William Napier: The Judgement

These wolf-men have come in high summer, but their white teeth gleam in the darkness just the same. They throw back their shaggy heads and laugh to the sky, giving thanks, their copper-banded arms raised to their gods of wind and storm and sky: to Astur the Eagle, and Savash the Lord of War, and the Lady Itugen, each of them a different face of the Maker of the Universe, who loves battle and rides with them and shall remain with them always. They grin in the firelight and their yellow eyes flash with delight as the town goes up in flames, and the helpless people flee before them and fall like mown feathergrass on the steppes, and the loot piles up in one corner of the stricken and burning town as fast as the corpses pile up in another. The church bells still clang in unholy panic, but it is the alien warriors who are ringing them now, in jest and victory. The priests have long since been stripped and slain, amid wailing people and howling dogs and the screams of abandoned children.

So Margus falls.

Afterwards, drunk on wine, they rode out, still rejoicing, past the black charcoal remnants of the once colourful Margus fair and back to the grasslands. They are no townsmen, and the ruins of booths and buildings are already haunted by the ghosts of those they have slain. They retreat to their tents and wagons in the meadows.

Among the many bodies lie an old woman and a girl. The girl with the hare-shot lip, lying still among her pails. She had seen the future truly, as the old woman had said. Truly she had the gift.

Viminacium: at the confluence of the Danube and the Mlava, headquarters of the VII Claudia Pia Fidelis, raised by Julius Caesar himself back in 58 BC to knock hell out of the Gauls and then do the same to their cousins over in Britain as well. An ancient legion with more than five hundred years of memories, stationed here on the Moesian Danube since Trajan’s day. Four long centuries since the crucifixion of Christ.

Gallus Sabinus, legionary legate, veteran of frontier battles and frontier boredom, with a bald bull-head, rolls of fat at the back of his neck and an impressive, solid mound of a belly, but muscles in his arms still strong enough to lift a hundredweight sandbag above his head without noticeable effort. At his rickety ink-stained wooden desk, going through the quartermaster’s monthly returns by the light of a sputtering oil-lamp. Only three times more he’d be doing this bureaucratic donkey-work. Only three more months, and then he’d be off to his Thracian vineyard, complete with neat little villa and courtyard, a fountain and everything, even a bit of mosaic floor, albeit a fairly crap one by some local shyster, featuring a dolphin which looked to him more like an overweight eel. But his Domitilla was very proud of it, out there sweeping it clean every morning at the crack of dawn. The woman he hardly knew, his wife, Domitilla: sharp of tongue, broad of behind, frosty of expression, but serviceable enough, all things considered.

He leaned forwards and his desk wobbled. One day they’d get round to giving it four equal legs.

He’d miss his men. They weren’t so bad, for a motley scrag-end of limitanei: frontier wolves. Dalmatians, Illyrians, Thracians, Teutons, a right gaggle of mongrel geese. But Sabinus looked after his own. No political appointee from a senatorial family, who disdained such Spartan frontier postings anyway nowadays, Sabinus was a soldier to the backbone and proud of the traditions of the VII. The mobile field army might be the glory boys nowadays, the generals’ gilded darlings, an elite force ready to march and fight wherever barbarian incursion threatened. But the frontier wolves were quartered out here permanently, doggedly training and arming and waiting for the day. Reduced in numbers, both rations and armour thinner than before, but still proud to call themselves a legion, with their eagle standard, plus the bull ensign common to all the Caesarian legions. Waiting for the barbarians to come.

In his years here Sabinus had done his best. He couldn’t do squat about their pay, but he’d drilled and trained them and instituted field exercises they’d grumblingly enjoyed. Both weapons and wall artillery were well up to scratch. As for the walls themselves, he just hoped they’d hold. Especially the Porta Praetoria, with its ominous ground-to-battlements crack in the left tower. One day, the prefect would stir himself off his fat arse enough to do a complete rebuild, or maybe far-off Constantinople would realise that the old fort was in need of a lick of paint or two.

Till then, three more months…

He looked up. ‘Well?’

The optio stood hesitantly in the gloom. ‘Margus is still burning, sir.’

Sabinus laid down his pen, sat back and pointed at his own eyes. ‘What are these, Optio?’

‘Eyes, sir.’

‘Correct. And with them I can see that Margus is still burning, in the same way I can see that you are still a useless twat. By “Well” I meant “What news?” Why is it still burning?’

‘We don’t… that is, the riders haven’t returned, sir.’

‘When did they ride out?’

‘About the ninth hour.’

‘What traffic on the road?’

The optio glanced nervously towards the open door.

‘Reports – unconfirmed reports – of incursion, sir. Over the river. Barbarian horsemen, so an old fellow says who crawled out of the river covered in duckweed. Said he’d floated down on driftwood from Margus itself. Babbling and half-mad.’

Sabinus kept his expressionless gaze on the hapless optio. ‘So. .. you’ve ordered the full legion to arms, for safety’s sake?’

‘I will, sir.’

‘Forget it. I will.’ His chair crashed backwards as he stood up. ‘And put yourself on fucking latrine duty.’

The legionary fortress of Viminacium stood square behind thick stone walls thirty feet high, battlemented and bastioned, with twin towers at each gate, north, south, east and west. From the flanks of the fortress ran a much lesser wall, flung out wide and embracing the many acres of the proud town with its churches and chapels, wide streets, richly decorated villas, splendid basilica and porticoed marketplaces and, beyond the walls, its own ten-thousand-seat hippodrome. People came from miles around to see the spectacles there. But now, thought Sabinus with a grim smile, another altogether more real kind of spectacle would drive them many more miles away.

He found a tall young decurion.

‘What’s happening in the town?’

‘People moving out already, heading for the hills.’

As he’d thought. ‘Any asking for refuge here?’

The decurion shook his head.

They both knew what that meant. The people had already judged. They were finished. He smiled again to himself. Like hell they were.

The legate’s bull roar sounded across the darkening fort from where he stood on the tower of the west gate, followed by a distant sound of stirring and then a steady crescendo of slamming doors, footsteps, the slap of leather soles on worn stone stairs, clanging weaponry, voices, heavy weights dragging, winches creaking.

His orders ricocheted around the fortress walls like missiles.

‘Tubernator, sound the recall! Every last soldier still working out in the fields, get him in. Ditto from the farmhouses. Families to the barracks. Muster rolls to be counted. Every other century on the walls! Cavalry alae armed and ready at the south gate. Artillery units on the towers. Four machines to each bastion, two for frontal bombardment, two for enfilading fire, standard set-up, do I have to tell you? All gates double-rammed! And I hope you got those holding-braces repaired on the Praetorian Gate like I ordered, Decurion!

‘Yes, sir!’

‘We’re expecting a night attack?’