“Nothing for cavalry to do now,” Marcus muttered at his side. “We’d only be in the way. By Jupiter,” he added, “just look at that.”
It was mass slaughter. It was no longer a battle, nor anything resembling one, as the helpless horde was pressed against its own barrier and hacked to pieces. Those Celtic warriors who valiantly tried to stand their ground, had no room to fight, and they went down like the women and children.
They now saw Agricola canter up to the governor.
“It’s over, sir,” he called. “Do I regroup the men and take prisoners?”
But to Porteus’s surprise Suetonius’s face was stony.
“No.”
“There are women and children,” the tribune began.
“Kill them all.”
And Porteus remembered what a friend of Graccus’s had told him before he left Rome:
“Suetonius – a fine general: none better. But when he is angry, then he is truly terrible.”
As the massacre of women and children took place before their eyes, a silence descended on those watching, but it did not seem to affect the governor. When it was done, he turned to his staff:
“Remember, gentlemen: when the natives forget to respect Rome, they must be taught to fear her.”
On the day of the battle, hardly any of the rebels escaped. Boudicca is dead for certain. The governor refused to stop to count the dead but Marcus and I think there were more than seventy thousand.
We went to Verulamium, then on to Londinium. In both places there was nothing left – just charred ground, as though the rebels had burned all the houses down and then trampled on them. I could not believe that places of such size, especially Londinium, could be so completely destroyed. All the inhabitants had been butchered – all.
As for our own people, the procurator Decianus Catus has run away to Gaul and we are to have a new procurator in his place; the most disgraceful performance of the whole business has been the behaviour of the prefect in charge of the II at Glevum. He heard about the defeat of the Ninth and so he disobeyed the governor’s orders and stayed like a coward in his garrison. No wonder we couldn’t find him! When he heard about our victory over Boudicca he fell on his sword.
Now the governor is taking vengeance on the whole island.
Vexillations
are being sent to every settlement in the country and any dissidents are being slaughtered. Suetonius says he will offer one choice only: absolute obedience or instant death. He means what he says.
This letter was sent by Porteus to his parents from the charred ruins of Londinium. His feelings for the governor were now mixed. He had come to admire the testy old soldier’s coolness and generalship during the rebellion: for if Suetonius had made one mistake, then certainly every Roman soldier in the province could have been massacred in the general uprising that must have followed. To Suetonius therefore, he owed a soldier’s loyalty. But he could not help being disgusted by the reign of terror that followed when the governor, seeing the ruins of the port of Londinium and the Roman colony of Camulodunum pounded his fist into his hand and shouted:
“Now they shall taste Roman revenge!”
Up and down the country the Romans went, killing and confiscating in a huge act of administrative anger; and as Suetonius intended, the islanders were cowed into submission. It was a correct military solution, but it left the new province poorer and more unhappy than ever, and the unease Porteus had felt before only grew stronger.
“The governor is a great soldier,” he acknowledged to Marcus one day, “but he is destroying this province. The natives fear us, but they do not trust us.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” his friend replied, “though frankly I don’t think so. But no one else would agree with you. The legions are all with Suetonius and from what I hear, the emperor would put the whole province in chains if he could.”
“They’re wrong,” Porteus insisted.
“Then all the more reason to keep quiet. Be sensible, young Porteus: forget the whole thing and let others do the worrying; just do as you’re told.”
This was good advice, and had he been wiser, Porteus would have taken it as his guide for the rest of his career. As it was, though he kept his thoughts to himself during the winter, he continued to ponder the matter.
In other ways, his life took a turn for the better. Suetonius, who knew nothing of his opinions, thought well enough of him after the revolt to send him on several missions, including one to the depleted garrison of the IX Legion at Lindum in the north, in the company of Agricola the tribune. And on that visit he was given further encouragement.
“Later on, we shall have some important campaigns in the north of the island,” Agricola told him. “Perhaps you’d like to come on my staff?”
“Oh yes,” he replied, and blushed with pleasure.
He wrote to tell his parents of what was passing; to Graccus he sent letters of respect; and to Lydia he wrote:
I think the governor is pleased with me and that by next year your father will have cause to be satisfied with my career.
Marcus continued to take a friendly interest in him. Several times he asked to see Lydia’s portrait and on each occasion he told Porteus what a lucky man he was.
“I even wrote to my family to tell them what a splendid fellow you were,” he said laughingly to Porteus one day. “Not good enough for that lovely girl of yours, of course!”
Late in the winter, while the snow was still on the ground, a new figure of great significance arrived on the island. He was tall, middle-aged, with a thin, kindly face and receding hair. He had two peculiarities that Porteus observed: he stooped when he spoke to people, as though concentrating intently on what they said; but when not involved in conversation his eyes often seemed to grow distant as though he were dreaming of some far-off place. He was Julius Classicianus, the new procurator and replacement for the disgraced Decianus Catus. His responsibility included all the island’s finances. Under the Roman system of divided authority, he reported direct to the emperor.
“He seems a decent man, but a bit vague,” Porteus commented to Marcus. “I don’t think he’ll make much headway here.”
In this assessment he was completely wrong.
Classicianus was, like him, a member of the minor provincial aristocracy, having come originally from the town of Trier on the Moselle; but by a combination of great astuteness and honesty he had worked his way up to the highest offices in the state. Kindly he was, but he missed nothing; and within weeks of his arrival he was secretly compiling a report that was to change the province completely. Of this, naturally, Porteus had no idea.
In the early spring, a letter came from Lydia, which Porteus read with joy.
The aunt of one of the other men on the governor’s staff, Marcus Marcellinus, was here at the house recently. She told us all the high opinion that he and the governor have of you and father was pleased. Marcus has written to Rome about you. His aunt showed me a picture of him like the one I have of you. Write to tell me the news of all that you do, and tell me about Marcus also.
This was good news indeed, and Porteus was grateful for the loyalty of his friend. He wrote to Lydia at once, telling her more of his successes, and gave her a warm and friendly account of Marcus too.
It was towards the end of winter, as the snows still lingered, that the governor camped in the windy eastern colony of Camulodunum which his legionaries were busily rebuilding; and it was there one day that he sent for young Porteus and said to him gruffly:
“You are to undertake a mission.”
He was delighted. Up to now, he had only accompanied the tribune or one of the
beneficarii
– the governor’s personal emissaries. Now at last he was being entrusted with a mission of his own: it was clearly a chance to prove himself, and he listened eagerly as Suetonius outlined his task.
The mission was simple enough: he was to take a centurion and eighty men and make a tour of inspection of some of the minor tribal settlements in the north west of the land under Roman control, close to the territory of the Deceangli where they had been lighting recently.
“They haven’t paid any taxes and they may be rebels. They’re to pay at once: if they don’t, kill their chief and burn down their houses,” the governor ordered.
Porteus opened his mouth to protest, but then said nothing. This was his first mission, and if he started arguing with the governor he could be sure it would also be his last. He prepared to leave at once.
They reached the place ten days later: Porteus, the eighty men, and a stocky, elderly centurion, who had served under Suetonius several times before, and who hated natives.
“Hammer them. It’s the only thing,” he told Porteus.
“Suetonius – he knows what he’s about.”
It was a dreary spot. Like many of the north western settlements at that time, it was poor; the tribe had been forced to abandon their earthwork, which was more a corral than a defensive fortress, and to rebuild their tribal centre at some distance from it. This was what Porteus found: an untidy clutter of huts, a small round shrine, two cattle pens each containing a small collection of thin, long-haired beasts, and a dozen small fields of barley on the hillsides. On the open ground above, however, there were many flocks of small, squat sheep who roamed over a large area. He toured the entire place carefully. The population was not large: at the centre, some five hundred people huddled together; in the foothills around, another two hundred lived in widely scattered homesteads. They were unlike those stout, thatched round houses with their wattle palisades and rich fields of corn that he had encountered all over the south: these were stone hovels, dug into the ground on windy hillsides, relics of an earlier age. The natives watched the progress of the legionaries silently. At the end of his inspection, Porteus confronted the chief – an elderly grey-haired man with a heavy woollen cloak over his shoulders. He stood in front of a gaggle of his people and stared at the Romans insolently. Porteus addressed him sharply.
“You have not paid the
annona
you were assessed last year.” This was the corn levy used to feed the army. The chief did not reply but shrugged. “You have not paid the
tributum soli
, or the
tributum capitis
– your land tax or the poll tax,” Porteus went on. “Why not?”
The chief regarded him dully. Finally he spoke.
“With what?”
“You have barley, cattle, sheep,” Porteus replied firmly.
“We cannot pay. You can see for yourself, Roman. Your emperor is too greedy,” the man replied.
“There’s no statue to the divine emperor anywhere in the settlement,” the centurion grumbled at his side. “And their shrine is to some native god we can’t recognise.”
This too was a serious matter. It was the policy of Rome to discover the characteristics of the gods the natives worshipped and to join them to whichever seemed the closest of the vast pantheon of Roman gods. In this way, the provinces passed easily into Roman forms of worship without abandoning their own ancestral gods. It was a practical compromise which usually worked; as long as they abandoned the cursed Druid sect and paid due respect to the divine emperor they were left alone. But the curious hooded figure that the centurion had found in the little shrine, who held a snake in one hand and a raven in the other, did not seem to be identifiable with any Roman deity.
“These ones are trouble,” he muttered. “We’d do better to burn the whole place down.”
But Porteus shook his head. It seemed pointless to destroy these miserable folk. He was also concerned to see that the taxes they had been assessed by the procurator Decius were obviously too high: for they amounted to more than half the cattle in the pens, and to two thirds of all the barley.
“I shall have their taxes reassessed,” he stated. “For the moment we shall take ten cattle, and one wagon of grain.”
“That’s letting them off lightly,” complained the centurion.
“They must pay it at once,” Porteus continued. And turning to the old chief he announced: “We shall take taxes from you now, but new assessments will be made in the future – less high than these, and those you must pay promptly.”
“Take the ten cattle,” Porteus said to the centurion, and the Roman legionaries moved quickly into the cattle pens.
It was then that the trouble began. The natives, seeing their livestock being taken, began to jostle the soldiers and the old chief, with great foolishness, did nothing to stop them. A scuffle began as the legionaries pushed the ragged natives aside with their shields. And then suddenly, as if from nowhere, an elderly woman appeared with a spear and rushed towards them. Before anyone could stop her, she hurled the spear with ferocious accuracy at one of the soldiers. It struck him in the neck and he fell. As soon as he saw it, Porteus knew what must follow.
“Form a line,” the centurion shouted. “We’ll deal with them,” he cried to Porteus. Before he could do anything about it, Porteus saw the battle line drawn up.