The Iron Hand of Mars (29 page)

So this was what his talk of taking tribunes on hunting trips had meant. Soldiers love to forget their own troubles by reliving other wars. They always want to know what
really
happened to their predecessors. Had it been the enemy's treachery, or just another case of sheer stupidity from the command?

“Did you locate the site?” I asked.

“I was sure I was close. Damn sure.”

I had never liked obsessive types. “Dubnus knows,” I told him wickedly. Helvetius whistled with annoyance. “Forget it,” I grinned. “That's one mystery we can leave to the exalted Germanicus. Let them lie, man. That was our grandfathers' disaster. Vespasian has given us enough to do, and so far I'm not planning to visit the Teutoburgerwald.” He was looking happier anyway, now that we had talked.

I then let myself be persuaded to search The Island. I knew as soon as we set off that the journey would be a waste of time.

I also knew that once we had travelled north, the Teutoburgerwald with its doom-laden reputation would be the sensible route back down to the haunts of the Bructeri.

*   *   *

We were riding. This came as a shock to the recruits. Jupiter knows why they thought we had brought thirty horses. Normally the legions march, but the distances we had to cover were too great for footwork. Besides, our boys were not exactly experienced at marching for days on end. In fact, they were generally such a shambles that most of the troops at Vetera piled out to see us off, wanting to stare at the hand-picked bunch of ninnies I was taking into the wilderness.

The recruits were like any group of adolescent boys: untidy, lazy, complaining, and truculent. They spent all day discussing gladiators or their sex lives with an astonishing mixture of lies and ignorance. They were starting to have identities now. Lentullus was our problem baby. Lentullus couldn't do anything. Helvetius had only brought him because he wanted to come so badly, and he had a touching face. Then there was Sextus, who had worse sore feet than the rest of them, which meant they were virtually rotting in his boots. Probus, whom we reckoned would never learn to march with both legs at once. Ascanius, the town boy from Patavium, whose jokes were good but timed with utter tastelessness. The one whose country accent nobody could understand; the one who smelt; the one no one liked; the one with a big nose; the one with big privates; the one who had no personality. My mother would have said not a lad of them was safe to leave in charge of a cooking pot.

Mind you, she said that about me.

Leaving Vetera, we looked like a highly disreputable merchant's caravan emerging from the Nabataean desert after fifteen days of storms. Out of twenty, nineteen recruits had never ridden a horse for more than three miles before; the one left was Lentullus, who had never been on anything four-legged at all. They all seemed to have vaguely wandering eyes, their ears stuck out behind their cheek-guards like steering paddles on a ship, and their swords seemed too big for them. The horses, though Gallic, which should have been a good pedigree, were an even less attractive bunch.

Justinus and I rode first, looking as trim as possible. We were not helped by the tribune's little dog yapping round our horses' hooves. In the middle of the line we were keeping Dubnus on his bow-legged pony, which had a tuneless set of sheepbells stitched to its bridle. We made the pedlar muffle them, but the wadding fell out after the first mile. Helvetius rode last, struggling to keep a tight pack. We could hear him cursing with dreary consistency amidst the
tonk
of the pedlar's bells.

Near the pedlar rode Helvetius's servant, his treasured entitlement as a centurion. He was a mournful dot, who looked after his kit and his horse. While the rest of us kept trying to poach his services, he kept whining to Helvetius that he wanted to apply for an immediate transfer to Moesia (Moesia is a disgusting post edging the bleakest corner of the Euxine Sea). Justinus, in contrast, had brought no retinue, though his rank rated a large one. He said the dangers of our trip made it unfair. Eccentric lad. Fairness has never featured in the terms of employment for senators' slaves. Still, despite his pampered upbringing, Justinus managed to look after not only himself, but his dog too.

We were all armoured. Even me. I had found a quartermaster who sorted me out a corslet that fitted.

“We have plenty to spare, as a matter of fact!” A bald man with some sort of Gallic accent and a wry sense of humour, he was one of the army's congenital experts. Where his ghostly racks of kit came from was obvious; some of it was still marked with dead men's names. “Are you sure you want to stand out like this? Why not all go in hunting gear and hope to meld in among the trees?”

I shook my shoulders, testing the familiar weight and the cold burn of the back hinges through my tunic as I hooked the plates together on my chest and tucked in a red neckerchief. It had been a long time. I was wriggling inside the armour like a crab in a lobster shell. “Disguise is no use. Over there all the men are taller and heavier, with white flesh and huge moustaches you could use to sweep floors. Twenty compact and swarthy brown-eyes with naked chins will be spotted as Romans from miles away. We're in trouble the minute we cross the border. At least a breastplate and groin-protector give a nice feeling of false confidence.”

“What if you run into trouble?”

“I have a plan.”

He made no comment. “Sword?”

“Always use my own.”

“Javelins?”

“We brought a load downstream with us.” Justinus had arranged that.

“Greaves, then?”

“Forget it. I'm not some flash officer.”

“Bonce pot?” I did let him kit me out with a helmet. “Take this, too.” He pressed something into my palm. It was a small piece of soapstone engraved with a human eye speared by various mystical emblems. “Weapons aren't going to be much use to you. Magic's the only other thing I have in store.”

Generous fellow. He had given me his personal amulet.

*   *   *

We spent more days than I cared for paddling in the morass. The Island must have been a dingy place even before the troubles. It was real delta country, all slime and salt flats. There were so many watercourses the land seemed a mere extension of the sea. A bad winter during the Cerialis campaign had brought down even more floods than usual. Untended by the stricken population ever since, the ground was recovering only sluggishly. Tracts that should have been farmed remained sodden. Civilis had also deliberately broken down the Germanicus weir, smashing its mole in order to devastate large areas during his last stand. We thought about Petilius Cerialis and his men, struggling to keep their horses' feet dry on the picket lines, dodging arrows and rainstorms while they splashed away looking for the shallows, constantly taunted by Batavians trying to lure them to destruction in the marshes.

The Batavian capital, Batavodurum, had been razed. Now sternly renamed Noviomagus, it was to be rebuilt and garrisoned. Vespasian had mentioned that to me but it only carried impact now that we were standing among the flattened homes, surveying the painful and desultory attempts of the population to revive their settlement while they lived under awnings with the family pig and chickens. Things must be taking a swing to the better, however, for we met Roman military engineers conducting a survey. They were on detached duty, discussing with local councillors how to bring in material and skills.

During the rebels' last stand, when he retreated to his homeland, Civilis had been besieged at Batavodurum, then driven deep into The Island. He had burned everything he was forced to leave behind. Any farms that escaped were destroyed by our forces—except for those belonging to Civilis himself. That was the mean old strategy of sparing the leader's estate so his suffering supporters grew jealous and angry, while he himself never reached the crucial state of having nothing left to lose. We followed his path inland. The selective scorched-earth policy meant we could see the estate where he should have been. But he had given up on his drenched fields and low dwelling-huts. None of his large family were living there, and there was no trace of him.

Perhaps the strategy had worked. The Batavians were a ruined people—temporarily at least—and their attitude to the prince who ruined them now appeared ambiguous. For the first time I began to doubt whether Civilis was still plotting. I wondered if he had simply fled in fear of the assassin's knife.

We felt no danger while on The Island. The atmosphere was sullen, but the populace had accepted peace and the old alliance. Once again they were a free people within the Roman Empire, exempt from taxes in return for armed manpower—though we all knew Batavian auxiliaries would never again serve in Germany. They let us pass among them without insult. And when we left, they were restrained in showing their relief.

By the Calends of November I was sick of searching, sick of crossing rivers on wobbly pontoons, and sick of half-submerged old roads on lurching wooden duckboards. I announced that we were moving out to seek dry toes and firmer ground.

And so we set off across the territory of the Frisii.

 

PART FIVE

S
WAMPS AND FORESTS

Germania Libera, November, AD 71

“The legionary commander Munius Lupercus had been sent along with other presents to Veleda, an unmarried woman who enjoyed wide influence over the tribe of the Bructeri.”

Tacitus,
The Histories

 

XLIII

It was hard to believe that Rome had once laid claim almost as far as the River Elbe. Drusus, his brother Tiberius, and his son Germanicus, had slogged away for years, trying to enclose a huge bight of Free Germany. They had used a double-ended pincer movement, invading from Moguntiacum in the south, and across the northern delta flats. Varus and his ineptitude had ended that. Some traces still remained from when Rome had fooled herself that she controlled these wild wetlands. Instead of returning to Batavodurum, we took the Drusus Canal from the mouth of the Rhenus to Lake Flevo, partly because the old canal was a wonder we might have no other chance to see.

We landed again. South of the lake there was little trace of the Roman occupation that had ended sixty years earlier. Lentullus, who was permanently impatient, asked when we would come to the first town. I explained, somewhat roughly, that there were no towns. It started raining. A horse stumbled and pulled a hamstring. We had to unpack and leave it, still within sight of the lake.

“So what do we know about the Frisii, Marcus Didius?” Justinus chaffed, as we surreptitiously made our first camp.

“Let's tell ourselves they are a placid, ranching, cereal-growing people with a yearning for the sea—and hope that their cattle are more dangerous than they are. The Frisii were conquered—no, I'll rephrase that tactfully—they were settled on Roman terms agreed by our esteemed Domitius Corbulo. That's quite recent history.” Corbulo was a real soldiers' general; one who made Petilius Cerialis look like a reject from the Roman fire brigade.

“So where were they in the rebellion?”

“Oh, keen supporters of Civilis, naturally!”

We had not yet reached the forest and were still in flat coastal country. To us it seemed a low, drear, dull land, lacking features as much as it lacked warmth. But perhaps if you were born in a byre there, Batavia and Frisia were a challenge, with their endless fight against floods from rivers, lakes, and seas, and their wide stirring vistas of open grey skies.

Much of this region seemed deserted. There were few of the settlements that flourished in Gaul. Even Britain was a populous, companionable place apart from its wildest parts. Germany, however, wanted to be different. All we saw were a few isolated houses, or at best crude huddles of huts and byres.

Here the people matched their reputation and lived a solitary life. If a tribesman could see his neighbour's smoke, he grew twitchy. He would want to ride over there, not for a meal and a game of dice, but to kill his neighbour, enslave his family, and plunder his goods. The presence of Romans just across the great river could only have made matters worse. Now the tribes had the decent excuse of trade to make warlike attacks on each other, seizing prisoners to meet the endless demand for slaves.

“Sir, will they try and capture us, then?”

“They know they can't sell Roman citizens back to Rome as slaves.”

“So what, sir?”

“They'll kill us, probably.”

“Is it true the barbarians are all head-hunters?” jested Ascanius.

“If it is, they'll have no trouble spotting your big noddle anyway.”

I was growing concerned about the pedlar. Dubnus appeared inexplicably restless. I had told him he could trade with the natives, yet he made no attempt to do so. When a man ignores a chance to pursue his living, I always deduce he has hopes of some bounty—and bounties are usually suspect in origin.

On one of my turns to be kind to him, I asked about trade. I knew that the great routes into the interior of northern Europe ran along the River Moenus from Moguntiacum, up the Lupia, and around the Baltic amber coast. The Moenus and Lupia traders, along with others who came up from the Danube, tended to converge in a market among the Bructeri, where we ourselves were heading. “I've done them all,” the pedlar said. “All except the sea. I won't sail. I'm a loner. Sometimes I just prefer to wander on my own.” Was that why he hated being in our group?

“Is there a good trade with the tribes, Dubnus? Do they buy or sell?”

“Sell mostly. Converting their plunder.”

“Which is what?”

He was feeling uncooperative. “Anything they may have snatched from someone else.”

“All right. So what do they snatch?”

“Oxhides and furs. Drinking-horns. Amber. Ironwork.” Dubnus must still be annoyed at being taken into custody and dragged along with us. He grinned evilly. “In this area they still have a good stock of Roman armour and gold!”