Gradually the rebellious lord and his two allies had moved so that they stood beside Marbod, four in a row, glaring at Ranvig.
“You are oath-sworn to me,” Ranvig said when they had finished shouting, “but if you wish to fight the Romans in one charge like stampeding cattle, I will release you from your oath to me. It will make the ravens happy.” He swung around to look at the arguing crowd of men behind him. “Any man of mine,” he said deliberately, “who wishes to ride with them is free of his oath.”
There was a surprised murmur and then a shout, and a small wave of men spilled forward. Fiorgyn narrowed her eyes as she counted them. Hotheads and quarrelers every one, men who were berserkers in battle and trouble at home. Every man among them had been called before the council over and again for provoking some grievance.
They slammed their spears against their shields and shouted that they would lay the Romans in a red grave. Arni started to move, and Fiorgyn dug her fingers into his arm. “No! Not you!”
* * *
“Where in the name of Pluto and Persephone are they?” Velius Rufus was an unlikely sight sitting on the edge of his camp bed in his undertunic, with his bowed legs wrapped in a blanket. His thick shock of hair was flattened at the back from the pillow, and his expression was pop-eyed and wrathful.
“Out there,” the decurion of the frontier scouts said. “And that’s about as good as we can get.” He was dressed in German breeches and wolfskin jacket, with sheep’s-wool leggings for warmth. His hair was long and braided like a German’s, and he had a bristly beard going gray around the chin. The cultivated Latin of an educated man was incongruous when he spoke.
Velius Rufus snorted. “And you cross-eyed fools have managed to lose Marbod, too? This isn’t a game of hide-and-go-seek with your sister!”
“He isn’t lost,” the frontier scout said, “but he’s moved east, presumably to meet up with the Semnone warriors, and they’re none of them sitting still long enough to make a count or pin down their base camp.” He wasn’t impressed with the general’s temper. He’d been out with his men for three days, crawling through bogs and forests so thick a man couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, and if no more of the Germans had been found than traces of old campfires, it was because they were taking pains not to be. He leaned one hand on the tent’s center pole, waiting for orders. He was cold, wet, and more than annoyed with his own lack of success, and he didn’t feel much like standing at attention, but he knew Rufus well enough not to sit down unless the general said to.
“I left orders to be waked up when you came in,” Velius Rufus said, “because we are supposed to be fighting the Germans, not bouncing around like hoptoads trying to find them! That was on the assumption that you would have found them because that is what the army pays you for, not for looking under a few bushes and coming sniveling back to me that you don’t see any Germans! If the rivers freeze again this winter, you’ll see Germans coming up through the hypocausts if we don’t catch up to them now. And as you may have noticed while you were out picking flowers, there isn’t a whole lot of fighting weather left. This army is breaking camp tomorrow and heading for where you think the Germans have gone, but I don’t want to chase ’em so far that they come circling back on our rear. So get your rear onto your horse and hop it out of here, and don’t show your face in my camp again until you can point a pilum at the Germans!” Rufus lay back down on his camp bed and pulled the blanket up over his ears. It was as cold as a Vestal Virgin in the German mountains at night.
“I hear and obey, lord.” The decurion salaamed, Eastern fashion, and Rufus chuckled under his blanket. The frontier scouts never had had any respect, but if anyone could find the Germans before the Germans found them, it was the scouts.
“Go and get something to eat first,” Rufus growled. The cold wind whipped in under the tent flap as the decurion lifted it. “Go and wake up a cook. It’s a fine night to try to start a fire.”
* * *
In the morning, the army was on the march. The camp’s defenses were destroyed at first light (no Roman army ever made the enemy a present of a fortified camp), and they moved out through the knee-high mist that came from a tributary of the Moenus and still rolled along the high valley. The four British legionary detachments and the auxiliary cavalry, in scale armor over their gold and scarlet, went in the vanguard. The auxiliary infantry fanned out ahead of them to scout the way, and the pioneers marched behind them to clear it, if necessary, to let the bulk of the legions pass in battle order. Behind the pioneers were the emperor Domitian with his staff, his Praetorians, and his generals Velius Rufus and Julius Frontinus, and then the gilded Eagles of five legions, with their troops marching six abreast: the Twenty-first Rapax and the four garrison legions of Upper Germany, the Eighth Augusta, the Eleventh Claudia, the Fourteenth Gemina, and the First Adiutrix.
With them were the legionary cavalry, the artillery mules with disassembled field catapults, the generals’ personal baggage, and, at the rear, just ahead of another auxiliary unit of foot troops and cavalry, the legionary baggage carts, the hospital wagons, and any civilians who had the general’s permission to be there. Those who didn’t, the most determined of the camp followers and entrepreneurs, would be strung out behind, at a safe distance from any official eye but close enough to catch up to the baggage wagons for safety if things got hot.
Correus, riding with the legates of the other German legions, just ahead of their column, could see the shadow of the Eighth Augusta’s Eagle flung out on the trampled meadow to his left as the mist burned off, but it was the baggage wagons that he had his mind on. Against his better judgment, he had sent the children back to Moguntiacum with Eumenes and their nurse (Eumenes cursing nonstop under his breath), and let Ygerna come with the column. It was probably safe enough, but he had never done it before, and he had argued against it furiously, while Ygerna just sat there and said, “I am coming, Correus. If you don’t get the general’s permission, I will ride behind with the wine sellers and Rhodope’s whores, but I am coming.”
“Why, in Typhon’s name?”
“Because I have had enough this year of sitting in a house somewhere and wondering if you have been killed,” she said frankly.
“So you want to come with the column where you can get killed.”
“I doubt that. With almost all of five legions and pieces of four more, and cavalry and auxiliaries, and the Morrigan knows what else? You said yourself we are going to win.”
“We are,” Correus said. “But not everyone is going to survive the experience. We don’t know how many men Ranvig has got, and the Chatti fight like wolves. You never know what’s going to happen in a battle. I don’t want you there!”
Ygerna’s black eyes glowed, and her mouth set in a tight line. “I am coming! I will not sit back and wonder if you are dead, not this time! I will stay with the baggage and behave, or I can make myself useful in the hospital, but I am coming!”
He started to say that she didn’t know what it would be like, and stopped. She had gone with Julius Frontinus’s army when she was thirteen. More than the other legates’ wives, more than anyone but the soldiers themselves, Ygerna knew what a battle and an army on the march were like.
So now she was back with the baggage wagons, riding her gray mare and putting on the charm for the chief surgeon. And Correus was going to have to stop thinking about her, or he would find himself worrying when he was supposed to be fighting, and that was a good way to end up in the surgeon’s tent himself. Or worse. He had told Ygerna that legates didn’t get killed, but that wasn’t quite true. Anything that wasn’t supposed to happen could happen in a battle, and the Fourteenth Gemina still had a few rickety spots. It was unlucky to think that way before a fight. Correus pushed both Ygerna and his own prospects to the back of his mind, and tilted his head to hear what the legate of the First Adiutrix was saying.
“I hope Rufus’s scouts know more than mine,” Adiutrix’s commander said sourly. He was an
old soldier, nearly twice Correus’s age, his legate’s post the cap of an uneventful career, and he was inclined to take a dour view of things. “No good will come of gallivanting over these mountains like a pack of brats after butterflies.” The eagle feathers on his helmet nodded in agreement as he bobbed his head gloomily.
Claudia’s legate laughed. “I’ll send over some liniment for your old bones, Sulpicius, and you’ll see the world some better. It’s that nag you’re riding that sours your viewpoint.”
The Adiutrix legate’s mount was a hammerheaded hack with a jolting gait. The older man shook his head. “I’ve had this beast a long time. At my age, a man doesn’t like changes. Better to retire, maybe, after this campaign, him and me both. Find a farm somewhere.” He lapsed into thought, and the Claudia’s legate turned to Correus, kindly including him in their talk.
“What about you, Julianus? This is your first legionary command. What do you think about it?”
“I’m too unnerved to think,” Correus said frankly. “I’d assumed we’d have a new legate by now.” He wouldn’t have traded this chance at command for all the sunken gold in Atlantis, but he was admittedly unsettled by the rush of events and uncomfortably aware of his scarlet cloak and helmet crest among the purple and eagle feathers of the legates.
“The Fourteenth does seem to have gone through commanders lately,” the Augusta’s legate said.
“Ill luck,” said the legate of the Adiutrix.
“I doubt that luck had anything to do with it,” Augusta’s commander said shortly. “Grattius Benacus was a good man, and Marius Vettius was a danger to the empire, and I’m quite certain I see a connection. The only curse on the Fourteenth was Vettius.”
“Thank you, sir,” Correus said. “Mithras knows he did it no good. But I was wondering if I was the only one who’d seen it.”
“Oh, no,” Augusta’s legate said grimly. “It was plain enough.” He gave Correus a serious look. “How are they now? Will they hold?”
“Oh, yes, they’ll hold,” Correus said. He hoped to Hades they would. They were much improved, but it hadn’t been very long, and obedience had to be a habit, or it might not last.
“You’ve done a good job with them, I’ll say that,” the legate of the Twenty-first Rapax put in. “I haven’t seen worse than what you started with, except maybe the men they sent over from the Ninth Hispana. They were a mess, and it took Rufus a month to knock them halfway straight. He bounced two of their commanders, did you know that?”
The legate of the Claudia whistled between his teeth, and Correus thought of the Ninth Hispana, which had nearly mutinied in Britain. There was something wrong with that legion, some rot at the heart of it. Queen Boudicca of the Iceni had cursed it twenty years earlier, and maybe it had stuck. But he kept quiet about it. That was an ill omen for the march.
They were winding into a mountain valley now, away from the little river and toward the high pastureland and the forests of the Taunus. It was cold, and the wind whipped their cloaks around them and ruffled the horses’ manes. Correus, looking down the length of the valley, thought that it would be no good place to meet the Germans, but there was winter coming. Velius Rufus had decided to waste no more time and trust to numbers to make up any disadvantage in terrain. It was the largest army the Romans had assembled at any one place in Germany, the equivalent of five full legions, and it would be broken up again when the season was ended, Correus thought. It was too large for safety. Marius Vettius wasn’t the only man who would think of making a bid for the purple with the temptation of an army this size to call on. In the meantime, it was a comforting bulk at his back. It would be nice, he thought, if the Germans found it as impressive.
* * *
Marbod, sitting on a rock under a pine tree and chewing his mustaches, had found it most impressive. The troops that Velius Rufus had brought against him earlier in the season had been nearly tripled in number by the addition of Julius Frontinus’s legions. And for that he had listened to Ranvig at least enough to let the Romans get onto unfavorable ground – but no more than that. A pair of warriors ran through the trees, and one dropped down on the ground and scraped the pine needles away with his hand.
“Here, lord.” He drew the little valley into the dirt. “They come this way, as we thought.”
Marbod nodded. His war band was gathered behind him, stretching away through the dark forest; the Semnone cowards, who were men with no honor, would be hooted away from Valhalla’s gates when they died. Marbod stood up, and his spear-bearer put his heavy war spear and shield into his hands and checked the fine red lacing of his sword scabbard. “Now!” he shouted. “Now is the last battle, and we leave the Roman-kind for the ravens!” He swung himself up onto his horse and waved his spear. They streamed out of the forest behind him, the lords and warriors of the Chatti and the rebels from Ranvig’s camp, a wild, unruly horde that bayed like wolves as they crashed down the mountainside.
* * *
From his place on the opposite hillcrest, Ranvig watched them go. He sat on his own horse, with the cold wind ruffling his braids and an odd light of satisfaction in his eyes as the troublemakers of his tribe streamed along the valley floor with their lords before them, neck and neck with Marbod of the Chatti for the honor of first kill, first blood, first place at the victory feast after they had danced on the Romans’ graves.
“Now we fight!” Arni shouted. He was practically hopping in the saddle beside Ranvig. “Now we fight before we are too shamed to go home again!”
Behind them the Semnone warriors tensed their hands on their spears, and the Dacians in their peaked caps looked interested. It was not their war, but any war interested them.
Steinvar sidled his horse over to Arni’s and put his lean, scarred hand in Arni’s face. “Be quiet, or I’ll tie you up and leave you with the Dacians. We won’t go home at all if we fight like those fools.” He nodded at the howling mob that was pouring down from Marbod’s hill, screaming taunts and curses at the Romans. The Roman scouts had seen them, and the auxiliary infantry was already forming their lines while the cavalry and the legions came up behind them, a solid wall of scarlet and bronze packed tightly across the valley floor. A Roman trumpet sang out, and the heavy boom of a German war horn answered it.
“Are we going to let them fight while we sit here?” Arni exploded.
“Yes,” Ranvig said harshly, still watching the valley floor. “We fought once while the Chatti sat by. I remember.”
“We are all that is left of the Semnones,” Steinvar said. “We have boys of twelve in this war band. If we go home on our shields, then it will all be gone.”
“This is a shame and a dishonor, and the gods will curse us for it!” Arni shouted. His usual flyaway smile was gone, and his face was furious. “These men rode here with me! If you won’t take them down, I will!” He raised his arm, and Steinvar grabbed it and wrestled it down to his side.
Ranvig wasn’t looking at him. Slowly he raised his own arm, spear in hand, and the Semnone warriors shifted a little in their places behind him, every eye on the long white hand with the red-gold bracelet. Below, the leading edge of Marbod’s war band crashed with a scream like demons out of Hel into the Roman lines.
Steinvar twisted Arni’s arm behind him. “You will wait until he gives the signal, or I will flay you alive and find my daughter another husband.”
Ranvig dropped his spear, pointing down to the valley, and another war horn bellowed above him. Steinvar let go of Arni, and the war host of the Semnones poured down the ridge.
* * *
Correus heard the shouting and the trumpet calls from the front of the column only an instant before he saw the dark wave that rolled down the hillside toward them. He pulled his horse around and rode at a gallop for his legion, third in line in the column behind them. The other legates were doing the same, the emperor and Velius Rufus had drawn up to the side, and Rufus was shouting orders to three optios at once. Two couriers raced by Correus, heading for th
e rear, as he swung Antaeus in at the head of the Fourteenth Gemina.
“What in Typhon’s name is going on up there, sir?” the Second Cohort commander asked.
“Germans, Centurion,” Correus said briskly. “Form them up.” He looked around him for Quintus.
The Second Cohort commander slid off his horse, and an optio on another horse took its reins and galloped for the rear. Down the line the other officers were dismounting. The legions were infantry, and an officer stood and fought with his men.
Quintus pushed his way through the crowd. “Looks like we found ’em, sir,” he said. “Nasty spot for it.”
Correus looked at the valley’s width. It narrowed where the head of the column was deployed. The Germans had chosen their timing carefully. “I’m betting we back up,” he said to Quintus. “Tell them to get ready.” As he spoke, another trumpet sounded the “Fall Back and Regroup” and a courier from Velius Rufus leaned down from his saddle.
“General’s compliments, sir, and we’re pulling back. Half a mile.” He spurred his horse on down the column.
“You’ll make general yet, sir,” Quintus said cheerfully, and trotted off to pass the order. The narrow valley ahead would have kept two-thirds of their troops jammed up behind the rest. By pulling back, they would both blunt the first fury of the Germans’ charge and gain enough ground to put their advantage in numbers to some use.
* * *
Ranvig saw the column begin to back up and re-form, like a single living body, and he swung his mountain-bred ponies and their riders in a wider arc along the slope. Below them, Marbod’s warriors were screaming challenges as the Romans fell back before them. Marbod would know the Romans weren’t running, but his war host, in a battle fury, wouldn’t stop to care. Marbod might hold his own men, but never the renegade Semnones. And Marbod’s men would never let Semnones take the lead. Ranvig had given the chieftain of the Chatti an ill gift.
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