The other fur-wearing warrior, realising he had no time to draw his weapon, leapt forward to contain this sudden threat. The man was big, built like an ox, so covered in thick curly brown hair it was difficult to tell where pelt ended and man began. A broad chest was flanked by muscular, powerful arms that closed to enfold Rufinus.
He’d met this type before. Atticus, the champion of the Fourth Cohort, was much the same: a huge brute with fists that could flatten a cart, but slow and unimaginative.
Ducking into the oncoming attack, Rufinus took the opportunity to pull his blade free from the dying warrior beneath him; he’d have liked to use it, but there was too little room in this fight. The barbarian’s huge arms closed on empty air, their target having dipped beneath their reach.
As the man grunted and craned his head to look down past his bulky animal skin, Rufinus sprang upright, delivering a left-handed uppercut that smashed into the brute’s jaw with such force that he worried for a moment that he might have broken a knuckle.
No, but he’d certainly broken the jaw.
The big man slowed in panic, bringing his arm back slowly, probably with the vague intent to deliver a punch.
Rufinus ducked away from the potential blow, though he barely considered it a threat, bending his knee and rotating, delivering a left hook that smashed into the man’s cheek, snapping his head sideways with the force. His instincts now in control, the legionary let go of his sword for a moment, changing his grip as it began to drop and catching it blade-down, held in the fashion of a dagger.
Not giving the barbarian time to recover, he performed a series of sharp jabs, the third of which, delivered with a fist wrapped around the hilt of a gladius, shattered the man’s nose.
The ox of a man slumped to his knees, his face a bloodied mess, and Rufinus’ eyes widened. While he had been dealing with the two warriors, their leader had drawn his straight, Germanic blade and was lunging toward him, intent on an easy kill.
His mind racing in the scant moments before the man ran him through, Rufinus dropped slightly, grasping the falling barbarian by the fur at his neck and, straining, hauled him up into the path of the sword blow.
He heard the Quadi nobleman’s blade slide into the brute’s back and stepped away in momentary consternation as the blade exited the front, raising a section of fur as though raising a tent with a pole.
The warrior’s eyes bulged, and a gout of dark blood vomited forth from his mouth. As the noble pulled his blade free and the huge man fell to the floor, Rufinus stepped to the side, righting the grip on his gladius and drawing his dagger with his free hand.
The two men circled one another.
Somewhere in the distance a cornu call rang out again. The rest of the legion was probably almost at the rally point.
The barbarian barked something at him in his unpleasant language, in a voice that rose toward the end, indicating a question. Rufinus shrugged.
‘Come on then. Let’s get to it.’
With a quick lunge, balanced on the balls of his feet, Rufinus leapt forward, stabbing out with his sword. The nobleman was quick and nipped to one side, bringing his own blade down on the gladius, perhaps trying to knock it from the legionary’s grasp. Rufinus’ grip, however, was iron-strong, and the blades skittered off one another with a nerve-jangling sound, raising sparks.
The nobleman drew his sword back and spun around quickly, the blade gaining momentum. Rufinus lurched to his left, slamming his gladius in the way urgently to block the blow. The impact rang up the steel and into his knuckles, numbing them momentarily. The barbarian followed on into the blow, perhaps expecting to bring the blade round with a second spin for another.
He knew how to handle his long, Germanic sword well, and was relatively innovative.
Not enough, though; not as innovative as Rufinus.
As the man continued to swing his blade, Rufinus allowed his own gladius to be knocked casually aside; it had been but a parry and a distraction for the real move, anyway.
His left hand slammed into the man’s throat just above the meeting point of the collarbones, driving the dagger so deep that he felt it wedge up against the spine. The barbarian stopped in mid spin, eyes wide as he tried to look down. The movement of the head was simply not possible, the hilt of the pugio protruding from his throat and the hand still wrapped around it holding his chin up as dark blood spat from the vicious neck wound, falling to the ground where it glistened on the forest floor.
The nobleman mouthed something at him desperately; pointlessly, given the language barrier. Rufinus let go of the dagger’s hilt, his crimson hand slick and slippery, as the sword toppled from the man’s grip. The barbarian’s hands lurched forward, gripping the shoulder plates at the top of Rufinus’ segmented armour. The fingers tightened on the armour as the barbarian arched his back, body spasming and juddering, fresh gouts of blood pumping out and splashing onto the steel plates.
Rufinus turned his face away from the desperate mouthings and prized the fingers from his armour, letting the man fall away to die in silence. After six years under the eagle – two of them fighting the barbarian tribes – he was anything but squeamish, but somehow it felt intrusive and wrong to stare into the eyes of a dying man and watch the spirit leave them forever.
Ever since Lucius…
His expression hardening, Rufinus dropped to the ground and drew his pugio from the neck of the hollow, empty vessel that had once been a man. The blade slipped free, followed by a fresh surge of blood.
With a grim face he wiped the dagger on the nobleman’s tunic, aware that he was doing little more than spreading the blood thinly over a wider surface. Slowly, sheathing the knife, he stood, a shiver of cold running down his spine.
The dell rang with a meaningful silence, four glassy eyes staring up accusingly at their killer, two more gazing into the earth. Rufinus took a deep breath and rolled his shoulders, the only sounds: the groaning and creaking of the tortured trees in the freezing wind, ice cracking and snapping on the bark, the distant slump of snow sliding from branches and the rhythmic pitter-patter of melting ice dripping to hard ground.
Rufinus tipped his head to one side.
No.
Nothing as mundane as snow and ice.
His head spun this way and that, taking in the undergrowth around him and the endless trunks of trees marching off into the depths of the barbarian world. The men had bows. What use were bows in deep woodland?
It was not the creak of straining branches he could hear, but the tension in a short wooden bow as the string was pulled taut. His initial fear that a fourth, hidden barbarian was about to put an end to him seemed, however, to be unfounded. As he spun around, there was no glinting arrow head; no lurking figure.
It took a moment, even after his third pass, to realise that the foliage thinned on the side of the dell opposite the point at which he’d entered. Light filtered through the leaves and the twisted carpet of snaking branches there.
A path through the forest, and wide enough that such light was visible, the weak sun reflecting off the snowy ground.
The steady drip of thawing snow?
His heart skipping a beat, Rufinus lunged across the dip and threw himself into the undergrowth, the twigs and leaves crunching and snapping beneath him. A struggle as he pushed branches aside with his elbows and forced himself forward, tearing his tunic on brambles and scratching his skin, and suddenly he was afforded a clear view of the track.