‘Stay alive until you see a medicus.’
‘Well if it’s an order,’ grinned Quadratus, still sweating and pale, the reins falling from his mouth. ‘What do we do now?’
‘We defeat them. Or we die trying.’
Quadratus pointed north with his good arm. ‘Looks like their infantry are using this distraction to flank us. The fortifications are about to be hit from both sides at once.’ Varus looked, and could just see a mass of figures skirting the cavalry battle and heading for the river downstream. It was exactly what they’d hoped to prevent, but the cavalry wings could only deal with one nightmare at a time.
‘Nothing we can do about that, for now. We just have to keep their horse busy and hope the legions can hold the walls.’
* * * * *
Fronto ducked behind the wicker fence as an arrow thrummed past him and thudded into the rear wooden post of the tower. As he rose to the fence top once again, gripping the pilum that had been passed up by the legionary on supply duty inside the defences, two Gauls appeared before him, snarling and shouting. One was armed with a Gallic sword and brought it back for a swing, the other with a spear. Fronto quickly noted the spearman’s position and stepped away from it, ducking again, into the path of the swordsman.
The men of his singulares fought along the wall to either side, Aurelius struggling with a particularly large specimen even now. Fronto had refused Masgava’s demand that he stay back from the wall, citing the need to commit every man if they hoped to hold. Thus the men of his bodyguard had taken position with him on the walls and were fighting like lions.
Even after hours of battle, the Gauls had yet to cotton on to the nature of the Roman defences. The swordsman slashed madly at the wicker, attempting to cut through the apparently flimsy defence and get to the Roman behind, only to find his blade turned easily by the flexible-yet-tough woven fence. As the man staggered back, almost slipping down the sharp incline and into the ‘v’ shaped ditch below, Fronto rose once more and jabbed out with the pilum, stabbing the iron point into the man’s neck — the only exposed flesh between his bronze helmet and tight-linked mail shirt. With a scream the attacker plunged down the treacherous slope, snapping the few remaining sharpened branches that jutted out, most having already come loose though having taken hundreds of Gauls with them on their keen points. The ditch into which he fell was already a mass burial waiting to be covered, almost full to ground level now with corpses, severed limbs, weapons and armour, bloodied timber, shredded pieces of wicker defences and mud, blood and shit. The pungent stink of the charnel pit rose constantly in the warm air to cover the defences in its choking stench.
He’d judged the move right. The swordsman had been unable to penetrate the fence, and had died for his ill judgement. The spear man, however, had thrust his weapon at the fence, roughly where Fronto had previously stood, driving the point with little trouble through the wicker. Had Fronto not moved, he would now be looking down at the spear in his belly. As it was, he turned and grabbed the protruding shaft with his free hand and pulled with every ounce of strength he could muster from battle-tired arms.
The spear came through easily and the surprised warrior gripping it hit the fence face-first. The shock made him loosen his grip and Fronto pulled the entire weapon through the narrow gap and let it roll down the inner slope, where one of the supply soldiers grabbed it and added it to the store of javelins he passed out continually to those who beckoned from the wall. Suddenly unbalanced and weaponless, the Gaul found himself staggering and plummeted back into the ditch. With an angry yell, he rose amid the grisly flesh-and-gore-pool and ripped his sword from his side only to be hit in the face by a scorpion bolt that threw him back and into the second, outer, ditch, which was as yet only half filled with corpses.
To his right Masgava, busy cleaving a climber in two, paused to yell at him. ‘Keep your right arm up when you strike. You’re sagging and your blows are going awry. Fronto gave him a tired shake of the head, but the big Numidian was already moving on to the next Gaul.
A few paces to the left an optio yelled at a legionary. Fronto couldn’t hear the details, but the tirade went unfinished as a lucky strike with a Gallic spear took the optio in the torso and threw him back from the rampart. Fronto glanced around for a moment and saw the junior officer pick himself up and rip the spear from his side, clutching a bleeding hole in his mail, starting to shout more orders even as the capsarii pushed him down onto a stretcher and carried him from the scene.
Three more legionaries arrived from the small reserve units being marshalled in the centre by Reginus, and moved up onto the ramparts to plug the gaps left by the wounded. Fronto hadn’t realised how thin this section had become until the reserves occupied it.
The battle had been raging now for so long he’d lost track of time. He knew that he’d been fighting for several hours when Atenos had appeared from somewhere and demanded that he step back and take a noon meal, else he would lose the strength to fight. He’d done as he was bidden and scoffed down a plate of meat, bread and fruit as though he’d been starved for weeks and had, in a sad acknowledgement of the fact that he was no longer a young man, taken the opportunity for an hour’s rest, in conference with Antonius, before returning to the fray.
That had been perhaps three hours ago. If fact, as Fronto glanced over his shoulder to where an equally brutal struggle was underway at the outer rampart a few hundred paces away, he could see the sun sinking towards the hillside upon which the Gallic relief army had been encamped the previous night.
Almost a whole day!
He couldn’t remember the last time a single engagement had lasted that long. A whole day of constant battle. The body count must be appalling on both sides. The number of men serving between the walls as both reserves and supply-porters had dropped drastically over that time — a telling sign of how many had been lost.
He thought back on the conversation he’d had with Antonius during his hour’s rest. The army’s second most senior officer had sent messengers to his camp at Mons Rea, as well as to Caesar and Labienus, requesting reserves to bolster the defences, but all three men had returned with nothing. The general had put down a blanket order across all his officers. Each sector was the responsibility of the officers assigned to it and they were to hold it with the troops they were given. There would be no calling for reserves from a different sector, in case the Gauls used the move to launch surprise attacks on any weak spots.
Antonius had exploded in anger and ridden off to the general, arguing that it was no use keeping the troops in position to prevent weak spots opening up where there was already one massive weak spot on the plain. Caesar had relented and allowed three more cohorts to be reassigned, but refused any further aid.
And so with ever decreasing numbers the men of the Tenth, Eleventh, Twelfth and Fifteenth had held the walls for most of a day, not even granted time to consider what might be happening out on the plain to the cavalry. Varus would be involved in a brutal fight for his own life, given that he was cut off from the Roman fortifications by the reinforcement rebel infantry who now besieged them.
His attention was brought back to the present by a flurry of arrows — they had begun as clouds sent up en-masse in the morning, but had become sporadic as the hours wore on and the archers became separated from one another and from their leaders, encouraged to stay back by the Roman bowmen and artillerists. The flurry was answered with a Roman volley, accompanied by the crack and thud of hurled iron-tipped bolts and heavy stones from the war machines atop the wooden towers.