Rome’s Fallen Eagle

CHAPTER VII

‘Easy with him, lads,’ Paetus hissed as one of the Batavians’ horses started to shy whilst being led up the ramp from the boat’s open hold.

Vespasian’s fingers twitched behind his back as he watched two auxiliaries fighting to control the beast, pulling down on its halter, whilst stroking its muzzle and talking soothingly to it in their strange, unmelodic language. The words seemed to calm the animal and it eventually allowed itself to be led up the ramp and then down another, over the side of the vessel and into the shallow water just a few paces from the eastern bank.

Vespasian shivered and pulled the travel cloak tighter around his shoulders. Upriver to him the five other transports were hove to, as close as their shallow hulls could get up the river’s bank. In the thin light of a quarter-moon the silhouettes of horses and men could be seen disembarking. Each whinny, muffled shout or splash caused Vespasian to tense and peer east into the gloom; but there was nothing to see.

Once Sabinus had rejoined them, having made his sacrifice, they had sailed downriver for six hours until they had found a stretch of bank devoid of any glimmers of light from farmstead windows; but that did not mean that there were no dwellings nearby. Vespasian was anxious to get his small force ashore without it coming to the attention of the local population; he did not want news of their arrival to precede them on their journey. Although the tribes along the river lived and traded in peace with the Empire, the more inland ones were not beyond butchering even the best-guarded Roman merchants’ trains.

‘I’ve sent Ansigar and eight of the lads out to scout around whilst we finish disembarking, sir,’ Paetus informed him as another horse plunged up to its chest into the river with a worryingly loud snort.

‘Good. Can’t this be done any quieter?’

‘This is quiet; all our mounts have done this before. You’ll realise just how noisy it can be in a moment when we try and get your four horses and the spares out; they won’t like it.’

Vespasian grimaced. ‘Do it as quickly as you can, then; I’m going ashore.’

‘Probably best, sir. It won’t sound nearly so loud there, you’ll be able to relax more.’

Vespasian glared at Paetus but his back was already turned, his attention refocused on the disembarkation.

‘Coming round to Corbulo’s point of view, eh, sir?’ Magnus asked lightly, heaving his kit bag onto Ziri’s shoulder.

‘Bring mine ashore too, Ziri,’ Vespasian snapped a little more tersely than he meant to. Annoyed with himself, he walked up the ramp.

He emerged cold and wet from the river to find Sabinus already on the bank rubbing his thighs vigorously with a cloth. All around the auxiliaries were busy saddling their horses; most were now on land.

‘Did you talk to Paetus?’ Vespasian demanded; his mood had not been improved by the dunking.

‘I did as a matter of fact and very accommodating he was too.’ Sabinus handed Vespasian his damp cloth.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that he was very grateful that I brought the subject up; he didn’t know about the debt at all and as a mark of his gratitude has waived all interest apart from the first two years and has told me to repay it as soon as I’m able; assuming that I survive this expedition, of course.’

Vespasian rubbed his arms irritably with the cloth. ‘He’s let you off thousands; I can’t believe it.’

‘I knew that you’d share my relief, brother. I’m coming to the conclusion that he’s a very generous and decent young man, just as his father was, and what’s more he comes from a powerful family and will surely be consul one day — if we don’t get him killed first. Just the sort of man I’d find useful as a son-in-law; after all, my Flavia’s eleven and I’ll be looking for a husband for her in a year or two.’

‘You’d marry your daughter to him so you could take advantage of his money?’

‘That’s what daughters are for, isn’t it?’

A pounding of hooves on wood and a shrill equine screech prevented Vespasian from expressing his opinion; he turned to see a horse rearing up at the top of the ramp. It brought its front hooves crashing down with an echoing report and then kicked out with its hind legs, catching an auxiliary’s outstretched forearm, snapping it back like a twig so that a jagged shard of bone tore through the flesh. The man screamed as he clutched his shattered limb, adding to the horse’s terror; it jumped forward half landing on the descending ramp, buckling a foreleg beneath it at an impossible angle and then rolled, with its three intact legs thrashing, shrieking into the river with a mighty splash.

‘Silence that man,’ Paetus called over the injured Batavian’s agonised groans, ‘and get a javelin into that horse and put it out of its misery.’

In the river the horse continued to struggle and bellow as half a dozen auxiliaries lined the side of the boat hefting javelins. After a moment’s pause to pick out the stricken beast’s shape amidst the turbulence it was creating, they flung their weapons. Another long screech testified to the accuracy of some of the throws; it was cut short by a gurgling and a rasping wheeze as the animal fought, unsuccessfully, to keep its head above the surface. It sank with an explosion of bubbles on the churned, moonlit water.

‘Thank the gods for that,’ Vespasian muttered as relative peace returned.

‘Perhaps I should have also sacrificed to the lares of this river,’ Sabinus said, ‘then they might not have felt compelled to take one of our horses.’

Vespasian turned and looked at his brother; there was no irony in his expression. ‘I thougt you worshipped only Mithras.’

Sabinus shrugged. ‘We’re a long way from my Lord’s birthplace; perhaps some help might …’ An agonised scream, not far inland, cut him short, and then another, the same voice but higher pitched. Finally a third that turned into a wail, lowering in tone that was then abruptly cut off. Someone, not far off, had just died in great pain.

All work on the shore and the six boats had ceased as the auxiliaries stared into the darkness, chilled by the sound whose memory seemed to echo still, uncannily, around them. Distant hoofbeats, galloping fast towards them, broke the silence.

Vespasian glanced around; most of the troopers were still in the process of readying their mounts, very few were fully armed and mounted. ‘Form up on me in two ranks on foot!’ Vespasian bellowed, drawing his sword.

The shouted command galvanised the auxiliaries into action; they unslung their oval shields from their backs and grabbed spears or swept their spathae, cavalry swords longer than an infantry gladius, from their scabbards as they ran to obey. Their comrades still aboard the boats followed Paetus’ lead, jumping into the river and wading ashore as the hoofbeats pounded closer, out of the night.

Vespasian felt Magnus’ shoulder to his right as Sabinus took up position on his left, interlocking their shields. He glanced right, past Magnus, down the line to see a wall of shields solidly formed up with Paetus at the centre and a second rank behind; some stragglers were still running up but otherwise the manoeuvre had been completed in less than a hundred heartbeats.

‘These Batavians know their business,’ Magnus muttered, ‘for cavalry, that is.’

‘Paetus! Paetus! Batavian!’ bawled a voice over the incoming hoofbeats. Their pace suddenly lessened as the shadowy figures of horsemen materialised out of the gloom; Vespasian counted eight of them.

The riders swerved around the shield wall with Ansigar in the lead. Along the line some auxiliaries began to relax their guard only to be bawled at by their decurions to raise their shields again. Ansigar pulled his horse up and dismounted. Paetus left his position and walked towards him; Vespasian and Sabinus joined them.

‘Well, decurion?’ Paetus asked.

‘I’m not sure, prefect,’ Ansigar replied, taking off his helmet and wiping his arm across his forehead. ‘One of my lads, Rothaid, suddenly wasn’t there any more; none of the boys noticed him go, he just disappeared. Then we heard the screams; they sounded to be about half a mile from where we were but they were over so quickly and we couldn’t locate them so we hurried back.’

‘Was it Rothaid, though?’

‘Screaming? Yes, we’re certain of it; but we saw nothing out there.’

‘Thank you, decurion; stand the men down and set some sentries whilst you get the rest of the horses on land.’

Ansigar saluted and led his patrol away, barking orders to resume the disembarkation.

Paetus turned to the brothers. ‘I’d like to think that we’ve just been unlucky and run into some bandits or suchlike, but there’s something not right about this.’

‘I agree,’ Sabinus said. ‘Why would bandits draw attention to themselves by taking one man from a patrol?’

‘It’s not so much that,’ Vespasian put in, ‘it’s why would they kill him in such a public way? They wanted us to hear him.’

‘Sending us a warning, you mean? But who knows that we’re here to warn us off?’

‘Precisely; we didn’t even know where we were going to land, so that rules out the idea of a traitor. So we must assume that we were either tracked down the river by people who aren’t as friendly to Rome as we would hope or-’

‘Or we have indeed been unlucky,’ Paetus cut in. ‘Either way, they didn’t challenge us whilst we were landing so we can assume that there aren’t enough of them to worry us.’

‘Yet,’ Vespasian reminded them, letting the word hang.

*

The first pale glow of dawn was touching the sky ahead of them as the column began to climb, leading their horses, up into the wooded hills beyond the flood plain. There had been no more disturbances during the disembarkation, nor had there been any sign of the men who had killed Rothaid as they crossed the plain; his body, however, had been found with his eyes gouged out and his throat cut. What had interested Vespasian about the find was that Rothaid still held a sword in his right hand but, judging by its pristine condition, had made no attempt to defend himself whilst being so terribly mutilated. Having ordered complete silence during the ride he felt unable to break his own command by asking for an explanation.

They climbed higher as the sun rose and soon there was enough light to ride without risk of their mounts stumbling and they were able to put a good few miles between themselves and the river. Paetus had chosen a couple of the auxiliaries who claimed to know the way to the Amisia to lead them, and once they had threaded their way through the range and then down into the undulating forest beyond they steered the column just east of north at the beginning of what they assured their superiors would be a six- to seven-day journey.

The forest was thickly wooded with mainly pines and firs; the undergrowth, however, was surprisingly light. They were able to walk their horses with ease and occasionally break into a trot, something that would have been impossible, Ansigar had informed them, if they had been in the main body of the forest that stretched over two hundred miles to the south of them. As it was they had entered it at its northern tip where the trees, being more spaced out, allowed easier passage and let more light through the canopy, giving the lie to the forest’s name, which Ansigar said in his own tongue before explaining that the word meant ‘black’.

They pushed on throughout the daylight hours even though they had had no sleep the previous night. Travelling in the dark would have been impossible in these conditions and so Vespasian had decided to press on and camp at nightfall. As they journeyed further into the forest the air grew heavier and the canopy denser, creating a sense of thickening gloom. Vespasian’s breathing became laborious and he found himself constantly looking over his shoulder, peering into the massed shadowy ranks of tree-trunks, or up into the weave of boughs that seemed to press down on them with menacing intent. Judging by the muttering and the nervous looks of the Batavians he was not the only one to feel an ever-increasing threat enclosing them from all sides.

‘If it’s like this at the edge of the forest,’ Magnus grumbled, sharing Vespasian’s unease, ‘I wouldn’t like to go into the heart of it; the German gods must be very powerful there.’

‘Yes, I’m getting the impression that they’re not keen on Romans.’

‘I’m getting the impression that they’re not keen on anyone.’

Throughout the day Paetus sent out patrols in all directions but they reported back after an hour or two having seen nothing more threatening than a couple of very large wild horses, some deer and a few wild boars, two of which had not been fast enough to evade the spears of the Batavians.

As the sun fell, they stopped and made camp, setting a turma on guard in pairs around the perimeter. With the forest disappearing in an all-encompassing dark, the visual menace lessened to be replaced by eerie night-sounds: owls’ hoots, strange animal cries and wind working on groaning trees.

The boars were gutted and roasted on a spit over a couple of fire-pits and provided enough hot flesh for a few mouthfuls each to supplement their army rations. It warmed them but it did not cheer them and conversation was very muted.

The five remaining turmae drew lots for their sentry duty during the night; the lucky ones getting the first or the last slot whilst the rest rolled up in their blankets grumbling, knowing that they would get a broken night’s sleep, if sleep would be at all possible with the sense of foreboding weighing down their spirits.

As dawn was breaking, Magnus nudged Vespasian’s shoulder. ‘Here you go, sir, get that down you.’ He offered him a cup of steaming hot watered-wine and a hunk of bread.

Vespasian sat up stiffly, his back aching from a night on the knobbly forest floor, and took his breakfast. ‘Thanks, Magnus.’

‘Don’t thank me, I don’t have to get up early to build up the fire and heat the wine. That’s Ziri’s job and as a slave he don’t deserve thanking.’

‘Well, thank him anyway.’ Vespasian dunked his bread into the cup.

‘If I start doing that then the next thing he’ll want is paying,’ Magnus muttered as he woke Sabinus. All through the camp men were rousing, stretching their stiff bodies and talking quietly in their native tongue as they prepared their breakfasts.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ Paetus said, striding over, looking decidedly cheerful; behind him the last turma on sentry duty was coming in and forming up to be counted off. ‘I’ve just had a word with the two chaps leading us; they reckon that we’ll leave the forest around midday and get into more open country.’

‘What does that mean?’ Sabinus asked, sipping his wine. ‘A tree every ten paces instead of every five?’

Paetus laughed. ‘That’s about the size of it, Sabinus, but different sorts of trees and hardly any undergrowth, so we should be able to go a lot faster and we won’t have the feeling of being stalked by hideous Germanic forest spirits. We’ll just have to be a little more wary, as the land we’ll be going through is far more settled and the locals are not too keen on Rome.’

‘What savage is?’

‘Prefect!’ the decurion of the returning turma shouted.

‘What is it, Kuno?’

‘We’re two men short, sir.’

Paetus frowned. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked in a manner that questioned Kuno’s arithmetical skills.

‘Batavians can count, sir.’

Vespasian looked at Sabinus in alarm. ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

Sabinus started strapping on his sandals. ‘We’d better go and look for them.’

*

Kuno led the way with eight of his turma to where the missing men had been posted; there was no sign of them, just a tangle of footprints in the earth where they and previous sentries had been pacing around.

‘There’s no indication of a struggle,’ Vespasian observed, looking at the ground, ‘no blood, nothing discarded.’

‘Decurion, have your men spread out and search,’ Paetus ordered. ‘But they’re to keep in sight, understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do you think they could’ve deserted, Paetus?’ Sabinus asked as the Batavians started to fan out.

‘Unlikely so far from home and especially not here.’

‘What’s so special about here?’

‘The guides tell me that very soon we’ll come to a river called the Moenus; they know a ford and once we cross it we enter the homeland of a tribe called the Chatti. They and the Batavians are enemies. They used to be a part of the same people but fell out a couple of hundred years ago, I’ve no idea what about because no one seems to remember; anyway it’s still very serious. The Batavians went north and the Chatti settled here but there is still a blood-feud between them. They’d be mad to go wandering around so close to Chatti land by themselves.’

‘Prefect! Look at this,’ Kuno shouted, walking towards them whilst brandishing an auxiliary helmet.

Paetus took the helmet, gave it a quick glance and then showed it to the brothers; blood and some matted hair clung to the rim. ‘I doubt very much whether we’ll be seeing them again.’

News of the sentries’ disappearance and probable murder spread throughout the column as it formed up not long after and it was with an increased air of trepidation that they moved out of the camp, keeping just east of north, down a gentle slope.

‘So do you think that it could be the Chatti carrying on their blood-feud with the Batavians?’ Magnus asked after the brothers had filled him in on the history between the two tribes.

Sabinus shook his head. ‘Unlikely. The Chatti’s lands start after the Moenus; they don’t live near the Rhenus so what would they have been doing there in the first place?’

‘Galba told me that he had repulsed a war band raiding across the river earlier this year,’ Vespasian informed them, ‘so they do stray this far west.’

Sabinus shrugged. ‘Well, even if they do, how would they have known that six boatloads of Batavians were going to be landing where we did?’

‘Fair point,’ Magnus acknowledged, ‘but someone did and that someone is following us. I’ve a nasty suspicion that those sentries ain’t going to be the last men to go missing on this trip.’

‘I’m afraid that you might be right, Magnus.’ Sabinus turned his head and peered into the shadow-ridden forest. ‘Even my Lord Mithras’ light has trouble piercing that gloom; without his constant protection whoever is trailing us will have a far easier time of it.’ He suddenly loosened his sword in its scabbard. A couple of Batavian outriders came into view, flitting through the trees; he let go of the hilt. ‘But what’s their objective? Are they trying to scare us off?’

‘Scare us off from what?’ Vespasian questioned. ‘How would they know where we’re going? I keep on thinking about how they found us when we landed at random in the middle of the night on the eastern side of the river.’

‘Yeah well, I think that I can answer that,’ Magnus replied. ‘They couldn’t have been waiting because they wouldn’t have known where to wait, so they must have followed us. Now, they couldn’t have started on the eastern bank because they wouldn’t have seen us come out of the harbour at night; so they had to be either in the port, in which case we would have noticed them, or already on the river slightly upstream, that way they could have tagged along behind us without our seeing.’

Vespasian digested this for a few moments and then nodded as the column broke into a trot. ‘Yes, I think you’re right. In which case whoever it is knew that we would be sailing from Argentoratum but nobody there knew that until the day before. More to the point, nobody knew that we would be leaving almost as soon as we arrived.’

‘Unless they were told before we arrived.’

‘But who else here knew what we were planning to do?’

‘No one here, but I can think of three people back in Rome who knew.’

‘Claudius’ freedmen?’

Magnus nodded.

‘But they’ve got a vested interest in our success. They wouldn’t want to jeopardise the mission; it was their idea.’

‘Then you tell me who else knows that we’re here apart from your family?’

‘Just Galba,’ Vespasian admitted, flummoxed, ‘but I didn’t tell him exactly where we were going. And why would he want to help the Chatti? He hates them. Mind you, he hates everyone who can’t trace their family back to the founding of the Republic.’

‘Halt!’ Paetus called from just in front of them.

‘What is it?’ Vespasian asked, following Paetus’ gaze.

Up ahead the trees thinned considerably, letting far more light in through the canopy in thick, golden shafts, dazzling them after so long in the relative gloom.

Paetus pointed in front of them to a couple of saplings no more than six feet tall, directly in their path, twenty paces away. Vespasian squinted; as his eyes got used to the bright light he realised that each tree bore one horrific, round fruit.

‘Cut them down,’ Paetus ordered the two guides next to him.

The two Batavians edged their horses forward nervously, towards the severed heads suspended within the branches of the small trees. As they approached, one of the horses caught a front hoof on an obstruction hidden beneath the leaf mulch. There was a loud crack, followed by the creaking of swaying rope; two dark shadows swung down from above, flicking through the streaks of sunlight, directly at the troopers. Their mounts shied, whinnying shrilly, hurling them backwards, as the right-hand shape thumped into one horse; the other narrowly missed the second horse, to continue its arc towards the head of the column. It brushed the forest floor, scattering dead leaves, and then swung upwards, oozing liquid as it did, until its momentum was lost; it hung for a moment in midair and Vespasian looked up at the headless corpse of one of the sentries as he fought to control his spooked mount. Droplets of noisome fluid splashed down from the gaping neck, further unsettling the mounts below, as the body arced back down towards the two riderless horses; they could take no more and bolted.

‘This is starting to piss me off,’ Magnus complained; behind him the column was in disarray as panic swept through the animals.

Vespasian leapt from his horse, narrowly avoiding the stamping back hooves of Paetus’ mount, and ran towards the line of the body’s swing as it came creaking back at him. He braced himself on his left leg and stuck out his right so that the sole of his sandal met the corpse’s chest as it swung through the perpendicular, forcing his knee to bend on impact and throwing him onto his back. He landed with a jolt and immediately raised his head to see the corpse dangling, rotating slightly, next to the second suspended body; both had their arms bound across their chests and a dagger was secured with a length of twine in each right hand. Before he had time to ponder the weird sight, screams of pain and screeching of wounded horses rose above the shouting and whinnying; he looked back to see arrows spitting out of the trees and into the column. A few men and horses fell to be trampled where they lay writhing as the salvo carried on for no more than ten heartbeats before stopping as abruptly as it had started.

Looking to the direction whence the arrows came, Vespasian caught a glimpse of some shadowy figures fleeing on foot. ‘Paetus, we could catch them,’ he shouted, jumping to his feet and looking for his horse; it was nowhere to be seen.

‘With me!’ Paetus bellowed above the din to the steadiest troopers nearest him. He kicked his horse forward; it responded immediately, pleased to be driven from the scene of terror. A dozen Batavians followed their prefect into the shadows; they were soon out of sight.

Vespasian went to grab Sabinus’ mount’s bridle and helped to calm the beast as Magnus and Ziri both dismounted, gently rubbing their horses’ flanks as they began to settle down. Gradually a semblance of calm spread throughout the turmae with just the moans of the wounded and the snorting of unsteady, skittish horses to disturb the air.

Ansigar appeared through the disarray of the column. ‘We’ve lost three dead and five wounded, one badly, and four horses, sir,’ he reported. ‘Where’s the prefect?’

‘Chasing our attackers,’ Vespasian answered. ‘Here, let me show you something.’ He led the decurion to the dangling corpses; the two unseated guides were getting painfully to their feet and staring at the macabre sight. ‘What do you make of that?’ he asked, pointing at the daggers in the corpses’ right hands. ‘Your man, Rothaid, was found clutching his sword, un-blooded, as if it had been placed there.’

Ansigar smiled without humour, smoothing his long, wellcombed beard. ‘That’s because it was placed there.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘It means that we are fighting honourable men.’

‘You call sneaking up on people and murdering them honourable?’

‘These men don’t condemn their victims to wander the earth as shapeless forms after their death. By placing a weapon in their hands when they die, they guarantee that the All-Father Wotan’s shield maidens will find them and take them to Walhalla to feast and fight until the final battle.’

‘So it’s just a religious thing, then, and has no significance for us to worry about?’

‘It has a great significance: it means that whoever is preying upon us is definitely Germanic, but their argument is not with us Batavians. If it was they wouldn’t worry about the niceties of caring about our afterlife. Their argument must be with what we represent: Rome.’

Warning shouts came from the forest and Paetus soon appeared leading his men back in.

‘Did you get them?’ Vespasian asked the prefect as he swung off his horse.

‘One of them.’

Behind him the troopers dismounted; they heaved a dead body off the rump of one of the horses and flung it face up on the ground. He was in his mid-twenties; his blond hair was tied in a top knot and the obligatory beard was streaked with blood. He wore only plain brown woollen trousers and leather boots, leaving his swirling-tattooed chest bare and slick with the blood seeping from a spear-thrust to his heart. There was a thick silver arm ring just above his right elbow.

‘How many were there?’

‘About twenty.’ Paetus looked down at the body, shaking his head. ‘He turned to fight us to allow the others time to get away, it was suicidal. By the time we killed him the rest had disappeared into the forest as if it just swallowed them up.’

Ansigar knelt down and lifted the flowing beard; under it, around the man’s neck, was a metal band almost a hand’s breadth wide. He spat in disgust. ‘There’s only one tribe that wears an iron collar; this man’s Chatti.’