Ian Ross - The War at the Edge of the World

‘Centurion! What do we do with the prisoners?’

‘Chop off their fucking heads,’ he said.

The soldier saluted and jogged away, drawing his sword.

‘No, wait! Better idea – rope them together in a coffle and take them back to the camp.’ He was forgetting himself. They needed captives to question – and slaves too. Already there were several hundred Picts and other Britons in the slave pens of the marching camp. They were supposed to be a lure, to draw the main Pictish force out to attack them. But so far there had been no sign of any organised enemy at all. Just these squalid little villages, most of them deserted. Old men, children and women in the rest. There was a word for this kind of war: atrocitas . It was grim work, but it was the only way to get at the enemy and draw them out to fight. This was the eighth village his cohort alone had destroyed since crossing the Wall, and the strain of it was showing on his men’s faces. They were growing bored and brutal now. More importantly, they were getting careless.

Castus kicked a chicken out of his way, spat against the wall of a burning hut.

‘Hornblower!’ he shouted. ‘Sound the assembly. We’re finished here.’

The sun was low behind them as the cohort made their way back to the camp. They marched in open order, the centuries straggling down the valley following a dirt path that crossed and recrossed a narrow rushing brook. Between them, roped together, they herded their haul of prisoners. It was hot, the valley filled with tiny insects, and all the men were sweating.

‘I had believed, centurion,’ Diogenes said from the line, ‘that this part of Britain was supposed to be perpetually cold and wet.’ A few of the men around him laughed; they were used to the schoolteacher’s curious asides.

‘Whoever told you that?’ Castus said over his shoulder.

‘It’s only what I read in the geographies of the ancients, centurion,’ Diogenes replied. ‘They all agree that in Britain, and especially the northern part, the sun is only seen for two or three hours a day, and the land constantly shrouded in thick mists. Also that the air and sea become thicker and more turgid the further north one goes.’

‘They never came here then.’

‘I suspect not. I am beginning to think that our ancient geographers had a lot of imagination, and not much else besides.’

Castus smiled. The men were not doing too badly after all, even with several days of burning and killing behind them. It had surprised him, in fact, how easily they had taken to the work. But most of them had seen the destruction wrought by the Picts on the land around Eboracum.

Now they climbed up out of the valley and crossed a rise, and the camp was before them. It lay on the level ground above the river; beyond were trees and the open slopes where the Pictish muster had been held the summer before. Somewhere to the right was the ford, and the low knoll with its ring of stone that Castus and his men had tried to defend. He could hardly bear to glance in that direction now. Five days they had been camped here, and he had not been able to steel himself to go and survey the scene of that terrible fight.

Cavalry piquets rode out to meet them, and the tribune at the head of the column called out the watchword. The air above the camp was misted with smoke from cooking fires, soft blue in the low evening light, and the high moors and mountains beyond were lit fiery orange and purple. Castus led his men up to the turf rampart and the palisade, then in through the open gateway. Brown leather tents stretched away in neat regular rows, horses tethered between the cavalry lines, carts and mules drawn up in the wagon park, and at the centre the huge white pavilions of the imperial party.

In the broad lane before the Sixth Legion lines Castus formed up his century and then dismissed them to their tents and cooking fires. Taking off his helmet, he swigged water from a skin, and then poured a little over his head and scrubbed it into his scalp. It was a sight to stir the heart, he thought as he blinked the water from his eyes: a Roman army in the field. Ten thousand men were camped here. Galerius had led more than double that number against the Persians, but Constantius’s force looked more than enough to totally annihilate the Picts.

But Romans had been in this place before: the soldiers’ entrenching mattocks had turned up corroded old coins and hobnails from hundred of years past. How many armies, Castus wondered, had marched into this land hoping to subdue its sav shy;age people? At least Constantius was not intending to con shy;quer the place, or try and turn it into a Roman province. This was a punitive campaign, nothing more. A campaign of extermina shy;tion, if it came to that. But first they had to get the Picts to face them in an open fight.

Forty days had passed since the army had departed Eboracum. They had marched north through Luguvalium, crossed the Wall at the fortress of Petrianis and moved into the territories of the Selgovae. The chiefs of that people had been quick to present themselves, quick to deny any role in the uprising – just a few hotheads among their youth, already punished. Constantius had ordered two thousand of their highest-ranking young men chained and sent back south, to the slave markets of the empire. It had seemed a cursory punishment to Castus, but the emperor hunted larger game.

The Votadini had been dealt with next. The old chief, Senomaglus, had ridden into the Roman camp beneath the Three Mountains, begging his loyalty to Rome, but Constantius had been unmoved. Senomaglus, his entire family and five hundred of his noblemen had been seized and sent to the imperial quarries, to break rocks until they died. Still the army had marched north. And once they had crossed the old grass-grown wall of Antoninus and moved into the lands of Picts, the real work of devastation had begun.

Castus sat by the fire as the evening sank into night, staring into the smoke at the darting insects that hovered around the flames. Being back in this place stirred strange memories and emotions. He remembered the meeting hut on the first night of the Pictish muster: the cup of foul beer they had given him to drink, and the scarred and barbaric chiefs standing up one by one to speak. Where were those chiefs now? Dead on the fields south of Eboracum, or up in the hills to the north with their assembled warriors, waiting to strike? He remembered his first sight of Cunomagla, as she had stood at the back of the gathering, proud and alone. How would she react, he wondered, to the Roman invasion? Would she surrender herself to the mercy of the emperor, like the Votadini chief? Castus knew she would not. The thought that he might have betrayed her trust twisted in his gut, but who would believe him now, a mere centurion, if he tried to claim that she was loyal to Rome? The possibility that she had tricked him, that Nigrinus was right and the uprising had been her doing, was still very real. He should not care about these things – he was back where he ought to be, in command of legionaries, with an army around him and a clear enemy somewhere ahead. But still his mind was shadowed by doubts.

Sitting back from the smoke, he listened to the nearest of his men, singing around their fire. From across the tent lines there was more music: a troop of Mauri was letting out a high wailing chant, beating hand drums and rattles. Then, in the distance, the roaring of the Alamanni from their own encampment near the imperial enclosure. And all around in the deep darkness, the silence of the mountains, the empty plains, the blackened, ravaged villages.

North again, the army spread out along the route of march in a column four miles long, following the track of an ancient road built by the legions in centuries past. At the vanguard rode the cavalry of the Equites Dalmatae and Equites Mauri, and behind them two cohorts of Legion I Minervia from the Rhine. Then came the commanders, the Augustus, his family and his staff, ringed by his elite bodyguard of Protectores, then the Praetorian Cohorts and a mounted guard of the Equites Scutarii. Following the emperor came the main legion force: detachments of VIII Augusta and XXII Primigenia; then II Augusta from the southern province of Britannia. The baggage train rolled after them, nearly two miles of carts and mules carrying tents and baggage, grain and water, and a full complement of siege artillery. With them went the slaves, and three hundred prisoners roped together and guarded by soldiers. The detachment of Legion VI Victrix brought up the rear, with the Equites Promoti as cavalry guard. And to either side of the march ranged the Alamannic warriors in loose order, with the horsemen of the Equites Batavi riding between them.