In irritation, he ripped his knife from his side and hamstrung the man who’d knocked him, dropping back through the press and leaving the screaming warrior floundering, flopping on his useless leg.
As he moved, he sheathed his dripping knife and fastened his arrow case. Despite the mass of men flowing this way from Vercingetorix’s army, he had a distinct feeling that this position was going to become a charnel pit soon and there was no guarantee which side would fill it most before the fight was won or lost. This was a place for a mindless killer, not for a huntsman. A place for brawn, not skill.
Ducking between slavering warriors, Molacos retreated from the fray until he reached the broken gate, where the mass still filled the space, though not quite so tightly-packed. With profound regret, he let his precious bow drop away to the floor and unfastened his quiver, dropping it among the mess.
Taking a steadying breath, he ripped a green scarf from his belt pouch and tied it around his neck above the mail shirt he had acquired during his days trapped in the oppidum. Hoping none of his kin would understand what he was trying, he whipped his bloody knife from his side again, grasped the end of the cart that butted up against the gate edge and sought the defenders behind it through gaps and nooks in the barricade. His eyes caught the russet of a Roman tunic and his hand disappeared into the hole, gouging with the knife. A moment later, he withdrew it and the Roman had gone. Another check and another tunic. Another lunge through a hole and another victim. And in heartbeats, the very end of the barricade was clear. With a deep breath, he pushed at the cart until it moved a few hand-widths. Another shove and it opened a little further. The Roman officer commanding the redoubt had clearly spotted something amiss and was shouting for his men to close the gap.
With a brief prayer to Ogmios in his guise as lord of words rather than master of the dead, he slipped through the gap, opening his mouth to shout in his best Latin, his accent a good southern Cadurci, carrying the same inflection as the Romanised men of Narbo.
‘Breach!’ he bellowed. ‘Help me!’
He’d known that the Romans would close the gap, of course. They were too efficient to let the warriors outside capitalise on the tiny breach. But it had been enough for him to squeeze through. The Romans nearby, not legionaries, but some sort of bodyguard for the officer, looked him up and down and a scout in Roman colours noted the green scarf — the same shade as the one the scout himself wore, along with every other auxiliary scout and hunter — and nodded, rushing over to help this auxiliary with the skeletal grin close the gap.
It was the work of a moment to help the Romans close the gap and re-deploy at the edge, and then to slip away with one of the legionaries who was running back to the piles of supplies nearby. An officer of some kind turned to him, probably seeking to send him to work elsewhere, but Molacos clutched his side with his knife hand, the blood from his three victims running from the blade and down his hip, looking for all the world like gore from a wound in his side, and the officer’s eyes slid past him and on to another target. A capsarius rushed over to help him, but Molacos shook his head, and the medic ran off after someone else.
With a satisfied smile, the Cadurci hunter picked up a battered shield from one of the piles and, almost indistinguishable from the many auxiliaries among the Roman force, made his way towards the northern rampart. This was no place for him. But somewhere outside the Roman lines — easy enough to traverse from the inside — back towards the reserve camp, Lucterius and his Cadurci brothers would be fighting.
And that was where he needed to be, for Molacos fought not for a unified Gaul, nor for hatred of the Romans, nor for Vercingetorix himself. Molacos fought for his master, Lucterius, and would do so to his last breath.
* * * * *
Fronto was hard pressed. What had begun as defending a weak point against the periphery of the inner force’s attack had quickly become the second-most fought-over position on the battlefield. While the reserve cavalry and their infantry support slugged it out over the ramparts on the plain, the north wall of the Mons Rea camp was swamped with enemy warriors, but the south-eastern side had become the target for the force that had been trapped on the oppidum. Another hour had passed at a guess, based on the movement of the sun across the sky, since the redoubt had almost caved, its defensive cohesion only saved at the last minute by one of the native levies who’d happened by.
Since then, the gate had become something of a focus for the rabid enemy. As the huge rebel army converged on this position, the powers inside the camp — who Fronto had no time to go and see since every man counted — had seen fit to send three more centuries of men to the makeshift barrier. Fronto had immediately left Masgava to directing the fighting men and sent the new arrivals to fetch more equipment and more junk to help strengthen the defence. It had worked and the place still held, though by the skin of their teeth. The barricade was perhaps half as high again as it had been and twice as thick, with grain sacks, clods of earth, timbers and more all thrown into the pile to help strengthen it, and the number of men fighting to hold it was gradually increasing, while the attacking force in the ‘U’ failed to grow, limited as they were by the gate.
A quarter of an hour ago he’d taken the time to pop up to the rampart and confer with the centurion again. Things were looking troubling all round, it seemed. The newly-arrived Gauls had managed to fill in the single ditch outside the east rampart with relative ease and had set up shield walls while their archers and slingers had begun to pelt the parapet with their missiles. Fronto had left the man to it. The situation was pretty bleak but the centurion — one Callimachus — seemed to have his head screwed on; one of the more competent officers Fronto had yet encountered in the whole system, and he could handle the disaster as well as any other. Before returning to the fray to discover that Arcadios had been forced to pull back with a vision-blurring head wound, Fronto had grabbed one of the nearer couriers and told him to ride for Antonius and Caesar as fast as possible and request help.
‘What message should I deliver, sir?’ the man had asked, worried.
Fronto had blinked. ‘Send help,’ he’d replied helpfully.
‘But how many men, from where and to where, sir?’ the young courier had asked, frowning.
Fronto had grasped him by the neck, bunching his scarf, and dragged him to the redoubt, lifting him so that he could see over it, almost having the top of his head removed by a stray sweep of a blade, and then lowering him, terrified, to the floor again.
‘Did you see the enemy?’
The acrid smell of urine had risen from the courier’s tunic. ‘Yessir.’
‘Unless you want them pushing a sponge-stick so far up your private manhole you can taste it, tell Antonius and Caesar to send everyone they can spare to Mons Rea.’
The man had nodded emphatically, his eyes wide, his curly locks having been trimmed by an impromptu blade. Fronto had let go and patted him on the head, and the man had run for his horse.
That had been almost quarter of an hour ago, and nothing had happened. Occasionally, Fronto had paused and tried to make sense of the military calls, but the simple fact was that the battlefield was such a chaotic din of noise that trying to unthread it was like trying to unpick a tapestry one handed in the dark while playing a lyre.