Hammer of Rome

by Douglas Jackson

  Valerius must have absorbed more of the Celtic language than he realized. He was certain he heard the Selgovae claiming his body, armour and any plunder for King Cathal of the Selgovae, and pointing out his helmet, which would be worth twelve cattle and was ample reward for their valour.

  ‘On your life, stay still.’ Colm’s lips were close to his ear. ‘Your leg is trapped under your horse and you scraped your scalp on a rock when your helmet came off. The skin has fallen over your eyes and it looks as if the top of your skull has been ripped off. You look more like a corpse than most dead men I’ve seen. Stay completely still and I might yet get you out of this. The others are all gone.’ He had answered Valerius’s unspoken question and despite his condition the Roman noticed an odd catch in his voice.

  Time stood still. Or perhaps it flew past on wings of fire. Valerius was aware of Colm’s reassuring presence and he heard the Celt speak but could make nothing of the words any longer. He made a mental inventory of his injuries. His leg was surely broken and his scalp felt as if it was on fire. He had a feeling he’d also broken his nose and his tongue told him he’d lost at least one tooth, which vexed him more than all the rest because he was vain about his teeth. At one point Colm covered his head with a cloak and the mildewed scent told him it had belonged to Gaius Rufus.

  ‘Arafa was my friend,’ the Celt said in a tone that spoke of more than friendship. ‘We were seldom apart that winter and he taught me how to speak your tongue. He said you were the very best of Romans. I will do what I can to save you. For him.’

  All the while Valerius sensed the battle ebb and flow like waves lapping on a beach. Eventually Colm said: ‘Things are going badly for us. King Cathal needs me. I must go.’ He lifted the cloak to pour water over Valerius’s lips and thrust a half-full skin into his hands. ‘I will return when I can.’

  Valerius wanted to plead with him to stay, but the only thing that emerged was a faint croak. Instead he lay back and bathed in his agony, listening to the sound of the battle and praying no one discovered he still lived. He must have fallen asleep because he dreamed of the dead. Dead emperors and dead friends. He had been touched by the shadow of great men, but most had been great only by virtue of their rank. Nero, who had frittered away an empire in debauchery and depravity, and whose last breath Valerius had felt on his cheek. Galba, whom he’d watched butchered in the forum along with his heir, and Otho who took his own life so others might live. Poor Vitellius, unsuited to the purple, who didn’t deserve to end up in pieces on the Gemonian Stairs. Vespasian, best of them all, and Titus, murdered by his own brother, who might have been greater still. And friends, the faces clear in his mind, but too many to list after so many wars. Of them all, Serpentius – slave, gladiator, prince – was the best, but Arafa, the little giant who’d shared his ordeal in the Temple of Claudius, had touched his heart in a way he could never have foreseen.

  He heard the tramp of hundreds of feet. Someone was singing a rousing battle song and Valerius risked pulling back the cloak and lifting the flap of skin from his eyes. A river of warriors flowed down the mountainside towards the south-east and he realized from his position that they’d be hidden by the hill’s contours from the watching Romans. A flanking movement if he’d ever witnessed one. If he wasn’t careful Agricola was about to get his arse well and truly kicked. Valerius guessed they were men Cathal had kept out of the battle for precisely this purpose, but his instinct told him the attack was also his last throw of the dice. An explosion of sound announced the completion of the assault, but a little later the few survivors stumbled back up the hill, bloodied and shocked and carrying their wounded. Cathal had failed. Worse, Agricola must have thrown his cavalry reserves against them because soon the cries of the maimed were drowned by the rattle of hooves as the mounted spearmen and archers scoured the hill. Some of them passed so close Valerius could have called for help, but somehow it seemed too much effort. He waited for silence and lay back and closed his eyes.

  A few hundred paces away Colm was trying to find his bearings so he could return to the stricken Roman. Cathal had asked him to lead the Selgovae contingent in what they knew was little more than a diversionary attack to allow the king to withdraw with what was left of his shattered army. They’d barely left the slopes of the hill when what seemed an entire legion fell on them like swooping eagles. He’d been avoiding their cavalry ever since, but he was too preoccupied to hear the trooper who swept out of a gully and severed his spine with a swing of his spatha. He dropped like a stone and was dead before he hit the ground.

  Valerius woke to find the blanket had disappeared. He was cold, cold to the very centre of his being, so cold that a block of ice might have been set near his heart. He could feel himself fading, but suddenly a jolt of energy surged through him and he remembered why he must stay alive. He could feel Tabitha’s loving caress and the focus of Lucius’s adoring eyes, hear the lilt of Olivia’s voice as she sang a childish rhyme. He clung to the memory. He couldn’t leave them. Not yet.

  The top of his skull was an inferno, making all the other pain seem inconsequential. It was still leaking blood; he could feel it running down his cheeks. Somehow he managed to push the flap of skin and hair back into place and untie his legate’s sash. He wrapped the scarlet cloth around his head and bound his scalp into position. The effort drove him to the brink of exhaustion and he had to fight for breath. His last memory was of Tabitha’s voice murmuring words he couldn’t understand. Or perhaps it was Domitia’s.

  Shabolz worked his way methodically up the hillside as the sun rose, checking the Roman dead. He’d already found the body of Aulus Atticus surrounded by a dozen enemy with a gaping spear wound in his groin and an expression of outraged dignity on his young face. It was an odd place to be, far in front of his unit’s position, and the Pannonian wondered if he’d been killed in some reckless charge to save Valerius and his men.

  He didn’t expect to find them alive. There was little hope unless they’d been kept as hostages. But he owed it to his brothers of Mithras to give them a proper burial, and Valerius and Arafa were brothers of the soul if not the fact. He saw a little cluster of dead horses and moved towards them. Hilario lay on his back with a look of serene contentment on his normally savage features, his neck broken by his fall. Arafa had been less fortunate. The little scout had died hard and Shabolz prayed his friend had found peace and rest among whatever gods he followed. He marked their positions with discarded spears and continued up the mountain in search of Gaius Valerius Verrens.

  It seemed impossible that such a man could be gone. A giant, not in stature, but in character. A warrior who had taken a legion’s eagle, but who’d think nothing of risking his life to rescue a stranded child. A true aristocrat, but one with no patrician airs. A commander who would share a cup of rough wine with his men without first wiping the lip. A man his soldiers would follow to the gates of Hades and beyond. A hero of Rome.

  He picked his way methodically upwards and his eye was drawn by a roan cavalry horse lying among a group of large boulders away to his left. As he walked towards it he recognized the legate’s familiar scarlet sash fluttering like a banner in the soft breeze.

  Epilogue

  ROME, AD 96

  The door from the gardens was open, as he’d been told to expect, and he slipped inside. It was a warm, still September night, but he wore a thick hooded cloak. Since the fire that took most of his flesh in Antioch all those years ago he’d never felt truly warm. Moving swiftly despite the limp in his left leg, he made his way through the empty marble corridors to the room where he’d been told he’d find the man he sought.

  He froze at the sight of two guards outside the chamber. They must have seen him, but they might have been statues for all the attention they paid. Despite the danger he moved warily towards them, eyes never leaving the sword hand of the closest sentry. Big, solid men in ornate breastplates, their faces masks of stone in the flicker of the oil lamps. When he moved between them into the d
oorway he could almost feel the grate of the sword point in his spine.

  The room was in darkness and he waited while his eyes acclimatized to the gloom. A large room, sumptuously furnished, the air heavy with the scent of jasmine and the evening’s spilled wine. The sound of heavy, nasal breathing drew him towards the far end. One man. Abed and asleep, but that wouldn’t do.

  He found an oil lamp and reached into his cloak for flint and iron. Light flared to fill the room.

  ‘What …’ A long, drawn-out groan as the figure on the bed stirred.

  He waited.

  ‘What’s going on?’ More ill-tempered mutters. ‘I didn’t ask to be wakened.’ A harsh intake of breath and a growing realization. A head appeared above the blanket, hair standing up like a hedgepig’s spikes and eyes blinking. ‘Who are you?’ Eager hands searched frantically beneath the heaped pillows.

  ‘The sword isn’t there.’ The voice of a talking crow. Fire and the smoke had destroyed his voice.

  ‘Guards! Guards!’

  ‘You’re wasting your time.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  His victim’s appearance was more shocking than he’d expected. The years had turned him into the image of his father, a man the intruder had loved. No outright fear yet. Power had given him a dangerous sense of invincibility. In any case, who would be frightened of a ragged, crook-backed beggar? He pulled back the hood.

  ‘By all the gods, you’re an ugly old bastard.’ The beady, piggish eyes he remembered flickered to the doorway, but the intruder took a step to his right to close the avenue of escape. ‘You look like a piece of overdone pork. Guards!’

  ‘You came close in Antioch, but not close enough.’ He twitched the cloak away to reveal his wooden hand.

  ‘No. No, it can’t be.’ Astonishment mixed with terror in the familiar high-pitched voice. ‘You’re long dead.’

  ‘No,’ Gaius Valerius Verrens said. ‘You are.’

  With his left hand he felt for the little metal button on the inside of the right wrist. A gleaming four-inch blade appeared with a sharp snap.

  Titus Flavius Caesar Domitianus Augustus, Master and God, screamed and flew from the bed towards the doorway. Valerius was there to meet him, working the blade deep into his body as the screams became shriller, until he could feel the point scrape on bone.

  He stepped back and allowed Domitian to slump to the floor, bloody hands frantically clawing at his midriff. Other men entered the room. More knives gleamed in the lamplight. Valerius replaced his hood and retraced his steps to the garden with the dying emperor’s shrieks echoing in his ears.

  She was waiting by the door to the garden. The years had changed her, of course, but not as much as they had him. She was handsome now, rather than outrightly beautiful, but the girl he remembered was still there in the middle-aged woman’s face.

  ‘It’s done,’ he said.

  ‘I never doubted it. He caused you so much pain.’

  ‘And you.’ Their love had once been an all-consuming passion. All he felt for her now was sympathy.

  ‘I have to see your face.’

  She reached up to move the cowl, but he gently pushed the hand away. ‘Better to remember me as I was.’

  A tall young man appeared from the darkness and Domitia Augusta stifled a cry as she recognized the handsome features she’d known so well.

  ‘Tell your mother and Olivia to meet me by the Ostia gate, Lucius,’ Valerius said. ‘We must move quickly if we’re to be at Portus by dawn.’

  ‘We’ll be waiting, Father.’ Lucius walked past Domitia with a slight nod of acknowledgement and a look of mild curiosity as if she reminded him of someone.

  ‘You don’t have to go,’ Domitia insisted. ‘You will be safe now. Honour and wealth await you for your part in what happened tonight. You could go back to your estate and take your seat in the Senate again.’

  He knew the offer was sincere, but he didn’t even consider it. ‘I think I’d prefer to be forgotten.’

  She heard something of the old humour in that broken voice.

  The sound of approaching footsteps distracted them and Domitia swivelled to face whoever was approaching.

  When she turned back she was alone.

  The End

  Historical note

  As I suspect many historians would concur, following in the footsteps of Julius Agricola, as recorded by his son-in-law, the historian Tacitus, can be a frustrating and sometimes infuriating business. Tacitus’s eulogy to his wife’s father, the governor of Britain between AD 77–78 and AD 84, is a panegyric of its time, written in a certain style for a certain audience, with one eye on the political hierarchy of which Tacitus was part. It is at heart an adventure story, with Agricola as its stainless if rather dull hero, but it pays little heed to either geography or chronology. Hammer of Rome deals primarily with events between AD 78, after Agricola had consolidated his conquest of Wales, and the summer of AD 83 when he is believed to have fought the battle of Mons Graupius and defeated the mighty Caledonian federation. The first question that occurred to me as I began my campaign with Valerius and the Ninth legion Hispana was why Agricola took so long. Marching at a leisurely twelve miles a day – a legion in a hurry could manage twenty – the Ninth could have covered the three hundred and fifty miles or so between its base at York and Bennachie, in Aberdeenshire, where I’ve chosen to site the hitherto undiscovered battlefield, in thirty days. According to Tacitus, his father-in-law took five years. Yes, Tacitus says there was political, social and military consolidation, but that in itself is puzzling. Agricola would have been under pressure to complete his task in as short a time as possible. Rome preferred that governors, especially those with four legions at their disposal, didn’t spend too long in their provinces, lest their ambition get the better of them. In the latter part of the Agricola it becomes clear that the destruction of Caledonian military power is the priority. Why waste time building forts, roads and townships in the early part of the campaign?

  Then there is the geographical progression, which is confusing at best. At one moment we have him campaigning beyond the Forth, as far as the Tay. The next he is supposedly crossing the Solway, a hundred and thirty miles south, and gazing out with covetous eyes towards the island of Hibernia. Given the dearth of vantage points where it’s possible to see Ireland from the Scottish coast, even on a clear day, I think it’s much more likely he crossed from the Ayrshire coast to the Mull of Kintyre as part of his reconnaissance of the western route.

  We can follow the progress of Agricola’s twin spearheads through southern Scotland by the siting of his legionary marching camps. Conveniently for British historians, a legion, or whichever portion of it was on campaign, built a defensive camp at the end of every day’s march. The two columns advanced more or less up the line of the M74 in the west and the A68 in the east, eventually converging on the Forth somewhere near Edinburgh. It is beyond the Forth, which Agricola probably crossed close to Stirling, that things begin to heat up. We have a suggestion that the Celtic forces may now outnumber Agricola’s troops, a night ambush where the governor, who has unwisely split his forces, rides to the rescue of the beleaguered Ninth, and then Mons Graupius where the Caledonian army, led by a war chief called Calgacus, inexplicably decide to fight in the open.

  Where did this great horde of warriors come from? The Caledonians are generally associated with the Grampian Mountains, to which the battle gave their name, and the Highland massif. Yet if you overlay a map of Agricola’s camps with the Atlas of British Hill Forts, the Caledonians might as well not exist. There is little sign of occupation in an area that has lain largely undisturbed by the plough for two thousand years, and no evidence of any great tribal capital or settlement. As late as 1746, an army largely recruited from the Highlands could barely amass five thousand men at Culloden, and the most powerful clan chief led only five hundred soldiers, many of them reluctant conscripts. It’s clear to me Agricola made no attempt to force the central Highlands, not
because he feared any threat, but because he believed no threat existed. There’s every likelihood that the people Agricola encountered in what is now Scotland were a peaceful, largely pastoral society, which only turned to tribal warfare as a last resort. The great hill forts like Woden Law and the Mither Tap of Bennachie, which seem to project Iron Age power, influence and military might, had been long abandoned by AD 80 (the ‘fort’ at Eildon Hill North, also abandoned, was much more of a sanctuary) and the people lived on scattered farmsteads, not in the mountains, but in valleys and on the coastal flatlands. The historian Tom Stanier, in his treatise ‘The Brigantes and the Ninth legion’, makes a convincing case for a substantial element of the tribe’s decamping en masse and fleeing north as refugees rather than accepting Roman rule. This mass migration before the advancing legions and the gradual assembling and hardening of opposition seems to me to make more military sense than the sudden appearance of a mystical tribal federation and a leader who miraculously summoned every warrior in the north of the country. Far from neutralizing any threat from the northern tribes, I think Agricola created one where none had previously existed.

  Why Bennachie, out of so many candidates? I believe the geography fits better than any other potential site, but the main reason is the location of the nearby marching camps. Kintore and Logie Durno are perfectly positioned for the legions to converge on Bennachie, and Logie Durno is the largest camp in the north of Scotland, capable of comfortably accommodating three legions. In my imagination it becomes the location for the celebration after the battle, when Agricola gathered his troops to hand out phalerae and reward bravery in a great ceremonial parade. It also helped that I stumbled on a field just west of Blairdaff and Finnlairg Farm, near Kemnay, that perfectly fits the topography of Agricola’s battle. Tacitus tells us that the ‘Caledonians’ numbered thirty thousand and the Romans barely half that, with eventual casualties of a suspiciously rounded ten thousand and three hundred and sixty respectively.