by Ian Ross
There were none. Castus felt Valens slapping him across the shoulders. His friend grinned, wolfish.
By daybreak the battle line was formed across the head of the valley, and the soldiers turned to the east and saluted the direction of the rising sun. The sun itself was invisible behind cloud – just a watery gleam low in the sky. Castus pulled his belts tight and squared his shoulders. On the march down from the camp his dream had returned to him: the faces of the dead. He closed his eyes and tried to banish the images from his mind.
To his left, the men of his century were waiting in position. A few of them swigged water, others talked in low nervous voices, others pissed where they stood. Behind him, Castus could hear Flaccus the standard-bearer whistling under his breath. They held the rear of the position; Valens’s century was in front, but each rank of men stood six paces from the next. The formation was deep, spreading over the upper slopes of the valley, but would appear thinly stretched to the enemy.
And the enemy, Castus noticed, were already appearing. The narrow wooded defile leading up from the river opened out as it climbed, and the valley formed a shallow amphitheatre below the crest of the ridge with the slopes thick with thorny scrub. Already Pictish riders were cantering up from the throat of the defile, warriors on foot massing behind them, filling the lower end of the valley. Castus listened carefully, but could hear nothing; the damp morning air seemed to muffle all sounds. He saw Valens glance back at him from his position with the forward century.
A distant shout cut through the mist, then a chorus of yells. Figures ran across the open ground: archers and slingers in loose formation, pelting the gathering mass of the enemy and then running back. A low swell of noise came from the Picts, a wordless roar and a percussive rattle and clash of spear-butts on shields. The noise rolled across the hollow of the valley in waves.
How many of them now? Castus squinted, trying to count, dividing the horde up into sections and estimating their numbers as he had been taught. Five thousand? Six? Most were on foot, with a few carts heaving through the mass, nobles or chiefs brandishing spears. The details became clearer as they approached: now Castus could make out the high crests of their hair, the scars swirling over their naked limbs. The men beside him were beginning to shuffle, ducking their heads and edging their shields higher.
‘Keep formation,’ he called. ‘Wait for them to come to us.’
There was a slight breeze now, stirring the bright tails of the draco standards. A good omen, Castus thought.
A sharp snapping sound from the rear, and a ballista bolt arced across the Roman lines and darted down into the forward ranks of the enemy. Ranging shot. A moment later, fifty catapults fired in unison; a volley of snaps and thuds, and the bolts flickered dark against the sky, then arced and fell. The Pictish mass shuddered under the impact, and a great groan went up from them.
Now they charge, Castus said under his breath.
But still the Picts hung back, massing in lines across the width of the valley. More of them came from the defile, pouring like liquid from the neck of a jug. The forward groups shouted and chanted, banging their weapons, taunting the Romans in their own tongue. Another volley of ballista bolts dropped into them, goading them, but still they did not break.
Castus glanced back towards the command position on the hillside, and saw the emperor’s purple draco standard swirling and flapping around its shaft. A shout went up from the cohorts of VIII Augusta, holding the centre of the line: ‘ROME AND VICTORY!’
The shout spread through the flanking cohorts.
‘ROME AND VICTORY!’ Castus cried, and his men took up the shout. Spears drummed off shield rims all along the Roman line. Some of the Picts were climbing up the slopes of the valley to dart javelins, but the archers and slingers on the heights drove them back.
Now the trumpet signal rang out. Valens called out the order, and the forward century began edging backwards, closing up the ranks. Castus swung his arm, and the front three lines of his own men backed up. Slowly, steadily, the gaps between the ranks narrowed. A cheer went up from the Picts. Some of them were already dashing forward, flinging spears, thinking that their enemy was retreating. Those at the rear of the mass began to surge forward, ordered on by their chiefs.
‘Steady,’ Castus called. ‘Hold steady… Back six paces…’
The leading century had already closed ranks, Valens’s men locking their shields together; now, as the Picts began their charge, they found a solid mass of armoured men facing them, a wall of shields and levelled spears. Castus could see Modestus moving along the rear ranks, shoving the men into line with his staff.
‘Ready javelins.’
Behind him he could still hear the thump and crack of the artillery; the sky overhead was stippled with arrows and ballista bolts.
‘Loose!’ he shouted, and as one the men of the front rank lunged forward and hurled their javelins. The missiles curved over the leading century and struck the face of the Pictish charge. At once the next rank stepped forward and threw: javelins clashed and shivered the air.
Castus stretched up, staring over the massed helmets of Valens’s men. The enemy charge had faltered under the storm of missiles, great gaps torn in the Pictish mass. But others were pressing forward, stumbling over the fallen bodies. Now a volley of throwing darts followed the javelins, pelting sharp iron down into the enemy horde.
‘Ready spears – prepare to advance!’
He heard the trumpet call even as he spoke, and Valens’s cry of command at the same moment. The leading century seemed to rear up, massing towards the front, and then suddenly lurched into motion.
‘Advance!’
Slow heavy movement, turf thick underfoot. Ahead, the noise of Valens’s men smashing into the riven horde of the enemy. Screams, sudden and high-pitched, and the hollow thud of shields. Pacing forward, wanting to run, Castus glanced to his left, down the line of his front-rank men. Spears gripped, shields up, the line held steady.
He saw the first enemy bodies, left twisted and bleeding on the ground as the leading ranks stepped over and across them. One of his own men darted his spear down to stab at a fallen man as he advanced. Others did the same, spears rising and falling like darning needles.
Up ahead, the leading century was moving through the Picts like reapers through a wheatfield. Through the shouts, the screaming, Castus could clearly pick out the chop and suck of blades cutting flesh and hacking bone. Occasionally an enemy javelin would flicker across the wall of shields and into the ranks of the armoured men.
Cheering from the right. When he looked up again, Castus saw the first wave of cavalry crashing down the far slopes, towards the open flank of the massed enemy. He looked to the left, and there were the Alamanni pouring down the steep hillside above the defile, hollering their own barbaric war cries.
At the apex of the cavalry attack, galloping on his grey horse, was the tribune Constantine. Castus saw him clearly: the golden helmet with its feathered crest, the white cloak swinging behind him, his mouth open in a scream of joyous violence.
The cavalry struck, ripping into the Pictish flank. From his vantage point on the slope Castus saw a wave of panic pass through the mass of the enemy, warriors turning to flee from the horses, colliding and pressing together. Those who fled forward faced the advancing line of infantry, the impregnable shields and reaping blades. Others tried to retreat back into the defile, but it was already choked by fugitives. Carts and horses meshed in the rout, while the Alamanni swarmed down from the higher slopes.
The advance slowed, Valens and his men pushing against a bulwark of desperate, dying men. Swords still thundered against the pressing shields, javelins arced, but it was butcher’s work now: the hollow of the valley was heaving with trapped Picts, cropped down on all sides, dying in a bloody morass.
Then, as Castus watched, he saw a knot of enemy warriors plunging forward towards the infantry lines, all of them scarred and painted nobles, screaming defiance. At their heart
was a single battle cart, their leader standing high and proud, spear raised. Castus saw the long face and goatlike beard, the dyed mane of hair, and recognised Talorcagus, High King of the Picts. For a few heartbeats the warband pressed forward, until it appeared that they might breach the mob of their own panicked men. Then Valens yelled out the order to his troops: Shield wall! And like a ship caught in a storm wave, the chariot and the warriors surrounding it veered and tilted, capsizing into the surge of bodies. Castus stared as the king went down, Talorcagus toppling from his cart and falling into the melee.
He glanced around for the cornicen, and found him staring dumbly forward at the massacre. He shook the man by the shoulder.
‘On my command,’ he said. ‘Sound charge.’
‘Great gods,’ Diogenes said. ‘This is a slaughteryard.’
Castus just nodded. They were picking their way back across the field of the battle, supervising a work detail retrieving the bodies of the Roman dead from among the slain. Behind him, he heard Diogenes cough, and then vomit noisily.
‘Sorry, centurion.’
‘Don’t be. Happens to everyone, now and again.’
Rain was falling, the water mixing with the blood to form huge red lakes between the mounds of corpses. Castus felt his boots sinking into the mire, sucking with every step. All across the valley the dead were piled, some individually, others in great mounds where they had fallen fighting or trying to flee. Dead horses and shattered carts too. There were even more at the lower end of the valley, where hundreds had pressed together trying to enter the defile. There, the ground was invisible under bodies piled two and three deep. Some of the Picts had crawled under a thicket of thorn bushes to try and escape, but archers had surrounded the thicket and filled it with arrows until all were dead. Down the defile it was the same, where the Alamanni had come whooping and howling like hunters to spear the packed fugitives below. The slaughter stretched to the river ford, where the cavalry had pursued the fleeing Picts through the shallows.
‘Are all battles like this, afterwards?’ Diogenes asked, wiping his mouth.
‘Sometimes.’ Maybe Oxsa, Castus thought, although he had been unconscious and had not seen the full extent of it. Those running skirmishes against the Carpi on the plains beyond the Danube had never resulted in such a massacre. The trapped Picts had died in such numbers it looked as though some god had destroyed them.
‘I’ve read of battles often,’ the schoolteacher said, ‘but never expected anything like this. Truly an awesome and terrible sight.’
Castus grunted. Rainwater was running down his neck. To his left, two men of his century were moving through the corpses, methodically killing any Picts that remained alive. To his right he saw a dead man sprawled against a chariot wheel; the top of his skull had been sheared away, and wet brain matter spattered the spokes. Another man, his torso cleaved from shoulder to ribcage, his face oddly placid-looking. One Pict was sitting up, slumped with his legs stretched before him. His stomach was ripped open, and entrails pooled pink and grey between his thighs. Castus nudged the corpse’s shoulder with his boot, and it rolled over backwards.
He knew the meaning of his dream now. The dead had returned to petition him for vengeance. They had got it, surely. The fury of battle had left him now, the killing rage of that last murderous charge across the valley, but Castus still felt the solid satisfaction of a job well done. Even so, there was a well of emptiness inside him. He and the men of his century had seen little real fighting, just killing; few of the Picts had put up any resistance to the charge, and those who had were easily despatched. Many had thrown aside their weapons and tried to surrender, but none had been spared. The Roman line had crossed the valley like an iron roller, crushing everything in its path.
Was that why he felt this hollowness? To watch a battle, but not truly participate, was hardly fulfilling. Then he remembered that other part of his dream: Cunomagla coming to him, accusing him. What did that signify?
He cleared his throat and spat. Dreams!
‘What will they do with all these dead men?’ Diogenes asked. ‘Theirs, I mean?’
‘Leave them to rot,’ Castus said. ‘They’re food for the crows now.’
There was a mood of festival around the camp fires that evening. The victory had been total: fewer than a hundred Roman dead for thousands of the enemy slain. The troops had gathered around the imperial tribunal, and built a battle trophy of piled shields and weapons taken from the enemy chiefs. They had cheered the emperor as he had stood before them, shouting out his name and saluting him imperator. But they had cheered Constantine too, when the tribune had ridden back from the river ford at the head of his cavalry, his horse sprayed with blood to the withers. The victory belonged officially to the emperor, but in the hearts of the troops his son had taken the palm.
Out in the rain the pyres were still burning the bodies of the Roman dead. Castus stood beside the cooking fire, drinking beer from a wooden cup, listening to his men recount their tales of valour and destruction. He had been like that himself, he thought, when he had been a common soldier like them…
‘Centurion Aurelius Castus?’
He turned, and saw two men in the white cloaks and uniforms of the Protectores, holding the hilts of their swords. One of them spoke again, in a heavy Germanic accent.
‘You must come with us, centurion. Now, if you please.’
The German went before him, the second man behind, and they led Castus away through the camp, between the scattered fires.
‘What’s this about?’ Castus asked. He did not expect a reply, and got none.
Out through the camp gates, they marched down the hillside towards the battle valley. Smoke from the funeral pyres hung in the rainy night air. On the slope where the imperial tribunal had been raised stood a large pavilion. Guards surrounded it – troopers of the Equites Scutarii, standing beside their horses. The Protectores led Castus through the guard lines and up to the door of the tent, and the German raised the flap and gestured for him to enter.
Warm light met him as he stepped inside, and the sweet stink of death. Oil lamps hung from tall stands around the leather tent walls. There were around a dozen men gathered in the smoky glow, and only half of them were still alive. Officers, mostly, with a few finely dressed civilians among them.
‘Domini!’ Castus cried, saluting, and jolted to attention, feet spread, thumbs hooked in his belt.
‘You may relax,’ said the notary, Nigrinus. ‘This is not a formal occasion.’ Castus was not at all surprised to find him here.
‘This is the centurion I mentioned, who was held captive among the Picts,’ the notary went on, addressing the gathering. ‘He may be able to help us, I think.’
The six dead men were laid out on the floor of the tent, some still wrapped in bloodstained blankets. All of them were Pictish warriors; the scar patterns were livid on their greying flesh.
‘These,’ said a very fat man in a damask robe, flapping his palm at the corpses on the floor, ‘are some of the bodies of the Pictish notables our scouts managed to recover from the field.’ He had a high fluting voice. A eunuch, Castus realised. ‘Study them, and see if you can identify any of them.’
Castus stepped closer to the row of corpses. The first was hard to recognise, as his face had been gouged almost entirely away. The ruined black features told him nothing, but the patterns etched onto the skin appeared familiar. Castus remembered the gathering in the meeting hut, the fug of smoke and sweat, the men gathered around the fire.
‘This is one of their chiefs, I think,’ he said.
‘Name?’ Nigrinus prompted. Castus shrugged and shook his head, and the notary scratched something on a waxed tablet. The others kept themselves away from the little man slightly, Castus noticed, even the senior officers. Almost as if they feared him. One of the civilians was wearing scent, or carrying a scented cloth perhaps – the floral aroma mixed with the cloying stink of dried blood.
The next two corpses we
re completely unidentifiable. Both warriors, faces contorted in death. Castus leaned across them, peering intently. Maybe he remembered them, maybe not. He shook his head again.
The fourth man he knew at once. The long goatlike face was crusted with blood, but there was no mistaking the stiff red mane of hair.
‘This is their king. Talorcagus.’
‘You’re sure?’ the eunuch asked eagerly. Castus nodded. A brief stir of pleasure and congratulation passed around the group of officers.
‘These last two I don’t know.’
‘What about the king’s nephew?’ one of the tribunes snapped. ‘Drustagnus, isn’t it? Do you see him here?’
Castus looked again, then shook his head. ‘No, dominus. He’s not here.’
‘Then he has escaped us!’ another voice said. The group of officers jolted to attention suddenly, and some of the civilians made little gestures of salute. The tribune Constantine strode from the tent door and stood before them. His face was flushed, as if he had just been exercising, and he held a gold cup of wine. ‘There was no way anyone could have slipped past my cavalry. Clearly this Drustagnus got clear before the rout began!’
‘Indeed, dominus,’ Nigrinus said, raising his stylus. ‘And one more, of course, is missing. The woman who started this revolt. Cunomagla.’
Castus clenched his jaw, and tried not to show his discomfort. Constantine stepped forward and leaned over to gaze at the corpses laid on the floor.
‘Such formidable warriors,’ he said, ‘stirred into hopeless rebellion by the wiles of a female…’ For a moment he appeared almost sad, staring down at the bloodied face of the dead Pictish king. Then he straightened up.
‘It is an unnatural thing,’ he declared, his voice slurring slightly, ‘when a woman gains primacy over a people! Nothing but evil can result from a woman’s rule. Do you not agree, centurion?’