“What do you know about it’” said Rufus, sounding increasingly irked. “You’ve never faced serious enemies and you’ve never faced important tactical problems. But that doesn’t mean that other people haven’t…”
Octavian wanted to kick Rufus. In that moment the stakes were high, and he was griping about the recent battles he and Agrippa had fought. He had tried to stop his friend’s defeat from weighing upon him, but Agrippa’s success hung like an indelible disgrace upon Rufus’s head.
“Staius Murcus is no idiot, as he is proving now that no ship can sail the Adriatic without being intercepted by him and Domitius Ahenobarbus,” said Agrippa, resentment audible, for once, in his voice.
“Do you want to compare him with Sextus Pompey? He is of the same calibre as his father as an admiral – indeed, perhaps even better! And I had the tactical disadvantage of having to operate in a very narrow stretch of sea!” protested Rufus, unwittingly admitting that Agrippa had been right when he had warned him against using quadriremes in the Strait.
“Silence!” muttered Octavian with the little strength that remained to him, before immediately being overcome by a fit of coughing. “We are not here to waste time bickering!” he continued, when he was again able to express himself. “I want to know the situation on the ground. Speak, Maecenas.”
The other two were silent. The Etruscan cleared his throat and said, “It is with his apparent tactical and strategic, as well as numerical, inferiority that Antony hopes to lure Brutus and Cassius to attack. He is camped almost beneath them and his fortifications are still in a precarious state: it is clear that he is trying to provoke an immediate clash, and not simply because he is worried about the lack of supplies. He wants to cut you out, even if it means fighting with less legions and less chance of winning.”
“So if he loses, he will claim he was forced to take the field without us so as not to let the enemy escape and avoid running out of supplies. And he will blame you, Octavian, for the defeat…” added Agrippa. “In any case, we will probably lose any chance of avenging Caesar. I am sure that, after having discredited us, he will eventually come to some agreement with Caesar’s murderers.”
“And if he wins, he will take all the credit and, with the prestige gained, will do everything possible to force you out of the triumvirate, blaming your inadequacies,” echoed Rufus.
Octavian nodded. It was clear to all what was happening.
“So I’m done for,” he was forced to admit, “whether Antony wins or loses.”
“Exactly,” echoed Maecenas. “Unless…”
“Unless?”
“Unless you set off immediately for Philippi with the whole army.”
Octavian looked at him in amazement. “But… Can’t you see the state I’m in?” he mumbled.
“I can see it all too well. But you have no choice. He will not wait for you, and now you must risk. We are at the reckoning – it is what we wanted and we cannot throw everything away now, you must see that.”
Astorius, the doctor, broke in: “He is absolutely not fit to travel, let alone to stand at the head of the legions.”
“I… I’m also afraid to let myself be seen like this. What would the troops think of me?” hesitated Octavian. Yet he knew that Maecenas was right: he had no choice. Better death on the field than ending up being shamed by Antony and deprived of his revenge.
“We shall make sure that they do not see you,” said the Etruscan. “And you will not be present at the battle. On the other hand, you cannot allow yourself to die, Octavian: you have too much to do, as I have said many times. There is no need for you to risk your life on the battlefield. Antony will take care of that for you, you’ll see: I have an idea…” he concluded cryptically, before urging Agrippa and Rufus to give instructions to the troops for their immediate departure.
XVIII
Agrippa could have sworn that, for a moment, an expression of annoyance crossed Antony’s face at the sight of Octavian and his staff appearing with the praetorian cohort. But then the triumvir gave a forced smile and strode off to greet his colleague and take his hands.
“So you’ve come at last!” said Antony, as he approached. He was on foot, but looked in any case more impressive than Octavian on horseback. “But you still look unwell, my friend. Was it wise to rush here? Were you afraid that I would take all the glory for myself? Is that what your errand boys told you?” he concluded, looking at Rufus and Maecenas, who were walking by their leader’s side.
“Or perhaps I… came to save your arse. If you had… attacked, you would have… cut an embarrassing figure… and ruined everything, even… my chances for revenge…” shot back Octavian, but his broken voice, slurred words, hunched shoulders and foggy gaze demonstrated beyond a doubt that he was in no position to play the braggart.
In fact, Antony gave him such a contemptuously superior smile that Rufus bridled, putting his hand to the pommel of his sword. “In your condition, I doubt that you’re much use for anything, boy,” snapped the consul. “In fact, you might even make things worse. The best thing for you would be to get yourself off to your tent: if the soldiers see you in this state they’ll start asking themselves who they are fighting for and lose heart. Unless you’ve come to give me your legions… In that case, I’ll be happy to accommodate your lieutenants in my staff and put them under my orders.”
“I’ve no intention of giving you anything,” said the young man. “My men obey my orders alone. And do not dare take any initiatives without consulting me, as I am certain you were planning to do.”
“So what exactly would you like me to do?” asked Antony. “I had almost managed to flush them out, but with the arrival of your troops, they’ll head back to their holes and sooner or later we’ll have to retreat to avoid starvation, without having achieved anything.”
Agrippa allowed himself to step in before his leader at that point. On the basis of the information he had received from Maecenas and Rufus, he had developed an idea of the situation, and when the Etruscan had asked him to draw up a strategy to buy them some time and let Octavian recover, an idea had begun to take shape in his mind. On the way there and while Octavian and Antony had been speaking, he had been studying the battlefield. Brutus and Cassius’s positions were unassailable, situated as they were in a high, well defended position, and, joined by the causeway that linked them, they made up a fortress the size and width of which made it impossible to besiege without the risk of being attacked from behind in one sector of the battlefield while you were trying to attack in another. On the other hand, the plain was all slime and mud, a slippery and treacherous terrain that did not allow anyone – infantry or cavalry – to get up enough momentum to climb the slope where the enemy were perched.
But if Brutus and Cassius were unassailable, they could perhaps still be flushed out, and in a less reckless way than that adopted hitherto by Antony. A quick glance over the plain of Philippi had, in fact, confirmed Agrippa’s assumptions: the presence of marshes along the southern side of the two fronts could be an advantage for them. Over there, just on the other side of them, there was the sea, with all the most immediate supply routes. “So let’s make sure that they suffer from hunger too, and have to come down to the plains to fight a way through for their supplies,” he said, suddenly.
Everyone looked at him, but it was again Antony who spoke.
“Bravo! You are a genius! Why, nobody had thought of that!” Then he turned to his legate Norbanus “Does it seem reasonable to you that I have to play nurse to these children? It’s like being at military school with know-it-all students who think they know more than the teacher.”
“You’ve already thought about blocking the swamp, then…” said Agrippa, not at all abashed.
“The swamp? Why should I block the swamp?” growled Antony. “It’s no use to us – and anyway, how do you intend to do it?”
“No use? If we cut off their access to the sea we could starve them out.”
“Oh really? To
do that we would need to get over to Cassius’s camp, which is practically impossible: he would do everything in his power to stop us as soon as we began! Not to mention that we have no wood available for fortifications. And anyway, they would just withdraw and go round us…”
“No, he wouldn’t: from what I know, there are gorges behind them. It would be difficult to get to the sea that way, and he would be forced to come down and fight.”
Antony sighed dismissively, and said, “The fact remains that we cannot build fortifications along the marsh. We are too close to their field and their archers and spears.” But Agrippa was ready with the idea that Maecenas had come up with when he had suggested closing off access to the sea. He too had encountered the same problem as Antony, and now that he had made an inspection of the ground he realised that his plan was feasible, thanks to the Etruscan’s suggestion. They really were a good team, and Octavian had been a genius to put them together. “The marsh is full of canes, Triumvir. We will cut only those necessary to create a road which will gradually lead us to the enemy camp with a parallel fence which we will man with many soldiers, adding fortifications as we go. The work and the presence of the soldiers will be hidden by the tall canes, and the enemy will notice only when it is too late to prevent us from closing off its access to the sea.”
Antony and his lieutenants looked at one another. The triumvir was visibly uncomfortable: you could see he wanted to oppose the idea with all his power, but could find no valid reason to do so. Finally he turned back to Agrippa and said, “It won’t work. It would cost us a lot of men. And anyway, I’ve already told you – we have no timber.”
Agrippa had an answer ready for this too. “Well,” he pointed out, “during the work each day, you deploy your troops on the plain ready for battle, with all the emblems in sight so the enemy thinks you have the whole army on the field. Instead, a portion of each cohort will be devoted to the work.”
The gleam in his eyes that showed that Antony did not scorn the idea, but neither was he willing to endorse it openly. “Even if we did… What about the wood for the fortifications? You don’t want to make them out of canes, surely?”
Agrippa hesitated a moment, then looked around himself, hoping to see something that would give him an idea for solving that problem. But Rufus intervened. “We’ll use those stones sticking out of the ground. There’s plenty of them. We’ll make dry stone walls instead of a fence. Anyway, we can always get to the woods on the hills on the other side and deploy the army to protect the transport of the wood. They wouldn’t be able to see what we were doing until the forts were already built.”
The silence that followed was a clear agreement. Agrippa was pleased again, and felt no discomfort that it had been Rufus who had found the solution to the problem: he was the first to rejoice when the cult of Mars Ultor proved itself to be a cohesive team.
“But we’ll use half of my men and half of yours,” said Antony. “I don’t want to lose all my soldiers if something goes wrong.”
“So be it,” said Octavian.
“And there’s no room on the hill for your camp,” the triumvir added, “so you will have to build it on the slopes or on the plain.”
“That’s nasty, and dangerous,” thought Agrippa. There was a bit of space on the hill, but it was clear that Antony wanted to expose them, perhaps to use them as bait, or perhaps in the hope that in an eventual battle their opponents would concentrate on Octavian’s camp and leave his in peace. If he won and at the same time Octavian fell ill, that would be cause for great celebration for Antony…
He was about to reply when he saw his friend Maecenas give him a nod of assent. He hesitated, and the Etruscan said, “Very well. We’ll set up along the slight elevation of the land further north,” he said, pointing to an area of the plain just beyond the hill which housed Antony’s camp. Agrippa asked himself what Maecenas was thinking, but decided that he must undoubtedly be following one of his convoluted and tortuous plans…
*
When Gaius Chaerea had agreed to carry out the task which Octavia had assigned him, he had known very well what awaited him. He knew that he would run the risk of dying and never seeing her or his own family again, and also that he would have to face danger from the moment he set sail from Brindisi.
But he had accepted it just the same. To please Octavia, not to prove himself worthy of the vow he had made before Mars Ultor, and to have the courage to look his son Marcus in the face in the future. Now, however, after seeing Staius Murcus’s impressive fleet of warships surrounding the transport ships on which he was traveling, he had grave doubts about being able to complete the task that – and on this he was in agreement with Octavia – could prove crucial for the survival of the sect. He hadn’t known that Octavian suspected any of his followers after the massacre that had involved her mother and Etain, but realised now what a fool he had been not to have: it was only logical. Perhaps the triumvir had even suspected him, and perhaps that was why he had not insisted upon taking him along on the campaign. When Octavia had told him, he realised that nothing was more vital than that his leader knew the truth. Not only would that give them back their unity, on the eve of his most important ordeal, but it would also restore his honour, which bore the stain of a reasonable suspicion.
In any case, it looked as though an unavoidable catastrophe was now on the cards. Two legions, including his own, the Martia, a praetorian cohort and four squadrons of cavalry – all intended for Octavian and perhaps decisive in the confrontation with Caesar’s killers – were likely to disappear somewhere in the Adriatic without ever having managed to even set foot on the shores of Epirus. He looked in the direction of the flagship, wondering what the intentions of their commander, Domitius Calvinus, were. Calvinus, unfortunately, had never been a great general: he had been rapidly defeated by Pharnaces of Pontus, who Caesar had soon after eliminated in the blink of an eye. If Agrippa had been in his place, he would have known what to do despite his young age. In Calvinus, however, Gaius had little confidence: the fact alone of not having brought along a sufficient number of galleys to protect the transport fleet spoke volumes about his inadequacy as an admiral.
And there was not a breath of wind. Even assuming that the commander gave the order to escape before the blockade closed its grip and that the heavy transport barges managed to escape Murcus’s agile triremes, their vessels would be going nowhere with only oars and without the assistance of sails.
They had to fight.
The number, ability and training of the soldiers of the two legions distributed on the transport ships would have re-assured any commander faced with an enemy fleet: more than ten thousand men, mostly veterans, made up an army which was hard to defeat in any circumstances. Unless they were loaded onto practically immobile transport ships, at the mercy of warships which could ram and destroy them before the legionaries had the opportunity to board the enemy vessels. It was as though they were on a series of islands with no defences, surrounded and under attack from all sides, targeted by dozens of throwing machines and archers.
The triremes began to move, converging on the area of the sea occupied by the transport fleet, and Gaius realised that they could take advantage of their manoeuvrability to dart between one barge and the next, ripping open their sides, breaking their oars, firing at them from close range and sending them crashing against each other, until in no time at all they would be just a collection of wrecks.
Unless…
Unless Calvinus gave orders to all the oarsmen to move the ships side by side and form a single line, like the wall of shields of a phalanx. A tactic which, if nothing else, would protect the sides of the ships and give the decks enough stability to provide the soldiers with a solid platform from which to execute their boardings before their opponents did.
But Calvinus was not equipped with enough imagination to come up with such a tactic. Gaius had to find a way of suggesting it to him.
And of achieving it. It was no easy feat to line up
a fleet which was already under pressure and without the propulsion required to perform manoeuvres. Gaius knew nothing about seamanship, but even he knew enough to realise that they were in deep trouble, and the first impact confirmed this: two of Murcus’s triremes attacked a barge a short distance from his, ramming it from both sides, and the trireme protecting that part of the convoy, which was obliged to cover too wide an area, just sat there watching, too far away to intervene and helpless in the face of the threats looming on all sides.
Gaius saw his fellow soldiers rolling across the deck and being thrown into the water, while the more determined attempted to hoist themselves up on the bulwark and throw themselves on the trireme’s deck. He could only admire their courage: if they were to die, then they would do it fighting and taking with them as many opponents as possible. He decided that he would do the same, when it was his turn. Which, by the looks of things, would be soon enough.
Especially as no signal was forthcoming from the admiral.
The ship which had been rammed was already sinking, its stern submerged and its bow much higher than the enemy’s deck, and the men who had sought safety in the part of the ship furthest from the water clung desperately to the bulwark until the bucking of the sinking vessel forced them to let go, when they slid across the deck and disappeared beneath the waves, some re-emerging in the midst of the debris, though more often disappearing without a trace.
The god Aeolus had it in for Caesar’s avengers, it seemed. With a gust of wind, they would have had a chance, but as things stood they were virtually prisoners of the enemy. You could not even place all the blame on the shoulders of Calvinus, whose options had been limited from the start: there were no other routes he could take without running into the fleet led by Domitius Ahenobarbus, and he could not wait for a more propitious time to set sail without the risk of reaching Octavian too late or of running into an autumn storm and an inevitable shipwreck.
Revenge Page 28
