The Eagle's Vengeance (38 page)

‘Tenth Century, on your feet!’

The pioneers got up from where they were resting after their exertions, a few of them copying their new centurion’s manner of drying his hands. Dubnus looked about him, nodding slowly at what he saw.

‘That’s more like it! Now you look like men who are ready to take their revenge on the bastard who ordered the ambush that led to Titus’s death! Who’s ready to come with me and kill their king?!’

One of the larger men in the century stepped forward, looking down at his centurion and then across the circle at the heaving press of men that stood between them and the horsemen at the rear of the barbarians.

‘I am! But how are we going to get at him, with that lot in the way?’

Dubnus grinned at him, and the pioneer’s eyes narrowed at the sudden glint of insanity in his new officer’s eyes.

‘That’s easy enough, if you’ve got the balls for it!’ He raised his voice to a parade-ground bellow, loud enough for every man inside the circle of trees to hear him. ‘Tenth Century, if you want revenge for Titus, follow me! If any of you isn’t man enough then stay here, and regret missing the chance for the rest of your miserable, snivelling lives!
For Titus!
’

He sprang across the clearing towards the barbarians, and for an instant his men stared after him with sheer amazement before the man he had challenged raised his voice in an equally berserk roar, running after his officer with his axe raised over his head.

‘For Titus! Follow the Prince!’

Suddenly the entire century was in furious motion, the soldiers pumping their legs with all their might as they strove to catch up with their centurion, shouts of
‘Titus!’
and
‘The Prince!’
rending the air. In his place behind the Fifth Century Marcus saw the pioneers flooding towards him with his friend at their head, but as he opened his mouth to welcome them to the fight the big man winked at him and leapt up onto the tree to his right, running up the trunk’s inclined surface as quickly as he could. His men followed, more of them climbing onto the tree to the Fifth’s left, and the young centurion’s faced creased with amazement as he realised exactly where it was that Dubnus was leading his men. Julius had joined him and Scaurus at the rear of the embattled century, and met his tribune’s amazed glance with a shrug.

‘Surely he isn’t going to …?’

The first spear drew his sword, spitting on the churned ground.

‘He bloody well is! It’ll either end in victory or kill us all, but he’s just shown us our one chance to mount a counter-attack! So, shall we join him?’

Calgus didn’t realise what was happening until the trees to either side of the frantic pushing match for the gap began to shake, their branches quivering beneath the weight of the heavy axe men as they stormed up the trunks’ gentle incline. With a wild yell the first of them, an officer to judge from the crest across his helmet, threw himself from the very end of his tree, his arms and legs flung back as he flew through the air towards the royal party. For an instant the Selgovae’s world was reduced to the murderous expression on the leaping man’s face, his eyes pinned wide and his teeth bared in a snarl of bestial ferocity. He was still marvelling at the Tungrian’s apparent insanity when the big man dropped to the ground a dozen paces from them, rolled once and spun to his left, laying about himself with the big axe in his right hand and smashing tribesmen from his path with the shield’s iron boss, another man leaping from the tree behind him and immediately springing to his officer’s side. Within a few heartbeats there were ten of the axe-wielding monsters in the very heart of the war band with more of them jumping into the fight with every second, big men, beyond big, hulking giants who seemed set on painting themselves red with Venicone blood and were going about it at a rage-fuelled pace, hacking their way out from their landing places in all directions in a flurry of heavy axe blades that felled one or two men with every blow.

The closest of the king’s bodyguards to the fray fell from his horse, and Calgus realised that the animal had been unceremoniously decapitated, the warrior dying in a froth of blood from a huge chest wound while he was still struggling to free himself from beneath the beast’s dead weight. The man who had killed him stood for a moment with his legs astride the still-warm corpse, raising the axe’s red blade to the sky and howling his triumph as blood rained down on his face and armour. Leaning forward, Calgus cut the mare’s reins free of Brem’s saddle, quailing as the king turned and raised his sword with an incoherent cry of rage as he realised that the Selgovae meant to flee. Before the blow could land the wounded king lurched back in his saddle with an arrow protruding from his chest, and Calgus realised that there were archers on the trees to either side of the war band, perhaps thirty of them pouring arrows into the packed mass of warriors as fast as they could. He ducked as low as possible, watching as the king toppled stiffly over his horse’s side and fell beneath the hoofs of the remaining animals. Unable to reach the dangling remnant of the mare’s reins he grabbed its right ear and pulled the graceful head round, trying to turn the beast away from the fight, but the horse was still wedged between the dead king’s mount and the men jostling around them.

The axe men were fighting in a more disciplined manner now, and their initial mad charge into the battle’s heart had given way to a tight formation organised around the lead of their centurion. Forming a two-sided line they were hewing at both the tribesmen trapped between them and the circle’s defenders and those warriors attempting to rescue their comrades, chanting three words over and over as they hacked their way into the battered tribesmen. It took a moment for him to realise exactly what it was that they were shouting, the chant gradually rising in pitch and volume as the other soldiers took it up, bellowing the words as they stormed into the fight.

‘Titus! The Prince! Titus! The Prince!’

The Selgovae’s blood ran cold at the realisation of what it was that he was hearing, and he redoubled his efforts to back his horse away from the crush of men as the Tungrians, further reinforced by a continual stream of men along the two fallen trees, tightened their stranglehold on the trapped and increasingly helpless Venicones, while the axe-wielding giants fought to keep the rush of men seeking to rescue their brothers at bay. With a last frantic effort he persuaded the mare to back away from the embattled king’s guard, as they fought for the body of their dead ruler, praying harder than he had ever prayed for them to ignore him as he turned the beast away from the fight and kicked its flanks to spur it up the ridge, and to the safety of the open forest. Looking back he saw a Roman officer with two swords fight his way out of the fray and stare after him, and he grinned as he recognised the dead legatus’s son, the man who had so cruelly cut his ankle tendons and left him for dead on the occasion of their last meeting. Turning in his saddle he shouted back at the Roman, his voice shaking with the closeness of his escape.

‘Not this time, Centurion! This time I—’

The mare started at the blare of a horn, and Calgus whipped his head round to look up the slope’s incline at the men who were staring impassively back down at him, their line stretching across his field of vision in both directions. One of them pointed with his sword, shouting a command at the line of armoured soldiers that left no room for any doubt in Calgus’s mind.

‘Sixth Legion,
advance
!’

He dragged the mare’s head around and kicked its flanks, only to find himself abruptly and shockingly face down on the forest floor, too stunned by the impact of his fall to do anything but lie helpless while his mount kicked and spasmed in its death throes with a spear buried deep in its neck. The wall of advancing legionaries parted to either side of the dying horse, and the helpless Selgovae watched numbly as the vengeful centurion walked easily up the rise to meet them, clasping hands with the officer who had ordered them forward before staring down at the fallen barbarian leader impassively. His face and hands were covered in lacerations and scrapes, a cut which had barely crusted over decorating the line of his cheek and nose.

‘Prefect Castus. You’ve arrived just in time to help us mop up the remnants, it seems.’

The older man laughed, looking out over the bloody battlefield as the embattled tribesmen were herded into an ever-decreasing pocket of space, swords and spears stabbing into them from all sides.

‘I don’t know how Rutilius Scaurus managed it, but by the gods below it’s nothing less than a miniature Cannae! Only this time it’s not Romans being slaughtered!’

The centurion smiled grimly.

‘Just this once the tribune had little to do with the outcome. This was mostly the work of a centurion called Titus.’

Castus smiled delightedly.

‘That enormous axe-wielding colleague of yours? In that case I’ll buy him a flask of wine and drink his health until we both fall off our chairs!’

The centurion put a hand to the hilt of his sword, his fingers caressing something tied onto the weapon with fine silver wire.

‘That won’t be possible, I’m afraid. He died earlier today, may our Lord for ever watch over him.’

Castus shook his head sadly.

‘A shame. He was a proper fighting man from the look of him, and the likes of him get fewer every year, or so it seems to me. We’ll drink to him in any case, you and I, and all of your Tungrian officers. Here I was thinking that I was ending my career in a blaze of glory to lead the legion to your rescue, and yet all the time you were putting it to the barbarians in fine style! Mind you, it was lucky that these hairy buggers left a trail from Lazy Hill that my woman could have followed, and luckier still that I was the officer entrusted with the order to pull the legions back from the frontier and back to the southern wall.’

Scaurus walked up the slope, grinning insouciantly at the prone and scowling Calgus.

‘Prefect Castus, never has your presence afforded me quite so much pleasure! Pleasure that is in no way lessened by the alarming irregularity of your presence north of the frontier with such a large body of soldiers. I presume you have a good reason for such blatant disregard of your orders?’

The older man grinned, and took his offered arm in a firm clasp.

‘I think we’ll put this small deviation from the withdrawal timetable down to what I believe our betters would term “the exploitation of a local opportunity”. Which is to say that I spotted the opportunity to give the locals one last spanking before we leave them to enjoy their swamps in peace for ever. Presumably I’ve managed to assist you in rescuing my legion’s eagle?’

Scaurus nodded.

‘Battered, abused and only recently washed clean of the blood of our captured soldiers, but yes, your pride is restored.’

The prefect smiled knowingly.

‘Excellent! In which case you’ll be as amused as I was to hear that one of Fulvius Sorex’s centurions has already rescued the Sixth’s eagle from a hiding place among the Brigantes people, barely a day’s march from Yew Grove and unexpectedly close to home. It would appear that the rumours that it was to be found among the Venicones were nothing more than barbarian lies, intended to lure your cohort onto their ground for destruction. Funny how things turn out, isn’t it? Now, shall we crucify this man here and now, or take him somewhere a little more public before nailing him up?’

The Tungrians were in surprisingly good spirits when they marched into Yew Grove a week later, considering that once again they had marched south without diverting to their home on the wall built by the emperor Hadrian. Sanga was still nursing a set of bruised knuckles, incurred during a short and painful session on the subject of promise-keeping for the Fort Habitus stone mason who, it was clear by the absence of the altar to his dead friend when the cohort had arrived at the fort’s gate, badly needed to be taught a lesson. His purse was bulging with the money that he had paid the mason and a substantial amount more in enforced compensation for there being no sign of any memorial to Scarface, and in the dead of night, when his tent mates were all asleep, he had promised his dead friend’s shade that he would erect a bigger and better stone somewhere fitting at the first opportunity.

The cohort had been marched into the fortress to join the Second Tungrian Cohort in the unexpected luxury of an empty stretch of barracks blocks, where they quickly discovered that, much to their disgust, their sister cohort had sat and waited in the German port until only a week before. While the two units reacquainted themselves, drank, bickered, and in a few cases indulged in inconclusive and swiftly punished fist fights over which of them was the better, the harder or simply the luckier of the two, Scaurus made his way to Prefect Castus’s house in the vicus in the company of Julius and Marcus. The prefect, who had ridden south before them to prepare the way for the return of four cohorts to the fortress, opened the door and ushered them through the hall and into the dining room while putting a hand on the first spear’s chest.

‘Not you, First Spear. You, my friend, should turn right, not left.’

Julius looked to his superior, but Scaurus simply smiled enigmatic-ally and extended a hand to indicate the bedroom door. The baffled first spear followed his direction, making his way through the doorway while Marcus and the tribune walked into the dining room as directed. The young centurion had no sooner entered the room than he found himself rocked backwards by the impact of his wife flying into his arms. Opening his mouth to greet her he closed it again when he realised that she was in floods of tears, sobbing incoherently into his chest. Looking about him in puzzlement he found an explanation in Castus’s swift interjection.

‘Your wife was assaulted by Tribune Sorex while you were away. The bastard’s attempt to rape her was frustrated by an old friend …’ He gestured to a man sitting quietly in a corner of the room, and Marcus’s face split in a broad smile as he recognised his former prefect, Legatus Equitius.

‘It was lucky that I came along when I did, and that I’d managed to keep my bodyguard despite my being relieved of command. I sent the evil young bastard on his way before he had the chance to do too much damage, but your woman will undoubtedly need as much love and care as you can provide for a while.’