the case. Every bird you startle tells an enemy where you are, just as the silence of the animals will let them know you’re coming, minutes before you arrive. But the same applies to them, so keep a sharp lookout for unusual movements. We, ourselves, will move at a steady, gentle pace. I will go ahead to a point where you can see me, then the men will follow in pairs and you can bring up the rear.’
He smiled to take the sting out of his next words. ‘By the time you two blunder along in our path, every fly will be used to a human presence.’
‘Meaning we won’t startle too many birds,’ said Publius.
‘That’s right, and by the time we return I fully intend that you’ll take the point, while I’ll be bringing up the rear.’
‘And if we are seen?’ asked Gnaeus.
‘Let’s hope it’s not someone we’ll have to fight.’ Aquila turned back into the trees, followed by his twin trainees. They saw that the soldiers had dug a shallow hole and filled it with water. They were now busy adding the earth they had dug up. ‘Smear your smocks and the metal parts of your weapons with mud. It’ll make you harder to see.’
It took a full week to reach Pallentia, by which time the Calvinus twins wondered if they were actually cut out for life in the army. Not that they alone had suffered; filthy and gaunt, there was no way now to tell they were Romans. It was just that their inferiors seemed more able to cope than they, but during that time they grew to understand Aquila Terentius, and to appreciate some of the problems that beset the Roman army in Spain.
They knew there had been casualties in this ongoing war, but neither had realised that they numbered well over one hundred thousand men lost in the last twenty years — more than half of them Roman citizens. Aquila was careful to point out that the men they were with now would probably be soldiers regardless of the dilectus; most, indeed, had slipped through the property qualifications for service and acquired the right to serve as princeps because of experience.
It was hard to argue with the centurion’s case that neither Rome, nor her allies, could afford losses at the rate they were suffering and expect to field armies sufficient to hold all the frontiers; that the solution lay in the removal of the archaic class- and property-based system of recruitment: if you owned land, you were eligible for service; if you were penniless, you were passed over. This would allow the farmers to tend their land, lessen the Republic’s dependence on imported corn, and end the abuse by which rich men bought up derelict farmland for ranching, the land having been let go to the bad because the men needed to tend it were serving as legionaries.
Little did they know that he was expressing the very things that had ruined his adopted parents. Clodius had been a legionary and had served the Republic of which he was a citizen; the reward was ruin, because when he returned from service, the land had gone to rack — Fulmina on her own could not tend it — while he lacked the funds for implements or seed to bring his land back to fruitfulness, and, in truth, it would have broken him to try. The Terentius farm had been sold to Cassius Barbinus and the already filthy rich senator had turned it into pasture for sheep and cattle. Reduced to a gimcrack hut by a stream, and work as a day labourer, no wonder Clodius had agreed to serve in place of his prosperous neighbour Piscius Dabo, when the latter was suddenly, and unexpectedly, called back to the colours.
‘And where will we get our soldiers?’ asked Publius.
‘When was the last time you looked in the streets of Rome? It’s bursting with men. So is every city in Italy.’
‘That useless mob. They’re a rabble,’ said Gnaeus.
‘Wrong, Tribune.’ He waved his arm around to include the men he had brought along with him. ‘They’re probably just like us. I mean no disrespect, but any man here, given a chance, could hold your rank. All this talk of needing noble blood to lead men into battle is a lot of patrician shit.’
Aquila grinned, noticing how their loyalties fought with their logic. He stood up, making his way to the crest of the hill they would have to cross to avoid a ten-league detour. ‘But we could talk all day and change nothing. The old windbags in the Senate have got it all sewn up. Personally, I couldn’t care if someone lopped off their heads.’
‘And what about being governed?’
‘Would you use that word to describe what we’ve got now? Go ask the men in the auxiliary legions what they think. Those togate bastards are happy to spill their blood, but they won’t even give them citizenship.’
Publius adopted a bland look. ‘You are aware, Aquila Terentius, that our father is a senator?’
‘’Course I am. Just as, in time, you’ll be one too. What worries me is that people like us will still be here in Spain doing drawings of places like Pallentia. Let’s move, quickly. We’ll do the crest one at a time and through the trees.’
The report they eventually submitted to Mancinus, ostensibly a tribunate one, did little to please him. He had called a full conference of his officers to discuss the prospects, placing Aquila, the true author, well to the rear so as to avoid his negative interventions, but that failed to work, since the Calvinus twins, who had taken Aquila’s observations and turned them into the proper, educated Latin form, seemed to share his pessimism. The general was now regretting the obligation to their father that had manoeuvred them onto his complement of officers, let alone the fact that he had allowed them to go on the reconnaissance, but his biggest mistake had been to ask Gnaeus Calvinus to read the report, assuming that he would put a gloss on matters to please his patron.
‘So, to conclude, sir, there’s insufficient forage and food in the vicinity to supply the whole army. We will be required to build a road and at least three bridges, all of which will have to be held so that supplies can be maintained, if Pallentia can’t be taken by direct assault, which in our opinion it cannot.’
‘Why not?’ demanded Mancinus’s quaestor and second-in-command, Gavius Aspicius.
Gnaeus gave him an odd look. Gavius had read the report so he knew as well as anyone that the place would withstand an army if those within the ramparts were numerous and well fed, so the only hope was a siege. Carefully Gnaeus went over the arguments again, returning in due course to the proposed solution. The hill fort had a supply of water that good engineering could divert. It was the one fault in the comprehensive system of defences that Aquila had spotted. The Celts, not themselves as talented in that field as the Romans, had failed to secure it absolutely.
But the method of cutting the supply would involve the engineers working very close to the earth bastions that jutted out from the main walls. If the Romans gathered to assault that section, the defenders would gather to oppose them. Aquila’s idea was an attack elsewhere, not designed to breach the defences but to hold their enemies at that point. This would allow a second group to engage the lightly protected alternative and damn the water supply. Then Mancinus could sit back and wait for the cistern inside the hill fort to dry up. Once that happened, the defenders would have to come out and fight, just to try and restore the supply. If they did, they would face defeat against any enemy who knew exactly where they would strike. Failure to do anything would see them expire from thirst within the walls.
‘And how long will all that take?’ barked the quaestor, clearly as displeased by the prospect of a siege as his commander.
The voice from the rear made them all spin round to look at Aquila. ‘If you can tell how much water they store and predict that we’ll have no rain, I’m sure we can provide an answer. With luck it will be weeks. If not, it could take a year.’
Gavius Aspicius turned back to face Mancinus.
‘This is nonsense. These are barbarians we’re facing. I say that one determined assault, delivered quickly, will breach the defences.’ A murmur of agreement came from the senior officers present, all of whom had a vested interest in a quick result. ‘If we stop to build a road, to construct bridges, they’ll have weeks to get the place ready and, since we can’t be sure that the other tribes will not attack, guarding that route will deplete our forces.’
Aspicius stepped forward and swept his arm in an arc over the map. ‘But if we force-march the entire army to Pallentia, and press home the attack without resting, we’ll catch them unawares.’
The general was nodding, since these were the kind of words he wanted to hear, and so were most of the others, either through a conviction that Aspicius was right, or merely a desire to agree with their patron. The quaestor, ramming home his point, slammed his fist down on the table to emphasise the point. ‘That’s the lesson we want to teach these tribesmen. That Rome can destroy them whenever we have the will.’
Mancinus stood, chest puffed out, clearly showing his spirits had been raised by those stirring words. ‘Gentlemen, it is time to sound the horns, time to march, and time to let our foes know that their years of causing
