It grew hot in our hiding place. We talked in whispers; while talking we seemed more indifferent to the heat.
Agathemer said:
"All this must have been planned beforehand and carefully and very skillfully carried out. It took ingenuity, minutely detailed arrangements and great skill to arrange that banquet so as to get all the tumultuary additions to the deputation surfeited and dead drunk and yet keep the veteran legionaries near enough to being sober to be waked up, marshalled and marched out. And it took amazing eloquence to wheedle their centurions into abandoning their invited associates. The whole thing is a miracle. I can't see through it."
I may interpolate here, what I learned more than four years later, after Cleander's downfall and death and after my return from Africa, that Agathemer's conjectures, as we talked the matter over in our nook, were correct. Perennis had formulated the plan and had prepared for it and given the preliminary orders. His was the policy of allowing the mutineers to march all the way to Rome unhindered. He, without consulting the Emperor and with every care to prevent him from suspecting what was afoot, imported a thousand archers from Crete, and as many mounted bowmen from Numidia, from Mauretania and from Gaetulia. He planned the banquet-feast, he made arrangements for the cordon of Praetorians. The massacre was his idea.
Cleander must have known of all this; he could not, like Commodus, be kept in ignorance. Either before he came to our camp, or, perhaps, in his elation at his rival's ruin and his own success, he adopted the ready plan. Most likely the separation from their fellows of the veteran mutineers was all his own idea; Perennis was not the man to carry out so bold a stroke nor so much as to conceive of it. Indubitably, after dark, the eighteen veteran sergeants were secretly called to a meeting with Cleander. The fellow must have possessed superhuman powers of persuasion. Certainly he made a long speech in which he convinced the leaders of the mutineers that their having associated with themselves tumultuary recruits in Gaul and the liberated inmates of ergastula in Italy was inconsistent with their expressed loyalty to Caesar and the Commonwealth; that by such action, they had gravely imperilled the very existence of the Republic and the safety of their Emperor. He won them over so completely that they acceded, without hesitation, to his dictum that they ought to do all in their power to repair the ill effects of their error of judgment; that the only way was to abandon their associates, to leave them for him to deal with and to march with all speed back to Britain to reassure their fellow- insurgents and reclaim Britain to effective loyalty.
So completely were they under his spell that they returned to their camp, roused their men without waking any of their tumultuary associates, and marched the whole body of veterans, in the night, across the Mulvian Bridge and on all day to a prepared camp near Careiae, where they spent the night. From there they marched in two days the forty-six miles to Cosa; whence they followed the Aurelian road to Marseilles, as we had ridden it, and from there marched across Gaul to Gessoriacum and shipped for Britain, all in half the time in which they had come.
Agathemer and I spent the whole day in our hiding place, suffering terribly from the heat, for the day was hot, muggy and breezeless, so that the still sultry air was stifling. We spared our water-bottles and made their contents last. Our bread we munched relishingly after noon.
Before sunset we were discovered and unearthed by some of the infantry whose trappings were unknown to us. We found out later that they belonged to the newly-enlisted Viarii, cohorts created from picked young men judged agile, alert, intelligent and loyal, to act as a special road-constabulary to deal with robbers and especially with the bands obeying the King of the Highwaymen and with him.
Our captors did not treat us roughly, though they bound our hands behind us effectually. They laughed over our device for escaping the arrows and commented on our cleverness. Our amulet-bags they ignored, being more interested in our brand-marks and scourge-scars. Their sergeant asked us where we were from.
"Do you think it likely," Agathemer laughed, "that we would tell you; can't you read on our backs that, wherever we came from it is the last place on earth we want to go back to?"