Legionary (45 page)

They glanced at each other for a heartbeat, faces pale, and then they were up, floundering mercilessly through flower gardens, churning up a multi-coloured glory in their wake. They hurled their spathas back at the advancing soldiers, then sprinted on.

‘Tarquitius! Get up! Get into the maze!’ Pavo rasped. But the senator’s sweating pate simply raised a little to present his piggy eyes which quickly grew in shock. ‘Get up!’ The pair thundered to the hedge, stammered to a halt and then dipped down to scoop the senator up.

Tarquitius squealed, kicking out, his eyes screwed shut. ‘They kidnapped me, they made me come here!’

Pavo acted without thought, bringing his fist crashing into the senator’s cheek. ‘It’s us, you fat fool!’ At once Tarquitius was silent, stunned. The urban detachment was almost upon them and the candidati raced for them too.

‘Pavo, how dare you?’

‘You want to see tomorrow? Move!’ Pavo and Sura hauled him forward and the trio stumbled into the hedgerow maze. The hedges grew taller and taller as they took each turn blindly. Every corner felt like running blind onto a sword point and all the while, the clatter of urban guards seemed to swirl around them as the detachment spilled into the labyrinth. Pavo grunted as Tarquitius slowed, panting, his face a raging scarlet. ‘Come on, we can’t carry you!’ Then he set off again, bursting round another corner. A dead end.

‘Oh bugger!’ Sura spat.

‘We’re dead!’ Pavo added.

Then a foreign voice sneered behind them. ‘Aye, you are now!’

The pair turned to face the sunken-eyed urban guard who beheld them, flicking his spatha nimbly on one hand and clutching his spear on the other.

‘In the gut or through the throat?’ He growled, eyes sparkling. ‘Ah, what do you care?’ With that, the guard’s eyes bulged and he hoisted his spear forward at Sura. Pavo leapt to parry the thrust with his forearm. But the weapon simply lunged weakly between the pair and there was a sinewy rasp.

The urban guard stood stock still, still holding his sword, but his eyes were distant. Then blood erupted from his mouth. The guard’s body toppled forward, revealing the quivering and sweat soaked figure of Tarquitius, still holding the crimson coated dagger in his hand. ‘I…I want immunity over this…’ Tarquitius stammered.

‘There ‘e is!’ Another voice cut through the air. Behind Tarquitius, a trio of guards stood at the far end of the maze corridor, and then bundled forward with a cry.

‘Spare us!’ Tarquitius warbled.

‘This is it,’ Pavo gulped, backing against the dead-end hedgerow.

‘Not yet,’ Sura rasped, ‘This way!’ He yanked Pavo and Tarquitius with him as he pushed back through the hedge. The branches tore at them and they roared, blinded and bleeding until they stumbled out into another green-walled corridor. From the other side of the hedge, swearing broke out along with the thudding of men running into the back of each other.

‘Nice one,’ Pavo gasped, wincing at the stinging array of cuts. Then his eyes widened; more guards haring in on them — this time from both sides. ‘Let’s stick to the quick route!’

One after another, the three leapt into the defiant hedge wall, bursting through one, then another, then another. ‘Are we even going in the right direction?’ Sura moaned as they delved into another razor-like growth. Tumbling out onto the grass at the other side, they spluttered out leaves, and stood up to delve forward once more. But a set of ten sword points hovered at their noses. Ten pristine candidati glowered over them, standing on a set of marble steps leading up into a side entrance of the palace. Buccinas blared across the walls. The game was up.

To their right, Bishop Evagrius and his party burst free of the maze exit, thundering over to them, swords drawn. ‘Strike the intruders down!’ Evagrius roared.

Surrounded by iron, Pavo clenched his eyes tight and his stomach turned over. Suddenly, a voice boomed across the great hall.

‘The candidati take orders from the emperor and the emperor only!’

Emperor Valens was standing in the palace doorway, flanked by ten candidati, his face wrinkled with doubt. ‘What is the meaning of this? Who are these men?’ He whipped his purple toga clear of his feet as he moved down the steps and his face fell. ‘Bishop Evagrius? What business have you on palace grounds? Why do you have an armed escort?’ As he spoke, a twenty of candidati rounded on the urban guards and disarmed them. Then Valens pushed his line of ten candidati apart, his eyes falling on the bedraggled trio of Tarquitius, Pavo and Sura.

‘I remember you — Senator Tarquitius, isn’t it?’ Valens spoke quietly, eyeing the bedraggled, bleeding and sweating Tarquitius.

‘Well, technically…I was, my m…magnificent emperor,’ Tarquitius gushed. ‘I truly do not deserve to be in your presence, and I offer you my most sincere gratitude…’

‘Enough!’ Valens barked. ‘Give me answers, what is going on here?’

Pavo longed to unburden himself with the whole sorry tale, but he remembered Gallus’ words;
you must only speak to the emperor and nobody else
.

‘Assassins, Emperor,’ Evagrius barked.

‘No!’ Pavo and Sura gasped in unison.

‘They murdered many of your gate guards.’ Evagrius continued in an even, matter-of-fact tone.

‘He’s lying!’ Pavo roared.

Tarquitius’ mouth opened and then, with a glance at the bishop, closed again.

Pavo held the emperor’s gaze. For once, his nerves were stilled and his heart steady. ‘Emperor, we request a private audience with you.’

At this Evagrius roared with a rasping laughter, then his face snapped back to a pointed rage. ‘Do not hesitate, Emperor. They mean to end your reign. Slay them!’

A trio of candidati moved their sword points to hover by each of Pavo, Sura and Tarquitius’ jugulars, and then looked to their master for the order.

Valens eyed the kneeling three with an austere distaste. ‘You come to my palace, the heart of the empire, like
this!
’ He muttered, his nose wrinkled as he stared at each of them in turn. ‘You reek of treachery!’

Pavo’s spirit plunged into blackness. It was to end here.

‘Execute them, but imprison the senator,’ then he hesitated, ‘but take them outside, slice off their heads in the Augusteum — a fine lesson to any who would dare follow their example.’ With that, the emperor turned to ascend the steps back into the palace.

Pavo’s ribs cracked as the candidati hauled him up. He caught the resignation in Sura’s eyes. Then he thought of Father — the legionary, the hero. Now his son was to die as a traitor. The XI Claudia was doomed and Gallus and the rest were dead. ‘I’m sorry, Gallus,’ he rasped up to the darkening sky as the candidati butted him forward, blinking back tears. Then he stopped abruptly as the candidati on either side of him suddenly halted to stand bolt upright. He blinked. Valens now stood in front of him, cobalt eyes piercing.

‘Gallus?’ Valens spoke in a murmur, his eyes searching.

Pavo fixed his gaze on the emperor’s eyes.

‘The centurion of the XI Claudia?’

Pavo’s lips trembled. He felt the bishop’s eyes rake his features. ‘No. He’s now acting tribunus. Nerva has been slain.’

Valens’ face tightened, his lips almost white. He looked to the bishop, then to the senator. A moment of stillness passed, before he spoke, his voice ice cool. ‘Senator, bishop…and you two,’ he pointed to Pavo and Sura, ‘come to my strategy room.’

The candidati surrounded them, glowering.

Gallus spat a curdled lump of blood and phlegm into the gore-coated battlement. His lungs rattled as he clasped his hands to his knees and sank back against the wall as thick, black smoke snaked across his face from the smouldering remains of the catapults in the courtyard, below. The Huns had withdrawn with the sun, leaving behind a shattered trickle of legionaries still standing amongst a carpet of dead. Less than two hundred men remained; not nearly enough to man the walls against the next wave of attack. Outside the fort, Horsa led a detachment of legionaries through the field of corpses — four deep in places, warrior and horse limbs entangled like weeds — in the grizzly task of collecting spears and arrows to bolster their own scant supply. Throughout the day the Huns had swamped the battlements twice; somehow, Gallus thought, somehow his men had dug in and managed to repel them. But to what end? The fort had been stripped back to what it was when the XI Claudia had found it — all traps used and all heavy weaponry shattered. The Hun retreat for the night served as little more than a taunt.

‘They should’ve just come and bloody well finished us,’ Zosimus growled, smashing his shield boss into a crippled ballista. The soldier’s face was black with dirt and smoke.

‘Easy, soldier. They’ll not get our blood cheaply tomorrow — they’ll have to die in their thousands to see a drop of it.’ Gallus slapped his flayed and stinging hand on Zosimus’ shoulder.

‘Don’t worry, sir, they’ll be feeling my sword all right,’ Zosimus nodded firmly.

Avitus and Quadratus hobbled over to stand beside them. These men were his limbs in the legion. They had stepped in strongly where Felix had served. It meant that those left alive had the benefit of facing an organised end the following day.

The bobbing torches down on the valley floor, below, still stretched impossibly like an infinite colony of fireflies. They had taken down maybe six thousand of their number, more than ten for every one of the XI Claudia fallen. Commendable but meaningless at the same time. The treacherous I Dacia had taken their share of the damage too, Wulfric barking them forward throughout the day while remaining back out of catapult range. Gallus balled his fists and gritted his teeth; if the man was as bold as he made out back in Durostorum, then he would be on the front line, dying with his men. But no, the I Dacia, while backed with the resources only afforded to a comitatenses legion, lacked the cohesion and spirit of the long-standing XI Claudia. He shook his head — pride was of little value now.

He turned, startled, as the tap-tapping of hammers on wood rang out; the legionaries had finished their rations — salted beef and biscuit — and were now busying themselves around the shattered artillery.

‘What’s this?’ Gallus called out. ‘I ordered you to fall out — we need fresh men for tomorrow.’

One filthy faced, gaunt trooper stepped forward, hammer and nails in his hands. ‘Beg your forgiveness, sir, but we want to work on the fort — there’s plenty of time for rest.’

Avitus leant in to his centurion’s ear. ‘They’ve got a point, sir — nobody will sleep tonight anyway. Let ‘em make tomorrow count?’

Gallus sighed — his body ached and his mind spun — rest could wait a while longer. ‘Go for it, soldier. Good on you, men, save a spot for me!’ He pushed off the battlement, his legs groaning under the strain, blistered soles roaring in protest. ‘Are my optios game for this, too?’

All three nodded with a grin, but Avitus added; ‘I have an idea sir — might buy us some time?’

Gallus, Quadratus and Zosimus all looked to the little optio.

‘We’re fixing the artillery — but we don’t have enough men to work the devices, let alone man the walls — the fort is too big.’

‘You call that an idea?’ Zosimus grunted.

‘Bear with me. If we can fix the catapults, then we can use them to make the fort smaller!’

‘What — knock the walls down? Have you been on the sauce?’ Quadratus spluttered.

‘Aye, why don’t we open the gates as well?’ Zosimus chuckled dryly.

Avitus turned to Gallus, exasperated. ‘Sir, you remember when we were in Dacia. That Gothic cavalry charge was coming right at us…’

‘…But they wouldn’t charge our spear line,’ Gallus’ eyes glinted, ‘because they won’t run onto a blade!’

‘Exactly, sir. And that lot out there, they’ve hoisted cartloads of missiles in here at us,’ Avitus waved a hand across the carpet of bent arrowheads, spears and I Dacia plumbatae, ‘So rather than sitting, waiting on them to swamp the walls tomorrow, how’s about we take the initiative. We can bring the side walls down into a steep pile of rubble and embed every bit of sharp iron we’ve got into it — their mounts won’t come near it. And it’ll take them Mithras knows how long to have what infantry they’ve got left to pick through it — at least longer than it would take for them to walk up to an undefended side wall with a ladder.’

Gallus nodded. ‘And we only have the front wall left to defend. Just like the rocky pass on the way up here.’

Avitus nodded briskly, shooting a frown at the unconvinced figures of Zosimus and Quadratus. ‘We can fashion caltrops out of any spears or arrow heads that are too mangled and sprinkle them on the rubble, just to be sure — it’ll cut them to ribbons.’

Zosimus and Quadratus looked at each other, wrinkling their brows.

‘Avitus is right; it’ll buy us time, albeit a precious sliver of the stuff.’ Gallus patted their shoulders and then nodded to the legionaries who busied themselves around the fort, ‘if nothing else let’s do it for them.’

As the three shuffled down the stairs to the courtyard, Gallus took another look over the wall to the foot of the hillside, grimacing at the storm that would smash them tomorrow. His momentary optimism evaporated.

Pavo felt like a rodent in the ornate and cavernous room, Sura sat to his left, while Tarquitius and Evagrius flanked them and a ring of fifteen stony faced candidati ringed the four, leaving only a gap to the emperor, sitting behind his map table. The tall open shutters allowed a cool night breeze to waft in, but the darkness only reminded him of how long they had been away from the legion — more than two full days, plenty of time for the Huns to have crushed the XI Claudia twice over.

Valens burned his intense gaze onto the map, his hands forming a triangle under his chin. The emperor had remained straight-faced throughout Tarquitius’ report, his arching brows giving him the appearance of a man who never quite believed anything he was told.
Why
, Pavo cursed inside,
why had Tarquitius omitted the bit about the bishop from his story?
The holy man, sitting right here next to him, smiling? Tarquitius had pulled on his tunic sleeve halfway up the marble staircase and hissed in his ear; ‘Your suspicions about Evagrius — not a word, for the greater good!’ He eyed his old tormentor — soaked in perspiration and looking an entirely wrong shade of green.