Venator, page 4
‘And that makes everything you think right by default? I apologise for not deferring to your superior judgement!’
‘Silence!’ Gruffydd cried. Sister and brother whipped their heads in his direction. ‘There is much to be done. Luciana, I need you to ride around to all the farms and inform the people of our situation. Timoteo,’ he turned towards his son gravely. ‘I want you to take the Gaesatae and make your way to Mona. The Druids will harbour you until it is safe to return; your mother’s people were among their order.’
‘But Father -!’
‘I don’t want you or the warriors inside the fort when the Romans come. As my successor, it is your duty that you keep yourself safe.’
‘Fine,’ Timoteo grumbled, turning away in order to hide his sudden relief.
Luciana was already out the rear door. She dashed past the sheep pens, whistling at the herds on the pasture. A dark mass situated on one of the distant knolls could have been cattle or horses, their bellies round and hides thick in the fading light.
The most valuable assets of the Cornovii were these beasts who still roamed the lands as they had in the time of her ancestors. The cattle provided invaluable resources, in the form of hides, needles, tools, milk, and meat, to barter and trade to their neighbouring tribes. Gruffydd had never attempted to start minting coins like the southern tribes had done to make themselves seem more Roman; Luciana suspected it may have had more to do with the lack of mines in their lands than a refusal to assimilate. It mattered little; the cattle and the sheep provided more than enough high-quality product to purchase foreign trappings.
The horses, however, were another matter entirely. While most of the southern tribes, particularly the Iceni, boasted to breed the best horses, Luciana privately thought most highly of her own people’s herd. They were small, shaggy things, with round bellies and a slight dip to their backs. Their shoulders were far less pronounced and their legs were far shorter and stouter than the Iceni’s sleeker beasts. Their trots were far joltier and their canters far more difficult to sit. But they made for willing work partners when hitched to a chariot or a plough, and Luciana secretly suspected that the Cornovii horses, while slower than Iceni steeds, could outlast any other tribe’s animals and continue going all day. They were fiercer than their stature belied, much like Luciana herself.
She whistled again and clicked her tongue. One mealy brown mare with a shaggy black mane and tail separated herself from the herd and trotted in the woman’s direction. Luciana smiled, recognising her companion instantly. She turned and lifted a bridle from its peg within their rudimentary equipment shed in the yard. The mare continued her progress, ears pricked.
She held up her bare hands. ‘Don’t look so interested! I’ve nothing for you.’
The mare, undeterred, nosed at a telling bulge along the folds swathing her belt.
‘You know me too well, Belena,’ she giggled, unearthing a raw turnip from her purse. The mare happily scoffed the treat while Luciana glanced furtively behind her back. ‘Quickly, before Father tells me off for spoiling you.’
She slipped the leather bridle over the head of the mare and buckled it into place. Luciana herself had tanned and braided the bridle’s leather from one of her father’s cows. The straps fit comfortably about Belena’s plain, stocky head. Luciana had only to lift the simple iron snaffle to the mare’s whiskered lips before she opened her mouth and accepted it. She stood there, mouthing the cold metal to warm it up, while Luciana gathered her reins and vaulted onto her back. With a light touch of her heels, they galloped through their paddock gate and were away down the path.
Luciana leant forwards, absorbing and becoming a part of Belena’s short, jerky strides. She bowed into the wind, letting her long mane stream out behind her. Her heart raced with grim excitement as she rode to warn the Cornovii about the impending battle.
III
‘
Cato?’ Decimus strode down the stable block and peered over the door of the stall housing his stallion. The dark form of Aquila loomed at its rear, chewing placidly on a mouthful of hay. Decimus grunted and quickly turned away.
‘Cato! Where are you?’ He kicked at his trunk in the aisle and stormed down the yard. A young auxiliary carting a load of soiled bedding quickly swerved out of his way. Decimus had rounded the corner by the time the soldier paused to give him a deferential nod.
‘Come on, lad! Now’s not the time for shirking!’ He flung open the door to a storage room and thrust his head inside. A startled cat jumped from its perch and darted out between his legs.
‘For Jupiter’s sake!’ He frowned at the collection of oval cavalry shields and piled spears heaped inside. Seeing no shape resembling the tall, reedy form of his slave, he slammed the latch and crossed into the stable’s forecourt.
His hobnailed boots ground against the cobbled stone pavers ringing the stables, beating a harsh tattoo across the grounds. A few assorted cavalrymen currying their horses threw him a cursory glance before continuing their work. A guttural, Gaulish patois resumed between them over their horses’ backs.
Decimus halted and surveyed the yard, hands on his hips. It would do no good asking the men; auxiliary cavalrymen, recruited from foreign provinces across the empire, had a tenuous grip of Latin at best. As they’d have to survive a full twenty-five-year term in order to become Roman citizens, many viewed their need to assimilate with a healthy degree of scepticism.
He squinted across the intervallum, trying to make out Cato’s faded blue tunic among the shapes scuttling around behind the hospital. Elevating his voice to parade volume, he called out, ‘Cato! As your master, I demand you report to me immediately!’
A horse lifted its head and squealed behind him. A low baritone answered in Greek, ‘Give it a rest, sir. Your man is not here and you’re upsetting Rhesus.’
The centurion turned around and smiled when he spotted a hulking figure crouched beneath a sleek black stallion. The man had a couple of leather threads sticking out of the corner of his mouth, one leg of the horse lifted and cradled between his knees. He held what looked to be a large iron plate with a toeclip against the horse’s hoof while trying to truss the pastern with leather rigging.
‘Tirintius.’ Decimus made his way over and hunkered down beside the man. Slipping likewise into Greek, he pointed at the hoof contraption. ‘Don’t tell me you’re still fooling around with your horse shoes nonsense?’
The man tensed, holding the stallion’s cannon steady as the horse tried to jerk its leg out of his grasp. He lifted his mop of dark curls just high enough to flash the centurion a grin. ‘Hipposandals, if you please. And it’s hardly nonsense.’ He picked a thread out of his mouth and tried to attach it to the other straps securing the plate. ‘You know as well as I do that, for all their merits, Roman roads are not forgiving on a horse’s feet. Rhesus has come down lame more times in the last year than he did in the previous decade. And what has changed?’ He gestured in the direction of the south gate and the vicus beyond. ‘Your army has put in the new roads.’
Decimus grunted his assent. ‘I try to keep Aquila to dirt ruts myself whenever possible. My old mentor always said that the hoof is a natural shock absorber. It can take most kinds of terrain, but not ground that doesn’t allow it to expand and breathe. He said that Rome’s policy of prohibiting wheeled transport between dawn and dusk was as much for the horses’ benefit as it was the humans’.’
The Thracian chuckled. ‘Indeed.’ He released the horse’s hoof and straightened to grab the stallion’s head. The horse tentatively lifted his contraption-laden hoof and set it down again. The iron plate clanged heavily against the hoof wall as Rhesus set his foot down. He lifted the foot again with some difficulty and began trying to kick the laced plate off.
‘All right, all right!’ Tirintius grumbled, retying the horse’s halter to its hitching post. He knelt down and grabbed the flailing foot to begin untying his hipposandal.
Decimus watched the nimble brown fingers work, frowning. ‘I fail to see how your invention is going to fix the problem.’
‘So the idea needs refinement. It will still provide me plenty to live on in my old age, once your emperor is through with me.’ He freed the prototype from Rhesus’s hoof and straightened, patting the stallion’s shoulder.
Decimus snorted and shook his head. ‘It’ll never catch on.’
Tirintius tucked the sandal away in his grooming box and reclined against the horizontal post beside Decimus. ‘So, we march tomorrow and your slave is nowhere to be found? Dear, dear. Does that mean a man so elevated as yourself must resort to packing his own tent and sorting his own tack? It must be very difficult.’
The man’s mocking grin instantly disarmed Decimus, who looked down at his boots and suppressed a laugh. It was impossible to take oneself too seriously around a man like Tiberius Claudius Tirintius. The handsome, swarthy Thracian with laughing brown eyes, dark beard, and ambling, bow-legged gait had a sarcastic wit that whittled every epic hero it met down to size. He’d first set foot on Britannia as an impetuous nineteen-year-old anxious for plunder to rival Alexander’s. The decades of mud and unpleasant natives, with nothing meaningful to show for it, had turned his outlook cynical. Now a decurion with the First Cohort of Thracians, still attached to the Fourteenth Legion, Tirintius hankered for nothing more than his title of citizenship and a quiet smithy of his own in the backwater bog the legion called home.
Decimus guiltily twisted the gold band on his left third finger that signified his middle-class status and tucked his hand behind his back. ‘You forget, Tirintius, that I grew up in the Subura. Had to hire myself out shovelling horseshit to make enough money to eat. I reckon I’ll manage if I have to.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ Tirintius gestured to Decimus’s gleaming silver leg greaves, embossed with a showy, swirling design. ‘You polish those yourself, then?’
The centurion cracked a grin. ‘Why else do you think I’m looking for Cato? Got to be bright and visible for all to see on the front lines!’
Tirintius shrugged and shook his head. ‘Ah, keep your brick quarters and fancy rings. Mad, you lot are. I’ll stay on the flanks, well out of heroic range. And do my level best to dodge patrol duty.’
Decimus sobered. ‘Was the decurion one of yours?’
The Thracian nodded. ‘Mokasios. His men occupied the barracks directly beside mine. Probably took the patrol because the prefect couldn’t pin me down.’ He sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth. ‘Nasty way to go.’
‘Regulus thinks it might be Druids.’
Tirintius glanced at him sharply. ‘Druids? In this country? So far north?’
Decimus shrugged. ‘How else to explain such a heel turn from the Cornovii? Something had to put them up to it.’
The Thracian ran a hand through his thatch of curls and shook his head. ‘If it is Druids stirring shit up out of the blue, can you go to their high priest or whoever and tell them to fuck right off? I was hoping to serve out the last eight years of my enlistment in relative peace and quiet, thank you very much.’
Decimus’s mouth tightened into a thin line. ‘How do you think I feel? I’ve only got two years left.’ He roused himself from the hitching post and gave the man’s hulking black stallion a pat. ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll be able to tell some of them yourself before the summer’s out.’
Tirintius waved. ‘Go on then, Equestrian Order. Make yourself useful and find your little helper.’
‘I’ll see you at the praetorium later.’ Decimus squared his shoulders and began making his way back towards his barracks.
He no sooner rounded the side of the praetorium before he spotted a flurry of commotion in the officers’ courtyard. A laden waggon stood in the middle of the weed-riddled garden, piled with amphorae, crates of glassware, and a delicately embroidered red dining couch. A black head belonging to the slave called Livius was struggling to load an elegantly carved desk into the waggon bed. His master, Publius Julianus Titianus, watched imperiously from the columned portico.
‘Higher…higher…Careful, you idiot!’ Titianus scowled as Livius bumped one of the legs against a stack of crates. ‘That’s stained cypress from the prefecture of Aegyptus! It’s worth at least ten of you!’
Decimus paused, frowning. ‘What are you taking all that lot for? We aren’t laying in for a siege!’
‘Oh, yes?’ Titianus inclined his head. ‘I must have been mistaken when I saw the ballistae being packed up this afternoon. And it’s sir to you. Leave it to some upstart mule such as yourself to forget military protocol.’
Decimus ground his teeth. Having to defer to the leadership of pampered senatorial playboys pretending to be soldiers had always rankled with him, but Titianus he found especially loathsome. Clad in a pristine silver cuirass adorned with a purple sash that indicated his rank and carrying a brightly plumed helmet under his arm, Titianus looked as if he had never done a day of work in his life. Of average height and build, Titianus sported a head of carefully combed dirty blond curls above narrow-set eyes, a pointed nose and a wide, leering mouth. Unlike the boys too young for their first shave who often took the post of tribunus laticlavius, Titianus had a few more years on him. Decimus attributed Titianus’s protracted path to the Forum Romanum to his seedy predilections. The tribune had a hankering for any young chit in a skirt, the younger the better.
The centurion straightened. ‘My apologies, sir. I’ve been spending my afternoon seeing that my men have their kit in order before looking to any of my personal affairs. Some people around here have to do all your fighting for you.’
Titianus tutted in disapproval. ‘Run along then, soldier. My business is none of your own.’
‘Hang on. Have you or your man seen my slave Cato? I can’t find him anywhere.’
‘No. Really, I do despair.’ The tribune rolled his eyes heavenward. ‘How incompetent do you have to be to fail managing a one-man staff? New money certainly can’t buy class.’
Decimus clapped his fist to his lorica in salute, arranging his fingers to form the infamis digitus. Scowling, he spun on his heel and stalked off.
‘How eloquently you prove my point, Centurion!’ Titianus called to his retreating back.
Decimus looked alertly about him as he came upon the first few rows of barracks. Several legionaries were sitting out in the greying afternoon sky, polishing their swords while others boiled laundry or assembled marching kits. A couple of men nearby loudly began arguing about how much food stores they were permitted to bring, while others shirked their duty by hiding indoors and throwing dice.
It seemed a veritable sea of red, with the occasional dark or off-colour tunic flitting amongst them. Decimus narrowed his eyes, searching for the distinctive washed-out blue belonging to Cato.
‘Sir! I’m glad to have stumbled into you.’
He jumped, surprised. Turning his head, he saw the squat form of the legion’s second spear falling into step beside him. ‘Have a care for me heart, Fortunatus. I’m not as young as I used to be.’
The smile on his chubby face faltered. ‘Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to startle you.’ He held up a scroll. ‘I just wanted to go over some ideas that occurred to me whilst studying the plans of Viricio.’
Decimus glanced down. ‘Go on, I’m listening.’
‘Well, sir, I was perusing the defences marked off along the frontal route…’ Centurion Paulus Junius Fortunatus ran a hand through his bushy dark beard, dark eyes alight with enthusiasm. He gestured to the map and outlined just how half the legion could plausibly scale the narrower southwest approach. Fortunatus was a career soldier, a student of generalship and a master of delegation. He had a sharp eye for war, wit, and detail with a hunger to go above and beyond, a passion that Decimus could only admire. He had his eye on recommending Fortunatus for the role of primus pilus when he retired in a couple of years’ time.
‘…so I think a coordinated attack might be the wiser approach. Force the natives to split their attention, or at least divert them in one sector long enough to get some of our men to the gates.’
Decimus studied the map and nodded. ‘Good thinking. I’d mention that at the officers’ meeting tonight if I were you.’
Fortunatus coughed and rolled up his scroll. ‘I wanted to run it by you first, sir, in case the notion didn’t hold water.’
Decimus barked a short laugh and shook his head. ‘The day one of your notions doesn’t hold water is the day our vaunted emperor refuses to pluck his lyre.’
The two men shared a gentle chuckle as they continued down the barracks rows.
Still glancing around in search of his slave, the primus pilus lowered his voice: ‘Is there a brotherhood meeting after prayers in the sanctum tonight?’
‘The usual place,’ Fortunatus replied in a likewise muted tone, ‘after the first watch has been sounded. Pass the message on to Optio Servius when you see him. The password will be Diviciacus.’
Decimus wrinkled his nose and glanced down at the squat man’s helmet. ‘What?’
‘I thought it fitting, given what the legate assumes we’re, er…dealing with now.’ Fortunatus noticed that Decimus still looked puzzled. ‘You know! Caesar’s Druid pal? As mentioned in De Bello Gallico?’
‘I’m afraid my knowledge of literature is rather thin.’ Decimus stopped and squinted, wondering if the shape he’d just seen rounding the corner of a building might have been Cato. ‘Most everything I’ve learned about the art of war has been on the job, with the exception of one lesson my father’s death taught me.’ He began moving off in the direction of the figure.
‘Oh? And what lesson would that be?’
‘Never trust a barbarian.’ Decimus threw a parting wave at Fortunatus and rounded the corner of the barracks block.
‘Cato? Cato!’ Decimus frowned at the figure just ahead in a blue tunic and shook his head. The man was too young and too dark to be his missing slave. ‘Where in Tartarus is that lad?’ He grumbled.
