The Boat of Fate (37 page)
There was a voice behind me, calling excitedly.
‘Sir ... sir . . .’
I looked up. It was Riconus, dusty and dishevelled, but beaming all over his face. He came bounding up the last of the steps to me; and I stared in amazement at the thing he held out. Tarnished it was and uncared-for, but unmistakable; a great staff, bronze-tipped, with the insignium of a charging boar.
‘Where the Hell,’ I said slowly, ‘did you find that?’
‘In the old chapel,’ he said. ‘Slung in a corner, under some junk. There was an old man, real dodderer. Reckoned they marched without it. Said the Christos banner was good enough ...’ He was polishing, vigorously, with the sleeve of his tunic. ‘They left the Standards,’ he said. ‘Even left the Standards. Reckon they left their luck as well. Look at that; it’ll come up a treat ....’ He glanced at me appealingly. ‘Can we keep it, sir? We’ve never had one of our own. . . .’
‘Good God,’ I said, ‘what are you thinking of, Riconus? That isn’t ours.’
His face dropped. He stood cradling the boar against his massive chest; and in spite of myself I had to laugh. ‘I haven’t seen the thing,’ I said. ‘If you want to collect baubles, that’s your affair. But just don’t wag it too often under my nose....’ I walked towards the steps. ‘I fancy some of that stew down yonder,’ I said. ‘Let’s get to it, before those hungry wolves have cleared the lot.’
I glanced round me one last time before descending, but the circuit of massive walls had already slipped into the dark.
I wintered at Deva, painfully aware of its insecurity. To the east were the hills that form the high spine of Brigantia; west and south lay the impenetrable fastness of the Silures. The fortress stood squarely in the gap, effectively defenceless, a standing invitation to seaborne attack; it was the weakest link I had yet seen in the defences of the Province. I wrote urgently to Tammonius, stressing the danger of the situation. I was rewarded by the appearance in November of a numerus of cavalry, detached from service on the Wall. They were followed by a ragtag and bobtail of archers, Syrian, half-caste and British, and one of the Duke’s last regiments of German infantry. When they arrived I breathed a little easier. At least I had some solid troops, that I felt I could rely on. The archers and infantry I detailed for garrison duty; the cavalry rode with me on patrols of the surrounding country. They too were a mixed bag: Hispanians, Belgic Celts and a few Franks. I preferred to keep them under my eye.
Winter clamped down, howling and grey. With it came the raiding parties I had anticipated. None of them wasted time besieging Deva; one and all pushed inland, outflanking the one manned position. We burned their boats, regularly and methodically. Sometimes we brought the owners to a stand, but usually not. They simply vanished, into the surrounding wilderness. The country was too big, the defending forces too small. I sent messages to the inland towns instructing them to look to their walls, while an increasing stream of refugees began to pour into Deva; peasants for the most part, whose holdings and villages had been burned. There were few rich estates in the area, but the rank and file of the Britons suffered sorely.
The new arrivals brought fresh problems in administration. For the most part they were too dispirited to do more than huddle in the unheated barrack blocks, waiting for death either from privation or enemy attack. I ordered the Praetorium buildings prepared for them, the stoke-holes fired. They had to be herded to the new quarters with the flats of swords. After that I had to further subdivide my men into armed foraging parties. Grain stocks were low; we had barely enough for ourselves, there was nothing to spare to feed the extra mouths. Messages flew again, to Eburacum and the Wall, begging supplies, but there was little to be had. Only Luguvalium answered. One grain cart reached us, miraculously; the rest were waylaid, their teams and drivers senselessly butchered. The refugees began slowly but surely to starve. I had to close my ears to the endless sound of misery. There was nothing further I could do.
A little news came in from the west. Segontium, miles away fronting the Isle of Mona, was held by a strong garrison, but most of the tribesmen had retreated to the hills. From there they waged bitter, unrelenting war on their enemies. There were battles in the mountains that will never be retold, massacres that will never be mourned. While gale after gale roared in blurring the outlines of the land with a creeping blanket of snow.
The New Year brought at least one relief. The raiding stopped; nothing now could cross the Hivernian Sea. My sentries were blind; for days on end we couldn’t see farther than a javelin-cast from the walls. The guards came down with their cloaks frozen into folds, their beards stiff with ice. I clung stubbornly to my duty rosters. In this land news travelled by means I couldn’t even guess at. The enemy might be invisible, but my walls must be known to be manned.
About that time I had what was probably my closest brush with death. Riconus caught the assassin, an Hispanian, creeping into my quarters, a drawn sword in his hand. Whether he had been hired, or whether the cold and privation had worked too powerfully in him, I never knew; the Celt’s methods, though effective, ruled out the possibility of interrogation. The head was displayed for some time above the gates as a warning to future malcontents, and I moved in with my men. I understood now their insistence on crowding together to sleep; one and all, they were masters of self-preservation.
But the hero of Deva was undoubtedly Valerius. I had been uncertain at first about taking him on, but through that grim winter he proved his worth time and again. Nothing seemed to daunt him for long and his energy was limitless. He headed foraging expeditions, drew up the rosters, re-established a camp hospital and actually chivvied a handful of the better-favoured refugees into forming a species of Town Guard. He grew quite proud of them, paying their grain rations from his own carefully-hoarded stores. In time the idea caught on; the ‘Tribune’s Patrol’ mounted the walls alongside the Germans, armed with clubs and staves. How they would have reacted at sight of an enemy is hard to imagine; perhaps it was as well they were never put to the test.
It was Valerius too who rode to Manucium to bring back a sorely needed British farrier; while in between his various self-allotted tasks I found he had set himself to learn German. Though he disapproved in principle of aliens on British soil--he confided as much to me, one night at supper--he had decided the Franks and Burgundians under my control were first-rate soldiers, ‘And after all, sir,’ he said, ‘an officer ought to be able to deal directly with his men. That’s obvious....’
March brought a lessening of the strain. We saw the sun, it seemed for the first time in weeks; and I mounted a series of well-armed patrols, determined to take the offensive against any parties of raiders still in the vicinity. No contacts were reported; it seemed the land round about was clear. A despatch from Tammonius confirmed that the northern sector was also quiet. I risked a trip to the south, making the long ride to Portus Adurni. The news that had filtered up from the Saxon Command had been universally bad; it seemed Hnaufridus had had his hands more than full.
I found him in a high rage, stamping round his quarters like an infuriated bull. ‘Ah, you come,’ was his greeting to me. ‘I wait for you. Tell these’--the phrase he used escaped me, but was evidently far from complimentary--‘I no longer keep their country. Tell them I go back to my own land, over the sea.’
His complaints, narrowed down, centred on the generally uncooperative attitude of the southern British. One and all, the inland towns seemed to feel the levying of emergency forces was no concern of theirs. They sat plumply, waiting for protection; or, as the Count put it, like chickens on a spit, ready for the roast. His depleted garrisons, already overextended, had been no match for the fleets of pirates that since my last visit had infested the coast. The military forts, solidly built and heavily armed, had for the most part weathered the storm, but inland it had been a different story. Venta, only a handful of miles from the Duke’s own base, had been insolently besieged, and Noviomagus severely battered. The forces withdrawn to cope with the attackers had left wide gaps in the defences. The original trouble had been caused by Saxon war parties, but Scoti had instantly appeared from the west and north, and confusion had turned to disaster. Lemanis had been reduced and its garrison--among them some of the Duke’s best troops--massacred, while villages and farms had been looted and burned over a wide area. It looked as if what I had feared was beginning to happen; the barbarians were once more acting in concert. Units of the British Fleet, hastily despatched from Gaul, had claimed moderate success, but by then the damage had been done. An entire fleet of German and Scotic war boats, all heavy with plunder, had been sunk off Dubris without trace; that added if anything to Hnaufridus’ grief.
I wrote a despatch for Tammonius, reporting the situation and begging the release of troops from the north to stiffen the sector and make good its losses. I didn’t expect to be answered, and wasn’t. I spent the rest of the season riding, from Venta and Portus Adurni as far afield as Camulodunum. A dozen times the scene in the Great Basilica repeated itself almost word for word. Maybe there were results. They were too few, and all too sporadic, for me.
I was conscious that my attitude was hardening. At first, remembering the network of spies that exists in every Province, I had taken every opportunity of stressing the virtues of Honorius and his concern for all things British. I think Valerius had come to know the speech by heart. Now I no longer bothered with it. The theme of my addresses was simple and blunt: ‘Arm yourselves, or die.’ I’d likewise ceased to worry too much over the precise limits of my authority. I had a more accurate idea of the layout of the Province now, gained by the endless travelling. A vast triangle of territory, from Augusta north to Deva and west to Glevum and the Sabrina, lay open and virtually defenceless. Within it were probably a few thousand limitanei, a handful of Regular detachments, and myself.
Whether I liked it or not, I was one of the commanders of the Province.
Things came to a head at Caesaromagus, on the coast road from Augusta. Outside the town I found an Imperial posting station garrisoned by a dozen scruffy cavalrymen. As Valerius had warned me, such detached auxiliaries were usually more concerned with raising wheat than the performance of their duties. Looking back, I don’t suppose they were wholly to blame; most of them hadn’t seen a penny of their pay for years. But I had neither time nor inclination for niceties of moral judgement. When I paraded them nobody could account for his full equipment, while three of the creatures owned neither horses nor weapons. The animals had died, they told me, with nicely barbed insolence; while their swords and armour had rusted clean away. It was the climate.
I suprised myself, and them, by clapping them in irons. When the anger passed I wrote to Hnaufridus for a directive; after all the men were, in theory at least, under his command. His office took its time about answering. I kicked my heels for a week--I could have been better employed in a score of places--before receiving the laconic suggestion that beheading seemed as good a solution as any, but it was really up to me.
I’d never had to answer for men’s lives in cold blood. I didn’t relish the prospect now. The prisoners were pitiful-looking villains, unshaven and unkempt; I doubted they even understood the severity of their crime. But I was fairly caught. Some sort of example had to be made or the word would spread, quicker than I could ride, that Roman authority was dead. In the end I commuted the sentences to flogging, and paraded the rest to see the punishment carried out.
Wounding in battle is horrible enough, but a flogging is something different again. The first strokes cut deep, and the blood starts to stream; then the scourge begins falling on flesh already torn. At first the victims scream like animals. Later they are dumb. There’s no sound but the thudding of the whips.
I stood to one side, arms folded, Valerius a pace or so behind me. I would have called out to stop the thing. I found I couldn’t. My throat constricted; the ground round me began to flicker and heave. I turned to Valerius. His face was a dirty white, glazed with sweat. He was weaving his head, it seemed unconsciously; swaying, and drawing himself erect.
It was too much. One couldn’t have senior officers collapsing in too broad a swath. I barked, ‘Fall out, Tribune ....’ The sound of my voice broke what had seemed like a horrible spell. ‘That’s enough,’ I said. ‘That will do.’ The prisoners were released from the frames to which they had been lashed. They lay shaking, red things that might perhaps live. I dismissed the parade, rode the rest of the day in silence. I was remembering the gesture Stilicho had prevented me from making. I had been on the point of riding to Mediolanum, to deliver myself up. To that. I’d thought the decision mature and noble. Now I realised it hadn’t been a decision at all. One can’t make decisions until one knows the relevant facts. In Massilia I hadn’t seen a flogging. Now I had.
I headed for Camulodunum. The Senate there had passed a resolution condemning Roman protection as ineffective and had let it be known they were considering overtures to the Saxons themselves, hoping that in return for land grants the pirates might undertake the town’s defence. I hope the address I gave them is remembered. It began with a description of the death of the Red Eagle. It’s as good an illustration as any of the barbarian sense of fun. I ordered the recruitment of five hundred men to serve as a garrison with the status of limitanei, giving the curiales a month to create an effective force. The unit was somehow enrolled. It lacked armour and most of the men had no swords. I requested the immediate despatch of a sum of money to Eburacum and wrote to Tammonius asking that his armourers, and any more who could be pressed or cajoled into service, set to at once to make the deficiency good. I left Valerius to oversee the training of the new force and rode west again by way of Verulamium. More trouble had flared behind my back, in Britannia Prima.