Marcus shook his head and pushed the blade aside.
‘You’re right, there’s no way we can take them with us, but if there’s a need to finish them off I’ll not let another man do my job for me. Dubnus, take the men back to the century and I’ll join you once I’ve seen these men across the river.’
His friend nodded and gathered the Tungrians, disappearing quickly and quietly back up the slope and into the darkened ranks of trees. Marcus sheathed his spatha, hefting the gladius and putting the short blade’s point against the first man’s ribs, angling it ready for the mercy stroke. A thought struck him, and he turned away to search the barbarians’ bodies until he found a purse full of Roman coin on the big man that Arminius had beheaded. Taking three coins before discarding the purse, he moved quickly, pushing one of them into the unconscious man’s mouth before repositioning the gladius.
‘Go to your gods, my friend.’
He stabbed the sword through the message rider’s ribs, expertly putting it through the man’s failing heart and killing him instantly. A thin wash of blood trickled down the man’s chest, testament to the amount he had already lost under the barbarians’ knives, and he died with no more than an almost silent last exhalation of breath. Marcus moved to the second man, but found his skin cold and his eyes empty. He pushed a coin into the man’s mouth, then looked across at the last of them to find the captive’s eyes locked on the gladius in his hand.
‘Take me… with you.’
Marcus shook his head sadly, hefting the sword as he spoke.
‘The barbarians have left you a wreck, friend, severed your hamstrings and cut off your thumbs. Even if I could carry you to safety you’ll never walk or hold a sword again. Better to die here with some dignity.’
A tear trickled down the message rider’s cheek.
‘Make it qui…’
He grunted with pain as Marcus struck fast and without warning, slamming the gladius into his chest and twisting it to make sure of the kill. The dying man’s eyes stared into his own for a long moment, then rolled upwards as his spirit left him. Marcus stood in silence for a second before tucking the last of the three coins into the dead man’s mouth and wiping and sheathing his sword. A voice from the shadows at the edge of the clearing spun him round, hands reaching for his swords.
‘You are a good man, Centurion Corvus. Not many men would have taken the time to find coin and see these men safely across the river.’
Arminius stepped out of the gloom, his face sombre in the presence of the dead messengers.
‘An unhappy passing, but you gave it all the dignity that was to be had. And now…’
He gestured up through the trees to where the two centuries would be waiting for them. Marcus nodded, but turned back towards the doomed fort.
‘We should leave before we’re discovered, I know. But I have to see it…’
The German nodded.
‘Quietly, then. We go as far as the forest edge. Any closer and we may find ourselves in the same trouble as these poor bastards.’
6
The duty officer at Fine View fort, seven miles to the east of White Strength, frowned with concentration as he leaned out over the fort’s western parapet, turning his head slightly in the hope of reducing the wind’s whine as it ruffled the crest of his helmet.
‘You’re sure you heard a trumpet?’
His watch officer shifted uncomfortably.
‘Certain, Centurion. It was the lad here that heard it first…’
He gestured to a soldier so young that his face was not yet darkened by any trace of a beard.
‘I can still hear it, sir. Listen, there it goes again!’
The centurion grimaced, screwing his face up in concentration. There it was… just… barely audible over the wind’s gentle moan.
‘Fuck me, they’re blowing the alarm signal. You, run for the first spear, tell him that White Strength is under attack!’
In the five minutes that it took for the senior centurion to make his way to the fort’s rampart the distant trumpet calls had stopped. He stood on the wall and stared out to the west.
‘The Frisians are in the shit, from the sound of it.’ The first spear turned to his prefect. ‘I doubt we’ll need to evacuate before dawn, they’ll be too busy trying to fight their way into the Strength, but you’d best order the preparations. We’ll have to get word to Noisy Valley, though; they won’t be seeing or hearing any of this given the lie of the land.’
His superior nodded and went to find his dispatch riders. The three men were waiting by their quarters, dressed and ready to ride.
‘Well predicted, gentlemen. There seems to be some kind of attack going in at White Strength and we’re going to need you to ride for Noisy Valley and get the legions into the fight.’
The small group’s commander, a young decurion temporarily detached from the Petriana cavalry wing, his aristocratic bearing confirmed by the thin purple stripe decorating the sleeves of his tunic where they protruded from beneath his bronze breastplate, nodded his understanding.
‘Yes, Prefect. I’ll send these two east and then south, there’s no way they’ll get through to the west.’
The cohort’s commander raised an eyebrow.
‘Not riding out yourself, Decurion?’
The young man smiled easily, pulling on his helmet and fastening the strap tightly under his chin.
‘Oh yes, sir, I’m riding, just not to the east. I said these two wouldn’t make it, but then neither of them’s riding my horse.’
His superior stepped closer, looking the decurion up and down.
‘Are you completely fucking mad, young man? If you ride to the west those bastards will have you dangling by your ankles with your balls in your mouth before sunrise.’
The cavalryman smiled again, his eyes steady on the prefect’s.
‘It will take until well after daybreak for these two to get through to Noisy Valley, by which time White Strength will be finished and those barbarians might well be knocking at your door too, eh, Prefect? I can probably make the ride in about two hours, and with a bit of luck the blue-noses won’t know I’m coming until I’m past them.’
The prefect nodded slowly, putting out a hand.
‘My apologies, Cornelius Felix, I’d taken you for something of a fop. If you get away with this you’ll have a place in the histories for centuries to come.’
The younger man took his hand, then tapped the hilt of his sword, the torchlight glinting off its gold and silver decoration.
‘And if I don’t, at least I’ll go down fighting. Mind you, I won’t be the blue-noses’ biggest problem if they catch up with us. Have you seen the chaos Hades can cause when the wicked bugger starts kicking?’
The defence of White Strength had begun well enough for the garrison’s men. They had waited under cover of the fort’s walls until the attacking barbarians had carried their improvised battering ram up to the gates, by means of ropes tied around the stripped trunk sufficiently loosely to allow them to be lifted. With the ram directly beneath them, ready to be swung at the gates, they had rained a hail of heavy stones down on to the heads of the men swinging the tree trunk. Dozens of the tribesmen had fallen under the barrage, and when more of them had rallied to the faltering attack, a shower of oil heated to the point of boiling by fires built into the fort’s walls had sent them away in screaming agony. For a few minutes it had seemed that the barbarian onslaught would fail, but a fresh group of attackers had quickly discovered that the gate’s initial defence had all but exhausted the supply of both stones and oil, and had set to swinging the heavy ram with gusto, while archers peppered the rampart above their comrades with arrows as soon as any of the defenders showed themselves. Even as the left-hand door of the twin archways started to disintegrate under the ram’s crunching impacts, and the soldiers waiting in the streets below shifted nervously in their defensive lines around the point of attack with their shields held up against the rain of arrows coming over the s
outhern wall, warning shouts rang out from the fort’s northern side.
The first spear ran from his place behind the centuries waiting around the straining gate, his view of the fort’s northern side blocked by the buildings between him and the source of the sudden commotion. As his field of view to the fort’s northern wall opened up he stopped and stared, aghast at what he was seeing. Along the fort’s thinly manned north wall barbarian warriors were climbing over the parapet from what appeared to be a dozen siege ladders. The outnumbered defenders were fighting back bravely enough, their swords flickering in the moonlight as they struggled to hold back the tide of attackers, but there was already a knot of tribesmen holding out against attacks from both sides of the fort’s north-west corner, and more warriors climbing over the wall behind them with every passing second. Turning to shout to the nearest of his officers, the first spear’s eye was caught by a flicker of light in the sky above the north wall. In a flurry of flame a shower of fire arrows arced in over the fort’s defences, the missiles impacting in showers of sparks across its northern side. While most of the arrows would strike the buildings’ tiled roofs or the paved streets, a few, he knew from grim experience, would inevitably hit the wooden frames around which the barrack blocks were built. Another volley of blazing arrows hammered down into the fort, breaking the spell that had frozen him in place for a moment. He spun back to bellow an order at the men waiting for orders on the walls to east and west.
‘Fourth Century, get your arses on to the north wall and throw those bastards back where they came from!’
As the century hurried along the fort’s walls to confront the new threat, he stalked back to the men clustered around the gate, putting the fire attack to the back of his mind. He hooked a thumb back over his shoulder towards the growing flames, shouting to the prefect over the fire’s crackling and popping.
‘Fire arrows from the north. We’ll have to let the old place burn, we’ve got no men to spare to fight it. All we have to do is keep the cohort alive through the night, nothing else matters. We’ve rebuilt the barracks once this summer already; we can do it again just as long as we can survive until morning. Besides, at least we get to fight in the warm for a while…’
The southern gateway’s left-hand arch, sorely tested by repeated blows from the barbarians’ improvised ram, burst open with a weary groan of tearing timbers. The doorway stood open to the darkness beyond, but for a moment there was no flood of attackers through the ruined defences, rather a moment’s unnatural quiet as both attackers and defenders gathered themselves for the fight. In that brief instant of peace the shouts and screams from the north wall seemed like no more than the rumour of a distant battle, disconnected from the havoc about to break on the grim-faced centuries clustered ready to defend their tiny world. A soldier in the front rank hawked loudly and then spat on the ground in front of the defenders, shouting a challenge into the night.
‘Come on, then, you blue-nosed sheep-fuckers! Let’s be having you!’
As if the barbarians outside the gate had been waiting for the challenge, and as the echoes of his shout died away, a wave of tribesmen stormed through the opened gateway and threw themselves on to the defenders’ shields. Other men hacked away the bracing that was keeping the right-hand door secure. The second arch was open within a minute, despite the high price in blood the defenders made the men fighting to open it pay for the privilege. Hacking at the soldiers with their long swords, the barbarians made easy targets for the expertly wielded spears striking into their mass from all three sides of the gate. Their first attack foundered in a welter of dead and dying men, as wounded and dying warriors staggered away from the Roman line in sprays of their own blood.
The prefect shouted encouragement into his senior centurion’s ear.
‘We’re holding them!’
The veteran officer grimaced, ducking as an arrow struck his helmet and clattered to the ground.
‘Early days, Prefect, early days. I’m going up to the north wall, see if we’ve…’
A shout from the fort’s south wall, almost directly above them, made them both crane their necks. Fresh enemy warriors were climbing over the southern defences, gaining footholds on the wall all the more easily in the absence of the men sent to repel the attack on the fort’s north side. Their archers filled the air to either side of them with flying iron to impede the defenders’ attempts to get at their ladder. A soldier fell from the parapet with an arrow lodged in his throat, thumping heavily to the cobbles beside the officers. In the space of a minute there were fifty men on the wall’s broad fighting platform and the defending soldiers were clearly already on the back foot. They were fighting not so much to evict attackers but simply to hold their ground against the inexorable build-up of warriors now pouring over the southern wall in three places. As the officers watched helplessly, one of the barbarians slung his spear down into the defenders’ ranks with a triumphant shout, piercing a defenceless soldier’s neck from back to front and dropping him like a sack of beans in a fountain of his own blood.
The first spear shouted into his superior’s ear to be heard above the clamour of combat.
‘They’ve got the fucking walls. We either pull back or stay here and let them shower us with iron until we’re too weak to resist.’
The other man nodded his understanding.
‘Fall back, there’s no choice.’
His subordinate grimaced, waving a hand at the scene before them.
‘A fighting retreat. With the enemy coming on like vicus drunks. This is going to be fun…’
He bellowed above the fight’s noise, keeping a wary eye on the barbarian warriors gathering on the wall above him.
‘Centurions, to me!’
Cornelius Felix rode west at a measured pace, using the light from the moon overhead to follow the road to the west as it ran parallel to the south of the wall. The big horse beneath him was skittish, unaccustomed to working in the dark, and its ears pricked forward and twitched at every tiny noise. After several miles the road climbed a gentle ridge, providing him with a good view of the neighbouring fort, seemingly afloat in the sea of torchlight from the surrounding attackers. The black stallion beneath him pawed at the ground impatiently, made nervous by the darkness and clearly eager to run. White Strength fort seemed adrift in a sea of flames, from both the blazing buildings within the walls and the hundreds of blazing torches clustered around them. As he watched, a volley of fire arrows arced over the fort’s walls. In the night’s quiet air, the wind having fallen away to nothing for a moment, he could just make out the distant sound of singing. He listened for a moment, then muttered quietly to himself as he spurred the horse on down the track.
‘Well, if you men have still got the balls to sing a marching song with that many blue-noses battering at your gates, I’m sure I’ve got enough to make one quick run past you. Come on, Hades, you cantankerous bastard, let’s go for a gallop and see where it gets us.’
He urged the horse forward, using the reins to hold the big animal’s speed down to a fast trot as they closed the gap to the embattled fort, all the while calculating when to unleash the power rippling through the horse’s flesh beneath him. With half a mile left to run he bent to speak into the horse’s ear.
‘Right then, my lad, if there was ever a time for you to prove you’re not just an evil sod that likes biting grooms, this is it!’
He touched his spurs to the horse’s flanks again, easing his tight grip on the reins to allow Hades to gradually accelerate his pace until they were cantering nicely and then, when it seemed impossible for them to go unnoticed for another second by the mob of tribesmen now swarming around and into the fort, he kicked the big horse’s flanks hard and bellowed encouragement. Clamping his thighs to the animal’s flanks he rose slightly from the saddle as the stallion responded with an exhilarating acceleration to its full speed, a bounding gallop that catapulted horse and rider along the stretch of road that ran past the fort’s southern walls.
The big horse slowed, feeling its rider’s weight across its heavy neck, and turned its head to look at the decurion through the delicately decorated armour that covered its long nose and eyes. The officer rallied his strength, his entire right side numb with the pain of the arrow’s protrusion up under his arm and only his good arm’s grip on the reins keeping him from slipping from the saddle. A figure loomed out of the darkness and the wounded horse reared its head in surprise, only to find its movement restrained by a strong grip on its bridle. Cornelius Felix reached left handed for the hilt of his sword, but found his hand restrained by a strong grip that the pain of his wound left him powerless to resist. He slumped on to the horse’s neck, hanging on for dear life as the animal reluctantly followed its unknown captors into the forest’s moonless gloom.
Arrows of Fury e-2 Page 19