Marius' Mules IV: Conspiracy of Eagles

by S. J. A. Turney

  The horse screamed in impossible pain at the gruesome task being performed on its belly, and bucked. The man, his work done, took the opportunity to step out and away before the beast came back down, with Varus tumbling away from the stricken mount.

  The commander hit the ground heavily, making his best attempt to roll and come up into a crouch as training dictated, but realising that something was wrong. It took a moment of utter confusion to realise that his horse’s flailing hoof had caught his helmet a glancing blow and, as he reached up to unfasten the strap and let the painful, dented helm fall to the ground, releasing his throbbing head, he also became aware that only one of his arms had obeyed his brain.

  A glance at his other arm showed a gleam of sharp white amid the crimson mess that was his forearm.

  A landing his old riding tutor would have beaten him for. Appalling!

  His brain was starting to swim with the pain-killing euphoria of battle – often the only thing that saved a soldier’s life when badly wounded and in a sticky situation.

  He was suddenly aware that the barbarian who had gutted his horse from underneath was now approaching him, blade held forward, coated to the waist in the slick of horse’s blood that had sluiced down over him. Varus felt a terrible rage infecting his mind though, unlike these crazed barbarians, he knew battle-rage for the double edged gift it was and his sheer will channelled it into a hard, cold urge to make this man pay for the death of his lovely mare.

  No sword. He’d lost both sword and shield during the fall. The shield, of course, would have been what broke his arm as he landed. He should have let it go. But the sword he’d simply dropped.

  A quick glance and he could see his expensive, carved and etched cavalry blade lying in the blood-soaked grass some ten feet away. Too far.

  The barbarian was on him. The blade flashed out, quick as a snake striking: once… twice… thrice.

  On the third lunge, Varus stepped calmly forward into the blow, coming alongside the man’s arm, and brought his elbow down on the man’s wrist, numbing the barbarian’s joint with a blow that sent waves up Varus’ own arm. The barbarian’s horse-gutting knife fell to the grass and the man stared in surprise at this Roman who’d appeared on the verge of death and totally helpless and unarmed a moment ago.

  With a growl, Varus’ good arm reached out and grasped the barbarian by the throat, his grip squeezing instantly with all the strength of a man who has spent twenty years using that fist to cling on to the reins of a startled mount or swing a heavy sword from horseback.

  The man’s gristle, cartilage, muscle, bone and soft tissue crunched and ground into a pulp in Varus’ tightening grip. His eyes bulged and his face turned purple and then grey, his head flopping at an angle, indicating that he’d kicked his last and that the jerks Varus could feel were those that came in death.

  Calmly, with steely eyes, Varus let go and the dead thing dropped to the ground before him.

  “That’s for Hyrpina. I raised her from a foal.”

  Turning slowly, he took in the situation. Despite the loss of a number of horses due to the unpleasant tactic of the enemy, the Gauls and Romans were winning out. Few of the enemy remained and at a shout they disengaged and ran to their beasts. One of the decurions called an order to chase them down, but it went unheeded in the chaos. No one had the urge or the energy to follow.

  As Varus watched, the Germanic warriors remounted in a smooth jump and, gathering the reins of the unmanned beasts, left the scene with every horse they had brought. Varus looked at the remaining twenty-odd men. He’d lost two Romans and about fifteen Gauls.

  With a cry of the sheerest agony, he yanked loose his neck scarf and pushed his broken arm into it, forming a temporary sling. His eyes streamed with the pain and he had to bite down on his lip with every movement that rubbed the raw wound on the rusty-coloured wool. With a wince and held breath, he retrieved his fallen sword and gestured with it.

  “Mount up and move – two to a horse if you have to. Let’s get back to Piso.”

  As one of the Roman riders closed, he reached down and helped haul Varus onto the back of his steed, trying not to jostle his bad arm in the process.

  Perhaps Fronto and his bleak mood had been right about today.

  * * * * *

  Piso had done a sterling job of consolidating the Gallic forces as they converged on his wolf standard. Each bolstering unit of three hundred horses and riders had joined the massed ranks, sitting in ordered rows, the front lines with their spears levelled and ready, the rest with the tips raised safely.

  Varus watched as he hurtled across the grass with his small battered unit, twenty two men sharing only fifteen horses. The Germanic tactics had been brutal and horribly effective. What it said about tribes that were supposed to hold the honour of individual combat in the highest esteem, he couldn’t say. It was apparently dishonourable to fire an arrow at an enemy, or sling a stone, but to gut his horse from under him and then pick off the downed rider seemed perfectly acceptable.

  The ranks of near five thousand horsemen were drawn up in their alae of three hundreds, with only a little manoeuvring room between the units. Piso had carefully withdrawn from his original position to the most open area of fields with no fences or ruined buildings to hamper his cavalry. It was a sensible, safe tactic.

  The Germanic attackers had abandoned their missile troops somewhere above the tree line, where the sling-wielding peasants were probably already running for their tribes’ camps. Now, the barbarian horsemen had drawn up in groups to three sides of the Roman forces.

  Varus’ initial estimate had been roughly accurate. There couldn’t be more than a thousand of them. And they’d herded the Roman forces back into a group at the centre, but left open a side for the cavalry to escape?

  Clearly they did not expect to crush the overwhelming superior forces, then. So what? Frighten them? Do enough damage to make Caesar stop and consider their offer? Anything was possible with these crazed people.

  Even as they rode, putting pressure on the tired horses with the extra riders, Varus watched the barbarians sweep forward and realised what they’d done.

  As the Germanic warriors reached some hundred yards distant from the Gallic spear tips, they vaulted smoothly from their moving horses like athletic dancers on a Greek vase, landing lightly and already running, their heavy swords in one hand and their now free hands going to their belt to withdraw their horse-gutting knives.

  The slaughter was going to be appalling. The barbarians had driven the Roman cavalry to withdraw into their tight ranks. It was a standard tactic against enemy cavalry, but once the enemy warriors got in among the press of men, they could merrily move about gutting anything above them and the Gauls would hardly have room to plunge down with a spear or swing a sword within their own massed ranks.

  Piso clearly didn’t know what to do, and Varus felt for the man. What could a commander do against such a strange tactic, and Piso hadn’t seen it happen yet; had no idea what was to come. He was simply stunned by the strangeness of cavalry dismounting and running at him. Ridiculously, the cavalry would have been better off in a traditional Gallic grouping, rather than the ordered ranks of Roman organisation that would turn the lines into a slaughterhouse.

  In a desperate move, the Aquitanian chieftain shouted an order in Gaulish and then Latin, which was relayed by the man with the horn and by the dipping and waving of the silvered wolf standard.

  The front ranks of Piso’s cavalry charged, their spears lowered and ready to thrust, or raised overhand, ready to throw. Shields were gripped tight. Shafts were launched almost instantly, as soon as the front rank broke; the enemy had already got too close to make any sort of charge effective. The cast spears came down haphazardly, only one or two finding a useful target, their throwers already drawing their long blades ready to swing from horseback.

  But the Germanic warriors had no intention of meeting the charge.

  As the Romano-Gallic cavalry reached them, the
enemy warriors hurled themselves to one side, rolling and coming up running, or ducking beneath swings. A few met the spear points or blades of Piso’s men, but far more slipped between the charging horses, more lithe than any hairy barbarian had any right to be. And suddenly Piso was faced with perhaps eight hundred warriors closing on his ranks of horse from three sides, his charges foundering as the riders tried to turn their mounts to follow the attackers back to their own lines.

  Varus was closing on the chaos as he watched the true horror and carnage unfold.

  Just as he’d predicted, as soon as the enemy managed to get into the tight mass of horses in the Gallic lines, their work became the simple, brutal job of slaughtermen. It was not a fight – it was a massacre; and he’d been wrong about the numbers. In fifteen or twenty minutes, the eight hundred or so remaining enemy warriors could gut the entire Gallic force, finishing off the stricken riders at their leisure.

  Something had to be done.

  Turning to Afranius, riding the horse next to him, Varus pointed and raised his voice to be heard over the approaching din.

  “We need to get them out of here. Get to the standard bearer and musician and have them sound the call. We’ll form a wedge to push through.”

  Afranius nodded and turned, relaying the orders to the other men of Varus’ small band, just as they reached the press of men. The scene was horrendous. The turf had lost every blade of grass, churned to mud that sucked at hooves and feet, coloured a rusty red by the gallons of blood that had been mixed in.

  Horses bucked and thrashed, their flailing hooves breaking the legs of others and smashing the skulls of men who floundered in the mud trying to pull themselves upright. Screaming Gauls lay trapped under convulsing horses. And among it all – the stamping and thrashing legs, the screaming and bucking – moved the enemy warriors like some sort of crimson demons, coated to the waist in blood, seemingly uncaring whether they lived or died.

  Varus and his men pushed into the mass, the commander jumping from the back of the horse he had shared and gripping his sword in his good arm. As he landed a jolt ran up his body, forcing him to clench his teeth as the agony from his shattered arm roared like white fire up to his brain. Around him, the extra riders who had hitched a lift across the valley dropped from horseback and ran alongside, swords at the ready. The small force of dismounted men stayed in close support of the horsemen, preventing the underhanded Germanic tactics from destroying their small attack with their gruesome tactic.

  Here and there in the press, as Varus and his dismounted men clambered over bodies both wounded and dead, beast and man, they found one of the enemy warriors gouging a fallen Gaul or shredding a horse’s belly to stop it rising again. Individually, in a straight fight, these barbarians were no match for Varus’ regulars and fell like wheat before their blades.

  But it was slow going.

  Clambering across a horse whose blood had run so dry that it lay helpless and heaving ragged final breaths, Varus paused to take stock of the situation. Despite the apparent carnage, a great number of Gallic cavalry remained intact, pressed in the tight formation and unable to do anything about the swathe of destruction moving slowly and inexorably their way.

  The standard wavered in an unpredictable manner, clearly random while its bearer fought off one of the enemy, rather than in the regular motions of a command being given. Since the standard would likely denote the position of the commanders too, that suggested that the enemy warriors had cut a line through the cavalry directly toward Piso, where they were currently embroiled. If the commander and his signallers went down, there would be precious little chance of pulling anyone out of this mess.

  With a single, economical motion of his sword arm, Varus indicated to his men the wavering standard. Afranius and Petro nodded, taking his meaning, the former turning his horse and the latter clambering over a body behind him.

  Like a force of avenging spirits in steel and crimson, the twenty two men hacked and stomped their way through the mess without pause or comment.

  The slogging through a mire of mud, blood and entrails seemed endless – the destruction left by the Germanic warriors making every step wearying and hazardous. And then suddenly, almost unexpectedly, Varus hauled himself painfully across the stilled body of a large piebald mare to find that he had reached the scene of current fighting. The press of men and horses blocked every inch of his vision and he could no longer identify the wavering standard. Taking a deep breath, he bellowed “Piso!”

  The clamour and din surrounded them, and Varus, his arm burning with pain, strained to see. “Piso? It’s Varus!”

  “Varus?” came a distant, desperate voice.

  And then Varus’ world turned crimson.

  A dozen or more blood-soaked, crimson painted barbarians, each easily a head taller than Varus, hurtled out of the mass, hamstrung a horse as they passed, and launched at him. Varus lurched back, trying to get a swing in with his sword, but there was simply not enough room. Two blows came at him simultaneously and he managed to turn one aside at the last minute with his own blade, but only the timely intervention of an unseen soldier behind him prevented him being spitted through the face by the other.

  More and more demonic, blood-slicked enemy warriors were appearing from the thong of horses now, attracted by the Latin shout. Identified by the language as officers, Varus and his men had suddenly become the prize targets in the fight, and every barbarian there wanted their heads.

  In mere moments the carnage had turned their way. In a heartbeat, his twenty two men had become two thirds that number. In another heartbeat and a gaggle of screams they had dropped to a half, the throng of Germanic warriors around them never dropping in number. No matter how many they killed, fresh demons appeared from the welter of blood and legs to plug the gaps.

  Varus who, in the space of ten breaths, had taken two minor slashes to his wounded shoulder and a nasty lunging knife wound in his left hip, was struggling simply to stay alive now. His men – the cream of the corps and the best Caesar’s army had to offer, fought by his side and at his back, trying with their every move to stop the blows coming at their commander as well as those striking directly at each of them.

  Varus knew he was costing his own men their lives through their desire to protect him, and guilt riddled him even as he collapsed with a shriek, a fresh strike having cut the scarf/sling, allowing his broken arm to swing agonisingly loose. His vision swam with the agony and his head felt tremendously light. He was close to passing out from the pain and he knew that when he did, it would be the end of him.

  Desperately, he tried to raise his sword to block a descending blow and almost turned it away, feeling the blade shear off the tip of his ear. He probably screamed, but then he was sure he’d been screaming almost nonstop for the last minute or two, so it didn’t seem to matter.

  Somewhere in the depth of the pain, fug and confusion, he felt sure he’d heard his name called. Blinking away sweat, blood and grime, Varus squinted upwards. The blades had stopped coming down at him. With a genuine and unbelievable sense of relief, Varus recognised Piso swinging left and right in his saddle, slicing, hacking and carving the barbarians that a moment ago were getting ready to take his head.

  Varus looked around in wonder. Maybe half a dozen of his own men remained, mostly wounded. Piso and his personal guard had arrived just in time. The standard waved silvery in the air behind the commander and Varus could see the musician, horn in his right hand, smashing the boss of his circular shield into the face of a barbarian.

  “Piso!”

  “Come on!” cried the other commander in reply.

  Varus struggled to his feet, wincing and shaking, having to lean on his sword to steady himself. His legs failed and he slumped again. “We have to get back to the column before we lose everyone.”

  Piso nodded and turned to the signallers behind him.

  “The commander’s safe. Sound the retreat!”

  The horn, put to the signaller’s li
ps, rang out with the five note call, the order confirmed by the circling of the silver wolf, high above the heads of even the mounted men.

  Piso smiled.

  “Been a bit of a shitty morning, all told!”

  Varus shook his head with relief and then looked up just in time to see a crimson-slicked warrior burst out of the crowd, a long, broad-bladed sword in his hands. Even as Varus tried to form the warning, the man swung a wide, two-handed blow with the sword, hacking with ease through both of Piso’s mount’s front legs.

  With a scream, Piso’s black steed collapsed forwards, the Aquitanian commander pitched from the saddle and thrown some five or six yards ahead, where he slumped to the ground in a heap, his mail shirt dulled with mud and blood.

  Helpless, unable to stand without aid, Varus watched as Piso staggered to his feet and drew his sword, barbarians closing around him in a circle. Varus lost sight of the man behind the grey and crimson bodies apart from the occasional flash of a golden helmet or glint of a sword. Two of Varus’ men pushed past him, running to help Piso, while the other four, too seriously wounded to do much else, helped Varus up.

  Somewhere close by came a shout in Gaulish. Varus looked round in surprise to see the signaller push his wolf standard into the hands of the musician before leaping from his horse and drawing his sword on the run. Behind him more and more of the Gallic horse guards followed.

  Piso was dead before the standard bearer and the two Roman riders could reach him. Still swinging his sword desperately, he was on his knees in the mud. Most of his assailants had turned away, leaving him for dead to face the new threat, and Varus could see him clearly as the remaining three barbarians toyed with the kneeling man. Piso had taken a crippling lower back wound that had rendered his legs useless. He was covered in blossoms of crimson and gobbets of blood poured from his mouth alongside shouts of defiance in two languages.