saluted, and rode off.
I returned to my post. The plain was dark with the great hordes of moving men. They stretched out to the woods on either side, and I knew that nothing would stop them. The aquilifer fetched the Eagle, and a wounded man brought a brazier glowing, white hot with our fire, and stood it by the signal tower.
“When they reach the palisade, take the Eagle from its standard and do what has to be done,” I said.
“Upon my life,” he replied.
Artorius came up to me, his face working. He was shivering like a dog. He said, and his voice was curiously calm, “This is the end for all of us.”
I nodded.
He said, “I wanted so much for my family. Not this.” He gestured with a shaking hand.
I said, “You are a brave man, Artorius. I have known men less frightened who would have run from the field long since.”
He said, “You make it all sound so easy.”
“It is very easy. I promise you that.”
He nodded and stumbled away, back to his waiting men.
They came nearer and nearer, and then a trumpet sounded, and Quintus Veronius, former commander of the Ala Petriana, and now Master of Horse in the Province of Upper Germany, raised his sword high, so that the blade glinted in the dying sun, and led his cavalry out across the snow on their last charge.
The charge went home: the mass broke up, and the horsemen disappeared into a tumultuous, sea of men. I saw the bright helmets vanish, one by one; watched rigidly as the standard dipped suddenly, as though the Eagle dived in flight; had a glimpse of a red cloak thrown high by a triumphant foe; and then the Vandals were across the ditch and smashing at the palisade with their axes. They swept round on the flanks, riderless horses with blood- stained saddles amongst them, and Fredegar’s Franks fell back, dying at every step. A loose bay with a white star fled past, snorting with terror, as we closed up in a tight circle about the signal tower; Fabianus and Aquila on my left and right, while Artorius and Scudilio stood a little beyond. I called out then: “I am dying in good company,” and they turned, smiled and lifted their sword hilts in salute. As the enemy checked and fell back before the thrust of our swords, I heard, above the screams of the wounded, and the hard yells of the Vandals, a deep voice that shouted, “Hail and Farewell.”
I turned. I saw the Eagle of the Twentieth, bright, fierce and once immortal, standing upon the fire. As I watched, it turned red and then black, and soon ceased to be anything but a lump of dripping, melted bronze.
They stormed the ditches and the ringed palisade. Fire arrows set the wooden tower blazing above our heads, and I could hear the wounded in the camp scream, as the barbarians fired the waggons and the tents, and butchered with their swords everything that moved. They closed in again and came at us, snarling like foxes, a mass of coloured shields and whirling swords. I thrust and parried and thrust again, until I was fighting behind a litter of their own dead; but still they came, and the circle grew smaller and smaller. Artorius, sobbing with rage and fighting like a madman, dropped with three swords in his chest; and Aquila, dying, killed four men with quick thrusts before he fell on the point of a boar spear. Fredegar, decapitating two men with one stroke of his great axe, was struck in the face by a fire arrow. He staggered backwards, flung up his arms, cried, “Marcomir!” and disappeared under the feet of an enemy horseman.
Scudilio said, across the body of my Chief Centurion, “I always wanted to be a Roman citizen. It is too late now.”
I said, “You have been a friend, which is better still.”
I smiled grimly, saw Fabianus lying in a huddle at my feet, and felt a searing pain in my right arm. I thrust desperately, and felt the sword go home as the bearded faces snarled about me. I heard a voice say, “Remember me to the Gods,” and, as I fell, it was Scudilio who dropped across my back with blood pouring from the javelins in his chest and neck.
It was the sixteenth day of January in the year one thousand one hundred and sixty, after the foundation of Rome, when the Twentieth Legion, the last to carry the Eagle, died at the thirtieth milestone, upon the road to Augusta Treverorum.
The last cohorts lay in their triple ranks behind the palisade, and they were as quiet as if they had been on parade. But they would salute no general as their emperor now; they would draw no gold for their pay; and they would hear no trumpets. They were beyond all hope and all fear; and they were colder than any snow.
EPILOGUE
MAXIMUS STIRRED THE ashes of the dead fire with a stick. It was light now, and the shadows were drawing back from the broken walls of the shattered camp where the listeners crouched in silence.
He said, “There is little more to tell. I remember a tent and a waggon, and voices that spoke a tongue I did not understand. I remember a voice that cried, once, in Latin, ‘He is mine. Give him to me.’ I remember the walls of a tent flapping in the wind, and a great pain in my wrist and hand. I remember warmth and hot drinks, and times of sickness and fever. I remember little else.
“When I began to recover I was in a house, and the Bishop was in the room. He had a livid scar on his cheek, and his hair was now quite white. He told me that two months after the city had been sacked, a man in the dress of the Alemanni brought me to him in a cart, secretly and by night. Before he left, the man spoke to the Bishop. He said, ‘If he lives, which I doubt, tell him it was for the sake of the happy times.’ That was all.
“I stayed there a long time. I was very ill, very weak, and very tired. Also, the hand that I had lost hurt me a great deal. The city was like all sacked cities; a place unclean and full of horror. The Bishop was kind, and I stayed on, for I had nowhere else to go. I had no purpose. I had nothing. What else was there for me to do?
“The barbarians devastated Gaul, and the provinces never recovered. They burned and sacked city after city, and made for the south; for that land of sun which was barred to them by high mountains that they could not cross.
“That summer when I was stronger, we had news that Constantinus had crossed to Gaul. He came to Treverorum, and I watched him ride through the streets with his men—the sweepings of the old Sixth and Second —on his way to the south. His son, Constans, was at his side. He had not changed. He rode with a swagger and his chin up, and I remembered there had been a time when he had offered his sword to another man. His father, plump and smiling, made promises, and the people shouted for him. But one man cried out, ‘You should have come before and helped Maximus who is dead.’ I shrank back against the wall when I heard that name, and pulled my hood about my face. Maximus had been a general, Dux Moguntiacensis, and Legate of the Twentieth. What was Maximus to me, who did not even own the cloak upon my back?
“I watched the young Constans ride out in the summer sun to his great adventure. And I wished him luck. He would need all the favours that the Gods could bestow, and even then he would still end as Maximus had ended.
“In the late autumn I borrowed a horse and I rode out through the great gate that ghosts had once named Romulus, and down the road to Moguntiacum—that road to nowhere. I stopped at the thirtieth milestone, where the road forked right and left, and looked at the ruins of my past. The bleached bones of my dead lay where they had fallen, but there was no message for me there, in that long grass among the broken spears, the rusted sword hilts and the smashed helms. I saw crows perched on a fragment of splintered paling, while a field mouse ran up and down the scorched pole of a burnt-out waggon. I poked at an overturned brazier, but it had been used as a nest and was full of dried grass. It meant nothing to me now. The ditches had been carelessly filled in, and the raw earth was covered with green weeds. A light wind ruffled the long grass, but that was all.
“No voices spoke; no-one cried out and reproached me for what I had done, nor for what I had failed to do. I looked at the sun, warm and friendly in a blue sky, and I prayed that Quintus’ dream had come true, and that he now drove the horses he had so long desired.
“They say that if you listen long enough, and have the gift, you may hear the sounds of the past, which never die. I do not know if that is so, but as I left that desolate and ghastly place, it seemed to me that I heard the faint
