Arthur Britannicus

by Paul Bannister

  The wounded Carausius was taken to safety, the legions tramped out into the glens of Caledonia and the tribune Cragus conducted a textbook campaign. He destroyed the Picts’ army, their crops, their huts and their morale, all in a matter of months. He cleared the region between the walls of Hadrian and Antoninus with flying columns of cavalry that surprised and defeated the wandering warbands. He encircled the rocky strongpoint of the Votadini that controlled the Forth valley, expecting to conduct a long siege of the steep-sided stronghold, but the resistance melted away after a lucky shot from a ballista toppled the Votadini king, Alpin from a high wall. Cragus took the fortress’ surrender, lined the cliff with burdened crucifixes and moved next to crush the Damnoni tribesmen who had gathered to the west. Then he turned north against the greater body of their kin, who were encamped behind the presumed safety of the estuary.

  Cragus remembered his history, and how the legions had conquered the wide Thames river at Londinium with a pontoon bridge. Under cover first of darkness and then of the morning’s sea fog, he constructed a floating highway from lashed-together fishing vessels to cross the wide waters. The bridge and the fog allowed him to evade the eyes of Damnoni scouts who watched the upstream crossings, and his force arrived unsuspected on the clan’s eastern flank. The battle to which he brought them effectively ended after the Picts’ initial berserk charge was broken on the curved shields and long spears of the legion’s front rank. Their impetus spent, the tribesmen backed away and Cragus waved his veterans to step forward, stamping, chopping and thrusting in mechanical precision as they wreaked bloody ruin on the rabble. Cragus herded hundreds of captives into the slave pens and marched east and north along the line of old Roman forts to roll up the rest of the resistance. He left behind him a wasteland of scorched earth, plundered crops and ruined hamlets and brought back another procession of manacled slaves.

  All the while, Carausius was immobilized, recovering from the ankle wound he’d received from the treacherous Calderian. The sword had cut deep, but the tendons seemed to have survived. British military medics had washed the wound carefully in vinegar, sewed it up and splinted and immobilized the joint. The emperor instructed them to do what the pharmacist Campana had done for his facial and foot injuries in the hospital in Mainz. She had applied henbane and poppy seed to the wounds, cleaned them daily with sour wine, hyssop and comfrey and re-bandaged them daily in fresh linen. “I came out of that without infection,” he told his medics, rubbing his scarred cheek. “Do the same now, I don’t want my flesh to rot, I want to keep my leg.” The treatments worked and within a month, although unable to walk without pain, the emperor was in a raeda carriage trundling south, first to Colchester, then on to coastal Fishbourne where he wanted to meet his staff and supervise the reinforcement of the Saxon Shore defences.

  Couriers sailed daily across the narrows from Gaul or rode from the corners of Britain to Carausius’ palace, bringing intelligence from the mainland and from the line of garrisons that guarded the southern and eastern ramparts of his empire. His well-rewarded spies along the Rhine and Scheldt rivers also told him of the progress Maximian was making, rebuilding his burned fleet, and the Briton knew that another naval crisis and invasion was brewing. But, for all his concerns, he made time to take pleasure in the great palace, where the artisans he had brought to work there were moving ahead.

  The mosaic artist Claria had been joined by a dark-haired Carthaginian astrologer, Cinea Carbonia, whose task was to create a detailed star chart that would be set in the tiny tiles to show the heavens just as they were on the night Carausius was born. On the walls above the mosaic, fresh murals displayed scenes from his life and career. Among them were painted images of his golden crown of courage, his recovery of the legion’s Eagle and his imperial wreath. The artist was careful too, to leave space for the triumphs still to come, and like a good courtier, diligently mentioned that plan and the plentiful spaces to the emperor.

  The forward planning was intelligent. The emperor of Britain was preparing to create new triumphs, and therefore was a frequent presence around the shipyards of Dover and Portus Magnus, where he was overseeing modifications to his refitted fleet. The shipmaster Cenhud had given the emperor some ideas, and he wanted them implemented. “The Romans are largely building ships of the kind they use in the Inland Sea, lord,” Cenhud explained. “They are useful in rivers like the Rhine, because they are nimble. They are also much easier to build, but they are not such effective sea-going warships as the Gaulish vessels we use.”

  The difference, the old shipmaster explained, was in the way the Gauls built their ships. They used oak frames and nailed the planking of the hull to them carvel-style, butting the edges together to make a strong, smooth-sided vessel that was not stiff or brittle but would flex enough to survive in bad seas. The planking finished, they caulked the seams, hammering fibrous material like cattle hair between the heavy timbers. It was a longer process than the lap-straked, or clinker-built vessels the Romans built, where each plank of the hull overlapped the next. That made for an easier build, and the clinkered ships were lighter and more nimble but they were also weaker, and did not do as well in heavy weather, flexing overmuch in heavy seas.

  Another vital difference was in the materials. Because of the strength of the Gauls’ ribbed ships, the hull planking could be heavy oak that was much stronger than the lighter pine boards used in the clinker-built boats. “Clinkered pine or cedar, Caros, is fine for small boats. Warships need oak, and oak bound in iron at that, better for ramming enemy vessels,” the shipmaster concluded. That, thought Carausius grimly, was where the great land general Maximian would learn a hard lesson from the seagoing Britons. He went back to the shipyards, hobbling but mobile, and supervised certain changes to the ships of his fleet.

  Maximian did not have the efficient spy network of his rival, so was unaware of Carausius’ actions. The Roman had moved forward impatiently with his ship building efforts, and ridden his men hard. Now, he judged he was ready for the invasion and recapture of Britain and ordered his fleet to sail from Gaul.

  The Roman had brought his newly-built troop barges down from Forum Hadriani. Eager to start, and champing at the bit after an eleven-day delay caused by foul weather, he had ignored his mariners’ advice and seized on a brief window between the storms to launch his invasion. He’d taken on troops along the Belgic coast and intended when he left the staging area off Ostend to sail northwest, weathering northerly around the south eastern tip of the British coast and into the mouth of the Thames river. His swift attack would plunge arrow-straight for the capital. Nothing could go wrong and Maximian gloated at the thought of seeing Carausius’ death.

  The triremes that headed the Roman’s armada made a brave sight as they entered the Gallic Strait and moved northeast against its fast-flowing ebb tide. Triple-banked oars under the blue sails dipped and swayed in rhythm, the tap of the hammer or sound of the horn that kept the rowers synchronized carried through the blustering wind, and the glint of the soldiers’ polished armour caught the rays of the watery sun. But all was not going well. The nasty northerly wind and high spring tides combined to wreck Maximian’s plan. The near-gale that rose unexpectedly quickly joined with seasonal strong currents to send a great salt river racing westwards. The German Sea poured out like a wall of water from a breached dam. It raced around headlands and churned up vast ridges of white-foamed waves as it forced itself into the narrows of the strait before racing to its spreading release in the wide Atlanticus.

  Maximian’s bigger ships could cope with crossing such powerful elements, but his more fragile, unhandy and flat-bottomed troop barges should never have put out into that rapid-moving mass of water. They simply could not successfully battle across the wind and tide to the Thames. They were forced west with the flow, but fast as they went with the wind and tide, they could not outrun the warnings of the beacons lighted at sight of them all along the Foreland of Kent. The invaders were swept past. There was no place safely t
o come ashore on this coast, where the British fleet waited to put out of their strongpoint at Dover. The frustrated Romans could see British cavalry archers trotting along the coastal battlements of chalk cliffs, keeping pace as the enemy army was carried along in their unseaworthy barges, helpless on the rapids of the ebb tide.

  Maximian viewed the line of smoking beacons that sent their wind-horizontal signals from headland to headland ahead of him, and cursed. He saw answering smoke signals across the strait to the south, where the fleet’s secondary base at Bononia was also alerted. No surprise attack today, he thought bitterly, cursing the incompetence of the Egyptian shipmaster who had overseen the timing of the operation. He’d have him nailed to the prow of his ship for the return journey, he vowed. “We’ll have to find somewhere suitable for landing further west, once we get rid of these horsemen,” he declared. “We can’t have them whistling up troops while we’re still wading ashore.”

  He looked at the straggling sails of his flotilla, and ordered his signal officer to flag them to close up, while telling his own shipmaster to slow and wait for them. In the waist of his ship, soldiers were throwing up, already seasick in the jostling, heaving waves. The invasion fleet swept along, the smaller ships and barges powerless against the thrusting tidal race, and the sails of the British fleet could be seen astern as they clawed out of Dover harbour in pursuit. A lookout in the fighting tower already erected in the prow of Maximian’s flagship called out a warning. Sails were putting out from Bononia, too.

  With enemies on two sides, Maximian opted to forge ahead. ‘Make for Portus Magnus,” he said, naming the great British harbour that sheltered behind an island off the southern coast. He was gambling that Carausius had gathered most of his fleet at Dover to repel an attack at the south eastern tip of Britain. Now that he’d been carried past the Britons there, his way might be clear to steal into their hopefully less-defended port to the west. He looked around. More of his soldiers were vomiting, the seasickness was worsening. Would his men even be ready to fight if they got ashore?

  Astern, the British fleet was standing out into the narrows and angling south of him, and the sails from Bononia were also out into open sea, shepherding him away from their coast. Carausius, he thought, is cutting diagonally across my wake. He’s not heading to intercept me.

  The Roman was correct. The British emperor’s plan was to drive the Roman fleet west and north onto the island’s rock ledges or into the whirlpools, eddies and pyramid-shaped waves they created. And he knew the exact place to do it. The tide churned, the Romans ran with the millrace of water, butting head-on into green rollers. Explosions of white spume towered over their bows from time to time, and the shallow-keeled barges struggled for a grip on the water so they could claw across the wind. Every seasick soldier hoped for a landfall, their officers looked at the steep chalk cliffs with their footings in narrow strips of shingle and prayed they’d find a beach where they could land troops.

  The experienced British sailors herded the invaders like sheepdogs, lying their warships close to the wind, closing in to nip at the heels of the flock, harrying them from east and south until their admiral emperor, who had destroyed many pirates in these very waters, judged the moment right and ordered them to attack. In its first engagement as a national fleet, the British came down like pack wolves on a sheepfold.

  Carausius had learned how the Romans fought naval battles, and he knew they were no sailors. Because he had taken the seasoned mariners of their British fleet with him, he guessed that the replacements they’d had to recruit from Greece, Phoenicia and Egypt would likely use the familiar, old tactics which called for them to ram an opponent with the sharp beak at the prow of their warships, to hook onto the enemy and board him or to cripple the opponent by cutting down his sail halyards.

  The oak-ribbed hulls and oak planking of the heavier British warships were for all practical purposes impervious to any ramming the Romans’ lighter ships could inflict. Additionally, Carausius’ ship’s chandlers and quartermasters had fitted chains to protect the rigging and keep the crossed spars in place if their ropes should be severed. Against the threat of boarders, or of rigging-cutting blades, they carried long spars to fend off any ship that drew too close. They had also equipped their ships with something else.

  Every warship of the British fleet had mounted several great catapults on platforms alongside the collapsible fighting towers that were erected at bow and stern before an engagement. The ballistae were terrible, powerful giant crossbows that could fire either iron bolts or shaped stone balls and were lethal enough to crumble a mortared wall or shatter a ship’s hull. Carausius had ordered loopholes cut in the gunwales of his warships and solid breastworks fitted above them so the crews of the highly-accurate ballistae could aim and fire their deadly missiles while protected and unimpeded. In long hours of practice, squads had been drilled to operate speedily the winches that drew back the catapults’ animal sinew bowstrings and to reload the heavy iron bolts equally swiftly.

  For their part, in the weeks before the engagement, the tribunes had experimented with different warheads to see which would best penetrate a ship’s hull, and determined that blunt projectiles best shattered pine boards, while bodkin-tipped arrows were the missiles of choice against mail or leather armour. Supplies of both were piled at intervals near the catapults. Some of the artillerymen had also loaded round stones onto their ships, choosing river stones and some shaped granite as the best projectiles for density and accuracy. Lastly, a detachment of slingshot men who were trained to hurl lead missiles that were the shape and size of eggs were deployed on each ship, to work with the archers as snipers.

  The legion’s officers had seen to it that every infantryman was equipped with five javelins, heavy, iron-pointed weapons that had a round lead ball attached just below the arm-length spike, to add extra impetus at the strike. The spearhead itself was of softer iron, so it would bend on impact and could not easily be pulled out. This had the benefit of impeding the target if that unfortunate to have survived the strike. Neither could the bent javelin be re-used quickly against the thrower. Some of the newer javelins had a wooden pin securing the blade to the shaft. On impact, the pin broke, making the javelin useless to the enemy. All the British sailors needed was to get close.

  As the signals officer waved the red cloak that finally turned the two halves of the British fleet towards the enemy, the Romans were off the indented coast where Carausius’ great palace of Fishbourne stood. The signal beacons had flared and smoked their warnings for hours, and the emperor’s household steward had assembled the house and farm slaves, armed the retainers and taken them all to the headland to watch for invaders. Guinevia, who had formed a friendship with the mosaic artist Claria, looked west across the water at the island of Hayling. “It reminds me greatly of the northland, beyond the Wall,” she said, “I was born there, but I could live in a place like this.”

  “Stop the dreaming. Right now, we need all your magic,” said the Ionian. “The emperor has to stop the Roman fleet or we will all be on the auction block. Can you do anything to help?”

  Guinevia nodded. “I can do something,” she said simply.

  The sorceress looked east to survey the approaching sails, then south, gauging the speed of their approach, the wind and the flow of the speeding tide. Below her feet where she stood at the edge of a bluff, a line of ragged sea foam, swirling currents and clashing waves marked hidden, underwater ledges. They blocked and diverted the great power of the current and created a killing ground for sailors. Long green rollers threw up great pillars of white water as they hit the obstructions, giving more warning that the ledges’ wicked stone teeth would tear out the heart and snap the spine of any ship thrown onto them. Those undersea fangs extended out into the strait for two long miles. “It would be best if the Romans did not see that,” Gunevia murmured to herself. And she closed her eyes to begin her enchantments.

  The Romans were being dogged ever more closely, and Maxi
mian was cursing his inexperienced sailors. The invasion fleet was being forced nearer and nearer to the shore, and was straggling. Along the line to the rear three British ships, spray bursting over their bows, had already closed on a trireme that was attempting to shepherd the struggling troop barges. The British sea wolves tore into the rear quarter of the trireme and a volley of iron bolts slammed low into the vessel’s hull. Some hit the oars, throwing the rowers off their benches and causing the ship to slew and roll. An alert artilleryman who had waited his chance, fired his ballista’s great rock at the Roman hull just as the ship rolled away from him, revealing itself below the waterline. The smooth round river rock smashed through the planking, the ship rolled back level and suddenly green seawater was gushing into the vessel’s waist.

  One group of sailors tried to fother the stove-in planking by bandaging the hull with a sail. They draped the canvas over the bow, then dragged both ends along opposite sides of the ship, wrapping it right around the hull. They used the power of the inrushing seawater to push a plug of bundled woollen cloaks into the shattered planking. One brave mariner was hanging upside down over the ship’s side adjusting the plug, when an iron bolt fired at 30 yards’ range went straight through his body and pinned him to the pine boards. The shipmate holding him by the legs vomited in shock and fell backwards. The plug slipped out, the saltwater gushed in, and the trireme fell away, sluggish as it started to settle, its fate sealed. The British ships turned and, like wolves among sheep, began carving into the smaller, fragile troop carriers.