Lataz’s face was deathly pale beneath the weathered, dirty skin, his features stretched taut with the grinding effort required simply to put one foot in front of the other as his strength ebbed, even with his brother under one arm and his remaining son supporting his other side. He looked down at the bloody stump of his right arm, still leaking blood into the filthy rag of wool that had been all they could find for a makeshift bandage, shaking his head in despair at the sudden loss of such an intrinsic part of his ability to soldier.
‘I’m nothing without that. Just leave me.’
‘Fuck that!’ Frijaz shook his head angrily at his younger brother’s words, slapping the back of the wounded man’s lolling head. ‘If you think you’re going to take the easy way out when the rest of us are stuck in this shit, you can give it some more thought!’
Lanzo dropped back to march alongside them, casting uneasy glances at the horsemen tracking their progress less than a hundred paces to their right, their presence clearly intended to put a hedge of spears between the defeated Batavi and the Rhenus, to make sure that none of the retreating warriors tried to escape by throwing themselves into the river.
‘Not long now, eh? They’ll piss off to make camp soon enough, if they don’t want to be spread out all over the countryside for the night. All we have to do is just keep moving for another half-mile or so. Don’t tell me you don’t have another half-mile in you, you old bastard, you’re tougher gristle than that.’
Lataz grinned weakly back at him, nodding wordlessly, and Egilhard took up the harangue that was evidently meant to distract the wounded man from his state of enervation.
‘He’s right! Hear that?’ In the distance the legion signallers were blowing a different call, summoning their legionaries to make camp for the night, and the men of the cohorts cheered raggedly at the sound. ‘They’ll call those riders off soon, and we can—’
A horn sounded close at hand, but not playing the signal the fleeing Batavi had hoped for.
‘They’re attacking! Stand to! Form a circle!’
The century reacted instinctively to Alcaeus’s bellowed command, dropping the wounded men they were supporting into the middle of a rapidly form’ing defensive ring and facing outwards with shields and spears ready to fight as the cavalrymen who had dogged their steps for hours abandoned the pursuit and turned to ride in at them with their spears raised in one last attempt to break their enemy’s resolve before nightfall. A dozen riders selected the century, whose place at the edge of the pack of exhausted men made it an easier target than the units buried deeper in the cohorts’ mass of men, the thunder of their hoofs drumming in the ground beneath the waiting soldiers’ feet as they bored in with their spears lowered. Alcaeus was shouting again, bellowing at his men to give them the hope that had been battered out of them by the day’s disastrous events.
‘One last attack and they’ll be gone! Give them nothing!’
Egilhard looked about him, his senses slowing to a trickle with the usual lurch of his stomach at the prospect of combat, his sword held ready to fight, his shield’s metal rim rattling against those held by the men on either side of him as they presented an unbroken wall of wood and iron to the oncoming horsemen.
‘Stand fast!’
He nodded at Lanzo’s barked command even as the riders loomed over their circle, stabbing out with their spears at men whose own javelins were long since lost in the chaos of the fight on the Roman right flank, a fight whose winning had been within their grasp when the rest of the army had taken flight and left them standing alone, with no choice but to follow their fleeing allies’ trail with a vengeful enemy close behind. The man alongside him died with a spear blade in his throat, gurgling as his lifeblood flooded into his lungs, and as the dying man’s shield slumped to the ground, one rider, braver or more skilful than his comrades, backed his beast into the circle, scattering the defenders with the brutal impact of its hindquarters.
‘For Sigu!’
Egilhard stepped forward where most of his comrades were backing away, swinging his sword low to hack at the beast’s leg and dropping it kicking to the ground, its rider trapped beneath the flailing animal’s dead weight, screaming with the pain. He lifted the blade high as he paced round to where the horseman lay helpless, his helmet thrown half-a-dozen paces clear by the impact of his fall and their eyes met momentarily, the hapless cavalryman finding nothing more in Egilhard’s dead stare than the certainty of his death. He screamed incoherently as the sword swung down, the cry silenced abruptly by the severing of his head from his shoulders, and the battle-crazed warrior lifted it by the hair and turned to roar his rage at the horsemen milling around him.
‘Batavi!’
The nearest rider pulled his spear back and spurred his mount forward, intent on avenging his comrade’s death, but as he thrust the long blade out to take Egilhard’s life, another man staggered into the path of the spear’s lethal point, shuddering as the weapon sank deep into his unarmoured body.
‘Father!’
Gripping the spear’s shaft with his left hand, the veteran warrior grinned bloodily up at his killer and raised his ruined right arm in salute. The rider pulled his weapon free and stared down at the swaying soldier, nodding at him and raising the spear’s blade in salute, meeting Egilhard’s agonised stare with a nod of respect before turning his horse and cantering away to leave the young warrior staring after him. Horns were blowing in the distance and the men of the cohorts cheered weakly as their persecutors rode away, abandoning their pursuit for the night.
‘They’re leaving! I told you we could—’ Lanzo fell silent as he saw Lataz slump to his knees, then pitch face-first onto the trampled mud.
Egilhard knelt beside his father, turning the dying man over to look into his eyes. Lataz stared up at him, his eyes struggling to focus, gasping out his last words.
‘Bury me … on the … Island …’
The hollow-eyed young soldier nodded silently, easing his father’s corpse back onto the grass into which his blood was soaking.
‘He took the blade for me. And then he thanked the man who killed him.’ He looked up at Frijaz, his eyes wet with tears. ‘Why?’
His uncle sank to his knees beside his brother’s corpse.
‘What else was he supposed to do? Watch you die and then go home a ruined man, having lost everything? This way he doesn’t have to suffer the pity of the tribe, or exist on the charity of others. This way he doesn’t have to face your mother with the news that both of her sons are dead.’
‘He knew that the gods have other plans for you than to die here with a spear in your guts. I told him so last night, for the pleasure of seeing him smile one last time.’ They looked up at Alcaeus, standing over them with his tunic wet with the blood of half-a-dozen dead enemies. ‘Which means that he was able to die happy. But now you have to leave him here, and trust that the Romans will give our brothers dignity in death rather than leaving them to the crows. Because we, my brothers, are leaving. There’s a long night ahead, and we need to be long gone before those horsemen come back to find our trail.’ He leaned closer to the two men, tapping Egilhard’s chest with a finger. ‘And you, Achilles, you need to survive this night and the day that will follow, because the gods do have other plans for you. And you’re no use to them dead, or to me.’ He turned to shout a command at the century. ‘Get your shit stacked and prepare to march! Let’s show the men of the Guard what it means to be warriors!’
Germania, August AD 70
Marius slid slowly into the cover of a birch tree, reflexively patting its trunk in the way that he knew Beran would expect, listening as the faint noises of an animal moving through the forest’s undergrowth moved slowly across his field of hearing from left to right. He had been stalking with the hunter for a month without success, struggling to learn a completely different set of skills from the military disciplines he had spent the last twenty years refining until they were as much second nature to him as the ways of the forest were
to the German.
‘See with ears.’
Beran had repeated the mantra more times than his new pupil could remember, drumming in the lesson that to see was to risk being seen by animals so well attuned to their surroundings that the slightest sound or movement that did not fit with the background would put them to flight. Crouching behind the tree, the Roman closed his eyes in the way that he had been told, dismissing the worthless evidence of eyes that could not see his prey to concentrate on the rustling and scraping of the stag’s progress as it grazed the undergrowth. From the moment that he had caught a fleeting glimpse of the beast’s antlers against the skyline, sinking reflexively to the forest floor to avoid alerting it to his presence, he had moved slowly and silently towards it, cautious paces that had brought him almost serendipitously into the birch’s shadow. The stag’s snuffling was getting steadily louder as it approached the Roman’s hiding place, until he judged it to be barely a dozen paces distant, unconsciously slowing the rate of his breathing to reduce the chances of being heard.
‘If hunt in forest, smell like forest. Be forest. You not forest, you not take heruta.’
His face and hands were liberally smeared with a paste made from water, soil and lichen to soften and conceal the lines of his body. He had initially baulked at Beran’s order to crumble a deer’s stool into the mixture, but as the feeding animal slowly progressed through the trees to his right, almost close enough for him to have reached out and touched its flank, the Roman exulted in the fact that he was invisible to all of the animal’s senses.
‘Hunt slow. Like spider.’
In the days following Beran’s initial sharing of his secrets of the hunt, Marius had followed the hunter in his glacially slow progress through the forest, wincing every time Beran had wordlessly raised a hand to indicate that he had heard the Roman pacing behind him despite all the careful stealth that Marius believed himself capable of, until his mentor had called him to his side and pointed to his own booted feet.
‘Watch feet. I walk.’
Concentrating closely on the German’s feet, he had realised that the hunter’s almost imperceptible progress was not simply the result of his philosophy that a born hunter had no need to pursue his quarry, and that the animals would be drawn to him by the invisible power of their spirit bond to a true man of the forest, but the result of the infinite care with which he walked through the trees.
‘I look twig or branch, not break.’
Beran, Marius realised, did not simply place his feet back on the forest floor, risking the chance of snapping a hidden twig buried in the detritus that littered the soil, but slid his boot into the litter toe first, gently sweeping any such debris aside. As the German continued forward, his pupil realised that he was picking a careful path from one tree to the next, always staying as close to cover as possible while making his slow, silent progress through the forest’s half-lit greenery. And as the days had passed, and he became accustomed to the slower rhythms of his new world, the Roman had gradually adopted not just his teacher’s way of moving, but also his sense of belonging in the vast emptiness of the woods. What he had not expected to pose a problem, however, had proved to be his biggest difficulty in learning Beran’s skills.
‘When you strike, no think. Only strike, like snake.’
Whilst complimentary with regard to the distance Marius could throw a spear, and the accuracy he was capable of achieving given a moment to consider the target, the hunter remained unconvinced even by his best efforts, simply shaking his head and pointing at a spot a hundred or more paces distant.
‘Heruta run while you look down spear. Now he laugh at you from there.’
Pointing to a large knot in the trunk of a massive oak, the German had walked him back twenty paces and bid him to turn his back on the target and squat down.
‘Now you turn and throw. White spot is top of heruta leg, where heart lie. You put spear in spot, you kill heruta. But you throw without wait to look and think, yes? Throw like hunter, not soldier.’
Marius’s efforts to hit the target had seen most of his throws sail away into the trees, and he had quickly become disillusioned with trudging after it, often having to search through the leaf litter to find the weapon, but Beran’s main concern had been with the speed with which he cast the weapon rather than whether it flew to the target or not. When, at length, he had declared himself satisfied with his pupil’s ability to turn and stamp forward to sling the spear in the same movement, he had smiled knowingly at Marius, marching him forward ten paces towards the oak.
‘Now you throw.’
Halving the distance had an almost revelatory effect on his ability to hit the knot, and as his confidence grew he was able to put the spear’s iron head into the circle nine times out of ten, and at the end of the day Beran asked him a question to which he already knew the answer.
‘So, Centurion, what you learn?’
‘That I need to stay invisible to the animals I’m hunting so that I can get close enough not to miss with the fastest throw I can make.’
The German had inclined his head in recognition.
‘And now is time you hunt. Have taught you all I know. Now is for you to use.’
The stag snuffled again, and Marius turned his head slowly to the left, estimating that the animal was no more than five paces away, moving slowly away as it hunted the forest floor for food. Summoning the memory of Beran’s last instruction, to put his spear into the beast’s body just behind its shoulder, throwing from behind to minimise the risk of the heart being protected by the big bones, he took a long, slow breath, allowing the air to leave his body in a gentle exhalation, then uncoiled himself from out of the tree’s cover, standing and hurling the spear with all the whiplash speed the German had drummed into him.
The weapon’s iron head sank deep into the animal’s side, a good throw but not perfect, and with an expression of disgust he watched helplessly as the stag bolted, blood streaming from the wound and encumbered by the weapon’s long shaft protruding from its side, but still moving fast enough that it would be out of sight in less than twenty paces. He knew from Beran’s tales of frustrated hunts in his younger days that the beast could easily run for a mile or more before succumbing to the wound, with every chance that it would be lost to them, along with the precious spear, but even as he shook his head the other man rose from the trees to his right and made his own throw. The stag dropped in mid-leap as it jumped a fallen tree, hitting the forest floor with a heavy thump and lying motionless, not even twitching, such was the speed with which the German had killed it. Marius ran to the spot, vaulting the tree trunk to find his teacher grinning happily at the dead animal.
‘Tonight we eat fresh meat, friend Marius! Skin heruta and butcher he. Then we cook heart and liver, take he strength to make us better hunter.’
The Roman stared in amazement at the dead beast, Beran’s spear having flown unerringly to punch through the stag’s eye socket and penetrate its skull, killing it instantly.
‘How did you do that?’
‘I learn, over many years, that spear in heart make hole in pell. So learn to kill this way.’
Marius shook his head in undisguised admiration.
‘In all my years I’ve never seen—’
Both men turned, and Marius’s hand went to the hilt of his sword, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up as the unmistakable howl of a wolf sounded from the forest, swiftly answered by several more calls. Beran shook his head in disgust.
‘Wulfa. Forest gods punish me for pride in making throw. We lose kill, wulfa too strong for we. Is … how you say …?’
‘Inevitable?’ Marius gripped his spear’s shaft and wrenched the weapon’s long iron head free. ‘No, it fucking well isn’t! Nothing is decided until the blood’s dry, my friend. And I’m fucked if I’m going to allow some dumb forest dogs to take my first kill away!’
The first wolf came trotting out of the undergrowth, a heavily built brute of an animal, and the R
oman instinctively strode towards it with his spear half raised, ready either to throw or wield in self-defence if the animal attacked, but the wolf, lacking the support of his pack, only stood his ground, lips pulled back in a fearsome snarl.
Striding swiftly towards the beast, Marius raised the spear, took a moment to pick his spot and then let fly, putting the heavy iron blade straight into the snarling face with enough force to tear the wolf’s jaw from its socket and rip deep into its chest, sending the animal into a paroxysm of thrashing agony. Drawing his sword he screamed defiance at the gathering pack, the wolves taken aback by the abject state of their leader.
‘Gods, Marius, what you do?’
Beran was alongside him, shaking his head in amazement at the pack leader’s writhing agony.
‘There is a time to be the forest and there is a time to be a man! And I am not just a man, I am a Roman fucking centurion!’ He stamped forward, finishing the dying animal with a brutal hack of the sword’s iron blade across the back of its neck, then turned to the hesitant pack with a roar of berserk defiance, waving the bloodied weapon at them. ‘Come on then! Have some of this!’
The pack considered the Roman for a moment as he strode forward, ignoring the risk that they might still attack together, the bubbling screams of their dying leader clearly having unnerved them, their disquiet growing as Beran stepped alongside him, ready to throw his own spear. The cold-eyed male closest to the two men considered them for a moment, then turned and loped away, followed by the remainder of the pack, and Beran allowed a long breath to gust from his body as he watched their unhurried departure.
‘Beran always submit to wulfa. Until this day. Now that time over.’ He walked over to the dying wolf, nodding at the spreadeagled corpse. ‘You not friend Mariuz now. You brother Mariuz. Hunt brother.’ The Roman smiled wearily, suddenly bone weary in reaction to the events of the previous moments, but Beran pointed back to the stag’s carcass. ‘Now we got two times work. Skin and butcher heruta, then same with wulfa. Give krubjan that left to wulfa.’
RETRIBUTION Page 35