Each man would wait until there was no movement close by, and would then shuffle slowly to the nearest piece of unoccupied cover. As soon as he was in place, someone else would move up to his unoccupied position and, gradually, the entire half-century moved forward at a barely noticeable speed.
Fronto grinned with relief as he realised it was possible. Other options had been quickly pushed aside, leaving this as the only feasible means of advance. Boats would be too obvious, and even swimming and then climbing the cliffs would draw too much attention. For all the openness of this approach, the defenders would be paying most of their attention to the water and the channel between the headlands, and much less to the remaining strip of land that connected them with the mainland.
With infinite slowness and care, the men of Curtius’ unit crossed the space, descending to the lowest point, close to the beach, where the scrub petered out but left them with dunes and large jumbled rocks instead.
Fronto paused as he pushed his back up against one of the great boulders of granite-like stone. He ran his fingers across the hard surface and nodded. Seems like Tetricus knew what he was talking about. Casting his eyes across the spur of land, he could see the other groups of men, slowly trickling across the ground toward the walls in much the same fashion as this group.
They had crossed fully half the distance to the walls, by his reckoning, in just a little over ten minutes, way ahead of his expectations. He glanced over the top of the rock and could just make out the faint shapes of the men on the wall in the darkness.
Once more, he was grateful that Fortuna had seen fit to give them high clouds that hardly moved in the still air, hanging helpfully in front of the moon and stars and hiding their light.
He realised that nobody nearby was moving and, taking a quick glance around the side of the boulder, dipped forward and crept across the sand and scrubby grass to the next low pile of rock. As he came to a halt and allowed himself to breathe once more, he watched one of the men behind steal forward into the place he had just vacated.
How was Balbus faring at the other side, he wondered?
The sound of a night bird drew his irritated attention for a moment before he realised that the noisy creature was, in fact, Curtius, trying to get his attention from a nearby boulder.
He gestured with a shrug and the optio pointed over the top of his stone shelter. Fronto turned and looked at the walls again. Two of the four figures he had been able to spot last time he looked had vanished and, as he watched, the other two converged on a spot close to the gate and gradually disappeared from view.
Fronto scratched his head. Had they left the walls for some reason? Had they seen something and were heading for the gate to come out and investigate? He winced and rubbed his scalp nervously. What to do?
A short distance away, Curtius flashed him a wide grin and, making a couple of expansive gestures to those behind them, ducked out from the boulder that covered him, and ran in clear view across twenty yards of open grass, ducking briefly behind a bush to make sure the wall was still empty before running on.
Fronto stared at him. What was the idiot doing? What would happen if the guards suddenly came back into view? Fronto ground his teeth, but his irritation at Curtius blossomed into full blown panic as the rest of the unit, having seen the optio’s gesture, broke cover at a run and hurtled past the legate toward the fortress.
“Oh bloody hell!” Fronto grunted in a loud whisper and then, taking a deep breath, left the boulder and joined the running men.
Over the grass and sand he padded, willing the wall to remain empty as he neared the point where the men were gathering behind Curtius, not ten yards from the bottom of the defences. Fronto, snarling and frowning, ignored the helping hands that were thrust out to him from behind rocks and ran past the men until he ducked behind the low bush that sheltered the optio.
“You damn idiot!” he hissed. “I nearly died when I saw you running. What possessed you to do that?”
Curtius shrugged with a faintly apologetic smile.
“Sorry, sir. Saw an opportunity and took it.”
“What would have happened if you’d been seen?”
Curtius grinned.
“Ah, but we weren’t, sir. And now we’re here.”
Fronto continued to grind his teeth as his glare bored into the junior officer but he didn’t trust himself to say anything else without shouting.
“You and I are going to have words when this is over.”
“By all means, sir. Shall we have a look at the wall for now, though.”
Fronto’s glare remained for a moment and he pointed a warning finger at the optio. A quick glance upwards confirmed the footsteps he thought he’d heard a moment ago. Figures were reappearing on the wall. Must have changed the guard for the next watch. The unit was, indeed, ridiculously lucky that they’d stopped running when they did. Fronto held his hand up, warning the others to stay still and, silently and slowly, ducked out from the bush, trying to avoid any noisy undergrowth.
It was only when his hands touched the chunks of rock that formed the face of the wall that he allowed his breath to escape. This was it.
Slowly, keeping close enough to the wall that he would be out of the defenders’ line of sight, he ran his hands across the surface.
Tetricus was right, the clever little bastard. He’d have to buy the tribune a whole cartload of drinks for this. The fort walls were constructed in much the same way as most Celtic defences. A frame of heavy timber beams formed the shape of the wall, faced with tightly fitted smooth stones and then filled with compacted earth. Very defensible. All very laudable. But these walls had been here for a very long time and, just as the tribune had predicted, decades, if not centuries, of salt water and wind had had a profound weathering effect on the sawn wooden ends of the beams as they punctuated the stone of the walls, while the hard, solid rock had hardly suffered a mark at their hands. The end result was that the periodic beam ends had shrunk back into the surface, creating ready-made hand holes in the otherwise unscalable walls. Nature, for once, seemed to be giving them a helping hand.
Fronto heaved a silent sigh of relief and turned to the men behind him, hidden in numerous places.
With a smile, he gestured with his thumb.
Fronto glanced once more with irritation at Curtius. The man seemed determined to do things his own way, regardless of the consequences. The legate had made it clear that the rest were to stay behind him, lower down, until he had reached the parapet and peered over and yet, as he pulled his face up to the edge, the optio was already level with him to his right and doing the same.
Again, he glanced past the man to see the other units further along the wall, slowly and quietly scaling the surface. Angrily, he waved an arm at Curtius, while clinging tightly to the parapet with his free hand. The optio, thankfully, saw the gesture and ducked back down. One of the defenders, wrapped tight in his woollen cloak, strode past perhaps five feet from where the legate clung.
Moments passed until finally he heard the distinctive night-time call of the corn crake from down near the water; nothing unusual enough to attract the guards’ attention, despite being replicated on this occasion with two notched sticks by one of the legionaries remaining at the beach on watch.
Fronto nodded. The call was short and singular and told him that all four units were in position along the walls.
Taking a deep breath, he nodded to the optio and hauled himself up onto the wall.
The guard had walked past him and almost reached Curtius’ position. As quietly as he could, as he got his knees on the top of the wall, Fronto drew his gladius. A few yards away, the optio’s hand shot out across the surface and grabbed the Gaul’s ankle, yanking it forward. The guard gave a gasp and fell heavily backwards. Fronto lunged forward to silence the man with his sword, but the fall had cracked the man’s head hard and driven the consciousness from him before he could shout.