Steam Legion (32 page)

“Tell Janusi to demand their surrender,” Gordian ordered.

“Yes, Tribunus!” one of the standard-bearers replied, changing his flags quickly before lifting the standard again.

The signal horn blew again, and in a few moments, he could see Janusi bring his maniples to a stop relative to the enemy’s newly formed real line. A Legion standard-bearer and messenger stepped out in front of the maniple and crossed about halfway between the lines to wait for the answer.

“There’s a job I’m glad I never pulled,” his Adjutant said.

Gordian didn’t blame him. Delivering demands of surrender to an enemy still capable of putting up a fight was not a safe occupation. If the enemy refused the demand, it was practically traditional that they at least
attempt
to kill the messenger.

“Well, they can’t win now,” Gordian said calmly as he settled his horse, the animal becoming a little edgy, as he was well aware of what was most likely about to happen. “We just have to wait and see if they realize that.”

****

A horn’s piercing ring rose up over the fighting, causing men to shift and look around. Dyna broke away from the fighting, eyes casting about. She hadn’t ordered the signal, and while it seemed like it had come from the enemy lines, they appeared as confused as she was.

The fighting slowed as others did the same as her, so more and more people were now standing around just a few feet from men they had been trying to kill just seconds earlier.

“My Lady!”

Dyna turned to see a scout running over. “What is it, Servus?”

“The Twenty-Second, my Lady!” he told her. “They just marched up to the rear of the enemy line and demanded their surrender!”

“It’s about damned
time
they got back!” Dyna snarled, mostly in relief, but more than a little of her frustrations coming to the forefront as well. The Twenty-Second Legion should have been within a march of Alexandria, not traipsing all over the northwestern regions of the Empire.

“My Lady, get control of our troops.”

“What?” Dyna asked, looking over to where Cassius was standing behind her.

“Don’t let our men relax,” Cassius urged, knowing that a lot of the men had been recruited directly by her. “Until they give up their weapons, the enemy forces just became far more dangerous since they’ve been cornered. Keep our line firm.”

Dyna swallowed, but nodded. “Go, do what you can. I’ll do the same.”

Cassius saluted quickly and headed up the line, snarling and occasionally hitting men who seemed to be slacking off. Dyna went the other direction, and while she avoided actually hitting anyone, men who were dropping their guard under her eyes found that her tongue was sharper than the Centurion’s blade by far.

Here and there, the fighting was still ongoing, and Dyna was struck by a bizarre surreal feeling as she strode past Zealots standing next to Egyptians, both sides looking more confused than hostile, just to get to other pairs who were trying to kill one another.

She paused to run a Zealot through and push one of her men back into line, breaking the fight up cleanly, growling at him, “Stand ready. The Legion is here, but this fight may not be done yet.”

He nodded. “Y…yes, my Lady!”

Between her and Cassius, they got the line back into formation, actually putting a little more discipline into the situation than had been there since the majority of the active Legion had been killed. They couldn’t see what was going on beyond the enemy line facing them, nor did they have communications with the Twenty-Second, so the tension rose with every passing moment as they waited for a sign, any sign, of what was to come.

****

It was like a cold hand on his heart, but there seemed nothing he could do.

They should not be here.
He was certain of that. The last reports on the Legion activity and their orders had them far to the northeast, assigned to clearing the trade routes and retaking the harbor at Caesarea. Either that had been misinformation intended to put him in a position precisely like this, or the Legion Commander was disobeying his orders.

Either way, it hardly mattered now.

The Commander of the Zealot forces did consider surrender, but only for a brief moment. He knew what the Romans would do to him and his officers, and had no intention of dying like that. Better to die fighting God’s enemies than to go out like a meek calf to the slaughter, after all.

“Stand strong!” he ordered. “It is not God’s will that we fail here. Any that fall will be rewarded by His own hand!”

He could hear his officers taking up the call, shoring up the men’s discipline as they repeated his orders. He ignored them for the moment, taking what time he could to evaluate the situation.

“Commander, what do we do?”

He was silent, ignoring the question, eyes flicking from the Legion banners behind him to the ragged line to the front.

“Commander!”

“Get our forces headed north again,” he ordered. “We’ll kill the rest of the nonbelievers ahead of us and retreat to the coast.”

“But, the Legion!?”

“We can outrun them!” he snarled, pushing the man aside. “Go!”

“What about the messenger?”

That brought him up short for a moment, then the Commander shook his head. “Leave him. The longer they wonder at what we’re doing, the better.”

****

The first sign of what was to come was not one Dyna had wanted to see.

“They’re coming through us,” she said quietly.

Cassius let out a long breath, but could only confirm her assessment. “That they are, my Lady.”

They were silent for a moment, then both began to give orders.

Cassius grabbed the closest man he could. “Get the archers to fall back and to the flanks. They’re to take what shots they can, as possible. Just remind them that if they shoot me or mine, they’d better kill me.”

The man nodded jerkily then ran off when Cassius let him go.

“Lock shields!” Dyan growled, kicking a battered scutem off the ground and grabbing it with her free hand. “Form the phalanx!”

Men with shields fell to order immediately; others took a moment to grab one up off the ground. They formed a line across the road from the bank of the river to the scrub and brush on the other side, three men deep. Standing in the bloody mud and with bodies from ankle-deep to as high as their knees, they brought their shields up and locked them together.

“Rear rank!” Dyna called from where she took a place at the front. “Pylum and spears!”

That confused most of those called on, as they had no spears, but again, it only took a second to realize that they were standing in the middle of one of the most well-armed places in the Empire. There were more unused arms and armor per square foot than any remotely sane place should have, and so they quickly grabbed up what they could find around them.

As the enemy ranks started to move, Dyna knew that the time had come.

“Pylum throwers! Launch!”

The density of the flight of javelins was ragged and inconsistent, but she’d expected no less. Many had already been spent, bent tips making them almost useless, but she wasn’t going to complain. She didn’t have time to complain at this point, even if it would do any good. So she just put her shoulder to her shield and glanced over to see Cassius standing by her side.

“I swore I’d never do this,” she admitted, chagrined.

“Do what?”

“Stand in the phalanx,” Dyna replied, raising her voice as the roar of the enemy began to drown her out. “I am the weak link here.”

“In what world,” he yelled back, grinning, “do you possibly see yourself as a weak link?”

She flashed a grin at him, then looked forward as the enemy line closed on them with increasing speed. “I suppose we’re about to find out now, are we not?”

Cassius didn’t have time to respond when the enemy line struck with enough force to slam him back into the man behind him and both of them into the man behind them. Beside him, he heard Dyna grunt from the impact, and he could see her scramble a little as she was pushed back; the man behind her was the only thing that kept her on her feet.

He put her out of his mind then, however, and threw his weight back into his shield to slow the advance. The line stabilized slowly as he ducked behind his shield, keeping his head low and back as far as possible as an enemy sword hacked away at the top.

Here, Dyna had the advantage, he was amused to note. She was noticeably shorter than he was, and the blades hacking at her shield were coming nowhere near her head. He laughed as he edged his shield out just enough to slide his sword out in a stab, noting that she was doing the same with her own.

****

For Dyna, the experience was surreal, both the culmination of a childhood dream and the ultimate nightmare terrorizing her with the thought of failure. She shoulder felt like it had been broken by the first impact of the line, then crushed again when the soldier behind her put his weight into her back to steady the line.

She knew then that her fears were well-founded, that her ancestors would truly be furious with her for
daring
to stand shoulder to shoulder in the phalanx and thus put the lives of her men, her soldiers, at such heightened risk.

Never again, I swear.
She gritted her teeth, putting her weight into the shoulder.
I will not risk the lives of those entrusted to me for my own foolish edification. Never again.

None of those thoughts helped her at this point, however, so she just gritted her teeth and shoved again as she slid her blade out from behind her shield and stabbed it as hard as she could, blindly trying to aim for the center of the man she was face to face with. There was a slight pressure on her hand, then she felt the weapon slide easily forward, and Dyna risked a look up to peer over the lip of her shield.

The man on the other side only wielded a wicker shield, and it dropped to reveal wide eyes from behind as he stared back into her own. She withdrew her sword, and his eyes only became wider in response, until he shuddered and buckled and then fell to his knees in front of her.

Dyna was pushed forward by the man behind her, driving her over the dying man as she found herself face to face with the next man in line. He rushed at her, causing her to brace for the impact, even as she felt more than saw the man behind her pause briefly to finish off the soldier she was stepping on with a thrust of his own weapon.

Then her shield slammed into her shoulder, sending stars of pain along her arm and behind her eyes. All she could do was grit her teeth, lean into the pain, and stab out with her falcata again.

Across the line of battle, men fell, the lines shuddered, stabilized, and reformed…and then they did it all again.

****

“Well now, Tribunus,” the Legion Adjutant said. “I suppose now we know what they’re going to do.”

Gordian sighed, more annoyed than anything, to be brutally honest, but nodded in agreement. “I suppose we do. Signal for Janusi to begin the assault.”

The standard-bearer lifted the attack signal as the horn blew loud and clear, causing the maniple under Centurion Janusi’s command to move forward into the line of enemy waiting to receive them. Gordian noted that, for once, the messenger hadn’t gotten himself killed, but he suspected that the only reason the enemy spared him was to delay the Legion’s response time.

It wouldn’t do the enemy Commander any good; he was still going to lose this battle and with it his life and now the lives of most, if not all, of his men. For all that, however, Gordian supposed he didn’t really blame him. The Empire was not kind to rebels, so he would probably choose death in battle himself, but he was also condemning his men.

Perhaps slavery was not so great a fate, but it was living, and it was something one could possibly even escape from. Now, however, most of their fates were sealed.

Janusi’s maniples slammed into the enemy line, sending a visible ripple through the Zealots’ formation. The sheer weight of man and metal slamming into the Zealot line was enough to likely break the bones of the first men to intercept it, as it wasn’t merely the weight of a single line of men in armor with shields. No, it was the weight of many lines of men, each pushing the man in front of them with as much force as they could.

It was the weight of a Legion, and it could crush mortal men with ease.

Even from his distance, he could see the wicker shields of the Zealot forces shattering against the Legion scutem and the ripple of men being forced back under the weight of metal bearing down on them. His men were reasonably fresh, they hadn’t been fighting a battle now for however long the enemy had, and they were Legion-trained and equipped, so Gordian wasn’t surprised to see the Zealot lines falling under his assault. He was, however, a little surprised that the enemy wasn’t falling away from him faster than they were.

“Militia line is holding surprisingly well,” his Adjutant said, apparently reading his mind.

Gordian looked past the enemy lines and saw that they were, in fact, holding quite well, given how thin the line actually was. He also saw that they had already redeployed their archers to harass the enemy forces if they got past.

Someone over there knows what he’s doing.

“Good,” he said aloud. “Hopefully we can mop this mess up here and now and get the Legion back to Caesarea before the Legatus gets back and has me crucified.”

His tone was more than a little wry, but there was a real hint of tension in it just the same. While Gordian didn’t believe that he’d be crucified for his
interpretation
of his orders, he might well lose his rank, and that would be a level of shame his family might not easily recover from.

“This battle is over.”

Gordian nodded. “All save the final tally for Pluto’s domain.”

The men around him agreed quietly. There was, after all, no escaping that fate.

****

“Shift more weight to the center of the line! Break through! Break through!”

The battle was going…poorly.

He hadn’t expected the ragged line to the front of his force to hold nearly as well as it had, and that was losing them a lot of time that they didn’t have. Dozens were being cut down every moment they were locked into action with the Legion at their backs, and almost as many were dying at the front, where the militia line was stubbornly holding against their push.