The Wolf's Gold (17 page)

‘Tungrians, we have marched a thousand miles to stand here and face these barbarians. And you, the men that our tribune has entrusted with the defence of this edge of the valley, you have been selected for the hardest task of all. Our brothers make their stand from the top of a wall too high to climb, or behind a wall of wooden stakes too dense for any horse to penetrate, but we will defeat this enemy in the way in which we have become accustomed. We will stare them in the face close enough to reach out and take their lives with our iron . . .’ Realising that most of the front rank were watching the enemy behind him, he turned to look down the slope, seeing with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that the enemy host forming before them was already far stronger than he had expected, with men still pouring out of the trees to their rear. He faced his men in silence until the soldiers turned their attention back to him. ‘Yes, there are many more of them than there are of us, but we have laboured to prepare this ground before us, and we have the support of three hundred archers. Be sure of this, my brothers, we will win this fight, as we have won so many times before, by standing together and fighting for one another. Ready yourselves to meet this enemy, and know that you are more than a match for whatever they have to throw at you!’

He ducked through the line, pulling a man from the second rank and taking him out of earshot of his fellow soldiers.

‘Give me your spear and shield. Now, run to Tribune Scaurus. Tell him we face three thousand enemy warriors up here and need urgent reinforcement.
Go!
’

The soldier took to his heels, vanishing over the ridge with more than a few of his comrades casting envious glances at the spot where he had disappeared from view.

‘How do you do that? How do you manage to sound so confident when the odds are so clearly against us?’ Marcus turned to find Tribune Sigilis at his shoulder, and paused long enough before answering that the younger man felt compelled to fill the silence. ‘Forgive me for asking, it’s just . . .’

‘I understand, Tribune. You find yourself on the verge of entering a world of which you have no experience. You wonder just how you will react when the killing begins.’ Sigilis nodded, and Marcus shrugged with a mirthless smile. ‘I stood in your boots less than two years ago.’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘An old centurion who came out of retirement to help save me from the empire’s assassins once told me that some leaders of men are born, screaming out their need to command their fellows even as their mothers push them from the womb, but that others among us are less driven, and are made into leaders by either choice or circumstance, forged in battle to reveal whatever strength lies within them. And in that forging, he told me, we learn things that we might rather never have known. We gain scars and lose friends, and by the time we’re hardened enough to cope with what’s waiting for us down that hill we’re not the men we were at the beginning. In facing our fears and forcing them to surrender to the need to survive, we become so hardened as to lose some part of what made us the men we were. He was right, of course, although I couldn’t ever see myself changing at the time.’

‘You’ve lost friends?’

Marcus nodded at the question, staring down the slope at the approaching Sarmatae with unseeing eyes.

‘Yes, but there was one man in particular, the retired centurion I mentioned. His name was Rufius, may Mithras honour him. I very nearly followed him across the river, such was my rage at his death. Battle touches us all in different ways, Tribune, and it finds our weaknesses as surely as it unveils our abilities. My weakness is a tendency to unmanageable fury once I am sufficiently provoked, a clear, cold anger that will sharpen my abilities but destroy all sense of what is either wise or even decent. I have it in me to become a mad man, Tribune, with no purpose other than to spill the blood of my enemies until I am too exhausted to lift my sword. If for any reason I am sufficiently roused to step into the enemy line in what is to come, you should under no circumstances follow me. I did it once, driven mad by the death of my closest friend, and was fortunate enough to escape that act of gross stupidity with my life. I doubt that sort of luck is granted to a man twice in one lifetime.’

The tribune nodded, his face still white at the prospect of the battle.

‘I understand.’

Marcus turned back to face the tribesmen. The Sarmatae force had now fully emerged from the forest, and were forming up in readiness for their attack.

‘We seem to have underestimated their leader’s intentions. He fooled us by sending a smaller party of men up the valley that leads to this hillside than we see before us now, but he must have reinforced it last night once our scouts were all pulled back.’ He exchanged glances with Sigilis. ‘And if he’s chosen to make this his main point of attack, then I doubt that four hundred infantrymen and three centuries of archers are going to hold him off for long, even if we do have Martos and his Votadini straining at their collars to get into the fight. But given that we have little choice in the matter, I suppose we might as well make a decent job of it . . .’ He blew his whistle to get his officers’ attention, raising his vine stick and pointing it at the oncoming mass of tribesmen. ‘Tungrians, prepare to form the shield wall!’

The Tungrian front rank went down on one knee, angling their shields so that they could just barely see over the iron rims as the second rank stepped up close behind their comrades. He nodded to Sigilis, tipping his head to the archers waiting in a line behind the Tungrians, and the younger man shouted a command in a voice tense with the pressure on him.

‘Archers, make ready!’

The Thracians hurried forward into the line’s shadow, each of them pulling an arrow from his quiver and nocking it to his weapon’s string. Marcus watched the oncoming enemy with his breath unconsciously held, calculating the distance between the two lines. At one hundred and fifty paces the Sarmatae stopped, and their archers stepped out in front of the line of shields some five hundred or so strong. They went about stringing arrows to their bows with the deliberate care of men at archery practice rather than preparing to go about the grim task of battlefield murder, seemingly confident that the Romans had no means of replying.

‘Rear rank, shields!’

The rear rankers lifted their shields into place, overlapping them with those of their kneeling comrades to form a wall of wood fully eight feet tall. Peering between two of his men, Marcus watched as the Sarmatae archers drew their arrows back, clearly awaiting the word of command.

‘Here it comes . . .’

He ducked into the cover of the line, pulling Sigilis by the arm to make sure the tribune was sheltered from the coming attack. At a shouted command the enemy bowmen loosed their arrows, and the Tungrians listened in silence as the missiles whistled across the gap between the two lines. With a sound like hail on a wooden roof the storm of arrows broke along the Tungrian line, hundreds of iron and bone arrowheads hammering into the raised shields, some protruding through cracks in the wood while the occasional missile found a gap in the defence, flicking between raised shields and past the men behind them. One of the Thracians staggered out of his place behind the infantrymen with an arrow protruding from his thigh, falling to the ground as the poison painted onto its barbed bone head took the life out of his twitching legs. Marcus raised his voice to bellow along the line at the Thracians.

‘Wait! Let them spend their arrows on our shields!’

Parting two shields to risk a swift glimpse of the enemy, Marcus saw that the Sarmatae warriors were making no attempt to advance, waiting instead while their bowmen peppered the Roman line with arrows. Judging that the enemy archers were starting to slow the rate at which they were loosing their missiles, he raised his voice to bellow a command along the length of the line.

‘Archers . . .’
Along the length of the line the Tungrians eased their shields fractionally sideways, each man allowing the archer standing next to him a thin gap through which to sight his bow on the enemy.
‘Loose!’

The unshielded enemy bowmen were easy meat for the Thracians, and dozens of them fell with the first volley of arrows, some falling to lie motionless while others staggered away from the clumps of arrows they had shoved point first into the ground by their feet. Another volley whipped out from between the Tungrians’ shields, reaping a further harvest from the wavering bowmen, and at a sharp word of command that rang out across the slope they turned and ran, more of them falling even as they fled for the cover of their fellow warriors’ shields.

‘Archers, cease! Rear rank, rest!’

The Thracians stopped shooting, nodding to each other at the ease of their quick initial victory over the tribesmen, while the Tungrian rear-rank soldiers lowered their shields and rubbed at their aching arms, waiting for the Sarmatae leader’s next move. After a moment’s pause the mass of enemy warriors began hammering their spears rhythmically against their shields, working themselves up to attack up the hill’s rippling, boulder-strewn slope.

‘The man in charge down there must still fancy his chances even without his archers . . .’

Marcus turned to look at the tribune, but to his relief found no sign in the younger man’s face that he was in terror of what was to come.

‘And so would I, if I were him, given their numbers. But then what we lack in strength we’ve made up for in the fact that Titus and his pioneers had a day with this ground yesterday. Let’s just hope that our men have it in them to stop running when their centurions tell them to stand and fight.’

He raised his voice to be heard over the Sarmatae warriors’ din, bellowing the command that his men were waiting for.

‘
Tungrians, prepare to retreat! Archers, retreat!
’

The centurions standing behind their soldiers watched in dark amusement as the Thracians obeyed their orders, turning away from the line and heading away up the slope at a fast jog. Spotting the movement the Sarmatae roared in delight, individual warriors stepping out in front of their line to wave their spears at the Romans, screaming threats and curses in crude Latin as they capered in front of their comrades, swinging their swords in extravagant arcs and bellowing their imminent victory at the sky above. The hammering of weapons on shields quickened in pace, and with a piercing shout of command the warband’s leader sent them forward at the Roman line. Before the shout had died away Marcus was roaring out his own orders.

‘Tungrians, retreat!’

The soldiers turned away from the oncoming enemy, running away up the slope at a pace which matched that of the archers moments before, their centurions swiftly outpacing them as they ran full pelt in front of their men. Howling in delight, the tribesmen lost any cohesion they still possessed, the faster men sprinting out of the oncoming mass in their determination to get at the retiring Romans. Fifty paces up the slope from where the retreat had begun the centurions stopped and turned to face their men, pointing their vine sticks at the ground in command, and as the retreating Tungrians reached them the soldiers stopped running and performed a swift about-face, quickly resetting their line and hefting their spears ready for combat. Both ends of the defence were now anchored against the fallen trees felled by the pioneers the previous day, presenting an unbroken defensive face to the oncoming tribesmen.

Undeterred by the apparent rallying of their enemies, the tribesmen came on at the gallop, still screaming their hatred and triumph as the first of them blundered into the mantraps that waited for them beneath thin carpets of turf laid with meticulous care just the day before.The ground collapsed beneath their feet to drop them into knee-deep pits sown with fire-hardened wooden stakes smeared with excrement. Marcus and Sigilis watched grimly as the Sarmatae advance foundered, each fallen warrior tripping two or three of his comrades in their uncontrolled rush. Marcus waited for a moment more as the tribesmen pushed forward, ignoring the pockets of chaos caused by the traps laid out for them, until he judged that enough of them had passed the marker laid out for the purpose.

‘Pull!’

The Votadini waiting at either end of the line dragged hard on their ends of a rope laid across the line’s entire frontage and looped around trees to provide an anchorage, snapping the fist thick line out of the narrow trench in which it had been concealed. Dozens of Sarmatae warriors were sent sprawling by the unexpected obstacle, and the mass of men behind them swiftly descended into chaos as they fought to get around or over their fallen comrades, giving them little chance to rise.

‘Archers! Loose!’

The Thracians had reformed at the head of the slope, ready to use their height advantage to send arrows skimming over the Tungrian’s helmets and plunging into the disordered mass of barbarian warriors. At Marcus’s command they loosed a volley at the warband’s sprawling target, and while the archers poured their missiles onto the milling mass of unordered warriors, the Roman turned his attention back to the men who had managed to struggle through the field of mantraps so carefully laid out for them.

‘Tungrians! Ready spears!’

Several hundred men had made their way through the obstacles, some simply climbing over the bodies of their less fortunate comrades, and were gathering themselves to storm up the slope at the Romans, but their earlier reckless charge had left them tired and Marcus knew that the time had come to take the offensive.

‘Front rank . . . throw!’

The Tungrian line took two quick steps forward to build momentum, then slung their spears with all the power they had, sending their iron-tipped javelins arcing into the mass of enemy warriors. A chorus of screams rent the air as the heavy missiles ripped into the barbarians, killing and wounding enemy warriors and painting their comrades with sprays of their blood.

‘Rear rank . . . throw!’