Chapter 2

Londinium

“ ... Then what good are you?” Maharbaal yelled, inches from Caesius’s face.

“You wanted to know what my father and his lackey were up to, and I got you that information. I even told you about their new weapons, not that you did anything with that information. I told you exactly how many men they had under arms and when they left Devnum to meet your forces. My spies told you everything you wanted. It was up to you to put an end to their forces and put me on my rightful throne. It was also you who screwed that up, losing an army five times the size of the Roman forces in an afternoon.”

“I will have you gutted,” Maharbaal fumed, spittle flying from his lips.

“How long do you think you’d last after I’m dead? I know you like to think you’re some all-powerful ruler here on your island, but we both know who you answer to and we both know how little patience your Emperor has for men who can’t do their duties. Now that you’ve all but given this island to this new empire of my father, I’m even more important to your Emperor than you are. I still have sources inside their territory able to pass along intelligence and maybe even designs or samples of these new weapons. All you have is a few thousand men, cowering behind your walls, slowly starving to death.”

“No one’s starving. Food shipments from Hibernia and Iberia continue.”

“And yet your men still hide.”

Maharbaal’s fists tightened and, for a moment, Caesius thought he might have goaded the fool into actually doing it. The moment passed and Maharbaal’s fists unclenched. For as arrogant and out of touch as the governor was, he wasn’t completely brain dead. He’d survived the cutthroat world of the Carthaginian court and managed to get appointed as a governor of one of the empire’s administrative districts. On the fringes of the empire, but their centuries-long battle against his own people made it a not insignificant one.

Caesius knew that Maharbaal knew he was right about how the Emperor would react to his having Caesius killed. They preferred to place someone controllable but native over every population they pacified and having the next man to wear the purple was as big of an agent as they could hope for. They would know Caesius being placed over his people would help keep the region under control, allowing them to redirect resources and manpower to other parts of their domain.

Plus, Maharbaal also had bigger things to worry about than one exiled prince. The city was dangerously low on soldiers and arms, and the shipments from Hibernia were not enough to offset the shortage. Caesius had read part of a message to Maharbaal when the fool hadn’t been paying attention, and knew that a relief mission was being assembled in Africa, but that it would take some months to get enough manpower to retake the lost land.

Maharbaal was already in a precarious position. He’d done well to blame the loss on his general and appeared to have gotten the Emperor to believe him, but it was unlikely the governor could deflect another failure. And the Carthaginians had a well-known solution for dealing with failures that Maharbaal certainly didn’t want to face.

“You,” Maharbaal said, turning away from Caesius to one of his nearby aides. “Put guards on the storehouses and keep all of the food shipments that come in under guard. Confiscate all of the food you can from vendors and sell no food to vendors any longer. Begin distributing rations to people directly from the warehouses. Limit civilians to one-quarter of the standard soldier’s ration. The soldiers themselves can maintain the standard rations. Go.”

“It will take months for the supply convoy to arrive. You’re not going to have enough food to keep soldiers at full rations while still feeding the populace,” Caesius pointed out.

“I realize that. We still have work projects reinforcing the wall and repairing damage from the Roman’s weapons and if we cut them off they won’t have the strength to do the work that’s needed. Once we make a list of essential workers, we’ll cut off everyone not on that list, and keep them at minimal rations to survive.”

“If they do anything to cut your shipments, by even a little bit, or your people slow down for whatever reason, you’re still going to have to cut rations to your soldiers. When my sister and her fool come, and they are going to come, your men are going to be too weak to repel them.”

Maharbaal’s frown deepened. Caesius knew he hated him, but he was also in desperate need of good advice, and he had to know Caesius was right.

“Stop,” Maharbaal yelled out after the retreating form of the aide. When the man returned to them, he said, “No rations to the civilians, unless they can show they are working on or they have been assigned to one of the work projects.”

The aide hesitated for a moment, and then dashed off again.

“Now do your part. You have people out there. Raid the Britannians. Kill their commanders. Do something to show your worth or you can be added to the names of people not being fed,” Maharbaal said, before turning and storming off.

Caesius watched him leave, contemplating. He was in a precarious position. He’d lost most of his informants, who’d been caught by Ramirus and his damn security forces. If he set those he had left on direct missions to counter his father’s soldiers, he would lose most of them, and his remaining usefulness to the Carthaginians. He liked to think they’d keep him around to put into power when they retook the island, but he also knew they only wanted people completely loyal to them. Something no one would believe of him, no matter what he said.

He needed to be seen as helping the situation here, but he also still needed leverage. This city was going to fall, of that he was certain. He needed to be seen doing just enough to deflect claims that he’d stood aside during the defense of the city.

He also needed to start working on a plan to get out before the city actually fell.

Britannic Camp, Outside Londinium

“ ... and four-thousand, three hundred and twelve critically wounded, which includes everyone from non-mobile prisoners to those who will most certainly die in the next several weeks,” Ursinus concluded.

After their defeat of the Carthaginian army Ky had pushed his commanders hard to cut off isolated detachments or fleeing survivors, keen to keep as many soldiers as possible from reaching Londinium and adding to their current manpower. They’d left a legion to guard the huge number of prisoners, but other than instructing Ursinus to treat the prisoners humanely, he hadn’t given much thought to their disposition.

Now that the cleanup of southern Britain was complete and they’d pushed the Carthaginians behind the walls of the city, it was time to deal with the mess they’d left in their wake. Lucilla had begun getting aid and supplies to the Roman population abused for so long by the Carthaginians well in hand, but that left the huge numbers of prisoners they’d taken after the battle.

While the death toll had been catastrophic, Ky had managed to stop the battle as larger and larger groups began surrendering, keeping it from turning into an all-out slaughter. That had left him the problem of what to do with the nearly twenty-five thousand prisoners currently under guard, only a little shy of the entire force Ky had taken into the battle. Feeding his army had been a problem. Feeding them and the nearly thirty-thousand prisoners, counting the ones still being held from their previous battle, was going to be nearly impossible.

They had nearly doubled their territory with the capture of the land previously controlled by the Carthaginians, but planting season hadn’t started yet and the Carthaginians had already stripped the land bare to feed their army. It would be months before they started producing enough food in these new regions to help offset the deficiency.

“You know my feelings on this,” Ky said, looking at Ramirus and the four senators standing at one edge of the large table holding maps of the newly conquered region.

“We aren’t recommending labor gangs,” Ramirus said, reiterating the statement he’d made at the beginning of the meeting before asking Ursinus to list the current prisoner counts. “We understand that is forbidden under the anti-slavery laws that our new Imperial senate adopted, and we understand that you are against using prisoners in that way. We however wanted to make the scope of our problem clear before we started addressing our suggestions.”

“Fine. I understand the scope of the problem and I will try to restrain myself until I hear all of your recommendations.”

“The number of prisoners and our current food supplies aren’t the only problems we face. Over the last hundred years, the Carthaginians have conscripted or eliminated many of the villagers who lived and worked in the re-conquered lands. The Carthaginians who later moved in and took over the land all fled with their soldiers behind the walls. While we now have all this land to grow food for our people, much of it is empty with no one to plant the food when the snows melt.”

“Since Senator Opilio is here, I suspect you have recommendations on what to do about that,” Ky said.

Opilio was the leader of what Ky had thought of as the farming block of senators. Theywere a handful of senators who represented mostly the farming interests, although that usually meant the large landowners, not the small yeoman farmers that provided nearly half of the food produced in the empire.

“I do have a suggestion, actually. Since much of that land was taken from our people who fled north when the Carthaginians pushed us back into the middle of the country, I think we should first allow their descendants to claim their re-conquered land. The remaining land we can auction off, allowing new opportunities to citizens willing to pay for it and revenue for the Imperial treasury, which has been sorely taxed of late by all of the new projects being introduced.”

“For people reclaiming land, what if the people currently on that land didn’t run? What if the descendants of former Romans, who didn’t or couldn’t escape north when the Carthaginians invaded, stayed? What if they were moved to new lands to work by the Carthaginians? A hundred years is a long time, and there will have been migrations. Children of those families might have moved to abandoned land and claimed it. We can’t start alienating people we are bringing back into the empire right after freeing them.”

“I’ve discussed this with the Emperor before coming down here, and he had similar concerns. This ‘reclaiming’ would only apply to currently unoccupied land. He made the point that we should make the same policy for land currently occupied by Carthaginians who chose to not flee to Londinium as we reclaimed the land.”

“I agree with him. We can’t very well call ourselves liberators if we are doing the same thing the Carthaginians did when they invaded. By my math, however, that will still not solve our problem. Without the slave labor that the Carthaginians used, we would either have to sell the land in very small parcels, or find the manpower to work that land.”