The legionaries met the Gauls with a resounding crash, each side going to work at the slaughter with the confidence of professionals or the strength of men who fought for a belief.
Fabius found himself suddenly lurching forward, his foot catching an unseen hole in the grass, and was immensely grateful when Furius’ free arm caught him from behind and prevented him falling prone before the enemy.
He had no time to thank his friend, though. Already the fight was joined fully, the Gauls giving as good as they got, neither protected nor inhibited by defences. A man with a single braid hanging down the side of his face and a moustache of impressive proportions, wearing a mail shirt but no helm, lunged out with a spear, the point coming dangerously close and forcing Fabius to duck slightly to preserve his life.
Using his free, slightly deformed, hand — unencumbered by shield — he grabbed the spear shaft behind the head and yanked it down and to the side, startling the weapon’s owner, who found himself suddenly presenting his right shoulder to the Roman. Fabius jabbed his blade down, the tapering point entering the man’s body where neck and shoulder met, snapping a tendon on its descent into his torso.
The man screamed, his fingers releasing the spear, and Fabius shifted his focus to the next rebel. As the Gaul bellowed his defiance and leapt forward, Fabius tensed to meet the attack, but found himself barged roughly aside. Frowning as he stumbled and righted himself, he glared at Furius, who had pushed past him and now dispatched that Gaul with rough blows and angry strength. As his friend rose from the kill, momentarily in an open space as the two armies wrestled around them, Fabius reached out and grasped him by the shoulder.
Furius turned, his gladius already sweeping out for the attack, and it was only with extreme effort of will that the man recognised his friend and pulled the blow back.
Fabius stared at him. ‘Calm,’ he breathed.
‘I told you to stay out of my way,’ Furius snapped and wrenched his shoulder from his friend’s grip, throwing himself on into the fight.
‘What has got into you lately?’ Fabius whispered as he ran off after his friend.
The next few heartbeats were a mess for Fabius. Swords and helmets and shield bosses gleaming ghostly in the moonlight as he pushed on, keeping himself positioned carefully so that the blind-side of his missing eye did not present too much danger, while attempting to stay close on the heel of his friend.
Here and there he found himself beset by some native or other as the Gauls fought desperately to hold their position, all the time pushed back by the weight of the heavy Roman infantry that had come upon them unexpected in the dark. Ahead, Furius seemed to have been possessed by some demon, his figure soaked with blood and leading the fight, way out at the front.
The man had always had a temper — Fabius knew that. His temper had almost cost them their lives in Pompey’s eastern campaign, but it had always been contained and controlled. Made to work for him. To some extent, it was what had made him a good soldier.
But since that day at Avaricon, when he’d climbed the ladder and failed to take the prize, something had changed in him. It seemed now that he was driven by different forces. After that siege, Furius could so easily have been charged with an offence for his actions, but the legionary he had laid out had refused to take the matter up, fearing retribution. No one had spoken to the two tribunes about the incident, but Fabius had seen Fronto’s expression when they were near and he knew that, somehow, the legate had heard what had happened. In fact, though Fabius had not been able to see Fronto’s face in the gloom down below a quarter of an hour ago, he was certain the legate had worn that very same look. Indeed, before the legions had moved out under cover of darkness, Fronto had paused for a long moment before acquiescing to their request to join the attack, not an action in which a legion’s tribunes would normally partake.
And now, Furius was busy hacking and maiming his way through the Gauls as though each and every one had personally offended him. Somewhere, over the din, Fabius could hear the booing and honking of a carnyx. Though he could hardly tell one Gallic call from another through the dreadful instrument, it was clear from both the urgency of the tune and the effect it seemed to have on the mass of men that it was a call to withdraw.
The call was answered by others high up among the hills, presumably relaying orders to the beaten force to abandon their lost ground and move to some other position.
The Gauls were pulling back, but Fabius pushed on, watching his friend kill and dismember indiscriminately. The press of Gauls ahead had stopped retreating and were jammed up in a seething mass into which Furius thrust his gladius again and again, yelling something incoherent. The man’s unoccupied shield arm hung by his side, blood sheeting down it from some wound that the man barely acknowledged.
Fabius moved forward still. The Gauls were trying to run now, but this particular part of the enemy force was in serious trouble. The forces of the Tenth had driven them back across the plateau, but they had run out of places to retreat, the front ranks of the Eighth pushing in from the far side, squeezing them between the two legions, the only real path to freedom presenting them with a seventy or eighty foot drop down the chalky cliff.
‘Furius!’
But his friend fought on, oblivious.
Fabius lunged forth, his sword lowered — the Gauls were trying to run or laying down their weapons in defeat. Few were still showing resistance, and the men of the Tenth were on hand all around anyway. Reaching out, Fabius grabbed Furius’ raised sword-arm before the blood-slicked blade could descend again, hauling his friend back from the press sharply. Furius staggered back, shocked out of whatever fog had descended upon his senses.
Fabius stared as Furius’ latest victim tumbled to the ground, blood spraying from his neck, his helmet slightly askew and his mail shirt torn. The tribune blinked. The unfortunate dying legionary’s eyes stared desperately, his fingers slipping from the shield’s grip, the curved, oval shield displaying Caesar’s bull and the ‘VIII’ of the Eighth legion falling to the blood-and-mud-churned grass.
‘You lunatic!’ Fabius snapped, turning Furius to face him. His friend’s expression, from beneath a coating of blood, was bewildered… almost unhinged, in fact. Fabius stared at him, as Furius looked down at the sword in his hand as though it were controlled by someone else, and then let go of the hilt suddenly as though it glowed white hot.
The gore-spattered tribune stood shaking, his eyes flashing back and forth between his blade on the grass and the convulsing legionary he had mistakenly killed in the press of men, his rage having overridden his senses.
Shaking his head to clear it of the shock, Fabius turned. Strangely, despite the situation, the battle seemed to have all-but stopped around them, a few legionaries still struggling with the more vehement of the trapped Gauls, but most of the enemy resigned to their fate and most of the legionaries staring in shock at the tribune and his victim.
Fabius exhaled slowly and unbuckled his helmet, ripping it from his head.
‘None of you saw this. I will deal with the matter in due course, but do not send rumours creeping across the camp. This is not the time to dishearten your comrades.’
He knew the tale would spread, of course, regardless of what he did, but if he could staunch the flow temporarily, he might be able to break the news first. Turning his despairing eye upon Furius, he ground his teeth for a moment, before clearing his throat.
‘Go back to the Tenth. Attend the capsarius for that arm.’
Furius stared for a moment and then nodded dumbly, turning and shuffling back from the scene, his sword forgotten, lying in the dirt.