Sword of Rome (34 page)

At first, the road took them through soft rolling countryside, dotted with farms and homesteads, and between mountain ranges that dominated the landscape to north and south. They saw little military activity, but Valerius knew that would change when they reached Vesontio, which was a major stop on the trade route formed by the Rhodanus, the Sauconna, the Mosella and the Rhenus. Up and down these rivers travelled olive oil, wine and
garum
from Massilia in the south, and grain, furs and timber from Colonia in the north. These were the rivers that had carried Vitellius’s western army on its dash south. Vesontio opened up possibilities, but there would be time to think about that.

Early on the third day the ground became more difficult: low hills, rough grassland and swampy, wooded river valleys. They were breasting
a rise as the ground fog cleared when Serpentius suddenly stiffened in the saddle and looked back. ‘Riders, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, and coming up fast along our trail.’

Valerius followed his gaze and saw nothing in the broken countryside, but the Spaniard was certain. ‘Victor has split his forces,’ Valerius thought aloud. ‘He’s sent an advance guard of his best horsemen to either pin us in place or make us turn and fight.’

‘Then here is as good as anywhere.’ It was Metto. The big centurion’s voice sounded weary and his words received muttered support from his men, who were arse-sore and exhausted after days and nights of struggling to stay in the saddle. ‘We can ambush the bastards among the trees.’

‘There aren’t enough of us,’ Valerius pointed out. ‘Would you fight them on horseback?’

Metto shrugged, but it was clear that a mounted battle with veteran cavalrymen could only have one winner.

‘And we can’t fight them from the ground, because they’ll cut us to pieces.’

‘So what do we do?’ the centurion demanded.

‘There may be a way.’ Valerius took Serpentius aside. ‘I want you to ride ahead and find a place. Remember the Cepha gap. Somewhere we can’t be outflanked.’

The Spaniard’s eyes lit up with understanding. ‘I know. If such a place exists, I will find it.’

An hour later, Serpentius met them where the road turned sharply from the river valley at the edge of a green meadow. The meadow was almost a mile deep, disappearing into heavy forest at the far end, bounded on one side by a scrubby hillside impassable to a horse, and on the other by the thick trees and bushes that lined the river bank.

Valerius shot a puzzled glance at the Spaniard.

‘You’ll see,’ Serpentius said. ‘We ride halfway across the meadow at the trot. When we get there you’ll see a branch I’ve pushed into the turf. That’s when you dismount and lead your horse. Go gently and stick close together on the line I’ve marked.’

The men did as they were ordered, and as he walked his horse
through the branches Serpentius had placed Valerius realized the genius of the plan. ‘Will it work?’

The Spaniard shrugged. ‘It’s the best I can do. It depends on how determined they are to get you and how blown their horses are. If it doesn’t, we take our chances among the trees.’

When they reached a point about three-quarters of the way across the green sward, Valerius halted the men.

‘Now we wait. Metto?’ The centurion nodded. ‘When they come into view we’ll be arguing. You want to go back. I want to go on. Lots of arm waving. The others will mill about looking demoralized and beaten. You hear that, you bastards? They’ve beaten you. Those sons of dogs have ridden you into the ground and now you’re ripe for their spears.’

A pent-up growl of frustration went up from the legionaries, but Valerius silenced it with a snarl. ‘Save your anger for the Batavians. If they win, you’ll find yourself with a stake up your arse and a flaying knife tickling your foreskin. They believe they’re going to win because they outnumber us two to one. But Serpentius thinks we can beat them and Serpentius survived a hundred fights in the arena so he knows what he’s talking about.’ The men glared at the Spaniard, hating him for bringing them to this place and their potential doom. Each of them was armed with the pair of legionary
pila
they had stolen from the armoury at Moguntiacum. ‘When the time comes, you slaughter them.’ Valerius’s voice rose to a shout. ‘You slaughter every last one of the bastards.’

The thunder of hooves heralded the arrival of the enemy. Valerius prayed to Mars and Jupiter for Claudius Victor to be leading the men, but one glance told him the glacier-eyed Batavian had stayed with his main force. Metto was red-faced and roaring obscenities, waving his sword back to the road, and Valerius had a feeling it wasn’t entirely an act. His men were doing their best to look defeated.

Valerius recognized the moment the auxiliary leader saw the small group trapped in the middle of a broad field. He knew what his adversary would be thinking: a perfect target, half his strength and ripe for the slaughter. The man swerved off the road and led his troopers
at the gallop across the meadow towards the confused fugitives. Of course, he would be suspicious. One part of him would be thinking it was too easy, but he’d have the scent of blood in his nostrils and his commander’s warning of the consequences of failure in his ears. It was obvious they’d ridden at a killing pace to get here. The horses were pop-eyed with exhaustion, their coats foam-flecked and silver-bright with sweat, but they still had one last charge in them and against so few their commander would be gambling that one would be enough.

Valerius watched them come, following the innocent hoof pattern. Saw the moment the commander registered the change and lost his certainty. But before the auxiliary’s mind could assess the implications of what he was seeing, his mount had covered another four strides. To disaster.

At the battle of the Cepha gap, Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo had used concealed pits and viciously spiked four-toed metal caltrops to confound the elite heavy cavalry of the Parthian host. Here, Serpentius had marked a path for Valerius and his men on the very edge of a bog concealed by heavy grass. By dismounting and leading the horses at a walk, they had ensured that the beasts’ hooves had cut into the surface crust of the bog without breaking it. But the Batavian horses covered the ground at the gallop with a fully armed and armoured cavalryman in each saddle. The moment they hit the soft ground their hooves plunged two feet into the clinging black ooze. At best, the horses hurtled to an instant halt in a welter of mud and water, throwing their riders into the mud. Animal screams of terror and pain told Valerius that several had broken legs and would never be ridden again.

‘Now!’

Valerius stayed in the saddle while his legionaries dismounted and hefted their heavy javelins with professional ease. Most of the Batavian riders were down, struggling to free themselves from the mud and groping desperately for swords or the long spears they’d lost in the thick sludge. Three had managed to stay in the saddle and were now urging their mounts to the edge of the bog and it was to these that Valerius directed the first of the spearmen. They aimed for the horses, because they were the more certain target, and soon all three were down or
standing shaking, knee deep in the mud and with a pair of the deadly
pila
projecting from their rib cages. A well-trained legionary could pin a moving target at forty paces. Now they were confronted with trapped and struggling men at twenty feet. The heavy mail the auxiliaries wore was designed to stop a sword cut, but the triangular points of the weighted javelins carved through the rings like paper to pierce hearts and lungs and guts. Serpentius circled the bog to cut off any retreat. As the remaining Batavians tried to struggle clear, they were chopped down before they touched dry ground. Two tried to surrender, but they were treated to the mercy they would have given their quarry.

When it was done, Serpentius put the injured horses out of their misery and the surface of the swamp was stained red. Valerius ordered his men into the saddle. There was no time to lose. Claudius Victor would be hard on his vanguard’s heels and the slaughter of his men would only add to his fury.

They arrived at Vesontio in the first light of dawn with the smoke from thousands of cooking fires rising to merge with the low grey cloud. The city had originally been contained by a narrow-necked bend in the river, made more impregnable by the fortified hill that filled the neck like a stopper in a wineskin. Now the familiar red-tiled roofs and stucco walls spilled over to the east bank and a sturdy wooden bridge linked the two sections.

Serpentius wanted to continue onwards to maintain their slender lead over Claudius Victor, but Valerius knew they were in a race they could never win. ‘We have to find another way,’ he said as they sat apart from the others in a grove outside the city.

‘How? You admitted we could never pass close inspection as Batavians.’

‘That’s true, but perhaps we don’t have to.’ The Emperor’s sealed warrant had survived the search of his bags by Batavians more interested in gold than parchment and now he drew it from the sleeve of his tunic. ‘This order requires every Roman citizen to lend all possible aid to Gaius Valerius Verrens, Hero of Rome, on pain of death. Vitellius probably thinks we’re already dead and he can forget about it, but the commandant of this city, or whoever we have to bully into providing us with a boat, doesn’t know that.’

‘But—’

‘We are on a secret mission,’ Valerius continued, anticipating the question. ‘So secret that it requires a Roman officer to dress in the uniform of a Batavian cavalry trooper. It is vital that we reach General Valens as soon as possible. We’ll leave the horses here and use the warrant to replace them somewhere downriver.’ He read the look on Serpentius’s face. ‘You’re not convinced?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I think. By the time we find out whether it’s going to work or not, Claudius Victor will have us bottled up like rats in a grain barrel.’

‘Then let’s make it work.’

Valerius left the legionaries with Metto and took Serpentius to the wharf downstream of the bridge, where he sought out the centurion in charge of shipping. Paladius Nepos was a small, officious martinet of a man, with a permanently angry scowl and a shock of mousy hair. The two rows of clerks under his command cringed away from the rod he carried and he was clearly unhappy at being disturbed by what he perceived as a mere barbarian.

‘I will have to consult the
quaestor
, who is away on official business for the next two days,’ he sniffed when he saw the seal. ‘I do not have the authority to deal with this.’ He turned away dismissively, but Valerius dropped the eagle-claw grip of his left hand on his shoulder.

‘Then find someone who does. I count three barges out there ready to sail. If I and my men are not on one of them in ten minutes the name Paladius Nepos will be on the Emperor Vitellius’s desk within a week. Perhaps you didn’t read the Imperial pass carefully enough?’ He pointed to the words
on pain of death
, and watched the conflicting emotions run across the other man’s face.

Like every Roman citizen, Nepos had been faced with a choice of Nero or Galba. Now it was Vitellius or Otho, and for the moment, by an accident of geography, Aulus Vitellius Germanicus Augustus held his grubby little career and his life in his plump hands. And here was a tall, scar-faced Batavian officer who sounded like a properly educated Roman claiming to be on a vital mission from the Emperor and with the paperwork to prove it. His eyes darted to Serpentius, who
stood at the door managing to look disinterested and dangerous at the same time. Beads of sweat appeared at Paladius Nepos’s hairline and gravitated together to produce tiny runnels that made their way slowly down each side of his narrow, weasel’s nose. The calculations going on behind the bulging eyes and the moment they reached a conclusion were as clear as a badly rigged chariot race. He picked up the pass.

‘The
Pride of Sauconna
leaves as soon as she has clearance …’

‘You mean now?’ Serpentius suggested helpfully.

‘There should be room aboard for eight men, if some of them sleep on the deck. She’s the galley out there on the downstream side. With this height of water behind her, you can be with the … the army within two days. The last we heard, General Valens was moving east from Valentia …’

‘We will only be with the ship as far as Lugdunum. One other thing.’ Nepos looked up with startled eyes. ‘You will tell no one about this.’ Valerius waved the Imperial pass under the other man’s nose. ‘On pain of death.’

‘You don’t expect him to keep quiet?’ Serpentius said as they headed back to Metto and his legionaries.

‘No, but I’m hoping it will make him think about it for an hour or two.’

As it turned out, his estimate was almost fatally optimistic.

The oarsmen of the
Pride of Sauconna
, a double-banked bireme of the Rhodanus fleet, had just got into their rhythm when Valerius heard a commotion behind them on the wharf. A rattle of hooves and a flurry of grey wolfskin told him that Claudius Victor had arrived earlier than anyone could have predicted. By the time they reached the downstream stretch of the bow in the river that encircled Vesontio, a Batavian cavalry patrol was already tracking them beyond the trees that lined the bank. Valerius could hear shouts and he turned to find the young prefect who captained the galley studying him with a question in his eyes.

‘Ignore them. They could be rebels,’ he said.

‘You’re the man with the Imperial pass.’ The sailor shrugged. ‘In any case, I don’t take orders from landsmen. I have a schedule to keep
and I’m buggered if I’m going to row against this current to get back to Vesontio.’

The Batavians stayed with them for another mile, dropping behind all the time. Valerius watched them disappear into the distance, and when a bend in the river carried the galley out of sight he relaxed for the first time in many days. Barring accidents, they had gained at least one day on their pursuers, perhaps two. He knew Claudius Victor couldn’t afford to abandon his horses and follow by boat, because that would mean splitting his forces again and the Batavians had already seen how deadly Valerius and his men could be against superior odds. He would follow the river road at least as far as Lugdunum, and stop there to make enquiries, because that was where Valerius had told Nepos he was going, and Nepos would not stay mute for long in the face of someone like Victor. But Valerius didn’t intend to leave the ship at Lugdunum. They would stay with the river until Valentia and then he would make his decision. That night they slept on deck wrapped in their wolfskin cloaks and listened to the rush of water beneath the ship’s hull. During the day, the ship’s company, always busy in any case, kept a discreet distance from the eight soldiers. There was something about the hard, unblinking eyes and the way their hands never strayed far from their swords that didn’t invite pleasantries or questions, and that was the way Valerius wanted it. Marcellus, the captain, was obviously curious about his passengers, but it wasn’t until they reached the point where the river they were on met the larger Sauconna that Valerius joined the young man at his place by the stern post.