spear that’s scraping your spine.’
He looked around him, taking the measure of his men. In the moment of silence he distinctly heard a distant wail of agony from the treeline. As he had grimly predicted, the barbarians were torturing the captured messengers, using their screams of pain to send a message back to the fort’s garrison.
‘One more thing! You lot look like you’ll run like frightened children the second that gate gets smashed in. It’s simple enough! If we fight well enough to hold them off until dawn then we get to live, or at least some of us will. If there’s anyone here that can’t take a joke, well, it’s a bit late to wish you hadn’t joined. So let’s give these blue- faced sheep-shaggers something to think about. You lot sing well enough when there’s nothing at stake, let’s see if you can belt it out when the blue-noses might have your heads off within the hour! Who’ll start us off…?’
A man on the wall above responded first, his voice ringing out clearly above the rattle of equipment from the street below.
‘The centurion took a message to the general’s villa where…’
The response from the cohort’s men was instantaneous. They roared into the song, lifting the hair on the first spear’s neck.
‘… he was greeted by the great man’s wife, in face and body fair,
Having given her the tablet he bowed and turned to leave,
But found the lady’s gentle hand had gripped him by the sleeve.’
‘Amazing…’ The senior centurion turned to find the prefect standing behind him. He leaned in close, shouting into his subordinate’s ear as the second verse began, ‘You’ve just told them that this is going to be the goat-fuck to end all goat-fucks, and they burst into song at the first opportunity. Perhaps we’ll get away with this after all?’
The veteran officer nodded, leaning over to shout his own response over the cohort’s enthusiasm.
‘Perhaps. The song gives them something familiar to hang on to. Let’s just pray they’re still singing that loudly in an hour. And let’s hope we can find the right god to ask for that small favour.’
Marcus hadn’t waited to witness any more of the barbarians’ torture of their prisoners, but headed back up the slope as fast as he could without making a noise that might betray him to the tribesmen. He looked around at the small group of soldiers, his face rigid with rage and his voice a furious whispered growl.
‘They’re torturing the message riders we heard them capture. There are twelve of the bastards, and eight of us. If they manage to warn their comrades that we’re here then we’ll probably all die to the last man, both centuries, but if we don’t do something then those three men are going to die after several hours of that agony. Who’s with me?’
Qadir drew his dagger from its sheath, holding it up to the moonlight.
‘I’ll come with you. We’ll all come.’
Dubnus nodded.
‘We’ve got three archers, so that’s two shots apiece and six men down before they know what’s happening and another six for the five of us. Seems fair enough.’
They crawled down the slope in silence, gritting their teeth to ignore the shouted pleas for mercy and screams of pain, as the barbarians were clearly warming to their role of making the message riders’ torture painfully obvious to the men defending the fort. When they reached the fallen tree, Marcus set Qadir and his three bowmen along its length and ordered them to keep their heads down until he gave the signal, then led the remaining 5th Century men away in a low crawl to the right. The scene was now lit by several torches set in the ground around the trees to which the prisoners were tied, and the Tungrians took special care as they crawled slowly around the clearing’s edge until they were between the scene of torture and the warband, then huddled for a last whispered briefing from Marcus.
‘When I give the order, the Hamians will put two arrows into the air apiece. If we wait for them to stop shooting we’ll likely be too late to avoid one or more of the survivors making a break into the forest, and if that happens we’ll have minutes before there are hundreds of men combing these woods for us. So I’ve got a better idea
…’
The barbarians were gathered around the last of the three message riders to have retained his consciousness, however much he might have preferred to have slipped into the merciful oblivion that had claimed his colleagues. Their hands bloody from their torment of the other two men, they were competing to see which of them could wring the loudest scream from their helpless prisoner, and were watching one of their number as he probed inexpertly at the root of the man’s penis with his knife when a call from behind alerted them to the presence of newcomers.
‘Who the fuck are you?’
The tallest of them strode out from the group with a swagger, backing up his challenge with his obvious bulk, while his comrades turned to back him up and crowded in behind him. The newcomers, four men huddled into their cloaks for warmth, stopped just inside the clearing’s edge, the largest of them calling out a reply in their own language.
‘We are sent by Calgus to help you.’
The torturer’s leader stepped closer to them, waving them away dismissively.
‘We have no need of help. Go back to the fight, if you have the balls for it…’
He stopped in his tracks as a series of muffled thumps reached his ears, turning back to see one of his men down and another two staggering away. As he stared uncomprehendingly another three of the torturers jerked with the impact of the unseen arrows hammering into their unprotected bodies. The newcomers dropped their cloaks to reveal their armour and weapons, and sprang forward with their swords ready to fight, but the barbarian had already realised his peril and turned away from their threat, sprinting for the clearing’s far side and gathering his strength to hurdle the fallen tree that lay across his path, seeking escape into the night in search of help. A shadowy figure rose from the ground in front of him, sharp iron glittering in the moonlight, and the tribesman ripped his sword from its scabbard as he used the tree’s trunk as a springboard for his attack, leaping at the other man with the blade held ready to strike. His opponent snarled and bounded forward to meet his charge, swinging his sword in an arc of razor-sharp iron.
Marcus ran toward the prisoners with both swords drawn, butchering a tribesman who turned to face him with a brutal hack of his spatha which cleaved the man’s body from shoulder to breastbone before kicking him off the blade and turning in search of a fresh target for his rage. Another man ran for the forest behind the trees to which the prisoners were bound, but made barely a dozen paces before an enraged Scarface ran him down and sank his gladius between the fleeing tribesman’s shoulders, while Dubnus charged into a pair of hapless barbarians with the heavy axe that was his habitual night patrol weapon. Smashing the butt of the axe’s heavy wooden handle into the face of the nearest man and breaking his jaw with an audible crack, he dodged to the right to avoid a sword-blow from the other, cleaving his attacker’s arm clean off at the elbow with a swing of the heavy blade. Spinning through a full circle, he lopped off the stricken barbarian’s head and then swung the axe blade high before hacking it down into the reeling victim of his butt stroke, chopping his head almost in two and killing him instantly. He ripped the axe blade from the dead man’s head as the one-eyed soldier known to his mates as Cyclops dragged the last man’s body across the clearing and dropped it on to the ground next to them.
Marcus walked across to a writhing tribesman, the man’s hands fretting at the arrow buried in his back, and dispatched him with a swift stab of his gladius, then looked over the corpses of the dead tribesmen and frowned.
‘There were a dozen of them, I see only eleven dead men.’
Dubnus pointed at the fallen tree.
‘One of them ran that way. Go and see for yourself.’
The barbarian group’s leader was laying spread-eagled a dozen paces beyond the tree, while the three Hamians stood solemnly around him. Seeing their centurion approaching, they moved away to allow Marcus to view the body. The man’s corpse was almost headless, only his neck and lower jaw remaining attached. A gout of blood had exploded down his chest, glistening black in the moonlight, and the rest of his head lay in the pine needles half a dozen paces from the rest of him.
‘How did you…’
Qadir pointed silently to a dark figure standing in the shadows behind them.
Marcus nodded to Arminius and then turned back to the prisoners, still tied to their trees. Even the man that
