“And make sure they feed you well and soak you in wine when you get there. On my orders, yes?”
The decurion grinned.
“Count on it, sir.”
With a salute, he turned and left the building, tucking the wax tablet away into his tunic. Galba sighed and leaned back in the chair. This room smelled of badly-cured animal skins, burned meat and a tightly-packed family group who had clearly eaten too many vegetables.
Trying not to picture what might be lurking in the dark corners of the room where he’d not yet had the courage to prod and examine, Galba stood and turned to follow the trooper through the door.
Outside the house, the street sloped gently down toward the river that cut Octodurus in two. It was the most unusual Celtic settlement Galba had ever seen. No hill fort here, with high walls and a central gathering place at the summit. Here, the Veragri had been at the mercy of the vertiginous landscape. Octodurus lay on almost flat land at the head of a ‘Y’-shaped valley, in a commanding position and bisected by a river. The view down the street was truly breathtaking, not for the town itself, but for the enormous mountains that rose up like unassailable walls to either side of the valley and at the spur rising like the prow of an upturned trireme between the valleys.
Climbing those mountains was an epic journey in itself, as the scouts that he’d sent up there yesterday had verified when they returned late in the evening, exhausted, scratched and bruised. Since the legion had arrived here two days ago, the town had changed beyond measure. In an effort to preserve a level of reasonable trust and acceptability with the Veragri, Galba had allowed them to keep the lower, flatter half of Octodurus for themselves on the other side of the river, across the single bridge that joined the two halves.
The Twelfth and their cavalry counterpart had taken control of the so-called ‘upper’ town and evicted the natives, forcing them to take up residence down the valley. The better of the squat stone and timber buildings had been requisitioned as the headquarters, armoury, store, watch office, and the various senior officers’ quarters. The town’s granary lay on the far side of the river, but the men were busy converting a building on high ground to do the job. The rest of the structures had been divided up among the men as barrack blocks.
The situation was hardly perfect and it would take days or even weeks before the buildings were clean and comfortable and serviceable as fort structures. Galba glanced back over his shoulder once more, narrowing his eyes at the dark corners of the house with their piles of unknown objects. The idea of burning the damn thing down and building a new one was appealing. It would take weeks just to get rid of the smell in there.
A voice surprisingly close by cleared its throat and Galba grimaced as he jumped a little in a very unprofessional manner. Whipping round to see who had been lurking at the corner of the legate’s quarters when they should have been busy working, he was relieved to see the battered and worn figure of Baculus, the primus pilus, sitting on a large half-buried block of stone and tapping his bronze greaves with his vine staff. His helmet lay on the grass beside him.
“In the name of Jupiter’s balls, do you have to sneak up on me like that?”
Baculus raised an eyebrow and Galba chortled at himself.
“You startled me. How can a man like you be so quiet?”
The primus pilus started pulling himself respectfully to his feet. Galba waved the man back down and wandered across to take a seat facing him on a similar stone nearby.
“Sit, man. You’re still supposed to be on light duties at best. The medicus keeps telling me that you’re a long way from healthy again and that you’re overdoing it. In his opinion you should be back in Rome for the next season recuperating.”
Baculus shrugged.
“Too much to so, sir. And you’re already under-staffed. Frankly if I wasn’t here, the whole collection of adolescents and near-cripples that pass for the officer class might just collapse into a blubbering heap.”
Galba frowned.
“Harsh, centurion, don’t you think?”
Baculus curled his lip and waved his vine staff expansively at the town around them.
“Respectfully, sir, there are four officers left in the legion that I would consider veterans. Apart from myself there’s Herculius, who’s damn near due for retirement, and Petreius who suffered a blow to the head at that hill fort with the rolling logs last month and keeps forgetting words and misplacing things. There’s the one tribune left who’s good but exhausted from having to perform the duties of several men. Other than that, the entire officer class is filled with centurions who’d been immunes legionaries with perhaps three years of service in other legions before being drafted across to us, or even green recruits who couldn’t have told you one end of a gladius from the other two years ago.”
He sighed and settled back on the rock.
“Don’t get me wrong, legate. They’re good lads, all of them. They’ve fought like monsters through this campaign, despite their youth and lack of experience, and they’ll do whatever you ask, they’re so damn loyal to the banner. They’ll be an excellent cadre of officers in time; best I could ask to serve with. But that’s at least two or three years of campaigning away yet. They’re trying hard, but they’ve just not got the experience to carry out this sort of operation without older, steadier hands holding them in place.”
Galba nodded and stretched his arms out.
“Good job they have you to advise them, then.”
The two men fell silent for a time, nodding, until finally Baculus raised his face and cast a meaningful glance at his commander.
“I assume you’ve put a fairly urgent request for men in that report, sir?”
Galba nodded.
“Couched it in the best terms I can, but you know as well as I that, even if we get these reinforcements, they’ll be raw and untrained. We’ll be very lucky indeed if the command in Cremona can rustle us up a few veterans who are bored of their retired farming lives and feel like taking up the stick again.”
“Indeed. But at least it would give us a little more manpower.”
Silence descended again for a long moment.
“How are the works coming on?”
Baculus looked up again at his commander and leaned forward, his hands on the end of the vine staff, standing point down in the turf.
“Getting there. They should be basically ready by noon or mid-afternoon tomorrow. We’ve got the ditch and breastworks complete around the west, south and east sides, and the palisade is being produced at the moment. I’ve got the men working in shifts cutting timber on the valley side and working on construction, and they’ll continue through the night. If everything goes according to plan, the gates and palisade should be up not long after first light. I’ve got them planning towers, lilia, a fortified bridge and various other things as well, though.”
He narrowed his eyes.
“We may have these bastards officially subdued and hostages and all that, but I wouldn’t trust any of those carrion-feeding dogs further than I could spit one. I won’t be able to relax until I have at least three levels of defence between us and them.”
Galba sighed and leaned back.
“I know what you mean. Things are theoretically quite settled here and yet I just can’t shake this impression that something is going on that we don’t know about.”
“It’s like that with Celts, legate. After all, Caesar’s conquered them twice and they still rise up and complain. They just won’t stay conquered.”
That last comment drew a throaty laugh from the stocky, barrel-chested legate.
“I wouldn’t say that too close to the general.”
Baculus reached down to the hardness on his chest and stroked the shiny phalera and golden corona decorations that hung from the leather.
“You think he’d take these back?” the grizzled veteran grinned. “I’d hate that, having just become accustomed to the extra weight.”