Deva Tales

by S. J. A. Turney

  ‘So it is not in your interest to stop this anyway,’ grunted the optio.

  ‘I have tried, man. But only the rescinding of the tax rises will halt the troubles now.’

  ‘Then we’re in trouble. You should have stayed outside, miss. Now you’re trapped with the rest of us.’

  ‘I’ve sent for help, officer. My two aides and two more of my guard are already on their way to Deva as fast as they can manage. I’m hoping you can hold out until sense prevails. Or preferably keep stringing out negotiations until then, so that there’s no actual violence.’

  The optio tapped his lip. ‘If your men are fast, they could reach Deva in less than an hour. Allow another quarter hour for the garrison to faff and get themselves organised and then, if the officers back in the fortress are sharp, they’ll get cavalry out to our aid, who can be here in maybe another quarter hour. That’s an hour and a half altogether. If your aides are stylus pushers, then they’ll probably be slower. We can’t hope for any kind of help really then in less than two hours. I don’t know about your powers of persuasion, but I doubt I can keep an angry miner arguing for two hours.’

  As a matter of fact, we never got to judge the optio’s powers of persuasion, and all because of one man’s lack of control. I didn’t see it at the time, though I had a good account of it later from friends. Off on the west wall one of the new lads snapped under the pressure, screaming some imprecation as he threw his pilum at the silent, brooding line of miners observing him. Stupid for many reasons, not the least of which was that they were still well out of range for a man so new to the weapon. The pilum plummeted harmlessly into the outer of the two ditches, bending uselessly as it landed. The panicked legionary had no time to consider the implications of his stupidity, though, for several of the miners apparently took the mistake personally.

  A flurry of hurled rocks came from the gloom in response. A pilum in an untrained hand has a short range and presents little danger, but any man can hurl a rock, and these men had arms like a bull’s leg. Two of the half dozen rocks were on-target, the first smashing into the legionary’s shield and splintering the layers of board. The other connected with his forehead and the man was knocked back to the floor, a huge dent caved into the front. The helmet had buckled and the bronze had dug a gouge in the man’s head, splitting his skull. He was out of it, either dying or at least concussed.

  As though the deep ‘clong’ of the rock on the bronze were a bell to announce the start of a sporting event, everything happened at once. The legionaries to either side of the felled man cast their own pila. They were better and one actually pinned a miner. Rocks hurtled out of the gloom and three men were struck, staggering back from the parapet, one badly hurt and removed from the game.

  The fight had begun.

  We ducked down behind our shields and below the tip of the parapet for a while as the rocks flew, barely daring to look up. One man not far from me rose to look over the rim of his shield, and his curiosity cost him an eye.

  We had few pila. Just one per man and no other missiles of any kind, and so we huddled and waited, unable to manage a return volley without leaving ourselves completely devoid of ammunition. I have no idea how long the barrage went on. It felt like hours, though I doubt it was anything much longer than half an hour in reality. We could sense it petering out at the end, as the objects coming across the parapet became smaller and muddier, freshly collected from the ground at their feet.

  Then it stopped, and there was an eerie silence. Slowly we began to emerge from our protective shelter like hibernating animals in the spring. We knew it for what it was, though: the pause before the real trouble started.

  Men turned and began to urinate back down the slope, trying to empty their bladders before it happened mid-fight and without warning.

  ‘When they come, use your pilum like an auxiliary spear,’ the optio commanded, the order relayed around the walls. ‘Jab down and pull back out. Keep it as straight as you can, else the shaft will bend and it’ll be useless. Jab and back… jab and back. That way, hopefully, we can keep them in the ditch and away from the wall itself. Those of you at the gates, try and find gaps in the wood and jab the pilum through when they come. Stop them forcing the gate whatever you do.’

  There was a long and nerve-jangling silence, and then a single cry.

  And it began for real.

  All about us was the song of battle. A melody of steel on iron, of bronze on wood. It was hard to imagine what the world had been like before the melody of death. It was all-encompassing. It was like being thrown into a freezing lake with your armour on and told to swim for it or you die.

  And we would have been dead.

  If it weren’t for those hours at the palus, hammering chips out of the timber post, or standing in a field hurling javelins at a badly-painted wooden barbarian, or running around a meadow until our feet were sore, making sure that it became second nature where we ran, where we dropped to one knee, where our shields interlocked, we would all be dead already. Discipline and training was what kept us alive. It was what kept us alive to the very end.

  And we were close to the very end.

  We had been fighting forever.

  I stabbed down with my gladius, its weight now ten times as great as when I’d first unsheathed it. My arm screamed with the strain of lifting the heavy weapon and thrusting it out again. My latest blow took a miner in the shoulder, but there was so little strength in the strike that it glanced off the man’s bone and merely scored a thin red line across his arm, cutting more material than flesh.

  We were exhausted.

  Some of the legionaries, of course, were still going strong. Among us were veterans who were still moving as though they were fresh to the fight. Many of us though – especially the new ones and the weak – were floundering and almost done for, our muscles strained beyond hope. To give us our credit, we had taken down forty or fifty of them while receiving remarkably few casualties in return, thanks to our excellent defences. I will always be grateful to the optio for his insistence on such quality.

  And the optio’s orders for the pila had helped too, keeping the enemy at bay for quite some time. I’d struck three men with mine before it became too crooked to use. If only they were better balanced and less prone to bending, they would have been excellent for the purpose. Of course, the new design would emerge in the following months, though that was of little use to us at the time, and therein lies another story.

  We were almost done for. The moment the enemy crossed the rampart and got into the fort, things would change very swiftly. It would soon be a massacre.

  I felt something on my arm and, had I not been holding a sword and shield, I would have reached up to brush it off. Instead, I glanced across and realised that my arm was gushing blood, some unseen blow having managed to catch me in that narrow spot under the arm-plates of my segmented armour and just above my shield rim. A very lucky hit, though not for me.

  It was pretty much the end of my battle. Far from a death-wound, it was a mere rent in the flesh, but with my already exhausted arms, it rendered me utterly incapable of raising my shield and I was forced to drop it. I continued to bat away the blades at the wall with my own as best I could, though it was pathetic, given the fact that I could hardly lift mine, while the enemy were strong as oxen and with everything still to fight for.

  I was the weak point in the defences, I think. If it had gone on that way, it would have been at my position that the enemy broke through and finished us. We were about to be overrun…

  But Fortuna must have been listening the week before when I poured a generous libation to the goddess on her summer festival. For as I was staggering back between the almost-burnt-out torches and wondering how I would find the strength to raise my sword once more, there came a shout in the local dialect and the fighting stopped. The enemy pulled back across the ditches at the command and, uncomprehending, I clambered up to the parapet once more, my leg muscles shrieking with the effort.
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  My eyes widened and I could not believe just how heavily Fortuna must be favouring me.

  Our centurion was approaching the fortlet along the road from Deva, leading a motley bunch. I could see men who could only have been the two stylus-pushers of Curatia Dionysia, along with their guards. They could not possibly have reached Deva and fetched help in that time. But then, this was no relief column from the fortress, anyway. With Centurion Ocratius came a senior officer I did not know, but would later discover was the camp prefect, Pompeius, along with his wife. Three legionaries in various states of blood-spatter accompanied him, and for some as-yet-unknown reason, two well-built and cloaked locals were out front, pushing along a man who struggled against the ropes that bound him, occasionally falling to his knees until the two big – what, bandits, perhaps? – hauled him back up and pushed him on.

  Yes, Fortuna was certainly favouring me.

  ‘End this revolt, now!’ bellowed Ocratius in that centurion’s voice that could make a stone stand at attention and feel guilty. The miners shuffled back away from the newly-arrived party, and the bound man was pushed forward by the two evil-looking locals.

  ‘This man, whose deeds have destroyed the Pax Romana at Deva, is here to publically rescind his proclamations. The next weapon that is brought to bear against a man of the legions will be considered a capital crime and dealt with appropriately under the laws of Rome and of Britannia. But if you all drop your weapons now and submit to my command, I will guarantee, in the name of legate Viator of the Twentieth, no retribution for your rising!’

  And like that, the revolt collapsed, almost before it began.

  The two big men had removed the rag from the procurator’s mouth, and he was alternately babbling words of conciliation to the miners and throwing jagged imprecations back over his shoulder at the centurion.

  It was over.

  The schemes and plots of a procurator and a senior tribune of the legions, which would have had the governor of Britannia removed for his inability to rule effectively, were over. A conspiracy which would have seen Procurator Severus take the place of Governor Lucullus with the support of his old friend in Raetia would have equally seen Viator removed as head of the Twentieth and replaced by Longus, had he lived.

  And what did Norbanus of Raetia gain from all this? Well, he would, in return for his support of his friend, have removed Lucullus from the scene. Lucullus, a man who had been one of the traitor Saturninus’ conspirators and who had more reason than most to hate the Raetian procurator. One of the few men in the empire who could hamper Norbanus’ rise to the top.

  It seemed, as we later discovered once the situation at the fortlet had been settled, that on their desperate way to Deva, the two merchants who served Curatia Dionysia had run into the centurion, who was already making his way to the fortlet with his strange group. The two locals they had encountered on their journey left without a word as soon as they could, and no one saw them again. We assumed they were bandits, but they had apparently done Ocratius a favour by recapturing the procurator when he ran, so they were allowed to go free and no one said anything more.

  The man they had dragged along with them – the procurator of Britannia – had been compelled to renounce his tax rises, given the option of being turned over to the miners for native justice instead. Native justice, after all, had been known to include burning in a big wicker figure, and Severus had sung like a bird at that threat. There were, of course, recriminations. The legate was forced to pay out a sizeable sum to both Curatia Dionysia and to her workers for the dreadful consequences of the procurator’s plot. But in the grand scheme, considering what could have happened in the Deva region that summer, the loss of less than a dozen legionaries and the death of two score native workers was a remarkably light toll.

  The End.

  The true personnel of Deva Tales

  Marcus Favonius Facilis went on to rise through the ranks to become a centurion in the 20th, clearly achieving the promotions of which he’d dreamed. He apparently died in Camulodunum (Colchester), where his tombstone was found. He must have died relatively wealthy, since he employed at least two freedmen, who set up the stone.

  Attius Celer rose to the centurionate, as is attested by a centurial stone recording the work of his century in the fortress wall at Deva. Of his fate, nothing is known.

  Ocratius Maximus, a centurion in the First Cohort of the 20th Legion is also remembered by a stone found at Chester recording that his century constructed a section of the fortress wall. His fate is unknown.

  Curatia Dionysia lived at Deva to the age of forty. She must have been a wealthy woman, for her tombstone, raised by her heirs, shows her feasting at a banquet. Her name suggests a Greek origin and she may have been from a mercantile family.

  Lucius Valerius Aurelius seems to have eventually tired of life in Deva. Following his service term, he headed south and is recorded on a tombstone at Gloucester as a veteran of the 20th.

  The fate of Tiberia (Marcia) is not recorded, other than the fact that she died in Deva and a fragment of her tombstone remains. There is in reality no evidence that she was involved with Pompeius, though she may well have been the wife of a former officer of the Twentieth.

  Quintus Valerius Fronto cannot have survived long into his second service, sadly, since he died at the age of fifty. His tombstone at Deva records only his twenty five years of service in the 2nd Legion. May the Light-bringer watch over his soul.

  Governor Sallustius Lucullus never saw another year. Shortly after the construction of the forts in Scotland, Domitian had him executed (or more likely compelled to commit suicide) for having the temerity to name a new design of spear after himself.

  The camp prefect, Marcus Pompeius Asper, went on to serve in the east under Domitian, where he became a highly decorated soldier. His tombstone rests at Tuscolo in Italy, to where he must have retired. Perhaps Tiberia finally tired of his gambling habits and threw him out.

  Tribune Flavius Longus, a native of Samosata on the Euphrates, is recorded on a dedicatory altar set up to the emperor(s) in Deva. In truth he was a junior tribune of the 20th, rather than the senior one. His fate is unknown.

  Procurator Titus Flavius Norbanus went on, after his meteoric rise to power and his aid in stopping the revolt of Saturninus, to become a commander of the Praetorian Guard. His love of intrigue clearly stayed with him, since it is believed he was one of the men responsible for the murder of the emperor Domitian.

  Of Lucius Cornelius Viator little is known, though his tombstone was found in Savaria (Szombathely in Hungary) so Britannia was not his permanent residence.

  Tiberius Claudius Fatalis went on to have a varied career, rising to the rank of centurion in the Second Augusta and also serving in the Twentieth, the Eleventh Claudia Pia Fidelis, the Fourteenth Gemina, the Twelfth Fulminata, and the Tenth Fretensis. He lived to 42, freed a slave and made her his heir, and is remembered on a tombstone in Jerusalem, where he presumably died.

  Tiberius Flavius Cicatricula’s fate is unknown, as is anything else about him other than he was a centurion whose unit built a structure at Deva. A stone records the work.

  And as for Gaius Licinius (Scriptor)? Well, he lived to the ripe old age of eighty. Clearly, he never rose above the rank of legionary for all his noble lineage, nor did he return to Verulamium to take up politics. And he never married, for it was a friend and not an heir who set up a tombstone in his memory at Deva.

  As to the fictional characters in this work, well they went on to lead interesting lives, of course. Leonidas, Lupus, Severus, Sacratus, Placidius, Carvilius and Segovax are not true attested folk at Deva, though the first two can occasionally be found fighting at re-enactment events as part of Deva Victrix.

  Historical Note

  Deva (Chester) remains a city of enigmatic history. As one of the three greatest legionary fortresses of Britain, it holds an important place in the collective conscience of both Britons and Roman fans. A lot is known about the fortress
and a surprising amount about its population, mainly from the tombstones and altars set up by and to those people. Deva was occupied by the 20th Valeria Victrix for more than three centuries, though this set of tales takes place in its earliest years. Consequently the amphitheatre here described is expanded from the scant details of the early one at Chester, and not the grand stone edifice visible there now. Similarly, there is no mention here of the fascinating ‘elliptical building’ in the city, as that too was a later construction. In the same way, I have included a statue of Minerva at the end of the bridge, instead of the extant Minerva relief preserved in situ across the river from the city.

  The site of the fortlet is on the edge of Caergwrle and Hope, a short way south of Chester, right on the probable ancient border of Ordovice and Deceangli lands. The mines mentioned here have been found at Ffrith in that area. There is an ancient hillfort or defended enclosure at Caer Estyn on the edge of Hope, and another probably occupied the hill that later held Caergwrle castle, and which has provided possible evidence for a late Roman signal station. Tantalising hints at the site near the lake point at the possibility of a Roman fort or fortlet there. Burials across the river, a long-gone yet recorded structure which sounds as though it might have been a bathhouse, ancient timbers exposed and then disposed of by the quarry on the site. Sadly, since much of the area has been quarried away, there will be little evidence left to be found, but I remain hopeful that the site where Park In The Past are constructing the replica fort will eventually produce solid evidence of Roman occupation.