The Legions of the Mist

by Damion Hunter

  ‘Back! Back in close order, we’ve almost got them in!’ the Legate shouted, and the shield wall backed another pace. Every time a man went down, the one behind him stepped up to fill the deadly hole, and still the line held, the Eagle of the Hispana waving above them. But they were dropping fast and if they couldn’t make the gate before the Britons broke the shield wall, the war host would sweep in a torrent through the opening. Justin drew a ragged, tearing breath, thrust at a screaming dark-haired warrior clad only in the nightmare paint of the Picts, and backed another pace. He could see little before him over the shield wall; but he knew that Death in the thousands was sweeping with the unleashed fury of a forest fire across what had once been the outer earthworks of Agricolan Inchtuthil, and that soon there would be no stopping them.

  And then they were between the wall and the gate: himself, Flavius, and a ragged handful of his old Eighth Cohort. ‘They’re in, sir!’ Clemens shouted. ‘Knock the bastards back for us, damn you!’ he added, and as if in answer, the few auxiliary archers of the garrison loosed their precious store of arrows on the pursuers.

  ‘Back and in! Now!’ They pulled back and flung themselves to either side of the great gates, as the men behind moved up to slam them shut. Shoulder to shoulder against the onslaught, they jerked the bolts into place and braced them. The weight of the enemy came around the wall and broke against the iron and timber gate.

  Aurelius Rufus, his face smeared with blood from a deep gash above one eye, took stock of what was left to him.

  ‘Galba. Still with us, I see.’

  The Primus Pilus sketched a salute. A deep gouge ran clean across his breastplate and he was blood-spattered from head to toe.

  ‘I want men to reinforce the catapult crews. Strengthen all the gates – they’ll be using rams before long. And get some more wall and earthworks thrown up here –’ He gestured at the central complex. ‘I want a three-cohort fort built before they can get through those gates. And I want every man who can use a bow up on the walls now! And get a signal fire going. Maybe Victrix’ll spot it.’

  They came in wave after wave, thundering at the gates, while off to the north the allied chieftains eyed the progress with satisfaction. Justin, on the ramparts with a mixed crew of archers, legionaries, and even the camp cook, a middle-aged Syrian with forearms like an ape, was occupied with picking off the men who were lashing ropes around the gate wall. He hadn’t shot a bow since he’d been in Spain and was pleased to discover that he hadn’t lost his eye. The string went singing past his ear and another body dropped down at the base of the wall, his fiery hair stained with a spreading pool of red.

  ‘Coming in again! Mark your target.’ He had discarded his helmet to get a better aim, and his hair hung in tangles about his face. He wiped the sweat and grime from his eyes with the back of his hand and nocked another arrow. But for every man who went down with an arrow in his chest, another came up to take his place, and on the other side of the wall, shielded from the archers, pickmen had set about digging away the mortar. At the nearest catapult emplacement, one of the crews was hurling their winged missiles at any of the main body of the enemy who strayed within range. Favonius, his usually immaculate curls hanging dankly in his eyes, seemed to be commanding them, Justin noticed with mild surprise, and then his attention was claimed again by the sound of falling stone, as the right side of the gate wall slid slowly to the ground.

  A thin, pale youth whom Justin recognized as one of the Legate’s clerks came up with a bucket of water and a ladle and Justin gulped it gratefully. He motioned the boy down to the rampart floor.

  ‘Get down, lad, you’re making a target.’

  Something hummed past his left ear and the trooper beside him choked and clutched at the little feathered shaft protruding from his throat. The clerk gulped and went white, but he hugged his water bucket to him and inched his way past the dead man to the next archer. Justin, bone-weary and almost beyond fear, stuck his head over the rampart and picked off the Pictish bowman as he ducked out from behind the wall to take aim. And then there was another sliding sound and a cloud of dust and mortar, and there was no wall. The path to the gate lay clear.

  ‘Mark the lead men when they bring up the ram,’ Justin called, ‘and you can bring down the rest.’ From the crashing which echoed to his right, he knew that the western gate wall had fallen too.

  Flavius in the hospital also heard it. He was probing a spear wound while the orderly held down the man from whose shoulder pieces of shaft still protruded, and he paused only long enough to note that the gate still held. His scavenged shield and weapons lay where he had flung them in the corner of the hospital, and he was back to the work he knew. He felt the forceps close on the last jagged shard. ‘Hold, brother, it’s almost over.’

  Outside, the inner defensive wall was rising, and all he could see from the window were its builders, grimly setting timber into place. He gave a grateful glance at Octavian, stitching a sword cut at the next table. The lad had guts, he thought. He’d make a good Army surgeon someday. It did not occur to him that until a month ago the same comment might have been made about him. He was a senior surgeon now, promoted by the stark hand of Necessity.

  ‘There, he’ll do for now.’ He nodded at the orderly, who had been a supply clerk ages ago that morning. ‘Bring me whoever looks the worst. And for the gods’ sake, find me some more bandages!’

  In the corner, those of the wounded who were capable of it were tearing strips from the bed linen, undertunics, and anything else that was handy; and at the western gate, Albinus, caked with dirt and his own dried blood, was shoring up the framework and wishing fervently for some painkiller. To the northward, enough medical supplies for a Legion lay strewn among the wreckage of the hospital wagons. Flavius had managed to salvage only his surgical kit. The few stores left in the Inchtuthil hospital he was hoarding for the most gravely wounded.

  The Legate had taken one look at the state of things in the hospital, cleaned his own wound, saw that it was not bleeding much, and tied a strip from his tunic hem around it. Their orderly world had been pulled out from under them, and now they wrestled not only with the enemy but with the unfamiliar. Cooks shot bows, clerks cleaned wounds, and mule drivers took up swords and wondered whether they would know how to use them when the time came. And yet in all of it there was still a certain order, a pattern laid down by the determined hand of Aurelius Rufus. He was everywhere: positioning the catapults, heaving a stone into place on the inner defense wall (they had torn down one of the outer barracks to build it), questioning, ordering, rearranging and encouraging, dealing with each new crisis as it came with the grim expediency of the man who has few options. And as the sun began its last downward course across the sky, the gates still held.

  Half an hour later the Britons pulled back. Favonius slumped down beside his catapult. He looked like a sewer rat, his face begrimed and his hands blistered raw, but he chuckled softly.

  Justin leaned back against the rampart and laid his own blistered hands in his lap. ‘They’ll be back, you know.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Favonius said. ‘Don’t think I don’t. But there’s a hitherto undiscovered pleasure in spitting in their eye.’

  * * *

  The signal beacon was a column of flame against the night sky, but still there was no answering spark from the south, while northward the campfires of the war host were clustered like fireflies.

  ‘What’s become of the ones who ran, do you suppose?’ Favonius finished the last of the carefully rationed evening meal and dusted his hands on his ragged tunic.

  ‘What do you think?’ Justin said shortly, remembering the baying horde that had pursued them to Inchtuthil. ‘It’s best you don’t think about it,’ he added more gently. ‘We’ve sentry duty in two hours. Get some sleep instead.’

  Favonius nodded, and they closed their eyes in the weariness of utter exhaustion that banishes even nightmares.

  Coming off their sentry shift, they collapsed and s
lept again, and at dawn they were back on the wall, waiting. The ground below stretched away, alien and secretive in the misty light, and Inchtuthil stood entombed in fog and an unnatural stillness.

  ‘The Pict must be sleeping late this morning,’ a catapult man said. ‘Freshening up, like, to have another go at us.’

  ‘Wait. Now that’s where you’re wrong.’ Favonius squinted into the mist. ‘Chariots… but just three of ’em. And with a green branch, by all the gods!’

  The wicker carts rose up out of the mist almost before anyone noticed them, and drew rein within shouting distance of the fort. ‘Come you up on the wall, Commander of the Eagles!’

  ‘I am here,’ a quiet voice said, and Justin jumped. Aurelius Rufus looked down at them from the rampart, eagle-crested helmet on his head, his gold-bordered cloak impressive against the sculptured bronze insignia of his breastplate. ‘What do you want, Vortrix of the Brigantes? You may come nearer,’ he added drily. ‘Rome does not fire on green branches.’

  ‘Rome would be advised not to.’ The three chariots moved into clear view, and through the mist the watchers on the wall could now also see the war host, gathered into battle line. Any threat to the three leaders would bring them down like hornets.

  Vortrix stood in the lead chariot, stripped for battle and painted according to the custom of all the Britons. The blue stain stood out brightly against his white skin. A cloak of grey wolf skin hung from his shoulders, and his blond hair was braided and tied back from his face with fine leather thongs. His driver, similarly attired, was the lithe blond harper Justin remembered seeing before.

  In the right-hand chariot stood a tall, flame-haired warrior in a dark green cloak bordered with scarlet. He also was painted for battle, and his milk-white team danced with impatience, swiveling their small pricked ears at the voices around them. Justin caught the gleam of a golden fillet in the warrior’s red hair… Brendan, War Lord of the Selgovae. To the left rode the third chieftain, dark-haired and shorter than the lowlanders, and tattooed from head to toe in a complication of spirals and interlocking bands… Dergdian, King of the Caledones, the Painted People.

  Vortrix nodded to his driver, and the red roan team moved a few paces forward. ‘Listen, Commander of the Eagles!’

  ‘I am listening,’ Aurelius Rufus shouted. ‘Tell me your tale.’

  ‘It is this. With the whole of your army, you were outnumbered. Now you have perhaps a third of them left to you – aye, we counted them as they ran, and we know what you began with. You are a brave man, Commander of the Eagles, and we do not like to do murder on brave men, my brothers and I.’ He gestured at the allied chieftains.

  ‘Then honor the treaty you signed with Rome.’

  Vortrix ignored him. ‘I would not order a massacre from choice. Surrender and give over your weapons and live.’

  ‘Is that the offer you made Trimontium?’

  ‘There are no dead at Trimontium.’

  ‘They are dead to Rome.’

  ‘But still they live,’ Brendan said. ‘Already they begin to take to them women from my tribe. In the winter there will be babes, and their babes’ babes will not even remember that once their forefathers marched with the Eagles.’

  ‘The death of a world in two generations,’ the Legate said. ‘And this is what you offer us?’

  ‘Trimontium came willingly,’ Brendan said. ‘With you there must be a surety that you will not go back to Rome one dark night.’

  ‘If I gave over my weapons,’ the Legate said grimly, ‘I could not go back to Rome. Thank you, no. My world does not die so easily. And I have no great desire to spend the rest of my days with a Pictish slave collar for ornament.’

  ‘There are many of mine in the slave houses of the Roman kind,’ Dergdian said, his voice bitter. ‘Never again will Rome make a desolation of my land.’

  ‘Nor of mine, brother,’ Vortrix said softly to him. ‘But a certain one of this Legion gave me my life once. I would like to return the favor if I could.’

  ‘Then you are a fool. He will stab you in the back.’

  ‘Not in the back, no, although I should go wary all my days.’ He raised his voice again. ‘Still, I have no taste for murder.’

  ‘Then what of the rest of my Legion?’ the Legate said.

  ‘They were dogs for the hunting,’ Vortrix said shortly. ‘This is a different matter.’

  ‘If the odds upset you, you will no doubt be glad to know that another army of the Eagles is on its way,’ the Legate said. ‘Of course, we would be willing to take your surrender.’

  Vortrix began to laugh, an honest, pleasant sound at odds with the business of the morning. ‘Indeed I would not be glad at all to know that. But then I do not believe it either.’ His voice sobered. ‘Well, Commander of the Eagles, will you take our peace?’

  ‘I told you, my world does not die so easily.’

  ‘I should be sorry to see you die in its stead. It will make no difference in the long run.’

  ‘It is my world,’ the Legate said. He turned down the steps from the rampart.

  Below them, Justin saw Vortrix fling up his hand, and their eyes came near to meeting before the three chariots wheeled around to the northward.

  ‘All right, back to your places. No need to stand there gaping.’ Claudius Galba touched one of the men lightly with his staff. ‘Tighten up those catapults and we’ll give them a nice welcome. And put your helmet on.’

  Below him, as Justin descended, the Legate stood in the shadow of the Eagle where it had been planted before the inner defenses. Justin approached and saluted, and Aurelius Rufus looked up, as if shaking off some private vision.

  ‘An odd character, young Vortrix. D’you know, I almost believed him when he said he didn’t care for murder.’

  ‘I think he meant it, sir,’ Justin answered thoughtfully, remembering the look in the king’s face. ‘But it won’t stop him. Any sign of Victrix, sir?’

  ‘Not so far,’ the Legate said. ‘Pray for their coming, Centurion.’

  ‘I have, sir.’ A memory of the Mithraeum at Trimontium passed over him like a shadow and he shivered.

  As if in answer, a horn rang out on the rampart, and the sound of hooves swelled like thunder to the north. ‘Here they come! Catapults ready! Take your aim!’

  They were up and over the earthworks, their dead scattered by the hundreds before the catapults’ deadly aim. But they numbered in the thousands, and still they came, beating like a storm against the gates. The ground was littered with broken chariots and men, and the air hideous with the scream of dying horses, but they clawed and hammered at the gates with a banshee howling that split every nerve. Then, suddenly, above the rising tumult, through the smell of dust and blood in the air, there was another scent, faint at first, then ominously stronger – fire! – burning brushwood stacked against the gates, and the flames slowly eating through them where the ram could not.

  There was water in plenty from the Tanaus below the fort, and they soaked the inner gates with it, and poured it from the ramparts; but flight after flight of arrows came over the wall, some of them also burning with pitch at the tips, and the Britons had rigged a shelter above the blaze to run the water away from it. The air was thick with smoke as Justin, among others, worked desperately to reinforce the gates and wet them down.

  Arms were issued to the walking wounded, and to every clerk and servant not already pressed into the battle line. Flavius looked at the timber walls of the hospital and shivered. It had never been meant as a defensive position, although it stood now just within the inner wall. But there was no place to move to that would not be in the way of the battle.

  ‘Wet down these walls some more,’ he told the orderly. ‘And post some of the wounded at the windows. At least they can sing out if they see fire. I want more water in here too. Fill anything you can get hold of.’ The baths were outside the inner wall, as was the river intake. When the fighting started, the water on hand would be all they had. The plumbing was ol
d and rotten and there had not been time to repair it all properly. He gave a glance at his borrowed armor stacked ready in the corner, and went back to laying out bandages and his surgical kit. He had wanted the Centuriate originally, but he hadn’t come up to the height standard. Ironic, that.

  Outside, the smell of burning timber was growing stronger, and they had rigged up a pipe from the river intake to douse the gates. Albinus, face blackened and coughing from the smoke, stood at the end of a bucket line on the north rampart while the Legate himself directed operations below. Favonius’s catapult crew was heaving anything they could get their hands on at the yelling horde outside, while Justin had again taken his place among the archers making the best use possible of their dwindling store of arrows. They were shooting the British arrows back again as well.

  The water turned the ground to sticky mud, while the smoke from the burning gates choked them and sent them reeling back to catch their breath. It must be choking the Britons too, Justin realized, as a blue-stained figure staggered back from the gate with his hands to his face. He took aim and the figure dropped, to be lost beneath the trampling feet of the besiegers. In the end, though, it was no use. They had wet the gate from the inside, but the shelter the Britons had rigged over the blaze was sturdy enough to withstand anything they could drop on it. It caught fire itself only when the flames had eaten more than halfway through the gate timbers, and then the rams did the rest. Justin dropped his bow and raced for the rampart stairs. His place now was at the gate, where the sad remnants of his Legion began their last effort to turn the tide.

  Today the fog had burned off completely, and the sun lent a brightness and a dazzle to the scarlet and bronze of the Legion and the wild blue war paint of the Britons, as if through the mists of time an ancient struggle had come suddenly into focus. The gates caved in almost simultaneously, with a noise of rending timber, and as the wall defenses were drawn off to reinforce the opening, the Picts began surging over the ramparts as well, silhouetted for a moment against the sky before they dropped down into the fort below. They dropped, most of them, to the end of a pilum, but a few slipped through to take at least one hated Roman with them into the otherworld. Albinus, for instance, never saw the naked, darkeyed warrior who drove a feathered spear clean through him; never knew that before his body had tumbled from the rampart, Favonius had leapt like a goat from his catapult emplacement and sent the Pict to join him. Or that Clemens, heading down the rampart stairs behind Justin, had paused long enough to grab another tattooed figure by the throat and hurl him downwards on the men scaling the wall behind him.