The Sands of Saturn - Chapter 9

Ériu, Southern Ulaid

Llassar swayed on the back of his horse, watching the ragged army move down the hill below and into an open plain to face their enemy, resisting the urge to smirk at the sudden change of his situation. A little over a week previous, he’d been in a dank dungeon, trying to ignore rats and water dripping from above, and now he was one of only a handful of men on horseback, riding with its commander and his ‘officers.’

Calling this an army was a stretch, even by Caledonian standards. The ragtag force of seasoned warriors, farmers and anyone else Conchobar’s guard could round up and force into the depleted ranks. The fact that he’d been given a horse as a sign of respect to make up for being thrown into a dungeon, was sign enough of how badly they were faring. Horses had, apparently, become a precious military resource after several devastating losses, including of their largest horse breeders and grazing lands.

“Now you will see our men in action,” Guaire, the Ulaid general who also happened to be one of Conchobar’s lesser cousins, said.

Llassar doubted it, seeing the contrast of men. Dozens of Carthaginian phalanxes, packed in tight squares, their spears bristling in the sunlight, flanked by a similar ragtag group of warriors as those being fielded by the Ulaid. The Ulaid might have been able to show something if they were only facing off against the warriors from Connacht or Ivernis, although even that would have been a stretch now that the loss of so many of their actual warriors had forced them to conscript people who’d barely even held a sword before.

Against a trained Carthaginian army equipped with steel-tipped swords, hardened leather armor, and metal breastplates, they stood no chance at all. It wouldn’t have done to actually point that out, however, so Llassar only nodded in acknowledgment.

Llassar could appreciate the simplicity of Guaire’s plan, sending his army head first into the opposition. His people had fought more or less the same way since his ancestors' time and until he watched Ky and his legates use maneuver and position to defeat huge armies with a faction of their force, he’d never seen anything wrong with that plan.

Unfortunately, the Ulaid couldn’t seem to hold to even this simple of a plan. As they aligned against the Carthaginians, Llassar had expected them to slowly move forward, reserving strength until the last moment, and then charging as a single group to increase the impact.

Instead, as soon as they hit the plain, the Ulaid began their charge, every man running full out, the faster ones quickly outpacing the slower ones. Llassar just shook his head. It was foolish. They had a long open expanse of ground to cross and the Ulaid would be exhausted by the time they got there. Their leaders, what few followed the army down onto the plains, didn’t seem to do anything to try and stop them.

The Carthaginians weren’t even moving, although they lowered their spears into position, ready to attack. Even the Carthaginian’s allies held their ground, which Llassar knew would be hard on them, since warriors like that would have their blood up and it wouldn’t take much to get them to counter charge.

They finally launched their attacks a few minutes later as the Ulaid got close enough. The Carthaginians continued to hold their ground, probably happy to let their allies waste their men on this battle rather than losing men of their own. To their credit, even exhausted, the men who made it across the field first held their own, at least for a moment, against the Carthaginian allies, with as many of them going down as the Ulaid’s own men.

Numbers told the story, however. There were too many of the Carthaginian allies and not enough of the Ulaid, half of who turned to run as things started to turn against them. The assault quickly turned into an all-out route, with the enemy hot on the Ulaid’s heels. The Carthaginian forces hadn’t even had to move. They just stood there and let their allies mop up the last of the forces.

Everything in Llassar’s being told him to ride down and show these people what a real warrior could do, but he hadn’t gotten this far by being foolish. Guaire and the few other Ulaid still on the hilltop turned and began galloping away, leaving the men to their fate. It was a pathetic display and one he thought Conchobar would be ashamed to hear about, but there wasn’t anything Llassar could do to help that wouldn’t lead to his death. The only way he was going to help was to be there to coordinate between his people and the Ulaid when the Britannic legions arrived.

It was with no small measure of shame that Llassar turned his horse and followed after the fleeing Ulaid leaders.

***

Outside Londinium

Another large boulder crashed into the wall, about a third of the way up, and remained where it was, impacted into the wood and brick structure, but not able to push past the earth berm that had been pushed up the other side.

“The men’s aim is getting better,” Ky said as an aside to Ursinus, who stood behind him on a small rise, watching the two trebuchets on this section of the line pull their ballasts back so the men could load another projectile.

“I’d hope so. They’ve been firing away every day for weeks now, that that it’s done us any good. Jupiter knows, we’ve probably made it stronger with all the boulders we’ve left embedded in the walls,” he said, gesturing at the boulder that the machines had just left behind.

“It won’t matter in the long run. The logged rounds won’t affect the men trying to go over the wall.”

“I don’t understand why we don’t fire over the walls. We have the range, and even with all of the practice the men are getting, a lot of shots miss the city and end up in the dirt. We’d at least kill a few of their soldiers and maybe actually cause some damage. I know we’re trying to avoid causing collateral damage, but we’re taking a city. We have to accept some collateral damage. When we storm the wall, there’s going to be damage anyway.”

“We have to rule these people once we kick out the Carthaginians, so collateral damage does matter, but that isn’t why I don’t want the men to fire over the wall. We’re never going to cause enough damage with this little artillery to help us get over the wall, so where we fire won’t actually matter all that much. Destroying large swaths of the city in exchange for killing a handful of soldiers doesn’t gain us enough to make it worthwhile, especially when you remember our actual goal is to build up men inside the city. If we create a lot of rubble and destruction behind the wall, it will slow our men inside the wall when they begin their assault, which will make it easier for the Carthaginians to bottle them up well short of the wall, which would make them completely ineffectual.”

“Then why even bother with continuing to fire at the walls day and night?”

“Because if we were just sitting here, not doing anything, they’d start to wonder what we were doing. They know we want to get into the city, and even their commander, as inexperienced or incompetent as he seems to be, would wonder if we were up to something. We need to keep their attention fixed on us, so they don't start looking for our real plan. A better commander would know that what we’re doing is pointless and we’d be forced to send in regular assaults on the wall, getting men killed, to keep him focused. I’m hoping we’ll be able to get away with just these trebuchet shots, and won’t have to waste men’s lives on a diversion.”

“And you can tell if we’re doing enough?” Ursinus asked.

It wasn’t accusatory or doubtful, but asked in earnest. Ursinus had been one of the first people in this timeline to fight alongside Ky, and he’d had a curiosity ever since he could see some of the things Ky was able to do.

“I can. My little bird allows me to see the men on the other side of the wall. No troops have moved off their wall and there is no troop or guard movement through the city, which there would be if they were hunting for something. They’ve actually been concentrating their forces on the sections of the walls we’ve been hitting with the trebuchets, which suggests they are taking the bait.”

When speaking in Latin, instead of talking to Sophus in his native language, he sometimes had to find exchange words, because the very idea of it was so foreign. Sometimes, if it was something the Romans would have to interact with regularly, like gunpowder, it was easier to introduce the word into their vocabulary. But the Romans wouldn’t reach the point of independently operated drones in even his extended lifespan, so it wasn’t worth the effort to explain what a drone was. It was easier to find something comparable and just go with it. All Ursinus needed to know was he was able to look down on the city from above, and Ursinus had witnessed him doing that before and got the gist.

“I guess you know what you’re doing,” Ursinus said.

“I hope so,” Ky said.

****

Londinium Docks

Carus stepped off the boat and onto the dock and wondered that this crumbling place, with piles of trash and refuse in the street and buildings crumbling from lack of maintenance, was the city his people had been trying to retake his entire life.

A guardsman walked past the end of the dock, and Carus had to avoid turning his head or acting suspicious. Dressed in a rough, and extremely itchy, tunic common Carthaginian laborers, they looked just like any of the other people unloading boats or otherwise working on getting what little food they could into the city. Carus couldn’t help but notice the group of guards around a wagon onto which a pretty significant amount of the food was being loaded. If he had to guess, the food, which was enough to feed a dozen families for a week, was all heading to the governor and his cronies. It was typical of what he’d heard about the man, who had little regard for human life, regardless if they were citizens supposedly under his protection or not.

Since there was nothing he could do about it, Carus turned his back on the scene and headed towards the warehouse the shipmaster had indicated as they pulled up on the dock, leading the other nine men with him. Each carried an empty box to look like they had a purpose, since the shipmaster couldn’t actually afford to give away food, even to help them.

The inside of the building was absolutely packed with Roman soldiers, all wearing the same tunics he was wearing, their armor being left in crates along the walls of the warehouse until it was time for the fighting to begin. Ramirus had thought that, if guards did stumble into the warehouse, they might be able to bluff their way out, saying it the soldiers were refugees or some such, hopefully preserving the plan.

The men were doing a good job of being calm, holding hushed conversations and generally keeping quiet. So much so that, if Carus hadn’t known the warehouse was full of soldiers ahead of time, he wouldn’t have known at all. Of course that was easier during the day, when laborers were unloading ships and offloading warehouses. It would be harder at night, when the city settled down to sleep, but the combination of the sound of water rushing by in the river and the occasional boom from the direction of the city wall when another bolder smashed into it, would help hide any noise, as long as it didn’t get out of hand.

Carus was doubly impressed since he knew soldiers. They were, by and large, not a particularly subtle or quiet bunch, and some of the men had been crammed in here for weeks, with nothing to do and less and less room to stretch their legs as the warehouse filled up.

Carus was a little concerned by that last part. Soldiers crammed into such a small place couldn’t move around much, which meant they wouldn’t be at their best when it came time to get down to the business at hand. He’d turned around to head back out of the warehouse and find Ramirus’s contact, and almost ran into the man as he was coming inside.

“This building is getting very full,” Carus said.

“I know, but I wanted to get as many of your people here as we could at first. I have two more warehouses we can use, but both are smaller and closer into the city, which means there’s less background noise at night to hide the sounds of the men.”

“That makes sense, but the men need a little room to move around, or they’re going to be wasted on the final attack. We need to shift some of these men to the smaller warehouse. If we send a third of the men in here and split them across the two warehouses you have, leaving enough room there for the men to have a little room, will we have enough space for the rest of the men coming behind me?”

“No, but I should be able to get at least one more warehouse that its owner has been trying to sell me. I’ve been putting it off because it’s not as well located to either the city or the docks and because I don’t have the money on hand to buy it.”

“Speaking of money, Ramirus sent this for you,” Carus said, pulling a small bag that had been tied around his arm and under his tunic and handing it over.

The shipmaster opened the drawstring and shook it, letting the gold pieces clink against each other.

“If I spend this on more warehouses for your men, my reward for helping you will be all gone.”

“Talk to Ramirus, he’ll make sure you’re well taken care of.”

The man looked skeptical, but said, “Okay.’

“I saw the guardsman out there. Have any of them poked around the warehouse or asked about the men you’ve been bringing in?”

“No. The only thing they seem to care about is getting the governors cut of every shipment and taking whatever graft they have from businesses still operating. They were always greedy, but the worse things have gotten, the larger their greed has become.”

“Are they pressuring you?”

“Yes, and because I’m bringing in your men, my boats seem to have larger crews than they do, which makes them think I am more prosperous than I am. They are taking almost half of my shipments every day, thinking they’re only taking a third.”

He wasn’t asking for a handout again straight out, but Carus could read between the lines. He’d known men like the shipmaster and had no doubt if the man thought he could make more money by selling the Romans off to the Carthaginians, he’d do it in a moment and still take Ramirus’s money beforehand. The only thing keeping him from doing it now was the certainty that the Carthaginians, at least here in Londinium, were doomed.

Since he couldn’t actually tell the man what he thought, Carus only said, “Talk to Ramirus. If this comes off, he’ll make sure you’re very well taken care of.”

***

Devnum

“… then we will be forced to tax every Roman business that operates on Caledonian land that sends its money back to owners in the south instead of investing in the areas they profit from.”

Lucilla had to mentally push back the yawn that threatened to escape. She knew this was important, but the bickering over taxation rights had been going for the better part of an hour and this was the third time she’d heard this exact point. Worse, she was mostly just a spectator today. Although her father had asked her to handle the vote on troop deployment to Ériu, that had been a tactical move because of her relationship with the Caledonians, which he thought would give her leverage in the discussion.

That same relationship caused problems when it came to disputes between the Caledonians and the Romans. Even though she was a Roman citizen, several of the senators had already accused her of favoritism towards the northerners when trying to mediate disputes between them in the imperial senate. True, she had a fondness for them, but still considered herself a Roman at heart. She always tried to be meticulously fair when it came to the dealings between them, but that was a hard thing to prove, which is why her father had decided to keep handling the senate sessions personally.

His reasoning made sense, but it also meant she had a passive role in these debates, which took away most of their interest. She realized she’d let her mind wander again and had missed everything that her father had said in reply as Taenaris, the nominal leader of the Romans in the imperial Senate, who’d switched places with the Caledonian who’d been speaking in the center of the forum.

“If our northern countrymen can hold to that, then we accept those terms.”

“Are you questioning our word?” Bredei, the Caledonian who’d been yelling earlier, said angrily.

“Of course not, but your people are still getting used to following the decisions made by representatives, or are you forgetting the incident at Trefaldwyn?”

Bredei mumbled something, but sat back down as Taenaris had scored a point. Lucilla loved the northerners and found their blunt to-the-point nature to be refreshing, but she had to admit a lot of them still struggled with the idea of republican democracy. For the bulk of their history, the Caledonians had been used to a more direct form of rule. Talogren’s Caledonian League had been novel when he’d first put it together, which is how he’d made the northerners a true threat to the Southern Romans for the first time since the two cultures had clashed.

For the bulk of their history, every northerner had seen themselves as only a member of whatever tribe or village they’d grown up in, and saw everyone else, even neighboring tribes or villages as foreigners. The idea of someone far away having the right to bargain and negotiate for their rights and responsibilities had never even crossed their minds. They believed in a direct form of democracy that allowed everyone not only a voice in every decision, but the expediency of being able to kill or exile a leader they felt no longer made the right choices for them.

While that had a simplicity to it, it had also limited the Caledonians from ever having the power to protect their homes and families from larger, more organized, groups. Which was how Talogren had been able to gain power in the first place. Now, many of these villages, particularly more remote ones that had less frequent contact with either the central villages of the Caledonian League or their new Roman countrymen, were having trouble adapting.

There’d been several instances of entire villages trying to break away or simply ignoring rules they didn’t feel like they had to follow, so she understood Taenaris’s point, although he could have been more diplomatic in the way he made it.

“I have confidence they will do everything in their power to ensure all sides hold to the compromise. Now, I believe you had some new business you wanted to discuss,” Her father said, moving things along.

“Yes. I wanted to address the increase in immigration that’s started happening. While we’ve always had a trickle of people from the mainland make their way here, it had mostly been traders in the like. Over the last month or so, that trickle has become a flood of people from Iberia, Germania, and Scandia. The Roman senate has requested that, since this is one of the areas of the empire has authority over, we do something about it. The coastal cities are already starting to feel the strain of these people on public works and could become a serious problem if left unchecked.”

Lucilla noticed the Caledonian senators nodding in agreement, which was an indication of just how big this influx of immigration must be, to get them to agree to anything Taenaris might say.

“This is a good thing, isn’t it? Haven’t we been discussing the problem of not enough men for the legions and not enough workers for the factories and farms?” Lucilla asked.

“We have, but these aren’t men in their prime, they’re families whose men have been drafted into the Carthaginian legions and left to fend for themselves. It’s old men, women and children. They’ve heard that Britannia is a safe haven from the Carthaginians and come here with only the clothes on their backs, and not much else. They are having trouble making it out of the villages where the captains who take their last valuables in exchange for passage dump them. Some of the families find work, but these are mostly small fishing villages that aren’t able to deal with these many refugees.”

“Even the Scandi?” Lucilla asked.

The Scandi were the people on the other side of the narrow sea north of Germania. While not many Romans had seen it, they’d been in regular contact with the Scandi people who made up a lot of the traders they dealt with. Since they’d never been conquered by the Carthaginians, they were the most direct source of trade for the free peoples still living on Britannia and a conduit to markets further east.

“No. The Scandi are mostly traders and a few craftsmen that have moved their families here, hoping to take advantage of all the money the empire is spending and to have faster demand to some of the new goods that were released commercially. Hortensius said the factory owners that are focusing on civilian goods are starting to see a lot of demand, enough that it might make sense for factories working on government contracts to switch over when they finish up with their current contracts. That will bring problems of its own, but Hortensius was planning on bringing that to your attention separately.”

“I’m still not sure I see the problem. One of the reasons we made room for civilian manufacturing was because of the money it would bring from the outside into the empire and the new tax revenues that would create, since most of the sales are on things covered by the patent tax the Consul created. The army is still short on supplies across the board, especially when considering the material being taken by the legions to the Ulaid.”

Patent was another new word Ky had introduced that, at least in the halls of government, had become so common that none of the senators seemed to even notice and she barely thought about it before saying it.

“We did, and when it was just an influx of traders, that was fine. The families coming here and settling with them, and the refugees from Germania, are a different matter.”

“What do you want us to do? We have had immigrants in the empire for as long as we’ve been around, and that doesn’t even count the large non-citizen base of slaves that existed during that time. Before coming to Britannia, there were more non-citizens than citizens in Rome. Why, now that we’re an empire made up of multiple cultures, is a non-citizen base a problem?”

“When we were in Italy, it was easy to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens, even citizens and slaves. That isn’t true now. I am not saying this to insult our Caledonian brothers,” Taenaris said with a note to the group of Senators, who started to shift at the hint of an insult. “But it is harder to distinguish who is and who is not a Britannic citizen. While you haven’t brought it before us yet, I know you have offered the Ulaid a choice to join the empire as an equal member, which would make it even harder. Much of the work we need done is in critical industries and these people are largely coming out of Carthaginian-held areas. We are opening ourselves up to saboteurs and spies, both of which could take from us the advantages that have allowed us to survive so far.”

“Do you want to keep them from coming here? Are you asking for the Praetorians to patrol the shores, rounding up refugees and putting them back on boats for the continent?” her father asked, speaking up for the first time since the subject changed.

She hadn’t meant to take over, but her father spent all of his time with Senators and government officials, and didn’t walk among the average people. Neither did the Senators, even the Caledonian ones, who were just as classist as their Roman counterparts. One of the benefits of spending so much time with Hortensius in the factories and among the legions was it let her see the lives of the workers they were discussing in a way that the men in the room didn’t.

“That would be a mistake,” she said, heated. “We need people to work in the fields, feeding all of our armies on the march. We need craftsmen and unskilled laborers working on the dozens of public projects, and in the factories and mills creating both military supplies and civilian goods for sale both here and abroad, to bring in the money to pay for this war. Across every part of the Empire, both in Caledonia and in Rome, the thing we needed the most was bodies, and this is the answer for that.”

“No. We aren’t blind to the needs of the empire. We just want to ensure that the people coming and working in these critical industries, or joining the legions, have a stake in the empire.”

Her father put his hand on her arm, stopping her reply, and said, “What are you proposing?”

“We aren’t going to kick any of these people out. We know as well as anyone what it’s like to live under the gaze of the Carthaginians and would never send anyone back to live that oppression. However, these refugees and transplants will put additional pressure on the Empire, which we are obligated to address. Under the power granted to the imperial senate over citizens as the empire as a whole and its goal to facilitate the movement of those citizens across the member states, we plan on passing a law placing a tax on all non-citizens. The same law will introduce a path to citizenship for them, either by a member of that family giving military or direct governmental service, through work in critical industry and with the backing of their employer, or by a fee paid to the government. Once they become citizens, they will no longer have to pay the tax and will have all the rights and privileges of any other Britannic citizen. We believe this is a good compromise, as it allows us the extra manpower and protects the empire.”

“What do the rest of the senators think of this?” Lucilla asked.

“We are all in agreement, my lady” Bredei said from the benches.

“That seems fair,” her father said. “Please have the law drawn up and we will review it at the next session.”

Lucilla was fuming, but sat quietly as her father and the senators finished up the rest of the days business. Finally, she and her father left, heading back towards the palace.

“Why did you give in to them?” she asked as soon as they were away from the senators. “Some of the people thinking about coming here will think twice when they know about this foreigner tax and what it will take to become a citizen. This is a mistake.”

“I don’t think it will chase off as many as you feel it might, but even if it does, we had little choice. This is what it means to be Emperor. The average person may think the emperor can do whatever he likes and answers to no one, but you can’t be that naïve. You’re going to be doing this one day, and you have to realize that things like the senate are the only way to make our empire work. Being emperor is as much about knowing how and when to compromise as deciding what is best for the empire. Today was a time for compromise.”

Lucilla didn’t answer right away. Her instinct was to disagree and argue with him, but she’d learned that, when her father gave these lectures, it was best to think on it rather than relying on her first instinct. She might decide in the end that she was right, but she didn’t want to make a mistake of ignoring advice out of hand. That had been one of the first lessons her father had taught her, and it had served her well.