The Legions of the Mist

by Damion Hunter

  The legionary Justin had carried back to Flavius proved to have drunk bad water and was shortly joined by a dozen others. No one died, but it merely heightened the feeling that the whole countryside was poisoned against them.

  They reached Inchtuthil at twilight, at the end of two days’ full-forced march, while the war band was still massing in the north, the only tangible evidence of its presence the corpses thrown in challenge in the Legion’s path and the empty, unexplained numbers on the morning roll. Justin, for whom nothing was clear these days and precious little was simple, wrestled with the horror in his soul and was silent.

  * * *

  Inchtuthil had had a Roman name once – Pinnata Castra – but now the old Agricolan fortress above the Tanaus was deserted and weed-grown, home to the myriad small animals of the forest who had encroached on man’s work as man had left… bats and mice and weasels, and a half-grown litter of fox kits lairing where the Army’s standards had been housed and its altars built. The forest moved back again as the Legate set the Hispana to clearing barracks and rebuilding wall, making of Inchtuthil a human habitation once more. But they felt them there on the outskirts of the newly cleared land, waiting, as if they knew that soon, soon, man would be gone again, leaving the weeds to flourish in the spring rains and the forest to reclaim its own.

  But for the time being Inchtuthil was a Roman fort, with clean, orderly streets and the comings and goings of a legionary garrison. Here they would make their base camp for the campaign, set up their hospital and armory, send out their scouts and patrols, and assemble the great war engines that loomed as a testament to Roman engineering over the armies below them. And here, if they were lucky, the Victrix detachment, maybe on the road already, would catch up to them.

  And it was here that Justin emerged from the horrors of the march as from a nightmare, and, blinking in the sun of Inchtuthil’s orderly reconstruction, pulled himself together and began to sort some sense back into his life. He never knew precisely what had done it – perhaps it was the sight of the Legate ordering his troops to their work with a show of confidence which should only have been engendered by the command of an army twice their size… perhaps it was Flavius, dealing calmly and painstakingly with his first surgical command, sitting late over his organization charts in the newly swept hospital, trying to prepare ahead of time for any of a thousand possible crises, and then turning when that was done to read and reread his surgical texts… perhaps it was Favonius, who had pulled himself back from the pit after Martius’s death and was trying, under the influence of stark necessity, to learn to command… or Lepidus, who had been described to Justin respectfully by one of his old cohort as ‘as big a devil for discipline as you was, sir, and that’s sayin’ some.’ Or perhaps, in an increasingly martial world, it was that one note of lightness, in the person of Owen Lucullus, cheerfully putting his troop through its paces, singing old campaign songs in the firelight for the amusement of his general, and sending his clear, true tenor sounding up to the hills in a variety of impromptu ballads on the subject of Vortrix, his ancestry, and private habits.

  Or maybe it was the Legion itself, rotten-ripe as it was and stinking with decay, but still a Roman Legion, the Eagles, Justin’s beloved Eagles, whose wings overspread half the world, and in whose service he had found every good thing in life that he had known… loyalty and the companionship of brothers, love, and a sense of purpose. And oddly enough, it was with the Ninth Hispana, the rebellious, mutinous, ill-ordered Ninth, that most of these had come to him. Here he had found Licinius, Hilarion, and now Owen; here he had known the satisfaction of turning almost five hundred leaderless misfits into a Roman cohort again; here he had found Gwytha, a lover and companion such as is given to few men, and small Justin, a child to come after him, the fulfillment of the urge to procreation that was as old as nature; and here also, he knew, he had met his dark-side mirror twin in the person of Vortrix, whom this time he must kill that they might not all go under, Roman and Briton alike. He didn’t know what it was that bound him to the king of the Brigantes, and he doubted that Vortrix did either, but somehow, with a certainty as strong as life itself, he knew that Vortrix felt it too. Remembering the battle of two summers before, Justin knew that this time he would not stay his blade – he could not – and he knew also that Vortrix would not have stayed his own even then, and that in that he was the stronger half. It seemed a pity, he thought as he watched the rebuilding of Inchtuthil around him, that they had not been born to the same people, he and Vortrix.

  And then he shook the mood away as a horse shakes the flies from its head in summer, and focused in on the activity around him. He remembered the grim, grey phantoms that had dogged his steps on the march north, and the horror of the vision that had come to him in the Mithraeum at Trimontium, but they were faded and far away, and his own world shone brave and purposeful in the sunlight.

  His second came up with a sheaf of duty rosters and he turned to their inspection. ‘Hmmm. I wouldn’t put Phaedrus next to young Tertius,’ Justin said. ‘And I don’t want any of our more excitable lads within a mile of Cassius’s men. Otherwise, they look fine. Thank you, Centurion.’

  Justin sighed and wiped a hand across his brow. Cassius was becoming dangerous, a natural rabble-rouser and barracks lawyer of a type far more common to the legionary ranks than the Centuriate. His natural instincts for trouble making were aggravated now by a full-fledged panic in his undisciplined soul, and there was no telling what he was likely to do. Worse, without the centurion posted with the Victrix detachment, there was no replacement for him. Justin knew that the Legate was privately considering breaking Cassius anyway and hoping to Hades that his second, with a good fright in him, would be able to keep his cohort in line. But it would be tricky. Very tricky.

  And then the next morning, with the mist waist-deep over the land, the scouts rode in to report the enemy on the march; and there was no chance to make the experiment. Justin saw the Legate’s grim, grey face as he listened to the riders’ report and knew that the gamble had failed. The Victrix detachment was too late, one way or another.

  * * *

  It was bitter cold in the meadow, and dead still where the Ninth stood formed up in order with the cohort and century standards marking each commander’s position. Aurelius Rufus had made a personal inspection of the land and had chosen his ground well. A long valley swept slightly downwards before them, guarded on either flank by rocky hillside and forest. Here they had gathered to meet the war band and try to stop it.

  With his bugler and Eagle-bearer beside him, the Legate gave his orders crisply and his staff aides moved from cohort to cohort, conferring with the centurions and auxiliary officers. The mist was beginning to burn off and visibility was growing better, although the far readies of the valley were still hazy. Now the Legate moved along the lines, dropping a steadying hand on a shoulder or a brief, cheerful word of encouragement, but Justin could see the line quiver like a half-schooled horse, and here and there the flicker of pure terror in a man’s eyes. Again the queasy edge-of-the-bog feeling rose in his stomach and he suppressed it, turning to his own men.

  ‘Hold them steady, lads, and we’ll turn them back where they came from.’ He gave them a thumbs-up sign. There were some murmured ‘ayes’ but mostly they stood stock-still and looked at him, and Justin began to feel the hair prickling along the back of his neck. Something was wrong, something more than mere battle nerves.

  A moment later he saw it happen. Centurion Cassius and a few of his junior officers were clustered around the Legate, and Aurelius Rufus had a fury in his face that Justin had never seen.

  ‘… gone mad?… a disgrace to…’ Only bits of words drifted up to him, but as Justin watched in horror, more men pulled out from their places and fell in behind Cassius, including a half dozen of the Sixth. The rest of the Legion turned to watch them, without curiosity but with a kind of suppressed excitement.

  ‘Oh, my god,’ a voice said softly, and Justin turned t
o see Lepidus at his shoulder. He made a sudden decision.

  ‘Lepidus, how good a hold have you got on the Eighth?’

  ‘I… well enough, I think.’

  ‘Then hold them!’ Justin said fiercely. ‘Get back there and hold them! Cajole them, swear at them, baby them, but hold them. And get them around behind and up front to the Legate! Hurry, man!’ He turned to his second. ‘You – don’t try to move these, just hold them steady for as long as you can!’ He slipped out of the lines and forward, trying not to run, to school the urgency from his face, to look as if nothing had gone wrong.

  No man moved to stop him as he pased. They did not seem even to notice him. Every eye was fixed on the Legate among his aides, and the growing circle of men before him. ‘You are a fool,’ he was saying in disgust as Justin reached him. ‘Do you know what the price is?’

  ‘There is no price on honorable surrender!’ Cassius spat at him.

  ‘Aye, that’s right!’

  ‘We were to have reinforcements – where are they, tell us that!’

  ‘Even our water turns poison – it’s an omen!’

  ‘We’ve no mind to be cut down three to one!’

  They chorused around him, and the Legate stood still as granite in their midst. ‘You will be, if you think the Pict will give you safe conduct,’ he said softly.

  ‘It’s our only chance.’ Cassius’s eyes were glittering and dangerous. ‘You led us into this devil’s land – now you will lead us out!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You can’t hold them here. They’ll follow me – won’t you, lads?’ They jostled forward behind him. ‘Aye, we follow Cassius!’

  ‘Not all of you.’ Justin shouldered forward between the Legate’s staff. ‘My men don’t follow a mutineer!’

  ‘What, your cohort of murderers?’

  ‘No, Cassius, my Eighth Cohort, which were mine long since. I warned you not to fool with my men, Cassius. D’you want to tangle with them now?’

  ‘Corvus, you don’t frighten me.’

  ‘No?’ Lepidus slipped up beside him, and behind him like a wall was a good four-fifths of the Eighth Cohort. ‘There are stronger loyalties than fear.’

  ‘Aye, Centurion, shall I break you in half and prove it?’ One of the Eighth stepped forward, towering above his commander. He looked at his hands and then longingly at Cassius’s neck.

  ‘No, Clemens,’ Justin said. ‘I thank you for the thought, but not yet.’

  ‘Roman does not fight Roman,’ the Legate said, ‘although I too will remember your offer. Neither does a Roman Army break ranks before the enemy. Now get back to your places!’

  ‘Aye, or we’ll put you in them and pound you two feet into the ground to see you stay there,’ another voice said. Justin and the Legate looked around to see the ranks behind them swelled by a grim-eyed segment of Geta’s Seventh Cohort, their commander in the lead.

  Cassius hesitated and, for a fraction of a second, the thing was ended. And then a voice cried out, and they swung around to face the end of the valley.

  It was hazy, but they could still see clear enough to drop a curtain of silence over the whole Legion. From one side of the valley to the other, and stretching back into the hillside passes, the massed war hosts of three nations loomed ghostly in the fog.

  ‘There! That is what they’d lead you against!’ Cassius voice was shrill and hysterical. ‘Death! Death and destruction, and nothing but their precious loyalties to fight it with!’

  ‘Death!’ another man yelled, and the British war horns echoed him. It was enough. The nearest ranks surged and broke like sea foam.

  ‘No!’ the Legate yelled. ‘No, damn you! Back to your lines!’

  ‘Back!’ Geta swung his loyal troops around to face them.

  ‘Stand firm, you fools!’ Justin shouted above the tumult. ‘They’ll cut you down like rabbits!’

  ‘Not if we don’t fight them! Let them have their damn land!’

  ‘No! You will stand and fight like Romans!’ The Legate laid about him with his staff. ‘Look to your Eagle, damn you!’

  But it was too late. The Ninth Hispana crumbled like an ill-made wall. They fell away in groups three centuries deep, streaming back away from the valley’s mouth, panicked, mindless, trampling their fellows as they went. The scent of fear was in the air and the cavalry horses screamed and plunged. And then their riders caught it also. One troop swung across their path trying desperately to turn them, but they rode through and over them.

  The war horns of the British cut through the air, mingling with the sound of chaos. The first wave of deserters stumbled toward the baggage carts and their drivers, seeing a rout, leapt down and fled before them. They ploughed through the rear lines, tipping over carts and snatching what they could from the supply train as they passed. Flavius, standing before the hospital wagons with a sword in one hand and a legionary’s abandoned pilum in the other, stabbed one man in the throat as he tried to heave a wagon over, and then they were on him. He dove under a second wagon, and the sound of running feet hammered past him, taking the rear guard with it like flotsam on a river.

  Midway down the valley, the Brigantes saw what was happening and surged forward. Their war horns sang out again and one flank peeled off from the rest and streamed down the far side of the valley, howling like wolves on the trail of the deserters.

  ‘Pull back!’ the Legate shouted. ‘Pull back and group!’ The handful that was left to him tightened into a circle and fell back over the discarded armor and broken pilums of the Legion. Justin had gathered his old Eighth Cohort, or most of it, about him, and the First Cohort was on his flank, the Eagle of the Legion swaying above them. Of the rest, there was Albinus with two centuries of his men, frightened but grimly determined, several leaderless centuries of Hilarion’s cohort, half of Geta’s, one century from the Tenth, and Favonius of all people, rallying a pitiful two centuries of the Third about their cohort standard.

  They pulled back, somehow in good order, collecting such few of the rear guard and baggage train as were left. Flavius, with young Octavian, was desperately pulling his precious supplies from the hospital wagons.

  ‘Leave them! Come on!’ Justin grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. ‘Much good you’ll do us dead!’

  Flavius caught up his sword and a shield that lay against one of the wagon wheels and fell into line, his slight, unarmored figure sandwiched between Clemens and another burly legionary of the Eighth Cohort.

  They hugged the valley’s edge, and, to their other side, a single troop of cavalry guarded their flank. They fell back in good order, but the war host was closing fast… and it was a long way to the dubious safety of Inchtuthil.

  ‘Go! Take them and go!’ the cavalry leader shouted. ‘We’ll hold them while we can!’ He signaled his troops, positioning them across the narrow mouth of the valley. Thirty stumbling blocks with sharp-pointed spears drew rein and waited. It was the last Justin saw of Owen Lucullus.

  XVIII

  The Road Home

  All the long, nightmare way to Inchtuthil they raced, until their breath came in ragged gasps and their hearts were pounding. At the bugle’s sound (all the trumpeters were gone) they formed and fought off the screaming blue warriors who had slipped through Owen’s wall, then turned and ran again. The Eagle-bearer went down with a spear through his side, but another man caught it up and fought forward. They were in sight of the fortress when the British chariots broke through the last of Owen’s Asturians and streamed through the gap, wheels bouncing and rocking over the corpses that lined their way.

  But that doomed handful of horsemen had bought them precious time. The sentry on the walls of Inchtuthil saw them coming and, with a scant dozen of his fellows, swung the great catapults around and trained them on the pursuing war host.

  ‘Hold your fire. Steady… steady. Wait til our lot are out of range. Zeus defend us!’ he added, as he saw the thin ranks streaming toward the fortress gate. Of the Legion that had marched
out that morning, only a third remained in the shattered Army flying one step ahead of the war host, for the fortress gates.

  ‘Gone… all gone,’ the catapult man beside him murmured, dazed.

  ‘Steady, lad. Let’s bring ’em in… what’s left of ’em, poor bastards.’ He raised his arm and the catapult crew wound the great engine back and dipped its sights to the leading edge of the baying war host. The last of the fleeing Legion pulled past the line of fire, and he dropped his arm. ‘Now!’

  A stone as big as three men flew like an arrow from the war engine and fell with all the deadly weight of civilized science on the careening host of chariots. They went down by the score, tangled in their own traces and the flailing legs of downed horses in front of them, and the fleeing army gained another foot. Behind them, the oncoming chariots split with precision around the destruction in their path, and the second catapult swung around to train on the right-hand flank.

  ‘Now, lads! Roll ’em up.’ The thongs and braces sang and another score went down. Number One catapult, reloaded, bit deep into the left flank. But the war host came on, over and around its dead, the vanguard slipping past catapult range on the tail of its quarry.

  ‘Shorten range!’ the garrison commander shouted. ‘Half the men to the gate. Get ready to let them in and close up fast!’

  The Britons were only a spear’s throw behind them when the tattered Army turned at bay outside the walls of Inchtuthil, the front line braced against the onslaught as the rear poured through the open gates. Justin, shield to shield with Flavius before the ten-foot wall which guarded the gate, took a chariot pony in the throat with his pilum and it crashed down almost on his feet. The driver leapt snarling along the ridge pole, silhouetted for a moment against the grey sky, until Justin caught him with a shortened thrust and locked his shield with Flavius’s again just as a second wave swarmed by the hundreds over the line of downed chariots, with the massed body of the war host swelling behind them.