The Poisoned Throne: Tintagel Book II

by M. K. Hume

  A disjointed sentence from the ancient Greek past invaded her thoughts. She had heard King Caradoc use it once when referring to Maximus.

  Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

  Had hubris driven her own practical and pragmatic husband into lunacy?

  Severa, afraid, ran to the scriptorium to fetch writing materials, then made her way back to the hall and the two young men who were impatiently awaiting her return.

  ‘I must send a message to my husband, so you must wait,’ she ordered the courier. He ignored the sight of a woman wielding a pen to write on a scroll, a rarity in those isles where women were rarely educated.

  On the other hand, Constans twitched at her brusque tone, for he considered that the letter was intended for his eyes only – so any reply should be his prerogative.

  Severa set up her writing tools and seated herself on a convenient bench, then began to write with such swiftness and passion that she marked the pristine hide from which the scroll had been made.

  Pointedly, Severa decided to use the High King’s birthname, while ignoring the praenomen that he had stolen. Perhaps, she thought, this small gesture might bring her husband back to earth and force him to reconsider his future course of action.

  Husband and Father.

  High King of the Britons.

  Constantinus, my love,

  My heart is heavy with fear, although I know that you will defeat your barbarian enemies with consummate ease. You must forgive a woman’s anxiety when she is forced to contemplate the possibility that her heart’s love might come to some harm. Please forgive me.

  I have borne another son and have named him Uther for his fierce cries and his great strength. He is as tempestuous as Ambrosius is placid, and I am sure he will make a fearsome warrior in the years to come.

  Please return at your earliest, my husband, for your subjects have need of your cleverness and planning. I long for my husband, while Constans and my sons look for the guiding hands of a father. As a person who has seen such abominations as the murder of Marcus Britannicus, the perfidy of Conanus and so many other tragedies, I beg you to return to Venta Belgarum at your earliest opportunity. I will only be content when you take up the sceptre of power and rule these islands with strength and ability.

  Constans asks me to assure you that he will do anything that you require of him, but he eagerly awaits your return to the home that is yours by right of reign.

  Be assured of my desire to see you again before the onset of winter.

  Ave.

  From Severa, your wife and Queen.

  Constans read the scroll over her shoulder, angered at her choice of words.

  ‘I would never ask Father to rush back to Venta Belgarum if his heart dictates otherwise,’ the youth snapped.

  Severa glanced at the vacant face of the courier who was trying to display a total lack of interest in the dangerous, albeit interesting, conversation that was taking place.

  ‘I’d never use love to tie my father to me, and neither should you,’ Constans hissed in a voice that was barely discreet and controlled.

  Ignoring her stepson completely, Severa rolled up the scroll and sealed it. She deliberately refrained from using the family seal. Then, satisfied, she called the courier to her and placed the scroll into his hands.

  ‘Ride back to your master and give him my reply. I pray your journey is safe and swift, and that the cause of Britannia has prospered under the hand of God during your absence.’

  The courier bowed, assuring her that he would carry out his duty to the letter.

  The Saxons began their attack at first light and made their first forays as soon as sunrise made the terrain visible, a tactic that spared them from the dangers of blundering into mantraps or deep water during periods of darkness. The Britons were alert and ready, because they knew that this battle hung in the balance. While Constantinus’s forces had superior numbers, the Saxons were compensated by their greater height and strength. Stripped of their cavalry, the Britons faced their barbarian enemy on foot, so they were forced to depend on the Roman battlecraft of old veterans like Paulus. Unfortunately for the Roman commander, the grim tactics needed to win this battle would favour the barbarians, warriors accustomed to the physical slog needed to snatch victory from an unfriendly landscape.

  Constantinus had chosen to create a forward perimeter of defenders on the very lip of the swamp, a tactical decision that forced the barbarians to plough their way through muddy obstacles if they were to join battle with the British front line. Because the leading edge of the solid ground was too wide to man his defences in depth, and because he had no intention of being outflanked, Constantinus directed his archers, a mere thirty men, to take up positions at each end of the front line which was aligned to the east and the west. Here, the archers could discourage any flanking action taken by the barbarians. As the side press of foot soldiers was positioned obliquely to the east and the west, they would be able to defend themselves if the Saxons broke through the archers’ firepower. The dice had been cast and few further precautions could be taken.

  Ever so slowly, the British supply wagons had been manoeuvred around the swamp at impossibly slow speed, but they were resting now on the protected side of this reef of firm earth. For all practical purposes, the Roman line was safe from encirclement from the swamps, but the spoils in his baggage train would be lost to Constantinus if the barbarian warriors should eliminate the Roman archers and the foot soldiers defending the eastern and western flanks. Constantinus was determined to maximise the strength of his defensive lines on all three sides for, if the Saxons could break through to the beaches behind him, the Roman camp followers, supplies and wagons would become further booty for the acquisitive raiders.

  Fortunately for the Britons, many of the Saxon warriors were inclined to fight as individuals and tended to think and attack with a fixed purpose. They preferred to charge directly at their enemy and batter their opponents until they defeated their opposition by brute force, or lost their own lives.

  From the slight rise where his banner flapped in the wind above his tent, Constantinus watched as Paulus ordered his men to assume the positions necessary to repel a charge by massed infantry. Many of these soldiers were veterans from Gallia, so they were accomplished tacticians who braced their spear-shafts with one foot while ensuring that their shields protected them from frontal attack. Many too had fought with Constantinus in eastern Britannia, so he trusted their martial skills. Meanwhile, the line of legionnaires behind them used their shields to protect the heads of the warriors in the front rank, while the same strategy was employed on each flank.

  So practised were the legionnaires in these tactical manoeuvres that a seamless face of overlapping iron, like fish scales, was presented to the Saxon warriors. Once settled into their places in the defensive line, Constantinus’s men could face the vicious axes and the great height of the barbarians as they attempted to rain death down on to their heads. A roof of iron covered the defenders like the hide of a small dragon that Constantinus had seen in Egypt that the local population called a crocodile. Its scales repelled the sharpest iron weapons unless a hunter knew exactly where the hide was weakest and used his blade to stab under the throat or the foreleg. So too was this wall of iron vulnerable to clever penetration, but not before spears and swords took a terrible toll on the Saxon enemy. Ultimately, Constantinus hoped that frustration would goad the Saxons into taking foolish risks.

  As well as having the tactical advantage of first choice of terrain, and sufficient time to prepare for the coming onslaught, the legionnaires would be able to deliver tactical surprises. Their short spears fitted with large, leaf-shaped blades would bristle toward their enemies like the spines of a hedgehog. And when the spears had been cast away or buried deep into the flesh of a dead enemy, the gladius would take its place. Breast to bre
ast with an enemy, this short sword and the tactical expertise of the legionnaires made them almost invincible.

  Now, as the Saxons ran, screamed their war cries and splashed their way through the mud and shallow waters, the Roman force settled into that dour, defensive stratagem that had won an empire for the legions. Constantinus could see that the forward momentum of the Saxons had already been blunted as their tree-trunk-sized legs became mired in the stinking black mud and sinking sands. The wiser barbarians attempted to use spear butts to check the nature of the land below the deceptive skin of shallow water, but such caution significantly slowed their advance.

  With typical Saxon bravery, most of the warriors threw caution to the winds and hoped they would miss the quicksand and strike at the centre of the enemy line.

  Most of them did.

  ‘Hold your nerve, Paulus. Wait until the first wave is within four paces.’

  Constantinus ordered his decurion, who would lead the defence from the centre of the front line, to instruct every second legionnaire to cast his spear at the enemy when the invaders were at close range. The risk of opening the wall of iron for a few seconds, in order to accomplish this strategy, was considerable, as was the tactical risk of wasting some of the spears allocated to the front line. But the advantage, if the manoeuvre worked, would ensure that the advance of the first wave was blunted and only half of its number would survive to engage the first line of defenders.

  The risk was worth taking.

  The slog of enemy warriors making their way through the bog seemed interminable although, from the perspective of the front line of Roman warriors, the advancing Saxons seemed awesomely tall, threatening and invincible. The rows of crouching legionnaires seemed like children playing at a mock battle with adults, men who filled the sky with their height and made the air tremble with their battle cries. Lesser troops would have turned tail and fled; throughout the spring and summer, the Cantii tribesmen had run from the invaders’ aura of ferocity.

  But the fifty legionnaires who manned Constantinus’s front line had served in dozens of vile provinces and faced many fierce enemies. They had fought some of the most terrifying warriors in the known world and were proud of their reputation for never admitting defeat and never retreating. They were prepared to die rather than lose their eagles, and more than one of the men sought courage from these proud standards rising above them on the hill beside Constantinus’s personal banner. Every legionnaire was duty-bound to protect these simple strips of cloth and gilded metal with their lifeblood.

  For the Romans, retreat meant shame for eternity.

  In a move that happened so quickly that Constantinus almost missed it, the forward line suddenly opened and a hail of spears filled the air between the combatants like a blanket of black, horizontal sleet. Behind the thrown weapons, the line closed again as fifty iron shields slammed together as one with an orderly clang of metal against metal.

  Few of the thrown spears missed their marks, so the Saxon charge faltered momentarily as many of its warriors were impaled on the leaves of iron. Only the shafts, many of which were still trembling, were visible above the shallow mounds of men as they died in the brown waters or the stinking mud. Many of the Saxons drowned in just a few inches of brackish water.

  But the Saxons knew, from long practice, that there was always a cost in being a combatant in the first wave of a frontal attack. Those men still standing upright had been among those warriors selected personally by their thane to receive the glory accorded to heroes who take part in the first wave, for every Saxon had been raised from infancy to believe in the honour of a good death at the forefront of a battle. For those men who died so gloriously for the common cause, the Valkyrie would come, armoured and winged, to bear their souls away to the drinking halls of Valhalla. Dragging their limbs through the mud that made every movement sluggish, they redoubled their efforts and howled to Odin and Thor to guide their weapons. Then, filled with dreams of glory, they crashed their considerable weight against the defending line of legionnaires with the brutal force of a giant hammer.

  The shock of sixty huge warriors throwing their bodies against the interlocked shields of the defenders was audible as Constantinus watched from his knoll. He saw the Roman line bow inward under the strain until, slowly and inexorably, the combined muscle of the men behind forced the front line to straighten once again.

  Swords appeared in the wall of iron, striking and stabbing upward at any unprotected body parts and spattering the mud with sprays of arterial blood. Meanwhile, axes shivered in the early-morning light as the weapons were pounded down on the protective shields held aloft by the defenders. Some of the wounded legionnaires in the front line were trampled into the mud as the second line of defenders climbed over them to reinforce the first rank. And so, inch by painful inch, the defenders were driven backwards until the Saxon warriors had achieved a small toehold on firm earth.

  The battle seemed to change perceptibly as the Saxon thane unleashed a second wave of attackers. The commander sensed that there was a major weakness in the centre of the Roman line, so he was anxious to capitalise on this at the earliest opportunity.

  But Constantinus had anticipated this and, as a naturally gifted strategist, he had made a brave decision to prepare two small forces that would mount counterattacks if required. Along with a small group of infantrymen, he had kept himself and Vortigern on the knoll for this eventuality. It was time to risk everything.

  As the second wave of Saxons made their laborious charge through the corpse-littered mud, Constantinus unleashed these small squads of men. Hopefully, the warriors on the extremes of the Saxon line would be marshalled towards the centre of the attack where they would find themselves in harm’s way. Protected to some extent by the bowmen, Constantinus’s small reserve would attack from the east, while Vortigern would lead the detachment that attacked the Saxon line from the west.

  Firstly, the archers exposed themselves by firing their supply of arrows into the front ranks of the charging Saxons. Tumbling from the momentum of their charge, wounded and dead Saxons fell, never to reach the weakened front line that Paulus was trying to hold with those inexperienced British cavalrymen who had replaced slain legionnaires. Faced with the enormity of their task, the Britons howled ancient war cries, half-maddened by the infectious wildness in the blood that hand-to-hand combat can bring to the surface in any warrior.

  But the Saxons still held the whip hand and they were now in possession of a small strip of firm earth that had been won with the corpses of their own dead who were driven, ever-deeper, into the foul mud of the swamp by the feet of their fellow warriors as they struggled to throw themselves at the front line of Roman defenders.

  Then Constantinus, Vortigern and their reinforcements, a mere twenty men in each group, slammed their way into the Saxon flanks at a time when the huge warriors were only a few scant yards from their prize.

  Some twenty years earlier, when Constantinus had been a raw recruit and little more than a boy, his old commander had clipped his left ear painfully when the lad had voiced an opinion that a small force could achieve nothing against a larger group of heavily armed men.

  ‘Don’t be a fool – or a child,’ the grizzled veteran had ordered with a snarl. ‘Ask yourself what possible advantages a smaller group might have? Think, boy! Use your brains and not your pecker.’

  Constantinus had been indignant. As he nursed his head and swollen ear with one hand, he recalled that his eyes had flashed with resentment. Then, to compound his embarrassment, he earned a further buffet to his right ear.

  ‘A smaller group has room to move, boy, so don’t you ever forget it. If the space in the battlefield is limited, your manoeuvrability will be lost. We Romans invented the Tortoise to capitalise on combat situations where space is limited, and we need to concentrate our force in difficult terrain. But tactics such as the Tortoise can work against
us if we are so outnumbered that we are forced to retreat, or if we are driven backwards by the overwhelming weight of numbers. An enemy, no matter how large, will be forced to batter at us in similar tight formations. They won’t have any other choice.’

  ‘So? How can a small attacking force develop an efficient battle plan? The larger force can turn and spread out, taking all advantage away from the smaller group.’

  Constantinus had responded with the resentment of youth.

  The veteran decurion had sighed and started to scrawl in the dust with a pointed stick. Constantinus had followed his plan, at first with scorn and, later, with wonder. Even now, as he ran at the forefront of his reinforcements, he could still smell the dust, the male sweat and the greasy heat of that long-past day of training in elementary tactics that were instilled into all Roman infantrymen in their preparation for service in the legions of Rome.

  The small groups of Britons hit the eastern and western flanks of the barbarian force like arrows and their momentum drove the Saxon flank towards the centre of the British front line where most of the northern warriors were already concentrated. The Britons had the advantage of speed because the Saxon dead provided a solid base where the defenders’ feet could be placed, although they still needed to exercise some care. Their heaving adversaries had established themselves on small clumps of firm soil, so Constantinus’s men headed straight for these islands and forced the Saxons back into the mud and brackish water.

  Constantinus’s swinging sword struck out at enemy flesh as he scythed his gladius through the air. His skill with the weapon was such that he scarcely needed the protection of his shield, which he used as an additional weapon to strike out at the Saxons. Then, whenever a Saxon faltered or reeled back from the attack, the Romano-British front line would open to swallow the man whole. Later, all that would remain of such unfortunate Saxons was a battered and trodden corpse and smears of bloody mud.