advance of their Tungrian auxiliaries. Bordered on both sides by the wild forest of oak and birch that made the hill fort’s steep approaches so difficult, the space beneath the trees thick with holly, alder and hazel that made it practically impassable, the ridge’s wide path led arrow straight down to the fort’s massive outer gates. Only here was there any realistic prospect of an attacker’s advance meeting with anything but disastrous rebuff, but in anticipation of such an obvious approach, the fort’s occupiers had long since constructed an elaborate series of defences across the fort’s western face. Three successive palisades of thick wooden beams defended the innermost point of the fort, the hill’s flat summit.
The Tungrians hunched behind their shields as the fort’s wooden rampart loomed in front of them, casting nervous glances at the thirty massively built barbarians striding purposefully between them. An iron-tipped battering ram fashioned from a tree trunk hacked from the surrounding forest hung between the two ranks of prisoners, and swung to and fro as they marched down the ridge’s slope. Each pair of men on either side of the ram was shackled together at the wrist, their chains wrapped around the tree trunk to remove any chance of flight, and every man was naked from the waist up, while a legion centurion and a dozen hard-faced soldiers marched alongside them in grim silence with drawn swords. The legion officer barked a command into the oppressive silence that greeted their advance.
‘When we reach the gate you barbarian bastards will swing that ram as if your lives depend on it. Which they do!’ He waited a moment to allow the men among them that spoke some Latin to translate his words for the others. ‘When the gate’s breached you will be released from your chains, and you will then go forward into the fort and take on the defenders with any weapon that you can get your hands on. Any man that runs will be put down by the soldiers alongside you or behind you without a second thought, so if you think that’s a better choice than going through the gates you can think again. Those of you that survive the attack will be freed to return to your villages with your second brand.’ Some of the men glanced down at the mark crudely burned into their right forearms, ‘C’ for ‘captivus’. ‘Let me remind you that if you decide to run, and in the unlikely event that you actually get away with it, the lack of that second brand to cancel out the first one will get you crucified when you’re recaptured. And that, my lads, is not a pleasant way to leave this life. Far better to die cleanly here in the sunlight than choking out your last miserable breaths in agony, and with your back opened up like a side of bad meat.’
Dubnus nudged his friend.
‘Keep your eyes open for them once we’re inside. I’m pretty sure that half of them fought us at Lost Eagle, I even recognise a couple of them, and they’ll probably be only too happy to take one or two of us with them. Especially men wearing crests on their piss buckets like you and me.’
Marcus nodded grimly as the attacking force came to a halt in front of the massive wooden gates.
‘Archers, ready…’
He glanced back, seeing the century of Syrian archers arrayed behind their small force taking up positions from which to shower the ramparts with arrows if the defenders were sufficiently unwise to show themselves. The legion centurion commanding the ram’s conscripted bearers pointed at the gates, bellowing the command for them to start their assault. With a collective grunt of effort the ram-bearers swung the tree trunk backwards, then heaved it forward with a collective lunge, the iron head’s arc ending against the gates’ timbers with a rending crash, sending a shower of dust cascading down on to the leading Tungrian soldiers waiting alongside them. A tribesman popped up from behind the wall and lifted his arms to hurl a rock down on to the ram’s bearers, but fell back with an arrow in his neck and a dozen more studding the palisade’s wooden wall before the missile even left his hands. Twice more the ram swung back and hammered into the gate’s creaking timbers, and with the fourth blow the left-hand gate sagged tiredly on to the ground, ready to fall. Julius barked an order back into the expectant silence.
‘Tungrians, wait for my command…’
The ram’s fifth collision with the fort’s defences ripped away the left-hand door; its shattered remnants fell back into the gap between the fort’s first and second palisades in a cloud of dust and splinters. Without the strength of its support, the right-hand gate surrendered after another two blows of the ram’s massive iron head, leaving the gateway open and empty. The waiting legionary guards tossed keys to the barbarians’ chains to the shackled men, waiting behind their shields with drawn swords as the prisoners freed themselves from the ram. Some of the barbarians gathered their chains to use as crude weapons, while others simply looked about them at the Roman troops gathered to all sides in a combination of hatred and simple terror. With the last of them freed, the centurion pointed his sword at the gateway.
‘Go! Go and earn your freedom!’
For a moment longer the prisoners hesitated, until a shaggy-haired giant who had hefted the ram’s heavy nose with straining muscles bellowed his defiance and loped forward into the fort, triggering a collective howl of anger and a sudden mad charge from the men behind him. As the last of the barbarians vanished through the gateway, Julius flashed his sword down.
‘Advance!’
The four centuries trotted quickly towards the smashed gate’s opening, flinching involuntarily as the bolt throwers on the hill behind them spat their heavy missiles over their heads in a salvo of shrieking iron. As Marcus rounded the gateway and stepped over the fallen gates’ shattered timbers a falling man rebounded from the palisade in front of him and hit the ground with a wet crunch of shattered bones, a bolt buried deeply in his chest. He stepped forward and hacked reflexively at the dying man’s head to make sure of the kill, then stared up and down the curved face of the inner wall. There seemed to be no other target for his sudden urgent need to take his blade to another enemy, only the half-naked barbarian prisoners milling about between the walls to either side of them and a few scattered corpses of the bolt throwers’ earlier targets. He started as a scream sounded from the rampart to his rear, suddenly feeling horridly vulnerable to whatever was happening above and behind him. Instinctively raising his shield as he spun to face the outer wall, he felt a clanging thud as a spear intended for his back found only the iron boss in the shield’s centre. The spearman howled his frustration at the miss, then staggered forward off the wall and turned a neat half-somersault to the ground with an arrow buried in his neck, the price of standing to make the throw.
A flicker of movement caught Marcus’s eye, a mob of a hundred or more barbarians streaming round the fort’s inner wall from his right, waving swords and axes in the air as they charged towards their attackers with berserk howls. They ripped through the barbarian prisoners without mercy, clearly aware of their former allies’ need for redemption through victory and taking no chances with their loyalties. For whatever reason, and whether it made sense or not, the defenders had committed most of their strength to meeting the Tungrian attack head on. Any chance that the legion cohorts would be bearing the brunt of the battle once the auxiliaries had broken the fort’s first line of defence was clearly no longer a reality. Dubnus had seen the barbarian charge, and stepped forward with a bellowed command that cut through the moment’s confusion.
‘Form a line!’
A good part of the 9th Century was through the gate already, and in seconds they had an unbroken wall of shields raised across the gap between the first and second palisades, the other centuries clustering to their rear in the thin space between the walls. The wave of attackers crashed into them, hammering at the shield wall with swords and axes, while the Tungrians held them at bay and stabbed back at them with practised skill, aiming killing blows at their throats, bellies and thighs. Stuck behind the line, Marcus craned his neck to see what was happening behind the fort’s enraged defenders. As he watched, the massively built prisoner who had headed the first wave of attackers through the gateway got back to his feet a dozen paces behind the rearmost enemy warrior. A red smear across his forehead indicated that one of the defenders had clubbed him to the ground without taking the precaution of checking that the blow had been sufficient to put him out of the combat. He was pointing to something that was out of sight to Marcus around the inner wall’s curve, bellowing words that were inaudible over the battle’s cacophony of screams and curses. With a sudden flash of insight Marcus realised what he must be pointing at.
‘The next gate…’
He turned to Dubnus, pointing urgently past the seething mob of barbarians on the other side of their shield wall.
‘The second gate’s open! Give me ten men, quickly!’
He sheathed his spatha and tossed the shield aside, climbing nimbly up the rough wooden ladder that led on to the wall’s wooden fighting platform with a sudden burst of energy born of his realisation that the way to the heart of the fort had been left open behind the mass of warriors throwing themselves on to the Tungrians’ shields.
