Marius' Mules VII: The Great Revolt (78 page)
Read Marius' Mules VII: The Great Revolt Online
Authors: S. J. A. Turney
Tags: #legion, #roman, #Rome, #caesar, #Gaul
And they were alive. Happy. Healthy.
He shuddered again.
‘The same dream?’ Lucilia asked softly, approaching from behind and draping a fresh, warm blanket over his shoulders. Fronto nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
‘Tomorrow we are going to see the herbalists and the priests in town.
Someone
will know how to stop them. You can’t go on like this, Marcus.’
He nodded again. Still, his voice wouldn’t come. Every night now for weeks. Not more than a few hours’ sleep. It was affecting his waking world, too. Yesterday he’d been to fulfil an order of Formian for one of the city’s council, only to discover he’d ordered and loaded a Caecuban of a far more expensive vintage by mistake, which he’d then been obliged then to let go at the same low price.
The Greeks, even these displaced ones in Massilia, had always held the best reputation for medicine of both body and mind, and it was clearly time to seek help.
How did a man kill the ghosts of his past, though?
His eyes strayed from the sleeping forms of the twins and up to the wall at the far end of the room, where a glittering gladius with an orichalcum hilt hung, delivered against all expectations a month ago by the hand of a veteran centurion from the Tenth heading back to Rome for the winter.
He sighed and supressed another shudder.
How did one kill the dead
?
The end.
Historical note
This was always going to be a very military novel. I think we all knew that. One simply cannot tell the story of Rome and Gaul in 52BC and expect to make it a thriller, or a mystery, or a love story. And so book 7 has returned in some ways to the roots of the series, tied closely to the text of Caesar’s own diary.
Firstly, I hope I did it justice. To write about Avaricum and Gergovia and, most of all, Alesia is a daunting prospect. They are well known battles and it is all too easy to get the pace wrong, or to skip something critical in such a process. I have tried hard to capture each and every event of this year, right down to the individual manoeuvres and hiccups in the battles. And one can rely on Caesar’s text and the helpful words of a dozen learned historians writing about these battles, but little could beat the experience of being there. In that respect, hopefully, I have managed to bring some real life to the scenes. This past year I spent a great deal of time walking the battlefields of which I’ve now written, as well as training with the Twentieth Legion Valeria Victrix, in the form of the excellent Deva Victrix reenactors of Chester. Between these two, I have been given deeper insight into what it might have been to be there than ever before.
I am grateful that each of the battles and sieges in the story are so well told by Caesar and so different that they hopefully all come across fresh and individual and do not blur into a year-long pall of bloodshed.
I had to make several important decisions in the writing of this particular volume in the story. Firstly, this could not simply be Fronto’s tale, nor simply a Roman one. It was going to have to be a tale told from both perspectives. Anyone who’s followed the series through so far will note a growing trend of mine to portray the Gauls as more than barbarians. By the time of Alesia, I can only see them as more or less equals to Rome in terms of culture, if not the refinements of civilization, and to see Gergovia and Alesia for what they were it is, I think, critical to understand the Gallic angle as much as the Roman.
And so there are the new characters. To an extent, each side has characters that mirror one another. Vercingetorix is the Gallic Caesar: efficient and brilliant and a charismatic leader, but flawed, with hubris and arrogance. Cavarinos is very much the Gallic Fronto, beset by doubts and a slave to reason, yet trying to do what is right. Vergasillaunus (also written Vercassivellaunus) is an opposite number for Antonius. Of course, while most of the characters are grey rather than black and white, Critognatos is simply a villain, no two ways about it. Most of the Gallic characters in this tale are true historical figures, including Critognatos, who is portrayed even by Caesar as vicious and unpleasant. Cavarinos is my own invention as a needed foil and, no, you have not seen the last of him.
And on to the Ogmios curse. Ogmios in an enigmatic deity. He is nowhere near as well known as for instance Toutatis or Epona or Taranis, and yet having the aspects he did he must have been fairly important in the pantheon. I have chosen to pull him rather to the fore in this book. Curse tablets in the era, as you may know, were usually written on pot or lead sheets by plaintive worshippers and cast somewhere sacred to the gods in the hope those gods would intervene and make the curse come true. The ‘curse of Ogmios’ in this book is a complete fiction, created to further my plot. I had decided early on that the druids would continue to meddle in the rebellion even when it had taken off and became a military affair, and this tablet was clearly created by the druids to bring heart to the army, exactly as Cavarinos planned to use it.
Some of you might be disappointed in one hole in the tale. Early on, Labienus left the scene and went north, and returned successfuly much later to fall back into the plot. Yes, there was a tale to tell there too. I could, in theory, have told of Labienus’ activities, but I had long since recognised that this book was going to be a long one - far longer than any previous MM volume - and decided that the campaign of Labienus was superfluous to the plot. Sorry, Labienus fans. It was a practical decision.
There was also a little fudging to be done with the whole Narbonensis garrison, Cisalpine Gaul recruits, Fifth and Sixth legions matter. The origins of those two legions are vague and may have occurred at this time from the Cisalpine recruits. They may not. The precise makeup of the force led across the mountains by Caesar is nowhere given in detail, and the proconsul does not say in his work what happens to them after he leaves them in Arverni lands and wanders off to start his war. I chose to have Brutus come and find Caesar later and join in once more. In addition, the Aristius character, who is historically noted to have experienced pretty much what I describe, was supposedly on his way back to join the army at the time a lot further east, at Chalons. Guilty, I’m afraid. I nudged the geography and cast a little to put him, Priscus and Brutus together and somewhere that much closer fitted the situation - upstream of modern Roanne on a bend in the river, where an oppidum is recorded.
And a note on names quickly: A few locations in the text are fictional, though not many, and certainly not anywhere important. In fact, even the Gallic sanctuary where Cavarinos and Fronto meet (near the fictional Borvo - which is the name of a Celtic god of healing waters) is the ruined site of Les Fontaines Salees near modern Vezelay. Where the Gallic name of a place is not known, I have attempted to extract a Gallic root from a later Latinized name. Thus modern Bourges, which was Roman Avaricum, becomes Gallic Avaricon, Nevers to Noviodunum to Novioduno etc.
I have moved Vercingetorix’s first camp near Avaricum (Avaricon) too, though there is good reason for this. Most maps show his first camp way off to the west, and then his second close to the west of the oppidum. Since he was likely coming from the east, this made little sense, and there is a suggestion that his first camp was actually at a place now called Alleans (on the edge of the town of Baugy) - see
Revue archéologique du Centre de la France, Tome 22 - Fonvielle, Holmgren & Leday
for details. Thus I described the camp at Alleans in my text. Similarly, I had to choose a Gorgobina to describe from several potential sites. I selected St-Parize-le-Chatel over for instance Champallement, after visiting them and looking over their topography. Research, you see…
And yes, while I’m holding up my hands, I did skip Caesar’s raid against the Gallic camp at Avaricum/Avaricon. It would have made little difference to the story, padded out yet more pages in this epic, and to be honest, makes Caesar look like a bit of a prat, which I’ve tried to avoid where I can. Indeed, in order to spare yet more detail of ditch-digging and to speed up the prose, I omitted the lines of defence the Romans created at Gergovia linking their two camps. I tried to keep the initial word count of the book below 200,000!
Another tweak comes in the form of the German cavalry. Strictly speaking, Caesar is noted to have used a small German cavalry force early on, and then sends across the Rhine for a much larger force between the times of Gergovia and Alesia. I helpfully combined these into one unit. I’ve also given them a bit of personality - albeit barbaric and gruesome - in order to explain to some extent why they were so effective. Sorry if you were eating your dinner while you read that…
I have rather downplayed Caesar’s figures throughout. If the Gallic army at Alesia had actually numbered what Caesar suggests in his text, there must have been hardly any sign of life anywhere else across Gaul! I have always assumed that, like all good self-publicists in war, Caesar downplays his own numbers and at least doubles those of the enemy. I adjusted accordingly.
So what of Fronto? I realise that he has had less of a direct martial role in this book, though I made sure he saw his fair share of action. Sorry to those of you who only read these volumes to watch Fronto carve his enemies to pieces. I made a conscious decision here that Fronto needed to step back a little more than usual, to see things from a grander perspective. Plus I had my grand plan for him to quit at the end, and it helped ease him into the transition to what must happen afterwards.
Why, you ask? Well, 51BC is not something I feel enthused to write an entire volume about. The tail end of the Gallic war drags on a little, including an impressive siege, but it’s not really enough for me to tuck into for a whole book. The war
will
be shown still in book eight, probably through the eyes of Atenos, interspersed with what will be happening to Fronto, a little of which you may already suspect from the epilogue of this book. The fact is that, with this volume, the Gallic Wars effectively end, and there is no fun to be had in writing Fronto’s adventures in camp for several years until the civil war finally kicks off. Instead, it is time to expand upon Fronto the civilian for a while. But remember that the civil war is only 3 years away, and we know that when Caesar takes the field, Fronto can’t resist a fight.
So I have my plans for the next three Marius’ Mules books. And personally I love them. I like to mix it up now and then, and it’ll be fun taking Fronto away from Gaul again and watching Lucilia and the boys grow.
Oh and lastly: sorry about the body count. Some of my friends will no doubt badger me over the death of old friends - particularly Priscus, but also Fabius and Furius, and Palmatus. Fabius’ death was inevitable. Caesar details it quite clearly, though in his version, Fabius comes across as a bit of a moron, frankly. I chose to have him go berserk after the death of a friend rather than succumb to greed. And Palmatus? Well, the singulares have shrunk and there really isn’t room for two officers, is there? Priscus? Priscus was just my own gratuitousness. To be honest, I have had characters (including Priscus) survive awful events and wounds before now, but I wanted to make sure I portrayed this year’s harrowing sieges and battles in the strongest possible manner, and the simple fact is that in times such as 52BC in Gaul, the body count was going to be massive. So, rest well Priscus and friends. Fronto will be back next year in Book 8: The Sons of Taranis.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed the culmination of the Gallic Wars.
Simon Turney, September 2014
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