The sword’s edge glittered slightly in the moonlight. Marcus touched the blade, his fingers snagging against a razor-sharp line of minutely ragged steel, rough-sharpened for combat, rather than the smooth steel of a peacetime weapon. He’d heard of the practice from old soldiers, but never seen it carried out. Someone expected him to need every small advantage that could be put his way. He remounted, riding cautiously on with an ear cocked for trouble, holding the reins with the hand that gripped the sword’s hilt. Shadows moved and swirled in his vision, purple and black, each eddy in the night’s mist taunting his senses.
At the one-mile marker he thought he could just make out the distant sound of horses’ hoofs in front of him. He halted his own mount to listen in silence, but could hear nothing other than the wind’s moan. Another five minutes of uninterrupted progress relaxed him a little, and he started to worry more about exactly who he would find waiting for him at the two-mile marker than what might happen in the intervening stretch of road. He reached down to pat the horse with the back of his sword hand, as much seeking as offering reassurance.
Looking up, he saw them materialise out of the mist to either side of the road, a pair of horsemen with swords held upright like cavalry troopers on parade. Wanting him to see the weapons, he guessed. He started as a voice spoke in the murk behind him, the Latin made crude by the edges of the man’s German accent.
‘Give up now and we’ll make it easy for you. Run, and these two will have their fun with you before you die.’
Three, or more? Marcus let the sword and shield, already held low from stroking the horse’s mane, slip down against the animal’s flanks, hopefully invisible in the dim grey light of approaching dawn. Curiously unafraid, although his heart was pounding at his ribs with the force of a blacksmith’s hammer, he gently spurred his horse with his boot-heels. Riding steadily towards the horsemen he allowed his body to slump in the saddle, reassuring them that he was already in their grip. Behind him, hoofs clattered on the road’s surface, a fast trot designed to close the distance and put the third man within striking distance. Marcus kicked the horse hard, shouting encouragement into its ear as it surged forward into a gallop. He lifted the sword and shield from their resting places on the beast’s flanks, and into the positions his father’s bodyguard had made him practise thousands of times.
‘He’s armed!’
Bracing himself against the saddle’s projecting horns, and clamping his feet to the horse’s flanks, he pulled the beast towards the man on the right, flinching as something flicked past his head with a vicious whirr. The arrow’s passage was close enough for him to feel the wind of its passing. The men to his front spurred their own horses forward, but his burst of speed caught them by surprise, closing the gap before they could manoeuvre to meet him as they might have wished. Punching out with the shield at the man to his left, he felt the jar of a heavy sword blow-hammer his left arm into numbness. His own weapon, the point thrust forward towards the centre of the other horseman’s indistinct mass as they came together, rang with contact on metal. The sword’s hilt moved in his hand as the blade struck something softer. The pain of the wound was enough to make the horseman wheel his mount away with a shout of anger, leaving a gap through which Marcus’s steed burst with its gathered momentum, too swift for the other man to get in a second attack.
He rode for his life now, crouching low to avoid any more arrows, looking back for any sign of his pursuers in the greyness behind him. A frantic clatter of hoofs behind convinced him to keep the horse at the gallop, angry shouts lending urgency to his efforts. The shield fell from his numb left hand, its layered wood and leather deeply scarred by the sword-blow. Without its protection the blade would almost certainly have taken his arm off.
The horse was starting to pant heavily with the exertion when a figure appeared out of the dawn’s murk at the roadside. In a second Marcus pivoted his mount to put the new threat on his right-hand side, within his sword’s striking arc. He pulled the blade back for the sweeping cut he’d been taught up on the wooden practice horse in the villa’s sunny courtyard almost a decade before, high above the rooftops and fume of the city.
‘Marcus!’
He allowed the weapon to drop from its slashing path, pulling the panting horse up with a hard pull at the reins.
‘Rufius?!’
He jumped down from the saddle, following the older man’s frantic beckoning to bring the horse into the deeper shadow of a small copse that crept close to the road’s edge. The animal, unimpressed by the events of the previous minutes, baulked at moving into the trees’ threatening gloom. Marcus dug his feet in and pulled, and for a second it looked as if they might succeed in finding cover, but the horse’s resistance had removed the slight time gap between him and his pursuers. The two horsemen who had attempted to block his path before rode out of the darkness, as the two men hesitated between fight and flight into the trees. Marcus grabbed for his saddlebag, releasing the horse’s bridle as his hand gripped the oiled cloth, allowing it to bolt into the darkness. Tossing the bag aside, he dropped into a wide-legged fighting stance with the cavalry sword extended, ready to fight. Rufius stepped to his side, unsheathing his shorter infantry sword and lifting a round gladiator’s shield from the ground where he had let it fall. The horsemen slowed their advance and crowded in closer, leaning out of their saddles with swords held ready to strike down at the two men.
At the last moment something flew past Marcus’s head, thudding into the nearer man’s chest and pitching him prone on to the dark road. A moment later a spear arced out of the trees, forcing the other rider to twist in his saddle in desperate evasion, his horse hesitating as the trees’ shadow loomed. As the rider wrestled with his mount’s reins a powerful figure stepped swiftly past an amazed Marcus, swinging a heavy sword in a single brutal blow at the animal’s legs. With an awful scream the animal fell to its knees, hurling its rider untidily on to the ground, where the horse’s assailant finished him with an efficient thrust to the throat. Another blow silenced the animal’s agony in a steaming flow of its blood. The silent attacker stepped back into the trees, vanishing wraith-like into their dark shelter.
The third rider trotted slowly out of the slowly departing night, an arrow ready to loose from his taut bow. The arrow’s point arced slowly across the bloodied scene in search of a target. Marcus shrank back towards the trees, Rufius pulling him into the shield’s inadequate protection, but the archer saw their movement while they were still a good ten feet from the deeper shadows. Straightening in his saddle, he swung the bow to bear on them, bending the bow the last few inches before loosing its arrow. With a berserk howl their rescuer broke from the trees again at a dead run, throwing himself into a forward roll as the mounted archer loosed the arrow at him in a split-second reaction. As the rider’s left hand plucked another arrow from his quiver his attacker rolled out of his dive and sprang forward with his sword, gutting the horse with a single turning thrust. The rider went down under his screaming, dying mount, trapped beneath its dead weight. The massive figure stepped over the dying animal’s trembling neck, lifting his sword for the final kill.
‘Dubnus! No!’
The sword froze in mid-strike, and then withdrew. Tiberius Rufius strode across to the man, slapping him on the back in congratulation.
‘Excellent work, man, worthy of celebration by mighty Mars himself! What a sacrifice you have made to him! Marcus, come and renew your acquaintanceship with my good friend Dubnus!’
Marcus walked across the road to where Rufius and his companion stood over the fallen horse and rider. The other man turned to face him, one hand exploring the muscle of his forearm, and the arrow shaft that protruded from it.