knowing he was gambling his soldiers’ lives on the result. He led his men swiftly past the first opening and on to a sloping platform running parallel with the fortress walls, and when it took a sharp uphill turn he followed it. The route brought the first legionaries within range of spears hurled from the palisade that topped the second rampart. ‘Form testudo!’ At the order, each man in the first century locked his shield above his head with those of the man next to him. Only those in the front and rear ranks and the men on the edges of the formation kept their shields vertical. The result was a solid carapace which made the eighty men inside the testudo invulnerable to attack from above. Behind him, Valerius knew each century in the attacking cohorts would be following his example. Now he was operating on pure instinct, following the well-worn path upwards, and praying the Silurians had placed no more false exits or hidden traps; a dozen knee-deep pits could shatter a testudo in less time than it took to draw his sword. No. A fortress this size must be a place of commerce as well as refuge, and commerce meant ease of access. Whoever had designed the defences would have been forced to make that compromise. His chest was heaving, his arm ached from holding the heavy shield above his head and the breath rasped in his throat. Sweat blinded his eyes in the little oven of his iron helmet, with the big cheek flaps that restricted his vision but wouldn’t save him from a blade to his throat. The clatter of spears and arrows against the outer surface of the testudo was almost constant now, like a heavy shower of rain. Death was everywhere around him but he had never felt more alive.
He thought of his father, mouldering in semi-retirement on the country estate in the pretty, wooded valley close to Fidenae and making his plans to revive the family’s political fortunes; plans which had Valerius at their very heart. Next year he would have to return to resume his legal career, touting for minor cases outside the Basilica Julia; snapping up the crumbs left by brighter minds. It wasn’t that he disliked the law; to sit and listen to one of the great practitioners wield logic and rhetoric the way a champion retiarius wielded net and trident was one of life’s pleasures. But to stand up before a court didn’t light a fire in his belly the way he knew it must do in a Cicero or a Seneca. Only combat did that, and — The gate! They had reached the gate!
‘Ram to the front.’ The missiles had destroyed the gate structure beyond recognition, but the Britons had used the smashed timbers to form a makeshift barrier. It wouldn’t take long to clear, though it would delay the assault, and he’d seen what happened when attacks became delayed. The battering ram was with the second century, but the legions practised re-forming the testudo under fire until it was almost habit, and the big rectangular shields quickly formed a tunnel that allowed the ram squad forward. Most legionaries were small men, iron tough but more gristle than muscle. Compared with them, the soldiers who wielded the legion’s battering ram were broad-chested giants; they had to be to handle the specially reinforced oak trunk that was their stock-in-trade. Still it took too long and he heard the inevitable crashes and screams that told him the Britons were making good use of the boulders the catapults had hurled at them. Now they were dropping those stones, some of them weighing as much as a small ox, on to the testudines following him. The defences were sure against light weapons, but a big boulder would smash a gaping hole in the shields, and then the spears and arrows could seek out the soldiers below. The testudo would reunite quickly enough but, behind him, he knew men were dying.
At last! He stepped sharply aside to allow the ram to do its work, the massive head of carved stone surging forward with the strength of twenty men behind it to smash the pathetic blockage aside. One. Two. Three. Yes, three, that would do it. ‘First cohort, with me. For Rome!’
As he turned to lead the way through the breach in the British defences, he glimpsed a line of snarling moustached faces from the gap between his helmet’s cheek pieces. A shower of burning fat thrown from his left spattered his legs and he screamed a curse. Now he was inside the fortress and his men filed past him to make the line and he stopped thinking and allowed training to take over.
‘Forward.’
The curve-edged shields of the leading cohort’s first and second centuries locked in one solid defensive wall, and the weight of the attack was multiplied by the addition of two further lines. At the far right of the first line Valerius tightened his fist on the wooden grip at the rear of the shield boss, bunched his muscles in the arm straps and butted the edge against that of the man to his left. He knew every man to his rear would be holding his shield aloft to protect the front line from spears and arrows fired by the defenders. The Romans had their own spear, the pilum, a four-foot shaft of ash tipped with an arm’s length of tempered iron. But no one carried one today, because they were long, heavy and awkward and would only have slowed the attack, creating more casualties than they caused. This was a day for swords.
The momentum of the initial breakthrough had pushed the defenders back a dozen paces but now they counterattacked in a single howling mass four or five hundred strong. Valerius flinched as an arrow nicked his helmet an inch above his right eye and he braced himself for the impact of the charge, his eyes searching the barbarian ranks for the man who wanted to kill him. There was always one: the single individual who hungered for your blood more than any other; who saw in your face everything he hated most in this world. It took a moment, because his eye naturally fell upon the British champions, the big men made even taller by hair lime-starched into spikes and horns who were the pick of their tribe and carried long iron swords or broad-bladed ash spears. They fought bare-chested to prove their courage and decorated their skin with blue tattoos that told the story of their heritage and their bravery in battle.
But the man who wished to kill him was no champion. Short, with lank, dirty-blond hair and a slight frame from which hung a filthy, ragged shirt, he looked almost harmless in that warrior throng because he didn’t carry a sword or a spear, only a curved dagger with an edge that gleamed blue from constant union with the whetstone. But his eyes told a different story. They burned with an enmity beyond hatred: a mindless promise of violent, painful death. All this Valerius noted in the time it took his enemy to cover a single pace. He knew that the man’s lack of height could be an advantage in this kind of fight, and it made him doubly dangerous. For the battle would be fought above the belly and he would come in low, under the big shield, and that gleaming blade would seek out the Roman’s unprotected genitals or try to hamstring him. Valerius experienced a chill in his lower guts. Yes, it would be the balls. The haunted eyes told of a loss beyond bearing. A loss that could only be avenged by inflicting horror upon its perpetrators.
A mighty crash announced that the first Britons had collided with the centre of the Roman shield wall. He felt the impact shiver along the line, bringing with it a roll like thunder as hundreds of swords began hammering at the painted oak shields, as if by obliterating the Twentieth’s emblem of a charging boar they were obliterating the men themselves. Above the rim of his shield he watched his enemy come with the extreme left of the British attack. To the man’s right were warriors bigger and better armed, but still Valerius’s instinct told him this was where the true danger lay. When the burning eyes disappeared below the level of the shield he counted the heartbeats: one, he would have covered another pace; two, he was crouching, preparing to roll under the shield and stab upward, the blade seeking the big artery in the groin; three. With the strength of his shoulder behind it, Valerius smashed his shield forward and down so that the rounded iron boss struck the charging Briton above the bridge of the nose, smashing flesh to instant pulp, the impact forcing his eyeballs from their sockets and splintering skull bone deep into the brain. The blow numbed Valerius’s left arm, but as it was struck his right was already moving, a lightning flick of the gladius that ripped out his enemy’s throat in a spray of scarlet. He felt the flame of exultation explode within him as it always did when he took a life and he tried to still it because he believed the savage, atavistic joy shamed him. He would never reveal or try to explain that feeling beyond the brotherhood of the battlefield. Only those who had experienced it could understand that most elemental of human reactions to the most basic of human experiences: to survive and to kill. The inner fire flared and was gone, replaced in an instant by cold calculation. From his left, a Silurian spear sought out the weak point below his armour. He brushed it aside with the strengthened edge of the scutum and, snarling defiance, he was back in line, the shield rim hooking behind his neighbour’s.
With the breath rasping in his chest, he took time to listen, attempting to gauge the battle and noticing for the first time the throat-filling stink from the burning huts and granaries, the rubbish pits and animal dung and human excrement that lay in haphazard piles all around. The main force of the British attack had struck the middle of the Roman line, and it was here that the howls of impotent rage and screams of the maimed and dying were centred. For the moment, Valerius was happy that his legionaries could contain the enemy. Crespo could not be far away.
He heard the call he had been waiting for. ‘Cornicen!’ The trumpeter who had been hovering behind the line appeared at his shoulder. Valerius spoke to the man on his left side, shouting to be certain he was heard above the clamour of battle. ‘On me, wheel right ten at the signal.’ He gave time for the order to be passed along the wall of shields. ‘Sound the command.’ The trumpeter pursed his lips and hesitated for a second before the circular horn
