Arthur Britannicus (24 page)

The Britons were held, chained and under guard, in a stone and thatch structure oddly similar to that in which the emperor had lived as a boy. He remembered his escape out of that hut from the sea raiders and assessed his chances this time. Not too good, he thought.  As he lay down to rest, uncomfortable in his irons, he wondered what had happened to his hounds Axis and Javelin, who that morning had run alongside the hunters’ horses. Now it seemed a lifetime ago. He asked Aemilius, who told him he’d seen the dogs slinking behind ‘like wolves, lord,’ as the captives were dragged towards the Tay.  With that news, the emperor settled down to doze. He was bruised, exhausted and hungry but somehow comforted.

Next morning, Guinevia, waking in her father’s compound, was the first of Carausius’ company to learn what had happened, but it came as no great shock. She had slept fitfully and knew the gods had a message for her, but she was curiously calm. Matters were bad, but they would be remedied, she knew. As the sun took the mist from the fields, a clansman came to her sleeping quarters at to summon her. She took her baby son to the wet nurse and walked calmly across the cobbled yard. The old chieftain, who had heard the news from two clansmen, who had seen the troop of captives pass and had followed their tracks back to the killing ground, was thoughtful when he relayed the news to his daughter.

“You are not just his lover, you managed that treaty,” he reminded her. “If the ones who broke it are fearful of your master’s vengeance, they might seek to kill you.” Guinevia was dismissive of the idea. “I am a Druid, adept of the witch goddess. I was trained by the sorcerer Myrddin,” she reminded him. “I have the power of rivers and mountains and I have wielded the iron sickle to cut mistletoe. They will not dare to touch me.” 

She dispatched two slaves by pony to Stirling, with a missive reporting the emperor’s capture, and set out with her guards for Bertha, the onetime Roman camp, now the village where treacherous Calderian ruled. She arrived in time to see the last minutes of Aemilius’ lingering death. The Picts had fastened him in a green wicker cage roughly shaped like a man, then hung it on a chain over a fire. The unfortunate Roman roasted to death, moaning, soon after his hair and eyelids had burned away. The dashing young centurion Crassus, who was noted for his luck at both women and dice, died next; his chest crushed under great stones that the painted savages piled onto him.

Guinevia hid her horror and remained impassive and outwardly calm, as she waited for Calderian to emerge from his sleeping quarters. Carausius, she knew, would not be killed until the chieftain was present. It was afternoon before he emerged, pallid and yawning. He registered the sorceress’ presence and was alarmed, but walked to her and inclined his head. “It is an honour to have you here for the ceremony, mother,” he said.

“Ceremony?” Guinevia snapped. “This to me looks like foul butchery. There is no honour to the gods in this.”

Calderian
hesitated, reconsidering his defiance, then stiffened his resolve and ordered the emperor brought out. “I shall kill your emperor myself,” he said. “We shall see about the gods.”

XXIX
. Selsey

Search parties had gone out at dusk when the emperor had failed to return from the hunt and the camp was disturbed all night with the comings and goings of horsemen. The tribune Cragus feared the worst, and found it soon after dawn. A patrol was drawn by the circling, cawing ravens to the mutilated bodies of their comrades, but the soldiers realized that the emperor and several others were not among the dead. Cragus deduced that Carausius had been taken prisoner, so ordered a dozen detachments to sweep the countryside. He detailed one squadron to head directly and with all speed to the next major settlement, at Perth. Those horsemen met the mounted slaves hurrying with their dispatch to Stirling. When he heard of their mission, the prefect in charge had the initiative to open the package and read Guinevia’s message. He ordered two cavalrymen and one of the slaves to continue to the camp at Stirling with Guinevia’s note and scribbled his own report for them to deliver, detailing his plans. He would ride to rescue Carausius, who was likely at the old Roman camp at Bertha. He indicated that he was taking a guide, and sending the other with the note to bring reinforcements to him. With Guinevia’s slave showing the way, he pushed his column forward at a steady hand-gallop. 

Three burly guards forced Carausius out of the hut at spear-point and pushed him to kneel in front of Calderian. The Pict walked around him and noticed the fine, nailed boots he wore. “Take those from him,” he ordered. As the marching boots came off, he saw the Briton’s mutilated foot where a Saxon’s sword had hacked off two of his toes. He laughed. “We can even that up for you,” he sneered, drawing his own blade.

Guinevia stepped forward. “If you harm him, I will call on the witch goddess Nicevenn to curse you,” she said calmly. “She will turn your eyes into suppurating pools of pus and your lying, false tongue into corpse marrow. Turning on the guards she continued. “Touch him, and you and your shrivelled souls will be the playthings of Rodak, the hideous boar goblin of the Underworld, and you will spend your agonized eternity howling and crying for mercy as you thrash in molten iron and sulphur.” 

The guards, turning pale at the threats to their souls, backed away, making the sign against the evil eye but Calderian, though nervous, would not accept such a total loss of face. He half turned away, then suddenly swung his sword, chopping down into Carausius’ unguarded
ankle. The Briton yelled in agony and rolled sideways. Guinevia grasped at the Pict’s sword arm, but he pushed her away and turned to hack again at the prone captive. Before he could strike, two grey-black blurs raced across the packed dirt of the courtyard and flattened themselves growling, fangs bared, in front of the Pict.

Carausius, trying to rise, saw his dogs face Calderian. He did not hesitate.  “Axis, Javelin!” he shouted, gesturing a hand to his chin. The dogs saw the familiar silent hunting sign to which they’d been trained, and stayed crouched and quivering for the release. The Pict saw his death in their menace but was frozen motionless. Carausius gestured again, a chopping motion, and the big dogs leaped simultaneously in a deadly choreograph of attack.

Their bodies knocked Calderian backwards, jarring his sword loose. Even before his shoulders hit the ground, two sets of great jaws were tearing into him. One had his windpipe, the other’s teeth clashed against the Pict’s, tearing his gums as the dog seized his lower jaw. The hounds shook the man like a rat, flopping his head wildly as they savaged him. The teeth of the first closed through Calderian’s trachea and larynx, ripping out his whole voice box and pulling it away in a froth of blood and saliva. The other dog, growling as it braced its paws for leverage against the man’s chest, tore his jaw half away, leaving the Pict choking in his own lifeblood, helpless and so shocked he was unable even to raise his arms in defence.

Deep-chested rumbling growls came from both dogs as they harried the dying man, and changed the targets of their savage, flesh-ripping attacks. Axis tore into Calderian’s groin, Javelin, foaming blood and spume, shook him violently by the nape, breaking his neck. The man had no voice even to whimper as his lifeblood pooled out steaming onto the packed dirt of the compound. Carausius lay nearby, propped on one elbow. He watched impassive, silent as his terrible hounds worried the mutilated Pict for a minute or so longer, then whistled sharply, three piercing notes, and called them off.

The prefect at the head of the column that galloped into the settlement could scarcely take in the sight. His emperor was propped against the wall of a hut, his foot wrapped in a gory cloak. Two blood-splashed, mottled grey dogs crouched protectively by him, snarling ferociously at any movement. Nearby a dead man with only half a face and a torn-apart crotch lay slumped on his side in a puddle of congealing blood, his head at an odd angle. Standing over the corpse and facing a dozen mesmerized, unmoving Pictish brigands, was a woman in an otter fur cloak that trailed blood from its lowest hem.

Over the woman’s head at the height of two men was a small vapour cloud that had mysteriously formed in the grey morning. Her arm was outstretched, her forefinger, on which a silver pentagram ring glowed in the poor light, was pointing at each of the transfixed men in
turn. She was keening in the Latin and British tongues, invoking the names of the pagan witches and demons from the deps of hell, who would seize them and theirs if they moved even a single step.

She chanted of her witch goddess Nicevenn, leader of the Wild Hunt that roamed the world with its hounds from Hell on Samhain, the night of the dead. She threatened the shaking, terrified Picts, chanting in a hypnotic and remorseless drone how she and her Druid powers would send them to flee in terror alongside Nicevenn’s damned down the long, black slopes of eternity. Their bodies would be so foul, she promised, that even Sterculius, Roman god of sewage would turn aside in disgust, and their eyes would liquify into pools of corruption at the very moment they turned to watch his rejection. She used the eloquence of her god Ogmia to shackle with brutal chains of words. She held her shaken listeners attentive and captive and her emperor safe from their swords with the awful power of her threats until the troops arrived. The drone went on as the prefect dismounted to stand by his commander, and the British troops circled around the Picts to herd them at sword-point. Only then did Guinevia fall silent, lower her accusatory outstretched arm and bow her head in relief. And nobody heard as she smiled to herself and murmured, “I don’t think the Jesus-botherers can do that.”

The wounded Carausius was taken to safety, the legions tramped out into the glens of Caledonia and the tribune Cragus conducted a textbook campaign. He destroyed the Picts’ army, their crops, their huts and their morale, all in a matter of months. He cleared the region between the walls of Hadrian and Antoninus with flying columns of cavalry that surprised and defeated the wandering warbands. He encircled the rocky strongpoint of the Votadini that controlled the Forth valley, expecting to conduct a long siege of the steep-sided stronghold, but the resistance melted away after a lucky shot from a ballista toppled the Votadini king, Alpin from a high wall. Cragus took the fortress’ surrender, lined the cliff with burdened crucifixes and moved next to crush the Damnoni tribesmen who had gathered to the west. Then he turned north against the greater body of their kin, who were encamped behind the presumed safety of the estuary.

Cragus remembered his history, and how the legions had conquered the wide Thames
river at Londinium with a pontoon bridge. Under cover first of darkness and then of the morning’s sea fog, he constructed a floating highway from lashed-together fishing vessels to cross the wide waters. The bridge and the fog allowed him to evade the eyes of Damnoni scouts who watched the upstream crossings, and his force arrived unsuspected on the clan’s eastern flank. The battle to which he brought them effectively ended after the Picts’ initial berserk charge was broken on the curved shields and long spears of the legion’s front rank. Their impetus spent, the tribesmen backed away and Cragus waved his veterans to step forward, stamping, chopping and thrusting in mechanical precision as they wreaked bloody ruin on the rabble. Cragus herded hundreds of captives into the slave pens and marched east and north along the line of old Roman forts to roll up the rest of the resistance. He left behind him a wasteland of scorched earth, plundered crops and ruined hamlets and brought back another procession of manacled slaves.

All the while, Carausius was immobilized, recovering from the ankle wound he’d received from the treacherous Calderian. The sword had cut deep, but the tendons seemed to have survived. British military medics had washed the wound carefully in vinegar, sewed it up and splinted and immobilized the joint. The emperor instructed them to do what the pharmacist Campana had done for his facial and foot injuries in the hospital in Mainz.  She had applied henbane and poppy seed to the wounds, cleaned them daily with sour wine, hyssop and comfrey and re-bandaged them daily in fresh linen. “I came out of that without infection,” he told his medics, rubbing his scarred cheek. “Do the same now, I don’t want my flesh to rot, I want to keep my leg.” The treatments worked and within a month, although unable to walk without pain, the emperor was in a raeda carriage trundling south, first to Colchester,
then on to coastal Fishbourne where he wanted to meet his staff and supervise the reinforcement of the Saxon Shore defences.

Couriers sailed daily across the narrows from Gaul or rode from the corners of Britain to Carausius’ palace, bringing intelligence from the mainland and from the line of garrisons that guarded the southern and eastern ramparts of his empire. His well-rewarded spies along the Rhine and Scheldt rivers also told him of the progress Maximian was making, rebuilding his burned fleet, and the Briton knew that another naval crisis and invasion was brewing. But, for all his concerns, he made time to take pleasure in the great palace, where the artisans he had brought to work there were moving ahead.

The mosaic artist Claria had been joined by a dark-haired Carthaginian astrologer, Cinea Carbonia, whose task was to create a detailed star chart that would be set in the tiny tiles to show the heavens just as they were on the night Carausius was born. On the walls above the mosaic, fresh murals displayed scenes from his life and career. Among them were painted images of his golden crown of courage, his recovery of the legion’s Eagle and his imperial wreath. The artist was careful
too, to leave space for the triumphs still to come, and like a good courtier, diligently mentioned that plan and the plentiful spaces to the emperor.

The forward planning was intelligent. The emperor of Britain was preparing to create new triumphs, and therefore was a frequent presence around the shipyards of Dover and Portus Magnus, where he was overseeing modifications to his refitted fleet. The shipmaster Cenhud had given the emperor some ideas, and he wanted them implemented. “The Romans are largely building ships of the kind they use in the Inland Sea, lord,” Cenhud explained. “They are useful in rivers like the Rhine, because they are nimble. They are also much easier to build, but they are not such effective sea-going warships as the Gaulish vessels we use.”

The difference, the old shipmaster explained, was in the way the Gauls built their ships. They used oak frames and nailed the planking of the hull to them carvel-style, butting the edges together to make a strong, smooth-sided vessel that was not stiff or brittle but would flex enough to survive in bad seas. The planking finished, they caulked the seams, hammering fibrous material like cattle hair between the heavy timbers. It was a longer process than the lap-straked, or clinker-built vessels the Romans built, where each plank of the hull overlapped the next. That made for an easier build, and the clinkered ships were lighter and more nimble but they were also weaker, and did not do as well in heavy weather, flexing overmuch in heavy seas.

Another vital difference was in the materials. Because of the strength of the Gauls’ ribbed ships, the hull planking could be heavy oak that was much stronger than the lighter pine boards used in the clinker-built boats.  “Clinkered pine or cedar, Caros, is fine for small boats. Warships need oak, and oak bound in iron at that, better for ramming enemy vessels,” the shipmaster concluded.  That, thought Carausius grimly, was where the great land general Maximian would learn a hard lesson from the seagoing Britons. He went back to the shipyards, hobbling but mobile, and supervised certain changes to the ships of his fleet.

Maximian did not have the efficient spy network of his rival, so was unaware of Carausius’ actions. The Roman had moved forward impatiently with his ship building efforts, and ridden his men hard. Now, he judged he was ready for the invasion and recapture of Britain and ordered his fleet to sail from Gaul.

The Roman had brought his newly-built troop barges down from Forum Hadriani. Eager to start, and champing at the bit after an eleven-day delay caused by foul weather, he had ignored his mariners’ advice and seized on a brief window between the storms to launch his invasion. He’d taken on troops along the Belgic coast and intended when he left the staging area off Ostend to sail northwest, weathering northerly around the south eastern tip of the British coast and into the mouth of the Thames river. His swift attack would plunge arrow-straight for the capital. Nothing could go wrong and Maximian gloated at the thought of seeing Carausius’ death.

The triremes that headed the Roman’s armada made a brave sight as they  entered the Gallic Strait and moved northeast against its fast-flowing ebb tide. Triple-banked oars under the blue sails dipped and swayed in rhythm, the tap of the hammer or sound of the horn that kept the rowers synchronized carried through the blustering wind, and the glint of the soldiers’ polished armour caught the rays of the watery sun. But all was not going well. The nasty northerly wind and high spring tides combined to wreck Maximian’s plan. The near-gale that rose unexpectedly quickly joined with seasonal strong currents to send a great salt river racing westwards. The German Sea poured out like a wall of water from a breached dam. It raced around headlands and churned up vast ridges of white-foamed waves as it forced itself into the narrows of the strait before racing to its spreading release in the wide Atlanticus.