‘Kill me.’
Egilhard looked down at him for a moment and then swept out Lightning, sliding one foot forward into a braced stance, ready to swing the sword high and then cut at the prince’s neck with all his power to sever the agonised man’s head. Ready to strike, he muttered one word, loud enough for Kivilaz to hear whilst inaudible to anyone else.
‘No.’
‘What?’
‘No. There will be no easy death for you, Prince Kivilaz.’
The agonised nobleman hunched forward over the weapon whose blade was sheathed deep in his body, his crotch and thighs red with the blood that was seeping from the wound in his stomach, forcing his head round to stare uncomprehendingly up at the hard-faced soldier.
‘W … what? What … are … you …’
‘My brother didn’t die easily. He coughed blood over me, stabbed through by a spear with his wind leaking out through the hole it left when the Roman who killed him tore it free. He cried for his mother as he choked out his life. When you cry out for your mother I will consider granting you release.’
‘What’s he doing?’ Hramn paced towards the bridge’s foot with a puzzled expression, shaking his head slightly as he wondered what it was that he was seeing. ‘He should have given Kivilaz the death stroke by now.’
‘Your uncle is cut from harder stone than the rest of us. Perhaps he is testing himself against the pain, showing the Romans how long a Batavi warrior can last before he calls on his second.’
The big man looked back at Alcaeus, finding nothing in the priest’s face to gainsay the note of respect in his voice.
‘Perhaps …’
Egilhard spat the hatred that had grown and festered within him over the hard months of the cohorts’ destruction at Kivilaz’s uncomprehending, upturned face.
‘My father didn’t die easily. He ran for an afternoon as his life bled out of an arm severed in the course of a doomed battle fought at your command, and at the end he threw himself onto an enemy spear to spare my life. He died because of you, so now you can suffer for him. And when you can’t control yourself any longer, when you have to scream with the pain, then I might send you to join him in the Underworld!’
‘What’s he doing? Shouldn’t he have cut off the man’s head by now? Or do the Batavians have a different way with these matters?’
Aquillius shook his head at Cerialis’s question.
‘No different to the rest of us. He holds the death blow. Why I do not know, but there is no mercy in that man.’
‘Kill … me … you … young … bastard …’
Egilhard shook his head, his flint-hard eyes locked on the nobleman’s hate-filled and yet imploring face.
‘No. You haven’t earned that death. You’ve earned what you’re getting, what you gave my brother and my father. They endured because they had no choice but to do so, and so can you because you have no choice in the matter either.’
‘This is wrong! Your man is letting him suffer!’
Alcaeus shook his head in evident disbelief.
‘Kivilaz must have ordered him to hold his arm. Why else would he …’
Hramn rounded on him, his eyes suddenly wide with anger.
‘You’ve seen this, haven’t you! You know!’ He drew his sword, pointing to the two figures at the bridge’s centre, one hunched over with both hands holding the hilt of his sword, the other waiting with his own blade upright, apparently ready to strike and yet showing no sign of granting his prince the release he surely craved. ‘This is treachery! Batavi Guard, with me!’
He stamped forward onto the bridge with a handful of soldiers at his back, but as more men moved to follow him, Alcaeus drew his own sword and stepped into their path, raising his left hand in a gesture of denial.
‘I will kill the next man to follow him. I have seen this in my dreams, and I know which one of you will test my resolve!’
He turned, shouting the words he had heard himself speak so many times in his sleep.
‘Centurion Aquillius! Now is the moment of your sacrifice!’
Cerialis stared at the scene in amazement. Kivilaz was looking up at his second with an expression that combined supplication and hatred, while a group of his followers were hurrying up the bridge’s length with their swords drawn.
‘I never thought I’d see such a …’
‘Centurion Aquillius! Now is the moment of your sacrifice!’
He frowned at the words, just audible over the wind’s thin whistle, turning to look at his bodyguard only to see the big man pacing backwards from where he stood at the bridge’s very end. ‘What in Hades are you—’
Aquillius looked up, rocking backwards and forwards like a sprinter preparing to hurl himself at his track, his eyes focused on the other side of the severed central span.
‘Step aside, Legatus Augusti. This is the moment when I must obey my oath.’
‘But …’
The hulking centurion was in motion, his powerful thighs thrusting him towards the bridge’s end as he strained every sinew in his body, and Cerialis realised that he had already been discounted as irrelevant. He stepped backwards, feeling the bridge’s side against his back as the wooden surface beneath his feet shook with each thunderous impact of the big man’s pounding feet. In a blur of motion, Aquillius was upon him, and the Roman shrank back as the centurion bellowed a challenge at the sky and hurled himself at the open space between the two halves of the severed crossing, leaping high into the empty air with his arms spread wide, his head thrown back to roar a single word.
‘Hercules!’
Alcaeus met his attacker blade-to-blade, pushing the guardsman’s sword wide and then snapping his vine stick, still gripped in his left hand, up into the other man’s throat. Before his victim had time to register the fact that he was suddenly unable to breathe, the priest lunged with the sword, opening his neck to the bone, then kicked his shuddering body back into the group of his fellows crowding in behind him.
‘No more of you will die today! But you will stand down!’
They faced him for a moment, twenty furious men confronting a lone centurion, torn between hatred for their comrade’s killer and fear of the wolf’s head affixed to his helmet and the absolute certainty in his voice. Then, as the boldest among them spat on the ground at his feet and raised his sword to attack, another voice spoke.
‘That’s. Fucking. Enough!’
To their rear, where a moment before there had been twenty paces of open ground between themselves and the men of the cohorts behind them, the guardsmen found themselves facing a wall of spears and shields, hostile faces staring at them with the dead-eyed knowledge of impending bloodshed. Lanzo stepped forward, his spear’s point unwavering as he confronted them.
‘Enough blood has been shed, too much of it ours and not enough of it yours! The cohorts have fought this war, and the men of the cohorts have died for the tribe by the thousand! And now the men of the cohorts are telling you to either stand down or die! Any man who raises his sword to Alcaeus raises that sword against me!’
Frijaz stepped forward alongside him.
‘And me!’
On his other side Adalwin paced forward, his eyes blank with the promise of death.
‘And me. Chose a side, you cunts, and make it quick.’
Egilhard shook his head at the shuddering prince, staring down into his tear-streaked eyes.
‘Not nearly enough. You’ve a while more in you yet.’
The bridge’s wooden surface began to tremble with the running feet of the guardsmen hurrying towards them, and Kivilaz turned his head to look at them, a chuckle staining his lips with fresh blood.
‘Here … comes … your … doom … boy …’
Egilhard stepped past the kneeling figure and raised his sword, readying himself for what he knew could only be a brief and one-sided fight, then looked back in amazement as the bridge shuddered with a sudden shock behind him, recognition dawning as a hulking figure straightened up from the
crouch into which he had dropped as his feet had touched down on the wooden surface only inches from the edge of the roughly hacked gap.
‘You’re the Banô!’
Aquillius drew his sword, kicked Kivilaz brutally against the bridge’s side and stepped alongside Egilhard.
‘Your priest told me this day would come. And that when it did I would fight alongside the greatest swordsman in your tribe. Now is your chance to prove him right.’
The guardsmen were upon them, Hramn at their head, their shields a wall of wood and iron as all five of his men stepped alongside their prefect at his shouted command.
‘Leave the traitor to me! And a farm to the man who kills the Banô!’
They advanced with the co-ordinated expertise of long practice, step after step towards the waiting pair of swordsmen, and Aquillius grinned back at them, his voice almost conversational as he waited for his moment.
‘You know the problem you people have?’ Egilhard shook his head blankly, seeing his death approaching in the implacable guardsmen’s eyes. ‘With all that drill you do, you’ve forgotten how to do this …’
He lunged forward, grinning savagely as the line of men facing him raised their spears to take him down and then, as they thrust the iron-tipped poles forward into his face he dropped, rolling beneath the questing spearheads and came back to his feet face-to-face with them. Pulling down the closest man’s shield with contemptuous ease, he used his superior height to stab the gladius in his right hand down into the space behind his opponent’s collarbone. The stricken guardsman coughed blood and died with a look of disbelief, as the sword’s blade tore a huge wound in his lungs and stopped his heart. Leaving the weapon embedded hilt deep in the dying Batavi’s body, the Roman plucked the spear from his unresisting fingers and spun it in his right hand, almost absentmindedly burying it deep in the booted foot of the man to his right. The wounded guardsman screamed in agony as Aquillius whipped out the dagger from the sheath on his left hip, releasing the spear’s shaft and grasping the shield to his left. Pulling it savagely down to put its holder off balance, he drove the knife’s blade through the Batavi’s mail once, twice, three times, each blow tearing through the iron rings and opening a rent in his chest through which blood poured. A stab of intense pain stiffened his body as another man stabbed him in the back with his spear, the long iron blade punching through the Roman’s scale armour. To the guardsman’s amazement the big man whipped a hand round and took hold of the weapon, pulling it free of the wound and then turned, ducking under the weapon’s shaft. Wrenching the spear away from its wielder, he rammed it back into the guardsman’s body with enough force for the butt spike to punch through his mail and impale him, his hands pulling uselessly at the deeply embedded blade.
Not knowing whether his wound was mortal, but feeling the wet warmth of blood soaking into the subarmalis, he looked beyond the human wreckage surrounding him to the bridge’s end where Egilhard was fighting a desperate battle against the remaining three Batavi, one of them the prefect Aquillius recognised from the moment that he had been stunned and carried away to the Old Camp’s arena. Wielding his sword with dizzying speed, the young soldier was nevertheless being forced back towards the edge of the timbers by the trio’s combined assault and, lacking the space in which to fight, had been reduced to desperate self-defence that could only end in his defeat as he tired. Grunting with the pain, the Roman straightened his back, feeling blood running down his legs from the wound, and judged from its flow that he had only a short period of consciousness left. Tearing the spear from his last victim’s body as he passed, his first step was tentative, the second less so, and with the third he was running, no more than a trot, but moving as fast as his damaged body would allow, every step taking him closer to the remaining guardsmen, whose rasping breaths and the hammer of iron on Egilhard’s increasingly tattered shield and flickering sword blade kept the sound of his hobnails on the bridge’s timbers from them until it was too late. Hurling the spear into the closest man’s back with such force that the blade tore through the front of his mail, he spread his arms wide and sprang at the Batavi prefect with a vengeful snarl. Turning at the last moment as he sensed the danger behind him, Hramn tried to raise his sword to defend himself from the oncoming centurion only to have it pushed aside as the big man wrapped his arms around him, butted him viciously with the brow guard of his helmet and then, as they tottered at the bridge’s edge, the Batavi’s feet scrabbling against the side boards as he fought to avoid the drop beneath them, made one last herculean effort and pushed them both over the bridge’s railings and into the water below. The water closed over both men as the weight of their armour pulled them beneath the wind-riffled surface, and as Cerialis watched in amazement, all trace of whatever was happening beneath the river’s rain-beaten surface was lost.
‘Can someone just tell me what happened on that bridge?’
Cerialis looked from Antonius and Pugno to Longus, and then finally squarely at Alcaeus and Draco, who had been summoned to his presence as the most senior members of their tribe’s polity and what was left of its army. The wolf-priest had been disarmed on his arrival at the command tent, and a pair of Pugno’s centurions had been stationed behind him with their swords drawn until the exasperated legatus augusti had dismissed them with a growl of frustration at their first spear.
‘We’re at peace, Pugno, or perhaps that had escaped your notice. He’s disarmed, he’s showing no sign of wanting to do anything other than talk, and to be quite frank I’ve seen more than enough blood for one lifetime. Is that clear, or do I have to post the Twenty-first somewhere cold and wet to make my point?’
Still clearly irascible, the general looked at each man in turn, waiting for an answer.
‘Is any of you going to speak, or do I have to have this priest open up a lamb to tell me exactly what I’m supposed to make of all that?’
Draco raised a hand.
‘If I may, Legatus Augusti?’
‘I’d be grateful.’
The veteran officer stepped forward, leaning on his staff, and gestured to Alcaeus.
‘What my centurion here cannot tell you, Legatus Augusti, for reasons of loyalty to the tribe, is that the men of our cohorts have become increasingly unhappy with this war. They have come to believe that Kivilaz’s nephew Hramn squandered their lives in pursuit of his own thirst for glory, that Kivilaz himself ignored opportunities to make peace, and that their lives have been spent without regard to who was actually paying the price for their collective hubris. In selecting a soldier to end his life whose father and younger brother died alongside him in one futile battle after another, Prince Kivilaz quite simply chose the wrong man to act as his second.’
Cerialis looked at him appraisingly.
‘And that’s why he allowed the prince to die in agony, rather than cutting the man’s head off once he had the sword in his guts?’ Draco nodded impassively, and the Roman looked up at the command tent’s roof for a moment before speaking. ‘Gods below, you people never cease to amaze me. What will happen to him?’
Draco pursed his lips.
‘There are precious few men of the tribe who feel that they owe any loyalty to the royal family these days. With the losses we’ve sustained over the last year, and the devastation your legions have visited on every part of the Island other than their farms, I think it’s fair to say that very few men consider the old families to be their natural rulers any more. Indeed, it would be my expectation that you will wish to extend Rome’s hospitality to what’s left of Kivilaz’s family, both to remove a rallying point for those men who still feel loyalty to them and for their own protection. Once you have appointed a new magistrate, the main concern will need to be feeding the tribe through the winter, and rebuilding Batavodurum, not with the rights and wrongs of what Egilhard did.’
‘And if the old families decide to make an example of him, or just to have revenge for the agony he inflicted on their leader?’
The veteran pref
ect smiled slowly.
‘I think you can leave that to me, Legatus Augusti. I wasn’t exaggerating when I told you that their day is done. Once the prince’s remaining kin have been shuffled off into exile, I expect their peers will quickly realise that even a hint of any attempt to retake their former influence will result in something similar for their own families. Or worse. And I also expect that his new prefect will decide to promote him to a position in which he’s effectively untouchable, once your new magistrate has decided who it is that he believes should command the tribe’s cohorts.’
Cerialis nodded.
‘Which brings me to the main reason for calling you here. Your people do indeed need a new magistrate, someone not effectively appointed by the tribe’s Julian families, but neither can that appointment just give power to the Claudians, for all that Claudius Labeo probably expects that he’ll be the man of the moment in return for risking his life on Rome’s behalf. Having spoken to the man, and reviewed his actions early in the war, it’s evident to me that he’s not to be trusted with power. I need a neutral, Prefect Draco, a man beholden to no man, who will govern your people through what is bound to be a difficult winter, with supplies and shelter both in short supply. You can have an election next summer when everything’s settled down, when your farms have been rebuilt with the assistance of legion craftsmen and hunger and cold are no longer problems, but until then I need a dependable man to shepherd your people through the winter. Do you think you’re up to it?’
Draco bowed respectfully, his face betraying no surprise at the offer.
‘It would be my honour to lead my people for a short time, Legatus Augusti. Am I right in thinking that it would be within the new magistrate’s remit to appoint a new prefect of the cohorts?’
The Roman nodded.
‘Yes. It’ll be more of a ceremonial position henceforth, of course, as your cohorts will never again be allowed to combine. Each one will always be commanded by a Roman prefect from now onwards, and your men will return to the Island on leave individually, rather than as formed units, but we’ll still need a good officer to take charge of recruitment and training.’
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