Oslac was a man in bed, every bit as enjoyable as Dernhelm or Holen. And Oslac was considerate in many other ways. He was open-handed, and he loved her. Yet he was not Holen, let alone Dernhelm. Oslac had always been in the shadow of the other sons of Isangrim: the beautiful, doomed Froda, the capable and strong Arkil, the wild young Eadwulf and Dernhelm, and his own full brother, the overbearing Morcar. Oslac was the quietest of the athelings; always thinking, reading Latin poetry and always consumed with worry.
Kadlin had been faithful to Oslac. She had given him no cause for concern. He had given her the son and daughter who stood by her. At nineteen winters, Aelfwynn was a beautiful girl, radiant like the sun, and Aethelgar, just a year younger, was already a fine young man, a proven warrior. The marriage had lasted, could be considered a success.
With the news that Dernhelm was travelling the Amber Road, much had changed. She knew Oslac was troubled. Much of the time he was yet more attentive, making love to her with something like desperation. But at others, he was withdrawn. Too often he was away, closeted with Morcar and his brother’s sinister familiars Glaum, son of Wulfmaer, and Swerting Snake-Tongue.
And all the time, Dernhelm was coming. She had to accept he would have changed. He would be older, much older. News travelled slowly up the Amber Road, but she knew he had two sons by his Roman wife. What would she do when she saw him? What would she say? Would she say anything? How could she tell him he had another son, and then in the next breath tell him that Starkad was a hostage far away in Gaul? Kadlin longed to tell him. She longed to see him. But she knew if she were given the choice, it would be Starkad coming home, not the father he had never met.
Sudden shouts through the sounds of merrymaking. A flash of steel. The screams of women and children. A man with a knife in his hand running towards her. Aethelgar stepped in front of Kadlin. The man thrust at him. Aethelgar failed to catch his wrist. The blade cut deep into her son’s arm. His blood was bright in the sunshine. Her daughter was screaming. Aethelgar doubled up, defenceless. The man drew back for the killing blow. He reeled sideways. Leoba hit him again with the heavy metal drinking cup. He went down. Leoba landed on top of him. Again and again she brought the cup down, smashing his face to a bloodied pulp.
Men were fighting. Others were running with the women and children. The chariot of the goddess had come to a halt. Her slaves were fleeing, seizing this opportunity to escape the terrible fate which awaited them.
Kadlin struggled to make sense of the confusion. The Brondings and the others subject to Unferth were massively outnumbered, but they had knives. Four of them surrounded Heoroweard and Oslac.
‘Get Aelfwynn to the boat.’
Kadlin struggled to take in what her son was saying.
‘The boat — you and Aelfwynn get to the boat. There are guards there.’
Leoba got up from her horrible handiwork. She had the dead Bronding’s dagger. She moved to help their brother and Oslac.
‘You are hurt,’ Kadlin said to Aethelgar.
‘Go, now!’ The youth sounded angry.
Kadlin put her arm around Aelfwynn’s shoulders, turned her to go.
Aethelgar wrapped his cloak around his left arm, and picked up the metal cup Leoba had discarded. When he was sure his mother and sister were moving, he ran after Leoba.
At the edge of the timber, Kadlin looked back. They were still fighting. She could see Aethelgar and Leoba. Oslac was still on his feet. But her brother Heoroweard was gone.
XXIII
The Alps
‘A coin for a shave, Dominus?’
Gallienus smiled down at the bearded soldier standing near his horse, and held out his hand for Achilleus, his a Memoria, to place a coin in it. A recollection came to the emperor. ‘You were at Mediolanum.’
‘I was, Dominus. We whipped those hairy fucking Alamanni.’
‘We certainly did, Commilito, and we will win again.’ Gallienus raised his voice. ‘Today we will beat Simplicinius Genialis and his rabble of Raetian levies. Next year we will crush his master, the Batavian bandit who pretends to be an emperor. Today we start to dismantle the foul, murderous tyranny of the half-barbarian Postumus.’
Gallienus flipped the coin through the air. ‘Good luck.’
The soldier caught the coin. ‘May the gods grant you victory, Imperator.’
Others called out. ‘Dominus, over here. Me, too, Dominus.’
Gallienus held up his hands, palms empty. He waited for the clamour to die down before speaking. ‘There will be little plunder today, although the baggage of Simplicinius Genialis I give to the troops. When we have won, you will not find me ungenerous. If you Cantabrians chase those northern peasants off this hillside, your donative will be doubled.’
The auxiliaries cheered. ‘Io Cantab! Io Cantab!’
Gallienus saluted them, and, nodding to his entourage to follow, turned his horse.
Riding back to where the horse guards waited behind the main line, Gallienus wondered about the loyalty of the Cantabrians. The unit had been raised in northern Hispania. But they had served with his comitatus for many years. There could not be many Spaniards left in their ranks; not many in whom the call of home and family might have been played upon by agents of Postumus to lead to thoughts of desertion.
The opening moves of the invasion of Raetia had gone smoothly enough, the result of long planning. Gallienus had left a sizable force in northern Italy; eight thousand infantry and six thousand cavalry under the Prefect of Cavalry. Aureolus may have started life as a Getan shepherd, but now he was a senior officer long experienced in independent command. He had orders to block the Alpine passes to the west. The infantry to be employed would be commanded by four other experienced protectores: the Danubian Claudius, the Egyptian Camsisoleus and the Italians Domitianus and Celer. Should Postumus break through, his counterattack would be met by the cavalry on the wide plains where they could best manoeuvre. As deputy, Aureolus had another protector in Marcianus. If all should fail, the towns of the region were being put in readiness for a siege by yet another protector, the siege engineer Bonitus, assisted by a capable officer called Julius Marcellinus. It was hard to think what more could have been done to protect the rear.
An order had long been issued that on the day Gallienus left Mediolanum, troops from the province of Noricum would begin their advance through the high country to the river Aenus to threaten Raetia from the east. The governor Aelius Restutus was capable. There was no reason to think it had not been carried out.
Gallienus and the comitatus had marched due north from Mediolanum to Comum. They had taken the road on the western shore of the lake, advanced as far as Clavenna, turned first east, then west, and negotiated the Julier pass. In the mild early-summer weather, the mountain road was not too hard for a lightly equipped expeditionary force. The slopes reached up on either side; dark green where there were trees, lighter on the high Alpine meadows. Mist hung in the valleys and folds in the mornings until the sun burnt them off, leaving odd clouds anchored to the distant bare rock peaks. They had just passed a perfect, still, little lake where the road clung to a precipice, when the scouts had come back with the unwelcome news.
Simplicinius Genialis had done well. There was only one other practicable route for an army from Mediolanum up through the mountains into Raetia. It started at Verona and ran east of Lake Benacus, up through Tridentum, on the Via Claudia Augusta. Unfortunately, both routes came together far to the north at the town of Cambodunum. Gallienus had known Simplicinius Genialis had based his army at that strategic place. What had surprised the emperor was the alacrity with which the governor of Raetia had moved to meet him down the path he had chosen. Gallienus was still some fifteen miles short of the small mountain settlement of Curia, a very long march south from Cambodunum. Obviously, the secrecy of the imperial consilium had been broken. Although it was probably otiose, Gallienus had instructed his Princeps Peregrinorum Rufinus and his junior Praetorian Prefect Censorinus to conduct investigat
ions.
For a fat, small-town equestrian with a civilian career behind him, Simplicinius Genialis was turning out to be something of a general. Some four years before he had defeated a force of Iuthungi and Semnones returning from the great Alamannic raid into Italy. Now he had selected an excellent defensive position for an army vastly outnumbered in cavalry. The road ran uphill through a highland plain about a thousand paces wide. Steep, heavily wooded slopes reared up on either side. These precluded not just cavalry but the movement of any formed body of troops. There was a small stream running along the tree line under the western escarpment, but Gallienus thought it was likely to prove of little consequence.
Simplicinius Genialis’s dispositions showed equal skill. He had drawn up his heavy infantry, six deep, in close order across the plain, filling it from slope to slope. Legio III Italia Concors, about four thousand men under the Spaniard Bonosus, held the centre. On their right were vexillationes from two legions from Germania Superior, VIII Augusta and XXII Primigenia, amounting to about a thousand shields. The left consisted of something less than a thousand Germanic warriors. They were on foot, but handlers held their horses a little way to their rear. Gallienus’s frumentarii had informed him recently that Postumus had despatched these Angles to Simplicinius Genialis.
Close behind the main battle line stood the provincial militia. Their numbers were harder to judge; by their very nature, they were ad hoc units. They looked to almost equal the total of those in the front. Raetia was a beleaguered frontier province, and its levies would have more experience of fighting than most. They had been a part of the recent victory over the barbarians. But militia could never stand up to regular troops in close combat. It had to be assumed they had been stationed there to hurl missiles over those in front. Should they want to, the amateur soldiers of Raetia would find it difficult to run. Some twenty paces to their rear were posted what Gallienus already knew were all the two thousand regular auxiliary archers in the province. Most likely, apart from shooting at the oncoming enemy, the latter also would have been given orders to shoot any of the militia who turned tail.
No reserve was to be seen, except, much higher up the road and thus well to the rear, almost back with the baggage, two alae of cavalry. At a distant glance it was evident that these were far less than the thousand riders which should have been on their muster rolls. Judging by the mounted messengers coming and going, Simplicinius Genialis himself probably was with them.
The array was completed by some regular auxiliaries on the extreme flanks armed with javelins and swords. Some of them could be seen now and then precariously scrambling between the trees on the vertiginous slopes. Given the terrain, despite the words he had spoken to the Cantabrians on his right, Gallienus considered it most improbable that troops there would have any influence on the outcome.
The emperor had had plenty of time to study his opponent’s order of battle. Simplicinius Genialis had chosen his ground well and set out his forces with acumen. Yet he had surrendered all initiative. For the past two days the imperial field army had watched the rebel forces. Each morning the army of Raetia formed up in good order, and each night posted adequate numbers of advanced pickets. The latter had little effect on the deserters. In the dark, men crossed from one side to the other, as was the way in any civil war.
Both days, the imperial army had remained in camp. They could not stay where they were indefinitely, because their supply line was too long and tenuous. They could not retreat, because that might prove fatal to imperial prestige. The troops were restless. Despite the advantageous position of their enemy, despite the terrible casualties that would come from plunging missiles, they were eager to advance. In part to curb this impatience, on the first day Gallienus had made it known he had sent two columns on flank marches to come around behind the enemy. One thousand Dalmatian horsemen under the Egyptian Theodotus had retraced their steps through the Julier pass all the way to Clavenna, where they were to take a parallel route north through the mountains to Curia. At a conservative estimate it was over a hundred and twenty miles along a narrow road easily blocked. If they arrived at all, it was unlikely to be any time soon. Another thousand cavalry, Moors commanded by the Danubian Probus, had followed a local shepherd who claimed he knew a sheep track passable by horses which snaked off to the east and came out to the north of the enemy. The existence of this path was dubious.
Several factors, all in the lap of the gods, had encouraged Gallienus to delay. The omens had been ambiguous, and there had been portents.
When they were in Clavenna, bees had swarmed around one of the standards. The priests had produced specious positive interpretations: bees laboured together for the common good; they never failed to obey the sole ruler of the hive. But Gallienus remembered the same had happened to the standards of the emperor Niger shortly before his army had been defeated by that of Severus.
Back in Comum, a priest of Jupiter had announced a dream he had said was sent by the god. In it a man in a toga had forced his way into the emperor’s encampment. He had been accompanied by two lares, the household divinities easily recognizable by the short dog-skin tunics they wore and the cornucopias in their hands. Near the praetorium, in front of the imperial standards, the lares had vanished. Left alone, the toga-clad figure had been beaten to death by the soldiers. The priest had produced his own exegesis of the dream. In every domestic shrine, the lares flanked the togate image of the genius of the household. Genialis was the adjective of genius. After initial success, the governor of Raetia would be deserted by the gods and killed.
Gallienus was unconvinced by this oneiromancy. For thirteen years his own genius had been worshipped across the imperium. The gods abandoning the genius chimed too closely with a thing that had been preying on his thoughts. Not since that day at Platonopolis with the old philosopher Plotinus, when his soul had been taken to these very Alps, had Gallienus sensed the presence of his divine companion. The emperor was sure Hercules had not left him for ever — like Antony in Alexandria, he would have heard the music — but the god was not with him now.
Amidst these supernatural concerns, Gallienus had been waiting for something else, something akin to divine intervention. It had appeared in the dead of the previous night in the form of the frumentarius called Venutus.
As dawn’s rose-red fingers lit the sky, Gallienus had led his army out to battle. His dispositions largely mirrored those of the enemy. A phalanx of heavy infantry was massed across the plain. On their right were four thousand drawn from all the four legions in the two Pannonian provinces. This mountain battle should hold nothing out of the ordinary for their commander, Proculus. He had been brought up in the Alpes Maritimae. Next to Proculus stood the veteran Prefect Volusianus with two thousand of his Praetorians. The left was held by Tacitus with a thousand shields drawn from the Italian Legio II Parthica, and another thousand from Legio V Macedonica marched west from Dacia. Like the enemy, they were all in six ranks, except on each wing, where the additional numbers allowed a formation packed twice as deep.
To provide covering shooting, the second line consisted of every one of the three thousand auxiliary foot archers the imperial field army possessed. The young Narbonensian protector Carus had charge of them.
The battle would be decided by the infantry, but not all the cavalry was without use. Gallienus had formed a third line of eastern horse archers to augment the storm of arrows. There were a thousand Persians. They were among those who had surrendered some years before at Corycus in Cilicia. They were still led by their original Sassanid commander, the framadar Zik Zabrigan. They were joined by five hundred Parthians. Ironically, these had fled to Rome to escape the Sassanids even longer ago. As he was a scion of their ancient Arsacid royal dynasty, Tiridates, son of the exiled Armenian king Chosroes, had been set over them.
The Cantabrians had been sent clambering up the cliff to the right; another five hundred auxiliaries were doing the same on the left. The remainder of the army was the reserve of
two thousand horse guards with Gallienus.
The emperor surveyed the field. All was ready. He had military men around him: the protectores Aurelian and Heraclian, the junior Praetorian Prefect, Censorinus, the Princeps Peregrinorum, Rufinus. Somewhat apart were the heads of the imperial chanceries. Quirinius, the a Rationibus, Palfurius, the ab Epistulis, Cominius, the a Studiis and the others looked very civilian and more than a little out of place, but wherever an emperor went, the commonplace business of the imperium followed.
It reminded Gallienus of the morning before the battle of Mediolanum. But there was a difference. At Mediolanum the divisions had been commanded by senators as well as protectores. Today the latter provided all the high command. However, he had senators in his entourage. Some were there because he liked and trusted them: Saturninus, the consul; Lucillus, the consul-designate; Sabinillus, the philosophic friend of Plotinus. Others were in attendance for the opposite reason. It was best not to have men like ex-prefect of the city Albinus or the wealthy Nummius Faustinianus out of his sight.
Gallienus looked up at the standards flying behind him: the red Pegasus on white background of the horse guards, and his own imperial purple draco. With the serried ranks of steel-clad riders and horses below, they made a brave sight. It was a pity he did not feel the tension in the air, the tightness in his skin, that told him his divine comes was with him. But, with or without Hercules, he knew he would acquit himself with courage. Was he not descended from both the Licinii and the Egnatii? Virtus had never been lacking in those two ancient Roman families.
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