"Their misfortune," I snapped, turning to Cyrus Appius. "Forced pace from here on out. Issue dry rations to all ranks as we move; we'll eat on horseback. Quarter-hour rest every ten miles: I want to catch these people by this time tomorrow. Tell your people." I turned back to Pellus. "I want you and all your men far out in front, in a narrow arc. Don't worry about our flanks. These people don't know we're coming. Tell your people to find them as quickly as they can, then keep them in sight, but to stay out of sight themselves. They know what to do, and you know what to tell them. Move out now."
We rode far into the night, stopping to sleep for only four hours, then rising and saddling up long before dawn, so that by the time the skies began to lighten behind us in the east, we had already covered ten miles along the solid Roman road, and it was there that a returning scout met us with the news that the enemy was less than three miles ahead, still in camp. Pellus had estimated their numbers at something less than three hundred, of whom less than one hundred were mounted. The most puzzling part of the scout's report, however, was the indication—and it was only an indication, since no one had been able to get close enough for absolute confirmation—that there were no non-combatants among the enemy. No women and no prisoners. Surprised, but not unduly concerned, I concluded that the women had either been killed or—a more likely alternative since we had found no corpses, and women might be considered a valuable commodity in terms of slave prices—they had been detached and sent off by some other route to await eventual collection and disposal. I decided to attack the sleeping camp immediately.
We charged out of the rising sun and surprised the strangers in a short, hard, bitter fight. It was a complete rout, and our trumpeters had to blow long and hard to recall our blood-hungry troopers from their pursuit of the fleeing remnants of the raiding party. We lost twenty-three dead and twice that number wounded, as opposed to one hundred and eighty-one enemy dead and no prisoners. I estimated that about a hundred of them had escaped, but the news brought to me by Centurion Rufio dispelled any thought of giving chase to them. Rufio had fought and killed one of their leaders, and before the man died he had damned Rufio, telling him that Gulrhys Lot of Cornwall Would take revenge for this.
The news appalled me. If Lot was on the rampage again, and this far north—more than a hundred miles above and to the east of our Colony—then my place was in Camulod, and I had no time to waste in getting there. Now, however, thanks to this latest episode, I had more than forty disabled men with injuries ranging from slight cuts to serious wounds, and only a hundred and thirty-some sound fighters remaining, which meant that I could not reasonably split my forces and drive on to Camulod in the cause of urgency. To leave our wounded behind, even with a strong escort, in territory that might be swarming with hostile forces, would be to condemn them to death. The corollary was that my own remaining troops, minus the escort for the wounded, would be depleted to the point of dangerous folly in the event that we encountered serious opposition on our route south. I cursed myself for having tied my men, through what I could only define as my own culpable ignorance and irresponsibility, to the pace at which the most seriously wounded could travel—a snail's crawl.
A quick conference with my officers confirmed my assessment. There was no safe means by which we could split our party now that we suspected—and had to believe—that what we had assumed to be a self-sufficient band of marauders might in fact be but one element of a much larger force: an invading army.
I sent Lucanus to distribute the fifteen most seriously wounded men among three of our huge wagons, redistributing their remaining cargo among the others. Then I detached a forty-man squadron to augment Pellus's scouts, first making them change out of their uniforms, enabling Pellus to throw a wider and more mobile protective screen around us as we moved. Those arrangements in place, we struck out again for Camulod, driving on as quickly as we could without seriously threatening our wounded and, for that same reason, keeping to the main road as the most level and direct route, knowing that it was also the most visible and therefore the most vulnerable.
The full truth began to assert itself within hours. Large as it was, the group of "raiders" that we had inadvertently come upon was as I had now begun to fear, no more than a skirmishing force, a single faction of a wide-ranging but rapidly coalescing army that must number in the thousands. As returning scouts began to come galloping from all directions with news of hostile sightings, a picture of the emerging situation formed quickly in my mind. Large groups of soldiers—I had no choice but to consider them soldiers, undisciplined and ungovernable as they might be—were converging, mainly on foot, upon some prearranged meeting point that seemed to lie to the south and west of our present position. According to our scouts, there were horsemen and even a few old-style chariots among these groups, but no evidence of organized cavalry. We had reports of sightings to the north-west and west, and to the east and southeast. I had early sent an extra detachment of fast riders directly to the north, behind us, to see if we were being followed from that direction. We were. A large concentration of mounted men was massed some fifteen miles behind us, using the road as we had. The scout who brought this report had managed to range fairly close to these newcomers, spying upon them from a fringe of trees close by the road, which curved in a wide loop there, winding between two hills. He had then cut across country, avoiding the loop and regaining the firm surface of the road in time to be safely out of sight on his return journey before the large group re- emerged from the hill pass. He was adamant that these people, too, were mere horsemen, undisciplined and formless, definitely not cavalry.
My mind finally made a connection that had been eluding me. Our scouts were passing freely to this point among the various armed groups on which they were reporting simply because there were so many people crossing and criss-crossing the country around us. It was evident that none of the insurgents expected to be challenged or accosted. None suspected that we, or any other forces inimical to their own, were among them. I realized that that state of affairs would continue only until the moment somebody recognized us as being uniformed. That awareness came to me as we descended into a small, wooded valley, which offered us protection for as long as it took us to halt, shed or conceal our uniform armour, and make ourselves look as motley as we could. Although few of us carried any clothes that were not regulation uniform and colours, we did what we could, most of us contriving to disguise our soldierliness, of which we had been so proud until then, under wrappings of torn horse-blankets. There was little we could do about our helmets. They were all of a kind, and we could not very well remove them, for we would have looked even more conspicuous riding to war bare-headed. I broke up that uniformity, however, by having one man in three remove his helmet and carry it at his saddle-bow. They were all short-haired, which endows men with another unmistakable military uniformity, but I hoped that distance would disguise that from casual view. Fortunately, many of our men had acquired heavy, external clothing of one kind or another in Verulamium because of the unseasonably cold weather, and I had seen fit to allow them to do so, more out of necessity than any willingness to allow their appearance to deteriorate.
Before we saddled up again, I explained my thoughts to all of them and impressed them with the need to disguise ourselves even more thoroughly; I ordered all of them to be aware, from now until we could no longer disguise ourselves; of the urgent need to avoid anything and everything that could be recognized as military formality or discipline. Having spent years learning to ride as a unit, I told them, their lives now depended on appearing to be a rabble.