The road was angling uphill now, and at the crest the cleared land widened around a fortified tower surrounded by two rings of ditch-and-wall. After the guards had passed them through, Paulinus dragged off his helmet with relief. It was cool in the forest, but the air was murky and oppressive, and the black woods that rose on either side of the cleared road bank were as inviting as a rat-hole.
“Nice spot for an ambush,” Correus commented to Paulinus.
“Oh, we’re safe enough this far back, but I expect we’ll have to go the last distance with one of the patrols.”
“You’re damn right we will,” Silvanus called over his shoulder. “The German bastards come and go like water snakes, sometimes just three or four at a time. One minute everything’s lovely, and the next minute you notice that the last man in line isn’t there anymore. And they have a liking for officers’ crests!”
Correus raised an eyebrow at Paulinus, who explained. “They have a tendency to pick off officers, I’m told. Most of them can’t tell one legionary uniform from another, so they look for the man whose helmet crest is set sideways. Highly dishonorable, of course.”
“Highly effective, I should think,” Correus said, running a hand over his own helmet crest. “What in hell are you doing in the middle of this, may I ask?”
“I want to be the first man to write the history of a major campaign from the battlefields, without having his own military reputation to consider. Having a military reputation clouds one’s veracity somewhat, I should think. Mine will be unquestionable.”
“That’s more than I can say for your chances of survival,” Correus said frankly. “This expedition could cost you more than you bargain for.”
“Perhaps,” Paulinus said. “It’s certainly costing me a great deal of money. But then I happen to have a great deal of money and my father is no longer alive to quarrel about how I choose to spend it. An admirable man in many ways, but we never did quite see eye to eye.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Correus said, and gave up. He had taken a liking to Paulinus and, after all, it was his own hide. “I take it you think it will come to an outright war in the end?” he said, after a minute or two.
“If Nyall can keep a firm grip on these tribes, yes,” Paulinus said. “His mother was Gaulish and that gives him the perfect stick to beat the Germans into line with.”
“So was mine,” Correus said. “I don’t see the connection.”
“You wouldn’t. You’re Roman. Think about it. Years ago, when Julius Caesar got there, Gaul was pretty much in the same state Barbarian Germany is now. That is: divided. If the Gauls could have united instead of trying to play Caesar’s army off against their neighbors, they might have stopped him.”
“Gaul’s been a Roman province for more than a hundred years,” Correus said thoughtfully.
“Nine-tenths of the Gaulish tribes think like Romans, act like Romans, dress like Romans. They are Romans. Even when some of them joined in Civilis’s rebellion, they were trying to set up a Gallic Empire fashioned after Rome. There’s nothing left of the people the Gauls used to be. The Germans know it could happen to them. Nyall’s got conquered Gaul to point to when his German allies start to waver.”
They caught up with the legion a full day’s ride from Argentoratum, covering the last stretch with an incoming foot patrol: a century of the Fourth Cohort, which they picked up at the last guard post. The centurion in charge gave them a friendly nod and salute, and pointed them toward the command tent inside the turf-and-timber camp. Paulinus had quietly disappeared and Correus suspected that he had slipped in among the confusion of the baggage train, where one body more or less would go unnoticed. The chronicler was taking no chances of being thrown out of camp by a suspicious commander.
The marching camp was laid out in the usual pattern and heavily fortified; two steep V-shaped ditches surrounded its walls, one of them filled with dark, unhealthy-looking water – probably runoff from the drained land. Beyond the ditches was a field of “lilies” – small, sharpened stakes set in holes and camouflaged with brushwood. The walls were timber on a turf bank with tri-level towers at intervals, and the land had been cleared of trees for some distance in all directions. A small stream, a tributary of the Rhenus, ran past the northern wall, and a centurion of engineers was supervising the digging of a water-intake channel to the camp.
In the command tent, a palatial six-roomed affair with a plank floor, the legate was studying a map and a sheaf of engineers’ projections simultaneously. Calpurnius Rufinus was a stocky, balding figure in field uniform. His helmet was on the desk beside him, its eagle-feather crest dusty and disheveled in the fading light. Rufinus had a cold in the head and a harassed expression, and he gave them a cursory inspection before signaling to an optio to present them to their respective commanders.
They found Correus’s century and most of the rest of the Eighth Cohort at work on the log road that the legion was pushing westward from the camp. The cohort commander, Messala Cominius, was a career officer in his mid-twenties, and at the moment he was standing in a ditch, mired to the knees in black mud. His discarded greaves and vine staff lay some distance away on a tree stump, along with his helmet. As Correus approached, he wiped his face with a grimy hand.
“First posting?” he inquired pleasantly. The sixth century was the lowest in a cohort and the standard spot for a new man. “Well, they pitched you right into it. The sixth century is down along that way with the fifth, redigging a channel because the sacred oracle of our infallible engineers has changed his damned mind again. Their centurion will show you around. They’re a good lot, only keep your eyes open at first – they’ll push a new man a bit just to see how far they can get with it.” He picked up an entrenching tool and hefted it. “Glad to have you with us, Centurion.” He turned to the sweating legionary beside him. “Look you, Porcus, if you swing thus” – the blade came down and bit into the black earth – “you get a clean stroke at the right angle, and you don’t waste your time smoothing out the sides afterward.”
Correus headed off in the direction Cominius had pointed and found his new command and another young centurion, who looked relieved to see him. The other man, no more than two months out of his own training, had been moved from the sixth to the fifth century when the fifth centurion had broken a leg working in the drainage ditch.
“Two centuries is one more than I really want on my hands,” he said frankly.
Correus nodded and touched the optio of the century on the shoulder. He had him call the rest up out of the ditch, and they stood on the bank, black as river rats, while Correus told them that they would look to him for orders now. Then, having decided that Messala Cominius was a commander to emulate, he stripped off his own greaves and helmet and set to work beside them.
* * *
The rest of that day and the days and weeks that followed were back-breaking work, digging drainage ditches and piling the turned-up earth on the roadbed to make a causeway, or cutting brushwood to throw in the ditches to check flooding or to tie in sheaves to form the foundation of the log road. When the planks were laid and skewered into the roadbed at each end, the men moved ahead to clear the next stretch of forest, while the engineers argued with each other over the proper course. At intervals in the cleared land, a fort would be built and a patrol garrison installed. When the road reached a full day’s march from the legion’s base, the entire camp was dismantled and moved up, leaving a patrol tower in its place. Two other legions from Moguntiacum in the north and Vindonissa in the south were doing the same, slowly cutting the Agri Decumates into thirds; and couriers came and went daily between their generals.
The German villages were quiet enough as the army passed by, although the inhabitants were somewhat less then helpful. The engineers made use of the Germans’ tracks through the forest and laid their road over them when possible. One aged headman assured them with such transparent deviousness that the track ahead ran into bogland and had been abandoned by his village
for that reason, that the centurion of engineers called him a liar to his face and ordered the road run over it anyway. Midway through the work the engineer discovered to his chagrin that the headman had been quite truthful. The route was redrawn and the headman went cackling back to his hut.
There was a noticeable lack of fighting-age men in the villages, but they were an unseen presence manifested in sabotaged roadwork and ambushed patrols. Correus, taking his century on a sweep from the leading edge of the road to a village at the end of the cleared land beyond, eyed the forest with suspicion, and marched his men in full battle gear.
“Did you ever have the feeling that something had its eye on you?” he asked Paulinus that evening. “The whole way back I had the feeling that someone out there was thinking about jumping us.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Paulinus said. “They generally wait for a good chance. If you don’t give ’em one, they may back off. But they’re always around – and my bet is there’s a war brewing.”
Correus laid down the scabbard strap he had been mending and dragged two pottery cups from a chest by his camp bed. “There was a German envoy in camp today, a fierce-looking old boy with one eye and enough scars for a gladiator. Not the sort you send when you want to be diplomatic.” He filled the cups from a hoarded crock of native beer and passed one to Paulinus.
“I know,” Paulinus said. “I asked the legate about him and he bellowed at me to mind my own business and threatened to revoke my pass, so I gave up.” Two days after his arrival in camp, Paulinus had become bored with the baggage train and had presented himself to the legate. There had then ensued a verbal battle which Paulinus had won by sheer stubbornness and by mentioning several influential connections in Rome. He took a drink of beer and made a face of distaste at Correus.
“I like beer,” Correus said. “Put it down to my low birth.”
“I put it down to its being better than the army’s wine,” Paulinus said. In the past weeks they had become friends, and Correus had found in him one of the few men with whom he could discuss his slave origins without feeling twitchy and defensive.
Paulinus had returned the compliment by letting Correus read the journal from which his history would be written. Paulinus kept two journals. The one for publication was a bit more honest than a legate would have cared for, but presentable enough. The second, private, one was a highly inflammatory document in which its author cast a ruthlessly honest eye on everything that came to his notice. This one was prudently kept in a locked chest under the constant guardianship of Tullius. Correus had also developed a fondness for Paulinus’s hulking servant. Tullius had the loyalty of a watchdog and the fighting technique of a gorilla, and Correus had ceased to wonder that Paulinus was willing to travel in dangerous lands with no other escort.
“Actually, he’s a bit of an embarrassment at times,” Paulinus said. “He goes too far. I mean, just because an innkeeper’s trying to cheat us doesn’t necessarily mean I want him turned inside out and tied in sailor’s knots.”
Tullius had entered his service in a dingy wineshop in Judaea on the day he parted company with the Fifth Legion there. Clutching their discharges, the hard-earned testament to twenty-five years on the march, Tullius and four cronies had repaired to a favorite dive in Emmaus to celebrate. The Bird in the Tree was not renowned for the quality of its clientele, and as happened often enough someone started a brawl, this time with a deadly difference: the wineshop keeper got stabbed. Everyone got away but Tullius. The shopkeeper, who died, was a cousin of the local magistrate, and in those days Judaea was wavering on the edge of rebellion. The officer of the watch was fully prepared to sacrifice Tullius in the cause of maintaining peace. It was then that Paulinus, who had prudently retired to a corner at the start of the excitement, had come forward and testified that Tullius had never come within ten paces of the shopkeeper. Tullius’s gratitude proved embarrassing. He figured he owed Paulinus his life and Paulinus found it impossible to get rid of him. Finally, in desperation, he took Tullius back to his lodging, to reason with him when he had sobered him up. Emmaus was a chancy place to go strolling after dark. They were attacked by a pair of back-alley thugs in search of an easy mark. Tullius, even falling-down drunk, had picked them up and smashed their heads against a wall. Then he had hiccuped and told his newfound benefactor that he needed a guardian.
Thereafter Tullius had accompanied Paulinus on all his travels, and Paulinus had long since given up trying to make him go away. Tullius still had a grant of land coming to him for his army service, if he ever wanted to take it up, but the truth was that he needed someone to look to, and he had eagerly transferred his allegiance from the army to Paulinus.
Now he poked his head through the flap of Correus’s tent to inform his master that his supper was ready, and there was enough for the centurion too, if he fancied joining them. “Better’n you’ll get in the officers’ mess,” Tullius said proudly, wiping his hands on a disreputable apron. “A nice little chicken and some greens.”
Paulinus chuckled. “Don’t ask him where he got the chicken,” he said.
VI Red Wolf, Black Wolf
The next morning the sky was leaden and the wind had teeth in it. Correus had never spent a winter this far north, but he had the feeling that they were soon in for bad weather. His cohort commander confirmed it.
“We’re going to have to pull into winter quarters pretty soon,” Cominius said, “either in Argentoratum or out here. I’m guessing here. We’re close to connecting up with Vindonissa’s and Moguntiacum’s words, and we have a pretty good supply line from Argentoratum.”
“It looks like it’s going to come down any minute,” Correus said, watching the black clouds shifting above the trees.
“I expect so,” Cominius said resignedly. “The Germans see the Underworld as a chasm of ice, and once you’ve spent a winter here you’ll know why.” Just then the wind came up in a vicious blast, driving a cloud of dirt and debris before it and whipping their cloaks about them. “The legate has finally pushed Nyall’s envoys around to a council meeting, so there’s a chance we may be able to loll about in Argentoratum this winter without any fighting, but I wouldn’t bet on it.” He adjusted his cloak. “Centurion Julianus, I’m told you speak passable German.”
“Very colloquial German, sir,” Correus said. “Enough to deal with the locals.”
“Good. I want you at that meeting. The legate has enough interpreters to start a school, but they’re nearly all Germans themselves and we never have figured out which ones we can trust. If any,” he added in a disgusted voice. “Mostly they interrupt to argue with each other, and half the time they tone down anything that they think we wouldn’t like. I don’t want you to interpret, just listen, especially when Nyall’s talking, and report to me any discrepancies between what he and the interpreters say.”
When he heard about Correus’s new task, Paulinus was openly envious and spent days concocting schemes to get himself admitted to the conference as well.
“I speak German, too!” he said indignantly.
“Which is precisely why the legate doesn’t want you there,” Correus said. “So if you’ve got any notion of hanging around disguised as a tree, with leaves in your hair, forget ’em. And don’t come wooing me afterward with any stolen chickens, either,” he added. “I’ve got strict instructions not to give you the time of day.”
Paulinus retired thwarted, and Correus laughed and went in search of Flavius, who also spoke some German and had been ordered by his own commander to attend the council. Unable to get information from Correus, the next person Paulinus would try to pump was Flavius. Correus liked Paulinus tremendously, but he didn’t trust him when he was after information.
Correus had seen less than usual of his brother since they had joined their legion. After the usual round of Castor-and-Pollux jokes (they looked so much alike it was inevitable), the other officers had ceased to comment on their relationship, and each found himself more involved with his
own cohort and century, learning to command the men under him. That was something which in truth could only be learned by doing. All the theory their training had offered did not equal the actual day-to-day responsibility of commanding eighty legionaries. The brothers grappled – hesitantly at first, then more confidently – with homesick recruits and barracks lawyers, malingerers, and jilted lovers who laid their woes on their centurion’s desk. Occasionally they spent their off-duty time together, more, Correus thought, from a feeling that they ought to than anything else.
Correus had put up with a certain amount of patrician disdain from the other officers, but Flavius, to give him credit, had added no more fuel to it than he could help. Some officers simply kept their distance from him, regarding his inclusion in the Centuriate as unfortunate but beneath their notice. Correus ignored them in return. He had learned early in life to keep his own distance, and in truth Paulinus was the first real friend he had ever made. The unspoken disapproval of his brother officers was nothing new to him, and he smothered the dull ache of loneliness by concentrating on leading his men. At least he had them, which was more than he had ever had before.
As for the cohort commander, Messala Cominius was shrewd enough not to care if his officers were sons of painted Picts as long as they were capable, and young Correus Julianus was proving to be one of the best. Correus was a born commander who also cared for his men, which was more than Cominius could say of his wellborn brother. Correus’s men responded by showing a loyalty and discipline that was rapidly turning the sixth into the best century in the cohort. Cominius had every intention of promoting Correus within his own cohort as soon as he decently could, before he lost him to another one. His fourth centurion had been hopeless from the day he was posted, but he was due for promotion for sheer length of service. Cominius had ruthlessly recommended the man be transferred to the Sixth Cohort, which needed a third centurion and whose commander he didn’t much care for. That would leave an opening, and Cominius could shift Correus to the fourth century and let him straighten it out before it got to be real trouble. Sixth to fourth century was a bit of a jump for a new centurion, but if Julianus came off well at the legate’s treaty council, that would help justify the promotion. Cominius drew a little eagle in the dirt with his vine staff while he thought. He fully intended to have his own legion someday, and the performance of his cohort would decide the next promotion on his path to it. He was quite prepared to use any halfway honorable means that came to his hand to ensure that performance.
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