While Caesar and his land army picnicked atop the towering cliffs to the north of the mouth of the Liger and watched the action like spectators in the Circus Maximus, Caesar’s ships produced the fangs Decimus Brutus and his engineers had grown during that frantic winter building the fleet. The leather sails of the Veneti vessels were so heavy and stout that the main shrouds were chain rather than rope; knowing this, Decimus Brutus had equipped each of his more than three hundred ships with a long pole to which were fixed a barbed hook and a set of grapples. A Roman ship would row in close to a Veneti ship and maneuver alongside, whereupon its crew would tilt their pole, tangle it among the Veneti shrouds, then sprint away under oar power. Down came the Veneti sails and masts, leaving the vessel helpless in the water. Three Roman ships would then surround it like terriers a deer, board it, kill the crew and set fire to it. When the wind fell, Decimus Brutus’s victory became complete. Only twenty Veneti ships had escaped.
Now the specially low sides with which these ships had been built came in very handy. It wasn’t possible to load animals as skittish as horses aboard before the ships were pushed into the water, but once they were afloat and held still in the water, long broad gangplanks connected each ship’s side with the beach, and the horses were run up so quickly they had no time to take fright.
“Not bad without a dock,” said Caesar, satisfied. “They’ll be back tomorrow, then the rest of us can leave.”
But tomorrow dawned in the teeth of a northwesterly gale which didn’t disturb the waters off the beach very much, but did prevent the return of those three hundred and fifty sound ships.
“Oh, Trebonius, this land holds no luck for me!” cried the General on the fifth day of the gale, scratching the stubble on his face fiercely.
“We’re the Greeks on the beach at Ilium,” said Trebonius.
Which remark seemed to make up the General’s mind; he turned cold pale eyes upon his legate. “I am no Agamemnon,” he said through his teeth, “nor will I stay here for ten years!” He turned and shouted. “Atrius!”
Up ran his camp prefect, startled. “Yes, Caesar?”
“Will the nails hold in what we have left here?”
“Probably, in all except about forty.”
“Then we’ll use this northwest wind. Sound the bugles, Atrius. I want everyone and everything on board all but the about forty.”
“They won’t fit!” squeaked Atrius, aghast.
“We’ll pack ’em in like salt fish in a barrel. If they puke all over each other, too bad. They can all go for a swim in full armor once we reach Portus Itius. We’ll sail the moment the last man and the last ballista are aboard.”
Atrius swallowed. “We may have to leave some of the heavy equipment behind,” he said in a small voice.
Caesar raised his brows. “I am not leaving my artillery or my rams behind, nor am I leaving my tools behind, nor am I leaving one soldier behind, nor am I leaving one noncombatant behind, nor am I leaving one slave behind. If you can’t fit them all in, Atrius, I will.”
They were not hollow words, and Atrius knew it. He also knew that his career depended upon his doing something the General could and would do with complete efficiency and astonishing speed. Quintus Atrius protested no more, but went off instead to sound the bugles.
Trebonius was laughing.
“What’s so funny?” asked Caesar coldly.
No, not the time to share this joke! Trebonius sobered in an instant. “Nothing, Caesar! Nothing at all.”
The decision had been made about an hour after the sun came up; all day the troops and noncombatants labored, loading the stoutest ships with Caesar’s precious artillery, tools, wagons and mules on the beach. The men waited until the ships were pushed into the choppy sea, doing the pushing themselves, then scrambled aboard up rope ladders. The normal load for one ship was a piece of artillery or some engineer’s device, four mules, one wagon, forty soldiers and twenty oarsmen; but with eighteen thousand soldiers and noncombatants as well as four thousand assorted slaves and sailors, today’s loads were much heavier.
“Isn’t it amazing?” asked Trebonius of Atrius as the sun went down.
“What?” asked the camp prefect, knees trembling.
“He’s happy. Oh, whatever grief he bears is still there, but he’s happy. He’s got something impossible to do.”
“I wish he’d let them go as soon as they’re loaded!”
“Not he! He came as a fleet and he’ll go as a fleet. When all those highborn Gauls in Portus Itius see him sail in, they’ll see a man in absolute command. Let the bulk of his army limp in a few ships at a time? Not he! And he’s right, Atrius. We have to show the Gauls that we’re better at everything.” Trebonius looked up at the pinkening sky. “We’ll have three-quarters of a waning moon tonight. He’ll leave when he’s ready, no matter what the hour.”
A good prediction. At midnight Caesar’s ship put out into the heaving blackness of a following sea, the lamps on its stern and mast twinkling beacons for the other ships to follow as they swung into a swelling teardrop behind him.
Caesar leaned on the stern rail atop the poop between the two professionals who guided the rudder oars, and watched the myriad firefly lights spreading across the impenetrable darkness of the ocean. Vale Britannia. I will not miss you. But what lies out there in the great beyond, where no man has ever sailed? This is no little sea; this is a mighty ocean. This where the great Neptune lives, not within the bowl of Our Sea. Maybe when I am old and I have done all that my blood and power demand, I shall take one of those solid-oak Veneti ships, hoist its leather sails and go into the West to follow the path of the sun. Romulus was lost in the ignobility of the Goat Swamps on the Campus Martius, yet when he didn’t come home, they thought he had been taken into the realm of the Gods. But I will sail into the mists of forever, and they will know I have been taken into the realm of the Gods. My Julia is there. The people knew. They burned her in the Forum and placed her tomb among the heroes. But first I must do all that my blood and power demand.
Clouds scudded, but the moon shone well enough and the ships stayed together, so shoved along that the single linen-canvas sails were as swollen as a woman near her time, and the oars were hardly needed. The crossing took six hours; Caesar’s ship sailed into Portus Itius with the dawn, the fleet still in formation behind him. His luck was back. Not one man, animal or piece of artillery became a sacrifice to Neptune.
GAUL OF THE LONG-HAIRS
(GALLIA COMATA)
from DECEMBER of 54 B.C. until
NOVEMBER of 53 B.C.
1
“With all eight legions in Portus Itius, we’ll run out of grain before the year is over,” said Titus Labienus. “The commissioners haven’t had much success finding it. There’s plenty of salt pork, bacon, oil, sweet beet syrup and dried fruit, but the ground crops from wheat to chickpea are very scarce.”
“Nor can we expect the troops to fight without bread.” Caesar sighed. “The trouble with drought is that it tends to strike everywhere at once. I can’t buy in grain or pulses from the Spains or Italian Gaul; they’re suffering too.” He shrugged. “Well, that leaves only one solution. Spread the legions out for the winter and offer to the Gods for a good harvest next year.”
“Such a pity the fleet didn’t stay in one piece,” said Quintus Titurius Sabinus tactlessly. “I know we sweltered there, but Britannia had a bountiful harvest. We could have brought a lot of wheat back with us if only we’d had all the ships.”
The rest of the legates shrank; keeping the fleet safe from harm was Caesar’s responsibility, and though it had been wind, sea and tide which foiled him, it was not politic to make statements in council which Caesar might interpret as reproach or criticism. But Sabinus was lucky, probably because Caesar had deemed him a prating fool from the moment he had reported for duty. He received a glance of contempt, nothing more.
“One legion to garrison one area,” the General went on.
“Except in the
lands of the Atrebates,” Commius volunteered eagerly. “We haven’t been hit as hard as most places; we can feed two legions if you’ll lend us some of your noncombatants to help us plough and sow in the spring.”
“If,” Sabinus butted in, voice loaded with irony, “you Gauls above the status of a serf didn’t deem it beneath your dignity to man a plough, you wouldn’t find large-scale farming so difficult. Why not put some of those hordes of useless Druids to it?”
“I haven’t noticed the Roman First Class behind a plough in quite some time, Sabinus,” the General said placidly, then smiled at Commius. “Good! That means Samarobriva can serve as our winter headquarters this year. But I won’t give you Sabinus for company. I think… that… Sabinus can go to the lands of the Eburones—and take Cotta with him as exactly equal co-commander. He can have the Thirteenth, and set up house inside Atuatuca. It’s a little the worse for wear, but Sabinus can fix it up, I’m sure.”
Every head bent suddenly, every hand leaped to hide a smile; Caesar had just banished Sabinus to the worst billet in Gaul, in the company of a man he detested, and in “exactly equal” co-command of a legion of raw recruits which just happened to bear a calamitously unlucky number. A bit hard on poor Cotta (an Aurunculeius, not an Aurelius), but someone had to inherit Sabinus, and everyone save poor Cotta was relieved that Caesar hadn’t chosen him.
The presence of King Commius offended men like Sabinus, of course; he couldn’t understand why Caesar invited any Gaul, no matter how obsequious or trustworthy, to a council. Even if it was only about food and billets. Perhaps had Commius been a more likable or attractive person he might have been better tolerated; alas, he was neither likable nor attractive. In height he was short for a Belgic Gaul, sharp-featured of face, and oddly furtive in his manner. His sandy hair, stiff as a broom because (like all Gallic warriors) he washed it with lime dissolved in water, was drawn into a kind of horse’s tail which stuck straight up in the air, and clashed with the vivid scarlet of his gaudily checkered shawl. Caesar’s legates dismissed him as the kind of sycophant who always popped up where the important men were, without stopping to relate what they saw to the fact that he was the King of a very powerful and warlike Belgic people. The Belgae of the northwest had not abandoned their kings to elect annual vergobrets, yet Belgic kings could be challenged by any aristocrat among their people; it was a status decided by strength, not heredity. And Commius had been King of the Atrebates for a long time.
“Trebonius,” said Caesar, “you’ll winter with the Tenth and Twelfth in Samarobriva, and have custody of the baggage. Marcus Crassus, you’ll camp fairly close to Samarobriva—about twenty-five miles away, on the border between the Bellovaci and the Ambiani. Take the Eighth. Fabius, you’ll stay here in Portus Itius with the Seventh. Quintus Cicero, you and the Ninth will go to the Nervii. Roscius, you can enjoy some peace and quiet—I’m sending you and the Fifth Alauda down among the Esubii, just to let the Celtae know that I haven’t forgotten they exist.”
“You’re expecting trouble among the Belgae,” said Labienus, frowning. “I agree they’ve been too quiet. Do you want me to go to the Treveri as usual?”
“Not quite so far away as Treves. Among the Treveri but adjacent to the Remi. Take the cavalry as well as the Eleventh.”
“Then I’ll sit myself down on the Mosa near Virodunum. If the snow isn’t ten feet deep, there’ll be plenty of grazing.”
Caesar rose to his feet, the signal for dismissal. He had called his legates together the moment he came ashore, which meant he wanted the eight legions at present encamped at Portus Itius shifted to their permanent winter quarters immediately. Even so, all the legates were now aware that it had been Julia who died. The news had been contained in many letters to those like Labienus who had not gone to Britannia. But no one said a word.
“You’ll be nice and cozy,” said Labienus to Trebonius as they walked away. The big horse’s teeth showed. “Sabinus’s stupidity staggers me! If he’d kept his mouth shut, he’d be cozy. Fancy spending the winter up there not so far from the mouth of the Mosa, with the wind shrieking, the sea flooding in, the hills rocks, the flat ground salt fen or peat marsh, and the Germans sniffing up your arse when the Eburones and Nervii aren’t.”
“They can get to the sea for fish, eels and sea-bird eggs,” said Trebonius.
“Thank you, I’m happy with freshwater fish, and my servants can keep chickens.”
“Caesar definitely thinks there’s going to be trouble.”
“Either that, or he’s cultivating an excuse not to have to return to Italian Gaul for the winter.”
“Eh?”
“Oh, Trebonius, he doesn’t want to have to face all those Romans! He’d be accepting condolences from Salona to Ocelum, and spend the whole winter terrified that he might break down.”
Trebonius stopped, his rather mournful grey eyes startled. “I didn’t know you understood him so well, Labienus.”
“I’ve been with him since he came among the Long-hairs.”
“But Romans don’t consider it unmanly to weep!”
“Nor did he when he was young. But he wasn’t Caesar then in anything but name.”
“Eh?”
“It’s not a name anymore,” said Labienus with rare patience. “It’s a symbol.”
“Oh!” Trebonius resumed walking. “I miss Decimus Brutus!” he said suddenly. “Sabinus is no substitute.”
“He’ll be back. You all itch for Rome occasionally.”
“Except you.”
Caesar’s senior legate grunted. “I know when I’m well off.”
“So do I. Samarobriva! Imagine, Labienus! I’ll be living in a real house with heated floors and a bathtub.”
“Sybarite,” said Labienus.
Correspondence with the Senate was copious and had to be attended to before anything else, which kept Caesar busy for three days. Outside the General’s wooden house the legions were on the move, not a process which created a great deal of fuss or noise; the paperwork could proceed in tranquillity. Even the torpid Gaius Trebatius was flung into the whirlpool, for Caesar had a habit of dictating to three secretaries at once, pacing between the figures hunched over their waxed tablets, giving each a couple of rapid sentences before going on to the next one, never tangling subjects or thoughts. It was his awesome capacity for work had won Trebatius’s heart. Difficult to hate a man who could keep so many pots on the boil at one and the same time.
But finally the personal letters had to be dealt with, for more communications from Rome kept coming in every day. It was eight hundred miles from Portus Itius to Rome along roads which were often rivers in Gaul of the Long-hairs until, way down in the Province, the highways of Via Domitia and Via Aemilia took over. Caesar kept a group of couriers perpetually riding or boating between Rome and wherever he was, and expected a minimum of fifty miles a day from them. Thus he received the latest news from Rome in less than two nundinae, and ensured that his isolation did not negate his influence. Which grew and grew in direct proportion to his ever-increasing wealth. Britannia may not have provided much, but Gaul of the Long-hairs had yielded mountains.
Caesar had a German freedman, Burgundus, whom he had inherited from Gaius Marius when Marius had died in Caesar’s fifteenth year of life. A happy bequest; Burgundus had fitted into adolescence and manhood indispensably. Until as recently as a year ago he had still been with Caesar, who, seeing his age, had retired him to Rome, where he cared for Caesar’s lands, Caesar’s mother and Caesar’s wife. His tribe had been the Cimbri, and though he had been a boy when Marius had annihilated the Cimbri and the Teutones, he knew the story of his people. According to Burgundus, the tribal treasures of the Cimbri and the Teutones had been left for safekeeping among their relatives the Atuatuci, with whom they had stayed over the winter before embarking on their invasion of Italia. Only six thousand of them had made it back to the lands of the Atuatuci out of a horde numbering over three-quarters of a million men, women and children, and there th
e survivors of Marius’s massacre had settled down, become Atuatuci rather than Cimbri. And there the tribal treasures of the Cimbri and Teutones had remained.
In his second year in Gaul of the Long-hairs Caesar had gone into the lands of the Nervii, who fought on foot and lived along the Mosa below the lands of the Eburones, to which a dismayed and unhappy Sabinus was at present conveying the Thirteenth Legion and an even more dismayed and unhappy Lucius Aurunculeius Cotta. A battle had been fought, the famous one during which the Nervii stayed on the field to die rather than live as defeated men; but Caesar had been merciful and allowed their women, children and old ones to return unmolested to their undamaged homes.
The Atuatuci were the next people upstream of the Nervii on the Mosa. Even though Caesar himself had sustained heavy losses, he was able to continue campaigning, and moved next on the Atuatuci. Who retreated inside their oppidum, Atuatuca, a fortress upon a hill overlooking the mighty forest of the Arduenna. Caesar had besieged and taken Atuatuca, but the Atuatuci did not fare as well as the Nervii had. Because they had lied to him and tried to trick him, Caesar massed the whole tribe in a field near the razed oppidum, summoned the slavers who always lurked among the Roman baggage train, and sold the entire tribe in one unculled lot to the highest bidder. Fifty-three thousand Atuatuci had gone on the auction block, a seemingly endless crocodile of bewildered, weeping and dispossessed people who had been driven through the lands of the other tribes all the way to the great slave market of Massilia, where they were divided, culled, and sold again.
It had been a shrewd move. Those other tribes had all been on the verge of revolt, unable to believe that the Nervii and the Atuatuci in their many thousands would not annihilate the Romans. But the crocodile of captives told a different story; the revolt never happened. Gaul of the Long-hairs began to wonder just who these Romans were, with their tiny little armies of splendidly equipped troops who behaved as if they were one man, didn’t just fall on the enemy in a screaming, undisciplined mass, nor work themselves into a battle frenzy capable of carrying them through anything. They had been feared for generations, but not with realism; until Caesar, they were bogeys to terrify children.
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