"For the standards of the Petriana!"
Arrows whizzed past like buzzing insects.
There was a great crash as the lines met, a scream of horses and shout of men, and then the cavalry was over the barbarians and past them, their lances left upright in writhing, impaled bodies. The Romans slid free their long swords and turned.
Galba's own sword had hit something solid in the initial collision, coming up red and glistening. Now he sawed with his reins, his horse's eyes rolling with the pain of the harsh cavalry bit, and charged toward the blond giant with the ax. The chieftain was whirling his weapon and singing a death song, his eyes opaque with wonder at that ghostly world he'd already half stepped into. "So shall I give it to you," the Roman promised. He cut with his sword to parry the ax shaft, used the heavy shoulder of his horse to knock his enemy over, and then leaped from his saddle to finish the pirate off. Strike fast, when they're down.
Yet the butted chieftain kept rolling and so Galba's grunting stroke missed and struck turf, sticking there. It was an almost fatal mistake. The barbarian came up howling, covered in grass and dirt and the smoke and blood of his earlier pillage, his torso a topography of sinew, bone, and blue tattoo. When the warrior reared back to lift his ax, he was like some monstrous bear, and a newcomer to war might have been transfixed enough to let the Scotti strike.
But Galba was a veteran of a hundred fights and gave his opponent no time to set himself. Instead he saw opportunity. Yanking his blade clear in the time the Scotti took to raise his ax, he made a quick horizontal slash that opened the barbarian's stomach and then stepped smartly back as the ax whizzed by his ear. The shock of disembowelment caused the Scotti to let the heavy weapon thud all the way into the ground, and so the Roman swung again and heard an audible crack of bone as he took off the chieftain's hands. The Celt staggered, only dimly realizing what had happened to him, screamed to the gods who'd forsaken him this day, and held his bloody stumps to heaven. Then he crashed to earth.
Galba whirled for another antagonist, but his men had already made short work of the rest who'd dared stand, the bravest already dying or enslaved. The Roman horses were prancing over the corpses as if uncertain where to put their hooves, and there was that familiar battlefield smell of urine, dung, hot blood, and fearful sweat, as bizarrely intoxicating as it was repulsive.
Galba looked at his chipped blade tip. It was the first time he'd missed an enemy already down, and he couldn't make that mistake again. Grunting, he stooped and pried a severed hand off the ax handle to look for a ring. There was a fine golden one, he saw, with a red stone. Probably stolen from a Roman.
"I'll take this back, boy." He used his dagger to saw the finger off.
Victory!
"They're getting away!" a decurion shouted.
Galba stood and whistled for his horse, leaping agilely into the saddle and roaring his men into some kind of quick order. The redheaded chieftain had escaped and was leading twenty of his raiders into the trees toward the water.
"Let them run!" he shouted to his men.
The Romans pursued just out of bowshot, weaving through trees. As the barbarians ran they looked back at their seemingly wary pursuers and jeered, but Galba held his men in careful check. They came to a bluff in time to see the Scotti fling their weapons and helmets aside and spill like lemmings into the sea. The barbarians surfaced, wet and howling from the cold, and struck for longboats hidden among the reeds of an estuary.
"Hold and watch!"
The redhead who'd escaped turned in the water and taunted them in thick Latin, vowing revenge.
"Hold, I say!"
The Romans stood mute and winded, lining the bluff.
The Scotti reached the reedy water on the far side of the inlet, some managing to stand in the shallows and others thrashing for their boats. They shouted for the comrades they'd left behind, gasping explanations, and anxiously grasped oar holes to lift themselves aboard.
Then there was a Latin shout, Falco's command carrying across the inlet of water, and a row of helmeted heads rose from the bowels of the longboats.
More Romans.
Falco's wing had ridden around and already captured the craft, slaying their guards. Now they stood from the hulls where they'd been hiding and fell upon the unarmed barbarians trying to climb aboard.
Galba's plan had worked.
The red-haired one, half naked and weaponless now, saw the murder that was happening and thrashed his way to a muddy bank.
Falco himself rode the man down.
The bang and thud of weapons and the screams of the wounded echoed across the water for only moments and then it was done, the reeds stained red, bodies floating like logs.
"Come," Galba said. "We meet Lucius Falco on the other side."
The two wings of cavalry joined at the head of the inlet, the longboats already burning as fiercely as Cato's village. A handful of captured warriors would stay with the Romans as slaves. Some of the booty would be returned to their client, others kept as tax.
One of them was the defiant red-haired chieftain: a rib cracked after being overridden by Falco's horse, head bloody, manner abject. In minutes he'd gone from conqueror to conquered, from lord to prisoner, and he stood trussed and naked with that dull expression of shock and resignation that comes from enslavement.
"I was hoping that one for my own, Falco," Galba congratulated.
"He's a bit of a badger. Even after riding over the top of him, I had to club with my dagger. He'll be trouble, perhaps."
"Or spirit. Get him home and make clear how things are."
Falco nodded.
"Let's find out who he is." Galba walked his horse up to the subdued barbarian. "What's your name, boy?" These Scotti were a last stubborn branch of those Celtic tribes the Romans had been fighting for eight centuries, their ferocity in battle and despair in defeat both as predictable as the tides. It might take a bit of whip and club to tame this one, but he, like them all, would submit. "What do they call you, stripling?"
The man looked up sullenly and for just one moment Galba felt chilled. It was a blackly baleful look he got, the captive thinking no doubt of the hearth and woman and horse he'd never see again, but beyond that there was something in his sorrow that seemed to give a glimpse of a dim and troubled future. Let Falco keep him, indeed.
"I am Odocullin of the Dal Riasta. Prince of the Scotti and a lord of Eiru."
"Odocul-what? That's more mouthful than a Sicilian sweetcake. Repeat yourself, slave!"
The man looked away.
Galba's hand went to the pouch at his side. He could feel the severed finger of this man's dead compatriot and the hard curve of the barbarian's ring. None ever ignored Galba Brassidias for long, and someday this carrot-colored Hibernian would learn that too. In the meantime, who cared what the captive was called by his own people? "We'll name you Odo, then," he pronounced, "and the cost of your defeat will be slavery in the house of the soldier who defeated you, Lucius Falco."
The Scotti still wouldn't look at his captors.
"Odo," Falco repeated. "Even I can remember that."
III
So Odo became houseboy to the villa of Lucius Falco, and Galba Brassidias, forty rings now jangling from the waist chain of his armor, burst from the base of the watchtower to receive his reward from Rome.
The courtyard of the fortress headquarters was lit with torches in the dusk, a turma of thirty-two men snapping to attention. "Straight ranks! Weapons high!" The butts of their lances banged smartly against paving stone. The courier who trotted through the barrel gate was another centurion, Longinus by name, his boots flecked with mud and the rim of his tunic sweaty.