As the food heated, they sat and watched the activity on the water.
‘It is good your father has so many grown sons, Dominus,’ Diocles said to Ballista. As with everything he did, the young Danubian gave his words a great seriousness.
Ballista made a noise which might have been interpreted as assent.
‘There are enough leaders he can trust to defend several places at once.’
Ballista made no reply, just gazed out over the water.
Diocles stirred the stew, his brow furrowed with earnestness. ‘It has never been that way in the imperium. If a general does well against some barbarians when the emperor is elsewhere, that general’s soldiers insist he takes the purple. It leads to civil war. No matter who wins, the frontiers are stripped of troops, and more barbarians seize their opportunity. If a local Roman commander does well against them, it all starts again.’
Ballista and the others agreed.
Diocles went on. ‘No imperial dynasty has had enough men to cover all the frontiers. Take Valerian. Before the Persians captured him, he could hold the east and Gallienus one of the frontiers in the west. But that left either the Rhine or the Danube in the charge of a child. If Saloninus had not been so young, would the revolt of Postumus have succeeded? Perhaps our emperors should marry several women, breed more sons.’
‘You Romans would have to change your ways,’ Ballista said.
‘As everyone says, it is an age of iron and rust. Perhaps it demands change, even from the mos maiorum.’ At times, Diocles was weightiness personified.
‘In my countries Suania,’ Tarchon said, ‘brother often killing brother, fratricide very good, very popular.’
‘And,’ Maximus interrupted, ‘there is no telling the son will be half the man the father was.’
‘There could be another way,’ Ballista said. ‘If the emperor could find a man to really trust, he could share his power. Then each of them could adopt a younger man of abilities. Four men holding imperial power: one for each of the Euphrates, Danube and Rhine, and one in Rome or somewhere else. They would form something like a collegium of emperors.’
‘Not a fuck of a chance that would last,’ Maximus said.
Diocles said nothing, but looked more serious than normal.
‘You so sure the arse-fucking-cunt Unferth come?’ Tarchon had developed a rare talent for creating compound obscenities in different languages.
‘Yes,’ Ballista said.
‘Come here for fucking sure? Not other fucking Angle place?’
‘No,’ Ballista said. ‘Not other fucking Angle place. No other fucking Angle killed his son.’
‘Fuck, indeed,’ said Tarchon.
‘Yes, fuck, indeed,’ said Maximus.
After they had eaten, Maximus and Tarchon rowed Ballista over to the other side in a skiff. Mord, son of Morcar, and Eadric, son of eorl Eadwine, were waiting. They made their reports. The work was progressing. Nothing too bad had happened that morning: two broken limbs and a near-drowning. With over a thousand men doing heavy work in a desperate hurry, accidents would happen. So far, no one had died.
They walked past the big stacks of planks and up to the low hill where the village had been. Half a dozen other young Angle nobles stood there. In all, twenty had accompanied Ballista. The glamour of serving the war leader who had killed the Roman emperor Quietus with his own hands, who had briefly worn the purple himself and who had now beheaded Widsith Travel-Quick, was strong. Ballista wondered whether the adulation of these young warriors would seem more natural to him if he had spent his life in the north.
Eadric asked if there was anything they could do. Ballista said it would be good if they could all draw back, create a ring around him and by intercepting any messengers give him some time to consider the defences.
Neither Maximus nor Tarchon withdrew, but Ballista was so accustomed to their presence, they did not impinge on his thoughts. He sat in the sun on a pile of wood. Three days before, there had been a village here; now it was a lumberyard. The women, the young and the old had been sent inland to find shelter among the other settlements of the Angles, Chali and Aviones. The able-bodied men had participated in the destruction of their own homes. Now they were labouring at the defences; when Unferth came, they would fight as part of Ballista’s war band. Unlike the young nobles, they had not been trained almost exclusively for war. Many of them would die.
The low, round hill commanded a fine view over the inlet of Norvasund: the still, inner waters to the left and the choppier outer ones to the right which led to the Little Belt between the Cimbric peninsula and the island of Varinsey, and on to the wider ocean. From up here Ballista could see the ships working on the sea barrage, and the vestigial defences appearing on either shore. The plans for the latter were simple. Where the floating barrage came to the shore on the far, eastern side, it would be protected by a semi-circular low ditch and bank, the latter topped by wooden stakes. From the sea barrage a palisade would run forward to meet the earthworks, thus enfilading the former from the land. If anything, the defences on the eastern side were even more basic. A simple palisade running out from the barrage along the waterline — again letting archers shoot along the face of the line of oaks — before snaking back to the hill, where here at the top another palisade would block access to the headland. The demolished houses of the village had provided excellent ready-worked wood.
Ballista worried at a shred of meat caught in his teeth. Water was not an issue. A stream ran into the Norvasund just inland of where the eastern palisade would stand. They were collecting food, but it should not be a problem. Unless completely surrounded, they would be able to draw supplies from the hinterland. They were stockpiling weapons which could kill at a distance — arrows, javelins and stones to throw — and incendiary materials. If there were time, refinements could be added. Sharpened stakes could be concealed in the ditch of the eastern fortlet, and maybe below the water on the west. When the blacksmiths had finished making arrowheads, they could turn to producing caltrops. Both Castricius and Diocles were familiar with torsion artillery. There were skilled carpenters among the Angles. If there were time, perhaps they could build two or three very simple artillery pieces, something similar to the ones he had designed and used a couple of years before when defending Miletus from the Goths.
If there were time … It all returned to that. A chain of beacons stretched across Hedinsey and Varinsey. Ballista had men out in small boats in the northern and southern approaches of the Little Belt. They would have warning: several hours, perhaps as much as two days. Yet that would mean little if the defences were incomplete. If Unferth came now, the plan was for the longships to defend the as yet unblocked section of the Norvasund, the men with Ballista here in the west to make a stand on the hill, and those in the east to force-march around the inlet to join them. If Unferth came now, the plan would allow them to die with honour.
Even if there were time, these defences would not hold for ever. Still — Ballista made an effort to cheer himself — they should not have to hold for long. Oslac’s ships from Varinsey could be here in a day, two at the outside — unless Unferth came with numbers that Oslac could not hope to defeat with just the aid of those already here. In which case, the defences at Norvasund would have to manage until Morcar could sail from Hedinsey to join Oslac. That meant at least two days; at the outside, no more than four. Ballista worked free the bit of gristle, spat it out. Four days; more if the weather was unseasonal.
Mord was walking up around the post holes of a destroyed cottage. The young atheling had his big hunting dog with him.