“I can see that an’ all…”
Martellus made a pair of socketed blades to Otto’s specification, each four inches long and two broad at their widest point. Otto tapered the ends of his spear shafts and fitted them himself. Martellus was doubtful.
“Don’t you think they are a bit on the small side?” he asked but Otto shook his head.
“No, big enough to kill. Light to carry all day; thank you.”
Titus Attius walked the length of the newly repaired bridge which smelled strongly of pine resin. He jumped up and down in the middle and expressed himself satisfied when it did not collapse under his substantial weight.
Aldermar visited Lucius down by the riverbank.
“It’s about Otto….”
“Oh no; what’s he done now?” Lucius asked anxiously.
“Nothing, he hasn’t impaled the faces of any slaves or cut appendages off legionaries for weeks…”
“That isn’t funny you know.”
“Well Tribune Longius, as it so happens, it is… to everybody except you. But the reason I want to talk to you is to ask what are you going to do with him when the marching season starts? He’ll want to go with you but you can’t let him take the field in just a tunic and boots; he’s going to need some decent protection.
“You see, this is where it gets difficult, Aldermar. He can’t wear standard issue kit; he isn’t a legionary nor is he one of your cavalrymen. I don’t quite know what to do.”
“Can I make a suggestion?
“Please do.”
“First of all, it’s your duty to arm your companion. He’s made his own spears and some of my boys think that you are being a bit mean with him because of it. Pay for one of the saddlers to measure him up and make him a decent subarmalis and then give the cavalry a gift, a good size pig will do, and they will sort him out a mail shirt. By the way, did you notice he’s letting his hair grow again? When the light’s right, it almost looks like some sort of fuzzy beard’s breaking out on his face as well.”
Lucius tipped the saddler enough to keep him drunk for a week and was outraged at the cost of the pig but gritted his teeth and paid up. It was worth it to see Otto, bright-eyed with excitement wearing his mail shirt, cinched in at the waist by the belt Titus Attius had given him, holding his two new spears and trying to look like a dignified warrior, in spite of his beaming face. When Lucius gave him a dark blue scarf to wrap around his neck to stop the mail links chafing, his joy was boundless. Otto felt that he had served an apprenticeship over the winter. He had learned the language of the legion, trained with and been accepted by the men. Now his lord was rewarding him with a man’s possessions; armour and the right to bear arms in his service. The wise woman had said he would never carry a shield in the ranks of the Suevi but Otto would like her to see him now, dressed as a warrior of the highest rank.
Attius had sent scouts out to look for the approach of the legate’s column shortly due to return with fresh men, equipment and supplies for the coming season. He was not going to be found with the camp and the men left in his charge in less than excellent condition. A lathered horse galloped up to the Porta Principalis Dextra to report that Legate Quadratus was one day’s hard ride away. That meant three days march for a body of men encumbered with heavy supply wagons.
The news caused an orgy of cleaning and inspecting. Centurions shouted at optios, corporals and legionaries that they weren’t going to be the one caught on the hop when the legate arrived. The men became infected with a sort of frenzied fever to polish everything in sight, to arrange things in straight lines and square corners and have the barber shave them until their faces were raw.
The hour finally arrived when they assembled in gleaming ranks under the eagles as the gate was opened and their legate entered the camp to a flourish of horn calls.
Chapter 14
It took two full days for the end of the legate’s column to come into sight He had brought fifteen hundred men with him, some returning from leave but over six hundred recruits. They had marched either from Rome or Luca and felt like veterans by the time they reached the Rhine. Not all of them were raw youngsters. Some had served their term and received their honourable discharge but found nothing for them in civilian life so they had re-enlisted. These men were not a problem provided they were fit enough. But the length of engagement had been ten years until very recently so most of them were “ten-year” soldiers and still relatively young. Amongst them was a small number of evocati. These were former officers or legionaries of exceptional merit who had been invited to remain with the legion after their time was up. Their position in the structure was not closely defined but they were always available to support the officer corps and steady the troops in times of extreme emergency. There were two new tribunes. One was keen but knew nothing and soon got in everyone’s way. The other had three personal servants and a wagon loaded with furniture, carpets, silver dishes, glassware and wine. He would be a very popular young man as long as that fine wine kept flowing.
As well as personnel, there were wagons loaded with grain for the coming campaigning season, metal ingots, weapons and an innovation. The standard mail shirt with double thickness shoulders was being replaced throughout the Roman armies by the new lorica segmentata. This body armour was made up of horizontal metal plates that slid over each other, looking like barrel hoops with a separate piece covering the upper chest, back, and shoulders. The individual iron and mild steel strips were held together with brass buckled clips and straps. One hundred sets were available, initially reserved for centurions and optios. They were of a standard size so the armourers had a busy week making alterations but there was only so much they could do; no amount of letting out and lengthening straps was going to make an average size fit around the deep chest and massive shoulders of Titus Attius. His was made up for him from scratch with his bronze and silver medals welded to it. Centurion Lentus grumbled. The new armour was difficult to put on and who knew if it would protect him as well as his familiar chainmail? Still orders were orders and within ten days, the centurions and optios on parade wore their lorica segmentata, if not with pride, then with sceptical acceptance.
Corvo ended up with one hundred and five men under his command but four of them were specialist arrow and bow makers. Among the supplies were two barrels of bow staves and one of arrow heads. There was also a cartload of lead pigs and twenty bullet moulds for the slingers. His optio was an expert with the sling so Corvo could put one hundred men into the field led by two specialist officers and their technical support. He was more than satisfied. His only complaint was the scarcity of beeswax. The quartermaster had a permanent indent for it.
“You lot bloody eating it or what?” he would complain when yet another of Corvo’s legionaries put in a request.
This was the time of year when good artillery officers took every machine to pieces and rebuilt it; Cestus Valens was one of the best. Human hair torsion ropes were rewound and replaced if showing signs of over-stretching. Wooden slides were smoothed down and greased. Metal fittings were examined and new ones forged if necessary. Lucius had arrived at the depot dressed as a smart Roman officer with Otto one pace behind him as usual and stopped in his tracks in surprise. Cestus was wearing a leather apron over a worn tunic and boots spotted with grease. He was helping five other straining men to lift a ballista off its chassis. Lucius said nothing but went back to his quarters and changed into his oldest tunic. Otto followed suit. The pair of them spent the next six hours in hard physical labour. Lucius learned more about the mechanics of artillery in that one day than he had taken-in by observation and reading over the entire winter. The men changed their attitude towards him after he had spent a fortnight working alongside them. Previously if he had wanted to know something he had been forced to ask. Sometimes the answers had been vague or grudging. But now they began to volunteer information they thought might be useful to him. He was becoming one of them; an artilleryman.
Over a flask of wine Cest
us offered more wisdom.
“Every artillery piece is made to a standard specification but they’re all different. It’s almost like each one has its own character. See that scorpion?” he asked, pointing at one exactly like all the rest. “He’s the most accurate. No matter which crew mans him, that scorpion fires truer than any of them. Why is that?” he shrugged. “No-one can tell but by putting aside the dignity of your rank and working on them with your own hands you get some understanding of each one. That could be the difference between victory and defeat.”
By the beginning of the first week in April, the last of the civilian haulage contractors had left along with the men who had come to the end of their service and were returning to their homes with a cash gratuity or a smaller amount of money if they had elected to take up land grants in Gaul. Publius Quadratus now commanded a fully manned and equipped legion together with its cavalry and missile troop support able to undertake all required military activities on a two-hundred-mile front along the Rhine. His legion was divided into nine cohorts. The first cohort had centuries of one hundred and sixty men in them, not the usual eighty. It also contained most of the immunes specialists; blacksmiths and the like. The first expedition of the year was always undertaken to show the flag. Two cohorts were sent out. One to patrol a hundred miles upstream, the other the same distance downstream for no other reason than to let the natives know that Rome was not only still there but there in force.
The pattern for the season was set. Forces marched out in the spring rain and the summer heat. They criss-crossed the whole area within the legion’s nominal control. Sometimes they were called on to support friendly local tribes against incursions, sometimes they were ambushed but never seriously opposed. The sudden attacks coming from a steep defile or the gloomy forest edge of a clearing were mounted by warriors wanting to make a name for themselves. Even though the Romans were never at risk of defeat, the tribesmen could return to their villages boasting that they had defied Rome. There were losses, gnat bites compared with the strength and manpower of the legion but even so, comrades and friends pointlessly lost from the Roman point of view. But as far as the raiders were concerned, any legionary cut down was one less to have to deal with in the future. They directed their main effort against officers. Lentus came in with a fearful slash through his left eyebrow. An axe blow had slid off the rim of his helmet, cut his face and dented his shoulder armour. The doctor stitched his wound and pointed out that if he had been wearing mail and not his lorica segmentata, his collar bone would have been broken. Lentus said that if he had been wearing his mail shirt, he would probably have been able to get out of the way. Centurions and optios were easily identified by the transverse crests on their helmets. They carried no shields and looked like easy pickings. Their losses were disproportionately high as compared with the rank and file. By the end of the month of Sextilis, seventy-five men had been killed or so badly wounded that they received a medical discharge once their wounds healed but nineteen centurions and optios had been killed or disabled.
Attius and Quadratus kept a running casualty total and, although the death of any man was regretful, their casualties were negligible in strict military terms. The sorrow felt when a jar of incinerated ashes, the remains of a brother, or a son was delivered to relatives hundreds of miles away never crossed their minds. The legate was able to report his sector “at peace”; as far as the German border could ever be truly pacified. It appeared as if The Second Lucan was totally isolated in the vastness of the territory but a regular trickle of dispatches passed between the legion and army administrative headquarters at Augusta Treverorum. Sometimes the riders brought letters from home. Although these were welcome, they seemed irrelevant; talking of events and people who would not seem real until the recipient stood in the open door of his home and saw his family and old friends face to face. All the information coming out of headquarters supported Attius and Quadratus’ opinion that things were as quiet as could be hoped for, although neither of them believed that this relative calm would last.
Lucius undertook his share of field duty. Now that he had been given specific responsibilities, his command was firmer than it had been. However, he listened carefully to the advice of his experienced officers. If they were patrolling in relatively open territory, he rode his horse. Otto acted as his groom in the field, marching or loping tirelessly beside him all day long. He had decided that the nickname “Boxer” had been bestowed on Lucius as a mark of honour and used it every time he spoke to him, to the amusement of anyone in hearing. If they were operating in forested areas, Lucius marched with the men; an officer on horseback would be a ready target for a solitary arrow or spear from a dense thicket. In either case, Otto had a further use. His rudimentary Latin was far in advance of any of the German scouts so he acted as translator. Unfortunately, his vocabulary was straight out of the barracks. On one occasion, a group of possibly hostile warriors had been sighted in the next valley. The scout reported to Otto. He called Lucius who gestured for the nearby senior centurions to join him.
“Boxer, sir, there’s about twenty dodgy looking fuckers in the next valley over,” he told him.
The other officers grinned widely. Lucius was embarrassed and for once showed his annoyance at his constant shadow.
“That is no way to make a military report,” he snapped.
Otto looked hurt.
“But I called you “sir”, Boxer and they’re there alright, so what’s your problem?”
“Just shut up,” Lucius shouted and walked away.
One of the centurions slapped Otto on the shoulder.
“Don’t worry son, you’re doing a grand job.”
Lucius grew closer to Otto over the summer. They were constantly together and the more they spoke, the greater the understanding between them. However, Lucius was an upper-class Roman trained practically from birth to reserve his friendship for, as his mother would have said, “people like us.” It did no good to become too close to the lower orders; plebeians, freemen, let alone slaves. So where did Otto belong in this rigid order? The concept of a warrior-companion was alien to Lucius but the relationship was an honoured tradition among the northern tribes. Otto had belonged to a family of minor nobility; that was obvious by the way the German cavalry treated him. It could be said that he and Lucius were of equal standing in their own societies. Army life had softened Lucius’ prejudices; he had seen dangerously useless young men of his own class fail and displays of intelligence and expertise from his social inferiors. But Otto…he was not a slave, not a servant but could he truly be a friend? Lucius thought long and hard about it without coming to a decision.
The legion veteran farmers working land near the camp brought in their hay and watched the sky anxiously, hoping the weather would hold up until the wheat could be harvested. On clear days, wavering lines of storks could be seen flying down to the salt marshes of southern Gaul for the winter. Flocks of other birds passed over, high up among the clouds, making longer journeys. Some crossed over the Alps to spend the cold months down in Africa. The air began to smell fresher and the days shortened, almost imperceptibly at first. The quartermasters hurried to replenish their stores before the snow and ice returned. Wagonloads of grain, of hay, of firewood trundled in through the gates. Yet more audits, accounts and indents were made up; checked, countersigned and filed. Men reported that their old mothers were dying and it would be the decent thing to do to give them leave. Earnest looking legionaries stood to attention shamelessly lying to their officers who had heard it all before and regarded them with cynical eyes. Unscrupulous officers based their decisions on whether to accept a leave request on the size of the bribe they were offered. Centurions passed the provisional lists up to Titus Attius who referred to Legate Quadratus for the final say.
Lucius was listed for home leave and although he was pleased, he foresaw a problem and went to talk it over with Aldermar. They sat with a flask of wine Lucius had brought with him in Aldermar’s office in the
cavalry lines; a cubicle with basic furniture, smelling of horses and leather and with wisps of hay on the floor.
“I need your advice,” Lucius began.
“Of course you do else you wouldn’t be sitting here sharing your not too dreadful wine with me. Come on then, young Boxer; what’s troubling you? Is it a woman? ‘Course not. Have you gambled all next year’s pay away? Did you….”
“It’s about my going home over this winter and Otto…”
“You don’t intend to leave him here over the winter?” Aldermar quickly interrupted.
“I don’t know what’s best; that’s what I want to speak to you about. Let’s face it; he’s bound to cause me some problems back in Luca,” Lucius said.
Aldermar took a deep breath and a deeper draught of his wine before responding. “So, let me understand you; he’s good enough to accompany you on every mission you’ve undertaken. To run beside your horse, to march with you, to carry messages up and down the line, to work with the scouts and always, always, have your back but he won’t fit in at home in Luca.”
“That’s putting it a little harshly,” Lucius replied.
“Oh, is it Boxer? If you don’t take him with you when you go on leave, in his eyes and the eyes of my men you have as good as said that he is unworthy to be your companion. He will be shamed. The only decent way to break your bonds is for you to offer him a princely gift and formally bid him farewell as if you were never going to see each other again. I don’t believe you want to do that.”
“Why is it always so serious and complicated?” Lucius complained. “But you’re only telling me what I know; I have a duty to him in return for his loyalty. And what’s he had out of it so far but food and shelter, a few clothes, a pair of boots and mail shirt? The only mark of recognition he has is the dagger Titus gave when he showed himself to be better with a javelin than any man in the legion. You and my conscience are both telling me it’s time I did the right thing by him.” Lucius rose to his feet and sighed. “But I dread what he’s going to say when I introduce him to my family…”
Knight of Rome Part I Page 15