whether it was one person or two writhing in the dust. They must have been standing face to face when they were hit. Mother and son? Brother and sister? Lovers? It did not matter now. The ballista bolt had taken the man in the centre of the back, punching through his spine on the downward arc of its trajectory. The impact of the strike had thrown him forward and the point of the five-foot arrow had pierced the woman’s lower body, so that now they squirmed and gasped and quivered in some obscene parody of the act of love.
It had begun.
Livius nodded to the engineer to continue and turned to Valerius. He looked the young tribune up and down. Yes, the boy would do — a credit to his father, even if the father was not a credit to him. Of medium height, but powerfully built with it. Crow-dark hair cropped short beneath the polished helmet, a strong jaw and a sculpted chin with its almost invisible central cleft shadowed with the slightest stubble. Serious eyes of a deep, aqueous green confidently returned his stare. But look a little closer and there was something slightly disturbing about those eyes; a hint of what might be cruelty that would attract a certain type of woman, and hidden in their depths the unyielding hardness which made him the right man for this mission.
He had his orders, but no harm in reinforcing them. ‘Rome does not generally place her tribunes in peril, but in your case I have decided to make an exception. You attack in two days, at dawn. Our Gaulish auxiliaries will carry out a diversionary assault on the western gateway. It will provide you with your opportunity. Once they have engaged the enemy and drawn their reserves you will assault the eastern gate with three cohorts of heavy infantry — more than fifteen hundred men. I have studied the east gate. Once the catapults have done their work it will not hold you for long. Remember, take the fight to them and do not stop killing until there are no more warriors left to kill. That is the price they pay for murdering Rome’s soldiers. The women and children will be taken as slaves. Anyone too old or too sick to march… well, you know what must be done. For Rome!’
For the next two nights Valerius watched as the bombardment battered the rebel defences. He had seen what the artillery could do; the casual, arbitrary malevolence that turned one family into bloody scraps fit for nothing but the dogs, and the next second immolated a dozen warriors in an all-encompassing fireball that left them blackened, smoking imitations of the human form. It was the big catapults, of course, with their boulders that would take out a section of wall or gate and everyone behind it, and the fiery missiles that stank of pitch and sulphur and consumed hut and flesh alike. The assault continued spasmodically through the night, the impact of each death- bringer preceded by the distinct sound of its passage: the almighty, whooshing surge of the giant rocks and the peculiar whup whup whup sound of the fireballs as they spun through the air. Against the awesome violence of the catapults the more numerous projectiles of the smaller weapons would seem almost puny by comparison, but still they would take their toll among the packed ranks of the refugees and the doomed warriors who stood on the ramparts, defiant, as if flesh and blood alone could halt the Roman assault. He tried to blank out images of the exposed bones of shattered children; tried not to imagine the screams of the dismembered or those impaled or blinded by splinters as the wooden palisades and the once mighty gates were smashed flat.
On the morning of the third day, an hour before dawn, the three cohorts of the assault force formed up amid the flickering torchlight on the camp’s parade ground. Valerius stood silently at the centre of the square beside the legion’s eagle and the individual unit standards held aloft by the signiferi, their rank and role emphasized by the wolf-fur cloaks they wore. Each man here had signed up for twenty-five years in the legions. As a military tribune, Valerius had joined for six months, served sixteen because the life agreed with him, and would be sent home in another eight months at most. He gazed slowly round the square, attempting to judge the mood, but in the darkness every face was lost in the shadow of a helmet brim. I’m leading an army of the dead: the thought entered his head before he could suppress it and he shuddered. Was it an ill omen? He made the sign against evil and took a deep breath.
‘You all know me.’ His firm voice carried across the parade ground. ‘And you know I’m only here because your Primus Pilus twisted his leg the other day. He regrets his absence, but not as much as I do.’ A few of them laughed at that, but not many. Valerius knew that some of them would be glad the legion’s feared senior centurion would not be there to hound them up the hill, but the veterans understood that the loss of experience could cost lives. He noticed Crespo, in his distinctive helmet with the curved transverse crest, scowl. ‘You’ve all done this a hundred times before and there’s nothing on that hill you have to fear. When we go, we go fast and we stop for nothing. Anyone who’s wounded on the way is left behind, and that includes the officers. Stay tight, because the tighter we are, the safer we are. I’ll be up front with the First cohort and where I lead, you follow. They won’t be expecting us to come knocking on the front door, so it should be simple.’ This time they did laugh, because they knew it was a lie. The sides of the hill were too steep for a direct assault on the walls. Only the two gateways to the east and the west were vulnerable and the enemy would be waiting behind both. ‘Once we’re inside the gate, it’s over,’ he ended decisively. ‘These people may know how to fight, but they don’t know how to win. We know how to win.’
They cheered him, and pride rose up inside him like water from a spring. He felt a bond with these men that was stronger than family; a comradeship of the spirit, tempered in the heat of battle. They had marched together and fought together, and there was a fair chance that when the sun came up they would die together, their blood mingling in the mud of a British ditch. All of them knew that some of the men who marched up that hill would not be coming down again. But instead of weakening them, the knowledge gave them strength. That was what made them what they were. Soldiers of Rome.
He issued detailed instructions to each of the unit commanders in turn, finally approaching Crespo, who was to lead the Second cohort. He found it difficult to hide his dislike for the man, but the hour before an attack was a time to put aside petty rivalries. He could see the pale eyes glittering in the darkness, but he couldn’t read what was in them.
‘May your god protect you, Crespo.’ The centurion followed Mithras and somewhere in the camp was the hidden shrine where he would have made a sacrifice to the bull-slayer. It was a secretive cult but anyone who survived the initiation was worthy of respect — for courage at least. Soldiers did well not to ignore the gods, but Valerius worshipped them the way most men did, doing just enough to keep them happy and calling on them in time of need. ‘Stay close on the way in. Once we’re past the gates, the First will hold the enemy in position while you punch a hole through their line with the Second. When you’re beyond them, turn and we’ll crush them between us.’ It was a good plan, but its success depended on many different factors. He had fought the Celtic warriors of western Britain before and, for all his confident talk about their weaknesses, he knew them for courageous fighters prepared to die in defence of what was theirs. Today, they would have no choice, because they had nowhere to run.
Crespo grunted suspiciously. ‘So we do the fighting and dying while you hide behind your shields and take all the glory?’
Valerius felt the anger rise in him, but bit back the words that accompanied it. No point in getting into an argument with the embittered Sicilian. ‘Dying is what we are paid to do, centurion,’ he said, and turned away before Crespo could reply.
III
The barrage paused and for a few seconds the soft, false light of the grey predawn was accompanied by an unearthly calm, the serenity broken only by the crackle of burning wood from the hilltop. At the head of his men, Valerius closed his eyes and tried to read the sounds. At first, nothing. But a moment later he heard the muted growl he knew was the start of the auxiliary attack. He kept his eyes shut a little longer, enjoying a final moment of peace, and when he opened them a fire arrow arched through the sky like a shooting star.
Now!
He led the legionaries at the trot, eight abreast in their centuries. The legate had placed a screen of archers to the right and left of the assault point and, as the spearhead of the attack passed them, the bowmen loosed a flight of arrows that harvested the defenders from the first of the three ramparts. Valerius had spent the two days preparing for the attack, examining every inch of the eastern slope, and he had noted something that gnawed like a maggot at his brain. The most obvious route to the gate had a very clear entrance, but no apparent exit. Of course, the way out could be hidden, a tunnel perhaps, but that, even in a fortress of this size, would be the expenditure of enormous effort for very little gain. The longer he looked at it, the less he liked it. The anomaly might have a perfectly innocent explanation but, in Valerius’s experience, nothing in war was innocent. Now he made his choice,
