Fortune's Favorites (90 page)

On the Kalends of April, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius the Piglet had left his comfortable quarters outside Italica on the western bank of the Baetis and headed for the Anas River. With him went all six of his legions-a total of thirty-five thousand men-and a thousand Numidian light horse. Since the aristocratic fluid coursing through his veins was undiluted by any good farming blood, he failed to notice as he went that the cultivated lands he traversed did not look as verdant, nor the sprouting crops as lush, as in other years. He had abundant grain in his supply column, and all the other foodstuffs necessary to vary the diet of his men and maintain their good health.

There was no waiting wall of Lusitani on the Anas when he reached it some hundred and fifty miles from its mouth; that pleased him, for it meant no word had come to them of his whereabouts, that they still waited for him by the sea. Though big settlements were nonexistent this far upstream, there were small hamlets, and the soil of the river valley was being tilled. Word of his arrival would certainly go downstream to the massed tribesmen; but by the time they got here, he intended to be far away from the Anas. They could pursue him, but they would not catch him!

The Roman snake wound on through the rolling uplands at a good pace, heading now for the Tagus at Turmuli. Occasional skirmishes of a purely local nature did happen, but were swished away like flies from a horse's rump. As Segovia was his penultimate destination, the Piglet did not attempt to follow the Tagus further upstream but continued to march cross-country instead, somewhere to the north of northwest.

The road he was following throughout was nothing more than a primitive wagon trail, but in the manner of such things it took the line of least resistance across this western plateau; its altitude varied only in the hundreds of feet, and never got above two thousand five hundred. As the region was unknown to him, the Piglet gazed about in fascination, exhorting his team of cartographers and geographers to chart and describe everything minutely. Of people there were few; any the Romans chanced upon were immediately killed.

Onward they pressed through beautiful mixed forests of oak, beech, elm and birch, sheltered from the increasing heat of the sun. The victory against Hirtuleius last year had put marvelous heart into the men, and had also endowed their general with a new attitude toward their comfort. Resolved that they must not suffer any more than possible-and aware too that he was well on time-the old woman of the Further province made sure the pace he set did not tire his soldiers to the point whereat a good meal and a good night's rest had not the power to restore them.

The Roman column passed between two much higher ranges and emerged into the lands which ran down to the Durius, the least well known to the Romans of all Spain's major rivers. Ahead of him had he continued on the same course was big and prosperous Salamantica, but Metellus Pius now turned to the northeast and hugged the slopes of the mountains on his right, unwilling to provoke the tribe of Vettones whose gold workings had caused the great Hannibal to sack Salamantica one hundred and forty-five years before. And on the Kalends of June, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius brought his army to a halt outside Segovia.

Hirtuleius had beaten him to Segovia nonetheless-not very surprising. Laminium lay only two hundred miles away, whereas Metellus Pius had needed to cover a distance of six hundred miles. Presumably someone at Turmuli on the Tagus had sent a message to Sertorius that the Romans were passing through-but not up the Tagus. Sertorius had (as the old woman of the Further province had surmised) assumed that the Roman objective was the upper Iberus, a ploy to lure Sertorius away from the east coast and Pompey, or else a genuine attempt to strike at Sertorius's loyalest heartlands. Hirtuleius had been ordered to intercept the old woman before he could reach Sertorius's heartlands. Of one thing Metellus Pius was sure: they had not guessed whereabouts he was really going. To have guessed that, Sertorius would have had to hold a much higher opinion of the old woman's ability-and subtlety!-than he did.

The first thing was to get the army into a very strongly fortified camp. As prudent as always, Metellus Pius made his men dig and build clad in their armor-an extra burden no legionary welcomed-but, as their centurions told them, Hirtuleius was in the neighborhood. They worked in a frenzy, burrowing and raising mounds like a vast colony of insects. The wagons, oxen, mules and horses had been brought in while the red flags were being planted and the surveying was still going on, then were left under the care of a skeleton crew because noncombatants were also being pressed into service. Thirty-five thousand men labored with such logic and organization that the camp was finished in one day, though each side measured one mile in length, the timber-reinforced ramparts were twenty-five feet high, there were towers every two hundred paces, and the ditch in front of the walls was twenty feet deep. Only when the four gates made of solid logs were slammed shut and the sentries posted did the general heave a sigh of relief; his army was safe from attack.

The day had not passed without incident, however. Lucius Hirtuleius had found the idea of the old woman from the Further province cozily ensconced behind trenches, walls and palisades too much to stomach, so he had launched a cavalry sortie from his own camp aimed at forcing the old woman to break off his construction. But Metellus Pius had not been in Spain for three and a half years for nothing; he was learning to think like his enemy. Deliberately paring away six hundred Numidian light horse from his column many miles before he reached Segovia, he instructed them to follow on with great stealth, then position themselves where a potential attacker could not see them. No sooner was the sortie under way than out they came from under the nearby trees and chased Hirtuleius back to his own camp.

For the full eight days of a nundinum nothing further happened. The men had to rest, to feel as if no enemy forces would dare to disturb their tranquillity, to sleep the nights away and spend the long hours of sunlight in a mixture of exercise and recreation. From where his command tent stood at the junction of the via praetoria and the via principalis (it occupied a knoll within the flat expanse of the camp so the general could see over the tops of its buildings to all four walls), the general walked the length of both main streets, dived off into the alleyways lined by oiled cowhide tents or slab huts, and everywhere talked to his men, explained to them carefully what he was going to do next, let them see that he was superbly confident.

He was not a warm man, nor one who felt comfortable when dealing with his subordinates or inferiors, yet nor was he so cold that he could render himself proof against overt affection. Ever since the battle on the Baetis when he had cared for his soldiers so scrupulously, they had looked at him differently; shyly at first, then more and more openly. And they looked at him with love, and told him how grateful they were to him for giving them the chance of that victory with his care, his forethought. Nor did it make any difference to them that his motives for this care had been entirely practical, founded not in love for them but in the desire to beat Hirtuleius. They knew better. He had fussed and clucked like the old woman Sertorius called him so derisively; he had betrayed a personal interest in their well-being.

Since then they had sailed with him from Gades to Emporiae and back again, and they had marched six hundred miles through unknown country riddled with barbarians; and always he had kept them safe. So by the time that Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius walked the streets and alleys of his camp at Segovia, he had thawed in the glow of this extraordinary affection, and understood that time, his own mind and a properly Roman attitude to detail had dowered him with an army he would weep to part from. They were his. What he did not quite come to terms with was the fact that he was also theirs. His son never did come to terms with this last fact, and found it difficult to accompany his father on these strolls around what was a veritable town. Metellus Scipio was more snob than stickler, incapable by nature of eliciting or accepting the affection of those who were not his peers-even, it might be said, of those who were not directly related to him through blood or adopted blood.

By the time that their general led them out to tempt Lucius Hirtuleius into battle, his men knew why he had crammed six full legions and a thousand horse into a camp considerably smaller than it ought to have been. He wanted Hirtuleius to think that there were only five under-strength legions with him, and to think too that he had built his camp so stoutly because his army had been obliged to travel without all the adjuncts it needed; some of the Numidian cavalry troopers had been heard to pass remarks to this effect while they chased Hirtuleius's cavalry away during the sortie.

Taking a deliberate leaf out of Scipio Africanus's book, he chose the kind of ground to form up on that a general in command of ill-equipped troops in cheerless spirits would choose-cut up by tiny watercourses, a trifle uneven, impeded by bushes and small trees. And it was plain to Hirtuleius that in order to cover the front presented by forty thousand superbly armed Spanish soldiers in top condition, Metellus Pius had been obliged to thin out his center. To compensate for this his wings straggled too far forward, with the Numidian cavalry at their tips behaving as if they were commanded by someone who could not control them. In two minds as to whether he would fight that day when his scouts had come to tell him that the old woman's army was marching out of its camp, Hirtuleius surveyed the opposition and the ground, grunted contemptuously, and elected to give battle after all.

The old woman's wings engaged Hirtuleius first, which was exactly what he wanted. Forward he charged for that thin center, intent upon punching a hole in it through which he would pull three legions in a hurry, then turn and fall upon its rear. But the moment the Spanish army inserted itself between those unruly wings, Metellus Pius sprang his trap. His best men were hidden within the wings; some suddenly moved to reinforce his center, others turned to fight on the flanks. Before he could attempt to extricate himself, Lucius Hirtuleius found himself rolled neatly into a milling mass of bewildered men, and lost the battle. He and his younger brother died on the field, and the soldiers of Metellus Pius, singing a victory paean, cut the beloved Spanish army of Sertorius into pieces. Very few of its men survived; those who did fled into Lusitania howling the awful news of defeat, and came no more to fight for Quintus Sertorius. Their fellow tribesmen, cheated of their quarry at the mouth of the Anas, had followed the Romans at first, then decided to invade the Further province, even to cross the Baetis. But when the word spread of the fate of the Spanish army, they keened a terrible dirge at the passing of their great chance, then melted away into the forests.

Little more than a village perched atop a crag high above the plateau, Segovia could not hold out against Metellus Pius for one single day. Its people were put to the sword and its buildings went up in flames. Metellus Pius wanted no one left alive to fly eastward to warn Sertorius that his Spanish army was dead.

As soon as his centurions pronounced the men fit and rested enough to leave, Metellus Pius commenced his march to the mouth of the Sucro River. Time dictated that he should cross the formidable massif behind Segovia without trying to find a way around it: the Juga Carpetana (as it was called) proved difficult but not impossible to conquer even for the ox-drawn wagons, and the passage was a short one, some twenty-five miles. Miaccum followed Segovia, and Sertobriga followed Miaccum; Metellus Pius and his army passed far enough to the south of them to delude their inhabitants into thinking they saw Hirtuleius and the Spanish army returning to Laminium.

After that it was a weary trek through country so arid even the sheep seemed to avoid it, but there were riverbeds at regular intervals which yielded water below the ground, and the distance to the upper Sucro, still flowing, was not so great that the army of Further Spain stood in any danger. The heat of course was colossal, and of shade there was none. But Metellus Pius marched only by night, as the moon was full enough, and by day made his men sleep in the shade of their tents.

What instinct caused him to cross the Sucro to its northern bank the moment he encountered that river he never afterward knew, for lower down its course the bed turned out to be a shifting mire of sandy gravel which would have proven time-consuming to ford. As it was, his legions were on the northern side of the stream when, stirring into activity just before sunset, he and his men heard in the distance the unmistakable sounds of battle. It was the second-last day of Quinctilis.

From dawn until an hour before sunset Quintus Sertorius watched Pompey's legions drawn up in battle formation, wondering as the day dragged on if Pompey would stay the course, or whether he would commence to march away. It was this latter alternative Sertorius wanted; the moment Pompey's back was turned, he would have found out soon enough that he had made a terrible blunder. As it was, either the kid was smart enough to know what he was doing, or else some lucky divinity stood by his shoulder and persuaded him to wait on for hour after hour in the frightful sun.

Things were not going well for Sertorius, despite the many advantages he enjoyed-the superior ability of his troops to endure the heat, plenty of water to drink and splash around, an intimate knowledge of the surrounding countryside. For one thing, he had heard nothing from Lucius Hirtuleius once he had reached Segovia beyond a curt note saying Metellus Pius was not there, but that he would wait for thirty days to see whether the old woman turned up before he proceeded as ordered to join Sertorius. For another, his scouts posted on the highest hills in the district had discerned no column of dust coming down the dry valley of the Sucro to indicate that Hirtuleius was on his way. And-by far the biggest worry of all!-Diana had disappeared.

The little white fawn had been with him all the way from Osca, unperturbed by the scuffle and chaos of an army on the march, unperturbed too by the summer sun (which ought to have burned her, as she was albino, but never did-one more sign of her divine origins). And then when he had located himself here by the Sucro, with Herennius and Perperna in good position near Valentia to soften Pompey up, Diana disappeared. One night he had gone to sleep in his command tent knowing the animal was curled up on its sheepskin rug beside his pallet, only to find when he awoke at dawn that it had vanished.