Marius' Mules IX: Pax Gallica

by Turney, S. J. A.

  As the ground began to level out once more close to a stone rampart the height of two men , Fronto was finally able to stop paying close attention to the terrain and fixed his eyes on their destination. The lead elements were already reaching the defences and as the legate’s gaze played across the line of the rampart he was not remotely surprised to see the lithe but hoary shape of Arruntius, shieldless and bellowing the many epithets of Mars as he pulled himself up the rampart toward dozens of lancing spears and jabbing swords. No wonder the men were mad , when you looked at who led them…

  There were shouts of fury and warning from the leading ranks of Fronto’s century as they hit the rampart. Like the other oppida Fronto had seen thus far in the region, the defences were formed from an earth bank with the outer face cut away and revetted in stone. They might look more solid than the murus gallicus of the north , but it was merely a façade of strength, comparatively.

  The century hit the stone face and began to surge up it using a number of different methods, depending on their original unit’s preferences. Some simply dropped their shields now that they would become an encumbrance and climbed with one hand and both feet, using the cracks and gaps between stones for foot and hand holds, jabbing upwards with swords to keep the defenders at bay. Others were giving their mates boosts, the ones below with forethought wearing leather gloves to protect them from the nailed boots of their companions. Still others were using their shields as a set of steps for their mates to jump up, gradually ascending to the wall top, the height of two men above them. It was chaos, but it was proving to be equally chaotic for the defenders, who had no idea how to defend against such a varied and inconsistent attack. Consequently there was no concerted defence with orders from commanders and the whole thing came down to the will and wit of the individual. The Begerri fought back, but the Romans were roaring and surging ever upwards. Even as a dozen Romans fell from the walls, spears sticking out of them, heads mashed by sling shot or horrific sword wounds to their arms and torsos, so the first man reached the wall top – a legionary bellowing something about Juno’s rather impressive chest as he swung and stabbed, lanced and chopped with his blade, using it in a dozen ways for which a drill master would punish him, and yet to stunning effect.

  The man was finally struck a dreadful blow from a Gallic blade, his chest opened in a spray of broken chain links and blood, and he fell on the bodies of his five glassy-eyed victims, but by that time three more legionaries were in his place, clambering over the wall top and shouting their cries of victory. The rain suddenly picked up its own assault battering down heavily on both forces.

  ‘Going up, sir?’ grinned one of Fronto’s men, gesturing to a line of three men who had formed a ramp up to the wall top with their shields held overhead. It looked rather treacherous, but Fronto found that he was grinning and nodding, and ran. With a spring in his step , he jumped onto the lower shield and almost fell disastrously to one side. The rain was coming down in earnest now, and it was making the shield surfaces extraordinarily slippery. Scrabbling and trying not to topple to either side, he stepped to the second shield, then finally to the third. A spear came lancing down at him and he knocked it aside wit h his shield, glad he’d not cast it aside, though wondering how he was going to climb the last five feet with the great board on his arm. Then suddenly the man sweeping down with the spear, trying to skewer him, suddenly shrieked and toppled past Fronto to the churned ground below, a huge rent in his neck-shoulder area spraying torrents of blood. An excited, leering legionary face appeared over the parapet, yelled something rather crude, and then disappeared again.

  Fronto unclasped his hand from the shield grip, dropped it to his feet, then took hold of the rim. With an effort that he felt might unseat his shoulder joint, he heaved the shield up and tipped it over the wall parapet above him, then set about climbing the last few feet with that aching arm. Below him, the shield upon which he stood wobbled for a moment as another man stepped onto it and shouted for him to ‘get a bloody move on, sir.’

  Grinning, feeling like a young man once again, Fronto hauled himself over the parapet and grasped his fallen shield just in time to deflect an axe blow that carved the bronze edging from most of the shield’ s top. Dropping to a knee and jabbing out with the gladius, the exhilarated, grinning legate delivered a perfectly accurate killing blow to the Begerri warrior’ s unarmoured groi n . As the man screamed and fell away, his life blood gushing out from below his chain shirt, Fronto stood, watching the mess around him as Roman and Aquitanian struggled all along the wall. Oddly, there was a gap in front of him for some reason, and as he peered into it , the smile slid from his face.

  The re was a wide space given over to small vegetable plots at this end of the oppidum ’s interior and it was filled with enemy warriors. He had expected there to be more of them than of the legion, but not by this kind of margin. For all the amazing success of Arruntius’ straight forward tactics, there was no hope of so few men subduing that lot. The attack was over before it had truly begun.

  * * *

  ‘Stop!’

  The command rang out across the oppidum like the toll of a great bronze bell in a public square and, like such a ring, it had the effect of silencing the attack. Even as the noise descended, that same voice called out something in a native tongue. The effect was the damnedest thing Fronto had ever seen. The entire attack stuttered to a halt, men of both forces poised with swords raised for a killing blow. A few stragglers were still fighting at the periphery, unable to hear the shouts for the battering rain, but after a brief pause, realising that the fight had halted, they too stopped.

  Fronto turned in surprise to see the tall, imposing figure of Arruntius standing on the gatehouse, already coated with blood and boosted by the bodies of half a dozen warriors beneath his feet. The whole oppidum – somewhere in the region of three hundred legionaries and six thousand Begerri – stood watching in fascination and surprise.

  ‘You signed the Pax Gallica,’ Arruntius bellowed, then to Fronto’s surprise, repeated the words in some Gallic dialect. ‘You made an oath to Rome and Rome made one to you . ’ Again he repeated himself in their own tongue – or at least in some more northern Gallic tongue that they seemed to understand.

  ‘Where I come from , oaths are binding and those that break them the worst sort of criminal,’ he said with the tone of a scalding teacher. Fronto was astounded to see a few of the Begerri lower their weapons to their side and their eyes to the floor as though embarr assed as the man repeated this reprimand in a Gallic language.

  ‘However, I know that you are being oppressed by a new king in the mountains.’ A pause, then a repeat in the Gallic tongue. ‘And I know that the Begerri reneged on their oath for fear of this king’s power.’

  There was more than on e exchange of sheepish looks among the locals, and Fronto almost laughed.

  ‘ But here, now, you have a chance to hold to your oath and to put things right. Any man who fights for Rome on this hill or lays down his arms and walks away will be given amnesty.’

  Another pause. Another repeat. Fronto watched the uncertainty form over Biguro in a cloud thicker than the ones above that dropped torrents of rain upon them.

  ‘I offer you a chance to return to your homes, resettle your town and trade for good Hispanic wine as you chose to in the past, and fear not about this smiling king in the mountains, for my commander will pull his heart out through his arse before summer is done .’

  This last, when repeated in the native tongue, saw a hundred weapons lowered.

  A voice from further back, toward the centre of the town , called out in the native tongue, a harsh langu age, all throat and sharp edges and , though Fronto could not follow what was said, the indignant, defiant, and furious tone was unmistakable. The warriors were wavering in the face of Arruntius’ seemingly-generous offer, and one of their leaders had arrived to command them back into the fray.

  It started again with a single clang. One of the Begerri on t
he wall had snarled and lurched forward, chopping down with his heavy sword, the startled legionary just managing to get his gladius in the way in time. And with that, battle recommenced, surging across the ramparts of Biguro. A sling shot hit Arruntius, but seemed to do little more than irritate the centurion, who bellowed a cry to Minerva and jumped from the gate top into a mass of warriors below.

  Fronto had a moment before that odd gap in front of him closed once more, and through it he saw the strange and not unwelcome effects of Arruntius’ speech. Most of the warriors in the centre were still surging forward, their weapons brandished, but a number had turned and were fighting their own people . Moreover, some cunning Begerri bastards had used the confusion to push their way out toward the back of the enemy host and now they were turning, laying swords, axes and spears into the backs of their own tribesmen. The enemy forces had split, some clearly seeing their future as either Roman or dead, others clinging to the original plan of defying the invader. In theory there were too few who had changed sides to make a great deal of difference in the great scheme of things, but as Fronto watched th e utter chaos and carnage ensue he smiled, realising what Arruntius had done. The centurion had not expected his offer to end the fight or to change things so thoroughly. But he knew warriors and he knew what went through men’s minds when facing a furious, concerted Roman attack. His calculated words had been designed to sow dissent and nothing more. Where a few moments ago each man within Biguro had waited impatiently for their chance to hack and stab at the Romans, now at most half of them were doing so. Others were busy fighting their own men and, Fronto was fairly certain, a number of rebels were busy killing other rebels in the mistaken belief that they had turned back to Rome. It was utter carnage as Begerri fought Begerri regardless of what they each stood for, and the cohort simply started to whittle away at the edges, leaving those below to fight one another and concentrating on removing the defences of the rampart.

  Fronto laughed then, realising how easy it was to become a follower of this mad old centurion. A warrior appeared close by and Fronto turned, raising his shield, blocking the stab of the sword, then using the defensive board as a weapon – its secondary function of design. Smashing out with the shield, he jabbed the iron boss into the warrior’s face, smashing bones and teeth and then pushing him back from the rampart where he tumbled down the turf bank into Biguro, clutching his ruined head. The legate paused to use the back of his hand to wipe away the rain from the portion of his face visible through the helmet. A deep crack of thunder made him jump slightly, and a ripple of uncertainty ran through the entire Begerri force. The storm was almost here.

  A legionary to the left of Fronto whooped and jumped from the wall-walk, plunging down the slope into the press of Begerri, howling like some blood-hungry animal as he shield-barged the press of the enemy. With a grin, Fronto barrelled down after him. Against all the odds, they had secured the rampart and most of the cohort were now in the oppidum , the stragglers already crossing the parapet to join them .

  The crowd below was in total disarray. Some were stabbing one another in the press, others trying to flee the slaughter . Whatever their intentions, almost the entire Begerri force was now in one huge mass, pushing back and forth, chopping one another to pieces.

  Gradually, as Fronto and the legionaries nearby took out occasional Begerri warriors who broke from the mass and charged them, grabbing the opportunity for a breather before the next heavy push, things started to change. A sense of order was beginning to instil itself among the tribe as various enemy nobles called out to their people and the mass stopped killing one another blindly .

  Still, Fronto had to acknowledge that the centurion’s calls had done their work. The enemy had thinned out by almost a quarter in the chaos, and had paid such little attention to the Roman forces that even some of the wounded had crossed the wall and moved into the oppidum, unwilling to let leg or arm wounds rob them of a cut of the treasure. When the legionaries had burst from the trees they had faced a hard fight to attain the walls, and even then odds of fourteen to one. Now, the cohort were facing perhaps ten to one, and they were inside the oppidum. It was still odds that would have a book-maker at the circus sweating, but they had improved so drastically in so few moments that it already felt like a victory. What was more, even though most of the chaos had ended , there were still clearly those among the Begerri who clung to the centurion’s words and were fiercely fighting their own people .

  This time, Fronto saw the white blaze of lightning sheet across the sky above the clouds, and started to count. He’d only reached three before the boom of Vulcan’s hammer cracked the sky in two. The storm was here.

  ‘By century, on your commander, ’ Arruntius bellowed somewhere off to the left as the rain lashed down with sudden ferocity , ‘Testudo!’

  The reaction was instant. Each man had practi s ed the manoeuver at least every other day for anywhere between five and forty years. Despite not having marked men to work from, due to the rather haphazard, random nature of the cohort, each man was experienced enough to see where he was needed and shuffled into place to plug any gaps left by the fallen, and each used their centurion as a left marker, forming on him. There was a moment of dithering, and the century began to swarm to Fronto’s side.

  The legate had been in a few testudos in his time, including horribly complicated manoeuvers such as testudos that had to march backwards up a slope. It was nothing new to him, nor was carrying it out at a moment’s notice in mid-fight. But this was the first time he had been the marker one formed on and as the men fell in with him, shields clonking together around and above, he realised with a start that there was no centurion in the unit. Whoever the man with the crest had been, he had fallen somewhere in the assault and now command was falling to Fronto. He found to his surprise that he felt an odd pride at that . He had commanded legions in battle, and sometimes multiple-legion forces, yet he had never had proper command of a century of men. And he knew damn well that no matter how clever or successful a senior officer might be, to the ordinary legionaries he was still just the commander, while a centurion was a figure of legend, as untouchable as a demi god . It was an odd feeling to suddenly achieve that position, and with a thrill he found he understood what drove the backbone of the Roman army to be what they were.

  The centurion’s whistle blew somewhere off to the left and Fronto realised he had no whistle to echo the call, but it seemed there was no need to spr ead the word to advance, for the testudo began to lurch forward suddenly. Fronto kept his shield out steadily, forming the rear left wall of the tortoise formation , and made sure to hold it locked in position. What was the plan? With no centurion here and unable to hear the calls of other units’ commanders within the sweaty, echoing confines of the testudo, Fronto could only guess. They were in a formation designed to provide the maximum protection and marching forward into a massive enemy force.

  It was all about damag e and confusion , he surmised. The enemy were still so numerous compared to the cohort and were beginning to regain their order through their commanders’ shouts . Arruntius was evening the odds. It was like sending one of those African horned beasts – the ones they sometimes had at games – into a crowd. Do as much damage as possible and instil utter chaos .

  ‘Swords,’ he shouted. ‘Kill ‘em. Kill ‘em all.’

  The men in the testudo pushed the tips of their blades through the various tiny gaps in the shield wall of the tortoise, and began to stab out. There was no chance they might miss . As the century stomped into the thick press of Begerri warriors, the sheer numbers meant that the enemy simply could not get out of the way in time. Half the warriors around them attempted to flee and were lacerated by the fifty blades jabbing repeatedly out of the shield-box . Others tried in vain to destroy the Roman war machine in their midst , desperately hammering at the shields with their own weapons. But the press was just too tight for them to be able to do much more than flail and then fall foul of the jabbing blades. The R
oman formation moved slowly, inexorably through the throng, mincing the Begerri with their blades and leaving a trail of blood-slick and twitching bodies. The rain hammered down like a wet club, drumming on the wood of the shield roof and soaking the Begerri outside to the bone. Fronto almost laughed as another flash, barely visible inside the formation, clearly shook the spirits of the enemy, and the crack of thunder that followed saw several of them pull back in fear. The Gauls were a superstitious race, almost on a par with Aurelius, who would be fuming back in camp at the order not to join him. The possibility that their gods were angry at oath-breaking was occurring to many now that Toutatis was hammering in the sky.

  As was inevitable, after a few moments, a lucky enemy strike caught one of the legionaries and he fell, crying in pain, out of the formation where he was butchered by howling warriors. Fronto shouted to fill the gap but the men were already on it, one of those who had formed part of the roof lowering his shield and stepping to the side to plug the gap left by the dead man. The torrential rain poured through the hole he’d left in the roof, making the interior of the testudo that little bit less pleasant.

  ‘Watch your pace,’ he said loudly in the close world of the shield-shell, for the footsteps of the men had become rather disconnected during the press.

  ‘Ju-no, Ju -no, Ju-no,’ chanted two of the men at the front in time with their footsteps and in a matter of heartbeats their companions had all fallen into step with the chant.

  ‘Cae-sar, Cae-sar, Cae-sar,’ started someone else, and the chant mor phed from Juno to Caesar as the thud of boots rhythmically ground the open spaces of Biguro into dust.

  Fronto grinned. There was simply no feeling in the world like being in the midst of some great fight on the fate of which everything hung. He snorted as he realised that the chant had changed again and had now become ‘Cae-sar’s Bas-tards, Cae-sar’s Bas-tards.’