RETRIBUTION

by Anthony Riches

  He looked up at the scudding clouds above for a moment.

  ‘You probably told me not to be a hero every other day of my life from the moment I was old enough to hold a wooden sword. And I listened, Father. I swore not to be that man you warned me not to be, the one with the swagger and the awed tent mates, so full of himself that he didn’t see the blade that took his life until it was sticking out of his back. And I succeeded. But …’

  He smiled, ignoring the trickle running down one cheek.

  ‘You weren’t telling me not to be a hero, were you? You knew what was in me, some mix of you, Wulfa, Frijaz and grandfather, and you knew what I’d become. What you were warning me off wasn’t following that path, because you knew I couldn’t not follow it. What you were trying to tell me was how to wear it. And in that respect, Father, you succeeded. I see that now.’

  He wiped the tear away, smiling down at the ground under which his father slept the deep, dreamless sleep of the dead.

  ‘And I know something now, something I wish I’d known before you died. Sitting round in barracks with nothing to do for six months gives a man time to think, and to come to fresh conclusions. You had a hero in you too, didn’t you? I only ever beat you with a sword by inches, but you kept all that ability under your helmet and played the simple soldier, because for a while you were happy to live that potential life through Wulfa and then, once he was taken by the gods as the price for his bright flame, you realised that you had a choice. And you made it. You kept your head down and soldiered, never accepted promotion and never showed your true skills, because by then you had me and Sigu, and you knew that you had to bring us up in a way that let us avoid your brother’s mistakes. And I love you for that more than I ever realised while you were still alive. Which means I owe you something.’

  ‘Are you going to be there on your knees all day, boy? There are beers to be drunk and women to be romanced!’

  He raised a hand, waving away Frijaz’s good-natured complaint, understanding what it was the veteran was trying to do.

  ‘Just a little longer.’

  Taking a deep breath he looked down at the grave again.

  ‘So here’s my promise. I’ll find a woman before I leave the Island. The gods know that Mother’s already put enough of them in front of me to form a decent harpastum team. And if I have sons I’ll raise them to your rules and in your name. And I’ll come here every time I pass, going south to serve the Romans or coming north to see my family, and tell you the stories of my life and how my sons are growing up, so that you can see that I’m keeping that promise. And to tell you that I love you.’

  He stood, smiling through his drying tears, raising his voice to be heard by his men.

  ‘Right, let’s go and see what sort of welcome we find in the Old Camp, shall we? I suspect that Frijaz’s rather original approach to “romance” means that he’ll end up spending the night with the wrinkled old lady and her five daughters, but that would be nothing new, would it, Soldier Frijaz?’

  Lanzo saluted and shouted for the tent party to form up, and while he strode up and down their short column checking that their equipment was suitably clean for them to make an appearance in a legion camp, the young centurion took one last look back at the forlom altar that showed where his father lay.

  ‘Sleep well, Lataz. You’ve earned that much.’

  Historical Note

  Researching the Centurions trilogy was a fresh challenge for a writer who has, over the course of writing nine previous stories in the Empire series, become a little blasé about the historical background, events, military units and tactics, weapons and armour and just about anything else you could care to name about the late second century. To find oneself suddenly over a hundred years adrift of one’s chosen period of history was in one respect easy enough – after all, not that much changed in that century in many ways – and yet a bit of a head-scratcher from several other perspectives. The revolt of the Batagwi tribe is on the face of it a simple thing – Romans upset tribal mercenaries, who then rise up and teach them an almighty lesson as to how to manage subject peoples and their armies – and yet the history, and the story that can be teased out of those dry pages left to us by the primary sources Tacitus and Cassius, is far more complex than anything I could have predicted.

  To start at the beginning, the Batagwi – Batavians to the Romans – were one of the German tribes subjugated by Caesar in the wake of his rampage through the Gauls, and quickly became a firm ally of what was to become the empire. Providing Rome with a military contingent that sounds like it would have been the match of any legion – eight part-mounted five-hundred-man infantry cohorts and a cavalry wing – they were a powerful blend of German ferocity in battle with Roman equipment and, to some degree, Rome’s military ethos and tactics. In return for this disproportionate contribution to the imperial forces, they paid no taxes to Rome, an indication of just how valuable their contribution was deemed to be. Their role, to judge from the relatively scant sources, was in the long tradition of shock troops that has continued into the modern era in formations like the Parachute Regiment and the US Marines, hard men trained to high levels of physical competency and tactical aggression and, by consequence of both that conditioning and their collective underlying social backgrounds, lacking some of the instincts to self-preservation that can hamper soldiers from risking everything in pursuit of victory in the moment of decision that occurs on all battlefields. The best equivalent for us to consider with regard to the Batagwi tribe’s contribution might well be the Gurkhas, Nepalese soldiers who have fought with great honour and bravery for the British empire and its post-colonial army, and whose bloody reputation has resulted in their mere presence in the order of battle proving fearsomely intimidating to Britain’s enemies on many occasions.

  Parented for decades by the Fourteenth Gemina Legion, it seems that the Batagwi cohorts did a good deal of the initial dirty work on one battlefield after another, as at the battle of the Medway in AD 43. Their sneak attack at dawn across the seemingly unfordable river seems to have destroyed the British tribes’ chariot threat before the battle commenced, and allowed the Fourteenth, under the improbably young Hosidius Geta, and the Second Augustan, under the future emperor Vespasianus, to establish the bridgehead from which victory would eventually result. Incidentally, for those readers with an interest in the cursus honorum and its age restrictions, the historical record is a little confused with regard to Geta, and the legatus in question might have been an older brother, although age restrictions on command tended to be relaxed by a year for each child born to a family, probably to encourage fertility among the ruling classes – so we can consider legion command at the age of twenty-four (it was usually no younger than thirty) as improbable but eminently possible under the right circumstances. The most startling aspect of all this is that on more than one occasion the Batagwi used an organic amphibious capability – and by organic I mean without the assistance of any third party such as a naval unit – to cross rivers and narrow coastal straits and turn an enemy flank by appearing where they were least expected. How did they do this, swimming while wearing their equipment, which, weighing around twenty-five kilos, would obviously overwhelm even the strongest of swimmers before the encumbrances of having to carry a shield and spear are taken into account? It’s possible that the latter were carried by means of some kind of improvised floatation device, but we cannot discount the possibility that fully equipped infantrymen were carried across the water obstacle and straight into battle by means of the cohort’s horses being used to literally tow them across. This seems to have been what Cassius Dio is describing in The History of Rome:

  The barbarians thought the Romans would not be able to cross this [the River Medway] without a bridge, and as a result had pitched camp in a rather careless fashion on the opposite bank. Plautius, however, sent across some Celts who were practiced in swimming with ease fully armed across even the fastest of rivers. These fell unexpectedly on the enemy �
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  This was probably as innovative and disruptive to an unprepared enemy as massed parachute drops were in the twentieth century, and the Batagwi seem to have been viewed as Rome’s best and bravest shock troops, capable of doing the impossible and turning a battle to Rome’s advantage by their unexpected abilities. For a long time this guaranteed them the highest possible status as an allied people, ruled not by a governor but instead by a magistrate voted into office by the tribe’s most exalted citizens, the noblissimi popularium (the ruling class, literally ‘most noble countrymen’). This tended to mean, one suspects, that they were pretty much guaranteed to take a Roman perspective on the behalf of a self-interested ruling class of families, themselves granted citizenship in perpetuity by the early emperors, in the pursuit of a Roman foreign policy that sought to ensure an alignment of the empire’s ambitions with those of the tribe’s rulers.

  This relationship went even further than the battlefield, for in 30 BCE Augustus recruited an imperial bodyguard from the Batagwi and the other tribes that dwelt in the same area: Ubii, Frisii, Baetasii and so on. Where the Praetorians guarded the city and in particular its palaces, the corporis custodes protected the emperor himself, and were trusted for their impartial devotion to the task of ensuring his safety and deterring assassination attempts that might otherwise have been considered by the praetorians themselves (and for which they later gained an unenviable reputation). Disbanded briefly at the time of the Varus disaster in AD 9, they were swiftly reinstated when it became clear that the tribe had taken no part in Arminius’s act of outright war, and the Batagwi played a full role in the suppression of the tribes to the north and east of the Rhine that was to follow. They remained at the side of a succession of emperors until late AD 68, when the new emperor Galba made what appears to have been the fatal mistake of dismissing them for their loyalty to Nero, thereby leaving himself open to assassination by an improbably small number of praetorians.

  It is important to understand just what this meant to the Batagwi, and why they took the dismissal quite as badly as they undoubtedly did. The Bodyguard were, of course, a source of enormous kudos to the tribe and their local neighbours, and a significant source of income to boot, but the importance of their place in Rome went deeper than simple national pride – the influence of their position close to the throne on the tribe itself cannot be ignored. Exposed to Rome, the hub of empire and meeting point for dozens of nationalities and cultures, it was inevitable that the guardsmen would have had the blinkers of their previous existence removed to some degree, and that they would have been eager to share their new experiences and learning with friends and families. Anthony Birley argues in Germania Inferior (in an article entitled ‘The Names of the Batavians and the Tungrians’) that many guardsmen would have been likely to have been given new Latin or Greek names on their entry into service, as their own names might be unpronounceable for a Roman. The perpetuation of these names into the Batagwi mainstream as proud parents sought to rub a little of a brother or an uncle’s fame off on their new offspring must have been inevitable, which is the reason why some Batagwi characters in Betrayal have apparently anachronistic Greek names that are in fact entirely valid for their time and place. The guard effectively came to define the Batagwi’s significant status within the empire, a source of enormous prestige at least within the tribe itself. This in turn justified the degree to which they had subjugated their culture to that of Rome, including the incorporation of their religion into the Roman framework, their god Megusanus, as was so often the case with local deities, being deftly spliced with the Roman version of Heracles/Hercules to create a new and mutually acceptable deity. The guard had come to define the Batagwi to a large degree, and when they came home for good late in AD 68 it must have seemed as if the tribe had been cast aside by the previously doting parent regime, with immense impacts on both the Batagwi’s own self-esteem and indeed their relationships with the other local tribes who were equally impacted by this inexplicably sudden and shocking change of fortunes.

  Of course, the split with Rome was more complex than just the overnight loss of their prestige. It went far deeper than the sudden thunderbolt of late AD 68, and had been growing ever more obvious to those with eyes to see it over the previous years. The Batagwi and their allies the Cananefates, the Marsacii and the Frisavones had to some degree, if the Roman commentators are to be believed, simply got too big for their own boots. In effect, it seems, they had made the age-old mistake of believing their own propaganda (or at least that of their Roman allies who called them the ‘best and bravest’, in itself possibly a play on the Germanic origins of the tribe’s name, Batagwi, which might well have meant ‘the best’). They had taken, we are told, to strutting around telling anyone who would listen how important they were to Rome, had fallen out with their former parent legion the Fourteenth Gemina – possibly because the legion was lauded by Nero as his most effective after the Battle of Watling Street and the defeat of the Iceni, while the Batagwi had presumably gone relatively unrecognised – and had thereby contributed to the increasing disenchantment with what was later portrayed as their overbearing behaviour. Rescued from internal exile of a sort by the onset of war between the German army of Vitellius and Otho’s loyalist legions – having previously been posted on garrison duty standing guard on the Lingones in eastern Gaul, ostensibly to prevent a recurrence of the Vindex revolt – they had immediately (if we believe the primary sources who were of course propagandists with their own agenda) taken up where they had left off, telling all and sundry how they had mastered their former parent legion and how critical they were to the success of the war against Otho. It is doubtful if they were much loved by either legions or generals, but rather tolerated for their ability to turn a battle given the chance to do so.

  In late AD 68, and at about the same time as the returning men of the Bodyguard, Gaius Julius Civilis (‘Kivilaz’ in the book, this being my own invention albeit at the learned encouragement of Jona Lendering, and therefore quite possibly accurate, but in no way attested by any source) returned from captivity, trial and acquittal in Rome. Civilis’s Roman name identifies him as the son of one of the tribe’s original noble families – a prince and successful military commander, but he was a man with an unhappy recent past. Charged with treason for having allegedly participated in the Vindex revolt, a failed uprising that had ultimately led to Nero’s suicide, his brother Paulus had been summarily executed and Civilis himself sent to Rome to face the same charge. Freed by Galba – who had after all benefited hugely from Vindex’s apparent folly in rising up without an army worthy of the name – he went home and was promptly rearrested by the army of Germania Inferior under the emperor-to-be, Aulus Vitellius, on the same charge. Freed once more, by a canny emperor who realised the risk posed by potentially hostile tribes in his own backyard while his armies were for the most part far distant in Italy, Civilis seems likely to have discerned the inevitability of a third attempt to make the charge stick, once Vitellius had no further need to tread softly around the Batagwi at the war’s end.

  And if the quasi-judicial murder of his brother and the threat hanging over his own head weren’t enough to motivate him to revolt against Rome, the opportunity to seize power in a political system that must have seemed to be sliding away from the noblissimi popularium’s control, as more and more men of common rank achieved citizen status through their military service, may also have been too strong a temptation to be passed up. Whatever the reason, Civilis roused his people to revolt and the bloody events that run to their completion in Retribution came to pass.

  And what of the military situation at the point that Retribution takes up where Onslaught left the story? On the face of it the odds were fairly evenly balanced at the end of AD 69. On the Roman side, underwritten by the empire’s usual single-minded focus on the restoration of power over their former German subjects, legions were being put back into the field fresh from the fighting that decided the last act of the Year of the F
our Emperors at Cremona, with orders to return north over the Alps and deal with the tribal revolt that threatened Rome’s grip on the province. And nor was the Rhine army, which had been ordered to return to its home province, the only threat that Rome could muster. From the periphery of the European empire, battle-hardened legions were being summoned to march to the fight, posing the Batagwi with a complex threat on several axes of advance, which only the rebel main force could hope to fend off. Properly coordinated, the oncoming legions would present Civilis with a threat whose defeat would be almost impossible unless they would obligingly present themselves to be beaten one at a time.

  The Batagwi, however, were far from defeated even if their master-stroke at Gelduba late the previous year had gone from triumph to disaster in minutes, with the unexpected arrival in their rear of cohorts from Northern Spain just when it seemed that victory was in their grasp. Despite losing about half of the cohorts’ fighting power at that one battle, they still had significant numbers, both their own remaining soldiers and the tribesmen who had flocked across the Rhine to join them in the hope of conquest and plunder. And Civilis had another trick up his sleeve. The Gallic tribes neighbouring the Batagwi homeland, Treveri, Lingones and Nervii, were in the final stages of planning their own revolt, not in the Germanic model so aptly illustrated by the rebellion to their north, but in the hope of emulating Rome’s civilised political model with an ‘empire’ of their own. Encouraged by the civil war, if perhaps a little late to the party, they were plotting to join with Civilis’s army and, at the right moment, expel the last of the legions from Gallia Lugdunensis and then march south to prevent Rome’s army from leaving the foothills of the Alps, securing rebel control from the mountains to the sea.

  The two forces were, therefore, probably more or less evenly matched in January AD 70. How long they would stay so would ultimately come down to a struggle for superiority between two men, Civilis and Cerialis. Both flawed, both ruthless and both capable of military masterstrokes. It would be a contest fought with all Rome’s implacable will and every bit of the Germans’ unrestrained ferocity. And so the stage was set for Retribution.