M. Scott - The Eagle of the Twelfth

‘But if we’re under attack, that won’t matter, will it? There won’t be a parade line.’

‘Idiot!’ I cuffed him, and kept pulling. ‘We’re not under attack. Nobody’s stupid enough to attack a legionary camp. Not even ours. This is a drill. I’ll lay a denarius on it.’

‘Done!’

Together, we ran into the parade ground. Exactly as I had feared, we were last out, but while I expected to stand in line under massed torches and have Lupus beat us in public for our tardiness, or the failure to polish our armour — he could find rust where no human eye could see it — or sandals tied awry, or any one of the thousand other things that a man might get wrong who had dressed in absolute dark… instead, we joined a heaving sea of running men, of the IVth as well as the XIIth, all streaming down the Via Praetoria and through the gate. Ahead, a horn blared five notes, sounding the call to defence of the camp.

‘It is an attack,’ Tears said, running. ‘Who’s insane enough to storm a legionary encampment?’

‘Vologases? Maybe he’s trying to take Syria for the Parthian empire while Corbulo is safe in Armenia.’

‘But it’s beyond the fighting season. Nobody fights after the rains start.’

‘Vologases does,’ I said grimly. I was still holding on toTears’ elbow, trying to see in the torch-studded dark so that I could find Syrion, or Horgias, Polydeuces — he was not the Rabbit then — Sarapammon, Rufus, Proclion, the remaining men in my unit. Attack or not, I knew the sting of Lupus’ vine stick too well to risk their being in place before us.

‘Northwest.’ I hauled Tears with me. ‘The second cohort is supposed to gather northwest of the gate. The others will be there.’

‘But they’re not.’ He pulled me round, spinning on my heel. ‘They’re by the engineers’ workshop. Look.’

Our unit carried a lit torch and ran on the edge of the others; six men I knew now as well as I had ever known my brothers. We sprinted to catch up. ‘Syrion… I owe you.’ I clapped his arm. ‘Lupus would-’

‘He might still. He’s at the gate. Move!’

In the throng of an entire legion, amidst shouting, swearing, hammering men, we streamed out on to the hard-beaten earth beyond the gates. By instinct more than memory, we found the place where we had practised our defence against cavalry that one time with Cadus and set to hammering our sharpened stakes into the ground.

I was paired with Syrion: he held his stake, I pounded it with the butt end of my javelin, praying that I wouldn’t miss and smash his fingers; we had already seen one man out of our century injured that way in daylight when last we did this.

As then, we were hammering into the parade ground which had been marched on by five thousand men daily for more years than I cared to count. It was set like concrete. I raised and smashed, raised and smashed. My fingers ached from the concussion. I felt the wood give a little, and again.

‘Will it hold at that?’ Syrion asked. ‘If he kicks it?’

Lupus would kick it; even if we were attacked, he’d testit to see if he could find a reason to beat us. I felt the stake wobble.

‘It might hold to a kick,’ I said. ‘But if the cataphracts come, they’ll ride it down.’

I had seen Vologases’ armoured cavalry. This fact alone had raised my standing in the unit; they trusted my judgement and I, in turn, found some respect for them if for nobody else. Syrion nodded. I pounded again. The javelin slipped in the sweat of my hands. I jerked it aside. Syrion swore, viciously.

‘Your hand?’ I asked.

‘Missed.’ Amidst the din I heard him swallow. ‘Try again.’

I tried again. And again. And again until I felt it inch away from me, into the ground.

‘Enough. It’ll hold. Now yours.’

Another stake. Another frantic pounding, but this time I held it and Syrion battered it with his pilum. I braced my feet and held my arms rigid and prayed the same prayers for the safety of my fingers. Broken bones used to excuse a man from duties in this place; not now.

It had been different, we were told, before we came. Our arrival, with our wealth, or our obvious loathing of the legion, or the fact that Cadus had dropped from the heavens into such a senior position and might rob the other centurions of their easy promotions… whatever the reason, the XIIth had never worked so hard in living memory as they had these past six months. Only my unit did not hate me for it. Perhaps they could not afford to.

‘Done.’

I stepped back. Syrion gave the stake one last, baleful smack. We stood in front of it, shoulder to shoulder, shield to shield. I felt Proclion press in on my left. He was largest of all of us, a bear of a man, from the south toe of Italy, where they have been Roman citizens for a dozen generations yet still speak Greek to spite their Latin masters.

Horgias fitted in to his left as his shield-man, then Rufus was left of him, and after him Polydeuces and then Sarapammon. Syrion held the century’s standard, which had the open hand of a god (some said it was the emperor, but I chose to think of it as Helios) at the top, and the badges of valour underneath. We had few of those, and none won since Caesar’s death.

Torches flared about us, bringing light to our hellish dark. Leontius, the aquilifer, who bore the legion’s Eagle, brought it now to the fore and stood beneath it in such a way that the shadow of the bird fell on to the front ranks. He wore a wolfskin as his bearer’s pride where others of his sort wore leopard or lion; that was done, we were all sure, to placate Lupus, for his name meant ‘wolf’ in Latin, although everyone on the camp spoke Greek unless forced to do otherwise by their officers, who themselves only did so to prove a point. A hundred paces to our left, the Eagle of the IVth Scythians caught the light of their many torches and spun it away to the dark.

By ragged starts, the sounds of hammering ceased. We stood in silence, bunched behind our shields, helmets aglow under the bouncing flames of the wool-and-pitch torches.

We were in the front and centre of the line; the place of dispensable men. I saw movement at my right and heard the trumpet’s blast. To give him credit, Munius Cattulinus might have been a sloppy clerk of clerks — in my role as clerk to the century I had had occasion to read his writing and it was as bad as I had feared — but he was an excellent signaller.

The trumpet called clear and fine; eight strong notes.

On the first note, we cast our javelins into the dark at an enemy we could not see and now knew did not exist, drew our swords and knelt.

On the second note, the rank behind us cast their javelins, drew their swords and knelt.

On the third note, the third rank cast their javelins, which was the point when we discovered that not all of the second rank had knelt yet; some were still struggling to draw their swords. Men shouted curses in the dark. Others cursed back, louder, so that, by the time the fourth note of the horn sounded, half the men were not sure if it was for them, and of those who did know not all were ready to rise and step to the right.

The remaining four notes, which should have timed our four paces backwards, descended into progressively greater chaos. An officer shouted for order; Lupus, I think, but there’s a point when all angry men sound the same. As silence fell, we were a milling soup of disordered men, facing all directions but front.

Syrion held our eight-man unit together by force of will and a carrying voice. We had not stepped fully to our right, because there was no room to do so, and when we tried to pace back we were stopped after two paces by the men behind. So we stood where we were, shields locked in a wall, with two rows of stakes in front of us, half of which were not sound, knowing that if Vologases’ cavalry rode out of the dark and charged at us now, we were dead men.