his legs out from under him and pitched him face first to the ground. Leaving the short sword in the spearman’s chest, he feinted momentarily at the last man standing to put him on the back foot, then finished the fallen barbarian with brutal speed, hacking the spatha deep into his spine before turning away to tackle the last remaining warrior. Ripping his gladius free as he passed the dying spearman, he brutally kicked him face first into the mud. The last man turned to run, but managed less than five paces before the enraged officer ran him down, spearing the long sword through his left thigh and dropping him howling to the ground. He waited for the Venicone warrior to roll on to his back before finishing the fight, batting aside the man’s sword with something close to contempt before pushing his spatha into his chest in a slow, measured thrust, watching the barbarian contort in agony as the iron’s cold bite pushed through his organs. The stink of faeces hung in the air as the dying warrior’s bowels voided themselves.
‘A hard death.’
Marcus turned to find Scaurus and Arminius standing behind him, their swords unsheathed. Both men were breathing hard from their run from the opposite hill. Marcus twisted the sword and pulled it from the dying man’s body, inspecting the point for any damage, then casually ran the blade through the throat of the concussed warrior he had smashed aside with his shield.
‘Not hard enough. They killed my clerk.’
The prefect nodded simple agreement, turning away to look for Lupus and finding him staring at the hill above them.
‘At least you managed to save the child, that’s some…’
He turned to look at whatever was holding the child’s attention, seeing another group of warriors staring down at them from the hill’s crest, nine or ten strong. Marcus and Arminius followed his glance, their faces hardening as the barbarians started down the slope towards them.
‘If you’ll allow me, Prefect, this is a job for your man here and me…’
Marcus fell silent as the prefect bent to pick up one of the dead Venicone warriors’ swords, seeing an amused smile touch Arminius’s face. Scaurus drew his gladius, taking up a two-handed fighting stance without ever taking his eyes off the oncoming warriors.
‘Thank you, Centurion, but I’ll take my chances alongside the pair of you if it’s all the same to you.’
The first warriors stormed in to attack the trio before Marcus had any chance to reply, assaulting the Romans in a furious whirl of swords and axes. In a second Marcus was fighting for his life, ducking under a wild sword-blow and hacking his gladius deep into his attacker’s thigh before shouldering the man into the path of another warrior. Sensing movement behind him, he swayed his upper body back out of the path of a spear-thrust, watching the wickedly sharp iron blade slide past within inches of his face. He flicked the spatha’s blade down into the muddy ground, relinquishing the sword’s hilt and grabbing the spear’s shaft with his right hand, then leaned in to thrust his gladius up under the spearman’s jaw, leaving the sword embedded in the dying man’s throat. Lifting the spear from the warrior’s numb fingers he pivoted back to the wounded barbarian and the man into whose path he had pushed him, reversing the weapon with a casual flourish and stepping in to plant the butt spike in the wounded barbarian’s throat in a spectacular shower of blood as the spike tore into the man’s neck. Shifting on to his back foot, he flipped the spear lengthwise again to present its razor-sharp blade before stamping his right foot forward again, thrusting the iron head deep into the other barbarian’s guts and ripping it free with a savage twist that contorted the warrior’s face with pain, the contents of his bowels gushing down his legs as his eyes rolled up. He watched the man’s face with savage intent, lost to blood rage as the barbarian slumped to the floor, ramming the spear’s blade between his ribs and through his heart. Arminius’s guttural shout snapped him back into the fight.
‘Behind you!’
He pivoted, ripping the spear free of the fallen warrior’s body to find a pair of warriors within a half-dozen paces and charging in fast. Without time either to pull the weapon back for the throw or turn fully enough to use the blade, he dived forward beneath their raised swords, tripping his attackers with the spear’s shaft and rolling out from beneath their tumbling bodies to where his spatha waited, its point buried in the mud. Dropping the spear and snatching at the sword’s hilt, he sprinted back into the fight, hacking at the closer of the two, the sword’s razor- sharp blade opening the man’s head up like ripe fruit, then kicked the sword loose from the lolling corpse to parry an attack from his companion. Too slow. The man’s booted foot hooked his leg and pitched him to the ground with a thump, driving the breath from his body and breaking his hold on the spatha’s hilt. The sword fell uselessly to the ground beside him and the barbarian smiled at him in triumph, his sword’s point suddenly at Marcus’s throat with a cold bite that froze his attempts to regain his feet. Groping unnoticed at his belt for his dagger he found instead the tribulus given to him on a cold spring hillside far to the south and months before by Rufius and tugged the vicious little device free, forming a fist around its iron spikes.
The Venico standing astride him laughed down at him, lifting his shoulders and taking a firm grip on his sword’s hilt in readiness to ram the blade home into the Roman’s windpipe. Marcus was a split second faster, slamming his fist up into the man’s unprotected groin and spearing the iron barb that protruded from between his fingers between his balls and deep into the root of his penis. The barbarian threw his head back and screamed in agony, his sword dangling forgotten as he staggered away, and Marcus rolled to one side, scooping up the spatha and surging to his feet to behead the man with a single blow. He looked to his comrades, fearful of what he might find.
A mile down the river, the fight was slowly but certainly turning against the Tungrian detachment sent to cover the defence’s southern flank. Julius watched with growing consternation as the number of Venico warriors ranged against the three centuries in his defensive line strengthened by the minute, a stream of tattooed barbarians crossing the river behind them to add two men to their strength for every one killed by the Tungrians. His men were tiring now, their initial battle fury exhausted, and while he knew they would fight on for a good deal longer he could tell that they were no longer battling as hard as before. While the Tungrians were increasingly huddled behind their shields, striking out with their short swords when the opportunity presented itself, the Venicones, bolstered by the flow of fresh warriors from the mass waiting on the other side of the river, were gradually gaining the upper hand, growing in confidence as their strength increased.
He looked to the rear, peering past the stolid lines of the 10th
Century’s axemen waiting for their turn to join the fight in the mist, knowing that the rest of the cohort probably had problems enough that reinforcement was unlikely.
‘Another five minutes of this and we’ll have to start putting the Bear’s lads into the fight.’
Julius nodded at Rufius’s muttered statement.
‘How’s the boy?’
The older man glanced down at Dubnus’s prone form, his wound temporarily staunched by the bandage stuffed through the hole in his armour by a bandage carrier who had shaken his head unhappily and moved on to the next casualty with the hardbitten detachment of a man who had seen death and mutilation too many times before to be affected by anything as prosaic as a spear wound.
‘Still with us. I’d say he’ll pull through, if only we can get him out of here…’
Julius snorted, pushing another of his century’s rear rank forward as a front ranker went down with an axe buried deeply in his head, the heavy blade cleft clean through his helmet’s bracing bars and deep into his skull. The rear rankers to either side grabbed him by the shoulders of his mail coat and threw him backwards past the officers and out from under the soldiers’ feet to lie wide eyed and spasming intermittently on the wet ground. The bandage carrier gave his twitching body a cursory glance before turning back to the task of bandaging a wounded man’s arm, opened up from wrist to elbow by a Venicone sword.
‘Not much chance of that. We stand here and most likely we’ll die like rats in a barrel. Bear, get your boys ready to…’
His head jerked up as he caught movement on the hill above them out of the corner of his eye.
‘What the fuck…?’
Men were mustering on the slope to the barbarian left, perfectly positioned for an attack down into their unprotected rear. Rufius stared up the hill alongside him, straining tired eyes to make out the detail masked by the curtains of mist drifting across the battlefield.
‘It’s a century of our lads, although they look bloody odd to me. Scruffy bastards from the look of it…’
Julius laughed grimly, tucking his vine stick into his belt and drawing his gladius as the men on the hill above gave a guttural war cry and poured down the hill in an undisciplined charge that narrowed Rufius’s eyes with bafflement.
