Arthur Britannicus (6 page)

The Briton was watching the Saxon carefully and saw the man’s eyes narrow and face redden deeply at the insult. ‘He can be goaded’, Carausius thought calmly. ‘I can incite this one to fury’.  He turned to Juventus and the line of legionaries and put a hand on his hip. “I think thith one’th a Greek”, he lisped, “a proper bum chum.” He kept his voice loud enough for both Beobwill and the nearer barbarians to hear. A growl from the mob of tribesmen, whose rough tongue sounded to civilized ears as if they were saying ‘ba-ba-ba,’ hence the ‘bar-barian’ tag, told him they may not have understood his words, but they’d certainly picked up on the gesture. The shot had gone home; the disrespect for their champion was assailing their pride. As a few of the legionaries laughed, and the Saxons muttered to each other, the growl spread. Carausius watched carefully as his opponent moved across the trampled, soggy leaves and mud of the clearing. The big barbarian seemed to step very deliberately.

The Briton noted salt stains on the inside of Beobwill’s brown wool trews and what looked like a string of dried spit on the outside of one massive calf.  “Trews?” he thought. Then the realization hit him. The man was an equestrian. The stains were from his horse. His fighting was not usually done on foot. Carausius’ appraising eye took in the man’s tight-laced boots with their smooth soles, and he turned quickly away, dropping his javelin, kneeling and pretending to fumble with the weapon. Surreptitiously, he slid out his punching knife and slashed the laces of his marching boots. As he stood, snatching up and brandishing his javelin high to attract Beobwill’s furious gaze, he kicked off the footwear. He’d fight barefooted for surer grip in the slippery clearing.

The Saxon saw Carausius’ bootless feet as he stepped forward, and recognized that the tactic would give the Briton an advantage in the uncertain footing, but it was too late and he was too proud and suspicious of a trick to stop and unlace his own boots. Instead, without hesitation he roared and rushed forward, scything the big-bladed axe horizontally, and aiming to chop Carausius in half at the waist. The Briton stepped lithely sideways to parry the blow with his javelin, angling the shaft and deflecting the huge force harmlessly upwards, though it shaved a thick, foot-long splinter from the ash. Beobwill staggered slightly as the heavy weapon tugged him off balance and Carausius circled the sweep of his javelin’s long blade to slice a cut below the Saxon’s elbow. “You’re too slow, bitch,” he goaded, stepping back. 

Beobwill snarled and swung again, less wildly. Carausius took the blow on the iron blade of the javelin and felt the weakened shaft tremble. His eye was diverted for an instant as he glanced at the fresh gouge to assess the damage and Beobwill, shortening his grip on the long axe handle, surged in unexpectedly, chopping and thrusting two-handed. The rush forced the Briton back, his heel hit a fist-sized stone half buried in the loam, and he was unbalanced. Beobwill was fast. His next blow slid off Carausius’ helmet, sliced into his unguarded cheek and delivered a numbing blow to his left shoulder, but the armour held. The Briton stumbled backwards, fountaining blood. He was dazed but from long training circled the point of his javelin at the big Saxon, who was snarling and roaring as he came at him again. Beobwill swatted the Briton’s javelin aside, smashed the butt of the axe into Carausius’ cheekbone and chopped down with the blade.

The blow was a killing one, and only blind instinct saved the Briton as, head ringing with pain, he threw himself backwards. The axe blade scored down his breastplate and thudded through his left foot, severing the two smallest toes before it buried itself in the dirt. Beobwill bellowed in triumph, and the massed Saxons roared in response, rattling their swords and spears against their shields. The Roman ranks, now formed into three battle lines, stood almost mute, sucking in their breath as they watched their bloodied champion stagger towards defeat.  Juventus swore softly, and reached down for his short Sarmatian bow. If it came to it, he’d stick the Saxon through the throat, he vowed.

The pain from his mutilated foot had not yet fully reached Carausius’ consciousness. His left arm was almost useless, his neck was slick with blood from his flapping cheek where the teeth showed though, and his face was numb where his cheekbone was crushed. He shook his head, spraying blood droplets, and blinked hard, trying to focus his mind as Beobwill wrenched his axe free of the ground. The Saxon moved in again, slower this time, readying for the kill. He shortened his two-handed grip on the axe, whirred it again at his crippled opponent and growled in pleasure as the big blade hacked clean through the ash shaft, causing the long iron spearhead to fly uselessly sideways.

Carausius swayed, head drooping, Beobwill pulled back to swing again and the Briton took his chance. In the blink of an eye, snarling like a hound, he kicked out his right foot, heel hitting the ground first, and booted hard off his left, feeling the toes dig into the soft ground. His trailing leg straightened, and he pushed his hips forward at the same instant that his right foot flattened against the ground. The strike was as fast as an adder’s and he extended it by leaning towards the big Saxon, adding to his reach as he aimed inside the Saxon’s guard. The lunge, with Carausius’ arm extended in the classic posture of the swordsman, thrust the javelin’s jagged, broken handle into the Saxon’s open mouth. The big man’s head snapped backward and a spray of spittle, blood and broken incisors spattered outwards. The Briton continued his forward lunge, releasing the broken shaft and hurling himself onward. He grasped the stinking bear fur with both hands and head-butted Beobwill square on the bridge of his nose. The ornamental silver gilt eagle on Carausius’ helmet crushed the Saxon’s
eyebrow, the shuddering, heavy impact of the blow dropped him stunned to his knees.

In the blood-pumping rush of combat, Carausius felt again the sense of being immortal that he knew in combat. For him, time was oozing by only imperceptibly and the dim light of the ravine seemed bright and clear. He did not feel his wounds, and he felt detached, almost an observer of the events around him. He did not hear his own animal
snarls, he felt he had all the time he needed while his opponent appeared to be moving so slowly he could have danced around him. The Briton gave himself a mental nod of approval. The gladiators’ street fighting lessons had served him again.  Better move on, he told himself semi-scoldingly, although an observer would have considered no time at all had elapsed. Carausius took a half pace sideways, reached back with his right hand and flashed out his gladius from its shouldered sheath. It was so easy and natural, it was as if every pace, every movement were choreographed. Without even the hesitation of a single heartbeat, he thrust the heavy blade through the kneeling Saxon’s neck, in the traditional killing stroke for a defeated gladiator.

The steel went in with a sucking sound and a spurt of bright oxygen-rich arterial blood spouted upwards. Carausius twisted the sword and wrenched hard to free it of the clinging muscle, then stepped back. Beobwill’s last sound was the
harsh  rattle of his lungs emptying for their final time. He was dead before he slumped sideways onto the leaf mould.

Carausius touched the lacerated flap of flesh at his cheek, and grimaced. The light seemed to dim, his adrenaline-heightened consciousness seemed to ebb away. He felt crushing pain, here in his face, there in his foot. He stumbled on his maimed, blood-squelching toes but
stood upright to face the Saxon ambushers. “Who else wants a piece?” he shouted in his grating, accented German. Around the edges of the throng men began to turn away and slip quietly into the dripping forest. A knocking clatter of metal sounded behind the centurion as his infantrymen touched shield edges and stepped forward a pace. The menacing promise of the oncoming storm of violence broke the spell and a bold ranker shouted to his fellow legionaries: “Let’s do them for the Bear!”

The Saxons turned and began to move slowly, then more quickly through the trees, but there were too many and the retreat became a panic. They blocked each other as they tried to edge away from the ravine’s track and into the safety of the forest. A tribune shouted to the archers: “Aim for their balls!” before a hissing volley of feathered death thumped into the Saxon ranks. At the officer’s next order, a storm of heavy, lead-weighted javelins from the closing Romans thudded into the Saxons’ unguarded backs as they flinched away. From the right, two squadrons of Roman cavalry cantered down the column into position, and at a brazen blown command, the horsemen rode their leather-armoured mounts into the flanks of the shuffling barbarians, spitting them on the long lances, chopping and hacking with their heavy cavalry swords, mercilessly doing the butcher’s business of slaughter. In minutes, the Germans’ forest was their death field, an abattoir where men were slashed into bloody meat and where those Saxons who surrendered soon found themselves chained, enslaved and trudging into a lifetime of misery.

His wounds had bled freely, and once Carausius had been carried by Juventus and two other companions back to the field aid station behind the legion’s standards, the lacerations were further cleansed with vinegar before being sewn shut. The days of the journey from the mountains of the Jura back to Mainz were a faint opium-deadened memory, a time of jolting horse-drawn carriages, flaring oil lamps at night, and the voices of the medical attendants as they told over and again of the heroic contest and of the slaughter of the Saxons. 

Then, Carausius was in the base hospital at Mainz, a place sunlit in the summer
mornings, cool in the day’s heat, in a room that smelled pleasantly of the lemons used to repel moths; a haven soothed by the murmuring of bees in the herb garden outside. He spent his days asleep or drowsing, healing gangrene-free, passing the time in a drifting half-world of hurt and recovery. Several weeks went by. He’d made a few tries to walk the quadrangle but putting weight on the mutilated foot was still painful and he’d always have a limp, he supposed, but he was healing. 

One person was largely responsible for the soldier’s recovery. Campana, a female pharmacist who was a Briton like himself, took a special interest in the big man and used her
considerable skills to help him through the process of healing. She gave him henbane and poppy seed to ease his wounds, cleaned them daily with sour wine, hyssop and comfrey and re-bandaged them with fresh Spanish linen.  She eased with infusions of Illyrican iris the terrible headaches that beset him and made concoctions of herbs for other specifics. She employed sage to reduce his fevers, created a broth of ginger to ease inflammation, gave him wild cucumber to control pain and a broth of thyme for nausea. She used plenty of fennel, that herb favoured by gladiators, which they believed gave them courage and stamina, as a general tonic, and she flavoured his food with expensive pepper brought far overland from the Indies to Baghdad and onwards to the northern Italian trading centre of Ticinum. Satisfied with her efforts, she watched with proprietary pride as the soldier’s condition improved, week by week.  

Carausius also took daily hot baths in salt water, to ease his many aches and pains. The medical care, the rest and the excellent barracks food, which included ham, venison, cheese, and plentiful vegetables all combined to help the injured man recover his strength and speed his recovery. Campana supplemented the barracks diet with soup made with barley and beef marrow, and sometimes with expensive but tasty chicken broth, which his nurse insisted had healing qualities. She also gave him a good supply of figs, olives and fermented fish sauce imported from Italy, delicacies she successfully employed to tempt his appetite.  The pharmacist had been to Italy and in one of their many conversations - in which they enjoyed speaking in their native British - spoke with awe of a feast she’d attended at the villa of a wealthy prefect. Swans, geese and duck were
cooked  and served whole, she reported, with boiled parsnips, all of it served on vast platters and in great style. One note jarred her, though. The Romans ate it with their hands, she told him, with a small moue of distaste.

But the feast!  She recalled it in loving detail. It had included a whole roasted wild boar, juniper sausage, cakes stuffed with live figpeckers, peas stewed in honey, and edible dormice covered in poppy seeds and honey. Her favourite dish had been a fruit sauce of damsons, prunes and dates from Jericho, she said. Carausius, now rested and relatively free of pain, was relaxed and mellow. He teased his nurse with his own tales of feasting. Once, he told her a story of ordering a lobster and being served with a crustacean possessed of only one claw. “I asked the slave; ‘why does this creature only have one claw?’ and he told me it had been in a fight and lost the other,” he said.

“What did you say?” Campana obligingly asked.

Solemnly, Carausius said, “I told him to bring me the winner.”

He spoke, too, of the old Roman Marcus Gavius Apicius, a fabulously wealthy man with a big kitchen staff and an adventurous palate. “Seneca himself wrote of the appetites of Apicius,” Carausius told her. “He ate omelettes made with jellyfish; he consumed minced dolphin, boiled parrot and herb-stuffed mouse. He considered brine-pickled sows’ wombs a delicacy and he invented the world’s most expensive dish: a pie made with larks’ tongues.”

Campana gasped, Carausius grinned. “It ended badly. Apicius used up his entire fortune of 100 million sestersi – it simply vanished down his gullet. When his secretary told him that he was down to his last ten million or so, Apicius realized that his epicurean days were ending, so he went out like a true Roman: he had one last banquet and then poisoned himself.” 

The days slid by, sunlit and carefree, marked chiefly by the unexpected news that Carausius had been promoted to tribune, one of the legion’s six senior officers, effectively making him second in command. Although he was eager to take up his new duties, it was also good to be away from campaigning, to idle away the time, although the soldier still had a deeply-felt urge to return to Britain that had been renewed by his conversations with his countrywoman.  He was both restive for action and employment and at the same time was almost content not to have responsibilities.