The Iron Hand of Mars (31 page)

Twigs snapped, too near for comfort, the way forest twigs do. Even Tigris was subdued. He stayed close to us instead of rushing off to scavenge for woodvoles and bad smells.

“I don't like it here, sir.”

“Show me what you found, then we can go.”

He led me through a few more thickets, over a giant log, past a dead fox which had been torn at by something much larger—something that was probably planning to come back for the rest of it just about now. Tigris growled worryingly. A cloud of midges was mobbing my forehead. “This is where I was standing. I thought that it looked like a path.” Maybe. Or just a coincidental space among the crowded trees. “I went along it for a look…” He was congenitally curious. And daft. Lentullus would pick up a scorpion to see if it's true they sting.

I still had no idea what he had seen, except that its effect on the recruit chilled me. “Come on then.”

We took the supposed path. Maybe deer came this way. The air smelt even more hostile, and the light was fading fast. Dew had made our boot-leather swell, and our feet dragged with clumsiness. Leaves crunched under foot louder than I liked. Our progress must have been audible for a couple of miles.

Then the trees stopped.

I was tired. I was cold and uneasy. At first my eyes refused to focus, fighting disbelief. Then I understood why the recruit had been afraid of his discovery.

The silent clearing we had entered lay hung with mist. It was a big clearing, or had been once. Ahead of us lay a strange low sea of brambles. The brambles and brushwood sank slightly nearer to us, then rose many feet away to a regular berm of woodland. The moat-like depression stretched sideways in each direction. The canes dipped, as if the ground beneath their tangled mass had been cut away. And so it had. We knew that, even without venturing forwards—which would have been deadly dangerous. Almost at our feet the ground must fall steeply, deeper than a man's height. Below us, invisible in the brambles, fiendishly sharpened stakes no doubt snarled. At the bottom of the ditch would be a trim channel one spade wide for drainage, then the farther wall would rise diagonally into a bank, before falling back to level ground. There, woodland filled the berm. Comparatively young woodland, not the ancient trees we had been struggling through all day, which must have been standing sturdily in the old times of legend when Hercules visited Germany.

It was a different legend we had found.

Beyond the wood there was a rampart. We could glimpse only the upper part above the vegetation. But there had to be a patrol track, faced with a timber palisade and broken by the shape of familiar square towers. Further on in the gloaming we made out the formidable bulk of a standard fortress gate.

It was silent. No sentries were patrolling and no lights showed. But here, a hundred miles from the Roman provinces, stood a Roman camp.

 

XLV

“Sir, is anybody there?”

“Dear gods, I hope not!” I was in no mood for exchanging travellers' tales with dead men or their ghosts.

I started to move.

“Are we going in?”

“No. We're going back.” I turned him round.

“Sir, we could camp inside—”

“We'll camp where we are…”

*   *   *

Few of us slept much that night. We lay awake, listening for trumpet calls from Hades, then nodded off just before dawn. I woke early and rose while it was still dark, stiff and snuffle-headed. The rest emerged, too. After a cold drink and some biscuit to brace us, we packed, brought the horses, and then set off in a close group to make a morning call on our colleagues' camp. At dawn, it managed to look even lonelier.

This was no Vetera. It was a field army's camp, and a large one. Though intended as a temporary construction, it stood in its isolation with an air of permanence. There were no signs of siege warfare. Decay, however, clung tenaciously. Apart from the rich clothing of brushwood on the outworks, some of the towers had lurched and the palisades collapsed. We could see now that further along from us the actual breastwork was broken down.

We battered a path to the gatehouse. One of the great wooden doors lay off its hinges. We edged just inside, no more. A spider the size of a duck's egg watched us entering.

The vegetation was dramatic. Everything within the ramparts was wrecked.

“Sir, was there a fight?”

“No bodies left, if there was.” Helvetius, alone of us, dismounted and wandered forwards to explore. Even he had no intention of going far. He stopped and picked up a small object. “I don't think the place was abandoned,” he murmured in a puzzled voice.

He began to make his passage further in, and this time we followed him. It would have been a tented camp, so there were large tracts of open ground where the long leather “butterflies” would have been pitched in rows. But wherever the legions stay for any length of time, the storehouses and the Principia are made from permanent materials. These should have been evident, in their familiar locations, as squares where only a low covering of thin weeds grew, because of their solid floors, yet rotting old timbers and mounds of other wreckage occupied their sites.

“What's your verdict, centurion?” Justinus asked. He was white-faced from the early hour, lack of sleep, and anxiety.

“It was an empty camp—but not dismantled normally.”

“They had left for the winter,” I said. I spoke with some confidence. The shrine and strongroom, built of stone, still stood erect. There were of course no standards and no eagles in the shrine. I had seen the gold eagles that once flew here. I had seen them in the Temple of Mars in Rome.

Helvetius looked at me. He too knew what we had found. “That's right. The buildings were all left here. Bad practice, but they expected to come back, of course.”

He was deeply upset. I turned to the others to explain. “You all know the rules when you leave a marching camp.” The recruits listened attentively, looking innocent. “You pack everything reusable in the baggage train. You take, for instance, all the staves from the palisade to use at your next stopping-point. Every soldier carries two of them.”

We all stared back. On the fortified ramparts behind us, stretches of the wooden defences lolled across the patrol track, still partly laced together, like estate fences that had suffered in a huge gale. Other pieces must have rotted; so had the stairs. Time had done this, no other force.

“You burn the rest,” Helvetius said. “You leave nothing an enemy could use—assuming you think you have an enemy.” He was turning the remains of an old storehouse door. “This was an empty camp!” he exclaimed, almost protesting at the breach of etiquette. “It's been trampled pretty thoroughly, by looters, I'd guess. The camp was built by Romans, Romans who stupidly believed the area was so safe they could go out like householders, leaving their door-key under the gatehouse mat…” The centurion was burning with a slowly increasing wrath. “The poor bastards hadn't the slightest inkling of how much danger they were in!”

He strode back to us, clenching his fist around the item he had taken up.

“Who were they, sir?”

“The three legions who were massacred in the forest by Arminius!” Helvetius raged. “There was a fight—dear gods, there was—but there are no bodies because Germanicus came afterwards and buried them.”

He held up his find. It was a silver coin. It carried the special mint mark which P. Quinctilius Varus had used on his soldiers' pay.

Not many of those ever circulate in Rome.

 

XLVI

Somewhere in this area had to stand the burial mound. The one whose first turf Germanicus had laid with his own hands—against the rules of sanctity, since he was at the time also holding office as a priest. Here he would have been a soldier first. Standing here, we understood. We too were overwhelmed by our emotional response.

We did not search for the mound. We did not even raise an altar as we had done at Vetera. We honoured them in silence. All of them: the dead, and those who had made it a duty to find them. Gripped by the past, all of us must have wondered whether, if we were killed here in this forest, anybody who cared for us would ever even hear our fate.

We left the camp in the mist by way of its broken Praetorian Gate, on the tough old relics of its exit road. It was easier riding than any other route through the forest, and we wanted to cover distance fast. Our forebears' road did eventually become overgrown. We made the usual complaints about useless engineers, though after sixty years without maintenance some potholing and weeding-over could be excused.

We kept going. Like the army of Varus, we were moving south. Like theirs, that was where our destiny lay in wait. The only difference was: we knew.

It was impossible not to keep churning over the history. Even Justinus had now joined in: “We know Varus was heading for winter quarters—either the forts they had built on the banks of the Lupia, or possibly right back somewhere along the Rhenus. He must have left that camp wrongly believing he had secured the territory, and all set to return there the next spring.”

“Why couldn't they stay there in winter, sir?”

“Too far from supplies to sit it out. Besides, I expect his troops were nagging for a break somewhere civilised.” The tribune's own troops thought about his solemn remark, then slowly grinned.

“And this is the way they went,” Helvetius said. He was really feeling it. He loved to dramatise; he loved to speculate. “Everyone believes they had hit the ridge when it happened, but why not here, much further north? All we really know for certain is that Germanicus found them somewhere east of the River Ems.”

“Sir, sir—” Now they had left the lost camp the recruits felt braver and more excited. “Will we find the famous battleground?”

“It's my belief,” Helvetius answered heavily, as if he had just worked something out, “the battlefield is all around us. That would be why Germanicus had such trouble finding it. You don't cut down twenty thousand men—veteran campaigners, after all—in a space like a backyard.”

I agreed. “We think it was quick, but the engagement may have lasted. No—it
must
have done. Clearly Arminius fell on them and did much damage. But after the first shock, the hardened soldiers would have made a stand.”

“Right, Falco. No choice. We know they did, anyway. Germanicus found whole heaps of bones where they had fought back in groups. He even came on the remains of some who had struggled back to their camp and been slaughtered there.”

“The camp we found?”

“Who knows. After all this time—and Germanicus clearing it as well—you'd have to spend days there to find any clues.”

“So after the initial assault,” I said, “they faced a drawn-out agony. There were even survivors. Arminius took prisoners: some were slung up on tree branches to propitiate the Celtic gods, but some were held in gruesome pits.” We found none of those, I'm glad to say. “Some eventually got home to Rome. A few poor sods even came back here with Germanicus.” Every war produces masochists. “But agreeing a surrender is not the point for the tribes. It was a Celtic fight—to kill and take heads. Any legionaries who tried to make a getaway would have been hunted through the woods. Just like in Britain when the Boudiccan tribes rose.” I heard my voice growing husky with old pain. “The chase is part of the terrible game. Blood-crazed warriors happily whooping after victims who know they are doomed…”

“Arminius may even have prolonged the fun deliberately,” Helvetius informed the rest. “The upshot would have been bodies all the way from here to—”

“To the next river in any direction, centurion.”

“Tell us, Falco?”

“The warriors stop any remaining fugitives at the water's edge. Their heads and their armour are dedicated to the gods in the running stream.”

We rode on very quietly. It took us two days, even with fine weather and favourable luck, to reach the Teutoburger hills.

*   *   *

I know that when we rested each evening some of the recruits vanished for long periods into the undergrowth. I know they found various items. They were boys. They cared about their old colleagues, but they found relic-hunting irresistible.

The general mood of our party hardened. Meanwhile, Lentullus would sit with Justinus and me near the fire, taking no part in the secret search for souvenirs. He was withdrawn, as if somehow he thought everything was his fault.

Once I laughed, briefly. “Here we are, stuck in the middle of nowhere with a whole basket of our own troubles, sounding off like strategists using apples on a tavern table to relive Marathon and Salamis.”

“Shut up about taverns, Falco,” murmured Camillus Justinus sleepily from the depths of his camp-bed. “Some of us could really use a drink!”

Since I had stayed in his house and tasted his awful table wine, I knew just how desperate His Honour the tribune must be.

*   *   *

Next day we tackled the Teutoburger heights.

We traversed the long escarpment strangely without incident. It seemed too good to be true. It was.

On our descent, all to order, we found the headwater of the River Lupia. At sunset we camped discreetly, making no fires. I noticed that Probus and another recruit went off together and stayed absent for too long. They were no doubt scouring the terrain for antique scabbards and studs again. At first we made no comment, as usual, but we had soon finished distributing rations and still they had failed to appear. That was unheard of. Helvetius stayed in the camp whilst Justinus and I went out to search for our lost lambs. We took a recruit each. He chose one called Orosius. With my luck I got Lentullus. In case I needed more company, Tigris gambolled happily along with us.

As you might expect, it was Tigris, Lentullus, and I who stumbled into the sacred grove.

It just seemed like any other clearing when we first went in. It must have been generations old. We marched boldly among the crook-armed trees, thinking the open ground between them had occurred naturally. An angry wind was rousing itself, rustling tirelessly through the dark, dry, November leaves. Tigris, who had bounded on ahead, raced back madly, bringing us a stick to throw. I bent and after the usual noisy struggle I forced him to release it.