Arrows of Fury: Empire Volume Two (45 page)

‘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.

‘Thank you, Centurion, but I’ll take my chances alongside the pair of you if it’s all the same to you.’

The first warriors stormed in to attack the trio before Marcus had any chance to reply, assaulting the Romans in a furious whirl of swords and axes. In a second Marcus was fighting for his life,
ducking under a wild sword-blow and hacking his gladius deep into his attacker’s thigh before shouldering the man into the path of another warrior. Sensing movement behind him, he swayed his upper body back out of the path of a spear-thrust, watching the wickedly sharp iron blade slide past within inches of his face. He flicked the spatha’s blade down into the muddy ground, relinquishing the sword’s hilt and grabbing the spear’s shaft with his right hand, then leaned in to thrust his gladius up under the spearman’s jaw, leaving the sword embedded in the dying man’s throat. Lifting the spear from the warrior’s numb fingers he pivoted back to the wounded barbarian and the man into whose path he had pushed him, reversing the weapon with a casual flourish and stepping in to plant the butt spike in the wounded barbarian’s throat in a spectacular shower of blood as the spike tore into the man’s neck. Shifting on to his back foot, he flipped the spear lengthwise again to present its razor-sharp blade before stamping his right foot forward again, thrusting the iron head deep into the other barbarian’s guts and ripping it free with a savage twist that contorted the warrior’s face with pain, the contents of his bowels gushing down his legs as his eyes rolled up. He watched the man’s face with savage intent, lost to blood rage as the barbarian slumped to the floor, ramming the spear’s blade between his ribs and through his heart. Arminius’s guttural shout snapped him back into the fight.

‘Behind you!’

He pivoted, ripping the spear free of the fallen warrior’s body to find a pair of warriors within a half-dozen paces and charging in fast. Without time either to pull the weapon back for the throw or turn fully enough to use the blade, he dived forward beneath their raised swords, tripping his attackers with the spear’s shaft and rolling out from beneath their tumbling bodies to where his spatha waited, its point buried in the mud. Dropping the spear and snatching at the sword’s hilt, he sprinted back into the fight, hacking at the closer of the two, the sword’s razor-sharp blade opening the man’s head up like ripe fruit, then kicked the sword loose from the lolling corpse to parry an attack from his companion. Too slow. The man’s booted foot hooked his leg and
pitched him to the ground with a thump, driving the breath from his body and breaking his hold on the spatha’s hilt. The sword fell uselessly to the ground beside him and the barbarian smiled at him in triumph, his sword’s point suddenly at Marcus’s throat with a cold bite that froze his attempts to regain his feet. Groping unnoticed at his belt for his dagger he found instead the tribulus given to him on a cold spring hillside far to the south and months before by Rufius and tugged the vicious little device free, forming a fist around its iron spikes.