Hero of Rome

III

The barrage paused and for a few seconds the soft, false light of the grey predawn was accompanied by an unearthly calm, the serenity broken only by the crackle of burning wood from the hilltop. At the head of his men, Valerius closed his eyes and tried to read the sounds. At first, nothing. But a moment later he heard the muted growl he knew was the start of the auxiliary attack. He kept his eyes shut a little longer, enjoying a final moment of peace, and when he opened them a fire arrow arched through the sky like a shooting star.

Now!

He led the legionaries at the trot, eight abreast in their centuries. The legate had placed a screen of archers to the right and left of the assault point and, as the spearhead of the attack passed them, the bowmen loosed a flight of arrows that harvested the defenders from the first of the three ramparts. Valerius had spent the two days preparing for the attack, examining every inch of the eastern slope, and he had noted something that gnawed like a maggot at his brain. The most obvious route to the gate had a very clear entrance, but no apparent exit. Of course, the way out could be hidden, a tunnel perhaps, but that, even in a fortress of this size, would be the expenditure of enormous effort for very little gain. The longer he looked at it, the less he liked it. The anomaly might have a perfectly innocent explanation but, in Valerius’s experience, nothing in war was innocent. Now he made his choice, knowing he was gambling his soldiers’ lives on the result. He led his men swiftly past the first opening and on to a sloping platform running parallel with the fortress walls, and when it took a sharp uphill turn he followed it. The route brought the first legionaries within range of spears hurled from the palisade that topped the second rampart. ‘Form testudo!’ At the order, each man in the first century locked his shield above his head with those of the man next to him. Only those in the front and rear ranks and the men on the edges of the formation kept their shields vertical. The result was a solid carapace which made the eighty men inside the testudo invulnerable to attack from above. Behind him, Valerius knew each century in the attacking cohorts would be following his example. Now he was operating on pure instinct, following the well-worn path upwards, and praying the Silurians had placed no more false exits or hidden traps; a dozen knee-deep pits could shatter a testudo in less time than it took to draw his sword. No. A fortress this size must be a place of commerce as well as refuge, and commerce meant ease of access. Whoever had designed the defences would have been forced to make that compromise. His chest was heaving, his arm ached from holding the heavy shield above his head and the breath rasped in his throat. Sweat blinded his eyes in the little oven of his iron helmet, with the big cheek flaps that restricted his vision but wouldn’t save him from a blade to his throat. The clatter of spears and arrows against the outer surface of the testudo was almost constant now, like a heavy shower of rain. Death was everywhere around him but he had never felt more alive.

He thought of his father, mouldering in semi-retirement on the country estate in the pretty, wooded valley close to Fidenae and making his plans to revive the family’s political fortunes; plans which had Valerius at their very heart. Next year he would have to return to resume his legal career, touting for minor cases outside the Basilica Julia; snapping up the crumbs left by brighter minds. It wasn’t that he disliked the law; to sit and listen to one of the great practitioners wield logic and rhetoric the way a champion retiarius wielded net and trident was one of life’s pleasures. But to stand up before a court didn’t light a fire in his belly the way he knew it must do in a Cicero or a Seneca. Only combat did that, and — The gate! They had reached the gate!

‘Ram to the front.’ The missiles had destroyed the gate structure beyond recognition, but the Britons had used the smashed timbers to form a makeshift barrier. It wouldn’t take long to clear, though it would delay the assault, and he’d seen what happened when attacks became delayed. The battering ram was with the second century, but the legions practised re-forming the testudo under fire until it was almost habit, and the big rectangular shields quickly formed a tunnel that allowed the ram squad forward. Most legionaries were small men, iron tough but more gristle than muscle. Compared with them, the soldiers who wielded the legion’s battering ram were broad-chested giants; they had to be to handle the specially reinforced oak trunk that was their stock-in-trade. Still it took too long and he heard the inevitable crashes and screams that told him the Britons were making good use of the boulders the catapults had hurled at them. Now they were dropping those stones, some of them weighing as much as a small ox, on to the testudines following him. The defences were sure against light weapons, but a big boulder would smash a gaping hole in the shields, and then the spears and arrows could seek out the soldiers below. The testudo would reunite quickly enough but, behind him, he knew men were dying.

At last! He stepped sharply aside to allow the ram to do its work, the massive head of carved stone surging forward with the strength of twenty men behind it to smash the pathetic blockage aside. One. Two. Three. Yes, three, that would do it. ‘First cohort, with me. For Rome!’

As he turned to lead the way through the breach in the British defences, he glimpsed a line of snarling moustached faces from the gap between his helmet’s cheek pieces. A shower of burning fat thrown from his left spattered his legs and he screamed a curse. Now he was inside the fortress and his men filed past him to make the line and he stopped thinking and allowed training to take over.

‘Forward.’

The curve-edged shields of the leading cohort’s first and second centuries locked in one solid defensive wall, and the weight of the attack was multiplied by the addition of two further lines. At the far right of the first line Valerius tightened his fist on the wooden grip at the rear of the shield boss, bunched his muscles in the arm straps and butted the edge against that of the man to his left. He knew every man to his rear would be holding his shield aloft to protect the front line from spears and arrows fired by the defenders. The Romans had their own spear, the pilum, a four-foot shaft of ash tipped with an arm’s length of tempered iron. But no one carried one today, because they were long, heavy and awkward and would only have slowed the attack, creating more casualties than they caused. This was a day for swords.

The momentum of the initial breakthrough had pushed the defenders back a dozen paces but now they counterattacked in a single howling mass four or five hundred strong. Valerius flinched as an arrow nicked his helmet an inch above his right eye and he braced himself for the impact of the charge, his eyes searching the barbarian ranks for the man who wanted to kill him. There was always one: the single individual who hungered for your blood more than any other; who saw in your face everything he hated most in this world. It took a moment, because his eye naturally fell upon the British champions, the big men made even taller by hair lime-starched into spikes and horns who were the pick of their tribe and carried long iron swords or broad-bladed ash spears. They fought bare-chested to prove their courage and decorated their skin with blue tattoos that told the story of their heritage and their bravery in battle.

But the man who wished to kill him was no champion. Short, with lank, dirty-blond hair and a slight frame from which hung a filthy, ragged shirt, he looked almost harmless in that warrior throng because he didn’t carry a sword or a spear, only a curved dagger with an edge that gleamed blue from constant union with the whetstone. But his eyes told a different story. They burned with an enmity beyond hatred: a mindless promise of violent, painful death. All this Valerius noted in the time it took his enemy to cover a single pace. He knew that the man’s lack of height could be an advantage in this kind of fight, and it made him doubly dangerous. For the battle would be fought above the belly and he would come in low, under the big shield, and that gleaming blade would seek out the Roman’s unprotected genitals or try to hamstring him. Valerius experienced a chill in his lower guts. Yes, it would be the balls. The haunted eyes told of a loss beyond bearing. A loss that could only be avenged by inflicting horror upon its perpetrators.

A mighty crash announced that the first Britons had collided with the centre of the Roman shield wall. He felt the impact shiver along the line, bringing with it a roll like thunder as hundreds of swords began hammering at the painted oak shields, as if by obliterating the Twentieth’s emblem of a charging boar they were obliterating the men themselves. Above the rim of his shield he watched his enemy come with the extreme left of the British attack. To the man’s right were warriors bigger and better armed, but still Valerius’s instinct told him this was where the true danger lay. When the burning eyes disappeared below the level of the shield he counted the heartbeats: one, he would have covered another pace; two, he was crouching, preparing to roll under the shield and stab upward, the blade seeking the big artery in the groin; three. With the strength of his shoulder behind it, Valerius smashed his shield forward and down so that the rounded iron boss struck the charging Briton above the bridge of the nose, smashing flesh to instant pulp, the impact forcing his eyeballs from their sockets and splintering skull bone deep into the brain. The blow numbed Valerius’s left arm, but as it was struck his right was already moving, a lightning flick of the gladius that ripped out his enemy’s throat in a spray of scarlet. He felt the flame of exultation explode within him as it always did when he took a life and he tried to still it because he believed the savage, atavistic joy shamed him. He would never reveal or try to explain that feeling beyond the brotherhood of the battlefield. Only those who had experienced it could understand that most elemental of human reactions to the most basic of human experiences: to survive and to kill. The inner fire flared and was gone, replaced in an instant by cold calculation. From his left, a Silurian spear sought out the weak point below his armour. He brushed it aside with the strengthened edge of the scutum and, snarling defiance, he was back in line, the shield rim hooking behind his neighbour’s.

With the breath rasping in his chest, he took time to listen, attempting to gauge the battle and noticing for the first time the throat-filling stink from the burning huts and granaries, the rubbish pits and animal dung and human excrement that lay in haphazard piles all around. The main force of the British attack had struck the middle of the Roman line, and it was here that the howls of impotent rage and screams of the maimed and dying were centred. For the moment, Valerius was happy that his legionaries could contain the enemy. Crespo could not be far away.

He heard the call he had been waiting for. ‘Cornicen!’ The trumpeter who had been hovering behind the line appeared at his shoulder. Valerius spoke to the man on his left side, shouting to be certain he was heard above the clamour of battle. ‘On me, wheel right ten at the signal.’ He gave time for the order to be passed along the wall of shields. ‘Sound the command.’ The trumpeter pursed his lips and hesitated for a second before the circular horn blasted out its message.

The manoeuvre Valerius had ordered was complicated and potentially dangerous, and he would only have asked it of men he trusted with his life. It meant the entire Roman line would pivot on his position like a door opening. Simple for the legionary two or three along from his commander who only had to move forward half a step, but not for the unfortunate soldier on the far left of the line who would have to put his shoulder to his shield and smash his way ten paces forward, aided by the power of the two men at his back, and all without losing formation. But ten paces could be the difference between defeat and victory.

Because through the gap — if he had timed it correctly — Crespo was now charging with his centuries in wedge formation. Arrowheaded human battering rams that would hammer their way through the enemy ranks, utterly destroying their cohesion, and then turn and attack them from the rear.

An increase in the intensity of the battle told him he’d been right. He stepped back and allowed the man behind him to take his place in the line. A few yards away, the ruins of a shattered roundhouse gave him a vantage point from which he could view the entire length of the British fort. Studying the smoke-wreathed hilltop, he realized that Crespo had added a refinement to his plan, or perhaps deliberately disobeyed orders. Two of his eighty-man wedges had punched all the way through to the west gate, and from there the auxiliaries of the diversionary attack were now pouring into the fort, killing as they came and not distinguishing between fighters and the women and children the legate had ordered taken captive.

Now, the Britons Valerius had faced were trapped; hundreds of warriors corralled between the two legionary forces and the fortress wall. Some attempted to escape by climbing the rampart, but there would be no refuge from the bowmen posted at the base of the hill. Sharp cries rang out from within the midst of those remaining, and Valerius knew they were calling for mercy. But there would be no mercy. Only the long slumber of the Roman peace.

A Roman legion was a killing machine and now he watched that machine at work. No amount of Silurian courage would change the outcome. In the confined space, the long, curved swords of the Britons had little or no room to swing and when they did they expended their force against the three layers of hardwood that made up a legionary shield. The gladius was different. Jabbing between gaps in the shield wall, the short, razor-edged swords ripped into belly and groin then twisted free, creating a gaping wound that left a man praying for death. Then the big shields smashed forward and the swords flicked again. The legionaries of the First cohort worked with a studied concentration that made no distinction between old or young, brave or fearful. The Celts were beasts to be slaughtered. At first, Valerius was fascinated by this utterly disciplined lack of humanity, the relentless rhythm of death which eventually left the prospective victims slack-jawed with horror and sapped of the will even to defend themselves. But the fascination faded as the individual details of the butchery burned themselves on to the surface of his brain. The moment he felt some fragile barrier in his mind threaten to crumble he turned and walked away through the chaos of victory.

Surviving women and children huddled for protection amongst the wreckage of the wattle-and-daub huts by the south wall. Close by, the bodies of the elders who had stood with them only a few moments earlier still twitched in an untidy heap. Valerius studied the prisoners, but none would meet his eye. He was reminded of cattle marked for slaughter, disturbed by the smell of blood from those who had gone before but helpless to escape their fate. Meanwhile, fighting continued all around him: small skirmishes involving groups of warriors who had defended the west gate; individual Britons fleeing for their lives from a dozen legionaries still lost in the frenzy of battle. The air was filled with screams. But one scream was different.

It was a child’s scream of pure terror.

He knew he should walk away: what was another child’s life in this slaughterhouse? But the scream was repeated and he realized it came from one of the few surviving huts less than twenty paces away. Two legionaries stood in the doorway with their backs towards him beside the crumpled body of a woman in a torn grey dress. He dropped his shield against the fence of a nearby animal enclosure and advanced to place the point of his gladius below the closer man’s ear. The legionary froze.

‘First rule of war, soldier,’ Valerius said quietly. ‘If you don’t keep your mind on the job, you get yourself killed.’

The second legionary turned with a nervous grin. He looked towards the first soldier questioningly, but Valerius shook his head and maintained just enough pressure on the sword to keep him honest.

‘Nothing in there you’d want to see, sir.’

‘I think I should decide that for myself, soldier. What century are you?’

‘Third of the Second, sir. We-’

A muffled cry of distress interrupted his words and Valerius pushed past him and stepped into the hut. At first he could see nothing in the darkness, but as his eyes acclimatized to the gloom he heard a rhythmic shuffling and traced it to a white blur at the rear of the hut. On closer inspection the blur was identified as a pair of male buttocks heaving and thrusting at something below it. He gave the buttocks a sharp kick and the heaving stopped. The man turned his head and stared up at him. The pale eyes were no longer expressionless. They could have been those of the Briton Valerius had killed earlier. The only difference was that in Crespo’s the killing rage was more controlled.

‘Go and find your own whore.’ The centurion’s voice was slurred with lust and contained a clear warning. He turned contemptuously away and began deliberately thrusting his hips back and forth in a brutal, almost violent motion. Over his shoulder Valerius could see two terrified, pain-filled eyes. He remembered the screams and wondered why the girl — she could be no more than twelve years old — now stayed silent. Then Crespo moved again and he understood. As he held his victim down with one hand, with the other the centurion had forced a dagger between the girl’s lips, the point at the back of her throat. He only had to shift his weight and she would be dead. Valerius almost gagged on the wave of disgust that swept through him. He turned as if to walk away, then spun and with all his strength swung a kick that took Crespo on the side of the skull, pitching him clear off the girl and catapulting the dagger from his hand.

The kick would have knocked a lesser man senseless. Crespo only shook his head and launched himself across the hut. Valerius was able to half sidestep the charge, but Crespo caught him with just enough force to throw him off balance and send his own sword flying. A fist landed a glancing blow below Valerius’s left cheek and he felt fingers clawing for his eyes. He retaliated with a punch of his own that took the centurion square on the chin and knocked him backwards, so he stumbled and almost fell. When he stooped to the floor Valerius thought he had stunned or disabled him, but Crespo straightened with the knife glittering in his right hand.

The Sicilian didn’t hesitate. He came in fast, holding the dagger low, point upwards, and feinting right and left, but Valerius knew he would go for the soft flesh of the lower belly just below the armour. He had no doubt that Crespo wanted to kill him, but he felt no fear at the sight of the blade. It was what made him a soldier. He knew instinctively he was quicker than his opponent. He allowed the centurion to come in close before twisting his body so that the thrust slid down his left side. The blade scored his hip and he gasped at the lightning streak of pain, but the sacrifice had been worthwhile. As he pivoted he grasped Crespo’s knife arm with both hands and used the man’s momentum to swing him against the centre post of the hut with a force that shook the whole structure. The centurion’s unprotected face took most of the impact and he reeled back spitting blood and teeth, with one eye already swelling closed. Still he retained the strength to stagger towards Valerius. Would the man never give up? The tribune allowed Crespo to take two tottering paces then stepped forward and smashed the reinforced cross-brace of his helmet into the centurion’s forehead, dropping him like a poleaxed bull.

Valerius picked up his sword and stood over the prone body. He remembered the feeling of power when he had killed the Briton and fought back the urge to experience it again. It would be neater. Crespo was capable of anything. He would never forgive or forget the disgrace of a defeat. But the moment passed quickly and all Valerius felt was a curious emptiness.

A sob attracted his attention and he turned to see the girl standing naked against the rear wall of the hut with one hand to her mouth and the other covering her sex. Fresh blood stained her inner thighs and Valerius had to look away. ‘You!’ he snapped to the two men staring wide eyed from the doorway. ‘Cover her up and put her with the rest.’ He took a last sickened look at the figure on the floor, noisily snoring through a broken nose. ‘When he wakes up tell him to report to the legate.’