Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank (75 page)

"And they killed for that? A pig and a cow?"

Cyrus looked at me strangely. "That could be a rich haul for starving men, Lord Clothar. Well worth killing for, nowadays."

"Sweet Jesus! What kind of a place is this Britain?"

Cyrus sniffed loudly, managing to sound disdainful and condescending at once, and his choice of honorific when he named me again conveyed something of the depths of his contempt for me as an Outlander who knew nothing yet disparaged everything.

"It is a place without leadership, Master Clothar. A land without law, where the only right to life that a man has is the one he holds in his hand to defend himself and to enable him to take what he needs in order to keep himself and his family alive. There is no state-run
civitas
in Britain now, no government granaries, no public relief in time of famine. No food at all, other than what a man may hunt or grow for himself. That ensures a harsh, cruel existence for those who cannot fight or claw their way to the top of the ruck of despair. This is only the first sight you have had of it, but you will see more, believe me. Of course, things are different in Camulod. Camulod has law. But Camulod is not yet large enough for its laws to cover all men. And by that I mean our army is not large enough. You cannot uphold or support the rule of law unless you have the means to enforce that rule. Someday we will expand from Camulod and govern more widely, but not yet. We are close to the time, but it is not yet right."

I found myself looking now with dawning respect at this young officer, seeing beyond his outward condescension to the mettle of the man underneath. I had been in his company only since dawn that day, and other than a casual nod of greeting when we were introduced to each other I had paid him little heed. I had noticed that he kept to himself, content to ride alone at the head of his men, followed by his two decurions, and that he seemed completely comfortable with himself and with his relationship to the thirty men in his charge. This young man Cyrus, I had thought, was a typical young squadron commander of Camulod, where thirty-man squadrons, each with two decurions and a squadron commander, were the norm according to Donuil, and the word
turma,
normally used in Gaul to denote a sixty-man squadron, was unknown.

It appeared that I had been in error yet again and that there was more to young Cyrus than first met the eye. Either that, or the typical young squadron commanders being trained in Camulod were several orders of magnitude ahead of their counterparts in Roman Gaul, for over there no incentive was offered to young officers to develop either philosophical opinions or moral platforms, both of which this young man appeared to value. Cyrus the tribune might have been three or perhaps four years older than I was, but I accepted after having listened to him for mere moments that he might be twice my age in terms of self-possession and analytical prowess. I decided to say nothing about either his tone of voice or his offhand treatment of me. I could see plainly that, in his eyes, I had laid solid claim to deserving both.

I noted the way he stared back at me clear eyed, his face devoid of expression, and then I looked again at the hanging farmer and the ruins of his little family.

"This happens often, then." I did not intend it to be a question, and Cyrus made no response. I glanced back at him. "The people who did this can't be far away. They haven't had time to travel far, encumbered by cattle."

He shook his head gently. "No, they have not. They must be close by. Would you like us to hunt them?"

Now it was my turn to quirk my brow. "You don't want to. Why not?"

"Because if we hunt them we will find them and then we will have to hang them and they will die in utter misery and great pain, and what will we have achieved, for all that pain and misery?"

"Justice, for these people!"

Cyrus glanced towards the hanged farmer. "I think not, Master Clothar. Vengeance, perhaps. Revenge. But justice? By whose criteria? Justice in your eyes, perhaps. But who are you, in the absence of any and all laws, to judge what might have happened to reduce the people who did this to such a condition? Or do you believe they might have been born as monstrous as they were today when they did this? Something made these people behave like this, and many of those might be things the like of which you could never imagine: starvation, suffering, deprivation, cruelty at the hands of stronger folk. But even if they are simply monsters, I would say no to hunting them. There are too many thousands like them between us and Verulamium, and our task is to find Bishop Enos, not to right the wrongs of a godless world."

I nodded, a single, abrupt dip of my head. "You are right, Tribune. Inarguably. And I am an ignorant Outlander with too many questions and no appropriate answers. Ride with me, if you will, and educate me further."

I pulled myself up into my saddle and wheeled away without another glance at the charnel house in the small clearing to ride with Cyrus at the head of our column as we trotted back towards the high roadway that cut across the horizon in a perfectly level slash of blackness.

We talked together at great length thereafter, Cyrus and I, and I learned much from him about the rule of law in Camulod, as devised and laid down by Merlyn Britannicus and his forebears: his father, Picus Britannicus, his grandsire Caius Britannicus and his great-uncle Publius Varrus.

Cyrus, it transpired, was a student of law, not merely the laws of Camulod but those of Rome itself. His grandsire's father had been a lawyer in the days before Camulod was founded and had later worked with Caius Britannicus to establish the colony, which at that time had no name, and to draft the first of what would become Camulod's own laws in later years. Since then, Cyrus told me with pride, his family had been involved in governing the colony, as members of the Council of Camulod and custodians of the justiciary of the colony. It was their right and privilege to guard and maintain the written annals and records of the Camulodian law and its tribunals, and they had steadfastly upheld that responsibility since it was entrusted to them by Caius Britannicus himself, the founder of Camulod.

Cyrus himself was now fully prepared to assume the burden of his family responsibility whenever it should be passed on to him. For the time being, however, he served the colony, as all its men did, in a military capacity.

At one point while he and I were talking I noticed a trio of horsemen watching us from high above, on the side of a hill, and when I mentioned it to Cyrus he merely glanced up at them, then returned his gaze to the road ahead.

"They're bandits. They won't bother us because we're too strong for them. And we won't bother them, because they're too far away and we would have to work too hard to come in reach of them, with no guarantee that we ever would. The fellow in the red cloak is notorious in these parts. They call him the Ghost, because he seems to have the ability to be in more than one place at the same time. He's instantly recognizable by the red cloak, of course, but it doesn't seem to have occurred yet to people that he might own more than one and that he might perhaps issue them to certain friends of his for specific purposes. It's always the cloak that's seen; seldom the man's face."

"How many men does he have?"

"Altogether about a hundred, perhaps a score or so more, plus all their women and camp followers. That's a lot of mouths to feed, for a bandit chief, so he has to keep traveling and raiding."

I was looking up to where the so-called Ghost sat on his horse, watching us. He seemed utterly unperturbed by our presence.

"If he has a hundred and more men, why do you say we're too strong for him?"

Cyrus chuckled. "Because we're cavalry. He might have twenty horsemen, at most, and none of them are trained in anything except staying on a horse's back. The rest of his men are all leg-mounted. We would crush them like a rotten nut, in one charge."

"He doesn't seem worried about being caught."

"Nor need he be. He knows he is not at risk, not today. One of these days, though, we'll catch him and his marauding will be ended."

"What will you do to him then? Hang him?"

"We might, although we have yet to hang anyone merely for being in disagreement with us. If he were to do something truly heinous, something that cried out for dire punishment, we might hang him and put an end to it. One of the men with whom we were at war in Cambria was such a creature—Carthac. He was a real devil, utterly incapable of mercy or compassion, and he received none from us when his time came. Merlyn killed him without compunction. There is simply no other way to deal with, or to control, someone like him.

"Simple banditry, though, as carried out by the Ghost up there, really boils down to feeding and providing for his people, and although admittedly he does it wantonly and at the dire expense of others, we have heard no reports of gross atrocities being laid at his feet. For that, and all his other crimes, we would probably simply disarm him and turn him loose afoot and weaponless, with a warning of what he can look forward to should we ever encounter him again at the same game."

Cyrus turned in his saddle then and gave the arm signal for our column to increase speed to a trot, and for a while after that there was no opportunity to talk further.

The network of magnificent roads that stretched all over Britain was, in my opinion, the single greatest marvel in the entire land, particularly so since it had existed for hundreds of years and was now barely used. That lack of use allowed an observer such as me to appreciate the complexity of all the work and planning that had gone into the construction of the network in the first place, but it was disconcerting to see such roads so deserted, because the traffic on the main roads of Gaul was so often dense and frantic. I had discussed the matter of road use at length with Donuil and Shelagh the night before we left for Verulamium, and what they had told me was fresh in my mind.

Donuil had said that the roads had fallen into disuse simply because they provided a focus for all the disruptive forces that existed to prey upon travelers. Bandits and thieves knew well that if they positioned themselves properly along a road they would, sooner or later, be easily able to intercept and rob any travelers who came along and were unequipped to fight strongly in their own defense. We, being who we were, were safe from any such threat, but few other people could afford to travel in the company of guardians strong enough to discourage attack, and so the roads had lain largely unused since the departure of the legions who had built, used and maintained them.

The roads represented the pragmatism of Rome's military genius. Knowing the shortest distance between two points to be a straight line, the ancient Romans had made it their first priority, from the earliest days of their military expansion, to construct roads for the convenience and the provisioning of their ubiquitous armies. The Roman legions, moving at the forced march pace along these magnificently straight causeways, could cover greater distances in less time than any other armies in history.

But mobility and ease of transportation were merely the most obvious aspects of the genius underlying Rome's road-building program. Another aspect, equally important, solved the ages-old problem of how to keep soldiers disciplined and usefully occupied during those times when they were not involved in war or preparing for war. In the ancient days of Republican Rome, the answer to that problem had been twofold: at the end of each day, after marching all day and eating on the move, the soldiers of each individual unit had been required to build an entire camp, fortified and defended on all four sides by a ditch and a defensive wall, to a specific plan that remained unchanged for hundreds of years. Only after the camp had been built and occupied were they permitted to relax and enjoy their only hot meal of the day. Then, the following morning before they resumed their march, they had to break down the camp they had built so painstakingly the night before. Thus the moving units of the armies were kept occupied, and effectively tired, with little time for dreaming up mischief and mayhem.

Their stationary counterparts, soldiers on garrison duty or those not currently marching over long distances, had their time filled for them by their superiors, too, all day, every day. They were kept hard at work building new roads or expanding and maintaining existing roads and buildings.

Over time, of course, what was temporary became permanent, and many of the overnight marching camps became permanent outposts, positioned at strategic road junctions or along particular stretches of road that had been identified as being in need of close supervision. And over the course of years and decades of the same efforts to keep soldiers busy and hard at work, the palisaded earthen ramparts of the original camps gave way to permanent walls of quarried, hand-dressed stone.

Meanwhile, outside the walls of these selfsame camps, the stalls and lean-to shelters of the tradesmen and merchants whose livelihood depended upon supplying the garrisons with all their needs were gradually replaced by solid, substantial buildings containing shops and manufactories for all kinds of commodities. And as these premises grew larger and required more and more support, they attracted workers and gave rise to towns.

Looking at those wondrous, unused roads in Britain, so different from the great, bustling highways of Gaul, I remembered clearly my own awestruck fascination when I first learned, at the Bishop's School, about the Roman roads and how they had transformed Rome's world. Because once the Empire had been pacified and the Pax Romana established, what remained was an open, universally accessible network of beautiful, publicly maintained roads connecting thriving towns everywhere, and that reality combined with the ease and swiftness of transportation and communication gave rise to commerce, so that eventually the hurrying bodies of troops for whom the roads had been originally built were supplanted by the caravans and wagon trains of trading merchants who bought and sold goods from all parts of the Empire and beyond its boundaries. And as the merchants prospered, so, too, did their society.