Marius' Mules V: Hades' Gate (46 page)

Somewhere in the awful woolly mess that was his head facts started to sink in. The shape of Sabinus stepping his horse out, the tribunes behind him.

No
!

Cotta, vomit still dribbling from his mouth and mixed with the constant flow of his blood, clawed at the legionary's arm. He had to stop it! He mumbled and grunted and wheezed at the soldier, but it was too late.

Sabinus must have given the order. The front ranks of the army lowered their shields and cast their swords and pila to the grass. Cotta shuddered in disbelief at the stupidity of the man. Had he not already been fooled once by this treacherous Gaul? Idiot!

Sabinus dismounted as he approached the party of Gaulish nobles on the middle of the slope.

Cotta tried so hard to concentrate - it seemed his mind was becoming more fluffy and fuddled with every passing moment. The damn capsarius had
ruined
him. He was too drugged to function. It took every last ounce of concentration just to focus on what was happening.

The Gauls - there were a small forest of them. No. He was counting some of them twice. No. There were a dozen? A score? They were on foot. Sabinus and the four remaining tribunes approached the king. Sabinus was offering his sword in surrender!

Cotta tried to shout something. He wasn't really sure what it was any more but that hardly mattered since it would be unintelligible anyway.

Ambiorix - that was the traitor bastard's name - reached out and grasped the handle, accepting the ornate hilt of the expensive officer's sword with a nod. He gripped Sabinus' upper arm in the traditional warrior's gesture of brotherhood even as he drove the point of the blade deep into the commander's chest.

Cotta felt his body surrendering to the fluff. He was suddenly aware that he had collapsed and only the legionary next to him was stopping him from falling to the grass in a gelatinous heap.

There was a cry of dismay that rose from the entire army as Sabinus and the tribunes were executed on the slope. A man in a long grey robe - a druid, clearly - took his own blade to the collapsing figure of Sabinus, who was still choking out his life around a mouthful of his own blood. As two other Gallic warriors held the dying officer up, the druid used the long knife hilt to smash his ribs to fragments and then with a butcher's skill cut out his heart and held it before the legions.

A second tumultuous roar rose from the Fourteenth as the husk that had been Sabinus was discarded to the earth and his heart was offered up to the sky.

Before they could even grasp their shields as the centurions were now ordering, the missile attack began anew, felling men in droves, their only defences lying on the grass in front of them, discarded on Sabinus' orders.

Cotta felt sicker than he had ever been.

The Fourteenth were doomed - that was clear - and with them, half of the Eighth. There was no chance of a fighting retreat now. A tenth of the remaining force was systematically felled by arrows, rocks and sling shots in that opening volley.

Desperately, aware that he was fighting off unconsciousness with every beat of his heart, Cotta tried to make himself understood to the legionary.

Shields up. Defensive formation. Every century form a testudo. Each century to run east as best they can and try to reach the relative safety of the camp.
It was hopeless, but better to die trying than surrendering.

Hopeless… like his attempts to communicate. The legionary couldn't understand what Cotta was trying to tell him. The mangled face worked madly with grunts, whines and gargling noises but the officer was too far gone to be comprehensible even with the help of gestures.

The Fourteenth was collapsing in on itself, no shield wall raised against the missiles. Cotta spun around to the far side to see the warriors starting to pour down the hill towards them.

This was it. The legion was about to be massacred. An ignominious defeat and - this particularly rankled - the first casualty of Priscus' damned predicted uprising.

When the sling-stone caught Cotta in the eye and ploughed through the orb, shredding a line all the way through his brain and rattling against the back of his skull, he fell into a white cloud of bliss. There was no pain - the capsarius had seen to that. He felt the blow in every last detail, but with fascination rather than agony. The fact that he was dying seemed to be a blessing. He tried to gesture even as he fell, begging the legionary to place a coin under his tongue. He had family he hoped to see in Elysium.

The world went blessedly, painlessly, black.

* * * * *

Balventius awoke with a start and instantly wished he hadn't.

At first he thought he must be blind, but as shapes began to resolve around him he realised that the sun had gone down and it was dark, a thick blanket of cloud hiding both moon and stars and turning the land into a deep blue-black world of shadow.

The pain was the second thing that hit him, hot on the heels of the darkness. Feeling the ground shaking beneath him as though in the midst of a tremor, he tried to struggle to his feet only to realise that there was not an ounce of strength in either leg. Both had severed muscles and tendons and neither would respond to his attempts to move them, let alone lift his weight. The spear blows had crippled him and the pain was intense and unrelenting.

Indeed, it had been the pain that had awakened him.

The idea of becoming one of those legless crippled ex-soldiers that filled the sides of Rome's streets begging for a coin frightened him more than any enemy he had ever faced,

Slowly he became aware that the ground was not shaking after all. Despite his immobility, it was him that was moving. His head snapped round and he realised that he was being dragged, his feet bumping up and down with every rock, dip or undulation of the ground. He was surrounded by battle-weary legionaries; perhaps a score or three dozen from the shapes moving in the gloom. He could smell the blood and the urine. The smell of a defeated army.

Where were they?

Even as his feet bounced and before his dry, unused throat attempted to find his voice, he recognised the severity of his injuries. He had been wounded so many times in his career that he had lost count a decade ago and had suffered a score of wounds to the legs alone. His experience made it abundantly clear that his right leg was now beyond help. Even had it been salvageable following immediately on from the battle, how many hours had passed since their early morning disaster that it was now dark? The leg was lost to him, which made him an ex-soldier whatever happened. There was the very high likelihood that the left was in a similar state too.

Both legs!

Balventius spat his anger at the world.

"You awake centurion?"

Somewhere deep in his chest, Balventius' voice came out a wheeze. He tried again.

"Just" he croaked. "Where are we?"

"Nearly back at the camp, sir."

Balventius nodded. Just as it should have been in the first place. How had he been unconscious for so long? He remembered the leg wounds and collapsing…

"I was hit in the head?"

"That was Mittius, sir. You wouldn't let the lads save you, so he had to clout you to stop you struggling."

Balventius almost laughed at the absurdity of it. Legless and defeated, what made them think he wanted to be saved? Bleeding out his age-old life in a Roman gutter begging for scraps was no way for a soldier to go.

"The cohort's retreat was successful?"

Another voice - a familiar one - laughed. "It was. Damnedest thing I ever saw!"

Balventius focussed on the source of the voice: Petrosidius, the eagle bearer, with his precious burden still held tight and shining over his shoulder. Lately of the Tenth, the man had become something of a legend after last year's landings in Britannia. If anyone other than Balventius could hope to be a focus and a beacon to the defeated legionaries it would be him.

"What happened?" he managed.

"Your lot got back nice and safe and then that donkey-prick Sabinus surrendered!"

"
What
?" Balventius almost lurched out of his escort's grasp.

"Led the tribunes out and threw down his weapons. Gave the order for a general disarmament. Soon as the shields were down, some druid bastard gutted him and they opened up their missiles on the men."

Balventius tried to picture the scene, but it left a sour taste and he moved on, shaking away the image.

"Cotta? Didn't he argue?"

"No one knows. Disappeared about that time and no one's heard anything of him since. Doubt he got out alive, though."

"Shit. So they massacred the men? Didn't anyone rally the legions?"

"The centurions of the Fourteenth did. Their primus pilus tried his best. To his credit we fought on for three hours, until the sun was high in the sky. Last I saw of the Fourteenth in bulk there were maybe two hundred of them left, fighting hard up against the abandoned carts."

"And you ran?" Balventius tried to put some invective and disapproval into the statement, but he found he had none left. What man would have stayed voluntarily for that? Any survivors would be turned inside out and used as a wall decoration by the druids.

Petrosidius was suddenly next to him, staring deep into his eyes.

"Did they run? The veterans of the Eighth? Are you mad, Balventius?"

"Sorry."

"They beat a fighting withdrawal. Half a cohort managed to get out of the mess and made it up the hill. We kicked the snot out of a couple of hundred archers and slingers until their reinforcements found us. Then one of your older centurions gave the order to pull back to the camp. Good on him. If he hadn't, I would have. We fought off a good few hundred of the bastards, but by the time we got clear of the field we'd lost most of the men. Last count we had thirty one, but that was at the sunset break. I reckon we've lost three or four to wounds since then and there'll be more coins for the boatman before the sun rises."

Balventius shook his head. "Wait. It was only two miles or so to camp. How…?"

"We took a slightly circuitous route. We've been in the Arduenna forest for most of the time. The Eburones seem to be everywhere and we're in no fit state to fight so we've kept out of sight as we moved slowly. To be honest, I'm not sure what we'll do when we get back to camp, but it was something to make for. A focus. I'm the only officer left, y'see. Apart from yourself, of course."

Balventius sighed.

"More than seven thousand men. A massacre. It's the worst loss Caesar's had in his career, I shouldn't wonder. The old man's going to be a mite angry when he hears about this."

"
If
he hears." Petrosidius rolled his shoulders and switched hands with the eagle. "Bear in mind this might not be an isolated incident. What happens if this has hit every encamped legion in Gaul?"

"Then our occupation is over and Gaul is for the Celts again. They'll have won." He shook his head. "But Jupiter won't let that happen. Caesar's still there. I can feel it like he's watching us. No. We got hit because we're the most remote. I reckon we were a test of strength, resolve and readiness and we've proved to be about as tough and dangerous as a bag of grapes. That'll just give them the confidence to do it again and maybe even on a bigger scale."

He blinked away the sweat, blood and grime. "We need to get a message to Caesar - to tell him about this; about what happened."

"Seems unlikely" Petrosidius replied calmly

"Bet you wish you'd stayed with the Tenth" Balventius grunted hollowly.

"They might yet be in even deeper shit."

Someone shouted something inaudible out of Balventius' arc of vision.

"What was that?"

"They've spotted the camp defences. We're nearly there. Couple of dozen heartbeats and we'll be in what we might laughingly call 'safety'."

Balventius shook his head. Not from
his
point of view. The rest of the men were facing the way they were going, eagerly - even hungrily - eying the imagined security of the camp. Not so: Balventius. Being dragged by the shoulders by two burly legionaries, he could not see the ditches and mound of the winter quarters. What he could see were the figures emerging from the treeline some few hundred yards behind them.

"I think we're out of time" he breathed, causing Petrosidius to turn and pick out the figures.

"Thought we'd lost the bastards. Oh well. Looks like we'll go down fighting after all."

The two men tried to make a rough mental estimate of the numbers of the Eburones flooding from the treeline towards them. It was not a good number. It spelled certain defeat even for a full, fresh century, let alone half a century of tired, badly-armed and wounded men.

The officers looked at one another as the men bearing Balventius bounced him painfully down the first ditch and then up the slope before dropping down into the second.

"Halt!" he bellowed.

The legionaries, their endless drilling bringing them to a dead stop with the command despite the situation, glanced back the way they had come. One of them said "but sir... the barbarians?"

"They'll be on us any moment" Balventius snapped. "We're dead men walking…" he snorted at the irony of the phrase as his two carriers pulled him upright. He looked at Petrosidius. "You thinking what I'm thinking?"

The aquilifer rubbed his brow. "I guess so. Using the ditch?"

Balventius nodded. "You'd best start running now."

The standard bearer shook his head. "Bollocksed if I'm going to be the one who carries this news to 'eagle beak'. Besides, you can't stand up. You need a good helping hand here."

Balventius began to splutter his argument but to his irritation, Petrosidius ignored him entirely and turned to one of the legionaries nearby - a man who was still fully equipped and whole and who appeared of an age to be a reasonable veteran. "Nasica? You're in charge."

The old soldier frowned. "In charge of
what
, sir?

"In charge of the survivors. Take the two best men and this." As the legionary watched in surprise, Petrosidius wrenched the silver eagle from the long, smooth staff and thrust it at him. "Wrap it up and keep it safe. Head south through the forest and try to get to Labienus. He's about three days' march away, but you'll be slowed by the forest. Stay out of sight of everyone. All that matters is that you find Labienus and tell him what happened here. And make sure that if you do get caught, you bury that eagle deep first. That thing never gets into the bastards' hands, alright?"