The Leopard Sword

by Anthony Riches

  ‘Centurion! Soldiers on the main road!’

  Sergius mounted the grain store’s wall two steps at a time in response to his chosen man’s call, responding more to the urgency in the man’s voice than the words themselves. He stood alongside his deputy breathing heavily and staring out into the evening sun’s radiance, and at length shook his head in disgust.

  ‘I can’t see a bloody thing, what with the setting sun and the fact that my eyes are twenty years older than I’d like. Who spotted them?’

  The chosen man ushered a soldier forward, and as Sergius turned to speak with the legionary he realised that the boy was barely old enough to shave. He sprang to attention, saluting his centurion with a look of uncertainty.

  ‘No wonder you’ve got sharp eyes, man; you’ve not spent a lifetime straining them to stare at the horizon in fear of what might be waiting for you just over it.’ He pointed to the distant horizon. ‘Now then, in your own time, tell me what you can see, eh?’

  He turned back to face the western horizon, waiting as the soldier stared out into the evening’s long shadows, and watching as the sun’s orange ball sank to meet the land’s smooth black line.

  ‘Not as much as I could just now, Centurion. They’re soldiers, marching on the main road. I can see their shields.’

  Sergius blew out a long sigh of relief.

  ‘Thank Mithras for that. For a moment I thought they might be Obduro’s men, but if they’re carrying shields then they must be—’

  ‘No, Centurion, I don’t think they’re ours. They’re not in any sort of formation, for one thing, and they don’t look . . . well, tidy enough to be Roman soldiers.’

  Sergius stood on the wall in the dying sun’s light, and as the dimming orb met the horizon it silhouetted the oncoming men, now less than a mile away, throwing them into sharp relief. The chosen man shook his head, screwing his eyes up in an attempt to make sense of what he was seeing.

  ‘What in Hades? They’re waving something over their heads, something on their spears. They look like . . .’

  ‘Heads.’ Sergius’s voice was flat with disappointment. ‘So much for our chances of a quiet life, eh?’ He turned back to the men waiting below him in the grain store’s wide expanse. ‘Stand to! Let’s have you up on the wall!’

  The young legionaries watched as the bandit gang marched up the road towards Tungrorum in total silence, the distant rapping of their hobnailed boots on the hard surface the only sound to be heard. Sergius stared out at them, calculating the odds as he counted their heads for a third time and came up with the same depressing answer. Turning to his chosen man he muttered his assessment quietly, unwilling to scare his men any more than they already were.

  ‘At least five hundred of them. With that many men I don’t see how we’re going to—’

  A screamed warning from the man to his right snatched his attention away from the oncoming bandits, and he leaned out from the wall to follow the legionary’s pointing hand. A pair of figures had burst from the closest of the city’s gates and were making for the safety of the grain store’s walls. The larger of the two was propping himself up with a spear, his pace more of a stagger than a limp, a piece of bloodstained cloth torn from his tunic tied about his leg. The woman beside him was dragging him along by the arm and looking back fearfully at the open gateway. As Sergius watched a small group of men came through the arch behind them, their murderous intent clear as they fanned out to either side of the fleeing couple, yelling challenges and imprecations. He turned and shouted down to the men guarding the store’s entrance. ‘It’s Julius! Open the gate!’

  He leapt down from the wall with more agility than grace and waited while his men pulled away the stout timber beams securing the store’s entrance, joined within seconds by Julius’s watch officer and a handful of his men. Drawing his sword as the gate started to open, Sergius dived through the gap at the head of the small group and ran towards the fleeing figures, still fifty paces distant, watching as Julius, clearly unable to go any further, turned to face his pursuers with only the spear on which he was leaning as armament. The woman ran a few more paces before she realised that she was alone, then she stopped and turned round, screaming in horror as their pursuers closed in on the Tungrian. Without hesitation the exhausted Tungrian obeyed his instincts and went on the offensive, lunging awkwardly forward to stab one man in the thigh with the spear and sending him reeling away clutching at his leg. Pivoting on his good leg, he punched the spear’s butt spike through the foot of another man, who had been sufficiently unwary in his approach, twisting the weapon’s shaft and tearing it free, flipping the spear over in his hand with practised skill and slashing the blade across the man’s throat, dropping him choking to the turf. The remaining attackers spread out, still not noticing the approaching soldiers in their fixation on the Tungrian, and as Julius stood panting, the spear’s blade weaving in the air as he struggled to keep it level, one of the gang members eased around behind him and raised his knife to strike. As the attacker stepped forward to deliver the death stroke the woman leapt onto him and buried her own knife deep into his back, bearing him to the ground and stabbing at him again and again in a frenzied spray of his blood, her screams clearly on the verge of hysteria. While the remaining attackers dithered in the face of Julius’s exhausted obduracy and the woman’s berserk attack, Sergius shouted a hoarse challenge that snatched their attention away from the fugitives and onto the oncoming soldiers. They turned as one man and ran, sprinting back towards the city’s gate as it closed in their faces with a dull thud.

  ‘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.�
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  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 that 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 ro
und 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 . . .’