The Course of Honour Page 16

  ‘Antonia Caenis, let me introduce you to my patron –’

  ‘I know your patron,’ she interrupted quickly. Despite everything, Claudius might possibly not remember her; he drank heavily and his recollection for faces was notoriously bad. ‘I am his mother’s freedwoman; he is my patron too.’

  The Emperor nodded to her with that helpless quirk of the head.

  They all sat, as Narcissus had suggested, quietly in the twilight. It was then for the first time that Caenis realised she was part of something new. Some strain which she had always known was lifting from Rome. By chance she belonged to the private household that was so unexpectedly governing the world. Narcissus, who approved of her, would bring her into this Emperor’s tight-knit circle to watch, and if she wanted, to help.

  Narcissus was saying openly to the Emperor, as if Caenis were already acknowledged as a colleague, ‘I left you the list to consider for army legates. You might give thought to Vespasianus. He could suit the Second Augusta. They’re at Argentoratum now; ideal candidates for your British scheme.’

  Argentoratum was one of the big military bases on the Rhine. Caenis knew the legions there had been fractious for years. It would be useful to pull them out of their secure pitch where they fraternised too closely with the locals and were apt to forget they owed allegiance to Rome. In other respects the legions in Germany were first class. It would be a good command.

  Claudius had turned to her. ‘I know Vespasianus, don’t I?’

  She reminded him quietly, ‘You met him, sir; at your mother’s house.’

  ‘Yes . . . oh yes.’ He had taken on his wandering air. Oddly, it seemed to be settled at that. The freedman winked at her.

  ‘If you take to him,’ Narcissus mentioned to Claudius after a time, ‘he has a boy we may educate with your own.’ Suddenly Caenis understood why he had been so interested in Vespasian’s son.

  Messalina had crowned the Emperor’s astonishing rise to power by presenting Claudius with a male heir just twenty-two days after he accepted the throne. It would be seven years before the little prince went formally to school; Narcissus must be making long-term plans. With one Caesar barely pinned into his gown of woven gold, he was already plotting the school curriculum to produce a dynasty.

  Narcissus himself handed wine. Caenis had withdrawn into herself, winded by a vision of Vespasian with a baby on his arm. She was also having some difficulty hanging on to the dish of sweetmeats; Claudius was addicted to food.

  ‘To the Emperor!’ murmured Narcissus, the civil servant at his most wickedly urbane. Claudius ducked his head, not fooled by it.

  ‘To good government!’ Caenis staunchly returned. She grinned at Narcissus, aware that she had for once embarrassed him. ‘Sorry. I forgot to tell you; I’m a secret republican.’

  ‘Forgot to tell you, Narcissus,’ mused Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, with the slight melancholy of a man sitting quietly at dusk among his friends. ‘I am a secret republican myself!’

  And as they all sat eating Greek sweetmeats, they laughed.

  It was a new world, a new order, staffed by people with like minds: Caenis could hardly believe it; she was part of this.

  She had an interview with her landlord later that week. Eumolpus came into her room without knocking, as she knew he did when he thought she was out.

  ‘Ah!’ exclaimed Caenis quietly, and had the satisfaction of seeing the slimy bastard jump.

  He stared at her so the tendons set in the back of her neck. His provocative eyes lingered on her skin and on the subtle folds of her dark red dress. The dress had loosely draped sleeves, fastened to the elbow five times along each arm. ‘Always so smart! I do like that dress, Caenis. Those with the little buttons are the most seductive kind; a man always imagines them being very slowly unfastened one by one for him . . .’

  ‘Actually,’ Caenis crushed him, ‘these are purely decoration – permanently sewn up.’ She could hardly bear to be in the same room. ‘So glad you called; I can serve you my notice. I shall not charge you,’ smiled Caenis gently, ‘for all the painting and shoring up of your walls and woodwork I have had done – though I may suggest to the incoming tenant that she changes the lock!’

  And in answer to the gratifying curiosity she had caused, ‘I am fortunate,’ she said modestly. ‘The new Emperor has offered me a suite in his mother’s house.’

  It was a lie, because she would never accept the offer of returning to the House of Livia. And this was the only time Caenis, who was no snob, ever used her connections so publicly.

  She did it on behalf of all the struggling women down the years who endured invasions of their privacy and acts against their person from men whose only advantage was the possession of property. She did it for them, and she did it for the bitter, barefoot slavey she had once been herself.

  She was fortunate now. Emperors would come and go. But as Narcissus so shrewdly deduced, Antonia Caenis would in many ways be bitter and barefoot all her life.

  XXI

  Narcissus went to Britain himself.

  In fact he almost went to Britain by himself: all the more ludicrous since according to his plan he should have been nursing things along in Rome.

  The plan was: the troops would sail over, establish a foothold, batter the heads of a few southern tribesmen, then invite the Emperor to join them for finishing off the by-now groggy tribes; afterwards he would push off home as Claudius Britannicus, leaving the army to pin down as much territory as they could without serious expense, loss of face or loss of life.

  It was a perfectly sound plan. Once Narcissus wound the machinery into action, like some solemn donkey toiling at a plod around his eternally creaking water-screw, the plan worked pretty well. Once, that is, he got himself to Gaul and shifted the invasion force.

  The troops refused to go.

  ‘That was not in the Daily Gazette!’ Caenis exclaimed, when she saw Narcissus after he returned to Rome. She had found him at his house, which had been redecorated meanwhile with a great deal of Carrara marble and flagrant use of gold leaf: all rather wearing on the eyes.

  ‘It seemed to us,’ returned the freedman, meaning it seemed to him but he possessed a shrewd degree of modesty, ‘that it would be ill-advised to let it be known too widely how four of the Emperor’s best legions, forty thousand of the finest, in the peak of condition, all flush with their recent bonus for the Emperor’s accession and looking up to a general (Aulus Plautius) against whom no troops could possibly hold a grievance – utterly decent all-round sort of chap – as I say, four spanking legions had trudged their way through Gaul, to camp at Gesoriacum (pig of a hole; just a dot on the map), only to sit on their beds looking out of their tents, staring boot-faced at the sea.’

  ‘I understand,’ suggested Caenis gently, ‘that the Gallic Strait is very rough.’

  Narcissus, who had been across in both directions, shuddered wordlessly. It was accepted by cultivated people that the thirty-odd miles between Britain and Gaul formed the wildest stretch of water in the world. That was the main reason, as the legionaries had advised their general frankly, why they did not want to go.

  ‘I told them,’ said Narcissus, ‘I thought they had a point.’

  Caenis slowly sucked a red-rimmed peach between her teeth. ‘You told them!’ she repeated thoughtfully, imagining the scene.

  Fortunately Aulus Plautius was a rare specimen: a general who never panicked. Faced with a polite though stubborn mutiny, he had written to the Emperor for advice. The Emperor sent the head of his secretariat to represent his views. So Narcissus had dragged himself seven hundred miles overland across Europe from Massilia, which was itself five hundred miles from Rome by sea.

  ‘You told them – oh, of course!’

  Caenis rolled on to her back on the healthily plump crimson quilting that covered the visitors’ couches in Narcissus’ grand reception room. ‘Now let me be quite sure I understand this: you, my fellow-freedman, have no remit in the army. Soldiers, l
et’s be honest, despise you as a stylus-pushing bureaucrat. So you climb on a military rostrum – the tribunal, that’s the word? – in a huge new transit base at the far edge of the world. In the poker-faced presence of this exemplary general Plautius, his four legionary commanders –’ including Sabinus and Vespasian – ‘and all their stiff-necked officers – who presumably had already been trying very hard for weeks to make the soldiers go? – you address forty thousand hard-bitten, foul-mouthed, filthy-tempered rankers, some of them bearing the scars of twenty years and all of them trained to the teeth? – Tell me, Narcissus; was this well-received? Didn’t they laugh?’

  Narcissus smiled. ‘They laughed,’ he agreed. Caenis removed the peach stone, now clean as a whistle, from her needle-sharp front teeth and smiled at him. ‘It reminded them of the Saturnalia,’ he admitted, rather sheepishly.

  Caenis thought of the jolly winter carnival when in good-humoured households the slaves and their masters all changed places for a day. She tried to draw favourable comparisons but instead she heard in her head forty thousand ribald voices as they cried, ‘Io Saturnalia!’ like the terrifying roar in unison of the crowd at the races in the Circus Maximus; it was her turn to grimace. ‘Yes; I see. And then they went?’

  ‘And then,’ boasted Narcissus, ‘they were so surprised, they went.’

  Caenis scrambled round on to her front with her chin in her hands as she listened like an eager child. ‘And was that when you went yourself?’

  ‘It was blowing a gale, Caenis; credit me with sense! I waited in Gesoriacum for my man.’

  Still he could describe it: the wind so ominously cold; the heavy sky; the sails that snapped to and fro overhead unpredictably; the rowers anxious; the soldiers huddling on the verge of panic and the commanders trying pallidly to look calm. As the transports moved out from the shelter of the Gallic coast, a force of truly bleak water had rolled under them, sinister as pewter, with a nasty yellow tinge. Then the storm rose. Energy surged through the channel from one bloated ocean to another as it never did in the land-locked seas at home, while the gale blew them back upon themselves as if the great god Oceanus were calmly clearing his domain with the flat of a mighty hand.

  ‘Then they saw the great green light.’

  ‘Dear gods! What was that?’

  ‘We have no idea. It was tactfully passed off to the troops as a meteor heading east – Jupiter’s sign that he had countermanded Oceanus and blessed our enterprise. At any rate, the wind completely changed. The boats made headway, then were dragged by the tow of the tide and reached the other side. It all added to the pantomime.’

  The army had landed unopposed. The months of delay during the mutiny had caused the British tribes to pack up away from the cliff-tops and go home. There was no need to hack ashore. The legions beached at a new harbour where, since Caesar’s day, the sea had burst a channel to create the Isle of Thanet. The whole fleet anchored safely in a sandy creek where they found the oysters that were to become famous throughout the Roman world. They named the place Rutupiae. They dug in; the invasion was under way.

  Caenis realised it would be no sinecure. No one knew what to expect. That difficult coastline just out of sight from Gaul was by now fairly well known to traders, but traders for their own reasons gave nothing away. Little of the interior had ever been explored. Even Julius Caesar, a century before, had thought Britain was no place for a wise general to delay. He had created what was supposed to be a client kingdom paying tribute to Rome, but no one ever put the theory to the test. Britain remained hopelessly mysterious, shrouded in bad weather, an implausible shape on an old Phoenician map. It was a refuge for druids who had been dispossessed from Gaul with their secrecy, their political intrigue, their shocking rites of human sacrifice. Now the powerful princes in the south-east hated the recognised Roman threat; in the south-west were dark tribes living in spectacular hilltop fortresses who had alliances of trade, kinship, and common interest with the Celts in western Gaul, who had themselves been brutally defeated by Rome in Julius Caesar’s time. One thing was certain: there would be fierce hostility.

  Yet Narcissus argued the odds must be favourable. The four legions he was sending had the Emperor’s personal interest and support. Their commander was experienced. The Roman army was one of the best supplied and organised ever in the world. This was a professional army, with its own colonies, contractors, burial clubs, savings banks. The men were magnificently organised, equipped and exercised, trained to run, ride, swim, leap, fence, wrestle, even trained to use their heads. They owned a time-tested book of tactics; in any situation every one knew what he was expected to do. In a wilderness like Britain the legions were prepared to build their own roads as they marched, to dig ditches and canals, to throw up frontier walls and fortresses, to dredge rivers and harbours, to colonise towns. Once they found the precious metals, they would run the mines. Men in the ranks were trained for every kind of specialised work. Whatever they might possibly want they either carried with them or could make once they arrived. They had javelins, swords, daggers, laminated shields, field artillery of many sorts. They wore bronze-tipped leather stomach-guards, articulated plate armour or chain mail, shoulder-plates, leg-protectors, heavy-duty helmets and the most efficient boots in the world. Against them stood brave but disorganised tribesmen, naked, almost barefoot, armed with stones and a few unwieldy swords.

  Caenis suggested in a dry voice, ‘So it was easy?’

  ‘No.’ Narcissus sighed. ‘Caratacus and Togodumnus, two shaggy British princes, nearly beat three crack Roman legions in their first fight.’

  He went back to the beginning.

  ‘They got there; sick but safe. Landed in the east. Found the natives – a stiff fight – overnight. I hope a girl so well read as I tried to make you realises that not many Roman battles take more than one day. The hero of the hour was . . .’

  Caenis sat up. ‘Who?’

  ‘Hosidius Geta.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘One of the legionary legates. Brilliant chap.’

  ‘Well done, Hosidius!’ Caenis said mockingly.

  Narcissus released a tetchy laugh. ‘Oh, your lad did well enough.’

  From Rutupiae three legions had moved out westwards, thousands of horny feet in studded boots tamping down the chalk of an ancient Downland track. Eventually from a high ridge above the River Medway they had glimpsed the grey skein of the River Tamesis and beyond it, the marshes that guarded the heartland of their main opposition, the Catuvellauni tribe. Skirmishers began to harry the legions but were beaten off. At the Medway, Togodumnus and Caratacus stood. The ford was too narrow, the ground too spongy to cross under attack. Any bridge there had ever been had disappeared.

  Aulus Plautius prepared to cross the river.

  On the far bank the warriors in checkered trousers and bare chests watched. Roman standard-bearers marched meaningfully to the approach, where they planted their eagles firmly on a knoll. Ranks of infantry moved from the ridge, then stood guard while men with poles tested the softness of the ground. Cavalry wheeled towards the ford then circled back abortively, plashing through the shallows to the general’s command point. Sometimes a horse, sucked in to the hocks amongst the silt, reared in panic as it tried to regain firmer ground.

  Behind the Britons sprawled a careless jumble of camp sites where levies from different tribes had parked just as they arrived, confident that their attackers would be caught fast in a bottleneck. Further off still were their horses and chariots. Not until they heard the first screams from the ham-strung horses did they realise that the Romans’ Batavian auxiliaries had already come across.

  Silently and without fuss, almost unnoticed even by their own army, the Batavians had slipped down the north side of the escarpment, entered deep water far away to the right, and swum to the western bank. They were attached to the Fourteenth Gemina; they were one of the many groups of native specialists who were taken into the Roman legions to give them a chance of achieving citizen
ship and to let the army exploit their unique skills. These Batavians came from the area around the estuary of the Rhine; they were famous boatmen and pilots – and this detachment had been trained to swim, with their horses alongside, in their full weight of kit.

  They went straight for the chariot park and put the British horses out of action. At the roar when the tribesmen realised what was happening, the Batavians melted away.

  On the Roman bank it was the two legions commanded by the Flavian brothers, Sabinus and Vespasian, who then made the move. Order materialised from the diversionary exercise. Screened by mounted auxiliaries – a line of cavalry upstream to break the force of the water and another lower down to catch any baggage that floated off – the soldiers began to swarm across the marsh while the Britons were unscrambling their chariots. The Britons hurled themselves upon this bridgehead. Vespasian and Sabinus held them off until dusk.

  The third legion under Hosidius Geta went across in the dark.

  The battle continued almost all the next day. In the end, Hosidius Geta’s legion forced a wedge into the crammed ranks of half-naked warriors. Geta himself was surrounded but cut a swathe free and broke out. His legion wheeled round to encircle the enemy, and the day and the province were won. The British forces broke and galloped north. Picking off stragglers and gathering up their own casualties, the Romans made after them. But the Britons had crossed the river where it widened; by the time pursuit arrived the tide had turned and flooded back up the estuary to form an impassable brackish lake.

  Some Batavians swam the river, but they grew careless, lost their way amongst the marshes, and were cut apart by Caratacus. The general Aulus Plautius pitched camp on the south bank of the Tamesis while pontoons were towed from Rutupiae to build a temporary bridge. The legions waited two months for the Emperor and the elephants to come from Rome.