‘Boraz!’
The Roman met his opponent’s attack head-on, countering the shout with his own battle cry.
‘Mithras!’
Their blades met in a shriek of metal on metal, but before the king had time to raise his sword again Marcus took another step forward, swinging the gladius in his left hand in a viciously swift arc to stab its point through the Sarmatae leader’s armour and into his side. Boraz crumpled, his eyes staring up at Marcus as he sagged to his knees with a face contorted by the crippling pain. Kicking the wounded man aside the Roman slashed at the bannerman behind him, dropping the blood-red flag into the battlefield’s churned and gore-soaked mud along with the hand that still gripped at its wooden shaft.
Faced with their king’s defeat, his bodyguard smashed and the Tungrian attack driving deep into their line, while the unknown force assailing them from the forest savaged from the rear, the Sarmatae were trembling on the edge of defeat. Raising his swords to renew the fight with Lugos and Arminius to either side, Marcus grinned cruelly as the warband broke like a flock of sheep attacked by a pack of wolves, men twisting this way and that in their efforts to run from the remorseless enemies to front and rear, the fight going out of them in the space of half a dozen heart beats. Straining like hunting dogs on their leashes, the Tungrians looked to their officers for the last command that would be required to bring the fight to a conclusion. At the line’s rear Scaurus nodded, putting his head back to bellow the words every man was waiting to hear.
‘Sound the pursuit!’
The soldiers were sprinting forward even before the first notes of the trumpet call sounded, every man intent on capturing any of the tribesmen not too badly wounded to work as a slave. Sigilis watched in amazement as the tidy Roman line disintegrated into a frenzy of running men, tent parties working together to wrestle individual tribesmen to the ground and disarm them, before leaving a man with his sword at each captive’s throat and setting out to repeat the feat. Scaurus watched the scene with dark amusement, raising an eyebrow to his junior colleague as Marcus walked out of the chaos holding the king’s banner at his side, while Arminius and Lugos were carrying the stricken Sarmatae leader between them, the big Briton raising a justly feared fist to any soldier entertaining designs on the king’s gold accoutrements. Arminius held a finely made helmet and a golden crown in one hand, having discovered the latter on the body of one of the bodyguards who had been carrying it while his king’s head was encumbered with his helmet.
‘Well done, Centurion! It seems that our last-minute reinforcement and your customary loss of reason on the battlefield have turned the day.’ He turned to Sigilis, pointing at the battle’s aftermath. ‘As you can see, colleague, the financial incentives for taking prisoners alive and in fit condition for labour make defeat in a battle like this all too final, wouldn’t you agree? If we’d lost then they would have been butchering our wounded and leading the living away down that hill and into slavery, never to be seen again. But as it happens, praise to our Lord Mithras, our unknown rescuer arrived at the very last moment and pulled our grapes out of the press in good style. Which means that we are the victors, despite the skill with which this poor man fooled us as to his intentions.’
He smiled down at the stricken Sarmatae king, bending to pat the man’s shoulder.
‘My compliments on your strategy, sir, you very nearly had us at your mercy.’
The wounded man was perhaps forty years of age and clearly in the prime of his life, arrayed in armour and clothing that stood out from the rough horseshoe-scale armour worn by his comrades. The helmet that Arminius had pulled from his head was fashioned from silver inlaid with gold, and his armour was made with finely wrought iron scales, each of them polished to a shine. An ornately decorated scabbard hung from his belt, its engraving matching the designs that adorned the beautifully crafted sword carried by Lugos, and similar craftsmanship had been lavished on the greaves still protecting his calves. The tribune tapped at the heavy gold bracelets adorning his prisoner’s wrists with a sardonic smile.
‘Well done, gentlemen, I’m pleased you’ve managed to keep all of his finery intact and resisted my soldiers’ predictable desire to strip him bare. I expect we’ll need it all to convince his people that their war with Rome really is over.’
The king spat a wad of bloody phlegm onto the ground at his feet, his words grating out from between teeth gritted against the agony of his wound.
‘This victory is only temporary, Roman. My son still commands enough horsemen to wipe your presence from this valley as if you had never existed.’
Scaurus smiled back at him beatifically.
‘Quite so, I’ve already seen them riding up and down the length of our rather fine wall with no clue as to how they are to get over or around it. And since this seems to have been the only place you deemed worthy of attacking, I shall improve the defences here and make it utterly impassable, once we’ve finished burning your dead.’ He turned to his bodyguard, drawing the German away out of earshot. ‘Arminius, please be good enough to find a bandage carrier and get the king’s wound bound, then take him down to the hospital as quickly as you can. Ask the doctor to work her magic upon him, and tell her that his survival may well be the key to our achieving a negotiated peace with these people.’
He turned back to the waiting officers.
‘And now, colleagues, let us go and offer our thanks to the officer commanding these men who seem to have stepped in with such commendable timing, whoever he is. Will you come with us, Centurion Corvus, and provide us with the additional security of your swords?’
Marcus raised his spatha once more and walked across the corpse-strewn battlefield several paces ahead of the tribunes, his eyes roaming the human carnage for any sign of movement. A wounded warrior groaned loudly to his left as he passed, holding out an imploring hand for succour while the other barely held his guts in place. The young centurion reached out and pulled the hand aside, scanning the severed ropes of the wounded warrior’s intestines for a moment before whipping out his sword and cutting the Sarmatae’s throat. Wiping the weapon’s blade he stood, shaking his head and ignoring Sigilis’s horrified gaze, to resume his slow, cautious pace across the field of battle.
‘A kindness. .’
Scaurus’s words must have had the desired effect on his younger colleague, for a long moment of silence followed before Sigilis spoke.
‘The smell is just. . I mean it’s indescribable. .’
Marcus could hear the bitter humour in Scaurus’s response.
‘Revolting? Without doubt. Beyond description? Hardly. That’s the same simple fragrance that has wafted over every battlefield I’ve ever trodden. All you have to do is liberally slop the fresh blood of a thousand men across the grass, then open their bellies to let the contents release their aroma into the air. Evocative, isn’t it? But believe me, this smell of freshly spilled blood and faeces is nothing compared to the rare delicacy that results from leaving that same mixture open to the air for a day or two, and adding some decomposition to the mixture. And a week-old battlefield where the winner had no time to clean up after himself, or perhaps just no inclination, now there’s the thing. You can smell the rotting bodies from five miles distant, if you have the misfortune to be downwind of them, and by the time you’ve passed the spot it’s a hard man indeed who hasn’t thrown up the contents of his stomach, either due to the smell or simply because so many of his comrades are vomiting around him. And that’s why we’ll set a pyre and burn every corpse here, both ours and theirs, once we’ve stripped away their armour. Here we are. .’