Arthur Britannicus

by Paul Bannister

  Carausius planned to seize several large cities like Narbonne, Nimes and Rouen, where the Romans operated a mint. The seizures would serve both strategic and bargaining purposes, and taxes and tribute from them would boost his coffers. Lastly, he instructed Bononia’s garrison commander Lucius Cornelius to supply and reinforce the citadel so it could be held against siege with a minimal number of troops. Done right, the port could still act as a forward headquarters so the fleet could continue to move against the pirates along the coast. Cornelius should, the emperor specified, keep a good portion of the fleet as well as a squadron of Gaulish merchant ships across the narrows in Dover, where all would be safe from any surprise land attack. “Don’t forget to guard against a seaborne attack, too,” he cautioned. “Maximian’s no fool, he might well come that way.”

  Maximian indeed was not a fool. Away in the eastern mountains and forests, he had out-marched the Alemanni invaders, trapped them as they came through the gap of the River Drava and butchered them without pity. Later generations of mountain people would claim that carrion crows returned to the killing field for a dozen years, long remembering the feast they once had there.

  Rome celebrated Maximian’s victory at the same time they acclaimed the Augustus, who took pleasure in his fresh status as a god. Diocletian promptly decreed that those lucky enough to be admitted to his presence must kneel to kiss the hem of his robe, and none was to raise their eyes to look into his. He introduced new, elaborate levels of court ceremonial, ordered some imposing new public buildings erected to his glory and generally ensured that his deity was acknowledged and worshipped properly. He had to consider what to do about those Christians, too. They refused to acknowledge the deity of any but their own carpenter-god and it was a poor example for the rest of the empire. He’d have to take steps to bring them to heel, he thought. The newly-minted god-emperor also boosted his own standing somewhat by declaring general Maximian a Hercules to his own Jupiter. That sent a message to the mere mortals of the cowed Senate that Diocletian-Jupiter did the planning, while Maximian-Hercules dutifully carried out the great tasks he was set, and they’d better stay subservient, or things could change, and painfully, for them.

  The new Hercules wasted no time in carrying out his tasks. Maximian turned away from the eastern borders of the empire and moved his legions to Gaul and Spain. “A dirty business,” he wrote to his Syrian wife Eutropia. “These are rebel citizens of the empire. There is no glory here, and there will be no glory in bringing Carausius to justice. First, I have to put down southern Gaul and Spain, then I’ll see to that Briton. It won’t take long.” The emperor was badly wrong about the timing. Putting down the insurgents took months. There was resistance, disease, and foul weather that bogged the Spanish roads. There were, too, guerrillas who cut his supply lines, so, it was no swift campaign, and throughout it, the grim general left rows of crucified rebels nailed to the poplar trees that lined and shaded the Rome-built roads of Gaul.

  He also erected crosses with their sun-scorched, stinking burdens all across the dusty Spanish plain. When that was finally finished, two more years had gone by during which Carausius was untroubled by Maximian’s troops, but there was still more work for the emperor. The barbarians had again crossed the Rhine, and in great force. Two vast armies, one of Heruli and Chaibones, the other of Alemanni boosted by some Carpiani, had forded the river and were sacking Roman settlements.

  Maximian turned his campaign-hardened legions east one more time. He confronted the Alemanni in the forests of eastern Gaul, and carried out a classic military operation. He battered the enemy with artillery and heavy infantry, then sent his cavalry to outflank and roll up their ranks before they chopped the fleeing rabble into bloody ruin. The second horde of invaders lay to the north, and was trapped between the German Sea and the wide river Rhine, unable to retreat and reluctant to advance against the Romans. Maximian did not hurry to meet them. Instead, he contained the invaders, who quickly denuded the land of its crops and, as the Roman expected, died where they camped, ravaged by starvation and dysentery. Maximian never needed to confront them. His main task was to round up several thousand to send back to Milan as slaves. He contemptuously allowed the ragged, emaciated remainder to straggle back to their native forests.

  The emperor marched his weary troops north to Cologne and settled them into winter quarters on the Rhine. “Hang up your breastplates and brain buckets and relax for a few months. It’s time to grow your seam squirrels and pants rabbits,” he told them cheerfully, referring to the inevitable flea and tick infestations that came to troops in barracks. “Enjoy it while you can.”

  Next spring he planned to drive deep into Germania with fire and sword, destroy all he found, scorch the earth and batter the barbarians into final, abject submission. After that, he could turn his attention and his veterans to the business of recapturing northern Gaul, and then Britain. The detail he’d sent had not been able to prevent Carausius from finding and parading that damned recovered Eagle in front of his superstitious troops, and they’d paid for that with their lives, but he was still a great general and he’d do what he knew best. He’d crush the usurper under his nailed military boot. He’d left Carausius alone for long enough. Now it was time to put him down, take what he wanted and build his own empire.

  XXIV. Fishbourne

  Carausius had used the lengthy breathing space to full advantage. He abandoned his plans to occupy Narbonne because of the proximity of Maximian’s superior force as it hurried by, moving at double pace from Spain to the Danube, but he marched into Rouen, emptied the mint and spread coin from it lavishly through northern Gaul, buying the loyalty of the legion at Bononia that had once been Maximian’s. The usurper emperor considered it politic to validate his claim in the eyes of his troops, so put on a ceremony to declare the founding of a British nation liberated from the emperors in Milan and Nicomedia, and free even from the new Roman centres of administrative power in Mediolanum, Antioch and Trier. It was a careful distinction Carausius made, as it implied that the twin emperors had turned their backs on Rome and its values but he, sent from heaven above, had not.

  The soldiers responded well to the implication that they were the last of Rome’s loyal legions, and happily took the generous donatives of gold that kept them bound to Carausius’ cause. The tribunes of the 30th Ulpia legion paraded their gilded silver Eagle through Bononia alongside the recovered Ninth Spanish’s Eagle and the standards of detachments from Carausius’ three British legions, the Second Augusta, the Sixth Victrix and the 20th Valerian. The new Empire of Britain covered the island itself and a large part of northern Gaul, and on the battlements of Bononia, a ship’s mast proudly displayed the multiple banners of the legions.

  With the dice rolled and Carausius committed to his course, he re-crossed the Narrow Sea to make the formal proclamations of empire in Britain and to begin the lengthy business of establishing its administration. Mindful of the reports he had received of the new pomp of Diocletian’s court, he ordered his own palace near Chichester to be upgraded into a fitting symbol of his power and influence, then journeyed north to Eboracum to meet the Pictish chieftains who were surprisingly keeping both their word and the peace along the Wall. Further south, as spring arrived, the Emperor Diocletian exchanged the imperial wreath for his military helmet and breastplate and came from the east with an armoured host. He sailed his convoy from Nicomedia and up the familiar Adriatic, where he was building a great new palace near his birthplace at Split, to make the passage through the Alps into Germania. At the same time, his co-emperor Maximian was readying for battle with another invading wave of Alemanni on the upper Danube.

  The twin pincers of the Caesars caught the barbarian armies unprepared. They crushed them, soaking the slaughter fields in Saxon blood. After their triumphs, the Romans were merciless. They burned field crops and granaries, razed settlements, took slaves, butchered livestock and crucified any man found with weapons. Tens of thousands of Carpiani were resettled in
the north, where territory devastated in earlier campaigns had been depopulated. The campaign to scorch the land subdued the inhabitants, added a huge swathe of new possessions to the empire and allowed the twin emperors to create a military frontier on the further, eastern bank of the Rhine.

  This they fortified and supplied from Mainz to Cologne via a great metalled road that allowed swift movement of troops, couriers and supplies. At Diocletian’s command, Maximian reduced the number of troops along the border itself, instead holding strike forces back from it a short distance behind the outlying garrisons that would warn of invasion. The response forces would activate when needed and use the new road system for rapid deployments. It meant more troops were needed, but it led to better stability in general and Diocletian’s newly-raised tax levels paid for it all.

  There was one more thing to do to prevent invasions. Maximian settled a long strip of northern border territory with Frisian and Chamavi tribes who pledged allegiance to Rome and formed a buffer against any wandering barbarian hordes. Now, with the frontier secured, the junior emperor could turn his attention to the upstart who’d stolen Britain. He’d start with those rebel Franks who had allied themselves to the enemy of Rome.

  Carausius was enjoying the fruits of his boldness. As well as living luxuriously in the north, in the Eboracum palace built a century or so before by Septimius Severus, he had ordered expensive improvements and additions to his south coast palace at Fishbourne. This, with its 100 rooms, was easily the largest Roman villa north of the Alps, and compared favourably with Nero’s fabled Golden House in Rome or the Sicilian villa at Piazza Armerina, where, Carausius heard, residents even enjoyed thermal baths from natural hot springs.

  The emperor had ordered a fine bath at his own palace, and he loved the building’s design and finish. Each day, he made time to examine the work being done by the builders, from the hypocaust that supplied underfloor heating to the fountains that graced the vast formal garden and courtyard and the atria of the living quarters. The arched and colonnaded dining hall was a beautiful airy space, the public hall and marble-faced reception rooms were opulent and huge, but the breath-taking showpiece was the integral bath house, an enclosure magnificent with pillars of polished Tibur stone decorated with gold leaf that graced the pre-plunge washrooms and the great bath itself, where 100 bathers could simultaneously take the water.

  The colonnaded fronts of the four wings that made up the palace - which measured about 150 paces square - had a triumphal entrance and a great assembly hall. With its courtyard garden, luxurious guest houses, fish ponds, granaries, military supply base and accommodations, it was a suitably imposing palace for an emperor, and Carausius revelled in it. For the first time in his life, he had time for relaxation, and one of his favourite pastimes was to take his big dogs Axis and Javelin into the forests to hunt deer, boar, wolf or, rarely, bear. It was when the emperor and his lover Guinevia were on a deer hunt that the dogs’ training truly showed itself.

  The duo had dallied behind the half-dozen spearmen who had accompanied them when the party set off in high excitement, chasing a magnificent red stag. The pair were embracing, laughingly fumbling at each other’s clothes. The sunlit forest clearing was quiet, the lovers were engrossed, and the dogs were lying a few paces away, when Axis let out a low growl and Javelin’s head swivelled to stare into the undergrowth. Carausius half-heard his dog’s warning, and waved a ‘silent!’ signal behind Guinevia’s bare shoulders, not wanting the distraction. He didn’t see the dogs rise to their feet and move almost without motion, their eyes flickering between their master’s hand signal and the brush 30 or so paces away, across the clearing.

  Carausius didn’t see the bulky black shape as it emerged from the bushes, but he looked up as a whiff of musty, rank fur struck his nostrils. What he saw was a black bear, its rheumy eyes blinking at the sunlight in the clearing, its wet doglike nose lifted to scent the air. In an instant his mind was racing, and he put his fingers over Guinevia’s warm lips. The bear, he realized, was upwind and had not yet scented them properly. Its eyes were poor and had not seen the lovers on the turf in front of it, but its hearing, he thought bitterly, would be good enough to catch any noise of movement he made towards his boar spear. He glanced at his dogs, which were crouched low, quivering, teeth bared in silent snarls. He made another hand gesture, a circling motion that told the dogs to move to the side. They flitted across the grass like shadows, and the bear turned its head suspiciously in their direction.

  Carausius moved his own head slowly, eyes seeking his heavy spear. Four paces away. He could get it and be in time turn to face the bear before it arrived, but Guinevia? He pressed his mouth to her ear. “Stay still. Keep lying here,” he breathed.

  Axis was glancing to him. He brought up his hand in the ‘Kill’ signal and waved the dogs’ release. They leaped forward at the bear. It turned to the movement and started to its hind legs. Carausius had the spear haft in hand and was turned towards the wild beast in time to see the racing dogs launch. The bear swatted at Javelin, who flew sideways, rolled and was back on his feet and lunging. The diversion had let Axis in and his great jaws were sunk in the bear’s thick fur at the throat. The big dog was tearing at it, the bear was clawing at its tormentor. Javelin hit the beast from the side and all three were entangled and growling ferociously as the man raced up, saw the moment and plunged his heavy boar spear under the bear’s ribs. He strained his great strength and lifted the beast, with both dogs still attached, like a harvester throwing hay. The spearhead burst the bear’s heart. Axis, bloodied from the beast’s claws, was bleeding from his shoulders but had torn an ugly slash across the predator’s throat. Javelin had the bear’s snout in his jaws and was shaking his head, tearing painfully at the dying beast that was pumping its blood onto the grass.

  As fast as that, the attack and kill were ended. Carausius gave the spearhead a final twist, then called his dogs away. He turned to Guinevia, who was white-faced with shock. “The dogs did well, eh?” he said, wiping his hands on the grass to remove some of the gore that had spattered up.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she whispered. “So silent, so quick.”

  “Aye,” said the emperor, “and they’ve ruined his pelt.” But he was smiling even as he complained. Sucia had done a fine job training his hounds. He was still to learn just how valuable that training was, and how it would save his life.

  Safely back in Fishbourne, where the emperor proudly relayed the story and showed the torn bear skin, prompting a few witticisms about a Bear killing a bear, Carausius was relaxed enough to tolerate the good-natured jibes, for he was enjoying life as never before. Just as he took deep pleasure in the lovemaking he shared with Guinevia, who had bewitched him with her spells and who was increasingly important in the daily running of the new administration, he and she both took a good deal of pleasure in the palace, and they both especially enjoyed wandering into the north wing, to watch the Ionian artist Claria Primanata, who had been brought at considerable expense from her faraway home, to construct a vast floor mosaic of sea creatures, one of a dozen the emperor had commissioned for the palace.

  The Greek oversaw a squad of nimble-fingered small boys who placed coloured fragments of pottery to her meticulous designs, which were all in the Italian style. The boys were working at low tables, where they put down the pieces onto a coloured design painted on papyrus, the whole thing contained in a frame. They fixed the mosaic fragments together with grout as they worked on one panel at a time. When it was done, the finished section was lifted out and laid over an older floor which had a black and white pattern but which had the advantage of being a level surface, a constant problem in creating a mosaic floor. Then, the edges between the latest section and the previous one were carefully joined and grouted. Claria’s ocean-themed artwork was dominated by the image of a trident-carrying Cupid riding on a dolphin and was intended to remind the viewer of the sea power of the emperor-admiral. On the walls above it, a vast se
a-themed mural was also being created.

  Claria’s slave Celvinius Ionis, a portrait painter who had been forced to sell himself into slavery because of an unfortunate gambling habit, was recording scenes from the emperor’s waterborne life. Here was the boy fleeing for his life across the German Sea, here was the river pilot on the great Rhine. Next in the mural came the Lord of the Narrow Sea as an admiral suppressing pirates. Here, he was fearlessly leading his fleet around the stormy northern horn of Pictland, where terrible cannibals waited to murder and eat the victims of shipwreck.

  Celvinius had slyly added an image or two of his own. A bear or two were half-hidden in woodland scenes, a figure that looked suspiciously like Guinevia could be seen on close examination to be hovering a few inches off the ground, and there was even a depiction of the mad emperor Caligula’s ‘conquest of the sea.’ The painter had pictured him ordering his soldiers to do battle with the waves and defeat Neptune before setting them to collect seashells, which he had displayed in Rome as evidence of his triumph. Now, the muralist was working on a vast wall-painting to show the fleet in Bononia, but he was handicapped by a lack of knowledge of the city and was waiting for an opportunity to interview Allectus to get a description of it.

  The sorceress Guinevia glided in, followed by several inky-fingered slaves, their arms wrapped around bundles of scrolls. “More decrees to sign, lord,” she said, gesturing for a slave to hold out the portable writing table he carried. She looked around. “I like the mosaic a great deal.” She flashed a motherly smile at the talented young Ionian, who dropped her usual haughtiness to respond with a gracious inclination of the head. “The mural is very effective, too, in its way,” Guinevia said thoughtfully. “Although it’s not classical art.” She fingered the decorative gold pestle shaped like a bull’s horns that hung around her neck.