The Eagle's Vengeance (37 page)

‘Send men into the trees! Root out those archers and have them track our progress along the forest edge to prevent any more ambushes!’

The noblemen responded without question, and Calgus urged his horse forward into the protection of the shields that had been raised by the king’s bodyguards. Brem had managed to force his body back into an upright position, panting with the pain and shock as he stared at a blood-covered hand.

‘Fool … to have … fallen for that … old trick.’

He put the hand back to his side, shut his eyes in anticipation of the pain to come and swiftly snapped off the arrow’s shaft where it protruded from his wound. Swaying in the saddle, he would clearly have fallen if not for the strong hands to either side. The Selgovae waited until his eyes opened again, nodding dour respect at the king’s resolve.

‘Can you continue, my lord King?’

Brem nodded, his face white with shock.

‘I have no choice. You men –’ he gestured to the bodyguards to either side of his horse ‘– hold me up. Try not to make it look –’ a racking cough shook the king’s body, and he coughed a wad of bloody phlegm on the animal’s neck ‘– too obvious. And march faster. I do not know how long I will be able to stand this pain.’

Their task of distraction complete, the enemy archers re-mounted behind the horsemen who had carried them to their shooting position and cantered away, vanishing into the trees a thousand paces or so further to the north.

‘Kind of them to show us the way to wherever it is that they’ve taken refuge.’

Calgus nodded distractedly at the king’s painfully grunted statement.

‘Indeed so, my lord King. Although I cannot help wondering why they would choose to face such overwhelming superiority in numbers in the forest, where we will be able to surround them and attack from all sides.’

Brem coughed again, a bubbling, half retch, and spat blood onto the ground to leave his lips flecked with red, and his eyes wide in a face pale with pain.

‘I care little. We find them, we crush them, and then I will bear the ordeal of this arrow’s removal.’

The path down which the archers had made their way back to their fellows was clear enough, already trampled wide and flat by the passage of hundreds of men, and Brem bent stiffly to look down from his horse with a bitter, painful laugh.

‘No deception this time, I see, just …’

He fell silent, cocking his head to listen. In the distance, the sound almost inaudible, they could hear the sound of axes striking wood, so many axes that the noise was a continuous hammering. With a creaking tear a tree fell, the noise of its impact with the forest floor lost beneath the continuous racket of chopping, and Calgus smiled to himself at the realisation of what the Tungrians were doing.

‘They will use trees as walls.’

Brem spat again, his mouth a sour gash in his face’s white mask.

‘It makes no difference. We will overwhelm them like hunting wolves. No wall can protect them from my fury –’ He coughed again. ‘For no wall can be long enough to prevent our washing around it to tear them apart. Onward!’

The warriors surged around them, fanning out on either side of the path with their weapons and shields ready to fight, and all the while they advanced into the forest’s dim green light the noise of axes hewing on wood continued, the unmistakable sound of trees falling seeming to reach Calgus’s ears with every few steps that his mare took. As the sound of the chopping grew louder the trees began to fall less frequently, until the war band crested a ridge and found the place where their enemies had chosen to make their stand. Calgus stared over the heads of the warriors surging round and past the small knot of horsemen protecting their wounded king with a half-smile. From his position, hunched white-faced over his horse’s neck, the king saw the expression flicker into life, and his voice was weak and peevish when he summoned the strength to speak.

‘What’s so fucking funny, Calgus?’

The Selgovae replied without taking his gaze off the spectacle before him, shaking his head slowly.

‘I could never have predicted it, and yet it’s just so obvious, my lord King. The enemy have constructed a line that your men will never outflank.’

Before them in the clearing below the Tungrian axe men had formed a great circle, almost two hundred paces across, it seemed, and had then felled every tree around its circumference so that they had fallen into the circle with their tops pointing to its middle. Almost the entire perimeter of their impromptu stockade was refused easy access by the interlocked branches of the fallen trees, and where there were gaps that the axe men had failed to fill the Tungrians were already waiting four and five men deep, their lines formed and ready to fight.

‘I have no doubt that we can defeat these tired, hungry men, my lord King, but I also have no doubt that they will make us pay a stiff price for the pleasure. Are you sure that you wouldn’t prefer the cheaper option of starving them out over a day or two?’

Brem shook his head, still unable to raise his head into an upright position, his voice even weaker than before.

‘Never. Why should I risk the eagle being smuggled away in the night when I can have every man down there dead before the sun sets? Why allow the man who killed my son the chance of escape from my retribution? No! Sound the horns! I will recover that eagle if it is my last act before I go to meet my ancestors.’

‘They’re coming then.’

Julius nodded, watching the Venicones pour over the lip of the ridge from which he could see the mounted royal party staring down at their improvised defences, the barbarians cheering at each sounding of their horns, shouting insults and threats at the waiting soldiers.

‘You didn’t expect them to be frightened off by a few trees?’

Scaurus shrugged, looking about the circular space in which his men were preparing to make their stand.

‘I had wondered if good sense would prevail. If the positions were reversed I’d be more than happy to wait for them to realise that without food or water they have no choice but to surrender.’

Julius shook his head.

‘Not these boys.’

The tribune sighed.

‘No. It was always a bit of a false hope. At least Dubnus and his men have allowed us the chance to go down fighting with a little pride, rather than simply being mobbed and ripped apart without much of a chance to let those bastards know they’ve been in a fight.’ He drew his sword. ‘I suggest that you take command of the reserve, First Spear, and be ready to hurry them into whichever of the gaps in our defence the tattooed buggers manage to breach first. I’ll just wander around and see what good I can be wherever the fighting gets a little warm, if that’s all right with you?’

Calgus stared impassively down as the first of the war band’s warriors charged into the Tungrians’ defences, hundreds of warriors streaming towards a ten-pace-wide gap between two fallen trees at the urging of their clan leaders.

‘Good choice.’

‘What was that?’

He turned to the king.

‘I said
“good choice”
, my lord King. Your men are striking the weakest point in the enemy’s defence, throwing themselves into the attack with the ferocity that will be needed if we are to break open this improvised fortress. You can be proud of them Brem, they are spending their lives lavishly in the hope of giving you victory.’

A victory to make your passing a little less sour
, he mused,
and to lighten the blow of your having died without an heir. I’ll play the role of the disinterested statesman to the hilt, I think, and seek to arbitrate between the various claimants to the throne whilst strengthening my position with them all to the point where no matter who wins I will be seen as an indispensable adviser. And if the Tungrians managed to take the eagle then presumably they will have put an end to that bloody priest and his predictions of death. The son, the prince and death, indeed? It seems that what he saw was only your death, Brem, as it turned out …

The king suddenly sat up bolt upright, staring down at the battle raging below him. He was sweating profusely, his left side dark and wet with the blood that continued to stream from the arrow wound in his side, but his face was set hard in remorseless lines, as if he had been granted a last moment of lucidity and strength by the gods.

‘I see the place where our breakthrough will be made!’

In the gap between two fallen trees Marcus’s Fifth Century were fighting for their lives against the mass of barbarians seeking to push them back into the circle, their front rank a dozen men wide, each of them stabbing into the tightly packed Venicones with his sword whenever the opportunity presented itself, their shields scored and notched by enemy blades. Another fifty soldiers were packed in tightly behind them, all of them wielding spears over the front rankers’ shoulders to punch the sharp points into the faces and throats of the men facing them. While the Romans’ discipline and training enabled them to pull their wounded back through the ranks, the Venicones who fell to their attacks had nowhere to go but down into the foaming blood- and urine-soaked morass beneath the two sides’ feet, their attempts to crawl out of the fray adding to the chaos in the war band’s ranks as they raged at the Tungrian line. A warrior climbed up onto the tree trunk to the century’s right, raising his axe and bellowing a challenge at the men below him, then toppled backwards into the branches with an arrow in his chest, shot by one of the Hamians standing behind the straining century.

‘Push!’

Quintus had cast his chosen man’s staff aside and thrown himself into the struggle with a spear taken from a wounded man, stabbing it repeatedly into the barbarian horde even as he took an involuntary step backwards, his feet sliding through the mud as the Venicones’ superior numbers started to tell against the tiring Tungrians.

‘A little help seems to be in order here, eh Centurion?’

Marcus turned to find the tribune standing beside him with his sword drawn, but before he could answer Scaurus had swivelled to shout an order at Julius.

‘First Spear! Reinforcements are required here!’

Brem pointed down at the circle of trees, and Calgus saw what it was that he was indicating. In the spot that Calgus had seen the tribesmen attack, the Romans were starting to weaken, falling back one step at a time as Brem’s warriors pushed them off their ground in the gap between the two trees through simple strength of numbers. A moment before their line had been no more than a dozen paces from the stumps of the trees that formed the battleground’s flanks, but now the distance was more like twenty. As the royal party watched, soldiers ran from both sides to reinforce their comrades, sent in groups of six to eight from the centuries that were under less pressure, the officers standing behind the embattled century ordering them into action in support of their men. With a roar that the men on the ridge heard clearly enough they stopped the retreat and started to press the Venicones back. The reinforced Romans seemed to gain fresh purpose, chanting in time as they smashed forward into the war band, battering the warriors backwards with their shields and stepping over the Venicones’ dead and wounded, swords and spears stabbing down to finish off the men crawling helplessly in the mud beneath them.

‘No!’

Brem turned to the leader of his bodyguard.

‘Now is the time, my brother, time for me to face the enemy in battle and inspire my people to rip into these invaders until they are no more. Take me to the fight!’

The warrior nodded, looking about him at the rest of the king’s guard and jerking his head at the fight below them.

‘You heard the king! We fight!’

The mounted men roared their approval, and with a sudden start Calgus realised that his horse’s bridle was still tied to the king’s saddle.

‘But—’

The word was barely out of his mouth before the royal party was in motion, moving down off the ridge and trotting towards the spot that the king had indicated would be the point of decision. Calgus’s horse lurched into movement, compelled to accompany Brem’s by its tether, and the Selgovae bit his tongue with the first jerk, the sudden pain reducing his protests to a thick mumble. Brem drew his sword, his hand steadied by that of the man riding alongside him, and the guards around him did the same, their weapons gleaming dully in the forest’s dim light. The king somehow managed to find the strength to raise himself out of the saddle, lifting the sword high and shouting a battle cry loud enough for the warriors packed into the breach to hear him.

‘For Drust! Revenge for King Drust!’

The Venicones responded with a great howl of anger, pushing back against the Tungrian line with a sudden explosive shove that rocked the Romans back by five paces in an instant, and Calgus realised that the king’s intervention just might succeed. It was time to play the role that the king had decreed for him, and to remake himself into a credible member of the tribe’s nobility once the king was dead.

‘You promised me a sword, my lord King!’

Brem nodded at his men, and a heavy length of polished iron with a bright edge was passed to him. Waving the sword in a suitably warlike manner and roaring as if gripped by a ferocious anger, Calgus nudged his mare’s sides with his booted feet, urging her up alongside the king to bring him shoulder to shoulder with Brem.

‘We fight at your command, my lord King! See, the enemy line is weakening! One more push and they will surely fold!’

In the middle of the Tungrian circle Julius turned to Dubnus and pointed at the Venicone horsemen who were nearing the rear of the crush of men that was threatening to break into the defences.

‘I’ve held you monsters back long enough, it seems. Now’s your chance to show Titus’s boys what you’re made of, I’d say.’

He’d found it hard not to smile when he had joined the Tenth Century in the centre of the circle a few moments before, amused by the way that their new centurion was sitting on a rock in the middle of his men with a small but very clear gap around him on all sides. Where Titus would have been at the very heart of his century’s press of men, his growl of a voice inspiring them to the acts of mayhem they would shortly be wreaking upon their enemies, Dubnus was clearly still a man apart. The events of the previous hour had proven that he could command the pioneers, but their attitude towards him was clearly still one of tolerance rather than respect. Dubnus got to his feet, taking a handful of dirt and rubbing it into his hands to dry the fluid that was still leaking from his blisters, the result of taking his turn in the frantic rush to complete the defences that had been his conception.