Arthur Britannicus (11 page)

One of the sailors got up and left the table, looking pale. Davius, unconcerned, took another draft of wine. “You strip them naked, of course, because they lose their bowels on that spike and that brings insects to add to their enjoyment.  How long do they last? I’ve had them die in a few hours, or take as long as three days. It all depends on how strong they are, how much the flogging took out of them, blood loss, all that. If the relatives see you right, and you know what effect a piece of gold can have on your attitude, you can speed things up by breaking their legs.

“I use an iron club. With no way to take weight on their heels, the hangers get it all on their arms. It compresses the lungs and they suffocate. But you know, don’t rush things. You want people to see them suffering, because that makes the punters think twice about staying on the right side of the law. I see this stuff all the time, and I tell you, I pay my taxes and I follow what the boss tells me to do. I’ve no intention of being fastened up there myself.”

The executioner took a last pull at his wine, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and mused: “Funny thing, really. We’re the civilizing influence, but barbarians like the Picts treat their perps kinder. They toss convicted felons into deep water, hands and feet tied.
Simple, no blood, and food for the fish, eh?  What’s wrong with that is that with their way nobody gets a stern lesson, so I suppose they get more criminals than we do.”

He laughed and eased himself up from the table. “I’ve got to see a smith about making some more nails since we did all these rebels. People buy the spikes as amulets, after they’ve been used on the condemned. They say they bring good health to the wearer.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and laughed. “They don’t bring the perps much luck, do they? Well, it’s a nice little earner for me, but it does deplete the ironmongery stocks.”

XIII. Margus

Word came to the emperor Carinus of his brother’s death and of the upstart general who had assumed the imperial purple. Diocletian, he raged, must die. He’d probably poisoned Numerian himself to steal the throne. The courtiers shrank away from their tyrant lord; a cruel, arrogant spendthrift who courted the mob with bread and circuses. Games, theatre, chariot races, naval battles in the Colosseum, parades, free bread and wine were extravagantly put before the common people. The nobles were treated to sumptuous feasts and debauches but few attended willingly, as Carinus was a vicious sadist who delighted in forcing himself on other men’s wives and young sons. His palaces were crowded with dyed-blonde prostitutes and actors, pimps and singers; the vast public spaces were bedecked with Milanese roses and violets from Parma, and the rooms were filled with gilded columns and pornographic frescoes. He maintained a warm water swimming pool in which he liked to swim naked among floating flowers, melons and apples while flutists and lyre players serenaded him.  Rumour said he enjoyed an incestuous relationship with his sister, although he had one long-serving wife, as well as having had eight others whom he’d murdered or divorced when they became pregnant. The boldest courtiers whispered to each other about his heir, wondering and snickering if he came from Carinus’ wife or his sister Paulina.

Vain and arrogant, Carinus wore jewels on every part of his person. A great ruby clasped his cloak, emeralds adorned his shoes, and pearls, sapphires and other gems studded his belt. He painted his face, gilded his fingernails with gold leaf and was everywhere trailed by an entourage of masseuses, hairdressers and wardrobe mistresses. His first delight was to force married noblewomen into humiliating sex with him, his second was to host sumptuous banquets when the wine flowed from fountains and a squadron of slaves stood by to dilute it to taste with spices or honey.

At one legendary feast, Carinus’ cooks served more than a thousand pounds of meats that ranged from giraffe to ibex, plus a hundred pounds each of fish and birds as varied as peacock and lark. To demonstrate his power, the tyrant had his former schoolfellows tortured and executed for remembered or imagined insults. He had wealthy men imprisoned for their riches and ordered the murders of men whose wives he coveted.  “He was a good soldier once, on the Rhine, but he’s become a monster since he returned to Rome,” was the consensus spoken only in private and after a careful check for eavesdroppers. 

The time came when Carinus needed his military skills, and urgently. Soon after news came of Diocletian’s revolt, word arrived from Venezia, where the governor had also risen against the tyrant’s rule. Carinus moved fast, and marched north with his legions. At Verona, he swiftly defeated and executed the rebel governor. Then he moved on again to face Diocletian, who had ended his long march back from Persia and was on the frontier, at the River Danube.

The rival generals met on the plains of Margus, near the great river, and matters did not go well at first for the usurper. Diocletian’s troops were reduced in numbers from their months of travel and were in generally poor health after an outbreak of dysentery. Carinus threw his fresh troops at them with conviction and broke the ranks of Diocletian’s legions. The slaughter was about to begin, and victory seemed assured for the Roman tyrant, but the Fates stepped in and snipped the threads of his life.

Carinus’ own officers, led by a tribune whose wife Carinus had raped, turned on him right there on the battlefield. The tribune and a few accomplices hacked down the despised tyrant, the other officers called off their men and both armies halted, the fighting put aside. In the matter of an hour Diocletian went from facing defeat and execution to being acclaimed emperor by both armies. His parade into Rome was a triumph. He’d left the Eternal City as the son of a senator’s household slaves. Then his tide of fortune flowed full. He became military governor of Moesia, took the curule chair of a consul, and next became commander of the palace guard. An oracle had forecast great fame for him, “
after he killed the boar.” With the murder of Aper the Boar, his men knew he was in the protecting hands of the gods. They bowed to the heavens, and acclaimed him. Now he was returning with his legion, clad in imperial purple and bringing an impedimenta train groaning with loot and slaves. Life, he reflected, had been good to him.

Some of it he had earned, for Diocletian was a highly competent soldier and not just a reckless warrior. Instead, he was a manipulator and an artful politician whose skill at misleading opponents about his true motives carried him a long way. After seeing victory snatched away from Carinus when he was assassinated by his own officers, Diocletian had absorbed the lesson. Popularity mattered. Because he’d evaded a civil war, he was shrewd enough to keep many of his predecessor’s civil servants in their old offices and transited them into his own administration. He knew how easily a barracks emperor could seize power, and was uncomfortably aware, too, of the number of short-lived emperors who had lived and died by sword or dagger thrust from a onetime friend. He needed, he knew, a wider base of power.

Diocletian saw clearly how this could be attained.  For a century, the legions had made and unmade the emperors, electing or selling the imperial crown to any general they favoured.  About 40 such ‘barracks emperors’ had taken the purple, some lasting only months before being deposed in a pool of their own lifeblood. Diocletian’s plan was to recruit several co-emperors, to parcel out the empire between them and to rule jointly, each emperor having his own autonomy and army. The checks and balances of such a system would rein in the legions’ power and control their insubordination and would remove the monopoly of influence from Rome’s corrupt administrators, all to the benefit of the empire as a whole. And, it would keep this barracks emperor in office for much, much longer.

Diocletian had to deal with the pressing business of holding the eastern frontier and he needed to reduce the terrible drain of maintaining it under arms. His first steps were to draw back some troops from the Rhine and Danube to act as a rapid deployment force.  Instead of massing troops along the entire frontier, he’d keep them behind the frontiers, use outlying garrisons to warn him of invaders and respond to their attacks by moving troops to meet them.

The need to revamp the military structure made him look for a suitable deputy to be the first of his co-emperors. His fellow countryman, the brutish soldier Maximian, caught his eye. Diocletian knew Maximian would remain loyal because he could not survive without the support of the senior emperor’s political skills. “You will be my fellow Augustus,” Diocletian told him, after greeting him in the old way, each man grasping the other’s right wrist. “Your military brawn and your legions will complement my political power. We will rule the empire together.
Do your work in Germania and Gaul, then come to Rome to be formally appointed.”

His mutual assistance pact sealed, Diocletian returned to his palace in Nicomedia, near the Bosphorus, where he lived and ruled in Oriental splendour as a god, demanding that those admitted to his glorious presence kneel and kiss the hem of his robe and not look at his face, on pain of death. Maximian, the
junior  emperor in waiting, obediently marched his troops to Milan and turned his eyes to the Rhine. There were battles to be fought, an empire to keep subjugated and barbarians to kill. He had Spain, Africa, Italy and Gaul to rule. He would be busy.

XIV
. Seine

Carausius was pondering over his maps of Gaul. He’d been stamping out the fires of revolution for several years now, but matters kept getting worse. Greedy absentee landowners, clerics and lawmakers in distant Rome had sorely gouged the colonials, and the tenants were passing matters on to the peasants.   The legate considered the problem: punishing taxation meant that crops and livestock were forfeited when the taxes were unpaid. It had ruined many smallholders, and they had been driven from their homes to become wandering bandits desperate merely to survive. You couldn’t blame them for rebelling, he thought, but he wasn’t in a position to sympathise. His job was to bring the rebels to heel.

The Bagaudae, a Gallic term for ‘aggressors’ who already infested the remoter areas of the empire, were runaway slaves, military deserters, highwaymen and brigands, and they had been joined by dispossessed peasants to form sizeable bands who preyed upon travellers, peasants who were still working the land, and even small settlements where there was insufficient force to drive them away. In several cases the bandits had overwhelmed the military forces sent to suppress them, and had sacked un-walled towns. What had started in Brittany had spread down the coast of the Atlanticus, across the wine country of the Loire and almost to the great southern city of Narbonne. Now
came news that faraway Spain was in flames, too.  It was a major headache for Rome, and for the legate to whom the problem had been handed, but it was only one of several pressing issues that faced Carausius.

While he was tasked with restoring the Roman Peace, he had to consider not just the brigandage on the land, but also the piracy on the seas off northern Gaul. Saxons from Denmark and Germania ruled the sea from the Baltic to the Gallic Strait.  Picts and Hibernians from the western islands were raiding Britain, as Carausius knew from bitter personal experience, and Frankish pirates infested the waters all around the Gallic coast.  Almost daily, cargoes were being taken, ships’ crews and passengers captured and sold into slavery and the trading fleet itself was being hijacked and turned into yet more pirate ships.

“We have to build and man a fleet, we have to increase the size of our legions and we have to find the money to do it,” Carausius told his aide, Lycaon. “Then we can clean up the pirates, and send an expedition across Gaul and into Hispania, crucify a few and get some forts built and garrisoned so we can keep these bastards in line. But we need money to do it.”

He was still fretting over funding as he watched the Minerva, one of the fleet’s few triremes, negotiate the narrow entrance into the harbour, and wondered sourly if theirs had been yet another fruitless patrol.  It had not, and he brightened at the sight of several strange vessels that were trailing in, following the trireme, obvious captives. The Minerva’s young captain was soon standing before his commander, glowing with pride. This, he thought, would please old Car the Bear. “We took five pirate vessels, sir,” he reported, “and we have 38 captives; we had to kill a few, but the good news is what we took from them.”  The officer fished under his blue naval cloak for his purse and pulled out five gold coins. “Aureii,” he said proudly. “We have a whole chest of coin and silver bullion under guard on Minerva.”

The tale came out quickly. After two routine stop-and-searches that had yielded some profit, the trireme had trapped three pirate vessels in a bay where they could not out sail the Romans’ oared galleys. After a brief fight with each, the warship had hooked on and boarded the corsairs.  “They’d been raiding and had looted several coastal settlements. We just liberated the loot and the captives for ourselves. We burned two of their ships, which were holed and sinking anyway.” 

The idea hit Carausius with almost perceptible force. Instead of chasing away the pirates, he could simply become a pirate himself. He would discover their home bases and intercept the corsairs as they returned, loaded with loot. He’d relieve them of most of it and release them. That way, he could pay his troops, put down the worst of the piracy, continue to increase his treasury and stamp out the land-based rebellions. “Get that money to the treasurer, Allectus,” he said thoughtfully. “You’ve done very well. Now, send just a few of the pirate crews but not the captains or their chosen men to the slave pens. You can discreetly let the pirate captains choose who we should take for the slave pens. That way, we’ll keep the pirates active and improve the quality of their crews. But,” he warned, “don’t enslave the brigands’ captives. They’re not rebels, they’re victims.  We need the general goodwill if we’re to get information. Give the victims passage to their places, drop them along the coast, they can make their own way home from there. That’s enough, go.  I have some business to get started.”

Carausius wanted to use the captured bullion, and for that he needed to melt it down and issue it as coin. He needed to build a mint as well as a navy and an army, but he was light-hearted at the once-daunting prospects. He had gold. “Lycaon,” he called to his adjutant, “get a few amphorae of good wine to the Minerva crew who just came in, announce a weekend’s leave for them. Give them a good donative, and let the whorehouses enjoy some extra business. The mariners deserve my thanks. And, by the way, get a couple of flagons of that wine for us. We can drink to the future with better prospects now!”

Carausius sent for his old shipmaster, and Cenhud came gladly from Forum Hadriani to the stone fortress of Bononia. He brought with him the several men Carausius had asked for, Belgic shipbuilders, expert on the rivers of the Rhine and Meuse.  Cenhud greeted him warmly. “Caros, my son,” he said, “I am so proud of what you are and who you have become.”  “Old friend, I want someone I can trust to run this operation,” the legate explained. “First, I want to build a fleet of warships that can transport my troops along the great rivers. You know how the army uses them in Germania? Even the smallest vessels can move about 40 men, and can cover 60 or more miles a day on the water. When we have that under way, I’ll subdue these bastards on the land, then next, you can build me a sea-going fleet, too, and we’ll knock out the pirates on the ocean itself.”

His land-based plan was simple. Carausius would move military forces swiftly and almost without warning across Gaul and Spain by river, outflanking the rebel hordes and pinning them against impassable water obstacles so his troops could trap and slaughter them.  At sea, he’d supplement his big warships with shallow-draught oared vessels that could intercept pirates close to the coast, so he could relieve them of their booty as they came home from their expeditions.  His soldiers would have to learn some of the skills of sailors, but as they used the great rivers, they would be the fastest-moving troops the world had seen. Running ahead of any warnings, they would strike deep and hard into the heart of rebel territories, and be virtually immune to ambush along the way.

The plan was a triumph and cemented the reputation the general had with his troops. They’d always had a grudging admiration for him, and he for them. They regarded him as hard but fair. Now, with a series of stunning victories, Carausius had brought them pride, and they loved him for it. The general himself led the first expedition, down the great Seine in its springtime floods, to the important stronghold at Lyon.  He explained his intent to his commander Lycaon.  “We’ll sail south and meet the scouts who went out a week ago, and we’ll leave one force north of where they find the brigands. Then we sail past the Bagaudae in the night, hopefully undetected because they won’t be expecting us, and disembark the rest of our force. With the river on our east, the disembarked troops north and us south, we’ll almost have them trapped.  We’ll send cavalry out to the west to spook them, and drive them north or south, where we’ll be waiting. And if they don’t move, we just advance up the river bank and trap them that way.”

The operation went as if its script had been chiselled into marble. The scouts questioned travellers, drovers and shepherds and found that about 1,200 brigands had sacked and burned several small towns west of the Seine and were camped about a half mile from the river. Lycaon took command of the northern force, landing troops and cavalry three miles short of the rebels, while Carausius waited until dusk and, led by several smaller craft with shielded lanterns to guide them, set off under sail and oars to glide past the unsuspecting horde under cover of dark.  Landing the horses and the artillery was the most difficult part of the exercise, but it was done before dawn and the cavalry set out north and west to close the circle on the sleeping insurgents. The scouts and the two bodies of legionaries kept in contact with fire and signal flags to synchronize their attack, and the cavalry pushed the rebels eastwards like beaters driving game. Both forces moved forward in double ranks, finding their line of advance impeded only twice by small copses of trees. The westernmost troops curved inwards as they advanced, better to trap the enemy, who were milling in confusion at the sight of the pincering phalanxes of metal coming at them.

Some army deserters with the rebels tried to organize a defensive line, but they were too few and the undisciplined peasants and brigands were more concerned with gathering their loot and their slaves and fleeing, unaware that they were in a noose of steel. Carausius ordered the catapults and ballistae forward, to add to the rebels’ panic. The catapults fired huge darts into the massed horde; the ballistae also hurled pots of blazing pitch into the mob. Then the brass trumpets sounded and the legions marched forward.

At 20 paces, they let their heavy javelins fly in first one, then a second volley that destroyed any cohesion the rebels might have had. The infantry followed that deadly hail of missiles with two more, short-range barrages of heavy darts, then, in wedge formation, levelled their spears over the tops of their shields and tramped in a saw tooth array straight into the mob. The legionaries used the heavy bronze bosses of their shields to pound the rebels backwards and their stabbing lances and swords battered and killed the Gauls as they scrambled over each other to escape.

Most of the brigands knelt in surrender. Those who fled found themselves caught between the river and the lances and slashing swords of the cavalry. After several hundred had been hacked down, the rest knelt to beg mercy. Soon, Davius the executioner and his crew were occupied in their grisly work with the ringleaders of the rebellion, but the armourers were even busier, chaining the captives for the slave coffles and their long march to the auction block.

Carausius had created a successful strategy, and over the next several years he sailed the coasts and quartered Gaul on its great rivers, patrolling the Loire, Seine and Rhone to trap bandits, repeat the butchery, liberate the rebels’ loot and fatten his coffers. Always, he took along his executioners, whose crosses appeared outside town after town. The rotting corpses nailed up high reminded rebels of the long, cruel arm of Roman retribution. “They can respect us or they can fear us, or both, but they’ll not defy us,” said the general, reinforcing his own belief that the cruelties were justified because making examples of the lawless saved many other lives.

After an expedition along the Garonne that mopped up much of the brigandage in the southwest, Carausius’ ship-borne troops edged along the coastal waters of Our Sea, outflanking the snowy, steep passes of the Pyrenees. The flotilla emerged without warning at the Ebro River. There, the legionaries surprised and slaughtered the Iberian insurgents who had looted great swathes of countryside right to the gates of Gerona, and marched onwards to capture the gold mines at Leon.  The rewards came every month, when ships and a heavily-guarded mule train took back bullion to the riverfront mint at Rouen. There, Allectus was busy producing the best coinage anyone had seen in 200 years. His moneyers were skilled at taking silver or gold and blending them with brass and bronze into an alloy that looked like pure gold. This they would beat into the proper thickness before cutting them into small square blanks. These were slightly larger than the circular dies a moneyer used. He’d place the blank onto the die,
then strike it with a mallet to impress one side of the coin. Next, he would put another die on the remaining blank side and hammer down on it to make the second imprint. When the edges were trimmed, the result was one new coin.

“Our money’s been taken right down since Septimius Severus,” Carausius grumbled to Cenhud as the pair shared a jug of wine and looked over plans for a new warship. “It’s been debased so far that it’s a joke.  Rome’s latest double denarius, for example, is just bronze washed over with silver. Nobody wants money like that but it was all we had to give the troops, so why would they fight for us? Now, with decent money, they have every incentive. Remember, Gaius Julius paid his troops with his own money when Rome wouldn’t send him their pay, and the boys remembered that, and stayed loyal when he needed them. It was fair, and it made him emperor. Anyway,” he grinned, “I make a far more handsome head on a dupondius than old Julius ever did. I’m surprised anyone would want to part with me just for food or wine.”

In the next months, Carausius shuttled back and forth between the green-topped, white cliffs of Bononia and Dover, overseeing legions in Britain and Gaul, and driving his sailors to harry the pirates of the narrows. He drove his men hard, he fed them well, he paid them well and they would have eaten out of his hand because he gave them fair rules administered fairly. Shrewdly, the Briton did not hesitate to let his troops know who was responsible for the good money they were getting. He had his own bearded image stamped on the coinage with the legend: ‘The new Golden Age is here.’ In another minting, aimed at the British jarls who ached for independence from Rome, he called himself ‘The Long-Awaited One,’ ‘Spirit of Britain,’ and ‘The Restorer of Britain.’ Not only did the coinage propaganda seem to validate Carausius’ right to lead, but as he cheerfully explained, “It pays to remind the footsloggers that Rome wasn’t always in the disarray it’s in these days, and if they want to think the gods sent me to bring back the good old days, so much the better.”