Misplaced Legion (Videssos Cycle) (46 page)

The Roman volley shook the terrifying momentum of the Yezda charge, but did not, could not, stop it altogether. Yelling like men possessed, the nomads collided with the soldiers who would bar their way. A bushy-bearded warrior slashed down at the tribune from horseback. He took the blow on his shield while he cut at the nomad’s leg, laying open his thigh and wounding his horse as well.

Rider and beast cried out in pain together. The luckless animal reared, blood dripping down its barrel. An arrow thudded into its belly. It slewed sideways and fell, pinning its rider beneath it. The saber bounced from his loosening grip as he struck.

A few hundred yards to his right, Marcus heard deep-voiced cries as the Namdaleni hurled themselves forward at the Yezda before them. They worked a fearful slaughter for a short time, striking with swords and lances and bowling the enemy over with the sheer weight of their charge. Like snapping
wolves against a bear, the nomads gave way before them, but even in retreat their deadly archery took its toll.

Again the Yezda tried to rush the Romans, and again the legionaries’ well-disciplined volley of throwing spears broke the charge before it could smash them. “I wish we had more heavy spearmen,” Gaius Philippus panted. “There’d be nothing like a line of
hastati
to keep these buggers off of us.” The
hasta
, though, was becoming obsolete in Rome’s armies, and few were the legionaries trained in its use.

“Wish for the moon, while you’re at it,” Marcus said, putting to flight a nomad who, fallen from horse, chose to fight on foot. The Yezda scuttled away before the tribune could finish him.

Viridovix, as always an army in himself, leaped out from the Roman line and, sidestepping an invader’s hacking sword-stroke, cut off the head of the nomad’s horse with a single slash of his great blade. The Romans cried out in triumph, the Yezda in dismay, at the mighty blow.

The rider threw himself clear as his beast foundered, but the tall Celt was on him like a cat after a lizard. Against Viridovix’s reach and strength he could do nothing, and his own head spun from his shoulders an instant later. Snatching up the gory trophy, the Gaul returned to the Roman ranks.

“I know it’s not your custom to be taking heads,” he told Scaurus, “but a fine reminder he’ll be of the fight.”

“You can have him for breakfast, for all I care,” the tribune shouted back. His usual equanimity frayed badly in the stress of battle.

The legionaries’ unyielding defense and the exploit of the Celt, as savage as any of their own, dissuaded the Yezda from further direct assaults. Instead, they drew back out of spear-range and plied the Romans with arrows. Marcus would have like nothing better than to let his men charge the nomads, but he had already seen what happened when a Vaspurakaner company, similarly assailed, ran pell-mell at the Yezda. They were cut off and cut to pieces in the twinkling of an eye.

Still, there was no reason for the Romans to endure such punishment without striking back. Scaurus sent a runner over to Laon Pakhymer. The Khatrisher acknowledged his request with a flourish of his helmet over his head. He sent a couple of squadrons of his countryman forward, just enough to drive
the Yezda out of bowshot. As the nomads retreated, Marcus moved his own line up to help cover the allies who had protected him.

He wondered how the fight was going. His own little piece of it was doing fairly well, but this was too big a battle to see all at once. The numbers on both sides, the length of the battle line, and the ever-present smothering dust made that hopeless.

But by the way the front was bending, Mavrikios’ plan seemed to be working. The Yezda, squeezed on both flanks, were being forced to hurl themselves at the Videssian line’s center. Deprived of the mobility that gave them their advantage, they were easy meat for the heavy troops the Emperor had concentrated there. The great axes of his Haloga guardsmen rose and fell, rose and fell, shearing through the nomad’s light small shields and boiled-leather cuirasses. The northerners sang as they fought, their slow, deep battle chant sounding steadily through the clamor around them.

Avshar growled, deep in his throat, a sound of thwarted fury. The Videssian center was even stronger than he had expected, though he had known it held his foes’ best troops. And among them, he suddenly recalled, was the outlander who had bested him at swords. He seldom lost at anything; revenge would be sweet.

Three times he fired his deadly bow at Scaurus. Twice he missed; despite terrified rumor, the weapon was not infallible. His third shot was true, but a luckless nomad rode into the arrow’s path. He fell, never knowing his own chieftain had slain him.

The wizard cursed to see that perfect shot ruined. “A different way, then,” he rumbled to himself. He had intended to use the spell against another, but it would serve here as well.

He handed his bow to an officer by his side, calmed his horse with his knees till it stood still—the spell required passes with both hands at once. As he began to chant, even the Yezda holding the bow flinched from him, so frigid and terrible were his words.

Marcus’ sword flared dazzlingly bright for an instant. It chilled him, but many magics were loose on the field today.
He waved to the buccinators to call a lagging maniple into position.

Avshar cursed again, feeling his sorcery deflected. His fists clenched, but even he had to bow to necessity—back to the first plan, then. Yezda scouts had watched the imperial host drill a score of times and brought him word of what they had seen. Of all the men in that host, one was the key—and Avshar’s spell would not go awry twice.

“There you go! There you go! Drive the whoresons back!” Nephon Khoumnos shouted. He was hoarse and tired, but increasingly happy over the battle’s course. Ortaias, Phos be praised, was not getting in his way too badly, and the troops were performing better than he’d dared hope. He wondered if Thorisin was having as much success on the right. If he was, soon the Yezda would be surrounded by a ring of steel.

The general sneezed, blinked in annoyance, sneezed again. Despite the sweltering heat, he was suddenly cold; the sweat turned clammy on his body. He shivered inside his armor—there were knives of ice stabbing at his bones. Agony shot through his joints at every move. His eyes bulged. He opened his mouth to cry out, but no words emerged. His last conscious thought was that freezing was not the numb, painless death it was supposed to be.

“They appear to be stepping up the pressure,” Ortaias Sphrantzes said. “What do you think, Khoumnos? Should we commit another brigade to throw them back?” Getting no reply, he turned to glance at the older man. Khoumnos was staring fixedly ahead and did not seem to be giving any heed to his surroundings.

“Are you all right?” Sphrantzes asked. He laid a hand on the general’s bare arm, then jerked it back in horror, leaving skin behind. Touching Khoumnos was like brushing against an ice-glazed wall in dead of winter, but worse, for this was a cold that burned like fire.

Startled at the sudden motion, the general’s horse shied. Its rider swayed, then toppled stiffly; it was as if a frozen statue bestrode the beast. A hundred throats echoed Sphrantzes’ cry of terror, for Khoumnos’ body, like a statue carved from brittle
ice, shattered into a thousand frozen shards when it struck the ground.

“A pox!” Gaius Philippus exclaimed. “Something’s gone wrong on the left!” Sensitive to battle’s changing tides as a deer to the shifting breeze, the centurion felt the Yezda swing to the offensive almost before they delivered their attack.

Pakhymer caught the scent of trouble, too, and sent one of his riders galloping south behind the line to find out what it was. He listened as his man reported back, then shouted to the Romans, “Khoumnos is down!”

“Oh, bloody hell,” Marcus muttered. Gaius Philippus clapped his hand to his forehead and swore. Here was a chance the Emperor had left unreckoned—responsibility for a third of the Videssian army had just landed squarely on Ortaias Sphrantzes’ skinny shoulders.

The Khatrisher who brought the news was still talking. Laon Pakhymer heard him out, then spoke so sharply the Romans could hear part of what he said: “—mouth shut, do you under—” The horseman nodded, gave him an untidy salute, and rode back into line.

“Sure and I wonder what all that was about,” Viridovix said.

Gaius Philippus said, “Nothing good, I’ll warrant.”

“You’re a rare gloomy soul, Roman dear, but I’m afraid you have the right of it this time.”

When his left wing faltered, Mavrikios guessed why. He sent Zeprin the Red south as fast as he could to rescue the situation, but the Haloga marshal found himself caught up in confused and bitter fighting that broke out when a band of Yezda cracked the imperial line and rampaged through the Videssian rear. The northerner’s two-handed axe sent more than one of them to his death, but meanwhile Ortaias Sphrantzes kept command.

Like a ship slowly going down on an even keel, the left’s plight grew worse. The various contingents’ officers led them as best they could, but with Nephon Khoumnos gone their overall guiding force disappeared. Ortaias, in his inexperience, frantically rushed men here and there to counter feints, while failing to answer real assaults.

The left was also a liability in another way. Despite Pakhymer’s
silencing his messenger, rumors of how Khoumnos died soon ran through the whole Videssian army. They were confused and sometimes wildly wrong, but Avshar’s name was writ large in all of them. Men in every section of the line looked south in apprehension, awaiting they knew not what.

The Emperor, seeing the failure of his scheme and the way the Yezda were everywhere pressing his disheartened soldiers back, ordered a withdrawal back to the camp he had left so full of hope. Using their superior mobility and the confusion on the left, the Yezda were beginning to slip small parties round the imperial army’s flank. If enough got round to cut the Videssians off from their base, what was now nearly a draw could quickly become disaster.

Mavrikios did not intend to give up the fight. The Videssians could regroup behind their field fortifications and return to the struggle the next morning.

For a moment Marcus did not recognize the new call the drummers and pipers were playing. “Retreat,” for obvious reasons, was not an often-practiced exercise. When he did realize what the command was, he read Mavrikios’ intentions accurately. “We’ll have another go at them tomorrow,” he predicted to Gaius Philippus.

“No doubt, no doubt,” the centurion agreed. “Hurry up, you fools!” he shouted to the legionaries. “Defensive front—get out there, you spearmen! Hold the losels off us.” His fury came more from habit than need; the Romans were smoothly moving into their covering formation.

“Is it running away we are?” Viridovix demanded. “There’s no sense of it. Aye, we’ve not beaten the spalpeens, but there’s no one would say they’ve beaten us either. Let’s stay at it and have this thing out.” He brandished his sword at the Yezda.

Gaius Philippus sighed, wiped sweat from his face, rubbed absently at a cut on his left cheek. He was as combative as the Celt, but had a firmer grip on the sometimes painful realities of the field. “We’re not beaten, no,” he said. “But there’s wavering all up and down the line, and the gods know what’s going on over there.” He waved his left arm. “Better we move back under our own control than fall apart trying to hold.”

“It’s a cold-blooded style of fighting, sure and it is. Still and all, there’s a bright side to everything—now I’ll have a
chance to salt this lovely down properly.” He gave a fond pat to the Yezda head tied to his belt. That was too much even for the hard-bitten centurion, who spat in disgust.

A deliberate fighting retreat is probably the most difficult maneuver to bring off on a battlefield. Soldiers equate withdrawal with defeat, and only the strongest discipline holds panic at bay. The Videssians and their mercenary allies performed better than Marcus would have expected from such a heterogeneous force. Warded by a bristling fence of spears, they began to disengage, dropping back a step here, two more there, gathering up the wounded as they went, always keeping a solid fighting front toward their foes.

“Steady, there!” Marcus grabbed the bridle of Senpat Sviodo’s horse. The young Vaspurakaner was about to charge a Yezda insolently sitting his horse not thirty yards away.

“Turn me loose, damn you!”

“We’ll get this one tomorrow—you’ve done your share for today.” That was nothing less than the truth; Sviodo’s fine wickerwork helm was broken and hanging loosely over one ear, while his right calf bore a rude bandage that showed the fighting had not all gone his way.

He was still eager for more, touching spurs to his mount to make it rear free of the tribune’s grip.

Scaurus held firm. “If he hasn’t the stomach to close with us, let him go now. All we have to do is keep them off us, and we’ll be fine.”

He glared up at the mutinous Vaspurakaner. To his legionaries he could simply give orders, but Senpat Sviodo was a long way from their obedience—and, to give him his due, he had better reason to hate that grinning Yezda than did the Romans. “I know how happy it would make you to spill his guts out on the dirt, but what if you get in trouble? To say nothing of your grieving your wife, we’d have to rescue you and risk getting cut off while the rest of the army pulled back.”

“Leave Nevrat out of this!” Senpat said hotly. “Were she here, we’d fight that swine together. And as for the rest of it, I don’t need your help and I don’t want it. I don’t care about the lot of you!”

“But want it or not, you’d have it, because we care about you, lad.” Marcus released his hold on the bridle. “Do what
you bloody well please—but even Viridovix is with us, you’ll notice.”

There was a pause. “Is he, now?” Senpat Sviodo’s chuckle was not the blithe one he’d had before the army entered ruined Vaspurakan, but Marcus knew he’d won his point. Sviodo wheeled his horse and trotted it back to the Roman line, which had moved on another score of paces while he and Scaurus argued.

The tribune followed more slowly, studying as best he could how well the army was holding together. It really was going better than he’d dared hope; even the left seemed pretty firm. “You know,” he said, catching up to the Vaspurakaner, “I do believe this is going to work.”