by Angus Watson
To the left the Romans had obliterated a good many of Lowa’s chariots. Some legionaries were pursuing the surviving vehicles back to the fort, but most charged on, heading for the body of her army.
The enemy were still outside the range of her large fort-based projectile weapons, but some of the legionaries chasing the chariots came within range of her bow. She strung it and aimed.
Chamanca spat. The infantry was blocking her horses. Most of the soldiers, to be fair, were dead or dying and it was perhaps a bit much to expect them to crawl out of the way, but still, they were impeding her troops’ progress and there were elephants’ tendons to sever.
“Follow me! And do as I do!” she shouted to the cavalry near her, then leapt from her horse, grabbed a shield off a dead legionary and ran towards the nearest elephant. She sprang from gap to gap between the casualties like a particularly nimble deer crossing a tussocky marsh, arrows from elephant turrets missing her and zipping into the flesh of the downed. Some of the arrows punched shouts from the not quite dead and a couple more thwocked into her shield.
It was the messiest battlefield Chamanca had seen, and she’d seen some messy ones. Being sliced apart by tusk-blades and trampled by iron-shod elephants was not a tidy way to go. There were guts everywhere and so much blood that it collect in pools on the blood-saturated earth. So much blood. Blood… She stopped and crouched behind her shield next to a dying legionary, arrow-shot rather than crushed and split open like so many of the others. She stabbed her teeth into his neck and drank deep while arrows whacked into her shield.
Satisfied, for now at least, she glanced back. The cavalry were following, not as fast as her, but protected by shields and carrying their newly made leg-severing spears. She didn’t need a special spear, she was good enough with her blade and ball-mace. She didn’t need the shield either, she’d picked it up only to show the others what to do. She tossed it aside and leapt on, much faster now she was blood-fuelled, and more than able to dodge the elephanteers’ arrows. She reached the first great grey animal and chopped into its leg.
Jagganoch shot arrows into spear-carriers as Bandonda trampled puny humans and butchered them with his tusks. There was nothing finer. Riding an armoured Yonkari war elephant through crowds of infantry was better than all sex, all food, all drink–everything. Bandonda was eviscerating and crushing a good number of fool Romans as well as dozens of Britons, but Jagganoch was not concerned. They should have learnt from the battle at the coast. If you want to live, do not block the path of Bandonda and his herd.
He saw that two legions of Romans were attacking from the west, directly towards him, so he commanded his squad to turn north. Killing allies when they were in the way was fine, but charging them directly when they weren’t mixed up with enemy troops was not good form. As Bandonda responded to the reins, Jagganoch looked over the rest of his elephants. He could see only one killed, but two more went down as he watched, bucking, rolling and crushing some crew who didn’t have the wherewithal to leap clear. What was this new threat?
It was the Iberian woman! Gripping an elephant’s ear with one hand, she swung up to the turret and over its wall. She was wearing almost nothing and she moved like a cheetah. The crew were all dead in the blink of an eye. She grabbed the elephant’s reins and pulled. It must have been luck, but somehow she got the succession of yanks and tweaks exactly right to make the elephant turn, bow its head and then ram its tusks up into the belly of the beast next to it.
He wanted that woman.
Behind her, in line with the speared elephant, a few dozen Maidunites advanced with bladed spears. He gave the order for the elephants to swing round to meet the challenge, at the same time as steering Bandonda directly for the Iberian’s new mount.
Chamanca’s beast thrashed around, destroying its herd-mate’s stomach and ribs, but its tusks became trapped and it could not pull free. The crew of the tusk-speared, bucking elephant balanced like acrobats in their little fort, shooting arrow after arrow at her. From that short range, with her own animal tossing its head and lurching like a burning bear in a desperate attempt to free itself, the missiles were impossible to dodge. One sliced the side of her neck, another lodged in her arm. She somersaulted backwards off her mount and landed neatly, but something whacked the back of her head and she fell.
The world swam back into focus. She was on her back and Jagganoch was standing over her, reaching down for his long club. He must have thrown it at her, she realised. She rolled away but the arrow in her arm stuck in the soil. It didn’t hold her for long, but it was long enough for Jagganoch to swing his club into the side of her head. She felt her skull smash, then everything went black.
Jagganoch had intended to keep the Iberian and mate with her. He’d never seen a better fighter, apart from himself, of course, so breeding with her was likely to create children at least nearly as capable as they were. So he was annoyed that, in his anger, he’d hit her too hard. He felt the wound, then her neck–yes, the bone was crushed and she had no pulse. No matter, he told himself. He had defeated her easily, so she was clearly not such a great fighter. There was a truism that even the best fighter could be unlucky. But Jagganoch believed that you made your own luck.
Back up on Bandonda, he took stock. He could not see any of the long-speared attackers still standing; his elephants had dealt with the new assault in moments, without further loss. It had surprised him at first when people attacked his elephants, rather than surrendering immediately or fleeing, but he’d learnt the reason for their foolishness. Previously the pink people had encountered only the forest elephants of the Carthaginians from north Africa and the even smaller eastern war elephants of the Persians. Jagganoch’s elephants, bred and improved for centuries by his ancestors in the heart of Africa, were completely different animals–larger, braver and much stronger. Bandonda and the others were to the eastern and northern elephants what war dogs were to the pet pups of the pampered women of Rome.
Thinking of war dogs, he’d seen some running about, but could see no more. That was a shame. People expected his elephants to be afraid of dogs because all other types of elephants were, but Yonkari elephants trampled all animals as happily as they trampled people.
So the British dogs were defeated, and to the west and south the Romans had formed lines between the enemy and their hillfort, blocking their route to temporary safety. To the north, the half-destroyed Roman legion had rallied and, further to the north, he could see Caesar and his retinue of praetorians marching southwards followed by two more legions. The Romans were winning, but only because they had greater numbers and because Jagganoch’s troop had killed so many. The British were better fighters than Jagganoch had expected, better than the Romans. Even now, the Roman lines pressing on three sides of the British infantry were static where the Romans’ superior numbers should have allowed them to advance.
He was about to give the order for his elephants to turn back to the main battle and finish off the British infantry, when he heard a new horn note, ringing out from beyond the fort to the south.
Chapter 6
They rode north as fast as the aurochs could go. Atlas was nauseous from the lumpy downing of a lumpenly pulped version of Nan’s invigorating stew, and the rhythmic lurching of the giant armoured bull beneath him was not helping.
The two hundred other riders from the forest of Branwin showed no signs of discomfort. Armoured in ringmail shirts and armed with stout-handled blades that were halfway between spears and swords, they looked grimly determined. They knew that they had much to atone for. Ula, riding along next to him, was still in her simple blue dress and armed with a long, elegant sword. Atlas had told her not to come, since she’d never ridden an aurochs and was no fighter as far as he knew, but she pointed out that she’d kicked his arse twice, wanted to make up for that, and besides, what did he know about her skills? And indeed she was riding the aurochs much more confidently than he was, so perhaps she might be useful in the battle to come.
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nbsp; His own aurochs snorted and he worried again that it might collapse under the weight of plate iron strapped to its flanks and head, the long iron blades attached to its forward-pointing horns, plus his own unusual bulk, but, no, it ran on, showing no more signs of fatigue than its herd-mates.
They crested a rise and he saw the fort, the legions and, dead ahead, the elephants. Immediately he knew where the beasts had come from. When Atlas had been no more than four years old, raiders on huge elephants from the Yonkari tribe to the south-west had invaded his tribe’s land and rampaged northwards, killing all who didn’t flee. His father and mother had been joint rulers of their village. Understanding that they could not defeat the elephants, they had surrendered, hoping that the rest of the village would be spared. That day was Atlas’ earliest memory. He remembered them telling him to stay put and walking away, his mother steely-faced, his father unable to hold his tears as they bade farewell.
The Yonkari elephant captain tied up his parents and all the adults in the village. He explained that, as thanks for surrendering and making their task easier, all children would be spared. The rest would be killed. They forced the children to watch as the adults were murdered in a variety of ways, each more horrible that the last. His father had been one of the first, simply whacked on the head with a club, then his flesh stripped from his bones by the elephants. He could remember that his mother had been the last, but he couldn’t remember what they’d done to her. He assumed his mind had obliterated the memory to preserve his sanity. He was both ashamed and glad that it had.
Atlas spent the next few years as a Yonkari slave, working in their fields and becoming stronger. When he was about eight years old, he escaped and killed the three men sent to hunt him down. He had not seen a central African elephant since, nor laid eyes on any Yonkari. Yet here they were. He was looking forward to killing a few more of them.
He nodded to Ula. She raised her horn to her lips and blew. The Aurochs tribe yelled, the giant cattle bellowed and they charged.
The remaining archer chariots reached the shelter of the fort’s projectile weaponry. A cohort of legionaries followed, but scorpion bolts from the fort cut swathes through their ranks and they retreated. Lowa ordered the charioteers to spike their vehicles and bring their horses into the fort. It was the same command she’d given when surrounded on Frogshold by the Murkan, Dumnonian and Eroo armies. This situation here was not as bad, she told herself.
It wasn’t great, though. The cavalry was gone, Chamanca nowhere to be seen. They’d had some effect on the elephants, killing maybe a quarter of the beasts, but the rest were still rampaging through the infantry.
The infantry, however, was holding out against the Romans on three sides, moving back steadily towards Saran Fort. It might take all day, but at this rate the majority of them would make it back to shelter.
The elephants were ripping into the infantry and still killing a great many, but their charge had been brought almost to a halt by men and women fighting back fiercely with long spears, and every now and then an elephant fell. It was hard to guess, but she reckoned out of the fifteen thousand men and women who’d taken to the field, only a few hundred at most had been killed, and almost of all of those by the elephants. The way things were going, Lowa reckoned that the elephants might kill two thousand of hers before they were stopped. It was a lot, it was a horrible thought, but if she were to beat Caesar there were going to be losses and she couldn’t dwell on them. He’d lost twice that number in his first attack on Big Bugger Hill and hadn’t faltered. Still, she wished that she was with her army, fighting, without time to think like this. She’d enjoyed potting a few legionaries earlier but there were no enemies in range now, and she had to stay where she was to co-ordinate her forces.
She was distracted by little Dug screaming angrily down in the fort, no doubt because a new plaything–a sandal or a stick or similar–had been taken from him. Her son was another problem. It had been a simple decision to keep him in the fort, because she didn’t want to risk herself running off and deserting the army again to save him. However, now they were surrounded and he was stuck there, whereas just the day before she could have sent him and Keelin off west to Dumnonia or Kimruk or even over the sea.
Then she heard the aurochs horn.
Moments later the great cattle appeared around a hill to the east, Atlas riding the lead beast. They tore towards the elephants.
She felt a rush of elation. This should change things.
If the aurochs could take out the elephants, then it was possible her infantry might be able to force its way back to the fort relatively intact. Once she had them back in the fort, she was confident of holding out for a long while, while raiding the besieging Romans every night and thinning their finite ranks. It had been a mistake to believe the false shouts and commit her entire infantry, but it wasn’t the end by any means.
The one thing, she thought, that could still ruin everything, was Felix’s legion of demons. She scanned the land but could see no sign of them. The last shout had said that they were still at their base to the east, but with her shouter network compromised, that meant nothing.
As if to mock her, another shout rang out: “Demons remain at Corner Bay.” The shout came from the west, the wrong direction–Corner Bay was to the east. Lowa guessed it was really meant as a taunt, and what it really said was “Demons nearby and about to attack.” She hoped that it didn’t.
Felix grinned as he pictured Lowa hearing that last shout. His operation to take over her messenger network had been a success. His Celermen had captured and gagged all of them swiftly and silently, without any raising the alarm. Then, after some light but painful torture and a three-pronged iron fork rammed into their spines, they’d shouted whatever he’d told them to. Amazing how compliant people were when you held the handle of a tool that could paralyse them with a twist. He’d made one of the shouters tell him how it felt, having that alien metal buried in his back, scraping bone and tugging at such vital cords. “Very bad” was the unsurprising gist of his reply.
Felix’s Celermen and Maximen had killed a few captives and run to a wooded hollow to the west of the fort the night before. He guessed that the declivity was a pond in the winter, but it had been a sunny summer so it was dry, cool in the shade of the leaves, and hidden from both Romans and Britons. Since the first invasion of Britain he’d lost twenty-eight Celermen and nine Maximen, so he still had twelve of the former and eleven of the latter. The losses sounded heavy and indeed they were greater than he would have liked, but almost all of them had been killed by factors he hadn’t anticipated; those wicked arrows from the new British bows, for example, or the raid that had caught them off guard. He’d learnt from his errors, become more controlled and more cautious, and from here on he would not lose his troops so carelessly. He was also confident that once Caesar had defeated the British, it would be no effort to capture Caesar himself and take over the Roman army. This far from Rome, it would be years before Pompey or Crassus or any of those fools sent anyone against him, and by then it would be far, far too late.
According to the Celerman watching the battle from the branch of a tree above, the Romans had the upper hand. Lowa had fallen for the false shouts and committed her entire force attacking one legion. She’d been surprised by the arrival of ten thousand men from the west. The elephants ripping into the east flank of her army had increased her woes.
“New British squad arrived!” called the Celerman. “Looks like aurochs in armour, couple of hundred of them, coming from the south-west.”
Interesting, thought Felix. Surely they’d be no match for the Yonkari elephants? And if they were, and the British somehow turned the tide of the battle? Then Felix would defy Caesar’s orders and his demons would leave their hiding place. The Romans were going to win this one.
Lowa held her breath as the African animals swung round to meet Britain’s giant war cattle. The aurochs were a magnificent sight–thundering bovine muscle with swept-forwar
d, iron-capped horns as long as chariot draught-poles. Each was so huge that the riders perched atop them, even Atlas, looked like midgets. Massive and formidable as the aurochs were though, the elephants were a great deal larger. But the aurochs were faster.
One elephant reared on its back legs to stamp down on an attacking aurochs, but the giant bull accelerated like a whipped horse, drove its long horns into the elephant’s underside and ripped out a shiny cascade of intestines. The African beast crashed down onto aurochs and rider.
Most of the leading aurochs were stamped or gored, but not before they’d brought down several elephants. Unseated aurochs riders in ringmail finished off injured beasts with heavy blades and easily overcame the lightly armed Yonkari crews. The second rank of aurochs charged between the foreign animals, bellowing rage, ripping through armour with their horns, spilling great washes of blood and viscera.
Atlas’ aurochs was impaled on a tusk, but he ran along its neck while pulling his axe from his back holster, and leapt onto the elephant’s head. He dispatched the crew with a few powerful swings of his double-bladed weapon, but a heartbeat later an aurochs, smacked aside by one elephant’s long snout, drove its horns into the back leg of Atlas’ elephant. The African monster reared, trumpeting, and collapsed. The Kushite jumped and landed, leapt again to avoid being crushed by the falling elephant, then dodged out of the path of a galloping aurochs.
Lowa lost sight of him. Others battled on. Half the elephants were down but the rest were fighting like the trained, enraged monsters that they were. None was fleeing. A large section of legionaries swung to help the elephants, hurling pilums at the aurochs riders. Ringmail proved no defence against a javelin thrown full strength from a couple of paces.
