Marius' Mules V: Hades' Gate (27 page)

The parts played by the Seventh and Tenth legions in the fracas had been lauded by the general and his somewhat sparse staff, as well as the other legates who had been delayed by the crossing and had arrived only to find it all over bar the abortive chase.

A curious state had arisen, however, between the two leading centurions of the Seventh, who had been almost entirely responsible for the success of the attack, and the two new tribunes of the Tenth, who had been responsible for the army managing to cross the river and come to their aid. While Pullo and Vorenus, Furius and Fabius had all been cheered for their actions and had clasped forearms in respect for their parts in the fight, there was an undefinable tension between the two pairs that Priscus had noted on more than one occasion.

It was understandable to some extent, of course. Two senior centurions moved to a new legion without any noticeable promotion only to take the place of two men of equal rank who had now been made tribunes. It would mar the relationship between many officers. But Priscus had truly thought these four men too professional to let such matters get to them. Unless, of course, the tension went all the way back to that reported encounter in the woodland during the winter when they'd argued over the Gaulish courier. Could it really run that deep?

It would certainly need an eye keeping on the situation. The fact that the four men were so rigidly polite and militaristic around each other reeked of worsening relations. Most centurions and their ilk were quite free with one another and relatively relaxed among their kind. If things did not improve, there could be trouble between the two legions as a whole, and that would do nobody any good.

Priscus huffed and shook his head angrily. He was letting his mind wander on purpose, trying to fill his thoughts with anything other than the task at hand. Nibbling his lower lip, he returned the stylus to the ink pot, dipped the split nub in it, rattled it against the glass bottle neck to remove the excess, and then lowered the pen to the small sheet of vellum.

Marcus Falerius Fronto, from Gnaeus Vinicius Priscus, legatus, Legio X.

The header had sat unchanged for a quarter of a useless hour so far.

My apologies, my friend, for the long delay in writing. Things have been very busy here and I have only

The legate sighed and reached for his sharp knife and rag, blotting the fresh ink and scraping the words from the vellum amid the numerous other marks of deleted writings. He was either going to have to commit to a sentence or find a fresh sheet of the expensive material. Perhaps he should have used a wax tablet.

I have tried ten times ten ways now to tell you of the passing of our friend Aulus Crispus and I give up. The latest in the long line of good men lost to this army, Crispus died fast but dishonourably at the hands of a treacherous Gaul.

Perhaps he should pull the blow a little and not talk about the manner of the man's death? But lying and omissions would never help when the truth came out. Priscus paused and closed his eyes, picturing Fronto as he read the words. His stomach twisted at the sight. The former commander had lost so many good friends over the past four years and each time he had taken his grief, honed it to a keen edge, and then inflicted it on the men responsible. Yet in this case, even had Dumnorix lived, Fronto was half a world away and impotent to do anything about it. Perhaps it would be kinder not to write the letter at all? Certainly it was way past due now. But when the day came that Fronto found out from someone else, Priscus' name would be unspeakable.

He was sent to Elysium with rich gold on his eyes and a good attendance by his pyre. The remains are already on their way to Rome for interment, should you wish to pay your respects to him and his family. I suffer a heavy heart to be the bearer of the news. There are hardly any of the senior staff now who marched with us against the Helvetii.

Still, we have taken captives in Britannia and have won a first small victory. The captives have given us information as to where we will find a ringleader named Cassivellaunus who has drawn together all of the aggressive local tribes, and the legions are preparing to march out and deal with him. Hopefully in a few weeks we can wrap up this entire expedition and get back to Gaul, where I will set about exacting revenge for Crispus. Would that you were here to help - I sorely need it and, while he would never say as much, so does Caesar. Of his senior men, the only ones now who can claim even remotely the same experience and ability as you are Sabinus and Labienus, and the latter is still hovering on the edge of Caesar's trust at the best of times.

Again, Priscus paused and re-inked the pen thoughtfully, staring at the vellum. He cursed himself for a bad letter writer. The news of Crispus, while being the most acceptable attempt so far, was still brief, sharp and poor. The rest read like a status report and then a stream of whining and complaining. This was why so many officers left their clerks to compose such letters and simply put their mark at the end.

I trust that all is well with you and your kin. Pass on my regards to those we hold dear and I pray that I will see you all when the season is over. With my newfound rank I see no reason to winter here with the men when I can return to Rome.

Another pause as Priscus wondered what else to say. There was only a little vellum left. With a shake of his head, he gave up and signed it, rolling it into a scroll and dropping it into a standard military tube-case. With clenched teeth, he dripped wax on the join to seal the case and then pressed his signet - the heron and olive branch of the Vinicii - into it.

"Courier?"

The young soldier who had been hovering just outside the door of the tent for the past half hour at his request pushed aside the flap and came to attention inside, saluting.

"Sir?"

"Take this, visit the chief clerk at Caesar's praetorium and check if there are any other messages awaiting the trip to Rome. If there are, take those too and head down to the ships, find the one set aside for courier duty and accompany the messages until they reach Gesoriacum and the supply chain. Then check for incoming messages and bring any you find back here. When you return, wait at this camp. The army may not have returned from our march, but there will be a resident garrison. You got all that?"

The messenger nodded. "Yes, sir. Anything else, legate?"

Priscus shook his head, motioning the lad to leave, and stood, reaching for his embossed helm with the ridiculous horsehair plume, and grabbing his sword and baldric before turning to leave the tent. This bloody Cassivellaunus had damn well better either capitulate quickly or run until he reached the edge of the Styx. Priscus was in no mood to mess around.

* * * * *

Tribune Fabius cleared his throat. "It's no good, sir. There's nothing usable here."

Priscus sagged, pinching the bridge of his nose irritably. "Nothing?"

"Not a thing, sir. All the animals that couldn't be taken away have been charred beyond edibility. The crops have been harvested early or burned where that's not possible. All the veg have gone. I swear the bastards have even picked all the fruit and berries from the trees!"

Priscus closed his eyes. Caesar was going to rant again. A week now the army had been on the move inland, crossing rivers and traversing forests, always heading west, forever stretching their communication and supply lines, and every mile west had been a chore.

The first two days had been perfectly acceptable, the army moving in good spirits, eating well from the supplies they had brought, and with no sign of the Britons. Day three had changed all that. The natives had appeared among the trees of the seemingly endless forest the army crossed. While the legions had hurriedly responded by drawing close and preparing for action, it appeared that the Britons were content to keep pace and watch the invaders from a distance - a habit that quickly began to unsettle the Romans.

By that first night, it became evident that their apparent non-involvement was an untruth. The army settled in to make camp, a heavy guard out against local incursions, and waited for the standard small rear-guard of men from the Ninth and Eleventh to arrive with the supply wagons.

They never came.

The first scout party sent out to find them also disappeared without trace.

When four cohorts of the Seventh were sent to discern what had happened, they discovered the supply train ransacked and the entire rear-guard still in position, minus their heads.

On the fourth day the army had stayed put while a strong force returned to the beachhead to collect more supplies, and then on the fifth they marched on, only to encounter a grisly tableau in a forest clearing involving an altar to a misshapen native deity surrounded by in excess of two hundred severed Roman heads. While a number of the rankers began to question the wisdom of continuing on into this barbaric land, the grim spectacle simply hardened Caesar's resolve, and the army marched on, crossing a second large waterway that morning that the locals called the 'Medu Wey'.

That night, the new rear-guard and replacement supply wagons failed to arrive and Caesar snapped one of Priscus' wax tablets in half in his anger.

It quickly became painfully clear that, unless the legions were to leave a continual line of men all the way back to the beach, they were unlikely to maintain a working supply train with these nightmarish hidden ambushes. Caesar decided on the sixth day that the force would have to become fully self-sufficient, cutting the standard daily rations and living from foraging and the commandeering of local resources.

It was an easily workable plan. It had seen Roman forces through hostile lands over several centuries.

It was also a complete failure in Britannia.

This Cassivellaunus, who - the questioned captives had confirmed - had managed to bring half a dozen tribes together in the single cause of resisting the Roman advance, was quite clearly dangerously insane, and possibly brilliant.

After the assault on the hill fort, the man had realised that this Roman force was unstoppable in the field, even with his novel tactics. And so he had combined with all the other tribes in a unified network of resistance, refusing to meet the Romans in battle, but continually severing the lines of supply and communication and effectively blinding the army. It was no longer viable to send out scouts and patrols in numbers of less than a thousand and comprised of both infantry and cavalry. The smaller groups had been all too easily picked off and then left, dismembered, in the path of the army.

And now that Caesar had decided the army could live off the land for the length of one short campaign, Cassivellaunus seemed determined, willing even to kill his own people if it stopped the Roman advance. Every farm they reached had been burned, slighted and raped of anything useful. Every orchard was picked, every field harvested. Even the woods seemed suspiciously empty of deer and game birds. Could the Britons really be overhunting their own forests to excess just to stop the Romans eating?

And it was working. The army was hungry and starting to slip into despondency. Gone were the high spirits gained from the hill-fort's conquest. Now, every man trudged slowly and miserably, trying to ignore the grumble in his stomach and living off only the dry rations he carried in his kit.

Then, last night, a shock arrow storm had swept down from a hill nearby, killing dozens of men and wounding many more. The whole thing was over before even a buccina call could go out, and by the time soldiers had reached the ridge, the archers were long gone. Since then, no man had left his shield out of reach.

And now here were the Tenth, standing in a deserted farm, looking at a field of inedible stubble and smelling the charred remains of the too-old, too-young, and lame animals that formed a carbonised smoking pile near the main hut.

Another failed foraging mission. Four hours of hunting the surrounding lands with almost two thousand men and what had they to show for it: a stray cow that had somehow escaped the mass cull, two unfortunate ducks and a hare. Oh, and a basket of mixed nuts, berries and fruit. When divided between four legions'-worth of men, it wasn't going to supplement the dry rations a great deal.

"What are your orders, legate?" Fabius asked quietly.

"What else? We return to camp. I face Caesar and everyone else makes a piss-poor stew out of the half dozen scrawny animals we found. I hope someone likes to eat arse meat, as that constitutes about ten per cent of what we've recovered. Brains, bums and balls."

"Sounds like the Seventh… apart from the brains" smiled Carbo from where he stood nearby, who then snapped to attention and straightened his face as the two officers turned to glare at him.

"When I find this poor excuse for a lame donkey's pizzle Cassivellaunus, I'm going to make a stew out of him." Priscus growled.

His hand fell to the water-skin at his side - of which the contents only comprised three parts in four of water - and he unstoppered it, lifting it to his lips and cursing the fact that every day saw him turning more and more into Fronto.
That
thought, in turn, brought him back to the letter he had despatched, which would now be somewhere in Northern Gaul, winging its way to Rome where it would make Fronto thoroughly angry.

"What's that?"

Priscus looked in the direction of Carbo's gesture. Flashes of bronze glinted in the sunlight among the trees at the far end of the farmer's field. There, a century of the Tenth were busy trying to hack the remaining few stalks of some crop from the ground.

"Ambush. Surely not enough to challenge four damn cohorts?"

And yet as the legate watched, arrows, sling stones and spears began to arc from the tree line and into the century of working legionaries. Fortunate were they that recent experiences had taught them to be ready at all times and to never underestimate the enemy. In a heartbeat every man had risen from his work, sword already in hand and shield unslung from his back. Nobody even bothered putting the leather cover on their shields these days.