say.’
Olympian turned his fear into scorn. ‘Oh, so you’re a military expert, too, are you now? Closely acquainted, no doubt, with the military treatises of Aeneas Tacitus, Frontinus and Vegetius?’
The boy eyed the eunuch and nodded evenly. ‘Yes, I’ve read them,’ he said. ‘And that anonymous one, De re militari, which shows you how to drive a boat using paddles powered by oxen. Interesting idea – be good for attacking up-river. Do you know it?’
The eunuch gaped at him like a dying mullet.
Attila smiled and closed his eyes. ‘They’ll be attacking again soon,’ he promised. ‘Better say your prayers.’
They climbed out of the gully and onto a high, barren plateau. Perfect for a hit-and-run cavalry attack on a heavy, slow-moving column. But the outriders Lucius had posted – Heraclian, for some reason, hadn’t got round to it – reported no sign of life except lizards and cicadas. And the ground was far too hard and rocky to leave any decent trail signs.
They crossed the plateau in tense silence, the Frontier Guard riding in the van, the Palatine Guard in the rear. Then they began to drop down again, into a vast natural amphitheatre of grassland. The track itself curved away, round and down the flank of the hill, the terrain rising steeply to the left and falling away just as steeply to the right.
Lucius called a halt.
There was no sound but the soughing of the wind in the dry grass.
Ops growled something. Lucius told him to be quiet.
He was thinking of the day Hannibal slaughtered the Romans at Lake Trasimene, ambushing them side-on when they were in marching file, unable to turn round into battle-order, pinned against the lakeside. He was thinking how good a place this would be to launch a similar ambush. To their left a steep ascent, and to their right an even steeper descent. There was no way they could get themselves into decent formation on this slope.
Then Marco said, ‘There are horses coming. That way, over the rise.’
‘Shepherds?’ suggested Lucius. ‘Goats?’
‘No, horses. Men on horses.’
They listened. Lucius could hear nothing. The tension was unbearable. A soldier’s desire to get stuck in, as Lucius knew, often made him attack too early. There was nothing worse than waiting for the enemy – especially for an unseen, uncounted enemy.
But Marco was no novice. He nodded again. ‘They’re coming.’
‘How can you hear that?’ said Lucius.
‘I can’t. But our horses can.’
He was right. Their mounts were skittish anyway, smelling their riders’ sweat and fear. But there was something more than that on the wind. Their ears twitched back and forth, and their nostrils flared to pick up the scent of their approaching kind.
Lucius leant forward and spoke into the flicking ear of his fine grey mare. ‘What is it, Tugha Ban? Trouble ahead?’ He sat back, oblivious of his centurion’s sceptical stares. ‘I think you’re right.’
He squinted up the slope to their left. Then he signalled to Marco to give the general order to dismount. ‘And that means the Palatine, too – if Master-General Heraclian doesn’t mind. So ride back and tell them to get off their fat arses.’
‘We’re not going to ride on down?’
‘At our speed? With those wretched, overweight carriages?’ Lucius shook his head. ‘We’ll be cut to pieces if we stay mounted.’ He slid to the ground and fingered the pommel of his sword. ‘We’re going to have to fight.’ He stood and scanned the steep slope again and the shimmering heat haze above. ‘Where are those fucking outriders?’
Marco said nothing. They both knew where the outriders were by now.
And they both knew what it meant when a troop of cawing rooks took flight and arose from the oak forest below them and flew away down the valley. Rooks are clever. They don’t fly away at the approach of horses, or sheep, or goats. But they fly at the approach of men, and they can tell a man armed with a bow from a man without. When rooks take flight, trouble is coming.
Marco drew his sword and touched its edge.
Lucius had them line up two deep to the left of the column, facing uphill.
‘That’s quite a climb,’ muttered Marco.
‘Certainly is,’ said Lucius. ‘Hope you’ve been doing your exercises.’
Marco hawked and spat. ‘Yeah, yeah.’
But he knew his officer was right. His officer was generally right, he had to admit it. Lieutenant Lucius was OK. In a situation like this, if they were about to be ambushed from above – and they were – the best thing to do was, as so often in warfare, the thing the enemy would least expect: counter-attack uphill.
Marco glanced up, and there they were. He gave a low whistle. Counter-attack uphill and with a lot fewer men. Jumping Jesus.
Along the ridge above them stood perhaps four hundred men, arrows already notched to their bows. They wore motley clothing, though many would fight naked to the waist. What little armour was in evidence was no more than leather breastplates. They stood unshaven, tattered, wild-eyed. But their weapons were serious. As well as bows and arrows they bore shields, swords, and a few carried heavy pikes. This would be no picnic. They stood in orderly formation, looking down on the hapless column without expression, waiting for the order.
Then a solitary figure in a white robe stepped forward and tossed a sack down the slope. As it bounced and tumbled, the mouth of the sack opened, and out rolled two severed heads. One clunked against the wheels of a carriage and stopped. The other bounced right across the track and then on down the slope beyond. The outriders.
There was no point waiting any longer. Lucius gave the order, and they charged.
He felt his leg muscles burning and trembling with the strain as he struggled up the steep slope for twenty or thirty yards, in the front line with his men. Above their bellowing, he heard with sickening frequency the hollow thunk of arrow after arrow hitting men in the chest. At this close range armour was useless, and the wound would almost always be fatal. Five men had already gone down, ten, even twenty. And they were only eighty in all, plus the fifty Palatines over on the left flank. At last he was five yards from the line of bowmen, and he could see the surprise in their eyes. Their leader had still given no command to pull back or draw swords, and most of them were still encumbered with bows, astonished to see how quickly the soldiers had sprinted up the steep hill. Lucius looked up at the bandit who towered above him, and saw that his eyes were bloodshot, his lips cracked with the parching summer sun, his cheeks sunken and his hands shaking. These men were not in peak condition. His own men were.
Then they slammed into them. Lucius stepped up and barged his man backwards off the ridge. He stepped forward again and thrust his sword forwards with all his weight behind it. The startled bowman tried to fend off the thrust, absurdly, with his bow, but the thick steel blade plunged past and went into his guts up to the hilt. Lucius gave the blade a smart twist and pull, and the man fell at his feet, choking out his lifeblood, his intestines oozing from the ragged hole in his belly. Behind him another man came on, drawing his sword. He got no further. Lucius raised his sword in a flash to shoulder height, his shield held across his chest and belly for defence, and drove the point into the man’s throat. His blade grated against the man’s neck vertebrae, and he could feel them coming apart as he twisted the blade and pulled it free. His hand and arm were covered in blood. The man lolled lifelessly against him, and he shoved the corpse back ferociously with his shield, into the man who came on behind.
All along the line it was the same story. On the left flank, the silent, orderly Palatines were making mincemeat of their malnourished opponents. You had to hand it to them: they were tough enough soldiers when it came to it.
Though they had lost perhaps a quarter of their men on the ascent, now they were fighting in deadly, close- packed formation as only Roman soldiers knew how, offering their enemy nothing but a solid wall of shields and shining blades. There was nothing for the ragged bandit army to attack but hard steel.
Marco was fighting to Lucius’ right. Although the battle-scarred centurion would never dream of uttering a word of complaint, Lucius could see that the arrowhead wound in his left arm was bleeding afresh. He was trying to keep his shield up to cover his flank as he thrust forward with his sword-arm, but his arm was weakening steadily,
