Silence. The village was as placid as it had appeared from the hillside. A few chickens still squabbled in panic around the open hut doors. But there was no sign of the inhabitants. Castus glanced up, and saw the smoke still rising peacefully from the hut roof. He looked to his left, and saw the vanguard troops of the main column moving between the huts, kicking doors, finding nobody. Behind him his men were piling through the gate of the sty, several streaked and spattered with filth – they had slipped and fallen as they had broken through the fence.
Fearing ambush, Castus moved around the wall of the hut, motioning for his men to follow. His ears were primed for the sound of a bow, his senses for the thwack of an arrow into a mud wall, or into flesh. His breath came in bursts. He raised his right forearm to wipe his face, and the mail grated against his brow – he had forgotten he was wearing armour.
The hut was a forge. As he reached the wide front doors, Castus glanced in at the straw and the big iron anvil, the tools still laid out ready for use. He edged inside, into the dim familiar stink of metal, charcoal and soot. Memories of his youth rose in him for a moment. The forge fire was still hot, the embers glowing orange in their nest of grey-white ash.
‘They’ve even left their dinner here,’ Aelianus said. On a low table just inside the hut door there were chunks of black bread and hard white cheese, with a platter of honey cakes. Aelianus picked up a cake, smiled and raised it to his mouth.
Castus swatted it out of his hand, and it dropped into the dust.
‘Remember Speratus?’ he said savagely. Aelianus’s face paled, and his throat rose and fell as he swallowed back bile.
As he left the hut there were already troops moving in columns though the central cleared space in the village. The sky was smudged with smoke, and the smell of burning thatch soured the air. A sudden cheer went up from the soldiers, and they turned to face back down the road. Castus moved up to join them, still wary. From the direction of the main valley road a mounted cavalcade was cantering between the enclosure fences and into the village. At the head, the unmistakeable figure in the gleaming gilded cuirass and purple cape. Castus stiffened to attention, then threw up his arm in salute as the emperor and his retinue rode past. Constantine’s face was set hard, reddened and furious. And then they were gone, and dust fogged the air in their wake.
It was only moments later that the men gathered around the huts heard the shouting from the far village boundary. Castus glanced around, and saw Erudianus with his head raised, scenting the air.
‘Trouble,’ the tracker said.
‘Lead me,’ Castus ordered, then waved for the rest to follow as Erudianus set off at a jog.
The air was still full of fine dust, but as he ran Castus could hear the sounds of fighting: a yell, a ring of iron and a thud of blade against shield. He doubled the fence between two huts, and saw the knot of men gathered along the far boundary of the compound. Bodies sprawled in the dirt: enemy warriors. Whatever skirmish had just erupted seemed over already. He slowed to a stride. A dog was barking and whining.
‘They were hiding in the ditch!’ a soldier exclaimed. A man from another legion; Castus did not recognise him. ‘Tried to burst out and get to the emperor and his people!’ The man’s mouth was grinning slackly, stupidly. ‘But our men got them! Yes, we did – and only that one centurion down!’
‘Who?’ Castus demanded, and then broke into a run again before the man could blurt out his guesses. Already he could see the cluster of soldiers surrounding the fallen man; their dark blue shields had the winged Victory emblem of the Sixth Legion. The lean grey dog sat to one side, its head down on its outstretched paws.
Before he could reach them, Rogatianus was holding him back, a palm on his chest. ‘I’m sorry, brother,’ he said. ‘Nothing you can do for him now.’
Castus shoved him aside. He strode the last few paces, hauled the men back from the fallen figure and dropped to his knees.
Valens turned his head, wincing with the effort, and Castus could see the pain in his eyes. His friend’s mouth was bloody, and there was a slow red lake forming in the dirt below him. He was not wearing his mail shirt, and half of his tunic was soaked with gore.
‘Got them,’ Valens said weakly, and stretched his mouth in a wry grin. ‘Reckon we got them all!’
Castus took his hand and clenched it tight. He tried to speak, but there was a knot of iron twisting in his throat, and he knew Valens would hear nothing now.
The ground opens up, he thought, and down you go.
5
The roaring echoed through the mutilated forest, between the trees and across the hacked stumps and the muddy green-scummed floodwater. It started as a low humming, then built rapidly into a bellow of massed voices before cresting with a shout. A moment of silence, then the hollow drumming rattle of spears against shields reverberated from behind the barricades. And then the great cry went up once more.
Castus remembered the noise the Picts had made, the hissing and howling they had raised before their attack on the hilltop redoubt, years ago in the far north of Britain. This war cry of the Bructeri was similar, but more unnerving in its volume and its barely leashed aggression. Many of the men in the Roman battle line were clearly feeling its effects; they stood with wide eyes and clenched teeth, gripping their shields and the shafts of their weapons. Some of the younger men were visibly trembling.
‘They should save their breath for fighting,’ Castus called out as another roar came from the enemy lines. ‘They’ll need it soon enough.’
A few of the men laughed, if nervously, though Castus was in no mood for humour. The death of his friend was a stone in his heart, and he felt primed with a violent need for revenge. Even so, for all his desire for battle it was clear that there would be no combat soon. The Bructeri had constructed a formidable fortification, and were not about to sally out of it and fight in the open. And any force trying to attack them would take severe casualties. All the Roman troops could do was shelter behind their shields and try not to lose their nerve as that terrifying noise rose from the forest opposite them.
It was even worse that they could barely see their enemy; only the tips of their wickedly barbed spears showed above the rampart of fallen trees the Bructeri had constructed on the far side of the shallow valley. The stream had been dammed or diverted in some way, and the waters had swelled to flood the valley floor, transforming it into a wide morass of muddy pools studded with the stumps of the hacked-down trees. Many of the tree stumps had been sharpened into stakes; in the sunlight the water appeared placid, shimmering with tiny insects, but many more such stakes were surely concealed beneath the surface, ready to impale the legs or groin of anyone attempting to wade across.
The distance over the valley and the swollen stream was not too great – Castus reckoned that a man could cover it on dry ground in two score running paces. But as soon as anyone left the cover of the trees on the Roman side they would be in range of the slingshot and arrows from the men behind the barricade, even as the water and sharpened stumps slowed any charge to a stumbling crawl. And after that, a scramble up a muddy slope into a storm of javelins, then a climb across a head-high breastwork of creaking timber. And only then would they get to face the enemy. Against those obstacles, any advance would be a slaughter yard. A prospect to chill the blood.
But that was not the plan, Castus reminded himself. The legionaries in the centre were just a blocking force, drawing the attention of the enemy while the cavalry and light troops forded the stream further to the west before attacking on the flank. Only when the cavalry attack had gone in would the legions advance. But they had been nearly an hour waiting in stoic passivity, and there had been no word from the flanking column at all.