palisade.
‘Wait there, I’ll come down.’
Julius nudged Marcus on the arm.
‘Fuck! Get ready, we’re only going to get one chance at this.’
Marcus tensed, understanding his brother officer’s concern. Viewed from the palisade the Tungrians resembled a footsore and hungry remnant of Harn’s warband, but it would be a different matter entirely were the Selgovae leader to get close to them, and a single shout of warning would see the fortress gates closed, and their hopes of storming the Dinpaladyr by surprise ruined in an instant. A man-sized door set in the right-hand gate opened to allow the speaker to step outside the fortress, and Haervui strode across to Harn, his glance flicking across the men standing behind him.
‘We’ve got scouts out on the main road to the south, I’m surprised they didn’t report your approach.’
Harn shrugged, giving no sign of betraying the Romans waiting anxiously behind him.
‘We stuck to the hills, brother. I didn’t trust the roads, there’ll be Romans hunting for us now that the warband is scattered.’
The other man nodded, staring past Harn at the Tungrians with appraising eyes.
‘So we’re all that’s left, my men and yours. We’d better get you inside, then!’ He barked a command at the gate, and the muffled sound of wooden bars being removed from their housings told the waiting soldiers that the way into the fortress would be opened to them within seconds. ‘Come on, then, get moving and get inside! I don’t want the gate open any longer than necessary, there are Romans…’
He stopped in mid-sentence, his attention caught by something unexpected, and Marcus realised that he was staring at their boots. He allowed the blanket to fall from his shoulders as he started running, drawing both swords from their scabbards and sprinting at the two barbarians, knowing that there was no way he could cross the gap before the barbarian leader could shout the command to close the gates. With a whistle of ragged-edged iron slicing the air, Arminius’s axe spun lazily over his shoulder, missing Harn by no more than a foot, and slamming into the barbarian leader’s head with a wet thud as he turned to bellow the alarm to the gatekeepers. The Selgovae leader dropped to the turf in an untidy heap of twitching limbs, and Marcus grasped his chance, angling his run to charge straight at the fortress’s gateway. As the two centuries ran forward the gates began to open with a groan of timbers, spurring Marcus and Arminius to greater speed as a fragile moment of opportunity opened before them. The men on the wall, realising what was happening, started to shout the alarm to the gatekeepers, while a couple of hastily aimed arrows hissed past the Roman to bury their iron heads in the ground behind him.
Marcus was the first man to the massive wooden gate by several paces, at the precise moment when the gatemen responded to the alarmed shouts from the warriors on the walls above them and released the winches at which they were toiling to pull the gates apart. In the split second before the gates started to close he squeezed through the thin gap between them, and found himself in a courtyard occupied by half a dozen men caught in various states of surprise as they dithered in the face of the panicked shouts from the wall above. One of them threw himself at the Roman with a knife in his hand and ran straight on to the spatha’s point as Marcus thrust it into his chest. Arminius had reached the gate, but was unable either to squeeze through after Marcus, or even to stop the massive wooden doors’ ponderous but irresistible closure. Marcus realised that the gateposts were angled slightly inwards, so as to make the gates fall back into the gateway and close upon themselves if the winches that opened them were released, and that he was, for the moment, beyond any assistance from their other side. He could hear the tribune’s bodyguard shouting at the Tungrians to help him as the gates fell shut with a heavy thump, leaving his friend alone inside the fortress.
‘Push, you bastards, before they get the door bars back in place!’
Marcus turned back to face the enemy, realising that half a dozen men were running at the gates with heavy wedges and hammers, seeking to secure the doors against the increasing press of soldiers straining at them from the other side. Kicking the dying man off his spatha’s blade, he twisted away to evade another attacker, who charged in swinging at him wildly with a heavy stave, ducking in under the staff’s reverse swing and stabbing the gladius down into the barbarian’s neck and deep into his chest. He wrenched the short blade free in a shower of blood, leaving the fatally wounded man to stagger away with his eyes rolling up to show their whites. Pausing for a split second to judge the distance to the nearest of the gatekeepers, as the man bent to thrust his wedge between gate and ground, he leapt forward and stabbed the eagle-pommelled gladius through his neck, pinning the hapless man to the gate with the short blade clean through his throat and buried in the gate’s timbers, his blood spraying across the gateway’s roughly paved courtyard. The gatekeepers hesitated for a second, and then broke in the face of their comrade’s last frenzied struggles against the cold iron draining the life from his body, running screaming from the gate into the gloom beyond the courtyard.
Marcus made to kick away the wedge that the dying man had managed to force into the space where the gates met, securing them both closed against the Tungrian soldiers throwing their weight against them, ignoring a poorly aimed stone that crashed to the crude flagstones a foot to his right, but something made him glance to his left. A long blade swept past his face, close enough that he felt its passage through the air. Dancing back with the spatha held blade up and to his right in a cocked stance, ready to either attack or defend, he watched with a sinking heart as the warrior who had so very nearly put a sword into his face advanced slowly towards him, another man behind him taking up the dying gatekeeper’s hammer to batter the wedge more firmly into place. Within seconds the gate would be irretrievably and firmly shut against the Tungrians, and his fate would be sealed – either a quick death or the same protracted end that would be meted out to Harn’s sons in the morning. His mind racing, he barely registered the arrow that flicked past his head close enough to graze his left ear, inflicting a stinging cut on the lobe. Distantly he was aware of the horn blowing on the other side of the gate, the signal for the remainder of the detachment to cross the plain and join the fight.
Taking two shuffling steps forward, he snapped the spatha downwards in a slanting cut to attack the barbarian’s left-hand side, sending the other man skipping backwards with his sword flung wide to his left to deflect the attack. Fighting the sword’s momentum with wrists muscular from years of incessant practice, Marcus altered the sword’s course, sweeping the blade straight down and evading the block, then whipping it back up to his left shoulder before striking again with blinding speed at the swordsman’s extended sword-hand, hacking it off at the elbow and dropping the severed limb to the ground with the long sword still gripped in its nerveless hand. Shouldering the horrified warrior aside, he swung the blade back to his right shoulder and put every ounce of his power into a vicious horizontal cut that buried the long steel blade deep into the second man’s body, dropping him in agony to the courtyard’s flagstones with the blade lodged against his spine and blood fountaining from the horrific wound opened in his side, his hammer falling to the flagstones with a dull clink.
Feeling the spatha’s refusal to come free from the dying barbarian’s body, Marcus released the weapon and spun away to take a firm grip of the gladius’s hilt, only to find it still stuck fast in the gate’s fine-grained oak. A memory flickered into his racing mind, of an afternoon in the hills above Rome on the day after his fourteenth birthday, when he had walked out to meet his tutors in the arts of combat to find no sign of the practice weapons that usually awaited him. The burly former gladiator who had until that day been his teacher with sword and shield had stood waiting for him with a long wooden staff held in one hand, a gentle smile on his face, while the taller, leaner man who was teaching him to fight with his fists and feet sat to one side with a neutral expression. Both men had walked alongside him in his unaccustomed toga the previous day, part of a full turnout of the villa’s household staff to escort the young man to the forum, and witness the ceremonies and sacrifices that celebrated his accession to adulthood, and both had been granted a place at the feast held to mark the occasion the previous evening. Festus bowed slightly, the smile staying fixed on his face despite the show of deference.
‘Fourteen years old, then. Not Master Marcus any more, but Marcus Valerius Aquila, a man. You’ll wear that tunic from now on, and your purple stripes will tell everyone that you’re the son of a senator. A man of influence, a man of breeding… and a target.’ He lifted the staff, tapping one of the tunic’s two crimson stripes where it ran up and over his right shoulder, the dusty iron tip leaving a dirty mark on the garment’s white cloth. ‘This will make you a mark for every thief and bandit that comes across you, and you’ll need to learn to defend yourself or risk having your dignity removed along with your purse.’
He’d shrugged, not seeing the point that his tutor was trying to make and impatient to start the afternoon’s lessons.
‘So teach me. Where are my weapons?’
The gladiator had shaken his head wryly, tossing the iron-shod staff and a helmet to his pupil before turning to pick up his own practice weapons.
