IX
Narcissus came to a ridge of high ground. He broke away from his companions and urged his horse to climb the rise. From here, he looked back at the column.
He would not have admitted it to any of the officers, not even to his ally Vespasian. But the fact was that a Roman army on the march was a stunning sight. The legionaries flowed past, an endless river, their metal armour shining under the watery British sun, the standard bearers identifying each unit. The army was noisy too. The sound of thousands of feet was a low thunder that shook the very landscape, overlaid with the amphitheatre-like murmur of a crowd of male voices, and the clatter of metal on metal, and the brittle peals of signal horns.
The men were heavily laden. As well as his weapons and armour each man carried a complicated kit containing a saw, a basket, a pickaxe, a water bottle, a sickle, a chain, a turf-cutter, a dish and pan, and enough rations for three days. Narcissus had heard the men grumble about this load; they called themselves 'Marius's mules', after Gaius Marius, the great general who had helped define the Roman way of waging war. But this meant that each unit was ready at a command to fight-or to dig out a fort or build a bridge-and the army as a whole was unburdened by a long baggage train.
Away from the main column of the legionaries the auxiliaries walked or rode. The specialist foot soldiers marched like the legionaries, the slingers and javelin-throwers and spearmen, the archers with their chain mail and bows, while cavalry units rode out to the flanks, providing cover for the infantry. Most of the auxiliaries were recruited from the provinces or even the barbarian lands beyond, and in the drab British landscape they made splashes of colour with their exotic helmets and cloaks and tunics. Indeed, many of the legionaries were provincials now too, a major change since Caesar's day, and when the cohorts came close enough Narcissus could hear the jabber of alien tongues. This Roman army was a vast mixing-up of races drawn from Gaul to Asia, from Germany to Africa, and yet they all worked in harmony under the command of a good Roman.
And the marching men threw up dust that caught the sun, so that a band of light stretched dead straight across the undulating British landscape.
Vespasian came trotting up. 'You shouldn't break away like that, secretary. This is hostile country, remember.'
'Oh, I like to test your vigilance, legate. And what a sight!'
'Quite. The poor little British.' Brittunculi. 'The legions will crush them like peppercorns in a grinder.'
'Well, it's a marvel of organisation,' Narcissus said. 'It's like a city on the march.'
'Aulus Plautius is nothing if not meticulous.'
Narcissus said softly, 'His enemies say he is nothing but meticulous.'
Vespasian raised his eyebrows. 'Are you testing my loyalty, secretary? I suppose that is your job. I'd rather follow a man like Plautius than a Caesar. What we need is planning and control, not brilliance-dedication to the cause, not to oneself.'
Narcissus mulled that over. He actually knew Aulus Plautius a little better than Vespasian probably suspected. The Plautii had a somewhat tangled relationship with the imperial family. A daughter of Plautius's father's cousin had been the Emperor Claudius's first wife-and her mother had been a close friend of Livia, the manipulative and dangerous wife of Augustus. So Aulus Plautius was a good choice personally for this crucial project, and as it happened, with his experience as governor of Pannonia, he was well suited militarily and politically as well. Claudius was wily enough to choose a man whom he could trust-but that hadn't stopped him sending Narcissus along to keep an eye on things.
Meanwhile, as Claudius trusted Aulus Plautius, so Narcissus knew he could trust Vespasian. It had been Narcissus's influence that had secured Vespasian this posting in Britain, his first legionary command. From humble origins, Vespasian had used the influence of his better-connected mother to climb up the social ladder. He had acquitted himself well in his first military post, as an equestrian tribune in Thrace. Narcissus watched constantly for young men like Vespasian, clearly able, eager for advancement yet blocked by their social origin. They were the hungry sort who needed a favour-and, once given it, were forever in your debt.
'Well, it's a marvel, however this adventure turns out,' Narcissus said. 'Look at that band of dust we throw up, right across the country, like a dream of the road that will one day be laid here.'
Vespasian grunted. 'Not "one day", secretary-today.' He pointed to the rear of the column.
In the back of the short baggage train, behind bulky shapes that were the components of prefabricated siege engines, Narcissus made out slower-moving units; he saw the flutter of flags, the flash of surveyors' mirrors. 'They are laying the road already?'
'Why not? We aren't coming this way by chance; for decades to come this route is likely to be a key artery inland from Rutupiae. May as well get it right from the start. Anyhow it keeps the troops busy, and there's no harm in that.'
'And show the natives we intend to stay.'
'Quite so.'
'Ah, but where is it we have come to stay?'
Narcissus tugged at his rein, turned his horse away and gazed out on the landscape of southern Britain. He saw a gently rolling land. Forest clumped on hilltops and spilled into the valleys-he thought he saw pigs snuffling at one forest fringe-but most of the land was cleared, and covered by a patchwork of fields. Round houses sat everywhere, squat, dark cones. The place was clearly densely populated-though empty today; evidently when they saw a Roman army approaching the people had sensibly run or hidden.
There were strikingly many circular structures: the houses, ditches and banks, rings of standing stones which for all he knew they might have been forts, or temples, or simply places to keep the sheep. It struck him that as seen from the air, by a curious crow perhaps, Britain would be covered by circles, like a muddy field splashed by rain.
But Romans built in straight lines, and the new military road would cut through this landscape of circles, rude as a sword slash. Roman roads ran straight for long stretches because they were designed to support army marches, and as long as they had a good surface and sound drainage and weren't too steep for a soldier loaded with his kit, the roads could be laid across almost any landscape.
Narcissus knew that such stupendous rectilinearity was itself an oppressive marker of Roman dominance. This was a land beyond the Ocean, a land at the very edge of the Roman mind, beyond which lay madness. But here was the army to impose order on chaos.
That was the theory. But, he reflected, this 'chaos' was a place of neat little fields and farmhouses. He murmured, 'We are here to civilise the moon. But there is a civilisation here already!'
'Peaceful, too,' Vespasian murmured. 'Those low walls are for keeping out sheep, not men.'
'Caesar wrote of waves of invaders from the continent. It's true you see pots from Germany and brooches from Gaul. That doesn't mean the potters and jewellers came over in force! Julius wanted to make Britain seem the wilder place, I suppose, and his own deeds the greater by association. Yet I should have anticipated this,' he said. 'After all it is deliberate policy to cultivate our neighbours.'
In return for high-quality goods from the empire, raw materials were imported from Britain: minerals, wheat, leather, minerals, hunting dogs-and, increasingly in the last few decades, slaves, though as Narcissus could testify from his personal experience Britons made for testy servants. The empire made a fat profit on such trade, trinkets exchanged for huge volumes of raw materials. Narcissus, a thoughtful man, considered this pattern probably inevitable when an advanced culture dealt with a more primitive one. And all of this served the longer term goals of the empire. Roman material culture was an invaluable tool for manipulating local elites, and friendly native rulers provided an inexpensive buffer against more remote barbarians.