The Wolf's Gold: Empire V

by Anthony Riches

  Marcus raised an eyebrow at his wife, whose cart had arrived in the Alburnus Major camp only an hour before.

  ‘So she’s not taking to pregnancy that well then?’

  Felicia smiled at him, happy to see Appius clinging to the neck of his father’s tunic and working his gums vigorously on a heavy gold pendant that hung around her husband’s neck.

  ‘Vomiting every morning, bilious for the rest of the day, and overcome with an inexplicable desire to eat raw onion. And if that’s how she is after three months, then life’s certainly going to be interesting for your colleague for the next six. What’s that the baby’s chewing on?’

  Marcus looked down.

  ‘It belonged to Carius Sigilis. I took it from his body out on the lake, after that battle on the ice. I promised Tribune Scaurus that I would return it to his father, if I ever get the chance.’

  Felicia took the baby from him, gently easing the pendant from between his jaws.

  ‘He likes the cold metal on his gums, I suppose. Watch out, by the way, he doesn’t have any teeth yet but he can still nip hard enough to raise a bruise.’ She looked at her husband with a gently raised eyebrow. ‘Another dead friend, Marcus? How are you sleeping?’

  His reply was unruffled, despite the unnerving accuracy of her question.

  ‘Well enough, my love.’

  Apart from the hour before dawn, when his father still haunted him with demands for retribution, frequently accompanied of late by the ghost of Lucius Carius Sigilis. While the senator simply berated his son to take revenge, the tribune’s ghost was at the same time both silent and yet gorily persistent in his demands, simply scrawling the same words across whatever surface was to hand in the dream’s context, writing with his fingers with the blood that ran from his wounds.

  Felicia took his arm, pulling him close so that the baby was sandwiched between them.

  ‘You do seem happier. Perhaps you just needed a few good fights to get whatever it was that was troubling you off your mind?’

  He smiled back at her, musing on the havoc he intended to wreak if he ever got the opportunity to return to the city of his birth. Praetorian Prefect Perennis and the four men known to him only as ‘The Emperor’s Knives’ were enough of a list for the time being, although he was sure that other names would come to light once he started working his way through the first five. His hand tensed on the dagger at his belt, the scarred skin over his knuckles tightening until the marks disappeared into the white flesh.

  ‘Yes my love. Perhaps I did.’

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  As a historical people the Sarmatians are easily the equal of the Romans, with whom they interacted and frequently fought. Entering known history in the seventh century BC, they occupied the land to the east of the Don River and south of the Ural Mountains. Having lived in peace with their western neighbours the Scythians for several centuries, it was in the third century BC that this pattern abruptly changed. The Sarmatian tribes came across the Don and took on the Scythians, driving them off their pastures and establishing a new reign over this fertile land that was to last for centuries.

  A nomadic people who largely lived off their herds, the several Sarmatian tribes – Roxolani, Iazyge, Aorsi, Siraces and Sauromatae – were tent dwellers whose young women, trained to fight alongside the men, are thought to have given rise to the legend of the Amazons. Hippocrates described how female Sarmatian babies were deliberately mutilated by the cauterisation of the right nipple, to inhibit growth of the breast so as to make the resulting adult female’s right arm as strong as possible. The bulk of the Sarmatian forces tended to be light cavalry armed predominantly with bows, but just as the main battle tank tends to get most of the media attention on the modern battlefield, it was the more heavily armoured lancer, named by the Romans as the contarius for the three- to four-metre-long contus lance with which the rider was armed, that was the focus for the writers of the age. Manoeuvring in massed squadrons, Sarmatian heavy cavalry used the classic tactics of mounted shock to overcome their enemies, tactics which could only be matched by either superbly disciplined and trained heavy infantry, preferably armed with long spears and sheltered behind sharpened wooden stakes, or by highly mobile horse archers who could outpace their charge whilst peppering them with heavy-headed armour-piercing arrows.

  By the first century AD the Iazyge were frequently engaging with the Roman Empire in the form of regular border incursions, often crossing the Danube in winter when the river’s ice was sufficiently thick to support the weight of their horses and wagons. As the Sarmatian tribes leapt into the pages of history in a series of devastating attacks on their neighbours the Parthians, the Armenians and the Medians, the Iazyges laid waste to the Roman provinces of Pannonia and Moesia (the provinces that lay on the southern side of the Danube river) as they pushed up the Danube to occupy the Hungarian plain between the Dacian kingdom and Pannonia Inferior. In AD 92 they provided a portent of the danger that they were to present to the empire for centuries to come, combining with the German Quadi and Marcomanni tribes to destroy an entire Roman legion – Twenty-First Rapax (a name which meant ‘Predator’ and proved sadly unapt for this last action in their long history). During the same period the Roxolani made repeated raids into Moesia, and came to side with the Dacians in their wars with Rome, while the Iazyge were more closely aligned with the empire as its expansionary impulse led to a series of assaults on the powerful Dacian kingdom. When Dacia was eventually conquered by Trajan, placing a well-defended piece of imperial territory between the two tribes, the Romans astutely allowed them to maintain contact through the province, and paid generous subsidies to ensure peace. Nevertheless, the time was bound to come when this would no longer be sufficient.

  So it was that the Iazyges once again joined forces with the German tribes in the Marcomannic wars of the 160s, taking the fight to a disease-weakened Roman army afresh in an alliance that was to last until a seemingly unmatched battle fought out on the frozen Danube. A dazzling Roman victory resulted – I did mention the efficacy of superbly disciplined and trained heavy infantry against the contarius – with 8,000 Iazyge horsemen being sent to serve in Britain as the price of failure. The uneasy peace that followed is the context for the fictional events described in The Wolf’s Gold, based on Cassius Dio’s report that two future contenders for the throne, Niger and Albinus, were instrumental in dealing with an Iazyge revolt early in Commodus’s reign, ten years after the battle on the Danube. After this heavy defeat the Sarmatians were not to trouble Rome sufficiently for it to enter the surviving historical record for another fifty years, but they continued to harass the empire throughout the third century until increasingly pragmatic imperial policy made a virtue out of a necessity, and allowed several mass Sarmatian resettlements inside the empire’s frontiers as a means of building a bulwark against the encroaching Goths. By the time of the Notitia Dignitatum (a documentary ‘snapshot’ of the Roman state’s geography and organisation at the end of the fourth century), Sarmatian settlement throughout the northern empire was apparently commonplace, and Sarmatians rose to positions of power and influence as the western empire began to succumb to the pressures building upon its borders from the east. But that, as more than one of my historical fiction colleagues would tell you, is another story altogether.

  One last (but important) point. As the regular reader will know, I present my stories against the background of documented history and set them in the authentic context of the empire’s topography as much as is possible. When it comes to the names of the places I use, I do try to present an understandable version of the Latin place name wherever possible – where it can be translated straight into English and make sense. Hence – my usual example – Brocolitia on Hadrian’s Wall becomes the wonderfully evocative Badger Holes. This isn’t always possible, of course, since the Romans were great adopters of other people’s ideas, weapons, tactics and yes, place names. Alburnus Major, Apulum, Porolissum and Napoca are all good examples of this,
with their roots believed to lie in the names given to them by the tribes that founded the original settlements on which the Romans built their cities and fortresses. Just as the conquerors knew that allowing the locals to worship their own gods made for a happier subject population (as long as they recognised the emperor as the supreme deity), so it made sense to use the place name that was already in common usage. With this in mind, and where prudent to do so, I have stayed on the safe side and retained the Roman name by which we know these fortress settlements. On the other hand, where Roman forts are known to have existed but whose original names are unknown, I have felt free to come up with my own name for what would otherwise be an anonymous fort, and something of a blot on the narrative. As ever, in the event that my research is proven to be at fault, I will be eternally grateful for any clarification that any reader can offer.

  THE ROMAN ARMY IN 182 AD

  By the late second century, the point at which the Empire series begins, the Imperial Roman Army had long since evolved into a stable organization with a stable modus operandi. Thirty or so legions (there’s still some debate about the 9th Legion’s fate), each with an official strength of 5,500 legionaries, formed the army’s 165,000-man heavy infantry backbone, while 360 or so auxiliary cohorts (each of them the equivalent of a 600-man infantry battalion) provided another 217,000 soldiers for the empire’s defence.

  Positioned mainly in the empire’s border provinces, these forces performed two main tasks. Whilst ostensibly providing a strong means of defence against external attack, their role was just as much about maintaining Roman rule in the most challenging of the empire’s subject territories. It was no coincidence that the troublesome provinces of Britain and Dacia were deemed to require 60 and 44 auxiliary cohorts respectively, almost a quarter of the total available. It should be noted, however, that whilst their overall strategic task was the same, the terms under the two halves of the army served were quite different.

  The legions, the primary Roman military unit for conducting warfare at the operational or theatre level, had been in existence since early in the Republic, hundreds of years before. They were composed mainly of close-order heavy infantry, well-drilled and highly motivated, recruited on a professional basis and, critically to an understanding of their place in Roman society, manned by soldiers who were Roman citizens. The jobless poor were thus provided with a route to both citizenship and a valuable trade, since service with the legions was as much about construction – fortresses, roads, and even major defensive works such as Hadrian’s Wall – as destruction. Vitally for the maintenance of the empire’s borders, this attractiveness of service made a large standing field army a possibility, and allowed for both the control and defence of the conquered territories.

  By this point in Britannia’s history three legions were positioned to control the restive peoples both beyond and behind the province’s borders. These were the 2nd, based in South Wales, the 20th, watching North Wales, and the 6th, positioned to the east of the Pennine range and ready to respond to any trouble on the northern frontier. Each of these legions was commanded by a legatus, an experienced man of senatorial rank deemed worthy of the responsibility and appointed by the emperor. The command structure beneath the legatus was a delicate balance, combining the requirement for training and advancing Rome’s young aristocrats for their future roles with the necessity for the legion to be led into battle by experienced and hardened officers.

  Directly beneath the legatus were a half-dozen or so military tribunes, one of them a young man of the senatorial class called the broad stripe tribune after the broad senatorial stripe on his tunic. This relatively inexperienced man – it would have been his first official position – acted as the legion’s second-in-command, despite being a relatively tender age when compared with the men around him. The remainder of the military tribunes were narrow stripes, men of the equestrian class who usually already had some command experience under their belts from leading an auxiliary cohort. Intriguingly, since the more experienced narrow-stripe tribunes effectively reported to the broad stripe, such a reversal of the usual military conventions around fitness for command must have made for some interesting man-management situations. The legion’s third in command was the camp prefect, an older and more experienced soldier, usually a former centurion deemed worthy of one last role in the legion’s service before retirement, usually for one year. He would by necessity have been a steady hand, operating as the voice of experience in advising the legion’s senior officers as to the realities of warfare and the management of the legion’s soldiers.

  Reporting into this command structure were ten cohorts of soldiers, each one composed of a number of eighty-man centuries. Each century was a collection of ten tent parties – eight men who literally shared a tent when out in the field. Nine of the cohorts had six centuries, and an establishment strength of 480 men, whilst the prestigious first cohort, commanded by the legion’s senior centurion, was composed of five double-strength centuries and therefore fielded 800 soldiers when fully manned. This organization provided the legion with its cutting edge: 5,000 or so well-trained heavy infantrymen operating in regiment and company sized units, and led by battle-hardened officers, the legion’s centurions, men whose position was usually achieved by dint of their demonstrated leadership skills.

  The rank of centurion was pretty much the peak of achievement for an ambitious soldier, commanding an eighty-man century and paid ten times as much as the men each officer commanded. Whilst the majority of centurions were promoted from the ranks, some were appointed from above as a result of patronage, or as a result of having completed their service in the Praetorian Guard, which had a shorter period of service than the legions. That these externally imposed centurions would have undergone their very own ‘sink or swim’ moment in dealing with their new colleagues is an unavoidable conclusion, for the role was one that by necessity led from the front, and as a result suffered disproportionate casualties. This makes it highly likely that any such appointee felt unlikely to make the grade in action would have received very short shrift from his brother officers.

  A small but necessarily effective team reported to the centurion. The optio, literally ‘best’ or chosen man, was his second-in-command, and stood behind the century in action with a long brass-knobbed stick, literally pushing the soldiers into the fight should the need arise. This seems to have been a remarkably efficient way of managing a large body of men, given the centurion’s place alongside rather than behind his soldiers, and the optio would have been a cool head, paid twice the usual soldier’s wage and a candidate for promotion to centurion if he performed well. The century’s third-in-command was the tesserarius or watch officer, ostensibly charged with ensuring that sentries were posted and that everyone know the watch word for the day, but also likely to have been responsible for the profusion of tasks such as checking the soldiers’ weapons and equipment, ensuring the maintenance of discipline and so on, that have occupied the lives of junior non-commissioned officers throughout history in delivering a combat-effective unit to their officer. The last member of the centurion’s team was the century’s signifer, the standard bearer, who both provided a rallying point for the soldiers and helped the centurion by transmitting marching orders to them through movements of his standard. Interestingly, he also functioned as the century’s banker, dealing with the soldiers’ financial affairs. While a soldier caught in the horror of battle might have thought twice about defending his unit’s standard, he might well also have felt a stronger attachment to the man who managed his money for him!

  At the shop-floor level were the eight soldiers of the tent party who shared a leather tent and messed together, their tent and cooking gear carried on a mule when the legion was on the march. Each tent party would inevitably have established its own pecking order based upon the time-honoured factors of strength, aggression, intelligence – and the rough humour required to survive in such a harsh world. The men that came to dominate their tent part
ies would have been the century’s unofficial backbone, candidates for promotion to watch officer. They would also have been vital to their tent mates’ cohesion under battlefield conditions, when the relatively thin leadership team could not always exert sufficient presence to inspire the individual soldier to stand and fight amid the horrific chaos of combat.

  The other element of the legion was a small 120-man detachment of cavalry, used for scouting and the carrying of messages between units. The regular army depended on auxiliary cavalry wings, drawn from those parts of the empire where horsemanship was a way of life, for their mounted combat arm. Which leads us to consider the other side of the army’s two-tier system.

  The auxiliary cohorts, unlike the legions alongside which they fought, were not Roman citizens, although the completion of a twenty-five-year term of service did grant both the soldier and his children citizenship. The original auxiliary cohorts had often served in their homelands, as a means of controlling the threat of large numbers of freshly conquered barbarian warriors, but this changed after the events of the first century ad. The Batavian revolt in particular – when the 5,000-strong Batavian cohorts rebelled and destroyed two Roman legions after suffering intolerable provocation during a recruiting campaign gone wrong – was the spur for the Flavian policy for these cohorts to be posted away from their home provinces. The last thing any Roman general wanted was to find his legions facing an army equipped and trained to fight in the same way. This is why the reader will find the auxiliary cohorts described in the Empire series, true to the historical record, representing a variety of other parts of the empire, including Tungria, which is now part of modern-day Belgium.

  Auxiliary infantry was equipped and organized in so close a manner to the legions that the casual observer would have been hard put to spot the differences. Often their armour would be mail, rather than plate, sometimes weapons would have minor differences, but in most respects an auxiliary cohort would be the same proposition to an enemy as a legion cohort. Indeed there are hints from history that the auxiliaries may have presented a greater challenge on the battlefield. At the battle of Mons Graupius in Scotland, Tacitus records that four cohorts of Batavians and two of Tungrians were sent in ahead of the legions and managed to defeat the enemy without requiring any significant assistance. Auxiliary cohorts were also often used on the flanks of the battle line, where reliable and well drilled troops are essential to handle attempts to outflank the army. And while the legions contained soldiers who were as much tradesmen as fighting men, the auxiliary cohorts were primarily focused on their fighting skills. By the end of the second century there were significantly more auxiliary troops serving the empire than were available from the legions, and it is clear that Hadrian’s Wall would have been invalid as a concept without the mass of infantry and mixed infantry/cavalry cohorts that were stationed along its length.