would career into the flimsy shield wall, a sudden flurry of movement at the forest edge fifty paces to their left caught his eye. He snapped his attention back to the more urgent events happening less than twenty paces from his men’s shields.
‘Throw! Throw!’
The legionaries hurled their spears into the oncoming mass of men, dropping two of them in screaming heaps and dragging down the shields of half a dozen others, then drew their swords and braced to receive the charge. With a clash of metal on steel the barbarians’ rush collided with his men’s defence. Sheer weight of numbers forced the line back half a dozen steps before the desperate legionaries managed to absorb the momentum. Only the slight slope favouring their defence had saved them from being overwhelmed by the impact, the watch officer estimated. He stepped back behind them to keep his position, watching with amazement as armoured men started to emerge from the trees behind their attackers. The initial screaming and shouting of the charge and contact had died away, and both sides fought in almost total silence, broken only by the rasp of laboured breathing and the occasional grunt of exertion or scream of pain.
To his front a man staggered dying out of the line, a two-stepper if ever he’d seen one, his throat ripped out in a fountain of hot blood whose coppery stink filled his nostrils. The men to either side of the sudden gap in the line inched together, unable to properly fill the dying man’s empty place. As the casualty sprawled full length on the road’s cobbled surface, twitching out his life in a quickly spreading pool of his own blood, Rufius shouldered his younger companion aside, grabbed the fallen shield and stepped into his place. Battering aside a vicious axe blow with the shield, he stepped forward with a speed and grace that belied his grey hair to gut its owner with a swift twisting stab of his short sword as the tribesman struggled to regain his balance. Clutching at his steaming entrails, the barbarian fell to his knees, staring with horror at the horrific wound with a rising wail of distress.
Another of the small detachment went down, an axe buried deep in his shoulder while its blue-painted owner wrestled frantically with the handle, trying to prise the blade free. In a second Marcus Valerius Aquila was in the gap, stooping to grab the fallen man’s infantry sword with his left hand even as he slid the cavalry sword up beneath the axeman’s ribs in a perfect killing thrust, getting a face full of blood as the price for his successful attack. Chopping away a spear-thrust from his left with the borrowed weapon, he swiftly kicked the dying barbarian off his sword, using the freed blade to hack off the spearman’s hand at the wrist before turning his wrist over to swing the long sword backhanded, and neatly sever the head of another attacker on his right. Stepping back into the line to regain his balance, the borrowed infantry sword held forward in his left hand, the longer sword held farther back to level the points of the two weapons, he paused for a moment, breathing hard with the sudden effort, his eyes wide with the shock of combat but still seeking new targets. The barbarians closest to him edged cautiously back from the fight, almost comically wary of the sudden threat from the twin blades.
From the rear of the warband a guttural voice shouted harshly in broken British over the clash of steel, a sword pointing at the retired officer’s place in the line.
‘Kill officer! Kill him!’
Distracted from his open-mouthed appraisal of Marcus’s swordplay by movement in the periphery of his vision, the watch officer found his attention dragged back to the detachment’s left, where the newcomers from the forest were advancing quickly to combat the barbarian flank and rear. The ten men ran quickly to within a dozen paces, threw their spears into the unsuspecting enemy’s rear, then drew their swords, and, screaming bloodlust, went to work on their unprotected backs. Seizing his fleeting chance with both hands, as the tribesmen closer to his men started looking back over their shoulders in bewilderment at the screams from their dying comrades, the watch officer gave the only command possible.
‘Counter-attack! Boards and swords, punch and thrust! Get into them, you dozy bastards!’
The response was almost uncomprehending, the product of a thousand mindless practice drills. The legionaries punched hard with the bosses of their shields at the Britons’ faces, then stepped forward a pace with a collective thrust of their short swords. Two of the distracted tribesmen went down screaming, while several others edged back, allowing the line time and room to repeat the attack. The warband’s leader turned to face their new assailants, spearing one of them with a powerful throw, drew his sword and roared defiance as he advanced into their line. A massive soldier with a crested helmet stepped out to meet him, slapping the sword-thrust aside with an almost casual flick of his shield before lunging his own weapon deep into the barbarian’s chest in one swift flowing movement, twisting it to free the blade as he brutally stamped the dying man off its length. A lone tribesman turned and ran at the sight, joined a second later by another. Like the gradual collapse of an overloaded dyke, another two ran after them, then five, at which point the remainder simply turned and fled. They left a dozen dead and dying men on the ground.
The surviving Romans, half of the legionaries sporting a wound of some kind or other, leant breathless on their shields and watched them run, happy enough to let their enemy escape unhindered when a minute before they had been facing impending death. The watch officer walked across to the newcomers, followed at a discreet distance by Rufius, while Marcus dropped the infantry sword beside its dead owner and wiped the drying blood from his own weapon, suddenly exhausted. The other detachment’s leader, a dark-bearded athlete of a man with the horsehair crest of a chosen man on his helmet, was staring after the retreating warband with a look that seemed to combine disgust and regret.
‘Whoever you lads are, you have the thanks of the Sixth Legion. If you hadn’t come out of the trees we were dead meat. You must have balls the size of apples to do what you just did with…’
The watch officer’s flow of gratitude dried up as he realised that the other man wasn’t paying him any attention, but was still watching the retreating Britons. After a moment the chosen man spoke, flicking indifferent eyes over the legionaries.
‘You’d better tell your officers to stop sending anything smaller than a full century up the road to Yew Grove. Next time you won’t be so lucky.’
He turned to his own men.
‘Take heads, then get ready to leave. We’ll march to the fortress in company with this lot. You two, you didn’t kill anyone that I saw so you can make a sling to carry Hadrun up to the fort. We’ll put him underground somewhere he can’t be dug up again.’
Rufius caught his arm, stepping back with open palms as the heavy-framed man swung back to face him with an angry look.
‘No offence, Chosen, but we’re only trying to thank you for what you did. Most men in your position would have given serious thought to letting us get on with things on our own…’
Marcus overcame his momentary exhaustion to raise his head and study the other detachment’s leader and his troops carefully in the moment’s silence that followed, intrigued by his first sight of native troops in the field. They wore chain mail, unlike the plate armour protecting the legionaries, and their weapons and clothing seemed of a lower quality. He noted, nevertheless, the same hard-edged efficiency in their movements, the same lean wiriness. Like their legion colleagues, these were men that had learnt the hard way not to waste energy on non- essentials. The chosen man’s eyes narrowed, his face expressionless.
‘We’re Tungrians, Grandfather, and we were doing our duty, nothing more, nothing less. We were moving quietly through the forest, and found that lot waiting by the road before they saw us. After that it was only a matter of pulling back and waiting for someone to come along. When we saw the size of your party it was obvious that we would have to help you out… although I doubt it was worth the loss of one of my men.’
Rufius smiled crookedly at the bald statement.
‘I understand better than you might imagine. And nevertheless, from one fighting man to another, you have my respect.’
He turned away, clapping an arm round the watch officer’s shoulder.
‘And as for you, my friend, I’d call that a nice little action. I’ll be sure to mention your name to my friends in the camp, see if we can’t get you a brush for the top of your piss bucket. For now we’d better get the wounded sorted out and then push on to the Grove, don’t you think?’
Sorting the wounded out was easy enough, despite the only bandage carrier in the party having lost three fingers of his right hand to a barbarian sword, which made him of use only in directing treatment rather than providing it. Two men were dead, the two-stepper and the axe victim, the latter with the huge blade still embedded deep in his upper chest. They were stripped of their weapons, armour and boots and hidden from casual view in the trees to await collection by cart the next day. The Tungrians, meanwhile, with pointed remarks about leaving no man behind on a battlefield, ostentatiously rigged a sling with which to carry their own casualty away with them. Of
