Harry Sidebottom - Iron and Rust

A barbarian came at him from the right. He blocked the blow with his blade, smashed the edge of his shield into the bearded face. The man staggered, getting in the way of his companions. Gordian checked over his shoulder. Sabinianus had his back.

Seeing their officers alone on the battlements, the legionaries surged towards the wall. Men fought to get on the ladder.

Two more warriors jabbed at Gordian. He took one blow on his shield, parried the other. He shaped to cut left, but thrust right. Both natives gave ground. There was a throng behind them.

A crack of wood, sharp over the sounds of battle, then shouts of pain and fury. The ladder had broken under the weight of men. The barbarians roared, triumphant and mocking. The pair facing Gordian rushed forward. A lifetime of training took over. Gordian stepped inside one blow, took the other on the rim of his shield. Turning, he used his weight to force one off the battlements, then chopped down into the knee of the other, finished him with a neat backhand.

High shouts, obviously orders in some barbaric tongue. The enemy shuffled away. A man down in the village, pointing up at the isolated Romans. A hideous sound as an arrow tore past Gordian’s ear. It felt to Gordian as if he had been here before: trapped on the wall, the ladders broken. It was Alexander the Great in some Indian town. The Macedonian had jumped down.

‘Sabinianus with me.’

Gordian charged the barbarians to his right. Its very unexpectedness made them shy away. Hacking and cutting, he drove them back past the head of some steps. Without pause, he plunged down.

The steps protected their right. They huddled together, crouching low behind their battered shields. Arrows thudded into the wooden boards, struck splinters out of the stonework. Gordian was gasping. His chest hollow and empty. Death is nothing to us . An impact jarred up into his shoulder. Something smashed into the side of his helmet. Blood ran hot down his neck. Death is nothing .

The hail of missiles slackened. A confusion of competing noises. The clash of steel behind and above. High-pitched yells of surprise and horror in front. Gordian’s head was ringing. He peeked around the rim of his shield. The barbarians were milling, their heads turning in all directions.

‘Menophilus!’ Sabinianus shouted. ‘Rescuing us is becoming a habit.’

A wedge of men was fighting its way down one of the alleys from the village. The enormity of the surprise robbed the barbarians of their senses. Some were fighting back; some stood and let themselves be cut down. The majority were running, this way and that, wildly seeking an illusory safety.

Hobnailed boots clattered down the steps. A knot of legionaries covered Gordian and Sabinianus with their shields.

‘Are you hurt?’

Gordian did not reply. He was trying to clear his head, think what needed to be done.

‘The gate — we have to get the gate open.’

A legionary helped Gordian to his feet. He was surprised that he was staggering. His thigh ached; his head hurt.

Groups of legionaries were appearing all along the wall. Up there, resistance was sporadic, still fierce in some places. The legionaries with Gordian overran those who stood between them and the gate.

It was the work of moments to lift the bar and open the gate. Legionaries flooded in, the Frontier Wolves hard on their heels. The auxiliaries of the 2nd Cohort would not be far behind. They had friends to avenge and would have no intention of missing out on the raping and plunder.

Gordian leant on his shield. Doing the same next to him, Sabinianus looked as white as a man who had stepped barefoot on a snake. Gordian thought that someone ought to keep some troops together, in case there was further opposition or other barbarians lurking in the hills. He was too tired. Gingerly, he explored the cut on his scalp. It had largely stopped bleeding, probably was not too serious. The lines of poetry from his dream came to him:

For I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it:

There will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish,

And Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear.

The Northern Frontier

Near the Town of Viminacium on the Danube,

the Ides of May, AD236

Timesitheus watched the beaters working down the field. Next to him, Macedo, the Prefect of the Osrhoenes, sat his horse in silence. It was good hunting country: gentle timbered slopes coming down to broad plains dotted with villas and stands of mature trees. The wide channels of the Danube glinted in the spring sunshine off to the north.

The imperial field army had left Castra Regina in Raetia as soon as the worst of the winter had broken. The immense column had taken two months by easy stages to reach Viminacium in Moesia Superior. It was camped in and around the legionary fortress and town, readying itself to cross the river into Dacia. Maximinus was eager to confront the Sarmatians and other barbarians infesting that province.

The campaign was of little interest to Timesitheus. The next day, with Tranquillina and his household, he would continue on south and east. Naissus, Serdica, Hadrianoupolis — they would follow the great military highway to Perinthus, where they would pick up the Via Egnatia, and so on to Byzantium and the crossing of the Bosphorus into his new province of Bithynia-Pontus. There was a long journey still ahead, and demanding work at the far end, unravelling complex civic finances and confronting the intransigence of atheist Christians, in addition to the normal duties of a governor. He was glad to be out hunting, glad to be away from the intrigue of the court.

Macedo owned a dozen well-bred Celtic gaze-hounds. Timesitheus had always enjoyed hunting. This was very different from what he had known in his childhood on Corcyra. There, the mountainous, broken ground had meant going on foot with a few local scent-hounds and nets. It might have been back in the days of Xenophon. If he were honest, the resources of his family would never have stretched to Celtic hounds, Illyrian horses and liveried huntsmen.

The beaters, more than twenty of them in line abreast, were walking a field sown with wheat. One of Macedo’s huntsmen had been out before dawn, and reported that there were several hares. It was well known that the braver, more intelligent hares made their seats in such open, worked land. They did so, Arrian of Nicomedia had written in his Cynegeticus , to challenge the hounds. Timesitheus thought it more probable they chose such places because they could not be stalked so easily by foxes. Whatever the reason, it promised good sport.

Macedo had not invited anyone else. The two mounted men waited behind a huntsman with two hounds on slip leashes. Other hunt servants, likewise clad in thick, embroidered coats and stout boots, held the rest of the hounds further back. The red and white feathers of their scarers flashed as the beaters drove across the front of those waiting. Timesitheus ran an educated eye over the two bitches in the slips. A brindle and a black, both long in the stand from head to tail, they trembled slightly, necks arched and proud.

A shout came from one of the beaters, taken up along the line. They had put up a hare. It took three or four huge jumps from its seat. Ears pricked, it sat for a moment then bounded away from the noise and the motion.

The huntsman crouched, walked the hounds forward, getting himself down to their horizon. The bitches were well trained. They pulled lightly on their collars but remained completely silent. The huntsman released the top ends of the slip leads. In a blur the hounds were gone. No one, Timesitheus thought, could fail to thrill at the beauty of their acceleration. He put his heels into his horse’s flanks.