Marius' Mules VII: The Great Revolt (70 page)

In defiance of Fronto’s ‘no more deaths’ order, one of the legionaries staggered back from the wall, clutching a ragged hole in his chest from which blood issued in gouts. It was only as the man fell to the ground that Fronto realised the man had not been the first. He joined three other legionary corpses in the dust. Gritting his teeth, Fronto looked back at the next attacker, slamming his blade point into the man’s face even as he brought the pitiful remains of his shield up.

Time rolled on in the small, ‘U’-shaped theatre of death as the Gallic bodies piled up and more and more of his defenders hit the ground. Without his having to send a request, one of the nearby officers had clearly seen the danger and sent two more contubernia of legionaries to bolster the gate defence. Biorix suddenly staggered away from the wall, his shield cast aside, clutching his own arm as crimson rivulets ran down his mail shirt from somewhere near his armpit. Fronto threw him a stark, questioning look but Biorix shook his head with a smile. Not critical, then, but debilitating. Without two serviceable arms and busy bleeding a man was no use on the redoubt. A capsarius appeared from nowhere and helped Biorix back from the fight to tend to his injury.

And on it went. Half an hour passed - perhaps three quarters - and Fronto took advantage of a pause to rise and peer over the makeshift barricade into the pit of seething forms, both living and dead.

‘Is it me or are there more now, despite everyone we’ve killed?’

Masgava nodded as he scythed off the jaw of a Gaul. ‘Looks that way.’

Fronto looked up at the wall, where a commotion cut across the fighting. The centurion commanding the wall defence was in close discussion with two of his men even as the others continued to fight off attackers, and Fronto felt a frisson of anticipation as he saw the officer pointing off to the southeast.

‘Hold the barricade,’ he shouted to Masgava, somewhat redundantly, as he dropped back down from the cart and turned, running across to the rampart and clambering up the bank. His heart, pounding heavily from both the fight and the climb, skipped a beat as he looked out from the wall-walk, seeing what the centurion had spotted.

Almost the entire Gallic force along the inner defences, which had issued from the oppidum and spread out to try each position, had turned in response to some unheard signal and was now leaving the circumvallation, their sights set on the Mons Rea camp. Many thousands were even now approaching the poorly-defended camp.

‘Oh shit.’

* * * * *

Molacos watched his shot thud into the officer’s shield and nocked another arrow, his sight shifting to Cavarinos of the Arverni. The man had fought like a wolf against the Roman atop the cart, but something about him disturbed Molacos, and he felt his mistrust bolstered when, rather than simply killing him, the Romans knocked him out. Drawing back the string, he marked the heap on the ground that was the Arvernian noble. Perhaps a waste of an arrow, but the man simply did not appear trustworthy. With a held breath, he let the missile fly, barking his annoyance as some unidentifiable warrior in the press barged into him, knocking him aside. The mob had closed up and he’d lost sight of Cavarinos, unsure whether his arrow had struck true or not.

In irritation, he ripped his knife from his side and hamstrung the man who’d knocked him, dropping back through the press and leaving the screaming warrior floundering, flopping on his useless leg.

As he moved, he sheathed his dripping knife and fastened his arrow case. Despite the mass of men flowing this way from Vercingetorix’s army, he had a distinct feeling that this position was going to become a charnel pit soon and there was no guarantee which side would fill it most before the fight was won or lost. This was a place for a mindless killer, not for a huntsman. A place for brawn, not skill.

Ducking between slavering warriors, Molacos retreated from the fray until he reached the broken gate, where the mass still filled the space, though not quite so tightly-packed. With profound regret, he let his precious bow drop away to the floor and unfastened his quiver, dropping it among the mess.

Taking a steadying breath, he ripped a green scarf from his belt pouch and tied it around his neck above the mail shirt he had acquired during his days trapped in the oppidum. Hoping none of his kin would understand what he was trying, he whipped his bloody knife from his side again, grasped the end of the cart that butted up against the gate edge and sought the defenders behind it through gaps and nooks in the barricade. His eyes caught the russet of a Roman tunic and his hand disappeared into the hole, gouging with the knife. A moment later, he withdrew it and the Roman had gone. Another check and another tunic. Another lunge through a hole and another victim. And in heartbeats, the very end of the barricade was clear. With a deep breath, he pushed at the cart until it moved a few hand-widths. Another shove and it opened a little further. The Roman officer commanding the redoubt had clearly spotted something amiss and was shouting for his men to close the gap.

With a brief prayer to Ogmios in his guise as
lord of words
rather than
master of the dead
, he slipped through the gap, opening his mouth to shout in his best Latin, his accent a good southern Cadurci, carrying the same inflection as the Romanised men of Narbo.

‘Breach!’ he bellowed. ‘Help me!’

He’d known that the Romans would close the gap, of course. They were too efficient to let the warriors outside capitalise on the tiny breach. But it had been enough for him to squeeze through. The Romans nearby, not legionaries, but some sort of bodyguard for the officer, looked him up and down and a scout in Roman colours noted the green scarf - the same shade as the one the scout himself wore, along with every other auxiliary scout and hunter - and nodded, rushing over to help this auxiliary with the skeletal grin close the gap.

It was the work of a moment to help the Romans close the gap and re-deploy at the edge, and then to slip away with one of the legionaries who was running back to the piles of supplies nearby. An officer of some kind turned to him, probably seeking to send him to work elsewhere, but Molacos clutched his side with his knife hand, the blood from his three victims running from the blade and down his hip, looking for all the world like gore from a wound in his side, and the officer’s eyes slid past him and on to another target. A capsarius rushed over to help him, but Molacos shook his head, and the medic ran off after someone else.

With a satisfied smile, the Cadurci hunter picked up a battered shield from one of the piles and, almost indistinguishable from the many auxiliaries among the Roman force, made his way towards the northern rampart. This was no place for him. But somewhere outside the Roman lines - easy enough to traverse from the inside - back towards the reserve camp, Lucterius and his Cadurci brothers would be fighting.

And that was where he needed to be, for Molacos fought not for a unified Gaul, nor for hatred of the Romans, nor for Vercingetorix himself. Molacos fought for his master, Lucterius, and would do so to his last breath.

* * * * *

Fronto was hard pressed. What had begun as defending a weak point against the periphery of the inner force’s attack had quickly become the second-most fought-over position on the battlefield. While the reserve cavalry and their infantry support slugged it out over the ramparts on the plain, the north wall of the Mons Rea camp was swamped with enemy warriors, but the south-eastern side had become the target for the force that had been trapped on the oppidum. Another hour had passed at a guess, based on the movement of the sun across the sky, since the redoubt had almost caved, its defensive cohesion only saved at the last minute by one of the native levies who’d happened by.

Since then, the gate had become something of a focus for the rabid enemy. As the huge rebel army converged on this position, the powers inside the camp - who Fronto had no time to go and see since every man counted - had seen fit to send three more centuries of men to the makeshift barrier. Fronto had immediately left Masgava to directing the fighting men and sent the new arrivals to fetch more equipment and more junk to help strengthen the defence. It had worked and the place still held, though by the skin of their teeth. The barricade was perhaps half as high again as it had been and twice as thick, with grain sacks, clods of earth, timbers and more all thrown into the pile to help strengthen it, and the number of men fighting to hold it was gradually increasing, while the attacking force in the ‘U’ failed to grow, limited as they were by the gate.

A quarter of an hour ago he’d taken the time to pop up to the rampart and confer with the centurion again. Things were looking troubling all round, it seemed. The newly-arrived Gauls had managed to fill in the single ditch outside the east rampart with relative ease and had set up shield walls while their archers and slingers had begun to pelt the parapet with their missiles. Fronto had left the man to it. The situation was pretty bleak but the centurion - one Callimachus - seemed to have his head screwed on; one of the more competent officers Fronto had yet encountered in the whole system, and he could handle the disaster as well as any other. Before returning to the fray to discover that Arcadios had been forced to pull back with a vision-blurring head wound, Fronto had grabbed one of the nearer couriers and told him to ride for Antonius and Caesar as fast as possible and request help.

‘What message should I deliver, sir?’ the man had asked, worried.

Fronto had blinked. ‘
Send help
,’ he’d replied helpfully.

‘But how many men, from where and to where, sir?’ the young courier had asked, frowning.

Fronto had grasped him by the neck, bunching his scarf, and dragged him to the redoubt, lifting him so that he could see over it, almost having the top of his head removed by a stray sweep of a blade, and then lowering him, terrified, to the floor again.

‘Did you see the enemy?’

The acrid smell of urine had risen from the courier’s tunic. ‘Yessir.’

‘Unless you want them pushing a sponge-stick so far up your private manhole you can taste it, tell Antonius and Caesar to send everyone they can spare to Mons Rea.’

The man had nodded emphatically, his eyes wide, his curly locks having been trimmed by an impromptu blade. Fronto had let go and patted him on the head, and the man had run for his horse.

That had been almost quarter of an hour ago, and nothing had happened. Occasionally, Fronto had paused and tried to make sense of the military calls, but the simple fact was that the battlefield was such a chaotic din of noise that trying to unthread it was like trying to unpick a tapestry one handed in the dark while playing a lyre.

A Gaul thrust a spear up at the wall top, the blade coming perilously close to Fronto’s helmet, and he ducked before lunging out and stabbing the man in the chest.

There seemed no end to the opposition. They had killed hundred upon hundred of the Gauls, and taken a steady stream of dead and wounded in the process, the poor bastards dragged or helped back from the redoubt by medics or the dead-patrol accordingly, only to be replaced by their weary tent-mates.

But it was not the numbers or the defences as such that worried Fronto. What gave him serious pause for thought was that there had been cracking and banging noises from fore and below for a while now, and that signified that some of the more astute Gauls had given up trying to flood over the barrier and were now busy pulling apart the carts plank by plank to get through to the Roman defenders. And they would, in due course.

‘You’re looking tired, Fronto. Are you getting enough sleep?’

Fronto delayed only long enough to put his utilitarian military gladius through the temple of an unhelmeted warrior who’d made it to the top of the barricade and turned with a frown.

Titus Labienus, Caesar’s senior lieutenant and one of the most successful and respected generals of Rome, sat astride an impatient looking bay a few paces away.

Fronto blinked and looked past him.

Legionaries in seeming hundreds and thousands were busy pulling what they needed from the supply dumps and filtering onto the rampart and to the barricade as their centurions commanded. Finally, after weeks of maintaining their position in the Alesia lines, the First and the Seventh had finally committed.

‘You are a sight for fucking sore eyes, Labienus. About time. Got sick of all the baths and the snoring did we?’

Labienus smiled indulgently, but the way his expression slid quickly into serious and troubled worried Fronto.

‘What is it?’

‘Don’t get over excited, Fronto. Estimates put your opposition at about five thousand, and I’ve brought six cohorts.’

Fronto heard a clunk and looked over his shoulder to see a grapnel over the wall top, the timbers up there already straining, the centurion sending legionaries over to deal with it before some behemoth of a Gaul ripped the wall apart. The bastards were serious and only a heave or two away from success, then. ‘Six cohorts is better than a kick in the teeth, Labienus.’

‘Then get ready for me to put the boot in. Five of them are for the north rampart. Caesar’s trying to bring in reserves to help here, but he’s got other troubles down on the plains. The Gallic reserves are pushing him to the limit, so he’s being careful with his own troop assignments. For now I’ve got only one cohort for you, I’m afraid.’

Fronto nodded tersely. ‘I’ll make them worthwhile.’

‘You do that,’ the staff officer replied. ‘And here’s a little something extra for you: new orders agreed by the general. Have a cornicen so close you can hear his arse squeak when he walks. If the walls are breached anywhere unrecoverable, have the man blow the Bacchanalia chant. As soon as that chant goes up anywhere along the walls, every century available is to form up and prepare for a sortie against the enemy.’

Fronto stared at the man. Sortie beyond the walls? The man was mad. But Labienus was nothing if not an inventive tactician, and had yet to be beaten in a campaign, with a success rate even surpassing Caesar’s.