Long years of training came into their own as Cato battered his way forward with his shield, pausing to strike and recover and advance again. He could see over the heads of the tribesmen immediately in front of him that some of those at the rear had turned to run and were clambering over the palisade to flee into the space behind the main line of fortifications, where the Fourteenth Legion was battling to break through.
‘Keep going!’ Thraxis yelled from behind Cato’s shoulder. ‘Carve them up, lads!’
Though they still outnumbered the Blood Crows who had made it inside the defences, most of the enemy were only levies – farmers and hunters with little training in the art of war – and now they were paying a high price for choosing to fight the invader. Scores had already been cut down and lay bleeding on the freezing ground. Some were finished off by the auxiliaries, the rest ignored as the slaughter continued, the Blood Crows leaving enemy bodies strewn in their wake.
Cato had just knocked a man cold with the guard of his sword when he next looked up and saw that they were close to the base of the rampart. The slope above was filled by tribesmen desperately attempting to escape the bloodshed. A few had cast aside their weapons and dropped to their knees, begging to be spared, but in the heat of battle there was little mercy. Cato saw a thin older man crying out as he implored an auxiliary to let him live. The response was swift and fatal. The Thracian split the man’s skull with the edge of his blade, the crack of bone clearly audible to Cato’s ears as blood and brains leapt into the air. The sight and sound brought back some semblance of cold reason in his mind, and he stopped in his tracks.
‘Blood Crows! Hold fast! Let ’em go!’
One by one his men halted and stood panting, swords and shields bloodied, glaring after the fleeing enemy. Not even the most stalwart of the warriors had any fight left in them, and all climbed over the palisade and dropped out of sight. As the last of them disappeared, Cato lowered Thraxis’s battered shield and looked round the interior of the redoubt, his chest heaving from his exertions as he exhaled puffs of breath into the cold morning air. Bodies, many still moving, lay all about, and to his grim satisfaction, he saw that very few of them were his men. He caught sight of Decurion Miro entering through one of the narrow breaches and called him over.
‘Detail ten of your squadron to get the wounded out of here and back to the dressing station.’ He turned to the small gate at the rear of the redoubt, its locking beam still securely in place. ‘I want the rest of the men formed up over there at once. Get to it.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Miro saluted and trotted away to carry out his orders. Cato watched him briefly, wondering why it had taken the decurion until now to enter the fortification when he should have been at the head of his men as they attacked. Then he climbed up on to the rampart and cautiously looked over the palisade and down the length of the enemy’s defences.
A ferocious battle was raging along the line of fortifications. It was at its fiercest in the breach that had been opened halfway along, where a dense mass of enemy warriors was managing to hold off the legionaries. In the immediate foreground, Cato saw the natives who had abandoned the fort streaming down towards the shore, where a line of small shallow-bottomed craft had been beached. A handful of men struggled in vain to hold them off as they began to drag the nearest boats out into the channel. A short distance beyond, Cato noticed a small party of cloaked figures on horseback, together with a man in the dark robes of a Druid. They had seen the men fleeing from the redoubt, and already the Druid was giving hurried orders. There was no time to waste in pressing home the opportunity that had been won by the swift fall of the flanking fortification.
Cato turned back and saw that most of his cohort had formed up just below him, the rest still climbing up through the breaches. The first of the casualties, the walking wounded, had to stand to one side as their comrades hurried to join the men gathering for the next action. Scrambling down, Cato pointed towards the gate and called across to Miro, ‘Get that open!’
As the decurion took a section forward to deal with the locking bar, Cato turned to address his men. ‘We’ve done well so far, lads. Already enough to warrant another medal for the standard.’ He pointed to the gilded discs attached to the staff that Thraxis was holding. ‘But let’s seal the deal with the kind of charge that only the Blood Crows can deliver. Outside, there’re thousands of those Celt bastards waiting, but they’re a little distracted by the Fourteenth Legion at the moment. Legate Valens’s boys are making hard work of it, and it’s up to us to help ’em out.’
‘Bloody legionaries!’ a voice cried out from the ranks. ‘You want the job done properly, you call on the Blood Crows!’
The men cheered lustily before Cato could identify the miscreant, and he went along with their hubris and grinned. ‘Quite so! Now is our moment. When I give the order, I want the cohort to double out of the gate and form a line across the enemy’s flank. When we go in, we go in hard and fast. Miro’s squadron will clear the rampart and the rest of us will sweep the ground behind. You hold the line and you stop for nothing. Clear?’
The excited men shouted their assent and punched their swords into the air. Their blood was up and Cato knew he could depend on them to finish the job that Quintatus had assigned the cohort. He turned to the gate and hefted his shield before he noticed that blood had run down the blade of his sword and on to the handle. He paused to bend down and wipe it off on the hem of a dead man’s tunic, then straightened up, ready to do his duty.
‘Blood Crows, advance, at the trot.’
He picked up his feet and broke into a light jog, his scabbard and dagger sheath jostling at either side. The rumble of his men’s boots on the frozen ground sounded at his back, together with their laboured breathing and the clatter of kit against shields.
‘Miro, your section leads the way, then once we’re in the open, get over to the rampart as fast as you can.’
‘Yes, sir.’
With Miro and his men taking their place at the front of the column, the auxiliaries poured out of the redoubt and round the curve of the ditch until the shoreline opened up in front of them. Keen to ensure that the sight of thousands of enemy warriors did not unsettle them, Cato urged his men on with as calm a demeanour as he could muster. To his right he saw several boats heading clumsily across the channel, manned by those who had fled. No doubt they would be given a cold reception by their comrades watching from the island. That was too bad. They should have put up a better fight. Now those tribesmen still defending the beach would pay the price for their lack of nerve.
He chose a point fifty paces from the redoubt, close to the water, and halted and extended his arm towards the rampart.
‘Form line!’
The decurions took up their positions for their squadrons to assume the required formation, while Miro and his men continued across the snowy ground towards the place where the long defence earthwork joined the redoubt. Only a handful of the enemy stood in their immediate path, as most had been drawn into the fight raging around the centre of the line. Miro led his men up the slope and then formed them into a tight column, ready to unleash them along the line of the rampart when Cato’s order came.
As the last of the men fell in, Cato turned to gauge the ground ahead of them. The strip of land between the rampart and the water was narrow, no more than forty paces deep at its widest. The cohort, still some three hundred strong, would be able to bring its weight to bear at the start of the attack, but he had no illusions about how far they would go in rolling up the enemy flank before they ran out of impetus or encountered sufficient resistance to halt them in their tracks. The best he could hope for was to shake the tribesmen badly enough that the alarm spread through their ranks as far as the breach being fiercely contested by Valens’s legionaries. If the Fourteenth broke through in numbers, then the struggle was as good as over, on this side of the channel at least.