attack in the same instant, the charging horses smashing men flat with bone-shattering force, ripping at faces with their yellowed teeth and crushing skulls with flying hooves. The elemental power of the charge gave the lances a killing capability that was almost beyond imagination, the long spears punching through a first body as if it were made of silk, then spearing another, then another, before the weight of dying men forced the cavalry trooper to drop the weapon and reach for his sword.
The first lines were followed ten seconds later by the second, with similar devastating effect, but the third rank of each squadron wheeled away to form an unbroken barrier between the attackers and the sanctuary of the tree-lined valley wall.
The Britons were trapped.
A growl of rage went up from the surrounded men. They understood they were defeated, but they were warriors, they knew how to fight and they knew how to die. If they were to go to their gods they would take as many Romans as they could kill with them. The intensity of the fighting in front of the shield wall, already savage, grew to a kind of wild-eyed mindlessness as men tore at each other to reach the hated enemy. Behind them, the heavy cavalry swords rose and fell, hacking at arms and shoulders and heads, until a spray of blood and brains fell like summer raindrops on killer and victim alike. A man screamed from what was once a mouth as he realized he would never see again because his face had been sheared off by a sword blade, the way a slave would peel the skin from a ripe pear. Another sobbed as he watched, stupefied, while his lifeblood drained from the stumps of his forearms. A few had helmets, but that did not save them. The force of the falling swords was enough to crush metal and bone alike.
‘They’re beaten,’ Rufus said, his voice shaking in wonder at the scale of the carnage. ‘Why don’t they give up?’
‘They are barbarians. They don’t surrender, they die.’ The voice was flat, emotionless. Not Narcissus, but a heavy-set man in elaborate, polished armour and a legate’s scarlet cloak. He was accompanied by a staff of a dozen young officers and a twenty-strong bodyguard of cavalry who reined in their nervous horses well upwind of Bersheba.
‘So you were right, Master Narcissus. They came for the elephant.’
‘And you were right, General, to salt the baggage train with a half-cohort of infantry disguised as slaves. The gap in the column was fortuitous, but I don’t believe they would have attacked unless they believed we were weak.’
Rufus studied the commander of the Second Augusta. Titus Flavius Vespasian had a way of holding himself that suggested he had been carved from solid stone. Now in his mid-thirties, he had used his family connections to rise steadily through the ranks of the aristocracy until the only thing standing between him and a consulship was a successful military campaign. He was tough, ambitious and intelligent, but if its owner was undoubtedly noble, the face was that of a provincial butcher, broad and puffy-fleshed, and only saved from being ugly by a rather handsome nose.
Vespasian frowned, as if Narcissus’s attempt at flattery offended him. ‘Nothing is certain in war. If the cavalry had been less timely it would have been hot work for a while.’ He nodded in dismissal and forced his white stallion forward through the crush of the baggage train, to where his legionaries were still sweating to contain the snarling remnants of the British attack in front of their shields.
‘Steady, comrades. You almost have them. A ration of the best wine for the third cohort tonight.’ The encouragement was greeted by a ragged, dry-throated cheer. Then in a quieter voice to the stern-faced officer who commanded the cohort he said, ‘Give them another minute and form wedge. That’ll finish the bastards.’
The surviving warriors were trapped in a blood-slick square perhaps two hundred paces across, hemmed in by cavalry on three sides and the fourth an impenetrable wall of shields. Five hundred men had launched themselves from the forest, confident they would slice through the thin defensive line and destroy the enemy’s talisman. Thirty minutes into the battle less than half of them were left standing, and more fell to join their dead and dying comrades with every swing of the sword.
‘Wedge formation.’ The centurion’s command was obeyed in three well-practised movements which turned the infantry line into four arrowheads. The legionaries used their shields to batter their way deep into the heart of the enemy ranks, destroying any remaining cohesion or illusion of command. Rufus saw the panic spread through the British force like a ripple on the surface of a wind-blown pool. There was no visible evidence of surrender, only a palpable recognition of defeat. It was accompanied by a sound like a snarling dog as the warriors realized they could no longer fight, but only die. Some of them would have given in to despair, but the trap was sealed so tight they did not even have the choice of falling on their swords. Only one among them retained his composure, on the far edge of the slaughter where the cavalry screen was lightest and the trees closest. Somehow he was able to organize a concerted assault against the weak point of the Roman line. Fifty warriors broke through the gap and sprinted for the wooded hillside and safety.
‘Let them go.’ The legate’s roar halted the cavalry pursuit. He turned to the tribune who was his closest aide. ‘You must always leave a few to tell the tale, Geta. They’ll think twice before they try to tickle us again.’
VIII
The taste of victory was the taste of blood.
Tiny droplets must have carried from the battleground on the breeze and settled on his thirst-dried lips, because when he licked them he could distinguish that unmistakable metallic tang.
Rufus hadn’t realized that the aftermath of a battle could be as terrible in its own way as the battle itself. But Narcissus insisted he see the enemy at close range to understand the primeval force which opposed them. Now they were walking among the dead and the dying, the severed heads and the gobbets of nameless flesh, and the sword-chopped hands that seemed to beckon their former owners. At first he had tried to avoid stepping in the blood, but he quickly realized how pointless it was. There was blood everywhere. Not an inch of the killing ground was unpolluted. It stank, too. There were two distinct varieties of dead, he noticed. Those in the rear had all suffered terrible wounds to the head and upper body as the long, heavy cavalry swords had chopped down on flesh unprotected by armour. In contrast, those who were closest to the shield line had mainly died of stomach wounds, where the three-foot gladius had punched into belly and groin. Some had been almost entirely eviscerated and it was their exposed entrails, lying in obscene heaps and twisted strings, which gave the battlefield the odour of a well-used open latrine. It was quieter now; the groans and whimpers of the wounded had faded as the legionaries moved among them, slitting throats as casually as if they were sacrificing chickens and surreptitiously pocketing the golden bracelets they found decorating the arms and necks of the richest corpses.
‘Magnificent, are they not?’
Magnificent? Rufus looked at Narcissus with puzzlement. An hour ago these had been vigorous, powerful young men full of the confidence that came with that stage of life when maturity of body and mind reached its pinnacle. The past was full of growing pains, the future an unavoidable fading. The present? It was for laughing and loving, and, yes, for fighting. But this? He had seen death before; in the arena and in the palace of Caligula how could one not? He had even killed a man, a man who might have been his friend. He remembered the feeling of having lost something for ever: an empty space deep at the heart of his being. This was different. The enormity of it, the scale of the suffering, numbed the mind and froze the body. It overwhelmed that part of him that cared, so he could stand here, in this obscene garden of the dead, and not go mad.
‘Why did they do it?’
‘They wanted Bersheba. They have never seen her like. She is a mystery to them. They fear her, so they must destroy her.’
‘But Bersheba is…’
‘Yes.’ Narcissus smiled. ‘We know that but they do not. We stumbled on their tracks about two days ago, when we were coming in from the north. They were shadowing the column, but keeping their distance; then a messenger came, and reinforcements. That was when they closed in and when I informed the legate. At first we weren’t sure where they would strike, but Bersheba drew them like wasps to rotting fruit.’
‘Will they come again?’
Narcissus cast a bleak eye across the sea of dead flesh surrounding them. His gaze settled on the big
