Hadrian's wall Read Online Free PDF

estuary.
    "Hold and watch!"
    The redhead who'd escaped turned in the water and taunted them in thick Latin, vowing revenge.
    "Hold, I say!"
    The Romans stood mute and winded, lining the bluff.
    The Scotti reached the reedy water on the far side of the inlet, some managing to stand in the shallows and others thrashing for their boats. They shouted for the comrades they'd left behind, gasping explanations, and anxiously grasped oar holes to lift themselves aboard.
    Then there was a Latin shout, Falco's command carrying across the inlet of water, and a row of helmeted heads rose from the bowels of the longboats.
    More Romans.
    Falco's wing had ridden around and already captured the craft, slaying their guards. Now they stood from the hulls where they'd been hiding and fell upon the unarmed barbarians trying to climb aboard.
    Galba's plan had worked.
    The red-haired one, half naked and weaponless now, saw the murder that was happening and thrashed his way to a muddy bank.
    Falco himself rode the man down.
    The bang and thud of weapons and the screams of the wounded echoed across the water for only moments and then it was done, the reeds stained red, bodies floating like logs.
    "Come," Galba said. "We meet Lucius Falco on the other side."
    The two wings of cavalry joined at the head of the inlet, the longboats already burning as fiercely as Cato's village. A handful of captured warriors would stay with the Romans as slaves. Some of the booty would be returned to their client, others kept as tax.
    One of them was the defiant red-haired chieftain: a rib cracked after being overridden by Falco's horse, head bloody, manner abject. In minutes he'd gone from conqueror to conquered, from lord to prisoner, and he stood trussed and naked with that dull expression of shock and resignation that comes from enslavement.
    "I was hoping that one for my own, Falco," Galba congratulated.
    "He's a bit of a badger. Even after riding over the top of him, I had to club with my dagger. He'll be trouble, perhaps."
    "Or spirit. Get him home and make clear how things are."
    Falco nodded.
    "Let's find out who he is." Galba walked his horse up to the subdued barbarian. "What's your name, boy?" These Scotti were a last stubborn branch of those Celtic tribes the Romans had been fighting for eight centuries, their ferocity in battle and despair in defeat both as predictable as the tides. It might take a bit of whip and club to tame this one, but he, like them all, would submit. "What do they call you, stripling?"
    The man looked up sullenly and for just one moment Galba felt chilled. It was a blackly baleful look he got, the captive thinking no doubt of the hearth and woman and horse he'd never see again, but beyond that there was something in his sorrow that seemed to give a glimpse of a dim and troubled future. Let Falco keep him, indeed.
    "I am Odocullin of the Dal Riasta. Prince of the Scotti and a lord of Eiru."
    "Odocul-what? That's more mouthful than a Sicilian sweetcake. Repeat yourself, slave!"
    The man looked away.
    Galba's hand went to the pouch at his side. He could feel the severed finger of this man's dead compatriot and the hard curve of the barbarian's ring. None ever ignored Galba Brassidias for long, and someday this carrot-colored Hibernian would learn that too. In the meantime, who cared what the captive was called by his own people? "We'll name you Odo, then," he pronounced, "and the cost of your defeat will be slavery in the house of the soldier who defeated you, Lucius Falco."
    The Scotti still wouldn't look at his captors.
    "Odo," Falco repeated. "Even I can remember that."

III
    So Odo became houseboy to the villa of Lucius Falco, and Galba Brassidias, forty rings now jangling from the waist chain of his armor, burst from the base of the watchtower to receive his reward from Rome.
    The courtyard of the fortress headquarters was lit with torches in the dusk, a turma of thirty-two men snapping to attention. "Straight ranks! Weapons high!"