by Alan Smale
“Futete. His other cohorts?”
“When I left, Agrippa had pulled them south to latch on to the Third Parthica.”
A chill began at the base of Marcellinus’s spine and wormed its way upward. “Leaving the right field wide open?”
Bjarnason nodded. “We’re flanked. Many thousands of warriors under Jebei Noyon are pouring around our right side. Don’t know yet whether they’ll target the Third Parthica or come all the way around to hit us in the rear.”
“Either way they can take out our launch towers and maybe cut us off from Forward Camp. Where’s Hadrianus?”
Bjarnason shook his head and pointed to Einar Stenberg, who took up the tale. “Since the charge, Sabinus’s Third Parthica has been fighting a steady battle of attrition against Badahur’s forces. Slow and cautious.”
“Shock me again,” Aurelius Dizala muttered.
Takoda raised his hand and interrupted. “Our Mongols are moving out.”
Marcellinus swung himself up into the saddle to see over the men in front of him. It was true. The heavy cavalry of Chagatai that had previously been assaulting the Sixth was regrouping in front of their burning camp, but some mingghans were already moving north. The horse archers had split into two. One group was cantering north with all due speed, and the remainder had lined up to form a wall to keep the heavies secure, their horses panting and ducking their heads in a futile attempt to find forage in the hacked-up mud beneath them. All attacks on the Roman line had ceased.
Scattered cheers were breaking out in his cohorts. They had no idea what was really happening. They weren’t going to be so thrilled when they found out.
“They haven’t suffered much from the air,” Stenberg continued, still reporting on the Third Parthica. “Our Hawks held the Firebirds back, and we don’t think they can launch the Serpents anymore. The center holds. But I couldn’t see the Praetorians anywhere. They—and the Imperator—are either wrapped up deep inside the Third or falling back to castra.”
Marcellinus had little doubt about which was the more likely. He scanned his cohorts, taking in positions, strengths, gaps in his lines. Some of his centurions had ordered their men to sit and rest while they could. In his left wing Hanska’s Third were off their horses, also taking a breather. Tahtay’s Hesperians were walking back and forth, breathing, calming down after the battle. He saw no Catanwakuwa in the air. Maybe they were back defending their launchers from the Mongols.
Dizala looked at Marcellinus. “Caesar will have no safety within the Third. We must get to him, quick as we can.”
Marcellinus nodded. “Can your men lead? The First Cohort has borne the brunt for the past hour.”
“Certainly.”
For the march across to the Imperator’s position Marcellinus needed his freshest men up front and the most battle-weary in the rear. But he couldn’t leave the launch towers unprotected, not with the Mongols sweeping around the broken 27th. To Furnius he said: “Sound the signals. Second and Third Cohorts lead out to the north, battle formation.” Aelfric’s men had also seen more than their fair share of combat. The other cohorts had gotten off lightly in comparison. “Fourth and Fifth Cohorts to follow, under Paulinus. Ifer takes the Tenth and Caecina’s Eighth and Ninth back to protect the launch towers if he can. Make it clear Ifer is the ranking officer for that action. The First Cohort joins with Aelfric’s men to bring up the rear. Tahtay and the First Cahokian with us, if they can.” He was getting tired. This was quite a day. “Is that everyone?”
“Everyone but the Cohors Equitata.”
“Right. The Ninth Syrian and Hanska’s Third guard our east flank to defend us in case the Mongols come in to attack. Send the signals. Dizala: go. I’ll join you presently. And march the men slowly. They need to arrive ready to fight.”
His First Tribune saluted and cantered away.
Marcellinus looked to the skies again, unsettled by Sintikala’s absence. How long had it been since he’d seen a Cahokian aerial craft at all?
Well. Nothing he could do about it.
The sun was only just past the meridian. Even after all this it was still only early afternoon. He blew out a long breath.
The Second Cohort was already leading off. Time to go.
“Takoda, go tell Appius Gallus that the First Cohort is his. Stay with them. I’ll be moving up to join Dizala. Napayshni, you’re with me. Norsemen: go to Tahtay and Wahchintonka. Make sure they understand what’s going on. Send Tahtay to me if he’s able.”
“Where’s Enopay?” Isleifur demanded.
“With the hospital crew.” He was about to point, but damn it, the pieces of his legion had moved around so much that he couldn’t tell anymore in which direction the wounded men had been taken. “I can’t worry about that now.”
“Can’t worry about Enopay?”
Marcellinus passed a hand over his eyes. Holy Jove. “All right. After you’ve talked to Tahtay, go get me a report on casualties from the hospital crew. If you find Enopay, keep him with you. Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid. But go to Tahtay first—”
“Aye, got it.” Without even waiting for Marcellinus to finish, Bjarnason rode off into the organized chaos that was the Sixth Ferrata.
—
As they marched north, the launch towers to their east went up in bright crackling explosions. The legions had just lost their launch capability for local air support. Ifer’s cohorts obviously had not gotten there in time.
Even more smoke drifted toward them. Otherwise, the skies were still empty. Marcellinus had no idea where Sintikala might be, or Kimimela, Taianita, Sooleawa. But he had no time to dwell on that, because the Ironclads were marching straight into another hot war.
The flanking Mongol forces must have hit the Third Parthica from beside and behind just minutes before Marcellinus and Tahtay met up with Aurelius Dizala at the front of the Sixth’s marching line. The rear cohorts of the Third had disintegrated, and by the looks of things its front line had already been carved into two parts by relentless Mongol attack.
Under pressure from three sides, Decinius Sabinus must have given the only orders he could. The Third Legion was forming up into defensive military squares, two cohorts to a square.
It was not an easy maneuver. Mongol horse archers swarmed around them, wheeling into the legionaries’ exposed flanks and firing arrow after arrow. The Mongols had no reason to close for hand-to-hand combat here. With the Romans so disorganized, the havoc they could cause with a barrage of arrows at close range from horseback was quite enough. Soldiers were falling out of line to lie crumpled on the torn-up soil. Even as Marcellinus watched in horror, one cohort—Decinius’s Ninth, based on the glimpse he got of their signifer—panicked and fell apart, dooming themselves to slaughter. The Tenth Cohort beat a hasty retreat to merge up with the Fifth and Fourth behind them. As far as Marcellinus could see, the other cohorts were maintaining cohesion.
Where was the Third’s tough Polovtsian cavalry? Probably still on the far side of the legion at what previously had been the front line, battling the main army of Chinggis and Subodei Badahur. Sabinus could have had no warning that his cohorts were about to face a major attack from Jebei Noyon in the rear.
“Furnius: signal. Send in the Ninth Syrian to harry those horse archers.”
Furnius glanced behind them. “What about the mingghans that took out the launch towers? They could still come for us.”
“I know. But I don’t see them. Perhaps Ifer’s men are holding them off.” Or those Mongol troopers might even now be galloping eastward to devastate Forward Camp. The camp was not defensible, of course; if attacked, its garrison would fall back to the river to protect the quinqueremes and the other matériel still aboard them. The warships were essentially floating forts and would cast off if they had to, making them almost unassailable from land. “Futete, Furnius, sound the damned signals.”
“Sir, yes, sir…Shit.”
“What now, soldier?”
Furnius pointed.
“Fire lances.”
It was the first time in the whole war that Marcellinus had seen a sizable contingent of Mongol and Jin infantry. Although technically they were cavalrymen who had dismounted.
They were not marching—Mongols had no infantry drills, no concept of advancing in step—but they were at least walking together side by side in open order in two broad ranks of at least two hundred men apiece. Each warrior wore heavy scale armor and carried a fire lance, with a second lance hanging over his shoulder by a leather strap. Behind them came two ranks of heavy cavalry with those heinous hooked spears, and following them were two lines of light horse archers with arrows nocked.
Their strategy was obvious. The fire lancers would break the Roman orbis formations, carving them into pieces with flame. The heavies would penetrate the ensuing breaches to slay the legionaries while the archers guarded their rear and shot past them into the mass of men beyond.
It would be bloody, fiery slaughter.
“Furnius, belay my previous orders. Signal Hanska and the Ninth Syrian to fall in behind me on the double.”
“You will not lead the charge,” Furnius said flatly. “Can’t let you do it. Caesar’s direct orders.”
“I’m overriding them. My responsibility.”
Furnius merely shook his head.
The hell with it. Marcellinus turned in the saddle, and of course Hanska was watching him from several hundred yards away, ready whenever he needed her. He made several large hand-talk gestures. Hanska nodded and nudged her horse forward, shouting orders to her men. Marcellinus glared at Furnius. “Order the Ninth Syrian to join us, if you would. Without them I’m even more likely to get myself killed. No?”
“Holy Jupiter…” Furnius shook his head in exasperation and practically sprinted to the cornicen’s side.
“Where do you need us, Hotah?” Tahtay asked.
“Other side of me and Hanska and the other cavalry. We charge. You follow us in. Then the Second and Third Cohorts of the Ironclads.” He cocked an eye at Dizala. “Right?”
Dizala nodded grimly. “Right, sir.”
“All right, let’s—”
Furnius pointed suddenly. “Monsters.”
Marcellinus turned back to look across the battlefield and for a moment had no idea what he was looking at. Suddenly he feared he was hallucinating shades from out of his nightmares. But from Dizala’s exclamation and Tahtay’s curse in the Blackfoot tongue he knew he was not alone in seeing them, and in a few moments it became clearer: a mixed force of Tlingit and Maya warriors was running up beside the Jin fire lancers in their support.
The Tlingit wore fur tunics or thick double hides of caribou or elk to armor them, over hide trousers or leather leggings, and were shod in beaded moccasins. Some wore additional armor constructed of slats of cedar painted in bright patterns and bearing images of eagles and whales. They carried big wooden clubs with wicked-looking bone hooks, long double-bladed knives, bows, and a range of other Hesperian weapons. But it was their tall helmets that singled them out from other Hesperians: grotesque masks of carved wood with the faces of demons and what looked like human hair and teeth as ornamentation.
Marcellinus could easily pick out the Tlingit warrior chief they had met in the southwest. He wore his demon mask with the copper eyebrows and moose hide armor fastened with toggles and bore a club studded with bone hooks.
By contrast, the warriors of the Yokot’an Maya appeared gaudy and—perhaps deceptively—nowhere near as deadly. Most wore breechcloths and feathers, some only loincloths and stripes of red body paint. The better equipped among them carried shields of deerskin stretched over wooden frames painted with crude representations of great wild cats or predatory birds. Their hair was short at the sides but left long at the back and braided with bright feathers, with the front shaved to emphasize the regal slope of their foreheads. They carried clubs, spears, slings, bows.
The Maya chief was easy to identify. He wore the pelt of a large spotted cat and a headdress adorned with long feathers of blue, green, and gold, and sat astride a fine Thessalian horse that must have been stolen from the Romans in a previous battle. He carried a heavy club spiked with obsidian, and his forehead, too, was slanted in the same style as the masters of the Maya longboats they had seen in the south. His ears, nose, and lips were pierced with golden plugs, and just like the chief at the Market of the Mud, he wore a necklace of heavy jade.
Marcellinus’s first sight of the Yokot’an Maya at the Market of the Mud had been startling, and his encounter with the Tlingit chief after the Battle of Yupkoyvi had been even more unnerving, but at least he knew what he was looking at today. For most of his Romans and Cahokians, though, their appearance came as a terrible shock. The brutal depictions of human faces on the Tlingit helmets, side by side with the exotic and fearsome visages of their old enemies, the Maya, stopped the Sixth in their tracks.
The Ironclads had been in battle for several hours. They had faced wave upon wave of Mongols, and many of their number had already fallen. To be confronted suddenly with a warrior force of unknown provenance was a major blow.
His soldiers of Roma and Cahokia were facing an odd alliance of the ruthless warrior tribes of the Hesperian coastal northwest and the bloodthirsty civilization of the far south, all in service to a tyrannical warlord from the steppes of eastern Asia.
If that wasn’t a nightmare, nothing was.
“Great gods,” Aurelius Dizala said, aghast, and then seemed to pull himself together. “Uh, full charge, sir?”
“Damned right,” Marcellinus said. “Straight down their throats.”
The time for caution was long past. With the bulk of Sabinus’s Third Legion facing imminent destruction and the whereabouts of the Imperator unknown, a steady advance under shields was out of the question. They had to punch through the alliance of Jin and Mongol, Tlingit and Maya, to prevent further catastrophic losses among the Third Parthica.
Marcellinus looked down at Tahtay. Today he saw no hesitation on the young man’s face, no uncertainty or fear. Still, he had to ask. “You’re ready for this, Tahtay?”
Tahtay barely spared him a glance. “To face the men of fire? Yes. We will tear them apart.”
Odd, what daunted his young friend and what didn’t. Then again, in some ways Marcellinus was the same.
Of course, the Hesperians looked less alien to Tahtay than to the Romans. And Tahtay would much rather kill warriors from Asia than those from the land.
At his silence, Tahtay looked up at him. “For Yupkoyvi.”
A place Tahtay had never been. But surely Taianita had told him every detail of the slaughter the Mongols had perpetrated. A massacre in which the fire lances had played a gruesome part.
Marcellinus nodded. “For Yupkoyvi. And Cahokia.” For certainly neither of them wanted Jin fire lancers marching into the Great City. War chief and Praetor looked each other in the eye. Both nodded.
Tahtay hefted his long metal-studded club, of the type that already had proved so effective against the Khan’s horsemen. Its solid clout would make it a good weapon against Mongol armored infantry, too, but Marcellinus was glad he did not have to run with anything so heavy. Especially toward an enemy who could shoot a ten-foot stream of flame.
He wanted to say Be careful, Tahtay. But those were not words one said to a warrior. “Listen for our signals. Be ready.”
Tahtay nodded and sprinted back toward his warriors of Cahokia and the Blackfoot, hand-talking as best he could to Akecheta and Wahchintonka as he ran.
“Oh, no,” Aurelius Dizala said. “Holy Son of God, why?”
Startled by his tribune’s tone, Marcellinus looked first at the Mongol line, which was still advancing toward the orbis of the Third Parthica. For once they were not loosing arrows, not exposing the Roman infantry square to a withering arrow storm. Such a cloud would be less effective against a well-armored square. More likely they were playing a game of intimidation, allowing fear of the fire lancers to soak into the Roman fron
t lines in the hope that dread of the black powder weapons would do half their work for them.
But now Marcellinus saw why Dizala was cursing.
“Oh, merda” was all he could manage in return.
Facing the Mongols was a solid wall of the tall, curved scuta emblazoned with the blue bull of III Parthica. Interspersed here and there were several shields bearing the device of the red lion, probably held by legionaries of the 27th who had gotten displaced from their units in the heat of battle. But now Marcellinus saw oval scorpion shields belonging to the Praetorian Guard, and the tall guardsmen with the distinctive blue plumes that held them.
Except that Praetorians had to be at least six feet tall and one among them was not. Marcellinus had been scanning the line for Sabinus or one of his tribunes, when his eye was arrested by this anomalous figure.
It was Hadrianus, dressed in the uniform of an ordinary guardsman. He stood in the front line, coolly studying the approaching Jin fire lancers and passing orders right and left, pumping up his men. Despite his disguise, his aristocratic bearing was obvious. Surely even the Mongols must see that this was a man used to having his orders obeyed.
The Imperator had his faults, but lack of courage was not one of them.
“Futete. Marcellinus? Uh, sir?” Furnius had caught sight of his Imperator and was verging on panic.
“Easy, soldier. I see him. Stand up straight and stop babbling.”
Furnius swallowed. “Sir, yes, sir.”
“Let’s get him out of there.”
“Yes, sir.”
Marcellinus was about to lead a charge against a unified force of Mongol cavalry, Jin fire lancers, and Maya and Tlingit infantry. Behind him his troops were fraying, and in front of him his Imperator was in a ridiculously vulnerable position. Matters were speedily going from desperate to downright awful.
And so he grinned a confident grin he certainly did not feel and sat up straighter in the saddle. “Then sound the horns, adjutant. Forward the Sixth Ferrata, and forward the First Cahokian!”