Where was Galba? Why wasn't he helping?
Now the Celts were surging up the slope again, and it was time to make a stand. Marcus threw a protesting Longinus behind the broken gate in hopes he'd remain undetected, then turned to fight his enemies. Something clawed viciously at his side, the scrape of a spear. An arrow thudded into his shoulder. He staggered backward.
I'm dying, he thought dimly.
The thought gave him a surprising peace.
Suddenly he remembered the Celt in the grove, the one who'd tied his torso to a tree. The one who didn't want to die lying down.
Marcus battled his way forward to grasp a line hanging from a grappling hook and cut a length free. Then he backed to a blackened, smoldering post. He was losing blood, and his vision was beginning to blur. He didn't have much time.
"Someone tie me!" he roared. "Someone tie so I can die standing like a man!"
As if they understood what he was trying to do, the Celts hung back for a moment. Small hands seized the line, and the rope was tightened against his chest. Gratefully he sagged against it, letting his last strength flow to his arms. He glanced aside a moment to give a visual thanks to his benefactor and realized with a start it was a woman-not just surprisingly female, but a woman vaguely recognizable.
"Savia?"
It was his wife's maidservant, her eyes wide with fear but mouth set in determination and sympathy. What was she doing in the blood and filth?
"Good-bye, Marcus."
Was she a hallucination?
"Take him, Cassius!" Marcus heard barbarians shouting. "Finish the Roman and confirm your freedom!" Then something cold as fire pierced into his side, robbing him of air. A sword thrust.
"Valeria!" He didn't know he screamed it.
Would his father approve of him now?
Then more blows, and he was dead.
Trapped on the southern side of the Wall, Arden ducked beneath the jab of a cavalryman's lance and swung his own sword at the horse's knee. It chopped through and the animal went down in agony, falling on its rider. Before the man could pull himself out, the chieftain had shoved his sword through the Roman's throat, feeling the crush of neck cartilage. Then he whirled and chopped at the back of another rider, and that man fell too, roaring in pain. Two barbarian warriors stabbed at him with their spears until he, too, was still.
Then a Roman arrow took one of the warriors in the chest, freezing him in place, and a lancer rode down the other. Everywhere his men were stumbling under the onslaught of horse and falling like timber. Galba's cavalry had height and hundreds of pounds of rearing horse to their advantage, and arrows were decimating Arden's men from the stonework behind. It was as ruthless a massacre as it was rank treachery.
"Retreat! Form by the Wall!"
The barbarians backed toward the southern gate of the milecastle they'd surged through just half an hour before, but it was a ragged rout toward a rain of arrows. The gate had been shut against them. Man after man grunted and went over, shot before they could even match blades with the Roman cavalry. As the horses pressed, the Celts were squeezed so tightly that some couldn't raise their swords. They were stuck at with lances like squealing pigs, pinned by their own dying comrades. Some, preferring death to slavery, thrust daggers into their own hearts.
Yet no arrow grazed Arden, no spear came close. Did the gods protect him?
No, it was Galba, trying to get to him. "Remember, that one stays alive, or the man who kills him is himself dead!"
What confusing conspiracy had isolated him here? What had happened to the Attacotti and Picts on the other side of the Wall? Why weren't they pouring through in support? Why hadn't Galba turned on the Romans, as promised? Brassidias had betrayed him, just as the woman had! Were they working together? Arden desperately picked up a loose helmet and hurled it at the senior tribune, hitting his shoulder.
If nothing else, he'd take the damned Thracian with him. He charged.
Galba acknowledged the challenge, his black horse bucking toward Caratacus. The Celt planned to strike at the underbelly to dismount the tribune and kill him on the ground. Yet even as he crouched to attack, he noticed that Galba had sheathed his sword and drawn something else. What? Then there was a sizzling buzz, and a whip cracked and wrapped on Arden's forearm, jerking him to his knees. "Now! The net!" Something entangling fell to ensnare Arden's arms. Two troopers had hurled the gladiatorial prop as if he were in the arena. He tried to struggle upward, but they pulled on the netting and he lost his footing again.
"Give me a chance to fight!" he cried.
The reply was harsh laughter. "See his tattoo! We've caught a deserter!"
Through the mesh he could see the last of his men pushed against the inner stone of the Wall, lances impaling them, arrows cutting them down, stones dropping on them from above. Luca fell, bleeding from twenty wounds. The Celts were singing their death songs, trying to take as many Romans as they could with them.
Then something hit his own head, and everything went black.
XXXIX
Stillness settled over the battlefield. To the south of the Wall, the Romans had won. Galba's cavalry had overwhelmed the Celts who'd broken through the gate and killed or enslaved every one of them. Arden Caratacus was unconscious and in chains. They'd even bagged a lean and defiant druid, caught in the conspiracy he'd spun. Kalin, the barbarians called him, clubbed to the ground and hog-tied to corral his magic. A priest to minister to the dungeon of Eburacum! The Romans spat on him and jeered, in fear.
To the north of the Wall the Celtic cavalry had triumphed. Marcus's force had been overwhelmed by a flood of numbers, and he and all his men killed, except for a handful who fought their way to the burned-out gate archway and finally gotten reinforcements from the Romans above. Longinus had survived, but the heart and the flower of the Petriana had been destroyed. His companions were dead.
The Celts, howling with triumph and wailing with grief, had retreated into the trees a mile away, taking most of their dead with them.
The stripped bodies of the Romans were left lying in the trampled and frozen mud. It began to snow harder, fogging the field.
The inner gate of the milecastle had been slammed shut against Arden's column of warriors, denying escape, and their bodies were heaped against it like a windrow of leaves. The pile was prickled with arrows and leaking a delta of blood. Now Galba ordered the corpses dragged aside and the gate opened, its lower half mottled with the stain of the dead. Eventually the heavy door swung wide, revealing the carnage of the milecastle courtyard beyond. Galba strode through in gruesome triumph, the dead the price of his victory. He stepped around the Roman bodies. He trod on the Celtic ones.
From the archway of the other side came the stink of ashes and burned flesh. Its barrel roof framed the other battlefield and its scattering of dead Romans and horses. From far away, through the gauze of snow, came the mournful drumming of the Celts.
Galba's expression was one of tight satisfaction. Everything had happened as he'd planned. He was the savior of Rome.
Huddled against the stone were the surviving men who'd ridden with the Petriana's flanking attack-a dozen in all, muddy, spattered with blood, exhausted. They were his now.
"Marcus Flavius?" he asked no one in particular.
They pointed. "A hero's death. He died standing up."
The praefectus hung from a loop of rope around his chest, his chin down, eyes closed, bloody arms dangling, one foot turned abjectly inward. Galba's face betrayed no emotion. "Indeed. We'll burn him with honors."
The Celts wouldn't come again, the tribune judged. Not for a while, at least, giving him the time needed to complete his scheme. The barbarians were headless, their leader captured. He'd won. Won everything in a morning! The praefectus dead, Caratacus in chains, the woman imprisoned and helpless, the victory his to claim alone. Now he'd see to the Roman beauty, and-