Legionary

Chapter 74

Gallus waved the remaining clutch — barely thirty — of the XI Claudia back from the walls, screaming through the thick smog of battle. The auxiliaries loosed one final volley of rubble onto the Huns as they washed over the crippled battlements and into the courtyard like a black torrent.

‘Fall back — now!’ He rasped again, knocking a rock from the hand of one young legionary and shoving him towards the tiny bunker-room they had set up in the sleeping area.

Arrows spattered against his mail vest, one punctured his shoulder and another ripped across his neck in the tiny unprotected sliver between his intercisa helmet and his vest. The last to leave the rubble-heap of the walls, his skin crawled at the whirring of lassos that grew like a giant swarm of dragonflies behind him. One legionary scudded along the ground, away from the bunker, his ankles trussed in a lasso and his face contorted in a pained scream. Gallus grappled the soldier’s wrist as he slipped past and clung on, but the Hun at the other end used his mount’s power to yank the lad back, before another rode up and speared the legionary in the face. Gallus staggered back on his palms, eyes wide at the sea of riders all now thundering towards him. He turned, scrambled to his feet and ran.

He ducked under a spear thrust from his left and leapt over a sword swipe at his knees, before hammering his fist out to his right, delivering a crunching jab into the nose of another would-be killer. He swivelled, dodging another swoosh of a spear tip, all the time trying to keep one eye on the tiny doorway to the bunker.

‘Cover me!’ He roared.

‘Sir — duck!’ A familiar voice cried in reply. Gallus leapt forward and down underneath the plumbata volley from the men at the bunker entrance, his palms skinning as he skidded forward and into the bunker doorway, pulling himself round and into the corridor inside just in time to miss a volley of spears, which clattered on the doorframe, sending a cloud of mortar up in his wake.

Wincing at the grinding from a broken rib, Gallus scrambled to his feet. ‘Get that doorway sealed!’

Inside the hall, Zosimus and Quadratus leapt to action as he ran past them; grappling on two hefty timber stakes supporting the ceiling they had weakened earlier, the two legionaries heaved them backwards, tearing the support away. Three Hun horsemen had bolted inside, eyes red with the promise of blood, when the corridor roared with collapsing masonry like a furious earthquake, filling up the entrance with solid rock and burying the Huns.

The noise died, and the hall was thick with dust and a shattered group of Legionaries. Gallus made a quick head count; nineteen men left. Zosimus, Quadratus and Avitus still stood — brothers to the last.

An eerie quiet rippled around them, while from outside, the dull roar of the Huns continued unabated. Gallus’ heart slowed. He saw the face of Olivia in his mind’s eye. ‘How long?’ He asked his optios. As he finished, a metallic clank shook the building, and the rubble blockade shifted visibly. A ram. The Romans eyed one another as the noise came again, and again.

Avitus, shining with sweat, looked to his centurion. ‘Moments, sir. If we’re lucky.’