Jack Whyte - The Singing Sword

ii

. Rome has conquered the world by the excellence of her legions, the greatest military force history has ever seen. Roman armies

—

Rome's foot-soldiers

—

have been invincible since the days of Gaius Marius and Julius Caesar; the only defeats sustained since then by Roman armies have been at the hands of other Roman armies.

iii

. The catastrophe at Adrianople, therefore, was epoch-making: the greatest defeat of a Roman army by a non-Roman force in more than half a millennium. To categorize it as anything other than an unfortunate and regrettable mischance would be an admission that the barbarian forces threatening the Empire are capable of repeating their performance at Adrianople whenever and wherever they please. Obviously, such an admission is officially beyond consideration. The capacity, therefore, to inflict such damage has been attributed to hazard and ill fortune

—

the fact that the barbarians simply happen to have been on horseback at the time of the incident, an eventuality unprecedented in the annals of Roman warfare.

iv

. Rome has never relied upon cavalry, other than for the provision of mobile screens of skirmishers and mounted archers to protect the legions while they deploy in line of battle. The cavalry function has always remained, more or less, in the hands of Rome's allies in Germany and Africa. To the Roman military mind, in fact, cavalry has always been deemed an inferior military presence, operating without the rigid discipline and training required by massed infantry formations. To this day, since the beginnings of Rome, there has always been something Jess than

Roman

about cavalry and cavalry troops.

Such are the findings of Flavius Stilicho; from them he has developed the following propositions:

v

. That any Roman worthy of the name will discern the four foregoing points for himself, after even the shortest period of analytical thought on the matter, and will accept the verity of the situation and the dominant peril it implies, namely:

vi

. That no Roman worthy of the name who has even the slightest knowledge of military matters can seriously doubt the existence of brilliant, clear-thinking generals, equally capable of analysis and action, in the territories of the barbarians. It follows logically and inevitably, therefore, that the action against Valens's army at Adrianople will be recognized by such men for what it was: an overwhelming victory against a supposedly invulnerable force, won by the simple expedient of falling upon the Roman cohorts with sufficient speed to ensnare them before they could deploy on their own ground and in their own battle lines, and then overwhelming them with a sheer mass of men and horseflesh. Granted that realization, at some time in the future, if not now, Adrianople will be emulated and repeated, and the day of the Roman legion

as it now exists

will be over.

That phrase, Father, "as it now exists," contains a seminal thought. Flavius Stilicho has the kind of mind that confronts potential disaster and circumvents it. His propositions continue:

vii

. That, accepting the inevitability of such a development, it is incumbent upon the senior legates of the imperial staff to begin immediately searching for effective means of precluding such a possibility, and to do so not by staring gape-mouthed into the future but by searching diligently in the past for an answer.

viii

. That the greatest military genius of ancient times was Alexander of Macedon, called The Great, who refined the heavy cavalry techniques of his father, Philip of Macedon, and used that heavy cavalry to conquer the world.

ix

. That since the cavalry in general use today consists of light skirmishers mounted on light horses, and the large, heavy horses used by Alexander and his troops are unknown in Roman military life, every effort should and must be made

—

immediately and without delay

—

to collect such horses, from wherever they may be found throughout the Empire, and to begin a program of breeding them selectively while training and equipping new, large bodies of troops to be the nucleus of a new form of warfare in the Roman world. And

—

x

. That within one decade, or two at the very most, fully 25 percent of the fighting strength of every imperial legion in the field should consist of such heavy, tightly disciplined, highly manoeuvrable cavalry.

Father, I had the privilege of being present when Stilicho outlined his findings, his conclusions, and his recommendations to the Emperor. Theodosius looked at him, frowning, and asked, "Do you really believe this ? " Stilicho merely inclined his head. "So be it, " said the Emperor. "Let it be done. " And the world as we know it

—

a thousand years of military history and tradition

—

changed.

This has been a long letter, Father, but I have enjoyed the writing of it, and I think I have but little now to add. I know you will give it serious thought, and I know you will see the portent of it. We began the task of conversion to cavalry that same night, although it has been largely a paper task to this point. I am embroiled in it, and already we make great progress. Our major difficulty has been finding men

—

officers senior enough and flexible enough in their thinking (strange how those two seldom go together) to envision what we are about to do.

I shall write again, as soon as I have substance to report. Take care of yourself, Father, and convey my respect and good wishes to all whom I hold dear.

Picus

"Strange how those two seldom go together ..." It pleased me considerably that Picus should be so evidently the son of his father. That one little observation, whimsical and acerbic at the same time, demonstrated to me, more clearly than anything else I had read, that our boy had a pragmatic and slightly cynical head on his shoulders. Pragmatism is all very well on its own, I find, but it is too often humourless. When it is salted with a healthy and subtle hint of cynicism, however, the result is often humour, wit and irony. Those who possess such a blend of spices in their character are seldom boring.

I was rereading this second letter from Picus as I walked to a meeting with Victorex, our Master of Horse, and I was smiling at my thoughts as I turned into the huge yard that fronted the main stables. There I found a spectacle that made my smile even wider and my pleasure greater, and I stopped and leaned against a gatepost to watch what was happening.

Victorex, due mainly to his strange appearance and his almost complete disregard for the concerns of normal men and women (he was obsessed with things equine to the exclusion of all else), had made few real friends in our Colony, and he seemed more than content with that. He had, however, within a very short time of his arrival here made two staunch friends in the Villa Britannicus, both of whom shared his fierce love of horses and neither of whom seemed even slightly aware of the strangeness of his appearance.

The first of these was my daughter Veronica, and the other was my wife. Veronica, now a beautiful, vivacious ten-year-old, had been besotted with a love of horses ever since she was old enough to tell a horse from a puppy. Her mother, I later discovered, had had the same passion as a girl but had forgotten it, by and large, on entering womanhood. In the past few years, however, her childhood love had been rekindled in the heat of her daughter's enthusiasm, and since Victorex had arrived to take over our horse-breeding program, both of them had spent all of their free time with him and his horses.