Castus glanced around, then remembered that his own century’s hornblower had been in the boat with Flaccus. Where were all the other detachments? Surely they had not all been lost in the crossing?
‘Modestus, lend me your cloak,’ he said, ‘then follow me.’
Passing quickly through the long grass, he pushed his way back into the undergrowth and between the trees. It was almost light enough to see clearly now, although the sun was not yet up. Kicking his way through the tangled scrub, not caring about the noise any more, Castus reached the bank of the river. Mist still covered the far bank, and he cursed under his breath.
He thought of the batteries of artillery over there, the heavy ballista bolts aimed at precisely the point he was standing now. The energy of battle was still in him, driving him onwards.
‘Cut me a long pole,’ he said to the men behind him. They gladly shrank back into the cover of the trees, thrashing about, breaking sticks.
Heaving himself up onto the mossy bole of a fallen tree, Castus gazed out across the water into the slow roll of mist. He considered shouting, but didn’t trust the men on the far bank to distinguish his voice. The artillerymen had been known to loose off shots at anything that moved or called from the barbarian shore.
One of the legionaries passed him up a cut stick, ten feet or so long. Castus looped the cloak over the top of it, tied it securely, then raised it over his head.
Come on, you bastards. Open your eyes!
Waterbirds cackled and splashed down in the river. The mist rolled steadily by.
A distant call from out of the mist – recognition, or a challenge?
‘Jupiter!’ Castus shouted. ‘Jupiter, by the arse of Mars! Preserver of Rome!’
The cloak flapped over his head, beating the mist.
Then the noise of a trumpet call from the far shore. One trumpet, then more.
Cheering drifted across the water.
Castus let his arms drop.
4
For the first day after crossing the river, the army crawled through a wilderness abandoned by man. Trees grew thick and wild, shagged with ivy and moss, and the ground between was lost to vaulting banks of brambles and fortresses of fern. The cavalry scouts and light-armed auxilia went ahead of the column, picking out a route, and the army marched behind them along overgrown droving trails criss-crossed by narrow footpaths, with forest massed all around them.
After the exploits of their detachment in the riverbank fight, the Sixth Legion had been assigned to the rear of the marching column. There were no baggage wagons with the army: all the supplies and even the artillery were loaded onto mules, and the animals left a rich fester of trampled dung all over the track behind them. Through hot dappled light and plunging shade, the column marched deeper into the barbarian wilderness. In places Castus could make out the shapes of ruined buildings, roofless and overgrown. He remembered what Diogenes had suggested on the riverbank. Surely it was true, he thought. The Bructeri had withdrawn their habitations for many miles from the Rhine.
But there were at least traces of human presence. They passed through clearings with the remains of fires, and in some of them the embers still glowed and smoked. Later in the day the soldiers saw bodies tumbled into the undergrowth beside the trail where the cavalry scouts had cut them down: bearded men in rough woollen tunics and breeches, some with a cloak shrouding them, others left exposed. The men of the Sixth glanced at them dispassionately as they marched by. These were the men that had attacked them on the riverbank, and sniped at them from the darkness. They owed them no respect – let the wild beasts of the forests take their dead flesh.
The soldiers made camp that night in clear ground, cutting timber to make a rough breastwork around their position, and the next morning in the cool grey of dawn they marched on once more. Now Castus and his men began to see signs of settled life: small fields stitched into the folds of the hills; the remains of plundered cattle byres. They crossed a small river, the banks rutted and boggy from the passage of the men and mules ahead of them, and climbed up through dense and tangled forest onto a high grassy ridge. From there, the men at the rear of the column could see the trails of black smoke rising from the horizon.
‘Is it true what they say, centurion? asked Aelianus. They had paused on the ridge in the hot sun to rest and drink water. ‘Do those trees stretch all the way to the frozen ocean at the top of the world?’
Castus stared out over the winding valley of the river, the hills and the plains beyond. A landscape of treetops, green shading into distant blue and grey.
‘With any luck we won’t have to find out,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen quite enough trees to last me a lifetime.’
‘You shouldn’t disrespect trees,’ came a voice from his left. Erudianus, the tracker, tipped his head back and directed a jet from his waterskin into his open mouth. He swallowed, then nodded away into the forested distance. ‘Trees are all different,’ he said. ‘They have quite different scents. The smell of an oak – like that one there – is completely different to a larch like those down the slope. And those pines up there on the hillside opposite…’ He paused, closing his eyes and breathing in, as if he was inhaling the choicest perfume.
They marched on along the ridge, and the sun shone down on the column of men, blazing off their armour, their polished helmets and the ranked tips of their spears. Almost like a triumphal procession, Castus thought. Was it just a ritual, then, this attack on the Bructeri? A show of power, to overawe the barbarians?
He remembered what Valens had told him three nights before as they had looked across the river, and apprehension itched at him. The Bructeri were the last of the Franks still under arms, and with them subdued there would be no further threat from the peoples across the Rhine. Then, with his rear and flank secured, the emperor would be free to direct his army against the new enemy: an enemy that came from the south, within the empire. Civil war was coming, of that Castus had no doubt. Roman against Roman, legion against legion. It was a type of war that Castus had never known, the sort of fighting that would make this foray into Germania look like a rabbit hunt. The thought of it roused his blood, but it chilled him to consider the cost.
And even if this expedition was a parade, or a rabbit hunt, the fighting here was real, the killing too. By midday the troops saw the first wounded men coming back down the line of march. First came walking men, hobbling on crutches or groping along in linked groups led by slaves. Then came others carried on stretchers, or on the backs of mules. The men of the Sixth moved off the trail each time to let them past; most were silent, a few called words of encouragement to men they knew.
Soon afterwards, as the trail began to descend from the ridge, the first groups of prisoners were herded back down the column. A few at first, then they came in their scores, roped together at the neck and driven by slaves, destined to be slaves themselves. All of them were women and children, or older people. Not a man of fighting age among them. Castus watched one group of them as he stood in the shade of a spreading tree, drinking water. The captives were dressed in rough tunics of red or yellow wool. A lot of them had yellow hair, and the women wore it in braids down their backs. They passed with heads down, many of them weeping, but as Castus watched, one young woman raised her head and glared back at him, her eyes bright blue in the sunlight, her face taut with sorrowing hatred.
‘Not surprising their menfolk don’t let themselves be taken,’ Diogenes commented. ‘The last lot of Franks that surrendered to us got used as wolf-bait in the arena!’