Dubnus nodded, muttering his reply in a tone so soft that it was almost lost in the wind’s steadily increasing moan through the tree tops.
‘Don’t try to focus on any part of the forest, just look at the whole thing.’ Marcus frowned at the advice, and Arminius leaned in to speak with an amused look.
‘It takes a hunter years to perfect this, my friend, and here you are trying to master it in the space of a two- hundred-pace stroll. Trust your Hamians; they are masters at seeing the slightest movement in places like this.’
The Roman shrugged and turned back to his section of the line feeling none the wiser, sensing his friends’ gazes following him. The tent party edged forward pace by pace, heads lifting with increasing frequency to look up at the wind-lashed trees, until one of the men to his right sank into cover with a hand raised. As the soldiers to either side followed his example in a ripple of hissed warnings Marcus went forward quickly, a hand on the hilt of his spatha, and knelt alongside the Hamian.
‘What did you see?’
‘It is their camp, Centurion.’
Raising his head a fraction, the Roman looked over the bushes and found himself staring into an encampment constructed in a large circular clearing fully a hundred paces across. A curved row of crudely constructed wooden huts stretched around the clearing, and thin lines of smoke were rising from several recently extinguished fires. Frowning, he turned his head slowly in a futile attempt to find any trace of the bandits’ presence.
‘Nothing?’
Marcus turned his head slightly, keeping his eyes fixed on the clearing
‘Nothing. But they were here recently, or the fire wouldn’t be burning. I-’
He stopped in mid-sentence as a single fat snowflake danced past his face, watching as it fell onto the forest’s floor and disappeared in an instant, melting away as if it had never existed. Looking up, the two men watched as a curtain of snow descended from the treetops high above them, its sudden onslaught all the more shocking for the bitterness of the wave of freezing air that washed over them at the same moment. Scarface turned a bemused gaze upwards, shaking his head.
‘Here it fucking comes.’ He raised an eyebrow at Marcus, tugging his cloak tighter about him. ‘What now, Centurion?’
The Roman stared up into the descending snow, momentarily uncertain as to the right thing to do. He turned back to Dubnus, seeing his own uncertainty written across his friend’s face.
‘We could retreat to the bridge.’ He paused and shook his head, imagining the first spear’s reaction to a retreat in the face of a snow shower. ‘No, we’ll go forward, slowly and carefully, and for the time being we’ll ignore the snow. It may be no more than a temporary inconvenience.’
Scarface nodded with pursed lips and turned back to his men, waving them forward with another whispered command.
‘Come on now, lads, nice and easy. An’ keep your fucking eyes peeled!’
The young centurion stepped through the tent party’s line and was the first to break cover from the forest’s edge, the patterned spatha drawn and ready in his right hand, the weight and feel of its carved hilt comforting in his moment of uncertainty. The snow was falling more thickly than before, and the clearing’s far side was already almost invisible behind a barely opaque white curtain that seemed to descend with the weight and speed of rain. The ground beneath their feet was covered in a thin layer of crisp white flakes that yielded a hobnailed boot print when a man lifted his foot, and with a sinking feeling Marcus realised that the snowfall wasn’t likely to stop any time soon. Turning back he found Dubnus behind him, his head shaking and his face set against the snow being blown into it by the storm’s intermittent gusts. His friend had to raise his voice to be heard over the wind’s howl, but the look he gave Marcus was eloquent.
‘We’ll have to turn back. This isn’t a quick squall; it’s a full blizzard, a freezing storm!’
‘But the bandits…’
Dubnus shook his head, pointing at the clearing’s far side, now entirely lost to sight in the blizzard’s shifting white wall.
‘They’re gone. Either they had a warning or they might just have pulled out when the storm started getting close. Either way you need to pull your men back, Marcus; this is only going to get worse. We need to get back to the-’
Something moving behind the wall of snow in front of them caught his attention, and as he squinted into the white murk a flight of arrows hissed out of the barely visible trees. One of the soldiers fell to his knees with blood pouring from his throat, his hands scrabbling at the arrow that had transfixed his neck, then pitched full length in a dark, spreading pool. Sanga, the soldier closest to Marcus of all the tent party, had the presence of mind to step in close and hold his shield across both their bodies with just enough speed to defend him against the second volley, and the Roman watched as a pair of iron heads slammed into the layered board with enough force for their points to protrude through the wood by a finger’s thickness. The soldier looked round at him with a shocked expression, then dropped the shield and slowly went down on one knee with a grunt of pain, another arrow protruding from his leg just above the knee. Marcus’s eyes narrowed as he reckoned the odds.
‘Dubnus! Get them out of here!’
He grabbed Sanga’s arrow-studded shield from the ground where the soldier had dropped it and sprinted forward across the clearing, weaving from left to right with missiles flicking past him to either side, protected from the archers by the thick, shifting curtains of snow. Without warning a figure holding a bow appeared from the storm in front of him, revealed by a sudden gust that whipped away the snow’s white curtain, and without pausing in his rush Marcus hammered the shield’s battered brass boss into the bandit’s face, hearing the crackle of breaking bones over the storm’s demonic scream. Spinning away from the felled archer he saw a line of bowmen to his left, still unaware of his presence as they loosed another volley of arrows into the snow’s murk. Dropping the shield, knowing it would be more hindrance than help at such close quarters, he drew his gladius and ran at the bowmen through the trees. Raising the spatha in readiness to strike, he was upon the closest of them as the archer fumbled with numb fingers to nock another arrow, only realising he was under attack as the Roman tore his throat out with a thrust of the long blade.
The man beyond him dropped his bow, his attention caught by his comrade’s choking death throes, drawing a sword and reaching for the small shield at his feet as his attacker lunged in without breaking step. Marcus raised the spatha horizontally across his body to hack at the raised shield with a backhand blow, smashing it aside and ignoring the small blade’s ineffectual rasping slither across the surface of his mail, gambling that the weapon’s point would not snag one of the shirt’s rings and rip through its protection, then rammed his gladius up into the bandit’s chest to stop his heart. The dead man’s corpse sagged into his arms with a gasp of expelled breath, and Marcus held him there, ignoring the hot blood running down to splash across his boots, and staring over his victim’s shoulder as the archers arrayed behind the man loosed their arrows into their comrade in the hope of killing their attacker. Three times the dead man’s body shivered with the impact of their iron heads, and Marcus felt three hard taps against his armoured body as the points tore through the dead man’s body and spent their remaining power against his mail’s rings.
He shoved the corpse away from him to his left and sprang away to the right again, counting on a moment of indecision before the remaining archers realised which of them would be next. Ducking round a tree he ran past the first man, chopping a deep wound into his thigh with the gladius and leaving him staggering in howling agony, then he charged on to his next target, dodging one last, panicked bowshot and lowering his shoulder to charge the archer, punching the air out of him. Spinning away from the winded man he threw the gladius at the last of them, forcing him to duck away from the blade’s tumbling flicker of polished iron and giving Marcus time to sprint the last few paces and hack the longer blade across the man’s exposed neck. The patterned sword’s lethal edge slid through flesh and bone as if he were cutting smoke, and the archer’s head spun away to land on the snow-covered ground while his body slumped away like an unstringed puppet, blood pumping from the severed artery. Spinning back, Marcus put the blade’s point to the winded man’s throat, gesturing for him to drop the bow hanging uselessly from his right hand. The bandit obeyed without hesitation, compelled by his captor’s wild stare, and he eased away into the snow’s protection with his hands raised from the knife at his belt.
Marcus turned round and found his gladius, dropping it back into its scabbard.
‘ Marcus! ’
The shout sounded distant, muffled by the snow, and he realised with a sinking feeling that he had run too far
