The Trumpets of Mars (Imperium #2) - Chapter 16

Lucilla used the hours before the move to tour the surrendered village. To Roman eyes, all of the Caledonian villages seemed primitive and rudimentary, but Rhaeadr looked just as primitive to Talogren’s home village as that one did to Devnum.

Gone were the permanent wood buildings and large, well-constructed tents. Most of the homes were formed out of mud and dirt mixed in with tents supplementing branches and woven plants to patch the holes. The people were universally thin and had the sickly look of people who ate far too infrequently.

They still had the proud bearing of the other Caledonians she’d met, especially when confronted with their conquerors, but Lucilla could see the desperation in their eyes.

“Send one of your men back to the praetorians. Tell them I want a convoy of food and supplies brought up from Rome, with stops at the other conquered villages along the way. Have them also include medical supplies and warm clothing. My father will ensure everything is paid for,” she said to Modius as they left the villages.

“They will not accept charity,” Cynwrig said.

“That would be their choice. We aren’t doing it for one village. See if you can get some of your people to go with the supply convoys and talk some sense into these people. We aren’t doing this out of the goodness of our hearts or to buy their loyalty. Over the next several years, we are going to need more men to keep the Carthaginians at bay and implement the new technology Ky is introducing. That means we need these people alive and healthy. We need them able to supply the markets and the legion quartermasters with raw materials. And we need them to have children to ensure the future of the Empire we’re building. But to get all of that, we have to make sure they don’t all starve to death, first. This is a fair trade, labor for food and supplies.”

Cynwrig didn’t seem convinced, which probably meant most of the villagers wouldn’t be convinced either. Some would and if she could save some of these people, then maybe they would be available when the Empire needed them. She also wasn’t convinced that Cynwrig was right and these people’s pride would allow them and their children to starve if there was a way out. She’d found that the average person might talk a lot about pride, honor, and other nebulous ideas, what really mattered was their day-to-day life. If they saw their day-to-day life improving, then they’d do what they could to ensure that better way continued.

It’s what Silo and his kind missed. Sure, they were able to talk some people, a lot even, into following them because of some idea of what Rome once was, but they didn’t convince the majority of Romans, or even enough to make their insurrection work, because the average citizen had seen their city saved from an enemy they could see and had started seeing increased benefits from the changes Ky had been making. By the time of the uprising, there had been more jobs, both in the army and in the factories needed to turn out supplies for the armies, which meant their families would be able to continue eating.

Real civil strife comes when people feel their day-to-day lives are getting worse. She’d met enough northerners to know they weren’t that much different from the Romans. They might be stubborn now, with so many of their men dead on the field and new leaders hand-picked by Talogren in charge, but if she could ensure they all still ate, that more of their children survived, and that their fortunes improved, they’d put that stubbornness aside.

This was why leaders like Talogren, or most of the Germanic chieftains on the mainland, would never control more than a small collection of villages, at least on their own. They were warriors and saw the world through a warrior’s eyes. They believed the solution to all problems was just applying enough pressure to force the other side to relent. That might work in the short term, but it didn’t ensure the loyalty of the average people, who’d just as easily swing to the warlord or chieftain who applied more pressure. She understood, as her father had, that real loyalty came by making the average person’s life better, or at least not worse, than it had been before.

This wasn’t the only reason she was arranging supply shipments for the conquered villages, of course. She’d like to think she was trying to do the right thing, and she was, but she also had to pay attention to the realities and understand the cause and effect of her decision. It was something she’d learned at her father’s knee but hadn’t actively thought about it until a conversation she had with Ky.

He’d been debating on how to best go about dealing with Rome’s slave population, weighing the impact of freeing them on the citizens and how to achieve his goal with the least impact possible. He’d called the idea that a system of principles should be based on practical concerns instead of moral or ideological ones realpolitik. He’d said that way of viewing the world could go too far and that his people had had several leaders who’d done that, losing their sense of morality or ideology to their practicality. She’d seen it in her own people, how someone who only thought of the practical implications could be as bad as someone who only thought of the ideological ones, but the word had stuck with her. Since she’d stepped up to take a more active role in government as his voice in Rome, she’d been thinking about it more often. It could be stressful, trying to find the right balance between being practical and doing what was right, but she was actively trying to achieve it.

She didn’t second guess the supply shipments, however. There would probably be some clerk who only saw the cost of sending supplies to remote villages, but she knew that, in the long term, it would pay off, both ideologically and practically.

“On this,” she continued to Cynwrig. “Enough of these people will accept the supplies to make it worth the effort.”

“If you say so,” he said.

She knew it would take time, not just for him but all of her guards, to come to trust her judgment. They were all loyal and predisposed to like her because of their close service, but she’d found it always took longer for men to defer to her wisdom on subjects she was more experienced in than they were, simply because she was a woman.

She’d gotten used to her old guard, men like Ursinus, who’d served her long enough to develop that kind of relationship. All of those men, save Ursinus, were dead and he’d moved on to greater things, which mean she’d have to be patient and once again prove that she was worth listening to.

Londinium

Maharbaal passed the old forum while he waited, which was something he wasn’t accustomed to doing. He’d sent for the general thirty minutes ago, demanding an update, and still the man hadn’t arrived.

Other men would have found themselves in the hands of death cultists who stood silently waiting for their next offering. Unfortunately, Bomilcar wasn’t someone he could just order tortured and executed on a whim. Besides being a favorite in Carthage, he was a descendant of one of the generals who’d fought alongside Hannibal, and his family remained in high standing.

On the one hand, it showed how seriously the emperor was taking the threat of the Romans. He was a younger member of the family, but he’d already earned some accolades in the east and was a rising star in the emperor’s service. Maharbaal was glad the emperor’s court had finally listened to him and stopped giving him fools like Zaracas, who’d lost his army to a force a fifth its size.

Of course, it also meant he couldn’t treat this man the way he would others placed in his service. The governor had grown used to his position and enjoyed the autonomy that he had so far from Africa, but even out here, he had to take into account the political realities. All of which meant he couldn’t have this man beaten for making him wait. Worse, he couldn’t even berate the man when he inevitably gave excuses.

Maharbaal’s annoyance had turned to anger by the time the general finally showed, his boots leaving muddy tracks and dirt caked to the armor protecting his shins.

“You sent for me, exalted governor?” the general said, giving a slight bow of the head instead of the normal genuflecting Maharbaal received from his inferiors.

His mouth tightened at the lack of excuses or begging for forgiveness. Maharbaal had to remind himself, again, that this man was not a politician or a lackey, but an experienced commander, and the one who the governor would have to rely on to carry out his vengeance.

“Yes. I want an update on your progress and why you still haven’t marched on the Romans.”

“We are still not ready. Most of the veteran units on the island were killed or surrendered at the battle of Devnum and the replacements available to us are substandard, mostly Germanic tribesman who can barely all march in one direction and are all but useless in a phalanx. We’ve been training with them and doing field maneuvers for weeks, but the progress has been slow.”

“What does it matter? You outnumber the Romans ten to one. Just send in the men and crush them.”

“My lord, have you ever seen the Romans fight? Or spoken to the men who did return from the battle?”

“Cowards and traitors you mean. They would have given any excuse to explain why they ran away.”

“You shouldn’t discount what those men have to say. While very few commanders have faced the Romans in a hundred years, the records of our encounters with them are clear in their tactics and fighting style and it matches everything the survivors reported after the battle. They may be a smaller force now, but every indication says they are still as disciplined a military force as ever, and not one to be taken lightly. Rushing undisciplined warriors at a coordinated front line like we will certainly face will just create a wall of bodies the men behind them have to crawl over to get at the Romans. I do not want to repeat past mistakes.”

Maharbaal held his tongue, but only by the thinnest of margins. He knew that people at court were placing the blame for Zaracas’s loss at his feet and saw his request for more men as an admission of his failure. Of course, he knew that was what was going to happen before he ever sent the request, which is why he tried to find any other way to solve the problem without the request. Unfortunately, the only answer any of his subordinates had been able to give him was ‘we need more men.’

Bomilcar’s not too subtle dig was just another reminder of how precarious his current position was, which made it an effective tool every time the general’s slow progress was questioned. He might be a fool, but Bomilcar knew how to play the game, and Maharbaal knew his hand was too weak to do anything about it, yet.

Once they were victorious, however, the governor’s fortunes would change and he’d ensure this man paid for his insolence.

“I, of course, leave the exact planning and details of the campaign to your expertise. I just wanted to remind you, again, how important it is that we move with all possible haste. When do you think you will be able to march?”

Although he used the language of diplomacy, every word was delivered through clenched teeth.

“I’d prefer to wait until the snows have melted, since foraging for supplies is going to be extremely difficult,” he said. After a momentary pause, he continued quickly, seeing the governor’s look of extreme annoyance at another topic they’d battled over multiple times before. “I know we don’t have time for the delay and I am not asking to wait until conditions improve. Since I can’t wait and I understand the urgency, I will begin my march as soon as the last troops arrive on the shore. I will continue to train them, especially the new arrivals, as we march, which will slow down our advance, but not as much as staying and training in camp would.”

“A timetable, general. Stop dancing around the question and give me something resembling an exact timeframe until we can finally crush the Romans.”

“Two to three weeks until we march. I know that isn’t precise, but we are beholden to the shipmasters and the whims of the ocean to determine how long that will take. Another few days for final provisions and assembling the new men, and a week and a half march. Say a month to a month and a half at the outside.”

“And there is no way to do this sooner?”

“No. Even if I wanted to march without the last shiploads of men, I’d still have to wait. Along with those shipments of men are gifts from the emperor of supplies to feed the men and animals, which we need, since we have to assume there will be nothing to forage. It doesn’t matter how many men I get together if they’re all starving and weak by the time we reach the Romans.”

“Fine. A month and a half at the maximum. Not a day more, general. I expect to hear about the success of your battle by then. Do we understand each other?”

“Of course, Excellency,” the general said, bowing.

Maharbaal watched him go, without even being granted official leave. His rage threatened to boil over, but even here, in the throne room with just his servants and guards, he had to control himself. He knew the emperor had eyes everywhere, and he couldn’t be seen losing control.

Northern Highlands

Lucilla was exhausted riding just behind the cart carrying Ky’s inert body. She’d been offered a more prestigious position, from the Caledonian point of view, at least, near the head of the column with Talogren, but she’d refused, saying she preferred instead to ride as close to Ky as she could.

While she really did want to stay near him, that had only been part of the truth. She had a lot of work remaining to try and ensure Ky’s goal of binding the Caledonians and Romans together as tightly as possible, and she preferred not to do it directly under Talogren’s nose. Of course, she knew that those Caledonians riding with her were sending reports back to Talogren, even the men who’d agreed to be her guards. However, reports and seeing her attempts to manipulate the north men were not the same thing.

So she remained on horseback since they’d been traveling, sending and receiving messengers, trying to ensure the aid shipments had begun at least leaving on their journey north, and requesting her father send agents north to monitor the early days of the alliance and catch problem spots before they happened.

Despite her knowing some of the north men serving her were reporting on her movements, she also began using her Caledonian men to try and build a network of north men to monitor the Caledonian side of the alliance, since the more she knew about what was going on, the better prepared she, and Ky when he finally woke up, would be.

Thankfully, Carus, one of Ky’s guards and the man in charge of his intelligence work, had already been on the job since they’d come north and already had information sources that he’d been happy to share with Lucilla, although he asked for access to any Caledonians she managed to recruit, since at the moment everyone he had access to was Roman.

Although there had been a lot of opposition when the alliance was first announced, especially among the wealthier sections of Roman society, it hadn’t taken long for those same men to start finding ways to exploit it for a profit. Carus said he hadn’t had a chance to do more than mention the developments along the border to Ky before he collapsed, since the Consul had been more preoccupied with ensuring the north was pacified and had put everything else as secondary until that happened.

Their attempts to track any notable movement by Romans coming north, now that the borders were open, had started showing results, but unfortunately, not in a way Lucilla liked.

This was made starkly clear with a set of merchants who’d crossed into the north the day Ky signed the agreement. They’d headed to a mountain range just north of the Talogren’s home village to set up mining operations. On the face of it, that was a good thing and exactly the kind of activity Ky and the Emperor had been hoping for.

One of the bottleneck areas of Roman production had been their limited mining capability, since the section of Britannia they had been limited to had only minimal areas of significant, easily reachable ore deposits. Ky had mentioned additional technologies making it possible to get a lot more ore out of the existing mines with little, or in some cases, less, manpower investment. He’d introduced the beginnings of those, but had yet to show them everything, saying they needed additional technological improvements that required more foundational knowledge, which was his go-to reasoning most of the times she’d asked why something he’d mentioned couldn’t be done right away.

One of the benefits to the alliance was the nearly untouched, rich ore deposits that required little initial mining to access. The Picts did some, of course, but they’d never been able to really export any of the resources they’d had access to.

Mostly, that was because the people who now made up the Caledonians didn’t actually control that area until a hundred and fifty or so years ago when Rome had finally pushed all of the people out of the bottom two-thirds of the island. Those groups that did manage to move north and set up settlements then fought amongst themselves as much as they did with the Romans for the next hundred and forty years, until Talogren came to power and finally started to convince the people living in the north that they might benefit from working together instead of each trying to gain some kind of supremacy.

The constant state of warfare for almost a century meant that, until recently, all of the tribes existed as either nomads or subsistence farmers with all of their available manpower not used for food production going towards fighting the other tribes for what little territory they could eke out. That left little for building up any kind of infrastructure for mining the ore deposits themselves.

All of that meant that, while there were a lot of industries that could benefit from Roman - Caledonian cooperation, mining was the most logical first choice for any of the entrepreneurial minds that had started to look north, towards the new opportunities opened up by the alliance.

Unfortunately, as with most new things, the sudden change brought not only entrepreneurs, but also grifters, charlatans, and those ready to take advantage of the situation. Equally as unfortunate was, because of the sudden outlawing of slavery in Rome itself, there were men with the will and available capital to take advantage of the alliance, but also at loose ends, since the new Roman laws meant their method of getting the most return out of the investments had suddenly become unavailable.

They had barely left Rhaeadr when word reached them of one of the first groups of Roman entrepreneurs to cross the border and set up mining operations, and the word wasn’t good. They’d essentially taken over a small village near the base of the mountain and all but enslaved the population to work in the mines, digging out ore that could then be sent by caravan south, to Roman forges.

“How is that even possible?” Lucilla asked when Llassar told her the news. “Even with the Devnum city guard disbanding, there aren’t enough trained and armed men for hire to do something like that, especially since a lot of what is available, like street toughs, aren’t going to agree to go to such a remote region. And you’re people aren’t exactly the type to roll over the moment a few men with swords show up.”

“The details are still sketchy, but it seems like they first arrived as friends, promising wealth and riches if these people worked for them excavating the mines. These are fairly poor villages and the men there have been doing similar, although less extensive, work for years, so it probably made sense to them at the time. What they didn’t have were the tools you Romans used to get to the richer, but harder to reach, veins of ore. Apparently, the businessmen had a solution for that. They would agree to give these people the tools and take it out of the money they earned digging out the ore until the cost of those tools was paid back.”

“Although I can think of better ways to handle the situation, that kind of thing happens a lot in Rome as well. I wouldn’t necessarily call it fair, but I thought these men were taking advantage of the locals?” Lucilla asked.

“I’m getting to that part. They first brought out agreements for the locals to sign, but we don’t really do that kind of thing, which is why the agreement Talogren signed with our new Emperor has made unifying the north harder, since it’s such an alien way to go about this kind of thing, at least to us. Since the locals seemed unsure of what it meant and couldn’t read the Romans’ agreement for themselves, the Romans offered another solution that was more familiar to my people. The way villages often secure deals with each other is to exchange family members until the deal is concluded.”

“Hostages?” Lucilla asked.

“Essentially. The Romans altered this, arguing that they were giving the villagers something and would only get paid in return when the work was done, so the villagers should be the ones sending hostages, which the Romans would care for and return when the equipment was paid off. They also suggested that, because the men were all needed to mine the ore which would be paying off the debt and the women were needed to produce enough food to maintain the men, the only likely candidates were the village's children. Again, this isn’t out of the norm in our culture, so the villagers agreed.”

“I’m guessing this is the point where everything went off ‘cultural norms’?”

“Yes. At first, everything seemed fine. The Romans delivered the equipment and showed the men how to use it. The problem came when the Romans started demanding the locals work longer and longer each day, increasing the quotas of ore the villagers originally agreed to. When the men complained, the Romans said the deal had changed. They had their children and could only guarantee their safety so long as the people of the village agreed. When the men suggested they had other ways of dealing with the betrayal, the Romans managing the operation said that, if anything happened to them, they’d never see their children again.”

“So someone came to Talogren for help.”

“Not directly, probably because they feared for their children’s lives, but remote as this village is, it does get the occasional trader, so word leaked out.”

“Where do things stand now?”

“From our latest reports, the people are slaves in all but name only. Technically, the men are still working to pay off the equipment, but the Romans have changed more than just the quota part of the deal. Anything, including ‘overseeing’ both the mineworkers and their families, who are now required to supply food to the Romans as well as the locals, has an additional payment connected to it. Instead of paying off just the equipment, each day they grow more and more in debt to the Romans.”

“And everyone’s hands are tied, since any move would end up hurting the children? Does Talogren want us to deal with them and get the children back?”

“No. He said I could tell you what was happening, but that he’d deal with it personally.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means he is going to make an example of them. Although he knew that Ky and your father were operating in good faith, he also knows your Romans, and expected this sort of thing. It is why he insisted that Caledonian lands were governed by Caledonian laws, which have high penalties for parties breaking their word like this. Had they stuck by the agreement, even if it had been disadvantageous to our people, he would have let it stay, since everything else was done according to our traditions. Wars have begun over changing the terms of an agreement after hostages have been given, and the penalty for breaking an agreement like this is death. He plans to show any future Romans just what, exactly, happens to your people who come north with plans of cheating Caledonians.”

“What about the children.”

“He is, of course, saddened that they will be victims in a situation they did not have a hand in making, but their parents will understand. Their sacrifice will secure the safety of all of us.”

“I need to talk to Talogren.”

“You won’t talk him out of this.”

“I have to try.”