Enemy of Rome

LI

The battle for the walls of the Castra Praetoria was over almost before it began. As Valerius predicted, Primus sent his siege towers forward to draw the defenders before launching squads of legionaries up the long ladders they carried into the gaps between. When the Praetorians rushed to meet the new threat, the Flavians burst from the towers and overwhelmed the weakened defences. In a siege, the first fissures must be instantly sealed or the cracks become gaping holes that undermine the entire defensive structure. Valerius could feel it happening around him.

A legionary in a red tunic rushed out of the darkness, his shield gone and his sword held too high. Valerius feinted to the right and hammered the hilt of his gladius into the man’s face, battering him so hard he flipped over the parapet and fell to the rocky ground thirty feet below. So much for not killing. He had to kill to survive. And he had to survive for Domitia.

‘They’re over the wall in about five places,’ came Aprilis’s harsh, breathless shout from his left, as he exchanged cuts with another shadowy figure. ‘If we’re going back to the armoury we have to go now.’

Valerius’s left-handed sword found a gap in his opponent’s defence and the point pierced the enemy’s thigh. Not a death wound by any means, and he would have been happy to leave it at that as he retreated towards the stairs. But the injury only seemed to enrage the man and he clambered forward, roaring until Valerius silenced his shout with a backhand cut that almost took his head off.

They leapt down the stairs three at a time and ran towards the armoury through a welter of struggling anonymous figures. One man rushed at Valerius, but he dropped shoulder and with a Serpentiustaught gladiator trick flipped his attacker over his back into the dust, running on with barely a pause. Others had a similar idea and by the time he reached the armoury building the doors had already been barred. For a moment they were trapped at the entrance with Flavian troops converging on them from all sides, but someone inside must have spied the silver breastplate because the door suddenly opened and they were dragged inside.

‘We thought you were already dead, centurion,’ a tired voice said, and Aprilis clasped hands with another survivor from his century. ‘We’ve done what we can, but perhaps you’d like to inspect our dispositions, sir.’

Aprilis nodded, but he needed a moment to recover his breath before he began. Like the rest of the Castra Praetoria, the armoury was solidly built of red brick with only a few barred windows; ideal for all-round defence. Valerius knew this was only a small part of it. They stood in a long corridor with doors on either side that opened on to narrow storerooms. A set of stairs led to the upper storey, and beyond them was another door that would lead to the open central courtyard where the armourers repaired Praetorian weapons and equipment on their forges. Men bustled about carrying benches and arms racks, turning every room into a mini-fortress, blocking the barred windows and using the torn-off doors to create barricades.

Aprilis looked over the preparations with quiet satisfaction, but few illusions. ‘We’ll keep them out for as long as we can,’ he nodded. ‘Once they get inside they’ll have to take the place room by room and we’ll make them pay.’

‘Has this place been provisioned?’ Valerius asked. Aprilis’s expression told its own story even before he replied with a bark of laughter.

‘Do you think we’re going to survive long enough to starve?’

‘Water?’ Valerius remembered the terrible trial of thirst in the Temple of Claudius as the Iceni rebels had tried to burn their way in.

‘We have ample,’ the other Praetorian assured him. ‘We filled every pot and amphora we could lay our hands on from the well in the courtyard before we closed it off.’

‘Open the door or we’ll burn you out.’ The sudden demand was accompanied by a thunderous hammering and answered by a string of obscene suggestions. Aprilis calmly ignored the order. The door would take at least an hour to burn through and with a pair of the armourers’ anvils behind it he would have plenty of time to react to the battering ram, when they eventually found one. For now, all they could do was wait.

Valerius left him talking quietly with the men who would defend the corridor and asked a passing soldier if any of the armourers were still in the building.

‘Old Vulcan over there will help you out.’ He pointed to a big man slumped at the end of the corridor using a whetstone to put an edge on a gladius.

‘I need a shield.’

Vulcan, whose given name was Septimus, looked up at the man towering over him, his eyes taking in the battle scars that marked a veteran. But they were all veterans here. ‘Plenty around,’ he shrugged. ‘Help yourself.’

‘A special shield.’ Valerius showed him the stump of his hand. ‘One that I can strap on to this.’

Vulcan’s eyes displayed new interest. ‘Albanus,’ he roared to one of the men barricading the nearest side room. ‘Bring me one of those new scuta we were keeping for the ceremonials.’ He winked at Valerius. ‘Probably won’t be needing them now.’ He pulled a piece of cord from his tunic and Valerius saw it had been marked in short sections so it could be used as a measure. ‘Let’s see your arm.’

Valerius held it out and the armourer wrapped the string around the bicep and again just above the mottled stump. He nodded to himself. ‘Easy. A couple of belts and a few rivets.’

A man handed the armourer a scutum, its face unpainted bare ash. ‘I’ll need an hour. Can you wait that long?’

‘That would depend on our guests.’ Valerius met his grin and Vulcan laughed and disappeared into one of the rooms, barking at Praetorians to get out of his way.

The one-handed Roman found a place to sit at the bottom of the stairs. As he listened to the muted cries and shouts beyond the door he closed his eyes and thought back to the final hours of the Temple of Claudius. In the confined space of the temple cella the atmosphere had been thick with the distinctive acrid scent of extreme fear and the stink of unwashed bodies. Most of those trapped by Boudicca’s rebels were tradesmen and their families, estate owners who had missed the evacuation, and the temple’s priests. Here it was different. The men defending the Castra’s armoury had all expected to be dead by now. Every man had resigned himself to his fate the moment he took the decision to stay with his comrades. The fear was there — they knew that beyond these protective walls fellow Praetorians were being hunted through the barracks and slaughtered — and the sweat of their earlier exertions, but Valerius was heartened by the quiet calm apparent in the way they went about their business. What seemed like moments later a rough hand shook him and he realized he must have fallen asleep. He looked up into a soot-pitted face.

‘Better be quick — I think our friends are getting impatient.’ Vulcan showed him the rear of the shield with its two partially buckled straps just above the normal grip. ‘Just slip your arm through there.’ Valerius did as he was urged and thick fingers pulled the straps tight and fixed the buckles in place. Vulcan saw him wince and grinned. ‘It’s not going to be very comfortable, but it should do the job for a while.’

‘I don’t expect to be wearing it for long.’ The smile on Valerius’s face froze as his words were punctuated by the first hammer blow of a battering ram on the armoury door. He met Vulcan’s eyes and the big man’s blackened features split into a wry grin. ‘A fucking silly place to die, eh?’ The armourer darted a last frown at the door as the ram crashed home again before returning to his sword.

Left alone, the sound of the ram brought back the fate of the men and women trapped in the Temple of Jupiter and Valerius was almost overwhelmed by a wave of regret. He would never see Domitia’s face again, feel the softness of her skin or taste the sweetness of her mouth. He dragged the back of his left hand across his dry lips, nipping the flesh between his teeth to drive the feeling away. Serpentius had vowed to defend her to his last breath, and that must be enough for Valerius. Still, a part of him wished the Spaniard were here, for if any man could have found a way out of this death trap it would have been Serpentius.

‘Must be a big bastard,’ he heard Aprilis mutter as the ram struck again. ‘They didn’t even try to weaken the door with fire first. Steady, lads,’ he said to the men crammed into the narrow passageway. The front rank knelt with their spears angled up towards the doorway at groin height and Valerius pitied the first men through the door because those lethal pyramid-shaped points would thrust beneath a shield and condemn them to a terrible, lingering death. Behind the kneeling men Aprilis had placed two further lines of spearmen with their pila ready to throw. Any of the initial javelins that killed an enemy would be a bonus; his best hope was that they’d force the owners to abandon their shields and expose them to the second volley.

The next strike splintered the door and suddenly Valerius had no more time to think as a horde of howling figures threw themselves into the gap, their yells becoming all the shriller as Aprilis’s spears found their mark. In a heartbeat everything was a chaos of men ramming their shields at each other in the confined space and hacking at any exposed flesh, accompanied by the familiar disbelieving shrieks of the newly eviscerated. A man reeled past Valerius with his lower jaw hanging by a white shard of bone, the exposed tongue enormous below the dreadful staring eyes. Another slipped and was instantly pinned by a Flavian spear, leaving Valerius in the front rank. Swords hammered at his newly acquired shield and something hit his helmet with a clatter. The desperate fight reminded him of a seagoing slaughter to win a pirate galley, and he kept half an eye for the floor and the man who would stab a sword up into his vitals from below.

‘Hold the line and take a step back,’ Aprilis snarled throatily. Valerius followed the order, careful to maintain station with his neighbour and feeling the pressure momentarily relax in front of him. ‘Again. Now!’ As the defenders backed away past the first pair of doorways a flight of javelins swept from right and left to catch the attackers unawares, piercing neck and throat and bringing the assault to a stop for a precious moment.

‘Back to the stairs!’ Aprilis took advantage of the momentary pause. Valerius didn’t wait for a second invitation, sprinting to clamber up between the fresh men waiting to resume the defence. Two or three of Aprilis’s troopers were too slow, or perhaps they’d been injured, for their screams echoed in the cramped space as the blood-maddened attackers hacked them to bloody ruin. When they reached the narrow stairway the Flavians were met by a solid wall of shields two wide and four high, and from above a hail of spears arced down, hurled by Praetorians blessed with an inexhaustible supply. But this mixture of men from four or five legions who had converged on the armoury from all sides of the camp were undaunted by casualties. When one fell another took his place, clawing at the defenders’ shields, hauling them apart to leave their holders exposed to the spears and swords of the Flavians. With a roar of triumph the first pair of defenders were torn from their places and thrown to the blades behind to be finished off. Then the process began again three steps higher and still the unrelenting hail of spears punched men back, only for them to be replaced again and again. A second pair of shields fell, and a moment later the third, and now a whole host of Flavians launched themselves up the blood-slick stairway, forcing the last shield-bearers on to the spearmen behind. At the back of the room, Valerius recovered his breath among the little band of defenders clustered around Aprilis.

He heard the Praetorian reciting a prayer, and to his surprise the words were those of the Christian cult. Aprilis saw his look and smiled wryly, as if to say it didn’t matter now. Valerius closed his eyes for a second and muttered a prayer of his own, trying to fix Domitia’s face in his mind. Not long. Aprilis waited until the attackers were pressing the spearmen. ‘Now!’ He hurled his exhausted men into the fray in a compact wedge, aiming his point of attack to drive the attackers back on to the stairs. Valerius knew even before they struck that they were too few, and the mass of Flavians absorbed the counter-attack as dry soil absorbs a shower of rain. Snarling faces and flashing swords surrounded him and he had to use all his strength and skill just to stay alive. At the edge of his vision he saw Vulcan fall, his body pierced by a hurled javelin. Something smashed into the back of his helmet and he fell to his knees. Screaming defiance he just managed to bring his sword round to counter a slashing blow that would have taken his head off before someone kicked him in the face with an iron-shod caliga. The blow knocked him backwards with blood in his mouth and at least one tooth gone. Worse, he’d lost his sword. With the last of his strength he managed to drag the shield to protect his body from the blades already seeking him out. He had a fleeting glimpse of Aprilis’s agonized face as he was hauled across the wooden floor with swords hacking at his torso before the shield above him began to splinter and he screamed as something caught him a glancing blow on the knee. Somehow he thrust himself up, only to be pushed back, staggering against the wall with the remains of the shield ripped away. He raised his arms in a futile bid to keep the swords at bay.

‘No!’ A snarling centurion thrust himself between Valerius and the blades that sought him out. The one-handed Roman froze in disbelief, his breath a searing pain his chest, and his heart caught between beats. Gaius Brocchus turned with an almost serene smile of triumph. ‘No quick death for this man,’ he ordered his bemused legionaries. ‘A spy and a traitor, isn’t it, tribune? A stinking coward who played both sides against the middle.’ He grinned, showing the sharpened teeth, and Valerius shuddered. ‘Somebody’s going to want you to burn, pretty boy, and old Gaius is going to be there to watch.’