Andivius Hedulio: Adventures of a Roman Nobleman in the Days of the Empire Part 51

"This banquet is an attempt to make all of us sleep far too soundly. Every man of us will be surfeited with food and fuddled with wine. You and I must be exceptions. Be sure to eat less than you want and to make a mere show of drinking. We must keep awake."

We did, and, in our tent, discussed in whispers our situation.

"North of Nuceria," Agathemer said, "I judged that we should be safer by ourselves than with these fools and rabble, but they kept such close watch on us that the risks of escape were too great. South of Narnia I have judged us better off where we were than if wandering alone. Now whatever the risks of an attempt to escape, whatever the perils we may encounter if we escape, try to escape we must. I have an intuition that this camp is, tonight, the most dangerous spot in all Italy."

We peered out of the tent at intervals; without hindrance or danger, for our tent-mates were utterly asleep. The night was windless and warm. A moon, more than half full, rose about midnight and, as it climbed the sky, shed a pearly light through a veil of mist which deepened and thickened.

Near the ground the mist was so thick that it made escape easy, though blundering likely.

We tried to judge our time so as to start a full hour before the first streak of dawn. We traversed unhindered a camp sunk in sleep, where we heard no sound but c.r.a.pulous snorings. Northward, towards the Mulvian Bridge, we sneaked out into the tomb-lined meadows. Through or above the dense fog we could spy the pinnacles of several vast and ambitious mausoleums glittering in the moon-rays.

We were not a hundred yards from the camp when I dimly perceived ahead of us through the fog something like a wall or stockade about two yards high.

A step or two further, at the same moment at which I made out that it was a serried rank of helmetted men, a challenge rang out, sharp and peremptory.

Instantaneously we dropped on our hands and knees and crawled back to camp.

"I told you I had a suspicion that this was a dangerous locality,"

Agathemer whispered when we had stood up and gotten our breath. "Those were regular infantry of some sort. We can only hope that they are on that side only. Let's try towards Rome."

There, at about the same distance we were similarly challenged.

In camp again Agathemer said:

"Those were Praetorian infantrymen, and they were standing shoulder to shoulder. This looks bad. But I believe in taking every possible chance.

Let's try towards the road."

Eastwards also we encountered the like obstacle.

Back we crawled unpursued. As we skurried through the snoring camp, unperceived by the sodden sleepers, Agathemer said, aloud:

"This looks increasingly bad. The Praetorians are standing with interlocked elbows; they look unpleasantly like samples of a complete cordon round the camp. The mounted Praetorians are behind them not two horse-lengths and less than that apart. I divined some sort of troops ma.s.sed behind the cavalrymen. I feel frightened."

Out we raced towards the broad Tiber, towards it we crept through fog across the meadow. Again we were challenged. The cordon was, apparently, complete.

As we regained the camp Agathemer said:

"If we are to escape alive we need all our craft, and we must be quick."

We sprinted, not to our quarters, but to those of the British veterans.

Into each tent we peered.

Every tent was empty!

Agathemer, plainly, felt in a desperate hurry, yet he took time to glance into the most of the hundred and fifty tents, tearing along past the lines of them. He also took time, after our brief inspection was finished, to pause, get his breath and say:

"This looks worse than bad. I miss my guess if many of these slumberers wake alive. Strip!"

We stripped of everything except our amulet bags.

Then, at full run, stark naked, our unsheathed sheath-knives in our hands, we raced through the fog, now glimmering with the first forehint of coming dawn, along the inner edge of the veterans' tents, till we were opposite the quarters of the tumultuary century formed from the outpourings of the _ergastulum_, at Nuceria.

Into one of the veterans' tents we went.

"Knife in teeth!" said Agathemer.

The tents were lavishly provided with unsoldierly comforts, a double allowance of blankets and mattresses stuffed with dried reeds or sedge.

Motioning me to help, Agathemer doubled a mattress and pressed on it till it lay so. Then he doubled another and set it so that the two were about a yard apart, with their folds towards each other. Another pair he set similarly so that the interval between the folds was over two yards long.

Then we roofed the interval, so to speak, with two mattresses laid flat, and laid two more on each of these. Not yet satisfied Agathemer led me out four times to drag in, from the near-by tents, mattresses, two of which we laid lengthwise over the triple mattress-roof, the others we heaped over the end of the roofed tunnel furthest from the opening of the tent.

Then we went outside yet again and cut the ropes of the two adjacent tents and of the one above the pile of mattresses. We threw our knives far away and bunched up the collapsed canvas of that tent so that it formed a sort of continuation of the mattress-roofed tunnel. Then we crawled, feet first, into the tunnel, taking with us two full water-bottles which Agathemer had found in one of the tents and a quarter loaf of bread, left over from the banquet. It smelt appetizing.

We wriggled into the tunnel side by side, until our heads were well under the mattress-roof. We could see out under the huddled, crumpled canvas.

Full in our limited view lay, in the middle of the camp street, a fat Nucerian, the outline of his big chest and prominent paunch dimly visible in the increasing light. His gurgling snores were plainly audible.

Agathemer broke off two fragments of the bread and we munched ruminatively.

We had hardly swallowed three mouthfuls when Agathemer exclaimed:

"Just in time! I can hear the arrows already! Listen!"

We listened. I could hear a sound as of hail on roofs. And, just above us, I could hear the arrows plunge into our protecting mound with a swis.h.i.+ng, rending thud.

"We ought to be safe," Agathemer whispered. "But we may get skewered even as we are. Volleyed arrows drive deep."

I heard many a volley and, after the first, since I was listening for it, I heard faintly before each volley the deep boom of thousands of powerful bows, tw.a.n.ging all at the same instant.

As the light increased I could see the drunken Nucerian with his hummocky outline emphasized by five feathered arrows planted in his body. He must have been killed by any of the five.

When we saw living men pa.s.s across our outlook, their legs looked like those of some sort of foreign auxiliaries. I made the conjecture, from their movements, that they were killing the merely wounded. Certainly, one of them drove his long sword through the prostrate, arrow-skewered Nucerian; and, sometime later, another, with quite a different type of leg-coverings, did the like.

After daylight we saw pa.s.s by the legs of many Praetorian infantrymen and of some cavalrymen. From the second hour we saw only legs of some novel sort of regular soldiery whose trappings neither of us could recognize.

It grew hot in our hiding place. We talked in whispers; while talking we seemed more indifferent to the heat.

Agathemer said:

"All this must have been planned beforehand and carefully and very skillfully carried out. It took ingenuity, minutely detailed arrangements and great skill to arrange that banquet so as to get all the tumultuary additions to the deputation surfeited and dead drunk and yet keep the veteran legionaries near enough to being sober to be waked up, marshalled and marched out. And it took amazing eloquence to wheedle their centurions into abandoning their invited a.s.sociates. The whole thing is a miracle. I can't see through it."

I may interpolate here, what I learned more than four years later, after Cleander's downfall and death and after my return from Africa, that Agathemer's conjectures, as we talked the matter over in our nook, were correct. Perennis had formulated the plan and had prepared for it and given the preliminary orders. His was the policy of allowing the mutineers to march all the way to Rome unhindered. He, without consulting the Emperor and with every care to prevent him from suspecting what was afoot, imported a thousand archers from Crete, and as many mounted bowmen from Numidia, from Mauretania and from Gaetulia. He planned the banquet-feast, he made arrangements for the cordon of Praetorians. The ma.s.sacre was his idea.

Cleander must have known of all this; he could not, like Commodus, be kept in ignorance. Either before he came to our camp, or, perhaps, in his elation at his rival's ruin and his own success, he adopted the ready plan. Most likely the separation from their fellows of the veteran mutineers was all his own idea; Perennis was not the man to carry out so bold a stroke nor so much as to conceive of it. Indubitably, after dark, the eighteen veteran sergeants were secretly called to a meeting with Cleander. The fellow must have possessed superhuman powers of persuasion.

Certainly he made a long speech in which he convinced the leaders of the mutineers that their having a.s.sociated with themselves tumultuary recruits in Gaul and the liberated inmates of _ergastula_ in Italy was inconsistent with their expressed loyalty to Caesar and the Commonwealth; that by such action, they had gravely imperilled the very existence of the Republic and the safety of their Emperor. He won them over so completely that they acceded, without hesitation, to his dictum that they ought to do all in their power to repair the ill effects of their error of judgment; that the only way was to abandon their a.s.sociates, to leave them for him to deal with and to march with all speed back to Britain to rea.s.sure their fellow- insurgents and reclaim Britain to effective loyalty.

So completely were they under his spell that they returned to their camp, roused their men without waking any of their tumultuary a.s.sociates, and marched the whole body of veterans, in the night, across the Mulvian Bridge and on all day to a prepared camp near Careiae, where they spent the night. From there they marched in two days the forty-six miles to Cosa; whence they followed the Aurelian road to Ma.r.s.eilles, as we had ridden it, and from there marched across Gaul to Gessoriac.u.m and s.h.i.+pped for Britain, all in half the time in which they had come.

Agathemer and I spent the whole day in our hiding place, suffering terribly from the heat, for the day was hot, muggy and breezeless, so that the still sultry air was stifling. We spared our water-bottles and made their contents last. Our bread we munched relis.h.i.+ngly after noon.

Before sunset we were discovered and unearthed by some of the infantry whose trappings were unknown to us. We found out later that they belonged to the newly-enlisted Viarii, cohorts created from picked young men judged agile, alert, intelligent and loyal, to act as a special road-constabulary to deal with robbers and especially with the bands obeying the King of the Highwaymen and with him.