Gods & Emperors (Legionary 5)

by Gordon Doherty

  ‘I noticed an eel escaping downriver there,’ Bastianus commented with a stifled laugh.

  Sura shrugged. ‘Aye, he was well-endowed, but not half as much as me. Back in Adrianople, they used to call me the serpent-’

  A sharp jab in the ribs from Pavo’s elbow ended his ill-timed boast. ‘We’re in the heart of a Gothic camp?’

  ‘But damn, we are,’ Bastianus whispered as Trupo, Cornix, Melus, Opis and Herma waded up to the copse to join them. ‘Now let’s set about bothering a few horses… ’

  Pavo stalked towards the trussed Gothic war horses. They shuffled and whinnied in fright every time the sky snarled with thunder. Good cover, he thought, better than dung. He part drew his spatha, keen to keep the gleaming blade hidden until it was needed. With a quick glance around to confirm that he was still unseen, he moved over to the nearest beast, smoothing its mane and stroking its muzzle. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s not going to be a peaceful night for you, nor me,’ he whispered. He unsheathed his sword and chopped through one tether, then another, working his way through the many steeds near him. He heard the muffled noise of tethers being cut in a similar fashion nearby and every so often rose to look over the beasts, seeing the Gothic sentries and those milling within the camp remained unaware. Cutting the beasts’ bonds was one thing, but scattering them all would be another. Slap their rumps, cut their hides – use your imagination! Bastianus had advised. We want a mass stampede.

  He hoisted his spatha to cut once more when, from nowhere, a titanic longsword swung down and knocked the spatha from his grasp. ‘What the?’ he stammered, swinging round to see a bull of a warrior grinning at him.

  ‘What’s this?’ the scarred man cooed as the sky roared with bone-shaking fury. ‘A lone Roman?’ he said then lifted a leg and thrust his boot at Pavo’s gut, winding him and sending him sprawling before slashing out with the sword once, twice, thrice. Pavo dodged one way and then the other – devoid of armour and spry for it, just as Bastianus had intended. This seemed to confuse and anger the Goth, but only until Pavo tripped and toppled onto his back. He felt time slow as the giant hefted his blade up, two-handed, ready to strike. But he noticed something else: the muggy air that had been growing hotter and balmier all night suddenly took on an acute, foul stench like that of a tanner’s yard. More, the ether around the giant warrior seemed to crackle and spit. He and the Goths shared a moment of odd camaraderie – both bemused by the strangeness. Suddenly, a great white flash of light forked down from the sky, spearing into the giant and his raised longsword. For an instant, it looked as if the man was alight inside, a molten glow shining from his eyes, nose, mouth and ears. An instant later, and he flew backwards through the air as if kicked by an invisible and enormous steed. Pavo gawped as the man’s body crunched against a post at the edge of the timber pen, his skin blackened and his hair half-fused onto his blistered, bubbling and smoking face. His longsword had landed some way away, glowing dully where it had landed on top of one tent, which swiftly burst into flame.

  All around him, panic erupted. The horses wrenched clear of their tethers without the need for his spatha. They reared and whinnied in terror, barging past him and near trampling him, before bolting through the camp in every direction, some even charging over tents and churning those asleep inside. Pained and panicked cries rang out and a thick waft of smoke hit Pavo as the tents neighbouring the burning one caught light too. He saw sentries darting around beyond the orange blaze, saw them shout and point in his direction, and realised it was now or never. He tore out his spatha and readied to fight. Where is Bastianus? his mind screamed. He has to give the signal!

  A pair of hands slapped onto his shoulders, sending his heart into a frenzy.

  ‘I asked you to frighten the damned horses – but how in Hades did you conjure that?’ Bastianus cackled, patting his back then taking up the buccina and blowing once, twice and again.

  Pavo sought a reply, but a Gothic cry cut him off. ‘Romans!’

  The sentries on the camp’s landward perimeter, the sea of heads poking from tents and the men around campfires all heard the cry loud and clear. Every pair of Gothic eyes turned to the tiny cluster of nine legionaries at the heart of their camp. There was a hiatus of disbelief then, like a noose snapping tight, they surged for the centre of the camp, dodging the rattled horses, leaping over burning tents, longswords drawn and spears raised, hair whipping behind them and faces bent in baleful snarls.

  ‘Together!’ Sura yelled as the nine contracted into a tight circle.

  Pavo swung his spatha up just in time to hack away a thrown spear while the others hurried to tear their shields from their backs and swept them up in a protective wall. Herma and Melus hoisted their shields overhead to complete a mini-testudo.

  The air was driven from Pavo’s lungs as the sheer weight of Gothic bodies crashed into the tiny shell of shields. He ducked and shifted as swords and spears rattled upon his shield. By his side, his saw Sura’s head shoot out of a gap in the testudo, just far enough to sink his forehead into the bridge of one Goth’s nose before retracting. A hot shower of blood coated Pavo as a Gothic spear plunged into Melus’ cheek and went clean through his face. As Melus fell, Pavo lanced his spatha out through the gap left behind and into the windpipe of the killer. One Goth dead, so many more clamouring to slay him. Suddenly, a pair of bloody, filthy hands wrapped over the top of his shield, and the knuckles turned instantly white as they tried to haul it away with seemingly limitless strength. Pavo felt a surge of panic like never before as the shield was prized from his grip. A wall of gleeful Goths saw the chink in the desperate defence and lunged for him.

  ‘For the Claudia!’ he roared, sure this was the end.

  ‘For the Claudia!’ the few others repeated as a fork of lightning lit up the sky and the mass of foes clamouring around them.

  But another fierce cry erupted from the darkness beyond the boundaries of the camp like an echo, but one thousand times more brash.

  ‘For the Claudia!’ the First and Third Cohorts roared as they poured into the Gothic camp from the now undefended landward side – a wall of ruby red shields. Thunder boomed and Pavo saw Zosimus and Quadratus leading the charge, barging into the rear of the Gothic mass like bulls, their shields smashing faces and their spathas tearing through bodies. An instant later, a cry from the riverside added to the frenzy: For the Claudia! the Second Cohort cried as they raced from their hiding place downriver and surged into the camp too, charging in from its eastern end. They hammered into the flanks of the Greuthingi before the warriors could react. The sudden influx of legionaries instantly drew every Gothic sword away from Pavo and the beleaguered handful of men at the horse pen. The Roman reinforcements moved like cats, leaping into the fray, abandoning formation and fighting man-to-man as Bastianus had instructed them. They bounded, ducked and circled swiftly – freed from the burden of armour – and the Goths seemed thrown by this, many looking this way and that, wary of legionaries circling behind them, swinging clumsily to cover their flanks and rears.

  A voice cried out from behind Pavo: ‘down!’

  Herenus? Pavo recognised the Cretan twang, and he and the others instantly dropped to their haunches. From the blackness somewhere near the camp’s eastern edge, a waspish rasp sounded and a shower of silvery missiles – shot, arrows, bolts and javelins – sped through the air where Pavo had been standing a moment ago. The hail plummeted into the backs and flanks of the Greuthingi and they fell in swathes. Pavo twisted to see Herenus and his slingers emerge from the blackness, slings loaded and spinning again. The Lancearii flanked them, fresh javelins hoisted, and the sagittarii nocked fresh arrows as they advanced too. The ballistarii came with them, crossbows loaded and aimed, and it was they who began the second hail. One savage-looking warrior swung to tackle the emerging marksmen. His face remained in an animal snarl even after a crossbow bolt had punched through his forehead and burst out the back of his head, expelling a surge of brain matter and black blood as he wilted lik
e a flower.

  In the hiatus before the next volley, Herenus waved Pavo and the crouching cluster to their feet. ‘Go!’

  ‘Let’s finish this!’ Bastianus howled, rising and leading the few to join the ranks of the Second Cohort. Pavo, shieldless, threw a left hook at one Goth then drove his spatha into the man’s side, before hacking the sword hand from another who was about to strike Sura. He spun on his heel and swept a reverse cut across the throat of another as the lines dissolved into a chaotic melee to the backdrop of the burning, chaotic camp and the wrathful, lightning-streaked skies. Soon, as if drawn together by nature, he found himself side by side with Zosimus, Quadratus and Sura, shoulder-to-shoulder, their battle cries in harmony. It was only when he swept his spatha all around him and found no more foes that he realised it was over. He heard splashing as some of the Goths ran for the river, and the dull shouts of others fleeing into the night. All around him and the panting, sweat and blood-lashed legionaries was a carpet of Greuthingi dead intermingled with several hundred legionary bodies.

  ‘It’s over,’ Sura wheezed, clasping a hand to his shoulder. ‘It’s over… and we’re alive.’ Soldiers nearby wept, some laughed in disbelief, others prayed. Zosimus and Quadratus bashed their foreheads together then locked arms.

  Bastianus climbed atop the heaped crates at the centre of the camp, kicking the lid from one. Gold and silver shone inside. Roman gold and silver – bounty raided from Beroea, Pavo realised. The Magister Peditum spread his arms out wide, his scarred, battered features uplit in orange from the burning tents. ‘And thus,’ he proclaimed with a genial smile so ill-suited to his demonic appearance, ‘southern Thracia is truly purged of Goths. Their spearmen fled before us and now their vile horsemen run in their wake!’

  An almighty cheer exploded at this.

  When he leapt down, he gathered Pavo and the other officers while the rest slaked their thirst with well-earned water and wine.

  Agilo was first to speak. ‘Then we should make haste back to the emperor. If we march back to Melanthias in the morning, we can be there within a week.’

  Still panting, Bastianus wiped the sweat from his bald scalp, readjusted his eyepatch then wagged a finger. ‘Why would I return when we are not finished? What we achieved here tonight gives Emperor Valens a chance to manoeuvre, to move his armies some way from Melanthias without fear of raiding attacks from the warbands, but only so far, for the warbands still roam like countless fangs, dispersed across the north. I promised Emperor Valens I would drive Fritigern to reunite the horde.’

  ‘Fritigern is shrewd,’ Agilo argued. ‘He won’t harness the horde again unless he has no other choice.’

  ‘We must find the secondary camp,’ Bastianus growled. ‘Find it and hit it hard.’

  Agilo shrugged. ‘But damn, sir, my riders have tried – relentlessly – to forge north to locate it. It remains elusive, like mist.’

  Pavo, listening, thought back to the silent approach through the waters to this camp, the half-conversation between the Goths that he had overheard. ‘No, not anymore,’ he said.

  Bastianus and Agilo turned to him.

  ‘I overheard the sentries talking: this wing of riders know where the secondary camp is,’ Pavo said. All heads looked round the bodies on the ground. All dead, those that had fled now well scattered into the night. ‘Or rather, they knew…’

  Bastianus looked bemused for a moment, then his face scrunched up like paper. ‘Oh for fu-’

  A groan cut him off. A groan from a Gothic ‘corpse’.

  Bastianus’ face lit up. He strode through the fallen and grabbed one prone rider by the plume of his helm, hoisting him up onto his knees. Their leader, Pavo guessed, going by the helm and fine mail shirt. The bearded man had taken a blow to the head and seemed dazed.

  ‘Well?’ Bastianus barked at the Goth. ‘Fritigern’s second camp – where is it?’

  The Goth looked back blankly. ‘I know nothing. Fritigern has told only a few-’

  Bastianus raked his knuckles across the man’s face, bursting his lips in a shower of blood. ‘One more chance, then you’ll wish you’d talked.’

  The man’s eyes widened. ‘I don’t know.’ he pleaded.

  Bastianus pinned him with a steely stare.

  ‘You must believe me!’ he insisted. ‘You must… must… ’ his words trailed off and his head lolled.

  For a moment, Pavo almost felt pity for the rider, until he saw the man’s hand slide towards his sword belt. ‘He’s going for his-’ he started, but the Goth was quicker than the lightning, drawing a small knife and plunging it into his own neck. Sheets of blood spat forth and the warrior toppled forward.

  ‘Wonderful!’ Bastianus roared, booting a clump of bloody earth in anger. ‘After weeks of hunting, we find one Goth who knows where this damned camp is and then he does himself in.’

  As the Magister Peditum went off on a tirade, Pavo’s gaze fell upon the plumed helm on the head of a dead Goth. It was an intercisa – a plundered Roman piece. He moved over and crouched before the corpse, a shiver dancing across the skin of his neck as he examined the small marking on the helmet’s cheekguard. ‘We don’t need the Goths to tell us. I know where it is,’ he gasped.

  ‘Pavo?’ Zosimus said with a bemused chuckle.

  ‘They said the camp was many days ride to the north, by a river,’ he replied, looking up. ‘They’re in the fort at Durostorum.’

  ‘Who, what?’ Bastianus said, head flicking between Zosimus and Pavo.

  ‘The Goths. Their second base in the north: it’s the fort at Durostorum,’ he repeated, gesturing to the marking on the helms, unique to the fabrica in the XI Claudia’s old, abandoned home.

  Quadratus crouched to examine the marking too. ‘Mithras’ balls – he’s right!’

  As dawn broke, the silver-toothed figure watched a messenger speeding from Bastianus’ lot across the burnt-gold grassy plain: a horseman tasked with taking word of their victories over the Goths back to Valens.

  A lone horseman – will they never learn? he chuckled, cleaning his nails with the semispatha.

  He lifted his loaded crossbow from his back, rising a little from the hummock at the edge of the plain, took aim and smiled, knowing that to squeeze the lever was to pluck the rider’s life. The confidence of a master marksman. But he let his finger relax and tucked the weapon away again on the strapping on his back.

  ‘Some messages favour my master’s designs, some do not,’ he mused.

  Bastianus’ lot were doing well, and now, it seemed, they were just one step away from completing their mission – to prime Fritigern and his horde for battle.

  Chapter 10

  Ropes and timbers creaked and shuddered as the thick line of imperial onagers were loaded with rocks the size of heads by busy legionaries, scuttling to and fro through the carpet of ferns and morning mist.

  ‘Loose!’ Merobaudes roared from horseback, sweeping his sword forward.

  As one, the catapults bucked and hurled their burdens up towards the tip of the Rauberg – the Rugged Mountain. The sturdy, circular stone and timber walls of the Lentienses’ last stronghold bore the first six or seven strikes, but the next few shattered the sharpened stakes or struck dark cracks in the lower stone sections of the bulwark. One punched into the chest of a Lentienses warrior on the battlements up there, bursting through his green leather vest and ruining his chest, sending him shooting from the walkway and hammering into the side of the timber-walled great hall within the enclosure. Another rock zoomed up and took a warrior’s head clean off his shoulders, leaving the body standing, still holding a spear and hide-covered shield, blood spouting from the neck until the cadaver toppled out over the parapet and tumbled down the grey, fern-streaked hillside like a discarded child’s toy towards the noose-like Roman lines below.

  Gallus stood in formation with what remained of his auxiliary unit, watching the sprays of dust, splintered wood and blood up on the acropolis as the siege engines endlessly spat this stony
hail. Some said that only a few hundred Lentienses held out up there with King Priarius, having fled there from the forest battle at Argentoratum, but Emperor Gratian had shown not a flicker of hesitation in bringing his obscenely overpowered army to the tribe’s last refuge. Some thirty thousand men: legions, cavalry alae, palace regiments and barbarian allies stood in a thick ring around the base of the hill. He looked to his left, glaring at Dexion – cold, expressionless – and Gratian who watched the bombardment with hooded eyes, assured of victory. Beside them was the giant Frankish general, Merobaudes. The man looked like an escaped nightmare with his drawn, scarred features and thinning, black hair hanging to his collar. Gallus knew little of this man, other than that he was one of Gratian’s minions, and that was a black enough indicator.

  The thunder of the onagers ceased only when Gratian raised a hand. At this, a few Lentienses heads peeked out from where they had been crouched behind their lofty parapet, confused at the unexpected hiatus. Gratian flicked his fingers, beckoning a gaunt fellow in courtier’s robes forward. The man wore a haughty look and peered down his blade of a nose. He bellowed in some jagged foreign tongue, addressing the hilltop. An interpres, Gallus realised, probably offering King Priarius the chance to surrender and no doubt enjoy the remainder of his days in the dungeons of Treverorum.

  Suddenly, a bucking of timber sounded from up on the acropolis, and one of the rocks that had been fired up there came arcing back out over its walls, shot from some hidden Lentienses device. The rock sailed down, straight for Gratian, Dexion and Merobaudes.

  Yes, Mithras guide the rock from which you were born, Gallus mouthed, his eyes wide. But the rock plummeted right onto the interpres, flattening him as if he was never there and showering all nearby in dirt and blood.

  Gratian’s horse reared wildly and the young emperor’s nostrils flared in terror and humiliation. He yanked at the reins, only just bringing the beast under control. ‘I’m tired of watching this,’ he called out like the boy he was in a screeching-gull voice, thrusting a shaking finger at the hilltop stronghold. ‘Set them aflame!’ The emperor and Dexion turned to look in Gallus’ direction, Gratian gesturing to the ballista crews there. Gallus swung away and dipped his head.