Anthony Riches - Wounds of Honour

He paused, swelling his chest with a great draught of air.

‘Breathe deep, lads, you’ll need all the air you can get in the next few minutes. And just remember, any of you bastards turn from this fight before it’s done and you’ll have me and my blade to deal with once we’re done with this shower of unwashed hairy arseholes. We stand together.’

Along the Tungrian line a few men quailed and were swiftly dealt with by the officers and their older comrades, slaps and kicks putting them back into the line. The majority listened to the cohort’s veteran soldiers tell them how to deal with what was coming and stared impassively down the slope at their enemy, prepared to kill in order to live, a stark equation both understood and accepted. In order to live through, to see their women and children again, they would have to slaughter the tribesmen in great numbers. Almost to a man, the soldiers were ready to start the butchery.

In the tribal ranks men swiftly made their last preparations, discarding heavy items of clothing that would restrict their movements in the coming melee, muttering hasty prayers to their gods for victory. The older warriors, alive to the possibilities of the coming combat, sensibly added the hope for a clean death should their time have come. Without the time to indulge in any lengthy diatribe against the invaders, the chieftains looked to each other, nodded their readiness, then charged forward up the slope, hurling thousands of warriors at the flimsy Roman line.

The Tungrian centurions looked to Frontinius at the line’s centre, waiting for his signal as the barbarian horde surged up the gentle incline. Waiting with one arm raised, he watched the shaggy warriors storm towards his men, thirty yards, twenty-five, the usual range of the initial spear-throw, twenty, until at fifteen yards from the shield wall they hit the strip of greasy mud that his troops had painstakingly stamped into bubbling ruin. The leading wave of attackers slowed, fighting to stay on their feet as they bunched to avoid the giant wooden obstacles’ sharpened points. Crowded from behind and perilously close to falling headlong into the mud, more than a few suddenly shouted their pain as the scattered metal caltrops, half hidden in the mud, pierced their feet. The tribesmen’s attention was suddenly focused more downward than forward.

Scarface raised his spear, shouting encouragement to his comrades, easing the weapon back and forth in readiness to throw, as he searched for a target among the mass of tribesmen struggling towards the Tungrian line.

Frontinius whipped his hand downward in the pre-agreed signal. A volley of spears arced flatly into the struggling tribesmen, finding targets unprotected in their struggle to stay upright. The front ranks shivered with the impact, men screaming as flying steel spitted them through limb and trunk, their flailing bodies adding to the chaos as the barbarian charge faltered.

The veteran soldier found his mark, a big man carrying a six-foot-long sword momentarily distracted by the greasy footing, and stepped forward to throw his spear, arm outstretched as he followed the weapon’s flight through to his point of aim. The barbarian jerked as the spear’s cruel steel head punched into his belly, blood jetting from the wound as he sank to his knees. Drawing his sword with a smile of satisfaction, Scarface backed up the slope until he felt hands grab his belt to steady him, lifting his shield into line with those to his right and left.

Along the line the centurions bawled new commands, their men drawing their swords and crouching deeper behind their shields as the barbarian wave regained some of its momentum, shrugging aside the dead and dying to struggle towards the silent Tungrian line. Seeing their momentary difficulty, Frontinius made a snap decision, lifting his sword and pointing at the barbarians with its blade, bawling the order that unleashed his men down the slope.

With a shrill of whistles from their officers the cohort lunged the few remaining paces down the hill into their enemy, smashing into the struggling barbarian line with their heavy shields and bowling the enemy front line back into the warriors behind, then stepped in with their swords.

Scarface heard the whistle, kicked back to disengage the soldier held fast to his belt and bounded down the slope alongside his comrades with a blood-curdling howl, punching his shield’s metal boss into the face of a warrior with his sword raised to strike, then stabbing his sword’s point into the man’s guts and kicking him off the blade in one fluid motion. He shouted to his mates as he raised his shield into position.

‘Line! Reform the line!’

The cohort’s front rank snapped their shields back into place, presenting the barbarians with an unbroken wall to frustrate their attacks. The soldiers repeatedly punched the metal bosses of their shields into the faces of the oncoming men, upsetting their precarious balance, then stabbed their short swords into their chosen targets, aiming for the body points that centuries of experience had taught would kill a man in seconds. Blood flew across the gap between the two lines in hot sprays as men fell back from the point of combat, weapons falling from their hands as they sought to halt the flow or hold intestines into torn bellies, or simply explored agonising wounds with shocked bewilderment as life ebbed from their bodies. The ground beneath their feet, doused with a mixture of blood, urine and faeces, became steadily more treacherous. The Tungrian rear rank’s role became one of keeping the men in front on their feet, and not exposed to an enemy blow on the ground. Punching and thrusting at the seething throng that railed desperately at their shield wall, parrying enemy sword and axe strokes and striving in turn to murder their deliverers, the Tungrians fought as men who understood that their only survival lay in slaughter, cold blooded and clinically efficient.

In the 9th’s front rank Scarface crouched behind his shield, his left arm shuddering with the shock of sword-blows against its scarred wooden face, watching the barbarians intently through the gap between his helmet and the shield’s top edge, looking for any chance to strike. The long-haired warrior facing him, hemmed in by the men around him, raised his sword to chop the blade downward in the only attack open to him, and presented a fleeting opportunity that the experienced soldier took without hesitation. Stepping forward one pace, he thrust his sword between the other man’s ribs and dropped him, doubled over with the sudden awful pain, into the blood-spattered mud.

A tribesman already fallen with a spear through his thigh gathered his strength to strike at the Roman’s extended leg, but the wily soldier simply slammed the sharpened metal edge of his shield down across the man’s sword arm, slicing down to the bone before stepping quickly back into his place in the shield wall. The man next to him slipped on the mud, going down on to one knee and opening himself up to the blows of his attackers. Without conscious thought, Scarface shifted his shield to protect his mate for the critical seconds required for him to regain his footing, ignoring his own peril. The man to his right killed a tribesman shaping to attack the momentarily unprotected veteran, ripping open his throat with a swift stab of his gladius. Within seconds their wall of shields was complete again, steady against the barbarians railing at its unyielding face.

To Marcus, standing behind the double line of his men with a tent party of soldiers ready to thrust into holes hacked in the line, it looked like a hopelessly unequal battle. As the seconds passed he realised that most of the dying was being done on the other side of their shields. Relatively few of his own men had gone down, despite the thick throng of enemy pressing up the slope.