Fortress of Spears (40 page)

‘Not bad. But not good enough.’

Qadir nodded at his fellow Hamian’s whispered verdict on the dead man’s abilities, leaning close to speak quietly into his ear.

‘Good enough to have got past anyone but us, I’d say. You’d better go and tell the tribune about this while I keep watch for any others. And be careful, there’ll be more of them between us and the cohort.’

His fellow archer jerked his head in silent amusement and vanished into the forest without a sound. Qadir turned and slid back through the trees, settling back into a hiding place within bowshot of the dead scout’s cooling corpse to wait for the dawn, silently mouthing a prayer for his victim’s spirit as he nocked another arrow to his bow and froze into perfect immobility.

Drust roused his warriors before dawn the next morning and gathered their family leaders around him in the grey light of the sun’s waking beneath the horizon. The previous night had been the time to fire his men up with tales of the riches they would win once the Romans were swept away, walking from one campfire to the next to show them his confident, wolfish grin. He stood in the middle of his warband, in the heart of a gathering of the fifty or so men who provided their leadership, thousands of warriors beyond them straining to hear his words.

‘One cohort and a few miserable horse boys aren’t going to hold us up for long, but I want to do this the true Venicone way, in a storm of iron and blood.
Their
blood. I’ve run from them for long enough to crave battle, to swing my hammer into their shield wall and see men shrink away in terror.’ He stared about him, his heart swelling with a savage pride in the host of warriors gathered about him, and raised the hammer over his head in one hand as he turned in a full circle to stare his chieftains in their eyes. ‘Not one of those Roman bastards is to survive to tell the tale of how we tore them limb from limb. Let it be as if they simply marched into the autumn fog and never came out again, as if the very hills wearied of their presence and rose up, crushing them flat without leaving any trace. Let there be no word of their deaths for their families, not even the bitter comfort of knowing that their men are dead, and not enslaved for the rest of their short lives. No more running, my brothers! Let the Romans know what it feels like to run … at least for as long as it takes for us to catch every last one of them and put them to the sword!’

When the cheers had died away he gathered his chieftains about him, speaking softly to avoid being heard beyond their tight ranks.

‘Once we move, we move quickly. Tell your men that any one of them that falls out of the march will be left to face his shame alone. We’ll meet the scouts I sent out last night on the road, and they will guide us into the enemy camp. We must mob the Romans, my brothers, like wolves bringing down a stag. When we find them there can be no hesitation, we must run straight into the fight and overcome their defence with simple weight of numbers. If we respect their shield wall they will hold us at spear’s length all morning, bleeding us from behind its shelter in their usual cowardly way. Run to the fight like wolves, my brothers, sink your teeth into their throats and bring them down in the way that we fight best. Spill blood for me, my brothers!’

The warband ran to the east in the dawn’s growing light in silence, their passage marked only by the jingle and clatter of their weapons, with the king and his twenty-man bodyguard running at their head. Three miles out from their camp, the scouts sent out by Drust the previous night rose from the vegetation at the side of the track that headed east to the Dinpaladyr, and Drust raised his hand to stop the warband’s forward progress. His men panted their steaming breath into the cold morning air while he walked to meet his men.

‘Only three of you?’

‘One of my men went closer to the enemy camp, my lord, but he did not return. We heard nothing, but they must have found him and either killed or captured him.’

Drust nodded unhappily, telling himself that the man’s loss would inform the Romans of nothing more than they already knew, but nevertheless cursing the lost opportunity to learn more about his enemy’s disposition.

‘Go on, then, tell me what you know.’

‘We found the Roman camp by the light of their watch fires, my lord, and stayed within sight of them until dawn, to better see what awaits us. They have camped in a gap in the forest, my lord, with the ground to either side made impassable by trees they have felled with the tops facing outwards, but the ground before their earth walls is clear and flat.’

Drust scowled, his face contorted with the ache in his chest from the effort of the run.

‘So they may be alerted, but no more so than would have been the case anyway. You can lead us to them?’

The scout nodded, pointing down the track with a dirty-nailed finger.

‘Simple enough, my lord. If we run another thousand paces we will come upon the break in the forest on your right, five hundred paces deep and the same wide. The enemy camp occupies the last third of the open space, with flat ground all the way from the track to their earth wall.’

Drust nodded, thinking fast.

‘How high is their wall?’

The other man tapped his leg where the thigh joined with his groin.

‘This high, my lord. A running man could be over it in one jump, if it were not defended.’

‘You read my mind. And when you left it to meet up here, was it defended?’

‘No, my lord. There was noise inside the camp, but no sign of any shields at the wall.’

‘Good. Now walk with me and give me a warning when we are within one hundred paces of the gap in the forest. We will make a quiet march from here, and only run again at the very last moment.’

The warband paced forward in silence, the lead scout walking alongside Drust as they crept down the track towards the Roman camp. With no more than fifty paces left before the point where he judged they should start the attack, the scout stiffened and grasped his master’s arm, pointing at a handful of men who had marched out of the mist to their front, each of them carrying a pair of leather buckets. The group’s leader bore the marks of a man who had recently taken a beating, and he carried himself gingerly, as if every movement were painful. Romans and barbarians alike goggled at each other in a moment of indecision before the soldiers reacted, tossing aside their buckets and turning to flee, screaming out warnings as they ran.

Too late, Drust told himself gleefully, much too late. He sprang forward, bellowing the only command required to unleash his men.

‘
Attack!
’

The men of his bodyguard ran with him, the faster of his warriors passing him within a dozen paces as they sprinted in pursuit of the fleeing Romans. Rounding the edge of the forest gap within which the enemy camp had been constructed, the Venicones stormed down the slight slope towards their objective, every man howling a battle cry as they swept towards the camp’s unmanned defences. Looking beyond the fleeing soldiers, Drust saw a sea of tents across the breadth of the Roman encampment, with smoke rising from dozens of cooking fires, while the few isolated sentries patrolling outside the earth walls took one look and bolted for the illusory safety of the camp’s interior. The warband’s onrushing tide reached the slowest of the soldiers fleeing before them, and the man went down with a spear in the back of his neck, his gurgling scream driving his comrades forward in their headlong flight from the howling warriors behind them.

The desperate soldiers reached their walls, running through the doglegged gap left open to allow unobstructed entry and exit, one of them falling on the mud-slicked grass and crashing to the ground. He was overrun in a second, dying in a flurry of blades as the leading Venicone warriors hurdled the earth wall to either side of the entry with ease and charged on into the Roman camp. Drust slowed a little as he reached the camp’s walls, his eyes narrowing in calculation. There was no ankle-breaker, the square-bottomed trench that the Romans usually dug alongside their earth walls to fell the unwary attacker with broken foot or ankle bones. Driven forward by the sheer mass of his men, he climbed on to the wall to stare across the leather tents that filled the camp, resisting the press of his warriors to keep his balance as they poured over the wall to either side and charged forward into the heart of the enemy position.

‘Cunning
bastards
…’

There, behind the camp’s far wall, there they were. A wall of round shields faced the Venicones across the empty camp. The cooking fires, the few patrolling sentries and even the apparently surprised water carriers, all a ruse to make him believe the Romans were unprepared for his onslaught, and a part of his mind wondered what trick might yet wait for them even as he pointed at the defenders and screamed the only possible command under the circumstances.

‘
Kill them all!
’

‘They’ve bitten off the bait and swallowed it whole.’

The three tribunes lay flat among the trees, looking down the long slope that ran down to the empty camp so painstakingly prepared the previous day. While the two Tungrian cohorts’ pioneer centuries had laboured with their axes to build an impassable abattis of fallen trees to either side of the earth walls, making an assault through the camp towards its rear wall the only way to reach its defenders, the soldiers and tribesmen had painstakingly prepared the ground inside the walls for an influx of unsuspecting Venicone warriors.

Licinius nodded in response to his colleague’s comment.

‘Just a little longer. Let them get properly mired before we show our hand.’

The barbarians stormed over the camp’s outer wall and charged through the cohort’s tents towards the real defence at its rear, a wall fully four feet tall and defended by a thicket of sharpened stakes set to rip the throat out of an unwary attacker.

‘There you go. What a delightful sound …’

Higher notes were piercing the berserk roar of the Venicone onslaught, screams of agony rising as the warriors charging across the empty camp found the other defences readied to greet them. Scaurus’s grimace when the older man had first outlined his plan for the battle had brought a smile to Licinius’s face, and blank incomprehension to Laenas’s.

‘Lilies? That’s a bit classical, colleague.’

Licinius had smiled grimly, holding the fire-blackened stake up for his brother officers to examine more closely.

‘You like the idea, then?’

Scaurus had nodded, taking the sharp sliver of wood and testing the point on the ball of his thumb before handing it to Laenas.

‘Very much so. If it was good enough for the Divine Julius in his conquest of the Gauls, it’s more than good enough for us to use on these animals.’

Judging that the volume of agonised screaming had risen to the level they were waiting for, he raised an eyebrow at Licinius, who nodded his agreement, raising his voice for the centurions waiting behind them to hear.

‘Very well, gentlemen, let’s go and show these tattooed bastards what it means to push Rome too hard.’

All three men climbed to their feet, and behind them the wood that overlooked the decoy camp came alive with the shouting of centurions and the rattle of equipment, as three cohorts stirred from their long wait and came to battle.

Still standing on the false camp’s front wall, Drust watched in dismay as his warriors blundered into the trap waiting for them, As they charged through the sea of tents, intent on bringing the defenders to battle, dozens of men lurched and fell within a few seconds, their screams merging with the war cries of their uninjured comrades in a cacophony of rage, pain and terror. The warriors following them turned to the left and right, seeking a way round the sudden chaos of fallen bodies twisting in the agony of their wounds, and blundered into more of the hidden traps, each hastily dug pit containing several stakes arranged to point in different directions like the petals of a flower.

‘Lilies. Nobody could ever accuse the bastards of failing to learn from their mistakes.’

Drust turned to find Calgus standing alongside him atop the low turf wall. The Selgovae leader shook his head slowly, watching as Drust’s warriors gingerly felt their way across the field of traps laid out in front of the rear wall’s entire length. Even advancing with caution, their progress suddenly reduced to a slow walk, the occasional man still found his foot vanishing into the apparently solid ground and impaled on the fire-hardened wooden stakes concealed in their well-camouflaged pits. Both men watched as the first warriors reached the defended rear wall, snaking around the long stakes protruding from the earth wall’s defence to attack the men waiting for them behind their shields. Calgus shook his head slowly.

‘I’ve seen this before this year. They’ll hide behind that wall and slaughter your men with their spears as they try to climb it. You’ve been fooled, Drust, they’ll hold us off all morning …’

‘So we’ll kill them all by the afternoon. They’re still stuck there behind that wall, and all I have to do is send a force around to their rear and we’ll have them bottled up like rats in a barrel.’ Drust turned to look at Calgus, who was staring at the defenders with an uncertain look in his eye. ‘What?’

The Selgovae king’s frown deepened.

‘There’s something wrong here. The Tungrians have oval shields …’ Drust turned to look again with fresh focus.

‘You’re right, they’re round. Like … those fucking horsemen!’

He spun and looked back up the slope, his jaw dropping at the sight of armed and armoured men pouring from the trees to their rear. Turning back, he pointed at the member of his bodyguard who carried the signal horn used to gain the warband’s attention in battle.

‘
Blow!
’

As the horn’s echoes rang across the field, and the Venicones paused in their struggles to reach the camp’s defended rear wall, Drust raised his hammer high over his head, then pivoted to point the weapon’s heavy iron head up the slope at the trap closing around the warband.

‘Warriors, there is our enemy!
Attack!
’