The Centurions

by The Centurions (retail) (epub)

  Messala Cominius swore, and his face, under the mud and sweat, was furious. Now he would have to disobey orders also, or watch another century slaughtered for no good-reason. He started to lift his shield and yelped. His arm was useless, and his second-in-command lay dead somewhere on the valley floor.

  “Typhon take their souls, every one!” Cominius gritted his teeth. “Julianus, take the cohort and go get those fools out of there! Circle around but don’t try to fight the whole German army.”

  Correus nodded and motioned the cohort standard-bearer up beside him. They circled away from the flying tail of the war band, and he hoped to Mithras he could get around through the wreckage of the battlefield and down the far slope in time before the century was cut to pieces.

  Cominius, watching them go, hoped so, too. But he knew well enough that his cohort was alone in this. The cavalry and the rest of the right wing were scattered and just beginning to reform, and the remains of the Ninth Cohort were leaderless except for that madman down the slope. So he had sent an untried centurion, still shaking from the effects of his first pitched battle, to haul the fool’s ass out of the fire if he could. Cominius didn’t even want to think about what the legate was going to have to say about that.

  Correus took them over the torn bodies of the dead (later he would be sick, he thought – not now) and down the sloping shelf of rock turned sideways by some ancient upheaval, at as reckless a pace as they could manage. The legate was still perched on his hilltop, and a staff optio was undoubtedly making a beeline between him and Messala Cominius even now, but Correus knew, as Cominius had known, that he would get there too late to call the cohort back. They made the last hundred yards at a stumbling run and threw themselves at the Germans, knocking them back by sheer weight of numbers to let the trapped century draw off. At the back of the press, the smaller group of enemy riders was also caught between the century of the Ninth Cohort and a face of rock that jutted up behind them. The trapped century had locked their shields into a square when the Germans had first encircled them, and if they couldn’t move, neither could Nyall and the handful of warriors under the rock face. But now the square was breaking up faster than Correus’s men could pull the Germans off their backs.

  Correus could hear the clash of swords and the shouted orders of the centurion, but all he could see above the thrashing forms of the horsemen was the silver of the cohort standard and the bronze insigne of the century. The bronze turned in the sun, gleaming and unreadable, but then as it turned again, he could read it all too clearly. The sixth century! Flavius’s century! It was his brother’s voice that he had heard screaming “Hold them!” above the chaos. Something ran hot under his skin, and Correus drove the cohort forward into the plunging horsemen.

  “Out! Push out! Break out, damn you!” he shouted to the faltering men in the square, and they turned with a last desperate effort as the Eighth Cohort broke the way open for them.

  A mounted warrior came plunging at him, and Correus swerved away from the deadly hooves as the man beside him went down screaming under the German’s spear. Correus felt his sword hilt slip from his hand as he fell. He rolled and came up and caught frantically at the spear shaft as the warrior leveled it at his breast. It was a chancy thing, he knew, but his shield wasn’t going to hold under the blow with the weight of horse and rider behind it, and he was caught tight against his own men behind him. He slipped his right arm free of his shield, kicking it under the horse’s feet, and swung hard on the spear shaft with both hands. It caught the warrior in the eye with the haft end as it came up, and he loosened his grip for only a second. It was enough. Correus twisted the spear away and ran the German through the chest with it as the man came down on top of him.

  The horse shrieked and reared, teeth bared and hooves black in the air above Correus’s head. Correus ducked and caught at the bridle reins, and as the horse came down he threw himself across its back, the spear still in his hand. The horse screamed and plunged again, and Correus hung on with his knees and reached down to pull its head tight against its shoulder. He couldn’t get down now or the horse would kill him. And he wanted that horse. He could see above the battle from its back.

  It was like fighting a wild thing, with one hand on the bridle, up close by the enameled ornaments of the bit, and one hand clutching the spear.

  “Look to the commander!” someone shouted, and Correus saw, as the world rocked around him with the stallion’s plunging, that the men of his own century were packed tight about him, as close to the flying hooves as they dared. He quit trying to watch his back and pulled the horse’s head hard until it could move only in a circle and then he simply hung on. Slowly, it ceased to fight him, knowing only that the man on its back was not afraid and thus was someone who must be obeyed. Correus, thanking Poseidon Horse-giver for the short memory of the beast, put his heels into its flank and turned it on its own kind, with the men of his cohort attacking behind him.

  The German riders were falling back, and now he could see the trapped men of Flavius’s century beginning to fight their way out. Behind them, equally desperate, rode Nyall and his men, their horses foam-flecked and running with blood. As Flavius’s century began to reform, Nyall rode straight for them with a scream of fury, and Correus saw the front ten soldiers go down under German hooves. Nyall rode at the center, and Correus, breaking clear almost on top of his brother’s men, could see his face. It was blood-smeared over the paint, and his knotted hair was coming down in a fall of flame over his shoulders. Except for the paint and a leather loin covering, he was naked. But it was his eyes that Correus saw most clearly. They gleamed like a wolf’s eyes at night and the only emotion in them was hate. Nyall drew his spear back from the body of a dead legionary and hurled his roan horse forward again, bringing another man down under its hooves.

  “Get him!” Correus screamed. If the legate and Cominius had known that the war leader rode in that knot of horsemen they would have sent the whole legion after him. That was what none of them had bargained for – Nyall himself, yelling like a demon astride the roan horse, and his Companions fighting like furies with a cohort ten times their number instead of fleeing before such odds.

  Flavius had known it, from the moment that the Companions had first come riding back against him; known that he had pulled the trap down around his own ears and that if he couldn’t kill Nyall, it would be better if he died trying. Splashed with the blood of his own dead men, he was bleeding from wounds in his leg and arm, and weaving on his feet, but he could still see Nyall, red death on a red horse, riding straight for him.

  “No!” Correus saw him too, and saw his brother rise from a tangle of armored bodies almost under the red roan’s feet, shield dropped low from a wounded arm, and sword raised for a last desperate stroke. Correus kicked the gray forward until it caromed into the roan’s shoulder, and he felt Nyall’s spear go into his thigh below the leather strips of his harness tunic. He shortened his own spear and then thrust. The roan reared as Nyall jerked back and the spear point punched through the green-and-scarlet shield. Flavius had stumbled to his knees, and as Correus met Nyall’s eyes over the broken shield rim, he knew that it was kill Nyall or save his brother and that there was no right choice, and no time to make it. He dropped the reins and swung his right hand down to catch Flavius by the arm.

  “Jump!” ,He pulled him up across the gray’s back and spun the horse around as Nyall and the last of his warriors plunged past.

  The Companions broke free, and Nyall swept away with them. They flew in a pack down the slope while the cohort and Flavius’s weary men watched them go.

  “After ’em, sir?” The standard-bearer of the Eighth Cohort kept a respectful distance from the gray horse.

  Correus shook his head. “Infantry don’t catch horsemen. We did what we came for. Take the cohort back to Cominius, with my compliments.” He gave the standard-bearer a tired smile.

  Flavius began to slide down from the gray’s back.

  “You�
��re wounded,” Correus said. “Ride.”

  “No.” Flavius dropped to the ground. He was shaking, but his eyes were steady and cold as dark glass. “I’ll not ride back in your tender care a second time… brother. You should have gone for Nyall, not me.” He turned and started up the slope. One of his men respectfully picked up his shield and sword, and another slipped Flavius’s arm around his shoulder to ease his wounded leg.

  Correus watched his brother walk away, supported between them.

  * * *

  Flavius’s men lied for him and swore to the legate that they had not heard the order to pull back. Flavius denied their tale just as vehemently and took the blame on himself. In the end the legate let him go with little more than a reprimand and a warning to the new commander of the Ninth Cohort to mark him for a hothead and keep his eye on him. With Correus he was somewhat less gentle. Flavius hadn’t known what he was doing when he took his century after that little knot of horsemen and thus called down fifty more on his head. Correus had known only too well who it was that he had traded for his brother’s life.

  “If Centurion Cominius didn’t swear he needs you where you are I’d break you back to sixth century for this!” the legate snapped. “As it is, you’re off privileges for a month!”

  “Yes, sir,” Correus said stiffly. A blood-soaked bandage was knotted around his thigh, beneath the healed scar of the old wound.

  The legate glared at him. “Is that all you’ve got to say for yourself?”

  “Yes, sir.” Nothing else was left, just an empty sickness that was partly Flavius and partly the battle.

  “Then why in Mithras’s name did you tell me that was Nyall you let loose?” the legate exploded.

  “I didn’t feel I had a choice, sir.”

  The legate said nothing. It was humid in his tent and he was tired and gritty and wished he could bathe. He glared at Correus again. “This was your first battle, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.” Again the memory washed over him – dead men, eyes open and staring to the sun.

  “All right, you’re dismissed.”

  Correus turned to go.

  “Julianus!”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Your horse is still tied where you left him. You’d better go water him.”

  Correus blinked. Antaeus was with Bericus and Nestor and the baggage train, where he had been all day. “The gray, sir? You mean you’re giving him to me?”

  “He has kicked my commander of horse from here to next Saturnalia, and bitten the cavalry vet,” the legate said with acid politeness. “You took him, Julianus; you deal with him.”

  * * *

  “I don’t get it.” Correus sat by the fire and put his head in his hands. It ached, like the rest of him. “Why in Poseidon’s name would the legate threaten to break me two centuries and then give me a valuable horse that ought to have gone with the rest of the spoils?”

  “Such as they are,” Silvanus said, thinking of the broken German bodies they had pulled from the field; poor men mostly, from a poor land. He shook his head and regarded Correus with an expression of elaborate patience. “Because, you thickwit, you are a hero.”

  “I’m a what?”

  “You’re a hero. You took command of a cohort when you’d just fought the first battle of your young life, and you saved a whole damn century of fellow citizens. They ought to give you the corona civica for it, but they won’t.”

  “I also let Nyall get away.”

  “And saved another life while you were at it. Your brother’s life – and he hardly even likes you! The story’s all over camp. We didn’t exactly win an unequivocal victory today, and your little stand for glory and the legion has raised morale enough to be worth a whole cohort of reinforcements.”

  Correus poked at the fire with his vine staff. He’d have to clean it, but he didn’t much care.

  Silvanus shook his head and his eyes were amused. “You didn’t really think that a one-to-one fight with a warrior like Nyall was a sure thing, did you? He’d probably have killed you and got away anyway, with that ring of watchdogs around him. You aren’t that good, you know.”

  Correus looked up as the irony sank in. He laughed tiredly. “No, I suppose I’m not.”

  “I should think not,” Silvanus said, “or you would have a swelled head. Here, have some wine and quit lashing yourself over it. The legate had to take some notice, but it’s not you he’s mad at. The only thing that saved Flavius’s ass was his owning up to being wrong in disobeying orders to fall back. And that’s just because we’re short of officers, and his men are too loyal to him to take kindly to a replacement. He’s made good there, you know.”

  Correus nodded. “I saw that. They fought well for him.”

  “Well, it’s just as well he’s got something to hang on to,” Silvanus said brutally, “because the next time it comes to a fight, he’s going to be marked for a place at the rear.”

  Correus was silent, thinking of Flavius’s cold eyes as he had turned away from him with his smashed century around him. Why did it have to be Flavius? But he knew why. Flavius had been proving something to himself, or trying to. Something that had to do with Correus, and the boar, and a family name.

  “I’ve lost him,” he said finally. “He’s gone from me completely now.”

  “Then let him go,” Silvanus said. His voice was unexpectedly gentle. “Your brother is what he is, and I don’t suppose he likes it much, either. My friend, if you don’t let him go it will tear you both apart.”

  The dark bond that linked his life to Flavius’s seemed to wind around his throat, strangling him. “He’s part of me,” Correus whispered. “I can’t.”

  Below them in the twilight a black cloud rolled upward from the valley floor. The legion was burning its dead.

  * * *

  They moved out again in three days. The worst wounded, Flavius among them, had been sent back to the hospital at Argentoratum. Correus watched his brother go with relief.

  He was grateful that his own wound proved to be minor; he couldn’t have faced a month in the hospital with Flavius.

  The legate sent for him to interrogate the few Germans they had managed to take alive. He got little enough from the prisoners. They lay shackled together in a guard tent, blank-faced and hopeless, prepared merely to grit their teeth and endure whatever came. One of them even tried to kill Labienus with a knife hidden in his boot when the surgeon came in to see to their wounds.

  “Let the bastards bleed, sir,” the guard said when he had kicked the German off Labienus and helped the surgeon to his feet.

  “I’m a surgeon,” Labienus said, panting. “I took an oath to more than the army.” The guard shrugged and sat on the prisoner, none too gently, while Labienus dressed his arm.

  Correus gave the legate the best estimate of the war band’s strength that he had been able to get, and he shook his head when Calpurnius Rufinus pressed him for more details. “I don’t think they really know, sir,” he said.

  The legate wasn’t overly surprised. These were merely foot fighters called up by their chiefs. Most had probably never even seen Nyall close up. It was pure chance that the legion had even these, for unless they were hard pressed, the Germans took their wounded and their dead as well. They had even been known to sacrifice a safe retreat to bring their dead away. Nyall was apparently more ruthless – or a better strategist. At any rate, he had learned one strategic lesson – he would not meet the legion face to face again in a pitched battle. That meant they were going to have to hunt him down among the hills.

  The most severely wounded of the prisoners were executed and the rest sent back under guard to Argentoratum to be sold in the slave market there.

  Correus, seeing the bodies of two of the men he had questioned tipped into a common pit with the rest of the German dead, said a brief prayer over them, the only one offered by Rome for the dead of the enemy. Below them in a broken heap he saw a braided knot of gold hair, bloodstained and muddy now, and a
face he knew – the boy he had killed himself, the boy who had been a warrior for no more than a year and who had stood beside Nyall and the one-eyed envoy at the meeting with the legate. “Valhalla take them,” he whispered, and turned away, saddened.

  In their own common grave, the legionary dead had been laid out with the prayers of their comrades and a coin for Charon’s passage fee on each eyelid. Pitch had been poured into the trench and brushwood laid on that, and the whole set alight, with the cohort standards and the Eagles of two legions paraded beside them in farewell.

  The grave of the German dead lay open to the sun and the wheeling ravens above; and when it was ready, the army pulled back out of sight and waited, hoping that Nyall would try to retrieve his uncovered dead. It was a brutal tactic, but Rome had never forgiven her enemies easily.

  Nyall kept clear. The legate never knew (although Correus, remembering the things that Forst had told him, suspected) that Nyall’s orders to ignore their dead had very nearly broken the remains of the war band in two.

  When it was plain that Nyall would not take the bait, the Romans moved out, leaving the open grave to the ravens and the wolf-folk as a warning. What followed was a mopping-up operation of march and countermarch, night raids and burned villages. Correus stayed with his men, riding the gray war-horse until his leg was healed enough to take a march again. He had given Antaeus into the charge of one of the wagon drivers, for Bericus had gone back to Argentoratum with Flavius. Correus rode the gray simply because no one else could get near him.

  The Twenty-second Legion from Moguntiacum caught up with them in camp, and two heavy drafts for the Eighth Augusta and the Vindonissa forces also came in on the second day out. Someone’s counsel had finally prevailed in Rome, but Calpurnius Rufinus, who was in overall command of the expedition, noted that the Emperor’s trust had not extended to more troops for the Twenty-second, which had played a part in supporting Vitellius’s bid for power. Emperor Vespasian deemed it enough of a favor that they had not been cashiered like the rest who had given Vitellius their allegiance.