Hope deserted him.
His men were running for the woods, but it was a futile, panicked move. Wherever they fled, there were more Romans waiting for them. Only one small group was free and out of danger, and that very fact gnawed at Correus more even than this unmitigated disaster.
The civilians who had initially fled to the defile had managed to run, and the Romans seemed to be making no effort to pursue them. Sharp of the Roman commander, for those women, children and old men would even now be carrying morale-destroying word of this catastrophe to the camp and the rest of the army.
The revolt of the Bellovaci had failed.
He hoped that when his people back in the camp realised all was lost, they might tear open Commius of the Atrebates and leave his flayed corpse hanging from a tree for the crows. It ate at him that his best men would die here for his error in judgement, but what really burned into his soul was the fact that he would die in this valley without getting a chance to personally gut the silver-tongued Atrebate for what he had done.
‘Come, my king.’
He turned and frowned at his bodyguard. ‘What?’
‘We must get you away from this place.’
‘There is no escape,’ he replied in the hollow voice of a defeated man.
‘Your guards can force a path through the enemy, my king.’
‘No they cannot. Even around the valley top, they will be forty lines deep. No. We fight here, and we die here.’
The man continued to plead, but Correus snarled defiance and turned, seeking out the most important man on the field. His eyes fell on a man with a transverse crest, marking him as a centurion. As the combatants parted for a moment, he also saw the man’s harness full of medals and the torcs and corona hanging from it. A veteran, heavily decorated. A worthy opponent.
He marked the man with a gesture of his sword and started to move towards him, though the Roman had not returned the sign that had been indicative of the desire for a personal duel of heroes. Shrugging as he closed on the man, a legionary swung up at him as he passed, and Correus swept his own blade down, turning the gladius aside and taking the tips from all four knuckles. The man screamed and dropped the sword, staring down at his hand, and Correus took the opportunity of the lowered face to bring his sword down heavily, hacking into the flesh and bone at the back of the man’s neck. He felt the spine go and the soldier fell away, curiously at one and the same time limp, yet twitching.
Another legionary came to stop him, but his bodyguard was there and pushed the man out of the way, killing him on the third stroke. Correus once more set his gaze upon the centurion, and suddenly his world exploded into a blurred kaleidoscope. It took a moment after the blow to his head to realise that someone had killed his horse and that he was now on the ground, his head swimming from contact with the hard turf. Desperately he realised he was surrounded by Romans, and none of them were the centurion. One of his bodyguard fought off a legionary, pushing him back into the crowd, and then reached down to help him up.
Correus gripped the man’s free hand, but then the guard’s fingers stiffened and the pointed tip of a gladius emerged through the side of his neck, showering the king in a torrent of his man’s blood. Desperately, he wiped the worst away, rolling to one side so that the body fell not on him, but on open grass.
Trying to recover his wits, he pulled himself painfully upright, realising only as he saw the centurion’s crest between two other soldiers that his sword had disappeared somewhere in the fall. Angry beyond reason, he reached down to his belt and drew his fighting knife – a weapon of last resort for a true warrior.
‘Come for me, Roman!’ he bellowed in thickly-accented Latin.
The centurion actually turned and noticed him, but it was an unseen legionary who answered.
‘Gladly, Gaul,’ came a voice from off to his left and he felt a horrific pain in his side as a pointed blade punctured his mail shirt end on, driving deep into muscle and then organs.
Hissing, more in shock at the lack of honour in the man than from the pain, he turned. The legionary had already accounted him dead, turning to his friend and laughing at his little moment of humour.
Correus lashed out and caught him in the cheek, driving his knife in, shattering teeth and splintering jaw, slicing through the tongue with its bland jokes. The soldier screamed, though the wound muffled the noise. Correus, king of the Bellovaci, was dead, and he knew it. Apart from the mortal wound in his side, he felt two more blows, one of which ruined his leg and the other slid between his ribs. But none of that stopped him taking out his fury on the laughing legionary.
‘Not so… funny… now…’
By the time the fifth wound he took severed Correus spinal cord and he flopped useless onto the ground, his blood and intestines pouring out onto the grass, he knew he had stabbed the legionary many dozens of times. The man was, miraculously, still alive, for he was shrieking in horror at his ruined body, each limb shredded and his torso full of rents and holes.
Correus felt the darkness closing on his senses and with it came an odd feeling of peace. The din of battle seemed to fade away and suddenly the centurion’s crest was in front of him, upside down as the man leaned over him.
‘Brave. Stupid, but brave.’ The Roman officer leaned down, gently pulled open the king’s mouth and pushed a small silver coin under his tongue before driving his own blade in deep and speeding up the advance of the blessed darkness.
* * * * *
Varus sat astride his mount, shivering in the cold of the morning, and glanced across at Brutus, who looked equally uncomfortable. Trebonius rode slightly ahead of them alongside Caesar in the place of honour for a victorious commander. Behind them marched the legions – all seven in good array and better spirits, their eagles leading the way. It was an impressive column. One of the largest displays of Roman forces Varus had seen in all his years in Gaul. Seven legions.
And ahead, across the narrow river which ran into that same defile that emerged some miles distant at the baggage valley that now served as a mass grave for eight thousand Bellovaci, stood the camp of the enemy.
And its gate was open.
‘Sound the horns,’ Caesar commanded. ‘Let’s see what happens.’
The cornicen blew their instruments, issuing the standard call for parley or recognition. As they fell silent again, there was a long pause. Varus watched intently as occasional figures appeared in the gateway up the slope. It was no oppidum or city, but a simple temporary camp atop a hill, surrounded by a hastily erected fence, and the gate was simply an area where the fence had been removed.
Still, that gate, such as it was, was open, which suggested surrender rather than defiance.
A moment later, half a dozen riders emerged through the gap and began to wend their slow way down to the waiting Romans. Varus watched with interest. They were all nobles, but he could see no sign of Commius of the Atrebates, a man who after years of repeated contact he would recognise quickly. The ambassadors reined in their horses close to Caesar and bowed. It did not escape Varus’ notice that the general did not return the gesture, and he knew Caesar well enough to know that that fact presaged no good for the ambassadors.
‘Proconsul,’ the first man greeted Caesar. He was well turned out and wearing enough gold that he sagged slightly under the weight, like a wet tent. His old, grey braids hung down by his ears and the loose steel-coloured hair at the rear whipped in the breeze.
‘Yes.’
The man looked somehow taken aback by the curtness of the general’s response.
‘I am Orcetrix of the Bellovaci. I speak for the tribe in the absence of Correus.’
‘Death,’ corrected Caesar.