cleaner. He turned, and he could see in Narcissus’s face that he knew.
The Greek waved a languid hand and two more dark figures separated themselves from the shelter of the rowans. Each held a short bow with a notched arrow at the ready and Rufus recognized one of them as Hanno, the Syrian archer who had saved him from Dafyd. The little man grinned, showing white teeth against the brown of his skin.
‘I never like to take chances,’ Narcissus said enigmatically. ‘We have work to do, you and I — and the Emperor’s elephant. Tomorrow we will honour the living and the dead. The following day we will fight another battle.’
He turned away, and the two Syrians trotted close behind, leaving Rufus alone with Verica’s body. He said a silent prayer to whichever gods would listen, to carry the Briton’s spirit to the Otherworld. When he was done, he walked into the night with his mind in shadow and his heart filled with dread. He was to fight another battle. Bersheba’s battle.
XXXVI
‘The enemy are destroyed?’
‘They are, Caesar.’ Narcissus noticed a bloom in Claudius’s cheeks that had never been apparent in Rome. Campaigning — and victory — obviously agreed with him. Even his habitual stutter had gone. The Emperor sat upright in a cushioned chair in the private quarters of his tented palace.
‘And this Caratacus? Dead?’
‘It can only be a matter of time, Caesar. He flees as a hare before the hounds, but General Vespasian and the Second are close on his scent. You will have his head within the week.’
Claudius nodded as if it were his right. It had not been a joyful reunion, but meetings between the two men had never been joyful. Businesslike, yes. That was what characterized their relationship, even before he had given Narcissus his freedom. In the dangerous years with Caligula, and before, Claudius had depended on Narcissus’s wiles to keep him alive and the Greek had been so successful that he had placed his master on the throne of the world’s greatest Empire. Now the Emperor needed him even more — to keep him there. He had always admired Narcissus’s enormous intellect — even when it was accompanied by an enormous conceit — but he had never been comfortable with it. What was going on behind those hypnotic, azure eyes? What schemes was that fertile mind concocting that he wasn’t aware of? Yet, if he needed Narcissus, did the Greek not need him too? Imperial patronage could be a profitable commodity and none had used it with more aptitude. Narcissus had grown so rich that he now depended on Claudius’s protection to keep his enemies at a safe distance and to retain the fortune that had been won at the cost of so much effort. Claudius swept the thought from his head. He was being ungrateful. Narcissus had given him his victory. The barbarians were routed and their army slaughtered. The bodies strewn across the river-side battlefield were already beginning to rot beneath the summer sun. The stink of decaying flesh had been thick in the air when he crossed the centre bridge at the head of the Eighth legion, and they had set up camp well upwind to the north of where the wreckage of the barbarian roundhouses still smouldered.
Victory. It should have been enough. But for Narcissus there was never enough. On this occasion, however, he was right. The Emperor allowed his expression to soften. ‘You have made the arrangements for the next phase of the campaign?’
The bald Greek smiled. ‘The venue is chosen. The stage is set. All that is required is that the players know their parts.’ He knew the statement was evidence of conceit, arrogance even, but it was he, and no one else, who had directed this piece of theatre, and none other could have achieved it. Claudius caught his mood.
‘Then let the play begin.’
It was time. ‘The Emperor will require his elephant at dawn,’ Narcissus announced. ‘You know what to do. This is your day, Rufus, yours and Bersheba’s. Garb her in her armour of gold. It is time these barbarians witnessed the Emperor’s elephant in her true splendour.’
Its presence in the bottom of the cart hidden beneath Bersheba’s hay had gnawed at Rufus every hour of every day since they had left Rome. It was an enormous responsibility, a vast treasure in any man’s currency; an Emperor’s ransom. Of course it should have been guarded. That was the first question he had put to Narcissus when the Greek had supervised the carpenters who cut the hidden compartment in the base of the cart. But the imperial aide had already made his decision. ‘Once its presence was known it would take a full legion to guard a prize of this magnitude, and our legions have more pressing duties. It would also send out a certain signal — one which I have good reason for not wanting to send.’
Rufus completed his preparations as the first smear of dawn dusted the horizon and consigned the fading stars to oblivion amidst a dense blanket of misty blue. Narcissus had at last allocated an honour guard of Praetorians, and their help proved invaluable. First Rufus had fitted the great headdress with the perforated eye coverings that gave Bersheba the look of a bug-eyed Babylonian monster. A lethal golden sting in the shape of a two-foot spike jutted from her forehead. Even her foot-long tusks were tipped with gold. The great mantle, which would have covered the floor of a small house, would have been too heavy to move without help. Not as heavy as pure gold, it had to be admitted, but heavy enough. The elephant armour had been manufactured from silver and each piece then plated with a thin layer of gold, but the effect was the same. Under Britte’s eagle eye the vast metal blanket and the intricately carved wooden howdah that would seat the Emperor were hoisted on to Bersheba’s back and buckled firmly into place.
When he had pulled the final strap tight and polished the last immaculate leaf of burnished gold, Rufus stepped back and examined her. With a perfection of timing that only the gods could have decreed, the sun cut through the shredding curtain of the morning mist and caught each scale of that immense golden carapace, reflecting its glory a thousand fold. She looked majestic. Terrifying.
As they marched to their position in the line a buzz of excitement ran through the legionary ranks at the sight of the armoured giant their Emperor had brought to fight alongside them. Here was the glory of Rome. Here in this fearsome gold-encrusted killer of men was combined the raw power and the prosperity of a civilization the barbarians could never match in a thousand lifetimes. The veterans among them knew her for what she was, an ungovernable, unreliable ally in the heat of the fight, but even they looked upon Bersheba and saw victory.
A sharp blast from the long funnel-shaped trumpets carried by the cornicens of the leading legion was taken up by others along the column. It was followed immediately by barked orders from tribunes to centurions and from centurions to decurions, and finally they were moving. To war.
Three hours later, the horns signalled the halt, and the legions began to disperse into their battle formations. For Rufus it was like being at the centre of someone else’s dream. The cohorts and centuries ahead and around him flowed in tight columns to left and right, the muted thunder of thousands of marching feet pounding the dry earth and the metal of their equipment clashing to the same hypnotic rhythm. In the distance, he saw sunlight glinting on polished metal as troops of auxiliary cavalry scoured clumps of trees and bushes for the inevitable scouts and ambush parties of the enemy. The precise, choreographed movements brought back a half-forgotten memory of the machine that had crushed the grain so long ago in Cerialis’s bakery. Mechanical and relentless; not quite human.
As suddenly as it began, the noise was replaced by a silence as shocking in its way as any unexpected fanfare. Rufus knew he could see only a fraction of the field of battle — that assigned to the Eighth — which he assumed was on the far right of the army. The legion’s ten cohorts were in a staggered formation, with six cohorts in the first line followed by two further lines of two cohorts each. The individual cohorts were tight-packed formations of six centuries, nominally four hundred and eighty men, but sickness and administrative absences would have whittled them down to less than four hundred. Only the first cohort, the long-serving elite of the legion, had more: eight full-strength centuries.
Every man knew his place and his job, in attack or in defence. Hundreds of hours of muscle-tearing training and hundreds more amid the tumult and madness of battle had made them what they were. In tight formation, if they stood squarely behind the shoulder-high protection of those brilliantly painted shields, no enemy of equal force could move them. Well aimed — and it was always so — the first cast of javelins from the front-rank cohorts could kill or disable a thousand attackers and it would be followed by a second in the time it took a man to draw back his throwing arm. Only against overwhelming numbers were they vulnerable, when the enemy could overlap their flanks
