Legionary

Chapter 72

Gallus wheezed through the dust coating him and the men on the wall. Each gargantuan boulder now ground the shattered battlements into a spray of rubble, and crimson smears along its length told of those caught under a direct hit.

‘They’re prising us open like a shellfish!’ Gallus hissed as another rock crunched down. Barely any defensible battlement remained, and only a few more hits would surely rent open a clear path into the fort. Of the defiant two hundred who had filed up onto the battlements this morning, a further seventy had been slain, and morale had dropped like one of those rocks.

‘Horsa’s nearly at ‘em, sir!’ Quadratus yelled from the timber watchtower. ‘Amalric’s just a few strides behind.’

‘Ride like the gods,’ Gallus whispered under his breath. Horsa would he would be the decoy while Amalric, weaving behind him, would hope to slip in close enough to the catapults to spring his surprise attack. They had slipped out of the side gate of the fort and dropped into a dip running around the eastern edge of the plateau. From there they had rode around the dip, obscured from Hun eyes, taking them almost up to the flank of the Hun line on the north edge of the plateau. They would be bursting into the enemy line of sight in moments. The centurion gripped the cracked crenellation in front of him, willing them on.

‘Amalric’s nearly in behind ‘em, sir!’ Quadratus cried again.

The straggle of the XI Claudia roared in support all at once as Horsa burst up to be level with the enemy. Like a porcupine, the Hun line bristled in surprise. Horsa whooped, spun his sword over his head, and galloped across the Hun front. The Huns, seeing a single rider, visibly relaxed, a detachment being sent out to slay him while the rest turned back to the fort. Just as they dropped their guard, Amalric burst out onto the plateau behind their front line, strides from the artillery.

‘He’s there!’ Avitus yelled.

The I Dacia artillerymen scrambled back in shock, crying out to the Hun spearmen, standing oblivious only paces away. But Amalric thundered forward, bringing a glowing ball of flames spinning above his head in a sling. The blazing pitch sack roared until he released it to zip across the air like a comet towards the rightmost catapult. The sack exploded in a fury of flames against the timber device. The Hun cavalry pitched forward to meet the solitary threat, but not before Amalric had unleashed the second, third and fourth sacks onto the remaining catapults.

‘They’ve done it!’ Gallus roared as the fifth catapult exploded in orange. ‘Now get our artillery trained on those riders!’ he pointed at the wave of nearly a thousand haring after Horsa and Amalric like a swarm of wasps — now in range. ‘This is the last free shot we get at them, lads. Fire at will! Take ‘em down!’

The men roared as a stone zipped through the air and ploughed right through the flank of the swarm. Gallus joined them, roaring until his lungs were spent, smashing his sword against his shield.

The roar subsided, and then died. Horsa and Amalric weaved across the plateau only to be blocked as they approached the fort by a detachment of Hun riders. Gallus watched as they wheeled round and then slipped towards the northeastern edge of the plateau and out of sight, down the hillside. Gods be with you, he mouthed.

The rest of the Huns, realizing they now had only one option left — to crush the pathetic remnant of the XI Claudia under weight of numbers — rumbled forward towards the shattered fort. He turned to the thin smattering of filthy and exhausted men.

‘This is it, lads. This is it!’