Caesar Read online

  "Never neglect your gear, soldier; it's all that stands between you and a Cassi spear." He turned to walk back to the command tent, but threw over his shoulder, laughing, "No, not quite all, soldier! There are your valor and your Roman mind. They're what really win for you. However, a helmet firmly on your noddle does keep that Roman mind intact!"

  Fire forgotten, the young legionary stared after the General with his jaw dropped. What a man! He'd talked as if to a person! So soft-spoken. And had all the jargon right. But he'd never served in the ranks, surely! How did he know? Grinning, the soldier finished raking furiously, then stamped on the ashes. The General knew, just as he knew the name of every centurion in his army. He was Caesar.

  2

  To a Briton, the main stronghold of Cassivellaunus and his tribe of Cassi was impregnable; it stood on a steep but gently rounded hill, and was encircled by great bulwarks of earth reinforced with logs. The Romans hadn't been able to find it because it stood in the midst of many miles of dense forest, but with Mandubracius and Trinobellunus as guides, Caesar's march to it was direct and swift.

  He was clever, Cassivellaunus. After that first pitched battle—lost when the Aedui cavalry overcame their terror of the chariots and discovered they were easier to deal with than German horsemen—the King of the Cassi had adopted true Fabian tactics. He had dismissed his infantry and shadowed the Roman column with four thousand chariots, striking suddenly during some forest leg of the Roman march, chariots erupting from between the trees through spaces barely wide enough to permit their passage, and always attacking Caesar's foot soldiers, who hadn't been able to come to terms with their fear of these archaic weapons of war.

  They were frightening, that was inarguable. The warrior stood to the right of his driver, one spear at the ready in his right hand and several more clenched in his left hand, his sword in a scabbard fixed to the short wicker wall by his right side, and he fought almost naked, curlicued from bare head to bare feet with woad. When his spears were gone he drew his sword and ran forward, nimble and fast as a tumbler, on the pole between the pair of little horses which drew the car, while the driver lashed the team into the midst of the Roman soldiers. The warrior then leaped from his superior height on the pole in among the flailing hooves, laying about him with impunity as the soldiers backed away to avoid the plunging horses.

  But by the time Caesar took that last march to the Cassi stronghold, his dour and stoic troops were utterly fed up with Britannia, chariots and short rations. Not to mention the terrible heat. They were used to heat; they could march fifteen hundred miles in heat with no more than an occasional day off to rest, each man carrying his thirty-pound load on a forked stick balanced across his left shoulder, and under the weight of his knee-length chain mail shirt, which he cinched on his hips with his sword and dagger belt to ease its twenty pounds off his shoulders. What they were not used to was the saturation-point humidity; it had snailed them during this second expedition, so much so that Caesar had needed to revise his estimates of how far the men could go during a day's foot slogging. In ordinary Italian or Spanish heat, upward of thirty miles a day. In Britannic heat, twenty-five miles a day.

  This day, however, was easier. With the Trinobantes and a small detachment of foot left behind to hold his field camp, his men could march free of impedimenta, helmets on their heads, pila in their own hands instead of on each octet's mule. As they entered the forest, they were ready. Caesar's orders had been specific: don't give an inch of ground, take the horses on your shields and have your pila aimed to plug the drivers straight through their blue-painted chests, then go for the warriors with your swords, boys.

  To keep their spirits up, Caesar marched in the middle of the column himself. Mostly he could be found walking, preferring to mount his charger with the toes only when he required additional height to scan the distance. But he usually walked surrounded by his staff of legates and tribunes. Not today. Today he strode along beside Asicius, a junior centurion of the Tenth, joking with those ahead and behind who could hear.

  The chariot attack, when it came, was upon the rear of the four-mile-long Roman column, just far enough in front of the Aedui rearguard to make it impossible for the cavalry to go forward; the road was narrow, the chariots everywhere. But this time the legionaries charged forward with their shields deflecting the horses, launched a volley of javelins at the drivers, then went for the warriors. They were fed up with Britannia, but they were not prepared to go back to Gaul without cutting down a few Cassi charioteers. And a Gallic longsword was no match for the short, upward-thrusting gladius of a Roman legionary when the enemy was at close quarters. The chariots drew off between the trees in disorder and did not appear again.

  After that, the stronghold was easy.

  "Like snitching a rattle off a baby!" said Asicius cheerfully to his general before they went into action.

  Caesar mounted an attack simultaneously on opposite sides of the ramparts, which the legionaries took in their stride while the Aedui, whooping, rode up and over. The Cassi scattered in all directions, though many of them died. Caesar owned their citadel. Together with a great deal of food, enough to pay the Trinobantes back and feed his own men until they quit Britannia forever. But perhaps the greatest Cassi loss was their chariots, gathered inside unharnessed. The elated legionaries chopped them into small pieces and burned them on a great bonfire, while the Trinobantes who had come along made off joyously with the horses. Of other booty there was practically none; Britannia was not rich in gold or silver, and there were certainly no pearls. The plate was Arvernian pottery and the drinking vessels were made of horn.

  Time to return to Gaul of the Long-hairs. The equinox was drawing near (the seasons were, as usual, well behind the calendar) and the battered Roman ships would not sustain the onslaught of those frightful equinoctial gales. Food supply secured, the Trinobantes left behind in possession of most of the Cassi lands and animals, Caesar put two of his four legions in front of the miles-long baggage train and two behind, then marched for his beach.

  "What do you intend to do about Cassivellaunus?" asked Gaius Trebonius, plodding alongside the General; if the General walked, even his chief legate couldn't ride, worse luck.

  "He'll be back to try again," said Caesar tranquilly. "I'll leave on time, but not without his submission and that treaty."

  "You mean he'll try again on the march?"

  "I doubt that. He lost too many men when his stronghold fell. Including a thousand chariot warriors. Plus all his chariots."

  "The Trinobantes were quick to make off with the horses. They've profited mightily."

  "That's why they helped us. Down today, up tomorrow."

  He seemed the same, thought Trebonius, who loved him and worried about him. But he wasn't. What had that letter contained, the one he burned? They had all noticed a subtle difference; then Hirtius had told them of Pompey's letters. No one would have dared to read any correspondence Caesar elected not to hand over to Hirtius or Faberius, yet Caesar had gone to the trouble of burning Pompey's letter. As if burning his boats. Why?

  Nor was that all. Caesar hadn't shaved. Highly significant in a man whose horror of body lice was so great that he plucked every hair of armpits, chest and groin, a man who would shave in the midst of total turmoil. You could see the scant hair on his head rise at the mere mention of vermin; he drove his servants mad by demanding that everything he wore be freshly laundered, no matter what the circumstances were. He wouldn't spend one night on an earthen floor because so often the earth contained fleas, for which reason in his personal baggage there were always sections of wooden flooring for his command tent. What fun his enemies in Rome had had with that item of information! The plain unvarnished wood had become marble and mosaic on some of those destructive tongues. Yet he would pick up a huge spider and laugh at its antics as it ran around his hand, something the most decorated centurion in the Tenth would have fainted at the thought of doing. They were, he would explain, clean creatures, respec
table housekeepers. Cockroaches, on the other hand, would see him on top of a table, nor could he bear to soil the sole of his boot by crushing one. They were filthy creatures, he would say, shuddering.

  Yet here he was, three days on the road, eleven days since that letter, and he had not shaved. Someone close to him was dead. He was in mourning. Who? Yes, they'd find out when they got back to Portus Itius, but what his silence said was that he would have no conversation about it, nor have it mentioned in his presence even after it became general knowledge. He and Hirtius both thought it must be Julia. Trebonius reminded himself to take that idiot Sabinus to one side and threaten him with circumcision if he offered the General his condolences—what had ever possessed the man to ask Caesar why he wasn't shaving?

  "Quintus Laberius," Caesar had answered briefly.

  No, it wasn't Quintus Laberius. It had to be Julia. Or perhaps his legendary mother, Aurelia. Though why would Pompey have been the one to write the news of that?

  Quintus Cicero—who was, much to everyone's relief, a far less irksome fellow than his puffed-up-with-importance brother, the Great Advocate—thought it was Julia too.

  "Only how is he going to hold Pompeius Magnus if it is?" Quintus Cicero had asked in the legates' mess tent over yet one more dinner to which Caesar hadn't come.

  Trebonius (whose forebears were not even as illustrious as Quintus Cicero's) was a member of the Senate and therefore well acquainted with political alliances—including those cemented by a marriage—so he had understood Quintus Cicero's question at once. Caesar needed Pompey the Great, who was the First Man in Rome. The war in Gaul was far from over; Caesar thought that it might even take the full five years of his second command to finish the job. But there were so many senatorial wolves howling for his carcass that he perpetually walked a tightrope above a pit of fire. Trebonius, who loved him and worried about him, found it difficult to believe that any man could inspire the kind of hatred Caesar seemed to generate. That sanctimonious fart Cato had made a whole career out of trying to bring Caesar down, not to mention Caesar's colleague in his consulship, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, and that boar Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, and the great aristocrat Metellus Scipio, thick as a wooden temple beam.

  They slavered after Pompey's hide too, but not with the strange and obsessive passion only Caesar seemed to fan in them. Why? Oh, they ought to go on campaign with the man, that would show them! You didn't doubt even in the darkest corner of your thoughts that things might go crashing when Caesar was in command. No matter how wrong they went, he could always find a way to go on. And a way to win.

  "Why do they pick on him?" Trebonius had asked angrily.

  "Simple," Hirtius had answered, grinning. "He's the Alexandrian lighthouse to their little oakum wick poking out of the end of Priapus's mentula. They pick on Pompeius Magnus because he's the First Man in Rome, and they don't believe there ought to be one. But Pompeius is a Picentine descended from a woodpecker. Whereas Caesar is a Roman descended from Venus and Romulus. All Romans worship their aristocrats, but some Romans prefer 'em to be like Metellus Scipio. Every time Cato and Bibulus and the rest of that lot look at Caesar, they see someone who's better than they are in every possible way. Just like Sulla. Caesar's got the birth and the ability to swat them like flies. They just want to get in first and swat him."

  "He needs Pompeius," Trebonius had said thoughtfully.

  "If he's to retain his imperium and his provinces," said Quintus Cicero, dipping his boring campaign bread into a dish of third-rate oil. "Ye Gods, I'll be glad to have some roast goose in Portus Itius!" he said then, closing the subject.

  The roast goose looked imminent when the army reached its main camp behind that long, sandy beach. Unfortunately Cassivellaunus had other ideas. With what he had left of his own Cassi, he went the rounds of the Cantii and the Regni, the two tribes who lived south of the Tamesa, and marshaled another army. But attacking this camp was to break the Briton hand against a stone wall. The Briton horde, all on foot, bared naked chests to the defenders atop the fortifications and were picked off by javelins like so many targets lined up on a drill field. Nor had the Britons yet learned the lesson the Gauls had: when Caesar led his men out of the camp to fight hand to hand, the Britons stayed to be cut down. For they still adhered to their ancient traditions, which said that a man who left a field of defeat alive was an outcast. That tradition had cost the Belgae on the mainland fifty thousand wasted lives in one battle. Now the Belgae abandoned the field the moment defeat was imminent, and lived to fight again another day.

  Cassivellaunus sued for peace, submitted, and signed the treaty Caesar demanded. Then handed over hostages. It was the end of November by the calendar, the beginning of autumn by the seasons.

  The evacuation began, but after a personal inspection of each of some seven hundred ships, Caesar decided it would have to be in two parts.

  "Something over half the fleet is in good condition," he said to Hirtius, Trebonius, Sabinus, Quintus Cicero and Atrius. "We'll put all the cavalry, all the baggage animals save for the century mules, and two of the legions on board that half, and send it to Portus Itius first. Then the ships can come back empty and pick up me and the last three legions."

  With him he kept Trebonius and Atrius; the other legates were ordered to sail with the first fleet.

  "I'm pleased and flattered to be asked to stay," Trebonius said, watching those three hundred and fifty ships pushed down into the water.

  These were the vessels Caesar had ordered specially built along the Liger River and then sent out into the open ocean to do battle with the two hundred and twenty solid-oak sailing ships of the Veneti, who thought the Roman vessels ludicrous with their oars and their flimsy pine hulls, their low prows and poops. Toy boats for sailing on a bathtub sea, easy meat. But it hadn't worked out that way at all.

  While Caesar and his land army picnicked atop the towering cliffs to the north of the mouth of the Liger and watched the action like spectators in the Circus Maximus, Caesar's ships produced the fangs Decimus Brutus and his engineers had grown during that frantic winter building the fleet. The leather sails of the Veneti vessels were so heavy and stout that the main shrouds were chain rather than rope; knowing this, Decimus Brutus had equipped each of his more than three hundred ships with a long pole to which were fixed a barbed hook and a set of grapples. A Roman ship would row in close to a Veneti ship and maneuver alongside, whereupon its crew would tilt their pole, tangle it among the Veneti shrouds, then sprint away under oar power. Down came the Veneti sails and masts, leaving the vessel helpless in the water. Three Roman ships would then surround it like terriers a deer, board it, kill the crew and set fire to it. When the wind fell, Decimus Brutus's victory became complete. Only twenty Veneti ships had escaped.

  Now the specially low sides with which these ships had been built came in very handy. It wasn't possible to load animals as skittish as horses aboard before the ships were pushed into the water, but once they were afloat and held still in the water, long broad gangplanks connected each ship's side with the beach, and the horses were run up so quickly they had no time to take fright.

  "Not bad without a dock," said Caesar, satisfied. "They'll be back tomorrow, then the rest of us can leave."

  But tomorrow dawned in the teeth of a northwesterly gale which didn't disturb the waters off the beach very much, but did prevent the return of those three hundred and fifty sound ships.

  "Oh, Trebonius, this land holds no luck for me!" cried the General on the fifth day of the gale, scratching the stubble on his face fiercely.

  "We're the Greeks on the beach at Ilium," said Trebonius.

  Which remark seemed to make up the General's mind; he turned cold pale eyes upon his legate. "I am no Agamemnon," he said through his teeth, "nor will I stay here for ten years!" He turned and shouted. "Atrius!"

  Up ran his camp prefect, startled. "Yes, Caesar?"

  "Will the nails hold in what we have left here?"

  "Probably
, in all except about forty."

  "Then we'll use this northwest wind. Sound the bugles, Atrius. I want everyone and everything on board all but the about forty."

  "They won't fit!" squeaked Atrius, aghast.

  "We'll pack 'em in like salt fish in a barrel. If they puke all over each other, too bad. They can all go for a swim in full armor once we reach Portus Itius. We'll sail the moment the last man and the last ballista are aboard."

  Atrius swallowed. "We may have to leave some of the heavy equipment behind," he said in a small voice.

  Caesar raised his brows. "I am not leaving my artillery or my rams behind, nor am I leaving my tools behind, nor am I leaving one soldier behind, nor am I leaving one noncombatant behind, nor am I leaving one slave behind. If you can't fit them all in, Atrius, I will."

  They were not hollow words, and Atrius knew it. He also knew that his career depended upon his doing something the General could and would do with complete efficiency and astonishing speed. Quintus Atrius protested no more, but went off instead to sound the bugles.

  Trebonius was laughing.

  "What's so funny?" asked Caesar coldly.

  No, not the time to share this joke! Trebonius sobered in an instant. "Nothing, Caesar! Nothing at all."

  The decision had been made about an hour after the sun came up; all day the troops and noncombatants labored, loading the stoutest ships with Caesar's precious artillery, tools, wagons and mules on the beach. The men waited until the ships were pushed into the choppy sea, doing the pushing themselves, then scrambled aboard up rope ladders. The normal load for one ship was a piece of artillery or some engineer's device, four mules, one wagon, forty soldiers and twenty oarsmen; but with eighteen thousand soldiers and noncombatants as well as four thousand assorted slaves and sailors, today's loads were much heavier.