Valerius could see the two aides still staring at the model on the sand table and trying to look as if they weren’t listening. The legate followed his gaze.
‘Leave us.’ The two men saluted and hurriedly made for the door.
‘Come.’ Valerius followed his commander across the dirt floor towards the sand table. ‘There will be a day, Valerius, when your soldiers are mere coins to be spent. What will you do then, when you know you must order them into the abyss? The truth is that they do not seek your friendship, but your leadership. Here.’ He pointed at the sand table, which held a perfect miniature replica of the hill and the British fortress.
‘Sir?’
‘It is time to end this.’
II
The Silurian chieftain looked down from the wooden ramparts towards the symmetrical lines of the Roman encampment and fought back an unfamiliar panic. He was puzzled, and, yes, frightened. Not frightened for himself, or for the impetuous warriors who had brought this upon him, but for the people who had come to this place seeking sanctuary, but were instead facing annihilation. Within the walls of the fortress stood perhaps a hundred and fifty thatched roundhouses, clustered in the lee of the ramparts or around the little temple in the centre of the compound dedicated to the god Teutates. The inhabitants farmed the fields in the surrounding countryside, hunted and fished and traded the surplus to the less fortunate communities, of which he was also the overlord, in the rugged hills to the west. Normally the fort would support fewer than five hundred people — today all the warrior strength he could gather and an additional thousand refugees scrabbled for space among the huts and fought for water from the single well.
The ambush on the Roman cavalry patrol had been carried out at the orders of the High King of the Silures, who had in turn received ‘guidance’ from his druid, who had no doubt received similar guidance from the leaders of his sect in faraway Mona. He had been against it, but how could he, a lowly border chieftain, refuse his king? In any case his young men were eager to test their mettle against the enemy who paraded across their hills and their valleys as if they were their masters. But the High King was a long way from the soldiers who now threatened his fortress. One tribe would feel the power of the Romans’ revenge and it would be this one.
He had always intended to fight; his honour and his authority depended on it. But initially he had intended to fight and run. This was not the first time he had seen a Roman legion prepare for battle. Ten years before, in a valley not three days’ ride away, he had stood with the Catuvellauni war leader Caratacus when the long line of brightly painted shields crossed the river and the last great alliance of the British tribes had smashed itself against them the way a wave breaks against a rocky shoreline. He knew what the Romans were capable of. His puzzlement had begun when the legionaries started digging, and by the time he’d worked out why, his opportunity to run had gone. Now his people were in a fortress within a fortress. Trapped. But the puzzlement only turned to fear when the messengers he sent to ask for terms and offer hostages failed to return. Such offers had always been accepted in the past. The reason this one was not became clear when the leader of the ambush explained the fate of the Roman auxiliary cavalrymen, and clearer still when the heads of his two messengers were sent back by a Roman catapult.
‘Father?’ At first he didn’t acknowledge the melodious high-pitched cry because he needed every ounce of courage and he knew that even to look at her would weaken his resolve. ‘Please, Father.’ He turned at last. Gilda stood at her mother’s side: part child, part woman, liquid doe eyes beneath an untidy fringe of raven hair. For a moment their combined beauty cast aside the bleak shadow that blanketed his mind. But only for a moment. The thought of what might happen to them in the next few hours placed a lump of stone in his throat and he barely knew his own voice.
‘I told you to go to the temple,’ he said to his wife, who, for reasons only a woman would understand, wore her best grey dress on this of all days. ‘You will be safe there.’ He could see she didn’t believe him, but what could he tell her? Another man would have given her a dagger and instructed her to use it. But he wasn’t that man. He had spoken more sharply than he intended and Gilda gave him a look of reproach as they walked away hand in hand. When he turned back to the ramparts and the Roman preparations below, his vision was strangely blurred.
Valerius stared up at the fortress on the flat-topped hill. He had seen native oppida like it many times but this was by far the largest and the most skilfully constructed. He studied it carefully, impressed by the engineering. The approaches had been cunningly designed to force attackers to assault the palisaded walls from an angle, so that they would be more exposed to the slings and spears of the defenders. He could see those defenders now, a silent line of heads silhouetted against the sky above the first of the three ramparts that encompassed an area measuring as much as two legionary encampments.
The legate called for his chief engineer, who had been summoned from Glevum when a siege became inevitable. ‘It may look formidable,’ Livius growled. ‘But this place is no Alesia and I do not have Caesar’s patience. How long before the heavy weapons are ready?’
The man chewed his lip but Livius knew him well enough to be certain he had the answer to hand. ‘One hour for the onagers and ballistas, perhaps two more for the big catapults. We had a little trouble at the last river crossing…’
‘You have two hours to put everything in place’ — he also knew the engineer well enough to be certain he had built in the leeway to be able to meet his general’s deadline — ‘two onagers, two ballistas and a single catapult between each pair of watchtowers.’
Later, the heavy chopping sound that was instantly recognizable as the discharge of a ballista brought him from his tent. He looked up at the sun and a particularly sensitive watcher might have noted the shadow of a smile cross the stern features. Two hours less perhaps ten minutes. Good.
‘A ranging shot, sir, short by a dozen yards,’ the engineer announced. ‘A waste of a bolt, but we’ll do better this time. More tension on the rope there!’
Valerius hurried across to join them and watched as the weapon’s commander hauled on the winch, and the two front arms of the ballista bent noticeably back as the ratchet turned noisily. It was a big bow, really, one that shot massive, five-foot arrows with heavy, needle-pointed iron heads. A big mechanical bow encased in a wooden frame and mounted on a cart for easy transportation. They called the arrows ‘shield-splitters’ and he had seen the destruction they could do to an enemy battle line. They would be equally deadly when they fell among the British warriors and the shambling mob of refugees who had sought the false security of the fortress walls. Those walls were now ringed by twenty ballistas and the same number of onagers, the little stone-throwing catapults. Experience told him the onagers would struggle to hurl their ten-pound projectiles over the walls of the inner rampart, but they would add to the chaos and the panic. There would be no such problems for the big catapults. The long, fifteen-foot arm could throw a boulder five times the size of a man’s head from one side of this hill to the other.
‘Weapon armed and ready, sir.’
The engineer scuttled round to the rear of the ballista and stared along the launching ramp towards the fortress. ‘Another elevation.’
The ballista commander lifted the central beam of the weapon a notch and stood back as the engineer again checked the aim, the calculations twitching one by one across his furrowed brow. Eventually he turned back towards Livius. ‘You have the honour, general.’
The legate nodded. ‘Ballista… fire!’
From the eastern gateway of his fortress the Silurian chieftain heard a soft thud at the base of the hill and detected a flicker of movement against the green and brown of the earth below. In the same second some force disturbed the air close by his left shoulder, plucking at the heavy cloth of his cloak, and a moment later he heard a shriek from within the fortress behind him. He turned, knowing what he would
see. At first he wasn’t certain whether it was one person or two writhing in the dust. They must have been standing face to face when they were hit. Mother and son? Brother and sister? Lovers? It did not matter now. The ballista bolt had taken the man in the centre of the back, punching through his spine on the downward arc of its trajectory. The impact of the strike had thrown him forward and the point of the five-foot arrow had pierced the woman’s lower body, so that now they squirmed and gasped and quivered in some obscene parody of the act of love.
It had begun.
Livius nodded to the engineer to continue and turned to Valerius. He looked the young tribune up and down. Yes, the boy would do — a credit to his father, even if the father was not a credit to him. Of medium height, but powerfully built with it. Crow-dark hair cropped short beneath the polished helmet, a strong jaw and a sculpted chin with its almost invisible central cleft shadowed with the slightest stubble. Serious eyes of a deep, aqueous green confidently returned his stare. But look a little closer and there was something slightly disturbing about those eyes; a hint of what might be cruelty that would attract a certain type of woman, and hidden in their depths the unyielding hardness which made him the right man for this mission.
He had his orders, but no harm in reinforcing them. ‘Rome does not generally place her tribunes in peril, but in your case I have decided to make an exception. You attack in two days, at dawn. Our Gaulish auxiliaries will carry out a diversionary assault on the western gateway. It will provide you with your opportunity. Once they have engaged the enemy and drawn their reserves you will assault the eastern gate with three cohorts of heavy infantry — more than fifteen hundred men. I have studied the east gate. Once the catapults have done their work it will not hold you for long. Remember, take the fight to them and do not stop killing until there are no more warriors left to kill. That is the price they pay for murdering Rome’s soldiers. The women and children will be taken as slaves. Anyone too old or too sick to march… well, you know what must be done. For Rome!’
For the next two nights Valerius watched as the bombardment battered the rebel defences. He had seen what the artillery could do; the casual, arbitrary malevolence that turned one family into bloody scraps fit for nothing but the dogs, and the next second immolated a dozen warriors in an all-encompassing fireball that left them blackened, smoking imitations of the human form. It was the big catapults, of course, with their boulders that would take out a section of wall or gate and everyone behind it, and the fiery missiles that stank of pitch and sulphur and consumed hut and flesh alike. The assault continued spasmodically through the night, the impact of each death-bringer preceded by the distinct sound of its passage: the almighty, whooshing surge of the giant rocks and the peculiar whup whup whup sound of the fireballs as they spun through the air. Against the awesome violence of the catapults the more numerous projectiles of the smaller weapons would seem almost puny by comparison, but still they would take their toll among the packed ranks of the refugees and the doomed warriors who stood on the ramparts, defiant, as if flesh and blood alone could halt the Roman assault. He tried to blank out images of the exposed bones of shattered children; tried not to imagine the screams of the dismembered or those impaled or blinded by splinters as the wooden palisades and the once mighty gates were smashed flat.
On the morning of the third day, an hour before dawn, the three cohorts of the assault force formed up amid the flickering torchlight on the camp’s parade ground. Valerius stood silently at the centre of the square beside the legion’s eagle and the individual unit standards held aloft by the signiferi, their rank and role emphasized by the wolf-fur cloaks they wore. Each man here had signed up for twenty-five years in the legions. As a military tribune, Valerius had joined for six months, served sixteen because the life agreed with him, and would be sent home in another eight months at most. He gazed slowly round the square, attempting to judge the mood, but in the darkness every face was lost in the shadow of a helmet brim. I’m leading an army of the dead: the thought entered his head before he could suppress it and he shuddered. Was it an ill omen? He made the sign against evil and took a deep breath.
‘You all know me.’ His firm voice carried across the parade ground. ‘And you know I’m only here because your Primus Pilus twisted his leg the other day. He regrets his absence, but not as much as I do.’ A few of them laughed at that, but not many. Valerius knew that some of them would be glad the legion’s feared senior centurion would not be there to hound them up the hill, but the veterans understood that the loss of experience could cost lives. He noticed Crespo, in his distinctive helmet with the curved transverse crest, scowl. ‘You’ve all done this a hundred times before and there’s nothing on that hill you have to fear. When we go, we go fast and we stop for nothing. Anyone who’s wounded on the way is left behind, and that includes the officers. Stay tight, because the tighter we are, the safer we are. I’ll be up front with the First cohort and where I lead, you follow. They won’t be expecting us to come knocking on the front door, so it should be simple.’ This time they did laugh, because they knew it was a lie. The sides of the hill were too steep for a direct assault on the walls. Only the two gateways to the east and the west were vulnerable and the enemy would be waiting behind both. ‘Once we’re inside the gate, it’s over,’ he ended decisively. ‘These people may know how to fight, but they don’t know how to win. We know how to win.’
They cheered him, and pride rose up inside him like water from a spring. He felt a bond with these men that was stronger than family; a comradeship of the spirit, tempered in the heat of battle. They had marched together and fought together, and there was a fair chance that when the sun came up they would die together, their blood mingling in the mud of a British ditch. All of them knew that some of the men who marched up that hill would not be coming down again. But instead of weakening them, the knowledge gave them strength. That was what made them what they were. Soldiers of Rome.
He issued detailed instructions to each of the unit commanders in turn, finally approaching Crespo, who was to lead the Second cohort. He found it difficult to hide his dislike for the man, but the hour before an attack was a time to put aside petty rivalries. He could see the pale eyes glittering in the darkness, but he couldn’t read what was in them.
‘May your god protect you, Crespo.’ The centurion followed Mithras and somewhere in the camp was the hidden shrine where he would have made a sacrifice to the bull-slayer. It was a secretive cult but anyone who survived the initiation was worthy of respect — for courage at least. Soldiers did well not to ignore the gods, but Valerius worshipped them the way most men did, doing just enough to keep them happy and calling on them in time of need. ‘Stay close on the way in. Once we’re past the gates, the First will hold the enemy in position while you punch a hole through their line with the Second. When you’re beyond them, turn and we’ll crush them between us.’ It was a good plan, but its success depended on many different factors. He had fought the Celtic warriors of western Britain before and, for all his confident talk about their weaknesses, he knew them for courageous fighters prepared to die in defence of what was theirs. Today, they would have no choice, because they had nowhere to run.
Crespo grunted suspiciously. ‘So we do the fighting and dying while you hide behind your shields and take all the glory?’
Valerius felt the anger rise in him, but bit back the words that accompanied it. No point in getting into an argument with the embittered Sicilian. ‘Dying is what we are paid to do, centurion,’ he said, and turned away before Crespo could reply.
III
The barrage paused and for a few seconds the soft, false light of the grey predawn was accompanied by an unearthly calm, the serenity broken only by the crackle of burning wood from the hilltop. At the head of his men, Valerius closed his eyes and tried to read the sounds. At first, nothing. But a moment later he heard the muted growl he knew was the start of the auxiliary attack. He kept his eyes shut a little longer, enjoying a
final moment of peace, and when he opened them a fire arrow arched through the sky like a shooting star.
Now!
He led the legionaries at the trot, eight abreast in their centuries. The legate had placed a screen of archers to the right and left of the assault point and, as the spearhead of the attack passed them, the bowmen loosed a flight of arrows that harvested the defenders from the first of the three ramparts. Valerius had spent the two days preparing for the attack, examining every inch of the eastern slope, and he had noted something that gnawed like a maggot at his brain. The most obvious route to the gate had a very clear entrance, but no apparent exit. Of course, the way out could be hidden, a tunnel perhaps, but that, even in a fortress of this size, would be the expenditure of enormous effort for very little gain. The longer he looked at it, the less he liked it. The anomaly might have a perfectly innocent explanation but, in Valerius’s experience, nothing in war was innocent. Now he made his choice, knowing he was gambling his soldiers’ lives on the result. He led his men swiftly past the first opening and on to a sloping platform running parallel with the fortress walls, and when it took a sharp uphill turn he followed it. The route brought the first legionaries within range of spears hurled from the palisade that topped the second rampart. ‘Form testudo!’ At the order, each man in the first century locked his shield above his head with those of the man next to him. Only those in the front and rear ranks and the men on the edges of the formation kept their shields vertical. The result was a solid carapace which made the eighty men inside the testudo invulnerable to attack from above. Behind him, Valerius knew each century in the attacking cohorts would be following his example. Now he was operating on pure instinct, following the well-worn path upwards, and praying the Silurians had placed no more false exits or hidden traps; a dozen knee-deep pits could shatter a testudo in less time than it took to draw his sword. No. A fortress this size must be a place of commerce as well as refuge, and commerce meant ease of access. Whoever had designed the defences would have been forced to make that compromise. His chest was heaving, his arm ached from holding the heavy shield above his head and the breath rasped in his throat. Sweat blinded his eyes in the little oven of his iron helmet, with the big cheek flaps that restricted his vision but wouldn’t save him from a blade to his throat. The clatter of spears and arrows against the outer surface of the testudo was almost constant now, like a heavy shower of rain. Death was everywhere around him but he had never felt more alive.
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