bodyguard, his mind moving over the calculations. He guessed at ten centuries in the Tungrian line, a full cohort. Given time they would make the thin line’s flanks impossible to turn, protected by impassable barricades of hastily felled trees and rows of sloping wooden spikes to impale the unwary attacker. Attack now, or pull his men away to safety, the victory already under his belt and a Roman legatus’s probably dead?
He stopped and looked up at the Tungrian line again, musing on the grim faces that had stared back at him. His own people, so familiar, obdurate in defence, incandescent in assault, but with the overlay of Roman discipline to temper their courage, which made each one of them the equal of his best warriors in terms of simple killing power. The difference, the key difference, was that no matter what the provocation, the situation, little would persuade them to break their wall of shields, from behind which their short stabbing swords would flicker like the tongues of hundreds of deadly snakes. Refusing to enter the chaotic swirl of man-to-man combat, the Tungrians could afford to fight several times their number, the more numerous enemy without any means of applying that superiority in numbers. Just one cohort, though, eight hundred men against thousands of his own. How long could that take? Even if he lost as many as he killed, or even twice as many, it was an exchange that made more than adequate sense.
He walked on, jumping back into his chariot as he reached his bodyguard. Eyes turned to him, awaiting his command, the men ready to put their lives at risk.
‘They will not withdraw. Their prefect was disappointingly resolute.’
Aed raised his eyebrows, indicating a desire to speak.
‘Then we must fight, my lord. No warrior will willingly walk away from that many heads begging to be taken. Besides, many are not yet blooded…’
‘I agree. But it must be fast. The Roman spoke of other legions, and at the very least the other cohorts commanded by their legatus must be close at hand, and their bloody Petriana too. Handled properly, their cavalry and even one full legion could carve us to ribbons if they caught us here, even though we would be more than twice their number. Send a rider to Emer and Catalus’s warbands – they’ve stood and watched the others kill Romans, they must be raring to get into the fight.’
The tribal bands moved forward at the run, eager after watching their fellows rip the guts out of the hopelessly outnumbered cohorts. The younger men joshed each other as they ran, boasting breathlessly of the heads they would take, the older warriors straining to catch a glimpse of their adversaries and take their measure. The two leaders met as they ran, agreeing swiftly on a simple left and right split, nothing fancy in the amount of time they had, a straight forward charge and hack, using their superior strength in numbers to overwhelm the auxiliaries.
On their slope the Tungrians stood impassively, still hammering out the menacing rhythm of spear and shield, the noise numbing their senses to any fear, replacing the emotion with an incoherent sense of common identity. The cohort had ceased to be a collection of individuals, and had become an engine of destruction ready to strike. The relentless pulse of its fighting heart had stripped away the feeling of self from its members and left them in a state of detachment from reality, ready for the impersonal fury shortly to be required for their survival. They watched, still pounding out their defiance, as the enemy advanced quickly across the open ground to their front, forming up into lines that roughly matched their own, one hundred and fifty paces down the slope, out of spear’s throw. Another brief command rang out from the trumpeter, silencing the drumming and bringing their spears into the preparatory position for the throw. In the sudden silence the slight noises of weapons and armour were suddenly magnified, the dull clink of equipment ringing out across the slope as both sides made ready.
In the 9th Century’s front line Scarface and his mates braced themselves for the fight to come, the veteran soldier talking quietly to the men around him. Even the tent party’s watch officer deferred to the scarred soldier’s twenty years of experience.
‘Now, lads, this is going to be a right gang fuck once they get up the slope, so here’s how it’s going to go. When Uncle Sextus gives the order we’ll sling a volley of spears into them. Aim for the men who’ve lost their footing, the ones too distracted to see your spear coming until it’s tickling their backbone. You’ve carried the bloody thing on your back since the day you joined, and never really had the chance to use it properly, so make the fucking thing pay you back for all those miles you’ve carted it. That’ll be one less blue-nose to wave a sword at you. Once the spears are gone we air our blades double quick and get the shields set strong, ready for them to hit the line with everything they’ve got. You lads at the rear, you get a good fucking grip of our belts and brace us to hold firm. We’re on a nice slope, so it shouldn’t be too hard to hold them if we work together. After that you just concentrate on the same old drills, board and sword, parry and thrust. Put your gladius into a blue-nose’s guts, twist the fucker, kick him off it and get back behind your board. Don’t fucking stand there watching him die, or his mate will carve you up just like you would if you was him.’
He paused, swelling his chest with a great draught of air.
‘Breathe deep, lads, you’ll need all the air you can get in the next few minutes. And just remember, any of you bastards turn from this fight before it’s done and you’ll have me and my blade to deal with once we’re done with this shower of unwashed hairy arseholes. We stand together.’
Along the Tungrian line a few men quailed and were swiftly dealt with by the officers and their older comrades, slaps and kicks putting them back into the line. The majority listened to the cohort’s veteran soldiers tell them how to deal with what was coming and stared impassively down the slope at their enemy, prepared to kill in order to live, a stark equation both understood and accepted. In order to live through, to see their women and children again, they would have to slaughter the tribesmen in great numbers. Almost to a man, the soldiers were ready to start the butchery.
In the tribal ranks men swiftly made their last preparations, discarding heavy items of clothing that would restrict their movements in the coming melee, muttering hasty prayers to their gods for victory. The older warriors, alive to the possibilities of the coming combat, sensibly added the hope for a clean death should their time have come. Without the time to indulge in any lengthy diatribe against the invaders, the chieftains looked to each other, nodded their readiness, then charged forward up the slope, hurling thousands of warriors at the flimsy Roman line.
The Tungrian centurions looked to Frontinius at the line’s centre, waiting for his signal as the barbarian horde surged up the gentle incline. Waiting with one arm raised, he watched the shaggy warriors storm towards his men, thirty yards, twenty-five, the usual range of the initial spear-throw, twenty, until at fifteen yards from the shield wall they hit the strip of greasy mud that his troops had painstakingly stamped into bubbling ruin. The leading wave of attackers slowed, fighting to stay on their feet as they bunched to avoid the giant wooden obstacles’ sharpened points. Crowded from behind and perilously close to falling headlong into the mud, more than a few suddenly shouted their pain as the scattered metal caltrops, half hidden in the mud, pierced their feet. The tribesmen’s attention was suddenly focused more downward than forward.
Scarface raised his spear, shouting encouragement to his comrades, easing the weapon back and forth in readiness to throw, as he searched for a target among the mass of tribesmen struggling towards the Tungrian line.
Frontinius whipped his hand downward in the pre-agreed signal. A volley of spears arced flatly into the struggling tribesmen, finding targets unprotected in their struggle to stay upright. The front ranks shivered with the impact, men screaming as flying steel spitted them through limb and trunk, their flailing bodies adding to the chaos as the barbarian charge faltered.
The veteran soldier found his mark, a big man carrying a six-foot-long sword momentarily distracted by the greasy footing, and stepped forward to throw his spear, arm outstretched as he followed the weapon’s flight through to his point of aim. The barbarian jerked as the spear’s cruel steel head punched into his belly, blood jetting from the wound as he sank to his knees. Drawing his sword with a smile of satisfaction, Scarface backed up the slope until he felt hands grab his belt to steady him, lifting his shield into line with those to his right and left.
Along the line the centurions bawled new commands, their men drawing their swords and crouching deeper behind their shields as the barbarian wave regained some of its momentum, shrugging aside the dead and dying to struggle towards the silent Tungrian line. Seeing their momentary difficulty, Frontinius made a snap decision, lifting his sword and pointing at the barbarians with its blade, bawling the order that unleashed his men down the slope.
With a shrill of whistles from their officers the cohort lunged the few remaining paces down the hill into their enemy, smashing into the struggling barbarian line with their heavy shields and bowling the enemy front line back into the warriors behind, then stepped in with their swords.
