The Legions of the Mist

by Damion Hunter

  But before he could move to press the advantage, one of Vortrix’s household warriors, the slim, flaxen-haired man who had driven his chariot, leapt out at Justin from the chaos around them, slipping between him and the king. Justin turned to defend himself as two more warriors hurled themselves forward, and Lepidus moved up to protect his unguarded flank. By the time he had dealt with them, and the seemingly endless line of those who took their place, and could look around him again, Vortrix and his chariot driver were lost in the shifting battle.

  The colors seemed unnaturally bright in the dust, the blue of the Brigantes’ war paint and the scarlet of the Legions and the blood that was everywhere. And everywhere the howling fury of the battle roared. Justin took stock of his cohort and signaled them to move in and up as another wave of blue-stained warriors flung themselves against the Legion. Although he could see Vortrix nowhere, he could almost feel the presence of the young king in the battle around him, a presence compounded of fury and vengeance, and a will to conquer that was almost overwhelming. He shook his head and bade himself ignore it. A soldier who couldn’t concentrate on the fight at hand soon had little need to concentrate on anything.

  And still the Britons came on in wave after wave as Vortrix eventually pulled his besieging wing in from Cataractonium to throw its weight at the Legion.

  Hilarion’s troops and the remainder of the garrison, freed of the watchdog at their gates, began to move out and make their force felt at Vortrix’s rear, as they joined with the auxiliary cavalry and archers. If Vortrix’s line could stand against them, he stood a good chance of winning the day. If not… he would have to pull back soon while his war band was strong enough to break out of the encircling Legion.

  As if sensing this, the Britons seemed to draw strength to redouble their thrust with a grim determination matched only by that of the Romans confronting them. The two lines wavered and held, wavered and held, and still the unbearable sun beat down, drenching the struggling figures below with sweat and dirt, and transforming the stench of blood in the air to a choking entity that enveloped them all.

  Licinius, in a makeshift surgeon’s camp to the rear, tended the wounded who came streaming back to him, and watched the cloud that rose on the far side of the hill with bitter eyes.

  Centurion Hilarion, directing the relief column and the tattered remains of the men who had served at Cataractonium, rallied them for yet another push at the rear of the king’s war band.

  ‘For Vinovia, damn them!’ And straight and true, the column drove like a knife into the war band’s back.

  Justin staggered a bit as he braced himself to meet the force of yet another blue-painted body, and realized that he was growing dizzy from the wound in his side. He struck desperately at the man who faced him, trying to shake off that strange heaviness whose meaning he knew too well. His adversary blocked the blow, but another sword came in where Justin’s had failed, and the man’s eyes widened suddenly as he fell backward. Lepidus, still at his side.

  Justin pressed forward again, realizing as he did so, that it was easier now. Everywhere the legionaries were moving forward steadily with the Eagle of the Hispana winged and shining above their heads. The Brigantes were falling back!

  ‘Hai! Vinovia! Push ’em, lads – hard now!’ And the sea horse standard of the Eighth Cohort fought to the front of the press. The enemy moved more quickly now – Vortrix was getting his war band out while he could still break through the force at his rear. The little band from Cataractonium, with Hilarion grimly at their head, prepared to make a determined stand, while the cavalry began to move in pursuit, but the trumpets rang out loudly with the Halt, and they let the Brigantes go with a shout and a spear or two to hurry them on their way. It was just as well, Justin thought, surveying the Legion’s losses and seeing the close formation the Britons kept even in retreat, shepherding their walking wounded with them as they went. They were beaten but not devastatingly so, and the Legion would do itself more harm than good in chasing them. Best to regroup and make an end of it at a time of their own choosing. He looked up at the sky and saw that it was still only midmorning. Then as he looked, it seemed to go from blue to black and he swayed dizzily.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’

  Someone put an arm about his shoulders. It was Lepidus again. Justin opened his eyes to see his second in command, a bloody sword in one hand and his face streaked with dirt, looking at him anxiously.

  ‘Yes. It’s not deep, I’ve only bled a lot. I have you to thank that it’s not worse, I think.’

  ‘I had better get you to the surgeon.’

  ‘I’ll be all right until he’s seen to those that need him worse,’ Justin replied, and leaned against him as they joined the stream of men moving toward Cataractonium. The wounded were being loaded onto the hospital carts, and in the rear Licinius was already moving his temporary field hospital up to the Cataractonium surgeon’s quarters. Justin looked bitterly at the number who lay still in the blood-soaked heather and the wreckage of disabled chariots. If it had been a victory at all, it had been a marginal one, with the bodies of the slain almost evenly divided between Briton and Roman. When he passed the body of the most junior centurion of his cohort, lying on his back with his eyes open and his throat cut nearly across, Justin turned away, sick.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right, sir?’ Lepidus asked again when they reached the fort, and looked so worried that Justin smiled.

  ‘Yes, quite all right,’ he said, and the world promptly started to walk round him in circles. ‘I think perhaps I had better sit down, though,’ he added.

  Lepidus helped him to where the less badly wounded were waiting. He went and got some linen from the Cataractonium camp surgeon and helped Justin bind it round his ribs to stop the blood, which had already slowed considerably as soon as he stopped moving.

  ‘Mithras,’ Lepidus said, looking down at Justin’s discarded armor where the blade had cut clean through the buckles of his breastplate and the leather tunic below it. ‘Who gave you that blow?’

  ‘Vortrix the King.’

  Lepidus whistled admiringly, inspecting the cut. ‘Well, I’ll just be taking his handiwork down to the armorer’s and have it mended, that he doesn’t get another chance.’

  Justin leaned his back against the wall and waited patiently for the world to turn itself right side up again. A depression, as unreasonable as it was enveloping, was settling around him. Unexpectedly, against all the odds of battle, he had actually come face to face with the High King – and he had failed. The fact that everyone else who had taken part in today’s battle had failed as well made little difference. Justin was too much a soldier to repine because another man had beaten him in a swordfight. What was bothering him was the fact that he felt almost relieved to have missed his mark, as if there was something indefinable in Vortrix that he was loath to kill. The High King’s face swam in and out of his weary delirium until Flavius came out and cleaned his wound and bound it with fresh bandages, muttering as he did so that it was a good thing Lepidus had gone into the Centuriate because he would never be a surgeon. For a while Justin was occupied with remembering that it was beneath the dignity of a cohort commander to shriek when salve was rubbed into a wound that was no more than a bad gash. After that he lay back in the shade and watched the burial party set out under a sky already filled with dark, soaring shapes. A legionary with his cloak wrapped around his shoulder dropped down beside a little group to his right.

  ‘Gods – Publius! I thought sure we’d lost you.’

  ‘Nay, then, I’m indestructible. Where’s Servius?’ The man looked around him.

  ‘Out there,’ another man said bitterly, pointing in the direction the burial party had taken. ‘With the rut of a British chariot wheel across half his chest. And for what? For the Pax Romana, all glory to it, it won’t bring Servius back. Curse it. And curse me for a fool for joining a Legion.’ He broke off as someone nudged him and motioned toward Justin. Then he spat and said, ‘Let
him hear. If they cared enough about this hole to keep it half garrisoned… but no, so we fight double to make up the difference. Well, one of these days someone will decide he doesn’t want to fight, and then where will the Pax Romana be?’

  Justin, finding that his head had cleared, got up and went into the hospital, carefully pretending not to have heard. He diagnosed a case of battle nerves, and to make an issue of it so soon after the fighting would only make matters worse. His own nerves also were still uncomfortably on end.

  Licinius looked up as he came in. His face was pale under his black hair except for a large daub of blood on one cheek where he had wiped his face with a scarlet hand. He had obviously been working for hours and looked on the point of exhaustion. The men were through when the battle was through, Justin reflected, but the surgeons often had to stay on their feet far into the night.

  ‘I thought you were wounded,’ Licinius said.

  ‘I’m not dead, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘You ought to be lying down.’

  ‘I’m all right. I thought I might be of use to you.’

  Licinius regarded him speculatively. ‘Very well, if you’re so much at a loose end, come and help. At least you aren’t squeamish. It never ceases to amaze me how many men who can spend their time hacking each other to pieces turn green at the sight of blood in a hospital. Here, hold this, and give me some bandages.’

  He had been working steadily as he talked, and Justin obediently took the forceps and handed him the things he asked for. He felt more than a little light-headed, but looking about him he saw that Licinius hadn’t been joking when he said he needed help. He spent the better part of five hours in the surgery, fetching and carrying, holding until he died the hand of a man for whom there was nothing to be done, helping to get a legionary whose arm was to be amputated as drunk as possible first on a mixture of wine and opium, and holding the lamp as he had done when Manlius died, while Licinius tried to save the arm of another. After he had watched Flavius a couple of times, he began to clean and bind the wounds of those only slightly hurt.

  ‘Very good,’ Licinius said approvingly, watching him finish and tie a bandage into place. ‘We’ll make a surgeon of you yet,’ and Justin felt more pleased with that than with anything else that had happened today.

  Finally, when the worst of the work was done, the Cataractonium camp surgeon chased them out, saying that they had had a long day and a long march before it, and he would finish up. Licinius and Justin walked wearily over to the tent of one of the other cohort commanders where, now that the business of pitching camp was finished, postmortems on the day’s proceedings were taking place.

  ‘Hai, Licinius, Justin – sit down and eat. You look like you’re about to collapse, the pair of you.’ It was Hilarion, the freckled, sandy-haired boy who commanded the Ninth Cohort and who had brought up the relief column. He passed them wine and a plate of bread and vegetables. ‘How was it with your cohort, Justin?’

  ‘As well as with any part of the Legion, but they shook us up some. And yours?’

  ‘Also well enough, under the circumstances. But we aren’t through with them yet.’

  ‘It’s in my mind that we should have chased them,’ Favonius said moodily, ‘once we had them in retreat.’

  ‘Ah now, that’s where you’re wrong,’ Hilarion said. ‘You can’t fight the Briton that way. They were still in good order and like as not they’d have led the cavalry where they wanted it, and then we’d have no cavalry.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with fighting an enemy who knows the country better than you do,’ Justin said. ‘He’ll be running as if all the fiends of Tartarus were after him, and you giving chase like a hero, and then suddenly you’ll look round to find you’re in the middle of a marsh, and he may know where the firm ground is, but you don’t.’

  ‘Or you’ll chase a hundred of them into a dead-end valley,’ put in Geta, ‘and turn around to find another five hundred coming in after you. Or maybe the heather fired before you. Oh no, it doesn’t pay to chase the Briton when he wants you to.’

  ‘What makes you so sure he wanted us to?’ Favonius asked.

  ‘I’m not, but the Brigantes know the country, and whether they wanted us or not, they’d know how to deal with us.’

  ‘I still think we should have gone after them when we had the chance,’ Favonius said. He stood up. ‘Well, I must go. My cohort’s on sentry duty and I have to make rounds.’

  ‘Pray the gods he never gets a Legion,’ Hilarion said when he had gone. ‘He’d probably lead a grand charge for glory and go off a cliff.’

  ‘Nay, then,’ Geta said. ‘He’s a conscientious man and he has courage. It’s only that he will try to do everything by rote, with no thought beyond the surface. That and one other matter.’

  ‘And what is that?’ Justin asked. Geta rarely joined in their conversations. He was older than the rest of them and had risen through the ranks to cohort level. Men with the ability to do that were rare, and Justin respected his opinions.

  ‘He doesn’t care enough for his men,’ Geta said. ‘He isn’t cruel, or anything like that, mind, though maybe a bit overheavy with the vine staff; he’s just… well, uninterested, as if they were pieces on a game board. I was a common rank-and-filer before I made the Centuriate, and I know what it means to morale if an officer cares for his men.’

  ‘That may be what’s wrong in a lot of ways,’ Hilarion said. ‘If we go on blindly convinced of the invincibility of Rome, we may turn around one day to find that we haven’t taken enough care to see that she stays that way.’

  ‘You mean the atttiude that Rome is unbeatable and that we will prevail, simply because we’re Romans?’ said Licinius.

  ‘As it touches the Legion, I’m not sure I like that,’ Justin said, and then stopped to realize that he had caught himself regarding the loathsome Hispana as his.

  ‘Nor I,’ Hilarion said. ‘Rome has come as far as she has because of her Army, no matter what the Senate may think to the contrary.’

  ‘And if the Army changes, Rome will change,’ said Justin.

  Hilarion shifted position gingerly so as to avoid putting any pressure on a cut hand. ‘That kind of talk is tempting the gods. This campaign will come hard enough as it is.’

  Licinius stood up. ‘It’s growing late. I advise you to postpone this philosophical discussion, especially you, Justin, if you don’t wish to bleed to death. As for me, if I don’t get some sleep I’ll likely do murder in surgery tomorrow.’

  ‘Do you know when we march again?’ Geta asked.

  ‘No, but it’ll be soon.’ Justin stood up also. ‘Vortrix isn’t a man for half measures.’

  And that, as Hilarion remarked, left the Legion with a full measure of trouble.

  V

  Pax Romana

  As things turned out, the next battle didn’t come until nearly a month later. The Legion was up and ready to march in three days, which was later than the Legate wanted it and sooner than the surgeons said it could be done, but, unexpectedly, Vortrix neither came out to meet them nor mounted an attack elsewhere. They chased him up into the hills for a bit, moving northward through Corstopitum, but their scouts saw no sign of the Brigantes other than the fact that foraging parties from the column invariably discovered Vortrix had been there first.

  ‘What in Hades is he doing?’ Justin and Hilarion were making the rounds of their sentry posts before turning in for the night.

  ‘I don’t know, but you can bet he’s cooking up something evil.’

  But, oddly, for four weeks there was no sign of the war band. The Legion took advantage of the time by sending a detachment to leave the steadings around Isurium a smoking ruin and strengthening defenses in the northern forts. A replacement contingent of troops from the south was sent to the murdered outpost at Vinovia, and Cataractonium was brought almost up to its former strength. But with the Legion not even up to its paper strength in the first place, their resources were stretched thin elsewh
ere. They grew daily more irritable and more scruffy, attempting to live off a land populated by tribes singularly disinclined to have their cattle commandeered by Rome.

  A cavalry scout had come in after a few days with word of some trouble to the north, and two weeks later a very hungry Pict, an outcast of his clan, traded some more definite information for a dinner.

  Vortrix, he explained between bites of mutton, was having trouble with his war band. It seemed there was a slight disagreement as to who should command where, and several of his chieftains had been so foolhardy as to take the High King’s youth as an assurance that they would get their way. There had been a confrontation, and Vortrix now seemed firmly in command, but in the meantime a raiding party from the north had been let slip by, and now Vortrix was busy chasing Picts. They were horse hungry, the outcast said, and had directed their efforts at the Brigantes’ northern pastures where the new chariot horses were schooled.

  It was unlikely that the Picts could stand against the war band long, but Vortrix needed those horses badly and the opinion in the Roman camp was that he wouldn’t tackle Rome until he had them. There was some talk of catching him while he was busy with the Picts, but it was vetoed on the grounds that to pursue Vortrix that far north would stretch their manpower and supply lines dangerously thin. Besides, the Picts were just as likely to switch sides if given an opportunity of fighting Rome with the Brigantes’ support, and the tribes who lay between the Brigantes’ land and the Picts’ were restless enough already.

  So the outcast was given a new cloak and enlisted as a permanent spy (payment for information delivered only), and all the Legion saw of Vortrix as they pushed northward was a few skirmishes between rival scouting or foraging parties. The column kept close enough on the High King’s trail to inconvenience him, but not close enough to risk an open battle with the Picts, who were, after all, outside Roman jurisdiction for the most part. They halted north of the auxiliary fort at Trimontium, among the birch and hazel woods and the billowing moors of the old northern province of Valentia, and waited.