He waited until the little man took his place. ‘They tell me you identified the camp site. I applaud your choice.’
The scout picked up his cup and sniffed the contents. ‘It wasn’t difficult, lord. It’s probably the only suitable place for ten miles.’ He took a long pull of the wine and his grizzled features broke into a grin. Behind the beard his face had an ageless quality. He might have been anything between his late twenties and early fifties.
‘You speak Latin well,’ Valerius complimented him.
‘You mean for a Celt.’
Valerius smiled. ‘For a Celt, then.’
‘That’s because I’m not a Celt. I’m a Roman. Gaius Rufus. Born on the Capitoline Hill and come to Britannia with the forces of Divine Claudius.’
‘You must have been young to be in the legions?’
That grin again, just the right side of insolence. ‘I was an infant, the son of a slave.’
‘I heard you tell an unlikely story a little earlier, about an elephant.’
Gaius didn’t react to the suggestion he might have been lying. ‘Every word, the honest truth,’ he said. ‘Bar a little exaggeration for effect. My father was the keeper of the Emperor’s elephant, Bersheba, first under Divine Gaius, known as Caligula, for whom I’m named, then Claudius.’
‘And where is your father now?’
‘He died.’ The dark eyes fixed on Valerius’s. ‘In the Temple of Claudius. Fighting beside you.’ Valerius’s cup froze on his lips. ‘You wouldn’t remember me, lord, but I remember you.’
‘Impossible.’ Valerius laughed, but there was little humour in it. ‘Nobody got out of the Temple of Claudius alive.’
‘You did.’ The little man’s eyes glittered. ‘So why not me?’
Valerius was torn between disbelief and curiosity, but in the end curiosity won. How could it not? If it was true this little man knew more about him than he did himself. He lifted the jug and filled Rufus’s cup.
‘Tell me about it, from the point where you left off.’
Gaius took a long swallow. ‘As my father told it, old Claudius was a bit of a rogue …’ The little man related how his father and the Emperor’s ceremonial elephant had been sent ahead with the legions, but Claudius had waited until they’d broken the military strength of the Britons before he landed. ‘They fought six more battles, but they’d already decided who’d won before the first arrow was loosed. Claudius needed a military reputation to keep the purple, and my father’s friend Narcissus, the Emperor’s secretary, gave him it. Bloodless victories he called them, but the Celts had been paid to run away.’
Gaius told how, after the final victory and the surrender ceremony when the Emperor rode in triumph on Bersheba, Claudius and Narcissus decided his father knew too much. Fortunately, Narcissus had persuaded the Emperor just to leave Rufus behind rather than killing him.
‘Bersheba reminded the Emperor of his mortality – he’d ridden her into battle and he didn’t care to remember the experience – so she stayed too. My father received his freedom and Roman citizenship, and there we were in newly conquered Britannia, with no friends, enemies on every side and little hope of staying alive.’
‘But you did,’ Valerius said.
‘Yes.’ Gaius nodded. ‘We survived thanks to Bersheba, who was as strong as ten oxen and as clever as any man. She could pull enormous loads and the fort at what became Colonia was built in half the time as a result. Eventually we prospered, thanks to Narcissus who made sure that when the veterans were granted land my father received his twenty-five iugera along with the rest. My father and Bersheba helped build the Temple of Claudius.’
The little man told his story without hesitation or variation. It was all so unlikely, yet every word rang true. Valerius wasn’t sure whether to welcome what was to come or dread it. One thing puzzled him, though.
‘I was in Colonia for months with my cohort. Surely I would have heard about this elephant?’
‘In the years after the invasion Bersheba was a great wonder to the people around what was then Camulodunum,’ Gaius said. ‘But you would be surprised how quickly people become used to even the most exotic creature. Gradually the mood changed. The druids were rousing the Celts to take arms against the invader and she was seen as something Roman, one of the conquerors. People began to throw stones at her when we passed. One day somebody hit her with an arrow and my father decided it would be best to keep her on the farm.’
‘You speak of her with great affection,’ Valerius suggested.
A sad smile flickered on the scout’s grizzled features. ‘She was huge and clever and gentle. It sounds odd to say that she was more member of the family than beast of burden, but it is true.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘She was in her barn the night they came.’ Something changed in the little man’s voice. ‘The night before they destroyed Colonia. We heard her distress cry and went out to find the barn alight. Bersheba was trapped inside. When we went to free her the Celts ambushed us from the darkness. She saved my father’s life when she broke out, but she was frightened and terribly burned and she ran off into the night. We found her in a bog the next morning, the flesh hanging from her in strips and too weak to free herself. We watched her die.’
Rufus stared into his cup and Valerius relived the same night in the long silence that followed. The tiny pinpricks of flame that advanced like a tide over the darkened slope opposite Colonia. Rufus’s barn would have been one of them, but something still troubled him. ‘I don’t understand how you could have reached the temple if you were on the hill north of Colonia at sunrise. The rebels would have surrounded the city by then.’
‘Not quite surrounded,’ the scout corrected him. ‘From the hillside, my father, my stepmother and I could see the little lines of soldiers on the far side of the river. Boudicca and her warriors were attracted to them like moths to a flame. My father understood the militia would eventually be overwhelmed and he predicted any survivors would retreat to the Temple of Claudius. We knew of a ford upstream from the city and crossed there. You remember how the walls were demolished in many places to make way for gardens and new houses?’
‘Yes, it was the reason we decided to fight them on the meadow by the river.’
Gaius’s eyes glittered in the flickering light of the oil lamps. ‘We were able to slip inside unnoticed. The sounds of a terrible battle came from the direction of the river. There were Celts everywhere, but we were dressed little differently from them – my stepmother Maeve was a Celt – and they were too busy looting.’ Valerius felt a shiver at the coincidence of the woman’s name. He stared at the little man as he continued. ‘But the deeper we went into the city the more numerous they became. The road to the temple was blocked and it was only a matter of time before we would have been discovered and killed. Then we saw the testudo.’
‘You saw the testudo?’ Barely a century of legionaries had survived to lock scuta and create the mobile, defensive carapace. Valerius remembered the stink of fear and sweat and soiled clothing, the agony in his legs and back, the sound of a hundred shields being battered against a hundred trees.
‘We were in a garden close by the road when it came, smashing through the ranks of the Celts.’ Gaius Rufus laughed at the memory. ‘It was the work of a moment to step into the testudo’s wake of dead and dying and follow it close until we reached the temple complex. You know what happened next. They came wave after wave and eventually forced us back into the temple. Despair and heat, air thick enough to chew on, and a terrible, unbearable thirst.’
‘We needed the water to cool the doors,’ Valerius heard himself say. ‘They set them on fire.’
‘Yes. And there were too many of us.’
‘I failed you all.’
‘No, you did your best. You could have done nothing more.’
‘And you survived?’ Of all the fantastic, unlikely elements of the scout’s story this was the most improbable.
‘My father was dying,
pierced through the side as he fought his way from the gate to the temple. Remember, he had helped build it. He told you about the tile. The loose tile you broke free to give access to the hypocaust.’
Valerius searched his memory. ‘I thought it was Numidius.’
‘No,’ Gaius insisted. ‘Rufus. You chipped at it till it was free and sent the young soldier …’
‘Messor. They called him Pipefish. He died.’
‘My mother was a midget. A dancer at the court of Caligula. I was eighteen then, but I looked like a skinny ten-year-old. My father urged me to strip, and as the doors burst open he thrust me into the hypocaust and replaced the tile after me. I was terrified, but I endured. For five days I lay in the darkness as they tried to burn the temple and tear it down. Every moment spent in the certainty of a terrible end.’
He waited for some kind of response, but Valerius was still reliving those final seconds. The boom of the battering ram. The door bursting asunder in a shower of sparks. Blood staining the air as Boudicca’s warriors took their revenge. The blur of bright iron and the pain and the fear and the rage, and the fierce joy of having lived alongside warriors like Lunaris and Falco and Paulus. Death. But that had only been the gods’ jest.
He could see the lightening sky through a chink in the curtained doorway. Night was fading, along with the past. Better to let it stay there.
‘And now you’re here, a Celt to anyone who didn’t know better.’
The little man shrugged. ‘I managed to reach the Twentieth. The legate thought I might be useful because I spoke the language and I can ride anything on four legs. It helped that the Celts think people like me have been touched by the gods. So, I became what I am. A scout. I live on the road and in the field. People talk to me. Every few months I return to the Twentieth with my report.’
‘A spy then.’ Valerius smiled to take the sting out of his words, but Gaius showed no offence.
‘Where would a commander be without his spies?’
‘And what will tomorrow bring?’
‘They left you alone today so they could gauge your numbers and make you seem unthreatened. You can expect the same at the start of the day, but it won’t last. Those sheep you see on the hills will turn into wolves.’
‘Ambushes?’
‘For now.’
‘Agricola wants me to bring them to battle.’
‘Then he’ll likely get his wish, lord.’ The little man’s face split in a grim smile. ‘Because for all the governor’s clever schemes Owain Lawhir is no fool. I warned Agricola the Ordovices are not the Brigantes. Word that the Twentieth was taking another route would have reached Owain the day after they marched. He knows the only way to beat you is to defeat you while you’re still divided and that’s what he’ll try to do. His warriors got a taste for killing Romans at Canovium and they want more.’
‘You talk as if you think they can defeat us.’
‘There’ll be a lot more of them than there are of us, and their druids certainly have them thinking they can win. They’re spreading word that Andraste, their most powerful female deity, is on the rise again, with Boudicca reincarnated at her shoulder. And there’s something else.’ One of the lamps spluttered out and a shadow fell across the bearded features, hiding his expression. ‘Some story about the power of the Roman mother goddess that people speak about in whispers when they think I can’t hear them. There’s a feeling in the air I don’t much like.’
‘Then why don’t you leave?’
‘Because my father taught me that sometimes a man’s honour and his loyalty to his friends is more important than life.’ He laughed. ‘Then again, if things go wrong I can always turn Celt and ride for the hills.’ He got to his feet and stretched. ‘I’d best be getting the scouts ready.’
‘Thank you,’ Valerius said. ‘It was right that two survivors of Colonia should meet and talk together.’ He yawned. ‘I’m just sorry I cost you a night’s sleep.’
‘It won’t be the last, lord,’ Gaius assured him. As he was walking to the doorway Valerius called him back.
‘Were you in camp when the legate had his accident?’
‘I was,’ the scout nodded. ‘And we both know it was no accident, lord. Every man in this legion is aware someone murdered Fronto. But if anyone knows who was responsible they’re not telling. One thing is puzzling people, though.’
‘Yes?’
‘There’s not a soldier in this camp who wouldn’t have cheerfully killed the legate if they thought they could get away with it, but not one of them would have given him the mercy of a quick death. Ask anyone and they would have made sure he suffered all the torments of Hades before he died.’
XXXIX
A screen of Gaius Rufus’s Celtic scouts roamed the slopes of the wooded valley ahead of the marching column. The landscape became more bleak and forbidding with every step westward, towering grey mountains scarred by deep gullies and swirling with mists that could hide an army. Valerius had a sense that the very earth of this land hated them. Perhaps with reason. The primitive farms and settlements they’d passed had proved empty of people and stripped of anything of value. Agricola had given orders to raze every building they encountered. Valerius relayed the command with regret and now swirling pillars of smoke from their blazing timbers marked the advance of the Ninth legion and announced their presence to the Ordovice chiefs.
Valerius rode with Naso and a pair of aides at the centre of his bodyguard, behind a cohort of Asturian light infantry who made up the legion’s vanguard. Troops of auxiliary cavalry acted as flank guards, forced closer than Valerius liked by the narrow contours of the valley. To his rear marched the newly appointed aquilifer, Claudius Honoratus, carrying the legion’s eagle and accompanied by eight of the largest men in the legion armed with fearsome axes. Behind them came the six cohorts of the Ninth, six centuries of eighty men to each cohort. The legionaries marched six abreast with two paces between each rank, which meant close to two hundred paces for each cohort, so the men of the legion alone took up almost a mile of the winding track. They were followed by the long baggage train of more than a thousand mules carrying tents, rations, spare pila and swords, fodder for the cavalry horses and the mules themselves, a grinding mill and iron cooking pot for each tent of eight men. Lastly came the rearguard of more auxiliaries.
Every rank and file soldier carried half his own weight in armour, equipment, weapons and supplies. Mail covered his shoulders, chest and back or, if he was fortunate, the lighter segmentata plate armour: thirty-four iron plates and bands held together by straps, clips and laces. His big scutum – three layers of oak – hung by straps from his back in a leather cover. His day to day rations, water skin, cup and plate hung from a long pole over his left shoulder, and a pilum and a pair of palisade stakes over his right. Every man wore a gladius on his right hip and a pugio dagger at his belt. Valerius never ceased to wonder at the strength and stamina packed into those wiry bodies. As always he’d done his best to ensure they’d been well fed and watered on the march, with decent rest stops. The last thing he needed with such a small force was stragglers.
The enemy struck with a howl as the column had just entered a broader part of the valley where the densely wooded slopes spilled over on to the frozen sward. Thirty half-naked warriors hurled themselves from the trees against the nearest auxiliary cavalrymen. This was far from the first ambush. The results were always the same. One or two troopers hauled from the saddle and butchered before they could react, then the response as the cavalry recovered their wits and broke the heads of a few attackers. Valerius waited for the next act in the little drama, and the Celts didn’t disappoint him. From the opposite side of the valley a much larger group, perhaps over a hundred men, erupted from the scrubby slopes and ran directly for the lightly defended mule train. Similar assaults had happened twice already that morning despite all his precautions. As he’d discovered before, men prepared to die were difficult to stop. This time he intended to give them their wish.<
br />
He’d deliberately left the flank open as an invitation to the Ordovice chief coordinating the assaults. The Celtic warriors sprinted across the frost-hardened turf carrying hooked reaping knives and big cleavers, intent on slaughtering or maiming as many of the pack animals as possible before making their escape. Valerius waited until they were halfway between the trees and the column.
‘Now,’ he said.
The mounted signaller at his side let out a long blast on his trumpet and the auxiliary infantry cohort stationed among the baggage threw off their cloaks and formed a double line between the attackers and the mule train. The unexpected sight checked the Ordovice warriors, but their leader screamed at them to keep going and they took up the cry, advancing again at a stumbling trot. In less time than it took to cover ten paces the thunder of hooves announced the arrival of the cavalry squadrons who’d been waiting for just such an attempt. They galloped along the treeline and wheeled to take the enemy in the rear as the auxiliary infantry moved forward at a steady walk, shields at shoulder height and gladii drawn. The Ordovices had believed they were wolves about to tear into the unprotected Roman baggage train. Instead, what followed was as simple as herding sheep to the slaughter. The charging troopers of the Ala Indiana smashed into the outer ranks of Ordovice warriors, swords hacking down on unprotected heads, their big cavalry-trained horses lashing out with their hooves and snapping at snarling bearded faces with their yellow teeth. As the shrieks of their dying comrades tore the air the men at the front of the attack sought sanctuary wherever they could, only to run on to the darting points of the auxiliary infantry.
They’d come to butcher mules, but the short scythes and heavy cleavers were as useful as spoons against the precision-made killing tools of their opponents. Now it was the Celts being butchered. The short swords flicked out as if the men were performing morning exercise, needle points piercing flesh and viscera to be ripped clear with that characteristic violent twist that left an enemy’s guts trailing from his body. Valerius could have asked for prisoners, to be put to the question or sold as slaves, but he wanted to send a message to whoever was facing him. Send as many as you like. I have an infinite capacity to provide more widows and orphans. This is the price of defying Rome.
Glory of Rome: (Gaius Valerius Verrens 8) Page 32