William Dietrich - Hadrian's wall

And then die, with a Celtic cry in his throat.

"You really hate them, don't you, Arden?" Luca asked. "That's how you're different from us, who just want gold and wine and silk and cotton and horses."

"I know them. That's how I'm different."

He turned and walked to Savia, who had trailed him for protection like a dog ever since Tiranen. He'd tolerated it because, strangely, she reminded him of Valeria. She'd given some of her strength to the girl. Any good Roman would choose duty over love, she'd told him. And any Celt would choose passion, he'd replied.

"Where will your lady be?"

"In the fort of the Petriana, I suppose." She looked at him sadly. She knew Valeria had broken his heart, just as he had broken Valeria's with this senseless war.

"If we get through the Wall and overwhelm the garrison, I want you to find her, protect her, and bring her to me."

"What will happen to her if I do?"

What would happen? He didn't know. He feared the moment, even as he desired it. Dread, and anticipation. "By then my sword will be slick with gore and my arms weary from killing. I'll look into her eyes and heart-look at the woman who made love and then left me-and let us both decide, together, what our fate must be."

Savia closed her eyes.

Now he must lead them to it.

Arden walked out in front, where the druid Kalin waited with a raven-headed staff. The barbarians stood as one when he did so, a great host rising up out of the dry and frosted grass like a crop of death. What must it look like from the Wall, this host materializing in the mist?

They were ready.

Caratacus raised his sword and faced his men. He'd no doubt of their courage. "For Dagda!" he shouted. His voice floated in the winter air.

Kalin raised his own staff. "For the gods of the oaken wood!"

The warriors roared their reply. "For Dagda!" Their shaking spears were like a field of wheat in the wind, their howls that of the pack. "For the sacred wood!" Neck torques and silver armlets gleamed in the pale light. Muscles, greased against the cold, shone like bronze. Celtic cattle horns were lifted and blown to add to the din, a clamor like the trumpeting of geese.

We're coming, the horns promised. Stop us if you can.

Then they charged, hard ground rumbling under their running feet.

The Celts raced toward the Wall in a streaming pack, shattering the thin ice of the Ilibrium as they crashed across its shallows and yelling at the cold. Then they surged up its far bank and scrambled toward the Wall like a cresting wave. Twenty carried a pointed log of forest pine to batter the gate, its snout a great brown phallus of revenge. Dozens more had grappling hooks on the end of coils of line.

A handful of Romans could be seen at the parapets above the gate now, running this way and that and shouting alarms. A trumpet sounded. Arrows began to sail out toward the attackers, most thunking into shields or sticking harmlessly into the ground. One found flesh, however, and a warrior grunted and went down. Then another Celt caught a shaft in the eye and whirled, screaming. There was a bang and a scorching sizzle in the chill air. The huge arrow of a cocked ballista rocketed into the barbarian charge, crashing into a tier of barbarians and bowling them over like crockery, their shields splintering under the impact.

It had started.

The attackers howled and shot arrows in turn, the woman Brisa among them. The steady rain of barbarian shafts took one catapult operator squarely in the chest, pitching him backward, and helped clear the parapet of Roman heads.

"Rapid aim!" Arden roared. "Don't give them time!"

One Roman soldier got a shaft through the throat, gurgled, and pitched violently over the wall, landing in a heap in the ditch at its base. A chieftain howled and dashed forward and in an instant the Roman's head was chopped off and thrown down the slope toward the river, bouncing like a ball. A woman of the Attacotti chased it, caught it, and danced by the Ilibrium, holding it aloft.

A Roman arrow shot the decapitator down.

The ballista fired again, but this time its range was long and the missile sizzled over the head of the first wave of attackers.

"We're under their fire! It's safest at the Wall!"

The defending arrow fire began to slacken and grow inaccurate. Romans who leaned out from the Wall to shoot or hurl stones became instant targets, reeling backward with five or six shafts jutting from their bodies. A grappling hook soared up, caught a defender, and jerked him over the lip of the parapet. Other hooks caught on the crenellations, and the barbarians began climbing the barrier hand-over-hand.

The dirt causeway that led over the defensive ditch hadn't been dug away, and so the Celts with the battering ram had an easy time of it, trotting across to hurl the end of the log against the gate. Its boom reverberated under the stone archway, shaking the entire mile-castle. The oak ominously cracked. Then another slam and another, even as a few javelins and arrows dropped from above.

"Keep shooting! Rain arrows! Throw hooks!"

The line of the grappling hooks made a shrill whine as they cut neat parabolas in the winter air, the ropes cinching the face of the Wall in an entangling web. A Roman leaned out to chop a line with his sword, and Brisa coolly shot an arrow that punched through his ear. He screamed and disappeared. First one Celt, then two, then three scrambled up to struggle with the defenders. At a dozen different points now the barbarians were scaling the Wall like flies. The defenders were desperate.

The ram crashed again, and then again, and finally the crossbeam broke and the gate burst, collapsing in a tangle of timber. Barbarians bounded over the top of their discarded ram. A few legionaries tried to stem the tide but were hopelessly outnumbered and swiftly cut down. Up on the top of the wall the Romans simply broke and ran, fleeing east and west along the crest of the barrier. Triumphant Celts streamed up their ropes and dropped down into the courtyard of the milecastle. The barracks was hurriedly ransacked, the second gate that led south was thrown open, and Arden led a throng of warriors through the mile-castle and into the grassy military zone beyond.

Hadrian's Wall had been pierced! As Galba had promised, it was a shell, as easily breached as a sword through parchment. Ahead was the earthen dike of the fossatum, and beyond that all the riches of Britannia. Even as the Celtic army behind bunched to squeeze through the milecastle, the first barbarians were whooping as they spread between wall and dike.

Galba grimly watched the attacking breakthrough from his hiding place on the crest of the fossatum's earthen dike, three hundred paces away. The barbarians poured out like angry bees, half naked and triumphant, and only Galba's firm disciplinary grip had kept his cavalry from bolting immediately to meet them. His men were in an agony of impatience to help their comrades dying in the early defense, but he held them in line.

"You'll get your blood," he'd promised them. "Mount when I tell you to."

Now it was time. He slipped down the dike and bounded up on Imperiurn, the black stallion dancing with excitement. A hundred cavalry swung onto their horses with him, their lances rotating to the sky. His chain of blood-won rings jangled at his waist, his gloved fist seized the reins, and his other hand pulled out his wicked spatha, its hilt carved, rumor held, from the bone of an enemy.

"Remember! I want Caratacus alive!"

Then he trotted to the lip of the grassy dike, calmly counting the barbarians to judge the perfect time. He was a sudden silhouette, posed like a marble effigy.

"Now!" he finally shouted.

A flaming arrow shot from behind the dike and soared above the Wall, giving the signal. A quarter mile from each side of the captured milecastle, on the six-foot-wide pathway atop the undulating Wall, two centuries of Roman infantry rose in unison from where they'd been lying prone in hiding. Their grove of spears rose with them. Silently, but with rehearsed urgency, the two units ran back along the top of the Wall toward the fortlet the Romans had just abandoned, boots ringing on the stonework. New Roman bowmen followed and spread out along the Wall to fire at the barbarians below. The trap was being sprung.