For some reason, Fronto had expected them to be on the run, prepared to flee at all times, the beasts still hooked up to the vehicles and in a position for a quick escape. He hadn’t planned on them having set up a semi-permanent store.
He slumped and shrugged.
Cantorix frowned and made strange arcane dances with his fingers, miming something incomprehensible. Fronto stared at him and shrugged again. The centurion sighed and repeated the gestures, slowly and elaborately, waggling his eyebrows meaningfully. Fronto sighed.
“I don’t know what you’re saying” he whispered through gritted teeth.
“Kill the cattle, burn the wagons” the man hissed back at him quietly.
Fronto frowned. It was a thought that had occurred to him before now. Shame to waste it all, but the primary goal of the whole escapade was to cut off the supplies of the rebels. The smoke from the wagons would alert the whole lot, of course. And then, with it having been dry for days there was always the possibility of the woods catching fire. Could it be worth it?
He shook his head. No. His reason for this was more than merely depriving them of goods. It was goading them into accepting terms and surrendering.
He shook his head again, this time directly at Cantorix.
“No. We go ahead and take them all. If it takes all day, we’ll still do it. Let’s just hope the others got here too.”
The Gaulish centurion gave him a helpless look, but nodded and Fronto nudged the scout and pointed back along the track. The three men wandered back to the seventy men standing in formation on the trail a couple of hundred yards away. Fronto looked them up and down.
“Well, centurion, that’s an end to the sneaking. Can’t sneak a whole century up there, Besides, we need the others to hear that we’ve arrived.”
Cantorix nodded and gestured to his optio.
“Idocus? You get the animal job. When we get to the clearing, the left side is a huge animal pen, separated into three parts. Send three men to the pigs and three to the goats. Get them roped together and start leading them back to camp. Take another twenty men and start moving the oxen out two at a time onto the track. While you’re doing that, I’ll take another twenty and we’ll start moving the carts out to hook them up to the animals. Soon as they’re done we can start moving them off, with one driver per cart.”
He turned to Fronto.
“That leaves only about twenty five men to defend us while we work. Will that be enough, sir?”
Fronto shrugged. “It’ll have to be. Hopefully, the other centuries have made it round through the woods and are waiting for us. I’ll take the carts, you lead the defence. If the Tenth arrive to help, send more men back to help us with the carts and animals. Alright?”
Cantorix nodded.
“I’m sending Dannos and Villu to help you. Villu used to be a thief and cattle rustler, I believe, so he should be quite useful, but he also had his tongue cut out, so don’t expect much conversation.”
Fronto rolled his eyes.
“Let’s go and hope Fortuna’s watching over us.”
Taking a deep breath, he raised his arm and let it fall and the century of men began to tramp forward in perfect unison. Fronto smiled to himself. Despite recent outbursts he would rather forget, he was surprised to find, as he thought about it, how many Gauls in whose company he had spent the past year and upon whom he had come to rely. Perhaps what the army was doing wasn’t merely an impediment to getting home, but was purposeful and worthwhile on a higher level.
The alarm went up in the clearing before the century even came within sight. There was a certain advantage to the alarm, in a way, since the non-combatant folk of the tribe would have time to stop milking goats and flee before they became involved in a brawl.
The century of Gallic legionaries rounded the slight bend in the track and the forest opened up ahead. Somewhere in the distance, beneath the canopy of the woods, a deep horn blow sounded.
The century marched out of the trail, four abreast, into the open and shouted commands went up. A column of men led by the optio picked up the pace to treble time and ran off to the left, toward the animal pens.
Another call from the centurion led a second group to peel off to the right. Fronto veered away with them, watching the centurion run straight ahead with his men, doubling their speed as they made their way through the middle of the clearing toward the group of tribal warriors who had been on watch and who were now hurriedly arming themselves and taking up a defensive stance.
The ground in the clearing was uneven and, though cleared of undergrowth, still plagued by hidden rocks and the gnarled, bulging roots of the cleared trees. The sounds of commotion in the near distance, muffled by the trees, spoke volumes about the sudden activity of the tribes. Their camp must be close, given the proximity of the noise, clearly caused by the tribes rallying their warriors to run and defend the supplies.
Fronto and his men reached the nearest wagon and the legate scrambled up onto the tree stump next to it, just high enough to afford him a view over the carts. Behind him, men started hauling the cart back, grunting and groaning with the exertion as they pulled the vehicle back into the open toward the track. As it passed slowly by, Fronto lifted the rain-proof cover and nodded in appreciation at the many sacks of wheat that were stored beneath; enough grain for an entire tribe for at least a week.
He was busy mentally congratulating himself for the speed and efficiency with which they had shifted the first cart and was beginning to believe that he had overestimated the work and that the whole job would be over quicker than he had initially thought when his face fell. A quick glance across the clearing, taking in the number of carts and how some of them were wedged in narrow spaces swept that thought aside. Yes, they had moved the first vehicle easily, but then it was in the easiest position to begin with.
As the cart cleared the tree stumps and more of the men ran in to approach the second cart, it became clear that already this one would be trouble, wedged sideways. He frowned and scanned the tops. They would have to move two other carts into the edge of the wood just to free up the space to move this one along. The whole thing was like some child’s wooden puzzle.
A crash across the clearing, followed by the grating and jarring sounds of steel on steel announced that Cantorix and his men had engaged the guards. The amount of shouting in guttural tongues, however, clearly showed that reinforcements were on the way from the camp deeper in the woods. Briefly, Fronto wondered whether it might have been a better idea just to attack their camp, but he quickly brushed the idea aside as potentially suicidal. Three centuries could probably hold the clearing against the enemy and shift the goods, but that was fighting a purely defensive action with no expectation of victory. A full attack would be a whole different matter.
He gradually became aware, as his men moved the next cart, that there were more metallic sounds, coming from a different direction. For a second he held his breath, tensely, but the sound was a familiar one: that of a century of men in mail, their weapons and shields out and ready. He craned to see over the carts.
One of the other centuries from the Tenth was pouring into the clearing from the eaves of the woods past the carts. Fronto grinned. He couldn’t tell which century it was from here, but he could see the centurion’s crest at the front as it disappeared among the carts, leading the men into the fight.
Good. He had been starting to worry whether the others would get here. If all had gone according to plan, they’d have been here already, ready to come in as pincers and close the trap. Clearly that had not happened, since only one century had arrived at all and they were late.