Arrows of Fury: Empire Volume Two (24 page)

‘Other men in forest. Not Roman. Hear speaking.’

Dubnus appeared at his other shoulder, sufficiently alert not to speak. The Hamian reached across and nudged him, pointing out into the darkness and then waggling two fingers in front of him to indicate moving men, miming a man talking by opening and closing his fingers close to his mouth. Dubnus whispered a quiet question.

‘How many?’

The Hamian pulled a face to show he was guessing, then pointed back up the column before raising ten fingers, closing his hands and then opening them again. Marcus and Dubnus exchanged glances, the latter whispering again with an edge of incredulity.

‘Thousands of them?’

Marcus nodded, putting a cupped hand to his ear to indicate that they should listen. The sounds were quiet, muted to the edge of inaudibility by the forest’s foliage, but they were unmistakable. An army was crossing the forest in front of them, the sounds of snapping twigs and guttural voices reaching them through the trees. The two friends exchanged glances again, and then Marcus turned back to the Hamian alongside them, bending to whisper in his ear.

‘Fetch Qadir. Quick and quiet.’

The man nodded and was gone, ghosting away back down the column without a sound. Dubnus leaned close and spoke quietly in his ear.

‘They must be moving to attack White Strength.’

Qadir appeared beside them a moment later, his face still imperturbable in the moon’s faint illumination. Marcus beckoned his head close before whispering to him.

‘Your men seem to have the edge when it comes to silent movement in the dark. Do any of them have what it takes to kill in the dark? Do we have any thieves, or murderers? I need a few men that won’t be afraid to put a knife in a barbarian’s back, and won’t waste any time staring at the corpse. Well?’

Qadir pondered for a moment, and then whispered an order to the man next to him, who vanished off into the darkness.

‘I have sent him to find two men who are of the background you desire. They have reformed, saved by the discipline demanded by their bows, that and the worship of their goddess, and both have renounced their former crimes. As have I.’

Marcus grinned wolfishly, his teeth a pale white in the shadows.

‘Then let’s hope I can persuade the three of you to revive your former selves for a short while. Dubnus, you’d best gather a few of your best men. And you …’

He turned and spoke to Arminius, who was waiting in silence three paces behind him.

‘You’d better come too. We’re going hunting.’

Only minutes later, just as the guard mounted at all corners of White Strength was changing, the sentries posted to watch out over the wall to the north reported lights on the horizon in increasing numbers. The cohort’s prefect ran to the watchtower and took the stairs two at a time, the unit’s first spear close at his heels. They pushed aside the gaggle of soldiers watching the distant, flickering dots of light, and took stock of what little they could make out in the darkness.

‘Shit.’ The prefect turned to his senior centurion. ‘It’s a warband all right, there’s nothing of ours that large that would be running around by torchlight in the dark, moon or no moon. The decision is ours; we either abandon the fort and head for Noisy Valley or stay here behind our walls and make a fight of it.’

The centurion, a leathery twenty-five-year veteran, with less than a month to his discharge under normal circumstances, spat expressively over the tower’s parapet.

‘I say we stand and fight. I’ve already supervised the reconstruction of this bloody fort once this year, and I’ll be damned if I want to have to do it all over again. Besides, that lot might just be a diversion to persuade us to run for it. For all we know there’s thousands more of the bastards already south of the wall, and waiting for us between here and the legions at the Valley.’

The prefect grimaced at the thought of his command caught on an open hillside in the dark by a warband of barbarian warriors raving for their heads.

‘I agree. You get the cohort stood to, and I’ll write a dispatch for the governor. With a bit of luck we can keep the buggers tied up for long enough to let him manoeuvre two legions into position for the kill. You never know, this could be the action that finishes the war.’

The Tungrian hunting party went forward in total silence, and again Marcus was struck by the way that Qadir and his Hamians seemed to ghost through the darkness with an almost total lack of
sound. Within a dozen careful paces they had taken the lead, padding softly through the darkened forest ahead of the Tungrians with delicate care for twigs or branches underfoot, their footfalls muffled by the carpet of pine needles. Somewhere off to their right an owl screeched, and the party froze into immobility for a long moment before starting off down the gentle slope again. After a few minutes’ more careful progress the leading man raised his hand to halt them, and Marcus eased forward to crouch next to him.

‘Many men, close. We stay here, listen, watch. Any closer, we be prisoner.’

Marcus nodded, signalling to the other men to hold fast. To their front the sounds of the warband were ever more apparent as the barbarian raiders gathered their strength to attack. Dubnus leaned in close to whisper in the man’s ear.

‘They’re waiting for something.’

Seconds later a horse’s scream of agony rang through the woods, answered almost immediately by a roar of triumph from the tribesmen. Dubnus nudged Marcus, putting his head close to his friend’s ear.

‘Dispatch riders, most likely. The warband were waiting to capture the message for help. Those poor bastards are in for it now.’

Marcus nodded in response to his friend’s bald statement.

’Stay here, I’m going forward for a look.’

Without allowing any time for argument he wormed forward on his stomach, crawling fifty paces or so until he reached a fallen tree. Where the tree’s roots had been ripped from the soil by its fall, a wide plug of dry earth still clinging to their tangles, a dark hole had been formed between the trunk and the bowl-like depression left in the ground. He slithered silently into the gap, covering his head with his cloak and looking out at the ground on the other side of the fallen tree. The clearing before him was almost empty, with a knot of warriors dragging three struggling men across the needle-strewn forest floor. As he watched them the barbarians, a dozen strong, manhandled the trussed Romans to
their feet and quickly lashed them to trees before cutting away their clothes to leave them naked and shivering in the cool night air. With a sick certainty Marcus watched as one of their captors unsheathed a knife, its polished blade a pale bar of moonlight in his hand, and stepped up to one of the captives. He thrust the blade deep into the captive’s thigh without any warning, wringing a reluctant snarl of pain from the helpless man before pulling the bloodied knife free and dragging its blade across the man’s eyes. If the man’s first cry had been born of physical distress, torn reluctantly from him by the sudden unexpected pain, the scream that echoed through the forest as he was blinded was a howl of agonised despair.

With the dispatch riders away towards the south-west, the soldiers manning the fort’s ramparts waited anxiously. The first spear watched impassively as the torches drew closer, counting under his breath. He stared ruminatively at the flickering lights, muttering to himself.

‘Two hundred or so. Hardly seems enough for a full-sized warband. Say there’s one torch for every ten of the bastards, that’s more like …’

A shout from the fort’s southern wall spun him round, staring out into the darkness. In the deep shadow of the woods to the fort’s south, where the faint moonlight was unable to provide any illumination, a spark of light was bobbing along the line of trees. Every few seconds a new light would kindle in its wake, until the wood was alive with light. The first spear hurried down the tower’s steps into the fort’s bustle, calling the officers to him. They gathered to find him grim faced, one hand reflexively gripping the hilt of his gladius.

‘We’ve been fooled. There’s a warband in the woods to the south and it looks like they’re getting ready to storm the gates …’

He issued a crisp stream of orders, sending a century to man the fort’s south-facing wall, splitting another to guard those parts of the east and west walls to the south of the point where the fort’s defences met the wall’s line, and took the calculated risk of leaving
only one more to man the fort’s northern side. The prefect stood alongside him as, gathering the other three centuries to the southern gate’s double arch, he arrayed the nervous soldiers on all three sides of the fort’s most vulnerable point. The veteran officer shook his head ruefully.

‘It’s quite simple really, Prefect, they showed us the torches to the north to flush us out. The man leading that collection of savages out there knew that one of two things had to happen once we saw what looked like movement in strength to the north – either the full cohort retreating to the south, or our messengers heading for Noisy Valley. Either would be an acceptable result for the man commanding that warband, since all he ever had to do to bottle us up in this trap was kill our only means of getting a message through to the heavy boys. With our messengers almost certainly taken there’s no way for the legions to know he’s got our nuts between the bricks, and without the legions there’ll be no escape for us. He’s got the rest of the night to chop a way in through one of the gates, most likely this one, since the other three are all on the other side of the wall …’ He pointed to the twin south gates, their thick timbers reinforced with three heavy oak bracing bars apiece. ‘It looks tough enough now, but they’ll be hacking down a tree out there right now and getting it ready to swing at those doors. No gate can take that sort of treatment for long.’

The prefect frowned, weighing up their options.

‘If their main strength is to the south surely we could still run to the east on the northern side of the wall. Standing orders specifically instruct all fort commanders not to waste lives defending fixed positions.’

The senior centurion rubbed a hand across his tired face, blinking away his fatigue.

‘In the darkness, and with two or three thousand of them waiting out there to the north? I’d say we’re better off taking our chances here, Prefect …’ He turned to the men gathered around the gate, raising his voice to make sure they all heard him. Men leaned out over the rampart’s internal wall, keen to hear the man who ran their small world speak.

‘Well now, my brothers, here’s the thing. Those blue-faced bastards have pulled a nice little trick, got men to the south of us as well as the north. They’re between us and Noisy Valley, so they’re probably already carving up the messengers we sent that way. If you listen carefully you’ll hear them screaming, most likely – it’s what they always do with captives, partly to get the piss running down our legs and partly because, well, that’s just what they do.’

He paused for a moment, looking around at the soldiers’ serious faces in the flickering torchlight.

‘This only ends one of two ways, gentlemen. Either we hold them off for long enough that the legions at Noisy Valley can get here and save our arses, or those barbarian bum-fuckers will manage to bludgeon their way in here, which is more than likely, and then try to overwhelm us in nasty, dirty street fighting. They have the advantage of numbers; we have discipline and superior equipment and training on our side. You all know the drills, all you have to do is follow them and we have a decent chance of getting out of the other side of this night with our heads still on our shoulders.’

He pointed up at the walls.

‘Soldiers on the rampart, you’ll have men with ladders looking to swarm up on to the walls. Your first priority is to push the ladders clear, and dump the bastards into the ditch, but watch out, they’ll have archers behind them shooting at anything that moves. Any man that gets his feet on to the fighting surface is your number-one target, and you take him down with spear, sword or your teeth and nails if that’s all you’ve got left.’

He took a breath, casting a jaundiced eye over the men standing around him, many of them looming over his stocky frame.

‘Soldiers in the streets, once I’ve finished this little speech you’ll form a wall of men, from one side of the street to the other, and on all three sides of the gate. This is going to be street fighting, my lads, so no throwing your spears this time, I want ten blue-nose dead for every spear, not just one. Front rankers, tonight we fight in the old-fashioned style, spears held underarm and thrust up into bellies and throats from behind your shields. None of that overarm nonsense, you’ll just open yourself up to a sword in your
armpit. Rear rankers, if you can reach, you can go in overarm, but be careful not to stick it through your mate’s ear. It may not endear you to him …’

The soldiers smiled wanly at the tired old joke, appreciating his effort under the circumstances.

‘If you lose your spear, air your iron and take it to them in the usual way, short thrusts, throat, thighs or guts, it doesn’t matter which, open your man up and step back to let him bleed to death. Nothing fancy, and no heroics. Rear rankers! If the man in front of you goes down, his place is yours, so don’t wait to be asked. Jump in there and fight like you’ve got a pair, because if the line breaks you’ll be the first one looking down the shaft of a barbarian spear that’s scraping your spine.’

He looked around him, taking the measure of his men. In the moment of silence he distinctly heard a distant wail of agony from the treeline. As he had grimly predicted, the barbarians were torturing the captured messengers, using their screams of pain to send a message back to the fort’s garrison.