Free Arthur Imperator by Paul Bannister

and I took in the faint scent of lavender from the flowers she placed in her clothes chest.
    She took Milo from his nurse and handed him, squirming, to me. “I’ll take good care of this fellow,” she smiled up at me. I nodded, numbly. I had sent many men to their deaths, I had killed enough of them myself, but I had never had this sense of great doom, even when I truly thought I was about to die in some skirmish or other.
    But the hour came and my hounds whined, sensing something. The gates were swung open, the escort formed around the pack mules and the two women in their raeda carriage. We bade farewell, may the gods speed and protect you, return soon, pay my respects to Myrddin and all the other words of parting, but I never could voice my fears, and the small procession clattered out of the gate, a small hand waved and I watched my best beloved leave on the road to hell. 

 
    XIII Equus
     
    Lycaon halted his small group: a file of soldiers and three horsemen, two of them leading the black Frisian stallions they trotted on the last part of their journey from Dover. He scanned the long vista of the chalk downs where the horse camp Arthur had ordered was taking shape. His fellow tribune Cragus had chosen well, sitting the pens near a vast grain farm that had served the legions for two centuries. The place was well watered by a tributary of one of the four rivers that bounded the plain, and the vista of smooth, rolling grasslands seemed to his eyes a grassy sea, islanded with occasional clumps of trees where he could pick out specks that were work parties harvesting timber for the camp. Here and there were the long, low lines of the burial mounds of the ancient peoples who had constructed the plain’s giant stone circles.
    The Romans had slashed a road across the downs, aligning it spear-straight east to west like the sloping long barrows of the burial mounds, and it came close to one edge of the horse camp. The soldiers, who were disciplined and practised engineers of camps, bridges, signal towers and the like, had constructed it well. There were paddocks and stables, a barracks and an administration block, much of it to the established plan of a Roman marching camp: a quadrangle with a gate centred on each side, a timber-walled rampart and ditch around it all and a given, familiar layout for the various occupants. Because it would be a semi-permanent camp, some of the tent lines were missing and barracks blocks and a bath house had been erected. Equally, the cavalry lines that would normally be protected inside the castrum were outside in several paddocks. Lycaon noted with satisfaction that guard posts had been established around those well-fenced areas. No point capturing and breaking horses only for them to be stolen, he thought. You could rely on good old Cragus to consider everything. He turned and waved his group forward, and trotted across the turf to find his old friend.
    The tribune Cragus Grabelius had served Arthur for years and was among his most experienced and trusted officers. He’d trained and readied the troops that turned back the Romans, had campaigned across Pictland, clearing the tribes from between the walls of Hadrian and Antoninus, and forced the surrender of the rocky fortress of the Votadini that commanded the River Forth valley. He’d outwitted and outflanked the Picts by building a floating bridge over that river, and he’d surprised the Romans at Dungeness by taking a force through the flanking marshes and attacking them from the rear. 
    Now he faced the task of building a cavalry unlike any the world had seen. He had as raw material the wild horse herds that roamed the southern downlands of Britain, and he could draw on the legions for troops. He did the former, and ignored the latter.
    “I wanted experienced horsemen,” he explained later to Lycaon, “so I went north to Carlisle. For three centuries, the cohort Ala Petriana was stationed there, 24 troops of auxiliary cavalry, 800