Arrows of Fury e-2

by Anthony Riches

  Martos led his warriors away from the ford without any of the defenders seeming to notice, climbing the steep hill to the south of the defences in long rangy strides that put them on the flat summit within two minutes. With their leader setting the pace the Votadini headed south along the crest’s rolling surface, Martos staring intently down into the mist for a sight of the place he was looking for. After a few minutes he saw the Hamians marching tiredly north along the river’s bank, followed closely by the survivors of the Tungrian century.

  ‘Can’t be too far now…’

  He led his men cautiously down the valley’s steep slope, their swords drawn and ready, his eyes scanning the ground.

  ‘There!’

  A man to his right had spotted the scene of the battle to hold the riverbank, marked by both the burning trees’ billowing smoke and the corpses scattered across the river’s narrow plain by the score. Martos waved his men forward and down the hill.

  ‘Make it quick. The longer we’re here, the more chance of our being surprised…’

  Julius took his four centuries south at a gentle jog, balancing the need to make haste with that of his men being ready to fight when they met the inevitable opposition. The other three centurions ran alongside him, their faces grim as they listened to his instructions.

  ‘It has to be another warband. That’s the reason those lads back at the ford haven’t attacked again, they’re waiting for this lot to turn our right flank. They’ll be building up their strength ready to attack the riverbank, hoping to sweep away any blocking force and fall on the defenders at the ford without warning. When we find them, we form a three-century line and then advance to make contact, with the Bear’s lads held back in reserve. We kill every blue-nose we can find, then we let the axemen loose on whatever they’re using as a bridge while the rest of us use our shields and spears to protect them as best we can. Right, it’s time to slow down and listen.’

  He signalled the advance to slow to walking pace, and ordered a quiet deployment into battle line, the muffled jingling of the soldiers’ equipment the only clue to their presence as they drew their swords and hefted their shields, ready to fight. They could hear the enemy now, a distant murmur of voices in the mist as they advanced cautiously down the riverbank. Julius signalled to his brother officers, pointing to his eyes and calling softly to them.

  ‘They’re closer than they sound in this fucking mist. Keep your eyes open.’

  With a gentle gust of wind the mist shifted, momentarily opening a window on the Venicones gathered by the river’s bank.

  ‘Fuck me sideways…’

  The veteran Scarface, in his usual place at the centre of the 9th Century’s line, stared aghast at the scene revealed as the mist rolled aside for a moment. Hundreds of Venico warriors were milling about on the riverbank less than fifty paces in front of them, clearly waiting for their leaders to send them along the river in force. Behind them a continual stream of men were crossing the trunks of three trees that had been felled and lashed together to span the river’s churning course. The Red now foamed and gurgled around rocks that protruded from the water, as the river approached the first in a series of falls that dropped it abruptly into a stone-walled canyon that would prevent any further progress down either of the river’s banks.

  Behind the Roman line Julius took one look at the scene laid out before them and stepped up behind his men, taking a deep breath and bellowing his orders.

  ‘Spears ready! Advance!’

  The Venicone warriors, alerted to the presence of their enemy by his voice, came bounding forward to the attack, their voices raised in a clamour of screamed abuse and swords brandished over their heads.

  ‘Front rank, throw…!’

  The front rankers ran swiftly forward and launched their spears across the twenty-five-yard gap between their line and the oncoming warriors, the heavy-bladed missiles slamming into the barbarian charge and dropping dozens of the Venicones to the steaming turf screaming in agony.

  ‘Rear rank, throw…!’

  The front rank had followed their training and gone down on one knee once their spears were in the air, ignoring the oncoming warriors to allow their fellows an unrestricted throw. The second volley of spears was thrown lower than the first, their trajectories flatter as their targets raced closer, and the missiles again took a vicious toll of the attackers, who were for the most part unarmoured. All along the front of the mass of charging warriors men fell under the thumping impact of the spears, the flying blades piercing their limbs and bodies and dropping them helplessly to the ground, impeding their fellows, who trampled over the fallen in their urgency to get at the Romans.

  ‘Line!’

  The Tungrian front rank drew their swords with a massed scrape of iron on scabbard fittings, slamming their shields into an unbroken wall that stretched from the riverbank to almost a third of the way up the valley’s side. With a mighty roar the tribesmen recovered the momentum stolen from them by the volleys of spears and dashed themselves against the Roman shields, swords flashing as they rose and fell in vicious arcs. Unlike the Selgovae tribesmen that the cohort had fought to a standstill at the battle of Lost Eagle the Venicones were incandescent in their battle fury, disdaining any pretence of self-preservation as they hacked and chopped at the Tungrians’ shields and the helmeted heads that peered over them, taking any opportunity to attack the men behind them even if it opened them up to devastating counter-attack from the soldiers’ short thrusting swords.

  Julius stalked down the rear of his command’s line to find Rufius marshalling his century’s defences, feeding men into the line as the soldiers to their front suffered under the barbarian swords. His brother officer nodded grimly, inclining his head to the warriors railing at the shields, almost close enough to reach out and touch, and shouted over the clamour of their assault.

  ‘This is more like the old days. If the lads that faced us at Lost Eagle had been this fired up I doubt we would have survived long enough for the legions to show up.’

  Julius nodded grimly, one hand gripping his sword’s hilt tightly.

  ‘And they’ve still got men crossing the river behind them. Unless we can chop that bridge off they’ll just wear us down with numbers.’

  A soldier to their left went down under a barbarian axe-blow that cleaved through the curved iron plate of his helmet, staggering blank eyed back from the shield wall before pitching headlong to the bloody grass with the weapon still embedded in his head. Rufius’s chosen man thrust a rear ranker into the breach, the soldier stepping forward to put his sword into the disarmed axeman’s throat as the man leapt at him with only his teeth and nails for weapons. Rufius raised an eyebrow, ducking momentarily as a spear flashed past the two men, clearly aimed at the enticing target of their helmet crests.

  ‘Fuck me, they’re keen. Perhaps we should send the Bear’s boys round them to attack the bridge?’

  ‘Perhaps not, little brother.’

  They turned to find Titus standing behind them, surveying the Venicones’ strength beyond their shields with a face equally as grim as their own.

  ‘There must be five hundred of them. We wouldn’t even get to the bridge before they cut us down like dogs. What this little skirmish is crying out for is a flank attack to get them fighting on two sides… then I’d have some chance of succeeding. Without something to distract them we’ll only hold them off until they get enough men across that bridge to overwhelm us…’

  Julius started, looking over Rufius’s shoulder.

  ‘Fuck!’

  He started running up the Tungrian line, his sword out of its scabbard, and Rufius and Titus turned to look at what had caught his eye. In the shield wall to their right, where the valley floor met the steep hillside that rose above it, the crested helmet of a centurion rose proudly above the helmets of the men to either side. Barbarian swords were rising and falling in flashing arcs around the embattled officer, clearly drawn to their chance of taking a Roman officer’s head
like wasps to honey.

  ‘Dubnus!’

  Even as Rufius realised his friend’s predicament the centurion staggered back out of the line, and a mighty roar went up from the men facing the 9th Century, pressing forward with the scent of victory in their nostrils.

  Antenoch and Lupus’s afternoon had been relatively non-eventful. The pair had been kept busy taking rations to the centuries manning the riverbank. With each brief visit to their comrades both had taken a moment to stare out between the waiting soldiers at their enemy, standing with apparent patience on the opposite bank. Antenoch pulled the child away from the Tungrian line, thinned out by the removal of the four centuries the first spear had taken south down the riverbank to the degree that the boy no longer had to duck to stare between the soldiers’ legs to see the Venicone warriors lurking on the far bank.

  ‘There’s more of them over there than we can see in this bloody mist. That lot are waiting there because their leaders know they keep us here to face them down just by being there. The question is, where are the rest of them?’

  Prefect Scaurus was asking the same question of himself, two or three times on the verge of sending another two centuries down after the first four. Each time he weakened, however, one look at his colleague’s face was enough to convince him not to do so. Prefect Furius was staring pale faced and trembling down at the massed warriors on the far bank, his eyes wide with the same fear that Scaurus had seen on his face ten years before. He watched Antenoch and the boy toil past his perch on the hillside once more and smiled wanly, wondering whether a position with such simple responsibilities would be better than the crushing burden of command bearing down on him.

  Movement in the mist to the south caught his eye, a century or so of weary men marching over the brow of the steep escarpment from the south. His first reaction, as he recognised the centurion leading the soldiers behind him out of the murk alongside First Spear Frontinius, was a wolfish smile of triumph, but the emotion faded quickly as he realised the sheer number of men missing from the ranks marching exhaustedly behind his officers, even with what appeared to be another century bringing up the rear. The Hamians staggered to a halt, clearly at the end of their tether, most of them bearing the marks of men that had been in a desperate fight, their shields scored and notched and their armour black with the drying blood of their enemies. Many of them were supporting walking wounded. As he watched his men’s obvious distress with pity and pride, Scaurus’s attention was drawn away from what was happening in front of him for a terrible, fateful moment.

  Antenoch saw them first, half a dozen ragged warriors loping down the hill in front of them towards the unguarded supply carts in the Tungrian rear, their swords gleaming dully in the mist. He pushed the child under the cart from which they were unloading the rations, snatching up his shield and unsheathing his own blade as he turned to face the barbarians bounding down the slope to attack, shouting a warning to the soldiers two hundred paces away on the far side of what remained of the previous night’s camp. His cry sounded weak and muffled in the mist’s dampness, and the Venicone warrior leading the pack grinned in anticipation, swinging his sword in a vicious hacking blow at the lone soldier.

  Antenoch parried the strike upwards with his gladius, stepping in fast to drive his helmet’s brow guard into the other man’s face so hard that he felt bone shatter under the blow’s force. Reversing his grip on the sword’s hilt he ducked under the next man’s spear-thrust, burying the gladius’s length in his side and snatching away the spear, leaving the blade sheathed in the crippled barbarian’s liver. The remaining warriors spread out around him, wary of the spear’s long reach but quickly surrounding him with blades and forcing him to twist and turn, continually stabbing with the weapon’s wide blade in a doomed attempt to hold them off. One of the warriors slid silently around to his rear, stepping close to the cart and landing a slashing blow across the back of the Roman’s thigh, dropping him on to one knee with his hamstring severed. The warrior’s howl of victory became a scream of pain as Lupus scuttled out from under the cart and dragged the razor-sharp blade of his knife across the back of the barbarian’s ankle. The tendon parted with an audible thump, and the Venicone staggered away on his good leg and fell to his knees, waving his sword at the child and screaming with fury. Antenoch turned to the boy, grimacing with pain, and muttered a single word between gritted teeth.

  ‘Run!’

  As Lupus watched, his eyes wide with the shock of combat, another warrior stepped in and butchered the stricken soldier, grabbing his helmet’s broad neck protector and jerking it up to expose the back of his neck. Slamming his sword through the space between Antenoch’s mail coat and his helmeted head, the tribesman speared the sword’s blade through his throat. A fine drizzle of the dying man’s blood flicked across the boy’s face as he stared without comprehension at the horror inches from his face. Antenoch’s mouth gaped open, but no sound issued other than his croaking death rattle. His eyes rolled upwards as he lost consciousness, and his body sagged twitching to the ground. Lupus, still frozen to the spot, looked up into the face of his protector’s killer as the warrior ripped his sword free from Antenoch’s neck, then drew back his arm to hack the child down, swinging the blade out in a wide arc that held Lupus mesmerised as the Venicone screamed his rage into the boy’s face.

  In a sudden blur of motion and with a crunching impact the barbarian was gone, punched away by the impact of a shield smashed into his body by a figure sprinting out of the mist. The warrior went down with his face wrecked, battered out of shape by the impact of the shield’s heavy bronze boss, and with blood pouring from his shattered nose. He groaned once, put a hand to his ruined cheekbone and collapsed to the grass only partially conscious. Lupus stared up from his crouch between the cart’s traces, watching numbly as Marcus tossed the shield aside, flashed out his gladius alongside the longer-bladed spatha and turned his ire on the man the child had wounded. Swinging the cavalry sword at the hobbling warrior’s throat in a precise arc, he dropped the wounded man to the turf with blood sheeting from his opened neck, then turned back to the remaining barbarians with a tight-lipped snarl that hardened to barely restrained rage as he lined up the blades’ points. He drew in a long breath and allowed it to escape in a slow exhalation as he paced slowly forward, eying the three remaining barbarians with cold calculation as they dithered between fight and flight, his eyes meeting the child’s empty stare and hardening as they flicked back to the Venicones. For all their numerical advantage the warriors quailed at the sight of a helmetless soldier daubed with mud and blood, his eyes flint hard above a mouth slitted with contempt. One of them groped on the floor in front of him, unable to take his eyes from the Roman’s approach as he picked up the spear that Antenoch had dropped.

  The attack, delivered after several long seconds of silence, was all the more shocking for the speed with which Marcus took his iron to the barbarians, too fast for the stunned child to follow from his hiding place. Turning aside the spearman’s frantic defence and punching his gladius through the man’s ribs, he deflected a stabbing sword from his left with an almost absent-minded parry with the spatha, slanting the long sword to allow the man’s attack to slide along its polished surface and extend the attack farther than the barbarian had intended, then kicked his legs out from under him and pitched him face first to the ground. Leaving the short sword in the spearman’s chest, he feinted momentarily at the last man standing to put him on the back foot, then finished the fallen barbarian with brutal speed, hacking the spatha deep into his spine before turning away to tackle the last remaining warrior. Ripping his gladius free as he passed the dying spearman, he brutally kicked him face first into the mud. The last man turned to run, but managed less than five paces before the enraged officer ran him down, spearing the long sword through his left thigh and dropping him howling to the ground. He waited for the Venicone warrior to roll on to his back before finishing the fight, batting aside the man’s sword with something close
to contempt before pushing his spatha into his chest in a slow, measured thrust, watching the barbarian contort in agony as the iron’s cold bite pushed through his organs. The stink of faeces hung in the air as the dying warrior’s bowels voided themselves.

  ‘A hard death.’

  Marcus turned to find Scaurus and Arminius standing behind him, their swords unsheathed. Both men were breathing hard from their run from the opposite hill. Marcus twisted the sword and pulled it from the dying man’s body, inspecting the point for any damage, then casually ran the blade through the throat of the concussed warrior he had smashed aside with his shield.

  ‘Not hard enough. They killed my clerk.’

  The prefect nodded simple agreement, turning away to look for Lupus and finding him staring at the hill above them.

  ‘At least you managed to save the child, that’s some…’

  He turned to look at whatever was holding the child’s attention, seeing another group of warriors staring down at them from the hill’s crest, nine or ten strong. Marcus and Arminius followed his glance, their faces hardening as the barbarians started down the slope towards them.

  ‘If you’ll allow me, Prefect, this is a job for your man here and me…’

  Marcus fell silent as the prefect bent to pick up one of the dead Venicone warriors’ swords, seeing an amused smile touch Arminius’s face. Scaurus drew his gladius, taking up a two-handed fighting stance without ever taking his eyes off the oncoming warriors.