answer. Turning to his chosen man he muttered his assessment quietly, unwilling to scare his men any more than they already were.
‘At least five hundred of them. With that many men I don’t see how we’re going to-’
A screamed warning from the man to his right snatched his attention away from the oncoming bandits, and he leaned out from the wall to follow the legionary’s pointing hand. A pair of figures had burst from the closest of the city’s gates and were making for the safety of the grain store’s walls. The larger of the two was propping himself up with a spear, his pace more of a stagger than a limp, a piece of bloodstained cloth torn from his tunic tied about his leg. The woman beside him was dragging him along by the arm and looking back fearfully at the open gateway. As Sergius watched a small group of men came through the arch behind them, their murderous intent clear as they fanned out to either side of the fleeing couple, yelling challenges and imprecations. He turned and shouted down to the men guarding the store’s entrance. ‘It’s Julius! Open the gate!’
He leapt down from the wall with more agility than grace and waited while his men pulled away the stout timber beams securing the store’s entrance, joined within seconds by Julius’s watch officer and a handful of his men. Drawing his sword as the gate started to open, Sergius dived through the gap at the head of the small group and ran towards the fleeing figures, still fifty paces distant, watching as Julius, clearly unable to go any further, turned to face his pursuers with only the spear on which he was leaning as armament. The woman ran a few more paces before she realised that she was alone, then she stopped and turned round, screaming in horror as their pursuers closed in on the Tungrian. Without hesitation the exhausted Tungrian obeyed his instincts and went on the offensive, lunging awkwardly forward to stab one man in the thigh with the spear and sending him reeling away clutching at his leg. Pivoting on his good leg, he punched the spear’s butt spike through the foot of another man, who had been sufficiently unwary in his approach, twisting the weapon’s shaft and tearing it free, flipping the spear over in his hand with practised skill and slashing the blade across the man’s throat, dropping him choking to the turf. The remaining attackers spread out, still not noticing the approaching soldiers in their fixation on the Tungrian, and as Julius stood panting, the spear’s blade weaving in the air as he struggled to keep it level, one of the gang members eased around behind him and raised his knife to strike. As the attacker stepped forward to deliver the death stroke the woman leapt onto him and buried her own knife deep into his back, bearing him to the ground and stabbing at him again and again in a frenzied spray of his blood, her screams clearly on the verge of hysteria. While the remaining attackers dithered in the face of Julius’s exhausted obduracy and the woman’s berserk attack, Sergius shouted a hoarse challenge that snatched their attention away from the fugitives and onto the oncoming soldiers. They turned as one man and ran, sprinting back towards the city’s gate as it closed in their faces with a dull thud.
‘Leave them!’ Sergius pointed to the bandit horde’s front rank, now barely two hundred paces from the grain store’s walls and running as fast as their weary legs would carry them, clearly intent on cutting the tiny party off from their refuge. ‘Carry him!’ A pair of Tungrians grabbed the staggering Julius by his arms, one of them tossing away the spear on which he was leaning, while Sergius abandoned any pretence at decorum and pulled the blood- soaked woman off the mutilated body of her victim, catching her knife arm and disarming her as she spun towards him with murderous intent. He dragged her alongside him as the soldiers ran for the gate in a desperate foot race with the bandits. Calculating the odds as he ran, the realisation dawned on Sergius that it was a race they were going to lose, if only by a few yards. Julius had clearly come to the same conclusion.
‘Leave me, and save yourselves!’
The Tungrians to either side of him kept running as fast as their burden allowed, drawing their swords and preparing to die in defence of their centurion, and Sergius nodded as he ran alongside them, reaching for his own gladius. Scant paces from the gate, and instants from being overrun by the bandits, Sergius was bracing himself to push the woman away and make his stand, when a flight of spears arced down from the store’s walls, reducing the oncoming rush of men to a chaotic jumble of tumbling limbs, giving the runners just enough time to throw themselves through the closing gate. The shattered Tungrians dropped Julius to the ground as they collapsed onto their hands and knees, one of them vomiting onto the store’s immaculately raked pebbles, and Sergius’s chosen man bellowed orders for the legionaries to stand ready for any attempt to climb the wall. Sergius, unable to do anything more than put his hands on his knees and resist the urge to throw up his last meal in sympathy with the exhausted man, looked down at the prostrate Tungrian centurion with a wry smile. Shaking his head, he raised a questioning eyebrow as Annia, painted with sprays of blood and trembling violently, was wrapped in a blanket by Felicia and led away.
‘I really hope she’s worth it, this woman of yours, given that you may well never walk without a limp again. What happened?’
Julius grimaced at the pain. Felicia had offered him a linen bandage and he held it to the wound, watching as his blood stained the fabric.
‘I thought we’d got away free, but a pair of them jumped us one block from the gate. One of them managed to put his spear into my thigh before I could return the compliment.’
Sergius nodded.
‘You said you had an idea about defending this place? Given we’ve got five hundred angry-looking bandits milling around out there I’d be grateful if you were to share it with me.’
He listened to Julius speak for a few moments then raised his eyebrows in shocked understanding.
‘By all the gods but that’s a terrifying idea. Nobody could ever accuse you of being afraid to think the unthinkable, could they, Centurion?’
He turned away and walked slowly up the steps onto the store’s wall, looking out at the ragged band assembled below him just out of spear-throwing range. A man wearing a masked cavalry helmet pushed his way through the throng and walked forward a few paces, holding up his empty hands to indicate his desire to talk.
‘I could hit him with a spear from here.’
Sergius shook his head at his chosen man’s suggestion without taking his gaze off the bandit leader.
‘I doubt it. And I’d rather not raise the stakes that far this early. Those men might well soon have us at the point of their spears. That’s close enough! ’
The bandits’ leader stopped, keeping his open hands raised. With the sunset behind him the cavalry helmet was stained red, and his words boomed out across the open ground in a pronouncement of the legionaries’ impending doom.
‘Men of the First Minervia, unless there are many more of you hiding behind those walls you appear to be no more than a single century, where we are five hundred men and more. Your walls were hardly designed for a siege, and most of your compound is not even defendable. Surrender now and I’ll allow you the choice of joining us or being disarmed and sent back to your legion, but be very clear when I tell you that this grain store, like this city, is now mine.’
Sergius stepped forward, a pair of soldiers defending him with their shields from any bowshot.
‘You seem to be forgetting that there are three cohorts out there to the west, and when they come back here they’ll be the ones doing the evicting. You might be best making a run for it while you still can!’
Obduro laughed loudly, shaking his sun-burnished head.
‘By the time your depressingly malleable tribune fetches up here tomorrow I’ll be long gone. Scaurus will be reduced to deciding whether to fall on his sword or wait for the emperor’s men to do the job for him, given the amount of Commodus’s gold he’s about to lose. And that’s before any mention of a certain Marcus Valerius Aquila reaches official ears. You did know that the Tungrians are harbouring a fugitive from the emperor’s justice?’
It was on the tip of Sergius’s tongue to blurt out that the gold was safe inside the grain store’s walls, but he changed his mind just as he opened his mouth to reply.
‘If you want the grain you’d better come and get it. But there’ll be no surrender of an imperial facility while I command here, whatever that means for the timing of my meeting with the gods.’
Obduro was silent for a long moment, then shrugged his indifference.
‘It means little enough to me whether you die here and now or in some other more fitting place, First Spear Sergius, but as you wish. Bring me the prisoners.’
The three gang members who had been unable to regain the safety of the city were bodily dragged out in front of him, and at a signal from their leader the men surrounding them pulled the prisoners’ arms up to the horizontal, then used their feet to hook the captives’ legs wide. Obduro drew his sword with a flourish, pointing it at the distant forest.
‘Mighty Arduenna, grant us swift and terrible victory in our struggle to free your land from those who have
