In a sudden blur of motion and with a crunching impact the barbarian was gone, punched away by the impact of a shield smashed into his body by a figure sprinting out of the mist. The warrior went down with his face wrecked, battered out of shape by the impact of the shield’s heavy bronze boss, and with blood pouring from his shattered nose. He groaned once, put a hand to his ruined cheekbone and collapsed to the grass only partially conscious. Lupus stared up from his crouch between the cart’s traces, watching numbly as Marcus tossed the shield aside, flashed out his gladius alongside the longer-bladed spatha and turned his ire on the man the child had wounded. Swinging the cavalry sword at the hobbling warrior’s throat in a precise arc, he dropped the wounded man to the turf with blood sheeting from his opened neck, then turned back to the remaining barbarians with a tight-lipped snarl that hardened to barely restrained rage as he lined up the blades’ points. He drew in a long breath and allowed it to escape in a slow exhalation as he paced slowly forward, eying the three remaining barbarians with cold calculation as they dithered between fight and flight, his eyes meeting the child’s empty stare and hardening as they flicked back to the Venicones. For all their numerical advantage the warriors quailed at the sight of a helmetless soldier daubed with mud and blood, his eyes flint hard above a mouth slitted with contempt. One of them groped on the floor in front of him, unable to take his eyes from the Roman’s approach as he picked up the spear that Antenoch had dropped.
The attack, delivered after several long seconds of silence, was all the more shocking for the speed with which Marcus took his iron to the barbarians, too fast for the stunned child to follow from his hiding place. Turning aside the spearman’s frantic defence and punching his gladius through the man’s ribs, he deflected a stabbing sword from his left with an almost absent-minded parry with the spatha, slanting the long sword to allow the man’s attack to slide along its polished surface and extend the attack farther than the barbarian had intended, then kicked his legs out from under him and pitched him face first to the ground. Leaving the short sword in the spearman’s chest, he feinted momentarily at the last man standing to put him on the back foot, then finished the fallen barbarian with brutal speed, hacking the spatha deep into his spine before turning away to tackle the last remaining warrior. Ripping his gladius free as he passed the dying spearman, he brutally kicked him face first into the mud. The last man turned to run, but managed less than five paces before the enraged officer ran him down, spearing the long sword through his left thigh and dropping him howling to the ground. He waited for the Venicone warrior to roll on to his back before finishing the fight, batting aside the man’s sword with something close to contempt before pushing his spatha into his chest in a slow, measured thrust, watching the barbarian contort in agony as the iron’s cold bite pushed through his organs. The stink of faeces hung in the air as the dying warrior’s bowels voided themselves.
‘A hard death.’
Marcus turned to find Scaurus and Arminius standing behind him, their swords unsheathed. Both men were breathing hard from their run from the opposite hill. Marcus twisted the sword and pulled it from the dying man’s body, inspecting the point for any damage, then casually ran the blade through the throat of the concussed warrior he had smashed aside with his shield.
‘Not hard enough. They killed my clerk.’
The prefect nodded simple agreement, turning away to look for Lupus and finding him staring at the hill above them.
‘At least you managed to save the child, that’s some…’
He turned to look at whatever was holding the child’s attention, seeing another group of warriors staring down at them from the hill’s crest, nine or ten strong. Marcus and Arminius followed his glance, their faces hardening as the barbarians started down the slope towards them.
‘If you’ll allow me, Prefect, this is a job for your man here and me…’
Marcus fell silent as the prefect bent to pick up one of the dead Venicone warriors’ swords, seeing an amused smile touch Arminius’s face. Scaurus drew his gladius, taking up a two-handed fighting stance without ever taking his eyes off the oncoming warriors.
‘Thank you, Centurion, but I’ll take my chances alongside the pair of you if it’s all the same to you.’
The first warriors stormed in to attack the trio before Marcus had any chance to reply, assaulting the Romans in a furious whirl of swords and axes. In a second Marcus was fighting for his life, ducking under a wild sword-blow and hacking his gladius deep into his attacker’s thigh before shouldering the man into the path of another warrior. Sensing movement behind him, he swayed his upper body back out of the path of a spear-thrust, watching the wickedly sharp iron blade slide past within inches of his face. He flicked the spatha’s blade down into the muddy ground, relinquishing the sword’s hilt and grabbing the spear’s shaft with his right hand, then leaned in to thrust his gladius up under the spearman’s jaw, leaving the sword embedded in the dying man’s throat. Lifting the spear from the warrior’s numb fingers he pivoted back to the wounded barbarian and the man into whose path he had pushed him, reversing the weapon with a casual flourish and stepping in to plant the butt spike in the wounded barbarian’s throat in a spectacular shower of blood as the spike tore into the man’s neck. Shifting on to his back foot, he flipped the spear lengthwise again to present its razor-sharp blade before stamping his right foot forward again, thrusting the iron head deep into the other barbarian’s guts and ripping it free with a savage twist that contorted the warrior’s face with pain, the contents of his bowels gushing down his legs as his eyes rolled up. He watched the man’s face with savage intent, lost to blood rage as the barbarian slumped to the floor, ramming the spear’s blade between his ribs and through his heart. Arminius’s guttural shout snapped him back into the fight.
‘Behind you!’
He pivoted, ripping the spear free of the fallen warrior’s body to find a pair of warriors within a half-dozen paces and charging in fast. Without time either to pull the weapon back for the throw or turn fully enough to use the blade, he dived forward beneath their raised swords, tripping his attackers with the spear’s shaft and rolling out from beneath their tumbling bodies to where his spatha waited, its point buried in the mud. Dropping the spear and snatching at the sword’s hilt, he sprinted back into the fight, hacking at the closer of the two, the sword’s razor-sharp blade opening the man’s head up like ripe fruit, then kicked the sword loose from the lolling corpse to parry an attack from his companion. Too slow. The man’s booted foot hooked his leg and pitched him to the ground with a thump, driving the breath from his body and breaking his hold on the spatha’s hilt. The sword fell uselessly to the ground beside him and the barbarian smiled at him in triumph, his sword’s point suddenly at Marcus’s throat with a cold bite that froze his attempts to regain his feet. Groping unnoticed at his belt for his dagger he found instead the tribulus given to him on a cold spring hillside far to the south and months before by Rufius and tugged the vicious little device free, forming a fist around its iron spikes.