by Vox Day
He had known that war wasn’t likely to be as glorious as the chronicles recorded, but as his father had predicted, his senses were reeling in shock from the impact of the experience. The sights, the sounds, the scale of it all…it was simply too much for his senses to take in at once. His heart was pounding, his palms were moist, and his mouth was dry. He hadn’t been this frightened since the night he’d found himself soaring through the night sky over the towers of Elebrion, dangling like a giant mouse caught up in the talons of Caitlys Shadowsong’s warhawk.
And today’s fighting hadn’t even begun.
The sound of thundering hoofbeats suddenly stopping nearby jarred him from his thoughts. “Pissed yourself yet, cousin?”
Marcus looked up. Gaius Valerius Fortex, the tribune commanding the Second Knights and his elder by three years, towered over him from the back of his big black warhorse, Incitatus. His cousin’s pale green eyes glittered with amusement. “I imagine that right about now you’re wishing you’d taken that bishopric Magnus offered you!”
I was holding out for an archbishop’s hat, Marcus tried to reply, but the words stuck in his throat.
“I’ll take it, if the tribune’s got no use for it,” Julianus said, making Fortex and some of the nearby riders laugh.
“How pretty you would look in a red cassock and mitre, Julianus! And with that bull’s voice of yours, the priests could give their bells a rest. They’ll just tell you when to bawl out matins and vigils.” Fortex swatted the decurion on the shoulder and turned back toward his cousin. “Don’t worry, Marcus. You’ll live to see your little elf girl again. Yonder pack is a big one, but they’ll run as soon as we charge them. Those wolves look fearsome enough, but their bark is worse than their bite. Count yourself bloody fortunate we didn’t have to break out the pigstickers.”
Marcus nodded and attempted to grin but his mouth didn’t seem to work properly. Everyone around him was cheerful, almost jocular. Even the decurion had an uncharacteristic smile on his face. They all seemed to be eagerly looking forward to the incipient clash of arms. Were they all mad? Didn’t they realize they might die here today? He hadn’t lost control of his bladder yet, thank Immaculatus, but his mouth was dry, and he was finding it hard to swallow.
Fortex was right. The very last thing he wanted to try at the moment was to ride down the hill wielding one of the giant oaken lances that were used to penetrate the thick hide of a warboar. One slip at just the wrong moment, and a rider would catapult himself right out of the saddle.
“Courage of the vine, cousin,” Fortex suggested, handing a half-empty flask down to him. “Remember, an officer has to keep his throat well-wetted throughout the day. You can’t expect anyone to hear an order when your voice is cracking.”
Marcus nodded and squeezed a dark red stream into his mouth. He winced at the sour taste, but it did relieve the dryness. “Thanks.” He handed the flask to Julianus, then pointed at the enemy lines. “What are they doing down there?”
Below them, a group of goblins on foot was beginning to emerge from the mass of wolfriders. Each carried little curved objects that looked much too small to be proper bows, but it wasn’t until they stopped about twenty paces from the base of the hill and began to withdraw equally small shafts from the quivers slung on their backs that he realized that was precisely what they were supposed to be. His cousin and the decurion were quicker on the uptake. Fortex had already kicked his horse and galloped away from the front.
Meanwhile Julianus was waving his free hand and bellowing orders. The decurion did not, however, drop the wine flask. He used it to point out the approaching archers.
“Slingers, front and center!” His voice was loud enough to drown out the goblin drums, which, up close, was nearly deafening. “Knights, shields ready!”
Marcus fumbled for his shield, a wedge-shaped piece of wood covered with a thin plate of blackened steel with his name, tumae, and legion engraved. He took two steps to the left to stand in front of his horse, as he’d been drilled, slipped the shield on his left arm, then held it before him. He’d already learned in the early skirmishes of the campaign that the goblin bows had little range, and he also knew their archers would have time to loose only a few shafts before the Amorran slingers would force them to retreat.
Without thinking about it, he began to count the goblin archers. There were thirty-six of them in all, at a distance of around sixty paces. He was relieved to see they were raising their bows high, to shoot for the cavalry, rather than aiming them directly at him and the others at the fore of the Amorran line.
The goblins loosed their first volley.
“Shields up!” Julianus roared. “Shields up, dammit!”
Marcus raised his shield, and a moment later, he heard a loud clattering sound behind him as the arrows began falling on the upraised shields of the knights, followed by the terrible, gut-wrenching shriek of a wounded horse screaming. While their rider’s shields guarded their vulnerable eyes and their saddles protected their backs, the horses’ naked haunches were still exposed to the falling arrows.
A few moments passed, and his arm began to ache, but another round of clattering rain quickly quenched any desire to lower his shield. Fortunately, the two dozen Balerans seconded to them by the tenth cohort arrived, and he lowered his shield as the air resounded with a series of whip-like cracks. With the ease of long-practiced experts, the elite slingers hurled their tiny missiles at the archers below.
Two goblins collapsed immediately, followed by a third, who fell clutching a shattered knee. The remaining goblins managed to loose one more haphazard volley, in which most of the shafts fell well short of the Amorran lines. Then another hail of stones drove them back to the safety of their own lines. They left seven of their number on the ground behind, presumably dead.
To Marcus’s far left down the front lines of the army there was a hissing sound, followed by a thunderous report. He turned his head. An evil-looking purple haze was rising from the midst of the infantry cohorts positioned on their south flank.
“What is that?” he asked the decurion.
“Battle shaman,” Julianus replied with disdain. “Not much of one, by the looks of it. A damned stupid one too. He should have saved those spells for the assault, used them to blast a hole in our line for their spearmen to enter. The scorpios and mules will put an end to that nonsense soon enough.”
“Pity we don’t have any Michaelines,” Marcus mused regretfully.
“We don’t need them. Goblin magic is nothing. Watch and see.”
Two more purple explosions erupted somewhere in between the seventh and eight centuries before the shaman’s position was spotted by the artillerymen. Marcus could tell the goblin had been seen because a dozen or more of the legion’s onagers loosed in quick succession. The last rock was hurled high into the air before the first one had even landed. Two of the scorpios also sent their huge bolts sailing into the mass of goblins in the same vicinity.
He couldn’t see if any of them actually hit their intended target, but the massive projectiles must have at least put a fright into the shaman, as no more magical attacks followed.
Time passed, and the sun rose higher. Based on its height, Marcus guessed it was about an hour before noon. The air was heating up, and the last patches of frost had vanished some time ago. The steam was no longer rising from the horses, and he was beginning to feel the first sense of perspiration under his arms.
The cohorts chanted, the goblins shrieked, and the wolves howled. Finally, after another shaman caused a great purple cloud to explode high over everyone’s heads, the goblin infantry moved forward to engage its Amorran counterpart. Then the air was filled with the clashing of metal on metal and the cries of the combatants. But that was all to Marcus’s left.
He glanced back to the standard, and this time he saw the yellow plume of his father’s helmet bobbing amidst a group of centurions’ helms, though he couldn’t see what Corvus was doing. Somehow, seeing it helped ease the te
nsion in his guts a little.
The wolfriders before Marcus were still doing nothing more than mill about, snapping and snarling to little purpose. From time to time a goblin would ride out from the lines, gesticulating and screaming at Marcus’s men, but to no avail.
“What are they doing?” he asked the decurion.
“They’re trying to draw us off the hill,” Julianus answered. “They don’t dare to come up to meet us for fear we’ll charge them while they’re climbing the slope. The archers didn’t bring us down to them, so now they’re trying insults.”
“It might work better if we could understand anything they were saying.”
“Or if we gave a damn what they thought of us.” Julianus grinned and pointed to movement at the front of the wolfrider’s lines. “No one said they were clever. Look, they’re going to try the archers again. Slings, get your useless Baleran arses up here!”
Once more, the goblin archers advanced and loosed a pair of volleys, to little effect. Once more, the legion’s slingers rained stones down upon them before they could manage a third volley. Once more, the goblin archers fled in disarray, leaving more of their fallen behind them. It was rather like a ritual dance, Marcus observed, albeit a deadly one. Like Sisyphus and his rock, if the rock kept rolling over the condemned man.
Marcus heard Julianus muttering curses again, only this time the decurion’s ire was directed at the goblins rather than any of the legion’s various functionaries. He looked at Julianus and was puzzled—until he noticed the black shaft that transfixed the muscular underside of the man’s left arm.
It was pure bad luck; the arrow had narrowly missed the brass greaves that protected his forearms and had punctured one of the leather straps that held the armor in place. But seemingly oblivious to the pain, Julianus was pointing to an injured goblin who was slowly crawling back toward its fellows.
“Can you hit that, Corander?” Julianus demanded of the tall Baleran who led the slingers.
“Can you hit the ground when you shit, sir?” the slinger snorted, withdrawing a stone from his pouch. He twirled it in his fingers. Its shape was oblong, and it had been ground to a snub point on either end. “Ten crowns says I will.”
“All right, but you can’t just hit the damn thing, you got to kill it. Ten says you don’t.”
“Done.” The slinger whirled the long leather once, twice, three, four times over his head, then released the stone.
A moment later, a small red flower bloomed from the back of the crawling goblin’s skull, and it slumped to the ground, unmoving. A roar went up from the watching cavalrymen, both a salute to the Baleran’s deadly skill and a heartfelt expression of relief. They might have to stand here all afternoon sweating under the increasingly hot rays of the sun, but at least they would not have to endure goblin arrows, as well.
“Double or nothing for the big one on the black wolf,” Julianus said.
“I’ll leave him for you, decurion,” the Baleran replied, smiling. “That pelt would look well on your shoulders. But I’ll want my ten crowns later, so try not to get yourself killed today.”
“Lucky bastard,” the decurion growled at the slinger’s back. But then his lips curled slightly, and the men around him cheered raucously.
Marcus suddenly suspected that Julianus had made the bet in order to distract them from his wound. Although Legio XVII was well-salted with veteran officers like Julianus and his fellow decurions, it was still a new and untested legion, and most of the knights in the Second were as green as Marcus was.
“Decurion, your arm.” Lucius, the reguntur, reached over and grabbed Julianus’s wrist. Blood was flowing down to the older man’s elbow in three narrow rivulets and dripping down to stain the grass near his feet. “You had better get that removed and cleaned. God knows what sort of swamp shit was smeared on the arrowhead.”
Julianus glared at both Lucius and Marcus, then looked back at the goblin cavalry’s lines. Despite the infantry battle raging to the south, the wolfriders still showed no signs of budging. Reluctantly, he shrugged. “Well, it seems they’ve got no belly to come at us today. Don’t either of you think of being a hero and going after them. You heard the legate’s orders: We hold the flank and hold the hill. You do not attack unless they actually start riding up the hill. All of them, not just one or two mad buggers. Are you clear on that, Tribune Valerius?”
“Absolutely clear, Decurion.” One of the first things that had been drilled into him since the day he’d pledged the legion was that there were only three penalties for disobeying battle orders: flogging, degradation, and death. Officers had a little more leeway, by necessity, but only insofar as the situation demanded it.
“Do you understand, Reguntur Dardanus?”
“Understood, Decurion! The Second holds its ground unless attacked in force, Decurion!”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can find Sedarius or one of his assistants. Belike you’ll all have naught to do but pick your arses anyhow.”
Marcus fervently hoped so, but he thumped his chest and nodded again as the decurion mounted his horse and rode off in search of someone who could safely remove the arrow for him. He glanced at the goblin lines. Were the drums louder? Were they beginning to move forward? Not now, of all times, surely! A trickle of sweat ran down from his hair into his eyes.
“Too tedious for old Julianus, sir?” asked the rider on his right, a young knight by the name of Servius Commius.
“I am given to understand our good decurion finds moving his own bowels to be more exciting than watching those wolves squatting and shitting all day,” Marcus told him. “But I don’t imagine it should take more than an hour or three for the novelty to wear off.”
Commius, Dardanus, and the other men around him laughed harder than his feeble joke merited, but at least they didn’t seem to notice that he was very nearly nervous enough about the decurion’s absence to imitate the wolves himself. Still keeping half an eye out for the return of the goblin archers, he turned with the others to watch the battle raging to the south.
The goblins were pressing hard against the principes of the three cohorts holding the center but making absolutely no headway. Their stone-tipped clubs and wooden spears shattered against the steel of the Amorran armor, and their own leather armor offered little protection against the swords that flickered out like silver snakes’ tongues from between the imposing wall of shields.
Marcus saw two goblins hurl a third warrior over the first line of troops, its arms and legs flailing wildly, but a quick-thinking hastatus brought the aerial assault to an end by intercepting the goblin with the sharp end of his spiculum. A roar went up from the hastati and the triari alike as the legionnaire triumphantly raised and lowered the impaled goblin as if it were a gruesome standard.
Goblins died by the dozen, but the drums continued to boom without ceasing, and no sooner had one rabid green-skinned warrior fallen than another leaped to take his place.
The fourth hour was barely half gone when a horn sounded and the hastati let out a roar even louder than before. The horn was echoed by horns throughout the centuries, and almost as one, each of the sixty mules and scorpios were released, targeted at a wide area that, from Marcus’s perspective, looked perilously close to the Amorran lines. The goblin assault buckled in disarray as the massive boulders bounced and crushed as many as ten goblins each, while one well-aimed bolt slashed a visible line that ran nearly to the rear of the massed goblins.
As the enemy reeled from the massed artillery assault, a third horn blew, and the tired principes in the five lead cohorts smoothly exchanged places with the fresh hastati. The energy of the replacements appeared to sap the spirits of the green-skinned warriors, and for the first time, the goblin line fell away from the wall of shields against which it had been pressing for nearly an hour.
The rapid pounding of hooves announced the return of Gaius Valerius Fortex, who cut a dashing figure with his long blue commander’s cloak flowing behind him. He was wearing his
helm now, a silvered construction with a blue horsehair plume and a beaked mask that was meant to represent the Valerian crow. He also held a cavalry lance about half the width of a pigsticker, and his shield was slung on Incitatus’s side.
“They’re on the verge of breaking,” Fortex announced breathlessly. “If we can only scatter these gutless wolves before us, we can hit their main body on the left flank and send them all running. Can’t you feel it! This is the moment of truth!”
As Fortex pointed at the wolfriders below, the warrior on the big black wolf rode out from the lines. Unlike most of the infantry, he bore a curved sabre, and his armor looked as if it was made of iron or perhaps even painted steel. He wore a human skull in the place of a helm. As the knights looked on from above, he pointed his sword directly at Fortex and shouted something unintelligible. Jerking back on the reins, the goblin made the giant wolf rear back and emit a bone-chilling howl before it fell back to all fours.
“He’s challenging me,” Fortex said, incredulous. “Single combat. Can you believe that?”
“Don’t do it, Gaius,” Marcus urged, forgetting that he was not speaking to his cousin, but his commanding officer. Even behind the masked helm, he recognized the unmistakable anger flashing in his cousin’s eyes; Gaius Valerius had always been hot-tempered and regarded a dare as a personal insult to his courage and his honor.
Even Dardanus saw it. “Sir, our orders are to hold the hill until they attack! No single combat, they said.”
