Arrows of Fury: Empire Volume Two (46 page)

The Venico standing astride him laughed down at him, lifting his shoulders and taking a firm grip on his sword’s hilt in readiness to ram the blade home into the Roman’s windpipe. Marcus was a split second faster, slamming his fist up into the man’s unprotected groin and spearing the iron barb that protruded from between his fingers between his balls and deep into the root of his penis. The barbarian threw his head back and screamed in agony, his sword dangling forgotten as he staggered away, and Marcus rolled to one side, scooping up the spatha and surging to his feet to behead the man with a single blow. He looked to his comrades, fearful of what he might find.

A mile down the river, the fight was slowly but certainly turning against the Tungrian detachment sent to cover the defence’s southern flank. Julius watched with growing consternation as the number of Venico warriors ranged against the three centuries in his defensive line strengthened by the minute, a stream of tattooed barbarians crossing the river behind them to add two men to their strength for every one killed by the Tungrians. His men were tiring now, their initial battle fury exhausted, and while he knew they would fight on for a good deal longer he could tell that they were no longer battling as hard as before. While the Tungrians were increasingly huddled behind their shields, striking out with their short swords when the opportunity presented itself, the Venicones, bolstered by the flow of fresh warriors from the mass waiting on the other side of the river, were gradually gaining the upper hand, growing in confidence as their strength increased.

He looked to the rear, peering past the stolid lines of the 10th
Century’s axemen waiting for their turn to join the fight in the mist, knowing that the rest of the cohort probably had problems enough that reinforcement was unlikely.

‘Another five minutes of this and we’ll have to start putting the Bear’s lads into the fight.’

Julius nodded at Rufius’s muttered statement.

‘How’s the boy?’

The older man glanced down at Dubnus’s prone form, his wound temporarily staunched by the bandage stuffed through the hole in his armour by a bandage carrier who had shaken his head unhappily and moved on to the next casualty with the hardbitten detachment of a man who had seen death and mutilation too many times before to be affected by anything as prosaic as a spear wound.

‘Still with us. I’d say he’ll pull through, if only we can get him out of here …’

Julius snorted, pushing another of his century’s rear rank forward as a front ranker went down with an axe buried deeply in his head, the heavy blade cleft clean through his helmet’s bracing bars and deep into his skull. The rear rankers to either side grabbed him by the shoulders of his mail coat and threw him backwards past the officers and out from under the soldiers’ feet to lie wide eyed and spasming intermittently on the wet ground. The bandage carrier gave his twitching body a cursory glance before turning back to the task of bandaging a wounded man’s arm, opened up from wrist to elbow by a Venicone sword.

‘Not much chance of that. We stand here and most likely we’ll die like rats in a barrel. Bear, get your boys ready to …’

His head jerked up as he caught movement on the hill above them out of the corner of his eye.

‘
What the fuck …?
’

Men were mustering on the slope to the barbarian left, perfectly positioned for an attack down into their unprotected rear. Rufius stared up the hill alongside him, straining tired eyes to make out the detail masked by the curtains of mist drifting across the battlefield.

‘It’s a century of our lads, although they look bloody odd to me. Scruffy bastards from the look of it …’

Julius laughed grimly, tucking his vine stick into his belt and drawing his gladius as the men on the hill above gave a guttural war cry and poured down the hill in an undisciplined charge that narrowed Rufius’s eyes with bafflement.

‘Those boys aren’t ours, Grandfather, you need a new set of peepers. That’s Martos and what’s left of his warband, wearing our kit and getting stuck into the Venicones. I might not like the man, but I’ll be buggered if I’ll let this chance go begging. Bear, get ready to attack to the bridge!’

He elbowed the trumpeter in the ribs.

‘Blow the advance, boy!
Burst your fucking lungs!
’

The trumpet’s call sang out over the riverbank, the notes stiffening backs previously bent to huddle into the cover of their shields as standard-bearers bellowed encouragement to their comrades. Julius stepped up to the line, motioning with both arms to the three centuries’ chosen men to put their poles to the soldier’s backs and start pushing. He took a deep breath and roared his command, the bellowed words cutting across the sounds of clashing metal.

‘
Tungrians, either we deal with these barbarian arse-fuckers now or we die before our time. Advance!
’

As the newcomers burst on to the Venicones’ left flank in a flurry of hacking swords, the Tungrians took their iron to the distracted tribesmen with renewed vigour, spending the last of their strength recklessly as they saw their one chance to snatch victory from the certainty of defeat. As they stepped up to the Venicones with new purpose, hammering at the warriors with their shields before stabbing their swords in drilled unison, the 10th Century took their chance, trotting around the end of the Tungrian line and past the mass of enraged Votadini assaulting the enemy flank before breaking into two halves. Five tent parties assaulted the barbarian rear, while the remainder, led by Titus, charged into the Venicones still coming across the improvised bridge. Their already bloodied axes rose and fell in pitiless arcs, each blow chopping a Venico warrior to the ground in bloodied ruin. Attacking unprepared and unarmoured warriors from the rear, the forty men at the Venicones’ rear killed three times their strength in less than a minute, before the barbarians
even had time to turn and fight. The warband, beset from the rear by blood-painted giants wielding their weapons with terrible ferocity, promptly lost all reason and threw themselves at the Tungrian line in a desperate attempt to escape, their abandon opening them up to vengeful soldiers who only seconds before had been suffering under their swords. With a sudden collective shudder of men at the end of their tether, the warband broke into a melee of fleeing warriors, pursued across the battlefield by soldiers and Votadini warriors whose blood was well and truly up, and whose only desire was to complete the slaughter of their mutual enemy.

Julius fought his way through the chaos to Martos, nodding in respect at the panting chieftain.

‘Well fought, Votadini. Can you finish them?’

The other man nodded.

‘We’ll hunt them down to the last man. I have a score to settle with these bastards.’

Julius nodded, turning back to his men.

‘
To the bridge!
’

‘So Martos broke the deadlock? In that case he’s been instrumental in more than one last-minute rescue. I thought we were dead men when the barbarians came out of the mist to our front with their swords ready, back there on the other side of the river. My lads were terrified, of course, so it was a good thing that it was him and his men and not the real thing, or we’d all have been dead inside a minute.’

Marcus rubbed at his still-wet hair with one bloody hand, his eyes blank as he remembered the frantic retreat from the Venicone warband.

‘He saved us, of course. Led us up the hill to our left, took us out of sight of the warband when they came thundering past a few minutes later. After that we just walked south until we came to the outcrop and climbed down it to reach the far bank of the Red. You know the rest, and you’ve seen the mess that the Venicones made of the Eighth, but I’ll wager when we count the corpses we’ll have killed five men for every one we lost. They’ve earned their
right to be called Tungrians, I’d say. What happened after the Votadini came down the hill in our armour then?’

Julius grinned, still elated with their victory.

‘You should have seen it, man, the Bear’s lads just ran wild. They hacked their way to the bridge those Venico bastards had thrown across the river and left a trail of bodies with their heads stove in and arms and legs lopped off. The barbarians tried to put them off, of course, chucked bucket-loads of arrows and spears at us from the other side of the Red, but we put a double line of shields on the riverbank and the Tenth took turns chopping at the trees behind them. Once the tops were off it was easy enough to push the trunks into the river, and that was that, pretty much. If only they hadn’t managed to put a spear into Dubnus I’d be counting this as a right result. As it is …’

Julius’s face darkened. Marcus shook his head sadly.

‘He shouldn’t have been in the front rank. He kicked my backside hard enough when I did it …’

Both men were silent for a moment, staring out across the river at the thousands of Venicone warriors still waiting in silence. The four centuries that Julius had led down the riverbank to deny them their last chance of crossing the river were now back in place at the ford, the two cohorts’ massed spears sufficient to deter any further attempt to force the crossing. The river itself was running slightly lower than had been the case during their first abortive attempt, but still had too much power for the warband’s leaders to seriously consider throwing their men across the river to die on the Roman defences.

‘I heard about Antenoch. He died defending the child?’

Marcus shrugged tiredly.

‘He died defending the supplies. Lupus was an incidental. Our prefect was a bit of a revelation, though …’

Julius raised an eyebrow.

‘Oh yes?’

‘Yes. I fought off the first group to come over the hill, but then another group followed them in and took the three of us on, me, Arminius and the prefect. I suggested that he stand back and let
the German and me do the fighting, but he just laughed at me and stood his ground.’

‘And …?’

‘And put down three of them without much difficulty, from what I gather. I was too busy while it was happening, but I had a quick word with Arminius after the fight was done, while Scaurus was busy making sure that they were all dead. All this time we’ve been assuming that the bodyguard’s the fighter, but it turns out he’s been taking lessons from the prefect since the day he was taken prisoner.’

Tiberius Rufius walked up with a weary demeanour, squatting down on his haunches opposite the other two, who both stared at him with open curiosity. He shrugged.

‘He’ll live, just as long as the gods keep smiling on him. The prefect’s got half a dozen tents up for the wounded and he’s warm enough, plus his wound’s stopped bleeding for the time being. Got any water left?’

Marcus passed over his water skin, waiting until his friend had drunk his fill before speaking again.

‘We need to get him back to Noisy Valley. That wound needs to be cleaned out before it closes up …’

‘In which case, that’s probably good news.’

Julius pointed up the road away from the ford. Half a mile distant, where the track met the skyline, the distant silhouettes of Roman soldiers were appearing against the bright evening sky. He stood up, looking back over his shoulder at the Venicones still waiting on the other side of the slowly subsiding river.

‘It’s their turn to run now. If that’s one full legion, never mind two, they’ll not want to be anywhere close to hand when that lot cross to the far side. Come on, let’s go and watch them leg it. And remember to put on a brave face for the troops; they need better from us than the despondency we’re feeling to show in our faces. We faced ten times our strength of the nastiest bastards in this whole shitty country and lived. Again. There are few enough men that have done that once, never mind twice in one year.’

The Tungrian cohorts marched into Noisy Valley behind the Petriana cavalry wing late the next day, having slogged back down the north road that afternoon. The surviving wounded had been carried on the carts that usually mounted the cohorts’ tents and cooking equipment, the dead left for burial by the soldiers of the 6th and 20th Legions. Scaurus had received his orders from the governor in the quiet of the man’s command tent the previous night, once the Legions had set up camp for the night beside the now quiescent Red River.

‘You’ve done a good job here, Prefect Scaurus, saved us from being ambushed by those ugly tattooed buggers. How many men did you lose?’

Scaurus made a show of consulting his tablet, although in truth the numbers, and their significance, were already burned into his brain.

‘Seventy-three men dead and a hundred and twenty-one wounded, seventy-six of them walking. The medics expect another dozen of the wounded to die before sunrise.’

The governor waited for a long moment.

‘And the Second Cohort …?’

‘Thirteen dead and twenty-five wounded, sir. Only one of their centuries actually saw any real combat.’

The tone of the governor’s reply made clear the frustration that was taking hold of his superior officer.

‘I know. I also know that a makeshift century composed mainly of Arab archers took more than double that number of casualties in the same action and still managed to frustrate an attempt by the Venicones to get over the river. I had Legatus Equitius make
discreet enquiries of your first spear, and you’ll be aware of the mutual esteem in which your centurions and their former commander hold each other. Not to mention the off-the-record comments I’ve had from Tribune Licinius after his debriefing of his message riders. It seems you were forced to take control of his cohort for fear that he would panic and scare his men into running?’