Clash of Iron by Angus Watson

Author:Angus Watson [Watson, Angus]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2015-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 28

Now that Ragnall was a free citizen, Caesar told him to do what he wanted in the winter break from campaigning. So he returned to Rome with the general and most of the army, and strode across town to Clodia Metelli’s palace. She welcomed him like a long lost pet and he spent the winter there, pirouetting between paroxysms of pleasure. The house was even more fun because Clodia’s husband Metellus Celer’s invisible but nevertheless looming presence was gone. He’d died shortly after Caesar had appropriated Ragnall.

Everyone said that Clodia had poisoned her husband, but nobody accused her directly. Her reputation for having detractors gang-raped in public was an effective buttoner of lips. Ragnall didn’t think she’d done it anyway. She had no reason to. The massive beneficiary of Metellus Celer’s death had in fact been Caesar, who’d inherited the governorship of Transalpine Gaul from the dead proconsul, to add to his other two provinces of Illyricum and toga-wearing Gaul to the south of the Alps. Caesar had launched his attack on the rest of Gaul from Transalpine Gaul, so none of his previous year’s victories could have happened if Metellus hadn’t conveniently carked it. But nobody was pointing the finger at Rome’s latest and greatest hero.

If there were any whispered allegations, they were drowned out by bellicose and jubilant shouting in the Senate, at the Forum, in houses, shops, inns, restaurants and on the streets of the magnificent city. Julius Caesar had won two wars! In one year! Everyone was saying that Caesar had pissed all over the Helvetians, and kicked the Germans so hard up their arses that they’d flown across the Renus river and would never be heard of again. This, if anyone had doubted it before, was proof that the Romans were the greatest people who had ever lived. The Senate, Tribunate and other ambitious types saw advantage in agreeing with the citizens, and granted an unprecedented fifteen days of public holiday to celebrate Caesar and Rome’s marvelousness.

Everybody, including Caesar, was claiming that Caesar had conquered all of Gaul. Ragnall knew that this was a massively premature declaration. Gaul was a rough square, bounded by the Alps and Pyrenees mountains to the south, the Renus river to the east and the ocean and the British Channel to the west and north. Thanks to Caesar, Rome now controlled more or less the south-east quarter. The south-west was already so loyal to Rome that it might as well have been a province – again more or less, you never knew where you really were with those two-faced barbarians.

The north of Gaul remained free and pissed off. Even as Caesar was marching on the Germans, the armies of northern Gaul and Belgium had begun to gather. Now, slowly assembling was a larger army that the Romans had ever faced before, the sort of eye-poppingly huge force that hadn’t been seen since the days of Alexander and the Persians.

Caesar persuaded the Senate, consuls and Tribunate that this mass of

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