The best-looking ones were snapped up by some of the wealthier ladies of Roman society, to be their ‘personal assistants’, ‘litter bearers’, or even, in one instance which caused great hilarity among the city’s satirists and literary salons, her ornatrix, or ‘hairdresser’. The word was of the feminine gender, but was now peculiarly applied to male hairdressers, who had become fashionable of late. They were mostly eunuchs, of course, or else interested strictly in boys. Upon hearing of the gladiator-hairdresser, the satirists sharpened their goose-quill pens. Soon there were circulating little squibs about how strange it was that an ornatrix should be required to attend upon his mistress in her private chambers only after having stripped naked, oiled himself all over, and performed vigorous weightlifting and strengthening exercises in the gym with his membrum virile.
But the laughter died on their sophisticated faces when they learnt that the great majority of the gladiators had taken to the hills to become bandits.
‘Remember Spartacus,’ said the pessimists.
‘Yes, and look what became of him,’ said the optimists. ‘Crucified along with his men all along the Appian Way.’
‘Yes,’ said the pessimists, ‘but only after they’d wiped out two Roman legions.’
‘Ah,’ said the optimists. ‘Well, yes…’
Which was why Olympian was so disturbed by this wretched barbarian boy’s suggestion that they might be ambushed. As the eunuch well knew, this was a real possibility.
In general, however, the bandit gangs of the Sabine Hills and beyond were not reckoned to be any great threat, but operated as cowards, attacking lonely, isolated farmsteads, or wealthy merchants foolish enough to travel without a decent armed escort. Whoever they were, it was inconceivable that they should have the temerity to attack a fully escorted imperial column, even in these remote hills.
3
FIRST BLOOD
The first arrow struck Marco in his upper arm.
‘Fuck!’ he roared, looking down. The arrow had punched almost through his tricep and out again. He ordered his optio to snap off the haft, and push the arrowhead through and out the other side, while he clenched his teeth furiously on the leather strap of his reins and bit down. Another arrow whistled over his head as their horses skittered, and the optio struggled to tie the tourniquet tightly above the wound.
His lieutenant came galloping back. It was Lucius, the grey-eyed British lieutenant.
‘First blood, centurion,’ he called cheerfully. ‘Good man!’
‘Yeah, unfortunately it’s my blood, sir.’
Another arrow fell short and clattered over the rough ground at their horses’ feet. Lucius squinted up. There was nothing in the silent air but the trill of the cicadas, nothing to be seen up on the ridge but the blue sky beyond. Not a plume of dust, not a scuffle.
‘We’re being ambushed by… what? A solitary six-year-old boy? What in the Name of Light is going on?’
Marco shook his head. ‘No idea, sir. Feeblest ambush I’ve ever been in.’
The column had come to a halt, even though it was in a narrow defile. No more arrows came. There was no need to panic.
‘When you’ve finally stopped bleeding-’ said Lucius.
‘Stopped already, sir,’ interrupted Marco, patting the tourniquet. ‘Tight as a virgin’s-’
‘OK, Centurion, I get the message. Now ride on up to the Palatine vanguard and ask Count Heraclian, respectfully, what he wants us to do.’
Marco soon returned. ‘He suggests you’re in a better intelligence position than he is, sir.’
Lucius stared at him. ‘He wants me to give the orders?’
‘Seems so, sir. He also suggests that you and your Frontier Guard ride at the head of the column from now on.’
‘Jesus the Jumping Jew.’ Lucius turned away. ‘Master-General Heraclian,’ he said under his breath, ‘you are one useless pile of mule-shit.’ He turned back. ‘OK, Centurion, we ride on. At the end of this defile, when we come to that stand of cork oaks there – see? – you and me and First Squadron turn sharply back and ride round to the left and see what we can see. How’s that for a plan?’
‘Tremendously complex, sir, but it might just work.’
‘OK, you cheeky bastard. Ride on.’
As they rode, Marco gave the silent signal to the first troop of eight cavalrymen to be ready to split off from the column and climb the slope to the left. At the given moment they did so, without Lucius needing to bark a single word of command. The horses strained to get them up the steep slope, their heads held low and their nostrils flared, until at last they reached the summit, and reined in and stopped, and looked away across the blank escarpment.
Nothing. Not even a plume of dust.
‘What the fuck is going on, sir?’
Lucius squinted across the plain. At last he said softly, ‘What kind of bandit gang, Centurion, launches probing, reconnaissance attacks, to test the strength of its chosen target? Not even a volley, just a few well-aimed arrows, and then has the discipline to retreat and vanish before the enemy can counter?’
‘None that I know of, sir.’
Lucius scanned the hazy horizon again with eyes almost closed.
‘Gladiators?’ said another, younger trooper, wide-eyed Carpicius, all boyish excitement and dread. ‘Turned bandits?’
‘Gladiators,’ snorted Ops, a bull-necked Egyptian decurion in his early forties, due for retirement soon but as tough as any in the legion. His real name was Oporsenes, but Ops suited him better. ‘Don’t give me fuckin’ gladiators. Gladiators, sunshine, is a bunch of actors with swords in their hands. They’re just celebrity fuckin’ murderers, they are.’
Like any other soldier, Ops had nothing but contempt for gladiators, unemployed or not. Overpaid sex symbols, nancy-boys, showy individualist fighters who wouldn’t last five minutes on a real battlefield, where the mutual loyalty and trust between you and your men was what kept you all alive. Not fancy bladework in front of a roaring crowd of thousands.
‘OK, men,’ said Lucius, wheeling his horse round again. ‘Back to the column and ride on, eyes skinned. This isn’t over yet.’
‘What on earth is going on?’ whispered Olympian as the column rumbled forwards again. ‘We can’t be under attack, can we?’
‘Looks like it,’ said the little barbarian, settling back comfortably in his seat. ‘Pretty disciplined attack, too, I’d say.’
Olympian turned his fear into scorn. ‘Oh, so you’re a military expert, too, are you now? Closely acquainted, no doubt, with the military treatises of Aeneas Tacitus, Frontinus and Vegetius?’
The boy eyed the eunuch and nodded evenly. ‘Yes, I’ve read them,’ he said. ‘And that anonymous one, De re militari, which shows you how to drive a boat using paddles powered by oxen. Interesting idea – be good for attacking up-river. Do you know it?’
The eunuch gaped at him like a dying mullet.
Attila smiled and closed his eyes. ‘They’ll be attacking again soon,’ he promised. ‘Better say your prayers.’
They climbed out of the gully and onto a high, barren plateau. Perfect for a hit-and-run cavalry attack on a heavy, slow-moving column. But the outriders Lucius had posted – Heraclian, for some reason, hadn’t got round to it – reported no sign of life except lizards and cicadas. And the ground was far too hard and rocky to leave any decent trail signs.
They crossed the plateau in tense silence, the Frontier Guard riding in the van, the Palatine Guard in the rear. Then they began to drop down again, into a vast natural amphitheatre of grassland. The track itself curved away, round and down the flank of the hill, the terrain rising steeply to the left and falling away just as steeply to the right.
Lucius called a halt.
There was no sound but the soughing of the wind in the dry grass.
Ops growled something. Lucius told him to be quiet.
He was thinking of the day Hannibal slaughtered the Romans at Lake Trasimene, ambushing them side-on when they were
in marching file, unable to turn round into battle-order, pinned against the lakeside. He was thinking how good a place this would be to launch a similar ambush. To their left a steep ascent, and to their right an even steeper descent. There was no way they could get themselves into decent formation on this slope.
Then Marco said, ‘There are horses coming. That way, over the rise.’
‘Shepherds?’ suggested Lucius. ‘Goats?’
‘No, horses. Men on horses.’
They listened. Lucius could hear nothing. The tension was unbearable. A soldier’s desire to get stuck in, as Lucius knew, often made him attack too early. There was nothing worse than waiting for the enemy – especially for an unseen, uncounted enemy.
But Marco was no novice. He nodded again. ‘They’re coming.’
‘How can you hear that?’ said Lucius.
‘I can’t. But our horses can.’
He was right. Their mounts were skittish anyway, smelling their riders’ sweat and fear. But there was something more than that on the wind. Their ears twitched back and forth, and their nostrils flared to pick up the scent of their approaching kind.
Lucius leant forward and spoke into the flicking ear of his fine grey mare. ‘What is it, Tugha Ban? Trouble ahead?’ He sat back, oblivious of his centurion’s sceptical stares. ‘I think you’re right.’
He squinted up the slope to their left. Then he signalled to Marco to give the general order to dismount. ‘And that means the Palatine, too – if Master-General Heraclian doesn’t mind. So ride back and tell them to get off their fat arses.’
‘We’re not going to ride on down?’
‘At our speed? With those wretched, overweight carriages?’ Lucius shook his head. ‘We’ll be cut to pieces if we stay mounted.’ He slid to the ground and fingered the pommel of his sword. ‘We’re going to have to fight.’ He stood and scanned the steep slope again and the shimmering heat haze above. ‘Where are those fucking outriders?’
Marco said nothing. They both knew where the outriders were by now.
And they both knew what it meant when a troop of cawing rooks took flight and arose from the oak forest below them and flew away down the valley. Rooks are clever. They don’t fly away at the approach of horses, or sheep, or goats. But they fly at the approach of men, and they can tell a man armed with a bow from a man without. When rooks take flight, trouble is coming.
Marco drew his sword and touched its edge.
Lucius had them line up two deep to the left of the column, facing uphill.
‘That’s quite a climb,’ muttered Marco.
‘Certainly is,’ said Lucius. ‘Hope you’ve been doing your exercises.’
Marco hawked and spat. ‘Yeah, yeah.’
But he knew his officer was right. His officer was generally right, he had to admit it. Lieutenant Lucius was OK. In a situation like this, if they were about to be ambushed from above – and they were – the best thing to do was, as so often in warfare, the thing the enemy would least expect: counter-attack uphill.
Marco glanced up, and there they were. He gave a low whistle. Counter-attack uphill and with a lot fewer men. Jumping Jesus.
Along the ridge above them stood perhaps four hundred men, arrows already notched to their bows. They wore motley clothing, though many would fight naked to the waist. What little armour was in evidence was no more than leather breastplates. They stood unshaven, tattered, wild-eyed. But their weapons were serious. As well as bows and arrows they bore shields, swords, and a few carried heavy pikes. This would be no picnic. They stood in orderly formation, looking down on the hapless column without expression, waiting for the order.
Then a solitary figure in a white robe stepped forward and tossed a sack down the slope. As it bounced and tumbled, the mouth of the sack opened, and out rolled two severed heads. One clunked against the wheels of a carriage and stopped. The other bounced right across the track and then on down the slope beyond. The outriders.
There was no point waiting any longer. Lucius gave the order, and they charged.
He felt his leg muscles burning and trembling with the strain as he struggled up the steep slope for twenty or thirty yards, in the front line with his men. Above their bellowing, he heard with sickening frequency the hollow thunk of arrow after arrow hitting men in the chest. At this close range armour was useless, and the wound would almost always be fatal. Five men had already gone down, ten, even twenty. And they were only eighty in all, plus the fifty Palatines over on the left flank. At last he was five yards from the line of bowmen, and he could see the surprise in their eyes. Their leader had still given no command to pull back or draw swords, and most of them were still encumbered with bows, astonished to see how quickly the soldiers had sprinted up the steep hill. Lucius looked up at the bandit who towered above him, and saw that his eyes were bloodshot, his lips cracked with the parching summer sun, his cheeks sunken and his hands shaking. These men were not in peak condition. His own men were.
Then they slammed into them. Lucius stepped up and barged his man backwards off the ridge. He stepped forward again and thrust his sword forwards with all his weight behind it. The startled bowman tried to fend off the thrust, absurdly, with his bow, but the thick steel blade plunged past and went into his guts up to the hilt. Lucius gave the blade a smart twist and pull, and the man fell at his feet, choking out his lifeblood, his intestines oozing from the ragged hole in his belly. Behind him another man came on, drawing his sword. He got no further. Lucius raised his sword in a flash to shoulder height, his shield held across his chest and belly for defence, and drove the point into the man’s throat. His blade grated against the man’s neck vertebrae, and he could feel them coming apart as he twisted the blade and pulled it free. His hand and arm were covered in blood. The man lolled lifelessly against him, and he shoved the corpse back ferociously with his shield, into the man who came on behind.
All along the line it was the same story. On the left flank, the silent, orderly Palatines were making mincemeat of their malnourished opponents. You had to hand it to them: they were tough enough soldiers when it came to it.
Though they had lost perhaps a quarter of their men on the ascent, now they were fighting in deadly, close-packed formation as only Roman soldiers knew how, offering their enemy nothing but a solid wall of shields and shining blades. There was nothing for the ragged bandit army to attack but hard steel.
Marco was fighting to Lucius’ right. Although the battle-scarred centurion would never dream of uttering a word of complaint, Lucius could see that the arrowhead wound in his left arm was bleeding afresh. He was trying to keep his shield up to cover his flank as he thrust forward with his sword-arm, but his arm was weakening steadily, his shield trembling and gradually sinking lower and lower. Any moment now the enemy was going to spot it and drive in over the top, straight into throat or lung. Lucius said nothing but made sure he kept him covered, too, fighting a little in front of Marco, covering his left. They had always made a good team.
Along the line, he saw the lad Carpicius stumble and fall. A bearded, beggarly-looking brute raised his short stabbing-spear above his head, ready to drive it into the back of the boy’s neck. Lucius turned, but it was too late. And then, even as the spearhead was coming down through the air, Ops, the burly Egyptian, flung himself forward, almost covering the boy, with his shield raised on his hefty arm. The spear went straight through the shield, of course, and from the roar Ops gave it must have gone into his arm as well. But Carpicius was saved, by the skin of his teeth, scrambling clear and sticking his sword smartly into his opponent’s side while he was still wrestling to free his spear from Ops’ shield. Lucius felt a momentary lump in his throat. He had some good men in his command. He was damned if he was going to lose any more. He fought on with mute ferocity.
The bandits were coming apart all over the place. And foolishly, they had left their horses immediately behind them. Now they were stumbling back against their whinnying mounts, trying to get past, under t
hem, even over them, mounting up and riding chaotically away. The line of soldiers came mowing into them still, the close-packed bandits utterly outfought. At the back, Lucius glimpsed the man who had tossed down the sack containing the two severed heads. He was trying to pull his horse round by the reins so he could mount.
He punched Marco on the arm. ‘With me!’
He fell back and sprinted round the rear of the line to the left, heading for the bandit leader. Marco sprinted at his heels, roaring at the top of his voice. Lucius grinned as he ran. That was Marco all over.
In fact, Marco was roaring because his wounded arm was flaming with pain where his officer had just punched him. If Lucius didn’t keep running, Marco would be strongly tempted to deck him.
They reached the bandit leader as he swung up onto his horse and wrenched the reins round to the right. Marco didn’t muck about. He hurled himself forwards and thrust his sword into the horse’s neck. Its carotid artery was cleanly severed and blood spurted with extraordinary force into the faces and chests of the two men. The rider wrenched the reins again, trying to control his dying mount, but it was futile. The poor beast was already done for, wheeling and staggering in a circle, its great heart driving the blood gushing from the gaping wound in its neck, as its back legs crumpled and it folded into the dust. The bandit leader rolled clear and scrambled to his feet, only to thump back down into the dust again as Marco planted a hefty hobnailed boot in the small of his back. He stuck the point of his sword firmly into the back of the man’s neck and waited, panting, for Lucius.
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