Arts of Dark and Light: Book 01 - A Throne of Bones (6 page)

Marcus heard Julianus muttering curses again, only this time the decurion’s ire was directed at the goblins rather than any of the legion’s various functionaries. He looked at Julianus and was puzzled—until he noticed the black shaft that transfixed the muscular underside of the man’s left arm.

It was pure bad luck; the arrow had narrowly missed the brass greaves that protected his forearms and had punctured one of the leather straps that held the armor in place. But seemingly oblivious to the pain, Julianus was pointing to an injured goblin who was slowly crawling back toward its fellows.

“Can you hit that, Corander?” Julianus demanded of the tall Baleran who led the slingers.

“Can you hit the ground when you shit, sir?” the slinger snorted, withdrawing a stone from his pouch. He twirled it in his fingers. Its shape was oblong, and it had been ground to a snub point on either end. “Ten crowns says I will.”

“All right, but you can’t just hit the damn thing, you got to kill it. Ten says you don’t.”

“Done.” The slinger whirled the long leather once, twice, three, four times over his head, then released the stone.

A moment later, a small red flower bloomed from the back of the crawling goblin’s skull, and it slumped to the ground, unmoving. A roar went up from the watching cavalrymen, both a salute to the Baleran’s deadly skill and a heartfelt expression of relief. They might have to stand here all afternoon sweating under the increasingly hot rays of the sun, but at least they would not have to endure goblin arrows, as well.

“Double or nothing for the big one on the black wolf,” Julianus said.

“I’ll leave him for you, decurion,” the Baleran replied, smiling. “That pelt would look well on your shoulders. But I’ll want my ten crowns later, so try not to get yourself killed today.”

“Lucky bastard,” the decurion growled at the slinger’s back. But then his lips curled slightly, and the men around him cheered raucously.

Marcus suddenly suspected that Julianus had made the bet in order to distract them from his wound. Although Legio XVII was well-salted with veteran officers like Julianus and his fellow decurions, it was still a new and untested legion, and most of the knights in the Second were as green as Marcus was.

“Decurion, your arm.” Lucius, the reguntur, reached over and grabbed Julianus’s wrist. Blood was flowing down to the older man’s elbow in three narrow rivulets and dripping down to stain the grass near his feet. “You had better get that removed and cleaned. God knows what sort of swamp shit was smeared on the arrowhead.”

Julianus glared at both Lucius and Marcus, then looked back at the goblin cavalry’s lines. Despite the infantry battle raging to the south, the wolfriders still showed no signs of budging. Reluctantly, he shrugged. “Well, it seems they’ve got no belly to come at us today. Don’t either of you think of being a hero and going after them. You heard the legate’s orders: We hold the flank and hold the hill. You do not attack unless they actually start riding up the hill. All of them, not just one or two mad buggers. Are you clear on that, Tribune Valerius?”

“Absolutely clear, Decurion.” One of the first things that had been drilled into him since the day he’d pledged the legion was that there were only three penalties for disobeying battle orders: flogging, degradation, and death. Officers had a little more leeway, by necessity, but only insofar as the situation demanded it.

“Do you understand, Reguntur Dardanus?”

“Understood, Decurion! The Second holds its ground unless attacked in force, Decurion!”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can find Sedarius or one of his assistants. Belike you’ll all have naught to do but pick your arses anyhow.”

Marcus fervently hoped so, but he thumped his chest and nodded again as the decurion mounted his horse and rode off in search of someone who could safely remove the arrow for him. He glanced at the goblin lines. Were the drums louder? Were they beginning to move forward? Not now, of all times, surely! A trickle of sweat ran down from his hair into his eyes.

“Too tedious for old Julianus, sir?” asked the rider on his right, a young knight by the name of Servius Commius.

“I am given to understand our good decurion finds moving his own bowels to be more exciting than watching those wolves squatting and shitting all day,” Marcus told him. “But I don’t imagine it should take more than an hour or three for the novelty to wear off.”

Commius, Dardanus, and the other men around him laughed harder than his feeble joke merited, but at least they didn’t seem to notice that he was very nearly nervous enough about the decurion’s absence to imitate the wolves himself. Still keeping half an eye out for the return of the goblin archers, he turned with the others to watch the battle raging to the south.

The goblins were pressing hard against the principes of the three cohorts holding the center but making absolutely no headway. Their stone-tipped clubs and wooden spears shattered against the steel of the Amorran armor, and their own leather armor offered little protection against the swords that flickered out like silver snakes’ tongues from between the imposing wall of shields.

Marcus saw two goblins hurl a third warrior over the first line of troops, its arms and legs flailing wildly, but a quick-thinking hastatus brought the aerial assault to an end by intercepting the goblin with the sharp end of his spiculum. A roar went up from the hastati and the triari alike as the legionnaire triumphantly raised and lowered the impaled goblin as if it were a gruesome standard.

Goblins died by the dozen, but the drums continued to boom without ceasing, and no sooner had one rabid green-skinned warrior fallen than another leaped to take his place.

The fourth hour was barely half gone when a horn sounded and the hastati let out a roar even louder than before. The horn was echoed by horns throughout the centuries, and almost as one, each of the sixty mules and scorpios were released, targeted at a wide area that, from Marcus’s perspective, looked perilously close to the Amorran lines. The goblin assault buckled in disarray as the massive boulders bounced and crushed as many as ten goblins each, while one well-aimed bolt slashed a visible line that ran nearly to the rear of the massed goblins.

As the enemy reeled from the massed artillery assault, a third horn blew, and the tired principes in the five lead cohorts smoothly exchanged places with the fresh hastati. The energy of the replacements appeared to sap the spirits of the green-skinned warriors, and for the first time, the goblin line fell away from the wall of shields against which it had been pressing for nearly an hour.

The rapid pounding of hooves announced the return of Gaius Valerius Fortex, who cut a dashing figure with his long blue commander’s cloak flowing behind him. He was wearing his helm now, a silvered construction with a blue horsehair plume and a beaked mask that was meant to represent the Valerian crow. He also held a cavalry lance about half the width of a pigsticker, and his shield was slung on Incitatus’s side.

“They’re on the verge of breaking,” Fortex announced breathlessly. “If we can only scatter these gutless wolves before us, we can hit their main body on the left flank and send them all running. Can’t you feel it! This is the moment of truth!”

As Fortex pointed at the wolfriders below, the warrior on the big black wolf rode out from the lines. Unlike most of the infantry, he bore a curved sabre, and his armor looked as if it was made of iron or perhaps even painted steel. He wore a human skull in the place of a helm. As the knights looked on from above, he pointed his sword directly at Fortex and shouted something unintelligible. Jerking back on the reins, the goblin made the giant wolf rear back and emit a bone-chilling howl before it fell back to all fours.

“He’s challenging me,” Fortex said, incredulous. “Single combat. Can you believe that?”

“Don’t do it, Gaius,” Marcus urged, forgetting that he was not speaking to his cousin, but his commanding officer. Even behind the masked helm, he recognized the unmistakable anger flashing in his cousin’s eyes; Gaius Valerius had always been hot-tempered and regarded a dare as a personal insult to his courage and his honor.

Even Dardanus saw it. “Sir, our orders are to hold the hill until they attack! No single combat, they said.”

“Damn our orders! They’re going to break. I know it. This is the moment!”

“Gaius, you can’t!”

“Shut up, Marcus. What the hell do you know about war? It’s your first bloody battle. This is the right time. I can feel it. We have to strike now.” His cousin looked around. “Where’s Julianus?”

“He took an arrow in the arm, had to get it bandaged. But Gaius—”

“How long…no, there’s no time. We can rout them right here if we hit them hard enough. Marcus, you’re the tribune—you have the command in my absence. Lucius Dardanus, you second him. If he kills me, you simply hold the hill as before. But if I kill him and they look like running, then you sound the charge. Everything clear? That’s an order!”

“But Gaius!”

“I said that’s an order, Tribune!” his cousin roared.

“Sir,” Marcus and the reguntur answered in instant unison, thumping their blackened steel breastplates. He and Fortex might both be tribunes, but his cousin outranked him, and as his superior officer, his orders could not be ignored.

“Saturnius said—”

“I know what Saturnius said! And I know it’s your first bloody battle too! Now shut up. The Knights are yours.”

Marcus watched in despair as Fortex reared his horse violently and raised his lance in acceptance of the challenge, provoking an enthusiastic cheer from the nearby knights. Almighty God, You watch over children and fools, so please save my idiot cousin from himself. Marcus saw the goblin below raise his sword in a salute, then urge his wolf forward to a position about thirty paces from the bottom of the hill.

Fortex reached back and unslung his shield from his saddle, slipped it on his arm, then raised his lance one more time. His gesture was greeted by even louder cheers, as the word had spread and the entire Second Knights now appeared to be aware of the imminent duel between the two mounted commanders.

“Fortex, Fortex, Fortex!” The knights began to chant as Fortex kicked the big black warhorse forward and plunged down the hill toward the waiting wolfrider. The chant rose to a wordless roar as the horse and rider closed with the mounted goblin.

The wolf crouched and sprang to the side at the last possible moment. There were cries of disappointment as the Amorran’s lance barely missed the wolfrider’s armored shoulder.

Being quicker and lower to the ground, the wolf was the first to recover and attack, springing toward the horse’s hind legs and snapping at them in an attempt to hamstring them. But before its flashing jaws met tender horseflesh, Fortex twisted his upper body, lifted the heavy lance in his right arm, and somehow managed to hurl it right into the wolf’s left shoulder.

The giant wolf howled as the lance penetrated its body and pinned it to the ground. It flipped up into what looked like an awkward, one-legged headstand, throwing its rider. Then the lance snapped, and the wolf collapsed, convulsing, onto its back. The goblin somersaulted through the air, past the horse’s rump, and slammed hard into the ground.

There was a triumphant shout from the Amorran lines, and the chant began anew.

“Fortex, Fortex! Amorr, Amorr!” Marcus couldn’t help joining in. The men had even drawn their swords and were beating them on their shields in time with the chant. On Marcus’s left stood a draconarius pumping his signal horn aloft in victory.

In response to the cheer, Fortex unsheathed his sword and caused Incitatus to rear again. His stunned foe had pushed itself to its feet unsteadily, but both its sword and shield were lying on the ground well out of its reach.

Fortex urged his horse forward in a gallop, drew back his arm, and struck the head off the helpless goblin commander in a single powerful stroke. The skull helmet flew off with the force of the blow, and for a moment it looked as if his cousin had slain a two-headed monster.

A terrified wail arose from the watching goblins that drowned out the victorious shouts of the Amorrans, and it grew even louder when Fortex leaned over to spear the severed head on the end of his longsword and raised it over his head like a pagan hero of old.

He may have shouted something, but if he did, no one heard it, as the deafening roar from the Second Knights that answered his gesture drowned out the wailing wolfriders as well as the sounds of the battle raging to the south. Marcus joined the knights around him in raising his lance and returning what he thought was a salute.

Caught up in the excitement of the victory, the draconarius standing beside Marcus half-sounded the horn he was already holding to his lips. It came out more like an aborted fart than a proper signal, but it was enough to cause about twelve or thirteen knights—already mounted and stirred to the edge of violence—to urge their horses forward and begin making their way down the steep incline.

“They’re going forward!” cried Dardanus. “What do we do? Clericus, what do we do?”

“Sound it,” Marcus shouted at the standard bearer, who was frozen in fear, shocked by what he had inadvertently done. “Sound it again! We can’t call them back—just sound the advance!” He leaped into the saddle. “What’s done is done! Gaius killed the brute, so let’s pray they look like running.” He raised his fist.
Fortex!
”

“
Fortex!
” Most of the Second’s knights were already mounted now, and they echoed his cry, their lances stabbing at the sky.

“Amorr!”

“
Amorr!
”

The draconarius sounded the horn, properly this time. Its deep booming resonated powerfully over the tumultous clangor of the battle and was echoed by the roars of the bloodthirsty Amorran cavalry.

Marcus rose in his stirrups, raised his lance, and pointed it toward the foe below. The terror was gone, and in its place was only fury and the desire to drench the field in oceans of goblin blood.

“Advance!”