Sword of Rome Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ‘The story I now commence is rich in vicissitudes, grim with warfare, torn by civil strife, a tale of horror even during times of peace.’ Tacitus, The Histories

  AD 68. The Emperor Nero’s erratic and bloody reign is in its death throes – and Gaius Valerius Verrens is dispatched to Rome to bring it to a close.

  Following Nero’s suicide, the city holds its breath and awaits the arrival of his successor, Servius Sulpicius Galba, the governor of Hispania. The Empire prays to the gods for peace . . . but its prayers are in vain.

  For while Galba promises stability and prosperity, his rule begins with a massacre and ends a few months later in chaos, carnage and his murder. This is a time that will come to be known as the Year of the Four Emperors – a time of vicious civil war that will tear Rome apart and test Valerius’s skills and loyalties to the limit.

  Fortunate to survive Galba’s fall, the one-handed tribune, titled the Empire’s Sword, is sent on a desperate mission by the new emperor, Otho. He must persuade his old friend Vitellius, charismatic commander of the armies of the north, not to cross the Rubicon. But Vitellius’s legions are already on the march and not even Valerius can halt the coming bloodbath that will see Roman fighting Roman and leave a field of forty thousand dead . . .

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  Epigraph

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  Chapter XLI

  Chapter XLII

  Chapter XLIII

  Chapter XLIV

  Chapter XLV

  Chapter XLVI

  Chapter XLVII

  Chapter XLVIII

  Chapter XLIX

  Chapter L

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Douglas Jackson

  Copyright

  SWORD OF ROME

  Douglas Jackson

  For my mum, June

  The story I now commence is rich in vicissitudes, grim with warfare, torn by civil strife, a tale of horror even during times of peace.

  Cornelius Tacitus, The Histories

  I

  Southern Gaul, May, AD 68

  She had died protecting her child; that seemed obvious. A tiny hand, the fingers already turning blue in the stifling heat, lay palm upwards just visible beneath the edge of the shabby grey cloak that covered her body. The raven hair fluttering in the soft breeze was still lustrous where it hadn’t been clotted by blood and brain matter from the terrible wound in her skull. Gaius Valerius Verrens was thankful he couldn’t see the mother’s face. He raised his eyes to the crows and buzzards circling in improbably blue skies, their cries of irritation at being disturbed from the feast an unlikely lament to the fallen. With a feeling of weary resignation he remounted the big roan and surveyed the swollen clusters of dead that lay like stranded maggots across the field of half-grown corn between the woods and the olive grove.

  ‘They would have hidden in the trees.’ He frowned. ‘But whoever killed them must have flushed them out and then ridden them down when they tried to flee.’

  ‘What does it matter?’ The speaker’s voice managed to combine impatience and arrogance in equal measure. ‘They’re just a few barbarian peasants. We are wasting time.’

  Valerius turned to consider his companion. It exasperated him that Marcus Salvius Otho could be so irritating, and at the same time so difficult not to like. Only a few years older and of the same senatorial rank, the man insisted on treating him as if he were a junior tribune on his first campaign. A rich man on a rich man’s horse, Otho had curly dark hair and a face that had never known hunger. Heavy brows arched above liquid, almost feminine eyes; sensitive eyes that softened a nose like a ship’s ram and an overweening sense of his own importance. The cavalry escort, a troop of mounted archers from some wild tribe of the Vascones mountains in the northernmost region of Hispania, rested their horses in the shade of the nearby olive trees. They had been in the saddle for eighteen days since leaving Carthago Nova, the last few through the chattel-stripped, fear-ridden landscape of a failed rebellion. Exhaustion and hunger were written stark in the deep lines on their faces. Valerius kept his voice low enough not to be overheard.

  ‘It matters because, judging by the hoofprints, there must have been fifty of them, which means they outnumber us two to one. If they’re a marauding band of surviving rebels, they would think twice about attacking regular cavalry …’

  ‘Those rebels, as you call them, are our allies,’ Otho sniffed. Valerius felt a familiar twinge of conscience at the reminder that he was himself a rebel. True, Nero had earned his enmity by his treatment of Valerius’s former commander, Corbulo, General of the East, but a gut-wrenching, very Roman part of him agonized over conspiring against a man born with a divine right to rule. He shook the thought from his mind. Nero had sown the seeds of his own destruction by his ill use of the army, the Senate and the people. The fruits of that sowing had become apparent two months earlier when the Gaulish aristocrat Gaius Julius Vindex had raised the southern tribes against the Emperor. Somehow, Vindex, the rustic senator, had convinced Otho’s patrician patron, Servius Sulpicius Galba, governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, to support him. But Galba had been too slow to act, leaving Vindex’s ill-disciplined and badly led rebel army to suffer inevitable defeat against the elite Rhenus legions the Emperor sent against him. Now Galba, whose ambitions for the purple remained undiminished, was back in Hispania, and he had dispatched Otho to Rome in a bid to persuade certain powerful men that change was necessary. If Otho succeeded, he was confident the ageing Galba would name him his heir. If he failed, all he could look forward to was a painful end. It was Valerius’s job to get him there.

  Valerius shrugged. ‘Since the defeat at Vesontio they’re hunted men with swords in their hands, bellies to fill and nothing to lose. If they sense weakness, they will attack, allies or not. I’d guess we’re too strong for them, but’ – he pointed to the dead woman – ‘if these people were killed by auxiliary cavalry we have a different problem. The legions which destroyed Vindex are loyal to the Emperor and still quartered at Lugdunum, less than fifty miles north. If they take us, the best you can hope for is to be strung up from the nearest tree.’

  Otho swatted at the flies plaguing his horse. ‘Then we must avoid—’

  ‘Shit.’ Valerius reacted instantly to a howling shriek that split the silence like an executioner’s sword as thirty horsemen burst from the cover of the trees on the far side of the field. He spun
the roan and dragged Otho’s mount by the bridle back into the shadow of the olive grove.

  ‘Form line,’ he roared. ‘Serpentius? With me in the centre. Two men to guard the governor.’ The field was heat-baked, as flat as a legionary parade ground and three hundred paces wide. By now the enemy horsemen – Batavian auxiliaries, judging by their war gear – were a quarter of the way across, but Valerius took the time to issue precise orders. He rapped out the commands, roaming the line as he shouted each word in their faces. ‘Swords only.’ The long, razor-edged spathae hissed from their sheaths. ‘Straight to the charge. Stay tight with me. We hit them once and we hit them hard. Leave them screaming and bloody then circle back to cover the governor. Understand?’

  The decurion commanding the Vascones grunted his acknowledgement and barked an order to his men, at the same time urging his mount out of cover and into the sunlight. Valerius was already in motion. After the months spent in the saddle with Corbulo’s cavalry the roan might have been a living extension of his body. He felt the comforting presence of Serpentius, his Spanish freedman, pull up to his right knee. Their eyes met for an instant, and Serpentius nodded. No need for spoken orders. Valerius reached across his body and slid the long blade of his spatha from its scabbard on his right hip. Neither man carried a shield, though each of the cavalry troopers held the light leather roundel the auxiliaries favoured. He checked his horse to allow the Vascones to form on him and looked up just as a slight stutter in the Batavian ranks and the strident cry of urgent orders confirmed what he had suspected. He felt a savage heat well up inside him. The Batavians had seen a small huddle of mounted men amongst the bodies of the villagers they had themselves slaughtered, and marked them as local lords or magistrates, rich pickings compared to the farmers and tanners who lay bled out among the stalks. When they had launched their surprise attack from the woods the last thing they had expected was to be confronted by a full troop of cavalry. Now they must face a fight they hadn’t bargained for or break away, leaving their flank exposed to the rampaging Vascones, already screaming their war cries as they pounded over the dry earth.

  Valerius saw the enemy come on, confirming that the Batavian commander had made the right choice. But that still wouldn’t save them.

  Three hundred paces separated the converging forces and they closed at a rate that would have terrified and bewildered a foot soldier. Valerius’s mind was that of a veteran cavalryman, effortlessly judging angle, distance and speed. He sensed fear and confusion in the enemy ranks and that awakened the killer inside him. All the long months of frustration and fear as he and Serpentius had stayed one step ahead of Nero’s assassins were condensed into a ball of fire at his core. He wanted to slaughter these cocky German bastards.

  ‘Close the ranks,’ he roared. ‘Hold the line.’ The order was echoed by the curved trumpet of the unit’s signaller. It was a question of nerve. When cavalry met cavalry the accepted tactic was to charge in open order, to avoid individual collisions that would cripple man and horse, but Valerius was inviting just that. His racing mind took in every detail of the enemy. The thunder of hooves pounded his ears and the Batavians were a sweat-blurred wall of horses and men that surged and rippled, the gaps opening and closing as each rider attempted to keep station on the next. Lance tips glinted in the sun. Had he miscalculated? Would their leader order a volley? He imagined the chaos if the spears arced into the close-packed ranks. No, they were closing too fast. If they waited to get within throwing range they wouldn’t have time to draw their swords and no man willingly went into battle defenceless. Instinct told him to pick a target, but it was still too soon. Think. Stay calm. You command. Today he must suppress the battle madness that made war a joy. Gaps opened in the Batavian line as countless hours of training prevailed and they resumed their natural formation. The enemy horse overlapped the Vascones by eight riders. Logic dictated that when the two lines met and the Vascones were checked, the Batavians would wrap around Valerius’s flank and the slaughter would begin. But Valerius didn’t intend to be checked. His plan was to smash through the Batavian centre. But first something had to break.

  Seventy paces.

  The faceless mob took shape as a line of glittering spear points and glaring-eyed, bearded faces, lips drawn back and teeth bared. A wolf pack closing for the kill.

  Fifty.

  It must be soon. But not yet. Patience.

  Thirty.

  ‘Boar’s head,’ Valerius screamed, and his command was instantly repeated by the signaller’s insistent call.

  At his side, Serpentius effortlessly switched his sword from right hand to left and put the reins in his mouth. The Spaniard reached to his belt and in a single smooth movement drew back his arm and hurled one of the two Scythian throwing axes he always carried. The spinning disc of razor-edged iron took the centre horse of the Batavian line in the forehead and the beast reared and swerved, setting off a chain reaction as riders hauled their mounts aside to avoid a bone-crushing collision. For the space of two heartbeats the centre of the disciplined Batavian attack splintered into chaos. It was long enough. Valerius nudged his mount right and the Vascones automatically followed. The boar’s head was predominantly an infantry tactic, a compact wedge designed to plunge like a dagger into the heart of the enemy, but every Roman cavalry unit practised the manoeuvre. At Valerius’s command the auxiliaries had moved seamlessly from line into an arrowhead formation, with Valerius, Serpentius and the signaller at the tip, aimed directly at the point where the stricken horse had swerved aside. Valerius hit the gap as the Batavian to his left tried to close it. He was already inside the rider’s spear point and he could smell the fear stink on the man’s wool over-tunic as his spatha swung in a scything cut that split ribs and breastbone, jarring his wrist and drawing a shriek of mortal agony from the other man. The dying Batavian reeled in the saddle even as Valerius’s angle of attack slammed his horse aside, creating more space for the rank behind. A simultaneous scream from his right told him that Serpentius had drawn blood and then they were through and clear. There was barely time to take a breath before he shouted his next orders.

  ‘Wheel left. Form line.’

  He had intended to smash the Batavian attack and retire to protect Otho, but the instant he turned he recognized an opportunity too tempting to ignore. The charge had carved the Batavians in two and now the riders to the right of his line milled in confusion a hundred paces away. Six or seven men and two horses writhed in the dust where Valerius had struck the centre. Those on his left were closest and had held their nerve, but they were pitifully few, with perhaps a dozen troopers still in the saddle. Valerius still had more than twenty men and now he launched them against the nearest Batavian survivors.

  ‘Kill the bastards!’

  The Vascones charged in open order while their enemies were still re-forming, and the Batavians had barely reached a trot before the Spanish tribesmen were among them, cutting right and left and howling their war whoops. Valerius picked out a mailed figure in the centre of the line and it was only as he closed that he saw how young the man was. Calculating eyes shone from a pale, determined face beneath the rim of a helmet that shone like gold. The Batavian drove his spear point at Valerius’s chest and only the speed of fear allowed the Roman to deflect the shaft upwards with the edge of his sword. He felt a bruising crunch as the point clipped his shoulder and ducked to avoid the ash shaft swung like a club at the side of his head. Still, the cavalryman was able to batter his shield into Valerius’s body as they collided, almost knocking him from the saddle. They circled like fighting dogs, snarling and seeking out a killing opportunity. Valerius saw the moment his enemy’s eyes widened, the mouth opening in a final scream as the auxiliary felt the edge of Serpentius’s sword crunch into his neck between helmet and mail. In the same instant, Valerius rammed his spatha between the gaping jaws. He felt the jarring impact as the iron point met the back of the skull and hot blood spewed from the boy’s mouth to coat his sword hand. His victim was
thrown back, already dead in the saddle, and his pony ran for a few strides before the body fell to sprawl among the corn stalks.

  ‘Must be getting slow,’ Serpentius muttered. ‘I’ve seen the day you’d have had a chicken like that for breakfast and spat out his bones.’

  Valerius gasped his thanks and turned to survey the battlefield. Four or five dismounted Batavians still battled for their lives on foot, but the rest were dead or dying, and the survivors of the enemy left flank were still milling about where they had been when the Vascones had charged their comrades. ‘Enough,’ he ordered the cavalry leader.

  The man looked mystified. Serpentius spat something in his own language and the officer called his men off. The surrounded Batavians formed a wary circle, but when Valerius ordered them to lay down their swords they complied readily enough. He heard the sound of hooves and Otho rode up with his guards. ‘Why have you spared these traitors?’

  ‘Because they’re not traitors. They were only obeying orders, just as we are. Think about it. If your mission succeeds, in a few weeks’ time we’ll all be fighting on the same side, so what’s the point of killing them?’

  ‘They would have killed us.’

  ‘I accept that, but—’

  ‘Then I’m ordering you to kill them.’

  Valerius raised his sword and Otho edged back. ‘I gave them my word that they’d live.’

  The other man bridled. ‘I—’

  ‘Look.’ Serpentius pointed to where the remaining Batavians were trotting back towards the edge of the wood, where another, larger force had appeared. Valerius bit back a curse as he saw that the newcomers vastly outnumbered his men.

  ‘Form up,’ he roared. ‘Senator Otho, retire to the rear.’

  He heard a sword being unsheathed. ‘I’ve done enough retiring for today.’

  Serpentius laughed and Valerius shook his head wearily. ‘Very well, but stay close to this Spanish rogue. And if he says run, by Mars’ sacred arse, you run.’