‘Go! Go and earn your freedom!’
For a moment longer the prisoners hesitated, until a shaggy-haired giant who had hefted the ram’s heavy nose with straining muscles bellowed his defiance and loped forward into the fort, triggering a collective howl of anger and a sudden mad charge from the men behind him. As the last of the barbarians vanished through the gateway, Julius flashed his sword down.
‘Advance!’
The four centuries trotted quickly towards the smashed gate’s opening, flinching involuntarily as the bolt throwers on the hill behind them spat their heavy missiles over their heads in a salvo of shrieking iron. As Marcus rounded the gateway and stepped over the fallen gates’ shattered timbers a falling man rebounded from the palisade in front of him and hit the ground with a wet crunch of shattered bones, a bolt buried deeply in his chest. He stepped forward and hacked reflexively at the dying man’s head to make sure of the kill, then stared up and down the curved face of the inner wall. There seemed to be no other target for his sudden urgent need to take his blade to another enemy, only the half-naked barbarian prisoners milling about between the walls to either side of them and a few scattered corpses of the bolt throwers’ earlier targets. He started as a scream sounded from the rampart to his rear, suddenly feeling horridly vulnerable to whatever was happening above and behind him. Instinctively raising his shield as he spun to face the outer wall, he felt a clanging thud as a spear intended for his back found only the iron boss in the shield’s centre. The spearman howled his frustration at the miss, then staggered forward off the wall and turned a neat half-somersault to the ground with an arrow buried in his neck, the price of standing to make the throw.
A flicker of movement caught Marcus’s eye, a mob of a hundred or more barbarians streaming round the fort’s inner wall from his right, waving swords and axes in the air as they charged towards their attackers with berserk howls. They ripped through the barbarian prisoners without mercy, clearly aware of their former allies’ need for redemption through victory and taking no chances with their loyalties. For whatever reason, and whether it made sense or not, the defenders had committed most of their strength to meeting the Tungrian attack head on. Any chance that the legion cohorts would be bearing the brunt of the battle once the auxiliaries had broken the fort’s first line of defence was clearly no longer a reality. Dubnus had seen the barbarian charge, and stepped forward with a bellowed command that cut through the moment’s confusion.
‘Form a line!’
A good part of the 9th Century was through the gate already, and in seconds they had an unbroken wall of shields raised across the gap between the first and second palisades, the other centuries clustering to their rear in the thin space between the walls. The wave of attackers crashed into them, hammering at the shield wall with swords and axes, while the Tungrians held them at bay and stabbed back at them with practised skill, aiming killing blows at their throats, bellies and thighs. Stuck behind the line, Marcus craned his neck to see what was happening behind the fort’s enraged defenders. As he watched, the massively built prisoner who had headed the first wave of attackers through the gateway got back to his feet a dozen paces behind the rearmost enemy warrior. A red smear across his forehead indicated that one of the defenders had clubbed him to the ground without taking the precaution of checking that the blow had been sufficient to put him out of the combat. He was pointing to something that was out of sight to Marcus around the inner wall’s curve, bellowing words that were inaudible over the battle’s cacophony of screams and curses. With a sudden flash of insight Marcus realised what he must be pointing at.
‘The next gate …’
He turned to Dubnus, pointing urgently past the seething mob of barbarians on the other side of their shield wall.
‘The second gate’s open! Give me ten men, quickly!’
He sheathed his spatha and tossed the shield aside, climbing nimbly up the rough wooden ladder that led on to the wall’s wooden fighting platform with a sudden burst of energy born of his realisation that the way to the heart of the fort had been left open behind the mass of warriors throwing themselves on to the Tungrians’ shields. Climbing on to the narrow platform, he looked out for a moment across the ridge, back to the legion cohorts waiting in the afternoon’s sunshine, their standards gleaming prettily in the sunlight. He waved down at the Syrian archers with the agreed crossed-fists gesture to indicate that the wall was taken, the signal to stop shooting at anything that moved along the wall’s length. The archers’ centurion waved back, barking to his men to stand down, and another man joined Marcus on the rampart, his face dimly remembered from his time commanding the 9th Century earlier that summer. Their eyes met, and as Marcus raised a hand to beckon him on down the wall in his wake a hot spray of the soldier’s blood stung his eyes. A heavy bolt had opened his throat with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel, the man’s blood fountaining across Marcus’s mail armour as the soldier toppled choking back into space and fell on to the men fighting below them. Another bolt slammed into the timber an inch below the top of the wall, directly in line with Marcus’s stomach, and the third screamed past his head with a hand-span to spare and no more, burying itself in the rough timber of the second palisade. Another man climbed on to the wall, and Marcus recognised Scarface, a 9th Century soldier with little respect for the cohort’s officers.
‘Best keep you fuckin’ head down, Centurion, or those legion tosspots’ll put a dart clean through it.’
Marcus nodded, ducking below the rampart and beckoning the other man on.
‘Follow me!’
He scuttled off down the line of the rampart bent almost double, slipping and almost falling on a patch of still-wet blood, and looked back to make sure that the men who had climbed up after him were following. Thirty paces around the outer palisade’s curve from the point he had climbed up he dropped from the platform’s eight-foot elevation to land beside the massively muscled prisoner, drawing both swords as the man spoke in rough Latin, his voice a bass rumble.
‘Gate open. We close, they trap.’
Marcus nodded, beckoning his men to jump down.
‘What’s your name?’
The Briton spoke without taking his eyes from the open gate.
‘Lugos.’
‘Come with me, Lugos. I may need someone that speaks the language, and you’ll be safer with us than staying here. If this works you’ll be a free man by the end of this fight.’
The big barbarian nodded curtly, and Marcus led his small party along the curve of the inner palisade to the gate, still open despite the obvious risk to the fort’s security. Marcus peeped round its timber frame, seeing a cluster of a dozen warriors standing next to the much smaller opening in the fort’s third and last wall. He pulled his head back, speaking quickly to his men.
‘There’s only one more gate. It’s still open, and they’ve only left a few men to guard it. We’ve already captured this one, and if we can stop them closing that one we’ve got the fort at our mercy. Are you with me?’
The three 9th Century men who had followed him nodded readily, Scarface glaring round at his comrades in a way they knew only too well, while the three others, from other centuries and therefore less used to his way of doing things, stared back with a mixture of uncertainty and apprehension. It would have to do. The barbarian had acquired a spear from somewhere, and stared down at him without any visible expression.
‘Very well, gentlemen, let’s go and win ourselves a fort.’
He threw himself round the gate’s wooden frame and shouted a challenge at the warriors guarding the last gate, wanting them to see the small number of men charging along the wall at them with a single officer at their head. They dithered for a moment, caught between the need to deny the Romans the gate they were entrusted to guard and the opportunity to kill their enemy, and in that time his sprinting pace halved the distance between them. Glancing back, he saw that only the barbarian, his three former soldiers and one other man had j
oined him, but it was too late to do anything but face the enemy warriors, suddenly confident as they realised that they outnumbered their Roman attackers by two to one and came forward with their swords drawn.
Jinking to right and left, Marcus batted aside the leading warrior’s sword-thrust with the long blade of his spatha and hit the man hard with his right shoulder, punching him back into the men behind him and gaining a moment’s confusion in which his small group could gather their strength. Spinning away from the tangled knot of barbarians, he readied himself to take on another warrior, only to see Lugos leap at his intended victim with a blood-curdling howl, spitting him through the guts with a downward lunge of the spear he had found and leaving it buried deep in the man, taking the sword from his nerveless fingers. He raised the weapon over his head and hacked it down into another warrior’s unprotected head, his eyes bulging wide with the bloodlust. Marcus dragged his gaze from the spectacle in time to parry a sword-blow from his left with the gladius’ short blade, spinning to his right and chopping the spatha’s heavy blade through his attacker’s spine, severing the man’s head in a shower of gore. The headless corpse toppled stiffly backwards to the turf. The other Tungrian soldiers were in the fight now, crowding in behind Scarface’s lead, and the gate guards were abruptly on the defensive as they found their strength almost halved.
Marcus looked beyond them to the last gate, knowing that their unexpected run of luck could still end in stalemate if the men remaining inside managed to get it closed. The eight-foot timbers of the fort’s innermost palisade were more than stout enough to hold off the attackers for long enough for the remaining occupants to have time to make their escape over the walls on the fort’s far side, and down the steep slopes into the surrounding wild forest, whose secret paths only they knew.
‘Scarface, hold them! You …’
He pointed at the panting Lugos, hooking a thumb at the last gate.
‘… with me!’
The other man nodded, understanding the Roman officer’s purpose if not his words, and the pair burst past the knot of fighting men and ran hard for the gate. A single man hurried through the gap just as they reached it, drawn by the sounds of battle, and died on the barbarian’s sword without ever quite comprehending how badly the fort’s defence was undone, the slippery rope of his guts falling through his torn stomach wall as Lugos pushed him back against the timber rampart and lunged at him again, shoving the sword’s blade up into his chest to skewer his heart. Marcus burst through the gate and stopped, his swords held ready to fight as he took in the scene before him. A wide-open space crowned the hill’s crest, perhaps fifty paces in diameter and surrounded on all sides by the final wooden palisade. A single timber-built hall stood against the enclosure’s far wall, and the open space between gate and building was studded with smoking cooking pits and the scattered remnants of their last meal. A single warrior stood outside the hall, and as Marcus stood breathing heavily in the gateway he shouted something through the door behind him. A massively built warrior stalked through the doorway, a fighting axe held in one hand and a round shield in the other, the thick gold torc around his bull neck marking him as the tribe’s king. He stood for a moment, taking in the sudden reality of his defeat before setting off towards Marcus at a lumbering trot with his bodyguard running alongside him.
The centurion looked back at the gateway behind him, seeing that the prisoner was still the only man to have reached as far into the enemy’s defences. He stabbed his spatha’s long blade into the grass at his feet, pointing to the gate and chopping at the air with a bladed hand.
‘Destroy the gate!’
Even if he lost this last fight there would be troops following up soon enough, once the battle between the first and second walls was resolved, and the fort’s last gate had to be kept open if that were to mean anything. The barbarian nodded, taking the sword’s heavy blade to the uppermost of the gate’s wooden hinges in a flurry of blows, and Marcus pulled his spatha from the turf and turned back to find the fort’s chieftain and his companion less then ten paces distant. Pointing to the barbarian prisoner, the big man growled a command, locking his eyes on Marcus as his bodyguard trotted warily round the Roman officer and ran at the prisoner with his sword held high.
With a growl of anger the chieftain stepped in to attack the young centurion, hacking down at him with his axe, and the savage attack left Marcus with no option but to step back beyond the blade’s humming arc. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse as the man’s bodyguard and the barbarian prisoner fought in a whirl of blades, the two men almost perfectly matched in their skill and strength. The chieftain stepped forward and struck again, slashing the axe horizontally at Marcus’s belly in a backhanded blow that knocked aside his sword and connected solidly with his mail armour, sending him staggering backwards, winded by the blow’s force even though his mail had stopped the blade from penetrating. As he struggled for breath the big man whooped in triumph, raising his weapon for the killing blow that would split the Roman’s helmet and cleave his head apart, only to stagger and fall as an impact of unimaginable force dumped him on his back.
The artillery bolt had missed Marcus by inches before punching through the big man’s mail shirt and burying fully two-thirds of its length in his chest, a chance hit by a shot fired at random into the figures struggling in the gate’s skylined opening by some frustrated artilleryman on the far slope. The chieftain struggled to get back on his feet, making it no farther than one knee. He stared stupidly down at the bolt protruding from his body, feeling the strength ebbing from him with the blood coursing down his chest, then gave Marcus a beseeching look as he dropped the axe and shield, holding out his arms in readiness for a mercy stroke. The Roman looked into his eyes for a moment before nodding, and then dropped his gladius and wielded the spatha two-handed to sever the grievously wounded tribal leader’s head from his shoulders with an executioner’s stroke. The dead man’s bodyguard stopped fighting and stepped back from the exhausted prisoner, dropping his sword and prostrating himself on the ground. Gathering his strength, the barbarian lifted his sword, looking to Marcus for a decision. The centurion shook his head tiredly, pulling the big man out of the gate’s deadly opening before any more bolts could be sent their way, and sat down heavily on the turf, his body suddenly trembling as the relentless urge to fight burned out of his blood to leave him shivering in the afternoon’s warmth.
‘Let me make sure that I’ve fully understood this. Once the fort’s first gate was open you took half a dozen soldiers and charged off like a man with his arse on fire, ignoring your instructions to hold and let the legion cohorts come forward?’
First Spear Sextus Frontinius fixed Marcus with a fierce stare from behind his desk, raising an eyebrow in a silent invitation to comment.
‘Yes, First Spear.’
‘And as a consequence of disobeying your orders, you proceeded to secure both of the gates that the regulars were supposed to capture, once you’d made the initial break in and cleared the way for them?’
Marcus kept his face stony, only too well aware of the first spear’s swift temper. He shifted his stare from the wall of The Hill’s hospital, visible through the office’s open window, to the heavy gold torc sitting on the first spear’s desk. Frontinius caught the quick glance and his face hardened.
‘Never mind the jewellery, Centurion, just answer the question.’
‘Yes, First Spear.’
‘And to round things off nicely, you also engaged the tribal leader of the Carvetii in single combat?’
‘Yes, First Spear, although I should point out that I can’t …’
‘… take the credit for his death? Yes, I read the dispatch that Julius sent ahead of your return march so I’ve had a day to consider the implications of this latest feat of arms. He stopped a bolt in the middle of the fight. Has anyone got anything to add to this tale of disobeyed orders and glorious victory?’
Rufius spoke quickly, his tone light.
‘Yes, First Spear. You should have seen Legion Tribune Antonius’s face – he had a golden fortification crown all polished up and ready to hand over to whichever of his officers was first man over the fort’s last wall and he ended up having to put it away again, or else hand it over to an auxiliary cohort centurion.’
Marcus shook his head ruefully at the memory of the legion tribune’s amazement on hearing that the Tungrians had taken the hill fort in less than ten minutes, and with only a handful of casualties. On the other side of the desk from the four centurions standing to attention in front of him, still in their mail armour from the march back to The Hill, the first spear raised his eyes in amazement to the low ceiling of his office in the cohort’s headquarters before turning his glare on the subject of their discussion. Marcus kept his eyes fixed firmly on the view through the open window and his face expressionless.
‘You may well shake your bloody head, Centurion. Once again you present me with the ultimate conundrum, young man. Once again I’ve allowed you out into the countryside only to have you come back with your reputation enhanced and your profile raised. You’ve drawn more attention to yourself than either you or this cohort can bear. It’s a mystery to me that we’ve not all been nailed up months ago …’ He rubbed reflexively at his bald scalp, turning to Julius. ‘I know Tribune Antonius isn’t the sharpest officer you’ve ever served under, but surely even he could see that there’s something not quite right about a man so obviously Roman serving in an auxiliary cohort?’
Arrows of Fury: Empire Volume Two Page 2