Fronto shook his head. “It’s them. I know it’s them.”
“I fear you’re mistaken, Marcus. The men would return to relative obscurity without Caesar. They’re his creatures. It’s why they’re assigned to the Fourteenth that’s always on supply train duty and safely out of the danger of combat. Speaking of which…”
Cicero gestured to Carbo, who stood beside Fronto’s neat little room at the end of a timber building. In the wide space beyond, his men were formed up ready for action.
The legate of the Tenth came to a stop. Cicero paused on his way to the Seventh and clasped hands with him. “Now is not the time for such talk or thoughts – we go to fight. Forget about your conspiracies, Fronto, and concentrate on the Britons.”
Fronto nodded and clasped the other legate’s hand. “Mars be your strength and Fortuna your protector. Come back safe, Cicero.”
“You too. I’ll meet you half way through the Celt army.”
Turning from his fellow legate, Fronto found the somewhat serious face of Carbo grimacing at him, pink and somewhat unhappy as the torrents poured down his face and soaked his tunic and armour.
“I know that look, sir. What sort of cockeyed insane plan have you cooked up now? With respect, the boys are near breaking point.”
Fronto nodded to him and strode on past to where the legion was assembled.
“Men of the Tenth” he shouted in his most inspiring voice, loud enough to be heard over the incessant roar of the rain battering on armour and helmets. “In order to give us an unfair advantage over the enemy, I am forced to split our legion.”
There was a groan from the men, though from no easily identifiable individual source.
“I and Carbo will be taking the first cohort into the woods to pounce on the enemy’s flanks. Cicero and his legion are pulling the same manoeuvre on the other side of the field. The rest of you… “he grinned. “The rest of you will create an impregnable wall. You’ll be serving under the direct command of the general.” He paused to let the fact sink in, during which there was silence, though whether a happy or a troubled one, he couldn’t tell.
“The general will allow the looting of the tribesmen when the battle is over and all the local settlements will be ours to pick over.” He grinned wickedly. “And despite your Roman origins, I know you’ve all grown quite fond of the native beers of Gaul. Well, guess what? These Celts brew the same stuff, though this beer is apparently strong enough to make the hairs on your chest stand up straight. And it’ll be ours for the taking when we finish. Just make sure you hold the line and stay alive long enough to enjoy it.”
A roar of approval greeted the statement.
“Now let’s get ready to kick them so hard they don’t wake up ‘til three weeks after they’re dead.”
* * * * *
“Shit shit shit shit shit!” Fronto hissed as he collapsed in an awkward heap, trying to remain as quiet as possible despite the agony that tore through his knee, having entangled his foot in a think gnarled tree root and twisted his leg on the way down.
“You alright sir?”
“Fine!” he snapped at Carbo. “Don’t worry about me.”
The primus pilus gave him a look that hovered somewhere between concern and disapproval and wiped the rain from his face. Here in the depths of the woodland, the rain was no longer a hail of watery shards, but a constant battering of heavy, bulbous droplets that formed on leaves and deposited themselves unerringly down the necks of the men.
“You sure you know where we are?” Fronto barked at his senior centurion.
“With respect, legate, finding north in a forest is a very easy task. We’ve already turned back south and we’re heading towards the field.”
“I hope you’re right” Fronto grumbled, using the rough surface of the tree to haul himself to his feet. “I’m remembering now why no famous general has ever led a campaign in a forest.” He glanced around to see the four hundred and twenty seven men who currently comprised the slightly under-strength first cohort, spread out in the woods, glinting in the sunlight between the trees, unable to hold to a formation. “If they anticipate this and come at us in…”
“Shh!” Fronto blinked as Carbo stopped dead and put the finger to his lips. Behind Fronto, the entire cohort came to a halt, the noise of the battering raindrops once more taking the place of the steady movement of soldiers.
“What?” He hissed.
In reply, and frowning at Fronto’s volume, Carbo cupped a hand around his ear. Fronto fell silent, trying to hear over his own laboured breathing and the downpour. As the thumping of his pulse and the wheezing of his lungs died down, he could now just make out the sounds of fighting.
“They’re already engaged!” Fronto hissed in surprise. Carbo nodded and Fronto shook his head in disbelief. The cohort had been ready to move by the time Fronto and Cicero had returned from their wall meeting with Caesar and they had been heading out of camp toward the forest’s edge before the encamped legions had even put out the call for assembly. How long had they been in this damned dripping sylvan nightmare?
“Fully engaged, too” whispered Carbo. “That’s not the opening roar of two lines; that’s the sound of ongoing fighting. We’d best move.”
Fronto nodded as his centurion made several hand gestures that began the cohort moving again, as quietly as they could through the woods, trying not to spook wildlife or snap large twigs. Inevitably, the noise level was louder than any officer would wish it – and certainly a different matter entirely to the surprisingly stealthy Celts – but with the din of battle growing louder with every cautious step and the background roar of the rain, there was little chance of the cohort being heard on the battlefield.
Carefully, slowly, Fronto approached the growing white-green ribbon of light that heralded the tree line and the field of battle. It would be overestimating their contribution to things to say that everything rode on their little manoeuvre, but certainly it would make a vast difference to the way the fight went, and might mean the saving of – or the death of – a great many men. Fronto found himself seething that they hadn’t thought of this earlier. He could have been moving through the forest with his men as soon as the scouts had even finished estimating their numbers. Then they’d have been ready. Now…
The whole plan had been based on the notion that both his and Cicero’s cohorts would be in position at the forest’s edge and ready to pounce when the Britons arrived. Now they were playing ‘catch-up’ and had to commit as soon as they were reasonably able. Would Cicero be there? Had he already arrived and committed his men, cursing Fronto for his absence? Was he still wandering around these cursed Britannic forests getting wet and angry and unaware that the fight was already on? Or was he too creeping through the undergrowth worrying about what might happen?
Finally, he began to see the movement of a vast seething army of men, largely naked or dressed in those curious long trousers such as the Gauls wore, painted and adorned with bronze or even gold where their status warranted. Every man seemed to be armed with a different weapon, like an unruly mob hastily dragged from their beds to save their land. Even in the haze of the downpour it was hard not to be chilled at the number of them.
They would be no match for a Roman legion in top fighting condition, even at two-to-one odds. But at the moment it was at best touch-and-go as to which side would gain the advantage and Fronto knew as well as any experienced commander that morale was half the battle. The army that thirsted for blood would push all the harder and an army that broke was lost in that instant. It was sadly a little too obvious which force had all the morale on that field.
The Roman lines, invisible somewhere behind the mass of warriors, were making only the noises of a group of men fighting for their life: grunting, yelling, screaming, occasional horn calls or bellowed commands. There was no roar of defiance; of the might of Rome, nor the silence that was sometimes called by a commander to frighten the enemy – a totally noiseless armoured advance was a disturbi
ng sight for anyone.
The Britons, on the other hand, were in full spirit, bellowing their war cries and howling their blood lust, exhorting their strange Gods to help them drive these hated invaders from their island, heedless of the rain battering their oft-naked skin. Likely the inhabitants of this accursed island viewed heavy rain as the normal weather for any time of the year. Fronto found himself wondering whether there were druids among them. It seemed that any Celtic force gained a dangerous amount of heart when they knew they were in the presence, and had the support, of that bunch of weird blood-drinking goat-humpers.
Closer now they crept, passing the boles of trees only ten or twelve yards from the edge. The field was becoming clearer all the time, the denser foliage at the periphery returning the roar of driving rain on green leaf.
Fronto felt a slow smile creep across his face as he took in the situation. The Britons had held nothing back in this, their apparently last ditch attempt to drive Rome from their shores. The bulk of the men – nobles and warriors alike – pushed and struggled to get to the Roman lines, formed in a mass. Their cavalry had apparently charged en masse on this flank at the north side of the field, expecting to break the Roman ranks. Whether it had been Caesar’s decision or that of the senior centurion among the Tenth’s ranks there, the Roman lines had pulled the age-old ‘fake flight’ manoeuvre, apparently breaking under the cavalry’s charge, but then consolidating again to slow their advance and enveloping them, wrapping them in a circle of steel. A small reserve cavalry force remained at the rear, on the far – southern – edge of the fight, but not enough to swing the battle. The nobles had all joined the throng, leaving their chariots in the hands of the drivers who, unaware of the approaching danger, had brought them toward the forest’s edge to watch the battle progress and wait for the call from their masters.
There was a chance, then. As long as the centre, a joint command of the Tenth and the Seventh, could hold against the much greater numbers of their enemy, there was a chance.
Glancing across at Carbo, Fronto tried to use his hands to mime the shape of a chariot, drew a line across his throat, pointed to himself and held up two fingers. Carbo nodded his understanding and turned, gesturing for the centurion of the second century to follow their legate. Like a flowing river of shining steel through the forest, the cohort separated, nine centuries forming on Carbo near the forest’s edge. The remaining century moved to Fronto’s location, where he repeated his mime until they all nodded.
With a last motion to Carbo, urging him to wait, Fronto gestured to his century and they spread out along the line of the trees in their eight-man contubernia, each group opposite one of the waiting chariots. As soon as he could look along the line and see that they were in place and all movement appeared to have ceased, he made the motion to attack.
The chariot drivers were oblivious; all their attention locked on the battle before them, they were hopelessly unprepared for a sudden attack from behind. By the time Fronto and his eight man unit reached the nearest chariot, the man was only just turning in alarm at the sound of jingling metal above the driving rain. His yell of panicked warning was cut short and became the gurgle of a man with an opened throat as a particularly energetic legionary bounded up onto the yoke, his shield hardly inconveniencing him as he plunged his gladius into the Briton’s neck, wrenched it free, and dropped down the far side without pause into a puddle of mud churned up by the vehicle’s wheels and horses’ hooves. For good measure, a second legionary put his blade in the driver’s ribs just to be sure, dragging him down from the traces to die on the sodden turf.
Two more men from the contubernium hurriedly cut the horses free of the vehicle and smacked them on the rump, sending them running from the field in panic. This last was, strictly speaking, unnecessary, the chariots having been rendered ineffective with the loss of the driver, but the wanton destruction emboldened the legionaries and gave them much needed heart.
A quick glance left and right told much the same story all along the forest’s edge. Of the ten parties that had sortied from the trees, only two had been forced to make a fight of it, their targets more alert than the others, and three of the contubernia had already moved on to take other chariots out. One or two of the vehicles that stood to the western edge of the field were making a run for it, and Fronto briefly considered ordering that they be chased down, but reminded himself that this was about a quick win, not a thorough trouncing – let them go.
Now, Carbo’s men were moving out of the tree line, filtering between the useless chariots and forming up into shield walls one century at a time, twenty men wide and four deep. Already Fronto’s contubernium was moving on to a chariot that was busy wheeling and making to leave, but which had neither the time nor the space to evade the onslaught.
Glancing around, Fronto tried to see what was happening elsewhere. The enemy’s reserve cavalry had apparently noticed the sudden danger from the wing and were forming up to come and meet them but behind them he could see the shapes of armoured legionaries emerging from the forest to the south: Cicero had arrived.
Calls were now going up among the horde of Britons, warning of the danger from the flanks. The warriors began to turn at the edge of the mass and form a front against this new threat. The reserve cavalry, preparing to charge Fronto’s cohort, was suddenly warned of the newly-arrived force behind them and dissolved into chaos, some of the riders turning to attack this fresh army, while others kicked their steeds into life and continued their original charge.
Such it always was with a disorganised army. The reserve cavalry had still been a strong enough force to punch through either new cohort, but having become divided and without the advantage of a system of officers and signallers, the force had neatly split into two groups, neither of which would have the strength to break a Roman advance.
With a wave at the centurion of the second century, Fronto signalled him to pull the men back into formation, but the well-trained soldiers were already finishing off the last of the chariots within reach and moving towards their standard, the glinting silver decorated with sprigs of greenery from its difficult passage through the woodland.
Cornu blasts and the cries of officers from the far side of the field revealed that Cicero’s cohort were moving against the far flank at a run. Carbo, ever the long-sighted officer, had slowed his own men so that all the advancing centuries could fall into step, allowing time for Fronto and his men to catch up and join them and, above all, letting their comrades beyond the enemy horde know that they had arrived.
Even as Fronto listened, he could hear the rhythmic battering of gladius on shield from all along his cohort’s line. There would be no surprise to this attack; the enemy had had sufficient warning from the chariots’ destruction to turn and face them, and so Carbo was sending a strong signal to the beleaguered centre of the Roman lines that help had arrived.
Sure enough, even as Fronto and his century began to form up and move at a jog to plug the gap Carbo had left them, an answering roar arose from the Roman force as they fought with renewed vigour, aware that they were no longer on the defensive.
The tone in the enemy also changed, though not enough. There were cries of dismay, but as many cries of defiance as the mass of warriors turned almost inside out to present three faces, leaving a clear way only to the west.
Fronto met up with the line only ten yards from the waiting Britons and shuffled along to find a spot between his century and the next where he wasn’t ruining a centurion’s formation.
“Respectfully, sir” an optio called from behind his men, where he was busy using his stick to prod them into a straighter line, “but you need to fall in at the rear, sir.”
Fronto stared at the junior officer in disbelief.
“You what, soldier?”
The optio didn’t even bend under the malice of Fronto’s gaze.
“Orders of the primus pilus, sir. On account of your knee, sir.”
The legate’s glare simply hardened
as he struggled to come up with a spiteful enough reply, but already the line had closed in front of him. Fronto was closer to his legion than most legates, but he was still a world apart, while their primus pilus might as well be Mars himself wielding a thunderbolt and no legionary would be about to defy the man.
Fronto realised he was standing glaring at a man who had already moved his attention back to his own men, and determined to have this out with Carbo the moment they were in private. His thoughts were interrupted a moment later by the tremendous crash of two armies meeting in a line of bloody violence.
* * * * *
Galronus, chieftain among the Remi tribe and commander of an entire wing of Caesar’s auxiliary cavalry force rubbed his hair to rid it of the excess water as his horse danced impatiently. “How far?”
“Not far” his best scout shrugged the rain from his shoulders as his horse came to a halt and it took Galronus a moment in the torrential downpour to see the grin on the man’s face.
“What?”
“You don’t recognise the ground, sir?”
“Don’t try my patience, Senocondos. I am tired, saddle sore, and now I find we’re on the trail of a damned war band!”
It had been two and a half days since he and the small cavalry command had left the lands of the Atrebates, riding as fast as they dared for the south east coastline. The local chieftain had taken some persuading and the promise of very heavy future concessions, but had not been averse to dealing with Roman commanders. Now, four hundred horsemen travelled with eight hundred mounts, changing beasts regularly to see them arrive fresh and capable for action.
Marius' Mules IV: Conspiracy of Eagles Page 42