Betrayal: The Centurions I

by Riches, Anthony

  ‘Gods below, Alcaeus, but you’d give Kivilaz a run for his money if there was a competition for the bloodiest handed man in the tribe.’

  Scar had pushed his way through the Batavi soldiers and clapped a hand on the gore-spattered centurion’s shoulder.

  ‘I’ll take over now. See to your casualties and get your prisoners squared away.’

  Alcaeus nodded gratefully at his superior, who had run from the riverbank, he discovered later, at the head of half a dozen centuries of men upon receiving the request for urgent reinforcement. Turning to his men he found Banon holding a terrified marine by the collar of his armour with his sword raised threateningly.

  ‘It’s too late to kill him now, they’ve given up.’

  The disgusted chosen man kicked the legs out from under the man and then punched him hard in the side of his helmetless head, leaving him dazed and unable to resist.

  ‘We’re taking prisoners? How will we get them back over the river?’

  Scar answered for Alcaeus.

  ‘We are this time. Caecina wants the message to get back to the enemy generals that nowhere is safe from us, and leaving a big pile of corpses for them to find won’t have quite the same effect as a cohort of disarmed men straggling into camp with their tunics hanging round their ankles. So get them disarmed and gather their weapons and armour, we’ll keep the good stuff and put the rest in the river. And cut their belts, they don’t deserve them.’

  The centurion who had surrendered raised a hand in protest, but the prefect turned a stare on him that was hard enough to lower the hand simply by the force of the Batavi centurion’s will.

  ‘Don’t try looking to me for sympathy, you fought like women so you’ll have to get used to looking like them, until you find someone willing to issue you with fresh equipment. And I’ll be expecting you all to pass under a yoke before we let you go, and swear to Mars not to take any further part in this campaign. It’s that or we’ll hamstring every last one of you. And if you break the oath then Mars’s judgement on you will be of a lot less concern to you than mine, because if I ever see you on a battlefield I’ll have your balls off before you die. Now drop your gear and get out of my sight.’

  Alcaeus mustered his century, finding that the brief action had cost five dead and several others wounded to varying degrees, one of whom was hovering unconscious on the edge of death with a shattered skull inflicted by a vicious spade blow, while another looked unlikely to see the day out, frothing blood leaking from his spear-pierced chest. He knelt over the dying man for a moment, placing a hand on his head and commending his spirit to their god before moving on to the spear wound.

  ‘I told you to keep your shield up, Wisaz.’

  The casualty looked up at him, his face pale from blood loss, gasping for breath as he whispered his response.

  ‘Killed two … of them … Tell my children … I died … like a man … Died cleanly … not … not …’ A tear glistened in his eye. ‘Not like this.’

  Alcaeus nodded mutely.

  ‘Your name will be remembered with pride.’ Reaching out he placed the dying man’s sword across his body, guiding his shaking hand to the blood-slicked hilt. ‘And I’ll make sure that Deathbringer will go to your oldest son. Now lie still and save your strength.’

  He stood, turning to one of the dying soldier’s tent mates.

  ‘He’ll fight for a while yet. Keep him comfortable, give him water and call me if he asks for the priest.’

  Grimmaz’s tent party had come through the fight unscathed, although Lanzo was sitting on the ground with the look of a man not entirely in command of his wits while a bandage carrier wound a strip of linen round his head to hold a thick wad of material cut from a dead marine’s blue tunic to his injury. Egilhard was sitting beside him, his thoughts clearly elsewhere, and the centurion called their leading man over, gesturing to the battered soldier.

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘His helmet stopped a sword. Saved his life, but left him seeing stars. The bone doctor says there’s no break in his skull, but reckons he’ll be out of sorts for a day or two, sleepy mostly.’

  The man in question raised a hand to stop the medic for a moment, turning away to vomit onto the grass beside him.

  ‘Oh, and apparently it’s common for men with a … what did he call it?’

  Lanzo looked up at him with eyes that fought to focus.

  ‘Concussion.’

  ‘Oh yes. Men with concussion puke a lot, apparently. He’s lucky though, he’d have been dead if not for the boy here, it seems. Egilhard killed two of them.’

  The soldier shook his head, drawing a curse and a command to keep still from the men tending to his injury.

  ‘Don’t know about two, but he saved me alright. Without him I was food for the crows.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was on my knees and ready for the death stroke, looking up while the bastard who’d just smacked me on the head with his sword lifted it up to finish me off, when the boy here just turned and speared the fucker through his neck like he’s been doing it all his life. If he needs a name then you can call him Achilles as far as I’m concerned, I was a dead man without him.’

  ‘Hmmm. And the other one? What happened there?’

  ‘I saw that.’

  Alcaeus turned to find Banon beside him, his eyes on the young soldier.

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘I was keeping an eye on him out of the corner of my eye while I played with that marine, the way you do with the new boys, to take the measure of them. When they rushed us one of them squared up to him, banged shields and stepped forward only to get Egilhard’s butt spike through his foot, clean through mind you, boot sole and all, and that must have taken some effort. Then while the poor bastard was busy screaming and working out why his foot was suddenly on fire Achilles here stamped down on the foot to pull his spear free, stepped back a pace as cool as you like to get some room and then put the blade into his throat as neatly as a priest sacrificing a bull. In and out like a darning needle, almost too fast to follow, and his man went down with only the whites of his eyes showing. Dead, just like that.’

  ‘And then he killed the man who’d put Lanzo down?’

  ‘Without even pausing for breath, like it was just a dance step he’d done a thousand times before. Look, turn, stab, job done.’

  Alcaeus looked down at the young soldier, nodding slowly.

  ‘Well, that’s one less thing to worry about.’

  His chosen man looked at him questioningly.

  ‘What, whether he can fight?’

  The centurion guffawed.

  ‘Oh he can clearly fight! No, I meant the question of what we ought to call him, now he’s spilled blood for the tribe. Question asked and answered, I’d say. And you can cut that plait off, young Achilles, the days of you needing to prove yourself a man are now officially in your past!’

  The Old Camp, Germania Inferior, March AD 69

  ‘Fifth legion …’

  Two hundred paces from where Marius stood, an answering command came from from the camp’s other legion.

  ‘Fifteenth Legion!’

  Both men barked out their next words in perfect synchronisation.

  ‘Atten-tion!’

  Marius stared out across the ranks of his three cohorts as they obeyed the order, not with the expected crisp snap of thousands of boots hitting the floor at the same moment, but rather a ragged stutter that lasted for most of the time it took him to puff out a depressed gust of air, a final distant crunch of hobnails impacting on crushed rock incensing him beyond tolerance. Some fool had not only been half asleep, but had compounded the error by stamping to attention when all around him had finally fallen silent.

  ‘Take that man’s name!’

  The senior centurion regarded his men bleakly for a moment longer before issuing his next command. Fifteen hundred men of legio Fifth Alaudae were paraded before their emperor: the seventh and ninth cohorts that
had been left behind when the remainder of the legion had marched south in search of glory and the imperial throne, and the new cohort that had been allocated the number eleven, constituted in the main from raw recruits who had joined the army not much more than a month before, with a leavening of trained soldiers to show them how they were expected to behave.

  ‘Five hundred men.’ He had bemoaned their failure to attract men to the legion’s service to Gaius the previous night in the officer’s mess over several cups of red, shaking his head at the prospect of the following day’s parade of the legion before their emperor. ‘Decimus told me to provide him with at least another two cohorts, instead of which I’ve got half that number, most of them halfwits and men fit for nothing better than picking stones out of the fields and tossing themselves off behind trees when they think nobody’s watching. And after tomorrow’s shambles of a demonstration of their non-existent prowess I’ll have a legatus, an army commander and an emperor up my arse. There’s a meeting with important people in my very near future, Gaius, and nobody’s going to be handing round the glass wine cups this time.’

  In the cold light of a late March morning he was, if anything, more depressed than he’d been the previous night, with a sinking sensation in his gut that was only partially the result of having drunk more than was wise for a man whose legion would be on display to an emperor the next day.

  ‘Form ranks for battle!’

  He watched with his heart in his mouth as his three cohorts swung through ninety degrees, perhaps the hardest manoeuvre they would undertake that morning as one end of the line stayed motionless while the men at the other were almost running to swing their century through a wide arc to face the Fifteenth’s cohorts who were performing the same manoeuvre. Closing his eyes in despair as he watched the more experienced soldiers literally dragging their freshly recruited comrades through the change of orientation. A man in the front rank of the leftmost century managed the seemingly impossible feat of tripping over the rim of his own shield and sprawling headlong to the parade ground’s gravelled surface, and in the blink of an eye dozens of men were reeling in chaos as the succeeding ranks quite literally fell over him, in a chain of disaster that left a score of men struggling in a tangled mess of limbs and equipment. The century’s centurion who was, Marius noted with a powerless sigh, one of the loudest and most brutal men in his cohort, waded into them with his vine stick thrashing out to left and right to deal out instant retribution, encouraging their efforts to rejoin the moving formation with kicks and punches. If the emperor had by some miracle missed the error and its resulting mayhem, there could be little doubt that he would be observing its aftermath with what Marius expected would be a distinct loss of his sense of humour.

  Regaining their feet, the men who had fallen out of their century’s formation literally ran to catch up with the cohort’s stately progression through the arc that would bring them face-to-face with the Fifteenth, one man in such a panic at his officer’s continuous stream of invective and violence that he left both his spears lying where they had fallen and sprinted for the safety of the first formed body of soldiers he saw which, unfortunately for him, happened to be the imperial bodyguard which had been formed from a cohort of the First Germanica as a short term expedient until the praetorian guards were to hand. Determined not to jeopardise their newfound status as by far the most impressive unit on parade, the result of not only their sudden rise to exalted status but also the fact that every other man on display was either apparently clueless or coping with the fact that the man next to him was completely overwhelmed by the novelty of the situation, they followed the simple but effective strategy of completely ignoring the stray, who roamed fruitlessly up and down their line in search of a friendly face.

  ‘Dear gods below …’

  Ignoring Lupercus’s muttered imprecation, Marius watched with what under different circumstances might well have been dark amusement as the errant soldier, realising his error, dithered for a moment before realising that he was at severe risk of being charged with deserting his unit and, knowing only too well that he would at the very least be flogged for the transgression, turned and fled for the safety of his century, now a hundred paces distant. Intercepted by his centurion while still ten paces from safety, he covered the remaining distance under a rain of blows from the incensed officer’s vine stick, throwing himself into the safety of the ranks while the centurion continued to stare at him meaningfully, his enmity and eventual further retribution clearly guaranteed.

  ‘It seems that every pigeon will find its home in due course, Munius Lupercus. Even those that have attempted to join another flock!’

  Marius waited stolidly for the emperor to follow up the seemingly mild comment with a curter rejoinder, but if Vitellius was angered by the hapless man’s display he showed no sign, and as the two grossly understrength legions dressed their ranks facing one another, he turned to the legatus and saluted crisply.

  ‘With your permission, Legatus?’

  Lupercus nodded graciously.

  ‘Do please carry on, First Spear. The emperor is keen to see how much training our Germans have managed to absorb in the short time since we recruited them.’ He turned back to Vitellius as Marius turned away to march out onto the parade ground. ‘You should have seen them on the day that we formed the new cohorts, Caesar. Perfect chaos, not a man with any idea as to what he should be doing, and our few veterans driven to distraction by the need to show them. Compared to that, this is like watching the praetorians changing the guard on the Palatine Hill.’

  Both men laughed as Marius stalked away, his ire rising despite the fact that he knew his superior was only attempting to make light of the situation. Halting by the right-hand end of the Fifth’s line, he raised a hand to his opposite number, the pre-agreed signal to indicate that his legion would take first turn at mounting an attack on the Fifteenth.

  ‘Fifth Legion … are you ready for war?’

  ‘Ready!’

  The response, whilst audible, was disappointing to say the least, no better than a half-hearted rumble of voices rather than the stirring response that was supposed to answer his challenge. Looking up and down the line at his centurions, many of them newly promoted from the ranks of optios, he raised both his vine stick and his voice to redouble the call to action.

  ‘Are you ready for war?’

  ‘Ready!’

  With their officers shouting threats and encouragement, the skeleton legion did better the second time, sounding more like soldiers ready to take their iron to an enemy and less like hapless men who had got themselves into something they neither understood nor desired. Waiting for a moment, he allowed his centurions the time to redouble their efforts to persuade the recruits that failure to impress the emperor was likely to result in a disinclination on his part to grant them a much hoped for afternoon off.

  ‘ARE YOU READY FOR WAR?’

  ‘READY!’

  The last response was just about acceptable, a proper roar, and with a wave of his vine stick Marius signalled to his officers to lead their men in readying themselves for the attack that they would shortly make on the other legion. Their soldiers were swiftly organising themselves into a line of century-sized testudo formations, each century interlocking their shields to form a barrier that ought to be almost impenetrable to attack if carried out effectively. At his signal his officers began rapping their vine sticks against their greaves, the curved and sculpted metal plates that protected their lower legs, and in an instant the trained soldiers among his cohorts took up the rhythm with their spear shafts and shield rims, the pulsing sound rapping out across the parade ground and intensifying as the recruits quickly joined the more experienced men. Waiting while the Fifteenth’s men dressed their formations in readiness for the assault, he relaxed into the moment, enjoying the rhythmic rattle of wood on metal. Judging that the moment was right he walked briskly out to one side of the legion’s line and raised the stick again, then swung it down to po
int at the waiting men of the Fifteenth.

  ‘Fifth legion …’ he paused, allowing his officers to repeat his order for their own men’s benefit, a chorus of gruff bellows instructing each century to be ready for the command to move. ‘At the walk … advance!’

  Long discussion had gone into what was planned to happen next, Marius and his colleague from the Fifteenth equally concerned both with the need to present their new recruits with the easiest possible challenge to meet in front of the emperor, whilst also exposing them to no more risk than was sensible under the circumstances.

  ‘I know …’ He’d sipped his wine once the two men and their senior centurions had agreed the routine to be followed, nodding with a hard smile at his colleague. ‘If this follows form we’ll lose a dozen men between us, half of them with recoverable injuries and half of them likely to be of no more use to us. One or two of them dead, quite possibly. Better now than on a battlefield though, where their mistakes won’t just earn them a wooden javelin in the throat but might be the difference between victory and defeat. Better to weed out some of the dead wood now, I’d say, rather than having to suffer the consequences when we’re face-to-face with Otho’s legions.’

  He counted the steps, knowing that a twenty-pace advance would bring them to the closest possible spear throw, and at fifteen paces shouted his penultimate order, inwardly cringing at what the result might look like.

  ‘Spears … ready!’

  The previous day when the legion’s cohorts had practised the act of changing their grips on the one spear that they were carrying from the upright position to a throwing grip – Marius having been steadfastly opposed to risking the chaos that might result from his men having to juggle the usual two weapons while they were advancing – it had proven too much for more than a few of the new recruits. After the fiftieth dropped spear of the morning his patience had snapped, and the decision was made to minimise the risk of a repeat in front of the emperor by dint of the legionaries on both sides of the mock battle having been ordered to take to the parade ground with their spears pointing at the ground. With wooden training weapons there were no iron heads to give away the fact that the two legions were still too raw to be trusted to change their grips from the vertical carry to the throwing position without dropping them, and so the order for that position to be adopted passed almost without incident apart from the impact of one hapless recruit’s dropped weapon tripping two men in the ranks behind him.