It was the campfires of an army.
Below us were the enemy. Above them, we waited like hungry eagles in the dark.
I looked back to the silver on the horizon. When dawn came, so would we. For many, darkness would quickly follow light.
No attempt was made to form centuries. We were on a narrow plateau on the mountainside, not a parade ground, and so the whispered orders that came around were simple: follow on to the low ground. Form up with whoever is near you. Wait for the order to advance, unless the enemy is alerted. If they wake, then attack. Kill for Rome. Kill for each other.
They were the kind of orders that I wanted.
Like the silhouettes of the men around me, I rested on my shield as we awaited the order to advance. It was an old soldier’s trick taught to me by Brutus. In such a position you could close your eyes and, fatigued as we were, slip into a shallow sleep. I was too tired to think about my past. Too tired to think about my future. I just closed my eyes and waited.
It was the sound of shuffling feet that let me know my rest was over. I was alert in an instant. At least, as alert as I could be following a day of battle and a night of climbing. But I was ready to follow. I was ready to kill, and I was so tired that I was certainly ready to die.
Like an upright corpse, I trod the dirt and gravel trail behind the man in front of me. His silhouette was huge.
Varo. Good. No better man to die alongside than him.
The fires below us numbered in their hundreds. They were an invitation to the afterlife, and we hurried towards it without conversation, but not without noise. I could hear the bump of shield. I could hear the drawing of breath. I could hear sandals on the rough mountainside. Hundreds of pairs of them, growing louder as fear began to grip us, and the inevitable quickening of the pace came – we just wanted it over with. We wanted to be in there, amongst the enemy. Enough of a night full of dark, and a head full of what ifs? Give us battle! Give us victory, or defeat!
Suddenly I was moving downhill at a jog-trot. The fires were getting closer. Still there was no shouting. No voices. It all seemed to be going so fast. They’d looked so far away, but it was a trick of the night. I could smell them, now. Smell the wood smoke of a sleeping enemy. I felt the movement ahead of me slow, and realized that I was no longer walking on harsh rock and dirt, but on the flat and greeting embrace of the plain. We were forming up, and I felt Varo’s shield hand grip me and pull me into a rank beside him.
I looked to my left and right. I felt the presence of the formed body of men around me. Somehow we had done it. Against nature, against the enemy, we had come through the night and now stood ranged in our ranks to visit death on his camp. There would be no withdrawal today. No more clever gambles of the legate’s. We would wait for the sliver of dawn’s light to become a spill. We would wait until we could see enough of our enemy to kill them, and then we would advance. By the time the sun slid over the horizon, I expected that we would all be dead, but maybe we would have won enough time for Tiberius to shut the door in the rebels’ face, and bar their way into Italy.
Maybe. I had no one that I cared for in that land. Save Marcus, my family stood here in the ranks around me. The legion could fight to save Italy, but I would fight for the lives of my comrades, if only for a dawn.
I looked at the horizon. Black sky was now grey ash.
A voice rang through the night. It was the promise of death, of pain and bloody murder.
It was the promise of a reckoning.
The promise of battle.
‘Eighth Legion! Advance!’
23
We stepped off in shadow.
Less than a day before we had faced this enemy on the open plain. As a brute barges open a closed door, they had used their mass to force us aside.
Not today.
Today we came for them in dawn’s fading darkness, and if yesterday they had been brutes, then today we were assassins. We were dealers of death. We were nightmare made flesh. The enemy had carried the field, marched through the pass, and then they had rested. They were amateurs, and amateurs in victory forget that a win in war is but a fleeting moment. Survive one sword stroke, and the next might take off your head. That was as true at the strategic level of leadership as it was for the foot soldier, and the leadership of these men was lacking. Even our call to advance had drawn no response. Only when the tramp of a fifteen hundred pairs of feet was on their head did the enemy know that they were waking with a blade to their throat.
And those blades were thirsty.
‘Eighth Legion! Charge!’
In rank and file, we came like demons from the shadows of their fires. The dark night gave birth to us, our arms and armour shining in the firelight, caked in the dry blood of our enemy’s brothers. They were sleeping on the ground, exhausted, ‘victorious’. For many, the first sign of their misconception was cold steel in their insides.
Gods, it was a slaughter.
Flame, and the exaltation of seeing a panicked enemy – that was my impression of our charge. I drove my blade downwards as often as up, and before I had chance to breathe, I had killed, and I had maimed.
‘Please!’ a rebel begged in Dalmatian.
I drove my sword into his chest. Then I was on to the next.
Flame and death. Amateur against professional.
We butchered them. Hundreds died in those first moments of terror. Maybe more than a thousand. The stink of blood and guts cut through the stench of sweat and the smoke of their fires.
I saw Varo take off a man’s arm with a swipe of his sword. He finished the rebel by stamping on his face. He turned. Saw me.
He was smiling.
‘Fear the Eighth!’ he roared into the night. ‘Fear the Eighth!’
Oh, there was fear. It was everywhere. In wails, and screams, and the fleeing backs of our enemy. Perhaps, if they had numbered only ten times our own force, we would have beaten them all before the sunrise.
But they were almost twenty thousand, and we were not much more than one.
Behind the bolting foe, in the depths of their camp, the enemy host rallied.
They rallied. And then they attacked.
‘Hold the line!’ someone was shouting. ‘Hold the line!’
I looked to my left and right. Flame lit the fugitive figures of the enemy as they raced for life from our now halted soldiers. Behind them was a stirring black mass. A mass that was soon to charge against us.
Something bumped into my back. I turned, my sword up.
Priscus. He wore the helmet that had once belonged to Justus. He was my leader now, as well as my friend. ‘Form up!’ he urged me, then shouting to the others: ‘Here! Form here! Three ranks! Three ranks! Form!’
A stranger came to each side of me. We touched our shields. Roman soldiers were replaceable parts, and we could fight as well with one comrade as another, though I hoped that my brothers were close. There was shouting in the night. Shouting in a language that I understood, and I knew that the guttural growls were no order to retreat.
‘They’re coming!’ I shouted, the words hard in my scorched throat. ‘They’re coming!’
And they came. A black blizzard. A storm of flesh and steel.
‘They’re coming!’
I heard a laugh behind me. I’d recognize it anywhere. Octavius. ‘Hey, Corvus? Do you think they’re coming?’
I had no time to laugh even if I’d wanted to. The enemy were upon us, battering against my shield, dying on my blade.
‘Fear the Eighth!’ I heard Varo bellow from somewhere, and other men took up the call. I screamed it myself as I rammed my sword into flesh. Shoved my shield against shield. Spat in my enemy’s face. ‘Fear the Eighth! Fear the Eighth!’