Onslaught_The Centurions II, page 40
‘The legatus augusti did what he thought was right, and—’
Vocula turned on his colleague Gallus in fury, his patience snapping with the man’s inability to see the situation running out of control.
‘What he thought was right? And you’re enough of an idiot to take his side in the matter?’ He stabbed a finger into the stunned legatus’s face. ‘You think he had the right to follow the dictates of his conscience when it came to paying these men enough money to get them all pissed for a fortnight? We knew well enough that the local tavern owners were sending waggons south to Bonna and Colonia Agrippinensis to fetch in more drink, and women, when it became clear that our esteemed colleague was going to pay out Vitellius’s donative, once the soldiers had found out about it! We knew that we’d be causing a temporary suspension of discipline, given all these men have been through! But at least they were going to be getting some small measure of what they’d been dreaming of – gold from their emperor! Gold sent here by Vitellius, something to justify their attachment to the man and allow them to move on to Vespasianus with some hint of pride.’
He shook his head at the darkly humorous irony of the defeated emperor’s gift to his German legions, sent north before his fate had become clear with the disaster at Cremona, being the source of such blatant unrest. A shipment of gold from Rome, intended to be paid out as a donative to allow the men who had put him on the throne to celebrate Saturnalia properly, the money had arrived just in time for the feast, and had initially been the source of much rejoicing by men whose year had been eminently forgettable and who had seen a chance to lose themselves to orgiastic celebration for a few days.
‘And then, just when it looked as if the money would guarantee us a week of peace while the legions drank and whored their way through the contents of their purses, that fool Flaccus went and announced that the gold was being issued to celebrate Vespasianus’s accession to the throne. Doing what he thought was right! And now look at them! Two solid days of drinking and they’ve turned to sedition of the grossest kind! If my first spear didn’t have the best of his men guarding this headquarters and the commanding officer’s residence, they’d be in here already, and the beating they gave you after that fiasco with the grain ship would have been nothing compared to what they would have done to us when they found us. They’re a mob, Herennius Gallus, and mobs tend not to respect rank once they’re on fire with anger!’
The office’s door opened and one of Antonius’s centurions put his head into the room.
‘Your pardon, sirs. If I might have a quiet word with the first spear?’
In the corridor he dropped the respectful mask, his voice taking on an urgent tone.
‘We have to get them out of here now, Antonius. The mood out there’s getting rougher by the minute, and they’re fetching weapons from their barracks.’
‘There’s no chance we could put them down?’
The other man shook his head decisively.
‘No chance at all. The First are the largest part of it, them and the men of the Fifteenth we brought out with us from the Old Camp, but the Sixteenth are pretty keen now that they can see there’s nothing to stop them from taking part, and even some of our own boys from the less reliable cohorts are chewing at their ropes to join the fun.’
Antonius nodded slowly.
‘The First have been on the losing side too many times, and they blame Flaccus for every damned battle they’ve managed to lose through their own idiocy or legatus Gallus’s incompetence. And the men of the Fifteenth are consumed with the guilt of having survived their siege while their comrades have been left to rot behind a wall of Civilis’s men, now that the siege has been renewed. You think they’ll run wild?’
‘I’d put a year’s salary on it. And I think they’ll be at it any moment now. You need to get those gentlemen to safety, and quickly, or they’ll find themselves swinging by their necks from the roof beams.’
The first spear looked at the corridor’s roof in thought for a moment.
‘Very well. Have your men ready to leave, and warn them that we may have to fight our way out of this mess.’
‘I already have. And they’ll fight. But if the legates are with us we won’t get more than twenty paces.’
Back in the office he found the officers waiting in uncomfortable silence, Vocula clearly having told his colleagues exactly what he thought of their support for Flaccus’s decision to link the long-awaited donative with Vespasianus’s victory.
‘My men believe that the legions will be in open revolt very shortly, Legatus.’
Vocula straightened his back, nodding at his subordinate.
‘In which case we may well have to accept the revenge that they will visit upon us for all of our perceived slights and failings. Would it be better for us to fall on our swords, do you think? The thought of being hacked to pieces by a crazed mob of drunken legionaries isn’t the most dignified of exits I can imagine.’
Antonius shook his head.
‘I have a less drastic idea, Legatus. As long as you can sacrifice a little dignity this evening we might all come out of this with our lives.’
The scene in the street outside the headquarters was more chaotic than that Vocula had seen from the upstairs window, a swirling mass of legionaries, some blind drunk and almost incapable of standing up, others bright-eyed with incoherent anger and eager to unleash their spleen on any target that presented itself. More than a few of them were armed, their bright iron reflecting the light of the torches that illuminated the fortress streets. The centurion nodded to the legionaries gathered around the door as he led the group out into the street, tucking his vine stick into his belt and drawing his own gladius, its familiar weight in his hand a comforting reassurance.
‘We’re going to double time it for our barracks, so air your iron! Anyone tries to stop us, put your shields through them! Anyone shows you their iron, put them down the hard way! Give me that shield!’
They advanced into the melee twenty men strong, their tight formation and fixed determination clearing a path through the mob’s disordered bodies and unfocused anger. A soldier staggered up to the leading soldiers and goggled at the centurions behind their shields for a moment before slurring a noisy challenge.
‘You’re … fucking officers!’
The centurion lunged forward with his borrowed shield, punching out with its iron boss to flatten the man even as he turned to call out to his comrades, but the damage was done. A dozen legionaries and more were suddenly intent on the party, some of them armed and all of them distinctly hostile.
‘You cunts! We’ll—’
Antonius stepped through the protective line of his men’s shields, knowing all too well that their illusory security would be torn down in an instant if hundreds of enraged legionaries descended on them, the rasp of his sword’s blade against its scabbard’s iron throat a familiar and distinctive warning note as he squared up to the speaker.
‘You’ll what? Kill us? You want to kill me, feel free to try, sonny! You’ll be coming with me on that ferry ride! And you …’ he looked at the man on the soldier’s right, then the man at his other shoulder. ‘And you! So make sure that’s what you want, before you open the lid on this box! We’re soldiers, just like you, and all we want is to get out of here before it goes to rat shit and you start killing each other! Want to try to stop us?’
The legionary who seemed to be their leader blinked hard, struggling to focus through the effects of the amount of beer he’d drunk.
‘Who’re … who’re they?’
He was pointing past Antonius at the men in the middle of his escort, the legates looking about them in evident fear of their lives as the mob’s chaos swirled around them, kept at bay only by the flimsy protection of a line of shields. Their usual finery had been hastily stripped away and discarded, high-quality wool and burnished bronze replaced by the roughly spun and less than pristine tunics of the slaves Antonius had ordered to relinquish them moments before.
‘They’re slaves! My fucking slaves! They cost me a small fortune and I’m not about to leave them to you lot to have your fun with! Now make your minds up, either fight or get out of my fucking way!’
The soldiers’ decision hung in the balance for a long moment before they stepped back, suddenly deferential in the face of an aggressive and seemingly unblinking authority figure of the type whose commands they had been conditioned to obey from the first days of their training. Antonius stepped back into the square of shields, shooting his centurion a glance that was an unspoken order, but as the latter barked at his men to march, Gallus pulled at the first spear’s sleeve.
‘Flaccus? What about the legatus augusti?’
Antonius slapped his hand away in only partially feigned amazement at the legatus’s inability to recognise his danger.
‘Get your fucking hands off me, slave, or I’ll have your back opened up like a butchered pig! Detachment, march!’
They ground into motion again, bulling their way through the crowd of men, and Vocula muttered in his ear loudly enough to be heard over the hubbub surrounding them.
‘Can we do anything for Flaccus?’
Even as he spoke, the mutineers pressing at the gates of the commanding officer’s residence broke through the heavily outnumbered guards, flooding into the building in such numbers that no resistance was possible. The centurion whistled for them to join his party, and as they did so he ordered his men forward at a swifter pace still, smashing their way through the crowd gathered around the gates and cowing any resistance to their passage with their raised swords.
‘Faster! This is going to turn really nasty once they have him!’
As they passed the gates, Antonius caught a fleeting glimpse of the grossly overweight senior officer being dragged out into the building’s central atrium by a pair of red-faced legionaries, his face a crumpled mask of terror as a third man stepped out of the crowd that had packed into the enclosed space with a sword held ready to strike.
‘Gods below!’ Vocula was fighting against the press of soldiers trying to hurry him along. ‘I have to do something!’
Antonius took him by the back of his tunic and thrust him forward.
‘There’s nothing you can do! Once they’ve gutted him they’ll be ready to do the same to anyone they can get their hands on that looks anything like an officer!’
The legionaries around them were moving faster now, in the relatively empty streets whose previous occupants were temporarily crowded into the residence.
‘We should run, Antonius!’
The first spear nodded, and at a barked command from their centurion his men started running, the rattle of their hobnails on the street’s cobbles momentarily drowned out by a huge cheer from the building behind them as whatever game the mob had been playing with the hapless Flaccus came to its inevitable bloody conclusion.
‘Keep running! We’ll take refuge in the barracks until this all blows over!’
Vocula nodded his assent, but to Antonius he bore the look of a man who would spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.
Marsaci tribal land, December AD 69
‘Why are you doing this? You’re of the Batavi tribe, are you not?’
Dragged in front of the leader of the small army that had ridden out of the mist to attack their village less than an hour before, the settlement’s chief elder stared at the man before him with undisguised amazement. Equipped in the segmented armour worn by Rome’s legionaries, he carried a helmet fitted with the cross-mounted crest of a centurion to differentiate himself from the men who served under him who had little to mark them as being anything other than legionary soldiers. Frowning at the leader of the men who had laid waste to his small settlement in a matter of minutes, he nodded slowly as recognition dawned upon him.
‘I know you, you command the horsemen who camp close to the Batavi city of Batavodurum! We have offered you hospitality in the past when you have patrolled through our lands, so how is it that you come to us with fire and destruction when the rest of your tribe is away to the south from what we are told, seeking to end Rome’s rule over us along with the men of our own cohort who fight alongside you?’
The roof of the village’s hall collapsed in a shower of sparks as its timbers gave up the unequal struggle with the fire that had been put to the structure soon after their arrival, the wash of orange light illuminating the features of the man to whom he was speaking. He smiled, opening his hands as if to accept the elder’s identification of him.
‘I am indeed the man of whom you speak. As to why I am here, and the reason why your houses and farmhouses are burning, you should send word to Prince Kivilaz of the Batavi – or King Kivilaz as he will no doubt decide to be known – to inform him that you people of the tribes who support the Batavi in their war with Rome are suffering Rome’s vengeance. You are not the only village to have discovered the hard way that to support the Batavi is to accept responsibility for their crimes, deeds which will bring Rome down upon you like an ill-tempered giant. For the time being Rome is content to have armed myself and these other men, dissenters from Kivilaz’s war on Rome who made their way south when this struggle began, and therefore natural recruits to my cause when Legatus Gaius Dillius Vocula decided to spare my life and send me to take some small part of Rome’s revenge ahead of the day of reckoning.’
‘You fight for Rome?’ The old man stared at his village’s tormentor in rheumy amazement. ‘But you are Batavi!’
The other man nodded.
‘I am. And proud to be so. When Rome has put King Kivilaz in his place then I will be happy to serve my people in any way the Romans see fit to allow, having proven my alliance with the empire through punishments of the allied tribes. And even if Rome decides that I should be put aside, seeing me as unreliable for having fought alongside Kivilaz for a short time, I will still be proud to have played my part in the defeat of a revolt which, allowed to continue unchallenged, can only result in further destruction of our once proud tribe. And your own. And as to all this?’ He waved a hand at the burning hall and other structures to which fire had been set by his followers. ‘This is ultimately for your own good, a small punishment now to save you from the full wrath of Rome’s revenge later.’
The old man stared at him for a moment and then spat at his feet.
‘You will be cursed by your own people, forever outcast. And I curse you too …’
The armoured man smiled at him again.
‘A curse, if it is to be effective, must surely have a name. And the name to scratch onto that little sheet of lead is that of Claudius Labeo, once prefect of the First Batavian Horse and now simply a freedom fighter, bearing arms against the accursed family that, if Kivilaz succeeds in his plan to destroy Rome’s legions on the great river, will undoubtedly preside over the destruction of our proud tribal name forever. For my part I’ll accept a curse from every man, woman and child in your tribe, if it means I can help to spare you Rome’s full retribution.’
He turned to look at the hall’s flaming wreckage as it collapsed inwards.
‘And it seems that my work here is done. Don’t forget to make it clear to the Batavi who did this. And tell them for me that this is just the beginning. I will bring fire to my own people before very long, and perhaps an awakening to the fact that they have been duped into a war that they cannot win.’
Colonia Agrippinensis, Germania Inferior, December AD 69
‘Welcome, Kivilaz of the Batavi.’
The Batavi prince walked forward into the circle of men who had gathered in a private house in one of the wealthier districts of Colonia Agrippinensis, its doors heavily guarded by men of the First Nervian Horse, stripped of their armour but still armed with their long cavalry swords. Bairaz, commander of the greatly depleted Batavi Guard, which had lost over two-thirds of its strength at Gelduba and was now little more than their prince’s bodyguard, waited silently at the room’s entrance. He watched as his master strode into the meeting of Gallic tribes like a man born to lead them all, despite his apparent deference.
‘My thanks for your hospitality, Julius Classicus of the Nervii.’
Classicus stepped forward and clasped hands with his guest. A big, imposing figure, in whose deportment and mannerisms the Batavi prince saw another man of his own stamp, he greeted the Batavi prince as an equal, another member of tribal nobility who, before Rome’s hegemony over the Gallic tribes, would have commanded his people by reason of his heredity rather than the empire’s indulgence.
‘When a man of your stature sends the message that he has a subject of mutual benefit to discuss, it would be remiss of me to do anything other than extend the hand of friendship and listen to your ideas. After all, when my cousin Montanus returned from the north and told me of your views on the matter of ceasing your war on Rome, I must admit that I found myself feeling a good deal of sympathy with your position.’
Kivilaz bowed, looking around him at the men Classicus had brought to their meeting.
‘These are the men of influence in your tribe?’
‘These men are elders of the Treveri, my kinsmen the Nervii, and of our hosts the Ubii as well, and of the Lingones whose rebellion was so cruelly crushed by Rome only last year.’ The Nervian prefect raised a hand and indicated one of his comrades. ‘This is Julius Tutor, a prince of the Treviran former royal family and appointed prefect of the riverbank by Vitellius before he left for Rome. And this …’ he turned to another man who seemed to have been blessed with a somewhat self-regarding expression, ‘is Julius Sabinus of the Lingones, a descendant of the divine Julius himself. His great-grandmother was a fine woman of the royal line, and it’s well known that Caesar had a wandering eye, which in this case is reputed to have alighted on our colleague’s ancestor and found her ripe for the taking.’
