The Gothic horsemen dismounted. They were going to fight on foot. Lucius and Marco exchanged looks: unusual. They formed up in strict rank and file, three deep, curving round to cover as much as two-thirds of the circle. They moved quietly, without fuss. Two hundred? thought Lucius. More like two hundred and fifty, maybe three.
Ops leant and spat, and muttered something obscene about barbarians. Salcus, the young recruit, stood nearby, milk-white.
Crates nudged him. ‘All right, lad?’
‘All right.’
There wasn’t much more to be said by way of comfort.
‘Can’t wait to get stuck in, that’s all,’ said the lad, speaking far too rapidly.
Crates managed a sardonic grin. ‘Me too.’
It would be the last time the Eighth Century, First Cohort, Legio II ‘Augusta’ ever fought together. It would be the last time they ever got stuck in. They knew that. It would be their last stand. For reasons they did not comprehend, this was where it would all end for them. A small army of Gothic horsemen had brought them to a standstill, here in the once-peaceful heart of Italy, and demanded that they hand over one of their hostages – who was no more than a boy, and a barbarian to boot! No, it made no sense. But they would go down fighting; and then, they supposed, the Goths would take the boy for themselves anyway. But they would have to pay in blood.
It was not what they had envisaged. This was not the long and happy retirement so many of them had fondly foreseen for themselves, after twenty years’ loyal service with the legion. Pensioned off with a nice bit of farmland in the mild south country of Britain, with a plump young rose-cheeked girl for a wife, with good round hips and a willing smile. Or, now that Britain, too, had been taken from them, maybe some place in Gaul, or the rich vinelands of the Moselle.
But here they were, here because they were here, and orders were orders. Anyway, they were buggered if they were going to take orders from a Goth. So, let it be. They’d never live to see retirement, as it turned out; or know gout, or arthritic hands, or the palsy, or old man’s staggers, or creep with bent and crooked back to a cold grave. They’d die here, after all, with sword in hand. It wasn’t so bad. All men must die.
The Gothic warlord alone remained mounted. He turned to look at the small, grim circle of Roman legionaries. He glanced back to salute his father, the sun, climbing slowly up the eastern sky. Then he looked out over his ranks of men. He dropped his gauntleted hand. They broke into a run.
‘Bows at the ready,’ ordered Lucius evenly.
Forty bows were raised aloft over the stockade.
The Gothic warriors were a hundred and fifty yards away. One hundred. Closing.
‘Take aim,’ said Lucius, raising his spatha.
They were fifty yards distant now, running at full pelt, knowing that the arrows would be coming soon.
‘ Fire! ’
The volley flew out into the enclosing circle of warriors, arrowheads finding their targets, burying themselves in the chests and legs of men. A few sank to their knees clutching the arrowshafts, a few more stumbled and fell full length, tripping their comrades who came on behind. More arrows glanced off the side of heavy shields or burnished helmets, or fell short and slithered into the dust. The mass of warriors came on.
‘ Fire! ’
There was time for one more volley, then Lucius gave the order to take up arms. The bows were thrown aside and men took up swords and shields, or else their spears, and held them high over the trench below. Lucius sensed a figure at his side. He started. It was the boy. He had stripped to the waist, and daubed himself from the crown of his head downwards with mud. His slanted eyes glittered in his blackened face like some forest animal’s. He had tied his shaggy hair up in a Hun-style top-knot, bound with plaited grasses, which made him look a little taller. Still, short though he was, his tattooed torso was tightly muscled and his biceps bulged as he held his short sword two-handed.
‘Back in the middle with the horses,’ Lucius ordered curtly.
The boy shook his head. ‘You’re fighting for me. So I’m fighting for you.’
And then he was away, sprinting across the circle and hurling himself at the stockade opposite.
The Goths were upon them.
Without the trench and the stockade, the fighting would have been over in minutes. But every Gothic warrior, no matter how tall, had to fight from below, stabbing his long spear upwards, while the legionaries thrust down with their weapons in response, to deadly effect.
Lucius and Marco fought side by side as always, flanking each other, and moving readily to fill the gaps. A Goth had one leg over the stockade when Marco rushed at him, bellowing, and planted his foot in the warrior’s chest. The warrior flew backwards into the trench, and Marco leant over to thrust his spear down into his exposed midriff. Another warrior slammed up against the stockade and drove his longsword at Marco’s side. The centurion gasped and twisted, and the swordthrust grazed past him. Lucius grabbed the warrior and rammed his head down against the stockade, then despatched him with a clean thrust of his blade to the neck. The corpse rolled back into the trench.
As the trench filled with corpses, so more came on behind, treading across the bodies of their fallen comrades and approaching the stockade on the level. It was grotesque but effective. Some of the warriors crossed themselves as they trod on the dead, and Lucius had to remind himself that they, too, were Christians now, so they said.
He looked back and saw the lad Salcus curling back from the stockade and then, gently, sitting down cross-legged like a schoolboy in the dust, cradling his belly. He heard Ops roaring nearby, seizing two warriors by the throat, one in each hand, and wrenching their heads down onto his upraised knee. Then he rolled them back contemptuously into their comrades.
Attila was climbing up onto the stockade opposite. Lucius roared at him to fall back, but then he saw what had happened. A knot of warriors had thrown a grappling hook over the top and were passing the rope back to a team of horses just behind their lines, ready to pull away and tear a breach in the defences. An instant before the rope was attached to the team, Attila leant down and cut it clean through with a single swipe of his sword. He moved so fast, it was a blur, but then he wrenched the grappling hook free from the splintered wood at his feet and swung it furiously into the head of a Gothic warrior who was swinging his shield edge at the boy to knock him down. The grappling hook connected first, and the warrior’s head spun round, his unconscious body sagging across the top of the sharpened staves. The stockade was saved, at least for a time.
Then, to his horror, Lucius watched as the boy, again moving faster than any man would have been able, aimed three rapid strokes in quick succession at the comatose warrior’s neck. He kicked the warrior’s helmet from his head, grabbed a fistful of his hair and, with a fourth stroke, separated his head cleanly from his body. He gave an unearthly cry of triumph and, whirling round, flung the severed head into the crowd of Gothic warriors massing beyond the sharpened staves. The bloody head whirled through the air, a tendril of spinal column hanging obscenely loose, grey pulp and crimson gore flying from the neckhole and spattering the chests and faces of the aghast warriors. The boy howled at them again, his teeth bared like a wild animal’s, his sword held aloft, his face and chest smeared with a paste of earth, sweat and blood, and for a single, frozen moment the mob of Gothic warriors stopped dead in their tracks at this figure of nightmare. Then they braced themselves and came on, and the boy stooped low beneath the clumsy swing of a longsword, and drove his own blade deep into the man’s guts. He wrenched his sword free and fresh blood welled over him as the dying man fell against him. Attila twisted away and slashed his blade across another man’s belly. Another corpse fell into the dust.
The boy had grown up since the night in the Suburra, two years since, when he had stabbed his drunken attacker, and then shed tears of remorse for it. In the fury of battle he had found his vocation, and the voice of remorse was quickly drowned in other men’s
blood.
All around Lucius, the hopelessly outnumbered men were fighting furiously, and the fighting was close-quarter, messy and chaotic. So far the defences had not been breached. But his men were tiring fast. And, with uncharacteristic control, the Gothic warlord was sending in his men in separate ranks. When one rank began to tire, they drew back and the next rank took their place. Then they gave way to the third, and so on. None need fight to the death. None need even tire. But for Lucius’ men there could be no such respite. Several lay dead already; more were wounded; and every one of them who could still stand and wield a sword did so. He saw that Crates had his left arm bandaged, at the end only a bloody stump where his hand had been. But still he fought on.
He smelt something oily burning, overlaying the denser odour of blood in the air. The Gothic archers had started firing arrows high into the bright morning air, and dropping them down into the circle. A risky strategy as they might well hit one of their own. But the arrows flew true, some wrapped in flaming cloths soaked in pitch, and soon the two great Liburnian carriages that formed so vital a part of the Roman defences were aflame. More arrows fell into the centre of the circle, where the horses were. The horses bucked and reared, straining white-eyed and terrified against their guyropes. The Goths were trying to start a stampede.
One of the horses was hit in the eye.
The sound it made was terrible. Lucius had heard horses scream before, on battlefields other than this, but the sound never ceased to wrench his heart. The agonised beast tore loose from its guyrope and reared, with its great head and its corded, muscled neck thrown back, its front legs dabbling helplessly at the empty air, its vocal chords stretched and tearing with the terrible screaming that arose from deep within. The arrow bristled from its right eye, and the animal’s screams seemed to cry out to heaven in despairing protest that anyone, anything, should feel such pain in this world. Lucius was at the horse’s side even as it reared, and as it came crashing down again he ducked beneath its neck and drove his swordpoint with all his might, two-handed, into its carotid artery, just below its jaw. The blood spurted out in a hot jet, and the horse was dead by the time it hit the dust.
But it was hopeless. The arrows came down in a cruel rain upon the wretched beasts’ backs and withers, and they began to tear loose and panic. Tugha Ban was somewhere in the centre. Lucius ran across the stockade to the eastern edge of the circle, trying to block out the sound of the horses’ screams that filled the air. He plunged into the melee with a roar, driving back a knot of Gothic warriors, seized the stockade poles and began to wrench them out of the earth. He found Ops nearby and bellowed at him to do the same. Soon they had torn a breach five or six feet wide in their own defences. Lucius returned to the milling, rearing horses, and drove them towards the gap. The stricken beasts stumbled through the breach and out across the battlefield, the boy’s stolen mule following stiff-legged after them, breaking up the lines of Gothic warriors and trampling one or two under their hooves. The Goths closed ranks, set the butts of their pikes into the earth, and drove the long iron heads into the horses as they came. Lucius could no longer watch. He hardly knew which was worse, the slaughter of men or the slaughter of horses.
He and Ops set the staves again and closed up the gap. The Gothic onrush was temporarily broken by the stampede, but it wouldn’t last. His men slumped against the wooden barrier, exhausted. Their mouths were cracked and dry with thirst, their throats as rough as sharkskin from shouting; but the water was all gone. Ops was drenched from neck to waist in blood; it was unclear whose.
Lucius felt every muscle in his body burning, and could scarcely believe he could still muster the strength to raise his sword-arm. His hands trembled uncontrollably with strain, his eyes were blurred and stinging with sweat and dust. He had long since thrown aside his heavy shield. They could only hold back one more onslaught, he knew. A second would destroy them all.
Then it came.
His men dragged themselves to their feet for the last time, uncomplaining, unsurprised and in silence, too exhausted even to give the battle-cry. They fought with astonishing ferocity, with the fury of despair, of men who know they are going to die. In such a mood, a man can take a wound which would bring him to the ground in any normal circumstances, and yet fight on. So, yet again, the Goths’ charge broke against the ranks of Roman swords and spears, what few remained, and they were forced to a standstill at the stockade; where, yet again, it came to a grim exchange of grunting blows, of wounds taken and wounds received and no quarter given on either side. Again, to the exhausted relief of the soldiers, the Gothic line fell back to regroup once more. Their retreat was slow and stumbling, the ground strewn as it was with the corpses heaped up in stark and scarecrow attitudes. A slain Gothic warrior sat in the dust bolt upright, facing the stockade where he had died. His severed head lay in the dust close by. Another lay cloven from the crown of his head to his belly, his intestines dragged out over many yards of ground where they had been caught by the hooves of passing horses. The air stank with the odour of spilt blood and of the ruptured bellies and bowels of men and horses.
An eerie silence fell over the battlefield as the dust settled between the two opposing warbands. Lucius saw to his despair that, although many Goths had fallen, many remained. They formed up three ranks deep, curving round to left and right; soon they would come again, and this time they would triumph. It would be a victory dearly bought, but it would be a victory none the less. All for the strange and glittering-eyed boy from the steppes of Scythia, who even now, to Lucius’ disgust, was sauntering round the perimeter of the stockade, whistling to himself and taking scalps.
The Gothic warlord sat mounted and still on his black horse to the far right of his ranks. He surveyed the chaos of the battlefield with apparent serenity.
Lucius looked around. Crates was on his knees in the dust, cradling his stump of an arm. Lucius called out to him, and the lithe, clever little Greek looked up at him very slowly, his mouth hanging open as if he were an idiot, all his sharp, sardonic wit drained from him with his lifeblood. And then, like a moment from a nightmare, his eyes still fixed on his commanding officer, Crates slumped sideways and fell dead into the dust.
Young Salcus lay dead nearby, a spear driven through his skinny ribs and deep into the ground below. And there lay Ops, too, Ops Invictus, Ops the Unvanquished from Caledonia to Egypt, from Syria to the banks of the Danube. But he was vanquished now, at last, in the very heart of Italy, arrows bristling from his great mound of a belly like a porcupine’s quills. Marco sat hunched, tawny with dust from head to foot as if he had been perversely anointed, his hands clutching his side. Surely not Marco, too… In a panic, Lucius called his name. Marco looked up at him and then down again. He said nothing. Slowly and painfully he clambered to his feet, one hand still clutching his side, and came to stand near his commanding officer. Marco wouldn’t be so easily beaten.
They were the only two men still standing. They and the boy. The boy, of course, the cause of all this mayhem, was still standing. Nothing could destroy him. Naked to the waist, sword in hand, top-knot tied and decorated with a plait of horsehair, his whole body thickly pasted with blood and sweat and dust – and none of that blood was his own, Lucius felt sure, not a drop of his own wild blood had been spilt. The boy eyed Lucius evenly across the corpse-strewn arena of the stockade, drew his sword-blade swiftly through the folds of his filthy, ragged tunic, which still hung from his belt, further garlanded with ragged and gory hanks of human scalp. And then he grinned.
The stockade was breached in three places, and the carriages were no more than a heap of ashes. There were three of them left to fight, and a hundred horsemen were about to ride in and slay them. They were finished. And the boy grinned.
Lucius looked at the ranks of standing men across the plateau. ‘You gods,’ he whispered, but with deep and bitter accusation. ‘ You gods.’
The Gothic warlord raised his gauntleted hand for the last time.
&nb
sp; Here they came now. The rear, untried ranks of horsemen were mounting up. The walking wounded were retiring to the shade and coolness of the forest edge, but the rest were riding forward. They would fight on horseback now. They would simply ride in and slaughter the last remnants of this troublesome century.
Here they came.
Beside him, Marco looked up. ‘To the otherworld, sir,’ he said.
‘To the otherworld.’
The horsemen did not even break into a gallop. No more than twenty yards from the stockade, the Gothic warlord raised his hand again and they came to a halt.
‘What the hell are they playing at?’ growled Marco. ‘Come on, you bastards!’ he yelled at them. ‘Come on! What are you waiting for?’
The ranks of tall, plumed horsemen sat their horses and didn’t stir.
Then their leader heeled his horse and rode forward, just as he had only yesterday evening, many lives and deaths ago. He stopped near the stockade, turned his long ashen spear deftly in his right hand, and drove the head deep into the ground in front of him. His sword remained in his long scabbard. For a moment he bowed his helmeted head, and when he raised it again, Lucius saw to his astonishment that his eyes were bright with tears.
He spoke quietly, but they heard his every word.
‘The battle is ended. The boy is yours. We will no longer fight against those who fight so bravely. We salute you, our brothers.’
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