Wounds of Honour: Empire I

by Anthony Riches

  ‘The Sixth.’

  Marcus nodded, watching their progress while Dubnus scanned the valley again, his gaze coming back to the woods that were piquing his suspicion without providing a basis for real concern. The legion ground across the valley at a fast pace, almost running now, centurions urging their men on with encouragement and imprecation, desperate to close the distance and get into line, knowing the vulnerability of a column in the face of a determined attack. The woods rippled their branches blamelessly in the breeze, catching his eye again, and as he stared at them the realisation hit him with a force that turned his legs to stone for a long second.

  ‘The trees.’

  Marcus looked over his shoulder, seeing only massed greenery.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look at the branches. They’re in the fucking branches!’

  He leapt to his feet and sprinted back up the path, leaving a bemused Marcus looking for something his chosen man had spotted, but he could not work out what it was. Then Cyclops whistled low behind him.

  ‘The branches, Two Knives, they’re not moving together. The bloody barbarians are in the trees!’

  ‘This is the point of decision, sir, these next two or three minutes.’

  The 4th Cohort’s First Spear wiped a hand across his sweat-beaded forehead, his legs pounding away on the soft grass to keep up the legion’s pace. Sollemnis nodded gravely, recognising the truth in the panted words. A legion in column in close country was a notoriously vulnerable situation. Varus had proved it at the Battle of the German Forest by advancing three legions into a massive and well-prepared ambush by German tribesmen, red-haired giants not unlike the present enemy, and had paid with his own life and eighteen thousand other men’s besides. Deployed into line, the legion could quickly reorient to meet any threat, could employ its disciplined fighting power against an enemy and exchange lives at a rate of three dead barbarians to one lost legionary. In column, with heavy cover to either side, a clever enemy could attack the legion’s rear no matter which way the marching men turned to fight. As long as Perennis was right, and they could reach the line of attack undetected, all would be well ...

  He turned back to look down the marching column. The 6th Cohort had cleared the valley side. The head of the column was now level with the wood to their left, and was swinging to take full advantage of the cover of the one to their right.

  ‘Five minutes, I’d say, then we’ll be out of the cover of that wood and start deploying.’

  He’d ordered that the column break out into two three-cohort-long lines four men deep, with the rearmost line ready to feed men into the grinder as barbarian axes and swords progressively ate into the front ranks.

  ‘Anyone from the front rank that survives the day will be awarded the assault medal. With ten thousand barbarians to hack through and a hill fort to storm, I’d say they’ll have earned it.’

  His senior centurion nodded agreement. The defeated barbarians were likely to fall back into their fort, and even with the bolt throwers set up on the flanks a few hundred yards back, spitting their foot-long bolts into the hill fort to discourage the barbarian archers, it was going to be an unpleasant day for the men going face to face with the warband.

  The column’s head was approaching the right-hand wood now, three minutes of vulnerability left, and then he’d take a victory that would stamp out this rebellion and put fear into the barbarians that would keep them quiet north of the Wall for another generation. Calgus, if he were taken alive, would be carried off in chains and paraded in front of the emperor before a staged execution. If not, his head would have to do. He knew of native scouts who understood the art of preserving a dead man’s head for years, and he would have Perennis take it to Commodus with the 6th’s Legion’s badge stamped on to the dead man’s forehead, cement his place in imperial favour and kill the rumours of disloyalty for good. He smiled to himself at the image. Perhaps he ought to have Perennis dealt with too ...

  From the ridge-line to the north of the advancing legion cohorts a trumpet note sounded, catching the attention of every man in the column, repeated itself, then sounded a third time, the note switching into the stand fast call and making his guts contract. It was the signal that he’d ordered Equitius to give if they were detected, or found an alerted enemy, but it was coming from the wrong place.

  With a sudden rattling hammer of iron against armour plate hundreds of arrows ripped into the legion’s ranks, dropping dozens of unprepared legionaries in writhing agony or sudden death. The column dithered for a moment, another rain of arrows striking home, and this time Sollemnis saw what he’d missed in the surprise of the first volley – that they were being fired from above head height, negating the defensive protection of the legionaries’ shields. A legionary near him spun and fell, an arrow lodged deep in his throat, another jerking and then toppling stiffly backwards to the ground with a feathered shaft protruding between the cheek-pieces of his helmet. The hissing passage of an arrow past his left ear warned that he was the archers’ target.

  ‘They’re in the trees!’

  At least one centurion had come to the same conclusion, and several centuries started to form testudos, shields held to side and overhead to frustrate the attacks, getting ready to charge into the trees and dig out the barbarian archers at close quarters. Then, as the situation started to stabilise after the first shock of attack, a thick wave of tribesmen bounded from the woods to either side of the stalled column with a berserk howl that lifted the hairs on the back of the legatus’s neck, pouring out of their cover in an apparently unending stream of rage to charge into the nearest cohorts. Swinging swords and axes with hate-fuelled ferocity, the barbarians smashed into the unformed line, in an instant exploding the legion’s carefully trained fighting tactic of shield wall and stabbing sword into thousands of individual duels. Sollemnis knew only too well that these were fights in which an infantryman armed with a short infantry-pattern sword was at a disadvantage faced with a weapon of twice the length.

  He regained his wits, drew his sword and bellowed above the din.

  ‘Defensive circles! Form defensive circles! The flank force will take them in the rear if we can defend long enough!’

  The 4th cohort’s senior centurion, his men suffering under the iron rain of barbarian arrows, but as yet not engaged, bellowed to his officers to follow the order, and Sollemnis walked into the protection of their shields with his bodyguard as the circle closed, looking across the battlefield to see two other cohorts fighting to achieve the same result under a press of barbarian attackers. The rest of the legion was already fighting in broken order, with little hope of regaining any meaningful formation before the battle’s end.

  Inside the circle a dozen wounded legionaries were being seen to by the cohort’s medical officer, most with arrows protruding from their throats and faces. The medic looked closely at a stricken chosen man, took gauge of the wound’s severity, shook his head decisively and moved on to the next casualty. The dying man, with an arrow’s shaft sticking out of his neck, and blood jetting from the wound, put a shuddering hand to his sword’s hilt, half drew the weapon, then stopped moving as the life ran out of him. Sollemnis wrenched his eyes from the scene, striding to the First Spear. The veteran soldier was calmly scanning the battle around them with a professional eye, looking for an advantage despite their desperate situation.

  ‘Situation?’

  ‘There’s more than ten thousand men out there, more like twenty. We’ve been had! Looks like the last three cohorts are already in pieces. Ourselves, the Fifth and Sixth managed to get into defensive formations, but once the others have been polished off they’ll make short enough work of us, or just stand off and let their archers pepper us until we’re too weak to resist. If the flanking force doesn’t get stuck in soon we’re all going to die ...’

  The legion’s eagle standard-bearer stood close, his own sword drawn, clearly determined to sell his own life in defence of the emperor’s eagle. An arrow clatte
red off his helmet, another hitting the standard’s eagle with a hollow thwock, making the man duck reflexively, his eyebrows raised at his legatus in mute comment. Sollemnis nodded grimly, then turned to stare up at the ridge-line where the alarm signal had sounded. A few figures stood silhouetted on the crest, apparently watching the battle below. The standard-bearer, a man of seniority in the legion and well known to the legatus, pushed his way to Sollemnis’s side, disdaining the stream of arrows directed at the eagle.

  ‘Why don’t they attack, sir? There’s another nine cohorts up there, and in good order.’

  The legatus shook his head in puzzlement, hearing the screams of his command’s dismemberment from all around.

  ‘I don’t know, but how Tigidius Perennis and his Asturians scouted this ground as safe for the approach is ...’

  A sudden insight gripped his guts hard, testing his sphincter with a sudden push that he barely managed to control. Perennis. Of course. The other warband had clearly never stayed in place as he’d been briefed, the brazen lie tempting him into a move whose audacity would clearly be judged as suicidal with the luxury of hindsight. He drew his sword and picked up a dead man’s shield, tugging down his ornate helmet to be sure the back of his neck was protected.

  ‘Very well, gentlemen, if we’re going to die today, let’s make sure we give these blue-faced bastards a decent fight to sing about. Wounds of honour, Sixth Legion. Wounds of honour!’

  Watching the slaughter below, Equitius shook his head with fascinated horror.

  ‘There must be something we can do.’

  Frontinius replied in tones dulled by resignation to the facts.

  ‘Yes, we can parade on the crest and in all likelihood the men down there will look up, laugh at us and get on with butchering the Sixth. Or we can advance down the slope into the battle and be dead inside ten minutes. You’re looking at a doomed legion, Prefect, something few men have seen and even fewer have lived to describe. The Sixth’s standard will be carried away into the northern mountains and become an object of wonder for the tribes, most likely with your friend Sollemnis’s head to accompany it. He made the decision to attack across that valley; he changed our role at the critical moment; now he’s paying for those mistakes the hard way ...’

  Equitius nodded unhappily.

  ‘I just don’t see how he could have got it so wrong. The man was a senior tribune in the war against the Marcomani, took command of a legion with a battlefield promotion when his legatus dropped dead in the middle of an action, and fought them brilliantly to rout twice his own strength of barbarians. It isn’t a mistake he ended up running Northern Command ... so how the bloody hell do we end up with this?’

  The 6th’s remaining three cohorts were creeping together, now under attack by thousands of barbarians and seeking to combine their strengths. A horn sounded, and the attackers drew back from combat, leaving the field clear for their archers to pour arrows into the compressed masses of legionaries. After a dozen volleys from the archers the horn sounded twice more, and the Britons charged in again, swords and axes glinting brightly in the morning sun as they went about their destructive work. Even at that distance the smell of blood and faeces was now reaching the watching soldiers, as the scale of the slaughter mounted. Equitius heard the sound of approaching hoofs, and turned to see Perennis and his escort approaching again. The tribune reined his horse in and took in the view from the valley’s edge for a moment before speaking.

  ‘Well, well. It would seem that our legatus has got himself into a bit of a pickle.’

  Equitius stared up at him with narrowed eyes, seeing the sardonic smile playing about his face.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be worrying about bringing up the reinforcements, Tribune?’

  The other man sat back in his saddle, sharing an amused glance with the decurion.

  ‘It might have made a difference when the barbarians first attacked, a few thousand armed men piling down into the battle from up here, but not now, thank you, Prefect Equitius. Those six cohorts are all but finished, and I don’t think that tossing another nine after them would be a particularly positive step, do you? At least this way I still have most of a legion’s strength to command until the reinforcements arrive from Gaul.’

  ‘You? A junior tribune? An equestrian in command of a legion?’

  ‘Oh yes, didn’t I mention my imperial warrant?’

  He reached into a pocket and pulled out a scroll, tossing it down to Equitius. The prefect read it, taking in the imperial seal and the wide range of power it bestowed upon Perennis.

  ‘I particularly like the sentence that says I should take command of the Sixth Legion should Legatus Sollemnis be found incapable of his task. I’d say he’ll reach a state of incapability some time quite soon, so while I may not be of senatorial class, I will be exercising the power granted to me by the Emperor . . .’

  Frontinius leaned over to Marcus, muttering quietly into his ear.

  ‘Get yourself back over to the cohort. Be ready to bring your century over here in a hurry.’

  ‘... And so, from this moment I’m assuming command. I’ll incorporate the auxiliary cohorts into my legion to bolster our strength, but not your cohort, Prefect. You and your people have a special place in my plans. Stay where you are, Marcus Valerius Aquila, no trying to creep away when you think nobody’s looking!’

  Marcus stopped, turning slowly to look up at Perennis.

  ‘Yes, I’ve known that you took refuge with these half-savages and their disloyal prefect for a while now. Your supply officer was very forthcoming one night in the camp at Cauldron Pool, when the decurion here applied the tip of a dagger to his throat. Did you really think that you could hide with these bumpkins for ever? All that you’ve done is bring your own disaster down on this entire cohort. Just as Legatus Sollemnis has paid the ultimate price for his treacherous attempt to hide you, so will this collection of semi-barbarian traitors!’

  Dubnus put a hand behind his back, and muttered the word ‘axe’ quietly over his shoulder to Cyclops. The weapon slid from its place in the small of his back, the handle slapping unnoticed on to his palm, its comfortingly familiar wood rubbed smooth by years of handling. Perennis nodded to the stone-faced decurion, who jumped down from his horse and drew his sword. The other cavalrymen watched intently, arrows nocked to their bows, ignoring the single tent party of men standing in a huddle to their left. Perennis leant out of his saddle, pointing towards the wood that Marcus and his men had recently scouted.

  ‘And now, gentlemen, your orders. The First Tungrians will establish a defensive position on the slope below that wood, and prevent the barbarians from breaking out of the valley by that route for as long as possible. There is to be no retreat from the position, which must be held at all costs and to the last man. You, First Spear, will command the cohort, since I am now declaring a sentence of death on your prefect for his treachery in harbouring an enemy of the emperor and the state. I could be more thorough in my punishment, but the rest of you will obviously be dead soon enough.’

  Equitius scowled up at Perennis, full realisation of the true nature of the last hour’s events striking him.

  ‘You’ve just thrown six legion cohorts into a barbarian trap to get rid of one man that was in your way? And now you’ll casually toss away eight hundred more spears because one innocent victim of Rome’s descent into despotism takes shelter among them?’

  Perennis smiled broadly.

  ‘Your friend Sollemnis is reaping the crop he’s sown, and so will you all, soon enough. The rest is detail. We’ll go on the defensive for a while, Rome will send in a legion or two from Gaul, the Sixth will be reinforced back to full strength, and all will be as it should be. Besides, you’ve got more pressing matters to worry about. Decurion, execute the prefect.’

  Frontinius half drew his sword, stopping as half a dozen drawn bows swung in his direction. Equitius put his hands on his hips, and straightened his back in readiness. The decurion took a step forward,
raising his long cavalry sword for the executioner’s blow before his eyes widened with shock as Dubnus’s throwing axe smashed into his back. The heavy axe blade’s weight punched through his armour, chopping through his spine and into the organs clustered behind it. A gout of blood spilled from his open mouth in a scarlet flood as he sank forward on to his knees, his hands helplessly seeking the source of the sudden rush of enervating pain. Before any of the cavalrymen could react, Dubnus was among them, his sword flashing as he struck at one and then another. Marcus and Frontinius drew their swords and charged in alongside him.

  One of the horsemen loosed an arrow at Frontinius, the missile’s iron head flicking off his helmet just as Marcus hacked at the man’s leg with a fierce downward cut, his sword severing the limb just above the knee and chopping into the horse’s ribs with the force of the blow. The animal reared up, tossing the crippled cavalryman from his horned saddle, then kicked out hard with its back legs in protest at the pain, catapulting another Asturian from his mount with his chest caved in.

  Marcus was knocked to one side as Cyclops jumped in front of him, raising his shield to block an arrow from a horseman the young centurion had failed to notice in the melee. At less than twenty paces’ range the missile punched through his shield’s layered wood and leather, the iron head transfixing his shield arm and drawing an agonised grimace from the one-eyed soldier. Pivoting on his left leg with a swelling bellow of rage, Cyclops slung his spear with deadly accuracy into the horseman’s chest as he reached back for another arrow. The throw’s huge power punched through a weak point in the cavalryman’s mail shirt, scattering a handful of broken rings from the point of impact and thrusting the spear’s steel point deep into the horseman’s lungs. Eyes rolling upwards, he fell backwards over the side of his horse and vanished under the hoofs of the horses surrounding him. Cyclops pointed to his one good eye, shouting over the fight’s swelling volume.