The Mask of Command

by Ian Ross

  *

  ‘Juliacum up ahead, dominus!’ the scout reported. The night was already fading towards dawn, and in the greyness Castus could make out the column of footsore troops stretching away behind him, stationary as they waited for the order to advance once more. Twenty-five miles they had marched under cover of darkness; all were tired, blistered, eager for food and rest. But all knew that the enemy were close now. He could sense the men watching him, waiting for his decision.

  ‘What’s the situation over there?’

  ‘The fort garrison’s still holding out, it looks like,’ the scout said. ‘But they’re surrounded on all sides. The cavalry have already hit some of the enemy piquets and outlying encampments. A lot of the ones we killed are escaped slaves – they’ve still got the shackle scars on their ankles.’

  Castus remembered the Frankish prisoners he had seen working on the estates of Magnius Rufus. He could hardly blame them for their revolt. Was Rufus himself now trapped inside the fort, with the troops he had gathered under his command and the refugees he had taken from Colonia? He would find out soon enough.

  The ground ahead rose slightly, the barest swelling of the flat plain but enough to hide the column of troops from the horde encircling Juliacum. Castus nudged his horse forward, riding up the slope of the road; then he dismounted and sent an order for his commanders to join him at a stand of trees overlooking the plain to the west. As he waited, Castus walked forward, screened by the trees. In the faint pre-dawn light he could make out the brown brick circle of the fort walls and the civilian settlement along the road with ribbons of smoke still rising from the plundered buildings. In the fields and open country surrounding the settlement he could see the scattered encampments of the barbarians.

  ‘Form up in close order,’ he told the commanders. ‘All standards to the fore. Horns and trumpets ready on my command, cavalry to fan out on either flank. Once they see us, we keep moving until I order a halt. Slow and steady.’

  Nods and mutters of acknowledgement from all around him, and the men returned to their units. Dexter alone lingered for a moment more, his face grave as he saluted. Striding back down the slope, Castus mounted and led his small party of mounted troopers, with his staff officers and standard-bearer, off to the right. The sky to the east was already flushed with the rising sun. He raised his hand, then let it fall.

  A single horn sounded from the vanguard of the column, answered at once by another, then more. With a crash of boots on gravel the column began to move.

  Sunlight flashed through the leaves of the trees overhead, then the full burst of dawn lit the plain. The brassy clamour of the trumpets was almost deafening, one horn answering another, a wild cacophony of command calls as the troops marched over the rise. Their standards caught the sunlight: the glinting eagle and the ram ensign of I Minervia, the vexilla of the II Britannica, XXII Primigenia and XXX Ulpia Victrix detachments, the flags of the cavalry units and Castus’s own purple draco streaming in the breeze.

  Already the plain was stirring into life and motion, as the mass of barbarian raiders and freed slaves camped around Juliacum looked into the rising sun and saw a phalanx of troops bearing down on them, with all the standards and the wild screaming trumpets of a field army on the march. They could see the cavalry fanning out along the crest of the rise, dark against the brightening sky, and the dust raised by the marching men. Already they were scattering in disarray, abandoning their encampments and fleeing westward, away from the advancing doom.

  As the last men of the column crested the rise, Castus signalled a halt. A single trumpet call, and all two thousand men raised their spears and let out a ringing battle cry. The noise died across the plain, but it was enough: their enemies were fleeing, masses of them streaming away on foot or on stolen horses. The cavalry were riding down the stragglers as the troops advanced along the road towards the gates of Juliacum.

  *

  It was four hours later that he saw her, at the end of a stable portico crowded with wounded men. She stood in a patch of sunlight falling between the wooden pillars, wadded linen and a water jug in her hands as a surgeon knelt beside her attending to one of the injured. Dressed in a plain long tunic, her hair bound in a cloth, she could have been one of the slaves, but Castus knew her at once. He strode forward, stepping over the straw pallets where the wounded men lay, the heaps of equipment and weapons piled beside them.

  Just for a moment, he felt that he could walk right up to her, close the distance between them and take her in his arms. The noise around him, the groans and cries of the injured and the clatter from the stable courtyard, fell into silence. She saw him, her eyes widened and she set down the jug and stepped back. He halted just in time. The noise rose up between them once more.

  ‘Excellency,’ Marcellina said with awkward formality. In the sunlight he could see the lines of weariness scored into her face, the dark smudges beneath her eyes. ‘I heard you were here. I... was going to find you, but I needed to help...’

  She gestured at the scene around her. Castus understood. To wait passively at a time like this would have been unbearable; without the constant pressure of decision and action, he would have fallen into despair days ago. But he could hear the strain in her voice, the desperate need to remain focused and not give way to grief.

  ‘Your son,’ she said. ‘Magnius Rufus took him. My daughters too.’

  Castus felt his throat tighten, his shoulders lock with anger. He had already learned what had happened here: how Rufus had ridden out against the invaders with his three thousand men and fallen into successive ambushes all along the road west towards Tungris. How the troops had become split up, their morale shattered, and panic taken hold. Rufus himself had fled back to Juliacum with the horsemen, and the survivors of his force had come in over the following hours, many of them wounded and lacking commanders, until the enemy had sealed the roads.

  ‘Where is he?’ he asked, unable to keep the jagged edge of rage from his voice.

  Marcellina drew herself upright, speaking with a crisp hauteur. ‘He left for his villa yesterday night. He intends to defend his own lands, and let the rest of us suffer for his mistakes.’

  Castus looked away, stifling a curse. Yesterday night... if only he had been quicker, had pushed himself and his men harder... But there was nothing he could do now. The entire space within the walls of Juliacum was packed with people, the parade ground turned into horse lines, the barrack porticos and stables, the posting station and the storage sheds all turned into billets for thousands of soldiers and the civilians who had fled from the surrounding lands.

  ‘I’ve set up my quarters in the western gatehouse,’ he said quietly, stiff with the sense of propriety. ‘Can you visit me there later? Once your duties here are done?’

  She gave him a quick nod, then knelt beside the surgeon to help him bandage the bloodied cavalry trooper at her feet.

  It was midday before she came to him. Castus had slept briefly, and even managed to take a hurried lukewarm bath. He was sitting on a stool with his back to the door, stripped to the waist as Eumolpius changed the dressings on his wound. The sentry showed Marcellina in, and she gasped as she saw him.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry! I’ll wait...’

  ‘No,’ he said, standing quickly and snatching up his sweat-stained tunic. Marcellina had turned away, staring into the corner of the room as Castus dressed himself and buckled his belt. With a quick wave of his hand Castus dismissed his orderly and the sentry.

  ‘I didn’t know you were hurt,’ Marcellina said, turning to face him once more.

  ‘Just a thorn scratch,’ Castus told her, and smiled as he saw her frown. She seated herself on the stool, and he crossed to the curve of arched windows at the far side of the chamber and leaned on the sill. Outside he could see parties of Dexter’s tireless cavalry troopers, returning from hunting the barbarian stragglers across the plain.

  ‘Rufus murdered my husband,’ Marcellina said. Her voice caught, and when Castus
glanced back he saw her cover her face with her hand, wiping away tears.

  ‘I know,’ he told her.

  ‘It was my fault. I persuaded Dulcitius to write to the Praetorian Prefect and tell him everything. About Rufus and the governor, and what they’d done to the last commander, what they were trying to do to you. But they found out. I don’t know how.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Castus said, in a gruff whisper.

  ‘My husband wasn’t a bad man,’ she said, and sniffed back a sob. ‘He tried to do what was right. But he was in debt to them – everything we owned.’ She pulled off her headcloth, her hair tumbling loose as she scrubbed her face. ‘And now he’s dead, and Rufus – Rufus! – you know what he did?’ She was sitting upright, her face burning with anger.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He offered to marry me! Him – the man who had killed my husband... He knew my father once held high military rank in Britain and my mother was of good family there. He told me that a woman with my heritage – with my blood – deserved more than to be the wife of a merchant...’ She choked a cry of disdain. ‘I deserved a husband who was descended from an emperor!’

  Castus flinched as he pushed himself away from the window. ‘What did you tell him?’

  Marcellina glared at him for a moment. ‘What do you think I said? I’m a widow, thirty years old, with two young daughters to support and nothing to my name. What could I say?’ She tightened her lips, alight with fury. ‘I told him to crawl back into whatever filthy pit of Hades he’d come from!’

  Castus snorted a laugh, unable to stop himself. Marcellina drew in a shuddering breath, then smiled as the boiling anger subsided in her once more. ‘But then,’ she said in a quieter voice. ‘Then it was chaos. Nobody here knew what they were doing, nobody... They haven’t seen anything like this before. But I have. I lived through all of it, back in Britain. My children are all I have left to me now – he knew that, so he took them when he fled south. He knows I’ll go after them.’

  ‘And my son?’ Castus said, pulling up a stool and sitting down to face her. ‘Why did he take Sabinus?’

  Marcellina looked away, her hair falling across her face as she pressed her fingers to her brow. ‘I believe he intends to use your son,’ she said. ‘Use him as a hostage. Trade him for his own life, if necessary. Either to you, or to the barbarians.’

  Castus gave an anguished groan, folding his arms tight to his chest. He had guessed as much, but hoped it was not true. Hoped there might be some other reason, some less hideous truth. He thought of the Chamavi leader, Ragnachar, standing at the riverside as Castus threatened his captive son with death. Now he shared that sense of helpless pain.

  ‘What happens now?’ Marcellina asked, her voice grown tender.

  Castus took a long breath, exhaled, tried to think clearly. ‘We’ve had messengers from the south,’ he said. ‘The young Caesar and the advance units of his field army are nearly at Icorigium. I’ve sent messengers requesting they divert onto the direct road to Aquae Granni. They could meet up with me a march west of here in a day – maybe two days.’

  Marcellina nodded, uncertain. Both of them knew that it was a hard and dirty road to Aquae Granni, through the dense forests of the Arduenna. A large force travelling that way could easily be held up.

  ‘And you? What will you do?’

  For a long while he could not answer. He knew what he wanted to do. Rufus’s villa lay only five miles south of Juliacum; if he took a small mounted escort and rode fast he could be there within an hour. He could rescue his son, and Marcellina’s children, and return in time to lead his men... But that could not happen. Dealing with Rufus could take time, and every moment his troops delayed at Juliacum, the main barbarian horde would be free to plunder the lands to the west. As soon as the Chamavi and Chattuari heard of the field army’s approach they would surely swing north along the valley of the Mosa, heading for the frontier and their own territories beyond. He was the supreme commander, for now at least, and he could not desert his men while the enemy were in the field.

  ‘I march west before sundown,’ he said, with a pained downward glance.

  Marcellina nodded slowly. She appeared breathless, a blush rising to her cheeks.

  ‘Then I will go to find Rufus myself,’ she said. ‘I still have a carriage in the yard outside, and I can find horses...’

  ‘No. You stay here. It’s not safe to travel the roads without an escort.’

  ‘You don’t give me orders!’ she said, with a flare of anger. ‘I’m not one of your soldiers!’

  She had said something very similar to him many years before, Castus remembered. He shrugged an apology. ‘I’m sorry. Command gets to be a habit after a while. But please, stay here. Just a day, two days more...’

  ‘I’m going to find my children,’ she said, with slow emphasis. ‘And you’ll have to lock me up if you want to stop me.’

  For a moment they stared at each other. Castus heard the heavy tread of a sentry climbing the stairs to the battlements in the next room. Then he let out a long sigh, leaned forward and took her hand. She ran her fingers over his palm, lightly tracing the pink calluses of blister-scars left from the hours of rowing.

  ‘At least let me send some of my men with you,’ he said.

  ‘No. Rufus has his guards all around him: they’d attack anyone trying to get to him – but he wouldn’t harm me, I’m sure of it. I think maybe I can talk to him, make him see reason.’

  Good luck with that, Castus thought.

  Marcellina lowered her head, then looked up at him again. ‘He’s mad, I know. He really believed that he could lead an army and liberate the whole province. He believed the troops would salute him as their triumphant leader and he could stand equal with the emperor himself, like his mighty ancestor... Great gods!’ she cried, casting a wild glance at the ceiling. ‘These men with their dreams of power! Why do they have this lust for it...? Do you have it too?’

  ‘No,’ Castus said. ‘I’ve never wanted power. But it’s been given to me anyway.’

  ‘Because you use it wisely, maybe.’

  ‘You think I’m wise? After all this?’ He grinned, and felt the warm pressure of her hands, the tightened clasp of affirmation. Standing, he drew her to her feet.

  ‘I know what you’re planning to do,’ she said with a quick stammer. ‘I know that the barbarian king wants to kill you for breaking your vow about the hostages... You’re going to use yourself as bait, aren’t you? March out into open country and wait for him to come and find you.’

  ‘That’s the only plan I’ve got,’ Castus said. ‘Seems like a good one.’

  ‘It’s too much to risk,’ she whispered. She stepped forward, pressing herself against him and stretching up to kiss his lips. ‘Please be careful. Come back alive.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ he said. But he would promise nothing. He had broken too many promises already.

  CHAPTER XXX

  Somehow he had always known that this would be the place.

  As he climbed the wooden ladder to the upper chamber of the isolated watchtower, Castus remembered the last time he had been here; his observation then had been inspired, a god’s whisper. This was a place of war. And this was where he would fight his battle.

  It had been winter then, the land bare and cold. Now it was high summer, and from the window of the tower he looked out over rolling pastures filled with wild flowers, scattered stands of trees along the horizon. Still early, the sky a pale eggshell blue, but the sun was already bright. It was going to be a warm day, a beautiful day. Cool air breathed in his face as Castus stepped out onto the walkway and gazed to the west. From the low ridge where the tower stood, the land sloped gently to the marshy valley of a river that fed into the Mosa. And a few miles along the valley, moving towards him, he could see the war host of the enemy. Men in their thousands, driving animals with them: horses, herds of cattle and flocks of sheep plundered from the surrounding lands. Captives, too, no doubt. They moved in dark
streams that flowed together into a single moving mass. The sun glittered on their spears.

  Castus gripped the wooden rail of the walkway, letting the shudder ripple through his body. Fear had its place, and he knew it well. Crossing to the eastern side of the tower, he stared up into the dazzle of early light and raised his palms to the warmth, muttering a prayer. It was a familiar prayer, one he had spoken many times before. Sol Invictus, Lord of Light, greatest of the heavens... But he did not pray for himself. He prayed for the men under his command, for Marcellina and her daughters. For his son. For all the people of this province that had been placed under his protection. Your light between them and darkness...

  Down on the road and around the watchtower itself he had 2,500 men. They had marched hard, another night advance, mile after mile across the flatlands from Juliacum, past the burnt villages and the smashed ruins of the roadside settlements. This tower alone had withstood the tide, the small garrison of cavalry driving off the raiding bands that moved west, then back east again. Moving around the circuit of the walkway, Castus scanned the country in all directions. He sucked at his cheek, raising his hand to shade his eyes, judging the lie of the land.

  From the palisaded compound below him he could smell the smoke of the cooking fires, the scents of frying bacon and steaming porridge. He heard the voices of the men at the fires rising up to him, their tired laughter and their nervous boasts. The familiar voices of men facing battle. He had summoned them here, he thought, just as the Frankish chieftains had summoned their warriors to this confrontation. He could have remained with them in Colonia or in Juliacum, safe behind the walls, waiting until the barbarian storm had passed. But they were fighting men, just as he was. This was what they had been trained to do. This was how they earned their gold.

  A rattle of feet on the ladder, and Castus stepped back into the chamber as Bonitus appeared through the trapdoor. He was yawning, his chin hazy with blond stubble. Like many of his warriors, he had found the night marches a trial.