‘Chelona!’
At his command, given in the Greek, for he couldn’t countenance a Latin command, the front rows of each block split neatly and efficiently and brought their shields up to the fore, the sides and the top in a more-than-passable imitation of a Roman testudo formation. His timing had been spot on. Even as the formations coalesced in the press of men, the pila rose from the defences, supported by the bolts from three scorpions and the arrows of a couple of dozen auxilia assigned to the rampart.
The Roman javelins went through the shields as often as they were turned by them, and no formation would stop the scorpion shots, but still the arrows were largely nullified and many men survived the volley because of the Roman tactic.
It took a moment for the tortoise formations to recover, shuffling together and attempting to fill the gaps with varying degrees of success. The Roman archers took advantage of the hesitations to put arrows into the gaps in the shield-walls, trying to open them up more and along the line, here and there, testudos collapsed.
But most reformed and moved inexorably against the wall.
The Gauls’ spears were designed for fighting with, not throwing, and their volley had been rather random and haphazard, yet it had had an astounding effect, which Vergasillaunus suspected would stay in the memory of these men and change their mode of warfare forever. The weapons may have been unwieldy and off-target, but there had been thousands of them and by the law of averages, many hundreds had found their mark. In a single volley, the wall’s defenders had thinned out considerably, and the way looked more inviting and easier than ever. His gaze dropped from the palisade, down the steep — if low — rampart slope to the v-shaped ditch with an equally precipitous inner slope. Many hundreds, if not thousands, would perish there, filling the ditch with their corpses.
Unless he could prevent it. Now to try something else.
At a third call, echoed along the lines by the tribes’ leaders, the testudos stopped advancing, closing up before the ditch and creating a solid line, two shields high against the Roman arrows. As the line formed, leaving gaps every hundred men, the blocks of archers reformed into longer lines behind them and began to return the volleys.
In a matter of heartbeats the air was full of arcing black shafts, many more hurtling towards the camp than issuing from it. And as the archers carried out their attack, Vergasillaunus gave his second-to-last planned command.
‘Ditches!’
At the call, the three thousand men loitering behind the attacking force and ahead of the reserves ran forward, disappearing into the gaps left in the formation, pushing their way out into the open and braving the missiles to cast their huge baskets, barrows and sacks of debris, earth, brush and so on into the ditches, one after the other.
Perhaps every third man of the earth-carriers disappeared with a shriek as he burst out into the open and fell foul of a thrown pilum or a loosed arrow or bolt, but their burden was already out, falling into the ditch, their bodies only adding to the debris.
It took the space of a hundred heartbeats to complete the manoeuvre. He had lost almost a thousand men, their bodies in the ditch beneath the rampart, adding to the crossings they had formed so thoroughly with their burdens. Though it irked him to think like a Roman commander, Vergasillaunus could only note that a thousand was a small price to pay to nullify the ditch and much of the rampart slope, for the attackers now had clear ramps leading straight to the Roman palisade. Had he led his army in the usual fashion, there would be five times as many bodies in that ditch before the first man ever reached the defences. He might hate the Romans for what they were and what they had done, but he was forced to grudgingly respect the efficiency of their military ways.
The shield wall closed up as the last man retreated, and at Vergasillaunus’ final command the army surged forward at the wall. The Arvernian commander took a deep breath as he watched his near twenty-nine thousand men rushing the meagre defences manned currently by less than a thousand. Unless the Romans pulled a miracle out of their backsides, the day would by his within the hour.
Expelling that explosive breath, he drew his blade. There were limits, of course, to how far he was willing to emulate a Roman general. No standing at the back and looking pretty for him. With a roar, Vergasillaunus of the Arverni pointed his sword-tip at the enemy, adjusted his shield and broke into a run.
* * * * *
When the camp’s east gate gave way it did so almost explosively, one leaf ripped from its rope bindings and flying in against the inner redoubt like a missile, the other breaking into individual timbers and crashing back against the rampart, smashed and useless.
The attack had been delayed by the efficacy of the centurion and his men on the wall-top, casting endless missiles down at the small Gaulish force and keeping them back for as long as possible, but as the attackers managed to pick off a few of the Roman guards and the supplies of pila began to thin out, the flurries of defending missiles diminished and the Gauls had come on afresh.
It had bought Fronto enough time to construct and man his redoubt, and now his twenty six men faced perhaps four times that number, bursting through the gate, the Romans gritting their teeth and ready to fight from their hasty barricade of wagons and barrels. The legionaries hefted their pila, watching the flood of Gauls push through the gate and into the ‘U’ of defences.
Fronto lifted his gladius — no longer the beautiful orichalcum hilted blade he’d lost in the fight against Critognatos of the Arverni — and angled the dulled-if-sharp point towards the dead brute’s brother who ran at the forefront of the attack, his face somehow hollow and empty. Fronto swallowed for a moment, awaiting the crash.
The Gallic warriors hit the wagons like a winter storm wave crashing on the rocky shore, shaking the entire redoubt and threatening to knock it over entire and trash the defence. But as the wagons rocked back to solidity, men like Masgava and one thick-set brute who’d come down from the walls steadying them with meaty hands, the work of killing began on both sides. Half the defending force stood atop barrels and raised platforms, stabbing down at the attackers, while the rest remained on the ground, jabbing through the numerous gaps in the rickety redoubt with their swords, trying to catch any unarmoured and exposed body part.
Cavarinos came at him like some sort of killing machine, his face hollow and expressionless, his actions mechanical and stiff, his empty, shield-free arm coming up to grab hold of an exposed spoke of a cart wheel, giving him leverage to leap up onto one of the reinforcing boards beneath the vehicle and use it as a step to stab out with his long, Gallic blade.
Fronto ducked to the side, the blow being unwieldy and poor, given Cavarinos’ precarious attack position. He lifted the small, round shield he had selected from the supplies his men had brought in — a signifer or musician’s shield, portable and light but with much less protective surface than a standard legionary equivalent. Cavarinos barely breathed before his sword came back and swung in a wide, unheeding arc that almost took the top off the head of one of his own men close by before sweeping forward and down against Fronto.
The man’s eyes might be hollow, but he was fighting like a demon, seemingly driven on by the sight of the Roman officer. Why? Yes, Fronto had killed the man’s brother, but if Cavarinos hadn’t saved his life, that same brother would have spitted him instead. The answer, of course, was simple: grief. Fronto had seen and lived through enough grief to know how it could grasp a fighting man. He might be seen to accept it stoically — might even believe that himself — but somewhere inside, the blame blossomed like a sick, crimson rose, forcing a man to test his fate at the edge of a blade. Cavarinos likely felt so deeply shocked at what he’d done that the only end he could see was the death of either Fronto or himself in atonement.