Britannia: Part I: The Wall Read online

  ‘Nothing,’ the little man shook his head. ‘As Jupiter is my witness …’

  ‘Let’s not pretend you and the Gods have anything in common, Arcanus. You’d swear you slept with Ceres if your life depended on it. And as of now, believe me, your life depends on it.’

  Justinus nodded to Paternus who drew his sword. The long-bladed spatha hissed clear of the scabbard and glinted at Dumno’s throat. ‘My man Paternus has a family hereabouts,’ Justinus said. ‘He’s worried about them. So worried, I’m worried he might over-react with that blade.’

  Dumno gurgled a little with his chin in the air and his eyes rolling. ‘Well, I did hear a rumour …’ he managed to choke out.

  Paternus lowered the sword point slightly.

  ‘What rumour?’ he asked. His dialect was not as good as Justinus’, but Dumno followed his drift.

  ‘The Attacotti have come east,’ the Arcanus said, ‘crossed the Hibernian Sea. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.’

  ‘Out of season?’ Justinus frowned. ‘The summer’s gone.’

  ‘Like I said . . .’ Dumno smirked. Out of the corner of his eye he could see his pony – and his rabbits – wandering ever further away. ‘. . . no rhyme nor reason to it.’

  ‘How do the Selgovae feel about cannibals on their ground?’ Justinus asked. He was talking about Dumno’s own tribe – he would get the truth or he wouldn’t; he would have to watch the Arcanus’ face carefully to be sure.

  ‘Oh, circitor,’ Dumno put on his humblest expression, ‘the Selgovae know that their lands belong to Rome. If the Attacotti have trespassed, it is up to Rome to punish them.’

  ‘Oh, we’ll do that all right,’ Justinus promised him.

  ‘We’re wasting time.’ Paternus was already marching south.

  Leocadius and Vitalis looked at their circitor. Could this strange little man of the foreign tongue and shaggy pony help them? Had Justinus found anything out that the four did not know already?

  ‘Get yourself west,’ the circitor said to Dumno. ‘Find out what’s going on. When I come back – and I will come back – it will be with a legion at my heels.’

  ‘Vale, Justinus,’ Dumno smiled, hurrying to catch his pony. He half turned to the others. ‘Valete!’ he called to them. Only Vitalis grunted something in return.

  The fort at the Crooked Bend was called Camboglanna. The VI Victrix had built it two hundred years ago under orders from the deified Adrianus whom men called Hadrian. It was part of that frontier that separated the civilized from the barbarian, men from animals. Its earth ramparts and white-painted stone towers said ‘Here is Rome. Defy us if you will. But you will break on our stones. And you will die on our swords.’

  For the last two years, Vitalis and Leocadius had called this place home. Usually it hummed with life: the thud of the VI going about their training, marching and wheeling into line, closing their shield wall and hurling their javelins; the rattle of carts as they rolled north and south through the gates; the clash and hurry of the smiths and the carpenters and the masons. Paternus had lived here longer than that, ever since he had married his Flavia and before the gods had blessed them with a son.

  But there was no sound today. Not even the wind had risen over the bluff and there were no guards on the ramparts. No birds, either. No rooks. No ravens. Just a stillness that was alien. The four crouched in the heather. In front of them the flat ground of the vallum would give no cover at all and if there were archers or spearmen behind that crenellated skyline, they would be sitting ducks for their weapons.

  Leocadius saw it first. He nudged Justinus and pointed to the stone-lined ditch that stretched away to the east. Half-hidden in the bracken, a warrior lay face down, his legs sprawled, his head a mass of blood. Justinus motioned the others to stay where they were and he scrabbled down the steep ramp of the ditch. In the shadows, the bracken, the soil and the body were wet, for all it was mid-morning by now. Justinus hauled the dead man over. A crossbow bolt was imbedded in his throat, the dark dry blood running in a straight line over his bare chest. And a slingshot had smashed his skull. The garrison at Banna, with the exception of Piso, had been stripped; a legionary’s armour and weapons fetched serious money and they could be re-used by any barbarian short of equipment. This man still retained his plaid trousers and a broad leather belt that covered most of his rib cage. His auburn hair was plaited in braids but the most telling thing about him was his face and body. It was covered in blue swirls and circles, old tattoos that marked the brooding darkness of this man’s race.

  ‘Picti,’ Justinus called to the others. ‘The painted ones.’ He and Paternus had faced these men before. They were almost certainly from the tribe called the Vectriones who lived on the northern fringes of Valentia in their strange, stone circular houses. They never washed and women ruled them.

  The others waited until Justinus had climbed out of the ditch. There were no more bodies lying on the vallum or at the foot of the tower, so the man in the ditch had probably been overlooked when they dragged their dead away for burial. The four edged forward slowly. There were not enough of them to form the tortoise defence, a moving maul of shields and all they could do if they were attacked now was to run or stand and fight. Ahead of them the gate had been smashed off its huge hinges and lay flat on the bloodied ground. The guards of Camboglanna lay beyond that, ripped and stripped as they had been at Banna, their armour gone, their wounds many. On the steps that led to the ramparts arrow-riddled corpses were sprawled in the bizarre attitudes of death.

  Justinus looked at their faces particularly, turning a corpse over if it lay on its side or front. They all still had their eyes, some closed, some wide open, staring in silent accusation at the stranger who was violating them again. But Justinus was not a stranger. He was a circitor for this vexillation and if the corpses did not know him any more, he still knew them. Here was Claudio, the demon Hand player. There lay Sixtus, with the fine beard of which he was so proud. The semisallis Atticus had died in front of the granary, now empty of grain. Justinus only knew Flavius Tarquinius by the tattooed name on his arm – Lucia; his head was battered to a pulp.

  Leocadius and Vitalis wandered the fort as if in a daze. This was a nightmare, surely, and any minute they would wake up. Banna was one thing. But there had only been thirty men there, give or take. And it was a single tower. Here, in this complex defence system, with ditches and ramparts and walls, there had been well over a hundred men. And that did not count the civilians who lived as camp followers behind the lines.

  Paternus had gone and Justinus knew where. While the others turned over corpses, looking for old friends and comrades, the semisallis had dashed through the courtyard, beyond the stone of the fortifications to the wooden huts and lean-tos. There were dead soldiers here too, as if the lines had been driven back from the Wall, desperately fighting all the way. But it was not the soldiers Paternus was interested in. It was the women. It was the children. His hands were shaking as he rolled over one corpse after another. There had been no armour to steal from these people, but several of the women had their dresses ripped or roughly pushed up around their hips. The painted ones had had a field day here. Having slaughtered the men at the Crooked Bend, they had then raped their way through their women. Paternus could hear it all rushing through his blood-filled ears – the taunting jeers of the Picts, the terrified screams of their victims.

  He knew his Flavia would not have gone quietly. If she had had any chance at all, she would have taken one of the bastards with her; more if she could. But Flavia was not among the dead. The last scattering of corpses lay along the river bank, one or two face-down in the bloody water. As he stared into each still face, Paternus offered his silent thanks to Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun. This was somebody’s Flavia, somebody’s Herminia, but not his. He found three dead babies that were the right age for his, little ones too little to toddle away from the hissing arrows, the slicing iron; children who could do no more than cry as the painted monsters of t
heir nightmares snuffed out their lives. But none of them was his. Paternus sank to his knees in the mud of the river, rank-smelling with the blood of Camboglanna. Violent sobs shook his body. Unless the Picts had taken his family as hostages, they had got away. They were alive. He felt his chest heave with the tension of it all and he threw up in the mud.

  ‘What do you see?’ Justinus called up to Vitalis on the ramparts.

  The boy took a while before he answered. To the north, the way the attack had come, Valentia lay silent and vast. Only the ravens circled like tiny insects, high in the grey of the sky, skimming the belly of the clouds to watch for more feasting. To the west, the next milecastle stood forlorn, with as little sign of life as here at Camboglanna. Beyond that, invisible because of the roll of the land, the Wall fell away to Uxellodunum, the next fort. To the east, where the brightest sky hurt the lad’s eyes with a sudden break in the clouds, another forlorn milecastle, abandoned and dead. Further east still, Aesica. Was that, too, a graveyard?

  ‘Nothing,’ Vitalis said.

  He was halfway down the steps again, stepping over bodies, when Justinus shouted, ‘The vexillum!’ and he was leaping over corpses, running into the eastern tower of the main gate. The other two were with him as he crashed into the chapel. A single shaft of light slashed diagonally onto the altar. There was a stone trough, the housings of the standard of the VI, but the standard itself had gone; the scarlet cloth edged with gold and glittering with the letters ‘Victrix’. This was the heart of the legion, the ancient reminder of the men who had marched from the Tiber to the far reaches of the world, under the deified Julius, Adrianus and Marcus Aurelius. These days, each cohort of the VI carried the streaming Draco standard with its snarling mouth and leather wings, but the vexillum carried the battle honours of the centuries.

  In the half light in that violated chamber lay the signifer, the standard bearer. He had been wearing his bearskin headdress and part of that was stuffed into his mouth. And his right hand had gone, taken as a trophy no doubt by the bastard who had hacked the vexillum from him.

  Justinus led the others out into the daylight. Vitalis felt as sick as he had at Banna but managed to check himself. Leocadius was still looking around in disbelief.

  ‘Where are the others?’ he asked. ‘The garrisons from Aesica and Uxellodunum? Why didn’t they get here?’

  ‘They didn’t get here because they couldn’t,’ Justinus told him. ‘Because if we travel the length of the Wall, we’ll find the same.’

  ‘That’s not possible,’ Vitalis said. ‘The entire Wall? It’s not possible.’

  ‘It might not be the entire Wall,’ Justinus was trying to make sense of it too, ‘but we’re not staying to find out.’

  Paternus came padding back up the corpse-strewn slope from the river. He shook his head in answer to Justinus’ enquiring look. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They’re not here.’

  Justinus slapped his shoulder, encouraging them all to hope for the best. ‘Eboracum,’ he said. ‘They’d have got away to the south.’

  ‘Is that where we’re going?’ Vitalis asked.

  ‘The Hell we are!’ Leocadius shouted. ‘Nobody tells a Roman army to run.’

  ‘Since when were you such a Roman?’ Justinus asked him. ‘I thought you’d had enough of soldiering.’

  ‘I thought I had, too,’ the younger man said. ‘But this . . . there’s a score to settle.’

  ‘Yes,’ Justinus agreed. ‘And the four of us aren’t going to settle it here. Pat, see if those murdering bastards have left us any food we can take with us. And fill your canteens, everybody. It’s five days march to Eboracum; assuming we don’t meet any painted people on the road.’ He looked at the three men with him: Paternus, who couldn’t find his loved ones; Leocadius, the arrogant, slovenly soldier who suddenly wanted revenge; Vitalis, the man who was a child again in the midst of all this slaughter. Would any of them survive, if they met the painted people on the road?

  CHAPTER II

  They spent the first night huddled in a copse above a stream, far enough away from the babbling, rushing water to be able to pick up other noises. They took turns to keep watch, straining their eyes through the gloom of the early autumn night and watching always to the north. The mountains loomed dark and mysterious on their horizon and the owls hunted in the black tangle of the trees, startling the watcher with a sudden call as they swept by on soft wings.

  No one really slept and as dawn broke, grey and chilly on the crags, they filled their canteens and moved on again. Once more they kept away from the army road that ran south like an arrow, breaking here and there where it crossed a brook or vanished into the thickness of a forest. Men on the run, as the Wall soldiers were, had a straight choice; take the open country where they could be seen a Roman mile away; or trail the woods where every tree might hide the enemy.

  Justinus chose the high land. If an enemy could see them, they could see the enemy. And if that happened, then it would be a straight race for survival. The only sure way to keep on the move before hunger and exhaustion overtook them was to find horses. And horses meant Vinovia.

  The cavalry fort stood on a low escarpment with woods behind. The Wall men splashed and swam their way across a dozen becks before they found it, and darkness was already on them by the time they crouched in the tall grass and looked across the vallum to the stockade. Vitalis felt his heart sink. It was Banna and Camboglanna all over again. No sound. No movement. By now they were close enough to have heard the thud of the guards’ boots on the wooden walkway; to hear the whinnying of the cavalry horses in the paddock beyond. There were no lights, no torches flaring at the north gate; nor any gate. Just the wind of evening moaning across the heather and the beat of the blood in each man’s throat.

  The general Agricola had built this place when the legions first came this far north, and the XX Valeria Victrix had sawn down every tree and lashed together every fence post. The tribes here were the Brigantes, whose chieftains since Cartimandua of the wild hair had learned to live with the Romans. There had been peace in this land south of the Wall for generations. Until now.

  ‘Nothing,’ Leocadius called through the night as the last of the day died behind purple clouds. ‘Not so much as a pile of horse shit.’ He was right. All four of them had scoured the place from gate to gate. The horses had gone. The stables were empty. Iron mangers stood stripped of hay and the straw in the stalls was cold. Stone troughs still held water but the water was dark under the rising moon and Justinus dabbled his fingers in it, bringing them out bloody.

  The Ala whose post this was had not given up easily. Some of them, at least, had gone down fighting. But where were their bodies? A raiding party would have stolen the horses, helped themselves to harness and hay but would they have risked taking the cavalrymen as prisoners? Prisoners slowed men down. They had to be fed and watered. Might as well kill them where they stood. But if that happened, where were their bodies? The question echoed and re-echoed in Justinus’ head and whatever other thoughts flashed through his mind that night, it kept coming back to that one.

  They talked in the shadow of the overhang of the stables and decided to stay put. Here at least was warm shelter and water from the brook nearby. There was little chance that the raiding party would come back. Other than to burn the timbers down, there was no point. And three of them settled down to their second night without food. Paternus took the first watch. Paternus, whose family were not at Vinovia either.

  Dawn the next day was bright and warm, the sun already waking the camp with its gentle rays. There was no horn, no drums, no prayers to Mithras, just three tired soldiers rolling out of the sharp straw and pulling on their coats of mail. They would have to hunt today. Blackberries on the moorland were fat and sweet at this time of year, not yet blemished by a frost but after the initial pleasure of the honeyed juice going down the throat there was no substance to them, nothing to keep a man’s body going and they could not warm his soul.

  Civilization
lay over a long day’s march away, at Isurium Brigantium. Justinus had been there once and knew its walls and the bright, mosaic pavements where Romulus and Remus suckled forever from their she-wolf mother and lions sat in the perpetual shade of trees. The four halted just before midday by a milestone of Trajan Decius. Isurium, to a man like Leocadius whose feet throbbed, might just as well have been the far side of the Styx. While Vitalis stood thigh-deep in a wide river, the sun dancing on the ripples, Leocadius sprawled on the long, warm grass. Overhead the sky was cloudless and the only sound he could hear was the rushing of the river and the murmur of the last bees of summer, mumbling over the heather hunting nectar against the winter which soon would come to the land once and for all. He could hear Justinus droning on, now and then, to Paternus, sitting together some yards away and he glanced down to see how Vitalis was doing tickling the fish. The peace of the moment was shattered by the rumbling of his own stomach. Leocadius had come to terms with what had happened. Last night, with Vinovia the cavalry school of ghosts and the awful silence of the stables, it seemed as if the world – at least, the world of Rome – had come to an end. But today was different. Today there was sun and softly waving grass and a babbling river and bees … all would yet be well.

  ‘Jupiter highest and best!’ That was Vitalis’ voice. Leocadius sat bolt upright to see his friend thrashing about in the water, making for the bank towards him, stumbling on the rolling slippery stones of the riverbed.

  ‘No! Other way!’ he heard Justinus hiss and he and Paternus were sliding down the bank into the water.

  ‘Leo!’ Vitalis was waving frantically at him and the fourth Wall soldier plunged into the river. It hit him like a wall of ice after his warm dozing on the hillside and all four of them were crouching up to their necks in water, hiding under the overhang of the branches that formed a canopy on the north bank.