Vergasillaunus of the Arverni exulted. Commius would writhe in humiliation when he realised how precisely the plan had fit its intention. His scouts had been absolutely correct: when viewed from the crest of Mons Rea, the Roman defensive lines had looped up the slope from the plain, encircling two of the smaller redoubts, but descended again to converge on the Roman camp, as had the twin lines at the far side. The camp itself, no more difficult a proposal than any Roman temporary installation, presented the only obstacle separating him from the trapped rebel force.
Moreover it was clearly under-manned, with much of its personnel engaged on the plain against the other attacking forces. Oh, he’d heard the desperate calls of the Roman horns as his thirty thousand hand-picked warriors descended towards the rampart. He could hardly identify one Roman call from another, but their tone and speed suggested more than a little urgency, and he knew them for a desperate command to reinforce the camp against this new threat.
They would be too late and too few to do anything much about it.
As his army flooded towards the camp’s north wall, the ground continued its gentle descent, giving the men an easy charge with no real danger of stumbling or falling, adding to their momentum and to their sense of triumph.
But the reason for the senior chieftain’s confidence was not based on numbers or surprise or terrain, though all three played their part. It was largely down to the fact that his men had been far too agitated to sleep since they had arrived in position during the dark of night, and instead of resting and eating throughout the morning, knowing that they were out of both sight and hearing of the Roman lines, they had practiced manoeuvres repeatedly.
Vercingetorix had reasoned time and again that if they were to succeed, they should be learning from their deadly adversaries; adopting whatever tactics they could make work. It had been uphill work much of the time with the unruly leaders and their fractious tribes.
But these were the best the army had to offer, and he had been careful to bring only those chieftains and nobles in command who were open to his ideas and who he could trust to carry them out without argument. The morning had been an eye-opener as to what the tribes were capable of if they only put aside their arguments and committed to an act.
And so, rather than a rag-tag mass of howling warriors running down the hill, aiming for their own individual glory-hunting duels, the army of Vergasillaunus descended on the Roman ramparts in a more disciplined formation than even many Romans might manage, slamming blades on shields in a rhythmic beat.
Eighteen thousand of his men moved in eight blocks, four-wide and two-deep, each in ordered lines, with the best-armed and -armoured men at the front, presenting a solid shield-wall, heads lowered to protect the face. Behind the shield wall, the next two rows held spears out ready, while two of the rear blocks were constituted entirely of archers and slingers. And following the blocks of infantry and missile troops, some forty paces to the rear, came the reserve force of nine thousand men, ready to take the place of the dead, the wounded, and the exhausted in the ranks as required. The remaining three thousand moved between the army and the reserves with their burdens, ready to tip the balance in this assault.
It was an army such as the tribes had never fielded and, because he had so carefully chosen the men and their commanders and five solid hours of planning and training had ensued, they carried out the manoeuvres with all the discipline and grace of a legion.
Fifty paces. Some of the men were already twitching to attack, their spear-tips wavering. But they held, despite the urge to cast. Good. Too early yet, but at least they were eager and prepared. Range had to close yet though.
Forty paces. Vergasillaunus could see the Romans tensing all along the rampart, ready to throw their own pila. There seemed to be more of them now than there had been a moment ago. As he watched, more men filed onto the defences, filling the gaps. Someone had managed to rally extra men into the fray, but still they were too few and hidden behind too poor obstacles. Time was running out for the men of the Mons Rea camp.
Thirty-five paces. The centurion he could see on the wall, identified by his red transverse horsehair crest, raised an arm. That was it, then.
‘Cast!’ Vergasillaunus shouted.
The second and third ranks barely faltered in their advance, hurling their spears up and over towards the defenders. Vergasillaunus saw the centurion’s arm falling to echo the manoeuvre and did not even pause for the last spear to leave before he bellowed his second command on the heel of the first.
‘Chelona!’
At his command, given in the Greek, for he couldn’t countenance a Latin command, the front rows of each block split neatly and efficiently and brought their shields up to the fore, the sides and the top in a more-than-passable imitation of a Roman testudo formation. His timing had been spot on. Even as the formations coalesced in the press of men, the pila rose from the defences, supported by the bolts from three scorpions and the arrows of a couple of dozen auxilia assigned to the rampart.
The Roman javelins went through the shields as often as they were turned by them, and no formation would stop the scorpion shots, but still the arrows were largely nullified and many men survived the volley because of the Roman tactic.
It took a moment for the tortoise formations to recover, shuffling together and attempting to fill the gaps with varying degrees of success. The Roman archers took advantage of the hesitations to put arrows into the gaps in the shield-walls, trying to open them up more and along the line, here and there, testudos collapsed.
But most reformed and moved inexorably against the wall.
The Gauls’ spears were designed for fighting with, not throwing, and their volley had been rather random and haphazard, yet it had had an astounding effect, which Vergasillaunus suspected would stay in the memory of these men and change their mode of warfare forever. The weapons may have been unwieldy and off-target, but there had been thousands of them and by the law of averages, many hundreds had found their mark. In a single volley, the wall’s defenders had thinned out considerably, and the way looked more inviting and easier than ever. His gaze dropped from the palisade, down the steep - if low - rampart slope to the v-shaped ditch with an equally precipitous inner slope. Many hundreds, if not thousands, would perish there, filling the ditch with their corpses.
Unless he could prevent it. Now to try something else.
At a third call, echoed along the lines by the tribes’ leaders, the testudos stopped advancing, closing up before the ditch and creating a solid line, two shields high against the Roman arrows. As the line formed, leaving gaps every hundred men, the blocks of archers reformed into longer lines behind them and began to return the volleys.
In a matter of heartbeats the air was full of arcing black shafts, many more hurtling towards the camp than issuing from it. And as the archers carried out their attack, Vergasillaunus gave his second-to-last planned command.
‘Ditches!’
At the call, the three thousand men loitering behind the attacking force and ahead of the reserves ran forward, disappearing into the gaps left in the formation, pushing their way out into the open and braving the missiles to cast their huge baskets, barrows and sacks of debris, earth, brush and so on into the ditches, one after the other.
Perhaps every third man of the earth-carriers disappeared with a shriek as he burst out into the open and fell foul of a thrown pilum or a loosed arrow or bolt, but their burden was already out, falling into the ditch, their bodies only adding to the debris.
It took the space of a hundred heartbeats to complete the manoeuvre. He had lost almost a thousand men, their bodies in the ditch beneath the rampart, adding to the crossings they had formed so thoroughly with their burdens. Though it irked him to think like a Roman commander, Vergasillaunus could only note that a thousand was a small price to pay to nullify the ditch and much of the rampart slope, for the attackers now had clear ramps leading straight to the Roman palisade. Had he led his army in the usual fashion, there would be five times as many bodies in that ditch before the first man ever reached the defences. He might hate the Romans for what they were and what they had done, but he was forced to grudgingly respect the efficiency of their military ways.
The shield wall closed up as the last man retreated, and at Vergasillaunus’ final command the army surged forward at the wall. The Arvernian commander took a deep breath as he watched his near twenty-nine thousand men rushing the meagre defences manned currently by less than a thousand. Unless the Romans pulled a miracle out of their backsides, the day would be his within the hour.
Expelling that explosive breath, he drew his blade. There were limits, of course, to how far he was willing to emulate a Roman general. No standing at the back and looking pretty for him. With a roar, Vergasillaunus of the Arverni pointed his sword-tip at the enemy, adjusted his shield and broke into a run.
* * * * *
When the camp’s east gate gave way it did so almost explosively, one leaf ripped from its rope bindings and flying in against the inner redoubt like a missile, the other breaking into individual timbers and crashing back against the rampart, smashed and useless.
The attack had been delayed by the efficacy of the centurion and his men on the wall-top, casting endless missiles down at the small Gaulish force and keeping them back for as long as possible, but as the attackers managed to pick off a few of the Roman guards and the supplies of pila began to thin out, the flurries of defending missiles diminished and the Gauls had come on afresh.
It had bought Fronto enough time to construct and man his redoubt, and now his twenty six men faced perhaps four times that number, bursting through the gate, the Romans gritting their teeth and ready to fight from their hasty barricade of wagons and barrels. The legionaries hefted their pila, watching the flood of Gauls push through the gate and into the ‘U’ of defences.
Fronto lifted his gladius - no longer the beautiful orichalcum hilted blade he’d lost in the fight against Critognatos of the Arverni - and angled the dulled-if-sharp point towards the dead brute’s brother who ran at the forefront of the attack, his face somehow hollow and empty. Fronto swallowed for a moment, awaiting the crash.
The Gallic warriors hit the wagons like a winter storm wave crashing on the rocky shore, shaking the entire redoubt and threatening to knock it over entire and trash the defence. But as the wagons rocked back to solidity, men like Masgava and one thick-set brute who’d come down from the walls steadying them with meaty hands, the work of killing began on both sides. Half the defending force stood atop barrels and raised platforms, stabbing down at the attackers, while the rest remained on the ground, jabbing through the numerous gaps in the rickety redoubt with their swords, trying to catch any unarmoured and exposed body part.
Cavarinos came at him like some sort of killing machine, his face hollow and expressionless, his actions mechanical and stiff, his empty, shield-free arm coming up to grab hold of an exposed spoke of a cart wheel, giving him leverage to leap up onto one of the reinforcing boards beneath the vehicle and use it as a step to stab out with his long, Gallic blade.
Fronto ducked to the side, the blow being unwieldy and poor, given Cavarinos’ precarious attack position. He lifted the small, round shield he had selected from the supplies his men had brought in - a signifer or musician’s shield, portable and light but with much less protective surface than a standard legionary equivalent. Cavarinos barely breathed before his sword came back and swung in a wide, unheeding arc that almost took the top off the head of one of his own men close by before sweeping forward and down against Fronto.
The man’s eyes might be hollow, but he was fighting like a demon, seemingly driven on by the sight of the Roman officer. Why? Yes, Fronto had killed the man’s brother, but if Cavarinos hadn’t saved his life, that same brother would have spitted him instead. The answer, of course, was simple: grief. Fronto had seen and lived through enough grief to know how it could grasp a fighting man. He might be seen to accept it stoically - might even believe that himself - but somewhere inside, the blame blossomed like a sick, crimson rose, forcing a man to test his fate at the edge of a blade. Cavarinos likely felt so deeply shocked at what he’d done that the only end he could see was the death of either Fronto or himself in atonement.
Well not today, my friend.
The legate raised his small shield in time to take the blow, though the power of it sent a shock along his arm and he thought it might have broken one or two of the small bones in his hand. An arc of red-painted wood and leather edging strip came away with the blow and flipped off into the distance.
Fronto recoiled, adjusting his hold on the battered shield with his stinging fingers, his sword hand whitened with the pressure of its grip. A second Gaul appeared at the side of Cavarinos and lunged at him. Fronto reached out to hack at him, but Masgava was there, a long sword lashing out and smashing into the man’s face, throwing him back from the defences.
There was no respite. Fronto had to raise his diminished shield again to stop another assault from the Arvernian noble before him. He noted, as fresh pieces of painted wood were carved from his defence, the bronze figure of Fortuna swinging beneath the man’s chin, and felt how odd it seemed that the man was clearly more possessed by Nemesis right now than by luck, while Fronto, who wore that sword-wielding Goddess, felt no anger but could do with a little good fortune.
‘Cavarinos, stop!’
There was no life in the man’s eyes as he lashed out again. Nor, it appeared, was the Arvernian putting heart or thought into his attacks. They were animalistic and mechanical. And as the noble lunged again, this time with such force that he overextended and almost lost his grip on the cart, Fronto jabbed out with his sword towards the exposed armpit. It came as no surprise when his heart overrode his brain and his arm jerked short, halting the easy-killing blow before it touched flesh. Instead, he flicked his gladius out and turned the blade away.
As Cavarinos came back from another silent, expressionless attack, Fronto caught sight of Masgava out of the corner of his eye. The big Numidian was giving him the oddest look, and Fronto chose to ignore it as he turned away another of Cavarinos’ lunges with his battered shield and kept his gladius back ready to block others.
Another lunge. And another. A sweep easily turned.
Fronto shook his head at the madness of it. The man was crazed and sooner or later he would have to kill him before the Arvernian got in a lucky blow.
From the corner of his eye, he saw his singulares commander take the arm off an attacker at the elbow and then slam out at another, knocking him back from the makeshift barricade.
‘Masgava?’
The big Numidian turned, taking advantage of the momentary lull, as Fronto blocked yet another blow.
The legate ducked back. ‘Put him down for me, if you would?’
Masgava frowned and, as Cavarinos lunged out for another attack on the legate, the huge former gladiator lashed out with his own sword, hilt first, smashing the heavy steel into the Arvernian’s head. The noble disappeared with a sigh, falling away from the barricade to be replaced by another warrior, this one exhibiting much more life and vitriol as he snarled and slammed his sword forward. Fronto felt relief flood him as he released the killer that he held locked behind his eyes and stabbed out into the man’s throat, tearing out his wind pipe and artery as he withdrew his blade in a spray of crimson that soaked the cart and the men fighting over it.
‘You’re going soft,’ grunted Masgava next to him as he turned back to take down the next of the attackers. Soft or not, he’d done the only thing he could with Cavarinos. The man might well die down there, taken by a stray blow or just trampled to death by his own people, but at least there was a chance, and Fronto had not had to skewer him. There was nothing he could do about the man’s fate right now. Perhaps when they had fought off this small attack he could be retrieved. All Fronto could do was hope that his beloved patron goddess continued to look after the man around whose neck she now hung.
Along the wall above, he could hear the centurion calling his men to greater feats of arms and marksmanship, so the fight must be going on as brutally elsewhere. Certainly the mob in the gateway seemed to have increased as the enemy realised that their compatriots had forced what appeared to be a breach.
Another Gaul appeared over the cart, hauling himself up and to Fronto’s left, Aurelius hacking out at him. Fronto heard a tell-tale thrumming noise and his keen eyes caught the missile in flight. His left arm lashed out, almost flattening Aurelius as the near-destroyed shield still in his grip caught the arrow in the wood surface. Aurelius blinked, and Fronto flashed him a grin.
‘I told you: no one else dies. Keep your eyes open.’
Down among the seemingly endless press of bodies in the gateway, Fronto caught a momentary glimpse of a mail-shirted man amid the bodies, bow still raised from the shot, his unpleasant, maniacally-grinning face lowering as he disappeared again amongst the crowd.
In defiance of Fronto’s ‘no more deaths’ order, one of the legionaries staggered back from the wall, clutching a ragged hole in his chest from which blood issued in gouts. It was only as the man fell to the ground that Fronto realised the man had not been the first. He joined three other legionary corpses in the dust. Gritting his teeth, Fronto looked back at the next attacker, slamming his blade point into the man’s face even as he brought the pitiful remains of his shield up.
Time rolled on in the small, ‘U’-shaped theatre of death as the Gallic bodies piled up and more and more of his defenders hit the ground. Without his having to send a request, one of the nearby officers had clearly seen the danger and sent two more contubernia of legionaries to bolster the gate defence. Biorix suddenly staggered away from the wall, his shield cast aside, clutching his own arm as crimson rivulets ran down his mail shirt from somewhere near his armpit. Fronto threw him a stark, questioning look but Biorix shook his head with a smile. Not critical, then, but debilitating. Without two serviceable arms and busy bleeding a man was no use on the redoubt. A capsarius appeared from nowhere and helped Biorix back from the fight to tend to his injury.
And on it went. Half an hour passed - perhaps three quarters - and Fronto took advantage of a pause to rise and peer over the makeshift barricade into the pit of seething forms, both living and dead.
‘Is it me or are there more now, despite everyone we’ve killed?’
Masgava nodded as he scythed off the jaw of a Gaul. ‘Looks that way.’
Fronto looked up at the wall, where a commotion cut across the fighting. The centurion commanding the wall defence was in close discussion with two of his men even as the others continued to fight off attackers, and Fronto felt a frisson of anticipation as he saw the officer pointing off to the southeast.
‘Hold the barricade,’ he shouted to Masgava, somewhat redundantly, as he dropped back down from the cart and turned, running across to the rampart and clambering up the bank. His heart, pounding heavily from both the fight and the climb, skipped a beat as he looked out from the wall-walk, seeing what the centurion had spotted.
Almost the entire Gallic force along the inner defences, which had issued from the oppidum and spread out to try each position, had turned in response to some unheard signal and was now leaving the circumvallation, their sights set on the Mons Rea camp. Many thousands were even now approaching the poorly-defended camp.
‘Oh shit.’
* * * * *
Molacos watched his shot thud into the officer’s shield and nocked another arrow, his sight shifting to Cavarinos of the Arverni. The man had fought like a wolf against the Roman atop the cart, but something about him disturbed Molacos, and he felt his mistrust bolstered when, rather than simply killing him, the Romans knocked him out. Drawing back the string, he marked the heap on the ground that was the Arvernian noble. Perhaps a waste of an arrow, but the man simply did not appear trustworthy. With a held breath, he let the missile fly, barking his annoyance as some unidentifiable warrior in the press barged into him, knocking him aside. The mob had closed up and he’d lost sight of Cavarinos, unsure whether his arrow had struck true or not.
In irritation, he ripped his knife from his side and hamstrung the man who’d knocked him, dropping back through the press and leaving the screaming warrior floundering, flopping on his useless leg.
As he moved, he sheathed his dripping knife and fastened his arrow case. Despite the mass of men flowing this way from Vercingetorix’s army, he had a distinct feeling that this position was going to become a charnel pit soon and there was no guarantee which side would fill it most before the fight was won or lost. This was a place for a mindless killer, not for a huntsman. A place for brawn, not skill.
Ducking between slavering warriors, Molacos retreated from the fray until he reached the broken gate, where the mass still filled the space, though not quite so tightly-packed. With profound regret, he let his precious bow drop away to the floor and unfastened his quiver, dropping it among the mess.
Taking a steadying breath, he ripped a green scarf from his belt pouch and tied it around his neck above the mail shirt he had acquired during his days trapped in the oppidum. Hoping none of his kin would understand what he was trying, he whipped his bloody knife from his side again, grasped the end of the cart that butted up against the gate edge and sought the defenders behind it through gaps and nooks in the barricade. His eyes caught the russet of a Roman tunic and his hand disappeared into the hole, gouging with the knife. A moment later, he withdrew it and the Roman had gone. Another check and another tunic. Another lunge through a hole and another victim. And in heartbeats, the very end of the barricade was clear. With a deep breath, he pushed at the cart until it moved a few hand-widths. Another shove and it opened a little further. The Roman officer commanding the redoubt had clearly spotted something amiss and was shouting for his men to close the gap.
With a brief prayer to Ogmios in his guise as lord of words rather than master of the dead, he slipped through the gap, opening his mouth to shout in his best Latin, his accent a good southern Cadurci, carrying the same inflection as the Romanised men of Narbo.
‘Breach!’ he bellowed. ‘Help me!’
He’d known that the Romans would close the gap, of course. They were too efficient to let the warriors outside capitalise on the tiny breach. But it had been enough for him to squeeze through. The Romans nearby, not legionaries, but some sort of bodyguard for the officer, looked him up and down and a scout in Roman colours noted the green scarf - the same shade as the one the scout himself wore, along with every other auxiliary scout and hunter - and nodded, rushing over to help this auxiliary with the skeletal grin close the gap.
It was the work of a moment to help the Romans close the gap and re-deploy at the edge, and then to slip away with one of the legionaries who was running back to the piles of supplies nearby. An officer of some kind turned to him, probably seeking to send him to work elsewhere, but Molacos clutched his side with his knife hand, the blood from his three victims running from the blade and down his hip, looking for all the world like gore from a wound in his side, and the officer’s eyes slid past him and on to another target. A capsarius rushed over to help him, but Molacos shook his head, and the medic ran off after someone else.
With a satisfied smile, the Cadurci hunter picked up a battered shield from one of the piles and, almost indistinguishable from the many auxiliaries among the Roman force, made his way towards the northern rampart. This was no place for him. But somewhere outside the Roman lines - easy enough to traverse from the inside - back towards the reserve camp, Lucterius and his Cadurci brothers would be fighting.
And that was where he needed to be, for Molacos fought not for a unified Gaul, nor for hatred of the Romans, nor for Vercingetorix himself. Molacos fought for his master, Lucterius, and would do so to his last breath.
* * * * *
Fronto was hard pressed. What had begun as defending a weak point against the periphery of the inner force’s attack had quickly become the second-most fought-over position on the battlefield. While the reserve cavalry and their infantry support slugged it out over the ramparts on the plain, the north wall of the Mons Rea camp was swamped with enemy warriors, but the south-eastern side had become the target for the force that had been trapped on the oppidum. Another hour had passed at a guess, based on the movement of the sun across the sky, since the redoubt had almost caved, its defensive cohesion only saved at the last minute by one of the native levies who’d happened by.
Since then, the gate had become something of a focus for the rabid enemy. As the huge rebel army converged on this position, the powers inside the camp - who Fronto had no time to go and see since every man counted - had seen fit to send three more centuries of men to the makeshift barrier. Fronto had immediately left Masgava to directing the fighting men and sent the new arrivals to fetch more equipment and more junk to help strengthen the defence. It had worked and the place still held, though by the skin of their teeth. The barricade was perhaps half as high again as it had been and twice as thick, with grain sacks, clods of earth, timbers and more all thrown into the pile to help strengthen it, and the number of men fighting to hold it was gradually increasing, while the attacking force in the ‘U’ failed to grow, limited as they were by the gate.
A quarter of an hour ago he’d taken the time to pop up to the rampart and confer with the centurion again. Things were looking troubling all round, it seemed. The newly-arrived Gauls had managed to fill in the single ditch outside the east rampart with relative ease and had set up shield walls while their archers and slingers had begun to pelt the parapet with their missiles. Fronto had left the man to it. The situation was pretty bleak but the centurion - one Callimachus - seemed to have his head screwed on; one of the more competent officers Fronto had yet encountered in the whole system, and he could handle the disaster as well as any other. Before returning to the fray to discover that Arcadios had been forced to pull back with a vision-blurring head wound, Fronto had grabbed one of the nearer couriers and told him to ride for Antonius and Caesar as fast as possible and request help.
‘What message should I deliver, sir?’ the man had asked, worried.
Fronto had blinked. ‘Send help,’ he’d replied helpfully.
‘But how many men, from where and to where, sir?’ the young courier had asked, frowning.
Fronto had grasped him by the neck, bunching his scarf, and dragged him to the redoubt, lifting him so that he could see over it, almost having the top of his head removed by a stray sweep of a blade, and then lowering him, terrified, to the floor again.
‘Did you see the enemy?’
The acrid smell of urine had risen from the courier’s tunic. ‘Yessir.’
‘Unless you want them pushing a sponge-stick so far up your private manhole you can taste it, tell Antonius and Caesar to send everyone they can spare to Mons Rea.’
The man had nodded emphatically, his eyes wide, his curly locks having been trimmed by an impromptu blade. Fronto had let go and patted him on the head, and the man had run for his horse.
That had been almost quarter of an hour ago, and nothing had happened. Occasionally, Fronto had paused and tried to make sense of the military calls, but the simple fact was that the battlefield was such a chaotic din of noise that trying to unthread it was like trying to unpick a tapestry one handed in the dark while playing a lyre.
A Gaul thrust a spear up at the wall top, the blade coming perilously close to Fronto’s helmet, and he ducked before lunging out and stabbing the man in the chest.
There seemed no end to the opposition. They had killed hundred upon hundred of the Gauls, and taken a steady stream of dead and wounded in the process, the poor bastards dragged or helped back from the redoubt by medics or the dead-patrol accordingly, only to be replaced by their weary tent-mates.
But it was not the numbers or the defences as such that worried Fronto. What gave him serious pause for thought was that there had been cracking and banging noises from fore and below for a while now, and that signified that some of the more astute Gauls had given up trying to flood over the barrier and were now busy pulling apart the carts plank by plank to get through to the Roman defenders. And they would, in due course.
‘You’re looking tired, Fronto. Are you getting enough sleep?’
Fronto delayed only long enough to put his utilitarian military gladius through the temple of an unhelmeted warrior who’d made it to the top of the barricade and turned with a frown.
Titus Labienus, Caesar’s senior lieutenant and one of the most successful and respected generals of Rome, sat astride an impatient looking bay a few paces away.
Fronto blinked and looked past him.
Legionaries in seeming hundreds and thousands were busy pulling what they needed from the supply dumps and filtering onto the rampart and to the barricade as their centurions commanded. Finally, after weeks of maintaining their position in the Alesia lines, the First and the Seventh had finally committed.
‘You are a sight for fucking sore eyes, Labienus. About time. Got sick of all the baths and the snoring did we?’
Labienus smiled indulgently, but the way his expression slid quickly into serious and troubled worried Fronto.
‘What is it?’
‘Don’t get over excited, Fronto. Estimates put your opposition at about five thousand, and I’ve brought six cohorts.’
Fronto heard a clunk and looked over his shoulder to see a grapnel over the wall top, the timbers up there already straining, the centurion sending legionaries over to deal with it before some behemoth of a Gaul ripped the wall apart. The bastards were serious and only a heave or two away from success, then. ‘Six cohorts is better than a kick in the teeth, Labienus.’
‘Then get ready for me to put the boot in. Five of them are for the north rampart. Caesar’s trying to bring in reserves to help here, but he’s got other troubles down on the plains. The Gallic reserves are pushing him to the limit, so he’s being careful with his own troop assignments. For now I’ve got only one cohort for you, I’m afraid.’
Fronto nodded tersely. ‘I’ll make them worthwhile.’
‘You do that,’ the staff officer replied. ‘And here’s a little something extra for you: new orders agreed by the general. Have a cornicen so close you can hear his arse squeak when he walks. If the walls are breached anywhere unrecoverable, have the man blow the Bacchanalia chant. As soon as that chant goes up anywhere along the walls, every century available is to form up and prepare for a sortie against the enemy.’
Fronto stared at the man. Sortie beyond the walls? The man was mad. But Labienus was nothing if not an inventive tactician, and had yet to be beaten in a campaign, with a success rate even surpassing Caesar’s.
‘Alright. You’d better know what you’re doing, Titus.’
‘For the love of Juno, Fronto, I really hope so!’
* * * * *
Caesar felt the icy thrill of uncertainty. Throughout his entire command of Gaul, which had taken him from governor of three provinces to becoming a conqueror and all-but-governor of a fourth new one, he had rarely been caught off-guard. When he had, he had usually had systems in place to recover the situation as quickly as possible, and had never truly felt that strange excitement of being on the cusp of losing everything until Gergovia. And now here he was, mere months later and feeling it again. It was strangely intoxicating. Much more so than the smug knowledge that he would overcome whatever the odds, which had been his gut feeling throughout his career, even in that ridiculous business with the pirates so many years ago.
But Gergovia had been a disaster and he’d chosen to turn it into a hurdle rather than a wall, withdrawing and deciding to regroup. Then somehow, despite his best plans, he’d found himself in almost as poor a position now. He had besieged his enemy and in turn been besieged, and he’d been sure of success even then. But while the Arvernian king on the hilltop had been predictable and ineffectual, some nobleman among the enemy reserves had proved to be at least as intuitive and inventive a commander as the rebel leader, and had in the end put the Roman forces to the test, at the very limit of their strength.
He knew that Mons Rea had proved to be a weak point, and had committed Labienus with six cohorts to aid them. He knew as well as any man that such an act was akin to jamming a single rag into a failing dam. Mons Rea would need more men. And yet the Gallic cavalry and their infantry support on the plains were in serious danger of breaking into the outer rampart, the defenders truly hard-pressed, and if that line fell then Mons Rea would be irrelevant, for the entire system would be swamped under the enemy bodies which even now outnumbered the Romans by perhaps three or four to one in total.
And the Gaulish reserve was well-fed and well-rested, while the beleaguered Romans were to a man hungry and exhausted. Things were dangerous here on the plain, and would only get worse as his men continued to tire until the rampart fell and the whole siege collapsed in annihilation for the legions.
His men needed encouragement and heart, and Caesar had spent the last hour in a frantic rush of action, all along the plains defences, from the foot of Mons Rea to the lowest slopes of Gods’ Gate. His white horse and red cloak marked him out wherever he went, and his continual cries of ‘For Rome!’ had made his voice hoarse and scratchy and left him shaking. Every now and then, he’d paused to take stock, rattling out a series of orders to whatever officer he could find - usually Antonius, who seemed to be everywhere at once, encouraging and organising like some sort of Mercury in human form. And between such confabs Caesar had been one with his men, at the fence, driving his priceless blade into Gallic bodies as he shouted for his men to hold, at the gates of the cavalry enclosures, helping keep the enemy from felling the timber leaves with axes, on the towers with the artillerists, helping them sight to pick off the most important of the enemy horsemen, his own steed tied to the posts below. And everywhere he had been, he had spoken to the men as equals with words of praise and reassurance - that they had held in more trying times and situations than these. That they must hold for the love of Rome and of victory. That this would be the last fight and with it Gaul would be theirs to loot. That by the time the sun touched the horizon, the rebels would be beaten.
Everywhere. He had not stopped, and he felt so tired. He kept suffering involuntary visions of his bed and a platter of fruit his slave would have waiting when he retired to it. And with every passing hour and the constant tiring activity, the fear increased that he might have one of his attacks in public, where it could not be contained and hidden. He stifled a yawn.
The afternoon was beginning to wear on, the sun slipping lower and lower in the sky, threatening to turn this fight into a night attack.
He paused at one of the small command posts where a supply centurion was giving out orders and receiving requests from an endless stream of runners, and took a swig of water from one of the open barrels from which buckets were being carried around the defences.
‘General?’
He turned to see Varus looking twitchy and tense. ‘Yes?’
‘I want permission to make a break out from one of the cavalry forts, sir. If I can get round behind them, I can perhaps take the pressure off the ramparts?’
‘Pointless,’ rumbled Antonius, appearing as if from nowhere, swigging from his ubiquitous wine flask and wiping a mix of it and half a pint of arterial spray from his lower face.
‘What?’
‘The cavalry are only the distraction down here. Their infantry are doing all the real damage to the ramparts and if you sally, their cavalry will engage you while their foot continue to rip us apart. You’ll just be throwing away your horse.’
Varus sighed. ‘We have to do something. I have thousands of good men sitting idle.’
Caesar nodded. ‘Their time will come, Varus. And soon, I think. In an hour or so, if things have not eased, I will have to do something drastic to turn the tide, and if that becomes a necessity I will have need of your cavalry. Have them continue to rest and prepare, but have them all filter slowly to the northern end of the defences, towards Mons Rea. Slowly and carefully, mark you. I don’t want the enemy to realise you’ve redeployed the entire horse.’
Varus frowned but nodded.
‘What is the news?’ the general enquired of Antonius as he took another handful of water and rubbed it across his tired face.
‘Brutus is making his way up to Mons Rea with another six cohorts. You know even then we won’t hold there, yes?’
Caesar nodded wearily and stretched, keeping his voice low. ‘I’m having the best part of a legion form up from Labienus’ forces. We’ve almost emptied the eastern arc of our circumvallation now. We can only hope that the entire oppidum has committed, for if they have kept a reserve and discover that we have withdrawn almost all our force to this section, this day could be over very quickly.’
‘But the same holds true of Mons Rea and the plains.’
Caesar nodded. ‘We will continue to feed whatever reserves we can pull together into the Mons Rea camp and hope they can hold while we maintain these ramparts on the plains. We cannot afford a night-time battle, though, Antonius. Our men are spent. If we cannot finish this in the next hour or two, I will have to try something. I’ve already given Labienus the authority to sally if the walls fail.’
‘Let’s hope he doesn’t have to try.’
‘Yes. Cast up your prayers to Mars and Minerva that young Brutus can plug that hole with six more cohorts.’
* * * * *
Brutus gestured to the cornicen he had chosen as chief signaller for the six cohorts. ‘First and Sixth cohort to the east gate. Looks like Fronto’s in deep trouble.’ The signaller nodded and pursed his lips to sound the melody that would send the two freshest and strongest cohorts to support the troubled east wall as Brutus went on. ‘Then sound for the other four to spread out and filter into the northern defences by century. As soon as they’re on the rampart, they are to pay attention to the musicians and signifers already there. They are much more aware of the situation than we.’
Leaving the cornicen to his work, Brutus hurried on ahead of the quick-marching cohorts, running through the centre of the camp, where the only men to be seen were a few supply troops lugging bundles and bags of equipment to some position or other, the critically wounded staring at the stumps of limbs and small makeshift hospitals where occasional medici and, more often, over-stretched capsarii worked tirelessly to save lives and limbs and to close wounds, far too busy to spend time with pain-killers or drugs. Screaming filled the void at the camp’s centre.
Finally, he arrived at the northern defences and he felt his heart catch in his throat.
He had known that the north end of the Mons Rea camp was in trouble - that was no secret anywhere among the circumvallation, for the mass of attacking Gauls swamping it was visible even down on the plain. But the extent of the danger was simply staggering up close. Even as he stumbled to a halt and stared, Caninius, legate of the Twelfth whose camp this was, lurched to a weary halt next to him, hands on his knees and breathing heavily. Brutus looked across at the man. Caninius was a good enough commander, but old-school. He remained at his command post and directed things through tribunes, relying on his centurions to carry out the battle at ground level. And yet the legate was liberally spattered with blood and muddy to the knees, his sword bloodied in his hand and a bandage tightly bound round his upper left arm blossoming pink to show the severity of the wound beneath. For Caninius to be in such a state, things were truly dire.
But then he could see that clearly for himself.
‘What happened to the towers?’
Caninius straightened. ‘You mean why are they empty? Expediency, Brutus. Can’t keep them manned.’
‘But the siege engines…’
‘Were costing us too many men to maintain. The enemy archers just riddle the towers with arrows any time a body appears up there. Didn’t take them long to empty every damn one. And the towers are open structures.’
Brutus peered at them. Each tower stood on four stout legs with a ladder between them reaching to the top platform. He could see the problem instantly from the piles of Roman dead beneath each one. Every man who’d set foot on the ladders had died before reaching the engines. In the end, Caninius had abandoned the artillery in favour of preserving his men. Not a foolish decision, in retrospect.
‘I’ve got four more cohorts coming to support you,’ Brutus said in what he hoped were encouraging tones.
‘Lambs to the slaughter,’ Caninius replied bleakly. ‘Labienus’ five cohorts are already so diminished you can’t tell they ever arrived! The man himself is up on the walls taking his sword and pugio to the enemy. I will be again, when I’ve taken a sip of water.’
It was true. As Brutus looked along the wall, the defenders were all too thin on the ground. It did not look like a position that had been reinforced with two thousand men only half an hour ago.
‘Then let’s not dally and disappoint, Caninius. Take your sip and meet me back on the walls. Time to wet my blade and see how many I can send to their gods before more reinforcements turn up to take all the glory.’
The four cohorts he had brought were here now, filtering into centuries and making for positions on the wall wherever they could. With a roll of his shoulders, Brutus drew his gladius and pugio and ran towards the wall, sending up prayers as he went, nodding to the strangely skeletal, grinning auxiliary who was also moving into position at the rampart.
* * * * *
Fronto turned and shouted to the men behind him. ‘Get that wagon bed over here now!’
The contubernium of legionaries from the Fourteenth who’d so recently arrived courtesy of Brutus struggled with the huge oaken platform, shorn of its axles and wheels and shaft, dragging it towards the barrier and leaving a muddy trench in the turf with its passage. As it closed on the barricade, half a dozen legionaries jabbed at the two-foot hole the enemy had hacked in the upturned cart there, repeatedly stabbing into the gap with their pila, spearing any of the attacking Gauls who dared attempt to widen it any further. Despite their success rate, as attested by the endless screaming and the lake of blood forming around the ruined cart, the enemy were still succeeding, the hole increasing every heartbeat with an axe or sword blow or even the grasping of frenzied, bloodied fingers.
The redoubt was holding better than Fronto could ever have hoped, given the pressure it was under. Yet it still remained in peril every single moment of the long afternoon, and one hiccup would be all it took to lose it all. And if the gate fell then the camp fell, and with it the entire Roman defensive system.
No pressure, then.
Fronto watched the men move the heavy oak bed into place and begin to drag across the adzed logs that had originally been meant for a stockade, piling them behind it to strengthen the newly-repaired barricade. With a sigh of relief, he climbed up to the top and ducked the expected scything blow, stabbing out instinctively with his crimson-slick gladius and half-decapitating the unarmoured Gaul.
The ‘U’ of the gate was still full of the enemy. Beyond, he could see many, many more swarming at the rampart, which that same centurion was still defending with steady strength and control, and yet more were flooding the circumvallation defences where they touched the camp, attempting to break through there as well. Units of the Fifteenth and the Ninth held that sector desperately. Only the enforced enclosure of the gate had kept Fronto’s barricade from falling through sheer numbers, funnelling the enemy to him and limiting his opposition at any given time.
Yet the large piles of dead only a dozen paces inside the camp and the gathering number of wounded moaning at one another back among the tents spoke of the dreadful cost of holding the gate.
Already he would like to see more reinforcements, troop numbers here beginning to decline noticeably. He jumped back down and scanned the chaos until he spotted one of the numerous runners, clutching a wax tablet as though his life depended upon it, which it well might, of course.
‘You.’
The man stopped. ‘Sir?’
‘Tell Caesar we need more men.’
The runner gave Fronto a look that spoke volumes about how many times he’d been stopped by an officer in the last half hour with the very same message, but to his credit, he did not argue, simply saluting and running off on his errand. Wiping a mix of foul liquids from his face, Fronto jogged back to the rampart and climbed to where the centurion stood, his ears picking up distant calls from a Roman cornu as he did so.
‘Hear that?’ he asked the centurion.
‘Deployment calls,’ the officer replied, rubbing tired eyes.
‘Yes. The Eighth and the Thirteenth if I’m not mistaken, down on the plain. Caesar gathers fresh men to his own position.’
‘And to ours,’ the centurion said with audible relief, jabbing out with a finger back towards the south gate. Fronto turned and heaved in a much needed cleansing breath. ‘That’s Fabius,’ he noted, recognising the figure in the grey cloak with the white plume and the small skewbald horse. ‘And… what? Six more cohorts?’
‘I count the standards of seven, sir.’
Fronto squinted and smiled. ‘I do believe you’re right. Caesar reinforces his own position because he’s sent us more of his men. Good boy,’ he grinned, noting the look of disapproval on the centurion’s face at such an appellation applied to the proconsul. ‘I wonder how many men we’ll get this time. Should buy us some time.’
The centurion nodded sombrely, his gaze slipping back over the camp to the distant western horizon. ‘I hope the general has something up his sleeve though, sir. Another hour and a half - two at the most - and that sun’s going to sink, and with it go our chances.’