by Cass Morris
Sempronius could only stare as Rabirus sauntered away, his chin held high.
Behind him, Felix cursed another blue streak.
XLIV
TOLETUM, PROVINCE OF CANTABRIA
“Advance!”
This was not the way an Aventan legion liked to give battle. Aventans preferred to know their ground first, to set a strategic formation. Fate was giving Vitellius no such chance.
A series of skirmishes had drawn Vitellius farther away from Toletum. There had been casualties, more than a lone cohort could afford, but realizing that he had wandered near-blind into a viper’s nest, he was loath to send for Mennenius and risk those men as well. They would be needed in Toletum—all the more if Vitellius’s cohort never returned.
And now there was word that Ekialde himself, the Lusetani war-king, was the one drawing the Aventans from their security.
Vitellius arrived at the top of a hill north of the town of Libora only to see the Lusetani approaching from the east. It was a larger force than Vitellius had seen since coming to Iberia. More than a thousand, he guessed, and all of them spoiling for a fight. Their women and noncombatants had been left elsewhere, and their formation was far superior to that of the Vettoni marauders the Avetans had encountered before.
Vitellius quickly assessed the situation. Libora had walls, but they were neither high nor strong. If the Aventans did not reach the city borders first, the Lusetani would swarm over the defenses like so many termites attacking a bit of rotting wood. Fortunately, with the River Tagus on one side and steep, rocky terrain on the others, the Lusetanians had little choice but to attack the town straight-on, charging up the packed dirt road that ran through the depression between the hillsides. If the Aventans were to prevent them from breaching the city walls, they would have to block and hold the road.
So they ran, down the hill and towards the dusty path that came in from the east. Vitellius could at last be glad for the months of racing around the uneven Iberian terrain. His men would not now be surprised by the sudden shift of their armor’s weight, nor by the rolling of pebbles beneath their caligae. They had learned to adapt to these conditions, allowing them to move down the hillside with alacrity, reaching the road just a few hundred paces ahead of the Lusetani.
Vitellius had only a moment to decide whether to meet the Lusetani with a counter-charge or to take a defensive position. These were experienced soldiers. But the run down the hill had cost them effort. Better to rest their legs and let the Lusetani break themselves on a solid line of Aventan shields. He signaled as much to Centurion Calix, then cried “Defensive formation!” and rode to the back of the lines with the rest of the Edetani auxiliaries. “Pila at the ready!” In perfect unison, the front two hundred men gripped their iron-tipped spears.
Vitellius waited. He had to choose the precise right moment for the pila to be most effective. As the sickle-shaped swords of the enemy caught the sunlight and glinted menacingly, not a man of Vitellius’s four hundred gave any sign that the approaching horde of screaming, wild-eyed barbarians bothered him in the least. That was Aventan discipline.
Vitellius let the Lusetani draw nearer, nearer, and there were so many of them, hundreds more than they had faced in any prior engagement, but he could not let that distract him. ‘This wants a general,’ he thought, ‘but there is only you. Stand for Aven, Tribune, and make Mars know your name.’
“Throw!”
A single, devastating motion. Two hundred spears sang as they flew through the air, then ended their trajectory with thuds or squelches. Many of the Lusetani were able to deflect the pila with their little round shields, but the heaviness of the iron tips made the shields thereafter useless. Others found the pila were too numerous to avoid, and their bodies created the first hazard for their fellows.
On they came, though; there were far more than two hundred Lusetani warriors charging at the huddled Aventan cohorts, even if every spear had found its mark. Vitellius did not need to order his men to draw swords; the Lusetani were upon them with a deafening crash. The first line of Aventans braced to absorb the force of the charge. Sometimes, a good check with an Aventan shield was enough to knock an opponent unconscious. For the rest, there was the legionary’s primary weapon, a short sword jabbing efficiently out from behind the protective line.
The Lusetani were fast and ferocious. Their curved swords distributed force differently than an Aventan gladius, able to strike with the shuddering power of an ax blow. Aventan shields would not splinter or crack even under such persuasion, but the legionaries behind the shields were not always so lucky. The impact of the sword’s swing, with the weight of a Lusetani warrior behind it, could stagger even the most hardily-trained soldier. Like waves beating down a rock into grains of sand, the Lusetani intended to wear the Aventan cohorts down until they broke.
Vitellius initially remained at the back of the field, where he could keep an eye on the battle as it developed. When he saw his first lines falter under the hammering force of all those heavy blades, however, he knew the time had come to lead from the front. Though the centurions were doing their best to cycle fresh men up, the replacements could not always make it fully forward in time, causing the line of locked shields to stagger—and that, in turn, made it easier for the Lusetani to worm in between the soldiers. Some injured were already collapsing, falling towards the back of the ranks, blood staining the packed dirt of the road.
Vitellius did not want to look too closely to see who would be breathing his last, or had already. He had to think of the whole, of the cohort as a unit. ‘If we break,’ Vitellius thought, ‘we’ll be cut to pieces.’
He was not concerned only for his own life and his men’s. He knew that if this cohort got massacred, it drastically increased the chances that Toletum would fall. If Toletum fell, there would be no one to stop the Lusetani from swarming towards the coast and the rich cities there.
Vitellius scanned the battlefield and saw the cohort standard: a dog reared on its hind legs, mounted atop a high pole. As he watched, the dog dipped, as though the signifer bearing it had taken a blow. They were not eagles, the sacred emblems of the Aventan legion; those were back in Nedhena with Governor Sallust and the rest of the Eighth, safe from the insurmountable shame of loss. But losing the cohort standard was a mark of defeat and weakness. It would be a blow to the cohort’s morale, if they fell, and a black mark on Vitellius’s record as a leader.
He dismounted, yelling instructions to the cavalry as he did so. “Lead a sally on their left flank,” he said. “But pull back as soon as your horses start to tire! Mars and Bellona willing, we’ll need the mounts strong and fresh to chase these bastards down at the end of the day.” He had time enough to see Hanath’s bloodthirsty grin before the horses sprang into motion. Vitellius drew his own sword, grabbed a shield from a fallen soldier, and pushed into the ranks.
Once the men noticed his presence, the effect rippled through the cohort. Few military tribunes ever actually engaged in a fight: it was a political appointment, meant to thrust ambitious young men into the association of their elders and betters. To see Vitellius taking up a sword, risking his own neck alongside them, cheered the men of the Eighth’s far-flung vexillation as little else in that moment could have. Even better were the insults Vitellius threw at them as he forced his way to the front rank.
“Come on, you callow bastards! You going to let these shit-eating, piss-swilling sons of pigs get the better of you? I want these lines firmer than a Bithynian dancing-boy’s butt-cheek!”
Such were the words of inspiration for Aventan legionaries.
The clamor inside the formation was astonishingly loud. The Lusetanian swords clanged horribly when they caught at the metal-bound borders of the Aventan shields. Worse were the splintering cracks of bones splitting, the muddy squish-and-suction of swords finding bowels. Vitellius gritted his teeth and tried to set a good example. When one Lusetani lau
nched himself high for a downward strike, Vitellius swiftly brought the top of his shield up into the warrior’s chin. His neck snapped back, and he crumpled.
For a few moments, it looked as though Vitellius’s surge of inspiration might have saved them—but his men were tired. The battle had gone on for too long, with so few reinforcements to cycle through the front lines. A hard check against his shield from a Lusetani warrior rattled Vitellius’s teeth and weakened his stance.
And then, quite suddenly, the press of Lusetani eased up. Had Vitellius remained upon his horse, he would have seen the cause immediately; as it was, he had as little idea as any of the rankers, unable to see much past their own helmets and shields. Then the cavalry, of their own initiative, came thundering in from both sides, driving the Lusetani apart, hacking at them with long swords and spitting them with spears. Only then did Vitellius get enough of a respite to look up and see a sight that filled his heart with a joy it had not known in weeks: two military standards draped in red fabric, the emblems of Legio IV Sanguineus, the legion of Gades. Relief had arrived.
Legio IV had approached from the southeast, at just the right angle to force the Lusetani to turn away from their attack on Vitellius’s cohort. With their attention split, the unrelenting force of their onslaught began to fail. So cheered was Vitellius that he hoisted shield and sword anew and gave the bellowing cry “Advance!” for the second time in that day. Flagging though they were, his cohort followed his initiative, charging at the Lusetanian’s retreating backsides.
One among the Lusetani refused to give ground, however: a man whose long black hair was as thick with blood as with grease, whose yellow eyes lit in anger as he saw his men retreating. There was gold bound not just around his forearms and biceps, but about his brow, and he was screaming furiously in the Lusetanian tongue.
Vitellius’s heart leapt. Here, at last, was the man responsible for the chaos he had borne witness to over the past months. Here was the epicenter of the turmoil quaking the Iberian peninsula. All the news from the allied tribes indicated that this uprising had centered around a single charismatic leader, Ekialde of the Lusetani. The opportunity glistened like a gem in the sunlight.
Vitellius charged him.
* * *
Ekialde saw the high gray plumes reaching above the shield heading towards him, the point of a wedge of blood-spattered shields, and he saw opportunity. Here, here was a proper chance to do honor to Bandue. No merchant or villager, this, and no mere ranker among the Aventans. The man who owned those feathers would be a man of rank and worth—someone the Aventans would miss.
Someone worth ensorcelling.
The two leaders engaged each other with vicious fervor, Ekialde wild-eyed with righteous fury at the invader. Around them, Ekialde’s stalwart war-band clashed, howling, with the Aventans that drove into them like a moving wall. The Aventan commander thrust at him, and Ekialde parried with such force that the man seemed to shiver. Yet Ekialde did not go in for the kill; he meant more than death for this Aventan.
He withdrew a small clay vessel, the container for Bailar’s compulsion magic, from where he had tucked it, safe in his belt. “Bandue, look here! Bandue, take this man as your slave!” The Aventan gave no sign that he understood the Lusetani words, but thrust at Ekialde with his stunted sword again. Ekialde easily parried; his opponent’s arm was growing weak, but that mattered little now. “Bandue, your force be mine! Bandue, use my blood to claim this man!” And with a great wheeling of his arm, he whipped the clay vessel down towards Vitellius’s helmet.
* * *
The whole thing was so strange that Vitellius barely lifted his shield in time, catching Ekialde in the arm with its reinforced edge. The vessel shattered against shield and helmet both, splashing out a hot red liquid. Blood, Vitellius realized with disgust, though it seemed strangely dark and thick, and it had a pungent, rotting odor. ‘But why?’
Vitellius made to stab at Ekialde again, but his right arm felt leaden, slow to respond to his commands. With a rush of panic, Vitellius moved his shield to defend against Ekialde’s next blow.
But Ekialde stepped back, staring at Vitellius as though waiting for something. Vitellius did feel strange. Fuzzy-headed, though he could contribute that to the blow to his helmet. Tired, as though his muscles suddenly felt the labor of the past hour. Sedate, as though none of this mattered, not the hollering of the men around him, not the groans and cries of the dying.
But then came a flushing warmth crawling across his skin. His tunic and neck scarf took on a faint glow, or so it seemed to Vitellius’s amazed eyes. The strange sanguine liquid seemed drawn to the fabric like a lodestone. The crimson wool soaked up the blood like bread sopping olive oil. Vitellius could feel it, sliding across the skin of his face, neck, and arm—and then the strange fog in his brain lifted. Vitellius shook his head, raised his sword arm, and made another thrust at Ekialde.
Ekialde’s jaw actually dropped. And then he turned and ran.
* * *
Recovering himself, Vitellius raised his sword in signal to Hanath and the other nearby cavalry, then pointed them at Ekialde’s retreating form. With ululating screams, the auxiliary forces spurred their horses onward. Ekialde cut immediately up the hill, scrambling up its steepest incline, where the horses could not easily follow. Vitellius had to watch, cursing under his breath, as Ekialde escaped.
The Edetani had plenty to occupy them, as not all of the Lusetani had been swift enough or clever enough to follow Ekialde’s lead up the rocky incline. As the cavalry finished off the straggling warriors, Vitellius looked around for the standards, and was gratified to find them still safe in Aventan hands. Sagging with relief, Vitellius leaned against his shield.
Vitellius was bleeding from his right arm and his right calf—the unprotected side, likely exposed during his charge towards Ekialde. But Vitellius was more concerned with his tunic and his neck scarf. They were stained with both his blood and the mystery substance, and the fabric still seemed warm to the touch. He unknotted the focale and threaded it through his fingers.
“Latona . . .” Then Vitellius laughed. He had no idea what the Lusetani princeling had tried to do to him, but it smacked of magic—some charm or potion that should have felled him. But Aventan magic had won out. His sister’s magic had protected him.
Vitellius was still contemplating the neck scarf when he was joined by several centurions of the newly arrived cohorts from the Fourth. “Tribune!” one of them called, saluting. The others followed suit. “Centurion Papius, sir.”
“Centurion,” Vitellius said, not caring how much his weariness showed, “I cannot thank you enough. Had you not arrived when you did—”
The centurion was younger than many and did not have the hard-bitten, leather-worn look of many of his type. Instead, he stared incredulously at the bodies around him. “I had no idea there were so many of them out here. Governor Fimbrianus only said . . .” He swallowed hard. “My apologies, sir, we should have been better prepared for the engagement.”
“While I appreciate your conscientiousness, centurion, I must point out that, well-prepared or not, your arrival prevented our annihilation.” Vitellius could feel his heartbeat slowing back to a normal rate. He looked past Papius at the men gathering behind him. “Are you the primus pilus, centurion, or—” But as he looked at the ranks re-forming behind Papius, he realized there were far fewer than the five thousand combatants there ought to have been. “Where— Where are the rest of you?”
“The rest?” Papius asked.
Vitellius blinked. “Yes, the rest. From Gades. You’re Fimbrianus’s Fourth from Gades, aren’t you? Where’s— Where’s your commander?”
“We are, tribune, but there are no more of us coming.” Papius looked truly sorry to say it. “Fimbrianus only sent one cohort out. The rest are staying to protect Gades. We were supposed to go up the coast, actually, but a scout said there was a large
Lusetani force headed this way. Fimbrianus said we needed the blooding most. We’re the newest recruits in the region, you see, and so—”
“He said he could spare us best,” growled a rank soldier from behind him.
Swallowing his rage at Fimbrianus, Vitellius looked Papius in the eye. “Well, whatever your qualifications, it’s a damn good thing you’re here. You honored Mars today.” He turned to call for Calix. “Centurion, show the men of the Fourth to our camp and see that they get settled in.”
Vitellius called for his horse, mounted swiftly, and rode for the camp. The centurions could see to cleaning up the site of battle. Vitellius had a letter to send.
He stormed into his tent, causing the clerk to leap up from his desk in surprise.
“Paper,” Vitellius growled. “Take a letter to the Senate. Copy to Governor Fimbrianus in Gades.”
The clerk took one look at Vitellius’s blood-spattered, anger-lined face, and scrambled to comply. “What should I tell them, sir?”
Vitellius thought for a moment, breathing heavily. His focale was still gripped in his hand, and its fading warmth reminded him of what could have happened today. This was more than a simple peasant rebellion, more than a spat between clans. He had been sent, ill-prepared, into a wilderness of the spirit as well as of geography.
Though there was no touch of magical blessing upon him, his nature was full of a fire of its own, and the temper that lurked in so many of the Vitelliae burst out now. “Tell them that several dozen good men of the Eighth Legion gave their lives in service to Aven today. Tell them we now have concrete evidence that the Lusetani are willing to use dark sorcery against us. Tell them if Governor Fimbrianus doesn’t stop his cowardly skulking and get his full legion out of Gades, then all of Baelonia is going to crumble around him—and as Baelonia goes, so will Cantabria and Pyreneia. Tell them if Toletum falls, we shall have precious little standing between these rebels and Tarraco.” His hand clenched around the focale so hard that it hurt, but it was all he could do to keep from hurling a hapless piece of furniture across the room. The rage was boiling in his blood at the unfairness of it all, that the responsibility was thrust upon him. “Tell them that while they may not have noticed that there’s a bloody war going on out here, there are a thousand Aventan soldiers all too aware of it who would be more than happy to educate them personally on the matter, if they could kindly get off their asses and come out here to see it!” The clerk gaped at him, too alarmed at his commander’s vitriolic energy to have written more than the first few words. Vitellius came to stand over him, jabbing a finger at the paper. “Write it. Just as I said.”