The Wolf's Gold: Empire V

by Anthony Riches

  Marcus nodded, his face set in stonelike immobility.

  ‘So why tell me all this now?’

  ‘That’s simple. Tomorrow, if your expectation is well founded, we will face thousands of barbarian warriors across this narrow strip of ground, and for me this coming battle is a thing of mystery. It may well find me lacking. It may even kill me. If I fail to speak my mind to you now I may never have the chance to do so again. In which case you will continue to live in ignorance of information that might well be of inestimable value to you if indeed you are, as I believe you to be, Marcus Valerius Aquila.’

  Marcus looked up at the stars for a moment before speaking.

  ‘In truth, I have almost ceased to consider myself by that name. I am Marcus Tribulus Corvus, centurion, husband and father, and nothing more than that. My former life is a grey memory of something I once had, but which is burned and gone for ever. I’ll admit that there are times when I dream of revenge, and I am haunted in my sleep by the ghosts of my family . . .’ He shook his head wearily. ‘And yet I also wonder why I should give any more thought to something I cannot change, inflicted upon my family by men whose names I will never know and whose damage can never be reversed? How can one man hope to take on the throne and hope to find anything other than death both for himself and his loved ones?’

  Sigilis nodded, his voice taking on a note of urgency.

  ‘And in your place I expect that I would feel the same uncertainties. But before I left Rome I was party to several discussions between my father and like-minded men of influence, men with the money required to buy the best investigator to be found in the city. He came to our house just once, sliding in through the servants’ entrance with one hand on the handle of his knife, a grey man who seemed happiest merging into the shadows. He told us what he had discovered of your father’s murder, details which, if I were you, would fill me with both despair and hope, and fuel my desire for revenge. And if I die tomorrow with these facts unshared, then your chance to hear what he had to say will be gone for ever.’

  Marcus shook his head, looking away into the darkness.

  ‘I cannot listen to this now.’ He waved an arm at the fires burning along the hill’s slope. ‘You call me Centurion, and in all truth this is my family now. Every one of these men is my responsibility, and if I allow thoughts of murder and revenge to cloud my thinking I will lose my concentration at the time when I need it the most. I appreciate your wanting to help me, but it must wait until a time when I can afford the distraction. And now, Tribune, I suggest we find my brother officer Otho, and find out how many black eyes he’s handed out to his men today.’

  The Tungrians and their Thracian archers took up their positions across the slope in the dawn’s grey light, centurions pacing out their sections of the defensive line and adjusting their men’s places until the infantrymen’s frontage was a single unbroken line of soldiery. Fifty paces behind the line the defence was anchored at either end, as the ground rose to meet the mountains on each side, by impenetrable barriers formed of trees expertly felled by the pioneers of the cohort’s Tenth Century to present their branches to any attacker. Martos and his two hundred or so warriors lurked behind the barriers on either side of the Tungrian line, the Votadini prince having insisted on leading his men up the slope behind the soldiers the previous evening, ignoring the nervous looks cast at them by the Thracian archers. Martos had shared a swift breakfast with the officers before rejoining his men, exchanging crude banter with Arminius while Sigilis had listened with a face white with tension. He’d clasped arms with Marcus, raising a scarred clenched fist, and grinning savagely at the thought of impending battle.

  ‘When your men are getting tired, you just shout for the Votadini. We’ll show you the meaning of war.’ He leaned closer to the Roman, muttering in his ear. ‘And watch out for the boy there, a pale face before battle is the sign of a fighter, as well you know. He’ll be in the line and trying to carve up the enemy before you know it, if you let him.’

  Marcus gathered his brother officers on the slope behind the line, sipping at a beaker of water and watching as their soldiers stood in line waiting for the Sarmatae to make their appearance. The Tungrians were for the most part talking with each other as matter-of-factly as men discussing their favourite gladiator or chariot racer, although he could see a few small huddles of men as veteran front rankers prepared their comrades for the terror of what was to come with hard words and rallying cries.

  ‘It occurs to me that we’ve been here before, brothers, or somewhere very much like it.’ The other four centurions nodded sagely, their minds going back to a similar hillside on which the cohort had fought for its life the previous year. ‘Only this time we’ve had long enough with this ground to make any army that comes at us up that slope deeply regret the idea. I saw the Sarmatae force that’s pitted against us up here this morning while I was scouting yesterday, and I’d say there were barely fifteen hundred of them. And that, brothers, is clearly not enough men to assault experienced heavy infantry in a position like this, especially given the fact that I expect our archers to neutralise theirs.’

  He looked around at his comrades, the pugnacious Otho, Caelius with his usual deceptive look of innocence, Qadir’s customary imperturbability and Titus’s glowering scowl, and felt his spirits rise at the sight.

  ‘No tribal warband of that size can threaten us, brothers, not while we retain our discipline. So we’ll stay safe behind our defences and let them come to us, as we discussed last night. And at the right moment . . .’

  ‘We go for the knock out, eh young ’un?’

  The Roman grinned at his colleague.

  ‘Very apt, Otho. Yes, at the right moment we’ll go forward and land the killer punch. Wait for my signal, and when I give it back me up with everything you have left to throw at them.’

  A horn blared from down the slope, swiftly followed by another, and the officers turned to see their Hamian scouts breaking from the treeline three hundred paces distant and running up the hill toward the safety of the waiting soldiers. As the Tungrians watched, the first enemy warriors came out of the trees behind them, some putting arrows to their bows. Qadir, seeing the danger to his men, raised his voice to bellow a command.

  ‘Dodge!’

  The fleeing scouts angled their runs from side to side, changing direction every few strides to put the barbarian archers off their aim, running hard to get beyond the Sarmatae bowmen’s maximum range, but one unfortunate was hit squarely between the shoulders and dropped to his knees, writhing in agony from the arrowhead’s deep intrusion. Half a dozen barbarians ran forward with their swords and knives drawn, clearly eager to take their first trophy. Qadir looked grimly at Marcus and then strode across to his century, taking a bow and a handful of arrows from one of his men and nocking the first missile to the weapon’s bowstring as he pushed his way through the Tungrian line.

  ‘Surely the distance is too great for any accuracy?’

  Otho snorted through his battered nose, shaking his head at Sigilis with no regard for the younger man’s rank.

  ‘Just you watch and learn, young sir.’

  Sigilis raised his eyebrows and turned back to the scene just in time to see Qadir’s first arrow hit his stricken comrade squarely in the chest, dropping him to the ground to lie unmoving.

  ‘That’s astound—’

  Otho snorted again.

  ‘He ain’t done yet.’

  While the Sarmatae warriors who had been advancing on the wounded scout were still digesting the stricken Hamian’s merciful death, a second arrow punched into the closest man’s body and toppled him into the long grass. Another warrior staggered to his knees with a fletched shaft protruding from his side as he turned to run, and Qadir shot the last of his arrows at the rearmost man as the rest of them sprinted back down the hill, missing by a hand’s breadth as his target dodged to one side. He turned with a look of disgust at the miss and walked back up the hill, handing the bow back to its
owner as he passed.

  ‘That will keep their archers from getting too pushy until they’ve got some numbers gathered.’

  Marcus nodded at the blunt statement, turning back to the other centurions.

  ‘Return to your centuries, brothers.’

  He strode out in front of his men, ignoring the Sarmatae warriors mustering at the edge of the forest three hundred paces down the slope, stalking along the Tungrian line with his eyes fixed on the soldiers of the five centuries under his command. Some of them returned the stare with faces set hard against the coming violence, others looked straight through him as they retreated into private places to protect themselves from the coming horror. Stopping before them he drew his spatha, holding the long patterned blade above his head until he had their attention and shouting his challenge across the hillside.

  ‘Tungrians, we have marched a thousand miles to stand here and face these barbarians. And you, the men that our tribune has entrusted with the defence of this edge of the valley, you have been selected for the hardest task of all. Our brothers make their stand from the top of a wall too high to climb, or behind a wall of wooden stakes too dense for any horse to penetrate, but we will defeat this enemy in the way in which we have become accustomed. We will stare them in the face close enough to reach out and take their lives with our iron . . .’ Realising that most of the front rank were watching the enemy behind him, he turned to look down the slope, seeing with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that the enemy host forming before them was already far stronger than he had expected, with men still pouring out of the trees to their rear. He faced his men in silence until the soldiers turned their attention back to him. ‘Yes, there are many more of them than there are of us, but we have laboured to prepare this ground before us, and we have the support of three hundred archers. Be sure of this, my brothers, we will win this fight, as we have won so many times before, by standing together and fighting for one another. Ready yourselves to meet this enemy, and know that you are more than a match for whatever they have to throw at you!’

  He ducked through the line, pulling a man from the second rank and taking him out of earshot of his fellow soldiers.

  ‘Give me your spear and shield. Now, run to Tribune Scaurus. Tell him we face three thousand enemy warriors up here and need urgent reinforcement. Go!’

  The soldier took to his heels, vanishing over the ridge with more than a few of his comrades casting envious glances at the spot where he had disappeared from view.

  ‘How do you do that? How do you manage to sound so confident when the odds are so clearly against us?’ Marcus turned to find Tribune Sigilis at his shoulder, and paused long enough before answering that the younger man felt compelled to fill the silence. ‘Forgive me for asking, it’s just . . .’

  ‘I understand, Tribune. You find yourself on the verge of entering a world of which you have no experience. You wonder just how you will react when the killing begins.’ Sigilis nodded, and Marcus shrugged with a mirthless smile. ‘I stood in your boots less than two years ago.’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘An old centurion who came out of retirement to help save me from the empire’s assassins once told me that some leaders of men are born, screaming out their need to command their fellows even as their mothers push them from the womb, but that others among us are less driven, and are made into leaders by either choice or circumstance, forged in battle to reveal whatever strength lies within them. And in that forging, he told me, we learn things that we might rather never have known. We gain scars and lose friends, and by the time we’re hardened enough to cope with what’s waiting for us down that hill we’re not the men we were at the beginning. In facing our fears and forcing them to surrender to the need to survive, we become so hardened as to lose some part of what made us the men we were. He was right, of course, although I couldn’t ever see myself changing at the time.’

  ‘You’ve lost friends?’

  Marcus nodded at the question, staring down the slope at the approaching Sarmatae with unseeing eyes.

  ‘Yes, but there was one man in particular, the retired centurion I mentioned. His name was Rufius, may Mithras honour him. I very nearly followed him across the river, such was my rage at his death. Battle touches us all in different ways, Tribune, and it finds our weaknesses as surely as it unveils our abilities. My weakness is a tendency to unmanageable fury once I am sufficiently provoked, a clear, cold anger that will sharpen my abilities but destroy all sense of what is either wise or even decent. I have it in me to become a mad man, Tribune, with no purpose other than to spill the blood of my enemies until I am too exhausted to lift my sword. If for any reason I am sufficiently roused to step into the enemy line in what is to come, you should under no circumstances follow me. I did it once, driven mad by the death of my closest friend, and was fortunate enough to escape that act of gross stupidity with my life. I doubt that sort of luck is granted to a man twice in one lifetime.’

  The tribune nodded, his face still white at the prospect of the battle.

  ‘I understand.’

  Marcus turned back to face the tribesmen. The Sarmatae force had now fully emerged from the forest, and were forming up in readiness for their attack.

  ‘We seem to have underestimated their leader’s intentions. He fooled us by sending a smaller party of men up the valley that leads to this hillside than we see before us now, but he must have reinforced it last night once our scouts were all pulled back.’ He exchanged glances with Sigilis. ‘And if he’s chosen to make this his main point of attack, then I doubt that four hundred infantrymen and three centuries of archers are going to hold him off for long, even if we do have Martos and his Votadini straining at their collars to get into the fight. But given that we have little choice in the matter, I suppose we might as well make a decent job of it . . .’ He blew his whistle to get his officers’ attention, raising his vine stick and pointing it at the oncoming mass of tribesmen. ‘Tungrians, prepare to form the shield wall!’

  The Tungrian front rank went down on one knee, angling their shields so that they could just barely see over the iron rims as the second rank stepped up close behind their comrades. He nodded to Sigilis, tipping his head to the archers waiting in a line behind the Tungrians, and the younger man shouted a command in a voice tense with the pressure on him.

  ‘Archers, make ready!’

  The Thracians hurried forward into the line’s shadow, each of them pulling an arrow from his quiver and nocking it to his weapon’s string. Marcus watched the oncoming enemy with his breath unconsciously held, calculating the distance between the two lines. At one hundred and fifty paces the Sarmatae stopped, and their archers stepped out in front of the line of shields some five hundred or so strong. They went about stringing arrows to their bows with the deliberate care of men at archery practice rather than preparing to go about the grim task of battlefield murder, seemingly confident that the Romans had no means of replying.

  ‘Rear rank, shields!’

  The rear rankers lifted their shields into place, overlapping them with those of their kneeling comrades to form a wall of wood fully eight feet tall. Peering between two of his men, Marcus watched as the Sarmatae archers drew their arrows back, clearly awaiting the word of command.

  ‘Here it comes . . .’

  He ducked into the cover of the line, pulling Sigilis by the arm to make sure the tribune was sheltered from the coming attack. At a shouted command the enemy bowmen loosed their arrows, and the Tungrians listened in silence as the missiles whistled across the gap between the two lines. With a sound like hail on a wooden roof the storm of arrows broke along the Tungrian line, hundreds of iron and bone arrowheads hammering into the raised shields, some protruding through cracks in the wood while the occasional missile found a gap in the defence, flicking between raised shields and past the men behind them. One of the Thracians staggered out of his place behind the infantrymen with an arrow protruding from his thigh, falling to the ground as the poison painte
d onto its barbed bone head took the life out of his twitching legs. Marcus raised his voice to bellow along the line at the Thracians.

  ‘Wait! Let them spend their arrows on our shields!’

  Parting two shields to risk a swift glimpse of the enemy, Marcus saw that the Sarmatae warriors were making no attempt to advance, waiting instead while their bowmen peppered the Roman line with arrows. Judging that the enemy archers were starting to slow the rate at which they were loosing their missiles, he raised his voice to bellow a command along the length of the line.

  ‘Archers . . .’ Along the length of the line the Tungrians eased their shields fractionally sideways, each man allowing the archer standing next to him a thin gap through which to sight his bow on the enemy. ‘Loose!’

  The unshielded enemy bowmen were easy meat for the Thracians, and dozens of them fell with the first volley of arrows, some falling to lie motionless while others staggered away from the clumps of arrows they had shoved point first into the ground by their feet. Another volley whipped out from between the Tungrians’ shields, reaping a further harvest from the wavering bowmen, and at a sharp word of command that rang out across the slope they turned and ran, more of them falling even as they fled for the cover of their fellow warriors’ shields.

  ‘Archers, cease! Rear rank, rest!’

  The Thracians stopped shooting, nodding to each other at the ease of their quick initial victory over the tribesmen, while the Tungrian rear-rank soldiers lowered their shields and rubbed at their aching arms, waiting for the Sarmatae leader’s next move. After a moment’s pause the mass of enemy warriors began hammering their spears rhythmically against their shields, working themselves up to attack up the hill’s rippling, boulder-strewn slope.

  ‘The man in charge down there must still fancy his chances even without his archers . . .’