Clash of Eagles (5 page)

As his cohorts tromped downhill, eagerly awaiting the onslaught and whistling like longshoremen, Marcellinus felt that surge of energy he loved, the spark that ran like lightning through well-trained men on the verge of combat. Today, at least, his Legion was behind him to the last man.

Sure enough, where the way was narrow and the crags around them tall, the Iroqua attacked.

Predictable. And yet not.

Suddenly the air was full of darting shapes that whirled above them as if the laws of nature and common sense had ceased to apply.

Briefly, Marcellinus feared he had lost his mind. A swarm of giant moths seemed to assault him, and for several dangerous seconds he couldn’t even bring them into focus. Then the shapes resolved, and he realized they were farther away than he’d thought.

The moths were actually men harnessed to rigid triangular wings.

Each pilot was spread-eagled beneath his wing, lying prone, steering left and right by tugging at a stiff cord that passed under his chest and extended from wingtip to wingtip. Yet control of these crude aerial vehicles required only part of their energy; each also held a bow and could reach across himself to pull arrows from a streamlined quiver strapped to his thigh to rain down death on Marcellinus’s troops. Each aviator wore a mask bearing the powerful hooked beak of a falcon.

His thoughts raced. Men in flight! Had this been a circus display, he might have laughed for joy. But these wings were not for sport; their intent was deadly serious. Marcellinus had been caught flat-footed. Behind the beat of the battle, he mentally lunged to catch up.

He was not the only one. Legionaries shouted, turning around and around, flinching from this strange aerial threat but finding nowhere to retreat to. Centurions barked, fighting to regain control. Close to Marcellinus a soldier lifted his shield over his head in defense, knocking the helmet off the man next to him. Soldiers slipped and fell.

The archers of his First Cohort, the cream of his military crop, capable of recognizing an enemy no matter what direction it came from, laconically pumped arrows into the air. But they were below the thrust of the attack and so were forced to fire back over the mass of the Legion. If they weren’t careful, there was a real risk that their arrows would fall among their own fellows.

As the Iroqua swooped over the densely packed line of the Legion, their deadly projectiles rarely failed to find a mark. These arrows needed only to wound, poison-tipped for sure; legionary after legionary toppled to the ground like a cut-string puppet moments after suffering no more
than the shallowest nick. Fortunately, most of the arrows plinked off armor.

The trumpeters looked to Marcellinus for commands. A pair of flying Iroqua buzzed them, an arrow thwacked into the ground by his side, and Marcellinus found his tongue. Over the pandemonium he shouted, “First, Second, Third: split line! Fire outward! All other cohorts, orbis!”

The signalmen nodded, and the trumpets brayed.

As always, the 33rd Legion spread over several miles. The Iroqua attack was concentrated on his first three cohorts, bottling up the men behind. Expecting a ground assault from both sides, Marcellinus had planned a split line anyway, and it was also the best formation to resist an attack from the air. The cohorts in the rear were overextended, and for them the hollow-square orbis formation would form the best defense even if hordes of barbarians flooded down the ravine behind them, given the advantages of discipline and steel armor.

More Iroqua swooped and soared; more legionaries fell. Up the hill the cohorts of Tullius and Aelfric were breaking into sections and forming ragged squares. Beyond them, in the distance, the slaves were crawling under the supply wagons. From somewhere came the unmistakable scream of a horse.

On either side of Marcellinus, the First and Second fell into close-order parallel lines, facing out to the left and right. Behind the First, the honor guard clustered around the Aquila.

From the sky came stones as well as arrows. Some of the flying warriors were armed with slings rather than bows. More arrows came from Iroqua archers standing on the crags above, shooting from much greater range.

One of his signiferi took an arrow in the neck and went down, screaming. Carrying no shields, the standard-bearers made easy targets from above. Next to Marcellinus an adjutant received an arrow to the arm; calmly, the man knelt and used his pugio to slice into his skin to yank out the arrowhead and then sucked the poison from his wound.

Then the Third Cohort broke in panic. Legionaries milled and shouted, unable to evade the soaring enemies without trampling their
comrades. Such a loss of discipline was unacceptable. Where was Corbulo? Marcellinus recovered himself, left the First under the control of his senior centurion, Pollius Scapax, and ran uphill into the ranks of the Third.

Marcellinus thought Corbulo was down and wounded until he reached his tribune’s side. Instead, Corbulo was watching the wings whirl over his head with something like terror, his hand thrown up as if to ward off a curse.

Marcellinus applied his foot to Corbulo’s ribs. “Up, man! Must your men see you trembling and afraid?”

“What?” Corbulo’s eyes searched for him as if the tribune were drunk or in darkness.

“Men in kites! You’re not so daunted by that?”

“Kites?” said Corbulo in a daze.

“Aye, kites,” the Praetor said. “And aboard them, just men.”

“Men!” said Corbulo. “Of course, I see it now,” and rose to his feet. Rushing into a group of his archers, he marshaled them to shoot long at the Iroqua who stood on the crag tops waiting to launch. A fusillade of arrows knocked a good half dozen of the attackers off their perches, and several more leaped off the crags, consigning themselves to the air. At least one crashed to earth immediately, a victim of the treacherous winds swirling up the valley.

Marcellinus leaned back to study the flying braves. It was the Praetor’s job to think strategically, but he was hard-pressed to devise a strategy against an enemy that soared out of reach.

Now, up the hill, he saw smoke. A flaming arrow had embedded itself in the canvas of one of the supply train carts and was setting a merry blaze. Critical provisions were at risk.

Marcellinus grabbed a pilum from a fallen soldier and ran to launch it upward at the nearest Iroqua. The javelin drifted lazily behind the wing and dropped back to earth; Marcellinus had badly underestimated the flying brave’s height and speed.

“Lead with your bows!” he shouted. “Fire ahead of them!
Well
ahead!”

Across the Legion the wave of terror had passed. The cohorts were
getting back under control, shields arrayed in defense and bows at the ready. The men had found themselves an enemy they could fight. It became a game now, though a deadly one; the more practiced Iroqua slew three Romans for every wing the legionaries sent tumbling into the rocks.

Marcellinus took a bow from a man of the Third who had fallen to his knees, cradling his arm. Nocking an arrow, he swung it upward and let fly. And then he did it again. His second arrow pierced an Iroqua’s stomach, and he savored the man’s scream as he plummeted into the ground.

The bow was not Marcellinus’s favored weapon. Let no man say the Praetor was not flexible in a pinch.

When the final tally came in, the Legion had lost two hundred fifty men in the skirmish. In return the Romans had shot down several dozen of the wings. Perhaps a couple of dozen more of the Iroqua had fallen out of the sky from overzealousness, or had misjudged the canyon walls, forging their own disasters.

Marcellinus loathed the loss of even a single legionary out here beyond the edge of the world, where they could not be replaced. Yet the deaths of their comrades brought such fire and fury to his men that considered as a whole, his Legion might well be the stronger for it.

“Cowards and skulkers, shooting their poison arrows from on high! We can hardly clamber into the air and meet them blade to blade!”

Side by side they rode at the head of the Legion, Praetor Gaius Publius Marcellinus and First Tribune Lucius Domitius Corbulo, as they had in happier times out east.

“Aye,” said Marcellinus tactfully. Corbulo was obviously not taking his momentary lapse of reason on the battlefield well.

Corbulo skewered him with a glance, and Marcellinus added, “As cowardly as picking off our legionaries when they step out of their marching line or go to fetch firewood.”

“Worse. What kind of man hides in the air?”

“The flying itself is not without risk,” Marcellinus pointed out.
“Merely learning the skill must present its hazards. Plenty of opportunities to tumble out of the sky onto your head.”

“The basic trick looked simple enough,” Corbulo grumbled. “Those men were not warriors.”

Marcellinus doubted the simplicity of it. He had ordered his adjutants to ensure that one of the crashed wings was packed into his cart for later study. The wing appeared to be constructed of deerskin scraped thin as parchment and stretched over pine and cedar spars and adorned with feathers. Certainly Marcellinus would never jump off a cliff under such a flimsy frame and knew of no other sane Roman who would. And once the Romans had organized and begun to get their enemies’ range, the Iroqua had retreated by flying back up to land on the crags once more, also hardly an easy task.

The skills of these aerial warriors must have taken a lifetime’s learning. More ominously, the fliers must be supported by their community while honing their talents. On the shores of the Mare Chesapica it had been every Hesperian’s chore to trap his own fish. Here, though, they were no longer scrabbling farmers and part-time warriors, but specialists. It implied civilization and a level of organization previously unthinkable for barbarian tribes such as these.

“But there’ll be no next time,” said Corbulo, shaking Marcellinus out of his reverie. “It’s a trick that only works once. You know how the wind rises on meeting a steep slope? Their kites ride on that. But the mountains are behind us now, and I see no terrain ahead where they’d have that advantage.”

Marcellinus glanced sidelong at his First Tribune. “No more element of surprise.”

“No more surprises,” Corbulo agreed.

And yet a small part of Marcellinus regretted that he would never see such a thing again. If the aerial Iroqua had not been deadly enemies, he could have watched them all day. Idly, he imagined himself jumping off the Palatine Hill and circling over the glitter and marble of the Roman Forum before alighting in front of the new Curia building where the Senate met. Now
that
would be a triumph!

He wished he’d opened his eyes even wider to take it all in.

Domitius Corbulo checked back over his shoulder. “And speaking of savages … a word in your ear about Aelfric.”

“Aelfric?” Marcellinus said, startled.

“He presumes too much. And you allow too much.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. Have a care, Marcellinus. Your friends should be patrician Romans, not Norse, Britons, or any other bloody outlanders. You’ll be chumming it up with Fuscus next.”

“Last I heard, Britannia was still solidly part of the Imperium.”

Corbulo gave a laugh so short that it was almost a cough. “Then you’ve never been there. Did you know I was stationed up in Caledonia, at the Wall of Antoninus? For three years.”

“That’s a long time,” Marcellinus said.

“Dismal bloody weather and a complete mess politically. You wouldn’t believe so many client kings and bizarre religions would fit onto such a small pair of islands. I could write you a list of the odd things they believe. It’s one of the few regions left in the Imperium where they still have genuine shamans, you know. The Hibernians are the worst: mystics and moaners. They’d wail as soon as talk.”

“Somehow Aelfric never struck me as the wailing type,” Marcellinus said.

Corbulo would not be distracted from his theme. “Britons are all natural plotters and counterplotters; it’s in their blood. And they mask it with congeniality. They’ll worm their way inside your thoughts, get you talking, though they’re quiet ones themselves. Before you know it, you’ve told ’em secrets they can use against you.”

That brought Marcellinus up short. He had certainly discussed many things with Aelfric that it would never have occurred to him to tell Corbulo. About his long-lost wife and daughter, his doubts that they’d find gold, and probably a dozen other topics that he probably shouldn’t have confided to a tribune. All because he felt comfortable with the man. What did he really know about Aelfric’s motivations?

“I see I’m not wrong,” Corbulo said. “And what do you know of him
in return? Do you even know where he was born? I do. Eboracum. He’s a Brigante.”

The Brigantes were a Celtic gens with an ancient heritage in the north of Britannia, one of the last tribes to fall to Roma during the conquest. But that was a thousand years ago.

Marcellinus frowned. “He’s really a Celt? Isn’t Aelfric a Saxon name?”

“Celt, Saxon, they’re all mixed up together now. But either way, Aelfric is too familiar by far. Ponder on it; that’s all I ask.”

“I’ll take care,” said Marcellinus. He paused. “Thank you.”

Corbulo smiled.

Imperators come and go. In Marcellinus’s time he’d seen six and served four, and he would not have donned the Imperial purple himself for a million sesterces. He would sooner have lived as a beggar in a shack than be Imperator of Roma, and everyone knew it, so he had survived many a bloody Imperial transition to become one of the most senior legates in the army. His problem with Hadrianus III was the Imperator’s ambition, not his own.

Gaius Publius Marcellinus was that rare thing, a Roman who was actually born in Urbs Roma. His family had been military for four generations, and his gens was not well to do. His father had retired from the army a senior centurion and legionary camp prefect with the characteristic streak of the martinet in him, a man who wanted his boy to make his own way in life. Thus, despite his obvious pedigree, Marcellinus had entered the military with no letters of recommendation and had gone through boot camp with the conscripted men rather than beginning his career with a commission. It had taken him four years of hard work as an optio and then five further years as a centurion in a dangerous campaign against the Ayyubid Sultanate before he was promoted to tribune by acclamation.