tales of the riches they would win once the Romans were swept away, walking from one campfire to the next to show them his confident, wolfish grin. He stood in the middle of his warband, in the heart of a gathering of the fifty or so men who provided their leadership, thousands of warriors beyond them straining to hear his words.
‘One cohort and a few miserable horse boys aren’t going to hold us up for long, but I want to do this the true Venicone way, in a storm of iron and blood. Their blood. I’ve run from them for long enough to crave battle, to swing my hammer into their shield wall and see men shrink away in terror.’ He stared about him, his heart swelling with a savage pride in the host of warriors gathered about him, and raised the hammer over his head in one hand as he turned in a full circle to stare his chieftains in their eyes. ‘Not one of those Roman bastards is to survive to tell the tale of how we tore them limb from limb. Let it be as if they simply marched into the autumn fog and never came out again, as if the very hills wearied of their presence and rose up, crushing them flat without leaving any trace. Let there be no word of their deaths for their families, not even the bitter comfort of knowing that their men are dead, and not enslaved for the rest of their short lives. No more running, my brothers! Let the Romans know what it feels like to run… at least for as long as it takes for us to catch every last one of them and put them to the sword!’
When the cheers had died away he gathered his chieftains about him, speaking softly to avoid being heard beyond their tight ranks.
‘Once we move, we move quickly. Tell your men that any one of them that falls out of the march will be left to face his shame alone. We’ll meet the scouts I sent out last night on the road, and they will guide us into the enemy camp. We must mob the Romans, my brothers, like wolves bringing down a stag. When we find them there can be no hesitation, we must run straight into the fight and overcome their defence with simple weight of numbers. If we respect their shield wall they will hold us at spear’s length all morning, bleeding us from behind its shelter in their usual cowardly way. Run to the fight like wolves, my brothers, sink your teeth into their throats and bring them down in the way that we fight best. Spill blood for me, my brothers!’
The warband ran to the east in the dawn’s growing light in silence, their passage marked only by the jingle and clatter of their weapons, with the king and his twenty-man bodyguard running at their head. Three miles out from their camp, the scouts sent out by Drust the previous night rose from the vegetation at the side of the track that headed east to the Dinpaladyr, and Drust raised his hand to stop the warband’s forward progress. His men panted their steaming breath into the cold morning air while he walked to meet his men.
‘Only three of you?’
‘One of my men went closer to the enemy camp, my lord, but he did not return. We heard nothing, but they must have found him and either killed or captured him.’
Drust nodded unhappily, telling himself that the man’s loss would inform the Romans of nothing more than they already knew, but nevertheless cursing the lost opportunity to learn more about his enemy’s disposition.
‘Go on, then, tell me what you know.’
‘We found the Roman camp by the light of their watch fires, my lord, and stayed within sight of them until dawn, to better see what awaits us. They have camped in a gap in the forest, my lord, with the ground to either side made impassable by trees they have felled with the tops facing outwards, but the ground before their earth walls is clear and flat.’
Drust scowled, his face contorted with the ache in his chest from the effort of the run.
‘So they may be alerted, but no more so than would have been the case anyway. You can lead us to them?’
The scout nodded, pointing down the track with a dirty-nailed finger.
‘Simple enough, my lord. If we run another thousand paces we will come upon the break in the forest on your right, five hundred paces deep and the same wide. The enemy camp occupies the last third of the open space, with flat ground all the way from the track to their earth wall.’
Drust nodded, thinking fast.
‘How high is their wall?’
The other man tapped his leg where the thigh joined with his groin.
‘This high, my lord. A running man could be over it in one jump, if it were not defended.’
‘You read my mind. And when you left it to meet up here, was it defended?’
‘No, my lord. There was noise inside the camp, but no sign of any shields at the wall.’
‘Good. Now walk with me and give me a warning when we are within one hundred paces of the gap in the forest. We will make a quiet march from here, and only run again at the very last moment.’
The warband paced forward in silence, the lead scout walking alongside Drust as they crept down the track towards the Roman camp. With no more than fifty paces left before the point where he judged they should start the attack, the scout stiffened and grasped his master’s arm, pointing at a handful of men who had marched out of the mist to their front, each of them carrying a pair of leather buckets. The group’s leader bore the marks of a man who had recently taken a beating, and he carried himself gingerly, as if every movement were painful. Romans and barbarians alike goggled at each other in a moment of indecision before the soldiers reacted, tossing aside their buckets and turning to flee, screaming out warnings as they ran.
Too late, Drust told himself gleefully, much too late. He sprang forward, bellowing the only command required to unleash his men.
‘Attack!’
The men of his bodyguard ran with him, the faster of his warriors passing him within a dozen paces as they sprinted in pursuit of the fleeing Romans. Rounding the edge of the forest gap within which the enemy camp had been constructed, the Venicones stormed down the slight slope towards their objective, every man howling a battle cry as they swept towards the camp’s unmanned defences. Looking beyond the fleeing soldiers, Drust saw a sea of tents across the breadth of the Roman encampment, with smoke rising from dozens of cooking fires, while the few isolated sentries patrolling outside the earth walls took one look and bolted for the illusory safety of the camp’s interior. The warband’s onrushing tide reached the slowest of the soldiers fleeing before them, and the man went down with a spear in the back of his neck, his gurgling scream driving his comrades forward in their headlong flight from the howling warriors behind them.
The desperate soldiers reached their walls, running through the doglegged gap left open to allow unobstructed entry and exit, one of them falling on the mud-slicked grass and crashing to the ground. He was overrun in a second, dying in a flurry of blades as the leading Venicone warriors hurdled the earth wall to either side of the entry with ease and charged on into the Roman camp. Drust slowed a little as he reached the camp’s walls, his eyes narrowing in calculation. There was no ankle-breaker, the square-bottomed trench that the Romans usually dug alongside their earth walls to fell the unwary attacker with broken foot or ankle bones. Driven forward by the sheer mass of his men, he climbed on to the wall to stare across the leather tents that filled the camp, resisting the press of his warriors to keep his balance as they poured over the wall to either side and charged forward into the heart of the enemy position.
‘Cunning bastards…’
There, behind the camp’s far wall, there they were. A wall of round shields faced the Venicones across the empty camp. The cooking fires, the few patrolling sentries and even the apparently surprised water carriers, all a ruse to make him believe the Romans were unprepared for his onslaught, and a part of his mind wondered what trick might yet wait for them even as he pointed at the defenders and screamed the only possible command under the circumstances.
‘Kill them all!’
‘They’ve bitten off the bait and swallowed it whole.’
The three tribunes lay flat among the trees, looking down the long slope that ran down to the empty camp so painstakingly prepared the previous day. While the two Tungrian cohorts’ pioneer centuries had laboured with their axes to build an impassable abattis of fallen trees to either side of the earth walls, making an assault through the camp towards its rear wall the only way to reach its defenders, the soldiers and tribesmen had painstakingly prepared the ground inside the walls for an influx of unsuspecting Venicone warriors.
Licinius nodded in response to his colleague’s comment.
‘Just a little longer. Let them get properly mired before we show our hand.’
The barbarians stormed over the camp’s outer wall and charged through the cohort’s tents towards the real defence at its rear, a wall fully four feet tall and defended by a thicket of sharpened stakes set to rip the throat out of an unwary attacker.
