He looked over Varus’s shoulder at the units still fighting on in the battlefield’s centre, nodding slowly with respect for the fact that neither had stepped back from their increasingly bloody struggle, as more and more dead and wounded men fell into the deeply churned mud beneath their feet, their spurting blood spraying the men still fighting, making them look more like abattoir slaughter men than soldiers.
‘You wanted to look at those praetorians down the length of your sword, Prefect? Now’s your chance, while they’re locked in battle with “Alexander the Great’s Phalanx”.’
Varus turned to follow his pointing hand, a slow smile spreading across his face as he realised that the enemy he despised was at his mercy. The imperial bodyguard were still fighting doggedly, their once white tunics now soiled with the battlefield’s fouled mud and the blood of friend and foe alike, barely resisting the onslaught of the First Italica’s stalwart legionaries who, recruited by Nero only a few years before for a campaign in the east that had never come to fruition and with no man less than six feet tall being accepted to their ranks, both outnumbered and out-muscled them.
‘They’re fighting for their very lives, because they know that if we break them they’re unlikely to be shown very much by way of mercy, the faithless, murdering scum.’
Scar pointed at them with his sword.
‘So shall we go and show them the way to Hades’ kingdom?’
Reforming under the lash of their centurions’ and chosen men’s tongues, boots and vine sticks, the Batavi had rejoined their formation for the most part, other than those men who had charged off in blood-crazed pursuit of the fleeing marines, and Scar stalked out in front of them to make one swift challenge.
‘This time we win the battle! Are you with me?’
The answer was instant, a grumbling growl of readiness as men set themselves to charge into the enemy, and Varus raised his voice in command as he stepped out alongside the Batavi prefect.
‘See the praetorians before us! The First Italica have them pinned! We will assault their flank and rear! Attack only men wearing white, and show no mercy! Revenge for a murdered emperor! Revenge for the lost pride of the German Bodyguard! Revenge!’
‘Revenge!’
The Batavi surged forward, eager to take their iron to the hated praetorians, and Scar saw those men who stood at the rear of the guard’s blood-soaked line glancing nervously at his cohorts as they advanced implacably across the two hundred pace gap between the spot where they had routed the Classica and the soldiers struggling over the point of the battle’s decision.
‘Batavi! Swim the seas …’
The soldiers to either side of Scar took up the song in a heartbeat, their voices swelling in a challenge that had both praetorians and legionaries staring at them as they strode across the battlefield’s churned and fouled earth, their pace unaffected by the obstacles presented by dead and dying men other than the occasional stutter as a warrior broke step for a moment to deliver a swift mercy stroke.
‘Batavi! Swim the seas!
Worship mighty Hercules!
Swords and spears!
Take their ears!
Never showing mercy!’
The praetorians on the left-hand side of their line were starting to edge away, every man already exhausted from two or three spells fighting for their lives against the Italica’s giants with only their justified fear of the treatment that would be meted out to them in the event that they were to break and run to stop them from running, but as the oncoming Germans’ song swelled to a full-throated roar it was clear they were at the limits of their desperate courage.
‘Batavi, break your shield!
Kill you even if you yield!
Slash and hack!
Stab your back!
Never showing mercy!’
They were close enough to see the individual expressions on the faces of both sides in the grim struggle now, the Italica’s men shouting and beckoning their allies on, the praetorians now positively flinching from their remorseless advance, a few of quicker-witted men trying to pull their line back to the left to fend off the oncoming threat.
‘Batavi, German spears!
Best and bravest many years!
Nail your balls!
To our walls!
Never showing mercy!’
Scar raised his arm, bellowing to be heard over the tumult.
‘Batavi! Halt!’
With twenty paces separating them from the cringing praetorian line, the command halted his advancing warriors in an instant. A hush fell across the battlefield, broken only by the weeping cries of the wounded and imprecations from the Italica’s men, as they implored the Batavi to attack.
‘Give them the last verse!’
The cohorts stared across the short space between themselves and the guardsmen in silence for a moment, and then a single voice roared out a new verse to the tribe’s battle hymn, written with just such a moment in mind.
‘Batavi, Bodyguard royal …’
Thousands of voices rang out, spitting out the words that summed up their outrage.
‘Batavi, Bodyguard royal!
To all seven emperors loyal!
Guard disbanded!
Emperor murdered!
Never show you mercy!’
Scar drew breath to bark out one last command as his men roared out the embittered last line, ready to shout the one order that he knew his men expected above all others, given their opponents.
‘Batavi … No! Prisoners!’
Even as the cohorts lunged forward at the praetorians, the guardsmen were already in motion, running for their lives, recognising the Germans’ deadly intent and fleeing to the last man, not one guardsman or officer willing to test the limits of what the incensed warriors might inflict upon any man who fell into their clutches.
‘Typical. Not even enough class to accept their defeat and die like men.’
Scar nodded at Varus’s bitter complaint.
‘There’ll be plenty of time for you to savour your revenge on them. Who knows, perhaps the emperor will make you their prefect, since you’re so set on purging them?’
The prefect laughed at the thought, and made to reply, but their moment of humour was interrupted by the interjection of a man in the pristine armour and almost spotless boots of a legatus, his sword still sheathed as he picked his way through the blood-filled ruts that had been dug into the soft soil by thousands of feet.
‘I see you arrived just in time to scare off the remnants of the usurper’s army with your barbarian horde, Alfenus Varus?’
Varus stared at him blankly for a moment before wiping his sword blade on a dead praetorian’s tunic, staining the off-white cloth scarlet, and sheathing it.
‘Greetings Legatus.’
The newcomer looked around himself at the scene of devastation for a moment before speaking again, his voice bitter with disappointment.
‘It seems to me, Varus, as if we’ve won the empire for Vitellius this day, with you and your Germans playing a pivotal part there at the end. Doubtless you’ll be suitably rewarded.’ He looked down at his blood-spotted boots. ‘Whereas any legatus who manages to lose his legion’s eagle can only expect the censure of his peers and superiors.’
‘In which case, Legatus, it’s a good thing that my command is so strong in mounted troops. They’re combing the battlefield as we speak, with a generous reward offered to the man who presents himself to me with that lost symbol of your legion’s imperial pride. And I saw the whole thing, how your leading cohorts insisted on driving into the enemy despite being ordered to pull back into line. You would seem to have been the victim of your legion’s legendary eagerness for blood, a weakness with which I am only too well acquainted given my command of an equally bloodthirsty collection of savages. Isn’t that right, Prefect Germanicus?’
‘Quite so, Prefect! Bloodthirsty and almost impossible to control, once the enemy is unwise enough to turn their backs and run!’
The Twenty-First legion’s commander stared at him for a moment, then nodded briskly.
‘Indeed. I will of course be grateful for the return of the eagle, should your horsemen come up with it from that fleeing rabble.’
‘And you’ll pay the reward I’ve offered, I presume?’
‘Whatever it is, send the man in question to me and I’ll see him paid with a smile. There’ll be a triumph when we reach Rome, and for the Twenty-First’s eagle not to be carried through the city alongside those of her sisters would mark the end of my career, of that much I can be certain. Possibly even the end of the Twenty-First as well.’
He nodded and turned away, leaving Varus staring after him with a small smile. After a moment he looked round at Scar, whose face was still commendably straight.
‘Well done, Prefect Germanicus. His career might be hanging on the latrine edge, but there was no need for him to have the slightest motivation to take you with him. And yes, before you ask, I do consider myself to be a politician. Who knows, perhaps I will end up commanding those faithless Praetorian scum. I might even ask the emperor for the opportunity to perform that purge you were speaking of.’
He stared after the fleeing guardsmen, nodding approvingly as the Batavi chased them away from the battlefield’s ruined ground with whoops and shouts of savage glee as the slower runners were hunted down and finished off without mercy.
‘If, that is, there any of them left to command after this rout. Oh, and I’d very much like to meet the soldier who took down that unfeasibly large marine with the axe, if he survives the day.’
Scar nodded, hooking a thumb at Alcaeus who was walking the battlefield with his sword drawn, delivering the mercy stroke to those wounded men who looked unlikely to survive.
‘My wolf priest’s new boy? I expect he’ll have come through it unscathed. After all, heroes tend not to die quite so early in their ascent to greatness. Not until the weight of their fame becomes too heavy for them to bear.’
8
Castra Augusta Taurinorum, May AD 69
‘We’ve only been here four days and I’m already sick to my back teeth of the fucking place!’
Grimmaz’s tent mates nodded disconsolately at the truth in his growled opinion. While he was known to be one of the century’s least cheerful individuals, when not distracted by the usual soldiers’ pursuits that their centurion habitually referred to as ‘feeding, fighting and fucking, and not necessarily in that order’, the truth of his statement was indisputable, given the way in which the initial euphoria at their victory at Cremona had swiftly been followed by a post-battle hangover more severe by far than any of the Batavi had ever suffered after combat in Britannia. While the two armies’ senior officers mused on the usual corrosive effects of Romans fighting Romans, with several rumoured cases of sons having killed fathers and men finding themselves face-to-face with their brothers at swordpoint, the concerns of the common soldiery, especially men who deemed themselves to be something other than Roman, were somewhat more basic.
‘It wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t have the “Fighting Fucking Fourteenth” sharing the town with us. Miserable cunts.’
More nodding greeted Grimmaz’s gloomy statement. The six remaining Othonian legions, more than strong enough to have fought an attritional war across Northern Italy for months, and certain to have gained in strength as they moved to combine while the German legions would only have become weaker as the result of poor supply and unfamiliar diseases, had been ordered to surrender by their imperial master as a prelude to a needless suicide which, from the victors’ perspective, only went to show how unsuitable he’d been for the role of emperor in the first place but which also, inevitably, provided his former followers with an excuse for their abrupt change of fortunes. His defeated legions had swiftly been ordered to disperse across the empire in order to nullify their remaining threat, with the sole exception of the Fourteenth, for decades the Batavis’ parent legion, a relationship that had already been deeply riven even before the two had found themselves on opposite sides of the battle lines. Still truculent in the extreme in their reluctance to accept defeat, the legion had been deemed as insufficiently trustworthy to be sent away unsupervised, and had instead been posted to the fortress town of Taurinorum where a weather eye could be kept on its behaviour by a loyal unit of equivalent strength. The choice of the Batavi cohorts to provide that counterbalancing presence had been judged as inept by even the mildest opinions, and in the view of many men on both sides could only have resulted from a deliberately cruel sense of humour, the presence of so many battle-hardened and mutually inimical soldiers seemingly the perfect recipe for trouble. Attempts by the legionaries to convince the Batavi that Cremona would have been an entirely different battle had they reached the scene of the fighting in time to participate in legion strength, rather than the small advance party that had marched ahead of the main force, had already led in brief succession to mocking, vicious abuse of each other’s perceived failings and then outright physical hostility. Now both Batavi and legionaries, under strict instructions to avoid any further conflict, walked the town’s streets in search of entertainment with a variety of concealed weapons hidden about them just in case there was any repeat of a fight the previous day, a spontaneous brawl between two centuries of men who had found themselves occupying the same tavern and seen no good reason not to violently dispute its ownership, the legionaries driven to fight by wounded pride, their former allies by something far darker.
At length Wigbrand spoke, his voice more wistful than angry, and if any of the men around the table felt inclined to mock either his sentiment or the soft, almost feminine voice in which he expressed it, the fact that he was a head taller and half a chest wider than the biggest of them was a powerful deterrent to any mirth at his expense.
‘I wouldn’t mind it so much if there were women to talk to. Not necessarily whores, just some girls to joke with, you know.’
Grimmaz looked at his mate.
‘You’re getting soft, you daft cunt. Women are for fucking, Tiny, not for talking to.’
The big man looked across the table at him and shook his head slowly.
‘How many men did you kill at Bedriacum?’
The soldier shrugged.
‘Four? Five? Might have been half a dozen. I wasn’t counting.’
‘I killed three. And I can tell you how each of them died. I can tell you where I speared the first one, and the noise he made when the blade went through a gap in his armour. And the look on his face. I still remember how I cut the second one down with my gladius, after Achilles had tripped him and put him on his knees with his neck open for the blow. I can still see the colour of his spine. And the third …’
The man around him went quiet, knowing that he’d been having nightmares about the third man he’d killed ever since the battle, waking screaming among them every night and having to be calmed by the men to either side before they could resume their sleep, the curses of the tents to either side ringing in their ears.
‘We know, the third was nothing more than a boy, and he begged you for mercy even as you were cutting his throat.’
Silence reigned for a moment before the big man spoke again.
‘I miss my mother and my sisters. All I want a woman for is to talk to.’
‘Just as well, since I doubt you could get it up anyway.’
Grimmaz’s muttered comment was supposed to be sotto voce, but a momentary lull in the din from the tables around them allowed it to reach every man at the table, most of whom looked uneasily at the giant, whose big fist had tightened on the half-loaf in his hand until crushed bread oozed from between his knuckles. He started to his feet, only to find his rise obstructed by a powerful pair of hands on his shoulders.
‘I don’t know who said what, and I don’t give a fuck. Sit down, drink your wine, eat your bread and all just concentrate on being friends, right?’
Wigbrand turned in his chair to find Alcaeus standing behind him. The
centurion was dressed in his walking-out tunic with its ornately decorated and distinctly non-standard wide leather belt from which were suspended purse and dagger, while his vine stick was tucked between leather and tunic to free both hands for whatever it was he had in mind.
‘Just as well I turned up, isn’t it?’
He waited, looking pointedly at Grimmaz until the soldier muttered the expected response.
‘Yes, Centurion.’
Alcaeus nodded his head at the abashed soldier in an exaggerated manner.
‘Yes, Centurion, it is a fucking good thing you turned up and avoided me getting my face punched in. Isn’t that what you meant to say, Happy? I am a clever centurion, knowing that with Banon on duty there’d be no-one to stop you from opening your big mouth and digging a hole with it, aren’t I?’
‘Yes, Centurion.’
‘Perhaps you could take some notice of one of your men? Young Achilles here …’ He gestured to Egilhard, who reddened at the unexpected attention. ‘He doesn’t seem to be bothered by anything much, does he?’
The younger man sank into his seat slightly, embarrassed not simply by being called out as an example by his centurion but by the glaring fact of his new nickname’s swift replacement by the one his father had so carefully warned him not to court. Saving Lanzo from certain death had quickly earned him a reputation among the men of the Second Century, but the defeat of the axe-wielding legionary had made his name known among the Batavi cohorts overnight and suddenly the young man found soldiers twice his age favouring him with respectful nods, many of whom were unknown to him but who seemed as certain in their recognition of his battlefield exploits as his own tent mates, and none of whom seemed to harbour even the smallest hint of jealousy. Indeed they seemed to revel in his new-found fame, happily pointing out to all and sundry the deep notch cut into the boss of his shield by the legionary’s axe at Cremona, marvelling that he had managed to stop such a powerful blow without any broken bones in his hand, the cloven iron one piece of equipment damage that Alcaeus flatly refused to see repaired, calling it a token of Hercules’ favour too strong to be tossed needlessly away.
Betrayal: The Centurions I Page 27
