Thunder of the Gods (14 page)

When the Tungrians staggered back onto the legion’s parade ground later that morning, they were surprised to find a cohort’s strength of armed and armoured men waiting for them, their dark-blue tunics the only clue the soldiers needed as to their identity. While the exhausted soldiers mustered their energy, Scaurus walked across to where Marcus stood talking to Procurator Ravilla, offering his hand to the fleet’s commander.

‘Greetings, Cassius Ravilla, and my thanks for your quick response to my request for assistance.’

The other man looked down at his hand pointedly before saluting with a punctilious precision that raised the legatus’s eyebrows.

‘I had no choice but to do my duty, Legatus. That was made very clear to me.’

Scaurus nodded his understanding gravely.

‘And for all your understandable reluctance, your marines may be the difference between success and failure. I promise you they won’t be misused.’

He stopped speaking as the procurator put a finger on his breastplate.

‘I know. Because wherever you take them you’ll find me at their head. Legatus you may be, but we’re men of the same class, so if you want these men in your ranks you’ll have to settle for me leading them.’

Scaurus smiled slowly, his eyes stonelike.

‘You commanded a cohort before taking to the sea, I presume.’

Ravilla nodded, his lips tight.

‘In Germania. At the tail end of the war with the Marcomanni. I saw a little fighting.’

‘I see. Very well, Cassius Ravilla, you’ll lead your cohort as a tribune. Which means that the the legion has ten such men where I’m supposed to have six. Did you bring the equipment I detailed in my message?’

Ravilla nodded.

‘I did. Although quite how you expect them to work without a deck to bolt them to is beyond me.’

The legatus grinned wolfishly.

‘Let me worry about that. I know a man who’ll put that right in no time.’

After a frugal lunch, taken in the open under the shade of their shields, the legion paraded again, and Scaurus walked down the line of cohorts with pursed lips, looking closely at the condition of his men and clearly finding himself unimpressed by what he saw.

‘Our men took over five hours to cover fifteen miles, First Spear Quintinus, and yet despite posting that rather mediocre time for a distance which is somewhat less than the usual daily march, half of them look as if they’ve gone a dozen rounds with the legion’s champion wrestler. You may have been teaching them to fight, but their marching skills are sadly underdeveloped. Nothing that can’t be rectified by a week or two of hard training though, is it?’

Quintinus inclined his head respectfully.

‘Indeed not, Legatus.’

‘Indeed not. I’m half tempted to send them around the circuit again, to accelerate the process of hardening them up, but that might be a little much for the first day, so I think we’ll concentrate on the further development of their fighting skills, shall we? Sword drills, I think.’

The senior centurion saluted and turned to his officers, who swiftly set about putting the men to work with wooden swords and heavy practice shields while the tribunes watched with expressions that in a few cases were little better than idle curiosity.

‘You too, gentlemen. Doubtless there are some well-trained swords among you who can teach the remainder a thing or two about the finer points of wielding a blade?’

Calling for practice weapons, they paired off at Umbrius’s suggestion.

‘Let’s have some sport from this, shall we? There are a dozen of us, so we’ll fight in pairs until we’re down to the last three and then they can fight each other in turn for the title of best sword. I’ll put up a jar of wine for the winner to share among us and toast his victory.’

Pairing up with his first opponent, a man barely out of his teens who had completely failed to make any impression on him until that moment, Marcus waved away the offer of a shield and picked up a second sword instead.

‘You do fight like a dimachaerus then?’

He nodded, raising the twin weapons.

‘Ready?’

The younger man nodded and stepped forward to fight with an almost comical look of determination. A simple feint low and to his right put him off balance sufficiently for Marcus to spring onto his other foot and snake the point of his right-hand sword over the top of the tribune’s shield, accommodatingly lowered to deal with the initial attack. The rough wooden weapon’s tip puckered the man’s neck at the point where the veins that ran to his brain were closest to the surface, making him jump back with a surprised expression. He dropped his sword to rub furiously at the sore spot, and Marcus turned away, shaking his head at the ease with which he had taken the victory.

‘You’re dead. When you fight a man with two swords you need to watch his weapons, not his eyes.’

He stood and watched while Umbrius and Flamininus both won their bouts effortlessly, and smiled quietly as Ravilla, theoretically at a disadvantage given he was ten years older than his opponent, dismantled the younger man’s defences with swift and economic ease. Barely breathing hard, he strolled away from his victim, left sprawling on the parade ground’s hard surface by a trip which he had instantly followed up with a sword jab to his exposed thigh. He raised the weapon in ironic salute to Marcus.

‘I’ll see you in the next round, perhaps?’

It was not to be. When the lots were drawn for the last six, Ravilla found himself paired off against Umbrius, while Flamininus grinned evilly at his man, one of the better-trained tribunes. Marcus was matched against Varus, and the two were soon facing each other with their weapons raised while the other officers gathered around them to watch. Varus raised his shield to the textbook position, staring at Marcus over the brass rim with a grim smile.

‘So, Britannia, Germania and Dacia, I’ve been practising what you told me—’

He lunged forward without warning, the attack so swift that Marcus had to step back sharply and parry the sword thrust away from his face. He spun away from the brutal swing that followed rather than block it, then avoided the weapon’s blurred arc again, content to evade the tribune’s strikes rather than parry them, while Varus came after him with the speed and determination of a man who knew that nothing less would have any chance of success. Flamininus folded his arms with a sneer, calling to Umbrius loudly enough for everyone in the group to hear his words.

‘I told you the man was a fraud. Look at him ducking away from poor little Varus’s attacks!’

Marcus looked across at Flamininus briefly, noting the man’s twisted smile. He swayed back to allow Varus’s sword to hiss past his nose with an inch to spare, then stepped in to attack with an abrupt violence that put him face-to-face with the young tribune, pushing his right sword out wide to pin the other man’s blade against his shoulder and putting out a knee to prevent him from punching out with his shield.

‘That was better, Tribune. Good aggression with the blade, tidy defence with the shield. Now let’s see how well you cope with an attack. Ready?’

Varus nodded and fell back, waiting with his sword and shield positioned in readiness for his opponent’s attack. Flamininus snorted his disgust behind Marcus.

‘Gods below, this isn’t some sort of glorified training session! Either fight or get the fuck out of the ring and let some real men have a go!’

Marcus replied without turning his gaze from Varus.

‘Let me know when you find a real man, Tribune Flamininus, and I’ll be delighted to spar with him. Until then I suggest you keep your mouth shut unless you want it shutting for you …’

He waited a beat for the insult to sink in.

‘Again.’

The evil-tempered tribune stormed forward, raising his sword and shield.

‘Get out of the way, Varus, I’m going to teach this upstart bastard a lesson!’

Varus straightened up from his defensive pose with a look of confusion, and Umbrius beckoned him over.

‘There’s no reasoning with the man in this mood. He won’t be happy until he’s faced this man and proved himself to be the better of them.’

‘Prove myself the better of him?’

Flamininus raised a disgusted eyebrow.

‘I do that simply by standing here. I’m going to teach this fool what it means to face a trained swordsman. By the time I left Rome there wasn’t an instructor in the city I couldn’t beat.’

He sprang forward, lunging with his wooden sword’s point, repeating the move twice more as Marcus calmly stepped back with his swords held ready, not deigning to block or parry.

‘You fucking coward! You’re no better than Varus!’

Abandoning his fencing style, Flamininus attacked again with a swing of his sword, the blade skating harmlessly down a sloping sword raised in effortless defence. Stamping forward to punch at his opponent with his shield’s heavy iron boss, his strike found only empty air as Marcus span away to the left, jabbing his sword’s blunt and splintered point into the bicep of Flamininus’s right arm.

‘Fuck!’

Stepping back, Marcus waited while his opponent grimaced at the pain, barely managing to maintain his trembling grip of the heavy practice sword’s hilt.

‘You’re too slow. Too predictable. And you make threats that your skill can’t deliver.’

The tribune’s face twisted in anger, the pain in his arm forgotten as he squared up to his tormentor.

‘I’ll have you, you f—’

Marcus was upon him in a whirl of blades, forcing his hapless opponent back half a dozen steps before Flamininus’s mind had caught up with the havoc that the Tungrian was playing with his defence. A wooden sword point snaked through his guard to jab into his thigh, and while he was still reeling, another smashed the shield from his hand. Umbrius nodded decisively.

‘That’s enough! Give it up, Flamininus, he has you at his mercy!’

The tribune recovered himself enough to look down the length of the wooden sword point only inches from his face.

‘Nothing to say, Flamininus?’

The response was growled between gritted teeth.

‘This isn’t over.’

Marcus smiled equably back at him.

‘I’m afraid it is. Your skill at arms is no better than average, no matter how many instructors took your gold and told you that you were a second Achilles. This bout
is
over.’

He turned away, tossing the wooden swords aside for the next man, only to stiffen in pain as Flamininus slammed his weapon’s wooden blade into his right thigh with enough force to leave a line of blood oozing where the sword’s ragged wooden edge had pierced the flesh. The enraged Flamininus drew his sword back again, his eyes pinned wide with the need to do harm, and as Marcus turned to face him, he whipped the weapon in at head height in a vicious swing clearly intended to strike him in the face.

Ducking under the attack, Marcus fell back, twisting sideways to evade a furious lunge.

‘Stop this idiocy, or I’ll—’

The sword swung high into the air, his assailant clearly aiming to deliver a knockout blow, and Marcus stepped swiftly in, butting his opponent hard with the brow guard of his helmet and sending him staggering backwards with blood running down his face, clearly dazed.

‘Umbrius, call this fool off before I’m forced to put him down hard!’

The senior tribune shrugged with a half-smile.

‘You’ve enraged him past the point that I can control him, Tribune Corvus. I suggest you make yourself scarce before he regains his wits.’

Flamininus shook his head and roared back into the fight, swinging the wooden sword extravagantly and forcing Marcus to retreat in the face of its whistling arcs.

‘
This
is how a Roman gentleman deals with a piece of shit like you!’

He raised the sword and stepped in fast, once more clearly going for the blow that would finish Marcus, but in the split second that the blade was raised to its highest point the Tungrian stopped retreating and stood his ground, suddenly face–to-face with the enraged tribune. Stabbing out with a half-fisted punch, he lunged at Flamininus, twisting to put the full strength of his body behind the blow. Seeing the punch coming, and with no way to avoid it, Flamininus instinctively reared back, taking the full force of Marcus’s knuckles not in his face, as had been the intention, but squarely in the throat. He staggered back, his eyes bulging as he fought for breath that would not come through his traumatised windpipe. An attempt to speak resulted in nothing more than a strangled grunt, his gestures becoming increasingly frantic as he beckoned for help with imploring eyes.

Umbrius stepped forward with a look of concern.

‘Very well, you’ve stopped him, now help him—’

Flamininus fell to his knees, his lips turning blue as he stared helplessly at the men around him. Marcus shook his head as he looked down at his stricken colleague.

‘I’ve seen this before, I’m afraid. He’s already dead.’

Umbrius turned to stare at Marcus, his face suddenly aghast as the Tungrian’s words sank in. Before he could speak, the tribune toppled full length into the parade ground’s dust, writhing as his body contorted in its death throes.

‘You’ve killed him.’

Umbrius dragged his gaze away from the twitching corpse, shaking his head in amazement.

‘You’ve killed a brother officer!’

Scaurus sat back in his chair, looking at his senior tribune with an expression of disbelief.

‘You want what?’

Umbrius’s face was set hard.

‘Justice, Legatus.’

‘Justice? And what measure of justice am I supposed to indulge you in, when a man who was clearly a lunatic provokes another who is far more skilled, and then through his own ineptitude suffers the consequences?’

Umbrius nodded, his face hard.

‘There! You say it yourself! Your man Corvus has fought in a dozen battles! He is a consummate killer, and when poor Flamininus provoked him he responded with immediate deadly retaliation. No warning, no attempt to disarm his opponent, just a straight punch to the throat. A punch he knew would kill Flamininus.’

He folded his arms, his face set in lines of defiance. Scaurus pursed his lips, his expression a combination of amusement and irritation.