Altar of Blood

7

Amalric and Gernot found Thusila much as they had left it, both men dismounting outside the king’s hall and hurrying inside while the men of the king’s household waited alongside their beasts. Amalric ran to check his family while Gernot strode swiftly to the treasury only to find it secure and under a redoubled guard, the previous sentry’s body and the bloody evidence of his murder having been removed in their absence. Frowning, he retraced his steps to find the king standing outside the hall.

‘They’re safe?’

Amalric nodded tersely.

‘Nobody has seen neither hide nor hair of the Romans since we rode out.’

The two men looked at each other for a moment before the king spoke.

‘Five Romans entered our land yesterday, but only two of them came here. They warned us of a plot to rob our treasury, provoked us to lock up a ragbag collection of idiots and former soldiers who may or may not have had any connection with them, and then stole the tribe’s eagle in the middle of the night. They made a run for the Roman bridge fort and led us away chasing shadows, while the other three freed the same men their comrades had incriminated and escaped into the forest, presumably with my eagle.’

Gernot looked at his king with a growing light of certainty in his eyes as Amalric continued.

‘One group of two men to distract us with their claims of a threat to our treasury, and then to steal the eagle. Although it puzzles me that the man guarding the treasury didn’t raise an alarm before he was killed.’

The noble nodded, grim-faced.

‘And another party of three, who entered the city during the night, received the eagle from the thieves, freed the Roman captives, and then used the distraction caused by the theft to do … what?’

They looked at each other for a moment, Amalric slowly shaking his head as if to dispel an idea that had just occurred to him.

‘Surely not.’

He stared out over the forested hill that rose to the city’s east. Gernot followed his gaze, his eyes narrowing as he realised the conclusion to which the king had suddenly sprung.

‘You don’t think …?’

The king pointed a finger at the trees, his eyes widening in horror.

‘Look!’

A thin plume of black smoke was rising through the forest halfway up the hill, thickening as they watched, as the fire’s grip of whatever it was burning intensified. A sudden piercing shriek rent the morning’s calm, audible despite the distance over which it had carried, the sound of a man undergoing mortal torment, and Amalric started.

‘Is that …?’

Gernot turned to the closest of his men.

‘Summon the men of the city! The enemy are in the forest!’

‘Did you hear that?’

Dubnus nodded grimly at the question, his chest heaving from the mile they had already run since leaving the sacred grove to reach the main track. A horn was sounding off to the north and west, its brazen note rendered thin and insubstantial by distance, but its meaning was no less clear for being distant. After a moment another blaring note joined the first, their urgent sound clearly a call to arms for the Bructeri tribesmen within earshot.

‘Horns. And horns means that they’ve woken up to the fact we’re out here, most likely.’ He turned to the men of their small party. ‘Run!’

They had covered the best part of another mile when the axeman bringing up the rear called out a warning, turning and setting himself for combat while he took great whooping breaths to steady his trembling frame. Shrugging his shield’s strap off his shoulder, he lifted the oval board into the fighting position, glaring over its hide-clad rim at the horseman whose appearance had prompted him to turn and fight, his axe held ready to strike while his fellows hurried to his side. Nocking arrows, the Hamians looked at Marcus for the order to shoot, but the rider, having taken a swift look at them from the vantage point of a rise in the ground, had already wheeled his horse about and disappeared. Dubnus shook his head in disappointment.

‘Gone to fetch his mates. Which means we’ll be thigh deep in the bastards before long. Keep moving!’ They ran again, Marcus blowing his horn in the agreed signal for the rejoin every five hundred paces. Behind them the sound of horses, at first distant and almost unreal in the absence of a visible presence, quickly grew louder.

‘We’ll be fighting in a moment! Archers, take position to shoot and get your breath back! Axes, to me!’

The detachment stopped running at the burly Briton’s command, the Hamians dividing their numbers either side of the track and taking up positions with clear shots back the way they had come, sucking in air to calm their heaving chests while each man pushed his arrows’ iron heads into the ground next to a tree behind which they could take shelter from any return shots. The Tenth Century men stepped into a wall of shields, two on either side of their centurion, blocking the path with their armoured bulk.

In a flurry of hoof beats the Bructeri were visible, half a dozen riders crouching low over their horse’s backs as they galloped at the waiting Tungrians.

‘Loose!’

The archers let their first arrows fly, dropping the leading horseman’s mount and hurling its rider into the undergrowth, the horses behind the fallen beast balking as it kicked and writhed before them.

‘Again!’

Another volley of missiles found targets along the struggling riders, picking one from his saddle with arrows in his chest and throat, another stepping off his mount as it staggered sideways into the forest and collapsed with feathered shafts protruding from its broad chest. The remaining tribesmen took flight, the unhorsed man grabbing onto the last horse’s saddle and running alongside it with exaggerated strides. The Hamians looked to their officers, but Dubnus shook his head.

‘We’re going to need every arrow if we’re going to get back to the river! Prepare to move!’

Dubnus detached himself from his men and walked across to his friend.

‘That was just the hotheads, right?’

The Roman nodded.

‘From what Morban was telling us about the state they were in last night I’d imagine they’re still trying to slap some sense into the city’s warriors, and doubtless their king felt he had to do something. That was probably just a roll of the dice aimed at finding out if we could be ridden down without much effort.’

Dubnus grinned humourlessly.

‘Well, they know the answer to that one, sure enough. Let’s get out of here before the rest of them come for a try at dealing with us the hard way.’

Gernot turned away from the horsemen who had returned from the first abortive foray against the intruders with a grim face.

‘Romans. Archers, and brutes with axes, from what they saw. Horsemen aren’t going to be enough, not without any more room to manoeuvre, and the forest paths are just too narrow.’

Amalric nodded tersely, his face a mask of fury.

‘They have the eagle, our sacred grove is burning, and if what I fear was their true purpose in worming their way into my kingdom, my seer may be their captive! I want these men’s corpses nailed to the trees around our sacred grove and their heads thrown over the walls of Novaesium, to remind the Romans who rules on this side of the river! Make it happen, Gernot, and spend whatever lives are necessary to deal with these thieving animals!’

The noble bowed and turned away to the city’s warriors, many of them still half asleep from their celebrations of the previous night, issuing a flurry of orders.

‘Two spearmen to every horseman! Spearmen, you will hold the horse’s saddle and run alongside. Nobody drops out! If you have to puke, then puke, but keep running or you’ll have me to deal with!’ He looked around at his men with a forbidding expression. ‘Horsemen, no faster than a trot to ensure the spearmen can hang on. There’s no need for us to ride any faster, these intruders aren’t going anywhere with the river at their backs.’

He waited while the foot soldiers paired up with riders, each man readying himself for the run through the forest with one hand clutching the horse’s saddle straps and the other holding onto his spear and shield for grim death, each of them clearly praying not to lose their grip and fall under the hoofs of the animals behind. It soon became clear that there were over a dozen horsemen either without any spearmen at all, or only a single man.

‘You, and you, go and find riders who need another man. You riders without spearmen, dismount and come here.’

‘What do you intend?’

He turned to find the king at his shoulder.

‘A dozen men won’t be sufficient to kill these Romans, but it will be enough to stop them running, and force them to defend themselves while we cover the distance between us. And who can tell how the gods might favour such a gamble, or the men who undertake it?’

Amalric thought for a moment and then nodded.

‘I will speak to them.’ He waited until the riders had gathered, then addressed them directly. ‘Men of the king’s household, you are indeed fortunate to have the chance to strike a first blow at these intruders, and to help speed the rescue of the most precious prize of war our tribe possesses. You will ride forward ahead of our main body, and as fast as you can safely travel, you will find the Romans and you will offer them battle. Hold them in place for me, and I will bring your brothers in arms to the fight to stamp them flat for having the temerity to attack us here, in our home. Ride before us, find these Romans, and teach them what it is to incur the rage of the Bructeri!’

‘What happened to the tribune?’

Marcus and Dubnus’s party had rejoined that led by the tribune moments before, only to find Scaurus stripped of his armour and tunic, and lying flat on his back while the woman who had been the target of their mission treated a wound in his side. Dubnus had stalked away to organise their defence of the clearing where the two paths met, arraying his men along its southern side to maximise the archers’ shooting time if an attack started while they were held static by Scaurus’s treatment. Arminius tapped Lupus on the shoulder and pointed to the clearing’s western edge.

‘Go and practise your spear work over there, and if anything happens get down and stay down until it’s all over.’

Scaurus scowled up at Marcus and Varus, craning his neck to see past the priestess bent over him.

‘I was stupid enough to stop a Bructeri dagger wielded with enough strength to put the blade through my mail, that’s what happened! And you don’t have to ask Varus, you cheeky young whelp, Valerius Aquila! I may have incurred a nasty little puncture but I can still talk for myself!’

‘You will lie back and allow me to work!’

The woman’s tone brooked no argument, and he subsided back onto the ground while she arranged a pad of linen over the wound, tying it in place with a longer strip of the same material.

‘There. Now rest awhile and gather your strength. There is a long way to ride, and difficult ground to cross, before you will be safe.’

Marcus looked at Varus questioningly, and the younger man led him away out of earshot of the woman before speaking again.

‘It seems that we won’t be-’

Dubnus strode up to them, cutting across the discussion and pointing at the pair of archers they had left watching the path on the far side of the clearing.

‘There are more of them coming! Horsemen!’

Having signalled the Bructeri approach, the two archers standing guard on the clearing’s far side were shooting as fast as they could, their arrows flicking away into the forest. As the sound of the oncoming horses’ hoofs grew louder they started looking back between shots, clearly attempting to gauge the right moment to make a run for the safety of the detachment’s line, such as it was. Loosing one last arrow apiece they turned and ran, one of them darting away to his right into the undergrowth while the other pelted directly towards the safety of his fellows. Bursting from the narrow path’s confines into the open ground, the Bructeri riders fanned out to either side, and were immediately engaged by the eight archers waiting on the clearing’s far edge. While the sleet of arrows took a rapid toll of those riders who guided their horses to right and left, a pair of men took it into their heads to ride down the fleeing archer and were protected to some degree by the man they were pursuing, his fellow bowmen unable to shoot at the mounted tribesmen for fear of hitting their comrade.

His vision fixed on the running archer, the leading horseman came on at the gallop, triumphantly spearing him ten paces short of the Tungrian line, the stricken soldier’s back arching as the long blade punched through his body. A pair of arrows sprouted from his mount’s chest, and, stricken, it half-cantered and half-staggered towards the Tungrians until one of Dubnus’s axemen stepped forward and swung his curved blade in a flickering arc to sever one of its front legs, sending the beast crashing to the ground with an awful scream of agony. The rider, pitched over the beast’s head by its headlong plunge, was thrown violently into a tree’s thick trunk and flopped lifelessly to the ground to stare vacantly at the sky above. His companion, realising the danger into which he had driven his mount, had started to wrestle his beast around when a broad-headed arrow loosed at close range plunged deep into its chest and stopped its heart in an instant, dropping the horse in the length of a single stride and sending him spinning away from its death throes. Rolling to his feet he looked about himself wildly, spotted a gap in the encircling Romans with only the boy Lupus to beat and ran for it, stabbing out with his spear at the boy only to find his thrust competently parried and the youth’s framea pointed squarely at his chest, Lupus himself rooted to the spot as the warrior bore down on him. Committed to his headlong charge the German almost fell onto the blade, gasping as it slid between his ribs and took his life in a single heartbeat, snapping the spear shaft as he collapsed lifelessly onto it and fell at the momentarily paralysed boy’s feet. An axe rose and fell, putting a merciful end to the maimed horse’s piteous attempts to regain its footing, and suddenly the clearing was silent again except for the sound of the handful of horsemen who had escaped death making a hasty retreat back down the track, the wheezes and piteous whinnies of their wounded mounts slowly dying away.

Scaurus got to his feet with Arminius’s assistance, white-faced from the loss of so much blood, his wound heavily padded with moss held in place by a strip of cloth that Gerhild had wrapped around his body. He gestured for the German to help him back into his tunic and armour, looking about him at the corpses of Bructeri warriors and their horses scattered across the clearing.

‘And with that, gentlemen, I think it’s time we were on our way, don’t you? I expect the next attack will be somewhat better thought through.’ He pointed to the boy, still staring down at his dead German with an open mouth. ‘Fetch the child, Arminius, he’ll stand there all day if you don’t pull him away.’

He gathered the officers around him, wincing while his mail was pulled over his head and dragged down into place, Gerhild’s hand on the padding over his wound preventing it from being pulled free by the armour’s weight.

‘Thank you, Madam. Centurion Varus, we’ll do this just as we discussed it.’

The younger man saluted and took the woman by her arm, drawing her away from the group while Scaurus turned back to the men of the detachment.

‘Now then, gentlemen, I think we all know what we have to do, but for those of you who live for the idea of burying an axe in a barbarian’s head …’ he stared at Dubnus for a moment before continuing, ‘this will be a tactical retreat to the river with our bows and axes combined, one axeman to accompany each archer for their protection while they use their bows to keep the Bructeri at arm’s length. Centurion Qadir, ensure that your men shepherd their remaining arrows carefully, and only shoot when they have clear targets. You must not let them get carried away and leave the detachment without any means of keeping the enemy’s heads down.’

Qadir nodded his understanding.

‘And you, Dubnus, your axemen are to fight going backwards, and only to step onto the front foot if necessary to preserve a tactical advantage. When not engaged hand to hand, I want them to concentrate on using their shields to protect both themselves and the archer with whom they’re paired.’

Dubnus nodded curtly.

‘Yes, Tribune. They’ll defend their brother soldiers to the last man.’

Scaurus smiled wanly.

‘I know they will. Very well then gentlemen, get your men moving. We’re still a long way from the river.’

‘What happened?’

The oldest of the three riders who had survived the ill-fated attack on the Romans shook his head, his face grey with shock and exhaustion. Amalric had found them at the side of the forest track, staring down at one of their number who was clearly close to death, his breathing shallow and eyes glassy, a pair of arrows protruding from his chest, and had halted the Bructeri main force’s column to question them.

‘It was a slaughter. Their archers shot us to ribbons.’ He pointed down at the dying man. ‘He was hit before we even saw them.’

‘How many are they?’

The man looked up at him, shaking his head again as he tried to gather his wits.

‘Twenty? Perhaps thirty?’

The Bructeri noble turned in his saddle to face the king.

‘Thirty men at most, and we have eighty spearmen and half as many riders! We should pursue these Romans until we catch up with them, then dismount and overrun them. Thirty men will never stand against this many warriors!’

Amalric nodded his consent, and the noble raised a hand to order the advance. He led the column to the south at a slow trot, eyes scanning the forest to either side of the track, until the clearing where the Romans had offered his horsemen battle came into view, with its grisly scattering of dead men and horses. Gernot shouted a peremptory command over his shoulder, knowing that some of his warriors would have recognised brothers and cousins among the fallen.

‘Leave them! We hunt Romans!’

They trotted on for another two miles before a flash of sunlight on iron alerted Gernot to the presence of armoured men ahead of them, the backs of the fleeing enemy giving him fresh purpose.

‘There, my King! There is your enemy! We must attack them on foot through the forest, the leading horses will never survive an attack down the path and the rest of us will be trapped behind the first beasts to fall.’ He turned back to the men behind him. ‘Dismount!’

The oldest and youngest among them led the horses away while the remaining warriors pressed in around their king, looking to him for leadership. A rider galloped up from behind them, jumping from his saddle and hurrying to Amalric, whispering urgently in the king’s ear. Amalric nodded at the messenger’s words, staring grim-faced around the tribesmen’s tight circle.

‘They have my seer! Gerhild has fallen into their filthy grasping hands! And I swear my revenge to Wodanaz!’ He drew his sword and raised the point at the sky. ‘My brothers! Men of my household! Men of my city! These Romans have stolen our pride away this day, through lies and deceit! We must bring them to bay, and then we must show them how the Bructeri deal with those who set foot on our soil without our leave to do so! If you have no choice then they are to die, but every one of them we take alive is worth a gold coin to the man who captures him, and five for an officer! I will take these captives to the Roman fort by the river, and I will put them to death, within clear sight of the soldiers who guard the bridge! Their screams will be heard in Rome itself!’

Gernot nodded, pointing at the distant Tungrians with his sword.

‘Run, brothers! Now we take this war to the men who started it!’

‘Here they come!’

Still a mile from the river, the detachment turned to fight in the way that Scaurus had prescribed once combat was inevitable, the bowmen laying out their arrows for rapid shooting while one of Dubnus’s men took his place beside each of them with their shields raised against enemy archery. Dozens of Bructeri warriors were advancing towards them through the trees, clearly already well aware of the Hamians’ threat as they moved from tree to tree and kept their bodies low, hoping to use the cover of the forest’s ferns and bushes to disguise their advance.

‘Wait!’

Qadir’s shouted command was obeyed with absolute discipline by his men, despite the increasing number of arrows flying past them, still mostly above head height as the few Bructeri archers loosed swift shots before diving back into cover. A handful of the younger tribesmen were loosing sling stones at them from the flanks of the war band’s advance, the improvised bullets hissing past them unseen and occasionally smacking into a man’s shield with a loud click. The pioneers pulled their Hamian comrades into cover as the volume of harassing arrows and sling stones increased with the Bructeri warriors’ confidence, more than one of them flinching despite their collective vow to show no fear, as arrows punched into the layered wood of their shields and were prevented from penetrating only by the layers of leather and silk that overlaid the wood, a trick that had saved more than one life in the battles of their eastern campaign. The enemy warriors were closing in, no longer distant figures flitting between the trees but individuals, the fear and determination on their faces visible as they shouted encouragement to each other, collectively readying themselves to storm the detachment’s line while behind them someone was shouting commands and driving them forward. With a sudden spur of collective determination they lurched forward, eschewing the protection of the trees for a straightforward charge towards the hated Romans, those men with shields leading the assault. Qadir swept his arm forward.

‘Loose!’

The Tungrians unleashed their arrows, shooting quickly into the mass of men running at them, three volleys in the space of five heartbeats, their deadly missiles hammering through the illusory protection of the leading warriors’ shields to pierce the bodies behind them. Loosing again, and again, they reaped a savage harvest of the poorly protected Germans, and with every man that fell the remaining warriors crouched a little closer to the ground, their headlong charge becoming little more than a shuffling, zigzagging trot from the cover of one tree to another. Qadir and Dubnus exchanged glances, both men nodding to affirm the plan that they had agreed minutes before. The Hamian shouted the command for which his men had been waiting.

‘Archers … Cease!’

Dubnus’s men clenched their hands on the grips of their shields and the handles of their axes, knowing that their turn to bleed the enemy was at hand. Their centurion bellowed the command they were waiting for, slipping their collars to send them at the wavering Bructeri.

‘Tenth Century! Advance!’

He strode out at their head with his face set implacably, a warrior chieftain come for vengeance at the head of men whose devotion to him was absolute, striding purposefully at the enemy with their shields and axes raised. Dubnus was the first into the fight, stamping forward to attack a pair of warriors who threw themselves at the armoured giant with suicidal bravery. Turning the spear thrust at him from the left with his shield and following through with a punch of the iron boss that sent the warrior staggering backwards, he sidestepped the other man’s stabbing attack before spinning to deliver a vicious chopping axe blow that hammered into the Bructeri’s chest, kicking the dying warrior off the blade in a spray of blood and turning on the first man with a snarl of triumph, looping the axe high to smash the spike on the reverse of its heavy iron blade down into his head. On either side his men waded into the enemy with equal fury, their shields and armour protecting them from the enemy’s spears while every swing of their axes did grievous damage to the men who were still attempting to resist their advance. One of the pioneers staggered from the fight with a spear wound to his thigh, and while he was reeling, a quick-witted archer lurking behind the Bructeri line put an arrow into his throat, but the roar of triumph from the warrior who’d managed to stab beneath the hem of his mail was short-lived, as the Tungrian fighting next to the dying man stepped forward and swung his axe in a flat arc, slicing off the top six inches of the German’s head and leaving his corpse to crumple limply to the ground. As those warriors who chose to fight rather than back away from the rampaging pioneers grew fewer, Dubnus realised that the Bructeri were collectively retreating before the Tungrian onslaught, no longer seeking to fight the armoured monsters whose axes were likely to be the ruin of any man who confronted them, and were instead consolidating their scattered force into a hedge of spears.

‘Tenth Century! Disengage!’

As one man they stepped back, retreating from the baying Germans without turning their backs, raising their shields against the threat of Bructeri arrows and sling stones as they pulled away from the line of spearmen. A scattering of dead and dying warriors marked the limit of their brief advance, their bodies wrecked by the axes’ awful blows, the spectacle they presented so terrifying that the enemy warriors standing and watching the Tungrians walk backwards out of the fight were unwilling to advance past the ruined bodies of their comrades in search of revenge for them. When his men were twenty paces from the enemy line Dubnus turned and flicked two pointing fingers towards the riverbank, still half a mile distant.

‘Tenth Century, at the run!’

Jogging past the archers he nodded to Qadir, who was already shouting the command for his archers to resume shooting. As the Bructeri regained their will to go forward, shamed by the imprecations of their leaders and heartened by the Tungrians’ retreat, those men who were the first to step forward became the targets of a fresh volley of shafts, precisely aimed shots that dropped several more men writhing and kicking at the pain of the iron arrowheads lodged deep in their bodies, and sent the remainder into cover once more. Seeing the enemy momentarily cowed, the Hamian centurion made a swift decision.

‘One more arrow! Pick your targets!’

The Hamians nocked one last time, selecting their marks with care to send shots into the mass of men attempting to shelter from their cold rain of iron behind their shields, then looked to their centurion for his next command.

‘Disengage!’

Waiting while his men hurried after Dubnus’s retreating axemen, he settled into the cover of the tree next to him, knowing that he needed to give them a few moments of grace to prevent the Bructeri bowmen targeting their retreating backs. Nocking an arrow he pulled it back until the flight feathers were level with his ear, waiting motionlessly with the bow pulled taut for a target to reveal itself. After a moment an archer stepped out from behind the tree he’d been using for cover, putting an arrow to his own bow and raising the weapon to loft the missile at the retreating Hamians’ backs. Qadir waited for an instant, holding his breath to steady his body, until the Bructeri bowman had his bow bent almost to its fullest extent, then killed the man with a clinical shot and reached back to his quiver for another arrow. He waited for a long moment for another target to present itself, but the remaining Bructeri seemed intent on keeping their skins intact, and the Hamian smiled wryly as he stood, backing cautiously away from the tree with the arrow still nocked in case of a sudden change of heart by any of the Germans. When he had paced backwards a dozen times he removed the arrow from his bow’s string, sliding it back into the quiver on his right hip, then turned to lope away in pursuit of his men.

With a dull clang, a sling stone struck the back of his helmet with enough power to dent the iron bowl, sending him sprawling unconscious to the sun dappled forest floor.

‘I have an idea, my King! Give me thirty men and I will break this resistance for you!’

The Bructeri had followed up on the retreating Romans eagerly enough until the retreating soldiers had formed a rough defensive line. Having turned to face the tribesmen they crouched behind their shields in small knots of men, clearly waiting for the tribesmen to advance upon them in another charge that could only end the same way as the last, in the face of their enemy’s viciously effective archery and brutal axe-work. In the distance behind them Amalric had twice caught a flash of blue among the forest’s more sober shades, fleeting glimpses of Gerhild’s distinctive cloak as her captors hurried her away towards the river.

‘What do you plan, Uncle?’

He threw an arm out to indicate the Roman left flank.

‘There is a weakness in their position, too much ground cover on our right for their archers to see us coming. You keep their attention and I will overrun them from the right. When they turn to face me you will have your moment of glory! Then you must charge!’

Amalric nodded, and Gernot pointed to two of his senior warriors.

‘Bring your men! We go to claim the victory!’

He bounded away to the west in a long, looping run that took his small force out of sight of the Romans, and as he threw his head back to suck in the cold morning air, he wondered briefly if anyone on the other side had seen their departure, and whether they would make the connection between the unexpected departure of so many men from the Bructeri line and the lack of clear ground for shooting on the Roman left. Concentrating on the uneven ground before him, wary of turning an ankle in a rabbit hole and losing the fight before it was properly joined, he dismissed the concern without a second thought. If Wodanaz willed it, his would be a mighty victory, a song to be shouted at roof beams studded with new heads, and the weapons and armour of the men he was about to tear apart with his audacious strategy.

‘Have you seen Qadir?’

Angar shook his head, staring out at the Bructeri war band less than two hundred paces distant, drumming their spear shafts against shield rims in a rhythmic pattern that was slowly increasing in tempo. Dubnus cursed and looked about him, shaking his head at his comrade’s disappearance. Angar pointed at the waiting Germans, hefting his blood-slathered axe, ready to fight again.

‘Never mind Qadir, his boys will cope without him. Concentrate on dealing with this lot, there must still be nearly a hundred of them.’

The big centurion nodded, scanning the battlefield with the seasoned eye of an old campaigner, his eye coming to rest on the far left of the small field of battle.

‘I don’t like that left flank, and I could swear there are less of them than there were last time I looked, so perhaps they’ve spotted it too. Take two men and reinforce it, I’ll manage this.’

Angar nodded and called to two of his remaining eight men, hurrying along the detachment’s short line to find a pair of archers nervously staring at a wall of foliage less than a hundred paces from them. With a sudden roar the Bructeri’s main line was lurching forward, the tribe’s warriors reflexively starting forward after a single man whose will to stand and wait in the face of the Romans’ rhythmic drumming had suddenly and decisively snapped, sending them forward at their enemy in an involuntary, screaming charge. As the chosen man watched the Hamians unleashed the full power of their long years of practice on the oncoming warriors, each men calmly and systematically nocking, drawing and loosing a shaft once every two heartbeats, their arrows hammering into the Germans’ shields and finding the gaps between them while Dubnus readied his remaining axemen.

‘They won’t even reach us, look, they’ve already lost a dozen men.’

Angar turned to speak to the retired legionary Lucius, standing alongside his son and watching the Bructeri suffer as they came on, but a faint movement in the bushes to their left caught his attention for an instant.

‘What the …?’

‘We must attack!’

Gernot nodded grimly at the warrior’s outburst, peering through the bushes behind which his small party was regaining its breath from their swift run. The main attack was already faltering, slowing under the Romans’ unceasing barrage of arrows. Every step forward took them closer to the Roman line, increasing the force with which the missiles’ wicked iron heads slammed through their raised shields to maim the flesh behind the layered wood, or pierced unprotected legs and arms, and a disquietingly large number of men lay silent or screaming in the wake of the advance.

‘Some idiot … decided to go … too soon … and those fools … followed him!’ The Bructeri chieftain sucked in one last breath. ‘Our time is here! Follow me!’

He burst through the bushes, praying to Wodanaz that his men were following, raised his sword and charged, too badly out of breath to shout a war cry.

‘To the left! Shoot to the left!’

The two archers in front of Angar took a moment to realise their deadly predicament, then swivelled and loosed their next arrows into the twenty or so men running at them in ominous silence, nocking and loosing again, but the pioneer officer could already see that the tribesmen would overrun them before they had time to shoot more than one more shaft apiece.

‘Ready!’

His men stepped alongside him, both tensing their bodies to fight, and the civilians made ready alongside them, the retired soldier exchanging a knowing glance with him while his giant of a son flexed his muscles and roared a deafening challenge at the Bructeri. Each of the archers managed one more arrow apiece, then were beaten down by the oncoming Germans before they could nock again, both men dying with spears through them as the Bructeri took their savage revenge for the punishing damage the Hamians’ bows had done to their brothers. The axemen charged into the melee, separating themselves widely enough that they could swing their axes with complete abandon in the manner demanded by the odds against them, arcs of blood flying as their brutal weapons hacked a path into the enemy. One of them went down with a spear blade in his foot, and Angar flung his axe in a wide arc into a hastily raised shield to smash down the man wielding the spear, knowing that he would be unable to reach his man before he died under the blades of the warriors gathered over him, only to goggle as Magan waded into the fight. Ignoring a stabbing attack that opened a wound in his side, he grasped two warriors by their heads, smashing them together and dropping them senseless to the forest floor. Another spear stabbed into his back, but, turning as if nothing had happened, he took the man who had inflicted it by his throat and squeezed, his knuckles white as the flailing warrior’s larynx collapsed under the pressure.

Angar found himself facing an older man, clad in furs and wielding a sword, parrying the German’s first stabbing lunge with his shield and sweeping the axe down while the weapon was still outstretched, snapping it in two close to the hilt and grinning ferociously as the swordsman backed away with a look of consternation. Two tribesmen were stabbing at the giant now, their spears bloody as they thrust and wrenched the blades free, and stabbed again, and then, as he tottered on the edge of collapse, his father was among them with a bellow of horrified rage at the blood streaming down his son’s body, gutting one with a lunge of his sword and distracting the other for long enough that the axeman who had fallen with a pierced foot could swing his weapon in retaliation from the spot where he lay, hacking the man’s back foot in two and leaving him screaming his agony at the forest’s canopy, his arched body open for the retired legionary’s death blow. And then the remaining Bructeri were gone, half a dozen men falling back, most of them wounded, while Angar and his remaining soldier bellowed imprecations after them.

Dubnus ran up with another two men, and Angar looked over at the main Bructeri force to find them in retreat, more corpses and struggling, kicking, arrow-shot men littering the ground before them. The chosen man spat on the forest floor, examining his axe’s notched, bloody blade.

‘Looks like you handed me the short straw.’

The centurion nodded dourly.

‘You held though. The Hamians?’

‘Died like men. Must have taken some balls to stand and keep shooting while that lot ran them down.’

They turned to look at Lucius, who was cradling his son’s bloody body as best he could, tears washing down his cheeks as he mourned the giant’s loss.

‘He had no idea … He was just a boy, really …’

The two men looked at each other for a moment before Angar spoke.

‘He saved us though, distracted enough of them for long enough that they couldn’t mob us. And died like a man. You can be proud.’

Lucius looked up at him and nodded, wiping his eyes with the back of his sleeve.

‘I can’t leave him. He’s my son. I have to bury him.’

Dubnus shook his head peremptorily.

‘You can’t. They’ll tear you to pieces once we pull back to the river, and we can’t carry him.’

‘Then …’ Lucius nodded to himself, hardening his face. ‘Send me with him. I have nothing to live for now that he’s gone. At least we can be together when we cross the river.’

Angar looked at Dubnus, nodding his head.

‘I’ll do it. You get the men ready to move. You …’ he pointed to the remaining soldier from his small party, ‘help your brother get back to the river, and tell the Hamians to come and get their mates’ arrows, there must be a hundred or so unspent in their quivers.’

‘They can’t escape! Their backs are to the water, we just have to wear them down!’

Several of the spearmen closest to Gernot cheered lustily, but their advance remained as careful as before, moving from tree to tree and keeping the protection of the thick wooden trunks between them and the deadly archers who were doggedly retreating before them. An arrow sighed past his head, and he reflexively ducked into the cover of a sturdy oak, looking to either side and realising that most of his men were doing just the same thing.

‘We have to charge them again!’ Looking over his shoulder he found Amalric a dozen paces back, crouched at the base of a tree and pointing forward at the Roman line. ‘They are only one hundred paces ahead of us! If we attack together we will smother them with our numbers!’

The nobleman pursed his lips, unable to shake the memory of the horrendously mutilated corpses that were the remnant of the last charge he had led at the deceptively small enemy force. To his horror Gernot had been forced to tolerate the ignominy of retreating from their deadly axes with his remaining men while knowing that their number should have been sufficient to deal with a handful of equally tired Romans. Crouching behind their shields his men had backed away from the blood-soaked enemy, pursued by their taunts and shouts of derision as the Romans retreated towards the river. They were calling out to the tribesmen now, while their archers, retreating from tree to tree, shot arrows at anyone who showed themselves for more than a brief moment, taunting his warriors for their timidity in their rough version of the Roman tongue. Running the gauntlet of the archers once more he zigzagged his way back to the tree behind which the king was sheltering, ducking behind its trunk as another arrow struck the wood with a heavy thwock.

‘My King, we have already spent the lives of fifty and more of your warriors attempting to break their resistance!’ He lowered his voice, the words for his king’s ears alone. ‘And I do not believe that many men here will respond eagerly if I call on them for another attack. They know that if we charge again more of us will fall to their bows, and as many again to their axes. And, my King, the Rhenus is close at their backs now and will prevent them from running any further. We should simply follow them, until they reach the river’s bank and realise that they have nowhere else to go. When their archers run out of arrows, and they tire for lack of food, then they will either surrender or fall to our spears.’

Amalric reluctantly nodded his consent, and Gernot gave the order for a slow, cautious advance, directing his men to spread their line out to the right, ready to form a wall of spears between the retreating Romans and the bridge fort. As the tribesmen warily followed the intruders in their retreat, the number of arrows being loosed at them began to perceptibly reduce, as the forest’s gloom grew lighter with the proximity of the river’s wide open space. Amalric grinned at Gernot triumphantly, as the nobleman pointed at the withdrawing Romans, disappearing over the last crest and down the slope that led to the river’s bank and the expanse of impassable water.

‘You see, my king? We have them now! They have nowhere left to run, and their supply of arrows appears to have been exhausted!’

Amalric snarled exultantly, raising his sword to urge his men forward.

‘The time has come, my brothers! Bructeri!’ He hammered on the boss of his shield with the blade of his sword. ‘Bruc-ter-i! Bruc-ter-i!’

The men closest to him joined the chant, some of them instinctively drawn to the comfort of its collective strength, others clearly more predatory in their intent, eager for revenge on men who had sought to kill them, and had left dozens of their brothers dead and wounded. They rose from cover, advancing towards the top of the shallow slope that fell away towards the river, their continued chanting bringing no more reaction from the Romans than a few hurried glances back at their oncoming line, as the last of the enemy vanished over the crest and made their way down towards the river bank that would be the scene of their final bloody stand.

Dubnus looked grimly across the river’s grey water at the warships anchored fifty paces from the shore, then back up the riverbank’s slope to where the Bructeri tribesmen were gathering for their final assault. The remaining men of the detachment were gathered about him, the seer’s blue cloak barely visible among their armoured bodies, archers stringing the last of their missiles and lofting the shafts speculatively up the hill at those of the enemy who were visible on the crest while his pioneers stood with their shields raised against the occasional incoming arrow.

‘Kasim!’

The archer loosed the arrow he had been holding on a taut bowstring, ready to release, and turned away from the enemy to find the big Briton close behind him, his face set in worried lines.

‘There’s still no sign of Qadir. What was the last you saw of him?’

The Hamian shook his head unhappily, looking up at Dubnus and trying not to be intimidated by the big centurion’s blood-slathered armour and weapons.

‘He ordered us to retreat after the first time we held them off, Centurion, and stayed for a moment longer to keep their heads down. I made the mistake of not stopping to watch his back as he followed us.’

Dubnus shook his head incredulously.

‘So he’s either dead or captive.’

He turned away and looked back across the river again, the sides of the warships seeming to ripple with movement as their marine archers readied themselves for action, shaking his head in frustration.

‘Shields to the rear!’ The men of the detachment looked round at him, the pioneers instinctively obeying the command and hurrying to face the river. ‘And get down behind them, all of you! The men on those ships are about to turn this slope into a butcher’s back yard, and I for one don’t much fancy getting one of our own arrows stuck in my back!’

The first of the Tungrians had come into view from the prefect’s flagship a few moments before, one of the big axe-hefting soldiers who had marched from Claudius’s Colony three days before supporting another man able only to hop on one foot. The pair were closely followed by the remainder of the detachment as they retreated down the slope and into view, no longer hidden beneath the canopy of trees that crowned the hill, the archers shooting carefully aimed arrows back up the slope at their pursuers while the axemen protected them from the occasional return shots with their shields. At their commander’s order, bellowed loudly enough to be heard on the other two ships, the vessel’s archers raised their bows and pulled back the arrows ready to loose, as those Tungrians who had made it back to the river huddled into a tight knot, shields presented towards the ships in a gesture of self-preservation that made the naval officer’s mouth twitch with amusement.

The governor’s next pronouncement wiped the smile away in an instant.

‘I’m half tempted to leave them to it, you know.’

The prefect frowned momentarily at Albinus’s words, then turned to his navarchus.

‘Hail the squadron. Archers are ordered to commence shooting when our bolt throwers engage the enemy.’

‘After all, even ignoring all those times in the past when that insubordinate shit Scaurus has sought to put me down, he has rather made a mess of it this time. I wouldn’t imagine it’s going to do him very much good when my report reaches Rome and details his refusal to follow my suggestions, and the all-out war with an otherwise neutral tribe that’s resulted. Perhaps the best outcome of all this would be for them all to die, and the problem to quietly disappear.’

The prefect’s mouth tightened to form a line, his jaw muscles hardening as he turned to his superior.

‘On the other hand, Governor, imagine the political consequences that would ensue when my family discovered that you’d abandoned one of their sons to the degradation and torture that we know these barbarian animals routinely practise with their captives. Not to mention the more meaningful consequences.’

Albinus raised an eyebrow at him, his mouth tightening into an angry line.

‘Consequences, Prefect? Am I to consider that a threat?’

Varus stared at the governor for a moment, then shook his head slowly. When he spoke again his voice was soft, barely audible to Albinus who was forced to lean closer to hear his words.

‘A threat, Governor? Of course not. I will execute any legal order you give me, as is my duty. But I can’t vouch for the considerable number of men in my family who are likely to feel less bound by imperial duty and rather more by their familial obligations. I know what my responsibility to my cousin would be, were I in their place.’

‘And?’

The prefect shrugged.

‘I expect it’s a moot question, Governor, since I’m sure you have no intention of following through with such an unlikely course of action. And now, if you’ll excuse me.’

He strode down the rail, staring across the fifty paces of water that separated the three anchored warships from the river’s bank. On the slopes above the tribesmen were gathering for the kill, coming out of the shelter of the trees as the Tungrian bowmen stopped shooting and sought the cover of the last feet of dry ground, advancing down the slope with murderous intent. Nodding to his Navarchus he snapped out the order that the captains of his engine crews had been waiting for.

‘Engage!’

The older man dragged in a lungful of air, then lunged forward to point at the advancing enemy in an unmistakable gesture.

‘Bolt throwers — shoot!’

Amalric raised his sword, lowering its point to aim at the Romans.

‘We have them now! Kill them all! With me, my brothers, with me!’

The Bructeri spearmen responded to their king’s enraged command with a sudden rush down the hillside, eighty men with Amalric at their head, their spear blades raised and eager for blood, and Gernot followed in the body of his warriors. Their charge down the slope suddenly slowed, and, craning his neck, the noble realised that the men leading the charge had found their path down the hill obstructed by the branches of several trees that had been felled and dragged into position with their tops pointing towards the river, presenting a more or less continuous barrier of branches with only one clear path through around which the war band was unavoidably bunching, almost fighting to get through the gap that would let them at the cowering Romans crouched at the river’s side.

Looking up, he started as he saw the wooden hulls of three ships anchored close to the shore, and with a horrible lurch in his guts realised in an instant the nature of the trap into which they had been lured. He bellowed a warning at Amalric, but the shout was lost in the general cacophony as the tribesmen vied for position at the opening in the unexpected obstacle.

‘My King! The ships! This is a tr-’

The man alongside him opened his mouth to bellow at the trapped Romans cowering at the water’s edge and then suddenly wasn’t there, the salt sting of his blood monetarily blinding the noble as his men’s roars of impending vengeance became a cacophony of screams.

The fleet’s bolt throwers spat their bolts into the milling warriors, perfectly presented to their eager crews by the tactic that had been agreed with the detachment’s tribune two days before, trees expertly felled to present the Bructeri with a near impossible obstacle and with only one clear path through to the river’s bank. Varus nodded to his fleet captain, and the grizzled veteran pointed at the bank again, raising his voice to bark a fresh command.

‘Archers — shoot!’

Thirty archers lined the rails of the vessels to either side of the Mars, and at the navarchus’s command they unleashed a volley of arrows that sang across the space between ship and shore in an instant, their arrows lancing down into the Bructeri war band in a new and unexpected savagery.

Gernot looked around, momentarily puzzled, then found the man’s corpse a dozen paces behind him, the body only recognisable by the heavy silver torque around its neck, a heavy iron-tipped bolt having reduced the warrior’s face to no more than a bloody crater in the front of his head. Looking up, he stared at what had been concealed from them by the trees until their charge had taken them close to the water’s edge, a trio of Roman warships moored so near to the bank that he could see the individual archers’ faces as they bent their bows, waiting for the command to shoot. Another bolt had pinned a man to the tree behind him with his feet dancing on thin air a foot above the ground, his lifeblood sprinkling the earth beneath him as he twitched and shuddered in his death spasms. And then, with an eerie sigh that made the hairs on the back of Gernot’s neck stand up, a flight of arrows fell across the Bructeri in a volley, a deadly sleet that peppered the hillside and took men’s lives as indiscriminately as the wrath of a vengeful god.

The tribesmen dithered momentarily and then ran for cover, cringing as another flight of arrows tore at them, men falling with leg wounds that reduced their attempts to flee to no more than frenzied crawling. The noble ducked into the cover of a tree, watching in horror as a wounded spearman no more than five paces from him was struck by a succession of arrows, his attempts to find shelter from the murderous rain of iron weakening with each impact until, with five shafts protruding from his back and legs, he slumped face down into the slope’s earth and stopped moving altogether.

Looking around he found Amalric staring at him grimly from the cover of a felled tree further down the slope, a grievously wounded tribesman hunched over the feathered shaft of an arrow beside him. The king made a gesture for him to stay where he was, a suggestion whose common sense was reinforced by the abrupt despatch of a man whose nerve had broken, his frantic attempt to flee up the hill’s difficult slope being terminated by a pair of feathered shafts that sprouted between his shoulder blades in swift succession and dropped him writhing to the ground.

‘Stay where you are, Gernot! This battle is lost!’

Squinting around the tree’s bole the noble watched as the Tungrians climbed into boats that had been lowered from the warships, cursing volubly as he saw Gerhild’s blue cloak among the men boarding the first of them. He looked about him frantically for one of the tribe’s archers, but the only man with a bow that he could see was already dead, the weapon’s limbs protruding out from beneath his body. Unable to watch any longer as the boat pulled away from the shore, he sank back into the tree’s cover and closed his eyes, listening to the groans and cries for assistance from the tribe’s wounded as the arrows fell in a harsh iron sleet, the marine archers shooting at anything that moved across the slope’s deadly killing ground.

Clodius Albinus watched with scarcely concealed delight as the first of the boats rowed back towards the Mars, its steersman under strict orders that the Tungrians were to be delivered to the flagship. It bumped against the warship’s flank, and a pair of crew members assisted its passengers up and over the vessel’s side, the first of them a pair of Hamians who stood blinking in the late morning sun after so long in the forest’s gloom.

‘Fuck me, look at the pair of ’em! All that’s missing is them holding hands! I reckon they’ll be toss-’

The suggestive nudgings of Albinus’s bodyguard were silenced by the appearance of one of Dubnus’s men who heaved his massive frame onto the deck with a grunt of effort, closely followed by another, equally impressive in his muscularity. Both men’s armour and skin were blasted with blood, their axes brown with the drying remnants of other men’s lives, and even the less experienced men aboard the Mars could see that they were still twitchy with the aftermath of mortal combat, their bodies almost shaking with the need to do violence. Looking about them with the expression of men who had discovered excrement on their boots, they turned and assisted the primary subject of the governor’s interest aboard. Clad in an ankle-length cloak of bright blue, the seer’s face was hidden by the garment’s hood, but Clodius Albinus was undeterred by the apparent attempt at modesty. Advancing across the vessel’s deck, he essayed a bow, holding out a hand to the new arrival.

‘Good morning, my dear, and welcome to …’

Looking up, he choked on the words as the subject of his address swept back the hood. After a moment’s horrified silence, as the governor stared in undisguised amazement, the man who had been wearing the cloak greeted him cheerily with a smart salute.

‘Good morning, Governor! Tribune Scaurus sends you his greetings, and his regrets that he won’t be able to join you today. He-’

‘What? You’re …’

Albinus groped for the name for a moment before the fleet’s prefect put him out of his misery. The fleet prefect shook his head in apparent disgust.

‘Gods below, Gaius, I knew there was something wrong with you, but I never expected it to be the wearing of women’s clothing!’

The governor stared, aghast, as the younger man took off the cloak to reveal his armour and weapons.

‘Forgive me, Governor, but I had strict orders from the Tribune to make sure the Bructeri saw a figure in a blue cloak make its way from the shore to this ship while he rode away to the north with her. Clever thinking too, I’d say.’

Albinus stared at him with narrowed eyes for a moment before replying.

‘So the Bructeri king believes his seer has boarded a Roman ship, and therefore gives up on the idea of getting her back.’ He stared at Varus with thin lips. ‘Whereas in truth your tribune clearly thought he had good reasons for not doing so, despite the fact that by failing to deliver her to me he has risked the success of his mission just at the point when it was set to be successfully completed. Why do you think that might be, Centurion Varus?’

The young aristocrat shook his head, his expression guileless.

‘I really don’t have a clue, Governor. It’s quite unusual for a centurion, and a junior centurion at that, to be invited to share the deliberations of his senior officer.’

‘I see …’ Albinus shook his head slowly at the frustration of having been outmanoeuvred once again. ‘So Scaurus gave you no clue as to where it was that he was taking the German woman?’

‘None at all, sir. The first thing I knew about the change in plans was when he rode away to the north, rather than falling back to the river with the rest of us.’

‘And who was with him?’

Varus looked up at the sky in an apparent effort to recall the moment’s detail.

‘Our Bructeri scout, who by somewhat of a quirk of fate turns out to be the seer’s brother, centurion Corvus and the veteran Cotta, the tribune’s slave Arminius and a boy he’s training to manhood, a pair of Qadir’s archers, the seer, of course, and three cavalrymen whose names I’m not aware of, Governor. They joined us as the result of a scouting mission into the Bructeri capital. It seems they were there on some kind of imperial business.’

The governor’s eyes narrowed again.

‘Dolfus? That insubordinate bastard has just signed his own death warrant.’ He looked up at Varus. ‘And Rutilius Scaurus has done the same for every man of his detachment. You, given your social rank, and the fact that Scaurus chose not to involve you in his crime, will come back to Claudius’s Colony with us. But every other man of his misbegotten command will be put back in the boats and rowed back to the …’

He turned to Varus’s cousin, whose ostentatious throat-clearing was evidently intended to draw his attention to something. While the governor had been apprising himself of the facts around Scaurus’s apparent decision to ignore the pre-arranged method of escape from the Bructeri, the remainder of the Tungrian detachment had boarded the flagship. Dubnus stood before them, the gore-slathered head of a heavy axe resting on the warship’s otherwise pristine deck, and to either side of him stood three of his pioneers, each of them a head taller than every other man aboard, while behind them stood half a dozen archers with their bows held loosely, hands resting idly on the arrows that remained in their quivers. The prefect stepped forward until he was within two paces of the Tungrian centurion.

‘I’d be grateful if this could be resolved peacefully, Centurion?’

Dubnus nodded, his expression an unchanging mask of contempt directed squarely at Albinus, and the prefect turned back to face his superior with raised eyebrows.

‘It is my estimation, Governor, that these men are somewhat dismayed to hear you suggest that you might consider putting them ashore. So before you consider turning that suggestion into an order, I’d be grateful if you were to consider the alternative.’ The Tungrians watched the men around them with hard, uncompromising eyes that played across Albinus’s bodyguard dismissively, looking around themselves for a genuine threat to face down while the naval prefect continued speaking. ‘An alternative which in simple terms is to pull up the anchor and sail back up river.’

He swivelled back to face Dubnus.

‘Lost men, have you, Centurion?’

The big man nodded slowly at the prefect’s question, which had been asked in a suitably respectful tone, then looked down meaningfully at the liberal quantity of blood and other unidentifiable substances that had been sprayed across his armour during the fight in the forest.

‘Five dead and one who may not walk again, since you ask, Prefect. And one of our officers is missing. Hopefully dead …’

Varus looked at Albinus for a moment before speaking.

‘Soldiers recently out of combat aren’t often feeling reasonable, Governor. I’d say that any attempt to put these men ashore would be likely to result in unpleasantness. And quite possibly even more blood on my deck for some poor bastard to wash off. Perhaps even mine. Perhaps even yours …’

The commander of Albinus’s bodyguard dropped a hand to the hilt of his sword, the dozen men behind him shuffling and setting themselves for combat at the minute but significant movement. Catching the shift in their stances from the corner of his eye, Varus stepped forward and raised a hand, his voice changing from reasonable persuasion to a harsh command in an instant.

‘Stand down, you fools! I don’t care how many of you die, but I do care how many of my men might get caught in the middle of the slaughter you’re intent on starting.’

He turned back to the governor.

‘It’s your choice, Governor. Either we transport these men back to the city or your fool of a guard captain can take on half a dozen bloody-handed men in armour with shields and axes and see how far it gets him?’

Albinus’s face twisted with frustrated anger.

‘I’ll have you both dismissed, you and your cousin, I’ll see you both …’

He spluttered into outraged silence, and Varus filled the gap in a tone that oozed patrician confidence.

‘Broken? Disgraced?’ The prefect laughed at him softly. ‘Of course, that’s something that may be within your power, although without the German woman you’ll have less leverage with the imperial chamberlain than perhaps you’d hoped. But I promise you this, Decimus Clodius Albinus, raise a finger against either of us and you’ll rue the day you choose to make an enemy of a family as well connected and numerous as ours.’ He waved a dismissive hand and turned away, catching his navarchus’s eye. ‘I’ve got a squadron to get turned around and heading back up the river, now that the barbarians seem to have got bored of being used for target practice.’

The return of Qadir’s consciousness was a slow, patchy thing, the dull ache in his head matched by an inability to move his limbs to any greater degree than a twitch. He lay in the shadow of an uprooted tree’s root crater staring up at the forest’s canopy, and the sunlight that was lancing down through the leaves, wincing with each fresh flash of light that found his eyes. As reason returned he realised that he was lying prone on a battlefield, probably in the midst of his enemies, and that, if the tribune’s plan had succeeded, he was very much alone. Lying back against the tangled roots beneath him, he closed his eyes, listening to the forest’s unnatural silence that told him the Bructeri were still in the vicinity even if their advance had probably passed the spot where he lay in pursuit of his fellows.

Raising his head fractionally to look about him, his heart leapt as he realised that his body was cushioned from the root ball’s knobbly surface by a thick carpet of fallen leaves, enough having drifted into the depression left by the tree’s collapse to cover a man, he calculated. Squirming deeper into their soft camouflage, he forced his right arm to move, sweeping a handful of the forest’s detritus across his legs to obscure his knees, then repeated the movement with his left, pushing more handfuls across himself until his chest was invisible to all but the most careful of observers. Wriggling carefully, mindful of the need to minimise the amount of noise he was making, he eased his left arm and shoulder beneath the carpet of leaves, using his right to complete the concealment of his upper body before brushing more across his helmet’s polished iron bowl, leaving only the arm and his face exposed.

A voice spoke, terrifyingly close to hand, and he pushed his right arm slowly beneath the surface of his camouflage and froze, trusting in the leaves’ concealment. If he could avoid capture then his ability to live off the forest’s flora and fauna would enable him to make his return to the safety of the other side of the Rhenus at leisure. A tribesman stepped into view, speaking to another man as he bent to pick something up from the ground at his feet. The Hamian groaned inwardly as he saw his bow in the German’s hands, not only for its loss but for the risk that its presence would betray him, willing himself to immobility as the tribesman looked around him for the body to which the discarded weapon must surely belong. His gaze swept across the centurion’s hiding place in a long, slow appraisal, but, just when Qadir was sure he was discovered, shook his head and turned away.

Allowing the breath to seep slowly from his nostrils with relief, he started involuntarily as the Bructeri whipped back round, tossing the bow aside and levelling his spear as the realisation of what it was he’d been staring at registered in his mind. Raising the weapon above him in a two-handed grip, he stepped forward, his knuckles whitening as he readied himself to thrust the blade down into the helpless Hamian.