Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [127]
It was mass slaughter. It was no longer a battle, nor anything resembling one, as the helpless horde was pressed against its own barrier and hacked to pieces. Those Celtic warriors who valiantly tried to stand their ground, had no room to fight, and they went down like the women and children.
They now saw Agricola canter up to the governor.
“It’s over, sir,” he called. “Do I regroup the men and take prisoners?”
But to Porteus’s surprise Suetonius’s face was stony.
“No.”
“There are women and children,” the tribune began.
“Kill them all.”
And Porteus remembered what a friend of Graccus’s had told him before he left Rome:
“Suetonius – a fine general: none better. But when he is angry, then he is truly terrible.”
As the massacre of women and children took place before their eyes, a silence descended on those watching, but it did not seem to affect the governor. When it was done, he turned to his staff:
“Remember, gentlemen: when the natives forget to respect Rome, they must be taught to fear her.”
On the day of the battle, hardly any of the rebels escaped. Boudicca is dead for certain. The governor refused to stop to count the dead but Marcus and I think there were more than seventy thousand.
We went to Verulamium, then on to Londinium. In both places there was nothing left – just charred ground, as though the rebels had burned all the houses down and then trampled on them. I could not believe that places of such size, especially Londinium, could be so completely destroyed. All the inhabitants had been butchered – all.
As for our own people, the procurator Decianus Catus has run away to Gaul and we are to have a new procurator in his place; the most disgraceful performance of the whole business has been the behaviour of the prefect in charge of the II at Glevum. He heard about the defeat of the Ninth and so he disobeyed the governor’s orders and stayed like a coward in his garrison. No wonder we couldn’t find him! When he heard about our victory over Boudicca he fell on his sword.
Now the governor is taking vengeance on the whole island. Vexillations are being sent to every settlement in the country and any dissidents are being slaughtered. Suetonius says he will offer one choice only: absolute obedience or instant death. He means what he says.
This letter was sent by Porteus to his parents from the charred ruins of Londinium. His feelings for the governor were now mixed. He had come to admire the testy old soldier’s coolness and generalship during the rebellion: for if Suetonius had made one mistake, then certainly every Roman soldier in the province could have been massacred in the general uprising that must have followed. To Suetonius therefore, he owed a soldier’s loyalty. But he could not help being disgusted by the reign of terror that followed when the governor, seeing the ruins of the port of Londinium and the Roman colony of Camulodunum pounded his fist into his hand and shouted:
“Now they shall taste Roman revenge!”
Up and down the country the Romans went, killing and confiscating in a huge act of administrative anger; and as Suetonius intended, the islanders were cowed into submission. It was a correct military solution, but it left the new province poorer and more unhappy than ever, and the unease Porteus had felt before only grew stronger.
“The governor is a great soldier,” he acknowledged to Marcus one day, “but he is destroying this province. The natives fear us, but they do not trust us.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” his friend replied, “though frankly I don’t think so. But no one else would agree with you. The legions are all with Suetonius and from what I hear, the emperor would put the whole province in chains if he could.”
“They’re wrong,” Porteus insisted.
“Then all the more reason to keep quiet. Be sensible, young Porteus: forget the whole thing and let others do the worrying; just do as you’re told.”
This was good advice, and had he been wiser, Porteus would have taken it as his guide for the rest of his career. As it was, though