He wore his hair long and braided like a German’s and affected the wolfskin jacket that was a matter of pride with the frontier scouts. He came through the gate on a pony whose shaggy winter coat and matted tail almost obscured its Arab blood, and he gave a casual salute to the stiff and polished sentries who barred his way.
“You look like a bog troll,” the gate centurion said disgustedly. “Go and clean up before you see the legate.”
“When I want to march about with a pilum up my ass, I’ll rejoin a legion,” the frontier scout said in an educated voice. “Step aside.”
Two minutes after the scout’s appearance in the Principia, three optios erupted through the tent flap, and the cohort commanders and tribunes received an abrupt summons. By midday the whole camp was being pulled down, and everyone knew the Germans were on the move.
Correus had seen a big camp broken before, but not like this. They had a good two days’ march to catch the Germans where the frontier scout reported the ground was best for Roman-style fighting, and everything had to be taken with them. They were not so much dismantling the camp as draining it hollow, leaving behind for a home base only the actual fortifications. Everything else was loaded in the baggage train, made as small as possible by burdening the legionaries themselves with their own gear. In the kitchen the head cook sat on a sack of onions grumbling over the provision lists, while the quartermaster quarreled with the armorer and with Labienus’s field-hospital crew over the allocation of the wagons. In the centuries, each centurion called his roll and checked off names against the fit-for-duty lists, reporting the tally to his commander, and so upward to the legate. The centurions were the backbone of the army, and they were at work everywhere, like an iron framework that held it all together; checking and rechecking, chewing out malingerers and calming new recruits, gathering their men about them with words of praise and duty.
The couriers to Vindonissa had gone out hours ago and would be back before dark with confirmation from the legate there; in the meantime the machinery of the army rolled on. For Correus, caught up in it, everything burned brightly, like a pitch flame, and the lump of fear in his stomach was acknowledged and then ignored. There was no time for fear, although he knew that the same leaden lump must be riding in the belly of every man in camp, unless he were a fool. So this was how you got around fear, he thought with the back of his mind while his optio read off the century’s supply lists. You crossed off one task and went on to the next, and not even fear could stand up to the endless tide of details that made it possible to move five thousand men on a day’s notice.
Far past nightfall, the torchlit camp scurried like an anthill, but they marched in the morning with the dawn mist swirling around their feet, a winding, deadly column moving down the log road like a spined beast with iron feet. They went in battle order, pilum points bristling above them in the chilly light, with the scarlet of the officers’ cloaks making fiery splashes at intervals among them. At the tail of the vanguard, the Eagle-bearer carried the great golden bird before him, as the legate and his tribunes rode behind. Then came the bulk of the legion in a steady tramp that drummed like thunder on the wooden road.
Paulinus, packing his saddlebags, with Tullius beside him, watched them move out. He had orders to get the hell out of there and back to Argentoratum, and he knew that this time he would have to obey. As the tail of the baggage train rumbled past and the rear guard came up in its wake, he thought: so many friends… So often before he had watched friends march out and wondered which of them would not march back. He shoved the pack buckle home and nodded at Tullius.
“Best we be going.”
* * *
The forest was lifting its green head to spring, and ferns and blue flowers grew in the damp patches between the rocks. It seemed ironic to Correus that this quickening of the world could signal the death of men, but his own troops seemed unconcerned by such philosophical considerations. One of them raised his voice in song, a rolling tune the legions marched to, and the rest caught it up, shouting out the chorus. Correus joined in, proud of them as he tramped at their head. They marched as they would fight, and in battle a centurion was a foot soldier like his men.
They camped at midday on an upland slope and dug in. The Germans should still be well to the east, but the legate took no chances that they were not closer. The legion was making slightly short marches to keep the Vindonissa Legion, traveling at a forced-march pace, within reinforcing distance if the scouts’ information should prove wrong and the Germans showed themselves before they were expected. They had better not, the legate said, and the frontier scout went over his deductions again, pointing to a herd of scrawny cattle grazing at the far end of the meadow. No tribe would leave its cattle loose where it planned to fight, and no more would they if they expected the legion to be on their trail so soon. The legate nodded thoughtfully and called up a troop of cavalry. They whooped off joyously, and in an hour or two there was beef stew bubbling on the cookfire.
“Nyall’s own damn cows,” Correus chuckled as he ate. “Now there’s justice.”
“Actually these pastures are in the Hermanduri’s land,” Silvanus said.
“I thought they were the only clan that had sworn allegiance to us,” Flavius said. The constraint between him and Correus had faded somewhat with the winter and seemed to vanish entirely on the march in the face of coming battle.
Silvanus wiped his bowl out with a piece of bread. “Yes and no,” he said. “They swore to us, all right, but I didn’t see one man of fighting age in any of the holdings we passed. I think we can eat their cows with a clear conscience.”
“When will it come?” Flavius’s face was carefully blank, but to Correus, at least, it was plain that he was tense.
“To a fight, you mean?” Silvanus looked cheerful at the prospect. “Tomorrow, maybe, but better the day after when Vindonissa’s had a rest. They’ll catch up with us by tomorrow midday.”
“What are the Germans like as fighters?” Correus asked. “I’ve had some training in their weapons.” He thought gratefully of Forst.
“Fierce enough,” Silvanus said. “They paint themselves up like devils to scare the daylights out of you. And they get their licks in now and again.” He glanced at the white, healed scar on his sword arm. “But they’re death-or-glory boys. They think it a point of honor to be in the front of a charge. Our men, who’ve had that sort of thing beaten out of them, make better soldiers.”
All of which did little to banish the fear of the unknown that lurked at the back of Correus’s mind – a fear that ran rampant in his brother’s. Maybe only your first battle could banish fear. Or perhaps nothing ever did. It was not a question that Correus wanted to ask Silvanus.
* * *
Two mornings later, he buckled on his lorica as the shrill notes of reveille and then the fall-to-arms sang out over the mountain pasture where the army had drawn up. The nervous sensation was unabated – a tight, solid knot at the pit of his stomach – and a hot excitement seemed to run just under the skin. The world looked very sharp and clean-edged as the mist drew off and revealed the bronze and scarlet of the Eighth Augusta and the detachment from Vindonissa, the bulk of that legion, who were spread out along the rise.
Before them, the ground dipped into a flat valley and then climbed again to a second hillcrest. That hill stood empty along the skyline, but they knew well enough what lay behind it – for the scouts who had slipped across the high moor in the night had seen the German campfires. Hundreds of them.
The legate moved along the line with his optios and his Eagle-bearer beside him, speaking to an officer here and there. The tribunes scurried in his wake like chicks behind a hen. They had probably never fought a battle before either, Correus realized. And they weren’t soldiers – not really. They hadn’t had a centurion’s training. They might outrank him, but he was the professional. He straightened his back and took a grip on his pilum staff, and the tight knot unwound just a little.
The
re was a sharp intake of breath from the man beside him, the standard-bearer of his century, and the bronze disk with “IV” inside a laurel wreath dipped as the soldier’s hand slipped on the staff.
“I see them,” Correus said quietly, looking where the man was pointing.
All along the hillcrest they stretched, too far away to be more than a black mass of spear points and tossing heads of horses. Something hung in the air, a sound almost too low to hear. It swelled up until it became the ominous rumble of a storm sky. Correus heard the rhythmic clatter of spear shaft on shield, and the chant of voices calling down destruction from German gods.
“Look now, they’re tryin’ to sing us to death!” someone called out. Another man answered, “Well, it’s workin’,” before Correus glared them into silence.
The legate gave a signal, and as the booming note of a German war horn rolled over the chanting on the hill, it was met by the high, sweet call of Roman trumpets, and the auxiliaries, the light-armed van of the army, moved into place on the valley floor. Then, with a thunder of hooves and a screeching war cry that set the teeth of every man in the legion on edge, Nyall’s war band came pouring down the slope – two thousand horsemen riding bareback with leveled spears, their faces and bodies painted with red clay and charcoal and blue herbal dye so that they looked like a Hell-wind and not men at all. Almost at their heels ran the swiftest of the foot fighters, ready to move in when the onslaught of horsemen broke the legion’s line.
The Roman auxiliaries flung their pilums. A few horsemen in the leading edge went down, but the rest still came on. The auxiliaries knelt to meet them, shields tipped up, swords held ready to stab into the bellies of the horses. They took the weight of the charge, and more riders crashed down in the spring grass, and then the trumpets sang again and the auxiliaries were pulling back, circling wide to harry the flanks of the enemy while the heavy-armed troops of the legions moved in.
“Our turn now,” Messala Cominius said, and they moved out with the rest to meet the baying horde that streamed down the far hillside. The German horsemen were in the thick of it, and Correus thought he saw Nyall’s flaming head behind a green and scarlet shield as an arm drove a spear clean through a legionary shield and the soldier behind it. Then the battle closed in around Correus, becoming a few feet of blood and clashing metal, the screams of men and horses, with the sun riding hot in a pale sky above, and there was no time for anything but to look to his men and to his own life.
They flung their pilums with deadly aim, then stepped forward as one man, and stabbed and stepped up again. When a soldier went down, another took his place, shield locked to the shields beside him, in the formation which gave a meaning to all those days of drill. Roman ranks held long enough to break the momentum of the German charge, and then the battle dissolved into a chaos of individual wars, fought out by cohort and by centuries with the standards swaying above them in the sun. Higher still on the hillcrest, the Eagle of the legion perched on his thunderbolts, and the legate sat calmly on a gray horse, taking stock, directing, and cursing the Emperor’s mistrust. With another legion he could simply have rolled over the Germans and there would have been no battle. He nodded an order to the bugler beside him and the boy licked his lips and blew hard. The cavalry pulled back and wheeled along the rocky southern edge of the meadow to harry the German flank.
Correus heard the bugle faintly above the din and fury, but all he could see was the naked, screaming warrior before him. He drove his sword upward under a bronze and blue shield, and the man crashed down in the trampled meadow grass. But two more took his place. There was no fear left in Correus now, only a deadly, singing excitement that said stab and push forward, kill or be killed. Stab and push forward. A dun horse reared and crashed down almost on top of him as a legionary rammed his sword into its belly, and the rider scrambled from its back, his sword flashing. Correus moved his shield just in time to send the blade sliding off the iron plates of his lorica. He thrust with his own blade and felt it pierce the breastbone. As the painted figure fell, Correus saw that he was no more than sixteen – a boy just come to manhood. And there was no time to mourn the wrongness of that death – he was fighting for his life with a snarling blond man with the gold collar of a chieftain and a red shield with a bronze boss shaped like a stag’s head. Odd, that he should see that all so clearly.
They were hardly moving now, and the battle began to have the nightmare quality of trying to run through water, while the smell of blood seemed to soak into the ground and the air. Correus realized that his sword hand was wet with blood. He tucked up under his shield and wiped his hand as well as he could on his tunic skirt – the blood would make the hilt slippery. The reserves, he thought. Surely now the legate would bring them in! The Germans had thrown everything they had into a wedge to try to break the legion in two, and it wasn’t going to hold much longer.
The legate on his hilltop also saw it and knew it was time. He had to break Nyall’s war band or it would break him. They were stronger than he had thought. But – and he smiled a grim little smile – he had something that Nyall hadn’t counted on, or the German would never have thrown his whole force at the legion’s center that way. The bugler blew again, the trumpets picked it up, and the reserves (mostly the Vindonissa detachment) moved out to shore up the front line. And then from among the trees at the tumbled northern edge of the meadow another trumpet sang out, and two full cohorts poured in a precisely calculated pattern through narrow gaps in the trees to hammer against Nyall’s flank. The legate smiled again as the Germans rocked under this counterattack. It was no easy maneuver to take a thousand men in battle order through a close-growing wood, but that was what Roman drills were for. And this one was going to save the Emperor’s frontier for him.
The battle was shifting. Correus could feel it as his men surged forward around him, without knowing what it was that had done the trick. Nyall’s allied war band was roughly the equal of the legion in number, but the foot fighters who followed the mounted warriors, most armed with only shield and spear, were no match for the heavy-armored infantry cohorts of the Romans. They buckled at the flank, and the whole northern wing of the German host began to fall in on its center. The legion’s left flank swung around behind them and pushed, and if the Roman right flank and cavalry could hold, they would have the Germans between hammer and anvil.
Nyall, in the thick of the horsemen, saw what was happening. The strength of the German war band lay in the weight of its first charge. Boxed in by the mechanical advance of the legion behind its locked shields, his flanks would crumble until they went down. He had never fought a Roman legion in full strength before. The demoralized troops of isolated Rhenus forts, caught in the upheaval of civil war, had been easy pickings. But now Nyall saw his mistake and knew that it was almost too late to recover. He pulled his horsemen back and hurled them at the weaker southern flank of the legion while the war band fell back behind him.
The Roman southern flank wavered and barely held under this onslaught, but the war band was fighting in desperation now, with the bulk of the legion pushing at its rear. There was a trumpeted order and the standards of the Eighth and Ninth Cohorts moved above their soldiers’ heads in the sunlight, drawing their men after them to shore up that wavering southern line.
At the southern end of the valley, the ground fell away into a running slope of tumbled rock and stunted trees, jagged ground that was dangerous to heavily armed soldiers.
In the end it was that slope that saved the Germans. They poured along it like mountain goats, their hill-bred horses keeping their footing where the lumbering troops of the legion began to stumble. There was a cry as the commander of the Ninth Cohort and his standard-bearer went down together, the standard pole snapping under the hooves of a war-horse. Someone else, a centurion, snatched the standard from the ground.
“Hold them! To me, and hold them!” the officer shouted.
Correus heard the shout, and over it the notes of fall-back-and-regr
oup. The legate was allowing the Germans to go, unwilling to break more men on the rocky slide that ran away downhill into the forest. Correus gathered his century, moving them back toward the main lines. Suddenly there was room to breathe as the war band streamed away. The enemy were foot troops mostly, with the horsemen giving cover at either side, and their wounded were borne among them at the center. German dead lay thick along the valley floor. The legion licked its own wounds and let them go; time enough to hunt the living on better ground.
* * *
“Ah, Julianus. Still with us, I see.”
Correus looked up to see Messala Cominius leaning a blood-streaked arm on a broken shield. An optio was trying to bind up with his neck scarf the gash that ran from wrist to elbow.
Correus inspected himself hesitantly, remembering the boar hunt when he had been hurt but did not feel it. This time there were no surprises. “Yes, sir,” he said a little shakily. “But you’re wounded. Let me get you back to Labienus.”
“No, no, I’ll do well enough,” Cominius said, “till—” He broke off as a gap opened up in the fleeing mass of Germans on the slope below. “Who’s the deaf fool that did that?” The fall-back-and-regroup had sounded three times, insistently, but someone had disobeyed, and charged the retreating war band. Far below them they could see a broken cohort standard waving at the edge of the trees with a single bronze century standard beside it, caught between a knot of some fifteen mounted warriors and another fifty at their backs. The century had pursued a group of Germans in vengeance for their dead commander. It should have been an easy one to take – but they had not allowed for the fact that Nyall of the Semnones rode among that little knot of horsemen, or that his Companions would turn back for him.
The Centurions Page 21