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Chapter One
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From the journals of Marcus Rutilius Robura … in which Marcus sets foot on home territory
    

The ballista missiles were now whistling over our heads – actually, screaming is the word I’m looking for – like demented banshees. I knew from long experience that as long as I could hear them I was safe or, at least as safe as you can be standing up to your waist in churning seawater during a contested landing from beached ships – it’s the one you don’t hear that gets you in the end. That didn’t stop me jumping when that first round landed but my reaction was nothing compared with the panic that bursting clay shell, pre-heated by the trireme gunners, caused amongst those shrieking woad-painted devils who were doing their damnedest to drive us back into the sea. I almost felt sorry for them – almost but not quite.
     It exploded, as far as I could tell right, in the middle of a group of mounted warriors, who moments beforehand had been taking a breather between bouts of slaughter. When the smoke and dust cleared the carnage was unbelievable – or it was for the barbarian rabble that was giving us lessons in how to wipe out a Roman landing party. If Jupiter himself had suddenly appeared on the beach in all his glory, I don’t think they could have been more terror-stricken. Nothing in their lives had prepared them for such devilish weaponry. They had no time to assimilate what was happening to them. The Onager and Scorpion catapults were one by one coming into action as the support ships, detailed off by Caesar to move out to our right flank, beached themselves, and began to fire across our front to enable us to get ashore. They were now beginning to find their range.
     The roar that went up from the landing ships was one of triumph born of intense relief. The men, who moments beforehand had been struggling desperately to keep their feet in the undertow as they stabbed with their Spanish blades and parried the slashing longswords of the mounted Britons with their cumbersome shields, now began to realise that there was a future after all. The enemy were twisting and turning in all directions, trying to control their panic-stricken horses. Panic won hands down. Those that managed to stay on their sturdy little beasts wheeled and fled and who knows where they stopped. Those that fell to the storm of artillery that was now making the beach above the high-water mark untenable or to the hail of hand-launched missiles from the ships behind us as they tried to regain dry land, as well as those who were unceremoniously dumped in the briny by their spirited four-legged friends, were never going to fight again. Their despatch to join their ancestors was quick but not clean.
     It was all over bar the shouting within minutes of that first round from Decimus Brutus’s command ship. But for Caesar’s quick thinking in re-deploying the support ships, none of us would have survived that landing, despite our intensive training on the beaches of Gaul all the previous week. Within a few minutes the standards were planted and men were rallying to their proper cohorts; the legions were fast forming up into a continuous battle line along the shelving sands and there wasn’t an Ancient Brit in sight.
     The men of the Tenth Legion were as usual the first to march forward into the dunes that bordered the landing site as an organised body of men. Their Standard Bearer had been the first man to launch himself over the side of the wallowing troopships, wielding his staff as both a weapon and a balancing aid, staunchly refusing to be daunted by the stone-hurling hordes that were waiting to welcome him and those brave enough to join him in the none too warm waters of the Channel. I seem to recall some guff written by Caesar about the inspiring words he shouted to rally the men in the heat of the moment – something like: “Come on, lads, jump for it unless you want the enemy to get our Eagle. I’m going to do my bit for the Republic and the Commander!” Well, it probably went down a storm in the forum when it was read out to the crowds waiting for the latest news from the front but I don’t quite recall it that way. It was more like: “Get your arses over the side, you cringing bunch of poofs! Last man ashore will die on the end of my sword if you don’t get an ‘effin’ move on!”
     Our losses were surprisingly small, considering the mayhem caused by those howling hordes that had been waiting for us to come ashore. Some of our earlier casualties were drowned but that was before Caesar ordered the launching of the ships dinghies to lend a hand in getting those men ashore who had jumped into water deeper than they had been expecting. All legionaries were supposed to be able to swim – after a fashion – but it is not so easy in a plate-mail leather jerkin with a heavy shield strapped to your left arm and a sword or spear in your right hand, especially if some importunate fool is trying to clobber you at the same time with a sharp length of gleaming iron – oh yes, these guys had traded in their bronze weapons – and his horse is making waves that are threatening to submerge you anyway.
     They had tried fire arrows on our sails but we had been ready for that and they gave up after the first few volleys. Their hail of flinty rocks once we came in range of their bowling arms caused some nasty wounds but nothing that a few days light duties wouldn’t cure – except for the odd unlucky fellow who had tried to impress by catching one in his teeth or staring one down. No… in a way we were lucky that we hadn’t made it out of the shallows before the artillery got their barrage under way. If we had, we might have really taken a pasting from the phalanx of warrior infantry that was just waiting for their mounted warriors – I wouldn’t dignify them with the term ‘cavalry’ – to get out of the way and let them get a piece of the action. By that time most of our men who had managed to get anywhere near the beach had been forced to discard their shields in order to stay on their feet. They were relying on staying close to the enemy to stay out of harm’s way of the missiles. It says a lot for the hardiness of those men that they were sensible enough to gang up into groups of half a dozen or more and operate as teams in taking on the over-confident riders who had never had to face the resourcefulness of trained legionaries.

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It has been a hard season’s fighting both in north western Gaul and in Germany and this expedition to Britain was meant to be something of a bonus as a well-prepared ‘peaceful’ reconnaissance to find out more about this group of islands at the end of the known world.
     I knew roughly where we were. I had been here with Volusenus about a month before on a recce. But more of that later. It was country that should have been familiar to me anyway – or rather to my alter ego, Mike Oakwood. Caesar had sent me, together with Gaius Procillus and one of his favoured Gallic chieftains, Commius, in a small flotilla of liburnians, to suss out the chances of peaceful alliance with the Britons – at least with the ones on that nearest piece of coastline that we could see from the cliff-tops in Gaul. That deputation to the Britons had not been a huge success but, again, more of that later.
     By the time we had got back to the coast after dealing with the Germans and familiarised ourselves with the immense task of embarking and disembarking from the fleet of some eighty transports that Balbus had managed to scrape together for him, it was nearly halfway through August. I was uneasy about the timing, being only too well aware of the dangerous storms that can brew up in the Channel in late summer but there was no point in my trying to deter the Commander from his stated aim once his mind was made up.
     As one of his senior legates in that task force, I sailed in Caesar’s command ship. He was aware of my interest in Britain although, of course, not of the reasons behind it. It was not possible to be close to such a man without finding that penetrating intelligence probing the depths of your commitment to him and to his cause. Being related – distantly by modern western standards but not by oriental ideas even today – made holding anything back even more difficult but I don’t think that even this remarkably modern man would have been able to grasp the idea of time warps.
     For reasons best known to himself, based, I suppose, on the well-tried concept of building on success, Caesar has kept me on the strength of his headquarters ever since those heady days in the Province and has given me a number of decidedly dicey (sometimes delicate) missions. Clearly, he is aware of my strangely different outlook on life. He seems to recognise that as a common bond, for there is no doubt in my mind that this is a man whose ideas of how power should be exercised are far in advance of those of his contemporaries.
     Caesar first became obsessed with the idea of going personally to Britain during the late summer of our last campaign, when I took him – somewhat out of our way I must admit – for an excursion along the Channel coast, knowing full well that the cliffs on the far side would be clearly visible in the early morning sunshine. He had the seeds of intent in mind because of the support given by the tribes of Britain related to the Veneti and Venelli in the campaign that had taken up most of that early summer. However, I think the sight of the ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ clinched the matter for him. What drew me to the spot I knew as Cap Gris Nez I don’t know? I can only put it down to a sub-conscious yearning to get back to my twenty-first century roots, increasingly submerged though they are in the midst of passing time and a fog of growing doubts about returning to my old persona – doubts heavily weighted by fascination with the exciting times through which I am now living and – more specifically – by the emotional attachments, forged since that fateful day five years ago, to Sylvia, to daughter, Rutilia (known to the family as Diana) and the families Rutilius and Polybius.
     But I’m getting ahead of myself as usual. Let me go back to the record of my adventure in my own personal time warp in the winter of 56/55 BC, long before that hard-fought battle to get ashore in the mysterious islands of Albion.

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I returned to Rome at the end of Caesar’s third year of campaigning in Gaul having reached the ripe old age of twenty-eight to stand in the elections for the privilege of a quaestorship on the starting grid in the so-called ‘Honours Race’, which – if I made the grade – would make me eligible on completion of the subsequent year of office for membership of Rome’s governing body, the Senate.
     I am increasingly aware of the ruthlessness of the Senate and especially those Senators, collectively known to history as ‘Optimates’, all of whom come from noble Roman families – like that of my alter ego, Marcus – who have ruled the Republic since the ‘Kings’ were defeated back in the mists of time. Many – perhaps even a majority – of these powerful men are determined to put a stop to Caesar’s plans to turn the growing empire into a meritocracy rather than an all-powerful plutocracy/oligarchy, with power reserved only for those with old money and the ambition to make even more. They are particularly incensed by his legislation to confer full Roman citizenship on the peoples of Northern Italy and the Province.
     Needless to say, as a beneficiary of that legislation whereby I have been legally allowed to marry Sylvia without any legal stigma attached, I am fully behind Caesar’s action. To me the apartheid politics of these Optimates stinks.
     As expected, I was elected on a landslide, coming top of the poll by a mile, which says a lot for the name of Rutilius Robura when linked to that of Julius Caesar, even if it doesn’t say much for me personally. My problem is that because of that result, Pompey now feels that he has the right, as the senior Army Commander, to reclaim my services as his personal military quaestor. Marcus, remember, served with Pompey during his triumphant campaign in what we once knew as Asia Minor before being knocked on the head and changing places with me. I have left it to the diplomacy of Caesar’s adjutant, Balbus, who is here in Rome on the great man’s business, to get me out of this particular hole, always assuming that Caesar cares enough to put up a fight. I don’t want to become a pawn in his negotiations with Pompey like his poor daughter, Julia. She, poor thing, is here in Rome, too, looking very delicate after a miscarriage brought on by a misunderstanding over a blood-stained toga during street troubles in the city, when her old man was mugged.
     The ever-percipient Sylvia is, of course, with me. We are holding court in the Rutilia mansion, currently vacated by my father and mother, who are living in Caesar’s North Italian province – Cisalpine Gaul as the Optimates still insist on calling it – in the town of Mediolanum . My father is there now as Caesar’s legal deputy, or legate, while the great man is away campaigning in Gaul. Jacobus is now fulfilling very capably the role of steward-cum-butler, or head of the household staff and if there are any problems ‘below stairs’ I have yet to hear of them. He will not hear of giving up his role as my personal amanuensis, freedman or no freedman.
     Quintus and my sister, Rutilia, are both in town living with his parents, although I have tried to persuade them that they are welcome here on the Viminal Hill. Quintus is now recovering fast from the near fatal arrow wound he suffered two years ago. He is determined, despite Rutilia’s urgent pleas, to rejoin us in Gaul for this year’s campaigning. I’ve told him – under pain of death if it gets out – that I believe we will be going across the northern Ocean to the islands of Albion. Rutilia and Sylvia are both aware of the pull this has for me and are beginning to get more than a little suspicious of my motives. I’ll have to be careful what I say. So far I’ve blamed my keenness on Jacobus, who is legitimately a genuine Brit, as they both well know, but I don’t think they wholly believe me.

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