Fronto leaned against the tree. For two miles as they had crept through the woodlands they had seen no sign of life, the only mark of habitation was one farmstead that had been burned out, leaving only shattered fences and the blackened stumps of a timber building. In a way, Fronto was pleased to discover life, as the journey had been too tense and silently uneventful for his liking; as if they were tip-toeing across a field where he knew there was a bull hidden in the mist.
“Anything else?”
Cantorix shook his head. “Just the smoke from the hearth. I’ve sent the scouts out to circle through the surrounding woods, just in case.”
The legate nodded. Two of the Ubii remained with them at the heart of the expeditionary force to act as advisors and, if necessary, interpreters. Turning, one hand on the hilt of his gladius, Fronto shook his head, creating a cascade of water from his sodden hair, and gestured to one of the guides, pointing at the farmstead, barely visible through the boles of the trees.
“What’s your opinion?”
“Commander?”
“Is it likely we would encounter an isolated farm still occupied by your people, but without animals?”
The scout shrugged.
“Many still trap this side of river. They leave village; go hide when enemy near; then come back when they gone. Could be.”
The legate sighed. Hardly conclusive, as answers went.
“We’ll wait for the scouts to check out the woods before we move through.”
Menenius, standing nearby with wild, nervous eyes, nodded emphatically.
The men stood among the trees, so many drab shapes blending in with the endless trunks of the woods, the rain here channelled from a constant battering force to form heavy, huge droplets that fell, swollen, from leaves and branch-tips, drenching the men beneath.
“That’s the signal” murmured Cantorix.
Fronto, Menenius and Atenos stepped forward to peer between the grey boles to the misty, rain-occluded farmstead. It took them a moment to see the scouts and the legate could only commend the centurion on his eyesight. Barely visible across the farm clearing, two of the Ubii had reappeared and stood, tiny figures in a grey, wet world, waving their arm in the signal that all was clear.
The officers deflated slightly.
“Menenius? You and Cantorix take these two scouts and go speak to the farmers. We should be able to get a good deal of information about the current situation in the area. Cantorix: take a few of your men in with you but not enough to frighten the civilians. The others can form a perimeter around the building. The rest of you, with Atenos and myself, will scatter in groups around the farmstead and search, consolidate and hold until we’re ready to move off again. We should be on the enemy archers sometime in the next half hour or so.”
The officers all nodded and moved off; Menenius hovering all too close to Cantorix for a Roman tribune. Fronto caught the Gallic centurion’s expression at being saddled with the fop and tried not to grin.
With long-practiced hand signals, Fronto directed the centurions who stayed with him, splitting them into four groups, two of which would move around the edge of the clearing, one in each direction, keeping the woodland under surveillance alongside the scouts, while the other two would spread out across the farmstead and its buildings.
The legate grinned happily as he moved along the eastern edge of the clearing, imagining the fun Cantorix was going to have with Menenius and the scouts in the farmer’s hut.
The centurion of the unit with whom Fronto moved pointed to the two scouts standing by the wood’s edge, others having now returned from the shadowed forest. The two men were waving their arms again and gesturing. The centurion, his voice low and in Latin but with a noticeable Gallic accent, leaned close. “What do they want now?”
Fronto shrugged. “Best check.”
The centurion nodded, made a couple of arcane signals to his optio and then jogged off forward to the two scouts, who were gesticulating expansively. As the centurion closed on them, the optio strolled up alongside Fronto.
“The men are separating out into contubernia to patrol the edge, sir.”
The legate nodded his understanding and squinted through the rain at the scene ahead.
“Why are they waving like that when we have so many arranged hand signals?”
He felt the optio stiffen beside him and the man’s hand grabbed his upper arm.
“Because they aren’t Ubii, sir!”
Fronto frowned as the centurion ahead reached the two scouts, demanding quietly of them what all the fuss was. The legate jerked back as he saw the tip of the Germanic long sword suddenly burst from the centurion’s back in a shower of blood. Even as the forest’s edge erupted with warriors, Fronto turned to order the musician and signifer to raise the alarm, but too late. A bellow of shocked pain rang out from the farmer’s hut and was immediately joined by others from the various buildings as the trap snapped shut.
The discordant, horrible Celtic horns rang out and Fronto was drawing his sword and letting his cloak fall to the floor even as he saw Cantorix stagger out of the central hut clutching his side and swinging his sword, bellowing at his men. No sign of Menenius yet. Suddenly, what looked like half the world’s barbarians were pouring from the treeline into the clearing.
The cornicen a few yards from Fronto was busy bleating out the alarm when the notes became a gurgle, a tribesman’s sword slamming into his neck in a backslash hard enough to snap the spine. In a sudden explosion of activity they were in the midst of battle. The century around Fronto hadn’t had the time and warning to form a defensive line and lacked shields and helmets, the fighting already devolving into a melee of individual duels.
There was no opportunity to call out a strategy or gather the men to him.
Turning again, his sword out, Fronto barely had time to raise it and knock aside the blow that was coming for him, the sheer strength of the strike when the blades met numbing his arm and sending shock waves through the joints up to his shoulder. He looked into the eyes of his opponent, a Germanic brute a good foot taller than he, with a dense, unkempt beard and his hair only kept from his eyes by a topknot. The man wore nothing but bronze arm-rings and a torc at his neck, his nakedness no shame or hardship in combat, with designs drawn on his chest in black mud. His eyes bore that crazed, unstoppable look that Fronto had seen before. A man who could only be stopped with a hard death.
The barbarian drew back his sword and swung again. Aware that his gladius was barely able to deflect the strength of a powerful blow from such a long weapon, Fronto slackened his knees and dropped into a crouch as the sword swung past above him at his former neck height.
Ridiculously, even as he stabbed up with the gladius into the big man’s vitals, the thoughts that suddenly crowded his mind were of how much his knees ached when he dropped and how much effect his age was having on his combat abilities. Would he really, realistically, be able to lead an assault like this for much longer?
The roar of the stricken barbarian stirred him from such disturbing and poorly-timed thoughts and he sank back into the crouch, ripping his blade from the man’s bladder, twisting it as it came out. Roaring and spraying blood down onto the legate, the tribesman seemed oblivious to the mortal wound he’d been dealt, apparently entirely impervious to the pain as he rocked back and clasped the hilt of his huge sword in both hands, preparing to bring it down on Fronto in a chop.
The legate stabbed up again with his blade, severing the man’s thigh artery and slicing through muscle in an attempt to unbalance him. Still standing solid despite the wounds, the barbarian’s sword came down like the falling sky, preparing to end the life of the last scion of the Falerii. Fronto left his sword jutting from the huge, bulbous thigh and dropped, trying to fall out of the way of the blow, horribly aware of the fact that the falling sword was moving too fast to dodge.