by Peter Tonkin
These thoughts were enough to carry Artemidorus, at Agrippa’s side, to young Caesar’s tent. The litter which had brought him here from Apollonia via Dyrrachium, stood by the tent door. It was no larger than normal, in spite of the fact that it carried the son of a god who ruled a third of the world - for Caesar Octavianus was slight bodied and weighed little even when he was well. But the curtains hanging from the litter’s rounded roof were scarlet edged with gold, bearing the elephant motif from Divus Julius’ personal vexillum banner. There was no doubting whose litter this was.
Both the tent and the distinctive litter were surrounded by a guard of shining Praetorians, who fell back the instant Agrippa gestured. He and Artemidorus entered the atrium of the young triumvir’s tent. It was every bit as practical as Antony’s – a well-designed briefing room that could also double as a dining area. But it was as Spartan as the units encamped beside the Fourth, lacking the touches of luxury Antony liked to surround himself with.
Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Divus Fili was seated at the table, poring over a map. At one shoulder stood Quintus Salvidienus Rufus, lately commander of the fleet that failed to destroy Sextus Pompey off Sicily, but still young Caesar’s friend and advisor. At the other shoulder stood Gaius Clinius Maecenas, the head of his intelligence service. Artemidorus knew them all well and trusted them in varying degrees. ‘Septem!’ said Caesar looking up as the two men entered. ‘Welcome! I hope you are going to brief me with all the details Antony has left out of our conversations so far…’
iv
‘OUR GENERAL’S FATHER SCREWED YOUR GENERAL’S MOTHER,’ bellowed the Fourth, their voices carrying across the no-man’s land between their front rank and the front rank of Brutus’ legions opposite, whose outraged reply was rendered inaudible by what little distance separated the two armies as well as by the lusty shouting from the nearest throats. ‘I’m not sure I approve of using my father’s reputation in this way,’ Caesar said to Artemidorus.
‘Word is that it’s effective, though, Caesar,’ said Maecenas before Artemidorus could reply. ‘If it wasn’t for young Messala Corvinus and Lucius Bibulus holding their commands steady, the Twenty Seventh and maybe the Thirty Seventh would already have broken ranks and come down to sort us out.’
‘We don’t want that to happen quite yet, do we Septem?’ said young Caesar. ‘Not while half of the men standing out there pretending to be battle-hardened legionaries are actually slaves, supernumeraries and servants in disguise. And, before you ask the question Antony no doubt sent you here to ask, no, I cannot spare any more men to help build the causeway. I’d have thought lending him Agrippa and half my army would have been enough!’
‘He wants it completed, manned and ready to go with units stationed on all the redoubts by the kalends of October,’ explained Artemidorus.
‘Then perhaps he should have hung on to some of the cavalry units he sent away to forage for themselves,’ snapped Caesar. ‘The price of feeding and watering the horses might have been paid back by using the cavalrymen to build his causeway. I’m by no means convinced that this is going to be a battle between foot-soldiers with only the occasional cavalry skirmish which the Legio X Equestris can take care of. Besides, the causeway seems to be proceeding well…’ He flicked a glance at Maecenas who nodded in confirmation.
‘However,’ said Artemidorus smoothly, ‘the further the causeway reaches into the marsh, the nearer to Cassius’ camp it gets and the greater the danger of discovery becomes and the faster, therefore, the General wants us to work.’
‘So what?’ wondered Caesar. ‘If Cassius does realise what’s going on, what can he actually do about it? Send his legions into the swamp to stop it? They’d get lost or sucked under almost immediately from what I’ve seen!’
‘He wouldn’t do that, Caesar,’ said Maecenas.
‘He’d build a causeway of his own,’ explained Artemidorus. ‘The distance from his camp to our furthest redoubt is nowhere near as far as it is from our own camp. He could cut our causeway, isolate our men and mop them up at his convenience. And even Antony would be hard-put to stop it and rescue them.’
‘Nightmare,’ said Maecenas.
‘Yes,’ confirmed Artemidorus. ‘Brutus isn’t the only one having nightmares.’
‘Well, thank the gods Antony thought to bring sufficient wine to knock himself out each night,’ snapped Caesar. ‘But he gets no more men from me!’
‘What do you think?’ Artemidorus asked Agrippa and Lucius sometime later that same day. ‘Can we get it done by the kalends?’ The three of them were standing on the leading edge of the causeway with the soldiers of the Fourth and Fifth labouring around them in silence while men from the Seventh and the Eighth worked on a new redoubt, building a simple, easily-defended fort capable of holding fifty men or so. The weather was warm, the atmosphere close, despite the fact that it was late September and became positively icy at night. The air between the tall reeds was fetid; the stench, sickeningly, that of rotten eggs. To take a deep breath led inevitably to choking and retching – hardly ideal conditions for the heaviest of manual labour. Some of the men – legionaries from the Sixth and the Tenth Equestris who were Spanish and knew the truth of it – said this was worse than working in the lead mines or the copper mines of Rio Tinto. Their work disturbed clouds of tiny black flies whose bite was almost as irritating as that of the mosquitoes and horseflies, ticks and leeches for whom they all represented an irresistible feast. Especially in the absence of most of the cavalry mounts. Oddly enough, despite all this, young Caesar found the place salubrious, though he did little more on his visits than to sit in his litter and breathe.
*
Absolute silence was impossible, of course, thought Artemidorus. Cart horses neighed and stamped, wagons groaned, rocks and stones clashed. Piles splashed into liquid mud and shuddered as they were driven down by hammer blows that echoed even though they were muffled. On the other hand, the insults being bellowed from one defensive line to the other effectively drowned out most of the noise being generated here. But, as his conversations with young Caesar and his advisors had already established, time was really beginning to press. Antony’s deadline was mere days away and the harder they worked to meet it, the more noise they seemed to generate. It was a dangerous situation that had the potential to turn into a real disaster.
As Agrippa and Lucius walked back side by side, deep in conversation, Artemidorus followed them deep in thought. He could only see one way of settling things – though his solution would be temporary at best. He was going to have to put together a small team who knew their way around swamps as well as he and Felix did. They would need to strike north from the furthest redoubt, work their way through the dangerous reed-beds until they could see Cassius’ camp from well behind his new wall. Their mission would be to assess whether he had got wind of Antony’s causeway yet. Then to report regularly what he was up to- whether he had discovered Antony’s causeway or not. A team willing and able to do this day after day until things came to a resolution one way or another.
Next afternoon, Artemidorus, Felix, Quintus, Hecate and Voadicia stood at the edge of the last redoubt looking northward towards Cassius’ camp which lay hidden behind the towering wilderness of reeds. Artemidorus and Felix had worked their way through these marshes before. Hecate had lived by a river in her homeland south of the Great Sand Sea and had hunted in the huge reed-beds where the most dangerous animals would have eaten the wild boar which peopled this place for breakfast. Similarly, Voadicia had been raised in the lands peopled by the Iceni along the bank of the great river in Albion where marshes sucked the unwary to their deaths – the ground itself being as dangerous as the crocodiles Hecate had encountered. And Quintus – like Artemidorus in earlier days – had been with Divus Julius in Egypt, fighting Cleopatra’s enemies, massive hippopotami and huge crocodiles all across the Nile Delta with equal vigour. ‘We stay close together,’ he said as he stepped forward off the firm ground and into the mud.
They each carried a heavy pilum – not as a weapon but as something that allowed them to probe the ground ahead, checking its solidity where that existed and the depth of liquid where it did not. The spears would also serve as safety lines if anyone got into trouble. They were more than six feet long and stronger than rope – they would reach over any quicksand or mud-hole the explorers were likely to come across. Each of them carried a well-honed cavalry spatha at their belts, but only the leaders needed to use them as scythes – and even then only if the reeds ahead became too thick to ease apart. They each also carried a pugio – Artemidorus at last having reclaimed his from Voadicia.
Artemidorus had at first considered laying a trail of thread behind them – like Ariadne’s in the Minotaur’s maze – in case they needed to make a rapid retreat. But half a mile of twine was going to be more of a problem than a help if things got complicated. He was also concerned about losing his way in the thickets of rushes. Then he thought how wide their target area was – almost anywhere along the northern edge of the marsh would tell them what they wanted to know. The story of Theseus in the Minotaur’s maze lingered in his mind, however, filed away for future use.
v
But as things turned out, he need not have worried on either count. Two careful hours after his little group left solid ground, they regained it and, easing forward unsuspected through the thinning wall of tight-packed reeds, they at last found themselves on the southern slope of the mudbank which was still rutted by the wheel marks left by Antony’s stolen grain wagon. For the last half-hour or so they had been guided by the sounds of industrious construction dead ahead. Artemidorus headed for these, mentally reckoning that he was listening to Cassius’ engineers completing the new palisade designed to stop Antony’s troops following the route Antony himself had taken when he went in search of Cassius’ grain. The first hint as to their exact location came with the realisation that the place was teeming with birds and rodents in equal numbers, many scavenging between the tall stems and still others in smoke-dark columns moving up and down the air, wheeling across the sky. Then the secret agents began to find the ears of grain lying amid the grass-blades and reed-stems. At last they saw the burst sacks which had been left lying by Cassius and his men – too well-stocked to bother with retrieval. Unlike the crows, rats and mice And the eagles that fed on them..
Artemidorus eased forward until he could see past the edge of the reed bed. Felix joined him while Quintus, Hecate and Voadicia closed up behind. He lay there, silently, concentrating. Something wasn’t right. Something was different to what he had been expecting. The movement and cacophony of the feeding creatures made it difficult for him to concentrate – to think clearly. But he slowly became aware that the hammering he could hear – the noise that had guided him here – was not just coming from one side but from two. He looked left and there, as he had expected, were Cassius’ engineers putting the finishing touches to the palisade they had thrown up in response to Antony’s attempt to steal the grain. But then he turned his head slowly until he could see clearly to his right. And there in the middle distance were more of Cassius’ engineers, supported by teams of legionaries and wagons full of piles, boards, rocks and stones. They were beginning to build a causeway which, by the look of things, would cut through Antony’s causeway and isolate all the soldiers building it and manning it.
‘He must somehow have learned about our causeway!’ snarled Antony several hours later when Artemidorus and Felix reported in. ‘How far do you estimate he’s got with his?’
‘He’s just starting it as far as I could see, General,’ said Artemidorus.
‘So,’ said Antony, glancing round the table at his usual counsellors as augmented by Caesar Octavianus and his closest advisors. ‘We’ve got some days in hand if we want to make a race of it. If we can get to where I wanted to be by the kalends within the next few days in stead then we can still outflank him as I originally planned.’
‘It looked to me as though he’s throwing everything he’s got at it,’ said Felix. ‘He’s clearly hoping to cut yours off and isolate your men. It’s coming up to the kalends of October now and we still have a way to go. But so, of course does Cassius. The two causeways won’t actually cross for another few days – say the third or fourth of October; certainly well before the nones.’
‘We can use his knowledge to our advantage, General,’ suggested Agrippa. ‘We don’t have to work in secret any longer.’
‘That’s true,’ Antony nodded. ‘So the first thing I’ll do is pack as many men onto those redoubts as we can fit in them, so that if and when the causeways cross he’ll be in for a nasty surprise.’
‘An unexpected present, perhaps,’ added Caesar Octavianus. ‘I hear the third of October is his forty-fourth birthday.’
*
So, as the kalends of October approached, work on the causeway continued. Voadicia and Hecate divided their time with Quintus and Hercules in the training area and with Felix – or occasionally Septem – in the swamp. It was their work amongst the reed-beds that was the most important as they reported twice daily on the direction and progress of Cassius’ causeway. And, prompted by Septem’s niggling memory of the maze Daedalus had built at the behest of King Minos, they began to mark any safe paths they discovered leading northward, two Ariadnes in the Labyrinth. The increasingly impatient Antony threw more and more men into the causeway’s construction but Caesar, wisely in Artemidorus’ opinion, refused to lend him any more of his legionaries. Indeed, he roused Antony’s anger once again by demanding the return of his men from the Fourth Legion.
Meanwhile Septem’s spies in the marshes did more than mark pathways – they reported that Cassius was also committing more and more of his legionaries to the task, and it didn’t take a genius to understand that Brutus, even more so than Caesar, was reluctant to commit his legions to the enterprise; maintaining his distance in more than mere miles.
‘The causeways will reach each other any day now, General,’ said Artemidorus at the briefing on the evening of the kalends. This meeting was particularly important – and fraught – because Antony had missed his deadline and, unwilling to admit that it had been unrealistic in the first place, was blaming lack of support from Caesar. ‘What is your plan for when they do so?’
‘Pack my causeway with every legionary under my command and kick Cassius’ arse from here to Olympus.’ Even as he spoke, Antony’s eyes narrowed as he realised that this was little more than a fervent wish – and certainly not a plan. ‘We can firm up the details when we get a little more intelligence,’ he said, his tone that of a sulky child.
‘We have more intelligence available, General,’ said Artemidorus. ‘Perhaps if you were to question my spies, something more solid might arise.’
‘Good idea. Call them in,’ said Antony, brightening at the possibility of putting something more solid and impressive together. His self esteem had taken quite a battering when he lost that grain-shipment, mused Artemidorus, and he felt that he was losing the respect of his men. Unlike young Caesar who – sickly or not – was their good-luck charm and almost their pet.
A few minutes later, Felix brought Voadicia and Hecate in. Both were fresh from their duties in the marsh and were covered in mud. Thickly so, having discovered that it not only camouflaged them, it kept the flies, mosquitoes and midges at bay.
‘So,’ said Antony, his tone jocular, ‘Septem tells me you can update me with about the situation in the swamp. You certainly look as though you can!’
Although Hecate was reluctant to speak at first, Voadicia had no such qualms, especially as Felix and Septem were there to support and extend her observations if they needed to.
‘We have been watching the progress of both causeways as you have ordered, General,’ she announced.
‘Good,’ said Antony, who had ordered no such thing; no more than he had ordered the safe paths to be marked out. But he was happy to take the credit. ‘And what have you discovered?’
‘Yours is wider and more heavily defended with small forts built along its northern edge. Cassius’ is narrower and has no such fortifications. That is one reason why he has been able to build it more swiftly.’
‘And the others?’ wondered Caesar.
‘The General’s starts well away from the camp here,’ explained Hecate, her voice quiet and her eyes downcast. ‘But Cassius’ starts right at the edge of his camp. You have to march your men down there to move them onto your causeway – he just sends them straight out. No waste of time or effort.’
‘It seems that his simple plan is to cut yours and isolate your men,’ emphasised Felix. ‘His causeway is in direct communication with his camp as Hecate says. He can pour legions along it in a manner that you cannot. That’s why you need to build defensive works, of course, while he does not.’
‘But he can only risk doing that if he’s absolutely certain that he won’t need his legionaries anywhere else,’ said Saxa.
‘Well, if the battle’s going to take place in the marshes, where else will he need them? Especially as he can call on Brutus to watch his back!’ Antony sent a frowning glance at young Caesar.
‘But can he?’ wondered Artemidorus. ‘Communication between the two camps – the two generals and the two armies – seems to be a lengthy and complicated process. If Cassius wanted help swiftly, he’d be lucky to get it. I don’t see Brutus moving in anything less than a couple of hours, if he moves at all. And by then the battle could well be over.’
‘So,’ Antony turned to the two women. ‘Is there anything else that has struck you about that side of Cassius’ camp – other than that it has a causeway reaching out of it?’