Arthur Britannicus
Read Arthur Britannicus Online
Authors: Paul Bannister
© Paul Bannister, 2013
Paul Bannister has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
An occasional scrape of hoof or jingle of harness was the only noise made by the pack mules as they plodded through the night, but the sentry was alert and called a challenge when they were still a hundred paces distant. The swift response came from a bulky figure that walked at the front of the mule train. As the shape moved into the light of the charcoal brazier by the toll bar, the sentry started. A lion’s head was advancing on him.
Gaius Misenus Flavialis wore an African lion’s mane and pelt over his helmet and shoulders, part of his uniform as proud Eagle bearer of the Ninth Legion, but this night in foggy, damp Britain, he was anything but prideful. His legion had been badly mauled by British rebels led by their queen Boadicea. Four of every five of those Pannonians who fought under the Eagle of the Ninth Spanish legion were dead, or captive and destined for the slave pens. Misenus and a detachment ordered to protect the standard that had once been carried before the great Julius Caesar’s army had hacked their way clear of the slaughter and struggled to the rear of the battle. There, the impedimenta guards had already loaded a dozen mules with the military pay chests. Swift action, fog and night helped the Romans to escape with the bullion and their sacred Eagle, and they had headed north into the limestone country of middle Britain. Their intent was to skirt the rebels who blocked the way and deliver the Eagle and silver to the colonial headquarters at Eboracum, on the great road to the north.
Misenus had sent his two pony soldiers ahead for help, and this sentry was the first sign of aid as the group trudged into the mining hamlet of Lutudarense. “How many of you?” Misenus demanded. “Just a dozen, sir,” said the sentry. “We’ll give you a guide to the fort at Navio. It’s another three hours away.”
“Get on with it,” said the officer wearily, and waved his small command forward. The group stepped through the night with cautious speed, ears and eyes straining for sign of the insurgents they knew were loose in the countryside, so their nerves jangled when, still several miles short of the garrison, two armed figures emerged from the darkness.
The soldiers were fellow legionaries, and their brief report was bad news. A strong enemy force was moving down from the northeast and would probably arrive at Navio within a half day. The garrison, established to protect the valuable silver and lead mines, was sorely depleted and the commander could not hope to hold out. Sensibly, he had sent a warning to divert the pack train and hide the bullion until it could be recovered later. His note suggested concealing it two miles from the fort in a disused fluorite mine. “We know the place, but it will be hard for just anyone to find it, and our miners have been warned not to lead the rebels to it,” one of the legionaries assured the aquilifer, who nodded. “One of you, go back to Lutudarense and bring the rest of the detachment, we’ll likely need them.”
By midday Misenus was standing in the fluorite cavern, which was the dry watercourse of an ancient stream. The gilded silver Eagle, with its proud wings and laurel crown, was taken from its long staff and wrapped reverently in the aquilifer’s scarlet wool officer’s cloak. Then it was hidden with the chests of coin in the cave floor. Blocks of tumbled limestone buried it all. The mules were led away, the entrance was disguised under another collapse of rubble and the detachment of weary soldiers marched to the garrison. Misenus took a scrap of flattened lead used to record company accounts and pulled out his knife. Best be safe, he thought, as he scratched a crude map of the cavern’s location.
The Britons came that evening, and before the sun set, every Roman had been butchered, and the insurgents were looting their bodies. The lion pelt of Misenus was torn and bloodied from the fight put up by the aquilifer, but it still attracted the scavengers. They took it as well as his mail armour, his weapons and his waist purse. A Briton with a blond moustache was still puzzled over an exchange that a wounded legionary had called out before he was finished off. “Treasure! I can show you. It’s on the officer’s map. Don’t kill me!” The plea went unheeded, and a blue-tattooed spearman had cut off the man’s words with a thrust through his throat. The warrior with the moustache had hacked down the standard bearer, and it was he who claimed his weapons and goods including the waist pouch, which he shook out on the trampled grass. It contained a few coins, a rough-hewn walrus ivory figurine of the god Mithras and a small sheet of lead marked with odd scratches. A day or two later, the Briton took the sad little pile and his other loot back to his village on the windswept coast of the German Sea. There, he told the story of the battle, and showed the lead sheet with its hurriedly-scratched map. “This must show where a Roman treasure is hidden,” he declared to his family, but nobody could decipher the clues. The lead sheet lost its interest for them, and for two long centuries, the Eagle waited under the rock fall, in its cavern beneath the earth.
The boy Carausius was sleeping safe in his parents’ home when, silent as clouds, the ships of the raiders came through the pre-dawn wolf light. Two vessels pushed through the fog that was settled on the oil-smooth sea and rolled to the rhythmic heave of the oarsmen. Beaded droplets glinted on rigging, cloaks and men’s beards; moisture muffled the creak of timbers and the slap of sails. The fog also hid the motion of the oars, which rose and fell like wings easing the raiders towards the looming land, and only the herring gulls that hung mewing above the two carvel-planked longships witnessed the arrival of Hibernian invaders at the seaboard of Britain.
The birds’ sea cliff home was the raiders’ landfall, a vast chalk promontory that spearheaded itself into the gently heaving waters of the German Sea. South of the headland’s prow, the curtain of fog was opening to reveal a village nestled in a wooded fold between two small white cliffs? “That,” said the war band’s chief, gesturing where a blue smudge of smoke proclaimed the settlement, “will be ours today. Steersman, you head for the ravine.”
The red-gold of Sol was warming and brightening the land as the keels of both ships ground up on the white chalk and shingle that shelved below the village. In moments, men were scrambling over the sides to heave their vessels above the wavelets’ reach, or were passing shields and weapons to shipmates who waded the last few yards to the beach.
They were Scoti, marauders from the western island of misty Hibernia. Seagoing adventurers experienced in the treacherous tides, storms, and rocks of the isles between their homeland and Britain, they could navigate through fog with the crystal stones that could find the shrouded sun. They knew the songs and chants that listed headlands, bays and other aids to navigation, and they could sail anywhere. They came to this coast because they had heard tales of a god whose followers had gathered wealth but had failed to make
themselves safe in the eastern lands of Britain. The marauders had listened, planned, and gone in search of these new sources of plunder. This war band had brought their oak-ribbed ships Fleetwing and Wavehorse around the northernmost tip of the land of the Picts, a place where the green, racing waters of the Atlantic surged into the dark German Sea.
They had battled through that clashing millrace, passing safely by the island’s sea-wracked coast with its headlands of spiked sandstone towers. The bards said the place was home to
fearsome half-humans who ate the hapless victims of shipwrecks, and the marauders scanned the land carefully as they rowed past. They had turned their broad-beamed vessels south, gliding in summer calm past the loom of the mountains of Alba and by the unseen imperial walls of Antoninus and Hadrian, and they had stayed well offshore, out of sight of Roman signal stations, until their leader felt they were beyond the reach of the frontier garrisons.
Filwen the Bastard, the Scoti warlord, made an imposing figure. His short ponytail of silver hair barely reached the humps of shoulder muscle that bulged beneath his wolf fur cloak, and his arms, sleeved in blue tattoos and clinking with warrior rings made from the weapons of his slaughtered enemies, rippled with power.
He urged his men on, telling them that Britain was rich in coin hoarded by priests faithful to a prophet dead for two centuries or more. The Christus followers had slid from sight, condemned by Rome because they refused to acknowledge the Augustus Caesar as a god, but their treasure was still somewhere, he told them. It would be easy pickings. The Romans, he knew, were hardly able to defend their northernmost province because they’d stripped it almost bare of soldiers, sending them to contain the threats to their empire posed by the hordes from beyond the rivers Rhine and Danube.
Nor were the cowed natives a viable opposition since the punishments that followed the Boadicean revolt. His half-hundred armed men, surprise and a few diversionary firebrands tossed into the thatch would soon overwhelm any settlement’s resistance. “We’ll have women and slaves tonight,” Filwen muttered. He removed the dagger he kept fastened inside his cloak, slipped it into his belt and threw the heavy fur to his servant. “And we’ll learn where the temples are, with the silver,” he added.
As the ships’ sturdy keels ground across the first shingle banks just off the beach, the warlord tugged on his leather helmet with its stitched ridge and green-dyed horsehair plume, pulled his iron breastplate straight and, for luck, tapped the oblong flat of his sword where it hung from a brass chain at his left side. The servant brought the warrior his full length shield of willow faced with waxed leather, but he gestured it away, and took only the ash pole with its spearhead that was half the length of a man’s arm. “No shield wall here,” he grunted, “just a few fishers, seal hunters and farmers. Now, let’s get busy.”
The ships were grounded, the raiders were readying, pulling on boiled leather breastplates over their wool tunics. Some carried heavy javelins, most had iron swords, a few possessed a prized, steel Roman gladius, the feared stabbing sword of the legions that had slaughtered Rome’s enemies from Aegyptus to Germania. “Leave the shields,” Filwen ordered, “and bring fire.”
The hamlet in the ravine above the hissing shingle looked Pictish, with reed-thatched round huts of stone, wattle and wood, and several byres for pigs and cattle. Its homely dung heaps steamed gently in the summer morning’s cool. Above the settlement, a fold held a dozen or so undersized grey-black sheep and a loom stood outside one hut, alongside a drying frame that held great hanks of dark wool. On the slope in the lee of the northern headland were strips of cultivated farmland where barley and rye glinted gold in the rays of the rising sun. Those same rays flashed off the accoutrements of the raiders as they hurried up the ravine’s hard-beaten path, and that caught the eye of a yawning man who’d stepped out of his hut to relieve himself. He gaped at the hurrying invaders as they rounded a slimy retting pond, then his sleep-fuddled brain understood what he was seeing. “Danger! Feraz! Danger!” he yelled, his voice breaking. “There are attackers coming, get out!”
The villager scrambled back into his hut, sliding on the dew-wet turf, but his shouts had alerted others and a boy began running from hut to hut, banging on the rough doors and shouting shrilly. In one of the huts, the child Carausius raised his head from his pillow. His father was scrambling off his sleeping cot and his older brothers’ feet thudded on the packed dirt floor. Outside, Filwen was emerging from the ravine, cursing because the surprise had gone. He gestured impatiently at the four who were carrying firebrands to scatter through the settlement. The other raiders, yelling to induce panic, thumped towards the huts where men were emerging, tugging on trews and tunics even as they hefted staves and axes. Carausius’ father Aulus, a black-bearded man in knee length breeches, stepped out of the settlement’s largest stone building. Over his head, the two faces of Janus Twin stood above the door, protector of both the interior and the exterior.
In one hand Aulus carried his wool cloak, in the other he grasped a horn-handled knife with a long blade shaped like a slender leaf. “Halt!” he bellowed at the onrushing raiders. “Cease this, at once!” Several of the invaders, struck by the obvious authority of the man, slowed and stopped short. Filwen, cursing quietly, stepped forward.
“Who are you?” he demanded of the bearded man. “I am Aulus and this land is Brigantia. That headland is Oceli Promontorium. It is my land,” said the chieftain. “Who in the name of hell are you?”
“I am your new master,” said Filwen, stepping forward and levelling his spear at Aulus’ naked, tattooed chest.
“Not you!” rasped the Briton. He stepped back, circling his arm to bind his cloak around it as an impromptu shield even as he extended his dagger straight out, at arm’s length. Behind him, two teenage boys pushed out of the hut’s door.
“Kill him, father!” urged one. Filwen stared, laughed, then spat at Aulus’ bare feet. “You and your whelps are mine,” he declared, twitching the point of his heavy spear. “Put down that dagger, you’re slaves now.”
Aulus looked across the trodden dirt of the settlement and saw that in amazingly quick time, the raiders had taken control. Several thatched roofs were already flickering flame and would soon be belching smoke into the sky; two raiders were hacking at a villager curled in fetal position on the ground. His axe was lying useless next to his blood-drenched body. Bilic, an unusually tall villager noted for his ability as a seal hunter, was slumped against the side of his hut, impaled through the chest with a javelin delivered so hard, a hands span of the blade protruded from his back. His wife was kneeling next to him, alternately wailing and sobbing deep, wracking gulps.
A clutch of hooting marauders were shooing six or seven women in their night shifts into the foul retting pond below the hamlet, where flax rotted. Other raiders had gathered half-awake men at sword point and were lashing their hands and necks together as they lay on the ground, some pinned under the nailed boot soles of the Scoti. “Put down the dagger, slave,” Filwen snarled at Aulus.
The big man nodded, sighed and
drooped his head. Then, fast as a striking adder, he stepped inside the raider’s spear point and seized the ash shaft, dragging Filwen towards him. He swept his dagger across the Scoti’s eyes. The raider, however, was just as fast. Untouched, he half-fell backwards, pulling Aulus off balance. The big man stumbled to his knees and Filwen kicked his wrist, numbing it but failing to make him drop the dagger. Behind their father, the two boys hesitated, then began to move forward, but they were unarmed and three of the raiders were at them, fast. One boy was quicker. He stepped swiftly back inside the hut and slammed shut the door; the other was seized by his long hair and forced to the ground.
Inside the hut, the youth who’d escaped faced his mother. “We’re dead,” he said simply. The woman looked at him, turned away and said calmly to the ten year old who was watching wide-eyed: ‘Caros, my son, you have to run away. Go quickly.” She grasped her small son under the arms. “Off you go, my love, through there.” She lifted Carausius up to the smoke-blackened rafters and pointed at the vent hole in the thatched roof. “Through there, carefully and run to the smith at the forge. Tell him everything. Go, my darling, go quickly.”
A thought struck her, and Clinia looked at her older son, paused, then fumbled in the dirt floor at the base of a support pole. Acting quickly, she scraped free a wool-wrapped scrap of lead, a small sheet of metal with something scratched into it. She whispered urgently: “Hide this, it’s important. Your father inherited it. His father told him it shows where a treasure is hidden, but we don’t know where to look.”
She put the thin lead sheet with its inscrutable markings into the older boy’s hand,
then turned in alarm. A raider outside had thrown himself against the door, making the whole frame shudder. Dust and soot drifted down from the thatch. Carausius, frozen on the rafter, reacted to the noise and scuttled for the vent hole. As he popped his head into the outside air, he saw his father in front of the hut, moving forward in a crouch, his dagger extended at Filwen. All eyes were on the fighters, nobody saw the boy squirm through the vent, slide onto the mossy reeds and squelch down onto the dung heap alongside the hut.
A sea raider spotted Carausius as he scooted across the settlement but the man turned away. There was loot to be had, women and slaves to be taken. He wanted his share and legging it after
a skinny boy across country while the others got the pick of things wasn’t for him. The boy could be caught later. He turned, grinning, to watch the fight between Filwen and the Briton, knowing his warlord’s skills with sword or spear. “He’ll hurt that peasant. They don’t call him the Bastard for nothing,” he muttered. His eyes flickered sideways, his attention caught by the seal hunter’s sobbing wife. Long, chestnut hair, slender shoulders. He licked his lips. He could take her into that hut, he thought. That would be better than chasing some boy. Let Filwen gut the peasant, he had other things in mind. He’d comfort the new widow, act of kindness, he grinned to himself.
The feeling was coming back into Aulus’ right hand and the bulge of the dagger’s handle again felt solid in his palm, but the chieftain knew his weapon was badly outmatched. He shifted the cloak more firmly around his left forearm, noting that the garment’s fastener, a heavy silver and amber brooch that was the symbol of his rank was on the outside, forming a miniature shield. He had no more time for reflection as Filwen thrust hard at him with the long spear point. Aulus was barely able to hurl himself aside as it scraped his bare upper arm. “Close with him,” the thought blazed through his mind. “Dust in his eyes.
Dust.” Aulus dodged another thrust, stumbling sideways. His fingers scrabbled at the ground. The spear thudded into the earth right by his hand, hurled at the instant he began to fall. The Briton’s fingers grasped gravel and dirt, he began to straighten to throw his blinding handful and his world went dark.
Filwen had launched the big ash and iron spear with his right hand and in a motion made skilful by long hours of training, had continued his arm’s swing to grab the haft of his sword. He instantly drew it across his body, snatching the sword free of its hanger chains. The Scoti whipped his sword backhanded, scything the blade across Aulus’ face. The tip took out the
Briton’s right eye in a gout of blood, smashed through the bridge of his nose and jellied his left eyeball so cleanly, its fluid ran unbloodied down his cheek like the albumen of an egg. The shock of the impact drove the Briton to his knees, stunned, blinded and helpless. Filwen glanced at the watching teenage boy held by his hair, throat tilted to the serving man’s blade, then crashed the pommel of his sword onto Aulus’ undefended head.