Steam Legion (18 page)

That couldn’t last forever, however, and soon the hill loomed before them and it was time for her full attention to be on the task at hand.

“Cassius, take your Century around to the east. I’ll get the siege teams set up,” she ordered. “Who commands the Cavalry Auxiliaries?”

“There.” Cassius looked over to a large man atop an even larger horse. “He’s from one of the northern tribes, Gesgaui of Arkady.”

She nodded curtly and turned to approach the mounted men, only for Cassius to put a hand on her shoulder.

“Be better if I passed on the order, my Lady,” he said.

She looked into his eyes for a moment, recognizing the concern, but her own turned cold as she dropped her gaze to look at where his hand was on her shoulder. Cassius dropped his grip reflexively and only just kept from taking a step back.

The drums were deafening in her ears now, but Dyna no longer cared to stop them.

“I’ll be fine,” she said simply. “Take your Century to the east as ordered, Centurion.”

“Yes, my Lady.” Cassius saluted on reflex and fell back as she continued on her chosen path.

She turned to focus on the horsemen again, eyes still narrow slits as she considered what she knew of them in general.
Tribal warriors, effective enough individually but unable to really work with the degree of precision needed to challenge the Legion. One-on-one they’re stronger than your average Roman, and skilled enough to slice a Legionnaire to ribbons if he were foolish enough to fight them like that.

The bows resting in the saddle-mounted sheaths were enough to tell her that their mounted skills included archery, which was one of the most valuable of mounted abilities.

Good. We’ll need that.

She spent the rest of the short walk to the mounted figure eyeing him carefully, sizing the man up. If he were from the northern tribes, obviously to the far east of the empire, she had a good idea of what to expect. Within their limits, those tribes were more respectful of women than the Empire. However, one of those limits was age and experience, and she was well aware that she fell well short on those two factors.

“Gesgaui of the Steppes, am I correct?”

The man nodded, not bothering to respond verbally.

She could see how this man was the leader of his little troop; he had to be two full heads taller than the rest of them and built similarly. His tough-looking animal was similarly sized, particularly in comparison to the solid little ponies ridden by the others.

“Take your group to the west, around this hill,” she ordered. “The rising sun will be the signal for the attack. While Centurion Cassius forms the shield wall to the east, you will run our enemies into his swords.”

There was a long moment of silence as the man stared down at her from his seat in the saddle, and she matched the look right back without a hint of hesitance. Finally, he grunted, eyes looking amused as a slow smile split his craggy face.

“The drums, they grow louder do they not?” he asked in broken Greek.

Dyna barely had time to register the words before he whirled his horse almost in place and called to the others to follow as he headed off to the west. She stared after him wonderingly for a moment, then shook her mind free of the shock at his words and focused on the task of the moment.

“Our time now, you dogs,” she said with a grin as she turned back to the siege train she now commanded directly. “Get your chariots moving. We’ll be in position and prepared before the dawn breaks, or you’ll answer to me.”

She needn’t have bothered with the threat by implication. None of those present had any intention of failing her this time. They’d seen the Lady in action before, and each wanted to be part of this action as well. The chariots turned off the road and slowly began to make their way up the hill as their horses and mules strained in the stocks, men pushing at the rear.

Brass cannons were heavy; just the tubes alone would stagger a single animal trying to draw them up a hill like this. With the pots, even the modified versions, the total weight was closing to insane levels, but they slowly made progress and only occasionally got stuck.

It was one of those occasions, while watching them slide a thick plank under the wheels of a mired chariot so they could draw it up the hill, that an idea came to her. She wished then for her tablet to scratch down a sketch. But for the moment, she would have to rely on her memory because, even as she was thinking, they reached the crest of the hill. Below, a village was burning.

They quickly set to laying out the weapons, relying on the scouts’ reports more than what they could see through the darkness. The work had to be done carefully, in near darkness, as any excessive light or sound might possibly be seen by their enemy. But Dyna had chosen her group carefully, and they had been drilling ever since the repelled assault on Alexandria for just this sort of thing.

For her part, Dyna chose an observer position, and while her Adjutant was laying out the command tent and tables, she began to take careful notes on the position of the village, the enemy troop she could see by their flickering campfires, and the directions and angles of her own position.

With great care and precision, Dyna set a small table in front of her tent, placed with a solid view of the town and battlefield-to-be. On it she set her personal planetaria, one of her early projects as an apprentice to Master Heron. It self-leveled on its gimbal mount, allowing her to take measurements of the stars while they were still visible and to calculate angles and directions with great precision. From this hilltop, the village was almost three hundred yards, with the enemy position being slightly farther due to the angles involved. Her instrumentation wasn’t as accurate, precise, or flexible as the planetaria she’d devised for the defense of Alexandria, but that masterwork was in the hands of Master Heron and the city’s defenders, so she would make do with what she had.

The onagers were set ahead of the cannons, spread out to either side. They didn’t have the potential range, but no one dared put them directly in front, as the most efficient placing would indicate. The fear of the dragon’s breath cannons was great, even among those who directed their power, and Dyna couldn’t blame them. Deep down she, too, felt a visceral fear of the sheer power that existed in steam.

Until she met Master Heron, Dyna had never considered the ferocity inherent in the gentle wisps of vapor that rose from a heated cauldron. Heron had put paid to any ideas of gentleness in steam, from the cannons he had recreated from Archimedes’s notes to the aeliopile that most viewed as little more than a toy. The entertaining aeliopile was a party favor to most, but to Heron it was the visual example of everything steam could do. Power bottled and yoked to human control.

The rawest form of that power anyone had ever seen was without a doubt the Archimedes steam cannon, though few people had truly seen what they were capable of due to the problems with the sheer complexity of the test models. With the new modifications provided by Sensus, Heron, and Dyna herself, she was eager to show the world just how badly they had underestimated what was boiling off their home stoves.

Chapter 14

The sun was just beginning to show on the horizon when they had finished setting up the camp positions, and Dyna was happily completing her initial range estimates. She scribbled some quick calculations on her wax tablet then ran those results through the planeteria before calling over a camp runner.

“Yes, my Lady?”

“Inform the cannons, adjust their angles to east twenty-three degrees off due north,” she ordered. “And make their elevation thirty degrees. Have the onagers stand by for orders, but I want them pointing to about…”

She paused, eyeing the terrain below as she tried to guess the route the enemy forces would take in response to the cavalry charge. The onagers didn’t have quite the range of the steam cannon, so she would have to position them in anticipation of how the battle would play out rather than use them for the first strike.

“Have the onagers make their direction…east thirty degrees.”

“Yes, my Lady.” The man saluted and ran off, leaving her to continue to second-guess the battle with far too little time and even less information.

With dawn’s light touching the hill, she knew that they were out of time to prepare, so Dyna offered up a quick prayer to Ares even as the distant thunder of the Cavalry charge began to roll across the land. The tribes of the northeastern edges of the Empire were known for two things they did spectacularly well, and both of those things were done on horseback. If one were to listen to the men of the tribes, they were actually excellent at one more thing, at least, on horseback, but the Legion didn’t have a lot of use for that particular skill.

Their archery from horseback and the strength of their cavalry charge, however, were two skills the Legion desperately needed. While known as nearly unbeatable Heavy Infantry, the armies of Rome traditionally leaned on the specialties of other peoples for the much-needed support roles such as Cavalry.

In Rome, the Legion won wars, but Dyna knew well that it was often the Auxilliaries that won battles.

The enemy was obviously preparing for the continuation of the campaign. They were awake and preparing their positions as she watched from her observation point. Their Infantry wasn’t as on the ball, however. Other than some perimeter guard, Dyna didn’t see any of the enemy Infantry in the open, and they hadn’t prepared much in the way of defensive lines against a Cavalry charge.

Unsurprising, in Dyna’s eyes. The township clearly didn’t have Cavalry, after all, but the misstep was about to cost them dearly.

****

The men preparing the siege weapons honestly mistook the sound in the distance for rolling thunder, and as a response, they cast their eyes skyward to look for any sign of rain. Their reaction could be forgiven since rain would prevent them from using their bows and even some of their siege weapons for fear of having the moisture cause the destruction of valuable equipment. For all that, however, it cost them a few more seconds before the first person dropped his eyes and saw the cloud of dust raised up by the hooves of a hundred horses thundering in their direction.

The cry of alarm went up, screams undulating from one side of the siege camp to the other, growing in panic and volume in direct relation to the steady increase of the rolling thunder bearing down on them.

Men poured from the tents, some pulling armor on in a hurry but most in tunics or, more often, bare-chested as they marshaled their response.

The oncoming horsemen split into three groups, two smaller lead elements galloping out ahead of the main group. Those elements closed fast, while the defenders were still scrambling, and split the defensive line as they angled their approach to pass the lines from either side.

The bowmen on the horses loosed their first arrows, the speed of their horses adding to the force of launch and driving the fletched missiles into the enemy line with devastating effect. The first line of defenders, mostly perimeter guards and siege experts, took the brunt of the assault as men went down with feathered shafts sprouting from their bodies.

A few scattered arrows answered back, driving men from horses and sending some of the large animals to the ground, rolling on their riders and being overrun by the riders behind them. On the whole, however, the archers continued virtually unopposed in the chaos of the first few moments of battle, loosing more arrows as they passed the lines and leaving more feather shafts sprouting from their enemies’ cooling corpses.

The archers continued to fire as they raced away, aiming well back while trusting their mounts to continue. The initial wave of chaos reigned over the group even as the archers raced away, leaving the perimeter lines a ragged mess when the main thrust of the northerners’ Cavalry charge struck the line.

The horses reared up and simply flew over the angled arrow defense line, hooves easily five to seven feet off the ground, as their riders called their battle cries at the top of the lungs. The screaming would chill the blood under normal circumstances, but to an already shaken line, it was the call of the devil himself as the world shook with the force of his riders.

Swords sung in the dawn’s light, the ringing of metal on bone surprisingly sweet if one didn’t know the nature of the song. Horses and riders rampaged through the camp, tearing through men, tents, and whatever else could be taken apart by sword, axe, or crash of hooves. The moments of chaos lasted an almost interminable time, both on the ground and on horseback, but all things come to an end.

The Zealot Commander of the siege group only took a few seconds to recognize what was happening when he emerged from his own tent, hastily buckling his armor while a boy chased along behind him with a sword-belt in hand. He ignored the boy’s entreaties to arm himself, instead snarling above the general chaos as he grabbed men in passing and redirected their flailing to directions he chose.

“Spears! Get your spears!” he growled. “It’s only Cavalry! Spearmen to the perimeter!”

When the horses began to stampede through the camp, he swore in three languages and finally grabbed his sword and belt from the boy. The sword jerked free of the belt in one motion, and then he tossed the belt back to the boy without a glance.

With the Cavalry within the perimeter, the game was different, but not unrecoverably so.

“Spear teams! Converge on the horses!” he yelled, grabbing men in passing and kicking them in the direction he wanted.

A horseman bore down on his position, a large cleaving axe in hand, but the Isrealite Commander merely pushed the boy at his side out of the way and slashed the animal’s legs out as the axe cleaved the air over his ducked head. The horse screamed in pain as it went down in a tumble, crushing the rider when he failed to jump clear in time.

The recovery from the initial chaos was slow but inexorable. Here and there, men got their wits about them and got to their spears, eight-foot-long shafts of ash wood tipped with iron. It only took a couple men wielding those to ruin the day of a passing Cavalry charge, as they merely had to plant the end and let the horses’ own weight drive them into the weapon with near irresistible force.