Marius’ Mule

or Want to Be A Roman Legionary? Get in Shape!

Like any modern soldier, a Roman legionary in the time of The Tribune carried weight — a lot of weight — while marching. How much weight?

His personal armor: Reconstructions of lorica hamata, the chainmail shirts worn by most legionaries in this period, come in around 22 to 33 pounds.

His helmet: Around 4 pounds.

His shield: Reconstructions of the scutum weigh between 12 and 22 pounds. (Although these are all modeled on finds that date to the 3rd century A.D.)

His short sword and dagger: The gladius and puglio combined, around 4 or 5 pounds, together with their scabbards or sheaths.

Two javelins (pila): Probably around 10 to 16 pounds, though the weights in reconstructions vary widely.

Now, add in his spare clothing, cloak, belt, mess kit, and share of the entrenching tools (saws, baskets, picks, axes, and bill-hooks) issued to each eight-man squad, a contuberium. And at least three days’ worth of rations.

All of that on your back or your shoulders — and no helicopters or humvees to help out.

Win a free copy of THE TRIBUNE eBook!

I’m adding exclusive content to my author page on Facebook, but I wanted to let those who read this blog know about this chance to win one of five free copies of The Tribune eBook. All you need to do is “like” my page to qualify to enter!

Win a free copy of THE TRIBUNE eBook!

Fighting a trained Roman legionary up close? Bad idea.

This great little clip from the History Channel series “Conquest” shows British actor Peter Woodward demonstrating the advantages of the pilum and the gladius in combat. (Woodward, a member of the British Academy of Dramatic Combat, was inspired by his film and stage work to study historical weaponry and combat techniques.)

Who are those guys?

One of the things I most loved about writing my Roman-era thriller,  The Tribune, was that it allowed me to indulge two of my passions — my abiding interest in military history and my fascination with Imperial Rome. Now, there are a lot of great works of historical fiction set in ancient Rome or among the Roman legions. But  The Tribune has a bit of a twist.

While there are strands in the story that tie back to the increasingly tyrannical Tiberius Caesar and his corrupt and cruel Praetorian prefect Sejanus, the action takes place on the empire’s eastern frontier, in Syria, Judea, and Galilee. And rather than depict legions embarked on a vast campaign, full of pitched battles and sieges, I show the hard and dangerous work that occupied most Roman soldiers most of the time — chasing down bandit gangs, patrolling the borders against nomadic raiders, and generally enforcing the Roman peace (and taxes) on the conquered natives. Campaigns of conquest built the empire. Constant vigilance and short, sharp punitive expeditions, skirmishes, and ambushes maintained the empire.

Which brings me to another twist in The Tribune .

Many readers of historical fiction are reasonably familiar with the structure, weapons, armor, and tactics of the Roman legions. And when the novel opens, Lucius Aurelius Valens, my protagonist, is serving as a military tribune with the VI Legion in Syria. But before too long, Valens earns a promotion. (Not easily, though, as you’ll see if you read the book!) He’s named as the new prefect, the commander, of an auxiliary cavalry regiment. (In Latin, an ala, or “wing.”)

Roman auxiliary cavalrymen? Just who are those guys, the hard-riding, hard-fighting troopers of the Third Gallic Cavalry?

“The Third, like most of our auxiliary cavalry units, had first been raised and commanded by a Celtic tribal noble, a chieftain who’d taken the Roman name Sextus Julius Gallus. The reports I’d read the night before told me that Gallus had been noted for both his fighting skill and his openhanded generosity to the warriors who followed him.”

In theory, Valens would lead 512 horsemen, organized in 16 turmae, or “troops,” of 32 men each, with each turmae commanded by a decurion. In practice, like all fighting formations stationed on the long Roman frontiers, the Third is badly under its “paper” strength.

“I’d studied the most recent regimental returns the night before, the ones the decurion had brought with him to Antioch. Not counting this draft of twenty recruits from Gaul, the Third Cavalry was down to just over three hundred troopers—little more than half its original strength. That wasn’t uncommon, especially among units stationed so far from their home province. Unless new soldiers were recruited from the local population, enlistments couldn’t hope to keep pace with losses from illness, accidents, age, and the occasional clash with bandits or raiding nomads.

The Third Gallic Cavalry had been sent east more than fifteen years before, and it had been stationed in Judea for nearly a decade—shrinking slowly, but steadily, with each passing year. No one wanted to see the regiment evaporate. But no one wanted to chance bringing Jews or Greeks or Syrians into the ranks. It was a problem without an easy solution.”

And so Valens rides off, heading for restless, rebellious Judea, with twenty raw recruits as his escort. What could possibly go wrong, right? [Grin.]

Four Horns that Changed the Art of War

Roman cavalry saddle

Sometimes, what “everyone knows” turns out to be wrong. Or at least mostly wrong.

When I was kid reading military history, I was assured that only the spread of the stirrup through Europe around the 7^th Century A.D. allowed cavalrymen to fight effectively from horseback using lances, swords, and spears. Before that, armed horsemen were more useful as skirmishers, throwing javelins or firing arrows from a distance. They weren’t, I was told by all the books I read, really capable of “shock action” – close-quarters combat against other horsemen or foot soldiers. Relying on depictions in Roman sculpture, historians were sure that a Roman cavalryman used a saddle pad that would barely let him stay seated on his horse, let alone whirl and hack and slash in any mounted melee.

Then, starting in 1967, archaeologists began publishing news of discoveries of leather in Roman sites – including saddle covers. More and more bits and pieces of ancient Roman cavalry saddles were found and recognized, and in 1986-88, the brilliant scholar and artist Peter Connolly used all this evidence to build a series of complete saddles – which riders then were able to test. And what they found was that these saddles, without stirrups, gave legionary cavalry and mounted auxiliaries the support and stability they needed to fight from horseback.

Ann Hyland, in her wonderful book Training the Roman Cavalry, comments: “When I first saw this saddle my immediate reaction was that in principle it very much resembled an American cutting horse saddle. To utilize a slashing weapon a trooper had to be confident of retaining his seat no matter how far he had to lean out from the horse’s back, either in a right-handed slash, a strike to the left over the horse’s neck, or an upwards parry with enough force behind it to deflect a downwards thrust and turn his opponent’s blade. For all these actions locking the thigh(s) under the respective angled horns enabled him not only to remain in the saddle but to put much greater poundage into his own thrust.”

And that makes the cavalry close-quarters fighting I show in my Roman-era thriller, The Tribune , and its upcoming sequel, The Standard-Bearer, possible, practical – and exciting.

Accuracy

Research on Roman artillery gone awry

but YOU’RE NOT WRITING A DOCTORAL DISSERTATION

Whether you’re writing a contemporary thriller or a work of historical fiction, you’d better be prepared to do the hard work of researching your setting and the equipment and technology used in your story. Historical fiction and thriller readers are generally a well-educated and merciless bunch. They’ll seize on errors of fact or interpretation with great and public glee. If a piece of your plot revolves around the flight characteristics of an F-15 Eagle or the ticket kiosks of the Moscow Metro or the command structure of a Roman legion, you’d better get it right.

And never assume that your research ends once you start tapping the keys. While working on THE TRIBUNE , the act of writing each scene inevitably turned up something new I needed to learn more about—everything from the street layout of Antioch-on-the-Orontes, to the menu for an elaborate Roman meal, to the methods used by a competent Greek doctor to suture and treat a wound.

There is a danger, though, in all that hard work. And that’s committing the cardinal sin of the DATA DUMP. “As you know, Major Fighterjock, an F-15’s wings generate eight bajillion pounds of lift, which means that turning at 4.3 g’s–”  [Insert scene of reader’s eyes glazing over.]

The peril for anyone who’s done the hard lifting needed to write convincingly about a subject is that you fall in love with all the neat facts you’ve learned – so much so that you try shoehorning them into every nook and cranny of your story, whether they fit or not. And doing that will kill your would-be thriller’s pacing stone-dead.

You have to be ruthless. Does that interesting historical or technological factoid advance the plot, give the reader insight about a major character, or help draw the reader deeper into your setting? No? Then get rid of it. Better to weep over the “cool” tidbit that didn’t make the cut than to weep because you read the word “turgid” in a review.

ACTION!

or Writing Battle and Chase Scenes in a World Full of Extraordinary Special Effects

Remember watching the fight or chase scenes from SKYFALL or the film version of THE HOBBIT? They were frenetic, loud, and packed with incredible feats of derring-do. They were exciting. Really exciting.

Now imagine being a thriller writer working today. You don’t have a multi-million dollar budget to insert precisely shot and digitally enhanced images of battles, explosions, and car crashes into your book. You’ve got words. Just words.

So, how do you capture some of that sheer intensity and split-second immediacy that most of your readers – who live in this same world of special-effects film-making – expect and enjoy?

You need to focus tightly, zooming in only on a few of the things your point-of-view character sees, says, hears, smells, feels, and, most importantly, does. Sentences compress. Secondary clauses vanish. There’s little room for extended interior monologues, elegant dialogue, and thorough, lovingly detailed description. If you want to capture the reader, to bring him fully into that short, sharp, and deadly moment, you can’t drag things out.

The good news is that your readers have watched those same movie and television action scenes themselves. And those images stay with them. So you don’t have to describe every piece of a sword fight, a gun battle, or a hand-to-hand struggle. Their imaginations work for you.

Here’s an example from  THE TRIBUNE , part of a scene where Valens is jumped by two assassins in an alley in Antioch:

“There were two men close behind me—one much taller and broader-shouldered than the other.  Both wore tattered, sand-colored robes.  Loose hoods concealed most of their faces.  Both carried long knives.

Stunned, I stepped back just as the big man lunged at me.  I threw my left arm up in a desperate bid to knock the dagger away.  The blade tore a line of fire across my forearm and then skidded off the bone.

Panting, I fell back.  I needed time.  Time to get my sword out.  Time to defend myself.

The big man flicked my blood from his knife, grinned nastily at me, and waved his comrade forward.

I spun round and pulled the stack of cages over, spilling birds and broken wicker across the alley.  The frightened doves whirled up in a cloud of beating wings.

Caught off-guard, the smaller man backed off with his hands shielding his face, swearing loudly.

In Latin.

I yanked my sword out of its scabbard and thrust it into his stomach in the same smooth motion.  I could feel it bite deep.  He screamed and folded over the blade.  I tore the sword loose as he went down.

Before I could bring my blade back into position, the big man attacked again.  He leaped straight over the body of his dying comrade and threw himself into me.

I slammed into the stone wall at my back, gasping as the impact knocked the air out of my lungs.  My sword spun away.  His dagger grated along my ribs, ripping more flesh and muscle.”

And here’s another example, this one from VORTEX , the second military thriller Larry Bond and I wrote together:

“O’Connell scrambled to his feet already running. Rifle in hand, he moved north, angling away from the heavy machine-gun fire now pouring out of the South African-held bunker. Four Rangers hurtled up and out of the trench after him.

All five men sprinted forward, dispersing on the move—spreading out in the hope that a single enemy burst wouldn’t hit them all. This gauntlet could only be run alone.

Burning buildings and vehicles added an eerie orange glow to the black night sky and sent strange shadows wavering ahead of them across the corpse-strewn, half-lit ground. O’Connell kept going, speeding past crumpled bodies, scattered gear, and torn, bullet-riddled parachutes. In an odd way, he felt almost superhuman, with every sense and every nerve ending magnified and set afire. He squinted through sweat toward the smoke-shrouded enemy bunker. Two hundred meters to go.

Movement flickered at the edge of his vision, far off to the right. Sergeant Johnson and his five Rangers were there, making their own headlong dash for the bunker. He lengthened his own stride.

One hundred and fifty meters. One hundred. O’Connell felt his pulse accelerating, racing in time with his pounding feet. My God, he thought exultantly, we might really pull this crazy stunt off after all!

Suddenly, the ground seemed to explode out from under him. Dirt sprayed high in the air as a machine-gun burst hammered the area. One slug moving at supersonic speeds tore the M16 right out of his hands and sent it whirling away into the darkness. Another bullet ripped through a fold of cloth over his right shoulder, leaving behind a raw, bleeding line of torn skin.

O’Connell threw himself prone, scarcely able to believe that he’d escaped without more serious injury.

Agonized screams rising above the crashing, crackling sounds of gunfire and grenade explosions told him that the rest of his men weren’t so lucky. He swiveled to look to the rear.

The four Rangers who’d been following him had vanished—cloaked behind a curtain of smoke and dust. As it settled, another burst of South African machine-gun fire stitched across the open ground—sweeping back and forth across the bodies of men who’d already been hit several times. No one moved or cried out in pain.

He was alone.

O’Connell clenched his teeth and tried to bury himself in the earth as more rounds whipcracked low overhead. Pebbles, sand, and torn bits of grass pattered off his helmet and neck.”

So, how should you write an action scene for a modern audience? Keep it short. Keep it tight. And keep it fast.

Beginnings

or THE GENTLE ART OF THROWING YOUR PROTAGONIST INTO THE DEEP END, WITH A WEIGHT TIED AROUND HIS ANKLES

When you buy a brand-new car, you dread that inevitable first dent or nick or scratch. You’ll spend hours looking for the perfect parking place — the one that’s as far away as possible from every rusting, but still running, piece of junk on wheels.

The rules aren’t the same when you’re writing a thriller. Readers want your shiny new protagonist — your would-be James Bond, Jason Bourne, or D’Artagnan — scuffed up, roughed up, banged up, and surrounded by a sea of powerful, dangerous, and vengeful enemies almost right from the start. If you open your story with your hero sitting down to a nice cup of tea, there’d better be a grenade flying through that window behind him by the second paragraph. Or, if you’re in a quieter mood, perhaps there’s just a ruthless villain sitting across the table with a pistol and the traditional vial of poison.

A battered hero, Marcus, from THE EAGLE

Done right, those opening scenes let you describe your protagonist through action. “Show, don’t tell” may be the oldest cliche in the writing game, but it works. You say that your hero is a man of honor? Or a crack shot? Or a master of disguise? Or the finest swordsman in France? Prove it.

“Nice theory, Mr. Larkin. But how does it work in practice?”

When I started outlining THE TRIBUNE, I knew that I wanted to write the story of a young, determined, honorable, and sometimes reckless, Roman officer, Lucius Aurelius Valens. I knew how the deadly mystery he would face would unfold throughout the novel. But I needed an opening, a situation that would test him right from the start.

I found that perfect opening in a minor scene in Robert Graves’s classic, I, CLAUDIUS. And Graves grabbed it right out of history — from Tacitus’s THE ANNALS:

“When [Gnaeus Piso] reached Syria and the legions, he began, by bribery and favoritism, to encourage the lowest of the common soldiers, removing the old centurions and the strict tribunes and assigning their places to creatures of his own or to the vilest of the men, while he allowed idleness in the camp, licentiousness in the towns, and the soldiers to roam through the country and take their pleasure.”

Throwing someone like Lucius Aurelius Valens into a mess like that means only one thing. A single word. Starts with a “T.” Trouble.

If that sounds like fun, you might just like THE TRIBUNE, which is now an eBook available through Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk for the princely sum of $2.99. If you’re interested, you can pick it up here.