Hadrian's wall (29 page)

"The Wall, Caratacus."

The ground had frozen brittle. A skin of ice had formed on the shallow river Ilibrium, which meandered in a swale below Hadrian's Wall. Gray cloud had covered the stars, and dawn saw a few scattered snowflakes drift down, sticking and then evaporating on the brown grass. The Wall itself materialized slowly, surfacing out of ground fog like the back of an undulating sea monster, its serpentine crest marking the horizon. The heads of a few Roman sentries were silhouetted against the sky, but as Galba had promised, there didn't seem to be any concentration of strength here.

"A good morning for fighting," Luca went on as he stretched and grunted, his breath forming a light cloud. "The kind of morning to hunt or ride."

"Can we beat them?" Arden asked softly.

Luca glanced at him. "A fine time to be asking."

"None in the world has ever beaten them permanently."

"Battle is no time for doubt."

"Every man has doubts."

"And real men don't voice them. It's that woman who's drained you of certainty, Arden, and you won't get it back until you get her back. Get through that Wall and find her. Kill her or marry her, but set things to right."

"Yes. To right." Could he find her? And if he did, what would she say? Had she fled him or this war? It was as useless to speculate as to spit upon a fire.

He reviewed their strategy. There were two gates to force open at each milecastle, one in the wall that he could plainly see, the other at the rear of the small fortlet that jutted from the southern side of the Wall like a boxed pimple. Get through those two gates, and all Britannia lay before them. Then wheel…

"The druids say the Roman time is over," Luca went on. "They've never been so weak, and we've never been so united. Worry if you wish, but I'll eat off Roman flatware tonight."

Arden thought such confidence tempted disaster. Better to worry. "The cavalry is ready?" The Celtic aristocracy had gathered as a reserve, their heads crowned with fantastically crested helmets, their swords inscribed with runes, their lances carved and beaded with gold.

"Yes. Everything is happening as Galba promised."

So: at long last it was time. None respected and feared Roman prowess at war more than Caratacus did. None had more confidence in Celtic courage than he did. At full charge, his clan was unstoppable.

Now the two would be tested, each against the other.

Arden wore chain mail but had rejected a helmet, preferring unencumbered sight. Some of his infantry disdained any protection at all, waiting naked or nearly so under their cloaks in the cold, as patient and dangerous as wolves. They squatted by the hundreds, staring at the stone barrier with predatory hunger, the ex-gladiator Cassius among them. They lived for war.

The bowmen waited nearby, their bows nearly as tall as a man and able to kill at three hundred paces. They'd provide covering fire. Each arrow had been shaped smooth over long winter evenings, given a name, marked with that name, and fitted with a slim iron arrowhead that could punch through armor. The war-maiden Brisa was among them, and Arden would trust her to find a fat target before anyone.

Still another group were the Scotti, who'd sailed from Eiru. They'd marched in only the night before, painted blue and garbed for war, grim and anxious. He'd never fought with their kind, but they said they wanted Roman blood to avenge a captured prince of theirs, a man named Odocullin of the Dal Riasta. Murdered, they said.

He envied their grim passion.

His own excitement, so long anticipated, was curiously absent. The world seemed a plain of ashes, its taste like sand. He'd opened his heart to two women in his life, and both times it had been squeezed like a rag, wrung dry of blood. He'd thought that after Alesia his sorrow had scabbed over and that he could never be hurt that badly again, but then he'd dropped from the oak to see Valeria on her mule cart, frightened and brave and wily enough to use her brooch pin to unhorse him, and with that he'd been lost.

So he hunted her again, captured her, and introduced her to his world. And just when Arden needed her most, trusted her most, desired her most, Valeria had deserted him for her husband. Chosen an empty marriage over love! She'd even taken her wedding ring back with her. She'd run to warn the Romans and ensure his defeat, to set up his death. And indeed, he longed to die after this betrayal.

First, he would do all he could to injure Rome.

And then die, with a Celtic cry in his throat.

"You really hate them, don't you, Arden?" Luca asked. "That's how you're different from us, who just want gold and wine and silk and cotton and horses."

"I know them. That's how I'm different."

He turned and walked to Savia, who had trailed him for protection like a dog ever since Tiranen. He'd tolerated it because, strangely, she reminded him of Valeria. She'd given some of her strength to the girl. Any good Roman would choose duty over love, she'd told him. And any Celt would choose passion, he'd replied.

"Where will your lady be?"

"In the fort of the Petriana, I suppose." She looked at him sadly. She knew Valeria had broken his heart, just as he had broken Valeria's with this senseless war.

"If we get through the Wall and overwhelm the garrison, I want you to find her, protect her, and bring her to me."

"What will happen to her if I do?"

What would happen? He didn't know. He feared the moment, even as he desired it. Dread, and anticipation. "By then my sword will be slick with gore and my arms weary from killing. I'll look into her eyes and heart-look at the woman who made love and then left me-and let us both decide, together, what our fate must be."

Savia closed her eyes.

Now he must lead them to it.

Arden walked out in front, where the druid Kalin waited with a raven-headed staff. The barbarians stood as one when he did so, a great host rising up out of the dry and frosted grass like a crop of death. What must it look like from the Wall, this host materializing in the mist?

They were ready.

Caratacus raised his sword and faced his men. He'd no doubt of their courage. "For Dagda!" he shouted. His voice floated in the winter air.

Kalin raised his own staff. "For the gods of the oaken wood!"

The warriors roared their reply. "For Dagda!" Their shaking spears were like a field of wheat in the wind, their howls that of the pack. "For the sacred wood!" Neck torques and silver armlets gleamed in the pale light. Muscles, greased against the cold, shone like bronze. Celtic cattle horns were lifted and blown to add to the din, a clamor like the trumpeting of geese.

We're coming, the horns promised. Stop us if you can.

Then they charged, hard ground rumbling under their running feet.

The Celts raced toward the Wall in a streaming pack, shattering the thin ice of the Ilibrium as they crashed across its shallows and yelling at the cold. Then they surged up its far bank and scrambled toward the Wall like a cresting wave. Twenty carried a pointed log of forest pine to batter the gate, its snout a great brown phallus of revenge. Dozens more had grappling hooks on the end of coils of line.

A handful of Romans could be seen at the parapets above the gate now, running this way and that and shouting alarms. A trumpet sounded. Arrows began to sail out toward the attackers, most thunking into shields or sticking harmlessly into the ground. One found flesh, however, and a warrior grunted and went down. Then another Celt caught a shaft in the eye and whirled, screaming. There was a bang and a scorching sizzle in the chill air. The huge arrow of a cocked ballista rocketed into the barbarian charge, crashing into a tier of barbarians and bowling them over like crockery, their shields splintering under the impact.

It had started.

The attackers howled and shot arrows in turn, the woman Brisa among them. The steady rain of barbarian shafts took one catapult operator squarely in the chest, pitching him backward, and helped clear the parapet of Roman heads.

"Rapid aim!" Arden roared. "Don't give them time!"

One Roman soldier got a shaft through the throat, gurgled, and pitched violently over the wall, landing in a heap in the ditch at its base. A chieftain howled and dashed forward and in an instant the Roman's head was chopped off and thrown down the slope toward the river, bouncing like a ball. A woman of the Attacotti chased it, caught it, and danced by the Ilibrium, holding it aloft.

A Roman arrow shot the decapitator down.

The ballista fired again, but this time its range was long and the missile sizzled over the head of the first wave of attackers.

"We're under their fire! It's safest at the Wall!"

The defending arrow fire began to slacken and grow inaccurate. Romans who leaned out from the Wall to shoot or hurl stones became instant targets, reeling backward with five or six shafts jutting from their bodies. A grappling hook soared up, caught a defender, and jerked him over the lip of the parapet. Other hooks caught on the crenellations, and the barbarians began climbing the barrier hand-over-hand.

The dirt causeway that led over the defensive ditch hadn't been dug away, and so the Celts with the battering ram had an easy time of it, trotting across to hurl the end of the log against the gate. Its boom reverberated under the stone archway, shaking the entire mile-castle. The oak ominously cracked. Then another slam and another, even as a few javelins and arrows dropped from above.

"Keep shooting! Rain arrows! Throw hooks!"

The line of the grappling hooks made a shrill whine as they cut neat parabolas in the winter air, the ropes cinching the face of the Wall in an entangling web. A Roman leaned out to chop a line with his sword, and Brisa coolly shot an arrow that punched through his ear. He screamed and disappeared. First one Celt, then two, then three scrambled up to struggle with the defenders. At a dozen different points now the barbarians were scaling the Wall like flies. The defenders were desperate.

The ram crashed again, and then again, and finally the crossbeam broke and the gate burst, collapsing in a tangle of timber. Barbarians bounded over the top of their discarded ram. A few legionaries tried to stem the tide but were hopelessly outnumbered and swiftly cut down. Up on the top of the wall the Romans simply broke and ran, fleeing east and west along the crest of the barrier. Triumphant Celts streamed up their ropes and dropped down into the courtyard of the milecastle. The barracks was hurriedly ransacked, the second gate that led south was thrown open, and Arden led a throng of warriors through the mile-castle and into the grassy military zone beyond.

Hadrian's Wall had been pierced! As Galba had promised, it was a shell, as easily breached as a sword through parchment. Ahead was the earthen dike of the fossatum, and beyond that all the riches of Britannia. Even as the Celtic army behind bunched to squeeze through the milecastle, the first barbarians were whooping as they spread between wall and dike.

Galba grimly watched the attacking breakthrough from his hiding place on the crest of the fossatum's earthen dike, three hundred paces away. The barbarians poured out like angry bees, half naked and triumphant, and only Galba's firm disciplinary grip had kept his cavalry from bolting immediately to meet them. His men were in an agony of impatience to help their comrades dying in the early defense, but he held them in line.

"You'll get your blood," he'd promised them. "Mount when I tell you to."

Now it was time. He slipped down the dike and bounded up on Imperiurn, the black stallion dancing with excitement. A hundred cavalry swung onto their horses with him, their lances rotating to the sky. His chain of blood-won rings jangled at his waist, his gloved fist seized the reins, and his other hand pulled out his wicked spatha, its hilt carved, rumor held, from the bone of an enemy.

"Remember! I want Caratacus alive!"

Then he trotted to the lip of the grassy dike, calmly counting the barbarians to judge the perfect time. He was a sudden silhouette, posed like a marble effigy.

"Now!" he finally shouted.

A flaming arrow shot from behind the dike and soared above the Wall, giving the signal. A quarter mile from each side of the captured milecastle, on the six-foot-wide pathway atop the undulating Wall, two centuries of Roman infantry rose in unison from where they'd been lying prone in hiding. Their grove of spears rose with them. Silently, but with rehearsed urgency, the two units ran back along the top of the Wall toward the fortlet the Romans had just abandoned, boots ringing on the stonework. New Roman bowmen followed and spread out along the Wall to fire at the barbarians below. The trap was being sprung.

A few Celts saw the danger. Brisa sent missiles at the charging Romans and watched in frustration as they stuck harmlessly in shields. Then she herself was hit in the arm, the impact throwing her onto her bow and breaking it. She cursed in pain.

Arden's spearhead of tribesmen hadn't yet noticed the envelopment of new Romans on the Wall behind them. They were still fanning out between Wall and dike, losing any sense of formation even as their chieftain shouted at them to maintain some kind of order. How many times had he lectured on the importance of discipline? Now they thought the battle was over.

"Not yet." Galba was watching their cohesion dissipate. "Not yet…"

The two charging columns of Romans atop the wall converged on the milecastle with crushing speed, slamming into the handful of Celts on the parapet between them like angry rams. Spears sliced through bodies, and Caledonii went over like pins, survivors spilling in confusion back down the milecastle stairs. They cried alarm, trying to warn Arden and his warriors of this fresh attack, but it was too late. The Roman columns met atop a litter of bodies over the archway of the outer gate, and quick commands brought heavy pots forward. These were upended, and their black contents spilled through firing portals onto the Celts milling in confusion in the passageway below.

The barbarians began to panic.

A torch was passed, and the sticky fluid exploded. Greek fire!

The passageway flashed into an oily inferno, setting aflame the warriors who were trying to press forward through it. The ignited men lurched and ran screaming back down the slope toward the river, blindly seeking relief. As they burned, Celtic fervor began to waver.

A disciplined Roman fire of missiles from atop the fortification began to grow again. Barbarian after barbarian pitched over in agony, the charms of the druids failing to save them from Roman ashwood shafts. The charging legionaries retook the ballista once more and began firing its heavy missiles as well, each bolt cutting down a file of attackers like a scythe. Other Romans ran to the rear wall of the milecastle and slammed shut the second gate there, sealing Arden's wave of barbarians off from retreat.

The Celtic army had been cut in two. The Wall was closed, its outer portal on fire, its inner one shut, its crest manned more heavily than ever. Caratacus and two hundred of his followers were suddenly trapped south of the barrier.

"Annihilation!" Galba roared.

A shout went up, there was a blare of trumpets, and suddenly the Roman cavalry surged up and over the earthen dike as if they were the dead of Samhain leaping out of the ground. They used the dike's downslope to accelerate their charge as they rode for the winded enemy.

"Betrayal!" Arden cried out in warning. It was too late.

There was a huge splintering of shields and lances as cavalry and Celtic infantry met, the screams of skewered men and disemboweled horses, and then a melee of combat, the senior tribune slashing with his spatha as he kicked his horse toward Arden.

"I want him alive, remember! He's no use to me dead!"

More trumpets, and then cheers from the Romans on the Wall.

Outside and to the north, Marcus and two hundred additional troopers of the Petriana had just swept out of the trees and were attacking as well. Just as Galba was about to pin part of the barbarian army against the southern side of the Wall, Marcus was going to pin the remainder against the north.

Lucius Marcus Flavius, his wife in prison and his career in probable ruin, was going to win glory this day. Glory, or die in the attempt. Rome was built on bloody conquest, and its history had proved that military victory could relieve every embarrassment, erase every humiliation. Rome was built on sacrifice, and a dead warrior could reclaim any honor lost while living.

This was his moment of redemption.

Marcus and his men had issued from the fort of the Petrianis at dusk the previous night, two hundred of his cavalry on a desperate swing through enemy territory to take the attacking barbarians in the rear. His garrison had been stripped bare of soldiers by the sortie and miles of the Wall were hollow, but Galba had persuaded his praefectus to take this gamble, that the barbarians would concentrate where he'd told Caratacus to attack. How else could the Petriana prevail against overwhelming numbers?

The Roman cavalry had drawn up in a grove of beech to the north of the Wall before dawn, watching the attack unfold and waiting impatiently for the flaming arrow that would be Galba's signal. Now the Celtic army had been neatly snipped in two, as the senior tribune had promised, and Marcus had the opportunity to destroy its rearward portion. If they could crush the barbarians between them and kill Caratacus- bring Valeria the man's bloody, dirtied head-maybe he could salvage something of his career and his marriage. And if he died in the attempt, well, there was a peace in that too. Certainly life had come to seem more burden than joy. His wife's abduction had been humiliation, and her infidelity a crushing betrayal. His tenure on the Wall had turned to chaos. His future had dissolved into recriminations.

So he'd oil his sword with the blood of the Caledonii this day, these Picts and Attacotti and Scotti and Saxons, and give back to them some of the sorrow they'd inflicted on him. That, or perish in the attempt.

"We take them from behind!" he cried. "For Mars and Mithras, charge!"

The line of Roman cavalry burst from the trees as if the forest had exploded, shields on the left arm, lances leveling on the right, the sound of hooves on frozen ground thundering like barbarian drums. The hundreds of Celts before them were milling in confusion in front of Hadrian's Wall after being hurled back from the burning gateway. Warnings were shouted, warriors turned, and they looked at his cavalry charge at their rear in horrified wonder, each individual barbarian deciding whether to fight or run.

Run where? The Wall and its rain of arrows were at their backs.

Marcus's own line widened as each trooper picked a target and aimed his lance.

Many Celts howled defiance, of course, running to meet this new threat with the fatalism of the condemned. Shields were raised and swords brandished. Their tactical hopelessness was perversely giving them maniacal courage. They'd fight as berserk individuals, and that, the Roman knew, would prove their undoing. They fought with bravery, but not with thought. And so they were doomed, or so Marcus hoped.

The cavalry first ran down some camp followers and wounded at the rear of the barbarian mass, the victims screaming in terror as the thrashing mill of hooves chewed over them. Then came a ragged line of defiant warriors, shields up, axes poised, a few of their arrows striking home and spilling some of Marcus's cavalry from their saddles. Brisa had pulled the shaft from her own arm and found another bow. Now, desperate and heedless of the flow of her own blood, she was firing as fast as she was able.

It wasn't enough. The Romans simply ran over them. The woman saw a blur of horseflesh, a maelstrom of hooves, and then she was under and trampled, blacking out. There was another concussive collision, its sound like a clap of thunder, and the two armies north of the Wall were shredded together as they were to the south, lances impaling the Celts who didn't dodge fast enough, horses screaming and toppling, men butted aside like dolls. The power and weight of the cavalry shattered the barbarian formation, and the Romans shouted fierce satisfaction as they wheeled their horses to work with their swords. The blades rose and fell in awful rhythm, like the arms of a primitive machine.

Marcus expertly guided his horse through the confusing combat, its horror more familiar now after the battle in the grove. He feinted as if to pass to the right of a painted barbarian carrying a two-handed broadsword, then cut his horse to take the man by surprise on his left. The praefectus's shield arm went out to fend off the barbarian's blow even as his own spatha swung in a great deadly arc. The handle stung as it chopped into muscle and bone. The barbarian screamed and went down. Then Marcus was beyond him, using the prancing hooves of his excited horse to push more of the barbarians into the cold river, trampling some underfoot. He saw a javelin catch one young cavalryman in the back, spilling him, but then another Roman rode up and cleaved the thrower's head.