FIELDS OF MARS

by S. J. A. Turney

Perhaps if there was enough of a distraction, he could slip across unseen?

  A racket suddenly drew his attention and his gaze tore from the gently lapping waters below to the tower behind him as voices gradually increased in volume, figures climbing the steps from inside onto the tower top. He felt the tiniest flush of worry as a man in Roman officer’s uniform emerged onto the parapet, but quickly it settled. Nerves only ever caused trouble. You had to control them or they’d undo you for sure.

  The officer was not alone. Two other Romans emerged, and Catháin’s eyebrow rose a little at the sight. He’d spent long enough around them by now to recognise their uniforms. The first man was a tribune of broad stripe status, probably a legionary man. The second wore a blue tunic beneath his cuirass and was bearded, which seemed to be almost unheard of among Romans. He was an officer of a Roman ship or some other naval rank. The third man was the bastard himself: Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus.

  For just a moment – the blink of an eye – Catháin wondered whether he might be able to end this entire thing if he simply ran around the rampart a little and pushed the gangling, long-limbed lunatic over the edge to plummet to his death on the quayside below. In fact, despite the presence of the other two officers, he was fairly sure he could do it. But Romans were resilient and nothing if not bloody minded. Ahenobarbus would die, but almost certainly one of those others would take his place, and there was always a possibility they would be worse. Besides, Catháin would die for his efforts, and he hadn’t come all this way and lived such a successful and profitable life to throw it all away now on some heroic attack. Oh, and Fronto and Balbus’ paperwork would fall into enemy hands then too.

  The three officers were followed by half a dozen local nobs in their expensive himations and fine sandals, and then by another half dozen soldiers along with an optio. These latter immediately went to the artillery piece and began to check it over.

  His eyes narrowing at the sight, Catháin turned and looked along the wall. Sure enough more soldiers had emerged at the other two waterfront towers and were testing the efficacy of the weapons atop them. Something was afoot…

  With a sharp bark of command, Ahenobarbus sent the port official and his clerk scurrying out of the way and took their place, looking down at the port, his companions close by. As he found the place he desired, the Roman commander’s gaze played around the tower and settled on Catháin.

  ‘Who is that?’ he snapped.

  ‘Some local engineer,’ the tribune by his side replied dismissively. ‘You see him all over the walls. I gather he’s something to do with the crew that patch up the cracks and replace the masonry.’

  Catháin sent a small silent thank you floating into the abyss for the cleverness of his contact who had acquired his permit. Good man. The Roman glared at him for a moment with a furrowed brow.

  ‘He looks untrustworthy to me.’

  ‘We’ve no engineers or masons with us, General,’ the tribune replied. ‘We have to rely on local talent.’

  Ahenobarbus harrumphed and, apparently dismissing Catháin from his mind, turned back to his work. The northerner paid attention to his role, producing a wax tablet and checking the mortar and any cracks in the parapet to allay suspicion. As he did so, he moved to the tower’s corner. Closer to the Roman officer and his party, but not so close as to seem suspicious.

  ‘How many in total?’ Ahenobarbus asked.

  ‘Seventeen warships, sir,’ the naval officer replied. ‘All the ones you can see at the jetties plus two in the sheds at the end. Eleven of them have fighting decks. Then there’s a total of twenty two sizeable civilian ships we can take, all smaller than the warships, but adequate. Thirty nine vessels in all. Quite a fleet, given our circumstances.’

  ‘Good. A good distribution.’

  Catháin felt a chill running through him. Something big was most definitely afoot. The danger he was currently in began to insist itself upon him, and he started to edge quietly and unobtrusively back along the wall away from the small Roman group and their local nobles. As he did so, he could not help but notice figures moving through the port below. He paused. Sailors, both Roman military and local civilians, were carrying goods aboard every ship on the quayside now, and small groups had formed in front of the warehouses. He recognised the figures of the Albici, the local Gallic tribe who had thrown in their lot with Massilia. They were archers, those men. Checking out the ships. There was no good reason for Albici archers to be examining the ships unless they expected to be on them at any moment.

  His heart began to thump.

  Trouble was most definitely afoot!

  As unobtrusively as possible, he paced back around the tower, skirting the crew now tilting and turning the great bolt thrower, and reaching the stairs. As he took the first ten steps into the gloom, he paused, his ears twitching.

  ‘Where did that engineer go?’ Ahenobarbus murmured.

  ‘No idea. Must have moved on.’

  ‘Good,’ the general grumbled. ‘Will all be ready at first light?’

  ‘Ready and waiting,’ came the reply.

  Catháin shivered and began to pad silently down the steps away from danger. His thoughts turned to Caesar’s blockade. The redoubtable Brutus had brought twelve ships to seal in Massilia. The city’s defenders had watched as the young Roman admiral had taken his small fleet to the island that sat outside the harbour mouth and there formed a small naval base. Twelve ships. And no matter how many men the admiral had for each ship, twelve vessels against almost forty was a foregone conclusion, especially when they would be taken entirely by surprise.

  Shit. Things never stayed simple, did they?

  * * *

  The darkness was almost total in the cold room. Catháin had found his way in with relative ease. His weeks of exploring the walls and defences had given him an almost unparalleled knowledge of the system, and he had climbed one of the lesser bastions far from danger, slipping along the wall-walk and nodding at the odd bored and tired guard, displaying his permit. The chances of his movements reaching the general from the mouth of these bored watchmen were minimal. They had not been told to keep out those with official permission and would not think to mention it to their superiors.

  After almost half an hour, he had reached the great chain tower at the port’s entrance. This was one of the most important and most occupied towers in the whole system, and he had been very careful as he reached the entrance from the wall top. He had slipped through the first room, rather blasé, and nipped into the corner stairwell, where he had climbed past a room of chattering and laughing soldiers. Crossing the stairwell without drawing their attention had been a nerve-wracking gamble, but he had reached the small room he sought unobserved and had removed the key, opened the door, entered, and locked it behind him.

  He was alone in a room just five feet across. It was claustrophobic to say the least. And dangerous. More dangerous than walking into a drinking pit back in Īweriū and telling the denizens that you’d never been beaten in a fight. And his chances of success were small, reliant upon whether anyone was paying attention and whether they would know what they were seeing even if they were.

  It was a longshot. More than that: it was a sequence of longshots with only one chance of success. But the poor bastards on the island with their twelve ship fleet had to be warned. He had to try.

  He approached the window. The room was unused now, due to its current empty purpose, for it had been the sighting window for the chain. Here one could look along the line of the long gone chain and into a matching window at the far, now ruined, tower. But if you looked at an oblique angle to the right, you could also see the island outside the harbour mouth. And due to pure chance of design, nowhere else on the city walls could quite see the window.

  Working quickly and with his breath controlled and slower by far than his heartbeat, Catháin produced from his belt pouch a small oil lamp and flask, filling it. He placed a little dried grass and a few twigs on the window sill, the night b
reeze ruffling them but not strong enough to blow them away. Striking iron to flint, he worked until a spark caught, then carefully lifted the lamp and lit the wick, then quickly tipped a small phial of water onto the smouldering grass. With just the glow of the lamp, he lifted it and placed it on the stone of the window, then fished in his pouch again. The convex mirror was his pride and joy, formed of perfect orichalcum and smooth as a baby’s behind. He placed it behind the lamp and gave a few test movements facing into the room, watching the light flash around in the darkness, illuminating the wall. It took a moment for him to remember that he needed to invert his signals, else they were displayed upside down. But still they were strong and bright. He hadn’t done this for a while. Not since he’d worked with a Roman smuggler from Narbo.

  Returning to the window, he tried to run through the signals in his head. It had been a few years, but they had been so critical in that illicit trade that he had burned them into his memory for all time. So far so good, but now he was reliant upon the island noticing and being able to read the signals.

  He held up the lamp and mirror facing the island and flashed the light up, up, down.

  Nothing. He waited for a count of thirty, and then repeated the signal.

  His heart thumping, he continued to wait in his gloomy cell. This small oil lamp burned for just less than a quarter of an hour. He might – might – be able to replenish the oil reservoir once from his flask without it going out, but it was a tricky process. And he had no spare tinder.

  Again and no response.

  He waited, attuned to every slight sound from the tower around him.

  Again. No response.

  Pause and try, pause and try, pause and try.

  He almost missed the reply when it came.

  To be sure, he tried again. Up, up, down.

  Down, down, up.

  He grinned like an idiot. The Roman navy might think themselves all noble and mighty, but some devious bastard out there under admiral Brutus knew the smugglers’ codes.

  Down, down, down. You are in danger.

  Up, up, right. Pirates?

  Left. No.

  Up, up, left. Warships?

  Right. Yes.

  Left, left, down. How many?

  Right, down… right, down… right, down… left, down… down… down… down… down. Thirty nine.

  Why did it have to be such a long damn number?

  Up, right, up. Armaments?

  Left, right, left. Arrows.

  Left, left, up. When?

  Right, Right, Right. Dawn.

  Down. Understood.

  There was no signal for ‘good luck’, so Catháin simply wished it silently and waited. No new signal came. Finally, his lamp guttered and began to fade. Hopefully he had done enough. At least Brutus had been warned and the fleet could flee before Ahenobarbus’ force emerged. Roman lives could be saved.

  * * *

  The northerner was up before dawn again, but this time he was not alone in that. Massilia had woken early and burst into life, a hive of activity. The city garrison had taken their place around the walls as usual, but now the defences at the port end were seeing unusual levels of occupation too. As Catháin hurried through the streets, even an hour before dawn the people of the city were up and about, stirred from their slumber by the activity of Ahenobarbus’ men.

  A few streets back from the port, he dropped by the alleyway where the dilapidated rowing boat rested. He had already identified, a street away, a small wheeled trolley used by some trader to transport goods through the narrow alleys, and had reasoned that he could take it to the boat and manage to tip the vessel onto the trolley. He had even worked out a route through the less visited backstreets that would bring him to the waterside far away from the dock, near the potters’ district, where he could slip it into the water with the minimum of fuss. It was heart-stoppingly dangerous, but whenever the nerves pinched at him, he remembered how perilous it would be to simply be in the city when the walls fell to enemy legions. Rome had something of a reputation for the way defiant cities were treated when captured.

  He would check the port and make sure all eyes were on the fleet first. Then, if there was even a chance of slipping across the inlet further down the waterside, he would go back and fetch the boat. Accompanied by the rising odour of brine and the increasing concentration of gulls, he emerged nonchalantly at the port, sauntering from a roadway as though on everyday business.

  The huge fleet had moved out from the jetties and now sat in the harbour, riding at anchor, already loaded and crewed, awaiting a signal. Archers from the Albici filled the decks, testing the efficacy of their bows in the salty damp air of the port, making sure the strings had not stretched, and securing their positions on the decks or among the rowing benches on ships with no deck.

  The quayside was alive with humanity, though the activity that had seen the fleet’s preparation had long since ended. Now those soldiers and civilians who had loaded ships, untied and coiled ropes, cleared jetties and the like, simply stood on the dock and watched the fruits of their labour bobbing and floating, waiting for the order to move. Catháin’s heart sank. Half a thousand eyes played across the water, and while they were largely centred on the fleet, they had a clear view inward right past the potters’ district and to the marshes at the far end. There was no unobserved stretch of water after all.

  Inwardly, he cursed. It seemed that the concentration of attention on the fleet would make any attempt impossible. His plans scuppered, he fumed impotently for a moment, finally deciding that, given the lack of opportunity for escape, he would instead pay attention to what was happening with Ahenobarbus’ fleet. With luck, Brutus’ ships had taken the opportunity to slip away from the island under cover of darkness. And then there would be another chance for the leaky little boat, for when the Roman officer had regained control of the sea approaches there would be less focus on the water.

  Catháin turned from the port and made for the walls, noting the Roman vexillum of Ahenobarbus on the chain tower. Carefully, he selected the turret two along from that, well out of sight of the Roman commander, just in case, and climbed to the top, showing his permit to the various legionaries or Massiliot guards who stood in the way.

  The bolt thrower atop the tower was manned and ready. A few men lined the parapet, but not enough to fill it. The city’s garrison was not that large, and most of them were still concentrated in the areas facing the legions outside. Locating a suitable spot, Catháin rested his elbows on the stone. He took out his wax tablet and stilus but did nothing else, assuming that there would be enough interest in the proceedings that no soldier would expect a civilian to work without watching. If the men in the port were allowed to stand and watch, why not the wall maintenance engineer the soldiers were so used to seeing around the defences?

  The sun was not yet up, but dawn had more or less broken anyway. The presence of the high hills behind Massilia meant that the sky became light some time before the golden disc made its first proper appearance. First the low peaks along the coast began to glow, and then the wine dark sea far out took on an indigo hue, lightening as the sun climbed as yet unseen. There was a subdued blast of a horn somewhere in the city and the entire fleet raised their anchors and began to move with expert coordination. Their trierarchs were good. In just moments they were moving through the port entrance and heading toward the island that was still as yet in shadow, little more than a mound of black against the purple waters.

  Catháin held his breath.

  The sky lightened further as the ships emerged, and the island began to become more visible, the observers able to pick out details in the glow as the first arc of yellow finally appeared above the peaks. The northerner blinked, certain his eyes deceived him. No, he had not been mistaken. The sunlight was now picking out white sails before the dark mound of the island. Twelve ships. The fleet of Decimus Brutus had not fled after all. In fact they had, during the hours of darkness, put to sea and come around the islan
d, arrayed in a spaced out line before the shore and facing the city.

  What was Caesar’s man doing? Was he mad?

  The lighter it got, the worse things looked. Catháin shook his head even as the soldiers across the tower top laughed in relief. Not only were the Caesarians outnumbered three to one, they were also clearly outclassed. From what Catháin understood, the blockading ships had been newly built at Arelate, and crewed only by what sailors could be found among merchant vessels there at short notice, unlike the naval professionals working for Ahenobarbus. Catháin knew his ships. The hastily recruited sailors would likely be inferior and slow, but so would Brutus’ vessels. They were heavy, of newly hewn and unseasoned timber and would be slow to manoeuvre. This fight looked over before it had even begun. Ahenobarbus’ ships were faster, stronger, better crewed and piloted and far more numerous. Unless Manannán mac Lir – or perhaps Poseidon, given where they were – popped out of the water and plucked a few Massiliot galleys from the fight, Brutus stood no chance.

  The city’s fleet would be able to outrun and surround the blockade vessels, peppering them with arrows. They might even be able to take out banks of oars if the Roman crews were slow or unprepared enough.

  For just a moment, Catháin wondered whether the wily young Roman had set these twelve as fire ships in an attempt to destroy the Massiliot fleet. But, no. He could see them moving now, heading to intercept the city’s ships, taking the massive force head-on. What was he doing? He had to have some sort of mad, reckless plan. While Catháin had only personally met the young Roman a couple of times, Fronto had often talked about Brutus – about his impressive defeat of the Veneti sailors in Gaul half a decade ago. Could that same genius be displayed here, against his own people.

  Bellows of triumph were echoing along the walls at the sight of the two fleets converging, and Ahenobarbus had calls blared out from the chain tower. They were picked up by musicians aboard the ships and the various trierarchs began to manoeuver in response. The ships of the Massiliot fleet separated. The smaller ones with fewer archers drifted out to the periphery, leaving just twenty four ships – the strongest and best crewed – making for Brutus’ fleet. It was a sensible tactic, and Catháin had seen the results at times, when pirates had taken some unsuspecting merchant in this fashion. Two ships to each enemy, gliding in alongside, trapping them between twin groups of archers. The arrow storm would come from both sides and the death toll would be appalling without too much damage to the vessel itself. Why was Brutus letting it all happen? It was as though he had planned this, given the wide spacing of his ships. Was he mad, or was he incredibly clever and had seen something Catháin had not?