The Pillars of Rome

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

‘Kill them all, Trebener. Their skulls will decorate the walls of your dwelling and bring you much respect.’

The Roman soldiers trapped in the Iberian defile did not hear these words but they could see above them the man who had uttered them. Tall, with red-gold hair, he was armed only with a heavy falcata, simply dressed apart from one gold object at his throat, which caught the sun and flashed as he made a wide sweep with his arm to encompass the intended victims.

‘I cannot do that, Brennos.’

The man who answered was very different; small beside Brennos, he had dark hair over pale facial skin and was decorated as a Celt-Iberian chieftain should be: on his head an elaborate helmet crowned with a sculpted boar, a thick and valuable gold torque encircled his neck and he wore several more on his arms. His chest was covered in a breastplate of hardened leather richly enhanced to exaggerate his muscular physique. Trebener, chieftain of the Averici knew the Romans well, he and his tribe living as they did in an uneasy peace, close to the settled plains which they inhabited along the Mediterranean shore. His reluctance to massacre those he saw as his enemies was not based on anything like mercy, but on self-preservation; if one thing was guaranteed to bring down upon his tribe massive retribution from the most powerful state in the world, it would be a pile of dead legionary bodies crying out for vengeance.

‘It would be madness to kill them all.’

‘Then let them all go,’ Brennos replied.

Trebener looked around at the members of his tribe, in truth not one tenth of the warriors he could muster and of that number only a third had set out to raid some cattle from the coastal pasture. It was a common enough incursion, which usually resulted in a desultory pursuit, soon abandoned when the Averici got into the hills that marked the boundary between the interior and the Roman settlements of Hither Spain. If they had moved at their normal pace they would have easily outrun the chase. It had been Brennos’s notion to move slowly, to see how far the Romans would come, and the fool of a centurion below had taken the bait and kept on after the raiding tribesmen, seemingly determined to teach them a lesson. In doing so he had led his men into a trap against numbers he could not hope to best, and he was now confined in a narrow defile that was the worst possible place to deploy the normal Roman tactics. The man was an idiot, but he was also one who had set the Averici chieftain a problem which he would rather not have. To kill eighty Roman soldiers would mean retribution at some point in the future; to let them go could bring trouble even sooner from the men he led, who would see such an act as one of weakness from a chieftain who was getting too old to properly command unquestioning respect.

‘I cannot do that either.’

‘You must do one or the other, Trebener, for no other course will make you friends, or reduce the number of your enemies.’

Brennos took the gold object in his hand, drawing Trebener’s eye towards what he knew to be the Druid shaman’s talisman. On a gold chain, shaped like an eagle in flight, it was recognised by those who saw him clutch it as a source of some kind of spiritual power. It had been in Brennos’s hand when he went amongst Trebener’s warriors and the ideas with which he seduced them were just as ambitious as those he had employed in the past; that Rome was mighty, but could be destroyed. It was twelve summers since Brennos had persuaded the tribes of the interior to combine against Rome and act like an army instead of a mob; twelve summers since they had so very nearly humbled a whole legionary army on the very plains they had just raided.

Had Brennos known this would happen, for he had the gift to foretell the future? It was telling that, even here, surrounded by the men of his own tribe, Trebener had too much fear of the power of Brennos to demand of him an answer to that question. He scanned the horizon to the east, seeking the tell-tale signs of the mass movement of men, a trail of dust that would signal a second pursuit. A wisp of a cloud was all he could see, a few miles distant, one caused by a small group, probably on horses given the speed of their movement — nothing for him to worry about. The Averici chief stepped forward and looked down at the Romans in the defile. Swords sheathed, spears and shields down, these legionaries knew that they faced death.

Damn them, he thought, why had they not stopped as they usually did; why did they have to face him with such a dilemma. ‘Get me the centurion.’

Brennos was looking at the dust cloud thrown up by the approaching horsemen, sure in his mind that he knew who led them, the son of the Roman general he had fought and so nearly beaten years before. Aulus Cornelius had been the name of the father, Titus was that of the son. Not that he had met either of them, but just as they spied on him, he sought information on them, as well as the wife of the enemy general, whom he had taken prisoner. Claudia Cornelia had been as haughty as only an aristocratic Roman lady could be, prepared to die rather than show fear, but two summers spent together, constantly on the move to avoid her husband and his soldiers had, gradually but inexorably, changed that. First had come respect, then friendship, until finally they had become lovers, and no woman Brennos had lain with since had come close to the passion she had aroused in him.

The last time he had seen her was when he sent her to a place of safety to bear the child of their union, escorted by the men he trusted most. All he knew was that they never reached their destination; the wagon in which she had been travelling had disappeared; he found the bones of his warriors where they had died trying to defend her. Claudia Cornelia and the child in her womb would be dead; Brennos could not believe that a proud Roman general, finding his wife with child by another man, would do anything other than kill her. It was something he himself would have done had the positions been reversed.

Titus Cornelius reined in his horse as soon as he saw the flashes from the Averici weapons and from that moment moved forward over the uneven ground with extreme caution; with an escort of a dozen men he was not keen to get too close. How could the fool of a centurion lead his whole command this far into the hills, in pursuit of a few tribesmen and a herd of cattle? It was a standing instruction never to pursue the tribes unless their raiding became too troublesome, and then the Romans would mount a punitive raid in force to subdue them. Most of the time a little judicious bribery kept them in the mountains. The hope that he would come up with the soldiers and turn them back had faded as soon as he saw the sun glinting on the tips of what he was sure were tribal spears.

He stopped his horse abruptly, so quickly that the men riding behind nearly collided with him. A thought came that made, if not sense, certainly provided a reason as to why the pursuit had come so far. ‘He’s here.’

‘Sir?’ asked the rider behind him.

‘Brennos. He’s here. I can feel it.’

Those cavalrymen he could not see pulled faces, for the tribune’s fixation with the Celtic chieftain Brennos was no secret. There had, it was true, been an increase in raids by the various tribes up and down the frontier, so many and so frequent that it hinted at some kind of coordination. No one doubted this Brennos character to be dangerous but the idea that he, who lived several weeks’ march away in the deep interior, would be here, leading a cattle raid, was a joke.

‘You mean that trickster, sir?’

‘He’s no trickster.’

‘Happen he is your honour, seeing as how, if’n you’re right, he has managed to disappear a hundred of our men.’

‘More likely we’ll find them up ahead, in a heap of splintered bones.’

Titus could feel the sentiment even if he was not looking at the cavalrymen; they had no desire to join that heap, nor had the man leading them, but he knew that he had to keep going forward, if only to find out what had happened. He held up a wetted finger to feel the wind, which with the heat of the day was in the west, coming off the land, then he dismounted.

‘Stay here and rest the mounts, but don’t let them feed.’ The cavalrymen nodded, it being a bad idea to let a horse graze if you might have to flee at a gallop; a full stomach slowed them down. ‘Gather some brushwood and tie it to their tails. If we have to run I want to set up a dust storm in our wake.’ Seeing a look of curiosity he added, ‘Only an idiot would ride flat out on rough terrain when he can’t see where he’s going.’

‘These are tribesmen, your honour,’ opined one horse soldier, in a voice that did nothing to hide his contempt.

‘And that is a ruse they taught me many years ago.’

‘Thinks he knows it all,’ said one soldier as Titus went forward on foot.

‘He knows a damn sight more than you or I, brother. He used to play with the buggers when he was a lad.’

That creepy feeling, that Brennos was close, grew more acute the closer he got to those flashing spears, but Titus was aware that he could be deluding himself. Part of it was the unusual situation; having spent a long time in Spain, both as a boy and a full grown soldier, he felt he knew the Celt-Iberians well, certainly better than most of his peers. They were excitable, boastful, warlike and drank like fish at the endless feasts which were the centrepiece of their existence. They sang, told endless stories and quite often fought bloody encounters if in receipt of anything perceived to be an insult, but Titus never thought of them as fools, which was why he had been surprised not to come across a hundred happy legionaries marching back to the coast. Raiding tribesmen would outrun infantry regardless of how many stolen livestock they were burdened with; if they had drawn that century on it could only have been as a deliberate ploy, but to what purpose?

Not to massacre them surely, for that would mean that they would be butchered in turn. They knew what Rome would and would not let pass. Steal cattle or pigs, but not too many; never kill a Roman farmer and leave their women alone. The rules were not written, but Titus knew they were understood because alone amongst his contemporaries, and because he had a smattering of the language, he had visited the encampments of the border tribes and had made sure that they did. Yet here he was, within a tenth of a league of this particular tribe who were stationary for a reason he dreaded, and the men he had trailed here were nowhere to be seen. It was unusual, and in his experience, every time something out of the ordinary happened in this part of the world the hand of Brennos was around somewhere.

It was almost a relief when Titus saw him, standing on the spur of a rock, looking straight at the spot where he himself stood. That it was Brennos he had no doubt even if he had never seen the man; the simplicity of the dress alone was nearly enough to identify him, but what was most telling was the feeling that he was subject to some outside influence, that the man staring at him was trying by the powerful exertion of a mystical force to crack his will, to make him turn and run away. Titus held the stare, and prayed with fierce determination to Strenua, the Goddess of strength and vigour. His will nearly cracked when he heard the first of the screams, horrible in themselves and made louder by the way they echoed off the surrounding hills.

They were still ringing out when the first of the naked Romans came stumbling down the track, soon followed by another, both hunched over with one arm couching the other. When they got close Titus could hear the sobbing and it was only another moment before he saw the reason. Both had had their right hands hacked off, and when the first man came abreast the smell of cauterised flesh almost made Titus wretch. With that knowledge the screams made sense; first they had sliced of the hand, then plunged it into fire to stop the bleeding.

The next hour, as the sun fell in the sky, was mental torture, listening to the suffering of Roman soldiers as each was subjected to the same treatment. Sure that he was not going to be attacked, certain this was a demonstration of cruelty to distress him, he had his men tether their horses and give what succour they could to their wounded comrades. One rider was sent back to the settlements to fetch wagons, for these men, naked and in agony, could not walk back to safety. Then he took up station again, eyes locked with those of the man on the spur, determined to show that whatever he chose to do would not make Rome bow the knee to him.

It was hardest when, with the sun nearly gone and Brennos a silhouette against the western sky, a group of tribesmen brought forth the centurion. They had not stripped him, no doubt so that he would be recognised, but they had strapped him to some kind of frame which almost crucified the poor fool, with his legs swinging loosely. Titus wondered if they were just going to throw him into the brushwood well below, where if he did not die he would be so broken as to do so soon. Within minutes the ridge was a mass of men, all seeming to look in his direction.

‘You see, Brennos,’ said Trebener, ‘there is always a middle way. The Romans are alive, but they will never be soldiers again.’

‘I would have killed them, you know that.’ His head jerked towards Titus Cornelius, wrapped in his red cloak, now barely visible as the gloom darkened the lower ground on which he stood. ‘Including him.’

‘And then you would be gone, Brennos.’

‘Yes. It was a Roman who said about one of their enemies, let them hate us as long as they fear us. It is one lesson I am happy to take from them.’

‘I am minded to grant to you the fate of our friend here. I had in mind to remove his legs so that he would remember, and perhaps pass on to others, that had he used them a little less he would still have them.’

Titus saw Brennos turn, lifting a heavy sword as he did so, recognisably a falcata, the most fearsome weapon in the armoury of the local tribes. Too unwieldy for most, it was carried only by those of great strength and martial skill. The shaman raised it above his head and it took no great leap of imagination to envisage the fear in the victim’s eyes.

‘You are a fool, Trebener.’ Then he shouted, in a voice that Titus heard more than once as it bounced and echoed around the surrounding hills. ‘There is only one way to deal with Rome.’

With that he brought the blade down, striking at the join between neck and body, with such force that it crunched through bone and flesh as Brennos nearly cut the centurion in half. Another sweeping blow removed the lolling head, two more the legs twitching in the throes of death. Drenched in blood from the fountain that sprang from the victim’s jugular, Trebener cursed Brennos, but he could say nothing. Even if he had, it would not have been heard over the sound of his own men cheering a man they saw as a hero.

It took two days to get the wounded back to civilisation, two days in which Titus Cornelius planned the revenge he would take on those who had mutilated them. For once he would put aside any thought of humanity or understanding and react as a Roman. He would surpass his father in the way he chastised the tribes, wondering if, years ago, Aulus had been too lenient. Let him hear of this and the great Macedonicus would want to lead another army to this place to finish what he had failed to achieve ten years past.

In his mind Titus imagined himself riding at his father’s side again, saw slaughtered men and cattle, for no beast or man would live, and a line of slaves. The women and children they would march into captivity. If the enemy had fields of crops they would be sown with salt, if they had wells they would poison them, forests they would burn so that anyone surviving would freeze in winter for want of the means to make a fire. Each thought of retribution piled on each other, but at the head of it all was the image of that Druid shaman hacking the centurion to death. Brennos he and his father would burn, patiently, over charcoal, and watch as the flesh fell slowly in strips off his pain-wracked body.

His commander was waiting for him as he marched, tired, hungry and covered in dust, into the command tent. That he was standing was unusual, for he was a person to have a care that his rank should be recognised. Just about to make a report, a raised hand stopped him.

‘Titus Cornelius, I have for you some very sad news. Your father, the great Macedonicus, is no longer with us. You are to return to Rome immediately.’