Arthur Britannicus

Read Arthur Britannicus for Free Online

Book: Read Arthur Britannicus for Free Online
Authors: Paul Bannister
watchman, shouting for support, laid into both men with his stout stave. He knocked one unconscious and found himself in a desperate struggle with the enraged other. Mullinus saw his chance.  Wrapped in the heavy, dark cloak, he fled down the gangplank and into the night. Only when he’d run a distance from the riverside jetty did he stop, gasping, to take stock.
    The weight that had banged against his shoulder as he ran was a large amber and spiralled-silver brooch pinned to the fur, and the weight inside the cloak that was fastened to a bit of sewn-on horn and had thumped against his thigh was a soft leather purse full of gold aureii. He was free, he was far from his former master, and he was rich.

 
     
    V . Cenhud
     
    Carausius was 14 now. In the years he’d been away from his native island, he’d turned from stocky boy to burly young man, made strong by the unremitting exercise of working on a transport scow on the Rhine and Meuse rivers, and nourished with good food by his master’s wife, who treated the young Briton as the son she’d never had.  Cait of Rodda was soft-spoken and as soft-hearted as her husband Cenhud, shipmaster and river pilot, was tough and wary. They had no children, so when Cenhud had been approached by Gimflod the smith about finding better care for the ten years old Carausius, the sailor had seen an opportunity to please his wife. She’d agreed to take on the boy, and had brought him back to health in short order.
    Next, she took pride, as a gentle-born woman with some education, in tutoring him in the Frankish and Belgic tongues, and especially in the Latin he’d need as a trader and navigator. Cait called on a friend, a young Celtic matron teasingly known as Celea Altissima because as a child she’d declared she would grow to be very tall, to help her tutor the boy.
    Celea worked with Carausius to teach him the principles of geometry laid down by the Greeks. This was a new discipline of earth measurements invaluable to any skilled sailor.  Carausius soaked it up like a Kalymnos sponge, just as he did when she taught him his letters. “Lege feliciter,” she’d smile at him, ‘Read happily.”  But, for all his new life and activities, he never forgot his homeland and his heritage as the son of a British chieftain, and promised the god Mithras that he’d return and that one day he would avenge his father’s death and the disaster that had befallen his family. Yet, even as the boy mourned for his lost parents and his twin brothers, he took on his shipboard duties with the relish and energy of a bright youth enjoying the physical life, clean salt air and stimulation of the Roman port.
    And the port was busier than ever before. That year, a dozen years after Rome had celebrated its millennium, Germanic tribes in the forests across the Rhine were contesting for land and the emperors needed to send ever more legions, even while unrest was surging in other provinces. The shifting power brought a spate of new rulers, frontier generals who had the legions to support their imperial ambitions. Senators from patrician clans contemptuously called them ‘barracks emperors’ for their lack of distinguished family history, but were powerless against them.
    Some of the barracks emperors had learned the lessons of Gaius Julius Caesar, from the old days of the Republic. Caesar had paid his legions out of his own fortune, and kept his men loyal. The ones who took note amassed plunder to boost the public funds with which they rewarded the spears that sustained them. Fifteen times in 43 years, usurpers had donned the imperial purple robes, but none had enjoyed lasting success, and all but one had been killed. The sole exception had committed suicide after ruling for a single month, in a year when six different emperors held the throne.
    And, the turmoil went on. Only last year the latest candidate, Postumus had seized power over Britain, Gaul and Germany to create his own Gallic Empire based on

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