Wounds of Honour: Empire I

by Anthony Riches

  ‘No help to be expected from that direction. Bloody cavalry are all the same, good for the chase once the battle’s won, just never around when the shit starts flying.’

  Marcus nodded grimly, watching the barbarians working themselves up for another charge. Julius spat on to the scarred turf again, examining his sword’s edge.

  ‘This is it. This time they’ll throw everything they have at us, here, on the flanks, everywhere, and that will be it, Second Tungrians or no Second Tungrians. Are you ready to die for the empire?’

  ‘For the cohort. The empire can kiss my hairy arse.’

  The older man laughed with a dark delight, his eyes wild with the fight.

  ‘Spoken like a real Tungrian. Let’s get into the line and get ready to go out in style.’

  Up the slope, the prefect was weighing his options, watching as a medic carried out field treatment on Frontinius. The medic, having cleaned the entry and exit wounds around the arrow’s shaft with water and a clean cloth, took an exploratory grip of the feathered end that protruded from the First Spear’s knee. The prefect winced with his friend’s obvious pain. Frontinius leant back on the grass wearily, closing his eyes as the bandage carrier took a firmer grip of the arrow. With a sudden twist, the medic snapped the arrow’s shaft, then swiftly pulled the barbed end out of the back of the officer’s knee. Frontinius watched with narrowed eyes as he expertly bandaged the wound, winding the cloth tightly as blood blossomed through its weave.

  ‘You can stand, First Spear, but you have to keep the leg straight. And keep your weight off it.’

  Frontinius struggled to his feet, accepting the prefect’s offered hand to pull him erect.

  ‘I’ll be separated from my head quite shortly, sonny boy. The knee can ...’

  His retort trailed off as movement up the slope, at the wood’s edge, caught his eye.

  The Tungrians watched the wall of barbarians slowly wash up the hill towards them, picking their way carefully across the wall of their dead. There was no headstrong charge this time, only a steady advance by the thousands of men to their front, confident in their numerical advantage but made cautious by the sight and smell of the dead and dying littering the ground around them. Facing them, men from both cohorts stood in an ordered line, calm in their resignation for the most part. A man close to Scarface whimpered with fear, quietening as the veteran soldier glared down the line at him and barked out his name. The 2nd Cohort watch officer nodded approvingly.

  ‘Too late for second thoughts now, my lads. If you can’t take a joke then you shouldn’t have joined in the first place. Just make sure you take some of the bastards across the river with you.’

  With certain death at hand, men tightened their sweat-and-blood-slickened grip on swords and shields, waiting to kill for the last time.

  The barbarian line passed over the wall of dead, speeding up to walking pace with the obstacle crossed, the lack of spears in Roman hands having reduced it to a hindrance rather than the death trap it had been earlier in the morning. Twenty yards from the Tungrians they stopped at a shouted command, allowing Calgus’s messenger to step into the gap between the two forces.

  ‘Tungrians, the Lord Calgus offers you one last chance to live. Surrender now and you will be well treated ...’

  His voice tailed away as Julius stepped forward, his armour painted with the blood of a dozen men, his shield scored and notched by swords, the shafts of three arrows protruding from its wooden face.

  ‘One step more and I’ll send your cock back to the Lord Calgus while the rest of you stays here. You want these ...’

  He raised sword and shield into their fighting positions, backing carefully into the line as the men to either side readied themselves in similar fashion.

  ‘... then fucking well come and get them, cum stain.’

  The messenger shrugged indifferently, then turned away and was absorbed into the barbarian mass. The warband’s fresh warriors began banging their swords and shields, creating a wall of sound that bore down oppressively on the Tungrians, first advancing one step, then another, some swinging their swords in extravagant arcs and screaming of the slaughter to come. The Tungrians waited, hollow eyed, for the barbarian line to charge across the narrowing gap and finish the unequal contest.

  13

  The barbarian line gathered itself to pounce, the mass of shaggy-haired warriors baying for blood as the Tungrian cohorts waited grimly for their assault. Frontinius’s voice rang out over the din, his command the last Marcus would have expected.

  ‘Tungrians, on the ground! On the ground!’

  The line went to the ground after a second’s bewildered pause, the brighter soldiers realising what it meant and twisting to look back to their rear as they fell. The barbarian line wavered at the sight, as a line of hard-faced soldiers, fresh and unblooded, came out of the smoke. These men were different to those in the Tungrian line, their armour fashioned from overlaid plates rather than chain mail, their javelins topped with slender iron shanks sprouting viciously barbed points. Scarface and the 2nd Cohort watch officer exchanged looks of amazed glee.

  ‘Legionaries? Fuck me, it’s the Sixth, or what’s left of ’em. They must be gagging to get into this lot.’

  The watch officer nodded as he hugged the blood-sodden grass.

  ‘They do look a tiny bit pissed off.’

  ‘Halt!’

  Prefect Licinius’s voice was authoritative above the warband’s din, all urbanity lost in the harsh command. The newcomers’ force stretched all the way across the small battlefield behind the Tungrians, three lines of men with spears held ready to throw. More men were advancing out of the smoke behind them. A lot more men.

  ‘Front rank, throw!’

  The advancing soldiers took an unhesitating three-step run-up and launched a volley of spears into the warband’s front rank.

  ‘Front rank, kneel! Second rank, throw!’

  Another rain of spears showered on to the barbarians.

  ‘Second rank, kneel! Third rank, throw!’

  The warband shuddered under the third volley, hundreds of men having fallen in the previous few seconds. Licinius’s voice hardened.

  ‘Sixth Legion, on your feet. Form line for attack.’

  The legionaries were on their feet with their line dressed and ready in seconds, a wall of shields and swords suddenly presented to their amazed enemy.

  ‘Sixth Legion, for the honour of your fallen dead ...’

  The hairs on the back of Marcus’s neck lifted with the emotion in the prefect’s voice. A sudden silence descended on the battlefield as the warband grew quiet with apprehension, their presumed easy victory suddenly impending disaster. Only the cries and moans of the wounded broke the silence. Licinius growled into the hush the last command that would be needed to start the slaughter, his harsh voice audible from one end of the line to other.

  ‘... no ... prisoners!’

  The depleted legion’s centurions echoed the command, ordering the surviving cohorts forward in a deliberate advance. Their determined tread took them over and past the Tungrians, the supine bodies trampled by men fixated with the view to their front. As the warband’s front rank quailed at their remorseless advance, unable to retreat owing to the sheer mass of men packed in behind them, the legionaries closed the gap between them and started their slaughter with ruthless efficiency and barely restrained fury.

  ‘Find the officers!’

  Marcus recognised the voice, and stood up in the shelter of the legion’s line.

  ‘No need, Prefect, we’re here.’

  Licinius nodded impassively, then switched his gaze to stare out across the valley.

  Through the smoke’s dying efforts Marcus could just make out a mass of men emerging from the cover of the wood to their right, a cohort at the least. The thick column kept on coming, pouring on to the slope like a monstrous armoured snake. Julius, staring at the mass of troops with eyes that seemed unfocused, pulled off his helmet and scratched h
is sweaty scalp.

  ‘How many?’

  The prefect smiled grimly.

  ‘Six thousand. That’s the entire Twentieth Legion. And to our left is the Second, the other half of the nutcrackers. These barbarian bastards are going to pay in blood for what they’ve done today.’

  From the cover of the wood’s other arm another tide of men was washing down the other slope, another legion in full cry. On the crest above them the cavalry’s armour still glittered in the morning sun, but as Marcus’s eye found them they started to pour down off the hill, the Petriana on the move at last, seeking targets for their lances. The warband, in severe danger of being encircled by the legions, shivered under the shock of their sudden appearance on its flanks, then broke into hundreds of family groups, falling over each other in their haste to escape the battlefield. Marcus bent over, putting his hands on his knees to provide support for suddenly weak limbs, and was abruptly, violently, sick.

  *

  Postumius Avitus Macrinus, legatus of the Imperial 20th Legion, stepped on to the blood-soaked slope with a grim face, the two centuries advancing up the hill ahead of him systematically butchering any of the wounded that had survived. A stroke of luck had brought a Petriana messenger to him as his own legion and the 2nd were marching less than five miles distant. His leading cohorts had been driven forward towards the distant smoke of the battle at a merciless run by their centurions, their exhaustion turning to cold purpose as they crested the final slope and saw thousands of the enemy below. The barbarian warband had scattered like chaff under their combined attack, put to flight in their tribal and family groups and pursued by a dozen cohorts with murder in their hearts and the guidance of questing cavalrymen, eager for heads.

  He’d met with Licinius briefly when the Petriana’s prefect had found the oncoming legions, and had guided them in to attack from either side of the wood before taking the 6th’s remaining cohorts down through the trees to reinforce the Tungrians. He’d been unsurprised to have his request for the prefect to take over the remnants of the 6th legion refused without hesitation.

  ‘Absolutely not, Legatus, I was brought up on horseback and this style of fighting doesn’t suit me. Besides, you need the Petriana out in front of your legions, and I’m the best man to keep a foot firmly up their idle British arses. Go and talk to the man that made this possible.’

  He’d pointed up the hill behind them, at a cohort-sized group of warriors arrayed behind an impressive rampart of dead barbarians, and told the legate in swift, economical sentences the story of Titus Tigidius Perennis’s betrayal of the 6th and the Tungrians’ stand on the hillside. Both Perennis’s treachery and his parentage had come as a shock to the veteran officer.

  ‘Jupiter! Sextus Tigidius Perennis’s son did this? The son of the praetorian prefect lured an imperial legion into a barbarian ambush? Every time I think I’ve seen it all ...’

  Nodding his understanding, and clapping the tired prefect on the shoulder, he’d called a senior centurion to his side, pointing up the hill.

  ‘I’m going up there. You might want to send a few men with me in case any of those dead barbarians is faking.’

  Behind him, mute testimony to the effectiveness of Perennis’s betrayal, thousands of Roman bodies lay in untidy bloodstained heaps around a series of unseen diminishing circles, the successive defence perimeters of the hopelessly outnumbered and disarrayed 6th Legion cohorts taken in Calgus’s trap. He had already seen Sollemnis’s body for himself, needing to know that the man was really dead and not carried away as a hostage. The legatus’s sword had been hidden under another man’s body, concealment sufficient to foil the brief search of the fallen for valuables that had been all the ongoing battle had allowed the barbarians. The weapon now rested in its scabbard once more, carried by one of his staff. He would have the difficult honour of passing it on to the man’s oldest son.

  He should have been at home himself, his age advancing towards a mature fifty more quickly than he cared to consider after a lifetime fighting Rome’s enemies. The throne, however, or those behind it, trusted him too well to leave him in retirement. He’d been called from his fireside to command the 20th barely three months before, with instructions to look for signs that senior officers in the province were not to be trusted.

  ‘I won’t be the imperial informer, Prefect Perennis,’ he’d told the praetorian guard’s commander flatly, pointing a thick finger at the emperor’s right-hand man, with whom he’d served twenty years before in Syria. He’d been respectfully summoned to dine with the imperial favourite, a private dinner served by slaves who appeared deaf, so little was their interest in the proceedings.

  ‘And no one expects you to, Senator, least of all me. I don’t care if some of the younger and impressionable idiots believe all they hear from Rome, and take it into their stupid heads that Commodus isn’t fit for their respect. Every young emperor has to earn the regard of the army, and he will, given time. What I want from you is hard intelligence on the British situation, who’s effective and who isn’t. The rumours reaching us here are that the governor is playing a foolish game, not sending all of the gold intended to keep the northern tribal leaders happy to the right places, and we’d rather know the truth with enough time to act on it. Gods above us, the last thing we need is another bloody revolt on the edge of the world. On top of that, you’ll provide us with a tested senior officer in place if anything does happen.’

  He’d nodded, able to accept the task he was bidden to take on. Perennis had smiled quietly and sipped his wine, then put the cup down.

  ‘One thing, though, you could keep an eye open for the late Senator Valerius Aquila’s boy. There are rumours that he might have buried himself out of sight in the Wall army.’

  He’d given the other man a darker look, as unresolved as to his views on young Aquila then as he was now. He’d known the senator in happier days, and had viewed his death with a sickened resignation as one of the small dramas that play out across every change of power. If the lad was still at large, and not dead or enslaved, he was mindful not to take too close an interest. Ignoring the misdemeanours of the men that surrounded the young emperor was one thing, abetting them was quite another.

  Before him, in increasing numbers as he climbed the incline, slipping more than once on the treacherous footing, were arrayed barbarian dead, the leavings of the auxiliary cohort’s defiant stand at the valley’s head. At first they lay alone, wounded men killed as they had crawled away from the battle, then in twos and threes. The ground, previously scattered with the blood of the wounded, became slick with blood and faeces, the earth pounded into a greasy bog under thousands of feet, and the dead suddenly outnumbered the living. An eye-watering stench pervaded the air.

  Unable to avoid committing the indignity of stepping upon the fallen, the legatus climbed a wall of corpses three feet high, men hacked and torn by grievous wounds, dropped in their hundreds to form a rampart for the defenders to shelter behind. A soldier to his right spotted some minute movement among the mangled warriors, and stepped in to strike with his gladius. The legatus returned his gaze to the front, seeing auxiliary troops among the dead for the first time, their bodies neatly laid in rows by their fellow troops and covered with their capes. He winced at the number of their dead, looking to the remaining troops to gauge their fitness for further action.

  The cohort was standing to attention, neatly paraded across the hillside by century, a good sign in itself, as was the fact that they had already washed most of the inevitable blood spray of battle from their faces, if not their black-caked armour. The cohort’s prefect stepped forward to meet him, the man’s grasp shaking slightly. Shock or fatigue? He kept his demeanour brisk, hoping to help the man a little with his battle weariness.

  ‘Prefect Equitius? I’m Legatus Postumius Avitus Macrinus, Twentieth Imperial Legion and, with the death of our esteemed colleague Legatus Gaius Calidius Sollemnis, now general in command of this whole sorry mess.’

  H
e paused, looking out across the sea of corpses.

  ‘You, Prefect, seem to have gained us a victory. The Petriana’s commander tells me that you held this place against many times your own number in order to keep Calgus busy until reinforcement could arrive. You paid a heavy price for that success, I see ...’

  The other man nodded, his eyes far away.

  ‘You could consider this ground bought and paid for, Legatus.’

  A burly man passed them without recognition, his hollow eyes fixed on the body cradled in his arms.

  ‘Another casualty. As you say, bought and paid for.’

  The prefect watched Morban deposit the corpse alongside the cohort’s other dead with gentle care.

  ‘His son, I fear.’

  ‘Ah ... a difficult moment for any man.’

  The senior officer waited a moment, watching the other for signs of mental defeat, but saw none.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I’m new enough to this country not to know your unit by anything other than name. Forgive the question as simple ignorance of your men’s resilience, but can they fight on?’

  The prefect nodded slowly.

  ‘We have an overall casualty figure of one hundred and fifty-eight dead and another one hundred and three seriously wounded, of whom at least half will die, plus a couple of hundred with minor wounds, cuts and bruises, who can be treated in the field. I am three officers short, one dead and two wounded, plus a First Spear with an arrow wound that he’s determined to ignore, and I’ve lost half a dozen or so watch officers. So it isn’t pretty, but yes, we can fight, given time to bury our dead and get some food into the troops.’

  ‘Good. And yourself?’

  The other man raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I’m in better condition than most of my men. They did the fighting here, not me.’

  ‘And yet your quick thinking, coupled with their prowess, made amends for what would otherwise have been a total disaster. With Calidius Sollemnis dead I’m the only general officer left in this command, which gives me the undisputed right to make battlefield promotions I feel are justified. I’m also a recent appointment from the imperial court. Even the governor wouldn’t consider challenging my authority on a question of promotion. You’re the man I need, Prefect, to take what’s left of the Sixth legion and rebuild it.’