The Silver Branch [book II] (24 page)

That was to the good, anyway, Justin was thinking, casting up good and bad as he sat two nights later looking out over the camp-fires of the army massed in the shallow downland pass where the old track came up to cross the Calleva road. He did not really doubt the outcome of tomorrow’s battle, he had faith in Asklepiodotus and the power of the Legions. But the fact remained that since Constantius had failed to land, they were going to have only half their forces tomorrow, to handle everything that Allectus could bring against them; and he realized soberly that they would have no easy victory.

The army had come up at full pace, covering the fifteen miles from Venta in three hours, a gruelling business in June, for men in heavy marching order. But they had done it, and now they waited—a long flat waiting—around their bivouac fires, while Allectus, beaten in that desperate race for the strategic pass, had made camp also, a couple of miles away, to rest his weary host, and maybe also in the hope of tempting the forces of Rome from their strong position.

Asklepiodotus, not finding himself tempted, had used the time to make strong defence works of felled thorn-trees across the mouth of the pass from which to base tomorrow’s operations. And now the camp was complete; the bivouac fires glowed red in the moon-washed darkness, and around them the men took their ease, each with his sword buckled on and his shield and pilum to his hand, waiting for tomorrow. From where he sat with the rest of the Lost Legion round their own fire a little above the main camp, Justin could look out to the silver snail-trail that was the moon on the metalled road to Calleva, six miles away. But that other, more ancient way, coming up from the lower ground, was hidden by the rising mist—mist which already lay like the ghost of a forgotten sea over the low ground of the Thamesis Valley; over the great camp where Allectus waited with his host.

Figures came and went like shadows between him and the fires, low voices exchanged a password. The horses stamped and shifted from time to time, and once he heard the scream of an angry mule. But the night itself was very still, behind the sounds of the camp. A wonderful night, up here above the mist; the bracken of the hillside frozen into silver stillness below the dark fleece of thorn-scrub that covered the higher slopes on either side, the moon still low in a glimmering sky that seemed brushed over with a kind of moth-wing dust of gold. Somewhere far down the widening valley a vixen called to her mate, and somehow the sound left the silence empty.

Justin thought, ‘If we are killed tomorrow, the vixen will still call across the valley to her mate. Maybe she has cubs somewhere among the root-tangle of the woods. Life goes on.’ And the thought was somehow comforting. Flavius had gone down to the Praetorium to get the new watchword and tomorrow’s battle-cry; and the rest of the band sprawled about their fire, waiting for his return. Cullen sat beneath the battered Eagle, which they had driven upright into the turf, his face absorbed and happy as he touched almost soundlessly the apples of his beloved Silver Branch; and beside him—an unlikely couple, but drawn together by the bond of their Hibernian blood, as fellow countrymen in a strange land—Evicatos sat with his hands round one updrawn knee, his face turned to the North and West of North, as though he looked away to his own lost hills. Kyndylan and one of the legionaries were playing knuckle-bones. Pandarus, with the dried wisp of yesterday’s yellow rose in his cloak-pin, had found a suitable stone and was sharpening his dagger, smiling to himself a small, grimly joyous smile. ‘The bread and onions you ate this morning tasted better than any feast to a man who expects to eat again, and the sun through the grills overhead is brighter for you than for any man who thinks to see it rise tomorrow,’ Pandarus had said once. For himself, Justin found that the knowledge that he was quite likely going to be killed tomorrow was rather a heavy price to pay for his own sudden and piercing awareness of the moonlit world and the faint scent of honeysuckle on the night air, and the vixen calling to her mate. ‘But then I suppose I’ve always been a coward—maybe that was the real reason I never wanted to be a soldier. It really isn’t any wonder father was so disappointed in me,’ thought poor Justin.

Somebody came by on his way back from visiting outposts, whistling a tune half under his breath, and checked beside them. Justin glanced up and saw a crested helmet outlined against the moon and was on his feet in an instant, as Licinius’s voice said, ‘It is pleasant up here above the camp; may I join you for a while?’

‘Surely, sir. Sit here.’ Justin indicated the sheepskin riding-rug on which he had been sitting, and with a word of thanks the Primus Pilus folded up on to it, saying to those of the band who, mindful of old discipline, had risen or showed signs of doing so, ‘Nay, go on as you were before. I come only as a self-invited guest, not in any official capacity.’

Justin said after a few minutes, ‘Everything seems so quiet. And by this hour tomorrow it will be as quiet again.’

‘Aye, and in all likelihood with the fate of the province settled in the time between.’

Justin nodded. ‘I am glad the Parthica and the Ulpia Victrix are here.’

‘Why so?’

‘Because they served under C-Carausius once. It seems right that his own legions should avenge him.’

Licinius glanced at him sideways under his helmet rim. ‘When you go into battle tomorrow, will it be for Rome, or for Carausius?’

‘I—don’t know,’ Justin said painstakingly. ‘I suppose for the province of Britain. And yet—it is in my mind there’ll be a good few remembering the little Emperor, among the men who served under him.’

‘So, for Britain, and for one little half-pirate Emperor, and not for Rome at all,’ Licinius said, ‘
Sa, sa
, the greatness of Rome falls into yesterday.’

Justin pulled a bracken frond beside him, and began carefully to strip the tiny lobes from the stalk. ‘Carausius said something like that to Flavius and me once. He said that if Britain could be made strong enough to stand alone when Rome fell, something m-might be saved from the dark, but if not—the lights would go out everywhere. He said that if he could avoid a knife in his back before the work was done, he would make Britain as strong as that. But in the end he d-didn’t avoid it; and so now we fight in the ranks of Rome again.’

They were silent a while, then Licinius drew his legs under him. ‘Ah well. I think that we have been talking treason, you and I. And now I must be on my way.’

When he was gone, Justin sat for a while staring into the fire. His few words with his old Commander had brought Carausius very vividly before him; the terrible little Emperor who had yet thought to write the letter that Flavius carried in the breast of his ragged tunic.

When he looked up again, Flavius was coming toward him through the bracken. ‘Have you the watchword?’

‘Watchword and battle-cry, they’re both the same,’ Flavius said. He looked round at the throng in the firelight, his eyes at their most blazing bright under the wild shock of flaming hair. ‘Brothers, the watchword for tonight and the battle shout for tomorrow are “
Carausius!
”’

The first light of next morning was shining water pale above the woods, as Justin headed down with Flavius and the rest, through the fern and the young foxgloves that swayed belly-high about their horses’ legs, to their appointed place among the Auxiliary cavalry of the right wing. The heavy dew of the summer morning was grey on the bracken fronds, and flew in shining spray as they brushed by, and suddenly, though there was no sun as yet, all the air was shining and a lark leapt into the morning, dropping its rippling thread of song above the massing Legions, as the disreputable band sidled their horses into position behind a squadron of Gaulish Cavalry.

After that there was waiting again—waiting.

And then Flavius’s head went up suddenly. ‘Listen! Did you hear anything?’

Justin listened, his heart racing. There was only the jink of a bridle-bit as one of the ponies moved, the distant bark of an order from the battle-line, and then stillness again. And then, somewhere away below them in the mist that still hung about the lower ground, a faint, low-pitched murmur of sound, like the distant thunder that one feels while it is still too far off to hear. Only a moment, before it was lost in some fold of the land; then, even as they strained after it, the tension running through the massed Cohorts like a wind-ripple through standing corn, here it came again, clearer, nearer: the sound of an advancing host with many horses.

‘Not long now,’ Flavius said.

Justin nodded, running the tip of his tongue over a dry lip.

Nearer and nearer rolled the blurred thunder of hooves and marching feet; and then, far ahead where the Auxiliary skirmishers held the first line of defence, a trumpet sang, and from farther off another answered it, as cock crows defiance to cock in the dawn.

The opening phases of that battle seemed to Justin, looking down on it from above and apart, as Jove might do, to be quite unreal; a thing of the ordered movements of great blocks of men, more like some vast and deadly game of chess than the struggle for a province. A game controlled by the tiny child’s-toy figure on the opposite hillside that he knew was the Prefect Asklepiodotus with his staff about him. He saw far away the wavering and billowing line where the light skirmishing troops of both armies came together; he saw, closer in, the solid, grey-mailed blocks of the Cohorts, each under its own standard, with the Eagle of the Ulpia Victrix in the van. He saw the Auxiliaries, their part played, falling back, slowly, steadily, passing cleanly through the gaps left for them between Cohort and Cohort; saw the gaps closing like a door. And now the trumpets were sounding the Advance, and with a slow and measured certainty that was somehow more terrible than any wild rush, the whole battle-front was rolling forward to meet that other host rolling darkly toward them up the line of the ancient track and far across the ferny hillside on either hand.

Again the trumpets were singing, ringing to the morning sky, Cavalry trumpets now, and the long waiting was over. ‘Come on, my heroes; it’s our turn now!’ Flavius cried; and with the fiery notes of the trumpets still ringing in their ears, the horses broke from a stand into a canter, and they were sweeping forward to guard the flanks of the Cohorts as the valley broadened and the shielding thorn-scrub fell away on either hand. The sun was well up now; far ahead of them it glinted on spearhead and shield-rim, axe-blade and helmet of grey iron, striking sparks of light from the polished bronze of horse ornaments. Justin saw the black boar banners of the Saxons, the swarming squadrons of Cavalry. He could make out the denser massing of standards in the midst of the enemy host, the stiffer lines of marines and legionaries and the gleam of gold and Imperial Purple where Allectus himself rode among his wild barbarian horde. Vaguely in the engulfing turmoil, he was aware of the two battle-lines rolling in toward each other; and his ears were full of a sound that he had never heard before: the clashing, grinding furnace-roar of full battle.

And now, for Justin, the battle whose opening moves had seemed like a game of chess, became a bright and terrible confusion, narrowing down to his own part in it, while all else ceased to have any meaning. For him, the great battle for the province of Britain fought out that fine summer’s day, was a snarling, blue-eyed face and streaming yellow hair; it was a coral-studded shield-boss and a darting spear-blade and the up-tossed rolling mane of a horse. It was a thunder of hooves and the wheeling and swerving of wild cavalry through the bracken, and the red stain growing on his own sword. It was Flavius always the length of his horse’s head in front of him, and the wingless Eagle in the thick of the press, and the little Emperor’s name yelled above the tumult for a battle cry, ‘Carausius! Carausius!’

And then somehow the battle was growing ragged, scattering and spreading out over the countryside, becoming no longer one battle, but a score. And suddenly, as though a bright and raging fever had lifted from his brain, Justin was aware of breathing-space, and the sun away over toward evening in a sky puffed with white summer cloud. And they were far to the North, on the tattered fringe of things; and southward the legionaries were rounding up the beaten enemy as sheep-dogs driving sheep.

He shook his head like a swimmer breaking surface, and looked about him at the Lost Legion. It was smaller than it had been this morning, and several of those who still rode with them had some hurt. Little Cullen, still carrying the Eagle proudly erect, its crown of yellow broom long since torn away, had a gash over one eye; and Kyndylan was managing his horse one-handed, with a useless arm hanging at his side.

Turning back toward what remained of the battle, they came straggling up a long wooded ridge; and from the crest of it found themselves looking down on the Londinium road.

And along the Londinium road and all across the country below them, like a river in storm spate, was pouring a wild flood of fugitives, reserves and horse-holders probably, for the most part; mercenaries breaking back and streaming away from the battle; a broken rabble of barbarians on foot and on horse-back, flying for their lives.

Justin felt suddenly sick. Few things in the world could be more pitiless than a beaten and demoralized army; and only a few miles away the Londinium road ran through Calleva!

Flavius broke the silence that had gripped them all with something like a groan. ‘Calleva! It will be fire and sword for the whole city if that rabble get in!’ He wheeled about on the men with him. ‘We must save Calleva! We must ride with them and hope for our chance at the gates. There’s no time to wait for orders. Anthonius, get back to Asklepiodotus and tell him what goes forward, and bid him, in the names of all the gods there be, to send up a few squadrons of Cavalry!’

Anthonius flung up his hand, and wheeling his horse was away almost before the words were spoken.

‘Cullen, cover up the Eagle. Now, come on, and remember we are fugitives like the rest until we are within the gates,’ Flavius cried. ‘Follow me—and
keep together
!’