"You told them—oh, of course!"
Caenis rolled onto 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 standing in the army. Soldiers, let'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-humored households the slaves and their masters all changed places for a day. She tried to draw favorable 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 around onto 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 clifftops and go home. There was no need to hack ashore. The legions beached at a new harbor 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 realized 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 southeast hated the recognized Roman threat; in the southwest 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 that the odds must be favorable. 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 organized ever in the world. This was a professional army, with its own colonies, contractors, burial clubs, savings banks. The men were magnificently organized, 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 everyone 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 harbors, to colonize towns. Once they found the precious metals, they would run the mines. Men in the ranks were trained for every kind of specialized 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 armor or chain mail, shoulder plates, leg protectors, heavy-duty helmets, and the most efficient boots in the world. Against them stood brave but disorganized 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 realizes 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 westward, 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 gray 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 toward the ford, then circled back abortively, plashing through the shallows to the general's command point. Sometimes a horse, sucked into the hocks among the silt, reared in panic as it tried to regain firmer ground.
Behind the Britons sprawled a careless jumble of campsites where levies from different tribes had parked just as they arrived, confident that their attackers would be caught fast in a bottleneck. Farther off still were their horses and chariots. Not until they heard the first screams from the hamstrung horses did they realize that the Romans' Batavian auxiliaries had already come across.