The enemy bank sloped up with a reasonable gradient that would not trouble a marching legion, but the south bank, upon which the tribunes’ men waited, was steep and high; a climb that would put strain on men’s calves. Those natives who’d crossed either fell foul of the water’s temperature and current and were washed downstream where they struggled back to their own side in chagrin, or they reached the imperial lines cold and tired, only to face a shield wall at an advantageous height. The spears that jabbed out from the shields soon took care of such advances.
An hour. Bellacon dreaded to think of the damage they’d suffered, and would not even estimate the numbers of fallen until it was all over and he had a cup of good strong wine in his hand. Or flies buzzing around his cold, twisted remains, of course.
But now, finally, something was happening and Cantex was almost jumping up and down in excitement back up the slope, pointing across the river. Bellacon, standing and taking his counter in the lottery of death with the legion, craned to see over the man in front, risking an arrow in the eye or one of the huge artillery bolts straight to the face.
Whatever was happening did not seem to have come to the attention of the men on the far bank yet, as they continued to howl and chant, and the arrows still came, though increasingly sporadic.
He blinked in surprise at the realisation: the artillery bolts had stopped coming.
Risking more puncture wounds from the enemy archers, he struggled higher for a better view and when he managed, a grin spread across his face. Horsemen were racing about on the hillside opposite behind the enemy lines, swooping in from either flank like the slashes of a curved Pelasian sword, raking across the enemy’s rear lines again and again. And then, even as he suppressed the urge to cheer like a youth at the races, he saw what else Convocus had achieved.
The bolt throwers started to loose into the enemy’s own packed ranks. Though he couldn’t spot the individual shots with any clarity, Bellacon could easily see the effects as swathes of the enemy fell or were thrown forward into their own ranks.
A ripple washed through the enemy as news of this dire threat filtered right down to the front.
‘He’s going to be in trouble any time now,’ he muttered under his breath, and then turned and began to push his way through the ranks of men, up the slope towards Cantex’s position, though he could no longer see exactly where his friend was.
By the time he reached the rear ranks, where the archers were still about their work, actually laughing and joking with one another as they released shaft after shaft, Cantex was just returning from somewhere, his face flush with exertion.
‘We have to help Convocus.’
‘I know,’ Cantex replied.
‘Across the river. We need to get over there and help him somehow.’
‘I know,’ repeated his friend. ‘Give the order to separate to flanks.’
‘What?’
‘Just do it, Bellacon.’
Frowning, wishing his friends would on occasion at least tell him what they were planning, Bellacon jogged a score of paces back down the slope, found the chief signaller of the Raven Legion standing beneath a flag, and relayed the order.
The man’s curved military horn blared out the sequence, a staccato lilt of rising and falling notes and, despite the undoubted surprise at the order that would have rippled through the ranks, in moments the legions parted and reformed, shuffling to the sides, leaving the signaller at the centre of a rapidly opening gap between the forces.
Not wishing to become a clear target for the enemy archers, the signaller, his job done, gathered up the flag-bearer and his men and hurtled back up the slope.
‘Care to explain?’ Bellacon said through heaving breaths as he once more trudged up the slope to his friend.
‘To cross, we’ll need a bridge,’ Cantex replied with cryptic smugness.
‘Will you stop playing, Cantex?’
‘Let there be flotsam,’ grinned the tribune, sweeping his arm up to the slope behind him. Bellacon peered past him, his eyes widening as he saw the teamsters at work. The non-combatants had been far back across the camp near the corral with their wagons – the precious few that had come north at speed with the army rather than the hundreds of vehicles still approaching from the south. Even as he watched, Bellacon realised what his friend had planned.
‘Are you quite mad?’
The teamsters, having got their first cart out of the fort and onto the slope, gave it a hefty push and then stepped aside as the next vehicle came rumbling over the crest behind them. Bellacon turned to Cantex, but his friend was grinning with that glazed, slightly manic look the man got when he committed to something of which he had no idea of the probability of success. Bellacon turned his disbelieving gaze back to the wagon, reflecting momentarily that Convocus might not be the only one who didn’t like to gamble.
The cart rolled down the hill, its front axle’s pivot pin jammed in place to stop it slewing to one side and ploughing into the ranks of imperial soldiers who had formed a runway for it. Against all Bellacon’s expectations, the vehicle reached the river’s edge directly on-target and plunged over into the torrent, where it fell among the wreckage of the bridge and broke into three pieces, settling into the rubble, the shattered fragments that fell off drifting downstream on the current.
Bellacon turned, trying to decide what synonym for ‘dangerously unbalanced idiot’ to use for his friend, but had to step back instead as a wagon whose pivot pin had become unsecured skewed towards him, then back, then turned fully side-on to the river and tipped on to its side. Miraculously, the momentum and the slope combined to carry the vehicle on, rolling over and over across the grassy bank, leaving a trail of fragments until it dropped over the bank and into the river, almost wiping out a unit of wide eyed soldiers in the process.
‘You are a dangerously unbalanced idiot,’ Bellacon shouted at his grinning friend, unable to think straight enough to locate a synonym.
‘Nothing ventured,’ Cantex chuckled, ‘nothing gained.’
The next wagon plunged straight on, though each time it hit a small piece of wreckage from its predecessor and bucked, Bellacon felt his heart lurch with it. The tribunes, and indeed the soldiers to either side, watched with nervous anticipation as the next three wagons hurtled down the slope, and then Cantex held up a hand to stop the following one.
Bellacon’s gaze slipped down to the river. There was…
He might charitably call it a causeway. Or at least a dam that was raising the water level upstream and forming high-speed torrents and waterfalls in any gaps along the length of rubble and timber. Naturally the nearer side was more solid and wider, while the far side, where only one exploded cart had added to the blockage, looked considerably less stable.
‘That?’ said Bellacon to his friend without looking at him. His eyes instead rose from the ridiculous makeshift crossing up to the far bank and raised a lump in his throat.
Convocus was in trouble.
His cavalry were gradually pulling back up the slope, already beyond the abandoned artillery, still carrying out their scything attacks, though with an ever-increasing casualty rate. The tribune was about to run out of space.
Either he would flee the field and any advantage he’d won would be lost, or he’d continue to fight until the cavalry were pinned against the treeline and obliterated. And worst of all, the enemy was formed of that particular brand of native who was driven by instinct and emotional urges rather than commands and discipline.
Rather than sensibly keeping a force at the river side facing the enemy, the vast majority of the warriors had turned and were now running back up the slope, howling their blood lust as they sought to kill those horsemen who had outmanoeuvred them. In fact, little more than three or four hundred men remained near the river, and Bellacon could see two of their nobles yelling and gesturing angrily, incensed at being abandoned by the bulk of the army.
‘The gods are with us, Bellacon. Care to give the order?’
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‘I’d rather this whole insane idea remained your responsibility, frankly,’ Bellacon huffed.
Cantex grinned in reply and waved at the musician. ‘Give the order to advance and engage.’
The sequence of notes blared and Bellacon watched with fascination. In ordinary circumstances, no sane soldier would leap at the chance to clamber down a steep bank in full kit and negotiate a dangerous, unstable dam of fallen stone and broken timber, only to face a howling, bloodthirsty enemy. But these were not ordinary circumstances.
For half a morning the enemy had been pounding the imperial force with artillery, and for the past hour had been shooting holes in them with iron-tipped bolts while the soldiers simply stood in formation and took it. The tension and anger in the men had been building through that time and now, with their comrades in mortal danger at the far end of the battlefield, the dam of human rage broke.
The legions poured across the river. In fact, such was the violent need to vent themselves upon the enemy that the captains were having some difficulty in maintaining order among their men.
Soldiers jumped down the slope with wild abandon, like an echo of the undisciplined and battle-crazed natives awaiting them. Others ran down the slope without care for the danger. They crossed the rubble and timber dam at a pace that begged broken and sprained ankles. Some men fell, plunging into the deeper upstream water or down into the shallows below the dam. Others collapsed and had to haul themselves back up amid their charging comrades.
Soldiers took the chances with the shallows and found them now to be crossable thanks to the dam, though the going was slow due to the sucking mud of the river bed under the newly-shallow flow.
‘Is that not a joy to watch?’ grinned Cantex.
‘All this does is make me worry about the men, that they might just be as crazed as you.’
A delicate figure appeared at the top of the slope, and Bellacon, heart fluttering with nerves, gestured to Lissa. ‘Come down here. If they get those catapults working again you’re in their range.’
But the enemy wouldn’t manage that. They were in chaos. As Bellacon turned and looked across the river again, he recognised that the turning point of the battle had passed with his friend’s ridiculous plan.
The legions were still crossing the river, but the lead elements had already overcome the few natives and archers who had remained to face them. The bulk of the enemy, who had been racing up the slope to take on Convocus and his cavalry, reacted to the desperate shouts of their fellows and turned to see the might of the empire crossing the river in force. They spun once more, charging back down the slope.
The fight had all but gone out of them. Instead of a gleeful, blood-crazed charge, this bore the marks of a desperate attempt to stem the enemy tide. As the weight of men pressing on Convocus gradually cleared, so the cavalry set to their work once more, swooping in from the sides and carving slices from the rear of the native force, who simply no longer knew which direction to turn or to attack. The initial fight across the river had been quick and brutal, but as soon as the imperial forces once more controlled the ground, they began to reform into units with order and strength.
The running natives met not the individual flood of men who had crossed the river, but a conventional and controlled legion, who chanted as they stomped forward in unison. The two sides crashed into each other some fifty paces from the river and the natives, who had clearly hoped in their desperation to hit the legions hard and drive them back into the water, now realised that would not be possible. Instead of pushing the imperial force back, they met an immovable wall of shields and steel, the army’s determination bolstered by their new success and the hours of enduring an enemy barrage.
The legions simply butchered their way through the native rabble, slowly advancing up the hill as more and more soldiers fell into their units behind and added to their weight.
‘That was as unlikely to succeed as our first arrival,’ Bellacon said quietly.
‘The access to the far bank was just as difficult,’ admitted Cantex, ‘but when we first got here and were crossing the bridge, the enemy were prepared and controlled the field. This time we had the advantage thanks to Convocus. Their attention was divided. They took their eyes off the river and that was their undoing.’
‘It could still have very easily gone wrong and seen the end of the entire army.’
‘But it didn’t,’ Cantex chuckled. ‘And now we’re winning.’
Across the river the battle was all-but over. The enemy, torn between the two forces and falling foul of growing panic, were breaking. Large groups of warriors were taking advantage of any gap and fleeing for the woods where they would be relatively safe, since the cavalry could not follow them and any infantry that did would have to lose their unit formation among the trees.
‘What if they re-form in the woods? Will they come back? They’ll still be a sizeable force.’
Lissa shook her head. ‘These are Oscui or the like. Warriors from the northern isles, where the sun sets annually rather than daily. They have no real interest here. They have come as part of some bargain, clearly, but they will go now, back to their round stone huts amid the sea-grass and high rocks. The bargain has become unpalatable for them. In the history of our island, when these tribes come south for war, they only fight until they are no longer winning or they have stolen enough to make it worthwhile. Then they will go.’
‘Thus speaks a native,’ Cantex said, smiling.
‘Nothing now stands between you and Steinvic,’ Lissa said, quietly.
‘We cannot know that,’ Bellacon replied. ‘If one army has been raised against us here, then there is every chance these Albantes or the good senator back in Velutio have more surprises up their sleeves.’
‘The way is clear,’ Lissa repeated with an air of quiet confidence.
Cantex looked at Bellacon with a question in his eyes. The commander of the Vulture Legion sagged. ‘Very well. But we wait here for two days before we move on. It will give the legions a chance to rest and recover, and with luck the wagon trains will arrive and we will be well provisioned once more. We have artillery now, even if our own are far behind. But we abandon this camp and move to the north bank. I have no intention of being trapped here again.’
‘Agreed.’ Cantex nodded. ‘Plus the fleeing survivors passing through the lands to the north might spread nervousness and uncertainty ahead of us. News of our approach will reach this Steinvic anyway – nothing we can do will stop that – but at least this way their confidence might take a knock.’
‘Two days, then,’ Bellacon concluded. ‘Then on to Steinvic.’
Part Five
Fortress at the edge of the world
Strange are the ways and turnings life takes. As a girl I had not thought beyond the confines of my village. Then, when I learned that I had sight beyond sight, and my people elevated me from my place among the animal pens, I learned of the world of my people, the Silvanes. I travelled to our tribe’s great market town, and there I learned of the island the empire calls Alba, and of the Silvanes’ relatively small place within it. I, a simple farmer’s daughter, now knew of tribes as far as the northern snow-capped peaks.
And I knew of the Albantes and their hegemony. And I knew that one day the Albantes would threaten the other tribes if things played out as they were. But I had a dream, and I knew it to be a warning, or perhaps instructions. Perhaps both. Then I was taken by Volentius, saw the empire in all its glory, and what it could offer my people if they only accepted it, and I understood my dream. And finally, after so long, as a grown woman and nearing my fortieth year, I was in the north, staring at the great fortress-city of the Albantes with the leaders of an invading force, knowing that this was the place where the future of my world would be decided.
And I knew how it would end, if not how we would get there. Impressive, for a simple farm-girl from a village without a name.
Chapter 22
The three tribunes were silent,
and had been for some time. Occasionally one of them would expel a hissing breath between their teeth, or mutter something unintelligible under their breath, but other than that there had been a long silence. Light footsteps attracted their attention and they turned in unison to see Lissa approaching.
A few short days of company had changed all their attitudes towards the strange Silvane seer woman. Bellacon gazed with an odd fondness at the striking woman, Cantex with a twinkle of humour, and Convocus with the understanding and acceptance of a peer. They turned back to Steinvic as she made the fourth figure in their contemplative line.
The view from here was impressive. The hills in this area were low and rolling, the land largely flat, like a blanket that has been ruffled in places by the shuffling of a pet. But from this particular hill the officers had a more than adequate view of their destination.
All around them, the army was flooding onto the flattest area and setting up camp, the newly-arrived supply wagons beginning to put in an appearance at the rear. They would camp here, at least for tonight, a mile or so from Steinvic, where they would be safe from surprise sallies and their view was unparalleled. It was a reasonable defensive position.
‘You are contemplating the defences?’ Lissa asked.
The three men nodded.
‘I had not been prepared for the scale,’ Cantex said. ‘I’ve seen tribal capitals before. Some are big, some small, some have high walls or are on mountain tops and the like. But I’ve never seen a place this large outside the empire’s planned cities.’
‘This is a city,’ Convocus said quietly. ‘It’s no fortress, though it looks to be adequately defended. How big would you say it is?’
‘Got to be a mile and a half in each direction, I’d say,’ Bellacon estimated. ‘A wall circuit of, what, four and a half or five miles?’
‘And smoke rising from many hundreds of home-fires, mostly clustered in the western area. The only advantage I can see is that the walls aren’t too high. Siege doesn’t look like too bad a proposition.’
Invasion (Tales of the Empire Book 5) Page 25
