They were no more than twenty paces from the bowmen now and the flames lit them up against the gathering gloom of the long grass and palms behind them.
‘Charge them!’ Cato yelled. ‘Charge!’
With a dry roar the legionaries burst into a run, keeping low, as they sheltered behind their heavy shields. Ahead of them the bowmen loosed off their final shots and turned to flee.
‘They’re running!’ a legionary shouted. ‘After ’em. Cut the bastards down!’
As the Romans surged forward, the archers turned and ran down the path. Then a movement to the side caught Cato’s attention and he glimpsed figures racing out from between the buildings on either side. More of Ajax’s men, armed with shields and spears. There was no time to shout a warning before the renegades burst out into the open and took the Roman force in both flanks. They let loose a wild cry as they attacked, thrusting their spears at the unprotected bodies of the legionaries. Three went down at once, skewered on the spear points and thrust across the width of the street under the impetus of the attackers’ savage charge. As the renegades burst in amongst them, the Romans turned to fight. There was no time to go into a balanced crouch and size up their opponents. It was a chaotic, frenzied skirmish in the fiery glare of the flames of the burning village.
A snarl close to his side made Cato whirl round and his shield deflected the spear thrust with a dull thud, and an instant later his assailant crashed bodily against Cato’s shield, sending him stumbling back, struggling to stay balanced and remain on his feet. Cato braced his boots apart and punched his sword round the side of the shield, and felt it strike home with a yielding tremor as a gasp burst from his assailant’s lips. Cato wrenched the blade back and went into a crouch as he looked round at the chaotic melee. His men, and those of Ajax, mingled in a blur of movement as the air rang with the metallic scrape of swords and the dull thuds of spear impacts on shields. Ajax’s spearmen had led the charge, and now his swordsmen joined in, well-built men - gladiators - trained for the deadliest combat of all in the arena. But here in the tight press of the village street, the training of legionary and gladiator found little opportunity for expression amid the desperate sword strokes, punches, kicks and head butts.
Cato parried a blow from his side, made a series of hacks at his opponent and then backed away towards the wall of one of the huts as he tried to spot Ajax. The lurid hue of the flames made it hard to tell one man from another and it was only the standard-issue kit of the legionaries that allowed each side to tell friend from foe.
‘Ajax!’ Cato yelled at the top of his voice. ‘Ajax! Face me! Fight me if you dare!’
He heard a laugh to his left and turned towards it, sword raised and ready to strike, but he could not make out the leader of the gladiators. Instead, a burly man in a light tunic and leather cuirass faced him. The man’s skin was dark, almost black, and his teeth gleamed as he clenched them and paced towards Cato with a heavy cavalry blade in one hand and a small round shield in the other.
‘If you want Ajax, Roman, then you’re going to have to kill me first,’ the man spat contemptuously and opened his arms to expose his chest and coax Cato into an attack.
‘If that’s what it takes,’ Cato replied coldly.
He feinted towards the man’s stomach, forcing him to protect himself. The gladiator was no fool, and blocked the blow with his buckler, before immediately striking back at Cato, aiming straight for his eyes. Instinctively Cato ducked his head and raised his shield, momentarily losing sight of his foe. A mistake, as he realised the moment reason retrieved control from instinct. The rim of the buckler snapped round the edge of his shield and with a roar the gladiator ripped it aside and thrust his blade at Cato’s chest. He stumbled back and came up hard against the rough wall behind him. The other man’s thrust came to the end of his reach and the point cut through Cato’s tunic and pierced the skin and muscle on his chest before being stopped by his ribs. The impact and sharp pain made Cato gasp.
‘Hah!’ The gladiator’s lips spread in a triumphant grin as he advanced a pace, drawing back his sword to strike again, this time a killing blow. As the sword flashed forward, catching a fiery gleam along its polished blade, Cato rolled to one side. He heard the soft crunch of the sword smashing into the mud bricks, and let the momentum of his roll carry him round before he swung his sword in a swift arc angled down so that it cut into the other man’s forearm, tearing up flesh and muscle to the bone. The gladiator’s teeth snapped shut in a grimace as he pulled his arm back and tried another thrust at Cato. This time the blow was weaker and easily deflected off the curve of the shield and Cato lunged at his opponent’s thigh, cutting into the powerful bunched muscles. The other man knew that it was too dangerous to risk continuing the fight, and he backed away, bleeding. Cato watched until he was at a safe distance, then risked another look round to gauge how his men were faring. Two were down on the ground close by, one still and the other screaming as he clutched the stump of his wrist. But the enemy had lost a man too and several were backing away from the fight, into the stark shadows between the buildings that had not yet caught fire.
‘They’re running!’ one of the legionaries shouted in triumph, and punched his sword into the air.
‘Shut your mouth and fight!’ Cato snapped, then stepped in amongst the men still engaged in combat. He saw a thin sinewy man with long lank hair standing over a legionary who had been beaten down on to his knees. Even as the renegade’s sword cut through the air, Cato thrust out his sword, blocking the blow with a sharp ring, and deflected it aside so that it grazed the legionary’s shoulder and caught in a fold of his tunic. As the gladiator tried to pull his blade free, Cato struck the man on the side with his shield, driving the breath from his lungs as he stumbled and fell to the ground. At once the legionary threw himself on the man, locking hands round his neck and crushing the windpipe under his thumbs.
‘Fall back!’ a voice cried from the end of the village. Cato recognised it at once and turned towards it.
‘Gladiators! Fall back!’
At once, the remaining renegades disengaged from their individual combats and backed warily out of range of the Roman swords. There was a brief lull as the legionaries stood and panted. The moment the last of the enemy withdrew between the buildings, there was another whirr of arrows in the fiery glow of the street. This time the archers were shooting from the shadows of the palm trees, almost invisible in the dusk. By contrast the legionaries were clearly visible in the glow of the flames. Two men were hit by the first volley, one in the leg, and another pierced through the neck.
‘Shields up!’ Cato ordered and his men resumed their earlier formation. ‘Keep your eyes on the flanks!’
He quickly looked back over his shoulder. Rufus and his men appeared to have cleared the far end of the village and chased the enemy bowmen away. For a fleeting moment Cato was tempted to attempt one more charge, to try and run Ajax and his men down, but in the gathering darkness he would quickly lose control of his soldiers and who knew what tricks Ajax had planned for them if the Romans charged after him into the shadows? He had already managed to fool them once with his alternate use of archers and a surprise charge. There was only one sensible course of action, Cato reflected bitterly. He must pull back and plan a fresh attack.
‘Fall back!’ he ordered. ‘Stay in formation and fall back, on me. One . . . two . . .’
The small knot of legionaries paced back, keeping time as the arrows continued to smack against the curved surface of their shields. Some ricocheted inside the formation, striking Cato’s men, but their energy was largely spent and they simply bruised the men through their tunics, or caused minor injuries. The wounded men had been gathered up and they clasped an arm around a comrade’s shoulder as they limped painfully along in the centre of the formation. Only the dead still lay in the street.
The small group of men steadily made their way back to the edge of the village. On either side fires blazed, hungrily consuming the dry palm
roofs and then the wooden supports and meagre furnishings within. The heat was intense in places and Cato could feel it stinging his arms and neck as he and his men tramped past, the arrows lodged in their shields making the formation look like a giant burr. Gradually the enemy archers stopped shooting to conserve their ammunition and Cato’s men finally reached the safety of Rufus’s position at the entrance to the village. The wounded were helped to the rear, where their comrades dressed their wounds as best they could with linen salvaged from the houses that had escaped the fire. Cato’s wound was shallow and he hurriedly tied a band of material around his chest. Dusk gave way to night as Cato and Rufus squatted down in the shadows to consider their options.
‘We can’t attack frontally, right down the street,’ Cato decided. ‘We’d make perfect targets for their archers, and they can come up at us from the flanks as we charge.’
Rufus nodded, then suggested, ‘I could try to cut round the village and take them in the flank and rear while you distracted them here, sir.’
Cato thought a moment and then nodded. ‘That’s all we can do. The trouble is that Ajax is sure to be expecting us.’
‘Only if he stays where he is, sir. In his place, I’d beat a retreat. He’s won as much advantage as he can from the ambush. He knows we’ll be forced to try a more indirect approach. Why sit there and wait? The sensible thing to do would be to leave a small rearguard to fool us into thinking he is still there, and then continue to make good his escape, steal as much of a march on us as possible before dawn comes. With good fortune, he might get far enough ahead for us to lose the scent when we continue the pursuit at dawn.’
‘You’re right,’ said Cato. They could not allow Ajax the chance to slip away now that they were closer to him than they had been at any time since he had escaped from Crete. He nodded at Rufus. ‘There’s too much thick scrub and undergrowth to the right - they’d hear you coming. Take half the men and work round the left of the village through the grass. I saw a dyke on the side of the village before we entered, perhaps a hundred paces from the buildings, so you won’t be able to swing out too far that side. Best wait until the flames have died down a bit before the attack, so you aren’t spotted.’
‘Yes, sir. What will you do when the time comes?’
‘Try another charge up the street.’ Cato smiled wearily. ‘What I lack in imagination I’ll make up for in making as much of a racket as possible. Right, then, pass the word on to the men. And let them know they can drink their fill. We’ll refill the canteens from the village’s water supply when it’s all over.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘How many men did we lose?’ Ajax asked as he stared at the distant Roman figures at the far end of the village.
Karim, his closest follower, looked up from the wound he was dressing on Hepithus’s arm. ‘Two dead. One as good as and four wounded. Though all of the wounded can still fight.’
Ajax considered the outcome of the ambush. He had lost two men and had killed or wounded as many as ten of the Romans. A profitable exchange then, though he had hoped to annihilate them completely, or at least scatter them so that they could not continue the pursuit. Some of his men had been in a bad way when they reached the village late in the afternoon. It had taken all his personal authority to get some of them to prepare the ambush. The rest, his fellow gladiators, had been content to make a stand against their pursuers rather than continue to struggle on through the mangrove. The small victory had gone some way towards restoring their belief in him. As he knew it would.
Ajax had a clear understanding of the mentality of the gladiators who followed him, thanks to the years he had lived, and fought, in their ranks. They lived to fight. Having once been forced to risk their lives at the behest of their masters, they knew the value of freedom and would endure any hardship and any danger rather than submit to being slaves again, or facing execution. It was as well that gladiators respected a hierarchy based on proficiency, Ajax mused, otherwise his leadership would surely have been challenged at some stage since their flight from Crete. But as long as he was unquestionably the best fighter amongst them, they would continue to respect and follow him, and obey his orders. Despite his lapse in judgement. Once again Ajax cursed himself for his complacency. The supply base had been a most useful lair from which to continue their harassment of the Romans. For nearly two months they had eaten well and rested, all the time knowing that they would have to abandon the bay at some point.
They should have quit the place long ago, Ajax realised bitterly. They had made themselves too comfortable. They had done what only the greenest of gladiators ever did - they had lowered their guard. The lookouts had failed to do their duty. He felt a moment’s rage course through his veins. The fools had cost their comrades dearly. In the months that the renegades had been at the supply base he had been able to swell their ranks from amongst the slaves on the ships they had preyed on. At the time of the Roman raid, Ajax’s original company of thirty of his closest lieutenants and the survivors of his bodyguard had swelled to over three hundred men, enough to crew both ships in the bay, and even the damaged Roman warship that had unwittingly fallen into his hands shortly before the raid.
Ajax frowned as he reproached himself again. It was inevitable that the warship would be missed, but not nearly so swiftly. As soon as he became aware that the Romans had found his hideout, Ajax marvelled at the speed with which his enemy had guessed the fate of the warship and moved to attack him. The base, all of his ships and all but fifty of his men had been lost in the attack.
Clearly the Romans were being led by an outstanding officer. Now he knew. Ajax had recognised the voice challenging him from the street. The prefect, Cato, who had brought his rebellion on Crete crashing to defeat at the point where Ajax had been certain that he held every advantage. That rebellion had failed. But there would be another, Ajax had resolved. One day, he and his men would be the cadre around which another army of slaves would rise up to challenge their Roman masters. The Egyptian peasants had suffered under the heel of Roman rule, and Ajax’s recent masquerade had exacerbated their discontent. Many would be willing enough to support a revolt. Many, but not all, Ajax thought, as he gazed at the burning village.
When Ajax had led his exhausted men out of the swamp and into the village, the headman had greeted them nervously. He had wisely offered water and food to the column of armed men. As Ajax’s men had thirstily gulped down the water the villagers brought to them, he had seen the place’s potential as an ambush site. Hemmed in by the dyke and reeds on one side, and the tangled mangrove on the other, the village was a natural chokepoint. Ajax knew that he was being closely followed by a handful of lightly armed Romans and saw the opportunity to be rid of them. Twenty men were left behind in hiding as the rest pretended to move on. The Romans had followed their trail, past the place of concealment, and then the trap was sprung. Caught between the men who had been hiding and Ajax and the main body who turned about and charged back into the village, the legionaries had been quickly cut down.
The success of the ambush had prompted Ajax to consider repeating it on a larger scale, against the main column of Romans who would be sure to be following up on their scouts. This time the headman ordered them to leave the village, fearful of the reprisals that the Romans would carry out against his village if they found the bodies of their comrades. Ajax had ordered the villagers to be rounded up and held in the goat pen to prevent any of them escaping to warn the Romans. However, the villagers had begun to wail fearfully and were heedless of his demand for them to be silent, even when he had threatened them with violence.
There had been no alternative, Ajax told himself. He had not wished to have the villagers’ blood on his hands, but the safety of his men came first. The Romans could not be alerted to the danger. The order was given to his most reliable men and they entered the animal pen and slaughtered the villagers. Years of training in Roman gladiator schools meant they were accustomed to obeying orders immediately, just as
they had become hardened to the suffering of others. It was over swiftly and when the last of the dying screams had faded, the village stood still and silent, waiting for the arrival of the Roman column.
Karim finished tying off the dressing round the Nubian’s arm and nodded at the man to withdraw from their presence. He wiped the blood off his fingers on the rim of his filthy tunic which stank of sweat and the stagnant odour of the swamp.
‘What now, General?’
Ajax glanced at him, wondering if Karim was mocking him. His followers had always referred to him as their general, and in time Ajax had come to insist on the title. Karim used it in front of other men but usually he spoke frankly and without deference when they were alone.
‘We wait for them to make another attack.’
‘What makes you think they will?’
‘What choice have they got?’ Ajax replied simply. ‘They are here to hunt us down. They must attack, and soon.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they fear that we may escape them again.’
Karim took a sip of water from his canteen and cleared his throat. ‘Then why don’t we escape? Now, while they hesitate.’
‘Because we are evenly matched. They have no more men than we do. We can kill these Romans and leave their bones to rot in the swamp. Are all the preparations complete?’
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