Sword of Rome

by Douglas Jackson

  But casualties there were, because suddenly men were crawling back through the ranks with blood hanging in skeins from gaping mouths, or reeling clear with scarlet spurts from a severed jugular clouding the air. A young legionary staggered from the line with one hand clapped over his eye and blood running through his fingers. A veteran centurion, transferred in from Moesia to give the First a backbone of experience, checked the sobbing man and inspected the wound, a diagonal cut that had split the eyeball like an over-ripe grape.

  ‘An honourable wound, son, taken in the front.’ Should he send the boy back to the wounded? He sniffed the air, as if he could scent the course of the battle, and made his decision. ‘Still, a man can fight with one eye. You can stand and you’ve kept hold of your sword. Get back there and let the medicus patch you up, and when you’ve had a bit of a rest join the reserves.’

  The boy shambled off and the veteran nodded to Valerius. ‘A good lad, keeping hold of his sword with a wound like that. They’re all good lads, tribune; they’ll do.’

  ‘Close up. Fill the gaps.’

  Similar small dramas were being played out all along the line, but the line held and in places it even forced the men of the elite Twenty-first Rapax back a few paces. The marine legionaries fought with a terrible ferocity fostered by the memory of their humiliation by Galba and hatred of an enemy whose aim was to oust the man who had given them their precious eagle. But it was the big former oarsmen from the Classis galleys who were making the difference. Their opponents couldn’t match their enormous strength and it was where the oar-hardened sailors were concentrated that the Rapax line bulged.

  Like the gladiator he’d once been, Serpentius sensed weakness and smelled an opportunity. ‘With your permission, tribune.’ Without waiting for Valerius’s answer he ran forward, dodging spears and skipping over dead bodies, to the centre of the third rank where a reserve century of gladiators awaited their opportunity. An animated conversation followed with the centurion of the unit and Valerius used the interval to check the progress of the five cohorts of Praetorian Guard on the roadway. His heart stuttered as he realized they were being forced to fight for their very existence against the might of the veteran First Italica. Whatever was happening in the trees beyond was hidden. He had an ominous feeling, but Serpentius returned before he could give it further thought.

  Valerius glared at him. ‘What was that about?’

  ‘You’ll see.’ Valerius looked towards the century the Spaniard had chosen. It stood opposite one of the weak points he had identified in the Twenty-first’s line. Adiutrix’s former sailors had created a bulge in the enemy front rank, but couldn’t break the wall of shields. Serpentius tried to explain, but the air around the two men seemed to shake with the growing cacophony of sound as tens of thousands of men attempted to slaughter each other. Valerius had to put his ear to the Spaniard’s mouth to hear him. ‘Your problem is that you think of them as soldiers,’ Serpentius shouted. ‘They’re not soldiers, they’re killers, and they can do things that no soldier would even attempt. But being in the arena isn’t just about killing, it’s about entertaining.’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘Old Marcus taught me that. Please the crowd and the rewards will come. One day it might even be your freedom. But the crowd always wanted something more, something they’d never witnessed before. We would practise things that might never be seen in the arena, but made us faster and harder and turned us into athletes and acrobats. Watch.’

  A dozen men in the gladiator century dropped to the ground and slithered their way like snakes through the legs of the fighting lines. At the same time, more men withdrew in threes from the unit and moved behind the third line, two of them holding a shield between them and one, the lightest and most agile of the three, backing further away.

  ‘What …?’

  ‘Wait.’

  Even as Serpentius said the word, the sound of battle altered. The screams of the dying and the maimed remained undiminished, but the normal cursing and insults changed to cries of consternation and confusion. In that instant, Valerius understood what had happened and what would happen next.

  ‘Marcus, tell the men to prepare,’ he called urgently. ‘Serpentius, since you’re so fond of giving orders, tell Juva to bring his cohort forward.’

  He ran across to Benignus and told him what was planned. The legate frowned. ‘You’re sure? It will weaken our reserves and it doesn’t seem very honourable.’

  ‘The only place for honour on a battlefield is when it’s over and you honour the dead.’ Valerius’s voice emerged harsher than he intended and the other man flinched. Valerius glanced back to the battle line. They didn’t have time for an argument. They must act now or the chance would be gone. ‘We have one chance to break them.’ The young legate recoiled from the savagery that accompanied the words, but Valerius was relentless. ‘You’ve seen what’s happening on the road.’ He pointed to their right, where the Praetorians were fighting and dying. ‘If we are to win, we have to win here.’

  Benignus’s face flared red with fury. He had taken enough insubordination from this crippled upstart foisted on him by the Emperor. He opened his mouth to order Valerius back to his men, but the one-armed tribune laid a hand on his arm and the look on the scarred face silenced him.

  ‘One chance, Benignus. One opportunity for glory. But it must be now.’

  The legate’s jaw clenched and unclenched and he felt the eyes of his aides on him. One chance. His eyes softened. ‘Very well.’ His voice was thick with emotion. ‘But give me a victory, Gaius Valerius Verrens, or die in the attempt.’

  By the time Valerius reached his men, Juva’s cohort had lined up to their right. He called the Nubian and his senior centurion across and told them the plan. The centurion looked sceptical, but Juva’s eyes lit up with visions of glory. With a final check of their flank, Valerius gave the order. ‘Gladiators, forward, at the trot. Marcus, they know what to do?’

  The lanista grinned. ‘What their tent mates are already doing.’

  It was not the legionary’s way, but they weren’t legionaries, they were gladiators: trained killers. And it was effective.

  Serpentius had sensed weakness in the enemy line the way he could sense weakness in an opponent’s defence. He knew the gladiators. Knew their qualities. And he knew that they were wasted in the reserves. He had ordered some of the century to crawl between the legs of their comrades and below the line of shields opposing them. A fully armoured legionary was difficult to kill. He fought from behind the protection of the curved scutum. Beyond the shield, his head was protected by an iron helmet and his body by the polished plates of the lorica segmentata. But get under the shield and a man with a short sword and no mercy could do terrible damage. Now those short, needle-pointed blades ripped up into unprotected groin and belly and the screams took on a new, horrifying dimension that sowed consternation and the seeds of panic among the tent mates of the screamers. At the same time, the remaining gladiators launched a second unorthodox assault. Acrobats, Serpentius had called them, and now they proved it. While two men held a shield face down between them, a third gladiator sprinted forward to leap on to the wooden platform and with perfect timing was propelled across the lines of fighting men and into the second and third lines of Vitellian troops to cause chaos and carnage. Their triumphs were short-lived – theirs was a virtual suicide mission – but their very existence caused dismay in the enemy ranks. These first efforts encompassed a section of line only a few dozen paces wide, but now Valerius threw more men into the attack and used all four centuries of gladiator reserves to broaden the point of contact. He waited behind the line, trying to gauge the effect of the new tactics. Gradually, the enemy’s first line disintegrated into a hundred individual fights. The shield wall was crumbling. Now was the time to break it. He ran back to where Juva’s Fifth cohort waited, eager to be part of the battle.

  ‘Form wedge.’

  In a series of smooth movements, the cohort’s six centuries transfor
med from a square to an arrowhead formation, with Juva’s first century – eight men wide and ten deep – as the tip, two centuries at their backs, and finally three centuries to add critical mass in the rear. Valerius had seen Boudicca’s horde of warriors crushed to dust between Paulinus’s flying wedges. Now he would use the boar’s head to tear the heart out of the Twenty-first Rapax. He and Serpentius attached themselves to the middle rank of Juva’s first century.

  ‘Charge!’

  Marcus and his gladiators had been warned of their coming and those who could made way. Those who couldn’t were smashed aside or trampled mercilessly underfoot. The first two lines of defenders had no warning and no chance as the equivalent of an armoured rhinoceros battered them down. The third line snapped like a piece of silk thread under the combined weight of four hundred and eighty men in tight formation. Without warning Valerius found himself in the open ground between the three Vitellian attacking lines and their reserve cohorts.

  ‘On,’ he screamed. ‘On!’

  He wasn’t worried about what was happening behind him because he knew that the moment the line broke Benignus had agreed to throw his final two cohorts of reserves into the gap to guarantee victory. They would pour through the hole the Fifth cohort had punched and roll up the lines from the centre. Caught between two irresistible forces, the legionaries of Twenty-first Rapax would have the choice of retreating or dying where they stood. There would be no surrendering today.

  Valerius’s task now was to keep the Vitellian reserves occupied until the attackers had done their job and could come to his aid. But there was another more powerful reason for the raw emotion in his cry.

  ‘On! On to victory! Kill the bastards!’

  Because in the front rank of the centre enemy cohort, less than sixty paces away, he had seen a glint of gold. His mind transformed it into a spread of wings, a beak opened wide in a shrill cry of defiance and cruel eyes that glinted in the sunlight. An eagle. The eagle of the Twenty-first Rapax.

  ‘On! The eagle! Take the eagle!’

  They were charging now, all cohesion lost, with Juva at their head. The Nubian’s long legs covered the ground faster than any other man and he ran with teeth bared in a face filled with elemental savagery, emitting a raw keening sound as he went. Valerius screamed until he thought his throat would tear and beside him Serpentius growled like an attack dog.

  ‘On!’ The centurions took up the cry. ‘The eagle!’

  It was the symbol of the legion’s power, presented personally by the Emperor, but it was more than that. A legion which lost its eagle lost its soul, and even its identity. Legions which had lost their eagles could be not just disgraced, but disbanded. And somewhere in the raging inferno of his mind, Valerius desperately wanted to inflict that humiliation on these men who had dared to support a false Emperor. It didn’t matter that Vitellius was his friend. He should not have taken arms against his own country and condemned its people to the horrors of civil war. The eagle of the Twenty-first Rapax was Vitellius’s eagle and in that moment Valerius wanted more than anything else to take it from him.

  ‘Kill!’

  The boar’s head had caught the Twenty-first’s commander by surprise and it took time for him to react, but the centurion in command of the centre reserve cohort understood that his formation was the focus of this attack. For the moment, his only option was to hold out until his neighbouring cohorts could reinforce him. He ordered his men to form square, with the legion’s eagle and the cohort standards in the centre. A special guard of his best men had orders to keep the aquila safe or die in the attempt. It was a sensible strategy and he was happy that it would work. The wedge might have broken three fragile lines, but it was only a single cohort and it could not break a stoutly defended square. He decided not to use his javelins, because when it came to it a javelin would outreach a sword and the threat would keep the attackers from closing. All he had to do was survive for a short time and these brave fools would die.

  But the centurion did not take into account the fury and the strength of the attackers, nor the fact that they still had their own pila.

  Valerius waited until they were close. ‘Throw!’ The spears sailed out and the defenders automatically raised their shields to protect themselves from the hail of missiles. By the time they recovered the Fifth was on them.

  Juva smashed his way into the first rank, taking two defenders with him and turning the air red with sweeps of his short sword. Men ignored the spears that jabbed at them from behind the scuta and tore at the curved shields with their bare hands, reeling back only when they received some mortal blow or had their clutching fingers removed by a blade. The first few ranks battered their way into the square and the Vitellians fought with a terrible ferocity to seal the gap. Valerius and Serpentius, at the centre of the first century, added their weight to the attack and hacked at the survivors who rose, stunned, among the carnage. A hand clutched at Valerius’s leg and he sliced down with his gladius to cut a snarling face in two. Serpentius dispatched victims with the dismissive ease of a man who had spent half his life in the arena. But gradually, as the Fifth penetrated deeper into the Vitellian square, the men ahead in the formation were cut down and subsumed in the carpet of maimed and dead or sucked into individual combats, and the friends found themselves near to the point of the wedge. Valerius felt the Spaniard move closer to his right side.

  ‘Remember, I am your shield.’

  Valerius blinked. He’d entirely forgotten his plan that they would fight together. Without warning, something flashed across Valerius’s vision and Serpentius’s blade swept up to divert the spear point that had been about to take out his throat. Before he could react, they were surrounded by scarlet and yellow shields and fighting for their lives. The sword in Valerius’s left hand hammered at a painted boar and Serpentius spun a web of bright iron to keep the attackers beyond striking distance. A hulking figure launched itself from Valerius’s left. He knew he was too slow to save himself, but it was Juva, driven beyond madness, his helmet gone and his face a mass of red from a cut that had sliced open his forehead. His bulging eyes were fixed on something in the distance and Valerius followed them to where the Twenty-first’s sacred eagle danced above a swirling mass of men. With a terrible roar the big Nubian tore apart the shields barring his way. A legionary lunged at him with his spear, but as the Roman raised his arm Valerius rammed his sword into the gap above his armour and the man froze as he felt the cold iron enter his body. With a twist of the wrist Valerius hauled the blade free in time to parry a scything cut from a soldier in a centurion’s helmet. The gladius deflected the blow, but his attacker kept coming and his weight smashed Valerius to the earth. The centurion’s sword was gone, but he still had the advantage. All Valerius could do was hack at his armoured ribs in a futile attempt to dislodge him. Strong hands gripped his helmet and the chin strap bit into his throat. He tried desperately to wriggle free, but the centurion was so close his nostrils filled with the stink of the other man’s breath and spittle dripped on his face. Lightning exploded in his head as his opponent battered it repeatedly into the ground until his skull rang like the inside of a bell. He knew he was done, but as his mind began to fade the hands loosened and the centurion went limp, his snarls turning into a scream as the point of Serpentius’s gladius severed his spine. Valerius lay pinned by the dead weight and for the first time became aware of the screams of the wounded and dying, the howls of men turned animal and the cloying stink of fresh-spilled blood and torn bowels. Serpentius kicked the corpse off his chest and hauled him to his feet.

  ‘The eagle,’ Valerius gasped. ‘Follow Juva.’

  Ten paces ahead, the Nubian was a roaring presence who surged through the carnage like one of the galleys he once rowed and, as if in a dream, Valerius followed in his wake. The men who faced Juva’s awesome savagery were paralysed for a heartbeat and the marine legionaries accompanying their optio used that precious interval to ensure those heartbeats were their last. Juva had
taken a dozen minor wounds, but he felt nothing but elation. All he knew was that the eagle was there, just beyond his grasp in the midst of the honour guard, who screamed their defiance at their attackers. They were big men, weighed down with phalerae, each at least a ten-year veteran, and they feared no enemy. At their centre stood the aquilifer, in a leopardskin cloak with the beast’s mask framing his face as he brandished the eagle high and howled for the Twenty-first to honour their oath to Jupiter. Valerius wondered why they hadn’t retreated to the rear of the cohort, but a glimpse of a First Adiutrix shield beyond the group answered his question. The guard had created a ring of spears around the standard-bearer and dared anyone to enter it. A dozen corpses testified to that ring’s resilience, but they had not reckoned on Juva. The Nubian launched himself at the nearest spear, one big hand brushing it aside while the other bent a second just behind the point. Still he would have died but for the little Scythian throwing axe that appeared magically in Serpentius’s hand and spun to take a third spearman in the face. Valerius and the Spaniard followed him into the gap and the slaughter began. When it ended Valerius stood panting with blood to his elbows and the familiar dull, metallic taste of it on his lips. The guards had died hard, but none harder than the aquilifer, who had beaten back every attack until Juva lifted him bodily from the pile of corpses that protected him and crushed him in his great arms so that Valerius heard ribs snapping and the legionary’s body flopped forward as his spine cracked.