Arthur Imperator (4 page)
Authors: Paul Bannister
When
finished, the north-south canal named for me would run from the hills north of Londinium to the fortress of Eboracum, and I had ordered it dug and fortified as a main supply line to carry leather, wool, corn and other heavy supplies to our frontier headquarters and garrison. My engineers had thousands of slaves working alongside our legionaries to create one of Britain’s most modern and greatest engineering works, a ditch longer and more valuable than Hadrian’s Entrenchment, and a great artery for our troop movements.
Hadrian
had 12,000 Spaniards, Dacians, Gauls and Tungrians to man the ditch and wall he’d built as a control and customs barrier. I didn’t have that luxury of numbers, but I was building an inland chain of forts along the canal to back up the coastal strongpoints. These two lines of defences were in contact by signal towers and would let us quickly deploy troops to respond to any invaders, while the canal traffic would move the vast quantities of supplies we needed under the protection of those forts with good speed and safety.
I
looked around the chamber. These were men with whom I had shared much. Present were my three tribunes Lycaon, Quirinus and Cragus. The first - ‘Lucky’ Lycaon - was onetime commander of my holdings in Gaul and, like me, a survivor of the sack of King Mosae’s citadel in Belgica. Bold Quirinus had sailed into the Roman anchorage and burned their invasion fleet. Cragus had personally led his men through chest-deep marsh on a flanking movement that had helped decide the bloody battle at Dungeness. Dandy Andy, my perfectly-presented aide, would have shuddered to have waded through those miles of mud, I grinned to myself, but he had done his bloody work in the shield wall, unflinching.
Allectus,
my treasurer and close confidant who’d helped me seize an empire, was there, sleek-headed and smooth, a man to whom I had never quite warmed but with whom I shared an alliance that was as close as it was uneasy. Maybe, I told myself, it was just that he was a very private person, unlike my own bluff, outgoing self. Or, maybe, there was more. He seemed abstracted and I noticed that he twice moved purposefully to study the picture map that showed the land from its eagle’s eye view. He caught my glance and raised an eyebrow. I shook my head. I had no intention of telling how Guinevia had seen the kingdom from that view. Something about his look, veiled and almost insolent, rang a tocsin bell in me.
I
scanned the chamber again. A few of my closest officers were missing. My twin brothers had vanished after Mosae’s defeat and the collapse of his Belgic fortress, and I supposed them dead or slaves. I had no time to grieve, and I had hardly known them, having been separated for 15 or so years. Besides, my life as a soldier had inured me to loss, and I had hardened my heart. Missing too were my longtime quartermaster Suetonius, whose knowledge of a coincidence had started me on this path to an empire, my aide Quintus, a good man and a good friend, and Papinius Statius, my baggage master and transport general whose efforts had brought us success across Gaul and in Britain. All had died under Roman blades on the shoreline of the Narrow Sea.
Then
there was Guinevia, a slight, slender figure posed as usual discreetly at the corner of the chamber. I nodded to her, cleared my throat and launched into it. “We’re all here, we’ve done this before, we’ll likely do it again. The basics we have to consider are objective, intelligence, personnel, communications, supply and…” I paused. Like schoolboys, they all chorused: “Transport!” I grinned. “Well, there’s a surprise, someone’s awake.” They grinned back at me, sunburnt, experienced young faces, men who’d stood by me on fields of battle, and who had walked from those killing places bespattered with hostiles’ blood, and were willing, even eager to repeat the operation.
“The
objective, gentlemen,” I said like a schoolmaster, “is to turn back all these bastards who want to come here without our permission.
“Allectus,
once again your overpaid spy ring will provide us with intelligence. I especially want to know about the Picts up there, trans vallum, and whatever you can discover about these Saxons. That, I accept is more difficult, but your merchants and traders should have something, and so should the shipbuilders around the Scheldt and Meuse and Rhine. We can’t monitor every single clan or family that opts to set sail for our lands, but we can get tabs on the military movements.” Allectus lowered his cropped head in agreement and murmured something inaudible.
I
looked at Cragus and Quirinus, the Lycian from the home of the fire-breathing female Chimerae, the other, Quirinus, a Briton who had boldly sailed a fleet of fireships into the Romans’ anchored fleet to destroy it. They were perched side by side on one end of the mensa, obviously relishing that we were preparing another series of campaigns. “You pair of fiery fellows,” I nodded, “work your usual communications and personnel magic. Quirinus especially get on top of the construction and repair of the coastal fortifications and signal towers. I’ll work with you on the Saxon Shore forts.
“Both
of you focus on recruiting more auxiliaries, look to Gaul and even Wales, there should be warriors in both places we can take on as mercenaries. If you can, get some of those Syrian fellows, the Hamian archers who were posted up there south of the Wall. Cragus, you will liaise with me over building cavalry forces. That, gentlemen, will be a major thrust of our force in the next couple of years and you’ll all be involved. I see us using horses from the southern downs and the plains south of Aquae Sulis, establishing breeding farms and studs for a considerable expansion of our cavalry as the Saxon and Frankish threats grow. We could also get some mountain ponies from the Welsh hills or from Cumbria, tough little horses that can go anywhere. We’ll be needing to build some training facilities, too. Let’s consider where best to place them.
“Next,
we have supplies and transport. Well, we lost our good quartermaster Suetonius and our transport genius Papinius, both of them killed at Dungeness, so I’m putting my aide Androcles into post as supplies officer. We have some decent supply dumps and granaries in the hinterlands of the Saxon Shore, we’ll need to develop more of them behind or along the Car Dyke and north east coast forts. Androcles, work with Allectus on inventory of things like grain sacks, barrels, amphorae and the like, especially on getting them to the ports where bulk supplies are unloaded. Make sure you have a supply of silver stoppers for the oil containers, to keep the contents from going bad. You’ll be busy dealing with negotiators who bring oil, olives, things like that from Spain and Massilia, so be prepared for some uncomfortable travels, too, your soft life hanging around me is over. And, thinking ahead a little, make sure we have good groves of coppiced trees to provide us in the near future with spear shafts. Ash is best.”
I
glanced down at the tabulum on which I’d scratched my list in the wax. “Lycaon, I left you to last because you’re lucky.” The room laughed. They knew he’d drawn the short straw of managing transport. “The good news is that Papinius successfully moved us away from using oxen except for the heaviest equipment, because they’re so slow. You’ll be able to use the Car Dyke as a feeder high road for the heavy sort of stuff between Londinium and Eboracum, so that’s a bonus, but you’ll need more mules than ever to keep our frontier garrisons supplied. Send drovers and negotiators into Armorica and Belgica and Spain, see what you can buy in their markets and get onto the horse farms around Colchester and Aquae Sulis, to boost their stud programmes, we’ll need plenty of remounts. Allectus will provide the coin. Get at least a couple of good Frisian stallions, too. You’ll probably have to go there yourself to get them, they don’t sell to just anyone, but you can pull some rank. Remind them who you are, and what I did against the Bagaudae.” Lycaon nodded, he understood. The Frisians on the face of it were being told of the troubles I’d cleared up for them, but they also had the spectre of my wrath to consider. They’d cooperate, I thought grimly, or else I’d peel their faces from their heads.
The
officers were looking at me, my expression must have given away some of my thoughts. “I want a mobile army,” I told them again, “and if we employ more cavalry, they’ll need swifter support from the transport boys. You did a splendid job in Gaul, maybe we can repeat it, use the smaller rivers here for swift movement of heavy goods. Someone talk to the shipwright Cenhud the Belge. He built a river fleet for us in Gaul, let’s see what we can do along those lines here. I remember that we built demountable sheerlegs so we could load and unload big equipment for transport by river. That should speed our impedimenta transport needs. Investigate that. In summary, all of you, the rules are simple: fight, move, communicate.”
I
looked over at Guinevia, who had been scribbling on her wax tabulum and who would, I knew, have reports and inventories readied for me by midday tomorrow. She’d come to me as a scribe, but when I’d found out her background as a Pictish sorceress who had become a Druid, I’d found other uses for her. She’d used her magic to help sink a Roman fleet, she’d negotiated a peace with the Picts, she’d become my lover and she’d saved my life when I was a prisoner. Near her were my hounds Axis and Javelin, killers of a traitor who had been ready to execute me. The dogs alertly caught my glance where they lay by the door, ready for a command, but I gestured to them to stay. I worked with those dogs almost daily, and when we hunted together they responded to silent signals as well as to verbal commands. It was training that had cost a treacherous Pict his throat and his life. I did not know it then, but those silent signals would save me another time.
Guinevia
looked up and smiled a small smile, and my throat tightened. Her magic was not confined to sorcery, and we had a boy child to prove it. My enchantress possessed powerful spells of many kinds…
Being
stranded for three weeks had ruined Iacco Grimr’s already-short temper. The blond Suehan warrior from southern Scandza had sailed south from his home port where in summer the sun never sets, had safely skirted the lands of the Danes and Jutes and slipped unnoticed into the waters off Germania. To avoid the open sea, he had opted to sail inside a long line of barrier islands, and there he and his four longships had met disaster. They had anchored for the night, and had wakened in the darkest midnight hours to find themselves stuck fast on a plain of tidal mudflats, stranded by a rapidly-receding sea.
At
first, Grimr was unflurried. The tide, he reasoned, would return and float them off. But a summer storm blew up, causing the green sea to race in like a hammer blow. The steep, thrashing waves scooped up the flimsy, clinker-built longships and tossed them around as if they were children’s toys. Seven of Grimr’s men drowned, but the rest of the 80-man century washed ashore mostly unhurt. They mustered themselves on one of the long, hook-shaped sandy ridges of low dunes which form an archipelago of islands among vast mudflats. As daylight showed through the lowering skies, the wind-scoured island where they crouched, chilled and wet, was revealed as a low-lying, miserable place.
The
few residents lived in huts made from wind-dried mud bricks, huts constructed on platforms or atop the built-up highest spots of the islands, all of them barely above the reach of the maximum tides. The natives seemed like sailors at sea when the tide was in, or like mariners shipwrecked in a vast plain of mud when it was out. Worse, the desolate, wind-whipped sand dunes were treeless, offering not a scrap of timber for repairs to Grimr’s ships. The food supplies were fish caught by the locals in nets and ropes braided from marsh grass or rushes and the only drinking water was rainwater collected in small tanks that stood outside the natives’ sorry homes. Even the fuel that cooked their miserable diet was dried mud and seaweed, a poor source that reflected their hardscrabble existence.
Grimr
had ordered his own hearth troops to repair two of the battered longships with materials salvaged from the other two, but the work had gone slowly and it had been only a week since he had dispatched one repaired ship south, with orders to capture a merchant ship and bring it back so the sea raiders could continue their voyage. “There’s nothing here but mud,” he growled to his lieutenant, Bjalf Fairhair. The residents of islands further along the chain had fled in their coracles, the two scrawny women of the island where the raiders had gathered had died under the incomers’ brutal ministrations two weeks ago, and the few children were penned under guard to be sold as slaves while their fathers were sent to wade out and fish for their new masters’ food. Once, just once in three weeks, the hungry raiders had eaten seal meat, and even that had tasted good, better than the score or so of seabirds they’d either shot with Grimr’s crossbow or netted and eaten half-raw for shortage of cooking fuel. Work parties had gone out to scour the beaches for shellfish, but without success. The men were chilled, wet and hungry.
“Fish, feathers, water, and no ale,” Grimr grumbled, but he had no intention of risking his one remaining longship on a journey to the mainland, damaged as the vessel was, in search of supplies. His best option was to wait until his other ship returned with whatever the crew had been able to capture. Then, he could rebuild his little fleet and sail for Britain, where he had heard there was loot and slaves to be taken, even land to be settled. Grimr narrowed his eyes against the battering gusts of wind and blown sand to scan the blue-grey loom of the horizon for the hundredth time. Not a sail in sight. He sighed, turned on his heel and strode to the scanty comfort of the beached longship to wait. Grimr’s men were lighting a small fire near it with ruined spars from their wrecked vessels, and the flickering flames gave welcome comfort. He could see the crouched, half-lit crew as he moved towards them. Another chill, windswept night. By morning, perhaps the others would be back and they could leave this barren place.
Offshore,
unnoticed in the thickening gloom, five dun sails were rising above the horizon. None of them belonged to Grimr’s flotilla, and a lookout’s sharp eyes on one of the incoming galleys picked up the fire’s small glow against the darkness of the shore. Within minutes, all five vessels were alerted. Unheard in the blustering wind, unseen in the dusk, armed men were sailing steadily towards the telltale beacon, under cover of the shroud of darkness.
Hundreds
of miles to the west, another sea raider had been scanning the horizon, too. Muirch ‘Iron Sword’ Corbitus – his tribal name came from ‘
corbita
,’ Latin for a merchant ship, but there was nothing of the trader about Muirch – was planning mayhem. The black-haired Hibernian from the big island west of Britannia was eager to sail again on a voyage of plunder and rapine.
It
was almost a year since he and his Scoti warriors had sailed out, around the western isles of the Picts and down the northeast coast of Britannia. They had sacked a monastery and several farmsteads and villages, loaded their oak-ribbed ships with loot, slaves and even a few cattle, then had turned their vessels’ steep prows north for home, through the German Sea and into the Atlantic. Now, as the summer and its calms had just a few weeks to run, it was time to sail again before winter storms would keep them ashore.
Muirch
looked carefully out to sea, no threats there, then turned his attention to the small shipyard where the carpenters and shipwrights were finishing their work. His two smooth-sided vessels, built the Gallic way, were shallow-keeled coasting ships that could take on any sea. Ribbed with foot-thick oak, sided in elm, they had their seams caulked with hemp and cattle hair, all sealed with pine tar.
The
raider had made one alteration to his own ship, Brotherblade, reinforcing the bow with its iron-banded ram that could sink an enemy vessel. “Looks good,” he grinned at the two carpenters who were chiselling the squared post where Iron Sword would slot the carved giant’s head that would offer menace as they sailed.
“Looks
like you,” grunted one of the carpenters. “Big teeth, long hair, big nose.”
Iron
Sword nodded amiably. “Don’t forget the huge ram, just like mine,” he countered, “but I’ll bet those British virgins would rather open to that wooden head than to your purple one.”
The
second carpenter spluttered. “Is it true that all those British women have huge tits?” he asked.
“Some
of them,” said the raider, “have four, two at the front, two at the back. They’re good to dance with, and you always have something to grasp, wherever you’re coming from.” Both carpenters howled laughing. Iron Sword might be a feared warrior, but among his men, he was relaxed and approachable.
They
knew though, that when he pulled on his breastplate and slid the flat blade of his sword from the hanger chains at his left hip, he would be readying for the blood-boiling, fighting madness that had crashed him through shield walls and over the guarded gunwales of the ships he had so often boarded and burned. But, when the leather helmet with its nose guard was off, when the elmwood shield faced with waxed leather was discarded and the ash-pole spear set down, Iron Sword would drink barley beer with the best, tell tales to match the bards’ and slyly drink an incautious husband under the table so he could make advances that were not always unwelcomed by a pretty young wife.
“They
say you’ve left a whole tribe of Scoti bastards in Britain,” said one of the carpenters, carefully shaving a curl of wood from the stem post. “They say there are more Scoti children where you’ve raided than there are British ones.”
Muirch
wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m not saying I always keep my sword in its scabbard,” he agreed. “You can’t let a blade go rusty, especially if it’s a long one.” The carpenters hooted again. “See this?” he said, tapping his right calf. “It’s bigger than the other one because I have to swing this leg over all those women so often. Those god-bothering monks are no use to the local lovelies. They’re skirted half-men who hide with their books and inks, they leave the flock-tending to us. Those British women look forward to our visits, and we try, we try. We are, after all, only here to oblige.” He gave the carpenters a mock bow and sauntered across the beach to view the other boat, where a rigger was braiding a halyard to the leather sail.
Behind
him, the village sat in a fold of green valley that emptied to a shingly beach on the shore of a wide lough. Hibernia was a green and damp place, a place of cool summers and wet winters. White-woolled sheep grazed, a few cattle lowed to be milked and an agreeable scent of peat smoke drifted on the breeze. Muirch sighed contentedly. With this to come home to, raiding and its pounding excitements was a perfect contrast. Now, he had a half-formed plan for his warrior ships’ next excursion. Blood would be spilled, fires would be set and hopefully, he’d have slaves and loot to bring home. There would be a long winter to eat, drink, sleep with his woman and plan the next voyages. But first, he would be taking misery and death to Britain.
Muirch’s
satisfied contemplation was rudely broken. Down the hard pack of the strand walked a tall figure. He groaned. It was the woman Karay, a flame-headed, single-minded troublemaker who had standing in the community, a vicious swinging fist, a fear of nobody and a frequently-expressed ambition that not only the men should go raiding. “We,” she said often in village councils, “are the important part of this community, but we have little part in the expeditions that sustain us. We can do better, and we should go with the men.”
Muirch
was a Celt, and the Celts accorded women high esteem. Those two facts were the bane of his life. He might sing, when deep in mead, of Cwylwch and great Hibernian heroes, but the women of the village, who were usually more sober, would out-sing his croaking male choir with their ballads of female heroes. They would remind him of the warrior queens, Boadicea, who butchered 70,000 Romans, and Sgathaich, who taught the great Cuchalainn to fight, of Aoifa and Niamh Golden Hair and all the other female Druids and warriors who had made the Celts feared.
Now
he faced Karay on the sand, and behind her he recognized Jesla, a blonde Amazon with no fear of men, beasts or the sea. Just behind her, and his spirits sank more, was the slight figure of a third female troublemaker, Caria the Sybil, the village sorceress whose name was used by parents to frighten their children into obedience. Muirch glanced to see if she was carrying her usual totem, an old skull with a few vertebrae in it that she used to cast auguries. Yes, there it was.
He
reluctantly turned back to red-haired Karay. She stared at Muirch from his own height, and he shrank away from her challenge. “You are going voyaging,” she said directly. “And I and some of my women are coming with you.” She paused. “Or we will burn your boats. Maybe we will just pound your heads to paste.”
Muirch
sighed and nodded. He’d been ‘persuaded’ by Karay before. It was like being knocked down and beaten senseless with a war axe.