you.’
By now they were on the threshold of the camp hospital. Valerius paused before walking through the flaps. ‘Your logic defeats my argument. Tell the governor I will accept.’
Inside the tent, a small man with sharp features and quick, restless hands rushed up to him like a mother hen. A dark beard and a mottled, balding head made him seem older than he probably was, but the eyes were lively and intelligent. ‘Tiberius Calpurnius,’ he introduced himself. ‘Late of Athens, now of this gods-forsaken mudpatch.’
He immediately began unwinding the bandage which covered the wound above Valerius’s right eye, explaining his reasoning as he did so. ‘You may feel your arm is more in need of my assistance, young man, but I can assure you it is not. I have seen men who appeared perfectly healthy drop dead at my feet hours after the merest bump with a sword, but a man with a severed arm may last a month without treatment if the blood flow is curtailed and the wound remains uninfected.’
Calpurnius deftly probed the sword cut with his fingers. ‘Fortunate indeed. A glancing blow, almost flat. Another inch to the left and you might have lost an eye; a little more of the edge and it would have been the top of your head. Contusions but no sign of fracture, and the wound is healing well, as I would expect in a man of your years. Fainting spells? Blurring of the vision? Yes? To be expected, but if they continue return to me and I will supply you with a draught. Now, the arm.’
Valerius winced as Calpurnius removed the thick cloth bandage to reveal a marbled, purple-yellow stump that reminded him of a piece of rotting meat. Vomit rose in his throat but the physician had anticipated his reaction and placed a bucket at his feet, into which he retched copiously.
Calpurnius whistled soundlessly to himself as he inspected the stump closely from every angle. When he reached out to touch it for the first time Valerius grunted in pain.
‘Yes, it would hurt.’ The little man gave a tight smile which quickly transformed to puzzlement. ‘Again you have been fortunate. I have never seen a battle injury like this. The cut is at the perfect angle, the weapon almost surgically sharp.’ Valerius gave a little cry as he probed the blackened, weeping face of the wound. ‘A few bone splinters, which I will deal with in a moment. The burned flesh must be removed, or it will mortify, but the unguent, though primitive, has kept infection at bay for the moment.’
He looked directly at Valerius and there was curiosity in his eyes, not quite suspicion, but certainly a question. ‘If a saw had been used I would have been quite proud of this myself.’
‘As you say, I was fortunate; more so than the man who treated me. He is dead.’ The lie came easily; there had been a militia physician but he had been among the first to fall on the field at Colonia.
Calpurnius shrugged. Plainly, the dead held little interest for him. ‘A pity. Now, as for treatment. In a moment I will administer a tincture of poppy seed which will render you unconscious and dull the pain. In other circumstances I would suggest that you rest for a few days before surgery, but I sense you are a man of strong heart and healthy lungs and will survive.’ He studied the stump again and sucked his teeth. ‘I plan to re-amputate two inches above the present level which will allow me to stitch a flap of skin across the wound, thereby protecting it from dirt and disease. It is by far the most effective procedure,’ he added, sensing resistance to his suggestion.
‘No. I’ll keep what I have. Stitch it up, or do what you have to do, but I need to be back on my feet tomorrow.’
‘Ha,’ Calpurnius grumbled. ‘Another young man in a hurry. It will be the death of you, but I will do what I can.’ He paused and his face brightened. ‘A leather cover, cowhide for thickness and wear. I have the very thing. And then, who knows?’
‘Will I be able to carry a shield?’
Calpurnius looked offended. ‘One hundred and fifty years ago, Marcus Sergius, grandfather of the odious Catilina, was fitted with an iron hand after his amputation, returned to battle within the week and captured twelve enemy camps. Medicine has progressed considerably since his day. Now, lie here while I prepare the tincture.’
XLI
Valerius rose early on the day of the last battle. Mist disguised the dawn the way a veil hides an ageing woman’s fading looks. It came as a pale suggestion of gold lost in a drifting curtain of smoky, ground-locked cloud and with it came Boudicca’s host. She had picked up the trail Paulinus had left for her while the ashes of Verulamium and the blackened bones of its inhabitants were still hot. For a week, the auxiliaries had led them on, first north, then west; day after day of forced marches and occasional, tantalizing glimpses of the enemy, the red cloaks and polished armour always on the next hill or beyond the next river. They were like wolves now, the Britons, with the Roman scent as thick in their nostrils as the taint of blood from a mortally injured deer as it stumbles towards its final refuge. Thirty days of constant movement, fighting and killing had worn them thin, but the hunger still remained, and with it the hatred. The wrath of Andraste and Boudicca’s need for revenge never diminished. She had spilled enough blood to fill a lake and sent enough souls to the gods to satisfy even their legendary appetite, but still it wasn’t sufficient. Only by smashing the legions and killing the man who led them would she and her people find peace.
As the ghosts of trees appeared a few hundred paces to his left Valerius knew it would be soon. The rebel camp fires had been visible on the horizon when Paulinus’s legions bedded down in their positions for the night. They would have been on the move for more than an hour now, ready for another day chasing shadows. But the shadows were no longer going to run.
From the murk, the familiar, inhuman sound — the buzz of a million bees — filled the air, then the weak sun staggered above the eastern horizon and the mist shredded and burned away. The buzz faded to a confused, unnerving silence, and from his position at the governor’s side Valerius looked out over countless thousands stretching into the distance in a sinuous black column of humanity. Paulinus had spent days manoeuvring towards this position so that Boudicca would be drawn behind him, funnelling her army into the killing ground. The five thousand men of the Fourteenth legion formed a triple defensive line across the narrow valley at the head of a long, gentle slope. Five cohorts of the Twentieth who accompanied Paulinus anchored his flanks against the valley walls. Among them, he set up his ‘shield-splitters’, the ballistas which could fire heavy metal-tipped arrows a quarter of a mile. Beyond them, the cavalry ranged to discourage attempts to bypass or attack the vulnerable flanks. Behind the legions, the auxiliaries waited in reserve, ready to exploit any success or to die in their turn. For there would be no retreat.
‘This is my weakness and my strength,’ Paulinus had explained as he laid out his battle plan. ‘We will have only one opportunity to destroy her. Even if we win a great victory but leave her army intact, we will be so mauled as not to be able to fight for another thirty days, while she would scarce need to draw breath. Our end would be long and slow, but inevitable. We must fight her to a standstill, draw every warrior on to our javelins and our swords, kill and keep killing until no man stands. The position I have chosen means that my soldiers must fight or die, but her confidence and the vast host she leads ensures that Boudicca will never turn back.’
Agricola broke the silence that followed. ‘But if we hold them and she does decide to withdraw…?’
‘Then we all die.’
It took the rebel queen time to bring her forces to battle. Valerius could make no estimate of their numbers, but his eyes told him the army had swelled enormously since he had first seen it on the slope above Colonia, perhaps even doubled in size. Covering an area a thousand paces wide and three times as deep, they seemed as many as the birds in the air or the fish in the sea. The silence had vanished now, replaced by a muted roaring akin to standing too close to an enormous waterfall; a relentless, surging rise and fall that seemed to shake the very air.
His lack of emotion surprised him. He sat on his horse, with the reins still unfamiliar in the grip of his left hand, and watched Boudicca’s forces deploy with the dispassionate detachment of a spectator at a cockfight who had already gambled his last sestertius. Fear had no hold on him because a man could only die once and he had died at Colonia. But how could a soldier fight without passion? Maeve had robbed him of his hand; had she also deprived him of his soul?
He drove her from his head and studied the scene again. A visible thickening was apparent in the numbers at
