Ranks of Bronze э-1

by David Weber

  Vibulenus brought the iron-bound edge of his shield down as he stepped over his fallen opponent. Bones and teeth splintered at the blow; and another warrior, with a clear look at the tribune's torso, thrust with all his strength.

  Vibulenus pitched backward off the quivering body which his hobnails gouged. There was a dent in his breastplate, centered and between the fifth and sixth ribs. The iron spearpoint had doubled back for three inches. While the warrior tried to swap ends for another stroke, a legionary crushed his face with the ferule of a javelin.

  The natives' blood was pale, and it had an odor like that of raw wool which struggled with the scent of trampled vegetation.

  The tribune, half supported by a soldier whom he did not bother to thank or even look at, staggered back to his feet. Every time he drew in a breath there was a sharp pain where the spear had struck him; but even if it were a cracked rib rather than a bruise, he could still function.

  He could still kill.

  The fighting was beginning to open out now that the nearest surviving warriors had experienced enough of the legion's onslaught to press away from rather than toward the swordblades. A knot of the enemy had been cut off on a hillock twenty feet in diameter and no more than three feet higher than its immediate surroundings.

  The warriors stood in a ring, shoulder to shoulder. Perhaps because there were no others immediately behind them to foul their strokes, the circle was defending itself ably. The height advantage permitted the long-armed natives to strike down at the eyes of legionaries attacking them, and that too contributed to the hillock being bypassed instead of overrun.

  The soldiers fighting here had won many battles since they marched away from Rome; and these were the men who survived.

  Titius Hostilianus, the soldier who had taken out the native who speared Vibulenus, paused to consider the defended hillock. There were twenty or so warriors here, and at least half of them bore shields painted solid blue in distinction to the multihued array of their fellows. A legionary lay at their feet. He had bent the stabbing spear when he fell on it, but its black iron point still projected through the back of his neck and spine.

  Titus nodded and started to edge around the hillock. Vibulenus halted him with the flat of his bloody sword.

  "Kill that one," ordered the bareheaded tribune, pointing the weapon toward the center of a blue shield four feet away.

  The native snarled like a furious cat. His spear rang on the sword, forcing the tribune's arm down.

  The shank of Titius' javelin had bent the first time he stabbed with the point. He scowled at Vibulenus, then eyed the native who flashed his blade through the empty air in threat.

  Grunting, the legionary hurled his javelin. The ferule's four-sided spike tore through the shield and the warrior's throat.

  Gaius Vibulenus jumped into the gap, even as the native pitched backward. The Roman's shield thrust the warrior to his left sideways, off the gravel knob, and a sword slash hamstrung the native to his right.

  Warriors turned, crying out at the sudden threat in their midst. A spear cut the tribune's left thigh and another wedged its point in the crack of his clamshell armor, breaking one hinge and gouging into his right armpit despite the resistance of the spreading bronze.

  Everything was white pain. He swung about him like a blinded bear, striking but not harming his assailants. Then he stumbled to his knees in the midst of orange-skinned bodies, Niger supporting him by one shoulder and Clodius Afer by the other.

  It had taken the nearest soldiers only seconds to clear the hillock once the ring was disrupted. Thanks to that and to armor with which the natives had not dealt before, Vivulenus had no wounds that were not superficial.

  He hurt as if he had rolled naked in nettles.

  "Are you fucking crazy?" wheezed Niger. One front tooth was broken, and his face was cut from his upper lip to the left cheek guard. When he spoke, he sprayed blood as well as spittle. "What're you fucking doing?"

  "Needed the height," the tribune mumbled back. "Had to be able to see." And speaking the words, he straightened his legs to use the vantage point for which he had risked his life.

  It was hard to concentrate on what he had to know as an officer in the midst of battle. It would have been easier to block severe pain, a limb crushed or the shattered-glass jaggedness of breathing with an arrow through the lung. Vibulenus felt instead that ants were crawling over him, gnawing and dribbling a poison from their tails that made his flesh burn and veins throb.

  Courage can overcome agony, but it has too diamond-like a focus to deal with amorphous discomfort.

  Vibulenus squinted, not because of the sun-which was too high now to interfere-but so that he could direct his attention where he wanted it. His vision kept flashing nervously from the battle scene as a whole to the centurions supporting him: Niger stolid, despite the cut in his face, but Clodius Afer visibly worried about the tribune's mental and physical state.

  "No, it's all right," Vibulenus muttered. "It had to be done that way."

  When he had spoken the words, which were not a lie if understood in more than a strictly military sense, his mind reasserted the control it needed and cooled his body to a support which did not intrude.

  The ten cavalrymen on the legion's left had held. The relief of seeing the armored riders hulking in place like so many fortresses, their visors raised to display the horror of their features, jellied the tribune's knees for an instant so that he sagged again into the grip of the two non-coms.

  It did not seem that the natives had made any attempt to attack the armored riders. The fear of monsters mounted on other slavering monsters would have worn off in time, but the crushing advance of the Roman infantry had left no time. The bodyguards were walking their beasts forward to keep pace with the legion. The warriors before them were beginning to stream away from the battle, able to do so safely because they were not anchored by contact with a foe who would slaughter them from behind.

  The central mass of the copper-skinned enemy, as far as Vibulenus could see, was struggling in panic. Roman shields pressed back the warriors so fiercely that those who knew how assured was their doom if they stayed were, nonetheless, unable to flee.

  Rising to his full height, craning his neck-he should have had a horse, but he would not have accepted one of the carnivores available even had it been offered- Vibulenus scanned the undulating ranks of the legion.

  Success had disordered the Roman lines somewhat; but because neither pursuit nor severe irregularities of terrain were involved, the rearmost pair of ranks had retained cohesion. Even more coolly reserved was the command group, its members visible more from the height of their mounts than because of the tribune's low vantage point. Falco; the Commander; and the ten remaining guards jutted up above the eagle standard, while the trumpeter and hornblower were hidden by the waving crests of the legionary infantry.

  The Commander had retained the guards whom he had not sent to the left flank. What in the names of Jove and Hades was going on at the legion's right?

  "Prepare to disengage the Tenth Cohort," said Gaius Vibulenus with such startling clarity that he could be heard by everyone within spear's length of him despite the sounds of battle. "We will reverse to the right flank while developing any hostile threats to the legion's rear."

  "Threat?" said Niger, stepping up on his toes to see what had led to the unexpected order.

  The cackling triumph of thousands of natives sweeping toward the command group from the right flank was more answer than the tribune had time to give.

  "Get the trumpeters and standard bearers, Niger." said Clodius Afer in instant decision. "I'll see what I can do to the front and send some non-coms back."

  Men promoted for courage were going to drift forward in battle, even if they would be of greater military benefit keeping control of ranks as yet uncommitted. Usually that stiffening of the front line came at very little cost. In the present circumstances, where the cohort had to execute a complex manuever from the re
ar, lack of centurions and file-closers in the disengaged ranks wouldn't make matters any easier.

  "About face!" Vibulenus shouted as he stepped off the hillock, stumbling on one of the tumbled native bodies because his foot had not lifted as high as he intended.

  Niger slapped the tribune's shoulder in friendly benediction as the two childhood friends went off on separate errands of slaughter. The non-com's round-faced boyishness contrasted with the taller officer's youthfully-delicate features; and both visages contrasted even more with the hard-souled men who lived beneath the skin.

  "Form your cursed ranks, you chaff-brained loafers!" Vibulenus shouted as he continued his staggering path back through the cohort. The pilus prior had not bothered to assign the tribune a task because there was no need to do so: Vibulenus was going to lead them from the cohort's new front, "About face, the fun's behind us now, boys!"

  The tribune sheathed his sword to free a hand, stripping off blood on the sheath's tight lip because he did not have time to wipe the blade first. It was a bad way to treat a faithful weapon, but there wasn't any slack just now for human beings either. He physically rotated the nearest legionaries as he passed them, men who were nervous about turning their back on enemies but were unwilling to cold-bloodedly ignore an order so baldly put.

  A few of their fellows followed the example and shouted orders. Then, as Vibulenus stepped through the sixth rank, two of the cohort's trumpets began blowing the four-note recall signal.

  One of the rear-rank soldiers was a Capuan named Hymenaeus. His extraction was such that when he turned and saw what was happening, it was in Greek that he blurted, "Zeus bugger me fer a heifer, here they come!"

  He started to walk out, hunching to loosen his mail.

  Vibulenus blocked the soldier with his shield. "Wait for it, curse ye! We're going to do this as I say."

  Because to meet the new threat piecemeal would mean disaster for the cohort, and for the legion whose only hope was the cohort.

  The command group was no longer a study in disinterested aloofness. The Commander's bodyguard had reined its mounts to face the right flank. One or two of the guards had enough skill to bring up their beasts lurchingly onto their hind legs so that their forepaws could ramp in the air.

  That had been enough to keep the natives back on the left flank… but the enemy that the Commander's own party faced was quite different from warriors in the chill dawn, trying to decide whether or not to attack monsters out of nightmare. The warriors who had boiled around the legion's right flank unhindered had both momentum and quick victories-legionaries cut down before they changed front-to enspirit them.

  A carnivore sprang forward, goaded by its rider or the presence of blatant enemies. It caught a native and tossed him in the air, his chest and shoulder crushed and a blunt wedge cut from the wicker shield to match the pattern of the beast's jaws.

  The natives gave back. Their front, twenty or thirty warriors across as they encircled the right of the legion, spread like water flowing against a brick on a smooth table. They flanked the short line of guards as they had flanked the legion itself… and then they attacked the mounted creatures from three sides with sudden wild abandon.

  "On the command, Tenth Cohort will pivot on the left file!" Vibulenus instructed as he ran the length of the cohort's new front. Actually, only the previous sixth rank had faced about uniformly, though more and more of the men closer to the old front were obeying the trumpets. Non-coms grabbed by Clodius Afer rushed through lines of common soldiers, snarling and cajoling in an attempt to rebuild a formation disordered by contact with the enemy.

  "Prepare to pivot," the tribune ordered in a voice barely audible for his wheezing. He had just run three hundred feet, the cohort's frontage, to reach the file that formed the open right flank of the unit's new alignment. Already exhausted by battle and emotion, he was scarcely able to breathe, much less speak.

  The men nearest to him were the ones who must start the pivot and march a five-hundred foot arc while the cohort's left file merely turned on its left boot. They could hear him; and anyway, they would follow.

  "Forward!" the tribune croaked and swept his sword out in a glittering curve.

  Striding like a bronze-clad automaton, his hair bloody and windblown, Gaius Vibulenus led his men toward the enemy. His personality was again submerged in duty, but the body controlled by the tribune's intellect had very little strength left to offer.

  Vibulenus could only pray-pray, and trust as experienced a team of non-coms as ever graced a cohort that there would be troops to support the single rank which marched at his side. He could have looked back over his shoulder, but he knew his feet would spill him if he did not watch his path. In a way, it did not matter whether he led a cohort or a rank: he had no choice but to carry out the maneuver as best he could, with however many men he had available.

  Ahead of them-his pivot completed, Vibulenus was now leading his men at right angles to their original alignment-the surviving bodyguards pitched like ships in a storm of coppery bodies.

  Two thousand right-flank legionaries, the first five cohorts, were tightly surrounded by native warriors. The light equipage that made the natives easy prey for the legion head-on gave them the speed to sweep like cavalry through gaps in the defenses.

  Rear-rank soldiers faced around and locked shields when they recognized the new threat, but here the advantage was to the natives who had momentum and room to use their weapons while the legionaries were suddenly compressed by a double threat. The legion bristled like a hedgehog, its swords and thrusting javelins drawing blood from the yelping warriors… but there was no weight behind the Roman jabs, only fear, and there were ten natives for every one who fell.

  "D'ye call that a fuckin' rank?" shrieked Clodius Afer from hearteningly near the tribune. "Slow it down, Piscinus, you're not runnin' fer a fuckin' bar!"

  The cohort's front was thickening with men who sprinted, gasping, to squeeze between legionaries already in position and lock step with them. Centurions, file-closers, watch clerks: possibly the bravest men in the unit, certainly the men to whom an appearance of courage was most important. In battle, the two were apt to amount to the same thing.

  Pompilius Niger edged between the tribune and the man to his shield-side. The centurion's swarthiness had been deepened by the flush of exertion, and blood from his cut lips splattered his forearm with oval markings. "No problem disengaging, sir," he gasped cheerfully. "Bastards run like chickens soon's we backed and let 'em go."

  The native blood that swirled and thickened on his sword, his hand, and his arm to the elbow was yellowish and anemic by contrast to the spray from his lips.

  They were a hundred and fifty feet from the swarm of enemies engaging the command group, thirty double paces measured from left boot-heel to left boot-heel. A few of the warriors who had been concentrating with mad intention on the mounted force now turned to see the Tenth bearing down on them in lockstep.

  It was time.

  "Charge!" cried Gaius Vibulenus, and lost the hard-bought rhythm in which he had been marching when he stumbled into a run. His headache was almost a relief, because it distracted him from the fire that throbbed in the pit of his stomach every time he drew a breath.

  The world in ruddy flames, and a granite fortress falling like the stage curtain of eternity…

  "Let's take 'em boys!" bellowed the pilus prior from the center of the front rank, and the cohort surged forward as if it had not already crashed to one victory this morning.

  The eagle standard fell with the Roman carrying it.

  Only two of the bodyguards were still mounted, trying with desperate mace-strokes to protect the Commander and Falco between them. Falco had his sword drawn, but the very size of his armored mount prevented him from using the short blade to any effect.

  The face beneath the gilded helmet was white with a fear Vibulenus had known only once: the moment in the Recreation Room when a ceramic spearpoint plunged toward his frog eyes.
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br />   The mounts of the bodyguards leaped simultaneously, not in snarling attacks but because spears had been thrust beneath their armored skirts. One of the toads managed to keep his seat for a moment despite the arch of the carnivore's back. Then the pain-maddened beast twisted, grasped its rider's right leg in its huge jaws, and flung the bawling guard in a twenty-foot pinwheel that ended in a crash of ironmongery and spraying gravel.

  Falco turned his head as if he intended to interpose himself between the Commander and the warriors who had been temporarily disarrayed by the death throes of the carnivores. Instead, he shouted something to his mount and slapped the beast's haunch ringingly with the flat of his sword. The carnivore leaped over the kicking body of one of its fellows even as the Commander's own mount went splay-legged and spilled the blue figure on the bloody shingle.

  Falco was hunched forward, his weight aiding his mount's graceful arc toward the Tenth Cohort and safety. The javelin thrown by a Roman desperately trying to break up the clot of natives intersected the gold-gleaming tribune at the top of the arc.

  The carnivore struck the ground at a gallop in the direction of the ship. Falco tumbled backward, turned by the momentum of the javelin which projected from his right eye. His helmet sprang away like a bit of glittering waste stained green by the ill-hued sun. The iron point poking through the back of the tribune's skull had knocked away the gilded bronze.

  The natives pausing to complete the slaughter of the command group looked up to see the front of the cohort sweeping toward them as a wall of bronze and iron and vermilion. The legionaries who had not been engaged were models of ferocious precision, their crests straight and the leather facings of their shields marked only by red dye and the lightning flashes blazoned upon them in gold.