Fortress of Spears (43 page)

The two soldiers snapped to attention, eyeing the hard-faced tribune as he stalked towards them. Licinius put a toe under Canutius’s shoulder, turning the dead man’s body over.

‘He was speared in the back, from the look of it.’

Scaurus reached out and took the spear from the taller man, examining its point with a critical eye.

‘There’s blood on this weapon, legionary.’

The soldier shook his head dourly.

‘Barbarian blood, sir. I did for their king.’

The tribune shook his head in turn, then handed the weapon back and turned away, bending to kneel alongside the dying tribune.

‘Well now, Popillius Laenas, you’ll be in the company of your ancestors soon enough. Hold your head up high when they greet you, for you’ve won this fight for us. See?’ He lifted the Venicone king’s head for the dying man to see. This was their king. Without him to lead them they’ll give it up soon enough, and you’re the man that took the fight to him and sealed his fate. I’ll make sure your family know you died with a soldier’s honour …’ He bent closer to the prostrate tribune, speaking quietly into his ear. ‘But now I need you to tell me one more thing, brother. You see, your first spear lies dead alongside you, murdered by one of your own men in all likelihood. It’s common enough when an officer is hated by his soldiers, of course, but we can’t allow it to stand unpunished. So tell me, Tribune, did you see it happen?’

Laenas moved his head with painful slowness to stare at the two soldiers standing behind the kneeling tribune, a faint smile ghosting across his face, and his lips moved in speech so quiet that Scaurus had to put his ear to the dying man’s mouth to hear them.

‘
Saw … nothing …
’

Scaurus stared into his eyes for a moment, watching as the life left them. He patted the dead man’s shoulder and then rose, turning back to the waiting legionaries with a flat stare.

‘Today, legionaries, is your lucky day, or so it seems. Rejoin your century.’

Glancing at each other with scarcely concealed relief, the two men turned back to the fight, freezing into immobility at the sound of the harsh metallic scrape of Scaurus’s sword leaving its scabbard.

‘Of course, I could still have the pair of you lashed to death, or simply execute you both myself, here and now. So I suggest you surrender that pretty gold neckpiece before I decide which of the two would be preferable.’

The spearman turned back white faced, pulling the massive gold collar from inside his armour and putting it into the tribune’s hand. Dismissing the men with a flick of his hand, Scaurus turned back to his colleague, who stared back at him with raised eyebrows.

‘If Laenas was willing to condone their murder of Canutius then who am I to deny him that last pleasure, given the number of times the man was the cause of his humiliation?’

Licinius nodded, taking the torc from his colleague’s outstretched hand and looking over his shoulder at the battle still raging on the slope below them.

‘Agreed. Now let’s go and finish what Drust was so keen to start. We have a chance to bring peace to the north for a generation to come. I’ll see every last one of these bastards dead or a slave before night falls.’

With the gap in their line closed, and reinforced by the five legion centuries that had pinched off the Venicones’ desperate attack and killed their king, the Romans began the process of inexorably grinding the resistance out of the tribesmen trapped between their shields and the forest. Advancing down the slope behind their shields, spears and swords stabbing out to kill and maim those barbarians still willing to face them, they herded the beaten tribesmen into an ever smaller space, until their only alternatives were surrender or death. Increasing numbers of men threw down their weapons and knelt under the detachment’s spears, cursed and spat on by those of their comrades still willing to fight on in defiance of the odds facing them as more and more men fell under the Romans’ unrelenting assault or gave up the struggle.

‘It’s a hard choice. In their place I chose to fight, but …’

Marcus raised an eyebrow at the tone in Arminius’s voice, both men watching as another sullen tribesman was dragged through the Tungrians’ line at spear point, his hands swiftly bound before he was pushed into a group of his beaten comrades under the swords of a pair of lightly wounded soldiers.

‘But what? You’d have missed this life of adventure if he’d just beaten your brains out. Can you really say that you’d …’ He raised his sword and pointed at one of the wounded guards. ‘
You!
Keep your distance from the prisoners and stop waving your iron at them, unless you want me to come over there and do the same to you!’ The soldier saluted gingerly with his wounded arm and stepped back from the tribesmen, lowering the sword whose blade he’d been passing inches from their downcast faces. ‘Where was I? Yes, can you really say that you’d exchange a quick death and an unmarked grave for …’

He looked up as a squadron of riders rode up to his place in the line, their leader reining his horse to a halt alongside him with another mount led alongside him.

‘Centurion! Would you like to be a cavalryman one last time? There are Venicones who escaped when your line was broken to be hunted down, and Tribune Licinius has ordered me to take the best men available in their pursuit. Leave this hairy gentleman to watch the fun, and join us in the hunt!’

The Roman looked up at the rider, shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare.

‘Is that Bonehead you’ve brought for me to ride, eh, Decurion Felix? Perhaps this is really just one more chance to get my neck broken?’

The decurion grinned back, gesturing to the horse with his free hand.

‘Nobody else can ride him, not now you’ve encouraged the unruly bugger to have his own way whenever he fancies it. Come on now, the blue-noses will be gone without trace at this rate, and your tribune gave me a message for you. He said to tell you that Calgus ran …’

‘
Qadir!
’

The chosen man turned from his place at the line’s rear, where he was supervising the capture of the continual flow of barbarian prisoners.

‘I’ve a score to settle! The century is yours until I get back!’

Felix watched as Marcus plucked a spear from the nearest rear-ranker and jumped into the saddle alongside him.

‘Yes, he said that would have the spring back in your step.’

The two men rode hard up the slope, with the remainder of Felix’s squadron following close behind in an extended line. They quickly overtook the hindmost of the barbarians who had fought their way free as the legion centuries had closed the door on their route to freedom, a tall skinny warrior limping painfully away from the battlefield as fast as his damaged body would carry him. The decurion lowered his spear and rode the straggler down, expertly thrusting the weapon’s long blade through his neck and tearing it free in a shower of blood, not bothering to look back as his victim sank to his knees and then pitched headlong to the turf.

‘There’s more of them! Form skirmish line!’

The horsemen rode down several groups of barbarians, initially wounded men, unable to flee fast enough to have any chance of escape, but soon they began catching the unharmed warriors who had taken their chance to run for their lives. Those that prostrated themselves were spared, and a rider detailed to guard the survivors of each group, while those that continued running or turned to fight were killed without compunction by the fast-riding cavalrymen.

‘
There!
’

Felix pointed his blood-slathered spear at a small group of warriors running hard for the shelter of a forest still a mile distant, and Marcus’s face hardened at the sight he’d been waiting for.

‘It’s Calgus! Cut them off, but nobody touches the man in the purple cloak!’

Brought to bay too far from the trees for there to be any chance of escape, the barbarians threw down their weapons and pushed the Selgovae king forward towards the horsemen. Calgus shrugged off their hands, stepping forward to meet the point of Marcus’s spear with his head held high, advancing until the point of the weapon’s iron blade rested firmly on his chest.

‘Very well, son of
two
dead fathers, take my life. If you have no interest in what your real father wrote about you in all those letters he never sent, put that spear through me and take your revenge.’

Stabbing the weapon into the turf, Marcus dismounted and stepped up to the barbarian leader with one hand on the hilt of his gladius and his face dark with anger. Calgus smirked back at him.

‘As I told you yesterday, the legatus was quite a writer, it seems. I captured a writing chest full of his correspondence, and among it was a sheaf of scrolls that he wrote to you, over the years. It was quite touching really, full of his hopes for you, and talking about the few times he managed to see you by visiting your father when you were younger. He …’

‘
No
.’

The barbarian blinked in surprise and then opened his mouth to speak again, but found himself looking down the length of Marcus’s gladius.

‘No. For all I know you’re spinning me a tale from your own desperation. You want me to escort you back to my tribune, who will send you back to Rome for the triumph that you assume must follow this victory. There, you presume, you might live another year, or more, and there have always been those barbarian leaders who are spared when they get the chance to work their wiles on the Emperor. What’s to say that you can’t pull the same trick?’

Calgus grinned wryly.

‘You’ll never know, then, will you? You’ll have to …’

He staggered back as Marcus punched him hard in the face, a straight jab that sent him reeling dazed to the ground. Before the barbarian leader could respond, Marcus stepped forward with the eagle-pommelled gladius raised, spearing the blade’s point down into the barbarian leader’s left calf with careful precision before pulling it loose through his Achilles tendon. Calgus raised his head and screamed in agony, jerking again as Marcus repeated the process with the other leg. He pulled a knife from Calgus’s belt, ripping the purple cloak away from the prostrate chieftain and cutting two long strips from it before stepping back and tossing them to the wounded man, his eyes pitiless as the barbarian leader twisted in pain.

‘That’s your death sentence, Calgus. Use these to bind your wounds and you’re not likely to die from them, but you’ll never walk unaided again. You can stay out here and take as long to die as you like. Of course, the wolves will find you soon enough, once there’s nobody else here to frighten them away, and if they don’t I’m sure the Votadini will be happy enough to provide you with a protracted death if they get to you first. You could kill yourself, of course, if you have enough will power to open your wrists with your teeth, but I suspect you’ll hang on to the very last moment, hoping against hope for some improbable rescue. Not much of a choice, I suppose, but it’s a good deal more than you gave my birth father.’

He turned away and remounted the big grey without a backward glance, meeting Felix’s raised eyebrows with a steady, expressionless gaze.

‘That will be the last of them, I’d say. Anyone that reached the forest deserves to live. Shall we take the survivors back to join their fellow slaves?’

The small detachment rode back down the slope an hour later, the heads of the tribesmen they had overtaken dangling from their saddle horns and their prisoners staggering exhaustedly before them. Marcus trotted his mount over to the tribunes with Felix following him, and dismounted wearily, saluting the two senior officers before holding out what was left of Calgus’s cloak to Scaurus. The tribune took the garment and passed it in turn to Licinius. The senior officer nodded solemnly, tossing the prize to one of his bodyguard.

‘You took revenge for your father, then?’

‘I crippled him, and left him for the animals.’

Licinius grimaced, casting a wry smile to Scaurus.

‘Remind me never to get on the wrong side of this young man. Still, with both Calgus and Drust dead we’ll have no more problems from the tribes any time soon, at least not until the current crop of barbarian children reaches maturity and decides to come looking for revenge, by which time it’ll be somebody else’s problem to handle. Who knows, perhaps we’ll even be able to reman the northern wall with this many of the tattooed bastards either dead or on their way to new homes.’

Marcus looked out across the battlefield from the vantage point of his mount, surveying the aftermath of the Venicones’ disastrous attack. A mound of enemy dead was being stacked unceremoniously where the fighting had been the heaviest, at the point where the line had momentarily broken. Other soldiers were carefully collecting the detachment’s dead and stacking their corpses in neat lines, each body stripped of its armour and weapons in preparation for the funeral pyre for which the two Tungrian pioneer centuries were cutting wood at the forest’s edge. In another corner of the clearing a large group of tribesmen were huddling under the legion cohort’s spears, while soldiers pulled them one at a time from the mass of their comrades to be searched before they were roped into lines of downcast men ready for the long march south into slavery.

‘How many of them did we kill, sir?’

The Petriana’s commander followed his gaze.

‘About five thousand of them at a guess. It was a bit of a bloodbath, if the truth be told. The killing was almost impossible to stop once we had them pinned against the forest, especially given the casualties our men took holding their first charge.’ He caught Marcus’s frown and smiled grimly. ‘We’ve lost over four hundred men, mainly in the struggle to close the line after Drust had battered his way through it. Apart from Tribune Laenas and that worthless fool Canutius, we’ve lost First Spear Neuto and three other centurions holding them back while the Sixth Legion decided whether to join in or not. If Canutius hadn’t been speared by his own men I’d probably have done the job myself. I suppose a couple of thousand slaves will make a decent contribution to the burial fund, and see the widows and children right, even if the sheer number of them drives their price down. And now that you’ve restored some measure of the Sixth Legion’s honour by dealing with the maniac that started the whole bloody mess off, I’d suggest that you …’