Arthur Imperator (10 page)

XX
Corvus

Behind
them on the hillside was an ancient tribal symbol, the giant white figure of a horse, made centuries before from trenches cut and filled with crushed chalk. It was a fine sight but the tribunes Cragus and Lycaon had no eyes for it. In front of them on the rolling grassland was a corral, raw new wood gleaming in the sunshine, containing a horse herd of about 100 animals. They were grazing, standing quiet. All, that is, except two young stallions that were stamping and snorting, posturing and baring their teeth at each other as they began a contest for leadership.

“Best
separate them two, sirs,” said a cavalry decurion, an auxiliary of the northern Brigantes tribe. He was a grizzled old soldier who had been recruited by the Romans, served his time, retired when his legion left for Gaul and had recently been unwillingly swept up from his comfortable, illegal life as a horse trader.

“Er,
yes, sergeant,” Lycaon said, wondering how on earth he was to dominate a great brute of horseflesh equipped with teeth and hooves and with its mind on sex and fighting. The decurion looked morosely at the two tribunes. 

“Ah’ll
do it, sirs,” he sighed in a gust of stale wine breath.

“Would
you, please?” drawled Cragus, unconvincingly pretending he himself was on the verge of stepping up to the task. The decurion gave him a disbelieving look from a face as hard as a hoof.

“Aye,
happen I might,” he said, taking a length of rope from the rail and stepping into the corral. The two tribunes watched in awe when the soldier walked up to the two pawing stallions. “Piss off, you,” he snarled at one horse, flicking a hand at the stallion he judged was losing the blustering match. The animal backed away, but its opponent was not going so quietly. 

As
the decurion strode up to it, the horse reared, pawing the air with its hoofs. The soldier acted as if this was an everyday event, which for him it might well have been, stepped up between the horse’s flailing legs and reached upwards with his right hand. As the surprised stallion began to come down, he seized its muzzle in a particular way and to the officers’ astonishment brought the beast directly and easily to its knees.

The
soldier stood above the humbled stallion, still gripping its muzzle somehow, and spoke to it. Then, after a long minute, he released the horse. It staggered to its feet and stood, head down, quivering. The decurion casually looped the rope around its neck and led it quietly to the rail, where he tied it. “Let t’bugger think on it for a few minutes,” he said cryptically.

Cragus,
all pretence of equine expertise abandoned, looked slack-jawed at the soldier. “How the devil did you…?” he said, his voice tailing off.

“Ah,”
said the decurion, “tha puts thy fingers up t’nostrils as they come down. Makes their eyes water a bit, then you tell ‘em that if they boogers you about onny more there’s lots where that come from. They allus listen.” He turned back to the tethered horse and released the loop of rope. “Right, cock,” he said, smacking the horse on the rump, “off tha goes, and behave.” 

Cragus
looked at the soldier carefully. No disrespect, just casual competence. “Stop by my adjutant when you’re done,” he said, “and tell him to give you a skin of the Rhenish wine from my store. Tell him to make it the good stuff, you’ve done well.”

For
the first time since he’d been drafted from his cushy billet and his woman in Colchester, the decurion grinned. “Aye, sir, thanks,” he said. “Ah will.” 

Lycaon
nodded to his fellow tribune. “With operators like that, we’ll have a cavalry faster than Arthur thinks,” he said. “Now, did you say you had more than one wineskin in that wretched hovel of yours?” The pair sat and wrangled happily over their Rhenish, discussing progress and plans for their horse breeding and training program. 

So
far, matters were going well enough. Cragus’ recruitment efforts had paid off, with 180 or so horse guards recruited who were experienced in equine husbandry, and a steady trickle of recruits was still arriving from south of the Wall, where once the Romans had maintained a cavalry force of about 800 men. Many of those horse soldiers were Sarmatians or their descendants, some of the 5,500 hostages taken from their homeland and stationed in Britain a century before. They lived, as they always had, in carriages not in houses, even after they were given land grants, and seemed to spend all their waking hours on horseback.

“Those
fellows,” said Lycaon, who’d recruited a contingent from Ribchester where horse farms were noted as immune to the depredations of wolves, “those fellows ready their horses for long journeys by withholding their fodder the day before they go, and only allowing them a little water. Even Pliny knew of it. He said they could ride 150 miles non-stop with such preparation.”

The two Friesian stallions Corvus and Nonios that Lycaon had spirited out of Gaul were at stud, carefully separated in pens at opposite ends of the paddock and the tribunes thought that a number of mares were already pregnant. Meanwhile, the task of taming and training the wild horses was well under way and already 50 or more cavalrymen were mounted and working with their steeds, wheeling, forming and reforming in squadrons. Several dozen cavalrymen were working with foot soldiers, having the infantrymen hang on alongside their stirrups, taking great bounds and leaps as the horsemen cantered towards the ‘enemy’ lines. The tactic was a successful one to deliver a surprise attack, fast, for the arrival of infantry right behind the shattering shock of a cavalry charge was almost guaranteed to break an enemy line. 

The
tribunes nodded approval. “By spring, we’ll have a viable cavalry force,” said Lycaon contentedly. The duo strolled out of Cragus’ quarters to view a decurion who was demonstrating the correct way to knot up a horse tail to prevent it being grabbed by an enemy in combat. “You also braid the mane, to stop all that loose hair getting in your way if you’re a horse archer, or if you’re swinging a sword or pointing a lance,” he declared.

Cragus
saw that the horse on which the decurion was demonstrating had a bloody handprint painted onto the shoulder. He nudged his companion to draw his attention to it.

“It’s
a Celt thing,” said Lycaon. “It’s to bring fortune in battle. The story is that a bloodied, dying Celtic hero gave his horse a last, farewell pat and left his handprint on there. He was such a hero, the groom never cleaned the blood away and soon all the warriors imitated the decoration.” Lycaon turned away. “We’d better get a report together for Arthur,” he said. “Herd management, halter training, remounts, horse archer equipment, forage bags, he wants to know the status of everything. Bring those lists of yours, would you?” 

XXI Candless

The
bishop stood on the rampart that was once the northernmost boundary of the Roman Empire, and looked south into Britain. He had climbed to the top of a watchtower on the 74-mile stone wall built at the orders of Publius Aelius Hadrianus, but even though the tower was many times a man’s height above the berm and deep defensive ditch of the Entrenchment, he could see only mist and cloud. On a fine day, unlike this one in the month of Mars, he knew he would have been able to view miles into the rolling countryside where shepherds watched for wolves and eagles, and for raiders like himself.

This
bishop was no ordinary cleric. He looked the part: he wore a surplice and wide leather belt. He assumed the tonsure and, on a gold chain around his neck, wore the tau-rho looped cross of a follower of Christ, but he also hung a well-used gladius sword on his hip, and kept a punching knife discreetly out of sight under his cloak. Beneath his tunic, on his shoulder was the tribal tattoo that marked him as a Painted One, a Pict, and his startling blue eyes and fair hair attested to a long-ago Scand ancestor.

Bishop
Candless was born in Dunbar, beside the sea forth where the Votadini buckled the belt at Pictland’s waist. He had fought the British when they took the steep-sided clifftop fortress that controlled the valley of the Forth. He had seen his king, Alpin, killed by a lucky bolt from a ballista there and he had finally been forced to flee the legions when they had outflanked and surprised the Damnoni with a makeshift floating bridge across an ‘unpassable’ sea inlet.

Candless
was not a bishop in those days, he was a maddened howling warrior with bare chest and whirring blade, but the invaders had rolled up the tribes, sent coffles of slaves to the southern markets and burned the settlements of the Painted Ones. 

Candless
had gone on the run. While making his way near the crumbled timber-and-turf relics of the Antonine Wall, high tide mark of the empire, he had come across a cleric on a mule and had elected to relieve him of the responsibilities of both office and wealth. Rather than be spotted as an escapee of the last rout, he had assumed the cleric’s robe, money purse and animal and had in turn been received well as a holy man. With scant Latin, an engaging manner and a newly-shaved head, he began a successful career as a mendicant, seeking food, shelter and frequent comfort in return for his prayers. He modestly let it be known that the faithful believers, and only they, could sometimes see the blessed nimbus that surrounded his saintly pate, and a few declared that indeed it was visible.

“Somf,”
he would say to his congregants, “et pax,” using a mix of invention and pig Latin on blessings they all received humbly and offering indulgences to some of the female congregants that they especially enjoyed.

Now
he was looking for his next opportunity, but was foiled by the mist. The bishop grunted in disappointment. Nothing to see. He climbed laboriously back down from the milecastle’s tower and strolled to where three men waited with horses.

“Customs
post. Long time since they were here to collect taxes, eh?” one of the men said, nodding to where the outline of a fortification marked the ground. “They were good at taking. They even took all this – timbers, stones, the lot.” Standard practice, thought Candless, who was no military fool. When they moved on, the Romans removed everything for use elsewhere and sealed the ground with a layer of clay and turf. They left nothing for the enemy. He didn’t bother to tell his brigands, just grunted at the comment. He had other things on his mind.

I too had plenty on my mind. One of the regular couriers from Segontium had travelled by Myrddin’s house to gather news of the sorcerer and of Guinevia, and I heard that she was planning to be back in Chester soon. My problem was that I was in Londinium overseeing improvements to the Saxon Shore fortifications and chivvying the chieftains of the Catuvellauni and Tribantes clans. I wanted them to support the overmatched Cantii to push back the Saxons who were establishing themselves in that tribe’s territory on the Downs. The invaders had already seized a couple of small hamlets and two valuable iron ore quarries, and their roaming bands of marauders were a threat to travellers to Dover and Chichester. So far, they had not menaced any major settlements, but that was just a question of time. I needed that tribal cooperation, and I needed to muster my troops soon, especially to have my cavalry at training. 

It
was early spring, the weather would be right in a few weeks, and once the barley and wheat crops were planted I could call territorial forces away from their gardens and grain fields to supplement my soldiers. The balancing act was a delicate one. Just as we waited for fair weather to release our farmer-soldiers, so too did the Saxons wait, for then they would be reinforced by the ships that brought warriors with their land-hungry settlers. The farmers wanted a place to grow their crops and their families, so they hired soldiers to help them establish a foothold, and the warriors came for the rape and loot. For the Britons, the result was the same. They lost their lives or their land, and in many cases their freedom vanished in unhappy circumstances, too. Fair-skinned females and children brought a premium in the slave markets of the south.

Also
on my mind was the growing threat from north of the Wall. I’d sent an expeditionary force up there a few years ago. They’d taken the great fortress on the rock above the Forth more by good fortune than anything, but a smart move had outflanked the next force of Picts and then it was just a question of marching down the old line of Roman garrisons and mopping up the rebels. Evidently time had worked its usual healing on memory and the Picts had forgotten their punishment, for reports were coming to me of raids across the old Wall, of citizens taken into slavery, homes and crops burned and flocks driven off. 

A
courier stamped into my quarters, dust-covered, sweat-stinking and streaked with horse spume. He saluted the old way, fist to heart, and handed over a soft leather pouch that had been sewn closed, then sealed with wax. I looked him over. He was young and he looked very tired.

“Where
have you come from?” I asked as I picked up a small knife and sliced the stitching.

“From
Chester, lord,” he said, still at attention.

“Relax,
fellow,” I said, “that’s a long ride.”

“Two
days, lord, I was told to make speed,” he said proudly. I looked up sharply. “Watling Street, lord,” he said in explanation. “The mansios and staging posts are very good.”

The
dispatch rider referred to the hostelries and stables at regular intervals along the road that bisected Britain. A government rider with authority could change horses every dozen miles, constantly riding a fresh mount, to bring important news at incredible speed. This dispatch had to be vital. It was. 

I
recognized at once my steadfast Guinevia’s clear hand and school-grammar-correct Latin. The message was brief. In one of her seer’s meditations, she had sent her mind to view her father at his compound on the River Tay, near Bertha. This town was the ultimate limit of the Roman empire, the place where the Picts had forced Rome’s legions to a halt. Since then all kings of the Picts had been crowned there, seated on a sacred stone of authority, and the place had become a symbolic centre of resistance to their southern neighbours. It was also a running sore for me.

The
Picts had broken every treaty we’d made, they’d made their promises, taken the concessions and then continued to raid and plunder south of the Wall, taking hundreds of Britons into slavery, driving off the herds and burning crops, settlements and farms. I’d overlooked their non-payment of agreed tributes but they had taken the gesture as weakness and had become insolent, and now, a threat.

What
Guinevia saw had caused her heart to crack. Her father was in discussion with four other Pictish chieftains, all of whom she knew, for she had once acted as my ambassador and had gathered their solemn oaths of peace while we fought the Roman invasion. Now she was viewing them plotting, but worse was to come. The man with whom they were dealing was my own treasurer and tribune, the wolfish Allectus, disguised in the habit of a Christian monk.

As
she observed from her faraway chamber, she saw the traitor hand over my legate’s fustis, the baton of office I had received from the Emperor Persicus himself. It was a stolen token that he would be ruler once I was deposed. She saw the chart Allectus laid before the five chiefs. On it, they sketched the divisions they would make of the lands they would take while I was engaged with the Saxons in the south. Lastly, she saw them each make a cut in the palms of their hands, then clasp them in brotherhood. A blood oath, a mingling of life forces, and all of it against me. I crumpled the scroll with its report of treachery and threw it into the fire. Allectus had shaken hands on his own death warrant, but how was I to serve it? I had to return to Chester and take up the reins before I became an executioner’s victim. What they planned, I did not know. I could guess they would join forces to confront me. If I acted quickly, I could meet them separately, with the reduced forces I had available in the north. They might be sufficient, or they might not, but I did not dare to draw other forces to meet them. I could not ignore the huge threat of the Saxons, which was growing by the week. 

It
was a deadly game of chess, and I would send my mounted knights to hold the Saxons while I took my foot soldier pawns north, to crush the Picts. And, I swore to myself, I’d have the head of that treacherous cleric Allectus. He would be a bishop removed from the chequerboard, thanks to my queen and her magic. I had no inkling of what that vision had cost her.