The Eagle's Vengeance (24 page)

‘Run!’

Tarion’s shout snapped Marcus from his momentary reverie, his gaze following the thief’s pointing hand across the tower’s open square to the landing’s far side where another four men were running from the room opposite them. Wrenching the gladius’s blade from his first victim by stamping on the dead man’s head and twisting the blade to free it from the severed vertebrae’s tight grip, he followed the fleeing thief down the stairs three at a time. Looking back, he saw that Verus had lifted the terrified priest’s body over his head and carried him out onto the landing, screaming defiance at the advancing warriors while the old man struggled helplessly in his iron grip. Staggering to the platform’s edge, the legionary grunted as he hurled the holy man out into the void, then squealed out a high-pitched laugh that raked the talons of its insanity down the back of the Roman’s neck as the soldier drew his sword to fight. The priest flew to the ground below them with a final scream of anguish, his frenzied howl cut off as abruptly as he hit the stone floor with a crunching impact. Tarion shot an amazed glance at Marcus.

‘If they’re not awake down there then they never will be.
Come on!
’

Bounding down the stairs the two men stormed past the fallen priest, Marcus noting from the corner of his eye that one of the old man’s fingers was twitching against the cold stone flags. Looking back up at the platform above them he saw Verus overwhelmed by the men storming in to assault him, one of the warriors burying a spear deep in his side before another thrust a sword up into his jaw as the legionary staggered under the first wound’s fearful pain. Turning back to the hall’s door the Roman readied his weapons as Tarion pulled the heavy wooden door open, crouching low to peer around the door’s thick frame. There were half a dozen or so corpses scattered across the open courtyard, some of them lying still while a pair of men were still writhing, grasping ineffectually at the arrows that protruded from their bodies. As he stared out into the darkened compound an arrow hissed overhead from his left to rattle off the stones of the wall by the main gate.

‘We can’t stay here!’

The thief was tugging at his shoulder, pointing back at the Venicones hurrying down the stairs behind them, their blades black with Verus’s blood. Marcus nodded decisively, taking a deep breath.

‘Follow me!’

Ducking round the door frame he ran for the fortress’s eastern side with the thief close behind knowing that the archers at the courtyard’s other end would be putting arrows to their bows in reaction to the sudden movements below them. With a hissing riffle of feathers and the sigh of iron cleaving the air, an arrow flew past his ear so close that he felt its passage as much as he heard it.

‘Eagle!
Friendlies coming in!’

The answering shout from the darkness beneath the eastern wall was recognisable as Arminius’s voice, a note of urgency in his bellowed response.

‘Get down!’

Marcus dropped to the ground, dragging the thief down with him, and flinched as a flight of arrows whirred over their heads. Looking back over his shoulder he saw a warrior who had clearly chosen to pursue them into the teeth of the unseen archers’ threat stagger backwards clutching at his chest, while another turned tail and hobbled back into the cover of the tower’s open doorway with a hand grasping at his wounded thigh.

‘Now! Run for it!’

Both men leapt to their feet at the command, sprinting across the fortress’s courtyard with arrows loosed from the western wall flicking past them and clattering off the stone walls.

‘Here!’

Marcus recognised Arminius’s voice and ran towards it almost blindly, his ability to see in the darkness still compromised by his exposure to the tower’s torchlight, dragging Tarion along in his wake. The German took his arm and they climbed the stone stairs that led to the wall’s fighting platform.

‘We need to go quickly, before they wake up and send a party around the walls to cut us off from our escape route!’

He bundled them along the wall, past the two Sarmatae who were nocking arrows to their bows and shooting into the darkness at the fortress’s far end. As the German passed the two men they shot one last arrow apiece and then abandoned their positions, dropping in behind Marcus as he followed Arminius around the wall’s curve to the spot where Drest waited for them, huddled in behind his heavy wooden shield from which a pair of arrows protruded, one barely an inch from the rim. Arminius gestured to the wall, and without a word the Thracian tossed his shield over the parapet and then climbed after it, keeping his body low against the stones as he eased himself over the wall. Readying himself for the ten-foot drop on the wall’s far side, Marcus moved to follow him only to receive a heavy blow from behind that forced his face into the cold stone of the wall, the eagle falling from his hand onto the walkway’s hard surface with a harsh metallic clatter.

6

Turning awkwardly, Marcus pushed the dead weight of a man’s body from his back and found himself looking down at Tarion, who had dropped onto his knees and was bent back as if in adoration of the sky above.

‘Arrow.’ Radu pointed to the thief’s back. ‘He is dead, even if he is still breathing.’

‘Aye.’ Arminius’s voice was flat with resignation in the young Roman’s ear. ‘We’ll have to leave him.’

Nodding his head in a reluctant decision, Marcus hooked a thumb over his shoulder, gesturing to the two Sarmatae.

‘Go.’

The two men squeezed past Arminius, who stepped forward and lifted his shield over Marcus in readiness to thwart any further well aimed or lucky shots. Turning his attention back to the thief, he felt around the dying man’s back until he found the arrow’s shaft, gripping it and twisting sharply to snap the thin wooden dowel. Tarion shuddered, groaning with pain as the arrow’s barbed head moved inside the wound it had carved deep into his body. Grimacing with self-loathing at the act even as he performed it, the Roman stripped away the thief’s cloak, feeling the weight of the golden bowl and the dead legatus’s head in the garment’s hidden pouch as he draped it over his own shoulders. Pulling the dagger from his belt he cut the thief’s throat without ceremony to spare him any further pain, then sheathed the weapon and touched the intaglio on the pommel of his spatha.

‘I have no coin for you, my friend, but may Our Lord Mithras receive you into the joy of his light in the afterlife as your reward for this noble end.’

He snatched up the eagle and the two men slid over the parapet, dropping to the ground below to find Drest waiting for them, a questioning look on his face as he glanced back up at the wall.

‘Tarion?’

Marcus shook his head wearily, raising the eagle’s staff to display the shining metal bird.

‘He’s dead.’

The Thracian made an intricate gesture over his forehead before speaking again. ‘Then we must leave. Come.’

Advancing round the wall’s curve towards the almost sheer slope they found Arabus and the two Sarmatae with arrows nocked to their bows, all three of them ready to shoot but without any target. Lugos was lurking behind the bowmen, the frustration in his voice at watching other men do the fighting for him obvious as he turned to speak to them.

‘Venicones try to attack.’

He indicated the patch of ground before them that was lit by a torch on the wall above, and Marcus saw that there were several more bodies littering the turf. The Briton waved a hand at the carnage.

‘They not come again until many more men. Fetch from camp.’

Marcus nodded his understanding in the torch’s faint light. At least half of the fortress guard’s strength would have been asleep in their camp alongside the fortress when the alarm was raised moments before.

‘They’ll have enough force to rush us quickly enough … ’ He looked across the short stretch of ground to the point where the gentle slope abruptly faded away into darkness. ‘We need to get away from here now.’ Pointing to the Sarmatae pair, he gestured at their escape route. ‘Leave your bows and go!’

The two men looked at each other for a moment.

‘Go!’

At Drest’s shouted command they rose as one man and dropped their weapons, shrugging off quivers that contained a few arrows apiece before running to the edge of the drop and picking up their shields, vanishing from sight down into the gloom. Marcus picked up one of the bows and nocked an arrow to it, turning to his companions as Drest did the same with the other weapon.

‘Arminius and Lugos, you’re next!’ The German opened his mouth to protest, but closed it again when he saw the look on Marcus’s face. As the two barbarians climbed down over the drop-off Arabus looked back and called out a warning, and the Roman flicked a glance back at the fortress to find a huddle of men approaching them at a cautious run behind a wall of their shields. He loosed the first arrow without thinking, watching it fly into the group of men as he reached for the next.

‘Shoot low!’

The three men worked their bows as fast as they could, sending arrow after arrow into the oncoming Venicones whose advance withered under the hail of sharp iron, first one man and then another falling with arrows in their legs. As they drew closer Marcus judged that they were inside the range at which an arrow might penetrate their shields’ layered wood, and raised his aim to send his next shot straight into them, rewarded by a yelp of pain and a sudden recoil from the man he had wounded. Drest loosed one more arrow and then threw his bow down, his supply of missiles exhausted.

‘We go!’

Dropping his own bow the Roman grabbed the eagle and led them towards the hill’s edge, picking up his shield from the spot where he had left it and groping for the drop-off with his booted feet as the slope abruptly fell away beneath him. Looking back over his shoulder he realised that the Venicones were within a dozen paces of them, and drawing back their spears to throw in the single torch’s uncertain light.

‘Jump!’

Allowing his feet to slip out from beneath him he slid the first few feet of the descent, aware that he was perilously close to the point where the slope went abruptly from steep to precipitous, hearing rather than seeing the spears that arced over their heads and were lost in the darkness. With a frustrated roar one of the tribesmen, whether braver or simply more foolhardy than the men to either side, leapt over the drop-off and raced down the steep slope beside Marcus, reaching out with a big hand to snatch at the eagle’s staff as the fleeing Roman fought for balance. Digging in his booted heels to arrest his downward rush, Marcus lowered the eagle and swept it at the warrior’s ankles, knocking his feet out from under him. With a wail of realisation that he was helpless to resist his own downward momentum the Venicone slid for a dozen feet, slipping ahead of the Roman until he encountered a bump in the slope’s surface that threw him unceremoniously out into thin air, screaming and kicking his legs as he fell out of sight onto the steep slope’s waiting boulders.

A spear flashed past Marcus, and he looked back up the slope’s almost vertical rise to find a group of warriors silhouetted above them, baying their frustration at having missed the chance to recapture the eagle. An arrow whipped between the Roman and Drest with a whirr, and another glanced off the metal eagle with a clang as the two men’s eyes met. Marcus raised his voice to bellow down the slope at the men below.

‘Shields up!’

He raised the heavy wooden shield which he had grabbed at the slope’s edge and cautiously started his descent again, holding it over his head and praying to Mithras for his divine protection. With a numbing blow to his raised arm he felt something hit the shield, and glanced up to find the point of an arrowhead poking through the solid wood. As he looked over at Drest a rock smashed into the Thracian’s raised shield, hammering it down onto the other man’s head and very nearly knocking him off his feet.

‘Keep moving!’

Above them Marcus could hear horns blowing distantly off to their right.

‘Hunters!’

He nodded grimly at Arabus’s pronouncement, focusing on keeping his footing on the slope, every step down requiring him to leave one foot planted while the other reached down two or three feet in search of safety. Another arrow clipped the side of his shield and flew off into the darkness below, and then there was silence other than the distant shouts and horn calls of the hunters working their way down the shallow hillside away to the west. Looking up again, wondering at the cessation in their harassment from above, Marcus realised that a handful of the more foolhardy warriors had started down the slope, and were coming down the precipitous hillside above them as fast as they dared, their bodies outlined against the stars above. Looking down again, he saw that against the hill’s slope the raiding party would now be invisible, lost in the dark mass of the ground below them.

‘Drest, pass me one end of that rope!’

At his whispered command the Thracian carefully made his way across the slope towards his dimly seen outline, handing him the tarred butt-end of the coil of line that was over his shoulder.

‘Get as far to your right as you can.
When I tug on the rope once, go to ground and pull it taut! When I tug it again, run up the slope as hard as you can!’

He saw the other man bare his teeth in a slash of white and then Drest was gone, crabbing away across the slope as fast as he could. Their pursuers were closer now, and Marcus could hear them calling softly to each other as they skipped nimbly down the steep hillside. He tugged on his end of the rope, then pulled hard to take up the slack and raise the cord a foot or so off the ground. The warrior closest to him caught sight of the Roman in the corner of his eye just as he reached the trap, turning to point with his mouth opening to shout a warning as he tripped and cartwheeled away down the hill, the breath bursting from his body in a loud grunt as if he’d been punched in the gut. Marcus tugged frantically at the rope again and ran back up the slope, his legs pumping as he dragged the rope upwards, praying that Drest was doing the same. Another warrior tripped and was gone without ever seeing the impending threat, and then the rope snagged against something more solid. Making one last titanic effort, Marcus turned his back to the hill and forced himself up another few paces with his thighs aflame from the effort, wrenching the rope upwards to be rewarded by a cacophony of screams as the knot of men who had stopped to listen, alerted by the shout of their comrades as they fell, were pitched into the air to tumble away down the slope. He listened for any other presence on the hill, but could hear nothing other than the wind whispering across the slope. Even the cries of the hunters were now inaudible, although whether that was a good thing or not was beyond his understanding.