Jack Whyte - The Singing Sword

Not the kind of horses we would need — big, heavy brutes. They would have to be massive to carry heavily armed men. Ours just aren't big enough. And we would need so many of them! Hundreds."

He laughed aloud and rose to his feet. "We shall have them, Publius! We'll breed them! Big horses! By the hundred!"

"No, Caius, hold up!" I felt it my duty to interrupt, to bring him back to earth. "That would take years!"

"Of course it will. No doubt of it, none at all!" His voice was fierce and jubilant. "But we have years, Publius! We'll start tomorrow. And the first thing we have to find is someone who has knowledge about horses, and I know just the man. You remember the bailiff who was tending Terra's villa when he bought it? Fellow called Victorex, or Victrix, or something? Terra told me his father used to run a hippodrome in Gaul. The son learned about horses as a child and was a horse physician of some kind. I'll have Terra send him over tomorrow, and we'll ask him what he knows of breeding. He knows horseflesh, from all accounts. He may just be our man. You, in the meantime, can concern yourself with finding out all you can about Alexander's methods."

I grimaced. "How will I do that? I know of his campaigns and his battles, and a little about his strategy. But there's little or nothing in our books about his actual tactics — how he deployed or trained his men. We Romans have never concerned ourselves with cavalry tactics of that kind."

"Not until now, my friend. Not until us."

"Anyway," I went on, "I don't like the sarissa idea. Those things were too cumbersome — sixteen-feet long and useless after the first charge. They had to drop them then, and use swords. I don't like that at all."

He nodded. "Nor do I. Find me some way of keeping hold of a spear so that it can be used after the first attack. Our men should be able to kill with it again and again, as often as is needed to win a battle."

"Hmmm," I said. "Sounds like you want a short spear."

"I don't know what I want. But you may be right. A short spear with a two-edged blade. Something that will cut as well as thrust. Something that will let our horsemen fight from horseback without having to dismount. That's what we need, and that's your department. See to it, please, and let me know as soon as you have solved the problem." The bridge from infantry to cavalry had already been built in the mind of Caius Britannicus.

"Let me think about it," I told him. "I'll talk to Equus, too. Perhaps between us we can come up with something."

"Good." He was standing close, leaning over me, his hands clasped in front of his chest, making little explosive noises as he brought the hollows of his palms together unconsciously again and again. "Excellent, excellent. Now let's go and find some more food. That pear was excellent, but I want meat. Thinking makes me hungry. In the meantime, I want you to think about that spear."

I laughed and stood up, stretching. "I will. I don't know what I might be able to come up with, but I'll think about it. You just reminded me of something else, though."

"What's that?"

"I'm due to meet that merchant again, Statius, the one who's collecting iron for me in the north-east. I arranged to meet him again in Noviomagus next month. I'd forgotten. You reminded me of it when you made me think of the Glevum trips we used to make."

"Is that important?"

"Very important." I grinned at the memory of the merchant's expression when he had seen my bag of gold auri. "You should have seen his face when I pulled out the money to pay him! Now that he knows how mad I am to exchange gold for iron, he'll probably have ten wagons loaded to overflowing. I hope he has, I'll gladly take them off his hands."

Cay frowned. "That much? Do we need that much?" His tone made me smile again, but I wiped the smile off my face as I answered him.

"As much as I can get, Cay, and then ten times as much again. You were the one who made me worry in the first place about what's going to happen in the future. Now I am convinced that your prophecies were short of the mark. If things keep deteriorating the way they have been, iron is going to be worth a hundred times its real weight in gold, and there's going to be little time or opportunity to mine it, smelt it and carry it here from wherever we might find it. A storeroom full of gold ingots will give you no more than indigestion when you have to grow and make your own food because there's no one left to buy from, Cay. But with a storeroom full of iron ingots, I can make all the tools we'll need to grow and harvest our own food and fight off anyone who tries to steal it from us."

He was nodding in agreement as I spoke. "You are correct, as usual, Publius. I can be very dense at times."

"No, not dense, brother. You were simply not brought up to see that iron might someday be worth more than gold, that's all."

"God! Was anyone?"

"Of course, I was."

"Oh. Silly of me, I should have known. So when will you leave?"

"In about three weeks."

"Just in time to take Lignus with you."

I shook my head in disgust. "By the Christus, I hope not! But you are probably right, and if I have to, then I will. But he had better behave himself until he gets out of my sight."

"He will, my friend, he will." Caius yawned and stretched. "Aye! I think I shall forgo that food after all. I am ready to sleep. I had no more than three hours last night and I'm too old for that. Good night to you, and don't forget to think about my two-edged spear."

VIII

Well, I thought about that spear. I thought of little else for a long time. I worked on it and worried over it day and night for months after that evening, not knowing it was to be another ten years before the discovery was made that would revolutionize our way of waging war, and even longer before we would recognize what we really had.

Victorex, the bailiff from Terra's estate, took to Caius's ideas before he had even finished outlining them, for horses were this man's life. He even looked like one. He was tall and bald except for a thick corona of stiff, straight, dun-coloured hair that encircled his head above his ears like a cropped mane. He had long, pointed ears, large, pale eyes that were slightly too close together and a face that seemed to fill up his whole head. His nose was long and flat and his big, oblong teeth seemed squeezed together at the front of his mouth. And he had no chin. A strange-looking character, altogether. The first time Equus saw him he said, "My God! And they call me Equus!"

Victorex was the perfect man to put in charge of Caius's new project, and he could not wait to get started. The first thing he did, after he had moved his belongings from Terra's villa to ours, was to examine every head of stock we had. Within a week he had divided them all up by sex, weight and colour and begun to devise complicated plans and charts for his "bloodlines," as he called them, and for his breeding stables. All told, including the horses from the other villas in the Colony, we had twenty-seven stallions, about fifty mares and a number of geldings, mules and horses too old to be useful. Victorex selected the three finest stallions and the ten biggest, strongest mares as breeding stock, to be kept at the villa. The rest he allocated to the various farms that made up the Colony. Caius had informed all of our people of his plans, and if there were any ill feelings over this relocation of stock, they went unvoiced. The word went out, too, that every expedition that left the Colony had to keep constant look-out for new stock. No plugs or swaybacks were wanted, but all horses judged to be suitable for breeding purposes were to be bought at a fair price and brought back to the Colony.

The first opportunity came on my next excursion to Noviomagus to meet with Statius, but we found no horses on that journey other than the nine pairs we bought from him, complete with wagons loaded with iron ingots. Caius had been correct, in his usual manner, about our timing on that trip. The twenty-one days of grace accorded to Lignus the carpenter expired as we were preparing to leave the Colony, and he was granted another two days in custody so that we could escort him safely off the Colony's lands. His son Simeon was recovering slowly, and there was now every reason to expect that the boy would grow healthy again, although his leg was broken and twisted beyond even Cletus's ability to repair. Lignus's burns, on the other hand, had been largely superficial and were healing quickly, except for the oil burn on his left ear, and hair had already begun to grow on the rest of his head, leaving him with a mangy, scabby look that I thought well suited to him. He still stank like a goat, too, and I ordered him forcibly washed before I would allow him to approach my train.