The King's Cavalry (13 page)

“Then,” said Constantine, “it’s up to us to find a way to make them want to get in the river.”

And the spectre of Myrddin burst into my mind. I had fought a riverbank battle once before and the sorcerer, who happily was on my side, had turned the tide with his magic, or non-magic. I had half an idea, and that triggered another half-idea. “How much time, Lord,” I asked, “can you give me?”

Constantine shrugged. “I have more men marching in, this battle will go until dusk, but after that, we shall have to move back, and once that happens, and they have room to move, they will inevitably slaughter us. You have four, maybe five hours before this is all ended, I’d say. “

I saluted and limped towards Corvus, bellowing for my tribunes and for several bright centurions I’d already marked for promotion. Myrddin was not here, Guinevia was not here, but I could use their magic because I’d seen it done, and I started issuing some frantic orders. Within minutes, three squadrons of light horse were galloping towards Ostia and the sea; two more squadrons were hurrying to the impedimenta train to collect certain supplies. All had strict commands to seize what we wanted, at swordpoint if necessary, we’d pay later, and then get back with the utmost haste.

Meanwhile, our heavy cavalrymen were drawn off a short distance and issued with a new set of instructions that caused even the grimmest of them to crack smiles. And then they checked their weapons.

XX
- Demons

First to canter back were the riders we’d sent to the impedimenta train, and they began distributing the supplies and equipment they had found there, while work parties dragged fuel to stack a line of bonfires. The wind, I noted, was still in about the right position for what I had in mind, leaving us upwind of the bridge and the front ranks of the enemy. I glanced at the sun, which was low; the late-October dusk was fast approaching, we might just have time…

On cue, the first riders trotted in from the coast, with sacks slung across their saddle bows, sacks whose contents they also began distributing among the heavy cavalry. Constantine, too, was glancing at the setting sun, then nervously eyeing our left flank, which was slowly giving way under the irresistible pressure of Maxentius’ greater weight of forces. Only a desperate barrage from the slingers and archers was slowing the oncoming tide of the legions.

“They’ll not hold much longer, and I can’t afford to send reinforcements without risking collapse in the centre,” he said matter-of-factly. “I have to hold these fellows,” pointing, “to throw in at the centre as we need them. I want a steady retreat of our centre to envelope Maxentius between our horns. If we can grab him in a pincer like a blacksmith’s, or like Hannibal did to Varro at Cannae, then we can defeat him, but if the right goes,” he shrugged, “we’re neck deep in the shit. Your magic had best work soon,” he said. “In a half hour at most, we’ll be forced too far back on the left and then we’ll face a bloody business.”

Instinctively, I glanced right, to where the bonfires were now burning brightly. Alongside them a swarm of troopers
were setting up the apparatus from the baggage train, and I saw officers racing from rig to rig. Behind the bonfires, in a small fold of the land and in the shadows of an olive grove, the dragoons were mostly dismounted and working with the contents of the sacks, the last of which were just arriving from Ostia.

Grabelius galloped up, saluted briefly and announced:
“We have the fire dragons ready, Lord, the men have been issued with the shellfish and the fires are ready, too.” I nodded, and Constantine breathed deeply, then said: “Do it.”

Grabelius turned in the saddle and waved, his attentive officers began throwing piles of wet leaves onto the bonfires and in moments, a dense white smoke began rolling towards the enemy lines. From my vantage, I could see what was happening in the clearer air behind the fires, and I saw the dragoons mounting up onto their big horses. “With your permission,
Lord?” I asked Constantine, indicating with an inclination of my head that I wanted to join my cavalrymen.

“May all the gods go with you,” he said, and I galloped away.

Dusk was closing in rapidly now, the bank of white smoke was almost at the front ranks of the enemy, who we later found thought we planned to retreat under its cover. I arrived at our squadrons of horses as they hauled up their red and white shields. They were still holding their mounts steady. Behind me, our artillerymen were waiting for the signal. My glance went down the line of horse heads and even though I knew what I was seeing, a shiver ran down my spine.

Every horse and every rider had a pale, eerie visage, an unearthly luminescent glow that seemed to come from the depths of the Underworld. The men had taken the shellfish called piddock or angelwings that we had brought from Ostia, and crushed it in their mouths. This released a luminous essence which they smeared on their own faces and their horse’s brows and muzzles. In the dusk, they looked like glowing spectres, and the black horses especially looked like steeds from Hades.

I bellowed in my biggest parade ground voice that the gods were with us – had they not sent a great thunderbolt yesterday to give us signal of their approval? “We cannot lose!” I shouted, and a rumble of growls came from my ranked horsemen. “Let us go in and scythe down these traitors!” I yelled. “Ride in hard, aim at their bellies, trample over them. We have the big horses, we have the lances and we have the gods!”

A ripple of cheers ran down the line. I motioned the front ranks to walk forward into the dense smoke bank, turned and waved ‘Ready!’ to the artillerymen, who were standing by a line of tripod-like structures. Each contained a battery of what the Qinese called ‘exploding bamboo’ and were a secret from hundreds of years ago obtained for me by Myrddin.

The Qinese in the remote lands beyond the Silk Roads had discovered that by mixing kitchen ingredients like saltpetre, charcoal and sulphur, packed into a hollow bamboo or other tube - we used tied-off heavy parchment and cow horn – you could create a combustible fire dragon that would scare off demons and ghosts with a shower of sparks and explosions.

Myrddin had experimented with this ‘
baozho’
of the Han people in hopes of making a flying chair, but all he had really found was that certain salts gave off different colours when the exploding tubes rocketed across the paddock outside his home. Guinevia had gleaned the results of his tests, written them down and given me a copy, which I had kept against the day I needed to scare enemy cavalry horses.

This day, beside the Tiber, I planned something slightly different, and signalled “Fire!” to our ballistae operators, who applied burning tapers to the incendiaries. Then I waved my great sword Exalter high to send our cavalry lines forward at the trot, and we all rode blindly into the fog bank we had created. It went murderously better than I could have hoped.

Maxentius’ men, eager for loot and glory, wrongly guessed we were retreating under cover of the smoke, and broke their shield wall to run forward. As they did, out of the bank of white fog came flaming missiles of rocketing, exploding flame. It was, they felt, another attack and signal from the gods like yesterday’s terrifying fireball from heaven.

And, right behind that maelstrom of white smoke and exploding red flame came a thundering solid rank of demon-black horses with ghost faces, ridden by glowing-visaged devils behind red and white shields, all of us swinging heavy weaponry and galloping in unearthly silence out of a void of white.

No general could expect his men to stand against demons from Hades, and Maxentius’ men were no exception. Most threw down their weapons and knelt in abject surrender. Some turned to flee and we spectral demons of the Wild Ride hacked and thrust and trampled bloody ruin on them. I was there, abandoning my heavy lance to the wretch spitted on it, now it was Exalter swinging effortlessly, hot blood slick to the shoulder, not even a mark on my shield from unresisting Romans.

The bloodlust was swamping me, my ears were roaring, the world had slowed and I was godlike. Powerful, immortal, swift. Crunching blows, the wet flap of a scalp sliced open, the gaping mouth of a deep cut into a fleeing man’s neck. I heard my cavalry commander Celvinius howling like a mad wolf as he hacked and thrust through the enemy ranks. The butchery was cruel as we trampled panicked men underfoot, and slashed and sliced into their unguarded heads and shoulders and backs.

The mob, because the once-proud Roman legions had turned into a stricken mob, fought each other to squeeze onto the pontoon bridge of boats, but it was a logjam of terrified humanity pursued by mounted demons from hell. On our left wing, it was a rout, a slaughter, and the Tiber ran streaked with the blood of Rome’s sons.

On our right, the picture was different. Maxentius’ prateorian guard fought stubbornly to hold a perimeter around the end of the part-repaired stone bridge and their left flank infantry, which had been pushing our forces back began retreating across it in fair order. We were out of the smoke now, and the breeze had freshened, dispersing the worst of it, but we still drove the enemy’s flank backwards towards the pontoon bridge until the drawbridge on it collapsed under their weight and cut off that retreat.

Now, I swung my riders to the right, and we hammered into the side of the praetorians’ perimeter. They had no hope. Too many of their allies were trying to push through their shield wall to get to the narrow wooden planks of the repaired stone bridge; the intruders were splitting their armoured defences apart. And then the crushing weight of the heavy British cavalry fell onto them.

Corvus was rearing, slashing with his huge hoofs at the faces of the soldiers before us, Exalter was swinging and thrusting seemingly of his own accord, chopping and clearing a swathe like a reaper in a hayfield, and the praetorians, pride of the empire, broke and ran.

But 500 British cavalry were on their flank, and we cut them off from the broken bridge. Many died where they were trapped, on the north bank of Rome’s river. I glimpsed Maxentius himself, on his horse, looming above the melee and pushing towards the Tiber’s bank. Later, we learned that he was thrown from his mount and drowned in the river, pulled under by the weight of his armour.

Dusk was now falling, our men looked like butchers, splattered with blood from wrist to shoulder, and the bonfires that had provided the screening smoke lit the shambles that was the killing field at the Milvian Bridge. Platoons of Constantine’s men were hacking the heads off corpses. They’d take them as prizes to be displayed in the city, where they’d be paraded, then thrown into open pits for dogs to fight over. Sometimes, I thought, their relatives would see the heads of their loved ones among these gruesome trophies, and the Romans called us barbarians?

Over there, Maxentius’ sullen soldiers were being herded at spearpoint, and Constantine was picking his horse’s way through the tidelines of dead that showed where the shield walls had once stood.

“Your Frisians and your Sarmatians under Celvinius turned the battle,” he said generously. “And the fire dragon magic was an
inspiration.” I didn’t say that I had used Myrddin’s explosive sorcery once before, on the banks of a northern river, with some decidedly risky results. There are some things you do not admit, even to an emperor. Anyway, I was hungry, tired and sticky with the blood of others, my face glowed luminously, and I wanted to cleanse myself.

“
Lord,” I said, “the gods be thanked.”

And I rode to find my tent, unaware as yet that my pagan troops and pagan magic had cleared the way for the Christians to defeat my gods and take over the world.

XXI
- Compensate

We fished Maxentius’ body out of the Tiber – it was difficult to retrieve as his heavy parade armour had caused him to sink deep into the mud - and decapitated it. Then we paraded the severed head with hundreds of others through the streets of Rome in a triumphal procession that attracted cheering crowds. Constantine was popular, he threw out donatives of gold and silver from Maxentius’ pay chests, and he cemented the people’s feelings for him by standing on the steps of the Senate house and declaring Christianity the state religion, although I noted that he also made a less-public sacrifice of two white bulls at the temple of Jupiter.

The emperor announced amnesty for Maxentius’ former supporters and sent his dead rival’s head to Africa, where it was sent through the streets of Carthage as proof of his defeat and as an unsubtle hint to discourage further hostilities, which aim it accomplished.

Constantine quietly disbanded the surviving praetorians and liquidated their senior officers, a shrewd move to prevent the rise of another barracks emperor. In their place, with a pleasant compliment to the British cavalry and our decisive action at the bridge battle, he appointed a number of horse units to his personal guard. I noted that they carried reflex compound bows of bone and sinew, almost exactly like those of the British Sarmatians whose forefathers came from the Steppes.

“Unusual,” I murmured.

“Those things can kill at 200 paces,” he said proudly.

“You’ll have your men shaping their skulls with bound planks next,
Lord,” I said.

“They’ll be Roman Huns.” He laughed. “If I could have 10,000 disciplined Hunnic cavalry, I could rule the world.” I shook my head.

“Just 500 British are enough,” I boasted, and he grinned.

“Plus the occasional fireball from the gods,” he said. That too, I thought. What had it meant?

The fireball had obliterated several small settlements and created a deep crater plus a scattering of smaller ones around it. It had certainly inspired our men to victory and that was helping the rise of Christianity. My pagan self had inadvertently acted against our gods’ interests. Slowly, the realisation grew in me. I had pushed the gods further away from Britain. How could I possibly compensate? I groaned aloud. I had to get back to my kingdom and put matters right.