Anthony Riches - Fortress of Spears

‘No!’

Marcus turned, to find his watch officer’s one good eye fierce with determination.

‘No use in your throwing yourself away. Take the lads in there and pull those poor bastards out of the fire, those that’s left.’

He nodded slowly, turning away from the scene of his comrades’ massacre. When he spoke, his voice was harsh with fresh purpose.

‘Get back to your men, Cyclops.’

He ran back down the slope through the smoke, his mind working quickly, almost falling over Morban in the murk.

‘Twenty paces more and then put them into line to the right, facing up the hill. No horns!’

The standard-bearer nodded at him and stamped away up the hill, while Marcus pulled a soldier out of the marching ranks and barked a command in the man’s ear.

‘Run back down the hill to the first spear. Tell him there’s a century being torn to pieces up here and we need urgent reinforcement now! Go!’

He pushed the soldier hard, sending him away down the slope, then turned back to the marching column. Morban, barely visible through the smoke, had the standard held horizontally over his head with its metal hand pointing to his right.

‘Scarface! Make sure they make the turn!’

The veteran soldier snapped a salute and ran to march at Morban’s shoulder, ready to stand firm once the standard-bearer made the right-angled turn to put the 9th in line facing the enemy, rather than risk encountering them in the vulnerable column of march. The line abruptly turned right, the soldiers following their standard without much of a clue as to what was happening. And just as well, Marcus mused, given what they would be facing in less than a minute. He stepped in alongside his deputy, pointing past the marching soldiers and up the smoke-wreathed slope.

‘Qadir, there are hundreds of barbarians less than a hundred paces that way, and they’ve already torn up one century. When we march out of this damned smoke they’ll throw themselves on to us like dogs on raw meat, so give me your pole and get your bow ready, you and your mates. Anyone that looks like they might be important, anyone with a lot of gold or that’s shouting the odds a bit too loudly, put them down.’

The big Hamian handed over his six-foot brass-knobbed pole, unslinging the bow from across his shoulders and barking a command in Aramaic to the dozen or so other Hamians marching in the 9th Century’s ranks. Marcus shot a glance back down the century’s line, waiting a few seconds to allow the last of the marching soldiers to make the turn, then drew breath to bellow his orders.

‘Ninth Century, halt!’

The column stamped to a halt, troops coughing and spluttering as they breathed in the thickening smoke from the rapidly spreading fires.

‘To the left… face! Form lines of battle!’

He waited while the soldiers straightened their lines, the front-rankers raising their shields and hefting their spears, the rear-rankers crowding close to the men in front of them, ready to grip their belts and hold them steady once the fighting started.

‘Ninth Century…’

Marcus’s voice rang out over the short double line, the din of battle from their right muffled by the smoke and the distant roar of blazing canvas.

‘When we march forward, we will soon come upon the remains of one of our sister centuries. They were surprised in the line of march, and never stood any chance of resisting the barbarians. You, however, are ready to fight, armed and armoured, drilled and trained to perfection. Any one of you is worth a dozen of those blue-nosed bastards. So we will go forward, we will find the men that killed our brothers and we will kill as many of them as possible before our reinforcement arrives. At the walk, advance!’

The century started forward as one man, and while Marcus had Qadir’s pole ready to push between the shoulders of any man hanging back, he quickly realised that he wasn’t going to need it. Ten, twenty paces they advanced, without any sign of an end to the dirty grey smoke what was making eyes water and lungs strain for breath, and then, in the blink of an eye, they were back out in the crisp dawn air with the scene of the other century’s massacre laid out before them.

The slope was littered with corpses clad in the same equipment his men were wearing, their mail armour a dull iron grey against the barbarian camp’s trampled mud. A few of the fallen soldiers were still moving, their wounds severe enough to leave them helpless but not enough to have killed them immediately. Half a dozen barbarians were moving among them, their swords black with the blood they had spilled, and, as Marcus watched, the nearest of them raised his blade in readiness to dispatch another of the wounded. Qadir snapped his bow up, and, with a sonorous note from the bowstring, put an arrow into his neck, dropping him choking and kicking to the ground beside his intended victim.

A couple of the barbarians closest to the dying warrior looked up at the sudden commotion, gaping in surprise at the 9th Century’s unexpected appearance from out of the smoke even as the other Hamians shot them down with a swift precision that rivalled Qadir’s. Forcing himself to ignore the dead and dying Tungrians scattered across the ground before him, Marcus pushed through the century’s battle line and looked around him for some sign of the barbarians who had massacred his fellow soldiers only minutes before. The smoke eddied with the gentle morning breeze again, affording him a momentary glimpse of the fight taking place down the slope to their right. The Tungrian line was now fully embattled, struggling to hold back easily three times their own strength of enemy warriors who were throwing themselves at the shield wall with the desperate fury of men who knew that if they failed to break through the soldiers they were as good as dead. Before the curtain of smoke closed again he realised, with a sickening jolt, exactly what it was that the barbarians had impaled on their spearheads and were waving up and down in front of the Tungrian soldiers. He turned back to his men with his eyes blazing and the muscles around his jaw rippling as he fought to hold his temper.

‘Ninth Century, right wheel!’

He held his breath for a long moment while the century swung ponderously through their quarter-turn to face down the slope. The Hamians were all at sea with the manoeuvre, still new to the disciplines of infantry fighting after choosing to join the century less than a week before, but the men around each of them gently pulled and pushed them through the line’s reorientation, with more than one kind word or pat on the shoulder for men who had been derided as nothing more than a burden on the cohort only days before. Marcus smiled to himself despite his anger, acknowledging their justified change of status. The battle at the Red River’s ford had seen to that in one desperate, bloody afternoon of seemingly doomed resistance to the Venicone tribe’s assault.

Within a minute the line was aligned with the direction in which a swelling roar of battle was reaching them through the smoke, the soldiers looking anxiously down their ranks at him as he pulled both swords from their places on his belt, his face grim with purpose. Morban, now no longer the pivot for their swing to the right, scuttled down the line’s rear to his place immediately behind their attack, the trumpeter running behind him. Marcus raised his voice again, steeling himself for the attack.

‘Ninth Century, your enemy are down there, hidden in the smoke.’ A few of the soldiers, he realised, were translating his words for those men around them with insufficient Latin to keep up with his angry words. ‘When I give the command we will march down this slope until we have them in sight. They will be close, Ninth Century, close enough for you to smell the shit that will stream down their legs when they see us come out of nowhere at their backs.’ A few men laughed, the delight of imminent combat evident in their wide eyes and flared nostrils. The rest of them were for the most part stone faced, working hard to hold their nerve with battle only seconds away. Marcus nodded to the trumpeter, who blew the advance strong and clear.