Raptor (123 page)

“That is all. Now they are signaling the same sequence over again. I assume they are spelling a single five-letter word.”

“Let me see, then, if I can decipher my twigs here. Hm… second group, first letter… that is E. First group, fourth letter… D.”

“Macte virtute,” I murmured admiringly. “It does work.”

“And P… and L… and O. Edplo. Edplo? Hm… it may not be working, after all. Edplo is not a word. Not in Latin or Gothic or Greek.”

I was watching the torches again, and said, “Well, they are signaling the exact same thing, over and over. That makes four or five times now.”

Theodoric growled in annoyance, “We got it right, then. But, confound it, what language are they—?”

“Wait,” I said. “I think I have it. The language is Latin, right enough, but the alphabet is not the Roman. Very cunning of them. They are employing the
futhark,
the old runic alphabet. Not A, B, C, D, but faihu, úrus, thorn, ansus… Let me see: second group, first letter… that would be raida. First group, fourth letter… ansus. So we have R and A… then teiws… and eis… and sauil. The word is
ratis.
You see? Latin!”

Theodoric laughed like a boy. “Ja! Ratis, a raft!”

“They heard our woodcutters at work. They are signaling to Odoacer or Tufa that we are building rafts here upriver.”

“Let them,” Theodoric said gaily as we returned to our horses. “If Odoacer and Tufa are fools enough to believe that we are fools enough to try building rafts for twenty-odd thousand men and half that many horses, let them believe it.”

“And in the meantime, what
will
we be doing?”

“Attacking in full force,” he said as we mounted and turned back the way we had come. “I have decided. Tomorrow, just before dawn, I shall cry my challenge. Then the war begins.”

“Good. Where would you have me fight?”

“On horse or on foot this time?”

“Akh, my Velox would never forgive me if I left him behind.” I fondly slapped his sleek neck.

“Velox?” Theodoric repeated, wonderingly, and leaned to peer through the darkness. “I thought only Wotan had an immortal steed, his Sleipnir. Surely, Thorn, that cannot be the same horse you were riding when we first met—fifteen years ago, was it?

It was my turn to laugh. “I ought to leave you in perplexity. But this is Velox the
Third.
I have been exceedingly fortunate that the bloodline has bred so true to the original.”

“Indeed, ja. If ever you retire from the warrior’s profession, you ought to devote yourself to horse-breeding. However, since you are still a warrior, and a well-mounted one, go in with Ibba tomorrow. His cavalry will be the vanguard.”

“You would not rather I ride with young Freidereikhs?”

“He will not be riding. As I ordered, he and his Rugii will be working the catapults—the ballistae and onagri. His men have been collecting boulders and other missiles ever since we got here.”

“Missiles for what, Theodoric? Are you going to knock down the Pons Sontii?”

“Why in the world would I do that? I need the bridge for our crossing.”

“What else, then? As Freidereikhs said, there is not a single wall or barricade to be battered and broken.”

“Akh, there is, Thorn. You fail to recognize it because it is not of stone and iron and timber. I only hope that Odoacer and Tufa think as you do—that I have no need or use for siege engines. But anything that impedes my way, I call a barricade, and I shall batter and break it.”

At dawn the next day, I realized what he meant: the barricade to be demolished was of flesh and bone and muscle.

It was not Odoacer but his Rugian-turned-Roman Tufa who faced Theodoric on the Pons Sontii. After the two men had gone through their ritual formalities—Theodoric crying his challenge, Tufa his counter-challenge, then both of them declaring, “This is war!”—Tufa returned to his end of the bridge. Theodoric stood where he was, drew his sword and swept it in the imperious overarm gesture calling for the “impetus!” But Ibba did not put us horsemen to the charge. Instead of our mounts’ hoofs making a thunder, we heard an astonishingly loud thrumming noise from behind us, and next a staggered series of earthshaking thuds, and next a sort of swooshing noise overheard, like the beating of many immense wings. The pearly dawn light was suddenly and luridly brightened by what might have been a cascade of igneous meteors, blazing across the sky from somewhere behind us and crashing to earth with explosions of sparks on the farther side of the bridge.

Those fiery, smoke-and-spark-trailing objects were not, of course, bolides come from the heavens. They were projectiles hurled by the ballistae and onagri ranged in the woods behind us—boulders wrapped in dry, oil-soaked brush, set alight just before they were launched. And they continued to fly over us, as Freidereikhs’s men briskly rewound and reloaded and reloosed the throwing arms of their siege engines. A ballista, discharging the power coiled into its tightly twisted torque-ropes, can catapult a rock weighing twice as much as a man a distance of two stadia. A massive onager, discharging the power squeezed into its tightly contorted torque-beams, can hurl the same weight twice that distance. So the ballistae were aimed at the farther end of the bridge and at the legions ranked along the riverside north and south. The onagri were flinging their missiles farther beyond, into the infantry and cavalry massed on the cleared ground between the riverside and the western tree line.

I do not know whether such machines, intended for the patient, deliberate hammering of heavy fortifications, had ever in any previous war been employed thus, against unprotected flesh and bone and muscle. But clearly Odoacer and his troops had not been expecting any such extraordinary assault. Many of those men and horses were straightway crushed by the plummeting boulders, but the most telling effect of the meteor shower was the consternation it caused. When a missile crashed down into the ranked and filed legionaries, that orderly formation exploded like the sparks, into a disorderly spray of dodging men. When a projectile landed among a troop of cavalry, that orderly array became a disorderly commotion of horses bolting, men thrown, horses plunging, men fighting for control of their terrified mounts. When a boulder flattened a stock pen or fold or sty and freed its contents, the horses and sheep and pigs scampered hither and yon, bleating, squealing, neighing, butting, kicking. When a missile fired one of the canvas supply and service tents, that contributed more sparks and smoke to the confusion. The eight-man butterfly tents, being of leather, did not burn, but their torn-loose panels blew about and tangled among the running feet and hoofs. Such was the chaos and catastrophe that, when our ranks of archers added a rain of arrows and fire arrows to the rain of rocks and flame, the rattled and disjointed Roman forces could return no concerted volley.

All of that was going on within range of my vision; no doubt much the same destruction was being worked to the north and south and farther west beyond my view. Now Theodoric’s shield-bearer went running onto the bridge, leading the king’s horse. He leapt to the saddle, again waved his sword in the command of “charge!” and this time Ibba and we of his cavalry clapped heels to our steeds. As evidently had been carefully arranged, Freidereikhs’s lighter ballistae ceased their action as Theodoric and Ibba led us pounding across the bridge, so that we did not have to worry about getting battered by boulders when we reached the other bank. But there were more flares of red light and swooshing noises going over our heads, so the heavier onagri were still pounding the enemy forces out beyond.

In a frontal assault, the point men almost always suffer the most casualties and the worst damage. But we cavalrymen—charging in among those milling, disorganized, unnerved troops nearest the bridge end—were at first almost unopposed, and we slaughtered busily but easily, as if we had been reaping a grainfield. Our every leveled spear was wrested from us only because it lodged inextricably in a foeman’s breast. Then we thrashed and slashed with our battle-axes and snake blades, and the enemy fell like mown wheat stalks, only not so quietly or juicelessly. And after us came more of our army, as we cleared the way for them and while the catapults and archers kept a canopy of missiles and arrows in the air over them—turmae and decades and centuries of horse and foot soldiers converging from north and south and east, and funneling onto and across the bridge.

Of course, our invasion did not go on for too long uncontested. This day we were not contemptuously brushing aside an undisciplined rabble of nomads or an unfriendly city’s hastily contrived defenses. This was the Roman army. Despite its appalling initial losses and its having reeled before our onslaught, it was by no means defeated or routed. Above the uproar of combat—human and animal cries, clashing arms and shields and armor, missiles booming down, boots and hoofs clumping—the blare of Roman trumpets could be heard, blowing the “ordinem!” that began rallying
their
turmae and decades and centuries to regroup about their standards and commanders. And more distant trumpets could be heard, summoning reinforcements from the long lines extending up and down the Sontius. Then, once the Romans recovered from their first unhappy fallback, they fought with courage and skill and more than ordinary ferocity (they being justifiably angry at having been seen to cringe from the projectiles). We were engaged in a major battle, and no mistake.

But it could have been worse for us. Had we made our dawn attack in any traditional, accepted, expectable manner, we would have had a hellish time trying to force our way across that bridge—or trying to cross the Sontius on rafts, or by swimming, or under cover of darkness, or on makeshift pontoon bridges, or by waiting for winter to freeze the river solid, or by any other means imaginable. But Theodoric’s unconventional, maybe even unprecedented, employment of catapults and blazing missiles had given us two inestimable advantages. It did some of our killing and crippling for us before we even closed with the enemy. And it so surprised and discomposed and roiled those troops that they could put up no real resistance before we got a considerable force of our own in among them. And now, we having accomplished that, we
had
to keep fighting ever forward. If we had let the enemy repulse us, there could have been no retreating, because we were far too numerous to back onto that bridge without jamming ourselves solid and helpless. The only alternative would have been to back into the river, which would likewise have meant our extermination. We had to fight and we had to prevail.

The history books now judge that battle at the river Sontius to have been one of the mightier clashes between mighty armies in recent times, and a momentous episode in the annals of the later Roman Empire, and an epochal event that will influence the destiny of all the western world to the furthest future. But the books do not tell what that battle was like, and no more can I.

This I have said before: a participant in a battle can honestly recount nothing of it but his own individual, meager, narrow experience of it. At the start of this one, when I was thrusting with my cavalry spear… and later, when I was flailing with my sword, after I had left my spear in the corselet of a signifer whom I had impaled… and later still, when I was fighting afoot, after I had been unhorsed but not injured by the glancing blow of a centurio’s battle-mace… all that while, I was conscious only of turmoil everywhere about me, except when I occasionally and briefly was conscious of a familiar face nearby. I glimpsed Theodoric hard at the fray, and Ibba, and other soldiers known to me, including young Freidereikhs, when his catapult work was done and he and his Rugii had come over the bridge to join us. I may at some point have crossed blades with such notable opponents as Odoacer and Tufa, but if I did I was too busy to recognize them. Like everyone else on that field, from the kings down to the camp cooks and clerks compelled to seize up arms, I was intent on doing just one thing—and that was not to make this battle worthy of inclusion in the history books, or to add anything to the annals of the Roman Empire, or to affect the future of western civilization. It was an aim rather less lofty, but much more immediate, and it was the one aim that every warrior had in common that day.

There are numerous ways to kill a man, without waiting for disease or old age to do it. He can be deprived of food or water or air, or all three, but that is a slow way of killing. He can be burned or crucified or poisoned, but those too take some time. He can be hit a crushing blow, as with a mace or a catapult’s projectile, but that cannot be depended on to kill with certainty. No, the surest and swiftest way to kill a man is to put a hole in him and let his life-spirit spurt or ooze out with his blood. The hole can be made with something as common as a sharp stick or with something as unlikely as what I used upon my own earliest victim, the beak of a juika-bloth. What weapon the first recorded killer used, the Bible does not say, but blood is mentioned, so Cain obviously put a hole in Abel. Ever since then, throughout history, man has exercised his best ingenuity to invent means of putting holes in other men: spears, lances, swords, knives, arrows—and to invent ever sharper and surer versions of those things: the twisting spear, the barb-pointed arrow, the keen snake blade. Men of the future may have weapons that I and my fellow warriors could not even dream of, but this I know: chief among them, and most reliable, will be something recognizable as a hole-maker. The intent will be no whit different in the far future than it was in the dim past age of Cain or on that day beside the river Sontius: this man striving to put a hole in that man, before that man could put a hole in him. Akh, I realize that I am risking disbelief and reproach by making manly combat—and the fiercest battle, and the mightiest war—sound absurd instead of heroic. But ask any other man who has ever been to war.

Well, we did prevail at last. When the Roman trumpets blared one final time to call the legions to their standards, those trumpets were urgently but mournfully sounding the “receptus!” All those forces that had converged here now drew away, and those still engaged with ours fought their way clear of us, and the whole army shrank away westward, snatching up what it could of its camps’ equipment and supplies, its dropped weapons and riderless mounts, and those of its wounded who could move or be moved. In its many centuries of waging war, the Roman army had not made too many retreats, but it had learned to make them orderly and expeditiously. Our men naturally chased after the enemy, harrying their rear and their fringes and their stragglers, but Theodoric had his officers likewise call their troops to regroup, and sent after the retreating Roman army only a body of speculatores to keep track of where it went.