By now he was on the ground beside her. He saw the spear come as if time had slowed to a crawl. Watched it spiral on its own axis, the polished metal of the lethal leaf-shaped point glinting in the sun as it rolled. He screamed in impotent anguish as it dropped, increasing speed, towards her. No! With all the strength he could muster he launched himself into the air so he was almost half his own height from the ground. Still the spear came and for a split second he feared that he had mistimed his jump and that it would be his body that felt the murderous bite of that terrible blade. But the fingers that reached out to snatch the spear from the air a bare four feet from Bersheba’s exposed flank were sure. He landed in a crouch with the long ash shaft clutched convulsively in his right fist, heavy and dangerous, the wood still blood-warm from its thrower’s hand and damp with the owner’s sweat. When he looked up every eye was on him, slaves and auxiliary soldiers staring with that not quite canny look he had seen aimed at Cupido after the gladiator had performed another seemingly impossible feat in the amphitheatre. For a moment he was no longer Rufus, the slave; he was Rufus the entertainer, who had once won over the mob in the crumbling magnificence of the Taurus arena. Very deliberately, he rose to his full height and brandished the spear above his head so all could see it. The acclamation began as a murmur but quickly grew to a roar that almost drowned the death cries from beyond the undulating wall of legionaries. When it reached its peak Rufus threw back his arm and hurled the spear in a great whirling curve over the heads of the Roman line and into the packed mass of British warriors.
Bersheba caught his mood. She turned her huge head in the direction of the fight, flared her galley-sail ears and raised her trunk to let out a trumpeting roar of defiance that echoed along the valley. It was an ear-bursting blast that made even Rufus, who had heard it a hundred times before, quail before its power. The violence and the terror of it cleared a half-moon among the awed baggage slaves in front of her and for a fleeting moment it seemed that even the battle paused. To the Britons she was the terrible beast they had come to kilclass="underline" the Roman monster whose annihilation would shatter Roman hopes and weaken Roman hearts. Now they saw her in all her might and for a second the sheer visceral force of it unmanned them, but only for a second. For the battle was continuing. Men were dying, Romans as well as Britons, because Rufus could hear the screamed curses as they were dragged, bleeding, from the front rank, and see that the shield line was noticeably shorter than before. If the Britons managed to outflank the legionary shields, only a few lightly armed auxiliaries would stand between them and the helpless baggage train. He looked round for some avenue of escape, but Narcissus touched his shoulder. ‘Wait.’
A rasping signal sounded from the curved horn of one of the cornicens — an insignificant echo of Bersheba’s trumpeted battle cry. Then, above the screams and the insane clamour of the battlefield, Rufus heard a rumble that reminded him of a distant waterfall, growing louder with each passing second.
They came simultaneously from both ends of the valley, as if they were practising a parade-ground manoeuvre. Two squadrons of cavalry, big men on big horses, recruited from the flat plains of northern Gaul, armed with iron-tipped lances and heavy swords. If the British war chief had seen them, he would surely have given the order to flee, but he was caught in the crush in front of the Roman line, cursing and screaming at his men to break through, to kill the beast. By the time the warriors at the rear realized what was about to happen, it was too late.
The squadrons came in three extended lines and at the full gallop. The first lines hit both flanks of the enemy attack in the same instant, the charging horses smashing men flat with bone-shattering force, ripping at faces with their yellowed teeth and crushing skulls with flying hooves. The elemental power of the charge gave the lances a killing capability that was almost beyond imagination, the long spears punching through a first body as if it were made of silk, then spearing another, then another, before the weight of dying men forced the cavalry trooper to drop the weapon and reach for his sword.
The first lines were followed ten seconds later by the second, with similar devastating effect, but the third rank of each squadron wheeled away to form an unbroken barrier between the attackers and the sanctuary of the tree-lined valley wall.
The Britons were trapped.
A growl of rage went up from the surrounded men. They understood they were defeated, but they were warriors, they knew how to fight and they knew how to die. If they were to go to their gods they would take as many Romans as they could kill with them. The intensity of the fighting in front of the shield wall, already savage, grew to a kind of wild-eyed mindlessness as men tore at each other to reach the hated enemy. Behind them, the heavy cavalry swords rose and fell, hacking at arms and shoulders and heads, until a spray of blood and brains fell like summer raindrops on killer and victim alike. A man screamed from what was once a mouth as he realized he would never see again because his face had been sheared off by a sword blade, the way a slave would peel the skin from a ripe pear. Another sobbed as he watched, stupefied, while his lifeblood drained from the stumps of his forearms. A few had helmets, but that did not save them. The force of the falling swords was enough to crush metal and bone alike.
‘They’re beaten,’ Rufus said, his voice shaking in wonder at the scale of the carnage. ‘Why don’t they give up?’
‘They are barbarians. They don’t surrender, they die.’ The voice was flat, emotionless. Not Narcissus, but a heavy-set man in elaborate, polished armour and a legate’s scarlet cloak. He was accompanied by a staff of a dozen young officers and a twenty-strong bodyguard of cavalry who reined in their nervous horses well upwind of Bersheba.
‘So you were right, Master Narcissus. They came for the elephant.’
‘And you were right, General, to salt the baggage train with a half-cohort of infantry disguised as slaves. The gap in the column was fortuitous, but I don’t believe they would have attacked unless they believed we were weak.’
Rufus studied the commander of the Second Augusta. Titus Flavius Vespasian had a way of holding himself that suggested he had been carved from solid stone. Now in his mid-thirties, he had used his family connections to rise steadily through the ranks of the aristocracy until the only thing standing between him and a consulship was a successful military campaign. He was tough, ambitious and intelligent, but if its owner was undoubtedly noble, the face was that of a provincial butcher, broad and puffy-fleshed, and only saved from being ugly by a rather handsome nose.
Vespasian frowned, as if Narcissus’s attempt at flattery offended him. ‘Nothing is certain in war. If the cavalry had been less timely it would have been hot work for a while.’ He nodded in dismissal and forced his white stallion forward through the crush of the baggage train, to where his legionaries were still sweating to contain the snarling remnants of the British attack in front of their shields.
‘Steady, comrades. You almost have them. A ration of the best wine for the third cohort tonight.’ The encouragement was greeted by a ragged, dry-throated cheer. Then in a quieter voice to the stern-faced officer who commanded the cohort he said, ‘Give them another minute and form wedge. That’ll finish the bastards.’
The surviving warriors were trapped in a blood-slick square perhaps two hundred paces across, hemmed in by cavalry on three sides and the fourth an impenetrable wall of shields. Five hundred men had launched themselves from the forest, confident they would slice through the thin defensive line and destroy the enemy’s talisman. Thirty minutes into the battle less than half of them were left standing, and more fell to join their dead and dying comrades with every swing of the sword.