They pushed on, striking for the coast, following the old paths that wandered lazily over the gentle, wooded hills. They waited for low tide and forded the Medway, the chiefs splashing beside their chariots, the freemen goading the frightened oxen with whips and cries. And then at last Togodumnus and Caradoc, with the chiefs of the Catuvellauni, stood upon the white cliffs, with the warm wind coursing through their hair, and looked down at the sparkle of sun on foamy breakers and out to where the coasts of Gaul blurred, a thin gray line misted by distance and the damp hazes of spring.
The scouts had no news. The boats were ready on the beaches of the mainland and the provisions were stowed away, but under Plautius’s gray, cool eye the legions still drilled and marched, and the centurions moved among them with curses and blows. The tribes settled down to wait, pitching their little leather tents around the firepits. Gladys tied her sword to her long leg, hitched up her black cloak, and climbed down the cliff face to disappear for two days, meandering alone across the wet, cold sand, singing her melancholy songs of loneliness and magic, and the leather pouch that swung from her belt was soon full of shells and bits of driftwood. The hubbub of the seething host rose above her, but she did not hear it. She sat cross legged in the sand, looking down into warm, limpid pools and tasting the bitter salt on her white fingers.
Two more days went by, and idleness curdled in the restless chiefs like milk souring under a hot sun. They gambled and came to blows by night. They thieved and fought by day. Caradoc went among them angrily, sword drawn, berating, coaxing, swearing, and threatening while his brother laughed at him cynically and spent his time charging the lip of the cliff in his little chariot, cloak and hair flying behind him, flirting with death again and again.
Then one night a boat nudged the dark shore and a scout struggled up the white, crumbling face of the cliff, Gladys behind him. He came to Caradoc, Togodumnus, and the others and ate and drank slowly, with relish, while the circle of men watched him, and the tension heightened. Finally, when the air was fraught with bursting, silent questions, seeming about to explode, he wiped his mouth, belched, and sat back with a sigh. Gladys poured herself wine and sank down beside Caradoc, and the scout grinned cheekily at them all, his spirits reviving.
“Lord, they will not come,” he said. “Once more the soldiers are refusing to cross the water. Three of the legions do not know Plautius and will not trust him when he says that we are only men like themselves. There have been executions, but the mutiny is spreading. Plautius has sent to the emperor for help. Or advice.”
Togodumnus whooped, springing to his feet. “What did I tell you Caradoc, you fool! The soldiers have more sense than you. Now we can go home and attend to our unfinished business!”
Caradoc sat stunned, a running tide of exultation washing over him, but even as he looked up at Togodumnus the tide peaked and began to recede, and doubt crept in on its swift wake. He glanced at his sister. She had not moved. Her head was bent, her eyes on the cup held in both thin hands.
The chiefs were chattering excitedly among themselves, but Cinnamus and Caelte mirrored Gladys’s still thought, and Fearachar grunted contemptuously. “Only a dead Roman tells the truth,” he remarked to no one in particular.
Caradoc turned to the scout. “When did Plautius send to Rome? How long ago?”
“Seven days ago. In a week the emperor will be deliberating, and in another week Plautius will have his orders.”
“Orders!” Togodumnus shouted, “I laugh! A commander who runs bleating to his superiors because he cannot handle his men has lost the respect of all and faces a ruined career, let alone the loss of Albion. And I thought that this Plautius was a man full of authority and power.” He began to saunter away, but Caradoc called sharply, “Where are you going?”
“To order my wains packed and my tent struck,” Togodumnus shouted back over his shoulder. “Your stupidity is unexcelled, Caradoc.” Several of the chiefs rose and began to drift after Togodumnus and one of them, a great, bearded Durotrigan with black hair hanging to his waist, said, “He is right, your brother. Plautius faces disgrace for his failure. The Romans are finished as far as we are concerned.” He nodded his shaggy head and went away, lumbering like an old bear.
“It does not smell right,” Caradoc said to his men angrily. “It is too easy. I know, I know that they will come.”
Gladys answered him softly, a bleakness chilling her voice. “Of course they will come. Plautius is all we have heard, and more. He is a wily man, my friends. I think that he has acted very cleverly in this. He knows that we sit here on the cliffs, waiting for him, and he wants us to scatter. What better way than the rumor of mutiny and a helpless petition for aid to Caesar? He will come. The chiefs must be made to see.”
Caradoc rose, and his men rose with him. “Go quickly,” he said to them. “Talk to the chieftains. I will call a Council tonight.”
“Leave Togodumnus to me,” Gladys said. “I think he is past listening to you, Caradoc, but I will make him see sense.”
They parted, but already the creak of wheels split the night and angry voices cursed the sleepy, unwilling oxen.
The chiefs attended the Council grudgingly, sitting in the open around the fire, the shushing of the sea an ever present taunt in their ears. Caradoc spoke to them for an hour, striding up and down before them, explaining and cajoling, while Togodumnus sat silently between his chiefs, his head bowed on his scarlet chest, and dreamed of his brother’s head swinging impotently from the lintel of his doorpost. The foreign tribesmen did not bother to conceal their contempt for him, this dreamer, this hasty, loud mouthed Catuvellaunian wolf who had dragged them from calving and sowing to lead them after a lie. Many of them had begun to say that it had all been a trick to confuse them, and that before they could reach their territories the Catuvellauni would descend on them in some wild, wooded valley and wipe them out. But Caradoc’s desperate, inspired eloquence rang in their ears and they found themselves agreeing to wait for two more weeks.
The two nightmare weeks went by. The days were pleasantly warm and breezy and in the evenings the sky clouded over and a light, thin rain fell, angling over the cliffs. Gladys went back to the sands, and Caradoc took to sleeping under his wain with Cinnamus and his other chiefs ranged around it. The threats and drunken challenges grew, and he knew that if Plautius did not move promptly the host would break suddenly, and be dispersed. He wondered whether Plautius was waiting also, waiting for his spies to bring him word that his ruse had succeeded and the tribes of Albion had left the coast. His own scouts came to him every day with grim nays—there was no activity outside Gesioracum. He thought of his wife and his little ones now that his woods must surely be carpeted with knee-high bluebells. The girls would be running under the trees, arms laden with blooms, their high, excited voices echoing under the oaks, while Tallia kept an anxious watch for boar and wolf and Eurgain sat rigidly by the gate, waiting for news. News. The chieftains no longer gathered eagerly around him at the first sign of a scout boat, and even Togodumnus kept away from him, trailed by a bored, silent Llyn. Caradoc had forbidden the beaches to him, and he sulked and avoided his father, behaving like a spoiled, younger Togodumnus. Caradoc did not approve, but his mind was too full of anxiety to worry over Llyn’s growing attachment to his uncle.
The fourteenth day dawned, and before its light had turned from pink to strong yellow the chiefs began to leave. Caradoc did not try to stop them. He sat on a bluff, his sword beside him, Cinnamus, Caelte, and Vocorio crouched at his feet, and watched as the wains and chariots rumbled away and disappeared between the wooded hills. All morning their clamor reproached him, and by the late afternoon the countryside was silent but for the lonely, broken keening of the seagulls, the clean, salt-edged air smudged by the smoke of the dying fires.
Togodumnus was the last to go, and he walked to Caradoc, said curtly, “I am going back to Verulamium,” spun on his sandaled heel, and went away. I feel no shame, Caradoc thought stubbornly. They
will come. But I cannot sit here with a few thousand freemen to face Plautius and his juggernaut. He saw Gladys walking toward him along the clifftop, her cloak over her arm and her dark hair whipping about her face, and he rose slowly, wearily, like an old man.
“Caelte, find Llyn and then get the wains packed and ready to move. Cinnamus, round up whatever scouts are left to us and tell them…” He paused. Tell them what? “Tell them to keep to their posts until I send them word, or until they bring me word that the Romans have come.”
Gladys approached him. “There is a storm over the mainland,” she said. “Far in the east the sea is hazed and it heaves without breaking.” She stepped closer so that Vocorio should not hear. “Caradoc, have you considered telling the omens?” Her skin smelt of seaweed. It was tanned to a deep, healthy brown and her eyes were clear as a summer night. “Many of the other chiefs did. They said that the signs were not good, but no one was able to tell them why. Have we a seer still, at Camulodunon?”
“He died, Gladys.” The answer came slackly. From somewhere close at hand Llyn’s shrill voice was protesting and Caelte remonstrating with humor in his voice. “I have considered such a thing, yes,” he finished, “but it is too late now. In any case, we would have to apply to the Master Druid on Mona for a new seer, and you know as well as I that the seers couch their pronouncements in such strange language that the sacrifice hardly seems worthwhile.”
“I can read the omens,” she said unexpectedly. “Let me try, Caradoc.”
He was too tired to be surprised. He sometimes wondered if there was anything Gladys did not know, and he did not doubt that she had absorbed some weird, incomprehensible second sight in her solitary commerce with the ocean. Like my Eurgain, he thought suddenly, remembering the hours she had spent sitting looking out her window, oblivious to all save the minute, nebulous shiftings of her own spirit. “No, Gladys,” he said. “We are going home. I need no omens to tell me what I know already.”
The Catuvellauni set out for Camulodunon leaving behind them a thousand black, ash-filled pits and many acres of trampled grass, as well as the hopes, fears, and broken dreams of a swift and devastating victory. They went slowly, savoring the growing, brash ebullience of a summer that promised to be hot and long, camping beside the paths, sprawling laxly around their fires in the deep, leaf-scented darkness. Caradoc no longer cared whether Plautius came or not. He was tired, and not even the imminent threat of Togodumnus’s war could rouse him from his lethargy.
Then, with a shocking suddenness, two days away from Camulodunon, the scouts found them ambling under the welcome shade of the forest and fell upon them with news that galvanized them into horrified action. The pleasant glow of anticlimax fled and the words sped back down the train from mouth to mouth like groundfire out of control.
“They have come! The beaches are swarming with them. Already they are digging in and raising defences for the provisions. The cavalry is still at sea but it cannot be long.”
Caradoc sprang to life. “Mocuxsoma!” he bellowed. “Ride to Verulamium. Take a scout with you. Tog must turn back. Gladys, speed to Camulodunon. Tell Eurgain of all that has passed. Tell her we face them alone and she must prepare for a siege. Then stay or return as you choose. Fearachar, from this moment you are not to let Llyn out of your sight.” He quickly calculated the distance that separated his tribe from the others, and debated whether to send freemen after them. It would make no difference, not at the first encounter with the enemy. The enemy! He saw himself a youth, laughing with the traders, mad for every new curiosity that they brought, sitting on Eurgain’s Roman couch and drinking Roman wine. He knew his change. Regret shook him, then dissolved. Rome was now the enemy.
“Vocorio, choose six of my chiefs. Send them south, west, and north. The tribes will be of no use yet, but perhaps they will come to engage Plautius if he breaks through us.”
“We could turn and try to join up with the Cantiaci,” Cinnamus said. “The place of Plautius’s landing is in their territory. Together we might hold them off until the others come.”
Caradoc nodded, thin-lipped, his mind clicking over furiously. There was a chance that the Cantiaci had not disbanded. Of all the tribes, they would know that Rome was here. “Go to them, Cin,” he said. “Don’t stop to sleep or eat. Take a spare horse with you. Ask them to cross the Medway and wait for us on our side of the river. No use in marching any farther south. We do not want to be caught on the move. Then come back to me.”
His chiefs and Gladys scattered, mounting their horses and pounding into action, and Caradoc sat listening to the fading of their dispersion. Then he raised himself, turned, and shouted, “Back, all! The Raven of Battle has come! Back to the Medway!”
Aulus Plautius Silvanus stood on the sand, watching his men disembark. His tribunes clustered around him, the plumes of their helmets tossing in the landward breeze, and beyond them all the troops boiled along the beach, the centurions moving among them. Farther up, where the sand gave way to pebbles and then grass, the standards and aquilae had been planted, and gradually the shouting, seething mass began to separate and gather to their units.
“Where is the enemy?” Rufus Pudens said. “We come expecting to face a horde of screaming savages and we find absolutely nothing. Not even a monster!”
Plautius smiled briefly at his senatorial tribune, wondering how Vespasianus was faring. Probably chaffering his seasick, miserable men into some kind of order. A good man, Plautius thought. No more imagination than one of Claudius’s precious doves, but a born soldier. Where would the Second Augusta be without his coarse, harsh discipline? “They have gone home,” he answered. “But they were waiting.” He waved to the south.
“They expected us by the cliffs, or so I hear. The Twentieth will know by now.”
A shrill, frightened neighing split the air, and the men turned to watch the first of the horses led ashore. The praefectus alae stood, hands on hips, and his men struggled to pacify the plunging, wild-eyed brutes. Already order was rapidly being established, and inland, just out of sight, they heard the soldiers begin to dig the trenches that would become the perimeters of their first camp. By nightfall the earth would be pulled into walls, the towers erected, the tents laid out in neat rows, and the officers would sleep on their own cots. Plautius listened to all of it with great satisfaction. So far, so good.
“Pudens,” he said, “Find me the primipilus. I want to know how many men have been incapacitated by the storm. And see that guards are posted well inland. To work, gentlemen. How I would like a bath!” They laughed dutifully and turned away and he sighed, his gaze traveling the calm, sparkling ocean, the sun-drenched, stirring grasses.
In spite of the activity going on all around him he felt a deep peace. Before the sun set, word would come from Vespasianus and from the Twentieth, and in the morning they could begin their march. He was glad that it was he standing here sweating in the sun, and not Paulinus, who was even now on his way through the mountains into Mauretania. He could find no reason for his happiness. It was just there, like the wind and the waves. He wondered how Vespasianus’s emissaries were getting on with the Atrebates and their new chieftain, Cogidumnus, who had offered their aid against these two foolhardy Catuvellaunian brothers. He thought briefly of the sulky, intractable Adminius, still sitting in one of the boats, and derision curled his lip for a moment. He would have his uses, but Plautius despised him. The primipilus coughed politely at his elbow and Plautius at last brought his thoughts back to the present. There was much to do before he could settle down in his tent to a little reading. Julius Caesar’s Comentarii nestled snugly in his knapsack.
Chapter Eleven
CARADOC and the Catuvellaunian chiefs wended back the way they had come. Many of the women who had traveled to the coast with the wains had decided to join Eurgain in defending their town and had taken their children back with them, but Gladys returned, catching them up just before they crossed the Thamus. They camped briefly on the farther side of
the river, high out of the tide’s inexorable reach, then pushed on quickly and came to the Medway at noon of the next day. Scouts passed in and out of the camp, bringing Caradoc detailed accounts of each movement of the enemy. In the middle of that night Togodumnus arrived, his men tired and hungry, for they had slept only briefly, curled in their cloaks beside the path, and had not stopped to light fire. Togodumnus did not apologize for his flagrant bad manners of the days before, but sauntered cheekily into camp, greeted his brother, and called for meat. Llyn left Fearachar’s side and ran to his uncle, throwing his arms about the slim, tight-muscled waist, but Caradoc ordered him sharply back to his place and told him to stay there on pain of a drubbing. He did not want his son to blithely follow Tog into the heart of battle, and he knew that this was what Llyn wanted to do. Later he told Fearachar that he was to use force if necessary, but Llyn was not to trail after Togodumnus any more.
At dawn a scout came, warning them that the legions, which had landed in three different places along the coast in an extremity of caution, had now joined forces and were on the march. Caradoc left his meal hastily and melted into the white morning mist, with Cinnamus and Caelte beside him, and soon the Catuvellaunian host followed, and began to spread out along the bare, level banks of the wide river, moving like wan, gray ghosts, silent in the clinging mist. Caradoc went up and down the lines, going from chief to chief, advising and admonishing. The chariots rolled between them and the water, their warriors and drivers swaying, but strangely there were few sounds. The damp chill of early morning enveloped them all, dulling thought and senses, and the warriors and freemen stood or squatted, wrapped in their own private, anesthetic dreams. Cinnamus had told Caradoc that the Cantiaci would come, but that they would sweep wide and find the fords to the south so as to avoid the Roman column, and could not be expected to arrive before noon. Caradoc heard, weighed, and shrugged. He and his men could surely hold the river until noon. He went back to Fearachar and Llyn.
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