Dreaming the Serpent Spear (46 page)

Only the two cavalry men were not of the governor’s
direct choosing: Ursus and Flavius came at Corvus’ invitation, the one to offer support, the other because it was no longer safe to leave him behind where he could not be watched, and for his precious pigeons, which had kept dry on the row over and might yet save their lives.

Last and least of the fifteen was a local guide named Gaius who had lived so long at the fortress of the XXth legion that he had acquired an accent traceable directly to the gutters of three streets that passed between the Mons Avertina and the Tiber in Rome. It had been rumoured on board ship that the governor had promised him citizenship if the war against the tribes was won. More plausible rumour said that the man had three sons of whom he was exceeding proud and that he wanted citizenship for them more than he wanted life itself.

Suetonius Paullinus, governor of all Britannia, stood on the weed and sand of a native shore that should have been friendly, or at least not hostile. He wore leather armour, because he had no intention of dying if the small-boat sank, and his sword was built for use, not for the parade ground. The hilt was covered in boarhide, and the cross-piece, so that no part of it would catch sun or moon and reveal him. His helmet was matt with age and could have been any legionary’s. They were all the same: grim, hard men who understood exactly what it was they were required to do, and how great were the risks.

His gaze read them, and was content. He said, “From here until we reach and take Vespasian’s Bridge, we will act as if the natives are the enemy. We will ride fast, we will ride hard. We will avoid confrontation or even meeting with the tribes, but whom we meet, we kill.”

They travelled hard, but not fast.

It was said that the emperor Tiberius, in the days when he was a general in the Germanies and not yet an emperor, had once ridden two hundred and twenty miles in a single day. If it were true, he could have ridden the full breadth of Britannia in that same day, except that the roads did not exist and it would have required him to change horses at the post stations every twenty miles.

Suetonius Paullinus and his fifteen men did not have his resources. They rode on trackways and goat paths and were dependent for their directions on the lead of Gaius, who was of the northern Silures and did not know the routes well, and each man had to nurse his horse, knowing that if it foundered, he would have to find another one immediately or be left at the wayside.

They met very few natives, and all of them warriors in paint, with kill-feathers woven into their hair. None of them came close enough to engage and the risk of ambush, or of destroying the horses, was too great to follow them. A boy was killed, who did not run fast enough and did not know that Flavius, like another before him, was skilled in the use of a throwing knife.

Beyond that one inglorious kill, there was nothing but hard days in the saddle, frequent turns back on themselves when a track proved impassable, and only the growing breadth of the river to tell them they were making any progress at all.

They came to the first of the deserted trading posts around noon on the fourth day of their travel. It was not an imposing place, a wharf no bigger than the jetty on Mona, lagged about with river weed and the debris of a skirmish; a
length of rope swayed in the brown water, caught on the wharf’s upstream footing, a tattered piece of woven wool showing green beneath it, the remnant of a child’s cloak shed in haste or by accident in flight.

Eight merchant’s huts were lined along the river up- and downstream of the wharf. The nearest was largest, paid for by the river tolls of those wishing to cross to the smaller jetty on the far bank, and the greater trading taxes of those who had bypassed the lower ports and sailed from the open seas through the mouth of the river and up this far.

Only one man could be spared at a time for reconnaissance. Corvus drew the white pebble from the helmet and rode down alone to look. He walked his black colt along the water’s edge. The horse was not strictly his remount, but he had come through the swim to Mona better than the mare had done and the Batavian who had ridden him was dead: Corvus did not want to come back and find the man’s soul-brother had taken his horse as were-geld.

The beast shied at a flapping door-hide and again more violently at a sow that had been left in a sty without food or water and screamed when it saw Corvus coming. He opened the gateway and let her out and she charged, ears flapping, for the river bank. A scatter of ducks rose in panic, honking so that for a moment there was screaming pandemonium and Ursus brought half of Paullinus’ troop at the gallop with swords drawn thinking that Corvus was under attack.

“There’s no-one here,” Corvus said. He had already checked each hut. The hearts of the fires were cold and damp, but, on a day when it was warm enough to ride in shirtsleeves, there was no mould yet on the fire stones. He said, “They’ve been gone more than two days, less than five.”

Ursus said, “Have they gone across the river, or east? They can’t have gone west; we’d have met them.”

Gaius, the Siluran guide, arrived after the first flurry of action. He had some facility as a tracker. He walked the length of the eight huts and came back to lean on the pigsty. He was taller than any of them, as the northman had been. He stooped a little, not to seem so. “The boats have gone,” he said. “Some of them likely went across, but at least three wagons travelled east along the trackway.”

“How far are we from Vespasian’s Bridge?”

“Half a day’s ride. They will be there long ahead of us.”

“And any others who have gone there.” Corvus swung himself into the saddle. “I hope the magistrates of the port are prepared for a thousand extra mouths to feed.”

The magistrates of the settlement that straggled along the northern bank of the Thamesis on either side of Vespasian’s Bridge were not well prepared. The pandemonium in the circle of huts and trading booths and the central corn exchange matched the chaos of the sow and ducks for noise and was spread over a far wider area.

It was a trading port based on a bridge, and the bridge itself was by far the most imposing piece of architecture within it. The place was barely a town: it had a tax room built of oak timbers with weighing scales and a clerk’s desk and another room built in stone for keeping records. It had two rows of stables for guest-horses and mounts for messengers who might have need to travel to Camulodunum where the centre of government lay. It had eight taverns, of varying reputation, and two brothels, one that supplied women and one that supplied everything else that might command money.

Of the hundred or so dwellings, the best were merchants’ houses, and even those were little more than huts built of wattle with thatched roofs. Cattle and sheep and pigs and goats and five-toed chickens strutted on the rooftops and pecked in the barnyards. It had hay stores and feed stores and a granary and a string of wells for when the river became swollen with spring floodwater and turned too brown to eat. It had small muddy lanes linking house to house and passage to passage and slightly wider ones linking all of these to the great northern roads that swept northwest to Verulamium and up towards Mona and northeast to Camulodunum. It had a ship, wallowing at the dock, that was being loaded with all that was precious of those who commanded it, ready to flee.

It did not have a wall.

Paullinus pulled up his group on a wooded slope set well back from the chaos. They had been seen, but not yet approached. They sat for a while, watching wagon after wagon, family after family, roll inward from the two broad trackways, and none roll outward again. There were more children than adults and more women than men. They were unarmed, unless one considered their eating knives to be armament, which only an optimist, or a desperate man, might do. Like herded sheep, they converged in increasing numbers on Vespasian’s Bridge. It arced across the river, broad enough for a wagon and a horse side by side, high enough for a sea-going vessel to pass underneath, handsome as any sculpture, a testament to the engineers of the legions who could create beauty and utility together. A man could weep for the beauty of it, and the inevitability of its loss.

Tired of the bridge and its township before the others, Corvus watched instead a haze of smoke on the eastern horizon and so was first to see the Eceni scouts.

“Enemy,” he said quietly. “East of here and north of the scrub oak with the anvil-shaped cloud behind. Fifteen that I can see and I will bet there is at least one more. Youths on foot. Knives only. War braids and kill-feathers. They are equal in numbers to us, and most are women. That won’t be an accident.”

They were seasoned men and they had fought in the west, where for every one of the enemy seen, there were a dozen unseen in the rocks and crannies of the mountains. They did not spin their horses, or shout, or stare, but talked and bantered amongst themselves and shifted their mounts a little to lessen their boredom and eased their blades in their sheaths for the practice of it until, as if by coincidence and certainly by chance, they were all facing a little more eastward and could look without seeming to at the place Corvus had described.

The scouts rose from their hiding, one by one. They stood half naked among the scrub elder and seeding thistles, wide-legged, with their knives in their belts, not deigning to unsheathe them in the presence of Rome. They were sixteen, of whom eight were women.

Once, the governors of Britannia had flogged men for suggesting that women fought in the native armies. Now, Suetonius Paullinus, fifth of the governing line, said, “They send us the flower of their youth.”

“They send them to look down on Vespasian’s Bridge, to show that the attack will come with the dawn,” said Corvus. “Their gods do not support a battle of which fair warning has not been given.”

“They don’t fear that the magistrates and people will rally a defence?”

“Do you see one happening?”

They did not. Fighting men know the sounds of panic and they were issuing now from the port at Vespasian’s Bridge. Where before had been chaos was now clear panic.

On the bridge, the bottleneck became a logjam and carts broke their axles rather than back up or give way. Figures climbed over them and round them and fell into the water and were ignored by the others who thought that safety lay south.

On the river, the ship loading at the wharf was flooded, suddenly, with men and their families who abandoned the need to preserve their family silver and fought each other instead for room on the gangplank and then on the deck. The whistle of the master shrieked loud enough to be heard on the hillside. The men it summoned were armed.

Paullinus leaned on the front arch of his saddle. He ran his tongue round his upper teeth, thoughtfully, and the fifteen men around him found other things to watch, rather than catch his eye and so his attention. Twice in his past, once in Mauretania and before that in Parthia, Paullinus had faced a decision and had given the men with him the opportunity to vote on their action. Those who chose wrongly were allowed to fall on their swords before the rest moved on. The ones who hesitated had been staked out and left to die at their leisure.

The governor drew his horse to one side. “Plebius?”

From the beginning, Plebius had ridden at his general’s right hand. A one-eyed duplicarius of the Second cohort of the XIVth, he had a natural head for numbers and was
obsessively conscientious. By default, he had become the quartermaster of their small troop, and carried the coins and gold they needed for bribes and payment. Wooden-faced, he pushed his horse beyond the hearing of his peers and listened while the governor explained what he wanted.

Given his orders, Plebius nodded and searched his packs and emptied what he found into the bowl of his helmet. Metal chimed heavily on metal.

Suetonius Paullinus swung his horse on its quarters and faced the semi-circle of men he had chosen to accompany him and whose opinions he professed to respect. His face was never expressive, but his eyes, for the most part, on most days, spoke from his soul. Now, in the cold wind that soughed up from the river, they were flat and watchful.

He said, “You will each take one denarius and one as from the helmet.”

The helmet passed round. Corvus was last. The as was a copper teardrop against the dull iron. He resisted the temptation to bite it and feel the texture of the metal. The denarius was silver and too obviously foiled to be worth the biting. A young, thin Augustus stared moodily east from its one surface. On the other side, a younger, thinner bull stood haltered and garlanded, awaiting the sacrifice. Corvus closed his hand over it; the bull god had never been his.

The governor said, “Two choices: we can stay and rally a defence in the township in an effort to preserve the bridge which is our best route to the south coast; or we can leave now, and ride hard for the coast and take ship and return in due course with the legions to face the Eceni war host en masse. Each of these has points to recommend it; I will not labour them. You will hold out your right hand containing a
coin. When I request it, you will open your hand to reveal what is hidden. The silver coin votes to stay and defend the bridge. The copper votes to return to the ship and meet the legions wherever we may. Is anyone unclear as to which coin denotes which choice?”

They were not. A man may die cleanly who falls on his sword; every one of them had faced a worse death daily in battle. Each made his choice alone, as a soldier, as an officer of the legions, as a veteran with twenty years of fighting experience, as a man prepared to live and die by the quality of his tactical judgement.

Corvus had made his decision before he saw the scouts; the volume of smoke on the wind told him as much as he needed to know of the size of the advancing war host and the speed with which the port of Vespasian’s Bridge would be crushed. He placed his two hands together and when he drew them apart the lighter, smaller, brighter, younger coin was in the right, so light as to barely be there.

He looked around. The rest sat easy on their horses and held out their closed fists so that the governor was ringed by brown skin laced with battle scars.