The Eagle and the Raven (21 page)

Then, with a shocking suddenness, two days away from Camulodunon, the scouts found them ambling under the welcome shade of the forest and fell upon them with news that galvanized them into horrified action. The pleasant glow of anticlimax fled and the words sped back down the train from mouth to mouth like groundfire out of control.

“They have come! The beaches are swarming with them. Already they are digging in and raising defences for the provisions. The cavalry is still at sea but it cannot be long.”

Caradoc sprang to life. “Mocuxsoma!” he bellowed. “Ride to Verulamium. Take a scout with you. Tog must turn back. Gladys, speed to Camulodunon. Tell Eurgain of all that has passed. Tell her we face them alone and she must prepare for a siege. Then stay or return as you choose. Fearachar, from this moment you are not to let Llyn out of your sight.” He quickly calculated the distance that separated his tribe from the others, and debated whether to send freemen after them. It would make no difference, not at the first encounter with the enemy. The enemy! He saw himself a youth, laughing with the traders, mad for every new curiosity that they brought, sitting on Eurgain’s Roman couch and drinking Roman wine. He knew his change. Regret shook him, then dissolved. Rome was now the enemy.

“Vocorio, choose six of my chiefs. Send them south, west, and north. The tribes will be of no use yet, but perhaps they will come to engage Plautius if he breaks through us.”

“We could turn and try to join up with the Cantiaci,” Cinnamus said. “The place of Plautius’s landing is in their territory. Together we might hold them off until the others come.”

Caradoc nodded, thin-lipped, his mind clicking over furiously. There was a chance that the Cantiaci had not disbanded. Of all the tribes, they would know that Rome was here. “Go to them, Cin,” he said. “Don’t stop to sleep or eat. Take a spare horse with you. Ask them to cross the Medway and wait for us on our side of the river. No use in marching any farther south. We do not want to be caught on the move. Then come back to me.”

His chiefs and Gladys scattered, mounting their horses and pounding into action, and Caradoc sat listening to the fading of their dispersion. Then he raised himself, turned, and shouted, “Back, all! The Raven of Battle has come! Back to the Medway!”

Aulus Plautius Silvanus stood on the sand, watching his men disembark. His tribunes clustered around him, the plumes of their helmets tossing in the landward breeze, and beyond them all the troops boiled along the beach, the centurions moving among them. Farther up, where the sand gave way to pebbles and then grass, the standards and aquilae had been planted, and gradually the shouting, seething mass began to separate and gather to their units.

“Where is the enemy?” Rufus Pudens said. “We come expecting to face a horde of screaming savages and we find absolutely nothing. Not even a monster!”

Plautius smiled briefly at his senatorial tribune, wondering how Vespasianus was faring. Probably chaffering his seasick, miserable men into some kind of order. A good man, Plautius thought. No more imagination than one of Claudius’s precious doves, but a born soldier. Where would the Second Augusta be without his coarse, harsh discipline? “They have gone home,” he answered. “But they were waiting.” He waved to the south.

“They expected us by the cliffs, or so I hear. The Twentieth will know by now.”

A shrill, frightened neighing split the air, and the men turned to watch the first of the horses led ashore. The praefectus alae stood, hands on hips, and his men struggled to pacify the plunging, wild-eyed brutes. Already order was rapidly being established, and inland, just out of sight, they heard the soldiers begin to dig the trenches that would become the perimeters of their first camp. By nightfall the earth would be pulled into walls, the towers erected, the tents laid out in neat rows, and the officers would sleep on their own cots. Plautius listened to all of it with great satisfaction. So far, so good.

“Pudens,” he said, “Find me the primipilus. I want to know how many men have been incapacitated by the storm. And see that guards are posted well inland. To work, gentlemen. How I would like a bath!” They laughed dutifully and turned away and he sighed, his gaze traveling the calm, sparkling ocean, the sun-drenched, stirring grasses.

In spite of the activity going on all around him he felt a deep peace. Before the sun set, word would come from Vespasianus and from the Twentieth, and in the morning they could begin their march. He was glad that it was he standing here sweating in the sun, and not Paulinus, who was even now on his way through the mountains into Mauretania. He could find no reason for his happiness. It was just there, like the wind and the waves. He wondered how Vespasianus’s emissaries were getting on with the Atrebates and their new chieftain, Cogidumnus, who had offered their aid against these two foolhardy Catuvellaunian brothers. He thought briefly of the sulky, intractable Adminius, still sitting in one of the boats, and derision curled his lip for a moment. He would have his uses, but Plautius despised him. The primipilus coughed politely at his elbow and Plautius at last brought his thoughts back to the present. There was much to do before he could settle down in his tent to a little reading. Julius Caesar’s
Comentarii
nestled snugly in his knapsack.

Chapter Eleven

C
ARADOC
and the Catuvellaunian chiefs wended back the way they had come. Many of the women who had traveled to the coast with the wains had decided to join Eurgain in defending their town and had taken their children back with them, but Gladys returned, catching them up just before they crossed the Thamus. They camped briefly on the farther side of the river, high out of the tide’s inexorable reach, then pushed on quickly and came to the Medway at noon of the next day. Scouts passed in and out of the camp, bringing Caradoc detailed accounts of each movement of the enemy. In the middle of that night Togodumnus arrived, his men tired and hungry, for they had slept only briefly, curled in their cloaks beside the path, and had not stopped to light fire. Togodumnus did not apologize for his flagrant bad manners of the days before, but sauntered cheekily into camp, greeted his brother, and called for meat. Llyn left Fearachar’s side and ran to his uncle, throwing his arms about the slim, tight-muscled waist, but Caradoc ordered him sharply back to his place and told him to stay there on pain of a drubbing. He did not want his son to blithely follow Tog into the heart of battle, and he knew that this was what Llyn wanted to do. Later he told Fearachar that he was to use force if necessary, but Llyn was not to trail after Togodumnus any more.

At dawn a scout came, warning them that the legions, which had landed in three different places along the coast in an extremity of caution, had now joined forces and were on the march. Caradoc left his meal hastily and melted into the white morning mist, with Cinnamus and Caelte beside him, and soon the Catuvellaunian host followed, and began to spread out along the bare, level banks of the wide river, moving like wan, gray ghosts, silent in the clinging mist. Caradoc went up and down the lines, going from chief to chief, advising and admonishing. The chariots rolled between them and the water, their warriors and drivers swaying, but strangely there were few sounds. The damp chill of early morning enveloped them all, dulling thought and senses, and the warriors and freemen stood or squatted, wrapped in their own private, anesthetic dreams. Cinnamus had told Caradoc that the Cantiaci would come, but that they would sweep wide and find the fords to the south so as to avoid the Roman column, and could not be expected to arrive before noon. Caradoc heard, weighed, and shrugged. He and his men could surely hold the river until noon. He went back to Fearachar and Llyn.

“Take the boy,” he said, “and go back toward the hills. Climb a little before you turn to watch, but choose your line of escape before you settle, my friend. And you, Llyn,” he said, taking his son’s hands and speaking sternly. “If you leave Fearachar’s side I will take your freedom from you in Council and you will become his slave forever more. Is that clear?” Llyn blanched and nodded solemnly, and he knew his father did not speak idly. Caradoc kissed him and sent them away, then he went and sat on the damp grass beside his chiefs, huddled in his warm cloak.

Already the mist was thinning, turning from pallid gray to the palest golden, shredding slowly, and he sat with head bowed, thinking of Eurgain and their cozy, laughter-filled house, and of Cunobelin, who in all the invisible nets of his ambition had never dared to snare a Roman army. But he thought also of his own moment of fear, of the feeling that would come soon when he sounded the carnyx and his chariot would begin to roll. He already felt it creeping over him, tingling in his limbs and filling his mouth with the taste of metallic sourness, and he rose abruptly and began to walk the lines again, hearing the muttered spells, the faint, guttural curses, and the pledges and pleas to Camulos. They had made the sacrifices yesterday. Many in the host had demanded a human victim, but Caradoc, not yet free completely of the years of Roman influence, though he did not know it, forbade the sacred knives. Besides, there was no Druid.

He found Togodumnus deep among his own chiefs, leaning on the spokes of his chariot and humming softly, but there was nothing to say, nothing at all. They looked at each other without rancor, then they embraced affectionately and Caradoc went back to his post. He tied back his hair and put on his helm, working it snugly against his head, then hefted his spear and loosened his sword in its scabbard. He removed his silver and bronze bracelets and put them in the pouch at his belt. His slow, nervous fingers found the golden torc at his neck and he stroked it for a moment, pride stiffening his spine. Catuvellaunian wolf! They shall feel my fangs this day, he thought. Then he picked up his shield, and as he slid his arm into the leather straps, the mist suddenly shook, dissolved, and blew away, and a gentle morning sun beamed down upon them, firing the sluggish water.

Then he saw them. It was as if they were black rocks, or a great hard wall of adamant sunk viciously behind the covering cloak of the fog by the hammer blows of some angry giant, or…his heart missed a beat and then began to thud within him. Like thousands upon thousands of stiff, motionless gods of doom carved out of stone, waiting for a word of magic to release them from the holding spell. The Catuvellaunians sprang to life. Their shouts and curses rent the air. They howled, they screamed, they drew their swords and beat upon their shields, and still the Roman forces did not move. Only the horsehair plumes on the mounted officers’ helmets danced gaily in the breeze.

“Jupiter!” said Pudens. “I have never seen such a sight! And listen to them! Are they drunk?”

“Some of them perhaps,” Plautius replied, “but their noise is ritual, Rufus. They beat the demons of death away and they also intend to frighten us.” He gazed across the river, watching the gaudy, screaming mob. How far? he thought swiftly. A quarter of a mile?

Beside him, Vespasianus grunted contemptuously. “Barbarians! And so few of them. Julius Caesar was right. They must be war mad.”

Plautius turned to the heavy, red face. “Remember what I told you all last night,” he said. “Their first charge is most to be feared. They pour all their effort into it. And do not forget what I said about the women!”

Vespasianus chuckled hoarsely. “Our men are not likely to care which sex is behind the swords. And as for a charge, there will be none today, poor fools.”

Plautius took a last, sweeping glance around at the flat, peaceful river valley, the sun streaming to mingle its warm rays with the turgid water, and the trees smudging into distance behind it. Then he straightened. “Vespasianus, get the Thracians into the water. Sound the incursus.”

The men around him saluted and scattered and the strident, harsh notes of the trumpet ended the dreamlike quiet of the summer morning.

At the sudden shock of a trumpet’s call Caradoc swung into his chariot and Cinnamus gathered up the reins. They rolled forward quickly, the chiefs running behind, spears raised and swords drawn, their clamor a constant, terrifying din, but when they reached the bank they stopped incredulously. There were soldiers in full armor in the river, swimming strongly, and behind them troops splashed into the shallows and struck out, hundreds of them. The river was full of bobbing, iron-clad heads. “They will flounder for sure, the idiots!” Caradoc heard Caelte shout. “The river is too deep and there are strong currents!” But Caradoc felt his heart sink. The men who were now almost halfway across were not Roman. They were auxiliaries, Batavians or Thracians or both, tribes renowned for their water skills.

“To the river!” he shouted. The bronze carnyx glittered suddenly in the upflung arm, its wolf’s claws grasping its gaping mouth, and its wolf’s fangs snarling to meet his own as he put it to his lips. He blew, and the company howled and began to run. “Camulos and the Catuvellauni!” he called, his voice rising strong above the chaos. “Death or victory!” Then he flung the carnyx to the floor of the chariot and they galloped at full stretch across the dry, cracking mud flats, the wind singing keenly in their ears.

The auxiliaries reached the bank and struggled out of the water to meet the brunt of the first mad onslaught. They went down like stricken boars, their blood suddenly, vividly pooling out and spreading on the water, but the second wave and the third gained the shore and rose to fight. Caradoc, out of his chariot now and swinging his blade, Cinnamus beside him, sensed a strange reluctance in the grim, expressionless faces that reared before him. The soldiers did not want to give battle. They were dodging blows, running this way and that, pushing for the rear, and suddenly Caradoc knew why. A scream of terror split the air and then another, the high, mindless outcry of animals in pain, and he turned with an oath and a bitter shout. The legionaries were hamstringing the chariot horses, darting in under the wide blows of the chiefs to slash quickly and run away again, and one by one the gallant beasts fell to their knees, their eyes turned back in their brown heads, the chilling, inhuman sound of their agony filling the ears of their masters. But Caradoc had no time to feel outrage at this cowardly attack. The flats were swarming with soldiers and more were coming, rising from the river water flooding from them as they came, and he turned from the useless chariots, a fierce bloodlust welling within him. He saw Gladys beside Caelte, both hands grasping the hilt of her slimed sword, her feet planted sturdily apart. She swung, but he had plunged with a snarl into the mess of seething, leatherclad Roman bodies and did not see the blow go whistling through the hot air.

The legionaries swam across the river like black flies and Plautius sat on his horse and watched. The resistance had been more sustained than he had expected, and accordingly he prepared for a long day. Soon the soldiers were across in sufficient numbers to form battle ranks, and hour after hour the solid, almost impenetrable wedges of men beat back the enraged Catuvellauni with their simple but devastatingly effective ploy.

Caradoc, sweating and filthy, caught in a sudden, welcome lull, watched as the front line retired and the second came to take its place, each man stepping smartly forward while the front rank rested far back. They fought without heart, without emotion, these Romans. Their faces remained blank, their arms moved with tight precision, while his chiefs hurled themselves against the cruelly studded leather shields with heroic recklessness, again and again. He turned back into the melee, then saw something that stopped his breath and brought a shout of unbelieving joy to his lips. The whirlpool of battle that had spun away from him had revealed an avenue of clear ground leading straight to Hosidius Geta as he sat calmly on his horse, surrounded by his protecting cohorts, and Caradoc looked wildly about him.

“Royal War Band! To me!” he shouted urgently, and his train came speeding out of the mass of struggling men. Other chiefs had seen the opportunity that would never come again and they fell in behind Caradoc, rushing up that sweet, open pathway. Togodumnus joined them, bloody and grinning, and together they charged. “Not dead!” Caradoc yelled. “Take him alive!” and the startled cohorts tumbled to close ranks around the general.

Plautius, watching from his vantage point, saw the pattern of engagement suddenly break up and swirl in another direction, and, astonished, he saw Geta islanded by a sea of jubilant, bright-clad chiefs, his cohorts in confusion. “Mighty Jupiter!” he exploded. “Rufus, have a left swing sounded and be quick!” The trumpets blared, two embattled centuries answered promptly, wheeling in tight precision, and the bitterly disappointed chiefs found themselves edged farther and farther from their almost defenceless target.

“A good gamble but evil luck!” Togodumnus shouted. He and Caradoc saluted each other ruefully and parted and Plautius saw his friend come galloping along the riverbank, cloak flying and plumes dancing.

Geta reined in and blew out his cheeks. “A tight moment, Aulus! What a prize I would have been to them. They would have bargained us right off the island!”

Plautius laughed. “Hosidius, you’re getting old.”

The Cantiaci came at last, rushing screaming into the fray, putting new heart into the beleaguered Catuvellaunian warriors, and the sun westered slowly, sinking at last beneath the reek and fume of battle. Finally, when it was too dark to tell friend from foe, the armies broke off, retiring to campfires, staggering with weariness. Not all the legions had crossed the river. The soldiers of the Second still waited on the farther shore with their commander, Vespasianus, pacing before them, and when nothing could be seen but the red twinkle of the watchfires, Plautius sent for him.

“Take your men, all of them,” he said. “Go south and try to find a ford lower down. It may be that we can encircle the barbarians and have done with this indecision. They fight well, don’t they?”

“By Mithras!” Vespasianus replied, a grudging admiration tinging his voice. “They fight as though they were possessed. I am no longer disposed to pity them.” He saluted and rode away and Plautius turned wearily to Pudens. He needed sleep. Tension ate at him, etching the lines around his thin mouth still deeper, but he knew from past experience that he would lie awake until the dawn, his strategies going round and round in his mind as he examined each one and searched for the flaw, the hidden mistake.

“Rufus, bring me the barbarian,” he ordered. “It is time for him to prove his worth.”

Pudens nodded and disappeared to return some minutes later with his reluctant companion. Adminius looked surly and afraid. The clean, handsome lines of his face, the cleft chin of the House Catuvellaun, the wide eyes and broad nose that he shared with his brothers were becoming blurred, softened with age, and he had a loose, unhealthy look. The years in Rome had put fat on him, and the idleness and frustration of his life had embittered him.

Plautius did not meet his eye. He was afraid that his distaste would show. “Now, sir,” he said crisply. “I want you to cross the river. Go quietly among your kinfolk. You know what to say. They will be tired and dispirited tonight, and your words should bear fruit.”

“What if they take me and kill me?” Adminius said plaintively.

Plautius smiled. “I do not think they will. Not if you choose the right ears for your…sedition.”