Arthur Britannicus (29 page)

Where were the Romans coming ashore? It was vital he knew, to concentrate his reserves and catch them as they came onto the beach, before they gained a decent foothold. He turned to the sorceress Guinevia, who had been recording orders for the garrisons in London and Eboracum. “What do you think Maximian is doing?” he asked, frustrated. She stared at him oddly, and a small vapour cloud formed unnoticed above their heads. Suddenly, clairvoyantly, it was all outlined in his mind, so sharp and detailed that it was palpably the truth; he knew. He was absolutely certain that he knew the future. The Romans intended first to seize the lesser port of Lympne, to use it to disembark an initial landing of the first waves of troops. With that established beach head, they’d march overland on a broad front to Dover, sweeping aside the thin screen of cavalry that would oppose them, to surprise and destroy his fleet in harbour. That accomplished, they could use the port’s facilities and the river wharfs for the swift disembarkations of more and more troops, with a quick turnaround of the invasion vessels to ferry more reinforcements from Bononia. With Dover in their hands, they would establish an unassailable strongpoint from which they could crush the Britons at leisure.

Those unexpected squalls had saved him as they deflected that first landing party from its target. That means, Carausius reasoned as he enjoyed the psychic clarity induced by the sorceress, that they’d been swept just a critical little way off course, down the strait. Everything was clear to him and his years of sailing the strait caused him to flash on the thoughts: ‘Chances are they wouldn’t try to weather Dungeness with all that offshore rip and the turbulence of the undersea ridge there. They’d have opted to run ashore where they could. Chances also are they’d have planned to arrive in two or more waves because Lympne isn’t big enough to handle them all at once.’ If the weather abates, he thought, and his experience in these waters told him that it soon would, they’d be able to get everyone ashore on the shingle beaches on the east side of Dungeness.

He was as certain as he breathed that Maximian would do that. “He won’t want to split his forces and risk having us destroy them one piece at a time,” Carausius murmured.  He calmed his racing thoughts. He should expect that the Romans were about to land the first part of their force, probably in the big bay east of Dungeness. They would not dare to land the second part in darkness. Anyway, the tide would be wrong for that. It was clear to him: the first troops would hack their way ashore to establish a beach head, the second would have to wait, or stand out to sea and come ashore on the beach on the next tide, in daylight tomorrow. That should give them enough legionaries to grab Lympne despite the troops the Britons could scramble together at short notice, and then the Romans could land their heavy stuff like the artillery and siege equipment, plus livestock like the cavalry horses and transport mules at a proper harbour.

It was all clear to Carausius, and equally clear to him was what he could do to stop the invaders. He turned to the flame-haired Welsh earl Cuneglasus, a fine warrior who had earned his kingdom of Powys with his own strong sword arm and command of his wild chariot squadrons. “Use your influence with these prickly princelings,” he told him. “Get the jarls and barons in here, as many of them as you can round up, as quickly as you can. I want a gathering within the hour. Don’t let them waste time squabbling about who defers to whom, or who sits where, and send messengers to get word out to the others up the coast. Send for the prefects and tribunes, too. Every officer here, half an hour.” His eye fell on Guinevia and he thought of their small son, who was presumably in his wicker crib with an attendant nurse. ‘Take Milo away from the coast. It won’t be safe here. Be ready to travel.”  Guinevia smiled gently and shook her head. “We shall be safe,” she said calmly. “And, Caros, my place is with you.”  Already though, Carausius was not listening. His mind was churning with the situation at hand since he had seen the future so clearly.  He turned to a tribune. “Get the fleet on full readiness, prepare the log booms to block the harbour here and across the Thames river, but don’t put them in place until we know they’re definitely coming. We’ll deny them Dover and Londinium with just a few big trees in the right place and a few hundred men on the shore. But first, get a boom in place at Lympne, too. I want that port shut down, now.  Don’t wait until you see the enemy, implement that order at once. And you,” he gestured at his cavalry commander, “stay with me. I have something urgent for you.”

XXXIII
. Lympne

Constantius Chlorus, meanwhile, was waist-deep in surging surf. The first wave of troopships was grinding ashore on a desolate bank of shingle that was barely east of a low promontory. That projection stuck out into the narrows and seemed to have created some truly foul currents and violent wave action out there. Good thing they’d not had to sail through that, he thought. The shipmasters had been obviously alarmed at the sight and had vehemently warned him against trying. They’d turned for the shore and run up the shingle, but the general’s own ship had grounded short of the shore on an outer bank and he and his troops had to wade ashore through deeper water. He was losing his footing and, armoured as he was, in serious danger when an attentive ensign caught Chlorus by the tie cords of his crimson officer’s cloak and half-dragged him to the shallows. Damned saltwater, everything will chafe and itch for days, the general thought. He struggled up the shingly beach and took the tribune’s salute crossly, two red spots marking his pale face.

“We’ve sent scouts out already, lord,” said the officer. “We seem to be at the arse end of nowhere. That way, north, is what looks like a big marsh, but this shingle seems to go northeast and inland.
It’s good footing, which could allow us to make decent progress once we get everyone landed.” The general frowned.

“Get on with it,” he snapped. “Get everyone ashore, it’ll take hours. Set up for the night. We’re here until dawn anyway; we’re not going stumbling off into a bog.” He gave his cloak to his servant. “Get that thing dried out, and get me another one,” he ordered. “I’m soaked.”

Even in the soft half-light of a summer’s dusk, the British cavalry troop sent from Dover did not make an impressive sight. The ponies, shaggy moorland creatures, were so small their riders’ dangling feet almost touched the ground, and behind each saddle was slung a pair of big nets untidily stuffed with forage, all of it adding to an unmilitary appearance. The riders themselves wore an assortment of armour and equipment: leather helmets with a stitched ridge, leather-reinforced trews to protect their thighs from chafing on the sheepskin horse blankets that covered their steeds’ backs, small round targs as shields and breastplates of boiled leather. The most military things about them were the long lances they carried, but the overall effect was hardly parade order, as each rider led two or three mules. Those beasts of burden were loaded with leather bags full of some metallic cargo that clinked occasionally as the animals trotted.

Their appearance may have been unimpressive, but the cavalry was highly trained and efficient, and their commander had taken careful note of his emperor’s orders, which were to locate but not engage the enemy, to remain unseen if possible, to scout the ground for a specified set of conditions and to dispose of the contents of the leather sacks in a particular manner.

The commander, a diligent man, saw to it that his equestrians carried out those orders scrupulously, discreetly and well. His silent scouts, their accoutrements tied with scraps of linen to prevent metal clashing on metal, went unobserved as they spotted the Romans encamped on the shingle, where they were readying for the next morning’s arrival of more troops. They reported the sighting, the cavalry commander issued some quiet directions, and he and his squadron did what they were ordered to do without being detected. The entire squadron faded away into the darkness after making certain identifying marks with small cairns of piled rocks on the shoreline.

High tide came just before first light, and Maximian ordered his two fleets launched from the coast of Gaul for Lympne, trusting that the port had been seized by now. The first fleet, under Maximian’s own command, set out from Itius Portus. The larger ships left the harbour in a steady procession and the smaller troop barges were manhandled down the shelving sandy beach into the now-calming waves. As the emperor sailed, he sent couriers south to inform his admirals. They and the larger transports from Bononia would carry the cavalry and heavier gear like the siege equipment, nail kegs, bridge-building materials and catapults. They’d delay their departures to allow Maximian time to disembark his troops and clear the harbour to receive the cavalry and heavy gear, for they too were headed for Lympne.

Maximian was barely clear of the shore when the bireme was sighted. “Finally,” he grumbled to an aide. “Where has that bloody messenger been?”  Shortly, the oared vessel pulled close alongside and the courier from Constantius made his report. The fleet had been blown off course and landed about ten miles down the coast from Lympne. The courier ship had spent the night battling wind and tide to bring the news, and the messenger did not know if the port had been seized. Perhaps the other bireme courier ship would have more news, lord.  Maximian tugged at his beard. “We may well not have the port,” he told his officers. “We’ll go there first to investigate. Send a couple of ships northwest to contact Constantius and find out his situation. It may be we’ll have to land these troops on the beach and march back to Lympne to seize the place. It’s a nuisance, but it can be done.”

He sent the bireme back into Bononia to apprise his officers there of the change. The cavalry and the siege train would have to follow later than planned. He’d get word to them when to leave, but it might mean the delay of a day or so. He shrugged. He could cope without the cavalry and there would be no call yet for siege engines. As he turned to watch the messengers depart, a plume of smoke caught his eye. He looked at the headland of Gris Nez, where an obvious signal fire was blazing, and swore. Eastwards, beyond the headland another and then another matching blaze and attendant smoke plume answered. Westwards, three more signals told the British across the narrows that the Roman fleet was on the water.

The heavy boom of tree trunks chained end to end was stretched across the mouth of the harbour at Lympne and the Britons had fortified the breakwater with ballistae and archers against any possible landing to remove it. In the Thames at Tilbury, grunting sailors were grumbling at Car the Bear’s demands as they hauled another floating barrier of chained logs to where it could be deployed across the river in the matter of a quarter hour. The long line of signal towers stretched along the banks of the estuary would give plenty of warning of the Romans’ approach.  At Dover, the British fleet was putting out into the Narrow Sea and a troop of marines was already floating the port’s vast boom into place as the last of the flotilla moved towards the strait. Britain was closing its sea gates, and the wooden walls of its defences were being sailed out to meet the invaders.

During the night, the warriors of Britain had also been moving into place, marching west down the high road from Dover to meet the enemy encamped on the sweeping shingle beach at Dungeness. Their cavalry scouts along the white cliffs could see more Romans sailing in mid-strait, angling towards the port at Lympne. Soon, after the invaders’ reconnaissance vessels had surveyed the defences and scurried back to the main fleet, the flotilla changed direction and, sailing parallel to the shore, headed west for the landing ground their comrades had occupied.

Carausius and his general staff trotted their horses onto a small bluff above the shingle to the east of the Roman beach head. From his vantage point, the war lord in his purple cloak surveyed the terrain. This was where he’d had his cavalry commander choose a site, and it had been carefully described to him. A ragged man was brought forward to the circle of officers. “This, lord, is a cattle drover who knows these marshes,” explained the tribune Cragus, "and he has shown my scouts a path through the wetlands a mile or more over there.” The emperor nodded. ‘Give him gold and keep him close. He is not to leave until this battle is over.”

He turned to the equestrian who had chosen the site. “Where did you put them?” The horseman pointed out the markers he’d left, rocks piled in groupings. Carausius looked and nodded. “Excellent.” He held out his hand to congratulate the soldier, and they grasped wrists, shaking with conspiratorial grins like mischievous schoolboys. The emperor was delighted with the dispositions and showed it. Carausius’ specific, detailed instructions to his cavalry commander had urged the man to choose a place like this with care, and he had chosen well. 

What the emperor was viewing around the beach head of the encamped Romans was a sweeping bay. It ended in a low headland to the south before the land turned west into the next big bay. The inverted triangle of the promontory contained along its eastern edge one of the world’s largest swathes of shingle where the Romans held their beach head. Tucked inside the triangle was a vast marshland almost impassable to man or beast. Further west, the marsh ran down to the sea on the other side of the headland, meaning that the Romans had chosen to camp with reedy marsh on two sides and the strait on the third. The Britons stood astride the invaders’ only feasible land route out. The confrontation would come and the battle would be fought along the wide, firm strip to the Romans’ east, between marsh and sea. Behind the British defenders was the road to Dover.

The emperor set his sappers to work. They began digging deep pits about 20 feet apart and drove sharpened stakes and short-shafted spears, points upright, into the bottoms of the holes. No cavalry could cross those works. The Britons’ left flank was guarded by the strait, their right flank ended at the marsh, and there, in the reedy shallows, the cavalry commander had under cover of darkness emptied the contents of the baggage mules’ leather sacks. Hundreds of coltrops, horse-crippling, four-pointed spikes were concealed under the surface of the muddied water. Infantry would be slowed and too vulnerable to the archers if they tried to plunge through the mud and water, but cavalry could be used to try to turn the flank there. Now, a hidden spiked barrier marked with rocks whose significance was known only to the British awaited any flanking cavalry.

Another surprise was in store for the invaders. Concealed behind the reverse slope of a line of dunes that stretched behind the Britons’ rear, a vast flood of the barons and jarls of Britain who had answered the emperor’s call was arriving. They had come from their halls and fortresses in the meadows and moors of their country to repel the Romans, and they had brought the weapons used two centuries before by their great queen Boadicea. Gathering quickly, and still hidden behind the dunes were rank upon rank of the terrible war chariots of the Britons’ ancestors, called to duty one more time to save the country from the ancient enemy.

Carausius paused in his anxious reconsideration of his deployments as he thought of those chariots so vital to his plans. Could they, would they carry out the task he’d set them? It was with the gods, he thought. At the same moment, on one of the rock piles that marked a limit of the cavalry trap, a white rat groomed its whiskers, and at an ancient shrine three miles away, the priestess Guinevia was sacrificing a lamb to the witch goddess Nicevenn.

The Romans had investigated the harbour at Lympne and found it barred to them by the log boom and the waiting ballistae. Maximian’s signal officers each took his red woollen flags, and following the book, waved two-handed the codes that turned the fleet west to join Constantius. It would have to be a beach landing, but the sea was calmer, so the operation was feasible. The emperor sent word back by bireme to Bononia to send on the cavalry, but to leave the siege engines behind for now. The blue sails of the Roman invasion fleet headed steadily west.

Carausius’ tribunes oversaw the dispositions as they chivvied their troops into line. On this overcast day, there was no sun behind them to dazzle the Romans, as the military manuals advised in choosing a position, but the wind at least was favourable, sending dust towards the enemy. In the battle lines, behind the deep-dug pits, each man had three feet of space; each rank was six feet apart. Carausius, resplendent in his war gear, ordered a century of 80 picked men to stay with him and the Eagle standards of the legions.

He and the elite red-chevroned guard who had uncovered the lost Eagle would be front and centre of the line, at the place where the fighting would be bloodiest, for the enemy would want to capture the vaunted standards and it was the place of honour. If the battle went badly, it was also the place of most danger, but the big emperor knew his purple crest, his Eagle standards, his new linen flag with its bear emblem would stand proudly. His silver jarl’s badge of office marked him as a feared lord of war and his men would take confidence from those symbols. Privately, he knew that every tiny advantage was desperately important. The Romans were a fearsome enemy, and this land battle would be his most difficult ever.  He had the advantage of fighting from behind defences, but his forces would be well outnumbered. It was, he thought grimly, a time to look at the sky and ask the gods for help. By the end of the day, he might well be in chains, dead or hanging from a crucifix. This was one battle he could not afford to lose, for himself or for his country.

Carausius glanced again at the clouded sky, wondering again how many more days or mere hours he had left in this life, then shrugged aside his pessimism; time to wonder about all that
after the battle. For now, he had much to do. He called to a tribune and instructed him to ensure that certain centurions had specific orders about moving men to allow the chariots through and when to do it. The wings of the line were secured by the sea and the marsh, the centre was reinforced with pits and stakes. The tribunes had mustered a reserve infantry force behind the dunes with the hidden chariots and another force was dispatched under Cragus with the cattle drover to guide their way through the marshes. A path there would bring them out behind the Romans’ rear, the drover had assured them. Cragus vowed to gut the man himself if he lied.