4.Conspiracy of Eagles

by S. J. A. Turney

  The attack had finally begun in earnest, despite the reticence and stupidity of the senior officers.

  In response to this new threat, several discordant cacophonic blasts issued from the rear of the beach and the innumerable infantry of the native horde began to race towards the water to join the fray.

  Fronto peered around to see where he could be best used and selected a knot of small fights in the shallows where the Celtic horsemen seemed to be getting the best of the legionaries. He sloshed through the water, grateful when the glistening pink frothy surface passed his midriff and lapped around his thighs as he neared land.

  “Marcus!”

  Glancing over his shoulder, Fronto grinned at the sight of Galronus heaving his way through the water to catch up, his long Celtic cavalry blade unsheathed in his hand, no shield visible.

  “Decided to join in then?”

  “Contrary to common Roman belief, we Belgae are surprisingly adaptable” he grinned. “I can fight, piss, and even sleep without a horse between my knees.”

  “We need to force them back on to the beach where we can form up into lines. Then we’ve got ‘em”

  Galronus nodded and grinned as he caught sight of Petrosidius, only ankle deep in the water’s edge, mercilessly beating a cringing, disarmed native to death with the gleaming silver eagle of the Tenth.

  “I fear the general would have a fit if he saw your standard bearer doing that.”

  “So long as he doesn’t break the bloody thing. He’s not the carefullest of men.”

  Fronto baulked for a moment as he bumped into something soft and malleable and glanced down to see a bloodied, sightless eye staring up at him from a smashed head. The sea was becoming a sight to sicken even the hardiest of soldiers.

  Accustomed to fighting on land, Fronto was used to the unpleasant aftermath of battle: the slick of blood and organs that covered every inch of the field; the bodies lying in gruesome, twisted positions, sometimes four deep.

  The pieces of head and limb that you couldn’t avoid treading on.

  The stench.

  What he wasn’t used to, and was wholly unprepared for, was that such an action fought in waist deep water resulted in the same carnage, except that there it flowed around you as you walked, occasionally bumping into you. A hand here; half a head there.

  If he’d had anything to bring up, he’d have done it as he surveyed the scene.

  Galronus seemed to be judiciously ignoring the grisly sea, the tidal currents dragging floating detritus back out from the areas of more intense battle in the shallows.

  Closing on the knot of more intense fighting, Fronto yelled at the top of his voice to be heard over the din. “The horses! Take out the horses!”

  The focus of the struggling men changed as they began to attack the steeds while using their shields to protect themselves from the constant hammering blows from above. Pausing, he once more took stock of the situation, the water’s surface now tickling the back of his knees. The enemy warriors had only partially committed to the attack. A fresh volley of fire from the ships had strafed the screaming, advancing horde and many had drawn up short at the sudden threat and run back to their comrades beyond the beach.

  Others, however, had made it to the sea, where the ballistae wouldn’t fire for fear of hitting their own, and had joined the horsemen in the desperate struggle to prevent the Romans reaching solid land. But the numbers were tilted in the favour of the invaders now and every moment saw fresh legionaries arriving from the ships that had been at the rear of the fleet against a diminishing number of natives.

  “Come on, let’s finish this.”

  Galronus grinned by his side and the two men sloshed through the knee-deep water, racing toward a small group of howling, half-naked men wielding spears.

  * * * * *

  Galronus found himself running lightly, almost enjoying himself as he left the last lapping wave and crunched onto fine gravel. He barely paused in his run to pull back his heavy long sword to his right and bring it round in a wide swing that took the leg clean off the nearest Briton. The man’s screaming turned from that of rage to that of agony as he fell to the shingle in two separate pieces.

  This was what every Remi son was born for.

  Life was the gift. Battle was the method. Blood was the price.

  There would be some, especially the druids, who would condemn or chastise him for this: for running with an army of Rome and bringing blood and death to fellow tribesmen – fellow worshippers of Belenus. But the history of the Belgae was a history of tribal warfare – of brother against brother. Had not the Belgae fought amongst themselves for centuries before the coming of Rome? And now, simply because a new force had entered the arena, the secretive druids expected the tribes to band together against Rome? To deny a thousand years of warfare and enmity?

  Galronus shook his head to discard the thought and the subject entire as a screaming, moustached face beneath a shock of spiked white hair rose up in front of him. The projected spittle of the warrior’s yelled invective had hardly touched his cheek before the blood spatter joined it. Galronus paused for only a moment to heave his sword back out of the man’s neck and push him to the ground with his foot, leaving him shaking out his life spasmodically on the pebbles.

  The thing was that Galronus had fought with the legions for more than two years now, and in those long months he had not once visited his tribe. Truth be told, he rarely thought of them. Oh, he knew of them, for he had sent and received word these past two winters while they endured the bitter wet cold and he sheltered in warm, cosy Rome. They had thrived, despite the supposed loss of their freedoms. He had heard that they had begun to re-road the oppidum of his birth with flag stones and drainage ditches after the Roman fashion. He could only imagine the relief the children and women would feel not having to slop through six inches of muck as they left their house.

  The druids had abandoned them, of course. Most of the strange, powerful cult had crossed the water to the believed safety of Britannia and their sacred isle of Ynis Mon, while others had stayed in Gaul, but retreated from the open world to carry out their own little hate campaigns against Rome.

  Galronus was not stupid. Far from it. He would never delude himself and suggest that the Belgic tribes were anything other than subjects of Rome now, or that he was still a chief of the Remi, for all that he held the title. He was now an officer of Rome. He had learned their language to the extent that people were often unaware of his origins. He had taken a liking to their wine, though not watered as they would drink it – a habit he shared with Fronto. He liked their chariot racing and their taverns. He liked their culture – apart from the dreadful theatre. He liked…

  He liked Faleria.

  A quick glance to one side confirmed that Fronto was still beside him, fighting with all the fury and strength of a battle-crazed Remi warrior, with the energy and agility of a man half his age. With the certainty and sureness of a man whose life is panning out exactly as he had planned it.

  With the blessings of Sucellus and Nantosuelta, Galronus would bind hands with Faleria this year and the man fighting furiously by his side would become his brother.

  He grinned and casually beheaded a yelling youth with a sharp spear but absolutely no ability to use it.

  Strange, really. He was suddenly aware for the first time that he appeared to be thinking in Latin, with all its idioms and intricacies. When had that started?

  He was so blood-tied to the inhabitants of this island that he shared not only Gods, names and culture, but even language. Despite the oddities of their regional dialects, if he concentrated, he could follow three quarters of all the shouting going on around him. The swords that were being raised against him bore so much more resemblance to his own than did the short stabbing weapons of the legions. He could very easily discard his Roman-style helmet and slip among the Britons and they would not even know him for an enemy.

  But Rome was the future. Better to embrace the future than
to fight it and disappear without trace, such as the Aduatuci, executed or enslaved entire after Caesar’s conquest.

  Again, Galronus shook his head and pushed the thoughts aside. Such reflection was best saved for the dark of the night after battle’s end.

  “Galronus!” yelled an insistent voice.

  Looking around in surprise, the Remi officer realised that the Roman forces had stopped advancing, cornu and buccina calls going out to mass the troops, standards waving, circling and dipping, whistles blowing, centurions’ voices carrying across it all. In his reverie, Galronus had not stopped with the rest and was standing in a strange twenty-yard no-man’s-land between the assembling legions and the expectant Britons who had drawn back up the beach. Fronto was desperately beckoning him.

  “Get back here before one of their archers decides to stick you!”

  With a smile, Galronus nodded and, turning, jogged back to the ranks of his new, uniformed, steel-armoured brothers.

  * * * * *

  Fronto took the opportunity to step out of the line and look along the assembled forces with a sense of immense satisfaction. Despite the debacle that had been the landing, the beachhead had been successfully established and the Britons had been forced to withdraw far enough to allow room to form up properly.

  It didn’t do to look back into the surf, as he’d quickly discovered. The swirling red tint from the blood had quickly diffused and disappeared with fresh waves, but the shapes of men and horses still stood proud of the water – ugly mounds that were an equally ugly testament to the brutality of the assault. The men didn’t bother him so much, but the horses…

  He’d half expected the Britons to keep retreating in view of the army now forming up opposite them but, to the credit of their courage, they had merely rearranged their forces, the remaining cavalry formed up at the rear, archers nowhere to be seen, infantry in a huge mass at the centre and the leaders in their chariots off to both sides.

  If Fronto craned his neck, Cicero could just be seen newly-arrived and bustling around at the rear of the formed-up Seventh. That man would get the benefit of Fronto’s personal and celebrated selection of curses later, when the entire army wasn’t listening, though there was also the coming confrontation with Caesar that would likely be much the same, only in the other direction. Although the general could have no proof that it was Fronto who had defied him and ordered the advance and disembarkation, he would suspect, and he knew for a fact that Fronto had been one of the first over the side with two centuries of the Tenth in further contradiction of orders.

  Caesar’s bile was hardly new though, and he knew how to weather that storm easily enough.

  In response to a demand, a shield was being passed through the ranks to the front, where the legionary behind Fronto respectfully handed it over. With satisfaction of the reassuring weight, Fronto hefted the grip, the callouses of his hand fitting harmoniously to the shape of the wood and leather. Cicero, Caesar and the other staff could stand at the back and wave their arms; he would stay here, in the front line. It was common knowledge in the army that a senior officer was as much use in the heat of combat as a knitted shield, and it was the centurionate that commanded the battle. Not so in the Tenth, and Fronto soured to think of what his men would think of him if he stood at the rear picking his nails with his knife like Cicero.

  “Ready!”

  Carbo’s voice cut through the general murmur and din of the assembled centuries and was repeated by the other fifty nine centurions of the Tenth and soon after by the officers of the Seventh. Across the front line, shields clacked against one another and the men planted their front feet, ready for the advance. The rattling, clanging and conversation died away to an expectant silence that was broken a moment later by the ‘musical’ instruments of the Britons, howling and wailing like a cat with its tail trapped in a door. With an exultant roar, the native army charged.

  “I don’t believe it.” Carbo muttered. On the other side of the legate, Galronus grinned behind his borrowed infantry shield. “Believe it. It’s the way they fight. To attack with the blood up is noble. To sit tight and wait for an advancing enemy is cowardly in their eyes.”

  “They must know they’ll never punch through this line” Fronto said quietly.

  “But they will try it anyway. They would rather die hopelessly and nobly than live in the knowledge that they had not tried.”

  “You mean they won’t run at all?”

  “Oh they’ll run, when they’re broken. But they’ll not retreat by design.”

  “Then we’d better break them.”

  Carbo laughed lightly and raised his sword. “Brace!”

  Along the line, the men of the Tenth hunched behind their shields, changing their stance so that, rather than preparing to march, they had all their weight ready to push forward into the wood and leather. The entire line of shields dropped slightly to cover exposed shins and heads were pulled down to leave only the eyes exposed between the metal helmet brow and the edge of the shield.

  A Roman shieldwall could withstand most attacks.

  Fronto was surprised as his eyes flicked across the ranks of the enemy to see that not only were the foot warriors of the native army charging forward en-masse with no formation or organisation, but the chariots at the periphery had swept forward only long enough to drop their noble passengers close enough to join the attack.

  He had a mind to enquire of Galronus as to this strange tactic, but now was not the time. He counted off his heartbeats.

  One… Two… Three…

  Four more and the lines would meet.

  Four…

  “Mark your men.”

  Three…

  Shame we didn’t have pila, Fronto thought, imagining all the stacks of the weighted javelins that were stored on board the ships and would have to be brought out later.

  Two…

  A man directly opposite Fronto with a strange bronze plate strapped over his bare chest, designs inked on his arms, his hair spiked and coated with white mud, and what he probably laughingly called his teeth bared, snarled something at Fronto.

  One…

  “I think he likes you” laughed Galronus to his left, as all hell broke loose.

  The power and voracity of the native charge took Fronto by surprise, and all along the shield wall there were curses and shouts in Latin as the legionaries of the Tenth and Seventh fought to maintain their position, their feet driving into the scattering pebbles, teeth grinding as they heaved with all their strength into the shields on their arms.

  Here and there the line buckled a little, but it held.

  “One” yelled Carbo, and the legion’s front line leaned back fractionally to gain a tiny fragment of room, only to smash forward with their shields half a heartbeat later. All along the line of combat, bronze shield bosses smashed into the poorly-armoured Britons, smashing bones, shattering teeth, pulverising noses and generally wrecking the momentum of their attack.

  “Two” called the primus pilus, and the shields were all angled slightly, opening up gaps half a foot wide all along the front, safe in the knowledge that the shield-barge had knocked the enemy back enough to make it extremely unlikely that any of them would take advantage of the gap. Every legionary’s blade jabbed out of the line, plunging into the enemy, twisting and then withdrawing. The shields clacked back together with a monstrous din.

  The majority of the front men in the Celtic army collapsed to the ground screaming and bleeding, leaving a momentary space before the next set of Britons could move in over their comrades and reach their enemy.

  “Three!” barked Carbo, and the legion took two uniform steps forward over the bodies of the fallen. As the front line settled back into position and made sure their shields were locked, the second rank of men stamped down with their hobnailed boots and smashed their bronze-edged shield rims into the bodies of the wounded and dying Britons, preventing them from causing any damage within the formation.

  Now, the atmosphere acro
ss the army of Britons had changed from exultant, angry excitement to desperate, uncertain urging. The men back in the press pushed their comrades forward, dying to reach their enemy, pushing between their fellows where they could. Here and there a richly-armoured noble managed to elbow his way to the front. Before Carbo could repeat the process, several legionaries along the line succumbed to the brutal attacks of the warriors, their swords or axes coming down at just the right angle to miss shields and plunge into faces beneath helmet brows or smash into mailed shoulders. Even as those legionaries collapsed, screaming, from the line, the men in the second rank stepped forward to take their place, locking their shields smoothly. Of the fallen wounded there was no time or opportunity to help. They would just have to hope they weren’t trampled to death by their fellow legionaries in the press.

  Most were.

  “One” Carbo bellowed, and the manoeuvre began again. Shield-barge… shield-turn… gladius blow, twist, withdraw… step forward… lock shields.

  It was simple; mechanical. Bred into the men of the legions through years of training and putting it into practice. Regardless of any selection of favourable ground, of legion formation, of enemy tactics or numbers, any centurion or veteran would stand by the fact that it was the simple three-stage manoeuvre of the front line that won the battle. It was those three stages that allowed Rome to conquer the world.

  Fronto found himself humming a ditty, lost in the almost monotonous regularity of it, and his attention was only focussed back on the real world when someone yelled something about fleeing. Two centurions’ whistles rang out and then the entire beach echoed to shouted commands and the calls of the musicians to draw up in formation.

  Peering over his shield rim, Fronto watched with weary satisfaction as the Britons broke for the treeline behind the beach, the remaining nobles mounting their chariots and hurling incomprehensible abuse at the invaders as their drivers took them away from the fight.