A soldier approached him, grinning, his bare legs muddy. ‘Good evening, sir.’
‘Marcus Allius, is that you? I’d recognise the stink of those feet even in the pitch dark.’
‘Half of us are over already.’
‘Good work. And no catastrophes?’
‘Oh, I had to make the crossing twice myself before they’d go near the water.’ Vespasian saw that Allius had his hob-nailed sandals slung around his neck, and he wore his new helmet, a design ordered by Claudius himself, based on a barbarian model from Germany, with a plate that offered better protection for the neck at the back.
Allius had served with Vespasian for years. Now he was a decurion in the first cohort of Vespasian’s own legion–the largest cohort, no less than eight hundred men. Allius was a good, solid, unimaginative man, the backbone of any army. Vespasian had heard he had been the first Roman soldier to step ashore when the invasion had begun–he had even been the first to kill a Briton, even if it had only been an idiot boy who had come wandering out of the dark. Because of this Allius had acquired a certain iconic status of his own, which was why Vespasian had assigned him to this crossing, as a good-luck token.
Now Allius said, ‘The men are grumbling, sir.’
‘Legionaries always grumble. The leeches in the river will probably put up a tougher fight than those Brittunculi.’
It was a weak joke that won Vespasian a laugh from some of the men lining up for their crossing. But he thought he heard a note of concern. After all they were far from home, they had crossed the Ocean, and now they faced a barbarian horde that had fought Caesar himself to a standstill. Legionaries were not cowards, but they were superstitious.
Vespasian dismounted and walked up to the line. ‘We’re surviving, are we, lads?’
A mumble of assent. ‘Seen worse, sir.’ That was about as much enthusiasm as you’d get from a legionary.
‘You.’ Vespasian pointed at random at a man. ‘What are your orders for tomorrow?’
‘In the morning the Britons will realise we’re here on their bank. We’re to hold our ground until legate Geta has assembled his legion.’
‘All right. But you’re outnumbered, and will remain so even when Geta joins you. What do you think about that?’ Some uncomfortable shrugs. ‘You saw all that posturing by the river. Listen to me. First, even if some huge barbarian savage came at you with a club like a tree trunk, he could not defeat you. Why? Because you aren’t alone. Your comrades likewise can’t be defeated because they have you at their side.
‘And then there is the question of the names. Do you know what these names of theirs mean–Catuvellaunian, Cassivellaunus? That vellau means good, the best, perfect. So Cassivellaunus called himself “the perfect man”. The Catuvellaunians are “the best warriors”.’ He grinned. ‘If they really were so perfect, would they need to tell themselves? You have no need of pompous names. You are citizens of Rome and the finest soldiers in history. Just remember that.’
That won him a whispered cheer.
Vespasian returned to his horse. ‘I thought that went well,’ he said to Sabinus. ‘I’ve always believed humour is the best antidote to fear.’
‘Maybe,’ his brother said to him as they rode away. ‘It’s just a shame you don’t have any good jokes.’
XIV
It had been a bad night for the Catuvellaunian forces. Many of them had been discouraged by the Batavians’ assault on the chariots and their horses, and the night had been disturbed by the screams of hamstrung and disembowelled animals.
Then, as the light had gathered, they were disconcerted to see the Roman forces drawn up on the western side of the river–this side, the British side. Nobody had had the slightest inkling that the Romans had made the crossing in the dark. Indeed, nobody was even sure how they had done so. But here they were, in the grey dawn.
The Romans were drawn up in the units of a few hundred men each that Nectovelin called ‘cohorts’, orderly rectangles scattered on high points of the gently undulating ground. They looked like toy blocks thrown down by some immense child, Cunedda thought. By contrast the British were just a single undifferentiated mass, with the warriors roughly drawn up in a line, their families and baggage at the back.
And, before a spear was thrown or a sword raised, the British were already melting away. The princes’ coalition had always been an uneasy one.
The morning wore on.
Cunedda, restless, asked Nectovelin, ‘Why don’t the Romans attack?’
‘They are waiting for us to charge,’ Nectovelin said. ‘And we will, if we are fools. If we are wise, we wait.’
‘How long? All day?’
‘If necessary, and all night, and another day. This is our country, remember. Let them sit here and starve.’
Cunedda said, ‘But this waiting is hard. Even I long to start swinging my sword.’
Nectovelin grimaced. ‘That’s the British way. You draw up your army to face the other fellow’s horde. After a lot of screaming and insulting and arse-showing, you might have a minor punch-up. Sometimes you’ll just send in a champion or two to fight on behalf of the rest. Then, when honour is satisfied, you go home to your farm.’
‘But that’s not the Roman way.’
‘Oh, no. The Romans believe in finishing what they start.’
‘Can we win today, Nectovelin?’
‘Of course we can. There are more of us than them, aren’t there? And they are a long way from home. But it’s out of our hands, Cunedda. It’s up to the princes. I don’t doubt their courage. Let’s see if either of them has half the wisdom of their father.’
So the two forces faced each other, the disciplined Roman cohorts eerily calm and silent, the braying British mob facing them. As the heat gathered and the last of the morning mist burned off, Cunedda grew hot, thirsty, weary from standing, irritable from the discomfort of his heavy armour. He longed for this to be over one way or another-he longed for something to happen, anything–and it seemed to him that the tension was gathering to breaking point.
At last one man rushed forward from the British line, eyes bulging, waving a gleaming sword and howling. Cunedda had no idea who he was or why he had done this, but it was enough to break the stalemate. In a moment the noise rose to a clamorous roar, so loud Cunedda could barely think, and all around him powerful bodies surged forward with a clatter of swords on spears. Cunedda hesitated, but a shove in the back propelled him forward after the rest.
The whole of the British line hurled itself forward at once, with not a command being given.
Cunedda was swept towards the nearest patch of high ground, and the Roman cohort stationed there. But the Romans stood firm. The legionaries in the front line held their half-cylinder shields lodged in the ground so they made a fence, from behind which spears protruded, metal tips on wooden shafts. They were so still it was as if Cunedda was being pushed towards a stone wall.
And before he reached the shields, to a thin trumpet blast, Roman javelins were raised and hurled into the air.
Under a sky black with a thousand javelins the advancing British stalled. Those in the lead scrambled back and raised their shields, but those charging from behind piled into those ahead, and the mass of warriors closed up into a struggling crowd. Now Cunedda was trapped in a compressed mass, wedged so tightly he could barely breathe, and his feet were swept off the ground. He was overwhelmed by the suddenness of all this after the hours of stasis.
Then the first javelins fell. Not a pace away from Cunedda one stitched a man to the ground, where he floundered, screaming, a frothy pink fluid bubbling out of his splayed rib cage. More javelins came down, piercing heads and limbs and torsos. Battle cries were now laced with screams of pain, and the mood of the mass turned from rage and frustration to panic. But there was nowhere to go, no way to flee, or even to advance. And still the javelins fell.
With a mighty effort Cunedda managed to get his own shield raised over his head–and just as he did so a point of harden
ed metal pushed through splintering wood, stopping not a fraction from his right eye. He lived, he breathed. But the embedded javelin made his shield impossibly unwieldy. The javelin had bent, he found. The shaft was attached to the tip by some soft metal, and the javelin was hard even to get hold of, let alone to pull out of his shield.
As Cunedda struggled, he saw he wasn’t alone. Suddenly the ground was covered by a kind of hedge of smashed shields and protruding javelins, so entangling it was impossible to move in any direction. The javelins were meant to bend, he saw, even if they didn’t succeed in killing. He felt awed by the cunning. Cunedda had been part of a disorganised mob since the charge had begun; now that mob was tripping, falling, those who could still move fighting with each other for space and air.
There was a steady drumming, and Cunedda looked ahead. The Romans were at last advancing. The blank shield wall of the front rank of troops had broken into wedge formations, which were now pushing down the hill. The Romans carried short, heavy-looking swords with massive hilts that they drummed against their shields as they advanced. And in the last moment the Romans ran.
When they closed, their shields thudding into British bodies, the crowd of Britons reeled back as if suffering a massive punch. From behind their shields the Romans stabbed at the faces of their enemies and clubbed at heads and necks. The blows landed with wet, meaty sounds. Cunedda saw a face split open from brow to upper teeth, a belly slashed so that grey guts poured out onto the ground, another man whose lower jaw was all but severed and left gaping almost comically from a sliver of gristle, but he fought on. Horrors, every way he looked. And everywhere blood spurted, impossibly crimson.
The screaming became focused now, as the men of the British front rank, trapped between the Roman shields and their fellows, began to die in a mass, and the air filled with the stink of shit and piss and blood.
Cunedda had had no idea it would be like this. Numbed, he tried to move forward. He dropped his speared shield, though he knew it left him vulnerable. But he was still so jammed in he couldn’t even raise his arms.
And the Romans worked on. Cunedda could clearly see how they were leaning into their shields, pushing the British back even as they thrust with their short swords. For armoured men they moved with remarkable flexibility, bending and twisting as they did their grisly work of slicing into the mass of British flesh ahead of them. Their armour was not mail or solid plate but an arrangement of overlapping steel strips, somehow linked together so the soldiers could bend easily. The legionaries did their work efficiently, without humour or joy or even much interest.
Soon the lead Romans had pushed so far into the crowd they were no more than paces away from Cunedda, and still the grinding slaughter continued. It was going to be a squalid death, Cunedda thought, like an animal trapped in a pen before a slaughterman’s knife. The waste of it overwhelmed him, a feeling stronger even than fear. But if he must die he would strike at least one blow first. He struggled to keep his feet on ground becoming slick with blood, and he tried again to raise his sword.
Something hard and heavy smashed into the back of his head. A massive hand grasped his neck and pulled him backward. His vision swam with blood, and he knew no more.
XV
Somehow Nectovelin had dragged Cunedda out of the thick of the fighting. He brought him to the cover of a scrap of wood, on a patch of high ground unoccupied by the Romans.
Nectovelin, his own face a mask of blood, loomed over him. ‘I don’t want to hear a word about how you have been dishonoured by not being allowed to die. You’re smart enough to know that there’s no honour in a pointless death. And it would have been pointless, wouldn’t it?’
Cunedda struggled to sit up. They were in the shade of the trees, in cool green. His head banged with pain; Nectovelin said a warrior on his own side had managed to clatter him with a club. He was drenched with blood, but little of it was his own.
The roaring of the battle continued, and the air stank of shit and death. He scrambled to the edge of the copse and peered out.
From this bit of high ground he could see the disposition of the Roman army. The Roman units were still hard, compact blocks, red and black and silver. There were ten of them, with four in a front row engaged with the British and two rows of three waiting in reserve behind. Further away was another set of ten cohorts with a similar deployment. Away from the stolid blocks of the legionary cohorts were smaller units, on foot or horseback. They were auxiliaries, he knew, cavalry or specialists such as archers and slingers. They held their positions, not needed yet.
By comparison the shapeless British mob looked like a tide that had swept forward. And wherever British wave crashed against sturdy Roman block there was a bright froth of blood.
Nectovelin, beside him, pointed. ‘Look over there.’
Marching from the west, Cunedda made out more compact Roman units, tramping steadily towards the fray.
‘I’ve been counting the cohorts,’ Nectovelin said grimly. ‘I reckon we face three Roman legions today. Ten cohorts each, see? We’ve already broken ourselves on two of them. And now here comes the third, to mop us up.’
‘How long was I out?’
Nectovelin shrugged. ‘Heartbeats. Not long.’
Cunedda glanced up and saw that the sun hadn’t moved perceptibly from where it had been when the charge had begun. ‘And yet the battle is already lost.’
‘Oh, there’s plenty of killing to be done. But, yes. In fact we lost it the moment we charged. Look.’ He pointed to the rear of the British lines, where the non-combatants, the wives and children and traders, were hastily packing up and fleeing. ‘The Roman cavalry will come after them, but the women and children ought to get away. Agrippina has a chance.’ He laughed darkly. ‘Never did think much of Roman cavalry.’
‘What of the princes?’
‘Who can say?’
‘Nectovelin, in the thick of the fighting–the way the Romans killed–it was relentless.’
‘This is the way civilised men kill,’ Nectovelin said. ‘It is an industry. They kill as they make pots. To leave a man to fight again is, to them’–he waved a hand–‘a waste of effort.’
‘Why did you pull me out of there?’
‘Because, by Coventina’s baggy quim, though the day is lost, Cunedda, the war is long. We’ll find Agrippina, and we’ll think again.’
They turned from the grinding battle and slipped away.
XVI
Agrippina woke to Cunedda shaking her shoulder.
“Pina! You have to see this.’
Reluctantly Agrippina rolled onto her back. She was hot under her thin woollen blanket, and her head was heavy, her throat dry, her bladder full. The air was still smoky from last night’s fire, but strong light poured through chinks in the conical thatched roof. It was late in the day. She had slept too long again, and would suffer from a sore head all day. And yet she did not want to wake up, not to another dismal day in defeated Camulodunum.
The house was empty, save for herself and Cunedda, whose family had fled north, away from the Roman advance. But Cunedda was here, kneeling at her side. Agrippina reached up to stroke his face. He was growing his beard. With the Romans so close he didn’t dare indulge in such Mediterranean fashions as shaving; sullen in defeat the Catuvellaunians were turning on each other. The beard, thin, straggling, really didn’t suit him at all, but she liked the way it held his scent.
The love between them had not recovered from that terrible moment on the beach. But there was tenderness, and comfort.
‘Come back to bed,’ she said, still sleepy.
‘We can’t spend our whole lives in bed, ‘Pina. Besides, Nectovelin has something you must see.’ His eyes were bright with curiosity. Even after the awful shock of the lost battle he was too interested in the world to just lie down and die.
If that was so, why couldn’t she feel the same? Her bitterness burned inside her like a blade fresh from the forge. A Roman, a man with a Roman name, Marcus All
ius, had killed her little brother, in a careless, arrogant moment. But the Romans were simply too powerful. It was as if Mandubracius had been struck down by lightning; what use would it be to raise a sword against a thundercloud? What use was anger, even?
She had lost hope, then. And yet her heart beat and her lungs filled. She was still alive. And here was dear Cunedda.
She sighed, rolled over stiffly, and sat up. ‘Give me a minute.’
He eyed her mischievously. ‘You want any help?’
She snorted. ‘Not unless you want to hold the cup for my piss.’
She rummaged through her clothing until she found a loose tunic that didn’t smell too bad. For her toilet she dragged her fingers through dirty hair, and wiped a hand over her face. She caught her own breath and was aware of its stink. She really ought to find a bit of willow bark to clean her teeth. She had no idea how she looked, nor did she care. After the battle she had smashed all her mirrors and given the fragments to the river. It wasn’t a time for mirrors, or other Roman fashions.
She stepped out of the house. It was close to midday, judging by the position of the sun. It had been a hot, oppressive summer, and though autumn would soon be here the heavy heat still lingered.
She walked with Cunedda across Camulodunum. The town was busy. People were on the move, carts rolled through the lanes, children and animals scurried about as they always did, and spindles of smoke rose up from the smiths’ forges. The market was thronged too, as people bartered goods and services, a young pig for a new sickle blade, a basket of strawberries for a dyed wool blanket. All this activity had nothing to do with the Romans but with the seasons. This was a town of farmers and, regardless of the great events of the human world, the sun and moon followed their patient cycles through the sky, and soon it would be time to gather in the harvest.
And yet things weren’t the same. People went about their work joylessly. Only a few people dared carry weapons; Cunedda himself didn’t. The battle had taken a bite out of the population. There were fewer young men around than there had been at the beginning of the summer. And there were injured, amputees, even among the women, and a few helpless folk who could no longer work at all lay in the shade with wooden bowls or cups before them. But nobody was starving in Camulodunum; if your family could no longer support you, the community would do so.
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