The Sands of Saturn - Chapter 2

Londinium

“… Then what good are you?” Maharbaal yelled, inches from Caesius’s face.

“You wanted to know what my father and his lackey were up to, and I got you that information. I even told you about their new weapons, not that you did anything with that information. I told you exactly how many men they had under arms and when they left Devnum to meet your forces. My spies told you everything you wanted. It was up to you to put an end to their forces and put me on my rightful throne. It was also you who screwed that up, losing an army five times the size of the Roman forces in an afternoon.”

“I will have you gutted,” Maharbaal fumed, spittle flying from his lips.

“How long do you think you’d last after I’m dead? I know you like to think you’re some all-powerful ruler here on your island, but we both know who you answer to and we both know how little patience your Emperor has for men who can’t do their duties. Now that you’ve all but given this island to this new empire of my fathers, I’m even more important to your Emperor than you are. I still have sources inside their territory able to pass along intelligence and maybe even designs or samples of these new weapons. All you have is a few thousand men, cowering behind your walls, slowly starving to death.”

“No one’s starving. Food shipments from Hibernia and Iberia continue.”

“And yet your men still hide.”

Maharbaal’s fists tightened and, for a moment, Caesius thought he might have goaded the fool into actually doing it. The moment passed and Maharbaal’s fists unclenched. For as arrogant and out of touch as the governor was, he wasn’t completely brain dead. He’d survived the cutthroat world of the Carthaginian court and managed to get appointed as a governor of one of the empire’s administrative districts. One of the fringes of the empire, but their centuries-long battle against his own people made it a not insignificant one.

Caesius knew Maharbaal knew he was right about how the Emperor would react to his having Caesius killed. They preferred to place someone controllable but native over any population they pacified, and having the next man to wear the purple was as big of an agent as they could hope for. They would know Caesius being placed over his people would help keep the region under control, allowing them to redirect resources and manpower to other parts of their domain.

Plus, Maharbaal also had bigger things to worry about than one exiled prince. The city was dangerously low on soldiers and arms, and the shipments from Hibernia were not enough to offset the shortage. Caesius had read part of a message to Maharbaal when the fool hadn’t been paying attention, and knew that a relief mission was being assembled in Africa, but that it would take some months to get enough manpower to retake the lost land.

Maharbaal was already in a precarious position. He’d done well to blame the loss on his general and appeared to have gotten the Emperor to believe him, but it was unlikely the governor could deflect another failure. And the Carthaginians had a well-known solution for dealing with failures that Maharbaal certainly didn’t want to face.

“You,” Maharbaal said, turning away from Caesius to one of his nearby aides. “Put guards on the storehouses, and keep any of the food shipments that come in under guard. Confiscate all of the food you can from vendors and sell no food to vendors any longer. Begin distributing rations to people directly from the warehouses. Limit civilians to one-quarter the standard soldiers’ rations. The soldiers themselves can maintain the standard rations. Go.”

“It will take months for the supply convoy. You’re not going to get enough food in to keep soldiers at full rations while still feeding the populace,” Caesius pointed out.

“I realize that. We still have work projects reinforcing the wall and repairing damage from the Roman’s weapons and if we cut them off they won’t have the strength to do what’s needed. Once we make a list of essential workers, we’ll cut off everyone not on that list, and keep them at minimal rations to survive.”

“If they do anything to cut your shipments, by even a little bit, or your people slow down for whatever reason, you’re going to have to still cut rations to your soldiers. When my sister and her fool come, and they are going to come, your men are going to be too weak to repel them.”

Maharbaal’s frown deepened. Caesius knew he hated him, but he was also in desperate need of good advice, and he had to know Caesius was right.

“Stop,” Maharbaal yelled out, after the retreating form of the aide. When the main returned to them, he said, “No rations to the civilians, unless they can show they are working on, or they have been assigned to one of the work projects.”

The aide hesitated for a moment, and then dashed off again.

“Now do your part. You have people out there. Raid the ‘Britannians.’ Kill their commanders. Do something to show your worth. Or you can be added along with the names of people not being fed,” Maharbaal said, before turning and storming off.

Caesius watched him leave, contemplating. He was in a precarious position. He’d lost most of his informants, who’d been caught by Ramirus and his damn security forces. If he set those he had left on direct missions to counter his father’s soldiers, he would lose most of them, and his remaining usefulness to the Carthaginians. He liked to think they’d keep him around to put into power when they retook the island, but he also knew they only wanted people completely loyal to them. Something no one would believe of him, no matter what he said.

He needed to be seen helping the situation here, but he also still needed enough leverage. This city was going to fall, of that he was certain. He needed to be seen doing just enough to deflect claims that he’d stood aside during the defense of the city.

He also needed to start working on a plan to get out before the city actually fell.

Britannic Camp, Outside Londinium

“ … and four-thousand, three hundred and twelve critically wounded, which includes everything from non-mobile prisoners to those who will most certainly die in the next several weeks,” Ursinus concluded.

After their defeat of the Carthaginian army Ky had pushed his commanders hard to cut off isolated detachments or fleeing survivors, keen to keep as many soldiers as possible from reaching Londinium and adding to their current manpower. They’d left a legion to guard the huge number of prisoners, but other than instructing Ursinus to treat the prisoners humanely, he hadn’t given much thought to their disposition.

Now that the cleanup of southern Britain was complete and they’d locked the Carthaginians behind the walls of the city, it was time to deal with the mess they’d left in their wake. Lucilla had begun getting aid and supplies to the Roman population abused for so long by the Carthaginians well in hand, but that left the huge numbers of prisoners they’d taken after the battle.

While the death toll had been catastrophic, Ky had managed to stop the battle as larger and larger groups began surrendering, keeping it from turning into an all-out slaughter. That had left him the problem of what to do with the nearly twenty-five thousand prisoners currently under guard, only a little shy of the entire force Ky had taken into the battle. Feeding his army had been a problem. Feeding them and the nearly thirty-thousand prisoners, counting the ones still being held from their previous battle, was going to be nearly impossible.

They had nearly doubled their territory with the capture of the land previously controlled by the Carthaginians, but planting season hadn’t started yet and the Carthaginians had stripped the land bare to feed their army already. It would be months before they started producing enough food in these new regions to help offset the deficiency.

“You know my feelings on this,” Ky said, looking at Ramirus’s four senators standing at one edge of the large table holding maps of the newly conquered region.

“We aren’t recommending labor gangs,” Ramirus said, reiterating the statement he’d made at the beginning of the meeting before asking Ursinus to list the current prisoner counts. “We understand that is forbidden under the anti-slavery laws that our new Imperial senate adopted, and we understand that you are against using prisoners in that way. We however wanted to make the scope of our problem clear before we started addressing our suggestions.”

“Fine. I understand the scope of the problem and I will try and restrain myself until I hear all of your recommendations.”

“The number of prisoners and our current food supplies aren’t the only problems we face. Over the last hundred years, the Carthaginians have conscripted or eliminated many of the villagers who lived and worked all of the re-conquered lands. The Carthaginians who later moved in and took over the land all fled with their soldiers behind the walls. While we now have all this land to grow food for our people, much of it is empty, with no one to plant the food when the snows melt.”

“Since Senator Opilio is here, I suspect you have recommendations on what to do about that,” Ky said.

Opilio was the leader of what Ky had thought of as the farming block of senators. There were a handful of senators who represented mostly the farming interests, although that usually meant the large landowners, not the small yeoman farmers that made up nearly half the food produced in the empire.

“I do have a suggestion, actually. Since much of that land was taken from our people who fled north when the Carthaginians pushed us back into the middle of the country, I think we should first allow their descendants to claim their re-conquered land. The remaining land, we can auction off, allowing new opportunities to citizens willing to pay for it and revenue for the Imperial treasure, which has been sorely taxed of late by all of the new projects being introduced.”

“For people reclaiming land, what if the people currently on that land didn’t run? What if the descendants of former Romans, who didn’t or couldn’t escape north when the Carthaginians invaded, stayed? What if they were moved to new lands to work by the Carthaginians? A hundred years is a long time, and there will have been migrations. Children of those families might have moved to abandoned land and claimed it. We can’t start alienating people we are bringing back into the empire right after freeing them.”

“I’ve discussed this with the Emperor before coming down here, and he had similar concerns. This 'reclaiming' would only apply to currently unoccupied land. He made the point that we should make the same policy for land currently occupied by Carthaginians who chose to not flee to Londinium as we reclaimed the land.”

“I agree with him. We can’t very well call ourselves liberators if we are just doing the same thing the Carthaginians did when they invaded. By my math, however, that will still not solve our problem. Without the slave labor that the Carthaginians used, we would either have to sell the land in very small parcels, or find the manpower to work that land.”

Ky began to object again, before Ramirus raised his hand and said, “Consul, we are not suggesting we conscript the prisoners to do the work. Or at least, we are not suggesting we conscript them to do the work against their will.”

“That sounds like a very fine line you are preparing to walk.”

“We can’t have men just languishing in prison camps every day. Idle men become mischief. Especially soldiers,” Velius said. “Better to keep them occupied.”

“But only the ones that volunteer,” Ramirus said. “This won’t be slave labor. We’ll offer more and better rations, which will matter, as we’re going to have to start putting them on shorter rations now, if we don’t want to have a major food crisis before the harvest. I know you said we needed to treat them humanely, and we are, but it’s either ration them, or our own soldiers. There are just too many mouths to feed and insufficient food to do it with. We can also offer other amenities, like cots, beds, things like that.”

“We aren’t giving them those things now?” Ky asked

“We don’t have enough,” Ramirus replied. “We were barely able to cover our first batch of prisoners, and this group exceeds the size of that group several times over. We could give maybe ten percent of the camp those items, but that would create issues for every prisoner, while giving comfort to very few. We’ve also discussed the possibility of early release back to the mainland for those who put in a set amount of work. It means we’ll have to fight many of them again, but I doubt we’ll ever reach the bottom of that pool. That’s only if the goods and food aren’t enough to get men to volunteer.”

“How will you control that many men?”

“We’re working on that as well. Patrols of Praetorians, cycling men through farms in batches so we can watch them closer, requiring the families to hire guards or the like to keep them under control. We haven’t figured out the details on it, but we will.”

“Fine, see to it then. But make sure they understand they aren’t required to do this. Volunteers only.”

“There’s something else,” Velius said. “The Carthaginian general survived the battle. We found him this morning when surveying the prisoners. He was so badly injured none of his men could identify him. He only regained consciousness today.”

“I see,” Ky said.

“I had him moved out of the prison camp and to the command area of my legion encampment, for now. Under guard, of course. I thought you might want to talk to him, and I don’t relish the idea of you walking into the prison camp, no matter how many guards you take.”

“I would have been fine, but that was good thinking all the same. I think I will talk to him. You all carry on. You know what I expect and it sounds like you’re doing your best to stay within the lines. Keep me apprised of what you decide.”

“Yes, Consul,” Ursinus said, slapping fist to chest in salute.

As the senior legate, the meeting had taken place in Velius’s camp, making Ky’s journey to the place where the Carthaginian commander had been moved short. Besides the specialty tents like the one used as a mess hall or the medical tent, there were really only two-sized tents currently used in the legions, small two-man tents used by the average soldier and much the much larger tents used by Tribunes and Legates, who needed the room to hold meetings with their subordinates. The Carthaginian commander had been moved into one of these larger tents, which probably meant a tribune was somewhere unhappily sleeping in a two-man tent.

It was easy to tell which tent the general was in, considering the dozen men spread around the outside, guarding it. Considering he had been unconscious since the day before and had been discovered with other severely injured Carthaginians, Ky assumed the guards were more to keep angry Britannians from getting revenge rather than fears that the general himself would escape.

Ky could feel the displeasure from Silo, the man currently leading his protective detail, when he ordered them to wait outside. While it was unlikely in the extreme that this injured man had somehow smuggled a weapon in with him, keeping it hidden on the off chance he was visited by the Britannians leader, he understood their concern. The general wasn’t asleep, but neither did he stir when Ky entered, continuing to stare at the ceiling of the tent, motionless.

“Hello, General,” Ky said, stopping just inside the doorway.

“I will not answer any of your questions,” the man said, continuing to look at the top of the tent, his expression focused and determined.

Sometimes, when dealing with his own people or watching his orders happen from afar, it was easy to forget how brutal and merciless this time period could be. While his own people, the ones back in the time he’d come from, could be equally heartless, the standards for how that manifested was much different.

Their people had known for centuries how ineffective physical torture was for obtaining information. While it could usually get a man to talk, the information supplied would often be at best worthless and at worst completely false or misleading. People under torture would say whatever they could to get the pain to stop, often choosing to say what the torturer wanted to hear instead of the truth. Interrogators usually came in with their own notions of what the truth was and found it difficult to distinguish between what was true but counter to those beliefs and what matched their own pre-conceived notions but wasn’t true. With torture, that would make the pain continue until they heard what they felt was right, regardless of its truth.

His people had abandoned physical persuasion for mind probes and psychology, both of which tended to give more accurate information. Of course, mind probes and psychological theory were both thousands of years away from the people of this time.

He knew his men hadn’t questioned the general yet, so the man’s response was probably more the anticipation of the expected torture, rather than fear that it would continue.

“I am not here to ask you questions, General. Or, I guess I am, but not in the way you think. I mostly wanted to just see you and ensure you had everything you needed.”

“Before you send in your torture masters!” the general said, a statement of anger more than a question.

“We have no torture masters,” Ky said, pulling a chair that had been placed at one side of the tent next to the cot the general was lying on. “Do I hope to glean some information from you that might help us? Sure. But that is a side benefit. We know that you were brought here specifically to lead the army sent to destroy us, an army which no longer exists, its soldiers dead or in camps, and all of your remaining countrymen on the island are locked behind the walls of Londinium. I’m not sure what you could tell us about the situation behind those walls that we don’t already know.”

“You’re the Roman commander?”

“We’re Britannians now,” Ky pointed out.

“I’d heard that. I commend you on your victory. I’d already heard of what happened to Zaracas when you faced him outside Devnum, but I wrote his loss off as incompetence. Now it seems I am either equally incompetent or I owe his memory an apology.”

“Zaracas wasn’t incompetent. A little foolhardy, having his men charge recklessly forward without holding back a reserve, but like you, he couldn’t have known of the advantages we had over you.”

“I don’t suppose you’d tell me what those advantages are?”

“Sorry. No.”

“Still, you suckered us in beautifully. I knew you were up to something when your men retreated, but I didn’t recognize the full extent of the trap until you sprang it on us. I only wished I could have done something to save my men from your slaughter.”

“There wasn’t a slaughter. Once your commanders realized how badly the situation was going, they began surrendering. We put the surrendered men under guard, and they are currently in a prison camp while we determine what to do with them.”

“So they aren’t slaughtered yet.”

“We are not Carthaginians,” Ky said pointedly. “We do not kill our prisoners, mistreat them, or sell the camp followers into slavery. The non-soldiers we rounded up have been released to join your remaining countrymen behind the walls of Londinium. Those that chose not to have the option of being, eventually, returned to the mainland or becoming Britannian citizens, once they have completed enough service to the Empire to prove their fidelity.”

“Clever,” The general said. “Under the guise of mercy, you put more mouths for the Governor to feed, starving his soldiers sooner rather than later. What about my soldiers?”

“The soldiers, unfortunately, cannot be released while we are still at war with your people. To do so would simply mean facing the same people in battle again. You might have an unlimited supply of manpower, but you don’t have an unlimited supply of seasoned commanders and men who know what to expect when fighting us. Better we keep those men under guard and unavailable to you. Don’t worry. We won’t be selling any of them into slavery or starving them to death. My commanders have strict orders to ensure the prisoners’ safety until the fighting has ended and we can return them.”

Bomilcar finally looked at Ky, “Then your people are unlike any I’ve ever faced.”

“I don’t know if that’s true. We’ve talked to the people living in the areas your army passed through and some of your men have answered minor questions put to them, not under duress, I assure you. From the reports I’ve seen, I understand you had standing orders to limit looting and harsh punishments for any men who abused citizens or camp followers. That is very different from the other Carthaginian commanders I’ve faced. The first thing you asked about was your men’s safety, another uncommon attitude from other Carthaginian commanders we’ve dealt with. I think you might be more like us than you are the people you were fighting for.”

“You’re people haven’t always been like this. From our reports, you lot were just as brutal. Maybe that’s why you’re alliance with the northern barbarians came as such a surprise to us, considering how brutally you treated them before.”

“True, but that’s why it’s important to be willing to change. If more of your people were like you, would we even be in this war?”

“It doesn’t matter. We are at war. You are trying to kill my people and I am trying to kill yours. I won’t help you in your pursuit, no matter how much you flatter my honor.”

“Of course,” Ky said, starting to turn for the door before stopping and looking back. “If you need anything, just call for the guards. They’ll do their best to get you anything you need.”

“Thank you,” Bomilcar said, returning his gaze to the ceiling.