Wounds of Honour: Empire I Read online

  He slapped a man whose eyes had wandered back to the advancing Britons.

  ‘On me! Your only chance is to stay in the line, and keep parrying and thrusting like you’ve done a thousand times in drills. They will give it up once they know we won’t be a pushover. I will be behind you, and I will step in for the first man that falls! Spears ... ready!’

  Stalking round to the line’s rear, he looked at the ground, gauging from the number of spreading dark patches in the road’s dust how many of his men had already lost control of their bladders. There was enough piss steaming in the winter’s chill air that their ability even to wait in line for the barbarian charge was hanging in the balance. They would all be dead inside of five minutes, he realised, mentally shrugging his shoulders and getting ready to give a decent account of himself. The men that the detachment was escorting had dismounted from their horses, the stocky veteran and his younger, taller companion something of a mismatched pair. Bloody civilians. At least they had a means of escape.

  ‘If you’re going to ride for help, this would be a good time!’

  The older man, a legion veteran if the watch officer was guessing correctly, simply smiled back, green eyes twinkling out of a weatherbeaten face still ruddy despite the prospect of imminent death. He was evidently in his late forties, and from the quality of his clothing comfortably well off, cloak pulled across his chest and draped across one shoulder in the military style. While the younger civilian had accompanied the detachment since leaving the fortress at Dark Pool, three days’ march to the south, the older man had ridden into the small fort that had sheltered them the previous night, arriving well after the sun’s setting. His apparent lack of concern at the danger of meeting robbers on the road had caused more than a few raised eyebrows among the more experienced troops, despite the chain-mail vest beneath his cloak, the short infantry-pattern sword hanging at his waist and the purposeful way in which he conducted himself.

  ‘I’m Rufius, formerly an officer with the imperial Sixth Legion. I never ran away from a fight in twenty-five years of service, and I won’t break that habit now ... Besides, we’ll see this lot off easy enough.’

  The watch officer nodded slowly.

  ‘Fair enough. What about you?’

  The younger man shook his head grimly, too tense for humour, drawing a long-bladed cavalry sword with a glimmer of polished iron. The watch officer wondered just how much use that was going to be, given that its owner seemed to be barely out of his teens. His voice when he spoke was strong enough, though, without any hint of the quaver that might have been expected given the circumstances.

  ‘Marcus ... Marcus Valerius Aquila. I won’t be running away either.’

  The veteran soldier alongside him nodded approvingly, unsheathing his sword, and gestured to the legionaries’ line.

  ‘Shall we?’

  The watch officer shrugged, turning back to face the oncoming warband.

  ‘It’s your funeral. Stay with me, you’re now my reserve. When a man goes down, you go into the line in his place. Right, detachment, spears ready to throw ... wait for it!’

  The barbarians’ trot had become a run now, closing the remaining distance between them quickly. Half a dozen of them were carrying axes, great tree-cutting blades that would cleave a man down to his waist or lop off a limb, armour or no armour. They were close enough for details to stand out now, lime-washed hair standing stiff from their heads, blue patterns swirling across their faces and jewellery flashing brightly in the afternoon’s pale sun, close enough for their harsh battle cries to raise his neck hairs. This was no chance encounter, but a tribal warband dressed and tooled up for a fight, probably fired up by the local beer too, eyes wide and teeth bared in snarls of eager anticipation. The detachment’s line shivered, more than one man starting to shrink backwards at the prospect of imminent brutal death. Before their collective breaking point was reached the veteran stepped up to their rear, dimpling the skin of the rearmost man’s neck with the point of his sword. He spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, loudly enough for the detachment to hear him above the growing din of the approaching barbarians.

  ‘Back in line, sonny, or those blue-nosed bastards won’t get the chance to do you.’

  More than one man looked round at him wide eyed, while the legionary in question inched forward again. One or two of the older salts, the men that already knew, and with grim resignation accepted, that their lives were about to become short and interesting whether they fought or ran, smiled in quiet recognition and raised their shields slightly in unconscious reaction to the voice of command. The watch officer nodded his head with respect, keeping his eyes on the charging barbarians and raising his voice to be heard above their harsh cries.

  ‘Wait for it ... Spears ...’

  As the watch officer opened his mouth to order the spears thrown, in the last seconds before the Britons would career into the flimsy shield wall, a sudden flurry of movement at the forest edge fifty paces to their left caught his eye. He snapped his attention back to the more urgent events happening less than twenty paces from his men’s shields.

  ‘Throw! Throw!’

  The legionaries hurled their spears into the oncoming mass of men, dropping two of them in screaming heaps and dragging down the shields of half a dozen others, then drew their swords and braced to receive the charge. With a clash of metal on steel the barbarians’ rush collided with his men’s defence. Sheer weight of numbers forced the line back half a dozen steps before the desperate legionaries managed to absorb the momentum. Only the slight slope favouring their defence had saved them from being overwhelmed by the impact, the watch officer estimated. He stepped back behind them to keep his position, watching with amazement as armoured men started to emerge from the trees behind their attackers. The initial screaming and shouting of the charge and contact had died away, and both sides fought in almost total silence, broken only by the rasp of laboured breathing and the occasional grunt of exertion or scream of pain.

  To his front a man staggered dying out of the line, a two-stepper if ever he’d seen one, his throat ripped out in a fountain of hot blood whose coppery stink filled his nostrils. The men to either side of the sudden gap in the line inched together, unable to properly fill the dying man’s empty place. As the casualty sprawled full length on the road’s cobbled surface, twitching out his life in a quickly spreading pool of his own blood, Rufius shouldered his younger companion aside, grabbed the fallen shield and stepped into his place. Battering aside a vicious axe blow with the shield, he stepped forward with a speed and grace that belied his grey hair to gut its owner with a swift twisting stab of his short sword as the tribesman struggled to regain his balance. Clutching at his steaming entrails, the barbarian fell to his knees, staring with horror at the horrific wound with a rising wail of distress.

  Another of the small detachment went down, an axe buried deep in his shoulder while its blue-painted owner wrestled frantically with the handle, trying to prise the blade free. In a second Marcus Valerius Aquila was in the gap, stooping to grab the fallen man’s infantry sword with his left hand even as he slid the cavalry sword up beneath the axeman’s ribs in a perfect killing thrust, getting a face full of blood as the price for his successful attack. Chopping away a spear-thrust from his left with the borrowed weapon, he swiftly kicked the dying barbarian off his sword, using the freed blade to hack off the spearman’s hand at the wrist before turning his wrist over to swing the long sword backhanded, and neatly sever the head of another attacker on his right. Stepping back into the line to regain his balance, the borrowed infantry sword held forward in his left hand, the longer sword held farther back to level the points of the two weapons, he paused for a moment, breathing hard with the sudden effort, his eyes wide with the shock of combat but still seeking new targets. The barbarians closest to him edged cautiously back from the fight, almost comically wary of the sudden threat from the twin blades.

  From the rear of the warband a guttural voice shouted ha
rshly in broken British over the clash of steel, a sword pointing at the retired officer’s place in the line.

  ‘Kill officer! Kill him!’

  Distracted from his open-mouthed appraisal of Marcus’s swordplay by movement in the periphery of his vision, the watch officer found his attention dragged back to the detachment’s left, where the newcomers from the forest were advancing quickly to combat the barbarian flank and rear. The ten men ran quickly to within a dozen paces, threw their spears into the unsuspecting enemy’s rear, then drew their swords, and, screaming bloodlust, went to work on their unprotected backs. Seizing his fleeting chance with both hands, as the tribesmen closer to his men started looking back over their shoulders in bewilderment at the screams from their dying comrades, the watch officer gave the only command possible.

  ‘Counter-attack! Boards and swords, punch and thrust! Get into them, you dozy bastards!’

  The response was almost uncomprehending, the product of a thousand mindless practice drills. The legionaries punched hard with the bosses of their shields at the Britons’ faces, then stepped forward a pace with a collective thrust of their short swords. Two of the distracted tribesmen went down screaming, while several others edged back, allowing the line time and room to repeat the attack. The warband’s leader turned to face their new assailants, spearing one of them with a powerful throw, drew his sword and roared defiance as he advanced into their line. A massive soldier with a crested helmet stepped out to meet him, slapping the sword-thrust aside with an almost casual flick of his shield before lunging his own weapon deep into the barbarian’s chest in one swift flowing movement, twisting it to free the blade as he brutally stamped the dying man off its length. A lone tribesman turned and ran at the sight, joined a second later by another. Like the gradual collapse of an overloaded dyke, another two ran after them, then five, at which point the remainder simply turned and fled. They left a dozen dead and dying men on the ground.

  The surviving Romans, half of the legionaries sporting a wound of some kind or other, leant breathless on their shields and watched them run, happy enough to let their enemy escape unhindered when a minute before they had been facing impending death. The watch officer walked across to the newcomers, followed at a discreet distance by Rufius, while Marcus dropped the infantry sword beside its dead owner and wiped the drying blood from his own weapon, suddenly exhausted. The other detachment’s leader, a dark-bearded athlete of a man with the horsehair crest of a chosen man on his helmet, was staring after the retreating warband with a look that seemed to combine disgust and regret.

  ‘Whoever you lads are, you have the thanks of the Sixth Legion. If you hadn’t come out of the trees we were dead meat. You must have balls the size of apples to do what you just did with ...’

  The watch officer’s flow of gratitude dried up as he realised that the other man wasn’t paying him any attention, but was still watching the retreating Britons. After a moment the chosen man spoke, flicking indifferent eyes over the legionaries.

  ‘You’d better tell your officers to stop sending anything smaller than a full century up the road to Yew Grove. Next time you won’t be so lucky.’

  He turned to his own men.

  ‘Take heads, then get ready to leave. We’ll march to the fortress in company with this lot. You two, you didn’t kill anyone that I saw so you can make a sling to carry Hadrun up to the fort. We’ll put him underground somewhere he can’t be dug up again.’

  Rufius caught his arm, stepping back with open palms as the heavy-framed man swung back to face him with an angry look.

  ‘No offence, Chosen, but we’re only trying to thank you for what you did. Most men in your position would have given serious thought to letting us get on with things on our own ...’

  Marcus overcame his momentary exhaustion to raise his head and study the other detachment’s leader and his troops carefully in the moment’s silence that followed, intrigued by his first sight of native troops in the field. They wore chain mail, unlike the plate armour protecting the legionaries, and their weapons and clothing seemed of a lower quality. He noted, nevertheless, the same hard-edged efficiency in their movements, the same lean wiriness. Like their legion colleagues, these were men that had learnt the hard way not to waste energy on non-essentials. The chosen man’s eyes narrowed, his face expressionless.

  ‘We’re Tungrians, Grandfather, and we were doing our duty, nothing more, nothing less. We were moving quietly through the forest, and found that lot waiting by the road before they saw us. After that it was only a matter of pulling back and waiting for someone to come along. When we saw the size of your party it was obvious that we would have to help you out ... although I doubt it was worth the loss of one of my men.’

  Rufius smiled crookedly at the bald statement.

  ‘I understand better than you might imagine. And nevertheless, from one fighting man to another, you have my respect.’

  He turned away, clapping an arm round the watch officer’s shoulder.

  ‘And as for you, my friend, I’d call that a nice little action. I’ll be sure to mention your name to my friends in the camp, see if we can’t get you a brush for the top of your piss bucket. For now we’d better get the wounded sorted out and then push on to the Grove, don’t you think?’

  Sorting the wounded out was easy enough, despite the only bandage carrier in the party having lost three fingers of his right hand to a barbarian sword, which made him of use only in directing treatment rather than providing it. Two men were dead, the two-stepper and the axe victim, the latter with the huge blade still embedded deep in his upper chest. They were stripped of their weapons, armour and boots and hidden from casual view in the trees to await collection by cart the next day. The Tungrians, meanwhile, with pointed remarks about leaving no man behind on a battlefield, ostentatiously rigged a sling with which to carry their own casualty away with them. Of the remaining troops three were incapable of walking, but by putting the lighter two on one of the civilians’ horses, and one with a nasty-looking axe wound on the other, they were able to resume their march. The barbarian wounded were finished off without ceremony by the watch officer, his swift economical sword-thrusts removing any chance of their survival. At length Marcus and Rufius fell in behind their legionary protectors for the remaining march, while the Tungrians, several with freshly decapitated heads dangling jauntily from pack yokes by their knotted hair, in turn fell in behind them.

  Marcus coughed politely and turned his face to Rufius’s after a moment’s march. He was tall, overtopping the veteran by a full head, slightly stringy in build but with the sinewy promise of muscle to come.

  ‘Yes, my friend?’

  ‘I’d be grateful to better understand a thing or two. If you’d be willing to talk?’

  Something in the younger man’s voice made Rufius look at him properly, the taut line of the young man’s jaw muscles betraying the fact that he was still dealing with the aftermath of the skirmish.

  ‘Mars forgive me but I’m an unfeeling old bastard. This was your first proper fight?’

  The younger man nodded tautly.

  ‘Gods below, how quickly the habits of command leave a man ... I always made a point of grabbing the first-timers after a fight, to humour or slap them out of their shock at tasting another man’s blood on their lips for the first time, and to congratulate them for surviving with the right number of arms and legs. Although I am forced to point out that for a first-timer you did better than just survive. You made a mess of more than one of our attackers without even the benefit of a shield for protection. Those skills won’t have come easily ...’

  Above his smile, he raised an interrogatory eyebrow, noting that the younger man’s jaw relaxed a fraction.

  ‘You can tell me more about your prowess with two swords later. I believe you had a question?’

  ‘I was wondering why these other soldiers didn’t take all of the barbarian heads, if that’s the local custom?’

  The veteran glanced
back at the auxiliary troops behind them.

  ‘The Tungrians? When you know more about the local troops you’ll understand better. Legions get moved around. They stay in one place for a year, or even ten, but they always move on again. There’s always a campaign that needs another legion, a frontier to be shored up, or just some idiot with a purple stripe on his tunic who wants to be emperor. That means that the legions never stay anywhere long enough to settle into the local traditions, so it’s Judaea one year, Germania the next. Besides, serving in a legion is like being a priest for a particularly jealous god – complicated rites, special sacrifices and offerings, your own way of doing things. In a legion the senior officers, the camp prefect and the senior centurions, they make sure that their way of doing things always comes first.

  ‘Auxiliaries, though, they stay put where they’ve been based for the most part, unless there’s a major campaign on, and even then they’ll usually come back home again. They put down roots, soak up the local lore, start worshipping local gods. Basically they go native. Now those lads, they were originally recruited in Tungria, across the sea, but they’ve been here on the Wall since it was built sixty years ago, more or less, so now there’s no real Tungrians, just a lot of their grandsons mixed in with the local lads. They take heads because that’s local tradition too, but they also have a code of honour that would shame a six-badge centurion, and they don’t, ever, take the head of a man they haven’t fought and killed face to face.

  ‘Anyway, enough about the Tungrians, I’m sure you’ll learn all about them in due course. Tell me, what brings you to the forsaken northern wastes of this cold, wet pisspot of a country ...’

  He looked calculatingly at the younger man, as if assessing him properly for the first time, despite the fact that they had ridden side by side for half the day, albeit mostly in silence.