his two legion commanders, Flaccus gestured wordlessly for them to do something to restore discipline and return the ceremony to normality. But as they stepped up alongside him, drawing breath to shout commands to their senior centurions, the ten senior centurions who led the Fourth Legion’s cohorts marched forward half a dozen paces from where they stood before their men and stamped back to attention, their raised voices, trained by years of issuing commands intended to be heard by every man under their command, ringing out across the parade ground in what was clearly a carefully rehearsed statement of the facts as they saw them.

  ‘Legatus augusti and legati legionaris! The men of our two legions have agreed that they cannot swear loyalty to an emperor whose claim to the throne is no stronger than that of Verginius Rufus, a man of honour who refused to accept the throne when we offered it to him! We demand that our wishes in this matter be conveyed to the senate and the people of Rome, and that an emperor be chosen who we can accept!’

  Shooting a glance to his right as he joined their chorus, Secundus saw that, as agreed the previous evening, the Twenty-Second Legion’s senior centurion was standing stock still, his eyes deliberately turned to ignore the outraged gestures his legatus was making at him to do something. If the Fourth Macedonica, an old legion founded by Caesar himself, was willing to take part in an act as vulgar as a parade ground mutiny, the Twenty-Second’s senior centurions were hardly likely to oppose an action intended to display the senior legion’s sense of outrage.

  Flaccus gaped at the spectacle of two whole imperial legions defying him, knowing that his career was circling the plughole unless he could take a grip of the situation. But even as he dithered, the Fourth’s senior centurion gestured to the nine men gathered behind him, all cohort commanders, Secundus at their head, and they hurried forward towards the podium. Stepping back involuntarily, fearing that he was about to be the subject of an assassination, Flaccus watched in horror as they toppled the bust of Galba that had been set on a plinth before them to land with a crack on the gravelled surface. Secundus and his colleagues stepped into the tight pack of standard bearers, each of them ripping away the portrait medallions bearing the new emperor’s image that dangled from their crossbars, dashing them to the ground to lie discarded and trodden upon. A sudden hubbub behind Secundus made him turn, to discover that a handful of the Twenty-Second’s officers, men he assumed had been carefully excluded from the conspiracy to prevent their loyalty to the throne from alerting Flaccus to what was to come, were fighting with his colleagues for control of their own legion’s standards.

  ‘The Twenty-Second Legion is loyal to the emp—’

  The centurion protesting went down with a fist in his face, and Secundus winced at the blow’s unexpected ferocity, shooting a glance at the other legion’s ranks as the counter-protest was swiftly snuffed out and the four men hustled away to temporary confinement by more of the Fourth’s centurions. Not a legionary had moved, and he breathed a sigh of relief that two fully armed and armoured legions were not about to take t
heir iron to each other in the cold grey dawn. Their carefully calculated act of mutiny complete, the legion’s centurions looked up at the men on the podium, Secundus holding his breath as he waited to see how they would respond.

  ‘Gentlemen …’

  Flaccus was looking down at the scene with a calculating expression, while behind him the gentlemen legati and their tribunes looked helpless in the face of such a show of obduracy. Such things were hardly unknown in Roman history, but most mutinies came from a legion’s rank and file, open to swift and vicious displays of the army’s savage disciplinary code, whereas there was little official guidance as to how to deal with a revolt led by a legion’s centurionate and where the object was not, at least on the face of things, based on self-interest. The general looked round at the men behind him only to find them equally nonplussed.

  ‘So I am to take it as a given that you are unwilling to swear your loyalty to the emperor?’

  Secundus frowned, finding Flaccus’s tone of voice different to what he had imagined. Where the expectation of a weak-willed glutton of a man had been inspired by discussions in the mess, the reality was that the senator sounded a good deal more resolute than had been predicted. He stared down at the centurions with an expression the centurion found almost predatory.

  ‘No sir, we won’t swear loyalty to a man who’s stolen the empire, and punished good men who fought to defeat a traitor only to find that traitor’s friend on the throne. We want Verginius Rufus!’