Authors: Paul Bannister
Arthur Invictus (5 page)
We rolled our loaded galleys into the smooth, dark flow of the river long before wolf light. We had to catch the outgoing tide 11 miles downriver, and if we had to navigate in the dark, so be it. We were not the first of our party to leave, however.
A
picked force of two dozen men, led by the centurion Damonius, was already marching overland to capture the Roman customs post that was a mile or more short of the shipyards. I hoped that when we reached that place, it would be secured, and I doubly hoped that the patrol galley stationed there would be in our hands. I surreptitiously threw a gold coin over the ship’s side as a token offering to Mithras.
The
god must have been pleased, because we edged quietly into the military wharf to find a grinning Damonius waiting. “Your galley is prepared, lord,” he said, gesturing with his sword, which I noted was bloodied, to the trim, blue-sailed warship. I heaved a gusty sigh of relief. It had a ram mounted at the bow. I would not need to jury-rig the vessel with the great baulk of timber I had ordered stowed on our ship.
Pointing
to the warship, I ordered: “Get the chains fastened to that,” as a work party who had been briefed days ago scrambled onto the wharf. I followed them, raising an eyebrow to Damonius.
“A
few dead,” he said laconically, “but none of ours.”
His
attack had been a success. Arriving silently out of the dark, our raiders had silenced the solitary sentry in a gush of arterial blood and had hacked down the handful of legionaries who resisted. Their officer, sullen and bruised, was shackled to a wagon yoke, the customs officials and surviving legionaries were under guard in a stone pig pen.
Now
it was time to carry out the major part of our plan. Our men took the war galley’s oars and to the steady rhythm of the hammer taps sent out by the decurion Celvinius, another hero of the battle of Londinium, we scudded downriver. Immediately behind us was the galley with a peculiar ramp arrangement that jutted out from its bows, and behind it followed our other three ships.
Celvinius
kept a watchful eye on the gaps between the vessels, not wishing to separate our small flotilla, and the current kept even the slower, cargo-laden ships with us easily enough. As the wolf light gave way to dawn, a light drizzle began to fall, making me curse, for fire was our best weapon in this attack and I wanted every advantage. I glanced at the scroll in my hand, a sketch of the layout of the shipyard, lock gates, stores, ropewalks and all the assorted warehouses and stores associated with it.
The
only small comfort I could draw was that the barracks block was located at the furthest point away from our attack, placed there to defend against seaborne raiders or against the land raiders who must, by nature of the channels and topography, approach from the west and north.
I
really had no need to look at the scroll. Everything was burned into my brain, and as I peered through the drizzle, I saw the first important landmark, the tall arches under a sawtooth roofline that denoted the ship assembly building. I growled at the signals officer and he waved his red flags to the following ships. As planned, the last ship in line, which Grimr commanded, peeled away for the shore and I watched as a swarm of laden men ran for the long, low building.
Next
to depart in ordered silence was the force tasked with destroying the long line of ropewalks, where ships’ rigging was created. They would also be setting fire to the lofts, canvas stores, sawyers’ shops and to the woodworks where the pinewood frames, ribs, spars, stem and sternposts were created.
I
looked with disappointment at the log beds of the shipways down which the part-finished vessels were launched. If I could destroy those, we could certainly delay any invasion for a long time, but we had no way to do that.
The
third ship to head for the wharves carried the commando force that would destroy as much of the blacksmiths’ forges as possible, heaving the anvils and tools, tacks, nails and lead sheathing into the tideway, burning down the smithies. They were ordered to complete that destruction, then join forces with the other landed crews to burn the grain stores and piers. If possible, they should burn down the cookhouse, poison the wells and set fire to the workmen’s barracks. This I wanted to leave for last, as it could bring resistance that could delay us in our other, more important targets.
A
half mile behind us, I could see the first flickers of flame rising, and grunted with satisfaction. No alarm trumpets had yet sounded, few shipyard workers were likely to have been at work at this early hour. We had a few more minutes to implement our destructive plans.
Ahead,
the lock gates appeared out of the thin drizzle. I glanced at Cenhud, who was acting as master of the war galley. “How’s the tide?” I asked.
He
grinned at me, a reassuring sight. “Excellent,” he said. I was relying on the exact confluence of river flow and tide to help me achieve serious destruction. I wanted the lock gates smashed and irreparable. I halted the war galley to allow the last of our vessels, with its curious platform at the bow, to slip past us towards a pier.
A
detail of armed men scrambled ashore and headed for the lock gates. Still no alarm. This was almost too good to be true. We held position for a few tense minutes.
Cenhud
nodded to me, issued a quiet command and as they had rehearsed, a crew hauled up every sail to catch the morning breeze off the land. Celvinius began his hammer taps to dictate the rowers’ rhythm, and steadily increased the pace.
Soon,
remarkably soon, the galley had leaped to the speed of a cantering horse and was coursing under full sail and straining muscles towards the lock gates. The white bone of water at its prow did not cover the deadly war ram, and Cenhud calmly kept the steerboard true and aimed at the exact junction of the heavy lock gates.
On
the stone quay alongside the lock chamber, we could see our comrades, who were hauling the downstream gates open and emptying the lock. Now we had the whole pressure of 600 miles of river building against one side of those gates, and we were speeding towards it with our deadly ram.
Moments
before impact, the rowers shipped oars and braced, the crew detailed to handle chains readied themselves, and with a splintering crash like Thor’s hammer the war galley rammed through the wooden river barrier.
Most
of us fell to the deck, but in seconds the chains were thrown to the waiting assault group and the galley was tethered to the chamber’s bollards long enough for us all to scramble onto the quay, jumping across a torrent of water that was already swamping our ship.
As
the stragglers scrambled to safety, Celvinius waved to the last of our galleys, and the crew tilted the curious platform towards the water and released the flaps on the containers of pumice attached to it. The grey volcanic stone slid down the wooden ramp into the water.
As
it went, men alongside the ramp, men dressed in vinegar-soaked leather with faces shielded, poured a stinking concoction of bitumen, rock oil, resin and sulphur across the pumice, which floated with the current rapidly towards the locks. The crew hurriedly stepped back as Damonius and several assistants began pumping more of the Byzantine Fire mix at the floating rock, and the big centurion, satisfied, touched a lighted taper to one of the pumps’ nozzles.
Damonius
noted later it was a good thing he shaved his head, because the backfire took his eyebrows and would have had his hair, too, even under his leather helmet.
A
giant whoosh of flame went from side to side across the stone-channelled river on the carpet of floating stones and ran with the surging current through the shattered lock gates. It sent our chained war galley up in flames and carried a wide tongue of bright-burning fire downriver and into the anchored ships of Maximian’s fleet.
The
ships themselves were tossed and scattered by the unleashed power of the world’s oldest river, and as they bumped and splintered against each other, they spread the sticky, unquenchable fire.
By
now, brazen-throated trumpets were sounding, gangs of alarmed men were appearing here and there, and a spreading, cloaking pall of smoke was coming downriver from the burning workshops and warehouses. Rapidly, it joined the flaring fires that were jumping from each anchored ship to its tethered companion vessel in the pool below the shipyard locks and put a great blue-grey ceiling low over the area.
Grimr
and the first soot-streaked commandos of our raider force were rowing in to report their assignments completed, and they brought with them the ship-mounted
ballistae
they had built in the previous weeks.
We
filled ceramic pots with the Byzantine Fire and lobbed them across the racing, near-impassable Meuse and into the clustered shipping on the opposite bank, causing more damage to vessels and buildings. Some returning troops also joined in so enthusiastically as their comrades smashed the sluice gear boxes that were vital in the operation of the lock gates that they had to be forcefully ordered away when it was time to leave.
With
one set of gates utterly destroyed and the other badly damaged by the bursting torrent, I felt that the raid would keep the shipyard inoperable for weeks or, perhaps, months. And, when all the added damage of fire-destroyed supplies, sunken equipment and devastated shelter was added, we might well have put the emperor’s invasion plans back by a year or more – if he even had the manpower to spare to restore the yards.
We
had lost several men of our party, one who had drowned, two who had been killed by the enemy and a fourth who had been trapped in a collapsed building. Not a bad butcher’s bill, I felt, for the results. About the only target we had not succeeded in destroying was the
pharos
light tower, but on viewing it, I had judged it too close to the bustling barracks for comfort, and had reluctantly called off the squad who had been briefed to destroy it.
It
only took an hour or so from releasing our first raiders until I ordered a withdrawal to the upriver rendezvous we had previously designated. We set our ships afire because we had little hope of rowing them upstream against that unhindered torrent and we marched away in good order, unchallenged, smoke-stinking and triumphant.
We marched openly across Gaul to the Ardennes foothills, a hardened war band of 55 dirty, dishevelled warriors improbably on a diplomatic mission.
My
intention was to meet the kings of the Belgae, of the Franks and of any others of Rome’s vassals, to forge an alliance against their Italian masters. I hoped that none of them would remember that the last Belgic king to show me favour had ended his days crucified on the battlements of his own citadel, or that I had left their land as a fugitive slinking through the woods.
We
moved through the rolling, forested hills without hindrance, and we avoided going close to any major settlements. I had no desire to alert the Romans to our presence, reasoning that they would expect us to have slipped away from Gaul and back to Britain after the shipyard raid. Several days’ cautious travel, always keeping the Meuse river at our right hand, brought us to the citadel of Vallis, an ancient stronghold on one of the highest points of the region.
The
Romans had once occupied it, but had moved to their Germania Inferior capital on the Rhine at Colonia and the place was now the citadel of the Belgic king Stelamann. He was a tall individual made even taller by the way he, like his warriors, used white lime to make his hair into a ferocious spiked mane. He sported a long, drooping moustache and his face and bare chest were covered in circular, flowing tattoos. At his belt, he invariably carried a long leaf-shaped dagger, and he wore tartan trews over soft leather riding boots, for he was a fine horseman.
Stelamann
greeted me with suspicion, but his attitude softened after an exchange of compliments and mutual admiration of each other’s swords, for his sword rivalled my Exalter as a graceful example of craftsmanship. The Celts, I knew, had made their weaponry some of the best in the world.
Stelamann
was a vassal king of the Romans, but seemed open to other suggestions, and after I had described our destruction of Maximian’s shipyard, was eager to see a demonstration of Byzantine Fire. Although we had abandoned the stirrup pumps, we had some of the mix with us, and demonstrated it by hurling a pot full from the battlements, which excited the king considerably. He made me promise to give him the formula, and his queen Martha, a literate Morini from the region around my lost stronghold of Bononia, was able to write down what parts of the mix I could recall.
It
interested me to see that for all the finely-made swords of his nobles, the ordinary soldiers were armed only with a spear and dagger, and had very little in the way of armour, although they did have shields for defensive purposes. King Stelamann shrugged away my questions about armour. His smiths, he said, had developed good chain mail, but his warriors preferred to fight “like men,” which appeared to be bare-chested or even naked, covered in blue woad and screaming intimidating war cries.
I
deduced that they relied for success on their ferocity and some excellent light cavalry, and when I questioned the king about catapults, siege engines or siege towers, he shrugged again. His warriors disdained sieges and would storm anything head-on, he boasted.
Cautiously,
I approached the idea of action against the Romans. I told him how I had defeated the Roman fleet, and twice now had burned Maximian’s invasion barges. I recounted the epic battle on the shingle of Dungeness, and his eyes sparkled at the description of our use of war chariots, for they were a famous Celtic battle weapon in ages past.
Those
chariots in our blood-soaked clash on the Cantian shingle drove the enemy away for several years, and I had executed the Caesar who led the legions, I told the king, but Maximian had invaded again. Although we destroyed two of their fleets, some legions got ashore, and the Romans had driven us back to Londinium and destroyed my capital. The king nodded. He knew the power of the legions. He also appreciated how lucky I had been to escape them alive, as they had been recalled from the siege in which I had been trapped.
Sometimes,
I said wryly, it is better to be lucky than good. Again the king nodded. The old pagan had not kept his throne without luck, and he appreciated that the gods favoured some people more than others. So, when I broached the subject of allying my forces with his and those of other Belgic or Gallic rulers, he did not flinch. He wanted to know specifics of numbers, weapons, gold, timings. I told him frankly that my own forces at present would not be enough, but I was planning to raise a second, Christian army to swell our ranks.
“We
have the weapons and an elite corps of trained men. We need more numbers, and the Christians can give us those. They have already had some training, but elected not to fight when they found we were not battling the Romans who threatened their religion,” I explained. “Now, I believe we can rally them in enough numbers to come here and help you throw off the Romans, especially as they are so busily engaged with the Alemanni and others across the Rhine.”
King
Stelamann nodded. “You would profit from our shed blood,” he said. “If together we defeated the emperor Maximian, you could then retreat to your island and let us face him alone when he has recovered.”
“This
I would not do,” I said, and I used the icon I knew would convince him. I took from the leather pouch where I kept it the great silver and amber brooch of a British jarl. “This you will know is my kingly crown,” I told him. “I am a lord of the British in my own right as well as an emperor by conquest. My word as your cousin is that I will always support you. If Maximian ever defeats you, he will next come to defeat me, too. We cannot let the legions battle us one by one, we must all face them, united. We must hang together or we certainly will hang separately.”
The
king chewed at the end of his moustache. “I need to hear what are the auguries,” he said abruptly. “Get my seer to me.” Shortly, a small flaxen-haired woman in a scholar’s grey gown walked into the chamber. Incongruously, she was carrying a half-full wineskin.
“I
am Danutaryl,” she said, inclining her head to me. She looked curiously at my jarl’s badge of office. “I was born near the trade route, the Amber Road, where that stone is carried from the northern seas to Italia,” she said. “I have seen much amber, and that specimen is a king’s ornament.”
She
turned to Stelamann, almost insolently casual to her king. “You want auguries, I suppose?” He grunted, but she continued before he could respond. “I heard a raven croaking as I came here. It was on my right. This is a good omen, and last night, I dreamed of Hermes, another, very good omen. Did you, king, dream of anything?”
He
shuffled as he sat. “I did,” he said. “I dreamed that I hunted a gazelle and a hare, but they were too swift. My hunt failed.”
The
seer shook her head. “No failure, king,” she declared. “The gazelle is symbol of a journey. If it is weak or feeble, the way forward will be a hard one. If the gazelle is strong and swift, so will the future be easy. The hare is a mystic symbol of Luna the moon and is good fortune. These are good auguries. Do you have something significant in the near future?”
The
king looked at me. “I am going to Armorica,” I said. “It will be an important journey for us both.”
“And
it will be a successful mission,” the seer said firmly. She turned to Stelamann. “King, you have your answer. The gods are with you, and as Hermes is the gods’ own messenger, the emissary of transitions, I think your endeavours are well blessed.” She smiled, gestured with her wineskin and walked calmly out of the chamber. I looked at the king and we nodded to each other, in satisfaction.
That
night, we feasted on wild boar in King Stelamann’s hall, whose roof timbers I noted were decorated with the pitch-covered heads of his enemies. We had a pact. Now we had to recruit more Celts, Belgae, Franks and Gauls and we could push the Romans back to their own lands. We needed the Christians, too, I thought gloomily. Lots of them.
A
few days later, I sent Grimr and half our force back to the coast to retrieve our sunken, hidden ship and return to Britain. I would take the other half of our company with me on a river voyage across Gaul to Armorica. That is the land of the Veneti and Pictones, a coastal land in western and northern Gaul. The kingdom is large, and includes the southerly Aquitania, so the whole monarchy extends from the shores of the Narrow Sea right down the western coast of Gaul to the mountains that separate it from Hispania. I know its coastal regions especially well, as it had been territory scoured by the Bagaudae pirates and bandits I had once suppressed for Rome.
Now
I was going there to raise an army of those same bandits to battle their Italian masters. The Fates who spin the threads that create the weft and warp of our lives must have chortled at how things had changed for me.
Before
I left, I had encouraging news. Stelamann had sent out his
tabellari
messengers to his fellow monarchs, outlining our proposed alliance and calling for a convocation. Now a
tabellarius
had arrived, bringing word that another potential ally was already at the Seine river in Gaul.
A
powerful Hun warlord khan called Busfeld had separated from his Ostrogoth allies with whom, in an uneasy alliance he had forced crossings of both the Volga and the Don in the eastern reaches of Germania. The other tribes were aiming for the riches of Milan and Cisalpine Gaul, but the Huns opted to go north for Celtica, and had crossed the river barriers of the Rhine, Moselle, Meuse and now, the Seine, where they were possibly preparing winter quarters, and for now at least, halting their advance west.
Rivers
that defeated other armies were never an obstacle to the Huns. Every warrior carried inflatable skins on which he could float, or would swim his horse across even the greatest width of water. If it was a whole horde of nomads, not just fighting men, they simply built rafts to carry their wagons or heavy equipment across a water barrier and continued their unstoppable progress.
Now,
the rumour was that Khan Busfeld was planning to sweep south across the Pyrenees into Iberia next spring. This, for me, was a wonderful opportunity. The Caesars would be torn. The Romans were attempting to suppress barbarians on the Rhine and Danube and now, in their rear Milan, the city in which Maximian himself maintained his chief palace was under threat from the Ostrogoths. I knew I should hasten to find Busfeld and bring him into our unlikely alliance so we could meet the emperor with only part of his forces, on Gallic soil.