[Gaius Valerius Verrens 05] - Enemy of Rome

by Douglas Jackson

  ‘I need men here.’ The centurion’s voice, shriller now, the need more urgent. Valerius’s head whipped round and he tried to gauge from which flank it had come. Should he act? No. They held. For now the Seventh Galbiana was still the effective fighting unit that Marcus Antonius Primus had forged. Valerius must trust centurions he barely knew to make the right judgements. Men like Brocchus, a man of no honour and little integrity, would win this battle or lose it. All he could do was support them. A new clatter of javelins landing among the front rank. More screams and more shouts for reserves. Did that mean that whoever was commanding the enemy had brought up his own reserve cohorts? No, not yet. The battle couldn’t be more than a few moments old.

  A rustle in the darkness and he felt the men of his bodyguard stiffen.

  ‘Tolosa.’

  He relaxed at the whispered password. Serpentius. The Spaniard rode out of the darkness. Valerius made out a struggling figure held against his horse’s flank by the collar of his tunic, choking as if he was on the end of a rope. A legionary’s shield lay across the former gladiator’s saddle. ‘He says he’s from the Fifteenth, but I wouldn’t know.’ He dropped the squirming man and brought the shield close so Valerius recognized the symbol on its face, a jagged star around the boss.

  ‘The wheel of Fortuna. He’s telling the truth. What else does he have to tell us?’

  Serpentius leapt from his mount and dragged the cowering legionary to his feet, a wicked curved knife appearing in his hand with the blade at the soldier’s throat. ‘I’m only going to ask once, friend. Who’s in command?’

  Valerius heard the pitiless menace in Serpentius’s voice and almost felt sorry for his prisoner. The man swallowed. ‘My legate is the honourable Munius Lupercus. Fabius Fabullus of Fifth Alaudae commands the army of Vitellius.’

  ‘Not Valens?’ Valerius asked.

  ‘No, lord. Some men wanted to wait at Hostilia for Valens, but General Fabullus insisted we march for Cremona. They say we covered a hundred miles in three days. I know we did thirty this day past. The men are exhausted. They just want this over.’

  ‘What word of Vitellius?’

  The legionary’s face turned sombre and he shrugged.

  ‘Very well.’ Valerius turned to his bodyguard. ‘Take him to the rear.’

  When the prisoner was gone Serpentius remounted. Valerius beckoned him close. ‘How did it seem to you?’

  ‘From what I heard we’re holding them. At least in the centre.’ The Spaniard shrugged. ‘As for the rest …’

  Valerius nodded. No Valens, but Fabius Fabullus was an unknown quantity. He had driven his men hard from Hostilia to Cremona, but was he too eager for battle? The one-handed Roman felt like a blind man groping his way along a cliff path. He could hear the wind and the waves, but what good was that if there was nothing but fresh air where his foot was about to fall? Five thousand lives depended on his next decision and all he had was his intuition. He called to Ferox.

  ‘Send an aide to check the reserve line. I need to know if it’s time to feed in another cohort from the squares.’

  The guard tensed again as a legionary loomed out of the darkness calling the watchword and dumped something on the ground nearby. ‘What’s that?’ Valerius demanded.

  ‘You asked for shields,’ Serpentius pointed out. ‘So they’re bringing you shields.’

  ‘Of course.’ Valerius remembered now. Why had he wanted shields? He had no idea. Still, things seemed to be going remarkably well … Even as the thought formed he froze in the saddle at a great howl from his right flank.

  ‘What …’

  ‘Flank attack.’ Claudius Ferox’s voice betrayed his fear.

  Valerius reacted instantly. ‘Take the Ninth and Tenth cohorts and do what you can to stop them. Send a runner once you have an idea of their strength.’

  Ferox galloped to the reserves, already shouting orders, and Valerius spent the next long nerve-grating moments in a turmoil of frustration before the runner returned.

  ‘Tribune Ferox reports that he is facing an entire new legion and begs for further reinforcements.’

  ‘Which legion?’

  ‘Fifth Alaudae, lord.’

  Valerius closed his eyes. Otho’s bane at Bedriacum, and now they were coming for him.

  XXI

  Valerius sensed the balance of the contest changing.

  The front ranks of Seventh Galbiana were under pressure, but they were holding. From the right, where the First and Ferox’s two reserve cohorts were struggling to hold what might be the entire Fifth legion, he could almost feel the panic amidst the cacophony of a battle being fought to the death. A sense of enormous pressure accompanied it, as if in the darkness a great physical mass was pressing against his legion’s flank. In the past few moments he’d been informed the enemy had taken at least two cohort standards. The next order would be crucial, not just for the Seventh, but for the battle and Titus Flavius Vespasian’s bid for the purple.

  Only one aide remained, the others missing, sucked into the shadowy maelstrom around them; dead, wounded or just lost in the darkness. ‘Find General Primus and tell him we are sore pressed on two fronts. Beg him to send reinforcements,’ he instructed the soldier, the youngest of the legion’s tribunes. ‘Serpentius?’ He muttered a curse as he realized the Spaniard had disappeared, and rode to where the last of his reserves waited. A single cohort held by the iron discipline of their trade as their comrades fought and died out there in the darkness. Atilius would be at its centre with the legion’s eagle standard, his face a stony mask of resolve beneath the bear’s yellow-toothed hood. Valerius hesitated, searching the clamour for a sign that would save him from giving the order. The desperate cries of men struggling for their lives told him that if he didn’t use the last of his reserves now he might not get another chance. He would not lose another eagle? The words of less than an hour earlier sounded hollow in his ears. What a vain, comical boast it had proved; nothing less than an invitation to the gods to prove him false. Sometimes an eagle must be risked. If he did not risk the eagle, he would certainly lose his legion and Primus his battle. So he’d risk the eagle, and if it was lost, make sure he didn’t live to suffer the terrible emptiness that followed, and the pain worse than defeat.

  ‘Aquilifer,’ he shouted, ‘to me.’ The standard-bearer marched from the centre of the cohort with the flickering torches of his bodyguard creating a circle of light that revealed his burden to every man.

  Valerius dismounted and met the soldier’s eyes. ‘You know what you must do?’ he said quietly. ‘Our comrades are pressed hard and they are wavering. They fight for their lives, but sometimes a man needs something more important to fight for.’ He saw the white flash of Atilius’s teeth and the glint as he raised the eagle standard a little higher. ‘Eighth cohort?’ Close to five hundred men came to attention at the shout. ‘I know you hoped your services wouldn’t be needed tonight,’ he heard a laugh from the ranks that raised his spirits, ‘but our enemy has decided otherwise. They have honoured the Seventh with the attentions of not one but two legions, and who can blame them? Your tentmates in the Ninth and Tenth cohorts are the anvil that holds them. The Eighth will be the hammer that destroys them.’

  Serpentius appeared from the darkness on foot. ‘You were right.’ His voice was just loud enough for Valerius to hear. ‘They flanked us. We have one chance. Ferox and his two cohorts are holding firm and as long as they keep their attention we might be able to surprise them. But we have to be quick.’

  Valerius ordered the eagle’s guards to extinguish their torches, but keep them ready in case of need. With the six close-ranked centuries on their heels he and Serpentius led the way across the uneven farmland; first north, then west. They found themselves in an almost uncanny peace between battles. If Valerius had calculated correctly, their parent legion, the Seventh, lay a hundred paces to their left front, fighting for its very existence. The Thirteenth were the same distance away on the right, apparently holding thei
r own. The gap between should have been held by one of the Thirteenth’s auxiliary cohorts, but they’d either been forced back or joined in the fight. Serpentius stopped and Valerius’s order to halt was passed back in an urgent whisper. ‘Thirty paces,’ the Spaniard whispered. Valerius could make nothing of what was ahead thanks to the chaos of sound that filled the darkness, but he trusted the freedman’s instincts. If he was right, they would be on the left flank of the legion that had punched into the Seventh, if not … But battles weren’t won by ifs.

  Valerius turned back to the ranks of legionaries, praying that none of the centuries had lost contact during the heart-pounding dash. ‘They don’t know you’re here.’ He spoke loud enough for the closest century to hear, aware of the risk but reckoning it worth taking. ‘So hit them fast and hit them hard. One cast and we will come screaming from the night like the daemones of Erebus. Form cohort wedge, let your eagle be your rallying point. Your watchword is Tolosa, the reply is Juva. Just get in amongst them and kill everything that isn’t screaming it at you. Slaughter the bastards.’

  He advanced another five paces to be certain. ‘Now!’

  The right arms that drew back had been straining for action all night and now the frustration of hours of inactivity was released in a single burst of energy. The pila curved into the darkness in an unerring arc, six feet of iron-tipped ash, with a weighted pyramid point designed to penetrate shields and chain armour. In daylight, a legionary facing a pila attack raised his big curve-edge scutum to protect himself. If it stuck, the missile might encumber him for the rest of the fight, but his odds of escaping injury were good. At night, in a surprise flank attack, it was different. The first the men of Legio V Alaudae knew of the danger was when ears long attuned to danger detected a soft rushing sound behind the raucous symphony of battle. A heartbeat later, the heavy javelins punched into helmet, neck and shoulder. Even protected by a stout iron helm and lorica segmentata plate armour, a direct hit would instantly stun the wearer, if the impact didn’t break bone or find the fatal, fleshy gap between helmet and armour. Before they recovered, the shocked legionaries found themselves the target of an unseen armoured battering ram that slammed into their unprotected left. The Boar’s Head. Valerius had first seen it used in Boudicca’s last battle when General Suetonius Paulinus had crushed an army of seventy thousand rebels to dust between his arrow-shaped wedges. Valerius had used it himself, to smash the Vitellian line, when Juva had taken the eagle of the Twenty-first Rapax.

  A cohort wedge consisted of a ‘point’ of a single century, formed eight men wide and ten deep, followed by two further centuries, and finally three more, to complete the arrowhead. Valerius was at the very heart of the formation in the gap between the second and third centuries, with Serpentius, Atilius and the eagle’s eight-man guard. He’d considered a mass charge into the enemy’s unsuspecting flank that would have caused instant and widespread confusion, but that wasn’t the legions’ way. Instead, the Boar’s Head lanced into the attacking enemy formations and broke the assault’s momentum. He might be charging as many as five thousand men with fewer than five hundred. The greater cohesion of the men in the wedge would keep them in the fight for longer, rather than wasting them in bloody single combat. Despite the odds, Valerius could feel the battle joy growing inside, that insane confusion of invincibility and power, speed and strength. Yet at his very core was the same emptiness he’d felt as he’d approached the executioner. With the gods’ aid they would survive, but only if Primus hurried to reinforce the Seventh Galbiana – and there was no guarantee he would.

  The legionaries of the Eighth cohort had practised the manoeuvre a thousand times, and the six centuries drew swords and charged the moment they hurled their spears. Valerius, their precious eagle and his little pocket of men were carried with them. He felt the lurch as the shields of the first century smashed into the flank of the Seventh’s attackers, the momentary hesitation and the cries of confusion and pain. Then the man-weight of the wedge carried it deep into a formation whose entire being was focused on its front. It pierced the unguarded flank like a knife blade entering a living body, plunging ever deeper. But it would not last. Inevitably, it must be slowed by the mass ahead until it was finally forced to a halt. Valerius didn’t hesitate.

  ‘Form square, three ranks,’ he roared.

  Never give an order you know won’t be obeyed, boy. Wise counsel from the camp prefect of Valerius’s first legion more than a decade earlier. So why was he giving an order he knew couldn’t be obeyed, at least not to the letter? Because a battle is like a living thing, a pulsating beast whose power surges and wanes, ebbs and flows, where strength can change to weakness, or victory to defeat, in a moment. It was like being at the heart of a nightmare. A thunderous, whirling vortex that blinded your eyes and battered your senses with howls of mortal agony, screams of terror, shouts for aid and cries for an unlikely mercy, all to the accompaniment of metal hammering on wood, metal clashing with metal and the butcher’s block thud of a bladed instrument meeting flesh. All around legionaries fought for their lives, snarling defiance as they wrestled shield to shield with the man in front of them. At the centre of the maelstrom, Valerius imagined the beast in his head, its jaws clamped on the cohort like a wolf tearing at a deer carcass. But the pressure from the wolf’s jaws was not uniform. The beast’s greatest weakness was in the hinge, at the point of the wedge, where the fewest enemy would be in contact. In contrast, the most dangerous threat came from the northern flank. Here, along the length of the wedge, the entire weight of the rear portion of the initial Vitellian attack would be attempting to claw their way forward. Instinct told him opportunity lay to the south, where the enemy centuries must be torn between carrying on the original attack and defending themselves against the shocking assault happening in their rear. This was where confusion would be greatest. By ordering square Valerius had gambled that he could force the southern jaw back, allowing the men of the three rear centuries of the wedge to take their places in the defensive formation that must stand – stand or die. Success depended on his officers’ ability to envisage the situation as he saw it, but he had faith that something like it was possible. Not a square, by any means; a ragged misshapen perimeter, but one that might be held. But for how long?

  Because already men were dying.

  Not many. Not yet. They were hard to kill because they fought from behind their big shields and their helmets and armour protected all but the eyes and throat, or a carelessly exposed armpit. But they were outnumbered. In the darkness, every man was faced by two, three and more battle-crazed faces, and those attackers were just as well armed and just as capable. If a legionary of the Fifth was brave enough to throw down his sword and tear a shield aside with his hands, he would open the way for his comrades. So Valerius’s men fell where they stood and their bodies lay to hinder the enemy. As the fighting raged around him, he attempted to judge where his precious reinforcements were needed most. Serpentius and Atilius stood at his side, the aquilifer bellowing encouragement to his tentmates, reminding them of their oath to the Emperor and to Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Pride swelled in Valerius’s chest. He knew these men would stand to the last, eagle or no eagle. His legion … Realization scored the inside of his skull like a knife point. Fool that he was to lose concentration in the middle of a battle. He alone hadn’t picked up a scutum. Before he had the chance to act on the thought something hammered into his chest and he was down, staring bewildered at the stars. Claw-like fingers took his wrist and hauled him to his feet. Serpentius shoved a shield at him and Valerius fixed it to the oak fist the Spaniard had personally carved. ‘Spears.’ The gladiator hefted his own scutum to protect Valerius’s head. He nodded to the still twitching figure of one of Atilius’s guards on the ground nearby, with the shaft of a pilum through his right eye. ‘I wondered when they’d get round to it.’

  No time to mourn. Valerius sensed a growing pressure on the centuries of the northern flank where they faced the full weight o
f the Vitellian attack. Should he reinforce it with every third man from the south? As his mind scrabbled for an answer a hoarse yell of triumph cut through the other sounds of battle like an executioner’s axe. From the corner of his eye he saw men thrown aside as a group of the enemy smashed their way into the square.

  ‘Hold your ranks and fill the gap,’ Valerius roared. ‘Serpentius.’

  The Spaniard threw his shield aside and in four strides was on the closest of the infiltrators. The man had been charged with guarding the backs of his comrades while they attacked the interior ranks of the already crumbling square. Serpentius ignored the darting gladius and in a single flowing movement slid into a forward roll that carried him beneath the enemy shield to bring his sword up into the other man’s groin.

  ‘Close the gap,’ Valerius screamed. ‘Close the gap.’ By now a stream of men were pouring into the square and he launched himself at them, praying that the eagle’s guards were still with him. One of the first attackers hesitated to find his bearings in the confusion. The momentary pause allowed Valerius to smash his shield into the legionary with all his weight behind it. Momentum forced the soldier back into the gap, but he recovered with incredible speed. Valerius reeled as the point of the infiltrator’s gladius flicked out to slice the flesh beside his eye. Blinded by the searing pain, he tried desperately to defend himself as his opponent hacked at his shield. Blow after blow smashed the scutum from his wooden fist, and only the thick leather of the cow-hide stock saved him from more serious injury. For a fatal instant, the one-handed Roman was defenceless, and his exultant adversary raised his sword for the killer blow. Valerius had all but resigned himself to death when something swooped out of the darkness to smash the man backwards, spitting teeth and spewing gore. An anonymous legionary stepped from the rear rank of the first century and dispatched the fallen man with a gladius thrust before wordlessly returning to his position. Blood spurted like liquid obsidian in the darkness.