by Tim Marquitz
More shafts hissed close. More screams followed, but not as many as he might have expected. The Ordovice archers lacked for training and were loosing as individuals, making their chances of hitting anything much poorer.
The Roman archers suffered no such lack.
Arrayed in double ranks, they loosed hundreds of shafts like swarms of buzzing insects. Each had a broadhead point with swept back tips designed to tear its victim’s insides apart. Dozens of the tribesmen fell, riven to the fletching by the iron-tipped darts.
Ballista launched yard-long bolts with ferocious power, and each lancing missile speared half a dozen tribesmen at a time, forcing them to scatter like panicked game. Roman laughter swelled from the boats with every such impaling.
Rocks gouged from the dark soil flew from the kicking spars of onagers, missiles that took six men to lift onto the catapult arms. The crews of the war engines knew boulders aimed at the beach would simply bury themselves in the sand, so hurled them beyond the enemy warriors, where rings of pale boulders fringed the forest’s edge.
Now every rock exploded into deadly shards as if a hundred slingers were unleashing on the rear ranks of the tribesmen with every deafening impact.
“Jupiter willing, they’ll be broken before we land,” said Tiberius, risking a glance over the lip of his shield.
Octavius shook his head. “A Celt will take worse than this and stand ready with sword in hand.”
Lucius flinched as a pair of arrows thudded into his shield. One sliced the meat of his forearm, the other skittered away into the water.
“Hold fast,” said Cato as a violent swell rocked the boat. The prow rose, then slammed down, jarring them all. Quintus puked over the side, retching into the scummed water.
An arrowhead burst from the cheek plates of his helm, spraying Octavius with blood and shattered teeth. The shaft was bedded through his jaw, and Quintus screamed, tearing his cheek wide with his pain. Blood poured in a red flood.
He fell into the boat, landing on the stacked lengths of pilum and thrashing like a leaping Salii priest.
He looked up at Octavius, his face a mask of blood.
“Hold him down!” shouted Cato.
Lucius dropped his knees onto Quintus’s shoulders, holding the wounded man’s head as steady as pain would allow.
“Cut the head, Rabaa!” yelled Lucius.
Octavius took out his dagger and began sawing through the shaft just behind the tip. The timber was new. It took time to cut, and every rasp of blade on wood tore agonized howls from Quintus. Eventually Cambrian oak gave way to Roman steel, and the arrowhead came loose.
“Pull!” shouted Octavius, and Tiberius wrenched the shaft free. Blood and teeth and bone went with it. Quintus puked his lungs empty of blood, and the butchered remnants of his tongue fell to the red-frothed bilges.
“Leave him!” roared Cato. “The beach is upon us!”
Octavius bent to lift a pilum from the bottom of the boat, a front-heavy javelin with a sharpened pyramidal tip and slender iron shank. He hefted it to his shoulder as a wave crashed over the prow of the boat.
He caught glimpses of the island. Gore-soaked sand, hordes of painted warriors baying for death, waving branches of the deep forest. Gutted corpses ruined by arrows and artillery. Fresh fires burning somewhere inland.
A roar engulfed Mona Insulis as the Roman boats hit the shoreline. Sound swept over Octavius in a rush; tribal curses, screams of pain, skirling trumpets and roaring war-shouts to dull fear. He realized he shouted too.
Leaving boats wallowing in the bloody surf, the first legionaries dropped to the sand with the trembling legs of newborn foals. Many fell with arrows buried in their guts but, with every passing moment, more legionaries gained the sand to form battle lines of shields.
“Let fly!” shouted Cato.
Octavius hurled his pilum into the approaching horde. It arced up and over as though guided by the hand of Jupiter himself. The tip plunged down through the shoulder of a warrior painted in orange-dyed chalk. The haft’s weight bent the thin iron shank, and the warrior fell screaming to the sand. The skewed tip churned the trove of vital organs there and rendered the weapon useless to any who might think to hurl it back. A hundred pilum swept out, then a hundred more.
Tribesmen fell by the score, impaled upon the sand and opening wide gaps between the tribal warbands.
“Over!” shouted Cato. “Split them!”
Octavius hurled himself over the gunwale, leaving Quintus coughing up blood. He hit the surf and bent his knees, feeling the rolling motion of bodies beneath his sandals. The water was red and opaque. Arrows hissed past, thudding home in the timbers of the boat or skidding out to sea.
Lucius and Tiberius were at his side, Cato just ahead of him. He pushed through the thigh-deep water with his brothers as they waded into the shallows. The contubernium marched into the chaos of the landing to join their brothers already ashore. Together into the bloodletting, shields locked in an impenetrable wall. Slingshot and arrows broke on the metal boss of his shield. Octavius drew his gladius, the edge keener than Horace’s wit.
The tide receded, and Octavius looked down. Red surf washed around his ankles, but they were on the beach. Trumpets and drums sounded orders. Roman ranks formed up, the shouts of the optios holding lines of overlapping shields firm in the face of berserk tribesmen charging with enormous broadswords.
They swung them in wide circles. Such a mass of iron needed to be kept in motion at all times. Blades whistled and shields split asunder with their sheer force and weight. Men screamed as they were cloven from shoulder to spleen. Centurions bellowed for their warriors to close ranks.
“Hold!” shouted Cato, peering over the lip of his shield. “On my word, Contubernium advance one pace.”
Octavius braced, tightening his grip on the shield’s leather straps. The granite face of his decanus was lined in concentration, adjudging the moment to strike. Octavius couldn’t see anything, could only hear pounding feet and approaching roars of bloodlust. He had to trust Cato’s eye.
“Shields!” shouted Cato.
Locked as one, Octavius and his brothers took a single pounding step forward. They thrust their shields out, battering them into the charging tribesmen.
The impact was tremendous, shivering up his arm and numbing it to the shoulder. Whirling broadswords bit the iron-edged shields at the top of their downswing. Not enough momentum to split them, but enough to bury the blade in their edges. Space opened between the shields, and Octavius saw the heaving mass of tribal flesh inches from his face.
“Gladius drill!” shouted Cato. “Gut these whoresons!”
Half a dozen swords stabbed through the gaps, and here the true strength of the Roman way of war became apparent. Each of the Ordovice bearing a vast broadsword needed room to swing without fear of hitting his brothers. Each warrior fought alone, facing five or six Romans fighting shoulder to shoulder. Octavius stabbed a chalked man in the hollow under his ribs. He bent his arm and pushed up, feeling the pressure ease as the gladius cut into the lungs. Blood fountained over his hand.
Twist, withdraw. Don’t let flesh and muscle grip the blade.
“Advance one!” shouted Cato.
The contubernium advanced again, stepping over the bodies of the dead and thrusting their shields forward with a roar. More bloodshed as the tribesmen fell before the implacable, mechanistic precision of the legion way of war.
Charioteers whooped and yelled farther along the beach, riding along the front of the Roman formations and hurling javelins over the shieldwalls. Too few to matter.
A second line of legionaries marched behind the first men onto the beach, dispatching wounded tribesmen with quick thrusts of their blades. Behind them formed a third line, the triarii. As the fighting continued and sword arms grew weary, Octavius and his brothers would withdraw, allowing the second line to fight. And when they were spent, the third rank would advance, keeping a constant, exhausting pressure on the enemy.
Octavius held his shield out, looking over its notched rim to see the tribesmen reeling from the slaughter. They’d left hundreds dead in the first few minutes of the assault. The Ordovice had faced the might of Rome before, but always with somewhere they could run to.
Today’s massacre offered no such escape.
“Close up!”
The cry didn’t come from Cato, but it was sound advice. Octavius stepped right, the plates of his shoulder guards scraping those of Tiberius.
“Bloody work,” said Octavius, his humors too choleric to feel fear. His gladius was wet with blood, his heart thudding with a feeling of invincibility.
“Bloody thirsty work,” said Tiberius.
“Any wine, Rabaa?” asked Lucius.
“Ask the eager bastards behind us,” said Octavius.
The second rankers were jostling to come forward, hungry to slake their battle lust in Ordovice blood.
“Your ardor does you credit,” cried Lucius, pushing back. “But our fury is not yet spent!”
Octavius grinned. The furies were watching, and they would take any man who faltered. The tribesmen’s resolve hung on a knife edge. All it would take was one man turning his back to destroy what little courage was left in them.
“Come on and die, you goat-fucking cunts!” shouted Tiberius, stepping from the shield line and grabbing his crotch. “I’ve a yard of steel for you and twice that in flesh for your women!”
The ground shook in answer, like the beginnings of an earthquake or the wrath of Neptune roused from the deeps. The Roman line faltered as a tidal surge flooded onto the shore.
“Hold line, Tiberius!” shouted Cato as the trees at the far end of the beach shook. They splintered as something vast and unnatural bludgeoned its way onto the beach. Another titanic hammer blow struck, like the footfall of an angry god.
Towering and monstrous, the demon of Mona Insulis crashed from the forest with lumbering, elephantine steps. It trailed broken branches and a blizzard of leaves. It howled with the distilled fury of all the elements bound as one.
Like the greatest oak of the forest given life, its form was that of a giant fashioned from salvaged timber, with limbs crudely bound to its torso with blood-sodden ropes. Its body was undulant with motion. Within the wicker cage of its enormous structure, the lowing, bleating, shrieking forms of thousands of animals were visible. A menagerie of living things were imprisoned within this towering construction, but at its heart was a living man.
Lashed in the demon’s chest was the splayed figure of an Ordovice tribesman, naked but for the tattoo of a red dragon across his chest. He howled with fury, and Octavius saw his eyes were burning pits of volcanic white light.
“Jupiter’s balls,” he said.
Branoc roared as the power wedded to him by Caerwyn and his druids filled him. He knew it was killing him, but didn’t care. His body was wrought from life itself, a giant of living form, bound in one new-birthed avatar of earthly fury.
Hundreds of his kinsmen were dead, their lifeblood soaking the white sands of this sacred island. Every drop spilled, tribal or Roman, sullied it.
Branoc stamped down on a knot of terrified Romans, crushing them beneath his colossal foot. He scooped up dozens in his wickerwork fists and hurled them out to sea. Crossbows pricked his living flesh, but such hurts were meaningless to him.
Even in the face of certain death, Roman discipline was iron. The enemy closed ranks as their mounted leaders bellowed at them to stand firm. Branoc laughed, and the sound sent tidal waves racing across the straits. His body of wood and flesh was one, and he felt every heartbeat within him, every breath expelled. All were his now. Swords cut at his feet and ankles, ants attacking the mightiest bull.
Like a titan from their own legends come to life, Branoc crushed the host of Rome beneath his vast feet. Boulders thundered into his chest and shoulders, smashing the woven structure of his body. Long lengths of barbed steel penetrated his timber skeleton and spitted the life within him. Crushed animals spilled from him like blood.
These hurts he could not ignore.
He bent to lift a pair of Roman boats from the corpse-choked shoreline and cast them over the water. His aim was true, and a host of war-machines were smashed to kindling.
Given heart by his might, the massed hordes of the Ordovice and Deceangli hurled themselves at the Romans once more. They fought in the shadow of their god, and what man would not fight harder with such an eye upon them?
Branoc laid waste to the Romans again, pulping men beneath his tread, and crushing them in his wooden fists. He saw the leaders of the Roman host atop two pale geldings. A baying host of tribesmen surrounded them, hacking at the heavily armored warriors defending their masters.
The glittering eagles of their war-standards give hope to those around them. Branoc knew what stock the Romans placed in these golden birds.
If the eagles broke so, too, would the Romans.
With Roman invincibility shown to be a lie, their hold over the tribes of Britannia would be broken forever. Branoc himself would drive the invaders back to Dubris and drown them in the ocean from whence they had come.
Branoc turned his ponderous course towards the eagles.
Blood coated Octavius from the neck down. Some was his, most was not, but it was all Roman. He’d lost his shield somewhere in the crushing impact of the demon’s fist as it swept along the battle line. His mail was in tatters, metalled strips hanging like rags from the leather undershirt.
He and Tiberius fought side by side, splashing through the tide of smashed bodies and blood to reach the general. Lucius was dead, his upper body flattened by the titan’s crushing weight. Cato was nowhere to be seen. The others? Who knew?
Who knew anything amid this wholesale slaughter?
Lines were broken, all hope of victory smashed in the face of the monstrous demon of timber, flesh, and necromancy. The demon’s foot slammed down on the beach once more. Bodies flew into the air, the ocean dyed red with Roman blood.
Only the triarii remained unbroken.
And then he heard it.
Deafening horn blasts from across the water, too loud for any mortal instruments, too powerful for anything other than a host of war gods. They sounded again, braying blasts of rising notes as familiar to him as his own name.
The contendite vestra sponte, the order to assume an aggressive stance and attack every opponent before them.
Octavius halted his headlong run and looked out over the dark water separating the mainland from this place of death.
Brutish forms emerged from the clouds and spume, as vast as the wickerwork giant, but angular and straight edged. Taller than the legendary statue of Helios at Rhodes, their bulk was enormous. Like striding siege towers, they were formed of vast spars of seasoned oak and plated in hundreds of Roman shields. A legion of soldiers labored within, and roaring furnaces, vast bellows and ingenious mechanisms empowered them.
“Ordo Talos,” cried Octavius.
Two Roman colossi marched over the strait, traversing the water as easily as a man might cross a gently flowing brook. They creaked and swayed with the groaning of timber and leather, of crafted steel and cranking hydraulics, surpassing the complexity and cunning of anything devised by the great Archimedes.
One bore a gladius of gargantuan proportions, a demon-slaying weapon sent down to earth by the gods themselves. The other carried a long, leaf-bladed pilum that might have bridged the sea separating Britannia and Gaul.
Roman cheers heralded their arrival, and the skirling of war horns was the screech of the furies as they offered challenge to the tribal giant.
The demon turned from its slaughter and loosed a bellowing roar of primal fury. It shook the earth and split the sky with thunder. Octavius found himself laughing at the sight of the giants of Ordo Talos, all thoughts of retreat forgotten.
“Rabaa!” shouted Cato, and Octavius saw the decanus crouched in the lee of a smashed pile of timber that looked like the vile of
f-spring of boat and chariot. “Run!”
Octavius suddenly realized he was standing directly in the path of the colossi. He ran through the water, all fighting forsaken at the sight of the giants lurching towards one another. Ordovice warbands rallied to their wicker giant, the Romans to the shoreline, like the warriors of ancient Troy witnessing the mythic duel of their champions.
Booming waves struck the island, all but submerging the beach and dragging hundreds of bodies into the sea. Corpses spinning in the water buffeted Octavius and Lucius, but Hades himself could not have dislodged them.
A Roman colossus thrust with its vast spear. The blade plunged home in the demon’s gut. A deafening bellow of pain blasted over the island, and any man afoot was hurled to the ground. Living things fell from the splintered wound; goats, sheep, and livestock of all descriptions.
The demon’s branched fist slammed down as the enormous spear of beaten steel withdrew. The weapon buckled with the force of the blow and bonded shards of steel fell to the beach like enormous cleaver blades. It bent with a creaking groan of compressing timbers to step inside the Roman war-engine’s guard. A fist of knotted branches hammered the shielded belly of the colossus. The impact of wood on iron was deafening.
Shields buckled and fell from the war-engine’s body in a red rain. The shattered bodies of legionaries fell after them, trailing long lengths of chain and rope. The war-engine took a reeling step back and swung its arm at the demon’s head.
The sound was that of a dull axe striking fire-seasoned timber. Blood from the creatures within burst from the lumpen form of the demon’s framework skull and lightning split the sky as it howled.
Even as it reeled from the blow, the second Roman war-engine crashed forward and brought its massive gladius around in a ponderous sweep that cut an upward arc into the wound caused by its brother engine.
An avalanche of leaves and mud poured onto the beach, but even as Octavius watched, he saw the wicker branches writhe like the questing heads of snakes as they regrew and knotted themselves back together.