Read Online Emperor by Stephen Baxter - Free Book Online Page B

fair.’
    ‘Oh, I understand that.’ Narcissus shook off his mood, reminding himself it was always a mistake to show the merest chink of weakness–always. He took one last glance back at the landscape. ‘By Apollo’s eyes I couldn’t bear to live in one of those wooden huts. They sit there like huge brown turds. No wonder the Britons are dazzled by a goblet of wine or two!’
    Vespasian laughed, and led the way down the slope.

X
    Agrippina lay on her belly in the low brush. She had been here since first light. She was stiff, her neck was sore, and she was out of food and low on water. But here she lay, silent and motionless, her face blackened by dirt, for she was spying on the Roman army.
    Even she, educated in Gaul, had been stunned to see a Roman army on the march close up. The tens of thousands of men in close order had taken no less than three hours, she estimated, to stream past her position. All that time the noise had been deafening. The Romans awed her, even as she clung to her shard of hatred over Mandubracius, and her longing for revenge.
    But she kept her mind clear. She had tried to count the troops and units, baggage carts and animals. She had already sent preliminary information by a runner to the camp Caratacus had established to the west of here, on the bank of the River of the Cantiaci. Despite the princes’ warlike bluster, for now they had followed Nectovelin’s advice, to watch, to gather information on the Romans, and to strike at them in small corrosive ways. Thus Agrippina was just one of a network of spies across the country.
    After the main body of the force passed she kept her station, to see what might follow. She was given a lesson in Roman road engineering.
    It had begun even before the first soldiers had come this way. Surveyors, protected by a detachment of cavalry, took up positions on ridges and hills. They had mysterious contraptions of wood and string and lead weights that they held up before their faces. Agrippina imagined this must have something to do with making sure the road ran straight. After that the route was marked out with canes thrust into the ground every few paces, and the surveyors hurried on to their next station.
    After the main force of the army had passed along the marked-out route a construction gang followed. The gang themselves seemed to be soldiers; a cart followed with armour and weaponry piled high, though every man kept a knife at his belt.
    They worked their way along a track already churned up by forty thousand pairs of boots, tens of thousands of hooves. First they cleared the central track of undergrowth, and then dug out ditches to either side, heaping up the dirt along the spine of the road. They piled large, heavy rocks on top of the ridge of dirt, and then a layer of smaller rocks, and finally gravel was shovelled out and spread crudely. The smaller rocks and gravel were hauled along in carts, but the heavy rocks were scavenged locally–mostly from the dry stone walls of local farms, but there were no farmers around to complain. At last the soldier-engineers walked up and down along the newly laid stretch of the road, ramming down the gravel with heavy posts.
    As the soldiers worked, under the pleasantly warm British sun, they sang. Many of their work-songs were in Latin, but Agrippina recognised some Gallic, and even a little Germanic. Rome’s soldiers did not only come from Rome these days.
    Agrippina had seen Gaul; she knew what the future would hold. From this beginning the roads would spread out across the country like ivy over a wall, bifurcating and firing off their straight-line segments, until every corner of the land was reached. Messages would flash along the roads fast as thought, and the next time the soldiers needed to march this way they would be able to make much faster progress than today, through the mud and dirt. And in the future the young fighters of Britain, who today were preparing raids against the advancing Romans, would