‘Present company excepted, General?’ Totavalas asked. The question was aimed more at my officers than at me.
‘Thank you for at least trying to help, Totavalas,’ Publilius said. Cerberus said nothing at first. I understood his silence. Half the blood in his veins was noble, even if he had inherited the dark colouring of his African father. He wasn’t obliged to tolerate another noble’s freedman.
‘Your master is lucky to have you,’ he finally admitted. The Hibernian even gave a slight bow of the head to thank him for the compliment that Cerberus had no need to pay. I smiled; was friendship on the verge of breaking out between my advisers? I hoped so. I would need all the friends I could get if Valens was to be the favoured man; if we managed to break Otho’s army, that is.
Quintus was waiting for us in the camp, his eyes red and his face pale. Either he had been crying or he had spent the night with a couple of skins for company. The discreet men I had sent to watch out for him each night had always reported the same thing: a man barely out of boyhood sat alone in a Cremonan tavern, drinking himself into a stupor. I would have to keep a closer eye on him after the final battle. Until then I was too busy to look after a drunk.
‘Been having fun playing at soldiers?’ he asked. Cerberus and Publilius said nothing. How could they? Quintus was technically their superior officer.
‘For your sake, Quintus, I’ll pretend you’re still drunk from last night.’
‘I wish I was drunk. So would you if you’d seen what I’d seen.’
‘And what have you seen?’ I said wearily.
‘I’ll show you.’ Quintus led us down the road that cut the camp in half, for we had constructed it right on top of the Postumian Way. After a hundred paces, past the praesidium, the cookhouses and the stables, I knew where we were headed. It was where we were going before we had met Quintus.
The hospital was full. So full that the lightly wounded sat on benches outside. An African with a crutch sat next to a pale-skinned Briton, an angry red scar gouged on to his face from his blind eye to the downy hair around his jaw. I dismounted slowly, not wanting to aggravate my shoulder. Quintus held the door open. The two officers and I followed, Totavalas choosing to wait outside; he didn’t bear the burden of command.
At once our noses were assaulted, on one front by the dank smell of all those warm bodies in the same small room, and on the other by the pungently sweet smell of death. But it was the noise that was the worst, cries of pain and anguish that hurt your very soul. At the end of the hospital were two tables, and two surgeons worked on each table. The unfortunates clamped down hard on gags that muffled their screams as limbs were amputated and innards salvaged. Orderlies shouted at us to get out of the way as they brought in more wounded soldiers. We stepped aside mutely. They were the officers here, not us.
‘General?’ One of the men recognized me from my ornate breastplate. The bandages around his belly were soaked with blood.
‘I’m here, lad,’ I said, sitting on the edge of his cot. I tried to smile. ‘You’ve been in the wars, haven’t you?’
The soldier’s face spasmed in pain. ‘Sword wound from one of those praetorians, sir. Drill-master would be ashamed of me,’ he gasped.
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘I’m proud of you, and if I’m proud of you he must be too. You hear that, men?’ I raised my voice. ‘I’m proud of you all.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ the man mumbled.
‘That accent… you’re from Britannia?’
‘Dumnonia.’
‘I remember Dumnonia. Rolling hills surrounding a sea of grass, soil so rich you could feed an army off it. And in the middle, a solitary hill rising out of the levels.’
‘It’s a beautiful country.’
‘The best,’ I agreed.
‘How do you know it, sir?’
‘My legion was stationed at Isca Dumnoniorum.’
‘You were with the Twentieth, General?’
‘Am I in trouble for fighting your countrymen?’ I asked half seriously.
‘No, sir. I was a boy at the time. My biggest battle was steering clear of my sweetheart’s older brother!’
I chuckled. ‘Britannian women! We never went near them for fear of making your people riot.’
‘That’s my people all over, General.’ The soldier winced again. I glanced up at one of the orderlies. He read my expression, then shook his head. The man gripped my hand hard as another wave of pain convulsed him.
‘Am I going to die, sir?’
‘Of course not! You’ve fought bravely for your emperor, and he’s going to give you your citizenship as a reward.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. Now I want you to imagine going home to your family, back in the sea of grass. Think of the look on your sweetheart’s face when you tell her that you, your sons and your sons’ sons will be citizens of the Roman Empire, and no one can take that away from you.’
He gripped my hand still tighter, and my shoulder was in agony keeping it there, but I didn’t move. I couldn’t. There was a smile on the Briton’s face; his eyes were closed but they still shed tears.
‘Dian,’ he whispered. His grip loosened, and his arm fell back on to the bed.
The orderly coughed.
‘I’m sorry, General, but if the man’s gone then there are others who’ll need his bed.’
I left Cerberus and Publilius tending to their own men. They were telling them not to blame themselves, it was Valens’s decision not to help that had brought them to death’s door, and they had fought like lions, every one of them.
Quintus and Totavalas were waiting for me outside, but standing several paces apart. Clearly they had nothing to say to each other, but Quintus still had some hot air to blow at me.
‘Are you proud of yourself?’ he asked.
‘Not here, Quintus,’ I said forcefully, grabbing him by the elbow and walking him out of earshot of the hospital.
‘Ashamed to talk to me in front of your men?’ he scoffed.
‘No, but it doesn’t do a dying man much good if he hears a senior tribune mouthing off like a petulant child.’
‘But I’m not a child any more, you put paid to that!’
‘Don’t you dare blame me for your own faults. You’re becoming more like your father every day.’
‘If I’m becoming like my father, does that mean you’re going to kill me one day?’
‘Your father turned a political ruse into a full-scale rebellion out of vanity and greed. If he hadn’t committed suicide your family’s lands would have been confiscated and you would have been exiled. I had to remind Vindex that suicide wipes the slate clean. You know that.’
‘And what are you doing if not leading a rebellion? You had a choice. You’ve always had a choice. I couldn’t disappoint my father, and what would have happened in Mogontiacum if I’d told you to stop this madness? Your men would have turned on me, the son of the traitor Vindex. I would have been strung up and you wouldn’t have been able to stop it because you didn’t have the courage to lead your own men.’
I slapped him hard in the face. ‘Nobody calls me a coward, Tribune. You want a choice? Fine, I can relieve you of your command. You can crawl back to your estates in Gaul and nurse your precious little conscience. But I’m staying, because when we beat Otho Valens will have the rule of Rome, and I love my city too much to leave her defenceless against that scheming bastard.’
Quintus stood motionless and confused, like a puppy that’s done wrong but doesn’t know why he’s being punished. His hand went up to feel his reddening cheek.
‘You hit me,’ he said quietly.
‘Believe me, you’ve had it coming,’ Totavalas chipped in.
‘Let me know your decision by this evening. I’ll need time to find a replacement. Come on, Totavalas, let’s leave the tribune to his thoughts.’
* * *
The council met after the evening meal the following day. The cicadas were chirping relentlessly around Valens’s tent. The
general’s body slaves had made the place as comfortable as possible. Where once there had been nothing but a table and chair with the grass as the floor, suddenly there were couches, cushions and carpet. A pretty girl served us wine from a beautiful silver jug, though perhaps the word jug does it an injustice. It was more like a chalice, with intricate patterns swirling up sides that some master craftsman must have sweated over for days.
‘A little something I picked up in Vienne,’ Valens called it.
‘Vienne?’ I asked.
‘A small town near Lugdunum,’ he said offhand. ‘Having thirty thousand men behind me helped persuade the locals into making some charitable donations.’
‘Yes, I can see how you needed fine cushions and carpets to conduct a military campaign,’ I said sardonically.
‘Remind me, Severus, how many battles have you won so far?’
I shifted in my seat uncomfortably. ‘We defeated a rebellion by the Alpine tribes.’
‘And I suppose the only spoils to be had was the deflowering of their sheep? Well, each to his own I always say.’ His men laughed as one, as if they were subordinates first and individuals second.
‘I lost some good men in the mountains,’ Pansa said grimly.
‘How careless of you!’ a centurion joked. I remembered him from the council we had held in Colonia four months earlier. This was Priscus, Valens’s right-hand man.
‘Now, now, Priscus. What have I told you about patronizing people?’
‘That I should only do it if they deserve it.’
‘Precisely, and these gallant gentlemen are the lions who conquered the goatherds of Raetia, and nearly defeated Otho’s conscripts, palace guards and gladiators twice.’
‘You’re quite right, sir. My apologies, gentlemen!’ It was like listening to a pair of bullies enthralled by their own voices, and bullies have to be stood up to.
‘Remind me, Priscus, how many men did you lose against Otho’s pirates in Gaul? I wouldn’t ask except we ought to know our full strength before drawing up a battle plan.’
It was Valens’s turn to look sour. ‘We dealt with them in the end,’ he said.
‘After losing three entire cohorts,’ I said acidly. ‘And how many men was it that the general left behind to guard the province, Cerberus?’
‘Three thousand, sir.’
‘Thank you, Cerberus. Three thousand men, plus the two thousand you lost against some conscript sailors. Let me see, that’s five thousand men we won’t be able to use against Otho in battle.’
‘A drop in the ocean. You’ve lost nearly a quarter of your whole column.’
‘At least we’ve been trying to advance Vitellius’s cause, at least we’ve tried to win this war by attacking Otho before the reinforcements from the east arrive,’ I retorted. ‘Now we hear the whole Thirteenth Legion has arrived, along with half the Fourteenth and four thousand auxiliaries. Otho’s doubled his strength to nearly thirty thousand men, and you’ve allowed him to do it. Check with your informers tonight, they’ll tell you that your men and mine all say the same thing. They wanted to unite and fight Otho without delay, but you hung back from joining us, hoping that my army would fail. Your own men blame you for the position we’re in. They even wish that I was in charge of the army, and can you blame them? If I had been, we would have crushed Otho by now.’
All this time Valens’s expression had hardened. Seeing his officers look down at the floor when I taunted him for his men’s malcontent told him that my information was correct. My own men, rather than blaming themselves for the defeats, blamed Valens for dawdling in the west. Valens’s men had immediately joined them in blaming their general to bat away the charges of cowardice.
‘Instead of bickering like children, why don’t we decide how we are to defeat Otho?’ Valens said.
‘At last,’ Pansa sighed.
‘Clearly we want to bring the Othonians to battle as soon as possible, but my men have been marching hard for weeks…’
‘Not hard enough,’ Publilius mumbled.
‘…and they need another day in camp to recuperate. Are all Otho’s forces encamped to the east?’
Cerberus spoke up. ‘My scouts report that the garrison at Placentia, around three thousand praetorians and gladiators are marching towards the bridge here at Cremona. They’re planning to stop us making a dash south of the Po tonight and heading for Rome now that she’s unprotected. Then tomorrow they will cross the river further east at Brixellum and join Otho’s main army.’
‘So, three thousand men who we’d rather not make it to the battlefield. If they’re holding the bridge we can’t assault them even with our superior numbers, and we know from experience what those gladiators are like at close quarters,’ I said.
‘But if we sent a legion and some auxiliary cavalry to the river before dawn and had them start building a bridge, surely they would hold their defensive position rather than risk being chased by the cavalry as they marched east to join Otho?’ Valens suggested.
It was a good idea, I thought grudgingly. Everyone agreed.
‘Who out of your army are the freshest?’ Valens asked me.
‘Probably the detachment from my own legion, the Fourth.’
Valens smiled. ‘You would have no objections to them guarding our southern flank while the army rested?’
‘None at all,’ I said. I didn’t like the way Valens was smiling, but how could I reasonably refuse? I had used my own legion sparingly in the campaign, and we didn’t expect there to be any fighting. The very act of building a makeshift bridge would scare Placentia’s garrison into nailing themselves to their defensive position, depriving Otho of 3,000 tried and tested fighters.
‘Good. Then the day after tomorrow we will march together to Otho’s camp and tear them into bloody shreds.’
‘Side by side,’ I said, raising my wine cup. ‘For Vitellius.’
‘For Vitellius,’ Valens agreed.
XV
The engineers loved a challenge. So far in the campaign all I had asked them to do was to assemble their onagers, fire them, then pack them up. A good engineer has two sides to him: the destructive and the creative. His brain works out the points for assault, calculates the angles, decides how best to beat down an enemy wall. But he should also be able to find a solution to almost any problem. Now building a bridge was no great difficulty, I grant you, but it offered these men a chance to construct something rather than simply destroy.
There were shouts of alarm as we approached the bridge. Soldiers scampered back and forth in confusion as my legion emerged out of the morning mist. I could just make out groups of gladiators running to cross the bridge itself, only for them to stop halfway over in a defensive formation, perhaps ten men across and twenty deep. They watched anxiously as the legionaries made their stately progress to the river bank. These men hadn’t fought at Placentia, the gladiators did not cow them!
The trusty chief engineer, now sporting a thick bandage on his forearm to cover the burns he had received that chaotic night, surveyed the river with his professional eye.
‘Just to be clear, General, I’m to build a bridge that in all likelihood we won’t have to use?’
‘Exactly. Building a second bridge here should stop the enemy scurrying off eastwards to join Otho’s main army,’ I told him.
‘Can I cut some corners then?’
‘I’d rather you didn’t, just in case we have to use your bridge. How long should it take you to build?’
‘Depends what sort of bridge you want.’
‘One that keeps that lot watching us until at least sunset.’
‘It had better be a pontoon bridge then, but a wide and sturdy one. Otherwise we’d have it done in a matter of hours.’
‘Fine.’
‘Where do you want the bridge, General? Alongside this one?’
‘No, I want the enemy to have to split their troops to cover the two points, but not so far apart that one section can surprise us and cross the river. I want t
hose men nailed to the far bank.’
Much of the morning was spent with my legionaries, under the close supervision of the engineers, searching the river bank for a couple of miles either side of the bridge for the little rafts and other small craft that we needed to make our pontoon bridge. All the while Publilius and the remnants of his cavalry squadron roamed the bank, and occasionally formed up on our side of the bridge as if to charge the gladiators, just to keep them on their toes. At one point I thought I heard the low calling of horns above the gentle sounds of farmland in spring, but dismissed it out of hand. Most likely it was a noisy herd of cattle. There was nothing to be seen for miles around. Even Cremona and our camp were out of sight; nothing but the chatter of the birds, the knocking of nails into wood and the gentle gurgle of the river rolling by.
The sun was at its highest point and the bridge was nearly half built when I heard a rider fast approaching. It was odd, since Publilius had taken his squadron beyond a bend in the river to make sure none of the enemy were fording the river downstream. After all, some in that force were from Placentia, and if anyone knew of a secret ford or ferry over the river, it would be them. I was doubly surprised to see that it was one of Cerberus’s Africans who rode towards me, at full speed too. What in Hades was going on?
‘Sir! Where can I find General Severus?’ the rider panted.
‘You’ve found him. What’s the matter, man?’
‘It’s the army, sir, it’s on the march!’
‘What?’
‘The whole army has moved out, sir. General Valens’s legions, his auxiliaries, your own legions and the rest of my squadron; the camp will be empty by now.’
‘That bloody man,’ I fumed. Valens had tricked me, sending me to build a bridge with my own legion so that he could try to beat Otho on his own, but with the rest of my army. A thought struck me. ‘I’m sure General Valens didn’t send a man to tell me this. Who sent you?’
‘Tribune Quintus Vindex, sir.’
‘Quintus?’ I said incredulously. ‘I thought he was meant to be riding home today.’
The Sword and the Throne Page 18
