Enemy of Rome

XXIV

Valerius only understood he’d survived the longest night of his life when there was enough light to make out the features of the man next to him. Claudius Ferox seemed to have aged ten years. The tribune’s aristocratic features were the colour of whey and the texture of parchment, and the deep lines on his cheeks hadn’t existed when the sun went down. From beneath the rim of his helmet, sunken, red-rimmed eyes studied the plain where the enemy waited. Valerius knew he looked no better. He’d never been so exhausted. Did he last sleep thirty-six hours ago, or was it forty-eight? His stomach screamed for food, but he’d shared the last of his bread with a contubernalis from the second cohort hours earlier. He slipped the water skin from the pommel of his leather saddle and handed it to the younger man. Ferox took it eagerly, drawing the tepid liquid through his salt-caked lips until he realized how little remained.

‘My apologies, legate.’ The words emerged almost as a sob as he handed the skin back. Valerius patted him on the shoulder and drank what remained, the barely discernible moisture as welcome as any nectar. He closed his eyes. By the gods, he’d never felt so old. Old enough to be Claudius Ferox’s father.

During that long night the men of Seventh Galbiana had fought their Vitellian opponents to a standstill. They’d stood shoulder to shoulder behind their big shields, rotating in and out of the front rank only when their blood stained the earth or their sword arms tired. Some men stood shield to shield with the enemy seven or eight times in that front line. Many would never leave it, lying in everlasting embrace with the men who died under their swords. While they fought, Valerius walked the lines, handing out food and water and giving quiet encouragement, accompanied by Drusus Rufio and the eagle standard. They repulsed attack after attack and always the enemy kept coming. Yet in the sixth hour of the night, shortly after the catapult missiles stopped falling on the Thirteenth’s positions, Valerius had sensed a weakening of resolve. They still fought. Still howled their hatred and their scorn, but the men of the Fifteenth Primigenia no longer believed they would prevail. When he realized it, he deliberately weakened his centre and placed his strongest cohorts on the flanks. When next they came the centre cohorts fell back, drawing the enemy on, then halted them with a devastating javelin shower. In the same instant he launched the flank attacks that would have destroyed the entire legion had they not retreated for the last time. None fought better than the First cohort. Yet, as he’d walked the lines in the darkness, his mind on the far side of the field where a few brave men were fighting and dying to save Primus’s campaign, Valerius would swear he heard a soft voice. One thrust and it would be over, my proud peacock. One thrust and the Seventh legion would be under the command of a proper soldier. At the time he wondered if he had imagined it, but now Brocchus’s face swam into his mind and the sneer on his lips said it was true. Why hadn’t he struck? With Serpentius gone, there would never be a better opportunity. But too many men were aware of the enmity between the legion’s primus pilus and his commander. His absence would have been noticed and questions asked. Brocchus might have survived or he might not. Those odds weren’t good enough for a man like him.

Valerius remembered the flames consuming the enemy’s catapult and exulting in Serpentius’s success. But, as the hours passed, the certainty grew that it had been bought at a terrible price. One part of him said he should have ignored the Spaniard’s words and gone himself, though he knew that would only have meant sacrificing the one for the other. Perhaps he should have let the Thirteenth deal with their own problems. Could he have sent Celer and his men without the gladiator? He knew he would have been sacrificing them for no purpose. Of course, with a man like Serpentius there was always hope, but … He shivered and wrapped his cloak tighter about him. At Colonia he’d lost his right hand, but in the grey, doom-filled light of this blood-soaked dawn it felt as if he had been robbed of something much more important.

A little later he noticed movement on the right where the three Praetorian cohorts had filled the gap left by the Thirteenth’s auxiliaries. Marcus Antonius Primus, in gleaming armour and sitting tall on a black stallion, rode into their ranks with an escort of twenty cavalry. The guards formed square and fleetingly Valerius heard the sound of shouted words on the wind, followed by a muted cheer.

‘Take one man in every three out of the line and have them prepare to receive the commander,’ he ordered Ferox. ‘And make sure they know to enjoy his speech.’

‘Perhaps if it was accompanied by some breakfast.’ The tribune smiled wearily.

‘And keep them on the alert, Claudius. It would be embarrassing if the general was killed during a visit to the Seventh Galbiana. History would never forgive us.’

By the time Primus approached, the legionaries had already formed a three-sided square to receive him. Valerius advanced to greet the general, who returned his salute with a tired smile. The one-handed Roman remarked inwardly how like Otho the man was; difficult to really know, but hard not to like.

‘Your men did well last night,’ Primus said quietly. ‘They — and you — have my thanks.’

Valerius bowed in the saddle. ‘They all did.’

The general nodded thoughtfully. ‘Though it was a close-run thing. Whether by accident or design, whoever destroyed the machine that was flaying the Thirteenth tipped the scales in our favour.’ He saw the mixture of pride and sadness on Valerius’s face. ‘Your people?’

‘Annius Cluvius Celer, prefect commanding the Ateste cohort of evocati,’ the general’s eyebrows went up as Valerius drew a wax block from his tunic, ‘and nineteen of his men. Serpentius was with them.’

‘The Spaniard?’

Valerius nodded.

‘Then their deeds shall be known and Vespasian will hear of your part in it.’

As the sun rose above the eastern horizon to capture the ranks of the Seventh in a halo of misty gold an enormous roar erupted from the far end of the Flavian line. Immediately cries of ‘Mucianus!’ went up, accompanied by shouts for silence and the rattle of the centurions’ vine sticks against helmet and armour.

Primus smiled. ‘The sun worshippers of Third Gallica,’ he said, referring to the legion that held the right of his line, ‘who some would say spent too long in the East, but it won’t do any harm to let our men think Mucianus is close.’ He kicked his mount forward into the centre of the square. ‘You did well last night, my fiery Spaniards,’ he told them. ‘You held the line, and but for the foot-racing prowess of your opponents you might well have added Victrix to your legion’s title.’ The flattery brought a cheer, as he intended it to. ‘You are tired,’ he continued, ‘as we all are, and hungry, but the enemy is more so. I have one more task for you. Drive them back and take Cremona. Drive them back and win the throne for Titus Flavius Vespasian. Did I hear that my friend General Mucianus and his African legions are close? Are we going to allow these latecomers to take all the glory and the loot?’

‘No!’ the shout went up.

‘Of course not. When your rations come up you will eat your fill and then you will drive the enemy from this field, drive them back on Cremona, where you will destroy them. This is where the war will be won, and the Seventh Galbiana will win it. Destroy them here and all the riches of Cremona will be yours.’

They cheered the general from the field and Valerius escorted him halfway to the Seventh Claudia.

‘You really think they are beaten?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Primus nodded emphatically. ‘They’ve pulled back to draw breath, but we won’t allow them that freedom. They are leaderless. They attacked piecemeal and in poor order when their commander should have concentrated against a single part of the line. If he had done that it might have been this army on the retreat. We will march in battle order and the Thirteenth will be our battering ram. Straight up the road, Valerius. Four miles to Cremona. Four miles to wipe away the stain of the defeat at Bedriacum. Four miles to victory.’

Valerius watched him go and marvelled at the man’s self-assurance. The legions he commanded had marched sixty miles in two days and gone forty-eight hours without sleep. Now he expected more of them? Well, only time would tell. They were still outnumbered, and though Primus’s light artillery had finally caught up with them, the heavy siege artillery needed to take Cremona was still somewhere down the road. But he must put all that to the back of his mind. The Seventh Galbiana and Gaius Valerius Verrens had another battle to fight.

And this time he would have to do it without Serpentius.

Not many battles go exactly to plan, but the final stage of the battle of the Cremona road happened exactly as Primus predicted. Thirteenth Gemina pushed the Vitellian centre before it, causing the enemy legions to north and south to retire in step to preserve their defensive line. In all, Primus’s five worn-out legions faced six full legions and substantial elements of at least four others, but, for the moment at least, it appeared the enemy commanders had lost heart, and their soldiers their taste for a civil war which had its own unique definitions of tragedy.

Valerius advanced his men across a field scattered with the bodies of dead and dying men from the previous night. As they went, the legionaries stooped to strip the dead of what spoils they could. He saw one young man suddenly fall to his knees beside a corpse and heard a wail that voiced more anguish than any sound he’d heard during that terrible night. A centurion immediately began screaming at the legionary and beating him with his stick. ‘Find out what’s happening,’ Valerius ordered an aide.

He came back within a few moments. ‘Tiberius Mansuetas of the second century Third cohort.’ The young man hesitated. ‘The dead legionary is his father. He was with Twenty-first Rapax.’

For a moment Valerius felt as if all the horrors of all his battles were bearing down on him in a tidal wave of darkness. Bile welled up in his throat and he had to spit the foulness out. The philosophers spoke of civil war being brother against brother and father against son, but how many had experienced its indescribable reality? ‘Tell his centurion the boy is to fall out and do his duty to his father. He will re-join us when he is done.’

Before the soldier had returned, Primus’s advancing legions cornered the retreating Fifteenth against its own baggage train as soldiers and camp followers fought for a place on the road to Cremona. Two casts of the javelin turned the retreat into a rout. Valerius saw that all along the line the Vitellian soldiers were making their way back to the sanctuary of the city by any means they could, utterly leaderless and all discipline gone.

Vipstanus Messalla, commander of Galbiana’s sister legion the Seventh Claudia, rode over from his position on the left. He greeted Valerius without ceremony. ‘It’s like herding sheep,’ he said. ‘Primus should order a general advance and we’d slaughter them before they got anywhere near the city. Once they’re in their camp it’ll be a different story.’

‘He wants to maintain the line,’ Valerius pointed out, ‘so they don’t have the opportunity to counter-attack. Maybe this is the end?’

‘No.’ The veteran tribune shook his head, his face grim. ‘They’ll fight, and it’ll be all the bloodier when they’re behind walls and we’re not.’

Not far away the Thirteenth’s advance guard toppled the charred remains of the great catapult into the ditch to allow free passage for the centuries that followed. The blackened skeleton lay on its side, partially intact, and the two men went to inspect the burned timbers.

‘This could have been the difference,’ Messalla said. ‘You did well to burn it.’

‘I hope so.’ Valerius attempted to disguise the break in his voice. ‘It was an expensive victory.’

Patches of drying blood stained the gravel where the catapult had been pegged. Valerius looked for the bodies of the men who had defended the machine or those who sacrificed so much to destroy it, but could see no sign. Messalla made his farewells and rode off towards his legion. Left alone with his personal guard, Valerius allowed his mount to make its own way through the scattered debris and wrecked tents of a Vitellian camp beside the road. The horse shied nervously as they approached a cloth pavilion that had been left more or less untouched. It was only when Valerius dismounted and looked inside that he understood why. A hospital tent, a temporary valetudinarium, and the medici who served it had either fled or been slaughtered as they worked, along with the wounded in their care. His nose wrinkled at the scent of freshly shed blood in the confined space. Some morbid fascination took him to inspect the rear of the tent and he felt a stab of pain in the stump of his right arm when he recognized the pile of amputated limbs. Beyond the severed arms and legs a large hole had been dug in the damp earth, perhaps fifteen paces across. Valerius warily approached it, knowing what he would find, but steeling himself to look anyway. The death pit.

The butchered lay where they’d been thrown, stripped of all clothing, possessions and dignity, piled haphazardly this way and that, their faces in repose or in the rictus of agony, depending on the method of their passing. These were the men who had been wounded on the field and were felt capable of recovery. Once they’d reached the medicus they’d either died in any case, or succumbed under his instruments. Valerius was used to death, had seen it in many forms and more often than he liked. However, this casual discarding of what a few hours earlier had been living, breathing human beings always disturbed him. His heart fluttered as he searched for a familiar face among the top layers — and froze. The man might have been sleeping, but for the fact that his eyes were half shut and would never see again. His only consolation was that despite the awfulness of the wound in his abdomen, it appeared the suffering of Annius Cluvius Celer had been over long before he died. Valerius sent up a prayer to Jupiter for Celer’s onward passage to the Otherworld and vowed to make a sacrifice in his memory, and that of … He turned away, sickened. He’d had his fill of death.

He’d walked five paces when at the very edge of his consciousness he registered a conversation between his guards. ‘Look, it’s moving.’ The words were Milo’s, reliable and never jumpy, but now patently shaken by what he saw.

‘Maggots,’ came the dismissive reply from Julius, the decurion. ‘You always get maggots in a pit, stands to reason. All those flies.’

‘No,’ Milo insisted. ‘It’s moving. Fuck …’

Valerius only reacted when he heard the whispered song of a sword clearing its scabbard. He spun, reaching for the gladius on his right hip. And froze. The sight that confronted him sent a spear point of superstitious dread down his spine and he almost cried out. A bloodied arm reached up from between a pair of corpses. A scarlet dome of a head broke from the surface of the pit, as if Hades was giving birth to some single-headed spawn of Cerberus. For a moment, the head stayed motionless as if considering its new surroundings, then it shook and growled like a dog, snorted to catch its first breath and let out an enormous roar that transformed the dog into a lion.

Julius stood by the edge of the pit, his face white as parchment and his sword raised. Milo had a pilum in his big fist ready to throw.

‘No!’ Valerius cannoned into the legionary just as the javelin left his hand, flying wide to impale a body less than a foot from its target, who had somehow managed to force himself waist high in the sea of bodies. The would-be corpse’s eyes bulged like duck eggs in the gore-stained mask of his face and his body shook with fury. ‘If that fornicating spear had found its mark, Roman, my shade would have haunted your dreams for all eternity and a bit fucking longer. As it is, I will be your living nightmare unless you help me out of this offal.’

The threat was directed at Milo and the man in the pit blinked as he noticed Valerius for the first time. Bizarrely, he raised his free hand to his chest in salute. ‘Serpentius of Avala, headquarters section of the Seventh, reporting for duty, tribune.’

Valerius wondered that he didn’t die of shock. ‘Don’t just stand there gaping like idiots, get something to pull him out.’ He ran to the edge of the pit, grinning like a moonstruck schoolboy, his heart soaring at the sight of the bloodied figure. He shook his head. ‘What kind of fool spends the night in a mass grave?’

Serpentius struggled to suppress a grin of his own. ‘The kind of fool who volunteers for a suicide mission and gets his skinny Spanish arse trapped behind enemy lines with the promise of a spear up it if he’s caught.’ He snorted and spat a gob of something red. ‘When I first went in I was only under one body, but they kept putting more of the bastards on top and I could barely move. I thought I might not get out before they got round to filling the pit in.’

Valerius shuddered at the image. But he had to ask. ‘What was it like?’

‘Cold,’ the Spaniard admitted. ‘But sometimes the company of the dead is preferable to the company of the living.’