Arthur Britannicus

by Paul Bannister

  The feeling was coming back into Aulus’ right hand and the bulge of the dagger’s handle again felt solid in his palm, but the chieftain knew his weapon was badly outmatched. He shifted the cloak more firmly around his left forearm, noting that the garment’s fastener, a heavy silver and amber brooch that was the symbol of his rank was on the outside, forming a miniature shield. He had no more time for reflection as Filwen thrust hard at him with the long spear point. Aulus was barely able to hurl himself aside as it scraped his bare upper arm. “Close with him,” the thought blazed through his mind. “Dust in his eyes. Dust.” Aulus dodged another thrust, stumbling sideways. His fingers scrabbled at the ground. The spear thudded into the earth right by his hand, hurled at the instant he began to fall. The Briton’s fingers grasped gravel and dirt, he began to straighten to throw his blinding handful and his world went dark.

  Filwen had launched the big ash and iron spear with his right hand and in a motion made skilful by long hours of training, had continued his arm’s swing to grab the haft of his sword. He instantly drew it across his body, snatching the sword free of its hanger chains. The Scoti whipped his sword backhanded, scything the blade across Aulus’ face. The tip took out the Briton’s right eye in a gout of blood, smashed through the bridge of his nose and jellied his left eyeball so cleanly, its fluid ran unbloodied down his cheek like the albumen of an egg. The shock of the impact drove the Briton to his knees, stunned, blinded and helpless. Filwen glanced at the watching teenage boy held by his hair, throat tilted to the serving man’s blade, then crashed the pommel of his sword onto Aulus’ undefended head.

  The down thrust shattered the skull, releasing a glob of pulped brain to glisten against the chieftain’s dark hair. Aulus slumped face forward into the dirt, twitching in his death spasms. He never felt the jarring impact of the raider’s blade as it hacked into the nape of his neck. His killer reached down to free the silver brooch and its bodkin from the cloak wrapped around the dead man’s arm, and jabbed it into the wolf fur his servant offered at his gesture. “A memento, a pleasing memento,” he said, eyeing the lump of amber set in a triple spiral of heavy silver that was, though he did not know it, symbol of a high chieftain. “Now, let’s find where these Druids are with their coin.”

  II. Peak

  Carausius had never been so terrified in all his ten years of life. He heard the roaring cheer from the raiders as his father was slaughtered, and knew what it meant. He felt he’d been seen as he ran for the copse of trees above the village and it lent speed to his flying feet. His chest hurt from his rasping breath, his throat felt raw, his bare legs were scratched from the brambles. His toes were bruised and cut where he’d stubbed them against stones, but he knew he could not stop. He still had several thousand more paces to run until he reached the forge. There, he’d find his friend, the young smith Gimflod and he would know what to do.

  The boy ran on, throat burning, chest heaving. A white rat scampered across the forest path in front of him and he started. White? He’d never seen such a thing in his life. He ran on, arms thrashing at the air, lungs on fire, legs knotting painfully with the effort. Finally, the hovel came in sight, tucked under an outcrop of ironstone that provided the smith with his raw material. A heap of turf-covered charcoal smouldered nearby, and Gimflod was patching a leak that was venting smoke through the patchwork of sod.

  “Hello, Caros, don’t want any air in there,” he said cheerily as the boy panted up. Then he looked again, realizing Carausius’ distress. In a spate of babbled words, the boy told what he had seen. “My father is dead,” he sobbed. The smith closed his eyes as he thought. A man unwilling to make swift decisions, he took time to pace into the forge, thoughtfully pumping the leather bellows. He was reheating the blade of a wheeled ploughshare he was repairing for a wealthy barley farmer and he took comfort in the familiar action as he tried to think. “They’re raiders,” he said, closing his eyes again. “Let me consider. They will be going inland. They will likely come this way, so we are not safe here. We must go.”

  At the hamlet, Filwen grunted satisfaction as he surveyed the woman Clinia, whom his men had dragged from Aulus’ hut. She was a handsome, full-breasted wench, he thought, and he’d enjoy teaching her new duties, but the real prize was her two sons. “By Mithras, they’re twins,” he’d muttered when he first saw them together. “They’re exactly alike.They’ll fetch a fine price on the slave block.”

  Domnal and Mael stared back at him, sullenly. Their teenage world had been brutally upended. In minutes they’d gone from being the privileged sons of a chieftain to captives at spear point. Their father was lying dead in his blood and their mother had been dragged away to join a coffle of slaves. Now they faced the same fate. Domnal, the older by 20 minutes, stared meaningfully at his brother, then glanced down at his right hand. The older twin was wearing what seemed to be an ugly grey metal ring he’d never seen before. In fact, it was the strip of lead, twisted and hidden in plain sight. Mael raised an eyebrow but said nothing. He knew his twin would explain later, and he understood it had to be important.

  Filwen walked around the pair, musing, turned to survey the settlement. “Put the saleable ones over there, the rest are the doomed,” he told three of his raiders. “Doomed, lord?” one man asked. “Yes, save the women, younger children and those who can work. Make double sure of those twins. You can kill the old, any strong ones who might make trouble, and any babies,” he instructed.

  A dozen women were being tied together, ropes looped from neck to neck. Only eight men had survived the invaders’ frenzied onslaught, and they were bound at the wrists, seated on the ground under guard. A gaggle of children and infants wailed from one of the huts into which they had been pushed while the raiders hunted from hovel to hovel, digging into floors by the doorposts and hearth stones, the usual places to hide valuables.

  Aulus’ madder-dyed cloak was spread on the ground and from time to time a raider would drop onto it a cooking pot, household utensil, a mortar and pestle, a few denarii coins or a pathetic piece of jet or silver jewellery. A poor haul. “Get me something to drink,” Filwen demanded, and a woman hurried to him with a leather cup of barley beer. He swigged it, then strode through the settlement to stand over the bound menfolk. ‘Where is your temple? Where are your priests and their silver?” he demanded. Nobody responded. The Bastard felt his quick rage rise. “You,” he stabbed his sword at one of the bound villagers. “Where’s your temple? Where is the silver?” The terrified man shook his head, mute and uncomprehending. There was no temple. Filwen boiled over.

  He chopped once, twice, at the man’s neck, stepping back as a wash of bright arterial blood sluiced across the dirt. He turned away, his rage vanished as quickly as it had come. “Take them to the Wavehorse, fasten them properly, keep them alive. Leave six guards, and stay alert,” he instructed. “We’ll try inland for a few days, then we’ll be back. If anything happens, send a messenger to find us, we’ll be west of here, but this side of the military road. The rest of you, get your shields, food and weapons and be back here quickly. We’ll take a few of those women, too.”

  An hour later, out on the open wold, Gimflod was watching. Alerted by the sun flashing off the blades of their shouldered spears, he saw the first scouts of the raiding party as they breasted a rise two miles away.

  “Now, we’ll have to go now,” he said urgently. He snatched up a cloak, several pieces of dried mackerel and a half loaf he had planned to eat that night. He caught up his valuable hammer and a small leather purse containing a collection of coins. Some silver pieces showed the head of the old emperor Septimius Severus, who’d ruled not so long ago from the palace at Eboracum, the provincial capital that was a day’s march to the west. His head was also stamped on the one precious golden aureus in the purse, but no one could tell whose image adorned the worn-down brass coins that made up the rest of Gimflod’s meagre fortune. Nevertheless, all were valuable, as only the military and traders usually got their hands on actual mo
ney. Barter was the normal form of exchange for lesser folk.

  The smith and the boy slipped away down a fold in the land, remaining unseen by the marauders, and began their trek to seek safety. They kept moving cautiously, scanning often as they slipped surreptitiously across the landscape under the wheeling gulls. That night, wrapped in Gimfold’s heavy cloak, they slept in a copse under the wind-shelter of a small headland, and awoke soaked in dew and hidden in a thick morning mist.

  After two long, cautious days of skulking travel, the pair arrived footsore and hungry at a coastal camp called Peak, where a Roman army detachment was building a signal station. Gimflod swung his bundled cloak over his shoulder and headed towards the weather-beaten legionaries, who viewed them curiously. Quickly, he explained himself to the hard-eyed centurio in charge, as that veteran of a dozen bloody killing fields looked with unexpected sympathy at the boy. “How many do you think there are of them?” the sergeant queried. “Fifty or sixty? We’ll settle them, and soon. We’ll have them down faster than a tart’s knickers.”

  He called over two of his soldiers and gave them instructions. Within a half hour the pair were provisioned, armed and striding west on the stony causeway towards the great north-south highway, where they would report to the nearest staging post. “There will be cavalry couriers going to the palace at Eboracum and on to Lindum v by nightfall,” the sergeant forecast, adding grimly: “There will be a detachment on the raiders soon enough, and the executioner will be busy with any bastards the slavers don’t want. Now, let’s get you two fed and watered and bedded down for the night. That boy needs rest.”

  A week went by without incident except that a messenger from a cavalry detachment rode by to say there had been no sign of the raiders, who had looted and burned a few homesteads inland, but now seemed to have left the area, probably on seeing the military.

  The soldiers working on the signal beacon continued their task, and they welcomed the smith’s skills. On request, the ironworker set up a small forge to repair a few broken tools and bits of personal equipment. The detachment had almost finished the lumber and stone structure that was temporary by Roman standards, and the centurion shrugged at it. “The engineers will be back in a few months with masons to make a proper building, a stone tower with a heavy timber superstructure for the fire signal,” he said, nodding to the great iron basket that would hold the fuel for the warning fire.

  “This is just for now, to establish an early alert system for pirates, Gaels, Celts, Picts; any of those thieving bastards. If they come at night, we light the fire, and the detachment at the next place along the coast will see that, and pass on the message. If they come in daylight, we throw wet moss on the flames, to create smoke. You can see it for miles. Our signals can outrun any ship, and we can send the message right around the country in a half day. The army keeps detachments a few miles inland, to use the military road north or south, and they can have cavalry at the coast to greet invaders before they’ve dried their feet on the beach. It’s important stuff, so we’ll be moving up the coast to build a few more of these.”

  Gimflod nodded his understanding. The big smith had had time to think and he announced his decision. “It’s time for us to be getting back. There will be things to do at our village, and maybe by now the prisoners will have been released.”

  As the men spoke, a Gallic trading ship with brown leather sails was tacking into the lee of the headland. With its flat bottom and high prow from which a lookout could spot rocks and shoals, it could approach very close to the shore. In these waters protected by the headland from the blustery north-easterly wind, its progress was smooth and unflurried.

  Carausius turned to the smith. “I saw a ship like that once before,” he recalled. “A tall man with long dark hair came in it, and he came especially to talk to my father.” “Was he a trader?” Gimflod asked idly, not really interested. “No, my mother said I was to be very polite, he was a powerful lord of magic.” The big smith’s interest was captured.

  “Magic?”

  “Mother said he’d come from the western islands to talk to my father. He seemed to know me, but I’m sure I never met him before.”

  “Lucky he didn’t turn you into a toad,” grunted the smith. “What was his name, this sorcerer?” The boy scowled as he tried to remember more.

  “It was Myr …… Myrddin,” he said, triumphantly. “He made prophecies. He could see the future, my father said, and he walked with kings in high places.” The smith shrugged, only half-convinced.

  “I suppose he visited your family because your father was an earl. Sorcerers don’t visit blacksmiths.”

  He turned away, interest fading as he watched the trading ship inch closer. Now the water was barely three feet deep and the crew could jump over the side to haul their vessel to the beach. One waited to carry the bearded negotiator, as the Romans called a trader, to do his buying and selling with dry feet and trews. “Talk to him,” said the centurion. “He’s going south and he can take you back to your settlement for a coin or two.”

  Gimflod nodded. A tiring trudge back to the site of the tragedy would be hard on the tired boy whose white face reflected his recent nightmare-torn nights. Sailing would be better. The smith had money, so the next morning, with an offshore breeze, they were aboard the trader and headed home, if there was a home left standing.

  III. Belgica

  As the salt-stained vessel cleared the wind shelter of the great headland, the German Sea and the squally weather began to assert their power, and the negotiator was obliged to tell his steersman to head more easterly. “We can’t sail due south in this wind,” he explained to his two passengers. “We’ll have to head out to sea, then turn back south and west.”

  The trader was faced with the main drawback of his stout ship. It had no oars and relied only on its bellying mainsail for propulsion. Although the stitched leather sheet was strong enough, tethered as it was to the deck on either side of the mast by halyards, it made the vessel clumsy. The negotiator could not easily sail his desired course when the wind was foul, and as night fell over the heaving sea, Gimflod and Carausius found themselves being carried ever further east and south.

  When dawn broke on the second morning of their voyage, revealing a line of threatening squalls, the Gaul’s vessel was far from Britain and its steersman was anxious. By noon, however, he was shouting in relief. He spotted a dark line on the horizon. “Land, master,” he called to the negotiator, pointing. “Probably Belgica.”

  He was right. As they neared the land, the steersman let out a whoop of joy. “There’s the pharos, the light tower to bring us home. See the colour of the water? That’s silt from the outfall of the Rhine. We’re close to Forum Hadriani!”

  The trader sighed with relief. Every sea voyage was a risk, and coming home was always cause for a gift of thanks to the gods, a vow he privately made to himself. “It’s a busy place, Hadrian’s Market, a town of a thousand people or more,” the negotiator explained to wide-eyed Carausius. ”You’ll like it, and we’ll soon be able to get you a ship back to Britain from here.” He could not have been more wrong.

  For weeks, everything seemed to conspire to keep the two Britons from going home. Carausius fell sick with a fever almost at the hour he set foot in the bustling settlement, and Gimflod the smith ran through most of his scant supply of coin to pay for room at a tavern and to employ a Greek physician to care for the boy. By the time Carausius was well enough to travel, they couldn’t afford to pay for the voyage.

  The smith, however, felt a lessening desire to go back. Hadrian’s Market was a vital naval centre, a place between the great rivers Rhine and Meuse, which were linked here by a shortcut canal that was an important waterway in Rome’s most northerly city on the continent. The town had become a staging post for the thousands of troops who had made the long voyage from around the great inland body of water the Romans called Mare Nostrum, Our Sea. In the Forum’s sheltered green waters were anchored several great warships,
a pair of three-decked triremes and a vast five-decked quinqereme, although the work on the mighty rivers was done by troops in smaller, more nimble vessels.

  The town was a thriving place, and the smith soon found employment at a shipyard, hammering out the short iron rivets used in clinker-built oar boats or making great round-headed bolts that were used to hold together the foot-thick oaken ribs of the Gallic coasting vessels. These stout ships, smooth-sided and caulked with cattle hair or hemp and sealed with pine tar, were so much stronger than the flexible, clinkered Roman ships that patrolled the coast.

  “The Romans aren’t sailors,” Gimflod explained to Carausius as the pair ate a supper of barley gruel with pork and a loaf of coarse bread. He flinched as he bit down on a scrap of rock from the millstone that had ground the flour. He considered his words: “They’re soldiers, and they know about land warfare, but as for sailing… They have to use Greeks or Syrians or Egyptians to do the sailing, because they’re the people who know how to do it best.

  “They put a few Romans on board their ships as officers, but that’s about it. If it’s going to be a sea action, they put land soldiers on board the galleys and fight that way. The rowers on those big warships are free men, and well paid and serve a fixed term. Lately, though, with all this crisis, they’ve been using pressed men from the colonies and conquered lands, but even they get their diploma of freedom after fifteen years or so.”