Enemy of Rome

VII

Serpentius slipped from the gloom beneath the olive trees as silent as any phantom, his face and clothing caked with mud the colour of a terracotta roof tile. ‘Atticus,’ he growled as he approached Valerius. Octavius and the ten-man patrol waiting in the fading light for his return relaxed in their saddles when they heard the watchword.

Valerius handed him a water skin and the Spaniard washed his mouth out and spat the residue to one side. ‘The ground is as flat as a ten-year-old virgin’s tits from here to the river,’ he reported. ‘But the olive groves and vines give plenty of cover until you’re about two hundred paces away. It looks as if they’ve put all their effort into building the bridge, because a child could cross the ditches around their camp and you could spit through the palisade.’

‘You got that close?’

Serpentius shrugged. ‘There are drainage channels leading to the river, and the camp is between two of them.’ He crouched and the other men huddled around him as he pulled out his knife and cleared a patch of sandy ground. There was just enough light to see the two lines he drew to represent the river, a further two to show the bridge, and a square on the ground to identify the camp. On either side of the camp a line extended to the Athesis at a slight diagonal, diverging as they approached the river bank. He met Valerius’s eye. ‘They have possibly two cohorts of infantry on this side of the bridge, and what looks like a third cohort and a cavalry squadron guarding the far side.’

Valerius felt a flare of exultation at the news that the enemy had split their forces. He tried to create an image of the fort, the bridge and the surrounding terrain. ‘What about guards?’

‘They were there, but they didn’t see me. They didn’t act like people who expect to meet opposition any time soon.’

‘You’re not two thousand men on horses,’ Valerius pointed out.

Serpentius nodded, acknowledging the truth of it. ‘But our Thracian archers should be able to take care of the guards. I can get them close enough, if they leave their horses behind.’

‘They’re holding the bridge until their main force comes up from the south.’ Valerius mentally wove his way through the enemy strategy. ‘That could be tomorrow, the next day, or next week, but if they do cross it gives them a tactical advantage over Primus. With enough men on this side of the river, they could push us back to Aquileia and bottle us up in the hills. If we attacked them it would be on ground they’d chosen and prepared for defence. We might still win, but it would cost a lot of blood.’

Octavius nodded, and his eyes glowed in the falling dusk as he realized what Valerius was thinking. ‘But if we can throw them back across the river …’

‘Burn the bridge and give Valens and Caecina something to think about …’

‘We should hit them at dawn,’ Serpentius advised, ‘when they’re taking their first piss of the day and thinking of lighting their cooking fires.’ His face twisted into a scowl. ‘But this isn’t horse country. I don’t know how close I can get your men before we’re seen.’

Valerius turned to the cavalry officer. ‘How will your men feel about fighting without their horses?’

Octavius grunted. ‘How would you feel about fighting without your armour?’ He sighed. ‘But if it’s the only way to kill them …’

Valerius slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Officers’ conference when we get back to camp. Serpentius will instruct your best scouts on the terrain. We’ll hit them from both sides. They will be like sheep to our wolves.’

The German’s eyes glittered. ‘And like sheep they will be slaughtered.’

In Serpentius, Octavius’s wolves were led by a hunting leopard. When they’d ridden as close as they dared, the Spaniard led the dismounted cavalrymen unerringly through the olive groves in the darkness. The last man in each turma of thirty men was linked to the first in the following turma by a rope, so even with two thousand men none was lost along the way. Despite the relative warmth of the night every trooper wore a cloak to dull the chinking of his armour. The silence wasn’t perfect — Valerius cringed at the rattle of sword belts and the occasional muffled collision and whispered curses that signalled when a man fell or stumbled — but none was so loud that it carried to the Vitellian encampment four hundred paces away. They went three abreast, striding warily because in the pitch dark every step felt as if it would carry them into a ditch. Their eyes never left the shadowy silhouette of the man in front, and the rustle of movement to rear or flank was the only evidence they were part of a larger whole. Even for the veterans among them the still night held a constant threat that made the blood thunder in their ears and their hearts hammer against their ribs. They told themselves it wasn’t fear, only the anticipation of battle, but few among them didn’t pray to the gods of their homeland during the ordeal of that interminable journey. Eventually, a hissed command rippled down the line ordering the halt that confirmed they’d come to the most dangerous part of the march. Behind him, Valerius knew, the picked scouts of the Hispanorum Aravacorum would be leading their turmae east to the drainage ditch closest to the far side of the camp. The success of the attack depended on total concealment. If even one man gave away his position the enemy guards would alert the entire camp. A heart-stopping delay as Serpentius gave his fellow Spaniards of the Aravacorum time to reach their position, then the First was on the move again through the darkness. After a few moments Valerius heard a whispered command to the leading rank of the turma, and word came back that they’d reached the ditch and to take care. Valerius would have continued with them, but a hand came out of the darkness and drew him aside. A harsh voice whispered in his ear. ‘Better that you’re in the centre where you can control things.’

He waited, kneeling by Serpentius’s side as the Spaniard counted the turmae through, warning each commander of the obstacle ahead. Once they were in the ditch they would make their way south towards the river, taking station opposite the temporary Vitellian fort. At a given moment Serpentius drew a junior officer aside from one of the units and told him to stay in position and inform the following cavalrymen about the ditch. When he was certain the man understood his duty he and Valerius joined the front rank of the man’s turma and slipped down the bank until their feet sank into the shallow layer of stinking ooze at the bottom. Thick mud sucked at their sandals like a living thing and released a stench of rotting eggs to clog their nostrils. The channel was only chest deep, and to stay hidden they were forced to walk in a low crouch that quickly made Valerius’s back ache and his calves burn as he wrestled to free his feet with every step. He was grateful when the man ahead stopped and he was able to sink back against the side of the trench to rest with his face to the sky.

His eyes picked out the brightest stars. When he was a child he had sometimes seen the faces of the gods in the stars, but at others they had formed images of sea monsters and ships. Now he could see that beyond the brightest stars there were many lesser ones, and beyond them a sense of still more, of great depth and untold numbers. The effect made him feel an unnatural sense of wonder and smallness. He shrugged off the sensation. Concentrate. Stars, but no moon, thank the gods. By now the men in the far ditch would also be in position.

Careful to remove his helmet to avoid creating a familiar silhouette, he risked a glance through the tangle of rushes and nettles on the lip of the ditch. Perhaps forty paces away a faint shadow was just visible against the luminosity of the night sky, and his mind visualized the raised bank topped by a palisade of stakes. That bank would be patrolled by sentries and fronted by at least two, possibly three ditches. In the enemy commander’s position, Valerius would have dug those ditches deep and filled them with traps, but Serpentius said that wasn’t the case, and Valerius had learned to trust the Spaniard with his life. Few men hated Romans as Serpentius did, but he was happy to serve Valerius because Valerius had saved him from certain death in the arena. The Spaniard had been taken in a reprisal raid after his Asturian mountain tribe had dared to raid one gold convoy too many. Romans like the men he marched with had killed his wife and son and he would never forget that, but revenge must wait until he had repaid his debt to the one who had given him his freedom and his life. A born warrior, and if he was to be believed a prince of his tribe, his fighting skills and preference for pitiless violence had made him an ideal recruit for the arena. Deadly with either sword or spear, his lightning speed and lethal precision soon earned him the name Serpentius — the Snake. Another man might eventually have won his freedom through his victories and popularity, but the Spaniard killed with a cold, murderous intensity that intimidated rather than entertained, and he never hid his contempt for the mob. Eventually, he would have been sacrificed, outnumbered and poorly armed, his death delivered to the crowd in a tawdry, blood-spattered spectacle. Valerius had found him just in time.

The Roman dropped back, doubt sending a shiver through him. Had he made the right decision, or should he have retreated towards Patavium? No. He’d done the only thing possible. If he could stop the Vitellians here it would give Primus time to bring his troops forward into the broad flatlands of Venetia. There, the general could choose his battleground and wait for Valens or Caecina to come to him. For the moment though, Valerius could do nothing but wait. In the surrounding darkness two thousand cavalrymen waited with him, every man alone with his thoughts, his hopes and his fears.

It wasn’t dawn so much as the promise of dawn. The sky transformed in a moment from inky black to darkest blue and, in the next breath, to a slightly fainter shade that silhouetted the stakes of the palisaded parapet and the guards patrolling it against the dying night. A plaintive screech split the fading darkness as if a hunting owl was making its final pass over the grasses bordering the ditch. It was the last thing the sentries would ever hear.

Valerius had posted a hundred of his Thracian archers among the men in the ditch. By now they had already picked their targets among the dozen or so unsuspecting sentries. The moment the screech died in Serpentius’s throat Valerius heard the familiar soft ‘thrum’ of bowstrings. It was followed by the unmistakable hiss of arrows carving the air, and a heartbeat later the smack as the iron-tipped shafts struck and the short-lived cries of men pinned by six or seven arrows apiece. In the same instant a single archer set the pitch-soaked cloth of a fire arrow to the bowl of glowing charcoal hidden beneath his cloak and sent the shaft curving through the sky like a shooting star.

Before the arrow fell to earth the men of the First had hauled themselves from the drainage ditch and were dashing silently towards the temporary fort. Valerius knew the death of the sentries wouldn’t have gone unnoticed, but he gambled that the suddenness of it would cause a moment of confusion rather than an instant call to arms. His heart stuttered as the ground dropped away beneath his feet. The ditch. Mars’ arse. He prayed Serpentius had been right about the ditch and the palisade. Fear gripped his guts like a closed fist. This was the moment. If the defences delayed them even for a few heartbeats the defenders would line the parapet above and their weighted javelins would lance down into the attackers. Those spears would easily punch through the light cavalry shields and the tight-knit auxiliary ring mail that would stop an edge, but not a point. Octavius and his men would be slaughtered and Valerius would be slaughtered with them.

He gritted his teeth and drove the fear aside; if he was going to die, let the fates decide. He was Gaius Valerius Verrens, Hero of Rome and the only survivor of the Temple of Claudius, and this was his attack. It was his plan that had brought these men here to this damp, misty field. Pride would haul him up the slope to die beneath the wooden palisade even if courage didn’t. But Serpentius had been certain and he was proved right. The ditch should have been eight feet deep with a shallow slope on the outward side, to draw an attacker in, but a vertical face on the inner, topped by the earthen bank and the palisade. A virtually unscaleable obstacle the height of three men with defenders at the top. But the enemy had been lazy. The ditch was only half the proper depth, and the earth spoil had been heaped in a soft, easily mounted slope. Above him, Valerius could see gaps in the wooden palisade and already men had climbed to the top of the earthen bank and started to tear at the stakes and rip them free from the loose soil.

The first shouts of alarm rang out and he knew the men of the First Hispanorum Aravacorum would already be carrying their swords into the camp. From somewhere in the distance a trumpet sounded and a torch flared on the far side of the river. Valerius kicked at a four-foot post and squeezed through the gap, knowing Serpentius wouldn’t be far from his side. Already hundreds of men were spilling down the rear of the earthen bank towards the neat rows of eight-man tents. He stepped over a dead man, noting the arrows that pierced his chest and throat. When he saw the dull glimmer of the man’s armour he realized how fortunate he’d been. The sentries were all auxiliaries wearing chain link vests. If they’d been a regular legionary unit wearing the more protective plate, some would certainly have survived to raise the alarm. But they hadn’t and now the killing could begin.

‘Now,’ he roared. ‘Let the bastards hear you.’ The Germans responded with the blood-curling wolf’s howl that was their battle cry and threw themselves at the men spilling from the tents, attempting to fix straps and pull armour over their heads. The Vitellians were unprepared, and men who go into battle unprepared are ripe for the slaughter.

A bearded soldier wearing only a brown tunic appeared from the darkness to Valerius’s left and tried to skewer him with a spear. Valerius swayed to allow the point to slip past his right shoulder and rammed forward with his sword, feeling it pierce soft flesh and solid muscle before the iron jarred against the soldier’s spine. A sharp twist should have torn it from the dying body, but he’d struck too deep. Instead, he had to put his foot on his victim’s chest to lever the blade free, thanking the gods no one was around to kill him for his stupidity.

He tried to gauge the course of the fight from the sounds around him. What he could hear was the noise of a rout. The sound of men exulting in the joy of battle in a guttural, formless tongue; the howls of the eviscerated and the shrieks of the dying; cries for mercy that would go unheard. It all seemed perfect, but something in the background made him uneasy. A headless torso lay nearby, the corpse wearing a set of lorica segmentata plate armour that told Valerius he wasn’t facing only auxiliaries. Not that it made any difference to the German cavalrymen who whooped and laughed as they chased unarmed, half-clothed enemies through the tents. Valerius attempted to restore some order, roaring for Octavius to form a reserve, but the Flavians were driven beyond control by the taste of blood and the ease of the killing. Serpentius appeared at his side like a wraith from the Otherworld, a bloodied sword in his hand.

‘The bastards had better enjoy it while they can,’ the Spaniard said ominously.

‘What?’ Valerius struggled to hear him above the clamour of battle.

‘To the west,’ the former gladiator pointed with his sword. ‘Some of them aren’t running around like headless chickens, and if you don’t do something about it we’ll be the ones with our cocks on the butcher’s block.’