“Ambush territory.” Caesarion exhaled. “I don’t think I can lure them out of that fortified of a position.”
“Sooner or later, they’ll run out of supplies, won’t they?” Eurydice pointed out.
“And they know their mountains better than we do. They’ll find routes down to the plains for grain and smuggle it in, even if I surround them for a year.” Caesarion grimaced. “No. We’re going to have to go in after them. I just want to be smart about it.” He kissed her hand. “And that’s where your eyes come in. Accipitra.”
With the constant hammering of iron-nailed boots from the rooms around them, and the low voices of officers conferring over reports and maps just past the curtain that offered this room its only privacy, he couldn’t offer her any more than that, and a squeeze of her hand, before standing and pulling her to her feet. A quick, light embrace. “Let’s get some food into you. And then you can draw me a map so that I know precisely how bad things will be.”
Chapter XII: The Mountains Dance
Iunius 5, 17 AC
Everything took time, and Caesarion tried not to chafe visibly. They couldn’t sally in force without completing the defenses of the castra, for instance. Leaving it only half-finished, without towers properly built and places for the ballistae, would just leave vulnerable whatever skeleton force he left behind to man it. So he sent out scouts in all directions, but particularly to test the area around a mountain thirty miles away, where Eurydice had spotted the enemy camp. He listened to the sound of saws ripping logs into boards, of drills boring holes into those boards, and the ring of hammers on wood and on iron, too, once the smithy got set up. And listened, too, to Cicero Minor and gray-haired Sextus Caesius, as they reminded him, “Young men are often impatient. Be ready first.”
“Keep in mind that the Tillii forces are working with barbarians,” Cicero Minor had added, shrugging. “They have no discipline. The longer they stay penned up in the mountains, the longer they have for the tribes to get impatient—” a sly look at Caesarion at that word, “—or bored, and just push off back to their homes. Or to get in arguments amongst themselves, and do the same.”
“It’s hard keeping that many men in one place,” Sextus added.
Tell me about it, Caesarion wanted to mutter. His supply line was a daily concern, as was morale and plain boredom among his troops.
“They all need to eat. And the area’s undoubtedly getting hunted out,” Cicero put in, and regarded Caesarion steadily. “Let time do some of the work for us. They might even get stupid, break, and come to attack us. When we’re in a fortified position, with the Pallaresa river at our feet. So we have drinking water for the men, and a body of water they’ll have to ford to get to us. Taking ballistae shot and arrows in the face the whole way across.”
“I don’t think we’ll be that lucky,” Caesarion replied tightly. “And much as I don’t want to lead the men up into the mountains in summer to pull out an entrenched enemy, it’ll be worse if we try to do it in winter..”
“Patience,” Sextus counseled again. “You’re a young man, and it’s showing. We stay here long enough, and the natives will build trading villages right up against the walls.” He smiled faintly. “They’ll come down from their mountains and realize that the world’s moved on without them.”
I don’t have years, Caesarion thought, but didn’t say, since he didn’t want to hear counsel about patience again. I have dispatches from Rome that tell me that Parthia sent an expeditionary force into Syria to test our defenses three months ago. Gods only know what’s going on there now. I have other dispatches from Antony suggesting that he’s got the Servilii penned, but that Dalmatia’s taken up arms alongside the rebels in Illyria. And Mother and Lepidus are doing their best to keep Octavian’s legacy from getting passed in the Senate, but I can’t do much about that from here. I don’t have years to spend on one theater of a larger war.
The only answer for his agitation of mind was physical exhaustion—but that was difficult for him to achieve. Most legionnaires had three hours a day of drill—and Caesarion was no exception, sweating in the practice yard with the men of the Tenth. It was good for the enlisted to see their officers training alongside them, and keeping everyone in fighting trim was damned important. But while it cleared his mind while he was sparring, or throwing weights or spears, or climbing over practice palisades, it couldn’t keep his mind from spinning the rest of the day in restless circles.
Of course, returning to his headquarters building, he always had to remind himself that at least he had those outlets. A handful of his older officers had brought their wives with them—Cicero Minor, for instance, had brought his own, Licinia Fabia, a cheerful matron in her late twenties, and mother of four healthy children from her first marriage—who was also now pregnant with her fifth, and Cicero’s own third child. Their quarters, outside the main building, were noisy, to say the least. And Eurydice had very little in common with Fabia, for the older woman—twice Eurydice’s age—was entirely consumed by her children. Their upbringing, overseeing their three Hellene slaves who served as pedagogues and cooks for this lively brood, and ensuring that her husband had comfortable quarters to come home to, were her only concern.
Caesarion had discovered first-hand that the well-meaning woman had decided that Eurydice must be lonely and bored, confined to the headquarters building as she was, and had brought half her children to the command area one day for a visit. He’d walked in just as this determinedly friendly woman managed to slip past the watchful Nesa with one of her children in her arms, three more underfoot, and an airy comment of, “Of course your mistress has a headache. All she ever does is hide in this stuffy room and read. What she needs is fresh air. A good walk with me and the children—and a slave or two for escort, so that the men don’t speak out of turn to us—will set her straight to rights!”
Eurydice, who’d sent her mind out with the birds for the morning, had opened her eyes on hearing voices in the same room, and the children had shrieked at the sight—not in fear, but in interest. Fabia had yelped herself, taking a step or two back—right into Caesarion himself, who’d walked in behind her, and caught her by the elbows to ensure that she didn’t fall or let her youngest drop to the floor in her surprise. “What a lovely visit,” Caesarion said, releasing her arms and stepping away, his face blank. “Eurydice, were you expecting Cicero’s wife?”
Eurydice shook her head, letting her eyes return to their normal shade, and stood stiffly from where she’d been laying on her couch all morning. “No, I wasn’t,” she replied, sounding confused, but put it aside. “There’s a problem, Caesarion,” she added urgently. “That group of scouts you sent up the mountain that the locals call Aneto—the one where I’ve seen the camps on? They’re being followed back here.”
That got his attention, and he caught her hand to pull her to the map table. “How far back of them, and what’s the troop composition?”
“About twenty to thirty cavalry. They’re about two hundred feet back, and using the trees for cover,” she replied immediately. “The scouts are about five miles from camp. I tried having the hawk I was riding circle around your scouts a few times—all but landed on the leader’s shoulder—but I’m not sure they got the message.” Her voice filled with tight concern. “They didn’t seem to be picking up the pace, and I can’t talk to them through the hawk.”
Ignoring the wide eyes of Fabia and her children, Caesarion scowled over his map. “Five miles. Damn it. The cavalry is probably just coming down to have a peek at our defenses. But they could decide to take out our scouts as a message of their own. Or they might have decided that our men saw something too important to pass on to us.”
“Can you do anything?” Eurydice asked, putting a hand lightly on his arm.
“I could send a hundred cavalry out,” he muttered. “But if I do, their scouts might get the idea that we can see what they’re doing. Their lack of knowledge of our capabilities,” a flick of a glance that said yo
ur and not our, “is an advantage.”
“There are twenty scouts out there,” Eurydice reminded him. Not with force or insistence, but with concern for the men’s lives.
“I know. Get your eyes back on them, b—sister. I’ll get an escort prepped. Horses can cover that ground in about twenty minutes. I have to trust that my men will defend themselves capably enough that our equites can reach them in time if it comes to a fight.”
She nodded, sitting beside the table, her eyes going gold again as Caesarion shouted out the door for a tribune, and got the cavalry moving. Fabia and her children had backed out of the room at some point, and Caesarion had taken the moment of privacy to rub Eurydice’s neck a little, against the strain of using her abilities for so long. “I think I may have scared Fabia off,” he murmured.
“She’s kind,” Eurydice murmured, her face and eyes distant. “She does keep reminding me that I should have brought more slaves. Since it’s the responsibility of the legate’s wife—if he has one—” a little tartness in her tone, “to ensure that all the other officers under him in his legion have good meals and refined company at them.” She paused. “I asked her if I should have brought dancers and poets with me from Rome as well.”
Caesarion snorted, stroking her hair back from her blankly-staring golden eyes. “She didn’t like that, I would assume?”
“Not at all. But I felt bad for saying it,” Eurydice admitted. “She means well. And a year ago, trapped in a carruca or the tent, I might have welcomed someone to walk with around the Brundisium camp.”
“But now you have your other eyes,” he said quietly. Ah, gods. And to think I ever wondered why she wanted to fly away before. Boredom, unrelieved by physical activity—at least I can go spar to burn off the energy and the boredom. I can go for a ride with only a small escort out past the walls—I can’t risk her doing that at the moment, not this deep in uncertain territory. I’m not trapped in a hot box of a room that smells of sawdust. And my only conversation doesn’t come from a mother and her babbling infants.
“My eyes are my freedom,” she whispered. “But at a price—oh, gods. The enemy scouts just came out from behind the trees. They’re riding straight for our—for your men.”
Caesarion swore and shouted out the door again. And half a minute later, he could hear the gates of the castra opening, and the jingle of harnesses and armor as the equites sallied forth. “Hold,” he muttered at the scouts, five miles away. “Form testudo and hold. Help’s on the way—”
Eurydice hissed, going rigid on her stool, and her fingers clenched like a hawk’s talons. “Got one of them,” she said, a tight smile appearing on her face. “Open-faced helmet. He’s missing an eye now.”
“Good,” Caesarion said in satisfaction, but the remorseless math of it ground down on him. Five miles. The cavalry can’t gallop the whole way. Canter’s the best they can do—plus they have to ford the river to get to our scouts. Hurry up, lads, the infantry won’t be able hold forever—
Outnumbered, and with reinforcements twenty minutes away, they didn’t hold. Eurydice put her hands over her face, and struggled not to weep, whispering brokenly, “They’re cutting the heads off the fallen—why are they cutting off their heads? They’re already dead! Leave them alone!”
“They’re headhunters,” Caesarion replied tightly, one hand on her shoulder to try to comfort her, but there was no comfort for the rage boiling in the put of his stomach. “They take them home as trophies. To show their strength. Gods damn it.” I should have sent the equites as soon as she told me—no. Wouldn’t have made a difference. It was only a minute or so between the report and the decision. “With luck, our cavalry will get there in time to avenge them. They’ll probably be so wrapped up in claiming their prizes that they won’t have a chance to get back on their mounts.”
And he all but crushed her hand as she reported with relief that the hundred equites had hit the enemy patrol hard. “One of them is getting away,” she reported. “Should I take his eyes with the hawk?”
“No,” Caesarion decided. “Let them know what happens when they attack a Roman patrol.”
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Nearly two miles above sea-level, on the steeply sloping sides of Aneto, the highest mountain in the Pyrenees, Aucissa of the Tegeingl sat outside one of the small, round huts of the Vascones, listening to the locals argue in a dozen dialects. One of them was Latin, the language of the hated invaders. The invaders who’d renamed her people the Deceangli on their maps and in their records, as if to wipe out who they really were by giving them a new name.
The Cantabri at least spoke in a manner that she could rightly call a language. The musical vowels and liquid consonants sounded familiar, and it was they who had sent the call north to her people, who lived in the wild hills of western Britannia. And it was they who’d arranged to have her and her companions smuggled, traveling only at night, through occupied Gaul. The villagers who’d heard the passage of their hooves, heard the long howl of her wolf, and had shivered and whispered among themselves and to their Roman captors of the Dark Hunt.
The Cantabri had spoken of Rome, the hated invaders. They’d spoken of a son to Caesar, who’d landed on her island home twenty-eight years ago. And her mother, who’d been travelling peacefully with the flocks east into the lands of the Dobunni—those craven, pale, sniveling farmers who’d taken one look at the armies of Rome and surrendered, rather than fight—had been caught and raped by a Roman soldier.
Nine months later, Aucissa had been born inside the walls of a Tegeingl farmhouse. Her mother told her she’d tried to rid herself of the rapist’s seed. Had taken decoctions of wild carrot and all the other herbs that the gods had given women to hurl unwanted children from their wombs in a wave of blood. But nothing had worked, and her belly had swelled. She’d prayed to the gods every night since the assault that if she was forced to have this child, that it at least be one that would live to make Rome pay.
And thus, Aucissa had been born, filled with the power of the Gallic gods and all her mother’s hate. And hearing the name of Rome, come to steal more of the land that belonged to distant kin, had been enough to engage her interest—and that of her companions. Twelve druids had made the journey with her. For while she was god-born of the Morrigan, they were all priests to the gods, and were most learned. Not just in woodcraft and the poetry-songs that told the history of their people, but in speaking to spirits and in the magic that lay in the earth itself. The divine power that would keep their lands free of the cursed Romans—the power that had kept Rome from encroaching into the west and north of Britannia just yet.
Like most of the women of her western hill tribe, Aucissa was a small thing, just over five feet in height. But unlike the other warriors of her people, she wore her white hair—sign of her divine blood—short. And around her neck hung a gold torc, denoting her high rank.
In spite of being so high in the mountains, and so near a glacier, she found these southern climates enervatingly warm. And thus, she wore an open leather vest and a short woolen skirt, along with soft boots, and nothing more. Her breasts weren’t an occasion for modesty. They weren’t even, for her, particularly sexual. She’d used them to feed her three children in years past, but they, like the rest of her, were covered in swirling bands of blue woad tattoos. Hundreds of them, knitting together over her flesh. This sign for the Morrigan. This sign for Lugh. These signs for her children. These two for her late husbands, Suali and Menatus.
They’d been brothers. She’d married Suali, the elder, first, when she was fourteen and he’d been sixteen. Two years later, after the birth of their first child, and after Menatus’ wife had died bearing him a son, she’d agreed to take the younger brother to their bed as well. All their children would be acknowledged as of Suali’s begetting, but Menatus hadn’t cared much. He’d been too busy looking into shadows for someone who wasn’t there anymore. So she and his brother had nursed him back to smiling now and again. Aucissa had been quite
certain that the son she’d borne next had actually been Menatus’, but who could really tell? They’d often had sex with her on the same night.
It didn’t matter, of course. She’d been heavy with that child at the age of eighteen, and in no condition to fight when the Romans had come back to her people’s shores, brought there by the same man named Caesar. And both her husbands had ridden off to protect their land, their sons, and her, when she’d been born to protect them.
Neither of them had come home. She’d borne the child, and turned that son and her first over to her mother to raise. And had gone about the business of killing Romans ever since. She hadn’t even felt pleasure in bed since then. Oh, she’d tried. She’d gone to the bonfires mother-naked when she was twenty-four, and let every man there do his best. She hadn’t felt a thing beyond the dry grind of flesh. She’d wound up with a daughter from that night. Turned over to her mother as soon as the child could be weaned, and Aucissa was able to ride once more.
She usually remembered to kiss her sons and that daughter when she came home. Stacked the skulls she’d taken on a spear beside her mother’s door, since Aucissa herself had no house anymore. Reminded her children to remember the names of their fathers—of course, in her daughter’s case, that was just “Lugh, the moon-lord. He gave you to me. Remember him in your prayers.” And then she’d ride off again, trying not to notice that they stared at her as if at a stranger. Because, in truth, she was. There was no care left in her. It was better that way.
On her arms, the symbols were different. They showed how many men she’d killed. There was room for more. Aucissa lifted her right arm and considered the underside dispassionately for a moment. Perhaps soon these fools of Vascones will stop arguing with their current Roman masters, and we can get on with the business of killing all the Romans we can find, she thought. Perhaps I’ll even get to kill this son of Caesar of which they speak so often. Apparently, their gods favor him greatly.
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