Hammer of Rome Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  D 80. Gaius Valerius Verrens is back where he belongs, at the head of a legion. But this is no ordinary legion – tainted by four decades of ill fortune and poor leadership, this is the ‘unlucky’ Ninth. A unit regarded as expendable by the governor of Britannia, Gnaeus Julius Agricola.

  Yet all that can be swept aside by a single moment of glory. The long-heralded invasion of the north is under way and Valerius leads his troops to a devastating victory against the Brigantes, infuriating Agricola in the process.

  And then, even greater honours beckon with the death of Emperor Vespasian and the succession of Valerius’s friend, Titus. But the new emperor faces his own challenges, not least from his brother, Domitian – whose insatiable lust for power is matched only by his deep hatred of Valerius.

  Valerius knows he must forget the rewards offered by Rome and concentrate on the matter at hand: defeating the recalcitrant tribes who lie in the path of the Ninth. If only the life of a soldier were so simple. For watching his every move is the most formidable and cunning enemy he will ever face: Calgacus, war chief of the Northern alliance …

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  Cast of Characters

  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

  Chapter LI

  Chapter LII

  Chapter LIII

  Chapter LIV

  Chapter LV

  Chapter LVI

  Chapter LVII

  Chapter LVIII

  Chapter LIX

  Chapter LX

  Chapter LXI

  Chapter LXII

  Chapter LXIII

  Chapter LXIV

  Chapter LXV

  Epilogue

  Historical note

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Douglas Jackson

  Copyright

  HAMMER OF ROME

  Douglas Jackson

  Hammer of Rome is dedicated to all of my loyal readers who’ve enjoyed the Valerius adventures, and without whose support they would never have been written. Thank you!

  Cast of Characters

  Gaius Valerius Verrens: Legate of the Ninth legion Hispana and a Hero of Rome

  Titus Flavius Vespasian: Emperor of Rome

  Titus Flavius Vespasian (Titus): The Emperor’s elder son and his heir

  Titus Flavius Domitianus (Domitian): The Emperor’s younger son and Valerius’s deadly enemy

  Domitia (later Augusta): Domitian’s wife and Valerius’s former lover

  Gnaeus Julius Agricola: Governor of Britannia

  Domitia Decidiana: Agricola’s wife

  Tabitha: Valerius’s wife and a princess of Emesa, mother of Lucius and Olivia

  Gaius Rufus: Roman scout, midget, survivor of the Temple of Claudius

  Quintus Naso: Praefectus castrorum of the Ninth, Valerius’s second in command

  Cornelius Felix: Commander of Valerius’s escort, rank of decurion

  Shabolz: Member of Valerius’s escort, former Pannonian auxiliary

  Hilario: Member of Valerius’s escort

  Rufius Florus: Member of Valerius’s escort and Lucius’s personal bodyguard

  Ceris: Tabitha’s maid/companion, a native Briton, Florus’s lover

  Cathal (known to the Romans as Calgacus): King of the Selgovae

  Olwyn: Cathal’s wife, mother of Dugald and Berta

  Gwlym: A blind druid, fugitive from Mona, sometimes adviser to Cathal

  Emrys: Cathal’s sword brother and leader of his bodyguard

  Colm: Cathal’s bodyguard

  Ranal: Cathal’s bodyguard

  The Argento Rìgh: King of the Venicones

  Donacha: Venicones lord

  Oenghus: Venicones druid

  Crinan: King of the Caledonians

  Rurid: Caledonian war chief

  Bruda: A petty Caledonian chief

  Vodenos: Leader of the Brigante contingent that fights beside Cathal

  Metilius Aprilis: Agricola’s aide and Valerius’s enemy

  Herenius Polio: Legate, Second legion Adiutrix

  Tiberius Julius Ursus: Legate, Twentieth legion Valeria Victrix

  Aulus Atticus: Prefect of the Ala Petriana, a cavalry wing of Gaulish auxiliaries

  The enemy suddenly changed their plan, and with their whole force attacked by night the Ninth Legion, as being the weakest, and cutting down the sentries they broke into the camp.

  Cornelius Tacitus, Life of Julius Agricola

  I

  Rome, AD 79

  Titus Flavius Vespasian smiled at his friend across the glittering gold surface of the table, the flickering oil lamps creating shadows and planes on the other man’s face that made him appear much older than his forty-five years.

  ‘It was kind of you to invite me.’ Aulus Caecina Alienus’s voice echoed in the great chamber of the dining room. ‘It is many years since I dined on the Palatine.’

  ‘Of course,’ Titus agreed blandly. ‘Vitellius favoured the Domus Aurea, did he not? He found the palaces on the hill draughty and uncomfortable, I remember.’ He took the sting from the words with a laugh. Caecina didn’t like to be reminded of his service to the short-lived Emperor Vitellius and the rumours of plots, conspiracies and downright betrayal it involved. And not just rumours.

  When the tide shifted and Vespasian’s generals marched on Rome from the east, Caecina might have turned the campaign irrevocably in Vitellius’s favour, but inexplicably – or perhaps not – offered to turn himself and his legions over to the Flavians. A misjudgement, it turned out. He’d misread the mood of his centurions, who promptly threw him in a cell to await execution. Only Vespasian’s swift triumph saved him from the axe. Somehow, he’d also persuaded the new emperor to spare his life when his fellow generals were losing theirs. What was it they said of him? Yes, that was it. Aulus Caecina Alienus could sell a wooden leg to a four-legged dog. Titus laughed again and Caecina gazed at him with something like reverence.

  A rogue, but an amusing one, charming with an endless supply of stories and anecdotes. Men instinctively liked him and women were attracted to him for reasons they could never explain. Once regarded as the most handsome man in Rome, his fine-boned features were puffy with excess and the
dark eyes red-rimmed from the wine of the previous evening.

  ‘What gossip do you have for me, Aulus?’ Titus demanded as the gustatio of eggs and intricately carved vegetable dishes was placed on the table by a stream of slaves. Hidden away, but somewhere nearby, another slave played a pleasing melody on a lyre.

  ‘You must hear all the interesting news,’ Caecina said with a sly sideways look. ‘Being the Praetorian prefect with access to all those ears at all those doors.’ He grinned and took a long pull from the gold cup in front of him. An Opimian, by the gods; old Titus was doing him proud tonight. His voice dropped into a stage whisper. ‘But I hear Julius, manager of the Greens, is to be brought up before the authorities for race fixing.’

  ‘Never,’ Titus gasped, knowing it wasn’t true.

  The courses came and went, with Caecina becoming increasingly voluble and Titus saying less and less. Eventually Caecina ran out of words and they sat together as the silence lengthened. Something had changed. Silence. Yes, that was it. Silence. The music had ended.

  ‘Tell me about Marcellus, Aulus.’ Caecina was puzzled for a moment. When the true import of the words struck he froze and stared at Titus as a mouse is transfixed by a snake. ‘What gossip do you have about him?’ Titus continued relentlessly. ‘I heard a whisper that Diogenes and Heras were back, flapping their tongues.’

  Caecina somehow forced a smile. ‘I hear Flavinius …’

  ‘I don’t want to know about Flavinius, Aulus.’ The voice contained a hint of iron that hadn’t been apparent earlier. ‘It’s Marcellus I want to hear about. Marcellus and all your other friends. The ones who meet behind those closed doors when they think I am not listening.’

  Caecina stared down at the table.

  ‘Lost your tongue, Aulus?’ Titus shook his head with genuine sorrow. ‘I was so good to you all. Paid off Marcellus’s gambling debts when Sabinus wanted to hire the Society to break his legs. Looked the other way the first time he brought those crooked lie-mongers to the city and I had to have them whipped from the Porta Salaria. And you, Aulus? How many husbands have I had warned off when they were waiting in some dark alley with their cudgels? How much do you still owe me from the loan for the house on the Esquiline?’

  ‘Please, Titus, I’ll pay. Just give me a chance.’

  It was as if he hadn’t spoken.

  ‘But how can I forgive this? You have plotted against my father, the man who saved your life and treated you as a son. Colluded with the worst elements in the Senate and the military. No, don’t deny it.’

  How could he not have heard them? Rough hands took Caecina by the shoulders and forced him down so his face slammed on the table. He struggled, but there were too many of them and they were too strong. ‘Please, Titus.’ The words were incomprehensible because his broken lips were forced against the sheeted gold.

  ‘I know what you’ve been saying to them, you and Marcellus and the others. My father is too old, or too sick, no longer up to the challenges of being Emperor. He must step down, or … well, we know what the alternative is, don’t we, Aulus?’ Caecina was weeping now. The metallic taste of blood from his nose and his smashed lips filled his mouth. ‘And Titus?’ the Emperor’s son continued. ‘Titus forfeited his right to be Emperor when he consorted with the Eastern bitch. That’s what you called Berenice, wasn’t it, Aulus, you of all people, who stalked her like a dog in heat? The Eastern bitch. Titus has none of his father’s talents and all of his father’s weaknesses. He’s too trusting. Not ruthless enough …’

  Caecina waited for more. Hoped for more. Prayed for the opportunity to talk himself out of this. He could, if only … He screamed as a hand wrapped itself in the thick dark hair he was so proud of and hauled his head back, exposing his neck. ‘No, plea—’ An almost innocuous sting across his throat and his vision turned black as a terrible prolonged gurgle punctuated the vain plea for a mercy that had never been on offer.

  Above them, two men watched from a darkened balcony that stretched the length of the room.

  ‘Let your brother’s bearing be a lesson for you,’ Titus Flavius Vespasianus Caesar Augustus told his younger son. ‘If we are to survive as a family and our name is to endure as a dynasty we must act with strength, but compassion.’

  Titus Flavius Domitianus, known as Domitian, looked from his father, bowed and rheumy-eyed with age, his hands shaking with some ague, to the man still sitting at the table as the dark stain spread wider and wider across the beaten gold. He understood this was not the only lesson he was supposed to learn from this exhibition. Caecina’s murder was, in a way, a gift to him. Oh, Caecina was guilty enough, but put to the hot irons and the gouging hooks, he would have implicated not just Marcellus, but Priscus and the others. They in turn would have led the inquisitors to Mucianus, long dead, but still dangerous, because his circle contained others who would scream a name that could not be allowed to fall from any man’s lips. His eyes never left his brother. ‘You have my word on it.’

  As he walked away, Vespasian’s frail body was racked by a hacking cough that seemed to go on for ever. The Emperor put a cloth to his mouth. It came away bloody and he shook his head in confusion.

  Domitian watched him go. Not long now, old man. Not long. At the end he might find some compassion for his father, but not for the others who stood in his way. Titus had overshadowed him since he was a boy. After Vespasian’s accession to the purple the situation had become worse. Instead of basking in the reflected glory of the Emperor, Domitian had been kept in the shadows and forced to live on scraps. No Praetorian prefect’s power for the younger son, just a few humiliating part-time consulships. Worse was the fact that, even after all these years, every time he looked into his wife’s eyes he saw the face of another man reflected there. So there would be no compassion for Titus Flavius Vespasian when the time came, as it surely must, or for Gaius Valerius Verrens, who had tried to steal Domitia Longina Corbulo from him, only utter ruthlessness.

  II

  Southern Brigantia

  Gaius Valerius Verrens, legate of the Ninth legion Hispana, walked across the grassy hillside as the fog began to clear. His bodyguard had tried to persuade him to stay away, but he insisted on inspecting the ground his men had just fought over. One of the legion’s auxiliary flanking cohorts had caught a band of Brigante spearmen in the open as they waited in ambush. Bodies littered the ground in that curious, boneless attitude of the dead, limbs twisted into impossible positions and dull, sightless eyes staring at the sky. In places where they’d fought to the last the corpses were so thick on the ground Valerius was forced to take a wide loop to avoid stepping on them. Crimson blood trails showed where men had staggered or crawled from the field in an attempt to save themselves. This was what happened when lightly armed, undisciplined barbarians met hardened Roman soldiers in open combat.

  ‘How many casualties, Barbarus?’ He directed the question at the decurion who’d commanded the auxiliaries, a swarthy bearded veteran wearing the distinctive green cloak of the Asturian cohort.

  ‘Just the three, lord, and a few scratches. But we killed forty or fifty of theirs.’ He saw Valerius’s look and shrugged. ‘We tried to follow your orders about bringing in prisoners, but they just didn’t want to surrender.’

  Valerius called for his horse. The Ninth and its auxiliary cohorts and cavalry wings made up the eastern column of the twin-pronged northern campaign. Two more legions, the Twentieth and the Second Augusta, mirrored this advance up the western flank of the mountains which made up the spine of the island. Valerius had initially marched on the Brigante capital at Isurium, but the Ninth found the settlement empty of King Guiderius and his warriors. Rather than negotiating a treaty of surrender and taking hostages, Valerius was met by a group of stony-faced elders who claimed they could not act without their king’s authority. When asked where he could be found, they would only say he was in the north.

  His left hand instinctively strayed to check the binding on the cowhide socket that held the
oak replica of his lost right one firmly in place on the wrist. Why was he chasing shadows in a stinking Brigante bog with enemies on every side when he could have been back in Italia tending his vines in the sun? The question provoked a wry smile.

  The truth was there was more than one kind of enemy. The one who had driven him from Rome had proved much more dangerous than the tattooed savages lying dead on the grass. Not just to Valerius, but to his family. A man with Valerius’s experience had the weapons to deal with most threats, but not an enemy with this kind of power. For the enemy was the Emperor Vespasian’s son Domitian. Fortunately, Valerius also had powerful friends, including Vespasian’s elder son Titus, who held the rank of consul and commander of the Praetorian Guard. Titus had arranged for Valerius to be appointed legatus iuridicus, the second most powerful official in Britannia and legal adviser to the governor Julius Agricola.

  Yet within weeks of arriving on the island Agricola had manoeuvred Valerius into accepting command of the Ninth Hispana, one of four legions stationed in the province. He’d led his new legion in a bloody, brutal campaign in which Agricola had all but exterminated the Ordovice tribe and destroyed for ever the power of the druids on the sacred isle of Mona. Agricola, with Vespasian’s support, already had plans for the final subjugation of the mountainous north of Britannia. Instead, he’d experienced a year of delays and frustration as his forces recovered from their savage mauling at the hands of Mona’s fanatical defenders.

  Valerius had used the respite to hone the Ninth into a weapon that mirrored the qualities of its new commander: disciplined, aggressive, flexible and deadly. He’d also taken the opportunity to bring his family north to the legion’s new base at Eboracum. He’d spent every possible moment with Tabitha, Lucius and his infant daughter Olivia, a dark-maned joy who, at six months, already had her mother’s flashing temperament and was named for Valerius’s sister. He felt a pang of regret as he recalled the moment he’d seen them off in the carriage to Londinium after the legion’s celebration of Augustalia.

  A trumpet blared and his chest swelled with pride as his legion marched into view on the valley floor below. He took up position on a hillock beside the track to watch them pass.