Wallace Breem - Eagle in the Snow

I said, “There are no orders now. We stand here until we die.”

The wind blew the top off the ground snow, and I heard a faint sound and saw a flight of swans, skimming above the trees on their way to the Mosella, which we should not see again.

Quintus spoke to my orderly. “Fetch a bowl of wine and bring it to the left flank. Quickly now.” He took his helmet from his arm and set it carefully upon his head. As he buckled the straps under his chin I noticed that his hands were quite steady. He said, “Give me all your men, Fabianus. They are massing again. When they come close I shall ride out at the head of my ala and try to break them up a little.”

Fabianus said, “No, it is not worth it.”

Quintus smiled. “You are so very wrong,” he said. “It has all been worth it. Do not ever think otherwise.” He looked round us in turn, giving each man a smile and a nod. When he turned to me, I said, “I will come with you.” Fabianus moved forward, but Aquila held him by the arm.

I walked with Quintus to the left flank and watched him give his orders. His men mounted and formed up. They looked very calm and determined. They were very young, most of them only boys.

“Well?”

He turned and we tried to smile. “I did my best to be Maharbal,” he said.

“I know. And I to be Hannibal.”

He gripped my arm and I his, and then he mounted his horse. He took the standard with its red banner and its silver eagle, that Stilicho had given him, and settled it comfortably in his shield hand. “This time, I carry it,” he said. “It is my right.”

I nodded. The orderly came up and I took the cups of wine. I handed one to Quintus, and we looked at each other, and then we drank.

He said hoarsely, “It was better to do this than grow fat and rot upon the Wall.”

“I have always thought so.”

“Maximus.”

“Yes.”

“I never laughed.”

“I know,” I said. “Go now, my dear friend, in the name of Mithras, and may the fates be kind.”

“And to you, also, my general. In the name of Mithras.” He threw the wine cup on to the snow; and then saluted, and rode off.

I returned to my post. The plain was dark with the great hordes of moving men. They stretched out to the woods on either side, and I knew that nothing would stop them. The aquilifer fetched the Eagle, and a wounded man brought a brazier glowing, white hot with our fire, and stood it by the signal tower.

“When they reach the palisade, take the Eagle from its standard and do what has to be done,” I said.

“Upon my life,” he replied.

Artorius came up to me, his face working. He was shivering like a dog. He said, and his voice was curiously calm, “This is the end for all of us.”

I nodded.

He said, “I wanted so much for my family. Not this.” He gestured with a shaking hand.

I said, “You are a brave man, Artorius. I have known men less frightened who would have run from the field long since.”

He said, “You make it all sound so easy.”

“It is very easy. I promise you that.”

He nodded and stumbled away, back to his waiting men.

They came nearer and nearer, and then a trumpet sounded, and Quintus Veronius, former commander of the Ala Petriana, and now Master of Horse in the Province of Upper Germany, raised his sword high, so that the blade glinted in the dying sun, and led his cavalry out across the snow on their last charge.

The charge went home: the mass broke up, and the horsemen disappeared into a tumultuous, sea of men. I saw the bright helmets vanish, one by one; watched rigidly as the standard dipped suddenly, as though the Eagle dived in flight; had a glimpse of a red cloak thrown high by a triumphant foe; and then the Vandals were across the ditch and smashing at the palisade with their axes. They swept round on the flanks, riderless horses with blood-stained saddles amongst them, and Fredegar’s Franks fell back, dying at every step. A loose bay with a white star fled past, snorting with terror, as we closed up in a tight circle about the signal tower; Fabianus and Aquila on my left and right, while Artorius and Scudilio stood a little beyond. I called out then: “I am dying in good company,” and they turned, smiled and lifted their sword hilts in salute. As the enemy checked and fell back before the thrust of our swords, I heard, above the screams of the wounded, and the hard yells of the Vandals, a deep voice that shouted, “Hail and Farewell.”

I turned. I saw the Eagle of the Twentieth, bright, fierce and once immortal, standing upon the fire. As I watched, it turned red and then black, and soon ceased to be anything but a lump of dripping, melted bronze.

They stormed the ditches and the ringed palisade. Fire arrows set the wooden tower blazing above our heads, and I could hear the wounded in the camp scream, as the barbarians fired the waggons and the tents, and butchered with their swords everything that moved. They closed in again and came at us, snarling like foxes, a mass of coloured shields and whirling swords. I thrust and parried and thrust again, until I was fighting behind a litter of their own dead; but still they came, and the circle grew smaller and smaller. Artorius, sobbing with rage and fighting like a madman, dropped with three swords in his chest; and Aquila, dying, killed four men with quick thrusts before he fell on the point of a boar spear. Fredegar, decapitating two men with one stroke of his great axe, was struck in the face by a fire arrow. He staggered backwards, flung up his arms, cried, “Marcomir!” and disappeared under the feet of an enemy horseman.

Scudilio said, across the body of my Chief Centurion, “I always wanted to be a Roman citizen. It is too late now.”

I said, “You have been a friend, which is better still.”

I smiled grimly, saw Fabianus lying in a huddle at my feet, and felt a searing pain in my right arm. I thrust desperately, and felt the sword go home as the bearded faces snarled about me. I heard a voice say, “Remember me to the Gods,” and, as I fell, it was Scudilio who dropped across my back with blood pouring from the javelins in his chest and neck.

It was the sixteenth day of January in the year one thousand one hundred and sixty, after the foundation of Rome, when the Twentieth Legion, the last to carry the Eagle, died at the thirtieth milestone, upon the road to Augusta Treverorum.

The last cohorts lay in their triple ranks behind the palisade, and they were as quiet as if they had been on parade. But they would salute no general as their emperor now; they would draw no gold for their pay; and they would hear no trumpets. They were beyond all hope and all fear; and they were colder than any snow.

MAXIMUS STIRRED THE ashes of the dead fire with a stick. It was light now, and the shadows were drawing back from the broken walls of the shattered camp where the listeners crouched in silence.

He said, “There is little more to tell. I remember a tent and a waggon, and voices that spoke a tongue I did not understand. I remember a voice that cried, once, in Latin, ‘He is mine. Give him to me.’ I remember the walls of a tent flapping in the wind, and a great pain in my wrist and hand. I remember warmth and hot drinks, and times of sickness and fever. I remember little else.

“When I began to recover I was in a house, and the Bishop was in the room. He had a livid scar on his cheek, and his hair was now quite white. He told me that two months after the city had been sacked, a man in the dress of the Alemanni brought me to him in a cart, secretly and by night. Before he left, the man spoke to the Bishop. He said, ‘If he lives, which I doubt, tell him it was for the sake of the happy times.’ That was all.