Simon Scarrow - Britannia

Cato saw that the charge had completely crushed the enemy, who were now streaming back in the direction they had come, some abandoning their weapons as they sought to escape the Blood Crows. Thraxis and the trumpeter were close by, and Cato turned to them.

‘Sound the recall!’

The shrill note rose above the wind and the scattered sounds of combat, and the officers bellowed to their men to return to their standards. Some took more persuading than others until threatened with punishment. But soon the last of the enemy had disappeared, save those who had been cut down in the charge, and the Blood Crows re-formed into their squadrons. Themistocles and several of his men were missing, and Cato took personal command of the survivors. When the men were all in place, he turned his mount towards the coast and waved them forward.

Already he could see further into the distance and make out more detail, and he realised that dawn was not far off. He glanced back towards the fires and the still forms of the dead and prayed to Fortuna that the enemy would take some time to recover following the charge, and would be held up further by the sight of the Roman soldiers still in place. Long enough for the Blood Crows to steal a sufficient advance before they were cut off by the enemy making the crossing from Mona.

As the sky brightened, so the snow began to abate, until only light flakes, like dust, were carried on the breeze. Cato and his men hunched their heads down into the folds of their hooded cloaks. To their left loomed the vast outline of the army’s camp, sprawling over the uneven ground. There, too, fires had been lit, stoked up and left to burn, their smoke rising at an angle, giving the appearance that the Romans were still there. Along the palisade and in the towers stood the distant figures of more of the army’s dead. The effect was quite convincing, Cato thought, and it should fool the enemy for a while yet.

He led his men in the direction of the sea, grey and ruffled with streaks of spray as it rolled in and dashed itself against the rocky coast in a dull rhythmic roar. They happened upon the route taken by the rest of the army almost by accident. Snow had covered the tracks of thousands of boots, hooves and wagon wheels, but the uneven surface was just visible, and Cato was able to follow it easily enough as he turned the column and increased the pace of the Blood Crows to a steady trot. The snow kicked up by the hooves was like a swirling cloud along the ground, and the absence of the usual drumming thunder of horsemen on the move added to the sense of unreality that Cato was experiencing. Despite the grave danger faced by him and his comrades, and the soul-numbing cold, his thoughts inevitably returned to Julia.

That she could be dead still seemed impossible. She had been blessed with a divine spark of vivacity that had struck him from the very first. Self-assured, she had taken on every challenge they had faced together with all the courage and endurance of a seasoned veteran. From the siege at Palmyra, the shipwreck off Crete and her subsequent capture and humiliation at the hands of Ajax and his rebel slaves. For a moment, as he sat swaying gently in his saddle, Cato recalled her face. The slightly squared jaw, small nose, grey eyes and dark eyebrows that occasionally rose archly when she was gently mocking him. And then the dark hair sweeping out from her widow’s peak to flow down to her shoulders. He realized how much he missed her, physically just as much as he did emotionally. She was slim, with breasts that he could easily cup, and a flat stomach that gave way to the soft dark tuft of her pubic hair – the sight of which always sparked a fire in his loins. The gentle curves of her buttocks were smooth and flawless. Her legs had been short in proportion to her back, another small deviation from the ideal, one of many, that had defined her perfection to Cato. His heart ached unbearably at the knowledge that she breathed no more. That he would never feel her warmth beside him ever again. She was like the others, those who had been left to the enemy, dead and cold. But where they would be abandoned to the forces of steady corruption, at least Julia would have been spared that when her body was cremated. The brief thought of her beauty being reduced to withered skin stretched over bone and shrunken muscle and organs made Cato feel sick.

He opened his eyes with a start and was furious to see that he had wandered a few paces off the faint path left in the snow. A twitch of his reins brought his mount back on course and he told himself firmly that he must accept the fact of Julia’s death. He knew that she would want him to live on and try to be happy. But Cato knew, as surely as the sun rose with the dawn, that he would forever look back to the time he had shared with Julia, and the present and all prospect of the future would be haunted by her memory. Every spring day, every budding flower, the jade gleam of young leaves and the heady scent of new life would never refresh his soul as they once did. For him, it would be a perpetual winter of the soul, all life shrunk beneath a mantle as white as bone, cold as ice and swept over by a wind filled with the sighs of every lost joy now denied him. And nothing would ever change that.

‘Sir!’

Cato started, and blinked hard. Miro was alongside him, craning his neck as he pointed ahead. A mile away he could make out the end of the Roman column stretched out across the winter landscape. Wagons were interspersed with units of infantry, some of whom toiled at the wheels to budge forward vehicles that had become stuck or were struggling with a steep incline. The cavalry formed an extended picket line to the landward side of the route, while the coast guarded the other flank. More riders were just visible in the distance, scouting the way ahead. Cato strained his eyes to look beyond them, to the east, the direction that held out the prospect of the army’s salvation. And yet in his heart, he felt that he was already dead and merely looking over the thousands of men who would soon share that fate in reality.

‘Keep them going,’ he said to Miro, and steered his mount off the track then turned to look back the way they had come. The cohort had kicked up a clear trail through the snow, and until there was another fall, it would be easy to follow, like a finger pointed directly at the retreating Roman army. The enemy would find it soon enough. And then they would hurl themselves into a savage pursuit of their prey, determined to run them to ground and tear them to pieces.

There was little sign of the enemy for the first two days, even though their scouts had established contact with the Romans as early as dusk on the first day of the retreat. The native horsemen were first seen in the distance, over two miles to the rear of the column. Having found the Roman army, they galloped forward and were only driven off when Cato and the Blood Crows turned to confront them. No attempt to engage the Romans was made, and the enemy were content to ride up into the hills on the flank and survey them as they kept pace. That was not a hard task for the native warriors due to the army’s difficulties in negotiating the snowdrifts that blocked the way. Each time the wagons had to be halted while the men took up their trenching tools and cleared a path. There was additional trouble once the passage of feet and wheels packed down the snow and compressed it into sheets of ice that made the going difficult for those following on. The only cheering thought for Cato was that the Druids and their followers would be enduring the same conditions, though they would not be burdened by carts and wagons as the Roman army were.

Legate Quintatus drove the men on as far as he could before giving the order to halt for the night. Due to the head start that the Romans had gained, he did not judge it possible for the natives to catch up for at least another day. And so no camp-in-the-face-of-the-enemy was constructed, the soldiers merely setting out a perimeter of field defences using the spiked lengths of wood that slotted together to make barricades. Come the dawn, these were easily broken down and carried on the back of carts or loaded on to mules. As soon as the tents were erected, those off duty scrambled inside to shelter from the wind and cold as best they could and chew disconsolately on their meagre rations.