The King's Cavalry (5 page)

VII - Italia

The legates Grabelius and Quirinus were anxious. They had been summoned back to Vallis by courier and returned with the heavy cavalry, the horses flecked with foam and stained with salt from a long hard ride. They found the citadel gates barred closed and the garrison on alert.

King Stelamann rapidly painted the picture. “Arthur killed their officer, then was himself captured and taken away. You lost two men in the skirmish. The Romans were not strong enough to enter the fortress, but I did not have enough men here to sally out against them.” The Roman patrol had set fire to the tent lines but had done little else. “They were probably in a hurry to get their dead centurion back to base and to report on the signs of new soldiers here,” said the monarch. “I have called on the local people to hide their valuables, get in what crops they can and bring them
selves and their flocks inside, for I expect the Romans will be back in force.” The king had also sent notice to his allies that the legionaries were active again, in case the tribesmen needed to ready for conflict.

Grabelius asked for and was promised the services of two guides who could lead the British cavalry to the Roman base where they guessed the patrol had taken Arthur. “They will be at Mainz, not Colonia,” said the king. “It is the strategic centre, where the Main empties into the Rhine, and there is a bridge, a big one with 20 or more piers. The place is the key to the east and the keystone of Gaul’s defences against the Alemanni and the Chatti.”

“We have to find Arthur,” said Quirinus. “We can’t expect to take on a legion with just a couple of hundred cavalrymen, but maybe we can find and free him.” The legates nodded agreement to each other.

“Give the troops one day to rest and feed the horses and to ready
for the next part of this mission,” said Grabelius. “We have to find our king before he is executed. May the gods be with him.”

The two looked at each other, the thought unspoken. They shared Arthur’s fear that the true gods were angered by their declaration for Christianity. “We should make sacrifice to Jupiter,” said Quirinus.

“And Mithras,” said Grabelius. “Tonight, before we head for Mainz.”

The soldiers did not know it, but the bishop at the root of the crisis of beliefs, Bishop Candless the Pict, had already passed that city. He was well past Mainz on his way to Rome. The bishop was travelling with an entourage and making good time, 25 or more miles each day, fo
r he was eager to reach Rome and Queen Helena before she could distribute any of the precious relics he knew she had collected in Jerusalem.

Candless was once a warrior, and he knew that the gold he carried, for gold would be needed to acquire relics, and the impedimenta of his train would attract bandits. He had accordingly gathered a proper guard for the entourage, headed by a warrior from the south, Kenetis Potius, who had served in Mainz and fought with the XXII Primogenia legion against the tribes of the Danube.

It was Potius who had overseen the equipment of his 80-man century at Bononia. Every soldier was kitted out Roman-style, from the heavy wool tunic that stretched to the knees, through the oiled-wool
sagum
, a hooded cloak that was his blanket, groundsheet, coat and sometimes the infantryman’s shroud, to the knee breeches, wool underpants and the toeless socks worn inside the closed, ankle-high, leather marching boots. These boots had soles that were cunningly nailed in an S or D pattern to spread the jolting load diagonally as the foot struck the ground, and they significantly reduced fatigue.

The consul Gaius Marius had reformed the army several centuries before, loading much of the supplies and weaponry onto the legionaries who could carry it further and faster than the impedimenta trains hauled by plodding oxen, and the soldiers had since then ruefully referred to themselves as Marius’ Mules.

But, even under full 80 lbs load of weapons, equipment and food supplies, those tough Mules could swiftly cover the ground, and Potius was resolved that his century would be a full match for any Roman infantry.

He knew what he was doing, and he saw to it that the British footsloggers’ military packs, carried on a short pole, contained all they needed. There was a two-week supply of food, including imported fish
paste flavouring and precious salt; a cooking kit, cloak bag, leather shield cover, spare socks and underwear. Lashed to the outside was an entrenching tool, and a six-foot heavy stake that would form part of the palisade of an overnight camp.

For weapons, each man had a weighted javelin, a thrusting spear, a foot-long punching knife at his belt, and a
gladius
, the stabbing broadsword that had won battles for the legions from Persia to Pictland. This sword was carried sheathed over the right shoulder, to be snatched free after the javelin and the heavy darts that were clipped behind the legionary’s shield had been hurled at the enemy.

The shield itself was a weapon. Tall, oblong and curved, the elmwood and leather
scutum
had a large bronze boss in its centre, and the soldiers used that as a punching weapon, smashing the shield forward into the enemy before stamping forward and crushing him under foot.

For the legionary’s own protection, he wore chainmail over his wool tunic, or sometimes acquired the lighter, preferred
segmentata
armour that hung hoops of iron around his chest like the carapace of a lobster. This segmentata was often worn over a leather tunic liberally greased with lanolin, and the soldier wore a scarf at the throat to prevent chafing. Topping it all was a metal helmet with horsehair crest, metal cheek flaps and a deep tail to protect the nape of the neck.

Candless had grumbled at the silver he had to spend to equip the guards, but he had plenty and the expedition should bring him a fortune. “We’ll obviously need supplies on the march, too,” Potius told the Pict. “So bring plenty of coin, we’ll be travelling for two months or so. Each way.”

Candless didn’t correct him. Privately, the bishop expected his return journey to be much shorter and less arduous. He opted to go to Rome overland because he needed the protection of a guard from a possibly-vengeful Caesar and he could not ship all those men and their equipment by water. But he planned to sail back from Rome if the season were not too late. He did not want his newly-acquired, precious relics to be at the mercy of every Belgic brigand or Gallic robber as the convoy trundled back across Gaul. A sea voyage from Ostia to Massalia in southern Gaul, then a river voyage up the great waterways from the southern coast to the northern shores and a swift voyage across the Narrow Sea was what he planned.

The soldiers could march back, they’d be home by the turn of the year. The bishop, Bilic his bodyguard captain and a squad of picked men would sail back more swiftly and in greater comfort and safety.

Candless was considering that return voyage as his train marched towards Rome. In the previous weeks, they had left the coast at Bononia, moved south through Bavay and on to Reims, where Arthur’s one-time mint lay shuttered and locked by the river. The blank walls of the town had been witness to a skill the bishop did not display often. At dusk, he had strolled out through the western gate to observe the sunset. Alone, seeming unarmed and in a cleric’s fine robe, he had attracted the attention of a cutpurse who stalked him to a quiet place.

There, the man produced a knife and demanded the bishop’s coins. Candless never hesitated. He seized the man’s tunic in both hands, dragged him forward and off balance and
headbutted him unconscious in one swift and practiced motion. “Robbing ME!” he murmured indignantly as he turned away. On impulse, he swiveled and leaned over the unconscious man, fumbled at his belt and pulled up the man’s own purse.

A clink of coin told him there was reward in it. “For the poor, my son, for the poor,” he said aloud as he slipped the leather bag beneath his surplice. “God thanks you.”

From Reims, the troupe took Agricola’s great highway south to the foothills of the Alps, turning east to Basel and halting for several days’ rest and repairs at Brigantia before beginning the laborious climbs and descents over the passes of the mountain ramparts of Cisalpine Gaul.

In the second month of travel, Candless and his hardened men had marched past the blue lake of Como and had gaped at the splendour of the imperial palace in Milan. They had crossed the multiple rivers that water the soft-lit northern plains, the Padus, Rigony, Paala, Saternu
m and Animo, and were marching to the seacoast of the Adriaticus on the Via Aemilia. Rome was only a week away, now.

News of the bishop’s mission had run ahead of him as he entered Italia and a steady stream of monks and preachers had attached themselves to Candless’ entourage, seeking patronage or reward from this distinguished prince of the church. Potius and Bilic tried to keep them away from their master, but some had useful information and the Pict patiently heard them all.

“There are tombs of the apostles Paul and Peter on the Via Ostia, and there are oratories over their graves,” one lean, unkempt hermit confided as he strode alongside Candless’ palfrey. “They have been there since the reign of Domitian.” Another mendicant insisted that the tombs were where the apostles had died – near the Vatican itself, the palace of the pontiff, while a third insisted that Peter was buried near the Tomb of Nero on the Via Aurelia.

Gradually, as he rode and listened, Candless sifted the possibilities. The Circus of Nero was where the infamously bloody games were held in the spring of 65 in the anno domini and that was where the great slaughter of Christians took place, and where Peter, first bishop of Rome had died and was buried
‘between two obelisks,’ said the third monk.

Paul was beheaded as was his right as a Roman citizen, and Candless listened eagerly to another, knowledgeable-sounding little cleric who trotted alongside on his mule. “It is recorded that the great apostle Paul was executed two years after St Peter, under a pine tree at the Springs of Salvation, on the Ostia road,” he said solemnly. “I have been to the site, at the third milestone on the Via Ostia and there is an oratory at the place, but the actual body of the saint was interred by a Christian matron called Lucina on land between the Via Ostia and the Via Valentiniana.”

“Do Christians pray there?” asked Candless.

“There, your grace, and at the Vatican and at the
catacombs, on the saints’ feast day,” said the cleric, graciously accepting and discreetly pocketing a piece of silver handed to him by the bishop’s body slave. He added as he moved away: “The emperor is said to have commissioned a fine bronze sarcophagus to honour each saint and will build a basilica over them.”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to bring back Paul’s or Peter’s remains,” Candless told Potius, “but I hear there was a great marble coffin opened recently that contained a mass of charred bones and ashes. These evidently come from the martyrs who were turned into human torches at Nero’s festivities, and may include the early bishops, who can say? I think the faithful will be delighted to come to my, that is, our church to pray to them there.”

Potius nodded, privately smiling at the bishop’s single-minded determination to obtain pilgrim-attracting materials. Candless intuited what he thought, but smiled benevolently and smoothly changed the subject.

“We are entering the other Holy Land,” he intoned.
“Soon we will turn inland on the Via Flaminia, through the gorge of the Furio where the saints walked as we do,” blithely ignoring the fact that he was actually riding comfortably, “over the bridge of Trajan and across the spine of Italia to descend to blessed Rome.” Potius nodded briefly.

“I’ll keep an eye on the money chest,” he said. “Those Romans would strip us bare.”

VIII - Captive

The jailers had not kept me long in isolation. After just three days in the stone cell above the gatehouse of the fortress of Mainz, I was moved into larger quarters with a dozen or so other prisoners. My size and scarred appearance seemed to impress them, and I was left alone. Within a few days the enforced rest had improved both my soreness and my wounded pride, so that when one morning a pair of jailers arrived with spearmen and an announcement that we were to form a working party, I was ready even to do that to get out into some fresh air.

Ironically, we were to dig latrine trenches on the old campground north of the fortress, an activity I’d been engaged in when I was captured. The guards had no idea who I was. To them I was merely a prisoner waiting for sentencing, and they were roughly amicable. They might have chosen a different attitude had they known that I had personally killed their emperor Maxentius’ father, Maximian, but I sensed they had no great affection for the officer I’d killed, and I kept my peace, worked willingly and waited for an opportunity. When you have slain two emperors yourself, it is wise sometimes to be patient.

On the fourth day of our digging, I unearthed a Roman tent peg hidden in the dirt. The spearmen were gossiping, not paying close attention and it was an easy thing to palm it and slip it into my tunic.

The peg was about nine inches long, hammered from iron, pointed like a blade and with a ring at one end, for the tent ropes to be passed through. My first thought was to use it to chip away the mortar of the stones around the cell door but as we were marched back to our prison, I looked more carefully at the exterior bolt on the door.

It was a small baulk of pig-greased elmwood that acted as a bolt. It ran through three iron brackets, two on the door, one on the casing. This simple lock (and I thanked Mithras that it was not one of the sophisticated iron pin locks the Romans often used) slid horizontally and had a knob at one end to grasp as the bolt was being operated.

A forearm’s length above the bolt was a shuttered narrow slot that the sentry could open to glance into the cell, and I knew I could use that to escape. Once we were all locked in, I held a series of muttered conversations with my cellmates, got their agreements and waited until the small hours of the morning to carry out my simple plan.

I made a noose from a strip of leather cut from a shepherd’s jerkin and fastened it to the tent peg’s iron ring. Someone gently slid open the judas hole from the inside and I went fishing with my iron tent peg ‘pole’ and looped line. The extra length of the pole was critical to help me snag the target, and it worked beautifully. I caught the knob at the end of the bolt, angled the pull of the leather line and slid the bolt open, thanking Mithras that the guards had greased the thing. I tested the door. Free. Someone knelt low to peer around the doorframe, where a sentry would be less likely to spot the movement. He signalled that the man was dozing against the far wall. I stepped out, barefoot and silent, smashed an elbow into the side of the jailer’s head and eased him to the stones.

The other prisoners, apprised by the lookout, began scrambling for the doorway and one fool stumbled into the hallway and knocked over an unlit brazier, which spilled with a clatter. A sentry around the corner called out a question and four or five of the idiot prisoners began running away, making obvious and unmistakable noise.

There was no time to go back for my boots, so I ran after the others, then dodged sideways into a spiral stairway that led upwards. I was mounting the steps two at a time, silent in my bare feet when I heard the jangle of metal above me. A guard, alerted, was coming down from the battlements. In the light of a wall-bracket, I saw his sword come first around the counter-sunwise spiral, grabbed for his wrist and heaved, flattening myself against the side. The man flew past me, but retained his grip on his sword even as he collided into the wall below me. I ran on upwards, still weaponless and feeling naked.

The stairway ended at the ramparts. To my right was one of the twin round
-towers of the gatehouse, in front of me was the fine stone bridge across the Rhine. There was a bath house a short distance away, the familiar Drusus cenotaph and the temple of Isis where I had worshipped during my long-ago convalescence.

The river was wide and dark, just an occasional glimmer in the guttering flare of torches on the bridge. I knew there were troop ships, trading
vessels and patrol boats of the river fleet tied along the quays, but I had no obvious means to descend the ramparts to get down to the river bank.

Below me, in the gate arch, I heard the guard being turned out. They would have men on the ramparts searching, and soon. I went back to the stair door and started to climb where the gate tower joined the rear wall. Being barefoot helped and I jammed my fingers and toes into the mortared niches as I ascended to the roof of the stairway and flattened myself prone on it. A low parapet partially hid me, the darkness did the rest. Few people, I knew, look upwards when seaching.

Poor as it was, the hiding place saved me for long enough. I heard the guards searching, swearing at being disturbed before first light, heard the ‘all clear here’ and the shouts as the prisoners were rounded up. From what I could tell three were reported missing but the soldiers’ conversations indicated that they were thought to have escaped over the wall.

Gradually, the castrum became quiet, the troops went back to their barrack rooms, wolf light stole over the eastern horizon and I heard the rumble of a provisions wag
gon on the quayside below. I risked a look. The canvas-topped waggon would pass under the wall as it rolled along the quay. It would mean a leap outwards of eight or ten feet, and a drop of about 25 feet. If I missed, I’d hit the granite of the quay and would be crippled or dead.

“You’re already a cripple,” I growled, thinking of my mangled foot. “Get on with it.” A quick glance left and right, a painful
, toe-crunching scramble down the wall and drop to the rampart, another glance to gauge the speed of the oncoming waggon trundling behind two ambling oxen. Then it was three paces back, the same smart steps forward and up into the castellation, a crouching push with both hands on the freezing limestone on either side, and I was launched.

In midair, I kicked my legs out and threw my shoulders back and I hit the canvas perfectly, feet and backside first, right between two of the wooden ribs that supported the cover. The fabric took the shock, tore, I plunged through and crashed into a case of amphorae packed in straw. Several of the terracotta containers broke, dousing me in olive oil but the impact was not crippling and I rolled sideways out of the gurgling mess.

The carter, a fat, balding man whose breath stank of wine was clearly drunk and had not even halted his plodding oxen. He turned blearily in dumb shock and I reached through the canvas folds and grasped his throat. “Keep moving or I’ll choke you then smash your skull to paste,” I hissed. He babbled something incomprehensible but it seemed affirmative and the draught animals continued to move. I yanked a dagger from his belt and prodded him with it. “Keep moving, keep quiet,” I ordered.

“In the back,” I said several minutes later. By this time I had found a hammer. The drunk wobbled so I pulled him backwards, tapped his skull into unconsciousness, tied and then gagged him with strips cut from his filthy tunic. I stole his boots, cloak, straw
hat and thin purse and kept urging the oxen forward along the quayside as I did so.

Another half mile downriver, I saw what I wanted, a neat little patrol boat that would be used by two or three customs officers or tax officials to inspect river traffic. I tied off the oxen’s reins, prodded each with the goad and slipped out of the wag
gon as it continued its steady progress, leaking olive oil in a thin stream down the centre of the stones.

The wolf light had brightened and now full dawn was spreading on the other side of the wide river. No sentry in sight, but one could easily be sleeping aboard any of the several vessels at the quayside. I headed for the tidy little cutter which stood 50 yards apart from the bigger troop ships. Lapstraked and built of fir, it was a light, handy vessel that would be fast even handled by just one man. Ideal.

The riverfront warehouses were separated here, the closest building looked to be a customs post, sturdily built of square-cut Roman stone. I sidled up to it from a blind side, listened, then cautiously peeked through the window hole. The leather covering was pulled back, and I saw several bunks, two of them occupied.

There would likely be a third man, but he was not in sight. No time to waste. I slipped across the quay and dropped as lightly as I could into the cutter. Everything was shipshape. The blue lateen sail was furled, oars were stowed neatly, the vessel was tied off fore and aft to bollards on the quay. All my years as a river pilot and saltwater sailor stood me in good stead.

In moments, the practised, smooth movements of the familiar had everything released, the little vessel seemed to bob eagerly. I pushed off from the seawall, took a turn of a painter and lashed the tiller, then grabbed a pair of oars, dropped them into the tholes, bent my back and pulled out of the wharf eddy and into the strong-running current.

I left the shore, still undetected, rose, hoisted the triangular sail to catch the breeze then settled at the stern, tiller in one fist, mainsheet in the other. The little craft came alive under wind and current and away I scudded downstream on the mighty Rhine, smirking.