Адриан Голдсуорти - The Fort

There were many heroes that night – and Ferox suspected a fair few whose deeds and names would never be known. Claudia Enica was in the praetorium, and he had had to hold her to stop her from running out to rally her warriors. She had bitten his arm before sleep faded, sense returned and she took charge of the far wall of the barricade. Vindex was at the rear gate with some of his Carvetii and some Brigantians and they met a much larger group of Bastarnae as they retreated. The fight was savage and swift, with half of the Britons cut down and dismembered where they lay. Vindex killed three of the enemy, until he took a bad cut to the shoulder even after the falx had shattered his shield, and a lighter cut to the leg. Ivonercus saved him, standing over his body to kill the warrior before he could strike again, and then kill another who came screaming out of the darkness. Vepoc lifted the scout onto his back, and they and five others made it to the acropolis. Maximus had similarly carried two men to safety, before a stone from a sling hit his ankle which had since swollen badly.

Some of the bravest were unlikely heroes. Privatus, the chamberlain of Sulpicia Lepidina, was away from the praetorium seeing to his owner’s horses, some of the tiny handful left alive. Hearing the noise he found a group of three wives belonging to the veterans and persuaded them to come out from where they were hiding in the rafters above the horse boxes and got them back. Achilles, Claudia Enica’s dwarf who served as both buffoon and accountant, somehow climbed onto the roof of the principia, prised off tiles and started lobbing them down at any warriors trying to attack one of the most vulnerable stretches of barricade where his mistress and some of her Brigantes stood guard. The Dacians flung javelins at him and the little man dodged. Then they brought up an archer, but even then he proved an elusive target and shaft after shaft bounced off the rooftop before he was finally hit and fell. He lived, at least for the moment, with broken legs, a broken arm and the arrow in his side, but the heavy clay tiles falling on the enemy had done a lot to keep them at bay.

There were piles of dead warriors in front of all the barricades before the Dacians gave up the attempt to overrun it and went off to rest or loot. Ferox guessed that they had seventy or so men able to fight, two or three times that many wounded, and thirty or forty civilians and others. He was not sure how to count Sosius as the freedman showed little enthusiasm for fighting for all his killer’s eyes.

Bran wept, sitting with his back pressed against the wall of the praetorium. Ferox had never seen the boy like that, and it took a while before he learned what had happened. He had been with Vindex, but had broken away from the others to search for Minura, for he knew that the queen had sent her to carry a message to the east gate. The attack there was slower, and Cunicius had hesitated before ordering his men to retreat. By that time they were surrounded, and the centurion had to lead a charge to clear a path down one of the side alleys. They broke the Dacians, but the centurion lost both legs below the knee to a low sweeping falx and a fresh band of warriors were coming through the now opened gate and nearly upon them. Minura told the men to flee and stood beside Cunicius as his life blood flowed away. Bran was too far away to help, but close enough to see.

‘She was like the Morrigan in her rage,’ he told Ferox. ‘Her armour gleaming like the sun, her shield a disc of fire and her sword like a bolt of lightning.’ Ferox had never thought the boy capable of such poetry. ‘I saw her behead one man and then spin to slice the arm off another coming at her from the other side. It was… beautiful. She put down seven at the very least, even when blood gushed from her own wounds. She had sworn that she would never let men take her. Never again.’

Claudia Enica had appeared and patted the boy on the shoulder. ‘She kept her word, brother,’ she said softly. ‘Our sister is gone to join all the other brothers and sisters and all the Mothers since the world began. One day our souls shall join them. We must make sure that we live to be worthy of their company.’

Bran got to his feet. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Fleeting though it be, there is vengeance to work.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Ferox said. ‘I do not think they will come again tonight.’ In truth the dawn was little more than an hour away, but as he watched the boy limp off, his left leg stiff from a wound taken several days ago, he did not envy the men who would meet him in battle.

As the sun was rising, they held a consilium in a side room of the principia.

‘Well, it is not much,’ Piso said, after Petrullus had read out a list of the men fit for action and all the other survivors. ‘What about food?’

‘Six days’ worth if we are careful,’ Sulpicia Lepidina told them. ‘Ten if we take only the bare minimum needed for life, but the wounded and sick will be dead before that time has passed.’

‘Six days, it is,’ Piso decided. ‘If no help has come by then, it will not matter and we may as well feast as long as we can. I take it that there is some wine left. Good. And thank you, lady, for all your efforts. I am so sorry that… Well, just take it that I am sorry. Now, Ferox and I will plan our strategies for holding this “acropolis” – or as Romans perhaps we should say our Capitol – and I think everyone else should get as much rest as they can. Thank you, all.

‘The enemy will take most of their army and go,’ Piso said after the others had gone. ‘Today or tomorrow, but now that they can cross the bridge at will, they need only leave a thousand or so here to slaughter us and the rest can march for the river.’

‘Perhaps, my lord.’

‘If help is to come in time then an army must already be on its way.’

‘Hadrian promised to do his best.’

Piso sniffed scornfully. ‘I do not care to rely on the lisping Graeculus ,’ he said. ‘Any fellow who sports a beard and is fonder of boys than women cannot be sound. Still, we have no choice, and my revered legatus is an ambitious man, there is no doubt of that. You have nothing to say, centurion?’

‘Not my place, sir.’ Ferox did not know that Hadrian was called the ‘little Greek’, although it did not surprise him. As far as he could tell, senators were as catty about each other as any group of fashionable young women.

‘Is it not? I do wonder what your place – or mine for that matter – is, given our circumstances. Well, it does not much matter. If somehow we can cling on here for a few days – I see no prospect of as many as six, but that is beside the point. We should not have lasted this long and Hadrian is a rational man, so he will surely expect us to be dead.’

‘He probably does not know that you are here, lord.’

‘Might be best that way. But he will balance the odds and judge that even the most heroic garrison must be dead by now. Which means that he will not hurry, and even if he is able to defeat the enemy army, he may not come to our aid in time.’ Piso paused, leaning forward on the table. ‘We need to send a message to him, so that he knows that we hold out and will hurry. He will not be able to resist the glory of saving the last remnant of the garrison, let alone two ladies, one of them well connected.’

Ferox knew what was coming, but was not about to volunteer.

‘You are the man to go,’ Piso said.

‘Forgive me, my lord, but my place is here, trying to make sure that we are still alive if relief does come.’

‘It is an order, not a request, centurion. The time for ingenuity in defence is gone, so I am sure that I can do whatever is needed almost as well as you could.’ The tribune smiled at this false modesty. ‘What I cannot do is creep through the night as quietly as a wolf. Is that not what they call your folk, the wolf people?’