Douglas Jackson - Hero of Rome

‘No. I’ll keep what I have. Stitch it up, or do what you have to do, but I need to be back on my feet tomorrow.’

‘Ha,’ Calpurnius grumbled. ‘Another young man in a hurry. It will be the death of you, but I will do what I can.’ He paused and his face brightened. ‘A leather cover, cowhide for thickness and wear. I have the very thing. And then, who knows?’

‘Will I be able to carry a shield?’

Calpurnius looked offended. ‘One hundred and fifty years ago, Marcus Sergius, grandfather of the odious Catilina, was fitted with an iron hand after his amputation, returned to battle within the week and captured twelve enemy camps. Medicine has progressed considerably since his day. Now, lie here while I prepare the tincture.’

Valerius rose early on the day of the last battle. Mist disguised the dawn the way a veil hides an ageing woman’s fading looks. It came as a pale suggestion of gold lost in a drifting curtain of smoky, ground-locked cloud and with it came Boudicca’s host. She had picked up the trail Paulinus had left for her while the ashes of Verulamium and the blackened bones of its inhabitants were still hot. For a week, the auxiliaries had led them on, first north, then west; day after day of forced marches and occasional, tantalizing glimpses of the enemy, the red cloaks and polished armour always on the next hill or beyond the next river. They were like wolves now, the Britons, with the Roman scent as thick in their nostrils as the taint of blood from a mortally injured deer as it stumbles towards its final refuge. Thirty days of constant movement, fighting and killing had worn them thin, but the hunger still remained, and with it the hatred. The wrath of Andraste and Boudicca’s need for revenge never diminished. She had spilled enough blood to fill a lake and sent enough souls to the gods to satisfy even their legendary appetite, but still it wasn’t sufficient. Only by smashing the legions and killing the man who led them would she and her people find peace.

As the ghosts of trees appeared a few hundred paces to his left Valerius knew it would be soon. The rebel camp fires had been visible on the horizon when Paulinus’s legions bedded down in their positions for the night. They would have been on the move for more than an hour now, ready for another day chasing shadows. But the shadows were no longer going to run.

From the murk, the familiar, inhuman sound — the buzz of a million bees — filled the air, then the weak sun staggered above the eastern horizon and the mist shredded and burned away. The buzz faded to a confused, unnerving silence, and from his position at the governor’s side Valerius looked out over countless thousands stretching into the distance in a sinuous black column of humanity. Paulinus had spent days manoeuvring towards this position so that Boudicca would be drawn behind him, funnelling her army into the killing ground. The five thousand men of the Fourteenth legion formed a triple defensive line across the narrow valley at the head of a long, gentle slope. Five cohorts of the Twentieth who accompanied Paulinus anchored his flanks against the valley walls. Among them, he set up his ‘shield-splitters’, the ballistas which could fire heavy metal-tipped arrows a quarter of a mile. Beyond them, the cavalry ranged to discourage attempts to bypass or attack the vulnerable flanks. Behind the legions, the auxiliaries waited in reserve, ready to exploit any success or to die in their turn. For there would be no retreat.

‘This is my weakness and my strength,’ Paulinus had explained as he laid out his battle plan. ‘We will have only one opportunity to destroy her. Even if we win a great victory but leave her army intact, we will be so mauled as not to be able to fight for another thirty days, while she would scarce need to draw breath. Our end would be long and slow, but inevitable. We must fight her to a standstill, draw every warrior on to our javelins and our swords, kill and keep killing until no man stands. The position I have chosen means that my soldiers must fight or die, but her confidence and the vast host she leads ensures that Boudicca will never turn back.’

Agricola broke the silence that followed. ‘But if we hold them and she does decide to withdraw…?’

‘Then we all die.’

It took the rebel queen time to bring her forces to battle. Valerius could make no estimate of their numbers, but his eyes told him the army had swelled enormously since he had first seen it on the slope above Colonia, perhaps even doubled in size. Covering an area a thousand paces wide and three times as deep, they seemed as many as the birds in the air or the fish in the sea. The silence had vanished now, replaced by a muted roaring akin to standing too close to an enormous waterfall; a relentless, surging rise and fall that seemed to shake the very air.

His lack of emotion surprised him. He sat on his horse, with the reins still unfamiliar in the grip of his left hand, and watched Boudicca’s forces deploy with the dispassionate detachment of a spectator at a cockfight who had already gambled his last sestertius. Fear had no hold on him because a man could only die once and he had died at Colonia. But how could a soldier fight without passion? Maeve had robbed him of his hand; had she also deprived him of his soul?

He drove her from his head and studied the scene again. A visible thickening was apparent in the numbers at the base of the slope as more and more warriors joined the throng edging its way towards the Roman line a mile distant. A few chariots forced their way to the front and he recognized the glitter from the torcs and arm-rings of the rebel chieftains, but of Boudicca herself there was still no sign. Beyond the mass of fighters he noted the dust cloud as the rebel baggage train and camp followers caught up with the main force, deploying to the left and right for a better view of the battlefield, determined to witness the destruction of the red scourge that had blighted their lives for almost two decades.

Maeve was out there somewhere, he was certain of it. Cearan had been determined to re-join his queen and where he went she would follow, in the knowledge that only she stood between his sanity and the total disintegration of that shattered mind. He closed his eyes, attempting to visualize her among the great swathe of humanity. When he opened them another glint of gold from the van of the rebel army stirred a memory. If you didn’t love me why do you still wear the boar pendant I gave you?

By now it was mid-morning and Paulinus watched in silence as the rebel forces filled the slope in front of him, his shoulders hunched forward, eyes glowering from below the gold-embossed brim of his helmet. He had made his decisions and given his orders. He had no thought of failure because failure was death. The massive head came up as a new figure entered the stage.

Boudicca.

Her fiery mane flowed behind her in the breeze and she stood tall and proud in her chariot as she emerged from the chanting sea of warriors and spun to a halt on the green sward twenty paces ahead of her army. She had her back to the Roman line and Valerius could feel the dismissive contempt in her gesture. As he watched a brown blur flew from beneath her feet and scampered across the field to his right. At first he was puzzled, but then he remembered one of Boudicca’s emblems was the hare. The omen must be positive because an enormous, snarling roar greeted her that sent a shiver through every Roman. At the same time, hundreds of banners, proud symbols of the combined might of the tribes of southern Britain, were raised in acclamation.

He heard her voice for the first time, deep and almost manly, and caught snatches of speech carried on the wind but could make nothing of the words. Paulinus must have heard it too, but if he did the governor dismissed it. ‘Come,’ he ordered, and Valerius and Agricola joined him as he rode along the front of his legionaries, who stood silent and motionless.