“Oh, Rapax troops are afraid of the dark,
And Adiutrix’s generals are crazy—”
The cheerful voice drifted over the glow of the cookfires, and an angry shout came back from Velius Rufus’s camp.
“The Ninth can’t be beat at sounding retreat,
And all of Augusta is lazy!So who pulls you out when the heathen box you in?
Who do they send for when the going’s getting hot?
Gemina! Fourteenth Gemina!
Gemina, the best of the lot!”
The singer’s mates joined in the last chorus and drummed their mess tins on the ground. Correus grinned. The Fourteenth Gemina still didn’t have a legate, but they had lost their sulks and malingering and had earned their Eagle back fairly. They had had enough of building roads, and of sabotage and fouled water, and of raiding parties that dropped out of trees, while the Rapax and the British detachments under Velius Rufus were fighting proper battles with the Chatti. But Marbod’s Chatti warriors had proven to be as dangerous as Ranvig had prophesied, and now the other wing of the army had been called in too, to smash them and end it. The Fourteenth Gemina was plainly feeling set up about it, and the singer renewed his insults happily. Correus considered stopping him before he provoked Rufus’s generals too far. He decided not to. The Gemina needed to feel proud of itself.
The singer began improvising a new verse, and Correus went back to his dinner, which Eumenes was serving in his tent – a legate’s tent, red leather and gilded fringe, with rugs
on the floor: Correus knew wistfully that he wasn’t going to keep it. He didn’t have enough service behind him for a legate’s posting. Not yet. But for this battle it was his, and the legion was his. Even with his failure to make Ranvig see sense, and now the uncertainty as to just how many men Ranvig was pulling into his war band, Correus couldn’t help feeling pleased with himself. It was no easy thing to turn a legion around when it had been spoiled, especially one that had been paid for it. A commander willing to bribe his men could have their total loyalty until the money ran out. It would ruin them in the long run, but Vettius hadn’t cared about that, and the common legionary didn’t think in those terms. The legionary served for twenty-five years in one legion, and it was his commander who shaped his life. The legionary thought only in the here and now. Correus’s first commander, Messala Cominius, who had a legion of his own now somewhere on the Danuvius, had taught him that. It had proved to be the most useful, and dangerous, thing Correus had learned in eleven years in the army.
The tent flap popped open, and Centurion Quintus came through. “All locked up, sir,” he said. “Pickets posted, and the watchword is ‘laurel.’ I’ll quiet our nightingale down when I go back through.” Quintus’s belt buckle proclaimed him as a man of the Gemina now. Centurions promoted from the ranks generally did not reach cohort level and so rarely changed legions, but Correus, serving as both legate and primus pilus of the Gemina, had asked for Quintus as a staff aide. It had seemed better than disturbing the precarious balance of the Gemina by pulling a man from its ranks for the job, and the Gemina First Cohort’s second centurion was going to have his hands full with Correus in the legate’s post.
Correus pushed away the remains of his dinner, and Eumenes splashed watered wine into the cup. “Have the scouts come in?” The emperor and Velius Rufus had scouts of their own out, of course, but Correus believed in firsthand information when he could get it. Tonight, it seemed, there wasn’t any.
“They’re in,” Quintus said. “But all they had to say was ‘Same as before,’ so I told ’em to go clean up before they came on to you. They smelled like bog trolls.”
Correus dismissed Quintus and sat watching the lamp flame in his wine. If he were Eilenn, maybe he would see something in it. Correus just saw wine, so he drank it and told Eumenes he was going to bed. Outside, the singer ended his song abruptly – that would be Quintus – and the camp began to doze. The scouts could report their lack of success in the morning. They knew that the Semnones were also massing their war band at last and were circling upriver to join the Chatti, but they kept shifting about, and so far no one had been able to tell whether or not Ranvig had all the allies he had claimed. There were other scattered tribes whose land lay between the Agri Decumates and the Semnones. They might ally with Ranvig, or they might lie low and hope the storm would pass them by. None had so far been willing to ally openly with Rome. Maybe Marbod would refuse alliance since Ranvig had left him to fight the Romans alone for so long, Correus thought hopefully. He turned over and went to sleep, counting Germans in his head.
Marbod was willing to ally. He needed the men, and he knew it. But he wasn’t willing to listen to Ranvig’s strategy. He scowled, his wide, thin salmon’s mouth snapping at his red mustache. “That is a cowardly, Roman way to fight that I might have expected of one who has sat in the Romans’ holds for a year, drinking wine like a woman.”
“Of course,” Ranvig said sarcastically. “And Marbod is a great warrior whose strategy has driven the Romans back to Rome. Those are trolls that we saw camped yonder in their tents.”
Fiorgyn looked at Ranvig suspiciously. She thought he was deliberately prodding Marbod. Ranvig didn’t like Marbod, but it also had something to do with the argument he had had earlier with some of Arni’s men over his orders, and with the Dacian men in the peaked caps who had ridden in with Steinvar. She wasn’t sure what. Her face grew interested, and she laid a hand on Arni’s arm when he started to intervene. Arni might learn to keep his tongue between his teeth by the time his hair had gone gray, but she doubted it. He stood shifting from foot to foot and glaring furiously at Marbod and Ranvig both. Marbod’s insults bit too close to the tribe’s honor. But when Arni was through fighting Marbod, he wanted to fight the Romans, and he didn’t like what Ranvig was saying, either. Beyond Arni, some of the other Semnone warriors were nodding vigorously when Marbod spoke, while Steinvar stood stolidly, arms folded across his wolfskin jacket. The men in the peaked caps had sent none of their own number to the council. They seemed content to let Steinvar or Ranvig speak for them.
“We could have driven the Romans back across the Rhenus by now, back all the way to Gaul!” Marbod shouted. “If the Semnones had sent the men they promised!”
“I promised nothing,” Ranvig said. “I gave you a piece of advice that you chose to ignore when you insulted the Romans’ emperor to his face.”
“And now you bring me foreigners out of Dacia and say they may not fight!”
“Their lord cannot afford their loss just now,” Ranvig said. He shrugged and looked amused. “He has other uses for his war host, so that was our bargain. If the chieftain of the Chatti will listen, the Dacians will be useful without fighting. And I have not brought them to you. They are my men, Marbod.”
Marbod exploded. “We will not fight in any cowardly Roman fashion, with holding back and running. And if Ranvig of the Semnones does not lead this war band, he may go and sit and spin with his women and his foreigners and let his warriors follow me!”
The lord of one of the Semnones’ outlying clans pushed his way forward, with two others trailing him. “The chieftain of the Chatti is right! We did not come here to play children’s games with the Romans!”
Ranvig considered him, and his crooked face grew angry. “I had assumed that you came because the Romans are a danger to the Free Lands, and because I am your chieftain.” He eyed Marbod and the other man as if they smelled. “We fought in the last war while Marbod sat and got fat in his hold. Are you wishful now to break the oath you swore to me, for Marbod? So much for your honor!”
“We will not run!” The clan lord stamped his foot. If he had been a horse he would have laid his ears back. “We will fight like men, in a battle like men!”
It was supposed to be a meeting for the chieftains and their tribal lords, the men who carried a vote in council, but they were making so much noise that others began to crowd around, too – small holders and younger warriors and any man with a mind to make his voice heard. Ranvig, who was normally willing to shout his council to a standstill if they pushed him too far, eyed Marbod consideringly and seemed more pleased than not, Fiorgyn thought. He is setting them to quarrel with each other, she realized suddenly. He had thrown his plan into their midst like a bone to a pack of hounds and was sitting back now to watch them fight. There was a thrall’s tale that Ranvig had the elves’ blood in him, and he looked much like one now, his crooked eyes watching with veiled amusement, his long fingers playing idly with the red-gold band around his wrist, while mortal lords quarreled among themselves for some dim purpose of his own. Fiorgyn looked at him, exasperated. Whatever Ranvig was up to, the elves had nothing to do with it, and now was not the time to be goading Marbod or the discontented among the Semnones.
Gradually the rebellious lord and his two allies had moved so that they stood beside Marbod, four in a row, glaring at Ranvig.
“You are oath-sworn to me,” Ranvig said when they had finished shouting, “but if you wish to fight the Romans in one charge like stampeding cattle, I will release you from your oath to me. It will make the ravens happy.” He swung around to look at the arguing crowd of men behind him. “Any man of mine,” he said deliberately, “who wishes to ride with them is free of his oath.”
There was a surprised murmur and then a shout, and a small wave of men spilled forward. Fiorgyn narrowed her eyes as she counted them. Hotheads and quarrelers every one, men who were berserkers in battle and trouble at home. Every man among them had been called before the council over and again for provoking some grievance.
They slammed their spears against their shields and shouted that they would lay the Romans in a red grave. Arni started to move, and Fiorgyn dug her fingers into his arm. “No! Not you!”
“Where in the name of Pluto and Persephone are they?” Velius Rufus was an unlikely sight sitting on the edge of his camp bed in his undertunic, with his bowed legs wrapped in a blanket. His thick shock of hair was flattened at the back from the pillow, and his expression was pop-eyed and wrathful.
“Out there,” the decurion of the frontier scouts said. “And that’s about as good as we can get.” He was dressed in German breeches and wolfskin jacket, with sheep’s-wool leggings for warmth. His hair was long and braided like a German’s, and he had a bristly beard going gray around the chin. The cultivated Latin of an educated man was incongruous when he spoke.
Velius Rufus snorted. “And you cross-eyed fools have managed to lose Marbod, too? This isn’t a game of hide-and-go-seek with your sister!”
“He isn’t lost,” the frontier scout said, “but he’s moved east, presumably to meet up with the Semnone warriors, and they’re none of them sitting still long enough to make a count or pin down their base camp.” He wasn’t impressed with the general’s temper. He’d been out with his men for three days, crawling through bogs and forests so thick a man couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, and if no more of the Germans had been found than traces of old campfires, it was because they were taking pains not to be. He leaned one hand on the tent’s center pole, waiting for orders. He was cold, wet, and more than annoyed with his own lack of success, and he didn’t feel much like standing at attention, but he knew Rufus well enough not to sit down unless the general said to.
“I left orders to be waked up when you came in,” Velius Rufus said, “because we are supposed to be fighting the Germans, not bouncing around like hoptoads trying to find them! That was on the assumption that you would have found them because that is what the army pays you for, not for looking under a few bushes and coming sniveling back to me that you don’t see any Germans! If the rivers freeze again this winter, you’ll see Germans coming up through the hypocausts if we don’t catch up to them now. And as you may have noticed while you were out picking flowers, there isn’t a whole lot of fighting weather left. This army is breaking camp tomorrow and heading for where you think the Germans have gone, but I don’t want to chase ’em so far that they come circling back on our rear. So get your rear onto your horse and hop it out of here, and don’t show your face in my camp again until you can point a pilum at the Germans!” Rufus lay back down on his camp bed and pulled the blanket up over his ears. It was as cold as a Vestal Virgin in the German mountains at night.
“I hear and obey, lord.” The decurion salaamed, Eastern fashion, and Rufus chuckled under his blanket. The frontier scouts never had had any respect, but if anyone could find the Germans before the Germans found them, it was the scouts.
“Go and get something to eat first,” Rufus growled. The cold wind whipped in under the tent flap as the decurion lifted it. “Go and wake up a cook. It’s a fine night to try to start a fire.”
In the morning, the army was on the march. The camp’s defenses were destroyed at first light (no Roman army ever made the enemy a present of a fortified camp), and they moved out through the knee-high mist that came from a tributary of the Moenus and still rolled along the high valley. The four British legionary detachments and the auxiliary cavalry, in scale armor over their gold and scarlet, went in the vanguard. The auxiliary infantry fanned out ahead of them to scout the way, and the pioneers marched behind them to clear it, if necessary, to let the bulk of the legions pass in battle order. Behind the pioneers were the emperor Domitian with his staff, his Praetorians, and his generals Velius Rufus and Julius Frontinus, and then the gilded Eagles of five legions, with their troops marching six abreast: the Twenty-first Rapax and the four garrison legions of Upper Germany, the Eighth Augusta, the Eleventh Claudia, the Fourteenth Gemina, and the First Adiutrix.
With them were the legionary cavalry, the artillery mules with disassembled field catapults, the generals’ personal baggage, and, at the rear, just ahead of another auxiliary unit of foot troops and cavalry, the legionary baggage carts, the hospital wagons, and any civilians who had the general’s permission to be there. Those who didn’t, the most determined of the camp followers and entrepreneurs, would be strung out behind, at a safe distance from any official eye but close enough to catch up to the baggage wagons for safety if things got hot.
Correus, riding with the legates of the other German legions, just ahead of their column, could see the shadow of the Eighth Augusta’s Eagle flung out on the trampled meadow to his left as the mist burned off, but it was the baggage wagons that he had his mind on. Against his better judgment, he had sent the children back to Moguntiacum with Eumenes and their nurse (Eumenes cursing nonstop under his breath), and let Ygerna come with the column. It was probably safe enough, but he had never done it before, and he had argued against it furiously, while Ygerna just sat there and said, “I am coming, Correus. If you don’t get the general’s permission, I will ride behind with the wine sellers and Rhodope’s whores, but I am coming.”
“Why, in Typhon’s name?”
“Because I have had enough this year of sitting in a house somewhere and wondering if you have been killed,” she said frankly.
“So you want to come with the column where you can get killed.”
“I doubt that. With almost all of five legions and pieces of four more, and cavalry and auxiliaries, and the Morrigan knows what else? You said yourself we are going to win.”
“We are,” Correus said. “But not everyone is going to survive the experience. We don’t know how many men Ranvig has got, and the Chatti fight like wolves. You never know what’s going to happen in a battle. I don’t want you there!”
Ygerna’s black eyes glowed, and her mouth set in a tight line. “I am coming! I will not sit back and wonder if you are dead, not this time! I will stay with the baggage and behave, or I can make myself useful in the hospital, but I am coming!”
He started to say that she didn’t know what it would be like, and stopped. She had gone with Julius Frontinus’s army when she was thirteen. More than the other legates’ wives, more than anyone but the soldiers themselves, Ygerna knew what a battle and an army on the march were like.
So now she was back with the baggage wagons, riding her gray mare and putting on the charm for the chief surgeon. And Correus was going to have to stop thinking about her, or he would find himself worrying when he was supposed to be fighting, and that was a good way to end up in the surgeon’s tent himself. Or worse. He had told Ygerna that legates didn’t get killed, but that wasn’t quite true. Anything that wasn’t supposed to happen could happen in a battle, and the Fourteenth Gemina still had a few rickety spots. It was unlucky to think that way before a fight. Correus pushed both Ygerna and his own prospects to the back of his mind, and tilted his head to hear what the legate of the First Adiutrix was saying.
“I hope Rufus’s scouts know more than mine,” Adiutrix’s commander said sourly. He was an old soldier, nearly twice Correus’s age, his legate’s post the cap of an uneventful career, and he was inclined to take a dour view of things. “No good will come of gallivanting over these mountains like a pack of brats after butterflies.” The eagle feathers on his helmet nodded in agreement as he bobbed his head gloomily.
Claudia’s legate laughed. “I’ll send over some liniment for your old bones, Sulpicius, and you’ll see the world some better. It’s that nag you’re riding that sours your viewpoint.”
The Adiutrix legate’s mount was a hammerheaded hack with a jolting gait. The older man shook his head. “I’ve had this beast a long time. At my age, a man doesn’t like changes. Better to retire, maybe, after this campaign, him and me both. Find a farm somewhere.” He lapsed into thought, and the Claudia’s legate turned to Correus, kindly including him in their talk.
“What about you, Julianus? This is your first legionary command. What do you think about it?”
“I’m too unnerved to think,” Correus said frankly. “I’d assumed we’d have a new legate by now.” He wouldn’t have traded this chance at command for all the sunken gold in Atlantis, but he was admittedly unsettled by the rush of events and uncomfortably aware of his scarlet cloak and helmet crest among the purple and eagle feathers of the legates.
“The Fourteenth does seem to have gone through commanders lately,” the Augusta’s legate said.
“Ill luck,” said the legate of the Adiutrix.
“I doubt that luck had anything to do with it,” Augusta’s commander said shortly. “Grattius Benacus was a good man, and Marius Vettius was a danger to the empire, and I’m quite certain I see a connection. The only curse on the Fourteenth was Vettius.”
“Thank you, sir,” Correus said. “Mithras knows he did it no good. But I was wondering if I was the only one who’d seen it.”
“Oh, no,” Augusta’s legate said grimly. “It was plain enough.” He gave Correus a serious look. “How are they now? Will they hold?”
“Oh, yes, they’ll hold,” Correus said. He hoped to Hades they would. They were much improved, but it hadn’t been very long, and obedience had to be a habit, or it might not last.
“You’ve done a good job with them, I’ll say that,” the legate of the Twenty-first Rapax put in. “I haven’t seen worse than what you started with, except maybe the men they sent over from the Ninth Hispana. They were a mess, and it took Rufus a month to knock them halfway straight. He bounced two of their commanders, did you know that?”
The legate of the Claudia whistled between his teeth, and Correus thought of the Ninth Hispana, which had nearly mutinied in Britain. There was something wrong with that legion, some rot at the heart of it. Queen Boudicca of the Iceni had cursed it twenty years earlier, and maybe it had stuck. But he kept quiet about it. That was an ill omen for the march.
They were winding into a mountain valley now, away from the little river and toward the high pastureland and the forests of the Taunus. It was cold, and the wind whipped their cloaks around them and ruffled the horses’ manes. Correus, looking down the length of the valley, thought that it would be no good place to meet the Germans, but there was winter coming. Velius Rufus had decided to waste no more time and trust to numbers to make up any disadvantage in terrain. It was the largest army the Romans had assembled at any one place in Germany, the equivalent of five full legions, and it would be broken up again when the season was ended, Correus thought. It was too large for safety. Marius Vettius wasn’t the only man who would think of making a bid for the purple with the temptation of an army this size to call on. In the meantime, it was a comforting bulk at his back. It would be nice, he thought, if the Germans found it as impressive.
Marbod, sitting on a rock under a pine tree and chewing his mustaches, had found it most impressive. The troops that Velius Rufus had brought against him earlier in the season had been nearly tripled in number by the addition of Julius Frontinus’s legions. And for that he had listened to Ranvig at least enough to let the Romans get onto unfavorable ground – but no more than that. A pair of warriors ran through the trees, and one dropped down on the ground and scraped the pine needles away with his hand.
“Here, lord.” He drew the little valley into the dirt. “They come this way, as we thought.”
Marbod nodded. His war band was gathered behind him, stretching away through the dark forest; the Semnone cowards, who were men with no honor, would be hooted away from Valhalla’s gates when they died. Marbod stood up, and his spear-bearer put his heavy war spear and shield into his hands and checked the fine red lacing of his sword scabbard. “Now!” he shouted. “Now is the last battle, and we leave the Roman-kind for the ravens!” He swung himself up onto his horse and waved his spear. They streamed out of the forest behind him, the lords and warriors of the Chatti and the rebels from Ranvig’s camp, a wild, unruly horde that bayed like wolves as they crashed down the mountainside.
From his place on the opposite hillcrest, Ranvig watched them go. He sat on his own horse, with the cold wind ruffling his braids and an odd light of satisfaction in his eyes as the troublemakers of his tribe streamed along the valley floor with their lords before them, neck and neck with Marbod of the Chatti for the honor of first kill, first blood, first place at the victory feast after they had danced on the Romans’ graves.
“Now we fight!” Arni shouted. He was practically hopping in the saddle beside Ranvig. “Now we fight before we are too shamed to go home again!”
Behind them the Semnone warriors tensed their hands on their spears, and the Dacians in their peaked caps looked interested. It was not their war, but any war interested them.
Steinvar sidled his horse over to Arni’s and put his lean, scarred hand in Arni’s face. “Be quiet, or I’ll tie you up and leave you with the Dacians. We won’t go home at all if we fight like those fools.” He nodded at the howling mob that was pouring down from Marbod’s hill, screaming taunts and curses at the Romans. The Roman scouts had seen them, and the auxiliary infantry was already forming their lines while the cavalry and the legions came up behind them, a solid wall of scarlet and bronze packed tightly across the valley floor. A Roman trumpet sang out, and the heavy boom of a German war horn answered it.
“Are we going to let them fight while we sit here?” Arni exploded.
“Yes,” Ranvig said harshly, still watching the valley floor. “We fought once while the Chatti sat by. I remember.”
“We are all that is left of the Semnones,” Steinvar said. “We have boys of twelve in this war band. If we go home on our shields, then it will all be gone.”
“This is a shame and a dishonor, and the gods will curse us for it!” Arni shouted. His usual flyaway smile was gone, and his face was furious. “These men rode here with me! If you won’t take them down, I will!” He raised his arm, and Steinvar grabbed it and wrestled it down to his side.
Ranvig wasn’t looking at him. Slowly he raised his own arm, spear in hand, and the Semnone warriors shifted a little in their places behind him, every eye on the long white hand with the red-gold bracelet. Below, the leading edge of Marbod’s war band crashed with a scream like demons out of Hel into the Roman lines.
Steinvar twisted Arni’s arm behind him. “You will wait until he gives the signal, or I will flay you alive and find my daughter another husband.”
Ranvig dropped his spear, pointing down to the valley, and another war horn bellowed above him. Steinvar let go of Arni, and the war host of the Semnones poured down the ridge.
Correus heard the shouting and the trumpet calls from the front of the column only an instant before he saw the dark wave that rolled down the hillside toward them. He pulled his horse around and rode at a gallop for his legion, third in line in the column behind them. The other legates were doing the same, the emperor and Velius Rufus had drawn up to the side, and Rufus was shouting orders to three optios at once. Two couriers raced by Correus, heading for the rear, as he swung Antaeus in at the head of the Fourteenth Gemina.
“What in Typhon’s name is going on up there, sir?” the Second Cohort commander asked.
“Germans, Centurion,” Correus said briskly. “Form them up.” He looked around him for Quintus.
The Second Cohort commander slid off his horse, and an optio on another horse took its reins and galloped for the rear. Down the line the other officers were dismounting. The legions were infantry, and an officer stood and fought with his men.
Quintus pushed his way through the crowd. “Looks like we found ’em, sir,” he said. “Nasty spot for it.”
Correus looked at the valley’s width. It narrowed where the head of the column was deployed. The Germans had chosen their timing carefully. “I’m betting we back up,” he said to Quintus. “Tell them to get ready.” As he spoke, another trumpet sounded the “Fall Back and Regroup” and a courier from Velius Rufus leaned down from his saddle.
“General’s compliments, sir, and we’re pulling back. Half a mile.” He spurred his horse on down the column.
“You’ll make general yet, sir,” Quintus said cheerfully, and trotted off to pass the order. The narrow valley ahead would have kept two-thirds of their troops jammed up behind the rest. By pulling back, they would both blunt the first fury of the Germans’ charge and gain enough ground to put their advantage in numbers to some use.
Ranvig saw the column begin to back up and re-form, like a single living body, and he swung his mountain-bred ponies and their riders in a wider arc along the slope. Below them, Marbod’s warriors were screaming challenges as the Romans fell back before them. Marbod would know the Romans weren’t running, but his war host, in a battle fury, wouldn’t stop to care. Marbod might hold his own men, but never the renegade Semnones. And Marbod’s men would never let Semnones take the lead. Ranvig had given the chieftain of the Chatti an ill gift.
The Romans had drawn their lines up across the widest stretch of the valley floor now, the auxiliaries to the fore with the scarlet weight of the legionary troops behind them, studded with the golden standards of cohort and century, and the great Eagles of the legions. The cavalry was forming up on the wings, but the wings ran right up onto the mountains’ slope, and the cavalry ponies, not bred to these hills as the Germans’ were, were finding it tricky going already.
Marbod’s men, blue and red and ocher with war paint, their wild hair streaming out behind them, were tangled now with the auxiliaries of the front lines. They were naked from the waist up, many of them, save for the dark iron collars and the paint, and they fought with a fine red fury. The auxiliaries were beginning to buckle under their onslaught when the Roman trumpets sounded again. The auxiliaries fell back through the opened ranks of the waiting legions, and Marbod’s men howled after them.
Ranvig’s horses came down the last of the slope on their haunches, the loose pebbles from some long-dead streambed rattling under their hooves and the Semnone foot fighters at their heels. The ridge above them was bare of men. As the legionaries flung their pilums into the mass of Marbod’s warriors, Ranvig’s war host swept around the Roman cavalry and into the Roman flank.
There was blood in the air already, along with the worse smells of battle, men who had vomited or lost control of their bowels. Ygerna had smelled it before, and she thought sickly of the destruction that that smell meant and went on laying out bandages. Labienus, the chief field surgeon, a lean, plain-faced man in his forties, had set up his hospital tent among the baggage wagons, and already the wounded were being brought to the rear. Auxiliaries, mostly, but Ygerna knew that the Romans always began a battle with their auxiliaries. The men from the legions would come in soon enough.
Cottia and a surgeon’s orderly were struggling to unfold the camp beds and laying out canvas on the dirt floor for the men the beds wouldn’t hold. Labienus, in a bloody apron, was using a deep, cup-shaped spoon with a hole in the bottom to pull a barbed spearhead out of a man’s shoulder while a junior surgeon held him to the table. Cottia had a white line around her mouth, but she worked grimly and cuffed the orderly indignantly when he looked at the writhing auxiliaryman and stopped to retch.
The wounded were coming faster now, faster than Labienus and the legionary surgeons and their juniors could deal with them. The orderlies laid the least desperate of them on the canvas and heaved the worst onto the surgery tables almost before the last man had been moved.
“Go and help Labienus,” a junior surgeon panted, taking Ygerna’s arm with a bloody hand and pointing her in the right direction. He didn’t stop to ask if she could stand it, and with gritted teeth she told herself that she could. The junior surgeon disappeared somewhere into the chaos and the, animal moaning that came from the men on the floor.
Labienus was pulling long splinters of what might have been the man’s own shield from the red wreckage of an arm, and with a lurch in her stomach Ygerna saw that the man’s belt buckle bore the Capricorn badge of the Fourteenth Gemina. She thought at first that he was unconscious, but then the man’s eyes opened in narrow slits, frantic with pain. Labienus shoved a clay cup in her hand.
“Lift his head and get as much of this down him as you can.” He had a pair of bronze forceps in one hand and a probe in the other, but Ygerna looked at the arm and knew that that wouldn’t be the end of it. It was smashed above the elbow, and splinters of bone stuck up whitely among the wooden ones.
She slipped an arm behind the man’s head and held the cup to his lips. “Drink this, it will make you better.” She didn’t know what was in it.
The man choked and gagged, but he got most of it down and his eyes began to dull. “No…” he whispered, and she saw with horror that Labienus had a saw in his hand.
“What is happening?” she asked, partly to distract him from the terror that still came through the cloudy veil of the drug and partly because he came from Correus’s legion.
“Spearmen…” he whispered. “Germans…” and she realized that he didn’t know. To a legionary in the line, there was no pattern to the battle but his own three feet of space. He gagged again and heaved on the table, and Ygerna heard the sick grinding sound of the bone saw. She put her hands on his shoulders and held him down and put her face close to his so that he would look at her and not at Labienus.
“Hold them!” Correus shouted. “For Rome! For your Eagle! Push!” A legate’s place was at the center of his men or with the generals on some vantage point, with a courier to send his orders, not in the front line where death was the likeliest prize. But the Fourteenth Gemina was a legion too newly disciplined for that, so Correus was in the forefront with the Eagle-bearer beside him, cursing them, cajoling them, screaming himself into hoarseness at them, over the screams of the wounded and the wild howling of the Germans. A German spearman staggered toward him, and Correus pulled Antaeus up on his haunches a split second too late. The spear cut a gash along the horse’s shoulder, and Antaeus screamed and lashed out with iron-shod hooves. The German fell back with a ruined face, and Correus swore. A Roman short sword was no use on horseback, but if he got down, his men couldn’t see him, and that was the point. “Give me that!” Correus dropped his useless sword as a legionary caught the German’s spear and tossed it up. It was a war spear, long, heavy, barbed at the end, with a bloody collar of speckled feathers around the shaft. Correus had learned to use one when he was eighteen. From Forst. He swung Antaeus around and drove the blade into a snarling German face. Blood welled up to cover the blue and ocher paint and the dark iron ring around the German’s neck.
Marbod’s men came on, like hunting wolves over the bodies of their dead. The Romans met them, still wedged solidly across the valley mouth, but the torn bodies of the Roman dead were growing, and the wounded who could not fall back were trampled underfoot. On the left flank, the Roman lines had begun to cave in a little on the center, jamming those behind them more solidly together, and the cavalry, on horses less adaptable to the steep terrain, were pushing gallantly against Ranvig’s host, with bad results.
The emperor Domitian and his generals, on a slight rise above the right flank, watched the pattern of the battle while the emperor slammed his fist into the purple silk of his saddlecloth. “That is more men than you thought, Rufus!”
“There is also bad weather coming, and the emperor wishes to conclude the campaign this season,” Rufus said. “Another ground would have been more favorable, but time was important. As we discussed.”
“Marbod’s men aren’t rested,” Julius Frontinus said. “Ours are. That will tell, sir, in the end.”
“And so will bad judgment when the Senate counts our losses!” Domitian snapped. He wanted a triumph, not a Pyrrhic victory and a slaughter.
Rufus and the chief of Engineers glanced at each other and kept their thoughts to themselves. It had been at Domitian’s insistence that they had pushed for a conclusion before winter. There were beginning to be loud noises in Rome that this campaign grew too costly, that the emperor was not the warrior his father and his brother had been. Domitian needed a clean, decisive victory – quickly.
Wherever they could stand clear and fight, the Romans cut down the German host, but it was like wading through heavy sand or waist-high water. There wasn’t enough room, and the Germans still loped howling into the front ranks. The front ranks began to thin. For each man killed, another moved up from the press at the rear, but the dead were growing. Still, there was a limit to Marbod’s men, and the warriors in his host had been lost from his control almost from the start. They threw themselves at the Romans like berserkers, and like berserkers they went to Valhalla by the thousands.
The air had grown thick and oppressive under lowering clouds, and the light was gray with the coming dusk when the last remnants of Marbod’s war host wavered. The Roman lines surged forward over them. Those who had been battling the men of Ranvig’s host, who had slashed their way through the Roman cavalry to hammer at the infantry’s flank all day, braced for one last charge. They were bone weary, spitting blood, their breath coming in gasps, but they would have to do it alone. If they sank under Ranvig’s charge, the front lines would never be able to turn in time to stop him. They raised their shields for one last push, one last time, and then halted, puzzled – because the Germans were gone.
Correus, whose Fourteenth Legion had swung around from the front to try to reinforce the faltering flank, halted his men, also. The Semnones had pulled back as suddenly as they had come, their hill-bred ponies scrambling up the slope, with only the ragged remnants of the Roman cavalry stumbling after them. Ranvig must have drawn off his foot-fighters first – it was only horsemen that streamed away up the hillside. Correus’s weary, heavily armored legion and the legions of the flank would only waste their time and lives on that hill. Almost as soon as he gave the order, a trumpet sounded the “Hold” to echo it and the scattered cavalry turned back as well. The sky above was dark with boiling rain clouds as well as the growing dusk. It was too late to chase the Germans tonight.
Mithras god. Too late forever, maybe. Strung out along the ridgetop, opening their ranks to let Ranvig’s fleeing horsemen through, were spears and men unending, a black line that stretched the length of the valley and back into the dusk.
The general had seen them, too. The trumpets called “Regroup” and the footsore legions stumbled to their places, but the Germans didn’t move. Then, while Correus watched from Antaeus’s back, his mouth dry and every limb aching, the low sun broke through the cloud just once behind the ridge. A single horseman moved from Ranvig’s lines and raised his shield and spear, black against the sun. The men on the ridge turned around, and, while the Romans watched them uncomprehending, they walked away into the dusk, and the horseman turned and followed them.
“They’re gone, sir.” Quintus saluted and staggered slightly.
“Sit down, man,” Correus said. “What do you mean they’re gone?” He had counted his dead and seen the wounded sent back to the rear, and now he was sitting on a rock under a tent flap, trying to start a fire in the rain.
“Where’s your optio?” Quintus said disapprovingly. He sat down and began to poke twigs in the fire. “They’re gone. Gone clean out of the territory by the look of it. Not a smell of them, and the scouts say they’re still traveling. I don’t get it, but the gods be thanked anyway. We couldn’t have fought another like this one today.”
“Out of the—?” Suddenly Correus began to laugh. The ground was getting soft in the rain, and one of the tent poles shifted and a corner of the flap came down, but Correus didn’t seem to notice it. Quintus watched him nervously as Correus sat there while his fire went out and the rain ran down his collar, and laughed.
The army had buried its dead by lantern light and tipped the Germans, of whom there were many, into a common pit in the rain-soaked ground. The Agri Decumates belonged to Rome. In the morning the weary men of the legions would parade by the graves of their dead in the shadow of their standards, and the commanders would call out the names while the emperor intoned the Prayer for the Slain. The emperor would send his dispatches back to Rome, and the Senate would vote him a triumph.
Ranvig of the Semnones had not wasted the year that he had spent playing at treaties with the emperor of the Romans. He knew Domitian now. Knew what he wanted from this campaign and had given it to him. And if the warning not to take more than had been given had been somewhat pointed, neither the emperor nor his generals would mention that in Rome.
Ranvig had never meant to hold the Agri Decumates. He had thrown Marbod of the Chatti and the troublemakers from his own tribe to the Romans to let the Romans’ emperor take the land in the way that would best please him: with a great battle, and a fine victory, and the robes of a triumphant general. And then there had been the warning: No farther. No farther if the emperor wishes to keep his triumph. Beyond the Agri Decumates, on the borders of the Suevi lands, they would be waiting, in case the emperor should be so foolish as not to listen.
He would listen, Correus thought. He laughed again, noiselessly now, half bitterly, at himself earnestly counseling Ranvig not to take on Rome. There was still something missing, some last piece of Ranvig’s game to be played, but it would come. He was as sure of that as he was that Ranvig had won. As sure as the dead men in their grave in the driving rain.
Quintus brought him his dinner, hard wheat biscuit and bacon, camp rations, with olives and wine from the officers’ mess, and he was eating it when Ygerna picked her way through the muddy camp with a lantern in her hand.
“You are alive,” she observed. “And you are sitting in a tent and swilling wine, while I have been wondering if you were dead.”
Quintus eyed her warily and backed out of the tent. Correus put his wine down and held his arms out to her. “Flavius was here. I asked him to find you. Didn’t he?”
“In this?” They had camped where they had fought, in the churned ground of the valley, and rain was sheeting down outside the tent. She set the lantern down, and he saw that her gown was soaked in blood under the mud and water.
“What have you been doing?”
“Helping Labienus to cut a man’s arm off,” she said shortly.
“Dear gods.” He put his arms around her, and she buried her face in his chest.