As the soldiers worked, under the pleasantly warm British sun, they sang. Many of their work-songs were in Latin, but Agrippina recognised some Gallic, and even a little Germanic. Rome's soldiers did not only come from Rome these days.
Agrippina had seen Gaul; she knew what the future would hold. From this beginning the roads would spread out across the country like ivy over a wall, bifurcating and firing off their straight-line segments, until every corner of the land was reached. Messages would flash along the roads fast as thought, and the next time the soldiers needed to march this way they would be able to make much faster progress than today, through the mud and dirt. And in the future the young fighters of Britain, who today were preparing raids against the advancing Romans, would be marched away along these roads to go fight in Germany and Thrace and Asia, far from the misty cool of their homeland. Thus the empire absorbed its enemies and used them for its own further expansion-
A hand was clamped over her mouth. Agrippina struggled, but she was pinned to the ground. Her mind flooded with awful memories of that night on the beach. But then the weight shifted off her back, and she was able to twist and see the broad, dirt-streaked face of Braint, the farmer.
'Sorry,' Braint hissed. 'Didn't want you yelling out.'
Agrippina tried to control her anger. 'You shouldn't have done that.'
'Well, you should be watching your back,' Braint said. She crawled deeper into the undergrowth, and winced.
For the first time Agrippina noticed that Braint's leg was bleeding. 'What happened? Were you found?'
'Nearly. I gashed my leg on a rock, and lost my knife, but I got away. Dodgy work, this spying. No wonder they gave it to us women.'
'You need to tie up that cut. Do you want to borrow my knife?'
'No need.' Braint cast around on the ground, and turned up a lump of flint. She slammed it down against a rock and cracked it in two, exposing an interior as smooth as cream. She tapped half the rock with a pebble to crack off long thin flakes, selected one shard, and began to saw a strip of cloth from her tunic. All this took only heartbeats. 'So,' she said as she worked, 'you counted the legionaries as they went by? How many?'
'You don't want to know. I even stayed to see the road builders pass.'
'Oh, yes. Those blond young Germans, stripped to the waist. I bet you enjoyed the sight.' She leered and grabbed her own crotch.
Agrippina, still shaken up, couldn't help smiling, for she had had some earthy thoughts as she watched the soldiers work.
Braint said, 'I saw them smashing up a holy place. They pulled down a ring of standing stones and crushed them for rubble, to make their road. They have no respect.'
'But it's a mighty force they've brought, Braint. Even Caratacus is going to be discouraged.'
'I wouldn't count on it,' Braint said gloomily. 'He's too fond of himself for that. Yesterday he led another assault on the Roman line. He burned a cart full of legionaries' socks, and lost three warriors in the process.' She snorted her contempt. 'Perhaps a thousand such flea bites will cause the Romans to falter. But it's beneath Caratacus's dignity, and I can't blame him for that. What's worse, all day the Roman commander has been receiving embassies. One local rich man or petty boss after another, coming to pledge allegiance to the Emperor.'
'We expected that,' Agrippina said.
'Yes, but one of them was the princes' own brother, Cogidubnus.' One of the sons Cunobelin had sent off for education to Rome. 'The word is that Cogidubnus is going to travel the country under Roman guard, negotiating treaties for the Emperor.'
'He would betray his own brothers?'
Braint shrugged. 'I think Cogidubnus would say that with their antics in recent years, Caratacus and Togodumnus have brought this storm down on all our heads. But there's rarely a right or a wrong in family matters, Agrippina, as you know.'
'So what now?'
'Caratacus is impatient. He's giving up the plan-the skirmishing, the ambushes. Soon the Romans will have to ford the Cantiaci River. Caratacus says that is where he will make his stand.'
'He's going for a pitched battle after all?' Agrippina felt a thrill of conflicting emotions. 'I suppose the whole course of Caratacus's life has led him to this point-him and Togodumnus.'
Braint harrumphed. 'If you use the word "honour" about them I'll smack you. The princes are two spoilt little boys who won't quit until they have it their own way. And they have the druidh whispering in their ear. Anyhow we have no choice but to support them. And, who knows, they might even win.' She cut free her strip of cloth and began to bind up her leg.
Idly, Agrippina picked through the flakes of flint.
After all her travelling she had a sense of the broad patterns of life across the island of Britain. Yes, in the south you had coins and pottery, farms and markets. But further away, where the Romans and their traders and their culture had yet to penetrate, older traditions prevailed. In her own nation of Brigantia you counted your wealth not in coin but by the numbers of cattle you owned. You ate off wooden bowls, not pots. You lived amid immense cairns, relics of the past. And you listened to fireside stories of kings of stone, and emperors of copper and tin, distant ancestors who had once ruled the land, their wealth and their domains utterly vanished with the coming of iron.
When Agrippina had learned to read she had come to doubt the truth of the family tales she had grown up hearing. How could such ancient histories have any truth if they had never been written down? But the stories were told and retold to audiences who knew them as well as the teller, and in their very telling the truth of these stories was preserved, from generation to generation. Thus she had grown up with the true deep history of her nation. Britain was an ancient place, soaked by deep culture. And when Braint had without conscious thought picked up a stone and shaped it into a tool, she was echoing a tradition that was far older than Rome.
But now the Romans were here, their army like an iron axe cutting through the trunk of an ancient tree. Whatever the outcome of the next few days, nothing would be the same, ever again-and Agrippina was here to see it. This wider perspective awed her, even as her lust for revenge still burned.
The sun was going down, the air cooling, and there had been no activity on the gleaming new road for some time.
'Come on, let's get back to the camp.' Braint stretched, and winced as the pain of her wound cut in once more. Agrippina helped her to her feet.
In the gathering twilight the two of them made their way through deserted farms towards Caratacus's camp.
XI
With Vespasian, Narcissus rode away from the dusty chaos of the soldiers' camp-building near the river bank. On the afternoon of this hot day, Narcissus was sweating as heavily as the horse beneath him. But as always it was a relief to get away from the army for a while; after another day on the march tens of thousands of men and their animals produced a tremendous stink.
They headed up to a scrap of higher ground, a ridge. Narcissus's horse picked its way cautiously over chalky earth littered with flints, which Narcissus inspected curiously. He had seen almost identical terrain throughout northern Gaul. It was as if, he mused, Gaul and Britain were in reality a single landscape, severed by a strip of Ocean as a surgeon's blade amputates a limb. It was an intriguing notion, but he had no idea how such huge changes in the structure of the earth could have come about. Perhaps Britain was a relic of Atlantis, he mused, or a bit of builder's debris left over from primordial days when giants constructed the earth.
From the ridge they looked west, to the river, and the soldiers who swarmed near its bank. An overnight fortress had been set out above the ford, constructed in a few hours despite the men's usual grumbling after a day of laden marching-but soldiers always complained, Vespasian said. The fort's rectangular formation was marked out by a ditch and a low bank topped by a palisade of wooden stakes, hastily lopped from a scrap of woodland nearby. In the interior the legionaries' leather tents were being set up in their usual rows. Already cooking smells curled u
p from a dozen fires, and the digging of latrines was itself a minor industry.
And when Narcissus looked further west, across the shining body of the river, he could see another force massed on the opposite bank. They were the Britons, here to oppose the Roman advance. The Britons, lacking any of the obvious discipline of the Roman troops, looked more like an urban mob, Narcissus thought idly, transplanted from Milan or Rome. Some of them seemed to be enacting some kind of ritual at the edge of the water. Narcissus could swear that they were breaking cups and plates, even weapons, and dumping the remains in the water. Was the barbarian mind really so bewildered that it imagined it was a good idea to smash your weapons and dump them in the river on the eve of battle?
But, disorganised and incomprehensible as they were, there were tens of thousands of them, Narcissus saw uneasily, perhaps even outnumbering the Roman forces. And at the rear of the crowd congregated by the river he saw horses drawing small, rapid, two-wheeled carts to and fro. They were the famous chariots of which Caesar had written so eloquently, rehearsing for war.
Vespasian showed no sign of unease. Indeed the legate seemed rather to be enjoying the spectacle. Vespasian pointed east, back the way they had come. 'You can see the native track we've been following,' he said.
The track had run parallel to the south bank of the estuary of the Tamesis, following a roughly straight line-not paved or properly constructed like a Roman road, but obviously ancient, heavily rutted and clearly useful. The army had made a thorough mess of its surface, leaving a band of churned earth that stretched off into the afternoon mist. But somewhere back there teams of road-builders laboured; the next force that came this way would make much faster progress.
'But,' Narcissus said, 'the track has led us to this fording place across the river.'
'Quite,' Vespasian said. 'The scouts say that the river here is an eighth of a mile wide. Not far downstream it widens-look, you can see-to perhaps twice that width. Further upstream it deepens quickly. So this ford is by far the easiest place to cross, and the British know it. This is the first significant obstacle we've faced since Rutupiae, the first pinch point where our formation is constrained. And so this is where the Britons have gathered to greet us. No doubt they intend to slaughter us one by one as we struggle across the ford.'
'But,' Narcissus said, 'the Britons know the land as we do not. Why make a stand at all? They could hide, harry us, try to starve us out.'
Narcissus shrugged. 'They've made some rather half-hearted attempts to do just that. But there doesn't seem a great deal of competence over there, secretary. We suspected as much from the moment we landed unopposed.'
'Unopposed save for a foolish boy who thought we were his friends,' Narcissus said, a little wistfully. 'Well, I imagine you have no intention of falling into the rather pathetic trap the Britons have set for you. What, then?'
Vespasian eyed him, almost mischievously. 'But that would spoil the fun! Do you really want to know how the plot will unfold even before the actors take the stage?'
Narcissus grumpily turned his horse's head, and led the way down towards the lower ground. 'Suit yourself. In the meantime I'm going to spend the rest of the day with Phoebus.' This was the most senior of the surgeons Aulus Plautius had brought with him-and, like most of the army's best doctors, he was Greek, like Narcissus. 'While you crack barbarian skulls, I may get some civilised conversation for a change. And perhaps I'll help stitch a few wounds or bathe a few broken heads. For I'm quite sure that for all your complacency, Vespasian, the Britons' iron blades will do some damage before this is over.'
Vespasian followed, apparently not offended. 'Yes, but we will prevail. Remember, Narcissus, that to these Britons all this is new. Even their leaders, the buzzing Catuvellaunian princes we hear so much about, have never engaged in a set-piece battle. We have been waging wars for centuries. We have preserved the wisdom of great generals like Scipio and Marius, Pompey and Caesar himself-we do not forget our victories, or our mistakes.'
'You are nothing if not systematic,' Narcissus said grudgingly.
Vespasian said, 'You're a hard man to amuse. Secretary, this may be the most significant engagement of the first phase of our campaign. It's hard to imagine the Britons raising such a force again, once we've scattered them. This is the battle of Britain! Aulus Plautius himself insists it is important for you to understand how this battle unfolds: you have the ear of the Emperor after all. Just watch, listen, remember-and tell Claudius what a good job we did for him today.'
XII
Nectovelin stalked through the Catuvellaunian camp on the bank of the Cantiaci River, with Agrippina and Cunedda at his side. The three of them were looking for Caratacus and Togodumnus. Nectovelin hoped to find out what, if any, strategy the princes had in mind. They weren't having much luck. The place was in chaos.
The warriors themselves looked imposing enough. Both Nectovelin and Cunedda, dressed for the fight themselves, wore armour: sword belts, chain mail, leather trousers, iron helmets, and big rectangular shields. Nectovelin's shield was especially handsome, with bronze inlays of angry boars over hardened wood, and it bore the scars of multiple axe blows. Cunedda was tense, though, fingering the hilt of his sword. He had no experience of war, but, he said, honour would not allow him to shirk the fight today. Other warriors worked on their weapons and armour, fixing holes in their chain mail vests, grinding the edges of their swords.
But many of the would-be fighters wore only farmers' work clothes, tunics and trousers and cloaks of wool or leather, and had no weapons save for a club or a scythe.
Agrippina admitted that a good crowd swarmed on this muddy river bank. Caratacus's army was made up of levies from the Catuvellaunians themselves and from the peoples who owed the Catuvellaunians tribute, mostly Trinovantes, Cantiaci, Iceni and Atrebates. Nectovelin constantly grumbled that the disunity of the British nations since Cassivellaunus gave the Romans their clearest advantage. Even before the invasion force had landed some southern rulers had allowed Roman soldiers on their territories, making them protectorates of the empire. So it was a significant feat of leadership for the Catuvellaunian princes even to have assembled this horde of many nations, though Nectovelin growled ominously that he could see no sign of the Dobunni's promised warriors. But it was a scramble, a mix-up, a crowd of many tongues, and it was hard to see who was in charge.
And the fighters had brought their families, even their dogs and goats and sheep. Children swarmed around Agrippina's feet, mock-fighting with bits of wood, excited by the noise. Vendors of broiled meat, pine cones and hazelnuts worked the crowd. With the noise of men shouting, children screaming, dogs barking and chickens clucking, it was more like a huge, disorganised market than an army.
This was the way the Catuvellaunians and their allies and enemies had always fought their wars. But Agrippina glanced uneasily across the river, where the clean straight lines of the legionaries' fort were clearly visible.
Cunedda asked Nectovelin, 'So what do you think?'
Nectovelin grunted. 'What a dog-fight. I wouldn't bring my family here, put it that way.'
'I'm your family,' Agrippina pointed out.
'Yes, and I had to stop you putting on armour!'
'There are many women preparing to fight here-Braint among them.'
'Braint is a tough old boot with forearms like Coventina's shuddering thighs.'
'I heard that,' Braint growled, suddenly right behind them. Agrippina was always surprised such a massive woman could move so silently.
Nectovelin sighed. 'My point is, 'Pina, she will make the Romans piss their pants-whereas you, child, would only make them laugh, before they performed revolting acts on you and slit your throat. I have a feeling you'll get your chance for revenge,' he said grimly. 'But not today, not here. Not like this.'
'You're looking for Caratacus,' Braint said.
'Since the sun was high.'
'The princes are at the edge of the water. Follow me.'
Nectovelin a
nd Braint led the way down to the river. The ground here, already marshy, was churned up by feet and hooves, and was thick with animal droppings. They had to work their way through hastily assembled defences: heaps of boulders, trenches, stakes thrust into the ground, all intended to deter the anticipated Roman crossing. The crowds grew denser until Agrippina was hemmed in on all sides, and the noise and stink of leather and sweat grew overwhelming. It took some heavy shouldering by Nectovelin and Braint to force a way through.
At last Agrippina found herself facing the languid water. But the river itself was crowded. Warriors stalked up and down in water that lapped up to their knees. Some of them waved swords at the Romans on the far bank, or slapped the water with their blades. Women pulled faces at the invaders, with tongues extended and eyes bulging. Even children were showing their little arses.
A handful of Romans on the far bank, washing their feet in the river, seemed unperturbed. They laughed and catcalled and pointed out to each other particular sights that amused them: a fat old warrior doing a war dance in the water, a dog that gambolled in the spray thinking everybody was playing this sunny afternoon.
Agrippina pointed out a mother duck who serenely swam down the river's centre followed by a line of her young, their formation as orderly as a Roman legion. 'All this nonsense doesn't even frighten the ducklings,' she said dryly.
'Perhaps it makes these big men feel better about themselves,' Braint murmured.
Nectovelin said, 'And Caratacus?'
'There.' Braint pointed.
The two princes stood knee-deep in the water, working their way through a heap of weaponry. They destroyed each item, snapping dagger blades, bending swords in two, smashing shields with axes, before hurling the pieces into the deep water. Agrippina saw a priest close to the princes; the druidh held his hands out wide, as if to embrace the river itself, and he chanted as the princes worked.
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