Marius' Mules V: Hades' Gate

by S. J. A. Turney

  And Sabinus had panicked.

  The reforming of the Eighth after a cohort's departure had left the western edge of the Roman formation loosely manned and they were coming under increasingly heavy attack. Deciding that the lack of Balventius' single cohort was endangering the rest, Sabinus had sounded the order for that advance to fall back into position again.

  Cotta had been speechless.

  If he had been Balventius, chain of command or not, he would have kept pushing on to the west and tried to get to safety. It certainly didn't bear thinking about what the scarred veteran would say to his senior commander if they lived through this. He might well kill him. Cotta wouldn't blame him; might even hand him the sword with which to do it.

  And the astounding thing was that, despite the fact that a successful fall back from that awful advance was impossible, again, Balventius and his men seemed to have carried it off. From his mounted vantage point, Cotta had watched as the advance force reappeared around the edge of the cavalry defences in a testudo formation and returned to the Eighth's ranks. When he found the old centurion later he would not have the words to put over how impressed he was.

  Moreover, it had steeled Cotta's resolve.

  This mess had gone on too long. Sabinus may be the man in command, but he was becoming increasingly useless. Panic and desperation were now informing his orders rather than reason or pride. He was issuing conflicting commands and the army was being steadily battered into submission by missile attack throughout.

  His gaze fixed on Sabinus, sitting tall and proud.

  Wheeling his horse, he pushed his way through the mass of despairing legionaries to the senior officer. Sabinus turned as he approached.

  "Yes?" A barked, harsh single word.

  "Are you going to order the general retreat?"

  "Don't be an idiot, Cotta. We…"

  "We are in the shit up to our necks, Titus. It's retreat or die. If we can make it back to the camp, we might have a chance. Only a small one, but a small one's better than none at all."

  "I will not…"

  Again, Cotta interrupted. "Then I will."

  "What?"

  "I am assuming command. You are not in a fit state to order these men."

  Sabinus started to splutter, his face turning a puce colour in rage. Ignoring him and feeling finally at peace with a decision he should have made an hour - or even a day - ago, Cotta turned away from him and pulled himself up in his saddle, clearing his throat to address the legions as loud as his voice would carry.

  The order never came.

  A lucky sling bullet smashed into Cotta's face, striking just between the nose and the right-hand corner of his mouth. In shock, the legate tumbled from his horse, shattered teeth embedding themselves in his tongue and the roof of his mouth, pieces of jagged jawbone driven into his throat.

  He gagged on blood. The pain was indescribable.

  Three legionaries stooped to help him up and he looked in agonised astonishment to see Sabinus peering at him with a look that spoke of both satisfaction and pleasure. Paying him no further heed, Sabinus began to bellow out orders again.

  Cotta struggled. He seemed to be able to grunt and gurgle and nothing more, and every attempt felt like he was gargling with broken glass while the lower half of his face burned as though in a furnace. A capsarius was suddenly next to him trying to reach into the ruins of his mouth. Cotta, agony making it hard to concentrate, batted the man aside. This was too important. He tried to tell the man he needed something for the pain, but it came out as a wavering gurgle.

  "Your teeth sir? I need to pull the shards."

  Gurgle. Cough, grunt, howl, gurgle - just stop the pain!

  "The jaw will mend, sir."

  Oh for the love of Venus!

  "I think he wants some pain killer" a helpful legionary butted in. Cotta nodded emphatically, glancing briefly at Sabinus, who was busy elsewhere.

  The capsarius looked at his patient for only a moment before reaching into his satchel. Selecting the small glass vial of viscous liquid formed from henbane and mandragora mixed with honey and grape mulch, he tipped it slowly and with painstaking care, trying to measure a dose into a wide, flat spoon. Seeing the look in the officer's eyes, he hurriedly unstoppered the vial and tipped more than two doses' worth directly into the ruined mouth - possibly even three or four. It was dangerous in such concentration and high quantity, but at least it would hit his system quick, particularly entering his blood through the wound.

  By the time the capsarius had scurried off to treat another wounded man, Cotta was already starting to experience a strange calm. While he could feel a rising wave of nausea, his pulse seemed to have slowed and the pain was receding at a rapid speed. He could feel himself starting to drift...

  Damn the bloody physician. He'd overdosed him!

  Somewhere through his drifting fug of calm, Cotta realised the missiles were no longer falling and the sounds of battle around him had ceased.

  Spinning round in a manner that made him dizzy and raised the nausea to almost unbearable proportions, Cotta tried to focus. Something was happening on the hill. Two figures that swayed and blurred were moving in front of the others. He had the feeling one of them was speaking, though all he could hear was his own blood thumping.

  Grunting and mumbling, he tried to ask the helpful legionary who was still holding his shoulder what was going on. Something in his face must have conveyed the question. The legionary swallowed.

  "Their king is offering us terms, sir."

  King? What king? Terms? He mumbled something.

  "We're to lay down our arms and the killing will stop" the legionary added, a note of desperate hope in his voice.

  Cotta shook his head - a movement that caused him to cough up a hefty pile of vomit. His mouth no longer hurt at all, but he was so sick and dizzy and couldn't think! Couldn't work out…

  Lay down their arms?

  Cotta's mind filled with images of an enslaved legion at the mercy of the druids that were supposedly behind all of this. The very notion made him sick again. No. They mustn't! It would be suicide!

  Shaking his head, he began to make urgent noises at the legionary, trying to tell him what must be done. The order must not be given. Must not!

  Somewhere in the awful woolly mess that was his head facts started to sink in. The shape of Sabinus stepping his horse out, the tribunes behind him.

  No!

  Cotta, vomit still dribbling from his mouth and mixed with the constant flow of his blood, clawed at the legionary's arm. He had to stop it! He mumbled and grunted and wheezed at the soldier, but it was too late.

  Sabinus must have given the order. The front ranks of the army lowered their shields and cast their swords and pila to the grass. Cotta shuddered in disbelief at the stupidity of the man. Had he not already been fooled once by this treacherous Gaul? Idiot!

  Sabinus dismounted as he approached the party of Gaulish nobles on the middle of the slope.

  Cotta tried so hard to concentrate - it seemed his mind was becoming more fluffy and fuddled with every passing moment. The damn capsarius had ruined him. He was too drugged to function. It took every last ounce of concentration just to focus on what was happening.

  The Gauls - there were a small forest of them. No. He was counting some of them twice. No. There were a dozen? A score? They were on foot. Sabinus and the four remaining tribunes approached the king. Sabinus was offering his sword in surrender!

  Cotta tried to shout something. He wasn't really sure what it was any more but that hardly mattered since it would be unintelligible anyway.

  Ambiorix - that was the traitor bastard's name - reached out and grasped the handle, accepting the ornate hilt of the expensive officer's sword with a nod. He gripped Sabinus' upper arm in the traditional warrior's gesture of brotherhood even as he drove the point of the blade deep into the commander's chest.

  Cotta felt his body surrendering to the fluff. He was suddenly aware that he had collapsed
and only the legionary next to him was stopping him from falling to the grass in a gelatinous heap.

  There was a cry of dismay that rose from the entire army as Sabinus and the tribunes were executed on the slope. A man in a long grey robe - a druid, clearly - took his own blade to the collapsing figure of Sabinus, who was still choking out his life around a mouthful of his own blood. As two other Gallic warriors held the dying officer up, the druid used the long knife hilt to smash his ribs to fragments and then with a butcher's skill cut out his heart and held it before the legions.

  A second tumultuous roar rose from the Fourteenth as the husk that had been Sabinus was discarded to the earth and his heart was offered up to the sky.

  Before they could even grasp their shields as the centurions were now ordering, the missile attack began anew, felling men in droves, their only defences lying on the grass in front of them, discarded on Sabinus' orders.

  Cotta felt sicker than he had ever been.

  The Fourteenth were doomed - that was clear - and with them, half of the Eighth. There was no chance of a fighting retreat now. A tenth of the remaining force was systematically felled by arrows, rocks and sling shots in that opening volley.

  Desperately, aware that he was fighting off unconsciousness with every beat of his heart, Cotta tried to make himself understood to the legionary.

  Shields up. Defensive formation. Every century form a testudo. Each century to run east as best they can and try to reach the relative safety of the camp. It was hopeless, but better to die trying than surrendering.

  Hopeless… like his attempts to communicate. The legionary couldn't understand what Cotta was trying to tell him. The mangled face worked madly with grunts, whines and gargling noises but the officer was too far gone to be comprehensible even with the help of gestures.

  The Fourteenth was collapsing in on itself, no shield wall raised against the missiles. Cotta spun around to the far side to see the warriors starting to pour down the hill towards them.

  This was it. The legion was about to be massacred. An ignominious defeat and - this particularly rankled - the first casualty of Priscus' damned predicted uprising.

  When the sling-stone caught Cotta in the eye and ploughed through the orb, shredding a line all the way through his brain and rattling against the back of his skull, he fell into a white cloud of bliss. There was no pain - the capsarius had seen to that. He felt the blow in every last detail, but with fascination rather than agony. The fact that he was dying seemed to be a blessing. He tried to gesture even as he fell, begging the legionary to place a coin under his tongue. He had family he hoped to see in Elysium.

  The world went blessedly, painlessly, black.

  * * * * *

  Balventius awoke with a start and instantly wished he hadn't.

  At first he thought he must be blind, but as shapes began to resolve around him he realised that the sun had gone down and it was dark, a thick blanket of cloud hiding both moon and stars and turning the land into a deep blue-black world of shadow.

  The pain was the second thing that hit him, hot on the heels of the darkness. Feeling the ground shaking beneath him as though in the midst of a tremor, he tried to struggle to his feet only to realise that there was not an ounce of strength in either leg. Both had severed muscles and tendons and neither would respond to his attempts to move them, let alone lift his weight. The spear blows had crippled him and the pain was intense and unrelenting.

  Indeed, it had been the pain that had awakened him.

  The idea of becoming one of those legless crippled ex-soldiers that filled the sides of Rome's streets begging for a coin frightened him more than any enemy he had ever faced,

  Slowly he became aware that the ground was not shaking after all. Despite his immobility, it was him that was moving. His head snapped round and he realised that he was being dragged, his feet bumping up and down with every rock, dip or undulation of the ground. He was surrounded by battle-weary legionaries; perhaps a score or three dozen from the shapes moving in the gloom. He could smell the blood and the urine. The smell of a defeated army.

  Where were they?

  Even as his feet bounced and before his dry, unused throat attempted to find his voice, he recognised the severity of his injuries. He had been wounded so many times in his career that he had lost count a decade ago and had suffered a score of wounds to the legs alone. His experience made it abundantly clear that his right leg was now beyond help. Even had it been salvageable following immediately on from the battle, how many hours had passed since their early morning disaster that it was now dark? The leg was lost to him, which made him an ex-soldier whatever happened. There was the very high likelihood that the left was in a similar state too.

  Both legs!

  Balventius spat his anger at the world.

  "You awake centurion?"

  Somewhere deep in his chest, Balventius' voice came out a wheeze. He tried again.

  "Just" he croaked. "Where are we?"

  "Nearly back at the camp, sir."

  Balventius nodded. Just as it should have been in the first place. How had he been unconscious for so long? He remembered the leg wounds and collapsing…

  "I was hit in the head?"

  "That was Mittius, sir. You wouldn't let the lads save you, so he had to clout you to stop you struggling."

  Balventius almost laughed at the absurdity of it. Legless and defeated, what made them think he wanted to be saved? Bleeding out his age-old life in a Roman gutter begging for scraps was no way for a soldier to go.

  "The cohort's retreat was successful?"

  Another voice - a familiar one - laughed. "It was. Damnedest thing I ever saw!"

  Balventius focussed on the source of the voice: Petrosidius, the eagle bearer, with his precious burden still held tight and shining over his shoulder. Lately of the Tenth, the man had become something of a legend after last year's landings in Britannia. If anyone other than Balventius could hope to be a focus and a beacon to the defeated legionaries it would be him.

  "What happened?" he managed.

  "Your lot got back nice and safe and then that donkey-prick Sabinus surrendered!"

  "What?" Balventius almost lurched out of his escort's grasp.

  "Led the tribunes out and threw down his weapons. Gave the order for a general disarmament. Soon as the shields were down, some druid bastard gutted him and they opened up their missiles on the men."

  Balventius tried to picture the scene, but it left a sour taste and he moved on, shaking away the image.

  "Cotta? Didn't he argue?"

  "No one knows. Disappeared about that time and no one's heard anything of him since. Doubt he got out alive, though."

  "Shit. So they massacred the men? Didn't anyone rally the legions?"

  "The centurions of the Fourteenth did. Their primus pilus tried his best. To his credit we fought on for three hours, until the sun was high in the sky. Last I saw of the Fourteenth in bulk there were maybe two hundred of them left, fighting hard up against the abandoned carts."

  "And you ran?" Balventius tried to put some invective and disapproval into the statement, but he found he had none left. What man would have stayed voluntarily for that? Any survivors would be turned inside out and used as a wall decoration by the druids.

  Petrosidius was suddenly next to him, staring deep into his eyes.

  "Did they run? The veterans of the Eighth? Are you mad, Balventius?"

  "Sorry."

  "They beat a fighting withdrawal. Half a cohort managed to get out of the mess and made it up the hill. We kicked the snot out of a couple of hundred archers and slingers until their reinforcements found us. Then one of your older centurions gave the order to pull back to the camp. Good on him. If he hadn't, I would have. We fought off a good few hundred of the bastards, but by the time we got clear of the field we'd lost most of the men. Last count we had thirty one, but that was at the sunset break. I reckon we've lost three or four to wounds since then and there'll be more c
oins for the boatman before the sun rises."

  Balventius shook his head. "Wait. It was only two miles or so to camp. How…?"

  "We took a slightly circuitous route. We've been in the Arduenna forest for most of the time. The Eburones seem to be everywhere and we're in no fit state to fight so we've kept out of sight as we moved slowly. To be honest, I'm not sure what we'll do when we get back to camp, but it was something to make for. A focus. I'm the only officer left, y'see. Apart from yourself, of course."

  Balventius sighed.

  "More than seven thousand men. A massacre. It's the worst loss Caesar's had in his career, I shouldn't wonder. The old man's going to be a mite angry when he hears about this."

  "If he hears." Petrosidius rolled his shoulders and switched hands with the eagle. "Bear in mind this might not be an isolated incident. What happens if this has hit every encamped legion in Gaul?"

  "Then our occupation is over and Gaul is for the Celts again. They'll have won." He shook his head. "But Jupiter won't let that happen. Caesar's still there. I can feel it like he's watching us. No. We got hit because we're the most remote. I reckon we were a test of strength, resolve and readiness and we've proved to be about as tough and dangerous as a bag of grapes. That'll just give them the confidence to do it again and maybe even on a bigger scale."

  He blinked away the sweat, blood and grime. "We need to get a message to Caesar - to tell him about this; about what happened."

  "Seems unlikely" Petrosidius replied calmly

  "Bet you wish you'd stayed with the Tenth" Balventius grunted hollowly.

  "They might yet be in even deeper shit."

  Someone shouted something inaudible out of Balventius' arc of vision.

  "What was that?"

  "They've spotted the camp defences. We're nearly there. Couple of dozen heartbeats and we'll be in what we might laughingly call 'safety'."