Fortress of Spears (35 page)

‘Wait there, I’ll come down.’

Julius nudged Marcus on the arm.

‘
Fuck!
Get ready, we’re only going to get one chance at this.’

Marcus tensed, understanding his brother officer’s concern. Viewed from the palisade the Tungrians resembled a footsore and hungry remnant of Harn’s warband, but it would be a different matter entirely were the Selgovae leader to get close to them, and a single shout of warning would see the fortress gates closed, and their hopes of storming the Dinpaladyr by surprise ruined in an instant. A man-sized door set in the right-hand gate opened to allow the speaker to step outside the fortress, and Haervui strode across to Harn, his glance flicking across the men standing behind him.

‘We’ve got scouts out on the main road to the south, I’m surprised they didn’t report your approach.’

Harn shrugged, giving no sign of betraying the Romans waiting anxiously behind him.

‘We stuck to the hills, brother. I didn’t trust the roads, there’ll be Romans hunting for us now that the warband is scattered.’

The other man nodded, staring past Harn at the Tungrians with appraising eyes.

‘So we’re all that’s left, my men and yours. We’d better get you inside, then!’ He barked a command at the gate, and the muffled sound of wooden bars being removed from their housings told the waiting soldiers that the way into the fortress would be opened to them within seconds. ‘Come on, then, get moving and get inside! I don’t want the gate open any longer than necessary, there are Romans …’

He stopped in mid-sentence, his attention caught by something unexpected, and Marcus realised that he was staring at their boots. He allowed the blanket to fall from his shoulders as he started running, drawing both swords from their scabbards and sprinting at the two barbarians, knowing that there was no way he could cross the gap before the barbarian leader could shout the command to close the gates. With a whistle of ragged-edged iron slicing the air, Arminius’s axe spun lazily over his shoulder, missing Harn by no more than a foot, and slamming into the barbarian leader’s head with a wet thud as he turned to bellow the alarm to the gatekeepers. The Selgovae leader dropped to the turf in an untidy heap of twitching limbs, and Marcus grasped his chance, angling his run to charge straight at the fortress’s gateway. As the two centuries ran forward the gates began to open with a groan of timbers, spurring Marcus and Arminius to greater speed as a fragile moment of opportunity opened before them. The men on the wall, realising what was happening, started to shout the alarm to the gatekeepers, while a couple of hastily aimed arrows hissed past the Roman to bury their iron heads in the ground behind him.

Marcus was the first man to the massive wooden gate by several paces, at the precise moment when the gatemen responded to the alarmed shouts from the warriors on the walls above them and released the winches at which they were toiling to pull the gates apart. In the split second before the gates started to close he squeezed through the thin gap between them, and found himself in a courtyard occupied by half a dozen men caught in various states of surprise as they dithered in the face of the panicked shouts from the wall above. One of them threw himself at the Roman with a knife in his hand and ran straight on to the spatha’s point as Marcus thrust it into his chest. Arminius had reached the gate, but was unable either to squeeze through after Marcus, or even to stop the massive wooden doors’ ponderous but irresistible closure. Marcus realised that the gateposts were angled slightly inwards, so as to make the gates fall back into the gateway and close upon themselves if the winches that opened them were released, and that he was, for the moment, beyond any assistance from their other side. He could hear the tribune’s bodyguard shouting at the Tungrians to help him as the gates fell shut with a heavy thump, leaving his friend alone inside the fortress.

‘Push, you bastards, before they get the door bars back in place!’

Marcus turned back to face the enemy, realising that half a dozen men were running at the gates with heavy wedges and hammers, seeking to secure the doors against the increasing press of soldiers straining at them from the other side. Kicking the dying man off his spatha’s blade, he twisted away to evade another attacker, who charged in swinging at him wildly with a heavy stave, ducking in under the staff’s reverse swing and stabbing the gladius down into the barbarian’s neck and deep into his chest. He wrenched the short blade free in a shower of blood, leaving the fatally wounded man to stagger away with his eyes rolling up to show their whites. Pausing for a split second to judge the distance to the nearest of the gatekeepers, as the man bent to thrust his wedge between gate and ground, he leapt forward and stabbed the eagle-pommelled gladius through his neck, pinning the hapless man to the gate with the short blade clean through his throat and buried in the gate’s timbers, his blood spraying across the gateway’s roughly paved courtyard. The gatekeepers hesitated for a second, and then broke in the face of their comrade’s last frenzied struggles against the cold iron draining the life from his body, running screaming from the gate into the gloom beyond the courtyard.

Marcus made to kick away the wedge that the dying man had managed to force into the space where the gates met, securing them both closed against the Tungrian soldiers throwing their weight against them, ignoring a poorly aimed stone that crashed to the crude flagstones a foot to his right, but something made him glance to his left. A long blade swept past his face, close enough that he felt its passage through the air. Dancing back with the spatha held blade up and to his right in a cocked stance, ready to either attack or defend, he watched with a sinking heart as the warrior who had so very nearly put a sword into his face advanced slowly towards him, another man behind him taking up the dying gatekeeper’s hammer to batter the wedge more firmly into place. Within seconds the gate would be irretrievably and firmly shut against the Tungrians, and his fate would be sealed – either a quick death or the same protracted end that would be meted out to Harn’s sons in the morning. His mind racing, he barely registered the arrow that flicked past his head close enough to graze his left ear, inflicting a stinging cut on the lobe. Distantly he was aware of the horn blowing on the other side of the gate, the signal for the remainder of the detachment to cross the plain and join the fight.

Taking two shuffling steps forward, he snapped the spatha downwards in a slanting cut to attack the barbarian’s left-hand side, sending the other man skipping backwards with his sword flung wide to his left to deflect the attack. Fighting the sword’s momentum with wrists muscular from years of incessant practice, Marcus altered the sword’s course, sweeping the blade straight down and evading the block, then whipping it back up to his left shoulder before striking again with blinding speed at the swordsman’s extended sword-hand, hacking it off at the elbow and dropping the severed limb to the ground with the long sword still gripped in its nerveless hand. Shouldering the horrified warrior aside, he swung the blade back to his right shoulder and put every ounce of his power into a vicious horizontal cut that buried the long steel blade deep into the second man’s body, dropping him in agony to the courtyard’s flagstones with the blade lodged against his spine and blood fountaining from the horrific wound opened in his side, his hammer falling to the flagstones with a dull clink.

Feeling the spatha’s refusal to come free from the dying barbarian’s body, Marcus released the weapon and spun away to take a firm grip of the gladius’s hilt, only to find it still stuck fast in the gate’s fine-grained oak. A memory flickered into his racing mind, of an afternoon in the hills above Rome on the day after his fourteenth birthday, when he had walked out to meet his tutors in the arts of combat to find no sign of the practice weapons that usually awaited him. The burly former gladiator who had until that day been his teacher with sword and shield had stood waiting for him with a long wooden staff held in one hand, a gentle smile on his face, while the taller, leaner man who was teaching him to fight with his fists and feet sat to one side with a neutral expression. Both men had walked alongside him in his unaccustomed toga the previous day, part of a full turnout of the villa’s household staff to escort the young man to the forum, and witness the ceremonies and sacrifices that celebrated his accession to adulthood, and both had been granted a place at the feast held to mark the occasion the previous evening. Festus bowed slightly, the smile staying fixed on his face despite the show of deference.

‘Fourteen years old, then. Not Master Marcus any more, but Marcus Valerius Aquila, a man. You’ll wear that tunic from now on, and your purple stripes will tell everyone that you’re the son of a senator. A man of influence, a man of breeding … and a target.’ He lifted the staff, tapping one of the tunic’s two crimson stripes where it ran up and over his right shoulder, the dusty iron tip leaving a dirty mark on the garment’s white cloth. ‘This will make you a mark for every thief and bandit that comes across you, and you’ll need to learn to defend yourself or risk having your dignity removed along with your purse.’

He’d shrugged, not seeing the point that his tutor was trying to make and impatient to start the afternoon’s lessons.

‘So teach me. Where are my weapons?’

The gladiator had shaken his head wryly, tossing the iron-shod staff and a helmet to his pupil before turning to pick up his own practice weapons.

‘Not today, Marcus. We have orders from your father that today your training is to change in recognition of your manhood. Until now we’ve concentrated on teaching you how to use a sword, on the techniques of fighting, and practising those disciplines until they have become automatic to you. From today we’re going to teach you how to
fight
.’ He’d settled behind the shield, staring over its rim at his bemused pupil. ‘This is where the classroom ends and the real schooling begins. And here’s your first lesson. I’m a robber, with my sword and shield, and all you have to defend yourself with is that stick. When I say the word “fight” you’d better be ready to put me on my back with my ears ringing, because that’s what I’m going to do to you if you can’t work out how to use the staff quickly enough.’

A dozen heartbeats later Marcus had found himself face down in the practice ground’s sand, his ribs aching and his nose bleeding, turning over to find the gladiator standing over him with the same sad smile and a hand outstretched to help him back to his feet.

‘That wasn’t easy for either of us. You don’t train a boy from the age of seven without gaining some fondness for the little bugger, but you’re not a boy any more, not since you put the ceremonial dagger to that goat’s throat yesterday. Now that I’ve made the point let’s go over that again, and see what you can learn from it. For a start, you’re holding the staff with your hands too wide apart …’

Shaking his head to clear his mind, he stooped and plucked the staff discarded by the dying barbarian from the flagstones, turning to face a trio of men charging at him from the right. Ducking low under the leading warrior’s swinging sword, he hooked the staff behind the man’s ankles and pulled it towards him sharply, wrenching his feet out from under him and sending his attacker crashing heavily to the stone floor with a grunt of expelled breath. The Roman spun away, planting the staff’s flat end squarely between another’s warrior’s eyes with enough force to stun him for a moment, finishing him off by slapping its other end across his throat with enough power to rupture his larynx. With two men on their backs, the first still struggling to get back to his feet after his heavy fall, Marcus focused on the last man left standing. The barbarian hacked down with his sword, cutting the raised staff into two halves and raising the weapon again in preparation for a killing stroke on the unarmed Roman’s head. Marcus saw his opening and took it, stepping in and ramming one of the cloven staff’s two sharp-edged halves up into the underside of the lunging warrior’s jaw, burying the jagged wooden edge deep in his head before turning to smash the other half across the back of the remaining barbarian’s head as he struggled to his knees.

Stooping to scoop up the hammer dropped by the man dying with the spatha buried in his side, he spun to face another warrior as the man screamed incoherently and ran at him with a battleaxe, swinging the heavy hammer up to clash with the axe blade as it swept towards him. The weapons met in a shower of sparks and the combatants spun apart, Marcus crouching low and sliding the hammer’s handle through his hand to extend its swing, smashing its heavy iron head into the axeman’s knee. With a loud crack of breaking bones the barbarian’s leg folded beneath him, sending him headlong with a shriek of agony as the Roman spun another full circle, smashing the hammer’s head into the wedge holding the gates closed and sending it flying across the courtyard.

With the weight of dozens of Tungrians pressing hard at them, the gates opened wide in seconds, admitting a tidal wave of angry soldiers who fanned out into the courtyard looking for someone to fight, leaving the half-dozen men killed or stunned by stones thrown down on to them from the palisade lying inert behind them. Julius shouted orders at the men around him, sending them hurrying to break into the buildings surrounding the courtyard in a search for anything with the potential to act as part of a barricade, intended to keep the inevitable barbarian counter-attack away from the gate long enough for the rest of the detachment to arrive, and turn the struggle into a one-sided contest.

Qadir stepped through the gates with an arrow nocked to his bow, barking a command to his Hamians as he chose his first mark, and sent an iron head up under the ribs of one of the men on the palisade. While Marcus stalked over to retrieve his swords from their resting places, the archers made short work of the men on the wall, leaving half a dozen dead and dying men slumped against the timber and the remainder lifeless across the courtyard’s flagstones. More barbarians lurked in the shadows to either side, unwilling to advance for fear of the Hamians’ arrows. Hearing his name shouted, Marcus turned away from the gate to find Julius pointing his sword at the two narrow roads leading away up the fortress’s steep slope from the gate, bellowing an order at his brother officer.