Nodding his head in a reluctant decision, Marcus hooked a thumb over his shoulder, gesturing to the two Sarmatae.
‘Go.’
The two men squeezed past Arminius, who stepped forward and lifted his shield over Marcus in readiness to thwart any further well aimed or lucky shots. Turning his attention back to the thief, he felt around the dying man’s back until he found the arrow’s shaft, gripping it and twisting sharply to snap the thin wooden dowel. Tarion shuddered, groaning with pain as the arrow’s barbed head moved inside the wound it had carved deep into his body. Grimacing with self-loathing at the act even as he performed it, the Roman stripped away the thief’s cloak, feeling the weight of the golden bowl and the dead legatus’s head in the garment’s hidden pouch as he draped it over his own shoulders. Pulling the dagger from his belt he cut the thief’s throat without ceremony to spare him any further pain, then sheathed the weapon and touched the intaglio on the pommel of his spatha.
‘I have no coin for you, my friend, but may Our Lord Mithras receive you into the joy of his light in the afterlife as your reward for this noble end.’
He snatched up the eagle and the two men slid over the parapet, dropping to the ground below to find Drest waiting for them, a questioning look on his face as he glanced back up at the wall.
‘Tarion?’
Marcus shook his head wearily, raising the eagle’s staff to display the shining metal bird.
‘He’s dead.’
The Thracian made an intricate gesture over his forehead before speaking again. ‘Then we must leave. Come.’
Advancing round the wall’s curve towards the almost sheer slope they found Arabus and the two Sarmatae with arrows nocked to their bows, all three of them ready to shoot but without any target. Lugos was lurking behind the bowmen, the frustration in his voice at watching other men do the fighting for him obvious as he turned to speak to them.
‘Venicones try to attack.’
He indicated the patch of ground before them that was lit by a torch on the wall above, and Marcus saw that there were several more bodies littering the turf. The Briton waved a hand at the carnage.
‘They not come again until many more men. Fetch from camp.’
Marcus nodded his understanding in the torch’s faint light. At least half of the fortress guard’s strength would have been asleep in their camp alongside the fortress when the alarm was raised moments before.
‘They’ll have enough force to rush us quickly enough … ’ He looked across the short stretch of ground to the point where the gentle slope abruptly faded away into darkness. ‘We need to get away from here now.’ Pointing to the Sarmatae pair, he gestured at their escape route. ‘Leave your bows and go!’
The two men looked at each other for a moment.
‘Go!’
At Drest’s shouted command they rose as one man and dropped their weapons, shrugging off quivers that contained a few arrows apiece before running to the edge of the drop and picking up their shields, vanishing from sight down into the gloom. Marcus picked up one of the bows and nocked an arrow to it, turning to his companions as Drest did the same with the other weapon.
‘Arminius and Lugos, you’re next!’ The German opened his mouth to protest, but closed it again when he saw the look on Marcus’s face. As the two barbarians climbed down over the drop-off Arabus looked back and called out a warning, and the Roman flicked a glance back at the fortress to find a huddle of men approaching them at a cautious run behind a wall of their shields. He loosed the first arrow without thinking, watching it fly into the group of men as he reached for the next.
‘Shoot low!’
The three men worked their bows as fast as they could, sending arrow after arrow into the oncoming Venicones whose advance withered under the hail of sharp iron, first one man and then another falling with arrows in their legs. As they drew closer Marcus judged that they were inside the range at which an arrow might penetrate their shields’ layered wood, and raised his aim to send his next shot straight into them, rewarded by a yelp of pain and a sudden recoil from the man he had wounded. Drest loosed one more arrow and then threw his bow down, his supply of missiles exhausted.
‘We go!’
Dropping his own bow the Roman grabbed the eagle and led them towards the hill’s edge, picking up his shield from the spot where he had left it and groping for the drop-off with his booted feet as the slope abruptly fell away beneath him. Looking back over his shoulder he realised that the Venicones were within a dozen paces of them, and drawing back their spears to throw in the single torch’s uncertain light.
‘Jump!’
Allowing his feet to slip out from beneath him he slid the first few feet of the descent, aware that he was perilously close to the point where the slope went abruptly from steep to precipitous, hearing rather than seeing the spears that arced over their heads and were lost in the darkness. With a frustrated roar one of the tribesmen, whether braver or simply more foolhardy than the men to either side, leapt over the drop-off and raced down the steep slope beside Marcus, reaching out with a big hand to snatch at the eagle’s staff as the fleeing Roman fought for balance. Digging in his booted heels to arrest his downward rush, Marcus lowered the eagle and swept it at the warrior’s ankles, knocking his feet out from under him. With a wail of realisation that he was helpless to resist his own downward momentum the Venicone slid for a dozen feet, slipping ahead of the Roman until he encountered a bump in the slope’s surface that threw him unceremoniously out into thin air, screaming and kicking his legs as he fell out of sight onto the steep slope’s waiting boulders.
A spear flashed past Marcus, and he looked back up the slope’s almost vertical rise to find a group of warriors silhouetted above them, baying their frustration at having missed the chance to recapture the eagle. An arrow whipped between the Roman and Drest with a whirr, and another glanced off the metal eagle with a clang as the two men’s eyes met. Marcus raised his voice to bellow down the slope at the men below.
‘Shields up!’
He raised the heavy wooden shield which he had grabbed at the slope’s edge and cautiously started his descent again, holding it over his head and praying to Mithras for his divine protection. With a numbing blow to his raised arm he felt something hit the shield, and glanced up to find the point of an arrowhead poking through the solid wood. As he looked over at Drest a rock smashed into the Thracian’s raised shield, hammering it down onto the other man’s head and very nearly knocking him off his feet.
‘Keep moving!’
Above them Marcus could hear horns blowing distantly off to their right.
‘Hunters!’
He nodded grimly at Arabus’s pronouncement, focusing on keeping his footing on the slope, every step down requiring him to leave one foot planted while the other reached down two or three feet in search of safety. Another arrow clipped the side of his shield and flew off into the darkness below, and then there was silence other than the distant shouts and horn calls of the hunters working their way down the shallow hillside away to the west. Looking up again, wondering at the cessation in their harassment from above, Marcus realised that a handful of the more foolhardy warriors had started down the slope, and were coming down the precipitous hillside above them as fast as they dared, their bodies outlined against the stars above. Looking down again, he saw that against the hill’s slope the raiding party would now be invisible, lost in the dark mass of the ground below them.
‘Drest, pass me one end of that rope!’
At his whispered command the Thracian carefully made his way across the slope towards his dimly seen outline, handing him the tarred butt-end of the coil of line that was over his shoulder.