Usurpers

by Q V Hunter

  They seemed to be leaving the plains altogether. It looked as if any minute they would gallop for another quarter of a mile until they trampled right over the queue of straggling refugees on the Cursus far beyond.

  But there came another set of signals and like a snake recoiling on itself, they pulled them up short. The noise multiplied as Magnentius’ signalers blew their alerts.

  Already the time for trumpets and cornets was almost over. From now on the legions had to act on standing orders issued through the cacophony of shouts and commands that barely reached my ears. Constantius’ monstrous wing doubled its speed and suddenly almost folded right in on itself. Like a carrion bird swooping its deadly wing around its prey, the thundering charge wheeled around in a colossal arc. Their deadly lances shot down from the sky as they angled them forward, pointing sharply at the right flanks of the Western infantry’s front lines.

  Magnentius troops swiveled to their right, southwards, to face the onslaught. They closed their shields hard and fast to resist the coming impact. It was obvious Magnentius’ formation had been foolhardy. Horns blew to reposition the northern-most cavalry, to bring from the river-bound rear, but they would be too late. Constantius was using his extra cavalry to shatter Magnentius’ right wing.

  And then Constantius’ killers smashed into them. A cloud of summer dust rose up into the sky. We listened to the clamor and horns for many minutes. I should have gone, I said to myself, listening to the rising cacophony, but now I can’t go, I can’t.

  The first wounded trickled in on stretchers, but for the most part, the battlefield had turned into a level of mayhem too ferocious for the stretcher slaves to penetrate. Discipline had kept the Western line tight for an anguishing half hour but suddenly, the Eastern forces, indifferent to the hail of missiles and arrows from the rear archers, recollected themselves for a second assault. With breathtaking choreography, they wheeled and reformed, and rushed forward to take on Gaiso’s cavalry legions.

  I could stand by watching no longer.

  ‘Finally getting out of here?’ the head Greek doctor asked as he wrapped a ragged thigh with a wide tourniquet. ‘I don’t blame you.’

  ‘You’ll see me again,’ I called to him. ‘Let’s hope it’s not feet first.’

  For I had decided, not with my mind but with my heart, that I would not abandon my father to this—whether he recognized me or not, whether my orders were to stay or go, and whether I had failed in my mission or merely finished it. Half of me was a Numidian provincial ready to leave these Romans to their incestuous struggle over a diadem and purple cloak. But half of me was Manlius, with the noble blood of the lost Republic hardened by my grandmother’s imperial Gallo-Roman valor.

  The future of the Empire was also my future, our future, to lose.

  Back on my horse, I charged hard eastward to clear the savage battle spreading as Constantius’ troops pressed Magnentius’ back northward towards the riverbanks. I was searching through the thickened air for the Ioviani or Herculiani banners. I wanted to find Gregorius somehow in the day’s fading, dust-clogged light. With one hour to go before nightfall, the Frankish and Saxons legions were taking huge losses, literally fleeing into my path and falling mashed under the hooves of my horse, as heavily armored Syrian archers pierced their unprotected flesh with ease. The Hispaniards and Celts were holding, just.

  I was within five hundred yards of the Drava now, close enough to see the dark forms of Saxon mercenaries sinking into the shallows of the water, failing in a last ditch attempt to wade across to safety. One by one, they suddenly disappeared, trapped without warning by a sharp drop into the swifter currents and dragged down to a cold and final relief by their heavy gear.

  The Franks’ infantry were rallying and suddenly gaining on the Easterners, sword for sword. Within a few feet of drowning, they were finally peeling themselves away from the riverbanks’s deadly embrace, yard by yard.

  Now, at last, I spotted Gaiso, still in his saddle and shouting to pull the Frankish ranks tighter. One of Constantius’ faceless riders, an enormous clibanarius was tearing towards the hunter. That was my cue. Drawing my sword, I galloped into the fray, between skirmishes, until I had reached him. I rounded on the steeled horseman who had just started slashing at Gaiso’s flank.

  The Easterner kicked his horse away to elude me and I raced after him, but leaning forward in my saddle, I saw nothing I could aim my sword—not a single inch of exposed human flesh. This rider was a veritable Achilles, but without a single vulnerable heel. And there were thousands upon thousands of them all battling all around me.

  I finally got into position at the left rear of his horse and without any chance to think, I poised my my spatha point straight into the root of the horsetail swishing at my knees and rammed it home the one place a horse needed to leave unarmored.

  The horse whinnied in agony and reared up in pain. My blade had found its target. As Constantius’ cavalryman clung to the agonized steed, Gaiso had not missed his chance behind me. I had wheeled around in a dash to safety. Gaiso saw his moment from the other side and ran his own spatha clean across the animal’s unarmored belly before he fell back to earth. Together we had downed man and horse.

  A second enemy horseman was close to attacking me. Like a mad peasant, I’d gone into battle without a shield. My helmet was merely the leather riding helmet of an agens and my legs were bare of any metal protection. He swerved away from Gaiso’s blood-drenched weapon and pulled his glittering axe, lifting it to slash at my reins and detach my forearms from my hand. Any second now, he would have my limb dropping into the churned up mud below my foot.

  Gaiso’s sword blocked the man’s mailed elbow, denting only the metal, but opening the enemy’s breast to a stab of my sword just above his neck plate. My thrust met flesh, he bled, and sank slowly off his horse.

  ‘Get a shield, messenger boy!’ Gaiso shouted—or at least I think that’s what he said—through the deafening noise. He signaled for me to follow him. I raced after his horse, kicking my own terrified postal mount to keep up with his war-hearty stallion.

  This was what Gaiso lived for. He grinned back at me, his reddened cheeks blanketed filthy with dust and sweat. It was the hunt all over again, another sunny autumn morning, innocently chasing a boar. But this time our lives were at stake and all around us, men were falling like hunted animals. Some of them rolled in their armor cages. Warhorses were trained to avoid men underfoot but the flailing metal objects pouring with blood confused them. The noise was deafening.

  There was an hour somewhere when my despair started to lift. It seemed that what the West had lacked in armor, we could make up for with a quicksilver brute strength and creative courage these Easterners lacked. They relied too much on their steel carcasses. Shorn of a helmet or armored horse, the Western men didn’t break and fun like Persians when their line was shattered. A German’s ferocity or the Celt’s quick wits were carrying more moments than then lost.

  The tide shifted in Magnentius’ favor, then against him, and then who knew? I battled on, breathing hard, thirsty, terrified. I realized there here were no more lines, no more assaults and no more horns blowing to call us to retreat and safety. Bewildered in the slaughter, officers were now just fighters. There were no longer two armies, just Roman men fighting Roman men in a slaughter without strategy or boundaries.

  I’d lost Gaiso in the chaos. I went on and on, slashing and kicking. I fought off three, four, five, six, and now I had lost count past the first dozen, always relying on my eye to find the soft flesh somewhere on the heavy-footed enemy. I killed some and discouraged others and only hoped that these were enemies of the Commander. I no longer heard anything distinct, but just went on like this, each bout with an Eastern soldier lasting an eternity or an instant. I lost track of time, heard nothing but my own terrified, exhilarated breath and the panting of my courageous horse. The lowering sun touched the tips of trees in on the distant slope behind our position but if the day was ending, the battle
raged on.

  Surely it was over for the day. Yet no horns sounded retreat. The valley of Mursa was a mass of killing. I saw no one I knew in the fray. I’d lost Gaiso hours ago. I now galloped towards the south, hunting for any officer or standard I could recognize. An Eastern hellhound gave chase and caught up with me, plunging his long contus at my side, but missing again and again as my sturdy little horse dodged and turned at my command. Perhaps he thought he was simply avoiding a traffic jam or lumbering obstacle on the Cursus Publicus but he was holding steady underneath me. The fighter was well beyond my reach. I had to escape him or die.

  I was again pinning my very life on Gaiso’s tricks, making the other man’s animal twist and turn, aiming for its eyes or unarmored knees, leaning low in my saddle to dodge the deadly lance that kept me at bay. Finally, I made a break for it and spurred my horse to charge as fast as he could go towards the Drava, to a high point where the water had eaten away part of the bloodsoaked bank. The featureless horseman took my bait and stormed after me, his lance tapping with frustration on my horse’s flank, missing again and again. We were heading straight for the black waters rushing below, then I wheeled my agile mount clear of the drop and watched as my pursuer’s momentum carried his heavy weight clean over the shard of crumbling earth and down on into the sucking mud up to his knees.

  I caught sight of no one to tell me what was happening. No one knew. It was sunset now and still I had found no sign of Gregorius or his legionaries. I took down more than half a dozen heavy-clad men in bouts lasting what seemed forever on the strength of mad indifference to death and deft agility. I realized I was going to fight forever until I died and joined the thick landscape of corpses and groaning wounded blanketing the field. At least I wasn’t going to die inside a metal coffin like these enemy riders.

  Now yet another one Constantius’ relentless devils made for me. I gripped my knees tight to my exhausted horse like an obstinate Numidian warrior out of my mother’s legends. She had always said that I was as stubborn as a mule. Now it was paying off as I postponed my death through sheer bloody-mindedness. Rising up in my saddle, I got one deep stab right into his horse’s whinnying mouth when it bucked with fear, but as it reared away in pain, it yanked my sword right out of my sweaty hand.

  Then horse and enemy descended down on top of my smaller horse. We all crashed together into the mess of blood and white gore spreading underfoot. A second Eastern horseman reined in but his horse refused to trample me. I rolled to safety from the hooves and with only my pugio in hand, slashed at the horse’s shins. I got at the small swivel knife hidden in my boot cuff and had two hands working now, back and forth, to catch his horse’s kicking fetlocks. Deadly hooves pounded all around me, as the Easterner struggled with his horse to finish me off. The horse disobeyed again and again, flashing target spots I missed over and over. I waited for the blow from the fallen rider to come up behind me and dodged sideways only just in time. I was ready to take on them both if I had to. My postal horse had galloped away, no doubt to search in panic for the familiar pavement of the Cursus.

  Then suddenly the Eastern horse and rider were gone, and the second enemy gone as well, all of them pulled back by horn signals I’d only missed. It was completely dark. Brutal duels and clashes rang out only yards within my reach but nearly invisible.

  There was so little moonlight, my Eastern horsemen had given up. They could no longer make me out as alive or dead among the limbs, no longer even see me among the heads and torsos flung onto the ground at every turn.

  The two armies were still fighting, but fighting blind as ghosts in the near-pitch black.

  Wary and panting in the blackness, I struggled for my balance, both blades held out ready ahead of me. I waited for my next foe. I had no thought in my head but killing.

  I started to walk, keeping the river at my back and ignoring the pleas for help that rang out in the night on either side. A clibanarius lumbered towards me on foot, his lance point racing towards my heart as I stood dumb and paralyzed, too tired to escape its aim. Then he fell over, dead right at my feet, his helmet crashing onto the shield of another fallen man.

  He had collapsed from some invisible wound or simple heat and exhaustion. I stared down at him, my dagger waiting, almost willing him to rise up again and fight as hard for life as I was fighting. But he didn’t move. Riderless horses galloped past me, slapping my dazed face with the foot loops and saddle ropes now emptied of man and weapons.

  I felt dizzy but no pain. I suspected I had been struck somehow on the head or wounded. I wonder if a kind of shock was moving me along on my way to the Underworld. I had seen men in Dr Ari’s medical tent unable to understand what had happened to them, and perhaps I was one of them now.

  I heard wails of pain and horror and more desperate animal grunts all around me. I crouched and moved forward, hoping no one would launch a fresh duel that I no longer had the will to repel. Splashes and shouts of victims fighting their way out of the river behind me gave me the direction of the Drava. Clouds obscured the moon. The tents must be half a mile to my right and the medic’s tents farthest away, along to the south. If I crawled along in this blackness, would I survive and return to life? Thousands upon thousands of dead men’s parts strewn across my answered ‘no.’

  I slipped and fell. I rose again and slipped again. In the distance I saw torches moving. They might belong to either side, whichever had won, if any had won at all.

  I stayed well clear of those moving flames. I crawled slowly, feeling other men’s helmets, boots, shoulders, bellies and ears under my groping fingers. I crawled aiming for the medics’ tents.

  I was crawling through an abattoir. My hand fell on another man’s fingers, still warm, clutching empty air. I stopped, disbelieving. I groped and peered at the hand wearing two rings. I gathered my strength and tried to pull the man up by the arm, hoping to drag him to rescue if he still breathed, but the arm came away with a sucking sound from the muck in which it had sunk. It was still bleeding. I explored around in the dark and it was as if the fingers I searched gripped at my heart. An army runner passed me carrying a flaming torch and by the frightening illumination I stared down at the rings. These were the very jewels I’d seen patting dispatches in my satchel bag and the same rings I’d witnessed on fingers signing off letter after letter.

  I was trying to save the butchered limb of Marcellinus.

  Carefully, ignoring the chaos all around me, I removed the rings for safekeeping to give his wife back in Augustodunum, as witness to his bravery to the last. With groping hand, I searched around me for the man himself.

  I turned up nothing a grieving widow would welcome.

  I crawled on, around dead horses and over men groaning for water. Other men were still on their feet, plunging here and darting there as they scavenged corpses for weapons, Eastern or Western, to fight on in the blackness. Some chased horses to regain their advantage. Some were skulking, trying to make a run for it. I gathered up a fresh sword and shield for myself, hardly knowing whether it marked me for one side or other, it was so covered in mud. All around me now, men kept on fighting in a morass of confusion.

  Moving faster now on foot, I skirted a small unit of cursing Franks fending off a pair of mounted clibanarii with determination. They didn’t need me. I hunted for an available horse, but every animal I found bore horrible wounds as it stood stockstill trembling in shock or laid itself into its muddy grave with gums bared in pain.

  I must have circled in panic. I found myself at the river again. It glinted like a liquid sword itself now in the dim light, but where there had been no crossing to safety, now thousands of bodies stretched out as if the riverbank had molted into a new and ghostly metal shore. It made for an eerie pontoon of dead men stretching halfway across the water but no farther.

  I saw more dead than anyone would ever be able to count. I huddled by the river, resting and shaking next to my shield. Some men found new fights to fling themselves at in the blackness. I was d
one with heroics. I’d seen enough and yet now saw no one. Although I wanted to lie low in the gloom, there was only one thing left. I knew that any of these stubborn heroes might be Gregorius himself, so I shifted my steps until I stumbled on two or even three men at a time, entangled in each other’s arms or weaponless and gouging at each other’s faces with muddied, bleeding fingers.

  One man, part of a mob so covered in dirt and blood, I could no longer determine which side he was on, and tried stabbing at my back. He just missed my right shoulder but when I saw that he had just felled an Hispaniard and was going for a final, fatal blow at the man’s bare head, I rounded on the Easterner and aimed for his neck with a swing of my sword. The blow was incomplete but he dropped his weapons and sank onto the ground trying to hold his head on, to close the deep gash. I kicked the Easterner aside and grabbed the Hispanic survivor by his good arm. There was a sickening sound of sucking mud as I left him up and dragged him forward, towards the medics’ tents. He was gasping and sobbing as he looked down at the remainder of his other arm, now so chopped and hacked, it was probably too damaged to save.

  There was a row of orderly lanterns and torches in sight ahead of us. The Hispaniard found his footing, mumbled some thick-throated thanks and staggered on his own for help.

  But another, unluckier man wasn’t making it alone. I nearly stepped on him. He was dragging himself towards the circle of light marking the medical station. He was grunting hard but gaining only inches. His strength was no match for the sucking action of blood mixed with slime and gore.

  One hand still clenched his shield and the other his sword. They were making it impossible for him to gain purchase pulling himself forward. He had reached the very edge of the battlefield. Why didn’t he go of his weapons to make better speed towards help?

  Then my heart split in two. The soldier could not let it go because his crippled hand was bound tight to the shield’s protective planks where another man’s darts would have been mounted. Another runner raced past us holding a torch that pierced the darkness. For a second, the man and I were illuminated as if under a flash of lightning that disappeared a second later but it was time enough. I’d recognized the Commander dragging himself through the mud.