“I’ve stood at the back, Fronto. I’ve occasionally had a musician send messages when required. I’m not at all cut out for this kind of thing, though. This is what centurions are for, isn’t it?”
Fronto smiled, though without genuine humour.
“The centurions will do nearly everything. Just stick with me.” He reached out and tapped the ornate scabbard of the tribune’s gladius. “With any luck you won’t need to use that.”
Menenius looked at the sword and sighed. Reaching down, he drew it slowly with a well-oiled hiss.
Fronto eyed the blade as it came free. Despite the showy scabbard and the eagle-embossed pommel, the blade itself was rust-free and unpitted, perfectly oiled and maintained and clearly sharp. Near the point where the tip began to taper, a pair of small nicks was visible.
“You keep your gladius in good condition, but it seems to be marked?”
Menenius looked at the blade in surprise, then spotted the nicks and nodded unhappily.
“My father. It was his sword. He served under Sertorius in Hispania — with distinction apparently, a fact that he never let me forget until his dying day. I sometimes suspect that if I let the blade rust, he’ll find a way to come back from the dead just to punish me.”
Fronto sagged. The tribune was clearly more suited to some administrative role somewhere.
“Just stay close and try to stay alive.”
Menenius nodded unhappily. “I wish Hortius was here. He’d know what to say.”
Fronto cast thanks up to the heavens to any God that was listening that this wasn’t the case, but fixed the fake smile of sympathy to his face again and turned at a shout from Atenos.
“We’re closing on the bank, sir.”
Sinking to the bench, the legate grasped the side of the boat again and clung on, watching the grassy slope approach at a worrying speed. Despite the swiftness of the river, the boats had managed to stay in reasonable formation, drifting downriver only a little more than planned.
The surface of the Rhenus hissed and spat as the rain hammered down into it, the boat’s bottom wallowing in several inches of freezing water. Fronto felt the numbing cold seeping in through the soft leather of his girlish boots and saturating the socks beneath and once again cursed Lucilia for offloading them on him and disposing of his good old hard boots. He really must get around to getting a new pair from Cita. Lucilia need never know.
The boat hit the bank with a crunch, jerking forward for a moment, the occupants lurching around briefly before leaping into action. At Atenos’ command, two men leapt over the bow with a mooring rope. One produced his mallet and a heavy wooden stake and proceeded to smash the peg into the ground to make a mooring post, while the other looped the rope ready and then tied it off on the heavy stake.
As soon as the boat was secured, the rest of the legionaries and the optio disembarked and began to disperse. Less than half a minute after the boat had touched earth, the men were formed up on the grassy rise, while the two Ubii scouts drifted toward the edge of the woods that surrounded them.
Fronto clambered from the boat with a great sigh of relief, feeling his gut begin to steady itself again and his bowels unclench for the first time in twenty minutes. Scanning the ground, he nodded to himself. The landing site had been well chosen. Three miles downriver, the boats would have been invisible from the building site as they crossed even in clear weather. In this torrential downpour, they would be obscured from even close range. The landing was a gentle, grassy slope where the legionaries could assemble.
Around the river-side clearing, the woodland stretched out who knew how far. This territory was beyond the ken of any of them and the forest could cover every inch from here to the end of the world for all they knew. But as long as they kept the river in view to their right, they would locate the construction site and the enemy enclave opposite soon enough.
It seemed odd to look at the men formed up as they were: in the efficient lines of parading legionaries, yet dressed so nondescript.
The reasoning had been simple: They would in theory need only a small force to deal with the lightly armoured archers they were to face and, between the element of surprise, their superior tactics and discipline and the quality of their weapons, they should not need their pila, helmets, shields or any such kit that would clearly mark them as Roman to even the least observant passer-by.
And so the men of the Tenth and Fourteenth stood with the disciplined straight backs and raised chins of the legions, wrapped in plain wool cloaks, their only concession to equipment shirts of mail and a gladius on their belts hidden beneath the folds of wool.
In a way it irritated Fronto that while, for the first time this year, he had the opportunity to control and command a military mission with a simple battle objective and no argument, discussion, or treachery, it still required subterfuge and sneaking. It would have been nice to arm up like a legion at war and tramp the grass toward a prepared and worthy enemy, rather than to run through the woods in disguise and fall upon a poorly-armed and soggy missile unit.
Somewhere deep inside, Fronto chided himself for hoping that the enemy were better armed and prepared than expected and the possibility of a proper fight, but looking across at Atenos, he realised that the big man was clearly thinking along similar lines.
Still, a fight was a fight, and anything was better than endless arguing while good men were knifed in the back by their own side.
Menenius fell in beside him, one hand wrapped around the hilt of the gladius beneath his cloak, the fingers white with pressure.
“The last of the boats is landing, legate” he reported, his voice cracking slightly with nerves.
The men poured out of the boats and fell in alongside those already gathered in the clearing. Fronto looked across the force: five centuries of troops. Three hundred and eighty two men, given the fallen and casualties back across the river; plus the two senior officers and twenty native scouts.
Four hundred and four men. And of them, perhaps only fifty who had no command of the Gallic language. Hopefully, if anything went horribly wrong, the Ubii scouts would be able to handle it, claiming to be the warriors of a large Ubii village from downriver, forced south by Suevi advances. The women and children and wagons would be following on.
“You all know why we’re here” he shouted through the siling rain. “To finish the bridge, the enemy archers on this bank must be dealt with. We have no idea about the disposition of enemy forces on this side of the river, so go carefully and quietly. If I hear a single Latin word spoken aloud once we leave this clearing, I’ll tear that man’s balls off and nail them to a tree as a warning to the rest.”
The officers, of course, were discounted from such strictures, given Fronto and Menenius’ almost total lack of comprehension of the local language. But then the tribune hardly seemed his usual loquacious self and, given the way he was still shaking gently, he was unlikely to draw any attention to them in enemy territory. And Fronto knew he could restrain himself.
“Leave any encounter to the Ubii if you can. If not, let those with the best Belgic dialects handle it. There should be very few native settlements or groups around here. The Ubii are all on the move due to the advances of enemy tribes, so it’s likely that anyone we meet will be hostile. I’m afraid we’ll just have to play it by ear. Listen to your officers and do your duty and in a few hours we’ll have cleared out the east bank and Caesar’s bridge will be marching toward us again. Right,” he pointed to the woodland at the northern side of the clearing where two Ubii scouts were waiting patiently “move out!”
“It’s a local farm” Cantorix said, so quietly he was barely audible over the rain. “Still occupied apparently. Though I see no animals, there’s smoke pouring out of the roof hole.”