‘That particular train, you might notice, has Caesar’s mark. The profit from those slaves is not going to the army and the province, you know? It’s filling the general’s personal coffers alone.’
‘Who can blame him, Varus? In a year or so he’ll have to lay down his command and return to Rome. He’ll want to take a profit with him.’
Varus grunted noncommittally. ‘Very wise men are saying that more than a third of the population of Gaul has been sent to Rome in chains.’
Brutus swallowed noisily, winced at a twinge of indigestion, and replied, ‘and other wise men say another third are dead. Gallic corpses will be feeding the plants of this land for years. That’s probably why the whole place is so green and fertile.’
‘That and the rain.’
‘You’re in a cheerful mood today, Varus.’
‘I’m sick of winter.’ He grunted again and slapped a palm on the table. ‘And I’m sick of war, and I’m sick of Gaul. We should have followed Fronto’s lead and become civilians. Sunning ourselves on the southern coast with nothing to worry about other than whether our jars of wine have gone bad.’
‘That time is coming soon enough, Varus. As soon as Caesar returns to Rome we’ll all be going with him. I’m bound for a praetorship, I think, though if Caesar has enough pull in the senate when he’s made consul, I might even secure a provincial governorship early. Somewhere warm like Cilicia or Crete sounds like a damn dream after soggy Gaul, eh? And what of you, Varus? Back to Rome for good, or will you try to secure a province with your newfound riches and the general’s goodwill?’
‘Let’s try and make it through Gaul first.’
‘Gods, but you’re fun today.’
Varus sighed yet again and turned to his companion. ‘Don’t kid yourself into thinking this is all over, Decimus Brutus. We broke them at Alesia, but we’ve got plenty of fights ahead of us yet before this place can be safely left and settled. How long have you been watching the Gauls? Do you think the people we fought at Gergovia and Alesia are going to just lie down and accept defeat?’
‘You don’t think they’ll try again, surely?’ Brutus replied incredulously. ‘After their land’s been stripped of two thirds of its population? They’re going to find it hard with this few people just making it through the next few harvests. They couldn’t possibly consider fighting on.’
Varus coughed in the cold air and watched the resulting cloud of frosted breath dissipate. ‘The farmers and craftsmen? No. Nor the women, the children and those who still have a family to protect. But remember how many leaders and warriors there were on that hill where the reserves waited opposite Alesia? They left bitter and angry. That’s never a good combination in anyone, but to the Gauls it’s fuel. The land will never rise again like it did under that Arverni son of a war-dog Vercingetorix, but there are plenty of lesser chieftains who’ll fight on just through sheer bloody-mindedness, determined to make us pay for every foot of land we control. Mark my words, Decimus: before the spring thaw we’ll be putting out small fires of revolution all over the bloody place.’
Brutus paused, clearly seeing the truth in his friend’s words, the cavalry officer’s gloomy mood beginning to infect him too. ‘And Caesar can’t afford to leave Gaul restless when he goes back to Rome. All those fires will have to be out within the year.’
‘See what I mean? Caesar’s preparing for his consulship. He’ll have the position and the money, and he’s always had the plebs behind him, especially when he wins something big. But if he goes home to the adoration of the Roman people claiming to have brought them Gaul as a province, he can’t afford to have rebellion flare up in his wake. Then even the plebs might turn against him.’
‘So what do you plan to do?’
Varus shrugged. ‘I plan to eat my cold pork, drink some sour wine, then go and brush down my horse, and make sure my slave’s got my saddle polished and all my kit in good order. I’m going to need it soon enough, I reckon.’
Brutus nodded wearily and watched his friend chew on a piece of poor quality meat before turning back to the slave column. At a conservative estimate of thirty denarii, even for these poor quality specimens, the column just leaving camp represented perhaps thirty or forty thousand denarii. If Caesar’s factor in Rome was worth his salt, the net gain could even go up to hundred thousand denarii. And this was the meagrest of the slave columns so far.
By the gods, Caesar really was feathering his nest…
Chapter One
Cavarinos, nobleman of the Arverni, former chieftain and general in the great war against Rome, perked up at the familiar voice and rose from his chair, taking the mug of frothing ale with him to the window, where he peered out.
The central square of Uxellodunon was suddenly thriving after an hour of near-emptiness. Perhaps two dozen nobles from a number of different tribes were striding resolutely across the packed earth towards the large inn where Cavarinos had lodged this past week. He could see men of the Cadurci, his own Arverni and the Ruteni, whose lands bordered these to the south. There were others too. He couldn’t precisely identify them, but would have been willing to bet they were Carnutes, Bituriges and Aedui. Their warriors trooped along in an unruly bunch behind them all, eyeing each other as suspiciously as they would had the men next to them been wearing a toga. But even the sight of a gathering of nobles from different tribes was not what made Cavarinos shake his head sadly. That was the sight of Lucterius of the Cadurci – avid anti-Roman, habitual rebel and former close friend of the great king Vercingetorix – leading them all, with great purpose in his step.
That boded badly for all concerned.
Cavarinos stepped back slightly as the group approached. Since the disaster – the wake-up call? – of Alesia, the Arvernian noble had moved around almost continuously, only pausing for a few weeks here and there. The simple fact was that he knew not what to do with himself. He was no longer truly Arverni. He had continued shaving off his moustaches in an effort to remove himself from his brother and the past, and had cast his serpent arm-ring into a wide river on his travels. The Arverni were not what they had been, and they would never be proud again. And if he stopped thinking in tribal terms, and started to think like a Roman, which sooner or later all the people would have to do, then he was not really a ‘Gaul’ any more either. Because what the Romans called ‘Gauls’ had ceased to exist as a people after Alesia. Now they were slaves or Roman provincials who just didn’t yet recognise the fact. Consequently, there was no home for him in this land, whether inside his tribe’s territory or without.
Yet the idea of leaving somehow seemed impossible. Even if he could endure the wrench of breaking those bonds with his ancestral lands, where would he go? To the northern island, where the tribes were all cousins of the Belgae, hard and bloodthirsty, and the land was inhospitable and swampy? Across the river to the lands of the Cherusci or the Suebi, who the Romans called Germani, where life was cheap and death a daily occurrence? To the tribes south of the mountains, in that parched, brown land of bronze and blood, where a war with Rome had been ongoing for more than a century now? To Rome itself, the enemy who had vanquished his people?
And so he had wandered, and he had observed, and he had learned. And most of what he had observed was a dying culture that knew it was about to be eclipsed and eradicated. And most of what he had learned was that he no longer really cared.
The vast majority of people he had seen had been hopeless and dead-eyed, trying to eke out an existence in the impoverished, war-ravaged fields that they were too weak and too few to make work for them. And here and there he had come across small pockets of anger, where a noble who claimed to have been on that hill at Alesia – and they were invariably lying – stirred up trouble among the disenchanted, dispossessed warriors who were truly too few to make any difference now. Even had Vercingetorix remained free and spoken to the masses, there was no longer any hope of success.