Marius' Mules V: Hades' Gate

by S. J. A. Turney

  It was a rout.

  The Gauls, taking advantage of the sudden failure of their enemy, whooped and howled as they kicked their horses into life to give chase, the bulk of their cavalry leaping the stream to join the action and seek the head of the man in crimson and white fleeing up the slope.

  Somewhere at the point where the low gradient gave way to the steeper upper slope, as the fleeing Romans slowed through necessity, Ingenuus managed to pull alongside his general.

  "I do not understand, general. All we have done is draw their cavalry. We can hardly turn and fight, and they will retreat as soon as they see the defences - unless they realise those defences are a sham?"

  Caesar smiled as he hauled his mount this way and that to navigate the slope.

  "I want them to get a good look at the defences - to see how well we have constructed them; how afraid of them we are. See the blockages?"

  Even as they closed on the gate that would separate them from their pursuers, Ingenuus could see the legionaries blocking the gates with turf sods.

  "General?"

  "They will let us pass through and then seal it all up tight. I want the enemy to think we're trapped and afraid."

  "We will be, sir."

  The general simply laughed and pushed his horse forwards and through the gate into the flimsy fort's interior.

  * * * * *

  "This won't hold against them for long" muttered Brutus, peering at the blocked gate. Priscus and Caesar, standing nearby, nodded - though only the latter smiled.

  "It is an illusion" the general declared, "as much as the rest of the camp. A single sod of turf thick. The only question now left in my mind is whether the enemy will buy what we sell. Will they test us and discover our weakness or have we tempted them just enough to make them commit blindly?"

  Priscus stepped up to the blockage - so flimsy that, close enough up, he could actually peer through the gaps between sods and see the valley beyond.

  "I think your question's just been answered Caesar. The cavalry have pulled back half way down the hill, but it looks to me like the whole damn lot of them are crossing the river and preparing to attack." He took a deep breath. "I hope you're right about this, general."

  Caesar gave him an enigmatic smile. "The day that I cannot beat a simple rabble of barbaroi, Priscus, you can retire me in peace to a pretty little island. But that day is not today."

  * * * * *

  Cativolcus of the eastern Eburones, king and son of kings, overlord of more than a dozen chiefs and joint commander of the army, pulled his horse alongside that of his brother king, Ambiorix.

  "They will not surrender. Romans do not surrender."

  "I think you forget our first great victory" Ambiorix laughed, slapping the decorative Roman cuirass he himself had unbuckled from the corpse of the Roman general Sabinus.

  "He was an idiot. This is Caesar. Caesar is not an idiot."

  "Then we will kill them all. Just get it over with."

  Cativolcus nudged his horse out ahead of the mass of their men, peering with distaste at the Nervii who formed much of the forward edge. He personally would have preferred not to have the Nervii with them - they were notoriously fickle in his experience. The huge army sprawled across the slope below the Roman camp, which stood glowering above them, impressive in its defences. The cavalry had scouted it out briefly and confirmed that it was sealed tight, even the gates blocked with turf. The Romans were going nowhere and they would not surrender, whatever Ambiorix thought. It would be a long fight, then, akin to the one they had just left. Perhaps he could persuade his fellow king to throw everything they had in a constant straight attack and finish it quickly this time?

  Some paces out in front of their army - which had stopped half way up the slope and massed ready for the assault - Cativolcus turned his steed side-on to the Romans. He had some small command of their tongue - a rigid and ordered thing with no emotion or colour, much like its speakers - and had spent a few moments formulating the speech as best he could.

  "Romans!" He paused to make sure he had their attention. The general noise atop the slope died away as the defenders behind their high ramparts listened. At least this time they only had these stick barricades and not walls and towers. Perhaps they would fall fast after all.

  "Romans, I give three hour. You come to me by three hour, I let you live. Past three hour: everyone die."

  He was entirely unsurprised when three Roman javelins arced up over the wall and converged on his position. Even as he pushed his horse on out of the way, he was impressed at their accuracy. He had thought the army well out of the range of their weapons. He had been mistaken. Why then were they not launching their javelins? Fear? The knowledge that they might need to conserve their ammunition?

  It mattered not. He had given his ultimatum as the two kings had agreed, and the Romans had given their reply by a simple act of violence.

  He looked over at Ambiorix, who nodded.

  "Sons of the Nervians - children of Taranis - you have the first taste of our final victory. Cross their ditches; tear down their ramparts; smash their gates. The Eburones will flank you and move to envelop them." He contemplated exhorting the other tribes to victory, but it was hardly worth it, for their numerical contributions were dwarfed by the masses of the Eburones and the Nervii.

  For a moment he wondered whether the treacherous Nervii were going to argue. It was glorious to have the main assault he had given them, but it was also dangerous and costly. When all of this was over and the Romans piled in decaying heaps, the Eburones would be strong and drinking their toasts to the dead. The Nervii would be glorious, but few: just how he would like them to be. Perhaps when Rome was gone, the territories of the Nervii would look good under the rule of the Eburones.

  To his immense relief and satisfaction, the mass began to move forward - slowly at first, as though uncertain as to whether they were doing the right thing, but soon the blood lust fell upon them. That was the one thing you could count on with the Nervii: when the lust fell and the desire to fight filled them, they were hard to turn aside. It was motivating them to start with that was the trouble.

  But now the Nervii were howling as they raced up the slope, waving spears and swords and axes. A few of the less intelligent paused in their run to throw their spears up at the ramparts or loose an occasional arrow or slingshot despite the fact that the height, distance and gradient made it all-but impossible to even hit the defences, let alone pass them.

  At a wave of his arm, the Eburones began to move up the slope beside their allies, his own subjects on the left flank and those of Ambiorix on the right. Here and there he could determine signs of the lesser tribes whose chiefs simply selected where they wanted to be, having been given no specific commands.

  Victory moved slowly up the slope with them. Caesar's blood was almost close enough to taste.

  At a shout from their king, the Eburones put on an extra turn of speed. Just as the Nervii began to fill in the ditch and then climb the rampart and dismantle the defences, the Eburones would swoop around the sides and seal off any chance of flight, waiting until the Nervii rabble had done their job and shattered the defences before moving in themselves to finish the fight.

  Gaul was almost free. There were more legions to deal with yet, of course, but the rebel kings had utterly destroyed two, and two more were about to fall along with the man who led them and kept them here. The rest of the task was simple 'mopping up'.

  So why did Cativolcus feel so unsure?

  * * * * *

  Caesar stood on the low rampart behind the scant defence offered by the sudis barricades. The enemy had committed. They had all committed. And now they would learn that victory could not always be assured by superior numbers, even as much as four men to one.

  He smiled and waited three dozen heartbeats until the first of the Nervian warriors crested the far side of the ditch and clambered across it, reaching up to claw at the turf bank of the rampart. The fools had not even qu
estioned why the legions were not throwing their pila.

  He turned his smile on the officers beside him as he squared his shoulders.

  "Now."

  * * * * *

  There are many reasons why a battle is won. Weight of numbers can be a decisive factor, but only if all the other facets are in equal balance. Terrain is often a heavy factor and has ruined many a great commander's day. Morale can be crucial and sees off even supposed conquering armies. And surprise can swing the tide of a fight in a heartbeat.

  When all three of these others come together in a single moment, the effects can be cataclysmic.

  Cativolcus, king of the Eburones, was not a young man. He would have liked to have been the man to take Caesar's head, but he was also wise enough to recognise his advancing years and the negative effect they were having on his skills as a warrior.

  And so he sat ahorse at the periphery of the field, on the high slope some hundred paces from the action, watching as events unfolded. He couldn't see the man, but was fairly certain that Ambiorix - despite his relative youth and vigour - was probably doing the same at the far side, past the seething mass of Gauls and the fort of the Romans.

  Cativolcus watched the weight of numbers bringing him an assured victory.

  And, as he watched, he saw with shock the Roman gates fall inwards as though they had been blocked with leaves and then blown in by a giant. He blinked in surprise as the sharp, wooden fences across the fort's perimeter simply collapsed as though a wind had blown them over.

  In two heartbeats the Roman fort was all but gone, barring a ridge and ditch around its edge.

  He realised in those two heartbeats just how badly they had been duped. The pointed stakes that had been their only defence were suddenly weapons, the men who had dropped the fence casting them like heavy spears into the mass, where they had a surprisingly brutal effect. As they hit the warriors they did little damage other than the occasional broken bone, but the terrain took them then. The slope was too much for men battered with stakes, and the victims toppled backwards, bringing down a dozen men around them who - in turn - brought down dozens more until a significant portion of the Nervian attack was tumbling back down the slope towards the stream, causing chaos and shouts of panic and consternation to rise from the rest of the army.

  But that was a simple opening salvo.

  As the gates vanished and the fences disappeared, they revealed not a panicked, trapped force of Romans scurrying around like rats in a granary caught when the door is opened, but a mass of tightly-packed soldiers bearing a solid shieldwall that was already advancing into the face of the suddenly-panicked Gauls like some implacable steel monster. Far from terror, the Romans were chanting something in their own language in time with their uniform steps.

  A voice shouted an order and two thousand arrows rose up into the air, the drizzle not having had time to ruin the strings on the previously-covered bows, and descended like a grey cloud of death into the massed ranks of Gauls, punching through eyes, necks, torsos and limbs, pinning men to the floor and killing them in droves..

  Even before the solid shieldwall and its five-man deep support smashed into the Nervii sending them scattering down the slope, two other shieldwalls unfolded at the wings, hinging on the corners and coming out to face the advancing Eburones on the flanks. Those who were unlucky enough to be beyond that sudden clash found themselves facing that Romano-Gallic cavalry yet again, who swept forward despite their exhaustion, bellowing curses, to take the Eburones' heads.

  Cativolcus saw utter defeat in those half dozen heartbeats.

  He knew they were beaten.

  Ambiorix had persuaded him to throw in his lot in this crazed mission. He should have listened to the damn druids who had been trying to persuade them to wait. It was too soon, they had said. It would fail, they had said. They had been right, but Cativolcus had been swept along by the words of his brother king. He had tried. They had failed.

  As he wheeled his horse and rode for the woodlands where he knew he could lose himself, he found himself cursing a man over and over, but it was not Caesar. The Roman played the game well and he had won with his great talent. Never again would Cativolcus disbelieve the rumours that the Roman general was descended from their Gods - he was clearly favoured by the divine.

  No. The man he cursed and would curse until he died was the man who had wrought this disaster: Ambiorix.

  The revolt of the Eburones was over.

  The future of Gaul was now in the hands of the druids and their Esus.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Priscus stood on the ramparts of Cicero's camp and shook his head in exasperated wonder. For the last hour, as the Eighth and Tenth legions had scurried around putting things right at the ravaged winter quarters, and while the scant remnants of the brave Eleventh had rested and eaten freshly delivered rations in peace, Priscus had prowled the battlefield like some restless spirit, trying to take in the enormity of what had happened here.

  It clearly was the uprising he had suspected, that he should have been able to prevent.

  And yet something nagged at him and made his scalp itch. Though Ambiorix and Cativolcus had both escaped so he could hardly prove it, none of the captives they had found had ever heard of 'Esus' even when questioned by Blattius Secundus and his evil knife. That, and the distinct absence of any druidical influence found among the enemy - both dead and captive - prompted Priscus to believe that this was something somehow disconnected from his discoveries; that worse was still to come.

  The dead were being carried off and dumped in piles for burning, the records of the legion being checked against the corpses' identity tags. Priscus knew from experience that near a tenth of the men would not be found or identified, but at least this way the ferryman could be paid for most of them and stones set up in their memory.

  Somewhere back across the camp, he could hear Caesar's voice raised in praise, delivering a public address to the Eleventh and thanking them for their bravery and fortitude, promising them bonuses and loot from the smashed Gallic army and their tribal lands - once punishment was delivered upon them.

  The Eleventh weren't cheering, but no one expected that. The poor brave bastards had fought for weeks against insurmountable odds with no hope of relief and with a commander who had apparently been laid low by an almost fatal fever.

  It was a feat just to have survived this long. There would be tales written and songs sung about Cicero's siege. He had succeeded on a level more pronounced even than Sabinus' failure.

  Priscus tried to block out the sound of the general's words.

  No druids. No 'Esus'. Just two big tribes and a lot of smaller ones riding in their wake, raised against Rome. It felt like a war of opportunity, not the grand-scale revolt he had been finding rumours of with every Gallic stone upturned. Even with the troubles down among the Carnutes - which had presumably caused no issue for Plancus - and with the resistance Labienus was meeting in the lands of the Treveri, this was less than nothing compared with what he'd been expecting.

  No druids. 'No Esus'.

  It wasn't over yet.

  This was a prelude.

  One of the things that had bound Priscus to his commander - Fronto - in their early days together had been a shared heritage in the great lands of Campania to the south. While Fronto hailed from the seaport of Puteoli and serious lineage and money, Priscus had been raised inland at Nuvlana into an unpopular branch of an old family, with faded glory and heavy debts.

  But the one thing they could both recount was the tremors that habitually swept through their homeland. No child of the region had lived to adulthood without feeling the shaking of the ground more than once. And sometimes, when there was to be a big quake - one that sheared marble columns and toppled weaker buildings - there were warning signs in the hours to its approach that a native could watch for: Faint trembles; cracks appearing in walls; even the birds leaving the trees in droves.

  That was what this felt like.

&
nbsp; It was a first rumble. A crack in the fabric of Gaul. A warning of the earth-shaking to come.

  With a sense of foreboding, and wishing for the thousandth time that his old friend was here to share his fears, Priscus turned from the rampart to tend to the business of command.

  * * * * *

  Caesar pushed the lists and maps back across the table.

  "I think that is all we can do."

  Priscus peered at the map and its markers. "The Eighth back in place. The Tenth and Eleventh to Samarobriva. What of the Ninth? Trebonius will likely be here tomorrow."

  "The Ninth to Samarobriva as well. It was a tactically sound idea to spread out the army, but we've learned a painful lesson, Priscus. Now let us have a strong central force that we can take to any trouble spots. Samarobriva is within a week's march of almost anywhere it could be needed."

  Priscus nodded. "With the Eighth back on the coast, and assuming that Labienus is still in position and not wiped out, we have a reasonable grip on the land. I'd like to hear word from both he and Plancus before things are set in stone, though."

  "Agreed. We will send fast riders in the morning to determine their status. With changes of horse, they should be able to being us news within a week."

  Priscus rubbed his eyes wearily. He really needed to sleep.

  "Are you staying with us until all the reports are in, general? The weather is still unseasonably mild for travelling south."

  Caesar leaned back in his chair.

  "More than that, Priscus: I will be wintering in Samarobriva with you and the main force."

  The veteran officer blinked in surprise. The general never wintered with the army, with political and familial commitments elsewhere. Illyricum sometimes; Cremona and Cisalpine Gaul on occasion. Even Rome for some months. But never the far flung Belgic lands.

  "Caesar?"

  "We both know Gaul is far from settled, Priscus. Anything could happen in the coming months and I do not intend to be sitting sipping mulsum in Pola while Gaul bucks and churns and attempts to dislodge us."