Anthony Riches - Fortress of Spears

‘About bloody time too.’

Qadir shook his shoulder, pointing across the Tungrian line.

‘Look!’

Fresh troops were pouring into the space behind the Tungrian cohort, moving quickly to bolster their sagging line.

‘It’s the Second Cohort. First Spear Neuto was never going to leave us in the sh-’

Marcus stopped in mid-sentence, his eyes suddenly caught by an object being waved around over the heads of the barbarians a dozen paces from the century’s line. Qadir caught his stare and looked to see what had taken his attention. It was a man’s head, still wearing the cross-crested helmet that denoted his centurion’s rank, evidently hacked from his body and impaled on the point of a spear as a crude trophy with which the Romans could be taunted. As Qadir watched, Marcus’s face went white with anger, and his eyes narrowed in calculation. He turned to the Hamian, reaching down and picking up a fallen shield, his voice stony as he turned to face the howling mob railing at the century’s shields.

‘Shoot to my right, and keep shooting.’

Guessing what was about to happen, Qadir reached out a hand to restrain his friend, but Marcus was too quick for him, pushing through the astonished rear-rankers and stepping into the front rank alongside Scarface. Stopping a sword-blow with his shield, he stepped forward and stabbed his gladius into the tribesman’s throat as the enemy warrior fought to free his blade from the painted wooden surface, turning back to stare with a blank-eyed intensity at the wide-eyed soldiers.

‘Guard my left.’

He turned back and stepped into the seething mass of warriors, hacking down a man to his right and blocking another sword-blow from his left with the shield, shouting a terse order over his shoulder.

‘Qadir! Shoot to my right!’

The Hamian shook himself free from the amazement of seeing his centurion actually throw himself into the mass of his enemies and bellowed a command in his own language.

‘Hamians, to me!’

Nocking an arrow and loosing it with one fluid motion, he sent the iron-tipped head through the throat of a warrior poised to bury his axe into Marcus’s helmet. Ramming his gladius deep into another barbarian’s chest and feeling the blade’s reluctance to come free of the wound’s tight grip, the young centurion released the weapon’s ornate handle without a second thought, kicking the dying warrior back into the men behind him. Grabbing the axe from the tribesman tottering backwards with Qadir’s arrow buried in his throat, he levelled his shield and hurled it horizontally into the press of the enemy, flattening another of the men facing him with a ruptured throat, then raised the axe two handed and gathered himself to attack again. Another Hamian reached Qadir’s side at the same second, ripping his bow from its place across his back and reaching for an arrow with the same unconscious grace with which the chosen man exercised his craft. With only a split second’s time spent finding a point of aim, he sent the missile into the fray around his centurion with an almost thoughtless speed that nevertheless sent another of the men facing Marcus staggering back into the men behind him in a spray of his own blood. At the same instant Scarface shook off his own momentary panic, hurling a furious command at the front-rankers to his left as he waded forward into the barbarians.

‘With me, you bastards!’

Slamming down his shield to block off a spear-thrust aimed at his legs, he thrust his sword’s blade into the barbarian’s throat and twisted the hilt, opening the warrior’s neck wide in a shower of hot blood that flicked across the half-dozen men who had advanced into the barbarian mass alongside him. Glancing up, he was momentarily open mouthed at the sight of his officer hurling his shield into the warband’s mass and grasping an axe two handed before throwing himself at the warriors gathering around him with an incoherent scream, clearly lost to his rage. The speed and savagery of his onslaught cleared a path into the heart of the warband as warriors fell away from him with their bodies rent by the weapon’s heavy blade, those as yet untouched by the unexpected attack backing away from the berserk Roman. Qadir and his fellow archers were ten strong now, and their arrows were killing the warriors to Marcus’s right faster than they could be replaced by the men behind them, the barbarians’ eyes flickering from their unhinged enemy, his armour dripping with the blood of the dying men scattered around him, to the archers dealing out impersonal death to them from behind the Roman line.

Scarface and his fellow soldiers now formed the other side of their centurion’s tenuous link to his century, their shields forming a diagonal wall from the century’s line to Scarface at its farthest extension. A man fell forward into the seething mass of barbarians facing them, his throat skewered by a barbed spear thrust over the rim of his shield and then pulled back to haul him bodily out of the shield wall, and Qadir pushed a rear-ranker forward to take his place before lifting his bow to shoot again. The soldiers were holding out well enough, stabbing into the mass of their enemies and parrying the inevitable counter-attacks in a way that the veteran soldier knew could only last so long before they succumbed to the overwhelming strength gathering against them. He dragged in a deep breath, meaning to entreat Marcus to retreat from his exposed position, but before he could do so the axe snagged between a dying man’s ribs and stuck fast. A warrior in the mass facing him stabbed at Marcus’s face, the blade slicing a long cut in his cheek as he swayed backwards to evade the attack, releasing his grasp on the axe’s handle as he bent to scoop up a dying warrior’s sword from the ground beside him. Stamping forward, he hacked the sword’s blade at his attacker’s legs, dropping the man to his knees with the muscles of both thighs opened to the bone. Drawing his spatha, the Roman roared his blood-soaked defiance at the barbarians now visibly shrinking away from him. A single man stepped forward to meet him in the space that had opened around the Roman, one hand grasping a massive battleaxe, the other a spear on which the centurion’s head was impaled, and as Scarface realised whose the head was his eyes narrowed in pain.

‘Oh, dear fuck…’

Marcus jumped forward to meet the newcomer’s attack, a fresh flight of arrows punching into the men to his right as he stopped the barbarian champion’s axe with crossed swords, halting the blade inches from his head before slamming his helmet’s brow guard forward in a vicious head-butt which sent the enemy warrior staggering backwards, blood streaming from his shattered nose. He followed up with lightning speed, his spatha hacking off the reeling barbarian’s right arm at the wrist before the other man ever realised what was happening to him. Thrusting forward with the barbarian weapon, he ran the warrior clean through, leaving the blade sheathed in his opponent’s chest and tearing the spear from his grip. While the barbarians around him watched in amazed silence, he pulled the severed head from the bloody blade, tossed the weapon aside and tucked the grisly trophy under his left arm. Stepping back a pace, he growled a quiet order to Scarface.

‘Fall back. Slowly.’

The tribesmen watched in silence as the Romans retreated to their line one pace at a time, never once looking back from their enemies, while the Hamians waited with arrows nocked and ready to fly. Regaining the relative safety of the Tungrian line, Marcus blew out a long shaky breath, tears running through the blood painted across his face between his cheek guards as he stared down into the pain-contorted face that stared back up at him. He lifted his head to watch numbly as the 20th Legion’s leading cohort smashed into the barbarian rear less than a hundred paces from the Tungrians’ place on the slope.