‘Keep your wits about you and your shields ready, and watch out for their swords.’
Scarface tested his footing behind the turf wall’s modest defence, seeking a firm footing before the fighting began. He muttered quietly to his neighbour, tipping his head to indicate their centurion.
‘I’m not sure what’s worse, that lot over the river shouting the odds or having him strutting up and down like he’s an officer or something.’
The other man nodded, spitting morosely into the river’s fast-flowing water.
‘Yeah. Was better when we had our young gentleman to tell us what to do, an’ he was stood behind us with the big stick. Don’t suppose we’ll be seeing Two Knives again, though…’
Scarface nodded morosely before looking back over his shoulder.
‘You, rear rank, you’ll have to keep a better grip of my belt than that unless you want me in the river with those tattooed bastards.’
Across the river, after the expected period of time for orders to work their way down to the family groups that made up the warband, the Venicones stopped milling about and advanced into the river with fresh purpose. The water reached almost to their knees, reducing their progress to a slow walk as they fought against the Red’s continual efforts to pull them off their feet. The waiting Tungrians settled down behind their shields, crouching into their shelter as the stronger Venico warriors began hurling their spears, for the most part futilely, although one lucky throw toppled a 3rd Century soldier across the rampart with his throat torn open.
The barbarians advanced through the freezing river’s flow to the western riverbank and began their assault in earnest, attempting to climb the earth wall and get to close quarters where their swords could come into play. Hopelessly disadvantaged by the turf rampart, losing the ability to use either spear or sword against the defenders as they climbed out of the water, they were easy meat for the Tungrians’ spear-thrusts. Within half a minute blood clouded the river’s water, as dozens of men fell back from the attack with horrific upper-body wounds inflicted by the darting spearheads that struck repeatedly into their ranks. A warrior might fight on for a short time with a single wound, but with hundreds of spears thrusting at the attackers ten or twelve times a minute the slaughter was more than the Venicones could sustain. A horn blew and the remaining attackers withdrew past their dead and dying comrades, shouting insults and threats at the impassive soldiers. Scarface took a deep breath, wiping the blood from his face where it had sprayed after his spear had pierced deep into a Venico warrior’s chest. He spat over the rampart into the river’s torrent, watching the surviving barbarians straggling back to the far bank.
‘Easy enough. I did for five of the fuckers without ever even seeing a blade, never mind using my shield. They can keep doing that as long as they like…’
On the eastern hillside, in a position chosen to allow the senior officers to see over the 1st Cohort, and with uninterrupted views to both north and south, the two cohorts’ tribunes and first spears watched as the Venico warriors backed away from the earth rampart. First Spear Frontinius curled his lip dismissively, pulling unconsciously on his moustache.
‘That was a diversion, and not much more by my reckoning. There are men moving along the bank in both directions. Let’s hope your men up and downriver are up to the task, Prefect Furius.’
The bands of warriors dispatched along the Red’s banks moved quickly, the northern group climbing the gentle slope until the wide expanse of the ford gave way to the steeper and narrower banks of the river where it ran through the softer rock that had once overlain the ford’s granite shelf. Higher they climbed, seeking a narrow point at which to wade or jump the river and thus reach the western bank unopposed. To the south another warband headed downriver, skirting round the falls by way of a slow, steep climb down the sloping rock face before jogging downstream in search of their own crossing point. Frontinius watched them go, his eyes narrowed in calculation as he stared into the rain, the downpour slowing as the clouds above them started to lift.
‘The rain’s stopping. Which means we’ll only have a few hours before the ford reduces in speed and depth enough for them to rush us in real numbers.’
Three hundred paces upriver the northern warband had found what they were looking for, a narrowing in the stream caused by the presence of a huge boulder buried deeply in the eastern bank. The massive, ancient rock reduced the river’s width to less than a running man’s jump, if well judged. Half a dozen men stepped back and ran at the jump, vaulting off the boulder and landing, in all but one case, squarely on the far bank. The one exception missed the bank’s edge by six inches, floundered and was swept away downstream in an instant by the fast-moving stream.
The remaining warriors turned to signal to their comrades, and went down under a volley of spears from the nearest 2nd Cohort century as they advanced out of the thinning rain. The soldiers rushed to the bank and formed a hasty line, meeting the next wave of warriors with spear points that dumped every man unceremoniously into the Red to be washed back downstream to the ford in clouds of their own blood. The centurion gestured to his men, half of them forming a defensive line while the rest set to work behind them with their turf-cutting spades to open a gap which, when cut through to the river’s bank, would widen the river sufficiently to make the leap impossible. Without the cover afforded by the rain the 2nd Cohort’s dispositions were now becoming clear, several centuries stepped up the western bank in ambush positions for just such an eventuality. Scaurus watched as the 2nd Cohort men toiled at the riverbank, his face thoughtful.
‘They’ll get no joy that way, the river’s moving far too quickly. It’s a crossing downstream from the falls that worries me — the flow might be slow enough for them to find a way across somewhere down there.’
Frontinius grimaced into the gentle drizzle that still drifted in the air.
‘I could send more men down there…’
‘Yes, but we need to keep the whole length of the river defended as well as possible. Weaken the section upstream of the falls and they’ll find a way across there instead. We’ll just have to make the best of what we have.’
He looked to the south again, but the Venico warriors that had gone south down the Red’s eastern bank were now invisible in the afternoon’s murk, a thick mist replacing the rain as the day’s warmth steamed moisture out of the sodden ground.
The 8th Century and Martos’s warriors lay soaked, muddy and bedraggled against the northern bank of a small stream, a tributary of the Red that ran in the shadow of the long rocky shelf scarring the hillside to the east of the falls. With his feet in the fast-flowing water Marcus peeped over the bank’s crest, just able to make out the figures of the Venicones as they hunted down the Red’s eastern bank less than two hundred paces away. Within a minute, he realised, they would draw level with the stream’s entrance into the river, and have clear line of sight to the 8th’s hiding place. He looked up and down the line of his men, gesturing them to stay prone against the mud. A single warrior moved into view, his presence almost ghostly in the curtains of mist hanging in the muggy afternoon air. The man stood slightly crouched, scouting the path for the warband behind him, his head cocked to one side as he listened for any threat, then slowly moved on down the river’s bank. Another man followed, then more, these warriors less alert than their scout.
‘How could he not see us?’
Martos answered his quiet question in an equally low voice.
‘Mist. Mud. Luck…’
‘They’re looking for a way across the river.’
‘Yes. Did you see their axes? They will look for a tree to drop across the river, then call the warband down here and seek to cross it in stealth. Your people will have centuries posted along the bank, but with this mist…’