by Manda Scott
It was for these men that she had insisted the chippings be cleared as the axes created them and the ruined trunks wrapped about in moss and lichens. For these, too, the best slingers had been stationed, watching for the marks of rank and authority, with orders to target them soon and early.
They were not soon enough and Longinus was proved entirely right. Deprived of all contact with senior officers, the twelve centurions trapped on the wrong side of the fallen oak took rapid command of their men. Startlingly fast, they drew order out of chaos. A dozen of the legionaries nearest Breaca turned, raising their shields to form a roof against falling spears. It was an obvious move for men who had not served in the west and did not know that slingstones were aimed for the unshielded knees of those who lifted their shields to protect their faces and heads, crippling them as effectively as if they had been hamstrung.
Somebody knew it, further up the line. Breaca heard frantic orders bellowed down the ragged column. The exposed men were already falling, but one group, higher up, were making better use of their shields.
Leaving the new formation to Ardacos and those who fought with him, she ran between the trees towards the source of the shouting. Oak branches stabbed at her. Leafing hazel slapped her face. She came level with a group of eight men who had formed a ring, kneeling, with six shields held outwards and two above. She could see no place where a pebble could pass through between the shields, still less a spear. From the centre came the bull’s bellow of a centurion, passing orders down the line. Already other eights were forming; spent spears glanced off the raised shields and skittered uselessly into the mere.
Dubornos was close to Breaca’s right shoulder. He had not been flogged as she had, but Rome’s inquisitors had ruined him long before that. For the past eight years, the only weapon he could bear with his right hand had been a sling. He had practised harder and for longer than anyone she knew, and was breathtakingly good.
Without turning, she said, “If I part the shields, can you at least wound the centurion in the centre?”
“If I can see him, I can kill him.”
Anyone else would have grinned, saying that. Dubornos had never been light-hearted; he carried too much guilt and grief for that. He slid a stone into his sling, and circled his wrist fluidly. “If you can do something to lower the shield with the black swans on it, it would give me the easiest target.”
The black swans faced each other on either side of crossed thunderbolts painted scarlet on black with the centurion’s left-pointing chevron below. Breaca could see the wind-burned skin of the man whose mark they were. His eyes looked momentarily over the rim of his shield and were hidden again. She said, “We should be mounted for this,” and ran out, holding her spear before her as if she were hunting boar.
The tip caught the left hand of the two swans, which was inmost on the shield, and drove through the bull’s hide to lodge in the laminated wood behind. Breaca thrust her whole weight in and then wrenched it back, snagging the shield in its wake.
The spear twisted in her hands and cracked and broke. A slingstone blurred at the edge of her vision. The wall of scarlet thunderbolts swayed and parted. Then her own private thunderbolt punched her in the back, between the shoulder blades where the flesh was most damaged. A scream split the air and she knew it as hers in the infinite moment before she fell. Sometime before she hit the paved rock of the trackway, hands caught her and held her and carried her. Some of them remembered not to touch her back.
The pain in her shoulder was astonishing, like a new wound breaking open. Someone whimpered, childlike. It seemed not to be her. When she was sure of that, Breaca opened her eyes. Dubornos’ face loomed above hers. He was not whimpering, but swearing and weeping together. Tears made shining tracks on his cheeks. He looked ten years older than he had done when she ran past him to break the shield ring.
“Never,” he said, “never, never, never did I think you would do that. Why couldn’t you throw your god-cursed spear like anyone else who values life above stupid, stupid displays of heroics? We have to survive, that’s all. You of all people have nothing to prove here.”
There were too many people too close to answer that, and a place on her shoulder that burned as if she had taken a sword thrust, which seemed unlikely. The whimpering continued and still she could not place the source.
She sat up and looked around. A young copper-haired youth knelt nearby with a bruise flaring crimson across his mouth and wild, white-rimmed eyes. The hair hung in furls by his left ear, as if the war-braids had been forcibly ripped out, and a livid welt at his right wrist showed where a sling had recently been stripped from him. He stared at Dubornos as if the singer were more dangerous than all the avenging armies of Rome. The whimpering was his.
To him, Breaca said, “Was it your slingstone that hit me?”
His face was answer enough. He was too terrified to speak. She said, “What’s your name?”
Dubornos answered for him. “Burannos. He was one of those who failed Cunomar’s spear trials. He trained instead as a slinger. Not well enough.”
Breaca said, “We could list for him the failures of our youth but it would take longer than we have.”
She tried to stand, and succeeded on the second attempt. She was deeper in the forest than she had been, shielded by trees from the track. Sounds of battle came clearly enough, but not the detail. She asked, “Did we break the eight-ring?”
Dubornos looked down at his hands. His sling still hung from his wrist, cradling a pebble as if it were the easiest thing in the world to walk with the pebble held, not something youths practised for months without success.
“No. The centurion is dead and one other, but when you fell we brought you clear and the ring re-formed. I set a dozen slingers to keep them occupied. If we leave it too long, they’ll remember that attack is better than defence and charge us instead.”
“Then we have to break them open again before they begin to think.” Someone offered Breaca a sling and she took it. “Burannos can stand between us. Set anyone with a spear who knows how to throw it to aim at one of the shields. We can direct the stones through to the centre if they can make a big enough gap.”
Back on the track, with fighting on either side, the black-swan shield was central now in a ring of five, with one held as roof-shield above. Young warriors hidden in the tree line with slings took time for target practice. Pebbles rang on bull’s hide and iron. The sound was lost in the other noises of battle.
A dozen youths with spears stepped past the shelter of the trees to take foot on the margins of the track. The legionaries trapped within the ring saw the danger. Momentarily, they pulled their shields tighter until the edges overlapped and there were no gaps at all, like a woodlouse, curling. Then one in the centre, seeing what might come, gave three words as an order and smoothly, beautifully, as if by an act of the gods, the entire ring unfolded and became a line.
For a heartbeat, perhaps two, the legionaries were not moving, each man looking sideways to see if he remained in line with his neighbours. The junior officer was in the centre, and had taken his centurion’s helmet. The horsehair crest waved black in the wind. He looked along the line and drew breath to shout a fresh order.
Breaca was before him. “Now!”
Dubornos’ pebble was too small to see, only a whisper of marsh mist as it passed her. A legionary whose elbow had been carelessly shown screamed and pitched forward, the bones of his forearm shattered.
The men who flanked him were already running. They jumped their comrade’s fallen body and when they landed they moved together, filling the gap where he had been. A spear angled low beneath the shield of one and he had to jump to avoid it. The second time, Breaca was waiting for the flash of flesh at his throat.
Burannos was ahead of her. She felt the swing of his throw and saw the legionary stagger. Her own stone was aimed lower and broke the man’s kneecap. A spear jammed into the shield of his running-mate, thrust by a rust-haired girl who, if she
was not Burannos’ twin, was his close kin. A sword peeled skin off her forearm as she jumped back. Another warrior, careless of death, stepped in to jab a spear into the face of a legionary who died in the moment when he realized he faced a dozen warriors alone.
Breaca reached for her sword and swore violently as the first two strokes with it pulled at muscles that were still stiffened from her night’s combat against Valerius. Then she warmed into the movement and, for a time, there was no room for doubt or the sluggishness of pain, only action and the need to survive, and with luck, to show an example that was not all bad.
In a lifetime of untidy skirmishes, it was the messiest. At the end, Breaca lowered her blade. There was blood on it, but only from cutting the throat of a man already down. She leaned back on a tree and the press of it down the length of her spine was almost welcome.
“Not glorious, but we lost no-one. It could have been worse.”
Dubornos spoke from his place at her shoulder. Together, he and Breaca watched the youth, Burannos, run forward to the rust-haired girl and embrace her in the middle of the trackway, as if they had fought a final battle, not a minor skirmish that cut the tail-tip of a serpent whose head still waited unawares and could smash them without thought.
Breaca said, “It needs to be immeasurably better before we can take on a full legion.”
She wiped a slick of sweat from her face. On either side along the trackway, a dozen similarly disorganized skirmishes still raged, as warriors of all ages engaged legionaries in rings or lines. Plumed helmets in black and white reared at intervals above the lines of battle. She saw one in red that reached higher than the others, and watched it fall. Spears arced over and vanished into the mere.
Exhausted, Breaca sat on the turf and thought of Valerius and what he would say at the lack of discipline in the warriors of her war host. She thought of Ardacos, and how the she-bears he had led for ten years in the western war had not needed the discipline of rank and fear, but had followed the fire and heart of the bear with Ardacos as their leader in spirit more than in flesh.
She thought of the warriors of Mona and the years that went into the training of them, so that each took to the field in absolute trust of their own skill and those around them. She looked at the wavering line of untested, untrained warriors and considered what it would take to bring them to that. She felt the weight of her blade in the palm of her hand and the numbness that had been in her since the start of the day’s fighting and she ached almost to weeping for the loss of the sharp, exciting pain that drew her into battle and sang inside of immortality and of stories by the fire.
CHAPTER 11
FAR FROM THE FIGHTING, THE LEGION’S NIGHT CAMP ROCKED to the rhythm of marching. Row after row, column after column, centuries of men flowed in through the gap in the trenches that Valerius had left as a gateway, dropped their packs in the place their tent would stand — where it had stood in every marching camp they had ever raised — and began to help with the digging of trenches, and the raising of the earth rampart with the network of crossed staves on top, and the pitching of tents and, as evening came, the building of fires and the cooking of meals.
They were drawing lots for guard duty, and finding in their packs the strips of dried mutton and figs and hazel nuts that would enliven the evening meal, when the peace was shattered by the harsh, high squeal of a legionary cornu blaring the alarm. Three notes sounded three times, with a gap left between the second and third repetitions, and a minor flurry at the end.
“Gods, they’ve cut off the whole of the third cohort and two centuries of the second. Your sister’s been busy.” Because his life and the actions of the next few moments depended on it, Longinus spoke in Thracian, quietly, and contrived to frown.
In Latin, loud enough for anyone to hear, Valerius said, “The tail of the legion is under attack. Find Civilis. Be ready to ride.”
He was already turning. The legate’s pavilion lay offset to one side of the centre point of the camp, where the direct and lateral pathways crossed. The pennants of the legion and Cerialis’ personal mark of the dolphin in blued green on white hung still in the mist. Lucius, the message-youth newly branded for Mithras, stood outside with his head tipped up, like a hound startled into the scent.
Valerius called to him, “Cerialis? Where is he?” and followed the jerk of the boy’s head inside.
Finely cured goat hides scented with rosemary oil and rosewater made the roof and walls of the legate’s pavilion. A brazier kept it warm. A clerk’s desk was placed to one side.
Valerius caught the legate in the act of rising from his bath. He was damp and draped in linen about the thighs. His armour hung from the centre pole of the tent, slick with oil and polish.
“Your excellency?” Valerius let the tent flap crack closed behind him. “You heard the alarm? The rear part of the second cohort is under attack and the third is in grave difficulty. The centurions have already sounded the recall-at-speed, but if the Eceni war host has command of the forest, even those who can run may not be able to reach us here without help. With your permission, I would take Civilis and his Batavians and make the rearward centuries secure.”
There was a risk in offering a tactical opinion to the man who considered himself the master tactician of all Britannia, more skilled than any previous governor and at least the equal of the one currently waging war in the west. Valerius, waiting, took time to pray.
Cerialis reached for his undershirt. Whoever his bath-attendant had been, he was no longer present. He said, “How soon before they attack the camp?”
Valerius shook his head. “I don’t think they will. Even the Eceni are not mad enough to attack a fortified night camp, but the cornicen of the second cohort has signalled that his men are in combat against superior numbers and that he has lost connection with the ranks behind.”
Cerialis’ body was knotted with scars in front and behind, testament to tactics of attack and retreat that had been less than wholly successful. He pulled on his shirt.
“You can’t go,” he said. “The Batavians are not reliable.”
“Civilis has been with the Ninth since they were stationed on the Rhine.”
“And he dreams of death in glory in circumstances just such as these. You would find yourself at the centre of a bloodbath, with discipline abandoned in the quest for a name sung in the winter halls.”
The smell from the brazier was not unlike the one sacred to Mithras. The red of it was the red of spilled blood and the mottling of a bull’s hide. The governor’s armour was ruddy in the heat, and made a mirror, disjointedly.
Valerius took a soft step to the side, and another, until he could see the legate’s face clearly reflected alongside his own. Watching himself and the other man equally, he said, “We need horsemen to reach the rear ranks in time, or they are lost. Better to risk Civilis than to lose the better half of the Batavians.”
Their eyes met, glancing off polished iron; a legate and a decurion-turned-messenger who offered tactics in a voice so dry, so clear, so lacking in emotion that it was hard to see past it.
Cerialis averted his gaze first. He reached for the beaker of wine that sat on the clerk’s desk and drank, savouring the richness. He did not offer any to the dry-voiced decurion standing just inside his tent. Presently, he said, “I need cavalry here; we can’t be without horsemen when the forest may be full of rebel warriors. Take the half-wing you brought here with you under Civilis’ command. Leave me the other half under his sister’s son, Henghes, who is prefect and would lead them now if they were not so heart-sworn to the old man. Find Henghes and send him to me. And signal the second cohort to make more speed in their retreat. The men are to reach here with all expediency, only to fight if actively engaged.”
“Excellency.”
The tent flap let in a little cold as it opened and closed. Cerialis drained his wine to the dregs and let the clerk-boy refill it before he looked again at the armour in which the decurion’s face had been reflected
. It was hard to remember the shape of it, only the passion in the black eyes that was the opposite of the empty dryness of his voice.
Outside, Longinus held the white-legged colt for Valerius to mount. The beast stood well in the chaos of others’ mounting. Through the commotion, men of the second cohort flooded in, running now, knowing themselves lucky not to be caught in the carnage, and grateful to their legate for ordering them in to the safety of the night camp with its ditches and stockade, not forcing them back to save men who were beyond saving.
Behind, half of the Batavians had mounted, half had not. Riding out, they took the track south, with Civilis at the head, and the horns of a full cohort sent them on their way. They kept to the centre of the paved trackway this time, pushing hard, and the legionaries of the second cohort ran sideways to let them past and then ran on again, in near-order, for the camp.
When there was no-one to overhear, Longinus said, “You have exactly what you wanted: the half-cohort that is most loyal to Civilis rides with us and the rest are left behind. Did you bewitch the legate?”
“No. I told him the truth and he heard it. The gods support that above everything else, always. Tell the standard-bearer to blow five times on his horn.”
Down the length of the ancestors’ stone trackway, the fivefold notes of a Batavian cavalry horn ripped apart the remains of the fog and let the sun in, blindingly.
Hearing it, knots of warriors and legionaries paused in their fighting. Blades and teeth and gouging fingers loosened their bite on flesh and skin and bone. Legionaries and warriors alike believed the sound signalled help for them alone, only that the warriors had been told to appear afraid, and did so, convincingly.
Without orders, or any coherent agreement, both sides stepped slowly back, relinquishing the narrow strip of green turf that had become their contested ground.
Early in the fighting, warriors who wanted to live had learned not to take on any groups of legionaries who formed a shield-wall and advanced on them. The legionaries, for their part, had found that stepping off the trackway into the forest was suicide; once past the first rank of trees, it was impossible to hold their shields together, and with the wall gone, they were easy pickings for spear and sling.
