Britannia: Part I: The Wall Read online

  Britannia

  Part I: The Wall

  Richard Denham & M

  J Trow

  Copyright © 2014, Richard Denham & M J Trow

  ‘He carried the sword and the buckler,

  He mounted his guard on the Wall,

  Till the Legions elected him Caesar,

  And he rose to be master of all.’

  Rimini: Marching Song of a Roman Legion of the Later Empire

  From Puck of Pook’s Hill

  Rudyard Kipling.

  This book is dedicated with much love to

  Colin and Tristan:

  Cura dat victoriam

  CONTENTS

  Liber I

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  Liber II

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  Liber III

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  Liber I

  CHAPTER I

  Valentia, Autumnus, in the year of the Christ 367

  It was cold on the heather ridges and the distant mountains stood like grey ghosts in the early morning. The only sound was the guttural scream of the rooks wheeling on the air currents. Their bright eyes saw everything; the hares darting in the tangled purple, the water, bright and babbling over the stones. And they saw four men trudging with their heavy loads, their studded boots smashing through the bracken at the stream’s bank.

  Leocadius had lost track of how far the four of them had marched since dawn. All he knew was that the pole had worn a groove in his shoulder and he was glad to let it drop, along with the corpse of the deer they had killed. He unhooked the shield slung over his back and threw it and his leather cap onto the grass. Leocadius was nineteen and already he was having his doubts about a soldier’s life. His boots were heavy. His mail was heavy. And he didn’t want to think about the weight of the shield. He looked across, beyond the still face and glassy eyes of the kill and watched Justinus.

  The old man was a born soldier, three decades old if he was a day. He was a circitor, two ranks up from the bottom where Leocadius was. How had he stood it this long – the monotony of the Wall? Justinus had laid down the trussed deer too, but he was not resting. He was standing with his shield still strapped to his back, watching the skyline. Did the man never give up?

  Vitalis nudged Leocadius and passed him the leather canteen he had just filled from the brook. The water was icy already, for all the summer had just gone and there was an early winter in the wind. Leocadius looked at the lad, just a year his junior. He was trying to grow a beard to make him look like a legionary, but he was still a boy underneath it. You could see it – a softness that did not suit a life on the frontier at the edge of the world, guarding a bloody wall.

  ‘What are they?’ Justinus asked the others.

  ‘Rooks,’ Leocadius took a long swig, without really looking.

  ‘Rooks be buggered,’ Paternus was climbing to his feet. He was actually older than Justinus but his face was softer, his eyes twinkled more kindly and he had less of the Roman about him. ‘They’re ravens.’

  Vitalis stood up too, watching the great black birds wheeling and diving in the steel of the sky. The wind had got up and it stung his eyes now so that focus was difficult.

  ‘So?’ Leocadius was still sitting, rubbing his calves and trying to get some feeling into them.

  Justinus looked at the boy with ill-disguised contempt. ‘So the raven is a sign of battle,’ he said flatly. ‘They are bringers of death.’ All four men were on their feet now, staring at the circling birds. Paternus squinted into the clouds, looking for the sun but there would be no sign of that today. Justinus had read his mind. ‘Banna,’ he said. ‘They’re over Banna.’

  Vitalis crouched to grab his end of the pole ready to lift the hunting trophies. ‘No,’ Justinus said. ‘Leave that. If all’s well, we’ll come back for them.’ Leocadius snatched up his weapons and splashed through the stream with the others. Now, he had something else to complain about – his boots were soaking. But complaints were the last thing on Leocadius’ mind as they made their way to high ground.

  The going was heavy, their shields bouncing on their backs and their swords hitting their legs at every stride. It was nothing for these men to march twenty miles a day, but that was on good roads and a stone surface. There were more sudden ravines and pot holes in Valentia than in the whole of Britannia Secunda and all four hunters found most of them that day.

  It was Paternus who stopped first, pointing ahead to where the fort of Banna stood in the grey stillness of the moors. Justinus dropped to one knee and the others did too, looking in all directions. There was nothing.

  ‘What’ll we do?’ Vitalis asked. He was scared. And he looked younger than ever.

  ‘What we’ve been trained to do,’ Justinus told him. ‘We keep together. Now!’

  All four were on their feet, jogging forward with their lead-weighted darts in their hands. Each of them had three left, tucked into the hollow of their shields, ready for any eventuality. These little weapons could bring down deer, whispering through the air to reach their mark; they could bring down men too.

  ‘Shields!’ Justinus barked and each man swung the oval wood and leather in front of him. Banna was a solitary tower, bobbing on the horizon in their vision and something was sticking up above the crenellated parapet. Vitalis could not make it out. None of them could, at first. Then Justinus stopped in his tracks and the others heard him mutter, ‘Jupiter highest and best!’

  Each man stood with his mouth open, staring at the tower. A body had been fixed to the tower’s top with spears. It had the discs of a centurion dangling from its lorica-clad chest and the four could hear these rattling in the wind. The arms hung forward while the legs were pinioned by the spear shafts. There was no head, just a mass of dry, dark blood around the neck and across the shoulders, crusting the mail.

  ‘That’s Piso,’ Paternus whispered. ‘I spoke to him only yesterday.’

  ‘The day before,’ Justinus reminded him. ‘We’ve been gone for two days.’

  They had. No one moved. It was Vitalis who spoke first, who said what each of them had been thinking, the reason that no one could look another in the face. ‘We should have been back yesterday,’ he blurted out. ‘We shouldn’t have dawdled. One deer was enough; why did we need two?’

  ‘If we’d got back yesterday,’ Leocadius hissed, ‘We’d have been up there with Piso.’

  ‘Shut up, both of you!’ Justinus growled. ‘Paternus, to the right. Vitalis, go with him. Leo – you come with me.’ In pairs now, the four began to circle the tower. Two days ago this fortlet had housed four contubernia – thirty two men. Now it housed nobody but ghosts. Paternus was first into the cramped compound, springing over the low stone wall and crouching there. He was listening for sounds. Whoever had done this had destroyed a vexillation of the VI Victrix and they had done it with speed and skill. Drusus would have been on guard duty, relived by Cimber, then Lucullus. All of them had eyes like eagles. How could they possibly have been surprised?

  Slowly, as his eyes got used to the darkness inside the fort, he made out the bodies lying there. There was Cimber, his naked body riddled with arrows, the eyes gouged out of his head. Who was tha
t lying across his body? Clitus, who still owed Leocadius six denarii for the last game of Hand. Well, he wouldn’t be repaying that any time soon. Vitalis took one look at the pale corpses, their eyes rolled to the sky and vomited all over his boots. He felt Paternus’ hand on his shoulder, steadying him. ‘All right, lad,’ the older man said. ‘Go outside. Get some fresh air.’

  A noise above made both men look up. Justinus had reached the ramparts from the steps on the far side and was staring at what was left of Piso. The man had been primus pilus, the senior centurion of the VI and every other month, he had solemnly made his way from Eboracum in the south to review the troops on the Wall and make sure that all was well. They had all been surprised when he had turned up unannounced a couple of days ago; that was not exactly routine but Wall soldiers did not ask questions of senior centurions and they had just gone about their business with more spit and polish than usual.

  Justinus slid the dart back into the hollow of his shield and slung the thing behind him. Then he hauled off his cap and began to lift Piso’s body down from its perch. Behind him, Leocadius watched in horror. He had never seen a decapitated man before and he felt sick. Somehow he managed to fight it down and took some of the weight off Justinus. Together, they laid the corpse down on the ramparts. Justinus took one of the dead man’s discs in his hand and ripped it away from its leather housings. He kissed the silver medusa’s head carved there and muttered under his breath, ‘Mithras, also a soldier, teach me to die aright.’

  ‘Out here!’ Paternus was calling from the ground to the west. The pair on the ramparts hurried down the steps to join the others. They were standing by the site of a fire, its smoke a memory, its ashes cold. There were bones strewn everywhere, with grey, cold meat still hanging from them. Overhead, the ravens still wheeled, calling to each other in their fury that their meal had been interrupted.

  Justinus looked as grey as the ashes he was looking at. ‘They go for the eyes first,’ he said, ‘then the liver and the heart. This …’ he kicked a long bone sticking out from the heart of the fire, ‘this is to make a point.’

  Leocadius and Vitalis looked at each other. ‘What go for the eyes?’ Leocadius found his voice first. ‘Ravens?’

  ‘Attacotti, boy,’ Justinus murmured. ‘Wild bastards from across the Hibernian Sea. They eat people and they always start with the eyes.’

  ‘Jupiter highest and best,’ Leocadius mouthed.

  ‘What are they doing here?’ Paternus asked. ‘I’ve heard of them on Monapia before now . . .’

  ‘And raids up the Itunae Estuary,’ Justinus nodded. ‘I’ve never known them come this far east.’

  Paternus had already strapped his shield more securely on his back and started jogging away, falling easily into the marching pace.

  ‘Wait!’ Leocadius called after him. ‘Where are you going?’

  Paternus did not look back. ‘My family are at the Crooked Bend. That’s where I’m going.’

  ‘That’s where we’re all going,’ Justinus said, ‘But we’re going together.’

  Paternus ran on for a few more paces, then stopped. He turned to look at the three of them, standing alongside the butchers’ shambles that was all that was left of a vexillation. And he knew Justinus was right.

  ‘What about the deer?’ Leocadius asked.

  ‘They’ll only slow us up,’ Justinus said. ‘And the bastards who did this haven’t vanished into thin air. Jupiter knows which way they went, but if it’s south, we’re going to run right into them.’

  ‘South?’ Leocadius frowned. ‘They’d never dare attack the Wall.’

  ‘No.’ Something approaching a grin crossed Justinus’ dark features, to disappear again like a lightning flash through a lowering cloud. ‘Any more than they would have attacked Banna and taken the head of Ulpius Piso.’

  ‘What about these men?’ Vitalis asked, gesturing to the desolate little tower. ‘They were our contubernia, our friends. We must give them decent burials.’

  Justinus looked hard at the boy. ‘Lad, if we meet up with the Attacotti, none of us is going to get a burial at all. We’ll end up like the deer we caught yesterday. Paternus, take the lead. Leo, Vit, you’re next. What is it, Pat? Two hours to the Crooked Bend?’

  Paternus nodded.

  ‘Let’s do it in one.’

  There would be no sun that day. Autumn came early in Valentia, the high country beyond the Wall, the long days of summer shortening quickly to give chill dawns and dusk. The wind lifted as the four crossed the heather. They kept away from the old track that linked Banna to their destination; a Roman road made too clear a target. Whoever had destroyed the little fort might still be in the area. The fire had been cold but that told the Wall soldiers nothing.

  Vitalis and Leocadius had never seen action before and bliss may have lain in their ignorance. Leocadius had joined the army out of a sense of adventure. There was little chance of seeing the world when you were a limitaneus, a frontier guard, but the legionary base was Eboracum, with girls. And taverns. And dice. And more girls. Vitalis had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, but he wanted to know what was out there, beyond the Wall. Did the world end there, as some men said, in ice and fire?

  Justinus knew it did not. He had been north of the Wall, across Valentia with its wild deer, its grouse, its wolves and its eagles. He had been as far north as that other wall, the Antonine and knew it was no more than a ruin of earth mounds and ditches where the rabbits ran on a summer’s evening and where deer barked in the morning. And beyond that wall? Ah, well, that was a question. Men called it Caledonia, but it might as well have been the far side of the moon.

  There was only one question on Paternus’ mind – where was his family? His wife and baby son? He could hear them as he tramped the heather, the little one gurgling as his mother tickled him. And his mother crying when the boy was sick. They did not allow families to follow their menfolk to the Wall’s outposts. Valentia was a frontier, a no-man’s land where everybody watched and waited; as if the very air held its breath. No, Flavia would be safe in the cluster of huts south of Camboglanna, high on the bluff of the Crooked Bend, overlooking the river. No Attacotti war band could take a fort like that. The Wall was designed that way. It was fifteen feet high with a parapet above that the height of a man. There were sixteen forts on the Wall, with eighty milecastles and two towers between each. If one section was attacked, the garrisons on either side could come to its aid.

  ‘There!’ Justinus had eyes like a hawk and he sprinted past the others to point to the road. ‘Arcani.’

  They all stopped and crouched in the heather, the spears they had collected from Banna flat to the ground. The circitor was right; Paternus knew that, even if the others were unsure. It was one of the secret ones, men whose people had ruled Valentia long before the Romans came; men who knew a superior race when they met them; men who had long ago sold their souls to the Eagles. This one was riding a shaggy little pony and he was not much of a horseman. He was bouncing on the animal’s back like a sack of grain and he had a brace of rabbits dangling from his saddlebow.

  Justinus took a chance. He could see no one else but the lone horseman and he needed answers. He stood up in the heather and cupped his mouth to make his voice carry over the wind. ‘Io, Arcanus,’ he called in Latin.

  The four of them saw the horseman stop. For a moment he looked as if he would ride away to the west, but then he hauled on the animal’s rein and trotted over to the Wall men.

  ‘Io, Justinus!’ the man called. The younger men had never seen him before, but the others knew him. He was called Dumno, a little, round man, hunched in his Roman horned saddle and he stared at the four, screwing up his forehead with the effort. He reined in alongside the circitor and grinned. ‘You lads hunting?’ he asked in the peculiar dialect of Valentia.

  ‘You might say that,’ Justinus lapsed into his language, leaving the younger men in the dark. ‘We’ve just come from Banna.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’<
br />
  Justinus tried to read the man’s face. He and Dumno went back a year or two. The man, like all his people, acted as an unofficial scout for the Roman army – and a spy, too, from time to time. Many was the time Dumno had slipped a useful piece of information to the garrison of the Crooked Bend; and many were the pieces of silver he had received for it. Justinus stepped closer so that his head was level with the Arcanus’s shoulder. ‘They’re all dead,’ he murmured.

  ‘What?’ Dumno’s eyebrows reached his hairline. ‘The entire command?’

  ‘And Ulpius Piso, the senior centurion.’

  ‘Jupiter highest and best!’ Dumno had long ago learned to pretend he loved the Roman gods. His own were of no consequence here. ‘What happened?’

  ‘That’s what I was going to ask you,’ the circitor said, ‘because that’s what we pay you for.’

  ‘I have no idea,’ the Arcanus gabbled. ‘As Jupiter is my witness …’

  Justinus launched himself with both hands and hauled the man out of his saddle. Alarmed at the sudden movement and loss of weight on his back, the little animal snorted and trotted away.

  ‘My rabbits!’ Dumno turned to run after them, but Justinus held him fast.

  ‘The command was butchered,’ he growled low in his throat, holding the man’s face close to him. ‘Not just killed, as in a fair fight. They were eaten. There was a fire. Charred bones. Meat.’ He shook the little hunter. ‘Am I speaking a foreign language?’ the circitor shouted.

  ‘Sounds … sounds like Attacotti,’ was the best Dumno could do, with Justinus’ iron grip on his wolf-skin collar tightening around his throat.

  ‘Doesn’t it, though?’ the circitor said. And he let the man go. ‘So what can you tell me?’

  Little Dumno looked at the four of them as he cricked his neck back into place, lifting each shoulder carefully. Limitanei. Wall soldiers. None of them had ever been to Rome in his life; nor would he. What was it about these idiots that made them take on the world? Didn’t they know it always ended in death in the heather?