Dreaming the Eagle (56 page)

Ban had spent two months with the legions by then. They believed themselves invulnerable and he had seen no reason to suppose they lied. Politeness constrained him from saying so. ‘How were they defeated?’ he had asked.

‘It was Augustus’ fault. He put Quinctilius Varus in charge of them and the man was a lawmaker, never a warrior. But they would have died anyway; Arminius had fought with them and seen their weakness They had not learned that to march in lines with armour polished to dazzle the sun is not a good way to fight in a forest. And then, too, they trusted Arminius because he had once been an officer. It was impossible for them to imagine that any man could forsake Rome and return to the tribes.’

Civilis grinned his contempt, showing white teeth in the moonlight. His own sword belt was polished to outshine the stars and he, too, was an officer in the legions, if only a decurion of an auxiliary cohort.

Ban said mildly, ‘We still fight in lines.’

‘Of course. The legions will never learn from that mistake. To do so would be to admit their weakness and Rome can never be weak. But she will also never again seek to bring Greater Germany, that part east of the river, into her empire. Because of Arminius, the tribes of the forest live free of the yoke of Rome.’

‘The same Rome that you fight for.’

Civilis shrugged. ‘The pay is good.’ He had leaned forward. ‘And I believe in the river. It is said amongst our people that it holds the spirit of Arminius. While the river flows, Rome and her allies may not pass.’

In that, Ban believed him. He had watched as the evil sucked at the hearts of the Gauls who had accompanied him from Durocortorum. Men who thought themselves warriors or hoped to become so turned to whimpering children when made to stand watch in pairs overnight. Forage parties sent across the bridge to cut timber for the new camps came back silent and white-eyed, shying like horses at any sudden noise. An army camp is full of sudden noises. Those sharing their tents, and later, once built, their wooden huts, passed unpeaceful nights. Ban alone had been untouched, his soul safe with Iccius in the lands of the dead.

Then the Roman legionaries arrived and, by the end of the month, Ban had witnessed the first execution of a deserter caught and returned three times to his unit. His headless body had been cast into the river and the remainder of his cohort were made to stand watch as it floated downstream on the grey, malice-ridden water. The losses had slowed after that, but never fully stopped.

With spring the snows had cleared and it had become possible to travel, and the river had become a minor irritant, a thing to be scratched off along with the mosquitoes and head lice in the face of the greater, more tangible threat of the emperor. The news had come with the first day of February. He is coming. He will be here in ten days’ time to inspect the legions. He has banished his own two sisters and executed Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, who was his lover. He will kill any man who catches his eye. Death from Gaius comes slowly.

The Romans of the new legion had known Gaius at first hand and were the most afraid. Their training had fallen apart as men panicked, and had come together again as the centurions flogged the sense back into them, or greater fear.

They had reached a peak of polish at the time it was required. Gaius had arrived in the early morning on a day of no cloud and the two legions of Moguntiacum had waited in perfect ranks with the winter sun sparking a million pinprick fires from their armour. For the honour of their emperor they had spent a day in manoeuvres and Galba, the governor, had marched amongst them, taking personal charge. They had marched for twenty miles up the banks of the river and back again, dug a ditch, built a rampart, attacked and defended it, and not a single man had faltered in a display that lasted all the hours of daylight. The emperor had let it be known that he was impressed.

That had been the first day. The second was given over to the cavalry. It was not a day in which Rome could excel, save by proxy. Romans did not make good cavalrymen but they had the gold to buy the loyalty of those who did, and so squadrons of Gauls vied with Germans for superiority in the speed, precision and daring of their displays. The day rocked to the thunder of mounts pushed to the limit, and the cries of men in triumph.

Later, close to evening, the legions gathered to watch a parade of a different kind. The emperor had need of new warriors for his German horse guard and Moguntiacum had the honour to provide them. From amongst three thousand volunteers of the Ubii and the Batavi, five hundred had been hand-picked by Galba. They were big men like Civilis, with the same sun-flushed skin. Mounted on matching chestnut horses, they had ridden out in their war dress, their red-gold hair knotted above the right ear, faces streaked with white clay and tunics hung with horse tails and the dried scalps of their dead.

Their display had been breath-stopping. In every respect, it had surpassed all that had gone before and, this once, Gaius had shown his approval in a way that could be seen by anyone who watched. He had ridden down the ranks congratulating the riders personally, adding, every now and then, an additional instruction so that, when the five hundred left the field, half of their number did so knowing that they would henceforth spend their lives bound to their emperor, closer than the Praetorian Guard. The legionaries and probationaries had watched and approved. Gaius might have a limited understanding of warfare, but he had a sharp sense of what it took to protect his own hide. It would be a brave man who took on the horse guard, and even so he would not reach the emperor alive.

Nearly finished. Don’t look up. Corvus said not to attract his attention. ‘What he likes he wants and what he wants he takes. You are different. You stand out the way your killer colt stands out in a field of brown mares. If he sees you, he will want you and the colt both. Don’t give him cause to look.’

He hasn’t looked yet.

The morning of the third day had been devoted entirely to the probationaries and they were nearly halfway through. Two horns sounded together, a semitone apart, calling the halt.

That’s it. We’re done.

They were not the horse guard. It was not given them to see their emperor face to face. An order was given through the tribune of the Praetorian Guard and Perulla, centurion to the probationaries, stepped forward ‘to an unknown fate. The emperor had not yet ordered the execution of a centurion for the failings of his century but it was not unknown. The recruits waited in utter silence. They had a respect for their centurion, if not a great love. For four months he had bullied, cajoled and flogged them into order. None had liked him but they recognized an evenhandedness in the way he had behaved. He had not chosen favourites, or bullied the weak more than their comrades, and all had grown into a measure of respect. More than one realized now that it would have hurt to see him die.

The Praetorian tribune stepped down from the stands. Ban held his breath and, behind him, heard a god named in Gaulish. An order was given in Latin, too far away to hear, and it seemed that Perulla was not to die, nor even to be dismissed, but that those of the recruits who hoped to win a place amongst the cavalry were required to fetch their mounts and conduct their display. Ban risked a downward glance. Greying river-mist sculled at his ankles, the river’s bane come out in force. With a brief prayer to Iccius, he turned and ran to fetch the brown mare whose colour and bearing would attract no attention.

‘How did it go?’

‘Badly.’

The mist had cleared. The parade ground had been so smooth a man might have pressed it with a flat iron, but neither of these facts made any difference to the quality of the display. Ban reached in under the brown mare’s belly and brushed dried sweat from her girth. It was not her fault that she was mediocre, or that he had spent all of his spare time with the Crow, making the infinitesimal progression towards mounting and riding, when he could have been practising with her. The mare was safe and had nothing to recommend her beyond her colour, which had matched the others of the troupe and had lent them a temporary uniformity, at least until the cantered circles had started.

‘Did Galba say anything?’

Rufus leaned against the post that marked the stall’s edge. The Gaul had been made a decurion in Corvus’ new cavalry wing and one would have thought he had better things to do than lean against a lump of oak talking to a probationary who had yet to be placed in a unit. Corvus had charged him to keep an eye on his protege, that was well known. It was not always appreciated.

‘Galba said nothing.’ Ban stooped under the belly of the mare and began to work under her mane where the lathered sweat had dried in creamy waves. ‘The emperor called for his meal before he had a chance to step down from the stands.’

‘He’ll do it later. You’ll get your place in the cavalry yet. He’s seen you in practice, and he knows who you are.’

‘He hasn’t the slightest idea who I am. He never comes down here. Perulla will make the decisions, and whatever he might have thought before he’s just seen enough to change his mind for ever.’

The mare had changed legs unexpectedly just before the end of the charge and come raggedly to the halt half a pace ahead of the line. It was not the only mistake, but it was the most obvious and had made of Ban a spectacle that he never wished to repeat. Ban said, ‘If I spend the next twenty-five years marching in line with a hundred stinking Gauls, it will be my own fault. If you see Corvus, tell him that from me. And he can have the Crow. I wouldn’t wish on him the life of an infantry pack horse.’

‘Corvus wouldn’t take that mad bastard beast as a gift if you died and left him in your will. In any case, it’s not over yet. Don’t give up hope.’ Rufus patted the mare on the rump, raising dust. ‘Don’t stay too long here. Get yourself to the parade ground and find something useful to do. Unless Civilis is lying through his ugly German teeth, there’ll be something worth watching before the emperor finishes his lunch.’

If Civilis had lied, more men than Rufus had heard him. Ban took a shovel and basket to gather horse dung from the parade ground and found three ahead of him doing the same, with more brushing the turf free of straw and others repairing a board in the stands where a nail may, or may not, have been loose. Gaius had retired to Galba’s headquarters within the legionary camp of the XIVth half a mile upriver. If anything did happen, there was little chance of their seeing it, but still they worked on the parade ground and Perulla did not stop them.

The sun rose above the top edge of the forest as they worked. It was the best time of day; for a while, the river livened, became a rippling of molten silver that lit the trees along its banks so that what had been black became green and one could imagine the forest, if not a friend, then not so implacable an enemy.

The alarm was raised first by the Praetorian guards stationed outside the door to the governor’s lodgings half a mile upstream. The German horse guard had been dismissed, which had offended many of those so recently instated, but they had retired to their quarters and stabled their horses to await a further command. The source of the commotion was not immediately apparent. Galba’s residence was the best guarded in the whole of Upper Germany, and only one truly desperate to die would risk attacking it. Still, it seemed that someone had, and that men on horseback were riding out in defence of their emperor. It was a while before the probationaries, leaning on their shovels and brushes, saw anything but a knot of hard-ridden horses, with cloaks flying behind. Some thought that the horse guard were back but there was too much armour and it flashed too brightly and, as the group came closer, it could be seen that there was gold at the head of it - that the emperor led himself, on his flashy white war horse, with every piece of harness metal bar the mouth-bit in gold and his cuirass embossed with images of Alexander. The man was no rider; he kept his balance by his hold on the horse’s mouth and the bit was savage. Blood ran freely in the foaming saliva. Ban turned away and so was first to see the attackers.

‘Chatti!’

He thought he screamed it but his voice had lost its power. In his place, the pied colt screamed for him - a shattering challenge that took all the fury the beast harboured and gave it voice. The horse was far back in the lines but the sound of it reached them as if he were close and the noise alone made the rest of the probationaries turn towards the river. To a man, they paled. Everybody knew the Chatti - the tribe of men bred for war, descendants by reputation if not by blood of the renegade Arminius, who emerged from deep in the forest to harry the villages and settlements on the Roman side of the river. They knotted their hair as the horse guard did, but wore the scalps of their vanquished dead in knitted capes about their shoulders and hung rotting skulls from their belts. Ban saw thirty or more of them surge up out of the water with their horses, shake themselves like dogs and mount, swinging rust-dulled greatswords of a size that could part a man’s skull as a hand knife parts an apple. He had opened his mouth again to shout the unnecessary, reflexive warning when they thrashed their horses to a gallop and the war howl began.

It had been different when the horse guard had raised the cry on parade - more ordered, less terrifying. Hearing it now, one could begin to understand why the Gauls said that their champion Vercingetorix had been defeated, not by the Roman legions, but by four hundred Germanic horsemen riding for Caesar. It was said they had hacked limbs from men for the joy of it, leaving them to die slowly on the field, and now, hearing their cry, Ban could believe it. The sound carried death in the heart of it, more certainly than the river. A man would have to be tired of life, or supremely self-confident, to ride against the Chatti.

The Emperor Gaius Germanicus, it seemed, was such a man. Riding hard at the head of his Praetorian Guard, he raised his voice in the cavalry paean, realized he could not be heard above the clamour, and wheeled his sword above his head instead. Light flared on iron polished to silver and an edge as fine as a man could make it. It was not a weapon that would last against the killing blades of the Chatti, but none could tell him that.