The Leopard sword e-4

by Anthony Riches

  ‘Leave them!’ Sergius pointed to the bandit horde’s front rank, now barely two hundred paces from the grain store’s walls and running as fast as their weary legs would carry them, clearly intent on cutting the tiny party off from their refuge. ‘Carry him!’ A pair of Tungrians grabbed the staggering Julius by his arms, one of them tossing away the spear on which he was leaning, while Sergius abandoned any pretence at decorum and pulled the blood-soaked woman off the mutilated body of her victim, catching her knife arm and disarming her as she spun towards him with murderous intent. He dragged her alongside him as the soldiers ran for the gate in a desperate foot race with the bandits. Calculating the odds as he ran, the realisation dawned on Sergius that it was a race they were going to lose, if only by a few yards. Julius had clearly come to the same conclusion.

  ‘Leave me, and save yourselves!’

  The Tungrians to either side of him kept running as fast as their burden allowed, drawing their swords and preparing to die in defence of their centurion, and Sergius nodded as he ran alongside them, reaching for his own gladius. Scant paces from the gate, and instants from being overrun by the bandits, Sergius was bracing himself to push the woman away and make his stand, when a flight of spears arced down from the store’s walls, reducing the oncoming rush of men to a chaotic jumble of tumbling limbs, giving the runners just enough time to throw themselves through the closing gate. The shattered Tungrians dropped Julius to the ground as they collapsed onto their hands and knees, one of them vomiting onto the store’s immaculately raked pebbles, and Sergius’s chosen man bellowed orders for the legionaries to stand ready for any attempt to climb the wall. Sergius, unable to do anything more than put his hands on his knees and resist the urge to throw up his last meal in sympathy with the exhausted man, looked down at the prostrate Tungrian centurion with a wry smile. Shaking his head, he raised a questioning eyebrow as Annia, painted with sprays of blood and trembling violently, was wrapped in a blanket by Felicia and led away.

  ‘I really hope she’s worth it, this woman of yours, given that you may well never walk without a limp again. What happened?’

  Julius grimaced at the pain. Felicia had offered him a linen bandage and he held it to the wound, watching as his blood stained the fabric.

  ‘I thought we’d got away free, but a pair of them jumped us one block from the gate. One of them managed to put his spear into my thigh before I could return the compliment.’

  Sergius nodded.

  ‘You said you had an idea about defending this place? Given we’ve got five hundred angry-looking bandits milling around out there I’d be grateful if you were to share it with me.’

  He listened to Julius speak for a few moments then raised his eyebrows in shocked understanding.

  ‘By all the gods but that’s a terrifying idea. Nobody could ever accuse you of being afraid to think the unthinkable, could they, Centurion?’

  He turned away and walked slowly up the steps onto the store’s wall, looking out at the ragged band assembled below him just out of spear-throwing range. A man wearing a masked cavalry helmet pushed his way through the throng and walked forward a few paces, holding up his empty hands to indicate his desire to talk.

  ‘I could hit him with a spear from here.’

  Sergius shook his head at his chosen man’s suggestion without taking his gaze off the bandit leader.

  ‘I doubt it. And I’d rather not raise the stakes that far this early. Those men might well soon have us at the point of their spears. That’s close enough! ’

  The bandits’ leader stopped, keeping his open hands raised. With the sunset behind him the cavalry helmet was stained red, and his words boomed out across the open ground in a pronouncement of the legionaries’ impending doom.

  ‘Men of the First Minervia, unless there are many more of you hiding behind those walls you appear to be no more than a single century, where we are five hundred men and more. Your walls were hardly designed for a siege, and most of your compound is not even defendable. Surrender now and I’ll allow you the choice of joining us or being disarmed and sent back to your legion, but be very clear when I tell you that this grain store, like this city, is now mine.’

  Sergius stepped forward, a pair of soldiers defending him with their shields from any bowshot.

  ‘You seem to be forgetting that there are three cohorts out there to the west, and when they come back here they’ll be the ones doing the evicting. You might be best making a run for it while you still can!’

  Obduro laughed loudly, shaking his sun-burnished head.

  ‘By the time your depressingly malleable tribune fetches up here tomorrow I’ll be long gone. Scaurus will be reduced to deciding whether to fall on his sword or wait for the emperor’s men to do the job for him, given the amount of Commodus’s gold he’s about to lose. And that’s before any mention of a certain Marcus Valerius Aquila reaches official ears. You did know that the Tungrians are harbouring a fugitive from the emperor’s justice?’

  It was on the tip of Sergius’s tongue to blurt out that the gold was safe inside the grain store’s walls, but he changed his mind just as he opened his mouth to reply.

  ‘If you want the grain you’d better come and get it. But there’ll be no surrender of an imperial facility while I command here, whatever that means for the timing of my meeting with the gods.’

  Obduro was silent for a long moment, then shrugged his indifference.

  ‘It means little enough to me whether you die here and now or in some other more fitting place, First Spear Sergius, but as you wish. Bring me the prisoners.’

  The three gang members who had been unable to regain the safety of the city were bodily dragged out in front of him, and at a signal from their leader the men surrounding them pulled the prisoners’ arms up to the horizontal, then used their feet to hook the captives’ legs wide. Obduro drew his sword with a flourish, pointing it at the distant forest.

  ‘Mighty Arduenna, grant us swift and terrible victory in our struggle to free your land from those who have subjugated your people! We offer you the blood of these unbelievers in the hope of your favour!’

  He turned swiftly and raised the sword, briefly holding the position before driving the blade down into his first victim’s body at the point where neck and chest met, hacking the man’s body in half with a diagonal cut that exited his body at the opposite hip. The two halves of the ruined corpse dropped to the ground, and Obduro spun across to his next victim, using the sword’s momentum to swing the blade up into the helpless gang member’s crotch, again cleaving the body cleanly in two. The third captive stared in terror at the blood-flecked mask as Obduro stopped in front of him with the sword’s point touching his chest. He paused momentarily before pushing the blade through the man’s ribs and stopping the heart behind them, pulling the sword free and raising its blood-soaked length to the men on the walls.

  ‘Soldiers of Rome, your choice is made! There will be no quarter asked of you, and none given. Your blood will be offered to the goddess, and in her name we will kill you all! Prepare to meet your doom!’

  He turned away and vanished into the press of his men, and Sergius tapped his chosen man’s shoulder.

  ‘They’ll be a moment or two working out how best to attack us. Call me when they show any sign of getting serious about wanting to be inside these walls.’ He climbed wearily down the steps and walked across to where Julius lay, shaking his head at the apparent depth of the bandit leader’s penetration of the defenders’ organisation and actions. ‘He even knows my bloody name, that’s how well informed he is. So, we have a choice. We can either surrender, and be butchered outside the city walls, or fight it out and be butchered inside these walls. It’s not much of a choice though.’

  Julius, still recumbent on the gravel, grimaced back up at him.

  ‘And I’m not going to be much use to you, am I?’

  He lifted the wounded leg, and both men shook their heads.

  ‘No, you’re not. If th
at wound’s as deep as it’s long you’re not going to be…’

  As Felicia walked towards them across the store’s wide expanse from her impromptu medical post in the administrative building, she called out, staring forebodingly at Julius.

  ‘Stop waving that leg about and keep it straight!’

  Sergius laughed wryly at the doctor’s imperious command, leaning closer to speak quietly into his colleague’s ear.

  ‘Obduro was shouting the odds about some fugitive by the name of Marcus Valerius Aquila. Would that be the same Marcus who had the balls to marry that woman?’

  Julius looked back up at him, his response pitched just as low.

  ‘There are some things you’re better not knowing, First Spear. The man in question is innocent, but his past won’t leave him alone, it seems.’

  Felicia reached the centurions and bent over Julius, casting a critical eye at the gash in his thigh.

  ‘You men, pick up this wounded officer and carry him to somewhere a little less likely to be showered with spears at any second. And then, Centurion, we can have a look at that leg and see how much damage you’ve taken this time.’

  Julius caught her sleeve as she straightened up.

  ‘Madam, my woman…?’

  Felicia shook her head swiftly.

  ‘She’s been raped, watched you brutally slaughter her attackers without any thought for her sensitivities, then had to run for her life and be reduced to a quite bestial act of murder, to judge from the blood she’s covered with, although she’s not saying much about it. I think she’s going to need a good deal of delicate handling for quite a while, and that will include your having no expectations that she’s “your woman”. Just because she’s a prostitute doesn’t make her any less vulnerable than any other woman under those circumstances. Come on, pick him up.’

  Obduro leaned close to the former centurion who now commanded the former Treveri auxiliaries that were the main part of his band, looking about him at the dimming landscape before speaking quietly, moving closer to ensure he could be heard above his men’s noise.

  ‘I want to be inside that store in less than a single hourglass, you understand?’

  The hard-faced soldier-turned-brigand nodded his understanding, intimidated by the expressionless mask only inches from his face.

  ‘It’ll be dark in less than half that time. I’ll have a century keep the men on the walls busy, and send two more round either side to dig our way in through the granary walls. The men inside can’t be everywhere, and once we’re through the bricks and into the store it’ll only take a minute or so to roll them all up.’

  Obduro nodded.

  ‘Good enough. Just make sure you succeed, if you want the share I’ve promised you. We need to be away from here before dawn.’

  He turned away, gesturing to a man waiting quietly at a respectful distance with a military trumpet in one hand.

  ‘It’s time for my triumphant return to the city. Give the signal.’

  On the city walls above Tungrorum’s west gate Tornach stared out into a landscape stained red by the setting sun, while the remaining member of the city guard detailed to ensure that the entry stayed firmly closed lounged on the defence’s thick stone parapet. They had watched in silence as the bandit army marched up the main road to the city and its vulnerable grain store. The guard shook his head and spat over the wall.

  ‘That lot will have the legion boys out of the granary in no time. It’s just as well we’ve got twenty-foot-high walls between them and us, or we’d be going the same way.’

  Tornach grunted his agreement and pulled a blue sharpening stone from his pack, unsheathing his sword and eyeing the edge critically. The other man looked over at him incuriously, then back out across the darkening fields beyond the walls.

  ‘You won’t need that. There’s no way they’ll be able to get into the city without ladders.’

  The bandit hunter spat on the whetstone and rasped it down the blade’s length, leaving a thin blue coating of the stone’s grit along the sword’s cutting edge.

  ‘Maybe not. But the one thing I’ve learned from Obduro over the last year is that the worst things tend to happen just when you’re least expecting them.’ He spat on the stone again and turned the sword over to sharpen the other side of the blade. ‘Take us. Here we are, safe on top of a twenty-foot-high wall, with the gates below us made from oak so thick and so well secured that it would take four strong men just to lift out the bars that hold them closed. And yet…’

  The other man eyed him dubiously.

  ‘And yet what?’

  A trumpet sounded from the south, a long wailing note followed swiftly by another, and then a third. The guard shifted from his lounging position, leaning out over the parapet and craning his neck in an attempt to see what was happening around the wall’s curve. ‘Sounds like some sort of signal.’

  He shuddered as Tornach’s sword slid up into the sleeve of his mail coat, the point stabbing deep into his left armpit with expert precision. Leaping back from the wall he put a hand to the hilt of his own weapon, his eyes wide with shock as he swayed on his feet for a moment with blood pouring down his left side, then crumpled helplessly to the wall’s stone walkway. Tornach stared dispassionately down at him, nodding as the truth dawned in the dying man eyes.

  ‘And yet one man inside these walls might change all that in an instant.’ He wiped the sword’s blade on the dying man’s tunic, a mixture of crimson blood and the whetstone’s blue residue staining the cloth a dark purple, then sheathed the weapon, spreading his arms as if taking the salute of a baying arena crowd. ‘All I have to do now is open the gate and my task is complete.’

  The guard shook his head weakly.

  ‘Needs… four… men…’

  Tornach smiled again, reaching into his pack and pulling out a coil of rope.

  ‘So it does. And here they are.’

  Several miles to the west, the reunited Tungrian cohorts were storming up the road towards the city with Scaurus at their head and the legion’s cohort struggling in their wake. No longer heedful of the effects of such a long march on his men he was setting a murderous pace at the front of the long column of soldiers, while behind him the three cohorts’ centurions encouraged, cajoled and simply threatened their men to keep them moving at the required pace. Silus had ridden far enough to the east to watch Obduro’s army making their approach to the city, further darkening Scaurus’s mood and goading him to greater efforts in leading his men’s increasingly painful double-pace forced march. Labouring alongside him, Frontinius glanced back down the column to the legion centuries, grimacing as he turned back to the road stretching out into the dusk before them.

  ‘Our lads are grinding along well enough, but the legion centuries are having a bad time of it. Perhaps we ought to call a rest halt? Apart from anything else we need to work out how we’re going to recognise the bandits in the heat of a night battle. It might be best to have that worked out before it gets dark?’

  Scaurus nodded.

  ‘We could get the torches lit too. Very well, First Spear, we’ll take a few minutes to work all that out.’

  The soldiers slumped exhaustedly at the roadside where the column came to a halt, their centurions trotting tiredly up the road to cluster round the First Spear, while the chosen men and watch officers pulled torches from each century’s mule cart and readied them for lighting. Frontinius waited until the last of the legion officers had reached him before starting his briefing, ignoring the fact that Tribune Belletor had yet to make an appearance.

  ‘Time isn’t on our side, gentlemen, so I’ll keep this brief. Decurion Silus’s reconnaissance confirms that we’ve been taken for fools, and decoyed away from the city in order for Obduro to have the time and leisure to smash his way into the grain store and make his escape with enough corn to keep his men fed for the best part of a year. And we can’t allow that to happen. On top of that, the emperor’s gold is also in the city, and whilst I expect Juliu
s has enough presence of mind to see off any gang interest, several hundred bandits would be a different matter. So after we get the men back on their feet we’re going all the way back to the city at the double, and there won’t be any time to issue orders.’ He looked around the cluster of serious-faced men, now barely visible as darkness crept over the landscape. ‘So you’re going to have to use your initiative, and we’ll depend on sheer numbers to do the job for us. Once we’re within sight of the city I’m going to blow one long blast on my whistle, which will be the signal to halt the march and form up for the attack. Use the torches of the men in front of you as your guide, and we’ll keep it simple, given that it’ll be pitch black by then. Odd-numbered centuries will deploy to the left, even numbers to the right. Find the end of the line and anchor your century onto it. I want one long line and no gaps, or we’ll have men blundering about in the dark in no time. A one-cohort front ought to be wide enough, so we’ll have the Second Cohort lined up behind the First, and the legion behind them. I don’t care if they run to the east, but any man trying to escape through us dies. And the tribune’s put a bounty on the head of their leader. There are ten gold aurei waiting for the man that brings me the head of this man Obduro still wearing his helmet.’ Eyebrows were raised around the circle of men at the size of the reward on offer. ‘Yes, he wants the man dead badly enough to offer a year’s pay to the man that can deliver it. And we want to avoid half of our men killing the other half, so we’ll use the watchword system to minimise the chance of mistakes. The challenge will be “Mithras”, the response “Unconquered”. Any man that doesn’t know the response should be considered an enemy, but make sure your men use some sense. The lads in the grain store won’t know the response, and neither will Julius’s men. Dismissed!’