Emperor by Stephen Baxter Page B

field. It will be glorious–and we will push the Romans back into the Ocean!’
    That won him a few cheers, but Agrippina saw that the support was only half-hearted.
    Nectovelin remained standing. Despite his obvious anger at the priest’s insult he spoke carefully. ‘But that, prince, is the mistake Cassivellaunus made in the end. When he fought limited skirmishes on grounds of his choosing, he won. When he met Caesar in a pitched battle in the field, he lost. Look around you, man! You have only a few warriors. It will be farmers who would take the field. And this will not be a war against the Trinovantes or the Atrebates, who are like you. Now you will face Roman legionaries, who are trained from boyhood for one thing only, and that is for battle. Even if you were to win a victory or two, what then? Your farmers will come home for the harvest, or to plant the winter wheat. The legionaries have no harvest to gather. They will come on and on, until they crush you.
    ‘You know me, Caratacus. I have fought at your side. I would never flinch from a fight. But I’m urging you to pick a fight you can win.’
    But Caratacus would have none of it. He yelled, ‘I say the priest is right, you think like a Brigantian cattle thief!’
    Nectovelin rested his hand lightly on the hilt of a dagger. The tension in the house was extraordinary.
    Agrippina could bear it no more. She pushed her way out of the house into the dusty air of Camulodunum. She could see the logic of Nectovelin’s argument, that patient resistance was the way to wear down the Romans. But she was not the person she had been a few days before. Her deep, angry core responded to Caratacus’s bold cries of total war; she longed to see Roman blood spilled.

IX
    Narcissus came to a ridge of high ground. He broke away from his companions and urged his horse to climb the rise. From here, he looked back at the column.
    He would not have admitted it to any of the officers, not even to his ally Vespasian. But the fact was that a Roman army on the march was a stunning sight. The legionaries flowed past, an endless river, their metal armour shining under the watery British sun, the standard bearers identifying each unit. The army was noisy too. The sound of thousands of feet was a low thunder that shook the very landscape, overlaid with the amphitheatre-like murmur of a crowd of male voices, and the clatter of metal on metal, and the brittle peals of signal horns.
    The men were heavily laden. As well as his weapons and armour each man carried a complicated kit containing a saw, a basket, a pickaxe, a water bottle, a sickle, a chain, a turf-cutter, a dish and pan, and enough rations for three days. Narcissus had heard the men grumble about this load; they called themselves ‘Marius’s mules’, after Gaius Marius, the great general who had helped define the Roman way of waging war. But this meant that each unit was ready at a command to fight–or to dig out a fort or build a bridge–and the army as a whole was unburdened by a long baggage train.
    Away from the main column of the legionaries the auxiliaries walked or rode. The specialist foot soldiers marched like the legionaries, the slingers and javelin-throwers and spearmen, the archers with their chain mail and bows, while cavalry units rode out to the flanks, providing cover for the infantry. Most of the auxiliaries were recruited from the provinces or even the barbarian lands beyond, and in the drab British landscape they made splashes of colour with their exotic helmets and cloaks and tunics. Indeed, many of the legionaries were provincials now too, a major change since Caesar’s day, and when the cohorts came close enough Narcissus could hear the jabber of alien tongues. This Roman army was a vast mixing-up of races drawn from Gaul to Asia, from Germany to Africa, and yet they all worked in harmony under the command of a good Roman.
    And the marching men threw up dust that caught the sun, so that a band of light