Emperor tt-1

by Stephen Baxter

  In fact Agrippina thought Nectovelin was unfair. It was the priests' own laws which made it impossible for them to submit to Roman rule. In their way, the druidh had integrity, even if it was suicidal.

  And this young man now proved he wasn't a priest for nothing. He said softly, 'Would you fight Roman legions without your gods at your back?'

  Nectovelin roared, 'Who are you to stand between me and my gods, boy?'

  'Oh, shut up, you bully.' A burly farmer called Braint got to her feet. Her hair was filthy, like a mass of smoky old thatch. She was an immense woman, as muscular as a man, but Agrippina knew she had raised six children and managed one of the largest farms in the area single-handed since the death of her husband. She said, 'I'm going to say what none of you men has the balls to say in front of these posturing princes. We should sue for peace.'

  After a brief, shocked silence, there were muttered replies. 'The Romans make peace only on their terms-it would be surrender!' 'We can't fight them. They have the resources of a continent. We have only a few farms.' 'Surrender? Cassivellaunus kicked Caesar himself back into the sea. We can do the same again!…'

  Cunedda surprised Agrippina by standing. He was one of the youngest here, but his status, as a junior member of Cunobelin's line, won him a moment of silence. 'With respect to Braint, I don't think peace is possible. It's gone too far for that. And we Catuvellaunians are in great danger. The Romans certainly recognise us as their strongest foe, and so we have more to lose than anybody else. Think: if we fight and lose, our power will be destroyed by the Romans.'

  Nectovelin growled, 'And if we fight and win?'

  'Then the Romans will come back, and their vengeance will be terrible. For they cannot afford to appear weak before their subject peoples.'

  Caratacus's lip curled. The prince wore armour, a leather chest-plate, and cut his hair short, so the lines of his scalp were revealed. His brother was like him but wore his hair in a long, unruly tangle. Caratacus snapped, 'Then what do you suggest, nephew?'

  'That we fight,' Cunedda said simply. 'I am no warrior-my own life will be spent cheaply. But we must fight as Cassivellaunus did. We must fight the Romans to a standstill. And then, with our strength proven, we must come to an honourable peace.' He sat down, trembling.

  Agrippina patted his arm. 'Well said,' she whispered.

  'If they listen.'

  Nectovelin stood again. 'So we must fight,' he said gravely. 'The question is, how?'

  Togodumnus called out shrilly, 'The boy said it! Like Cassivellaunus!'

  'Yes,' said Nectovelin, 'but the Cassivellaunus who won, not the one who lost.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'We must use our strengths,' Nectovelin insisted. Nobody knew how many troops the Romans planned to field, he said. Reports claimed that many thousands had already landed, and there were more of their terrifying ships on the horizon. But all those Romans needed to be fed, every day. 'We know the land, they don't. A corn field becomes a weapon if burning it leaves a hundred legionaries hungry. We draw them in, as far as they will come. And we wear them down, bit by bit.'

  'Then you are suggesting raids,' said Togodumnus. 'Ambushes.'

  Braint nodded. 'Cassivellaunus did that. And he used delaying tactics too. He had his allies send embassies to negotiate for peace. All of it used up Caesar's energy and patience.'

  The druidh got to his feet. 'Sneak attacks? Delays? Perhaps you should go back to your own country, Nectovelin, for I hear the Brigantians make a living off stealing each other's cattle.'

  Nectovelin glowered.

  But Caratacus was immediately on his feet. 'The priest is right. We must fight with devastating force. We must gather an army of our allies and meet the Romans in the field. It will be glorious-and we will push the Romans back into the Ocean!'

  That won him a few cheers, but Agrippina saw that the support was only half-hearted.

  Nectovelin remained standing. Despite his obvious anger at the priest's insult he spoke carefully. 'But that, prince, is the mistake Cassivellaunus made in the end. When he fought limited skirmishes on grounds of his choosing, he won. When he met Caesar in a pitched battle in the field, he lost. Look around you, man! You have only a few warriors. It will be farmers who would take the field. And this will not be a war against the Trinovantes or the Atrebates, who are like you. Now you will face Roman legionaries, who are trained from boyhood for one thing only, and that is for battle. Even if you were to win a victory or two, what then? Your farmers will come home for the harvest, or to plant the winter wheat. The legionaries have no harvest to gather. They will come on and on, until they crush you.

  'You know me, Caratacus. I have fought at your side. I would never flinch from a fight. But I'm urging you to pick a fight you can win.'

  But Caratacus would have none of it. He yelled, 'I say the priest is right, you think like a Brigantian cattle thief!'

  Nectovelin rested his hand lightly on the hilt of a dagger. The tension in the house was extraordinary.

  Agrippina could bear it no more. She pushed her way out of the house into the dusty air of Camulodunum. She could see the logic of Nectovelin's argument, that patient resistance was the way to wear down the Romans. But she was not the person she had been a few days before. Her deep, angry core responded to Caratacus's bold cries of total war; she longed to see Roman blood spilled.

  IX

  Narcissus came to a ridge of high ground. He broke away from his companions and urged his horse to climb the rise. From here, he looked back at the column.

  He would not have admitted it to any of the officers, not even to his ally Vespasian. But the fact was that a Roman army on the march was a stunning sight. The legionaries flowed past, an endless river, their metal armour shining under the watery British sun, the standard bearers identifying each unit. The army was noisy too. The sound of thousands of feet was a low thunder that shook the very landscape, overlaid with the amphitheatre-like murmur of a crowd of male voices, and the clatter of metal on metal, and the brittle peals of signal horns.

  The men were heavily laden. As well as his weapons and armour each man carried a complicated kit containing a saw, a basket, a pickaxe, a water bottle, a sickle, a chain, a turf-cutter, a dish and pan, and enough rations for three days. Narcissus had heard the men grumble about this load; they called themselves 'Marius's mules', after Gaius Marius, the great general who had helped define the Roman way of waging war. But this meant that each unit was ready at a command to fight-or to dig out a fort or build a bridge-and the army as a whole was unburdened by a long baggage train.

  Away from the main column of the legionaries the auxiliaries walked or rode. The specialist foot soldiers marched like the legionaries, the slingers and javelin-throwers and spearmen, the archers with their chain mail and bows, while cavalry units rode out to the flanks, providing cover for the infantry. Most of the auxiliaries were recruited from the provinces or even the barbarian lands beyond, and in the drab British landscape they made splashes of colour with their exotic helmets and cloaks and tunics. Indeed, many of the legionaries were provincials now too, a major change since Caesar's day, and when the cohorts came close enough Narcissus could hear the jabber of alien tongues. This Roman army was a vast mixing-up of races drawn from Gaul to Asia, from Germany to Africa, and yet they all worked in harmony under the command of a good Roman.

  And the marching men threw up dust that caught the sun, so that a band of light stretched dead straight across the undulating British landscape.

  Vespasian came trotting up. 'You shouldn't break away like that, secretary. This is hostile country, remember.'

  'Oh, I like to test your vigilance, legate. And what a sight!'

  'Quite. The poor little British.' Brittunculi. 'The legions will crush them like peppercorns in a grinder.'

  'Well, it's a marvel of organisation,' Narcissus said. 'It's like a city on the march.'

  'Aulus Plautius is nothing if not meticulous.'

  Narcissus said soft
ly, 'His enemies say he is nothing but meticulous.'

  Vespasian raised his eyebrows. 'Are you testing my loyalty, secretary? I suppose that is your job. I'd rather follow a man like Plautius than a Caesar. What we need is planning and control, not brilliance-dedication to the cause, not to oneself.'

  Narcissus mulled that over. He actually knew Aulus Plautius a little better than Vespasian probably suspected. The Plautii had a somewhat tangled relationship with the imperial family. A daughter of Plautius's father's cousin had been the Emperor Claudius's first wife-and her mother had been a close friend of Livia, the manipulative and dangerous wife of Augustus. So Aulus Plautius was a good choice personally for this crucial project, and as it happened, with his experience as governor of Pannonia, he was well suited militarily and politically as well. Claudius was wily enough to choose a man whom he could trust-but that hadn't stopped him sending Narcissus along to keep an eye on things.

  Meanwhile, as Claudius trusted Aulus Plautius, so Narcissus knew he could trust Vespasian. It had been Narcissus's influence that had secured Vespasian this posting in Britain, his first legionary command. From humble origins, Vespasian had used the influence of his better-connected mother to climb up the social ladder. He had acquitted himself well in his first military post, as an equestrian tribune in Thrace. Narcissus watched constantly for young men like Vespasian, clearly able, eager for advancement yet blocked by their social origin. They were the hungry sort who needed a favour-and, once given it, were forever in your debt.

  'Well, it's a marvel, however this adventure turns out,' Narcissus said. 'Look at that band of dust we throw up, right across the country, like a dream of the road that will one day be laid here.'

  Vespasian grunted. 'Not "one day", secretary-today.' He pointed to the rear of the column.

  In the back of the short baggage train, behind bulky shapes that were the components of prefabricated siege engines, Narcissus made out slower-moving units; he saw the flutter of flags, the flash of surveyors' mirrors. 'They are laying the road already?'

  'Why not? We aren't coming this way by chance; for decades to come this route is likely to be a key artery inland from Rutupiae. May as well get it right from the start. Anyhow it keeps the troops busy, and there's no harm in that.'

  'And show the natives we intend to stay.'

  'Quite so.'

  'Ah, but where is it we have come to stay?'

  Narcissus tugged at his rein, turned his horse away and gazed out on the landscape of southern Britain. He saw a gently rolling land. Forest clumped on hilltops and spilled into the valleys-he thought he saw pigs snuffling at one forest fringe-but most of the land was cleared, and covered by a patchwork of fields. Round houses sat everywhere, squat, dark cones. The place was clearly densely populated-though empty today; evidently when they saw a Roman army approaching the people had sensibly run or hidden.

  There were strikingly many circular structures: the houses, ditches and banks, rings of standing stones which for all he knew they might have been forts, or temples, or simply places to keep the sheep. It struck him that as seen from the air, by a curious crow perhaps, Britain would be covered by circles, like a muddy field splashed by rain.

  But Romans built in straight lines, and the new military road would cut through this landscape of circles, rude as a sword slash. Roman roads ran straight for long stretches because they were designed to support army marches, and as long as they had a good surface and sound drainage and weren't too steep for a soldier loaded with his kit, the roads could be laid across almost any landscape.

  Narcissus knew that such stupendous rectilinearity was itself an oppressive marker of Roman dominance. This was a land beyond the Ocean, a land at the very edge of the Roman mind, beyond which lay madness. But here was the army to impose order on chaos.

  That was the theory. But, he reflected, this 'chaos' was a place of neat little fields and farmhouses. He murmured, 'We are here to civilise the moon. But there is a civilisation here already!'

  'Peaceful, too,' Vespasian murmured. 'Those low walls are for keeping out sheep, not men.'

  'Caesar wrote of waves of invaders from the continent. It's true you see pots from Germany and brooches from Gaul. That doesn't mean the potters and jewellers came over in force! Julius wanted to make Britain seem the wilder place, I suppose, and his own deeds the greater by association. Yet I should have anticipated this,' he said. 'After all it is deliberate policy to cultivate our neighbours.'

  In return for high-quality goods from the empire, raw materials were imported from Britain: minerals, wheat, leather, minerals, hunting dogs-and, increasingly in the last few decades, slaves, though as Narcissus could testify from his personal experience Britons made for testy servants. The empire made a fat profit on such trade, trinkets exchanged for huge volumes of raw materials. Narcissus, a thoughtful man, considered this pattern probably inevitable when an advanced culture dealt with a more primitive one. And all of this served the longer term goals of the empire. Roman material culture was an invaluable tool for manipulating local elites, and friendly native rulers provided an inexpensive buffer against more remote barbarians.

  'So we have tamed these southern Britons. I just didn't expect to see it had gone this far.' Narcissus felt somehow irritated by the landscape's lack of strangeness.

  'Perhaps it has gone further than you think,' Vespasian said. He produced a coin, roughly cut and stamped. 'This was part of a hoard, a tribute for Aulus Plautius from the ruler of a local mud-heap. The coin was issued by the king of the Atrebates, in fact-our friend Verica. Yes, the British strike their own coins! Or at least some of them do.'

  Narcissus took the coin. 'It's gold.'

  'Yes. Used for tribute, it seems, not for commerce, for it has too high a value. Even these half-civilised Britons don't get the point of a currency, it seems.

  'But we still know little of what lies beyond this south-east corner. We believe there are more than twenty tribes out there, of which we have made serious contact with only a handful. No doubt there are plenty of hairy-arsed fellows out there in the hills who have never even heard of a Roman.'

  Still Narcissus felt faintly uneasy. 'But this is a land with its own story. You can see that, just by looking from here. And now here we are to wipe it all away. You know, when you occupy a country you take on the responsibility for its people, perhaps millions of them, for all their hopes and dreams. I sometimes wonder if Rome knows the gravity of what it is doing.'

  Vespasian looked at Narcissus curiously. 'You aren't feeling a prick of conscience, are you, secretary?'

  'Every thoughtful man has a conscience.'

  'The Britons are farmers, but nothing more. You can buy a woman with a handful of glass beads, and her husband with a mirror so he can comb his scraggly beard-but he will be frightened by the barbarian looking back out at him! We must be like parents with these child-like people. Firm but fair.'

  'Oh, I understand that.' Narcissus shook off his mood, reminding himself it was always a mistake to show the merest chink of weakness-always. He took one last glance back at the landscape. 'By Apollo's eyes I couldn't bear to live in one of those wooden huts. They sit there like huge brown turds. No wonder the Britons are dazzled by a goblet of wine or two!'

  Vespasian laughed, and led the way down the slope.

  X

  Agrippina lay on her belly in the low brush. She had been here since first light. She was stiff, her neck was sore, and she was out of food and low on water. But here she lay, silent and motionless, her face blackened by dirt, for she was spying on the Roman army.

  Even she, educated in Gaul, had been stunned to see a Roman army on the march close up. The tens of thousands of men in close order had taken no less than three hours, she estimated, to stream past her position. All that time the noise had been deafening. The Romans awed her, even as she clung to her shard of hatred over Mandubracius, and her longing for revenge.

  But she kept her mind clear. She had tried to count the troops
and units, baggage carts and animals. She had already sent preliminary information by a runner to the camp Caratacus had established to the west of here, on the bank of the River of the Cantiaci. Despite the princes' warlike bluster, for now they had followed Nectovelin's advice, to watch, to gather information on the Romans, and to strike at them in small corrosive ways. Thus Agrippina was just one of a network of spies across the country.

  After the main body of the force passed she kept her station, to see what might follow. She was given a lesson in Roman road engineering.

  It had begun even before the first soldiers had come this way. Surveyors, protected by a detachment of cavalry, took up positions on ridges and hills. They had mysterious contraptions of wood and string and lead weights that they held up before their faces. Agrippina imagined this must have something to do with making sure the road ran straight. After that the route was marked out with canes thrust into the ground every few paces, and the surveyors hurried on to their next station.

  After the main force of the army had passed along the marked-out route a construction gang followed. The gang themselves seemed to be soldiers; a cart followed with armour and weaponry piled high, though every man kept a knife at his belt.

  They worked their way along a track already churned up by forty thousand pairs of boots, tens of thousands of hooves. First they cleared the central track of undergrowth, and then dug out ditches to either side, heaping up the dirt along the spine of the road. They piled large, heavy rocks on top of the ridge of dirt, and then a layer of smaller rocks, and finally gravel was shovelled out and spread crudely. The smaller rocks and gravel were hauled along in carts, but the heavy rocks were scavenged locally-mostly from the dry stone walls of local farms, but there were no farmers around to complain. At last the soldier-engineers walked up and down along the newly laid stretch of the road, ramming down the gravel with heavy posts.