"Repeatedly, Tribune, and ad nauseam."
"Should we set the date far enough in advance to allow them to prepare?"
I sat up straight and finished my wine. "Makes no difference, Tribune," I said. "They'll never beat the Second, no matter how hard they try." Britannicus reached for the jug again and refused to listen to my protestations that I had had enough. When he had refilled both our cups, the jug was empty. He replaced it in the cupboard and returned to sit across from me. For a period of time, neither of us spoke.
"Well," he said, at last, "I'm going to make the challenge, and we'll see what happens. Win or lose, it should shake things up around here." He stopped again and looked at me quizzically, one eyebrow arched high on his forehead. "What about you? How do you feel about your life here? Are you content? Satisfied? Thinking of transferring out?"
"What? Why would...? No, thank you, Tribune. I am well here, and pleased with my lot. I've no complaints." I was slightly embarrassed by this turn in the conversation, but he pursued it.
"You could have ... complaints, I mean. Some might say you should have. It hasn't been easy for you, has it?"
I was almost squirming now, feeling the blood flushing my cheeks, but still he went on.
"I want you to know I appreciate your loyalty, all the support you've provided for me over the past two years. It's a large debt, and I intend to repay it."
I cleared my throat and started to bluster something about having to leave, but he rode right over my protests, finally silencing me by standing up and holding out his right hand, palm towards me.
"Varrus, trust me," he continued, his face breaking into a grin. "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking your Tribune is losing his grip, losing his feeling for the fitness of things, and you don't want to be around him while he's falling apart. Forget it. I'm not going to embarrass you. But I am going to say what I have to."
He sat down again as I tried to breathe more easily. "We're very similar in many ways, you and I," he said then. "We are soldiers first and foremost, and we have a rigid and very fine code by which we live. We feel safe operating within that code. When we drift away from it, we lose that feeling of safety. We become embarrassed. But there are some things that aren't dealt with in the code, Varrus. I have some things to say to you that I cannot leave unsaid, and I feel this may be the best time to say them, so let's get them out and deal with them and have done with it.
"As I said a moment ago, I want to thank you, man to man, for the support you have given me over the past two years. It can't have been easy for you, being perceived as my man while everyone else was loving hating me, but you bore it stoically. I watched and listened and appreciated your loyally. I have been tempted to say something to you long before this, but I guessed it might be better to simply leave you to your own devices. And it was, I think. The men accept you completely now, as one of them, and that is as it should be. And now there's something in the air, something I can't quite define, but I think we may be close to a breakthrough. Aaron Flavius focused my thinking, and I decided to speak my thoughts. There, I've finished, and I will never mention the matter again. But bear in mind, please, that I am in your debt. If ever you need a friend in the future, I will be glad to serve in that capacity." He smiled again, a small quirking of his lips accompanied by a rising eyebrow. "Now you may finish your wine and flee."
The following night, in the course of a well-attended dinner in the Officers' Mess, Britannicus publicly challenged Titus Cirrius, the Tribune of the First Cohort, to a match between his men and ours, man against man, squad against squad, formation against formation. The match would consist of athletic contests in the morning, and tests of military skill in the afternoon. The judging would be conducted by the Legate, assisted by officers from the auxiliary cohorts. Britannicus told me later that it was done in such a way that Cirrius could refuse neither the challenge nor the wager involved. Of course Cirrius, in common with everybody else, knew that his men had neither the training nor the discipline of ours, so Britannicus very nobly set the date for ten weeks in the future, around the Ides, the fifteenth, of October.
We whipped their tails, but not as easily as we would have done ten weeks earlier. Those lads made up a lot of ground in ten weeks of training; the word was out that there was gold riding on the match, and a lot of it was theirs. They drilled and marched and trained almost as hard as we did normally. In our cohort, all the jokes and sneers about our training rosters were forgotten and forgiven, and without anything being said, we stepped training up to a level that would have produced mass desertions a month earlier.
The magic had been performed. The Second Cohort had been transformed into a solid unit, pulling together for the honour and the gold they could win as a group, as a tight, disciplined, highly trained entity. A fighting force was born, and over the next few years it grew into one of the elite units of the garrison of Britain. The First Cohort kept on trying to beat us, but they didn't have a chance. We were too finely honed. And, four years later, there we were — an elite fighting unit stranded in the field, in a fortified overnight camp, surrounded by God only knew how many thousand howling savages drunk on victory and spilling southward around us like wine from a broken barrel.
By nightfall that first day following the Invasion, we were no longer able to estimate the numbers of men drawn up around the camp, just out of range of our arrows. The first party who had spotted our camp and had been sighted by our sentries, causing the first alarm we heard from the Tribune's tent, had sent back runners to summon help. From that point on, they had gathered like vultures.
We watched the hordes that first evening from the safety of our parapets, wondering when they would attack us. We had no illusions about their fear of us. After Hadrian's Wall, our little camp must have looked like a pimple on an elephant's arse to them. The Picts, we knew, were dawn fighters. They would sleep during the night and come at us in massed charges with the rising of the sun. The Scots, we believed and prayed, were similar, so the odds looked good for a quiet night before Hades came to earth with the morning.
Britannicus, however, had other ideas, and they involved me. On leaving his conference, I had called a meeting of all the centurions in the cohort. There were twenty of them, not including myself. I asked each of them to pick the five best all-round soldiers in his unit of fifty men (the days when a centurion commanded a hundred men had been gone four hundred years). It wasn't quite that tidy, because some of them came up with six or seven, but within half an hour I had the names of one hundred and twenty of our very best.
I set the clerks to the job of drawing up a roster for this new maniple and chose two centurions to command it, sixty men apiece. I promoted ten of those men to decurion rank, retaining two who were already decurions, and then detailed ten centurions to assemble all of these bodies in full gear against the wall of the camp closest to my tent within half an hour. Having done that, I went to tell Britannicus that his "special unit" was being prepared.
He astonished me by having one of the smiths from the regimental armourer's quarters set up an anvil and a hammer at the assembly point. I stayed in his tent with him, sharing the briefing he was giving to young Cato, one of the subalterns, whom he had promoted to command the new maniple. When a decurion stuck his head into the tent to tell us that the men were all assembled, Britannicus himself came with us to address them.
The new 120-man detail stiffened to attention as we approached. The two centurions had them drawn up into their two divisions of 60 men each; ten ranks by six files. Apart from the far-off whoops and yells of the enemy outside the camp, there was utter silence. Britannicus eyed them and, cool as a spring breeze, inspected each of them. When he had finished his inspection he returned to the front and faced them, picking up the hammer from the anvil and swinging it over his head to bring it smashing down onto the flat surface. He knew then that he had everyone's attention.