Onslaught_The Centurions II, page 3
‘Ready! Spears!’ He waited for the legionaries to transfer their spare weapons from left hand to right, and ready themselves to throw again. ‘Throw!’
The second volley was thrown higher than the first, to fall out of the dark dawn sky onto men behind the Britons’ front rank who would never see what had killed them, only recoil in sudden agonised shock as the missiles’ long iron shanks transfixed their bodies. Putting his whistle to his lips, he drew breath and blew a long blast, the Second Legion’s men going from kneeling to lying flat at the chorus of whistle blasts that greeted the command, shouting encouragement as the Fourteenth’s legionaries strode forward across their prone bodies, cursing at the bite of hobnailed boots on unprotected legs and arms as the fresh troops hurried forward to take the fight to the enemy, individual soldiers stabbing down with their swords to kill the wounded Britons in their paths. Before the reeling tribesmen could recover, the legion had reformed barely five paces from them, a very different proposition from the exhausted legionaries of the Second they had faced a moment before, fresh soldiers standing with swords drawn and shields raised in an unbroken line, ready to fight.
Geta turned to the young tribune standing behind him.
‘Go and bring the Batavians across the river, would you, Gaius? I want them well placed to launch the pursuit when we’ve broken this barbarian scum.’
The officer, little more than a boy despite his rank, saluted and turned to hurry down the hill, while Geta turned to Vespasianus with his face alive at the prospect of a fight.
‘If you’ll excuse me, Flavius Vespasianus? I think it only fair for my men to see that I’m every bit as keen to get at the enemy as they are!’
‘A good deal keener, I’d say …’
But the younger man was already gone, his sword unsheathed and gleaming in the dawn’s meagre light as he hailed his first spear in the clipped, patrician tones that were widely imitated by his men when no officer was listening.
‘Now then, First Spear, I think it’s time to show this ugly mob what can be achieved by the application of Roman discipline and courage. Shall we?’
He took his place beside the legion’s aquilifer, deliberately placed close to the first cohort’s rear as an encouragement to the other cohorts to press forward with equal vigour once the advance began, and Sextus drew breath to bellow his next order.
‘Fourteenth Legion! With swords! Advance!’
‘If we have to stand here much longer I’m going to fall asleep standing up.’
Draco turned back from his place at the riverbank to shoot a pointed glance at Kivilaz, shaking his head as he admonished the younger man with a raised eyebrow.
‘Fighting one action, your highness, especially a one-sided slash and run against a witless mob of sheep-worriers, hardly qualifies you to come it the veteran. You’re no more likely to be able to sleep than the youngest warrior in the tribe, although I’ll concede that in your case it would be less to do with fear than the urge to take the heads of as many men as possible to decorate the roof beams of your farm.’ He turned back to the far bank, casting an expert eye on the scene that was gradually being revealed by the daylight that grew brighter with every minute. ‘Besides, we’ll be moving in a minute, most of the Fourteenth is engaged.’
‘It’s about time, Draco. Anyone would think this Roman legatus Geta considers us to be no better than the Nervians …’
Kivilaz fell silent as a legion tribune came splashing across the river, whose waters were on the rise and already calf deep. The Batavi officers snapped to attention while the young man gasped out his message.
‘Prefect Draco! Legatus Geta requests you to advance across the river and into place behind the Fourteenth Legion! He wants you ready to pursue the enemy once we have them on the run!’
Draco saluted.
‘At once, Tribune. Please tell the legatus that we will be ready for his command.’
He turned back to the gathered centurions.
‘Back to your cohorts, brothers.’
As they hurried away to re-join their commands, he shouted the order for his own cohort to follow him, and stepped into the river in the wake of the tribune who was already close to the far bank. Leading his men across the Medui, he took them up the hill on the far side at a swift march, looking up the slope at the line of legion cohorts fighting their way forward into the barbarians, the screams and bellows of men in combat an unending cacophony of violence, bloodshed and death. By contrast, it seemed that the left and right-hand sides of the bridgehead’s perimeter were almost silent, only the occasional bow shot serving to remind the Second Legion’s men that the Britons were still lurking on the slope around them. Seeing the Second Legion’s legatus, Draco walked across the hillside and nodded, knowing better than to advertise their status by saluting when there were sharp-eyed archers on the other side of their men’s shields.
‘Legatus.’
Vespasianus turned from his critical consideration of the Fourteenth Legion’s advance.
‘Ah, Prefect. Your men are ready to take whatever part is required of you?’
The Batavi warrior nodded briskly.
‘We are. The boy sent to fetch us mentioned a pursuit, once the fight is won?’
The Roman nodded distractedly, watching the Britons still streaming down the slope from their camp to join the fight in growing numbers.
‘My colleague Geta may have been a little premature in that assessment of his current position.’
The two men shared a moment of silent understanding.
‘You think he’s bitten off too big a mouthful, Legatus?’
Vespasianus shrugged.
‘My legion came across the river at dawn yesterday, just as you were pulling back from dealing with their chariot horses. We barely had time to get our perimeter established before they came at us in tens of thousands. At first there were three of them for every one of us, and my men killed them at such a rate that the wall of their dead became a hindrance to them, but even when they were climbing over the corpses of their own people to get at us they still bayed for our blood, an unending torrent of blue-painted warriors with no other aim than to hurl themselves onto our swords in the hope of taking one of us with them. Their priests have them whipped into the same frenzy now, and I fear that Geta may be pushing his luck a little too hard. Look up the slope to the top of the hill.’
Draco craned his neck and stared for a moment, his practised eye taking in the cluster of barbarian standards on the hill’s crest with groups of warriors gathered about them.
‘They’re gathering more men to attack.’
Vespasianus nodded dourly.
‘Not only that, but you see those men gathered around their tribal standards?’
The Batavi prefect looked again, nodding slowly.
‘They wear iron helmets and carry shields with heavy iron and bronze bosses. And they wear swords while most of these warriors have nothing better than spears.’
‘They are the royal guards and champions of the kings of Britannia. The best fighting men of the Cantiaci, Trinovantes, Regni, Catuvellauni, and so many other tribes that I cannot remember their names. The finest warriors their peoples have, lavishly equipped, and every one of them an accomplished swordsman who has spent most of his life preparing for this moment. A thousand trained swords or more, and the key to victory on this battlefield for either side, our victory if we can send them away with their tails between their legs, theirs if they can concentrate their force and strike us such a blow that we are unable to recover from it. Those are the men at whom your dawn attack yesterday was aimed, not to strike them directly but to deny them their chariots’ speed into action, speed that might have thwarted our river crossing by putting those swords right in our faces as we waded out of the water. Their leader has wisely preserved them, kept them out of the fight and spent his peasant levies lavishly to wear us down, but now young Geta has thrown his legion into the fight I suspect the man up on that hill knows that to delay any longer might be his undoing. If the Fourteenth manage to get his peasants running then they won’t stop for anyone, and his swordsmen will either find themselves alone with two very angry legions or just swept away in the mob like twigs on the flood.’
The legatus looked up at the host of swordsmen clustered around the enemy king’s standard, tipping his head to one side in calculation.
‘Yes, I’m as sure of it as I know that I’ll need to piss in the next hour. Any time now he’s going to send them down this slope, gambling that they can cut the head off the Fourteenth and leave the legion leaderless and adrift on the tide of battle. He can see the eagle, and he can probably even see Geta, and he’ll expect the legion to be so devastated by the loss of both that the fight will go out of them. And he might well be right. And so I suggest, Prefect, that you take your men up that hill and get close in behind my colleague’s leading cohort, ready for whatever it might be th—’
His musing was cut off by the blare of a horn, loud and clear above the angry buzz of the Fourteenth Legion’s drive into the mass of the enemy.
‘They’re coming.’ The legatus turned to Draco with fresh urgency. ‘Viewed from up there, Geta’s legion is a beast with its head in a trap of its own making. And now their king has slipped the collar on his wolves and sent them at us to bite that head off. If you can stop them from doing that, I’ll swing my legion’s blade at the throat they expose in making their attack.’
The two men nodded at each other, Vespasianus turning away and calling for his first spear as Draco gestured his centurions to join him, ordering them to gather round in a tight knot so that every man could hear him.
‘For decades now we have fought as the Romans do, ignoring our urge to fight as heroes and wielding our swords and spears from behind a wall of shields instead, like the Greeks of ancient times! But there were heroes in those days, men like Achilles and Hector, gifted with skills that made them seem almost divine among their fellow warriors, and there are heroes still in these days! Our enemy has such men, trained all their lives to fight man to man just as we are, and a thousand of them and more have been sent against our parent legion!’ He pointed up the slope, aiming his finger at two spearhead formations that were advancing to meet the Fourteenth Legion’s first cohort. ‘They come to kill the legion’s legatus, and to capture the legion’s holy eagle standard and carry it away in shame, taking the legion’s spirit with them! They believe that to do so will be to win this fight. But they reckon without the Batavi!’
He looked around them, his face hard.
‘There will be no skulking in the night this time, with no one to see our ferocity and tell their children tales of the fell-handed horror we will inflict on Rome’s enemies! This time the heat of our fury will start a fire that will burn in men’s minds for a hundred years and more! Make gardens of ash poles with your men’s spears, for there will be no spear fighting today! This day, my brothers, is a day of swords! A day for blood! A day for heroes! A day for wolves to fight wolves! Bring your men as the warriors they are, and be swift about it! Today we fight not as cohorts, in tidy ranks, but as we truly are! As … The … Batavi!’
He waited impatiently as his centurions mustered and arrayed their men ready to fight, while the battle within a battle unfolded before him exactly as Vespasian had predicted. Storming down the hillside with all the speed and purpose of men held back from fighting for far longer than they felt fitting, the Britons drove the points of their wedges into the Fourteenth’s line at two carefully chosen points, swordsmen spending their lives extravagantly to wreak havoc among the legionaries facing them, fighting furiously to separate the legion’s first cohort and those to either side. Their onslaught first penetrated the legion’s line in a furious whirl of swordplay that felled two Romans for every warrior lost, then pushed deeper, pressing the legion’s severed line away from their intended victims, as the struggling soldiers lost cohesion and allowed their tidy ranks to splinter into groups of two and three men fighting for their own survival, the freshly encouraged peasant warriors flooding in to reinforce the swordsmen who had broken through the invaders’ dogged resistance. The tips of the two horns fought their way through into the open space behind the first cohort and then turned to engage the Roman rear. They forced the first cohort’s legionaries to go back to back, isolating them from their fellows, the men on either side too busy fighting for their own survival to have any hope of assisting their encircled comrades. As the Batavi hurried forward to take their places behind him, Draco shook his head at the speed with which the legion’s spearhead had been stopped and then trapped, turning to his men who had fallen silent at the sight of their parent legion’s eagle in such deadly trouble. He drew his sword and raised it high above his head, then flashed it down to point at the enemy host.
‘Batavi! As warriors! With me!’
Running up the hill’s slope at the Britons, the prefect had covered no more than a dozen paces before the younger, stronger men of the tribe overtook him, and he shot a disgusted glance at Kivilaz as the centurion and a dozen of his biggest and most dangerous men arrayed themselves to either side of him, adjusting their pace to match his own.
‘I don’t … need babysitting … Centurion! You get on … with your … own fight … and leave me … to mine!’
The prince shook his head, grinning back at his superior as they pounded up the hill.
‘Just this once … Prefect, royalty outranks you! If a prince … of the tribe … says he’ll fight alongside you … that’s how it is! It was you … who asked us … to fight … the old way!’
They were close enough to pick opponents now, a few of the Britons having realised the danger at their backs and turned to meet the oncoming wave of Batavi swordsmen, yelling at their heedless comrades who were, for the most part, lost in their individual battles with the encircled legionaries. As he covered the last few paces, Draco fixed his attention on a big man whose back was still turned, wielding his blade in wild chopping strokes at the legionaries clustered around the Fourteenth’s eagle. Most of the beleaguered soldiers were too cowed by their unexpected peril and too heavily outnumbered to do much more than defend themselves against the tribesmen hammering at their shields, and even as the prefect poised his blade to strike, the Briton hacked his sword down into a legionary’s helmet, felling the man with its stunning impact and opening a gap in the shrinking circle of shields. He swung the sword up again, but before the blow could fall Draco was upon him with his men on either side, plunging the point of his gladius deep into the warrior’s back before twisting it savagely and wrenching it free, stepping back against the men pushing in behind him to thrust the point down in a swift death stroke.
‘Batavi!’
The men around him echoed the war cry, and Draco felt something unravelling in his head, decades of military training and conditioning falling away, suddenly acutely aware of the stink of blood and excreta and the bellowing, screaming, weeping chaos of hand-to-hand combat roaring in his ears as he momentarily exulted at the sight of his warriors assaulting the Britons with all the savagery of the tribesmen they still were at heart, bellowing a command over the tumult to give his men the last order they would need.
‘The eagle! To the eagle!’
Kivilaz’s men were already ripping into the ranks of the Britons, the swordsmen either turning to face them or dying without ever seeing their killers, while the Batavi fought with deadly purpose, focused only on killing the men in front of them and carving a bloody swathe through the enemy warriors. The man to Draco’s left died with a sword thrust through his throat, and Kivilaz, fighting alongside him, smashed away another tribesman’s sword with his shield before pivoting to ram his gladius into his killer’s belly with a bellow of rage at his comrade’s loss. While his men pulled their dying comrade’s body back into the protection of their ranks, uncontrollably coughing and spluttering bloody spittle in his choking death throes, the centurion abruptly threw himself into the fray with berserk speed, hacking to left and right as he carved his way deep into the host of Britons.
‘With him!’
Draco led the press of men in the prince’s wake, realising that the younger man had lost himself in the rage that was coursing through him. As each man he encountered fell, whether stabbed through or simply smashed aside by a shield punch, the arrowhead of Batavi warriors close behind him put them to the sword without compunction, the prefect at their head realising that he was experiencing something that he had only ever heard in the tribe’s songs of wars and heroes from days long departed. Feeling the blood coursing through his body as a dull roaring in his ears, he took advantage of a momentary lull as Kivilaz fought shield to shield with a quick-handed warrior, pushing his sword’s point down into the turf, switching the shield to his right hand and then taking the weapon’s hilt in his left in the way he had been taught by his father, drilled through hour upon hour of practice until his skill with the other hand was almost as good as with his right. Kivilaz put his man down with a sword thrust to the thigh that left the Briton staggering, staring stupidly as blood sprayed from the wound, and Draco stepped up alongside him, tapping his shield’s boss with his own as he slid into position.
‘See the eagle?’
The centurion looked up, nodding. The first cohort’s embattled remnant was holding, just, and the golden standard was a flicker of the morning’s pale light as it bobbed with the exertions of the men surrounding it. The two men shared a moment of understanding before glancing around them at the warriors behind them on either side, set and ready to attack again, and Draco lifted his shield in readiness to move forward into the press of the enemy.
‘This time we go all the way through them! And we don’t stop until we reach that standard!’
Kivilaz nodded, his face hardening.
‘For Hercules!’
Draco grinned.
‘Not this time! This one’s for our own god! For Magusanus!’ He lunged forward, the men at his back baying for blood as he led them into the enemy. ‘And for glory!’
The second volley was thrown higher than the first, to fall out of the dark dawn sky onto men behind the Britons’ front rank who would never see what had killed them, only recoil in sudden agonised shock as the missiles’ long iron shanks transfixed their bodies. Putting his whistle to his lips, he drew breath and blew a long blast, the Second Legion’s men going from kneeling to lying flat at the chorus of whistle blasts that greeted the command, shouting encouragement as the Fourteenth’s legionaries strode forward across their prone bodies, cursing at the bite of hobnailed boots on unprotected legs and arms as the fresh troops hurried forward to take the fight to the enemy, individual soldiers stabbing down with their swords to kill the wounded Britons in their paths. Before the reeling tribesmen could recover, the legion had reformed barely five paces from them, a very different proposition from the exhausted legionaries of the Second they had faced a moment before, fresh soldiers standing with swords drawn and shields raised in an unbroken line, ready to fight.
Geta turned to the young tribune standing behind him.
‘Go and bring the Batavians across the river, would you, Gaius? I want them well placed to launch the pursuit when we’ve broken this barbarian scum.’
The officer, little more than a boy despite his rank, saluted and turned to hurry down the hill, while Geta turned to Vespasianus with his face alive at the prospect of a fight.
‘If you’ll excuse me, Flavius Vespasianus? I think it only fair for my men to see that I’m every bit as keen to get at the enemy as they are!’
‘A good deal keener, I’d say …’
But the younger man was already gone, his sword unsheathed and gleaming in the dawn’s meagre light as he hailed his first spear in the clipped, patrician tones that were widely imitated by his men when no officer was listening.
‘Now then, First Spear, I think it’s time to show this ugly mob what can be achieved by the application of Roman discipline and courage. Shall we?’
He took his place beside the legion’s aquilifer, deliberately placed close to the first cohort’s rear as an encouragement to the other cohorts to press forward with equal vigour once the advance began, and Sextus drew breath to bellow his next order.
‘Fourteenth Legion! With swords! Advance!’
‘If we have to stand here much longer I’m going to fall asleep standing up.’
Draco turned back from his place at the riverbank to shoot a pointed glance at Kivilaz, shaking his head as he admonished the younger man with a raised eyebrow.
‘Fighting one action, your highness, especially a one-sided slash and run against a witless mob of sheep-worriers, hardly qualifies you to come it the veteran. You’re no more likely to be able to sleep than the youngest warrior in the tribe, although I’ll concede that in your case it would be less to do with fear than the urge to take the heads of as many men as possible to decorate the roof beams of your farm.’ He turned back to the far bank, casting an expert eye on the scene that was gradually being revealed by the daylight that grew brighter with every minute. ‘Besides, we’ll be moving in a minute, most of the Fourteenth is engaged.’
‘It’s about time, Draco. Anyone would think this Roman legatus Geta considers us to be no better than the Nervians …’
Kivilaz fell silent as a legion tribune came splashing across the river, whose waters were on the rise and already calf deep. The Batavi officers snapped to attention while the young man gasped out his message.
‘Prefect Draco! Legatus Geta requests you to advance across the river and into place behind the Fourteenth Legion! He wants you ready to pursue the enemy once we have them on the run!’
Draco saluted.
‘At once, Tribune. Please tell the legatus that we will be ready for his command.’
He turned back to the gathered centurions.
‘Back to your cohorts, brothers.’
As they hurried away to re-join their commands, he shouted the order for his own cohort to follow him, and stepped into the river in the wake of the tribune who was already close to the far bank. Leading his men across the Medui, he took them up the hill on the far side at a swift march, looking up the slope at the line of legion cohorts fighting their way forward into the barbarians, the screams and bellows of men in combat an unending cacophony of violence, bloodshed and death. By contrast, it seemed that the left and right-hand sides of the bridgehead’s perimeter were almost silent, only the occasional bow shot serving to remind the Second Legion’s men that the Britons were still lurking on the slope around them. Seeing the Second Legion’s legatus, Draco walked across the hillside and nodded, knowing better than to advertise their status by saluting when there were sharp-eyed archers on the other side of their men’s shields.
‘Legatus.’
Vespasianus turned from his critical consideration of the Fourteenth Legion’s advance.
‘Ah, Prefect. Your men are ready to take whatever part is required of you?’
The Batavi warrior nodded briskly.
‘We are. The boy sent to fetch us mentioned a pursuit, once the fight is won?’
The Roman nodded distractedly, watching the Britons still streaming down the slope from their camp to join the fight in growing numbers.
‘My colleague Geta may have been a little premature in that assessment of his current position.’
The two men shared a moment of silent understanding.
‘You think he’s bitten off too big a mouthful, Legatus?’
Vespasianus shrugged.
‘My legion came across the river at dawn yesterday, just as you were pulling back from dealing with their chariot horses. We barely had time to get our perimeter established before they came at us in tens of thousands. At first there were three of them for every one of us, and my men killed them at such a rate that the wall of their dead became a hindrance to them, but even when they were climbing over the corpses of their own people to get at us they still bayed for our blood, an unending torrent of blue-painted warriors with no other aim than to hurl themselves onto our swords in the hope of taking one of us with them. Their priests have them whipped into the same frenzy now, and I fear that Geta may be pushing his luck a little too hard. Look up the slope to the top of the hill.’
Draco craned his neck and stared for a moment, his practised eye taking in the cluster of barbarian standards on the hill’s crest with groups of warriors gathered about them.
‘They’re gathering more men to attack.’
Vespasianus nodded dourly.
‘Not only that, but you see those men gathered around their tribal standards?’
The Batavi prefect looked again, nodding slowly.
‘They wear iron helmets and carry shields with heavy iron and bronze bosses. And they wear swords while most of these warriors have nothing better than spears.’
‘They are the royal guards and champions of the kings of Britannia. The best fighting men of the Cantiaci, Trinovantes, Regni, Catuvellauni, and so many other tribes that I cannot remember their names. The finest warriors their peoples have, lavishly equipped, and every one of them an accomplished swordsman who has spent most of his life preparing for this moment. A thousand trained swords or more, and the key to victory on this battlefield for either side, our victory if we can send them away with their tails between their legs, theirs if they can concentrate their force and strike us such a blow that we are unable to recover from it. Those are the men at whom your dawn attack yesterday was aimed, not to strike them directly but to deny them their chariots’ speed into action, speed that might have thwarted our river crossing by putting those swords right in our faces as we waded out of the water. Their leader has wisely preserved them, kept them out of the fight and spent his peasant levies lavishly to wear us down, but now young Geta has thrown his legion into the fight I suspect the man up on that hill knows that to delay any longer might be his undoing. If the Fourteenth manage to get his peasants running then they won’t stop for anyone, and his swordsmen will either find themselves alone with two very angry legions or just swept away in the mob like twigs on the flood.’
The legatus looked up at the host of swordsmen clustered around the enemy king’s standard, tipping his head to one side in calculation.
‘Yes, I’m as sure of it as I know that I’ll need to piss in the next hour. Any time now he’s going to send them down this slope, gambling that they can cut the head off the Fourteenth and leave the legion leaderless and adrift on the tide of battle. He can see the eagle, and he can probably even see Geta, and he’ll expect the legion to be so devastated by the loss of both that the fight will go out of them. And he might well be right. And so I suggest, Prefect, that you take your men up that hill and get close in behind my colleague’s leading cohort, ready for whatever it might be th—’
His musing was cut off by the blare of a horn, loud and clear above the angry buzz of the Fourteenth Legion’s drive into the mass of the enemy.
‘They’re coming.’ The legatus turned to Draco with fresh urgency. ‘Viewed from up there, Geta’s legion is a beast with its head in a trap of its own making. And now their king has slipped the collar on his wolves and sent them at us to bite that head off. If you can stop them from doing that, I’ll swing my legion’s blade at the throat they expose in making their attack.’
The two men nodded at each other, Vespasianus turning away and calling for his first spear as Draco gestured his centurions to join him, ordering them to gather round in a tight knot so that every man could hear him.
‘For decades now we have fought as the Romans do, ignoring our urge to fight as heroes and wielding our swords and spears from behind a wall of shields instead, like the Greeks of ancient times! But there were heroes in those days, men like Achilles and Hector, gifted with skills that made them seem almost divine among their fellow warriors, and there are heroes still in these days! Our enemy has such men, trained all their lives to fight man to man just as we are, and a thousand of them and more have been sent against our parent legion!’ He pointed up the slope, aiming his finger at two spearhead formations that were advancing to meet the Fourteenth Legion’s first cohort. ‘They come to kill the legion’s legatus, and to capture the legion’s holy eagle standard and carry it away in shame, taking the legion’s spirit with them! They believe that to do so will be to win this fight. But they reckon without the Batavi!’
He looked around them, his face hard.
‘There will be no skulking in the night this time, with no one to see our ferocity and tell their children tales of the fell-handed horror we will inflict on Rome’s enemies! This time the heat of our fury will start a fire that will burn in men’s minds for a hundred years and more! Make gardens of ash poles with your men’s spears, for there will be no spear fighting today! This day, my brothers, is a day of swords! A day for blood! A day for heroes! A day for wolves to fight wolves! Bring your men as the warriors they are, and be swift about it! Today we fight not as cohorts, in tidy ranks, but as we truly are! As … The … Batavi!’
He waited impatiently as his centurions mustered and arrayed their men ready to fight, while the battle within a battle unfolded before him exactly as Vespasian had predicted. Storming down the hillside with all the speed and purpose of men held back from fighting for far longer than they felt fitting, the Britons drove the points of their wedges into the Fourteenth’s line at two carefully chosen points, swordsmen spending their lives extravagantly to wreak havoc among the legionaries facing them, fighting furiously to separate the legion’s first cohort and those to either side. Their onslaught first penetrated the legion’s line in a furious whirl of swordplay that felled two Romans for every warrior lost, then pushed deeper, pressing the legion’s severed line away from their intended victims, as the struggling soldiers lost cohesion and allowed their tidy ranks to splinter into groups of two and three men fighting for their own survival, the freshly encouraged peasant warriors flooding in to reinforce the swordsmen who had broken through the invaders’ dogged resistance. The tips of the two horns fought their way through into the open space behind the first cohort and then turned to engage the Roman rear. They forced the first cohort’s legionaries to go back to back, isolating them from their fellows, the men on either side too busy fighting for their own survival to have any hope of assisting their encircled comrades. As the Batavi hurried forward to take their places behind him, Draco shook his head at the speed with which the legion’s spearhead had been stopped and then trapped, turning to his men who had fallen silent at the sight of their parent legion’s eagle in such deadly trouble. He drew his sword and raised it high above his head, then flashed it down to point at the enemy host.
‘Batavi! As warriors! With me!’
Running up the hill’s slope at the Britons, the prefect had covered no more than a dozen paces before the younger, stronger men of the tribe overtook him, and he shot a disgusted glance at Kivilaz as the centurion and a dozen of his biggest and most dangerous men arrayed themselves to either side of him, adjusting their pace to match his own.
‘I don’t … need babysitting … Centurion! You get on … with your … own fight … and leave me … to mine!’
The prince shook his head, grinning back at his superior as they pounded up the hill.
‘Just this once … Prefect, royalty outranks you! If a prince … of the tribe … says he’ll fight alongside you … that’s how it is! It was you … who asked us … to fight … the old way!’
They were close enough to pick opponents now, a few of the Britons having realised the danger at their backs and turned to meet the oncoming wave of Batavi swordsmen, yelling at their heedless comrades who were, for the most part, lost in their individual battles with the encircled legionaries. As he covered the last few paces, Draco fixed his attention on a big man whose back was still turned, wielding his blade in wild chopping strokes at the legionaries clustered around the Fourteenth’s eagle. Most of the beleaguered soldiers were too cowed by their unexpected peril and too heavily outnumbered to do much more than defend themselves against the tribesmen hammering at their shields, and even as the prefect poised his blade to strike, the Briton hacked his sword down into a legionary’s helmet, felling the man with its stunning impact and opening a gap in the shrinking circle of shields. He swung the sword up again, but before the blow could fall Draco was upon him with his men on either side, plunging the point of his gladius deep into the warrior’s back before twisting it savagely and wrenching it free, stepping back against the men pushing in behind him to thrust the point down in a swift death stroke.
‘Batavi!’
The men around him echoed the war cry, and Draco felt something unravelling in his head, decades of military training and conditioning falling away, suddenly acutely aware of the stink of blood and excreta and the bellowing, screaming, weeping chaos of hand-to-hand combat roaring in his ears as he momentarily exulted at the sight of his warriors assaulting the Britons with all the savagery of the tribesmen they still were at heart, bellowing a command over the tumult to give his men the last order they would need.
‘The eagle! To the eagle!’
Kivilaz’s men were already ripping into the ranks of the Britons, the swordsmen either turning to face them or dying without ever seeing their killers, while the Batavi fought with deadly purpose, focused only on killing the men in front of them and carving a bloody swathe through the enemy warriors. The man to Draco’s left died with a sword thrust through his throat, and Kivilaz, fighting alongside him, smashed away another tribesman’s sword with his shield before pivoting to ram his gladius into his killer’s belly with a bellow of rage at his comrade’s loss. While his men pulled their dying comrade’s body back into the protection of their ranks, uncontrollably coughing and spluttering bloody spittle in his choking death throes, the centurion abruptly threw himself into the fray with berserk speed, hacking to left and right as he carved his way deep into the host of Britons.
‘With him!’
Draco led the press of men in the prince’s wake, realising that the younger man had lost himself in the rage that was coursing through him. As each man he encountered fell, whether stabbed through or simply smashed aside by a shield punch, the arrowhead of Batavi warriors close behind him put them to the sword without compunction, the prefect at their head realising that he was experiencing something that he had only ever heard in the tribe’s songs of wars and heroes from days long departed. Feeling the blood coursing through his body as a dull roaring in his ears, he took advantage of a momentary lull as Kivilaz fought shield to shield with a quick-handed warrior, pushing his sword’s point down into the turf, switching the shield to his right hand and then taking the weapon’s hilt in his left in the way he had been taught by his father, drilled through hour upon hour of practice until his skill with the other hand was almost as good as with his right. Kivilaz put his man down with a sword thrust to the thigh that left the Briton staggering, staring stupidly as blood sprayed from the wound, and Draco stepped up alongside him, tapping his shield’s boss with his own as he slid into position.
‘See the eagle?’
The centurion looked up, nodding. The first cohort’s embattled remnant was holding, just, and the golden standard was a flicker of the morning’s pale light as it bobbed with the exertions of the men surrounding it. The two men shared a moment of understanding before glancing around them at the warriors behind them on either side, set and ready to attack again, and Draco lifted his shield in readiness to move forward into the press of the enemy.
‘This time we go all the way through them! And we don’t stop until we reach that standard!’
Kivilaz nodded, his face hardening.
‘For Hercules!’
Draco grinned.
‘Not this time! This one’s for our own god! For Magusanus!’ He lunged forward, the men at his back baying for blood as he led them into the enemy. ‘And for glory!’
