Douglas Jackson - Hero of Rome

‘You were here with Claudius?’

Julius shook his head. ‘Not with Claudius. With Aulus Plautius. Claudius didn’t arrive until the main battle was over. It was the Twentieth and the Fourteenth who forced the bridges, but if I’m being honest the Second did most of the fighting.’

‘I thought the Ninth were there as well?’

Julius spat. ‘You know the Ninth: last on the battlefield and first off it.’ Valerius grinned. The rivalry between the Ninth and the Twentieth was legendary; any bar where off-duty soldiers of the two met was certain to become a battleground.

A decurion approached and reported that one of the recent recruits to the fourth century was struggling to keep the pace. His centurion requested a short halt to allow the man to recover. Valerius opened his mouth to agree, but then he remembered the legate’s words of a few days earlier. Did he want to be liked or did he want to be a leader?

He shook his head. ‘I won’t stop the cohort because one man can’t keep up. Assign two of his section to help him. If he’s still lagging we’ll leave him at the next way station. He can rest there and follow on to Colonia in his own time.’

‘But-’ Julius interrupted.

‘I know,’ Valerius said sharply. If they left the man behind without written orders he’d have trouble persuading any military post to feed him and might well be accused of desertion. ‘This is the First cohort of the Twentieth, not a parade of Vestal Virgins. When he gets to Colonia make sure he gets extra training. Think, Julius. Think what would happen if he was left behind in some valley on the way to Mona.’

Julius nodded. He had seen the result when Roman prisoners fell into the hands of the Britons. He remembered a night on guard on a river bank: screams from the darkness and a terrible, flaming figure. And in the morning blackened lumps of charcoal that had once been men he had called friends.

They reached the halt by late afternoon; the scouts had already marked out the position of the cohort marching camp. Each legionary took his place without thinking in a combined effort they had carried out a thousand times before. Men dug, erected palisades or put up tents. A fortunate few formed hunting parties to seek out hare or deer to supplement the monotonous legionary rations. They had only covered a dozen miles since dawn but Valerius was satisfied. He knew they’d reach Colonia in four more days and he was in no hurry. The only thing that awaited him there was barrack-room walls and boredom.

He was wrong.

V

They approached from the west, on the Londinium road, through a gap in one of the great turf ramparts which had once defended Cunobelin’s Camulodunum. Colonia’s origins were clear the moment the city itself came into view. It stood on a low, flat-topped rise above a river crossing; a classic defensive position designed to dominate all the country around. What had once been a continuous ditch, backed by a turf wall and topped by a wooden palisade, surrounded the city, but much of it was now obliterated by new buildings and orchards. To the north, beyond the river, the ground rose in a hogsback ridge that stretched for miles from east to west. Once, the ridge must have been wild land, wood and bog, but it had been tamed by the dozens of farmsteads and the occasional small villa that dotted the hillside. At the eastern end of the ridge Valerius could just make out the distinctive outline of a military signal tower. The layout of the farms was almost entirely Roman because they were occupied by Roman citizens. The men who had won this land — cleared it, ploughed and sown it — had been granted that right by the Emperor Claudius in honour of his victory on the Tamesa. They were twenty-five-year veterans of the four legions who had conquered Briton. Men who had reached the end of their service and been rewarded either with twenty iugera of prime land or a share in the legionary fortress they had turned into the first Roman colony in Britain. In return they pledged their service as militia and vowed to protect what they’d been given. That had been eight years earlier and from a distance it looked as though they had used the time well.

Beyond the broken walls lay the familiar grid of streets that had originally been home to a legion. Once, those streets would have been lined with tents, then permanent legionary barracks, but now insulae, apartment blocks, some of them three storeys high, jostled the roadways. Valerius’s attention was drawn to a small group of soldiers gathered beside the western entrance, an honour guard to welcome the cohort to its temporary home, and he instinctively straightened his helmet and adjusted the plate armour beneath his cloak. Behind him, he heard the centurions and decurions closing up the ranks. He smiled. Of course, they would want to make a show before the men of another unit.

But as he approached the legionaries at the gate, he sensed something odd. A Roman soldier’s equipment had changed little over the last thirty years, but the armour and weapons of the men arrayed to welcome him appeared curiously dated. And something else was missing: a legionary had a certain posture, a straight-backed solidity that hinted at strength and stamina. These men looked to have neither. They stood ten to each side of the roadway beneath a modest triumphal arch that was in the latter stages of completion, and as Valerius rode towards them a soldier wearing a centurion’s crested helmet stepped smartly into the road in front of him and saluted.

Valerius reined in and dismounted, returning the salute. ‘Tribune Gaius Valerius Verrens commanding the First cohort of the Twentieth legion, on assignment to Colonia for the winter,’ he announced formally.

The man pulled back his shoulders. ‘Marcus Quintus Falco, First File of the Colonia militia, at your service.’

Valerius attempted not to stare. The militiaman facing him was like no soldier he had seen before. For a start, he was an old man, perhaps more than fifty, with a well-trimmed beard peppered with grey and a substantial paunch that bulged over his belt beneath the oft-mended chain-mail vest that covered his chest and shoulders. His helmet was of a pattern that Valerius only recognized because he’d seen it on altar stones dedicated to the men of Julius Caesar’s legions — men who had last worn those helmets a hundred years earlier. The cloak he wore had been washed so many times the original vibrant red had faded to a sickly pink, and the leather of his scabbard was worn through at the point. Each member of the welcoming party shared their commander’s failings to a degree. Slumped shoulders weighed down by out-of-date, rust-pitted armour. Lined faces staring out from beneath antique helmets. The hands that held the spears were veined and wrinkled.

‘Your scouts brought word this morning that you were on the way.’ Falco ignored the stare. ‘No soldier is more welcome here than a ranker of the Twentieth. We have prepared ground for your men’s tents in the old horse lines, but we hope that you personally will accept our hospitality and stay as a guest of the town.’

Valerius opened his mouth to refuse, but Julius appeared at his side before he could speak. ‘Centurion Julius Crispinus makes his greetings,’ he rapped out, and there was a respect in his voice that surprised Valerius. It took a lot to win Julius’s respect. ‘How are you, Primus Pilus?’

Falco squinted, focusing on the newcomer’s face. ‘Julius? An officer? No, it cannot be. I knew a Julius once who was only fit for cleaning out the latrines.’ Valerius waited for the eruption that would inevitably follow this insult, but Julius only laughed.

‘And I knew a First File once with shoulders like a bull, not a belly like one.’

With a grin, Falco reached forward to take the centurion’s hand by the wrist and drew him forward into an embrace that was more father and son than a meeting of military equals. ‘By the gods it’s good to see you again, Julius. A centurion, and a proper centurion too.’ He reached out to touch the medals that hung from the younger man’s chest. ‘Where did you win these phalerae?’