It was well-sited, on a vital narrows where the river turned north after making a giant ‘U.’ The pioneers had done a fine job, and we had sufficient vessels fastened end to end to make a pontoon bridge behind the defensive boom. This bridge would have archers and slingshot men along its length, and they would fire at the enemy from behind a wooden rampart.
The boom itself was made of huge logs, chained and stapled end to end, that floated, barely showing above the surface, and I ordered the pontoon barrier to be placed a short distance further back from it, in case the Roman galleys attempted to ram their way across. I knew they would sink in the attempt, and I wanted a field of fire for my archers to butcher them, clear of any sinking ships.
At the south end, where the log boom was fastened to the land, our engineers had constructed another strong point so we could repel any attempt to unfasten the barrier. On a thought, I ordered the pontoon bridge to be given an extra surface of planking, to create a rough roadway. If needed, we could move troops swiftly across the river to the south bank. If it were not needed, we would use the floating platform as a rampart for the archers. It all seemed satisfactory, so I moved a few miles downstream, to view the first boom the enemy would encounter, the one that would close the trap behind them.
The giant logs floated near-invisible, so low were they in the water and again I satisfied myself that the massive chains which held them in line could not easily be hacked free by some daring axemen. Such heroes would have to swim to them, straddle the slippery logs and wield an axe at the linkages, all while coming under fire from the banks. The archers got instructions should that happen, and I turned to the boom. One end of the chained logs was secured to the north bank, again guarded by a discreet blockhouse, against any effort to loose the boom, the other floated free and would be floated across the river after the enemy had passed by.
An engineer officer respectfully required my attention. He suggested fastening a long hawser to the loose end of the boom, a hawser that would be attached to a windlass or winding gear on the south bank. It would be a quicker and more positive way to move the loose end to its fastenings, he felt, than by towing the heavy logs across the river by galley, even if we did have the ebb or flow of the tide to assist. It would also assist in landing the end to be fastened at the exact place we had readied for it, where we could build a strongpoint. His idea was better than mine, and I nodded agreement, so he set about creating and installing the machinery we needed, and building a fort to protect it.
Next, I inspected the artillery. Most of it was concentrated at the western end of our trap. There were sling catapults called ‘wild asses’ because they made such a powerful kick, and these could be used to thrown burning pitch or other inflammables at the invaders’ ships. I ordered dozens of ballistae to be placed in support of them. These were crossbow-style weapons that could fire big iron bolts with considerable precision, or could also hurl rounded river stones that would stave in the ribs of a lap-straked ship with ease.
Lastly, I viewed the nimble little rowboats that could dash among the invaders. I did not want them to hook onto the enemy ships, I wanted them to perform a specific duty, and I instructed their crews in it and ordered small fighting towers installed fore and aft on these speedy river craft.
All that was left to do was to ensure our watchtowers along the estuary were manned, that the signal fires were laid and that our men and materials were in place along the killing ground we had established. My officers and I went over every detail, from the braziers that would supply burning coals to how we would provide sheaves of arrows for the archers on the pontoon roadway. Finally, I was satisfied we had omitted nothing. Then I went back to the palace in Londinium where Guinevia had arrived and discussed what she could view for me. And I sent couriers to Cragus and Grimr to return and attend a council of war. We had several more days before we could expect Maximian’s attack. I wanted everything to be ready for him.
XXXV Thames
Guinevia helped the imperator to prepare, and she managed some of it right, but she also got something very badly wrong and it put Britain in mortal danger. Arthur asked her as a matter of great importance to see what his enemies were doing, and she made an honest attempt. Her technique for remote viewing called for her to specify where she wanted to send her mind, or on whom she wanted to concentrate. She naturally opted to view the doings of Maximian and Allectus. She looked at the Meuse and Scheldt rivers’ shipyards and at the harbour of Bononia. She strained to view the places she knew: the Seine at Rouen, the ruined remains of her father’s compound on the Tay; the castra at Chester, Dover and Eboracum, the Saxon encampments at Colchester and Aquae Sulis. One by one, she sent out her mental eye and reported her impressions.
Two scribes diligently scribbled down what she saw, and also what she did not see: if the once-bustling shipyards were now empty, that was as significant as seeing a legion encamped outside Bononia. If the vessels in the shipyard had sails hoisted, that was significant. If their masts were not yet stepped, that too could tell secrets. It was a masterful display of magic, but the Druid did not know she should send her mind to examine the rocky coast of northwest Gaul, where Maximian’s secret fleet was readying to sail. So, unobserved, the Roman force would arrive in a part of Britain that was unprepared for it, and soon.
Arthur read her reports and was pleased. He thought he had a comprehensive picture of the doings of his enemies, but the portrait was flawed and he did not suspect it.
On their ordered days, the two blue-sheeted Roman fleets sailed their separate ways, from their different harbours. One went west from the Scheldt, another went west from Armorica, the rugged rocky peninsula of northwestern Gaul. The first fleet aimed its menace at the Thames, the second sailed a course around the land of the Dumnonii, who hold the south western arm of Britain, to deliver its threat up the Severn estuary.
Arthur was only ready for the first flotilla. The imperator knew that when lit, the line of beacons that ringed the southeast coastal ramparts of his island were employed as navigation aids by mariners, and he had conceived an idea to use that knowledge. He created a new, false line of beacons inland, to mislead Maximian’s fleet as it crept towards Britain in the pre-dawn dark. The British imperator had once been admiral of the Roman fleet that policed the Narrow Sea, and he knew that an undersea ridge of chalk covered with deadly sandbanks lay a half dozen miles off the coast, just east of the narrowest neck of the straits, at Britain’s forefoot.
When he was a sailor patrolling those waters, he had often enough taken soundings in fog or dark to determine his exact position, and had tested between his fingers and tasted on his tongue the grit and clay that a grease-covered weight brought up from the sand below. The old sailor’s trick to analyze the seabed under his hull was an accurate gauge for the experienced, but was no help to novices in those treacherous waters.
Maximian’s new sailors had been made strangers to those seas, because Arthur’s own admiral Grimr and his fleet ruthlessly ruled them. The Romans, leaving Gaul by dark to cloak their invasion, innocently trusted the wreckers’ false guidelights and sailed unsuspecting to their doom. The first they knew were the juddering crashes as their pinewood hulls ran into the undersea obstructions that make the area a ships’ graveyard.
All the Romans had for visibility were guttering oil lamps, carefully guarded and shielded on their wooden ships. They could not see the sandbanks, they could not see their sister ships except for a small flicker of flame, so they wrecked in darkness. Even the calls of alarm and shouts of distress could not save the following ships as they ran into the undersea teeth. More than a third of the fleet that set out for the Thames went ashore on those deadly shoals. The loss of life was horrendous, as ship after ship was misled into a maze of sand, rocks and killing waters.
Dawn broke over the heaving grey seas to reveal the survivors of the fleet anchored or hauled to in disarray among the treacherous shoals. All they could do was drag aboard the corpses floating ove
rside, and edge cautiously out to open water, nervous leadsmen chanting the depths they plumbed as they corrected their course to the north and around the headlands of the territory of the Cantii. Finally, in daylight, they gained the broad mouth of the estuary of the Thames, and began sailing into an even worse nightmare.
When the grey light of dawn revealed the fleet to the watchers on the cliffs, the fire beacons’ signals ran ahead to raise the alarm. In full daylight, smoke from the wet hay and oily waste thrown on the blazes confirmed the Romans’ arrival and groups of horsemen were summoned to gather along the low bluffs and high hills that rimmed the estuary. They cantered alongside as the invasion fleet sailed for Londinium, and destruction, the warships’ beaked rams throwing up a fine spray, their crews pulling in time to the inexorable hammer taps of the coxswain beating out the stroke.
Arthur’s ambush worked even better than he had dared to hope. The depleted Roman fleet sailed down the narrowing funnel of the Thames estuary and slowed to a crawl as they rounded the sweep of the bend where the Celtish King Till’s burh began. The ships were carried forward, the incoming tide flowing fast and pushing them westerly towards Londinium. Soon, they were struggling along the river’s reach where Arthur had created his killing ground. A blustery March wind battered in from the north, raising a chop that made steering difficult, and the push of the incoming tide largely took control from the steersmen’s hands. Anxious and struggling with their vessels, the Romans paid small attention to the nimble galleys that pulled out into the river behind them, nor did they notice the long hawser that was being dragged from the water by men and oxen working a windlass on the southern bank.
In a half hour, that windlass and its panting human and animal crews had hauled a heavy log boom from shore to shore and had it fast, and guarded. The door had been closed on the invaders’ retreat.
The river funnelled tighter and tighter, and another right-angled bend, this time trending to the north, was approaching. The Romans were uncomfortably aware that both banks were crowded with warriors keeping pace with their vessels, but the ships’ commanders confidently waved the fleet onwards. They reasoned that when the banks grew marshy, they would lose their hostile companions. Then they saw the line of the pontoon bridge, a floating span across the river that held clusters of men, and the commanders gestured their archers forward to the bows.
Too late, they saw the slop of waves that betrayed the near-submerged line of the log boom, and the first half dozen longships crunched against the huge timbers, stove in their hulls and began to founder. The waiting archers on the pontoon bridge released the first of a steady barrage of deadly missiles, their first target an unfortunate galley that had struck the underwater boom exactly between two chained log ends. The impact had holed the iron-reinforced bow and the projecting ram was inextricably stuck. The crew of the pinioned ship was forced either to stand and receive a deadly arrow storm at close range, or to leap overboard and face almost-certain drowning.
Because the oncoming fleet was pointing directly at the pontoon rampart, few Roman archers could bear on it to return fire, but the line of British bowmen, standing safely behind a breastworks on the pontoon roadway, had the entire fleet as their targets. The flotilla halted, milling in confusion, and the ballistae hidden in the scrubby undergrowth on both banks began firing.
The big iron arrows shattered gunwales and pierced hulls; volleys of rounded river rocks arced down steeply to plunge clean through the pinewood bottoms of the ships. Smoking containers of burning pitch began to crash down on the huddled fleet, spreading a fog of choking fumes before the taut blue canvas sails flamed, flared, then vanished in gouts of smoke and ash. Then a new horror emerged.
Small, swift galleys rowed by eager Britons brought deadly slingers close, slingers who fired from fighting towers that loomed above the open ships into which they were sending their rain of death and injury. These men, many of them shepherds who used the weapons to keep their flocks safe from predators, hurled with astonishing accuracy lead weights the size of a hen’s egg. They had a range of up to a hundred paces, and were deadly at about half that, a distance at which they could kill a horse with a single weighty missile.
The slingers’ orders were to assassinate the steersmen and officers, and when they hurled their missiles in volleys from 20 or 30 paces’ range, the result was murderous. The mere sight of a scarlet-cloaked officer dropping to the deck, his head crushed by one of the unusual missiles was enough to make the sailors fearful, and the fact that the officers and steersmen were obviously targeted made those individuals more conscious of taking shelter than of operating their vessels.
The steersmen cowered away from the rain of arrows and died under the brutal blows of the slung lead missiles. Dying or panicked, they rammed and crashed their vessels into each other in the struggle to turn in the narrow river, a desperate but vain attempt to escape a maelstrom of burning ships, panicked men and dense smoke. On the pontoon roadway, firing from ultra-short range, the archers poured their goose-feathered missiles blindly into the smoke, knowing that a yard-long, bodkin-pointed arrow would transfix any Roman mail or Celtic leather breastplate when fired from such a close distance. As fast as they fired, they were resupplied by boys who ran crouching behind them with linen-and-willow-wand quivers of arrows designed to prevent the feather flights being crushed.
The British archers’ long hunting bows twanged and hummed a dozen times to the minute, delivering a storm of iron death into the hapless throngs in the Roman ships. No man could stand in that storm and live. It was hardly a skirmish, it was more of a butcher’s shambles, a slaughter yard on the water, and the Romans who went over the side in hopes of escaping the missiles or the flames or their own sinking ships mostly drowned under the weight of their armour.
The few who struggled ashore were hacked down, and the longships that did manage to turn back were trapped at the eastern boom, and destroyed by two fireships that the Britons pushed among them. The quickest-thinking steersmen ran their ships ashore, where some few score of the invaders escaped their hunters and fled into the countryside.
A rainstorm began pounding the region as Arthur’s men took the surrender of hundreds, chained them and marched them to the slave pens. Arthur himself, smoke-grimed, bloodied and soaked, rode to his riverfront palace by the bridge at Londinium, and there, during the victory celebration, heard the news: the real invasion would be coming at Dover. The news from spies in Gaul was that the attack had been a feint to feel out the defences, and it would be a week before Maximian would launch at Britain’s south coast. Time to rest. The rain would bog them down on any march to the coast. Give the men a day or two to rest, Arthur thought. What he did not know was that the spies had been turned after the death of King Gennobaudes. Maximian was already on his way.
XXXVI Severn
At Arthur’s insistence, Guinevia had taken her son Milo and left Londinium for the safety of Chester before the Romans attacked southern Britain. She opted first to travel west to Caerleon for an important druidical conclave at the edifice built by King Ebranck, which since the Roman invasion had been a temple of Diana. It was still an important religious site and especially important to the Druids, who had been largely underground during the occupation of the Caesars, who regarded them more as a political force than a religious one. Then, the Romans had not allowed druidical beliefs with their usual tolerant indifference. Now that the Romans had gone, the druids were gathering strength again, and Guinevia found herself in a position of considerable influence and power, from both her training and for her closeness to the imperator.
The sorceress took in her entourage the three female Hibernian slaves Jesla, Karay and Caria who had been captured after sailing with their menfolk marauders. Guinevia enjoyed the women’s native music and crak, a term they used for lively conversation, and they in turn enjoyed their good treatment as slaves in a wealthy household. It was a life much more comfortable than the one they had left in the boggy green island west o
f Britain.
Guinevia had taken fondly to the smallest of the women, blonde Caria, whose fake sorcery had bemused and frightened male warriors, and who had the trick, worked best in dim light, of exhaling a luminous glow from crushed shellfish secretly held in her mouth. It looked convincingly like actual fire-breathing. The Druid priestess had retrieved the decrepit skull and handful of vertebrae the girl used for her show of casting auspices, equipment the jailers regarded with superstition and had swiftly confiscated. “How do you use these, dear?” she asked gently. Caria, well aware that she was dealing with a real and powerful sorceress whose goddess was the dreadful Nicevenn, huntress and tormentor of the souls of the dead, shook her head.
“It’s for show,” she whispered. Guinevia nodded, she’d known that. Neither was the girl was a haruspex, as she claimed. She couldn’t divine the future from the entrails of a sacrifice, but she was courageous and intelligent.
“I could teach you a little about divination,” Guinevia offered. Caria nodded silently. “The old Babylonians were the experts, and I have had counsel with some of their wise men,” Guinevia explained. “They knew that the liver is the source of the blood, so examining it could tell you much about the will of the gods. Animal livers will do, but human sacrifice is very powerful, and you can learn the future from seeing where a dying human moves, and what his intestines tell you.”
She paused as the raeda carriages in which the women were riding lurched and splashed through a ford. Something about the water disturbed her, some hidden whisper of faraway threat came to her, flowing with the power of the river. Guinevia scented the air like a dog. Nothing, but an unease prickled the nape of her neck. She leaned from the window to summon the guard captain, who rode close behind. “Stop the column under those trees,” she said. “And, where are we on the iterum?”
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