‘Leave them!’ Sergius pointed to the bandit horde’s front rank, now barely two hundred paces from the grain store’s walls and running as fast as their weary legs would carry them, clearly intent on cutting the tiny party off from their refuge. ‘Carry him!’ A pair of Tungrians grabbed the staggering Julius by his arms, one of them tossing away the spear on which he was leaning, while Sergius abandoned any pretence at decorum and pulled the blood-soaked woman off the mutilated body of her victim, catching her knife arm and disarming her as she spun towards him with murderous intent. He dragged her alongside him as the soldiers ran for the gate in a desperate foot race with the bandits. Calculating the odds as he ran, the realisation dawned on Sergius that it was a race they were going to lose, if only by a few yards. Julius had clearly come to the same conclusion.
‘Leave me, and save yourselves!’
The Tungrians to either side of him kept running as fast as their burden allowed, drawing their swords and preparing to die in defence of their centurion, and Sergius nodded as he ran alongside them, reaching for his own gladius. Scant paces from the gate, and instants from being overrun by the bandits, Sergius was bracing himself to push the woman away and make his stand, when a flight of spears arced down from the store’s walls, reducing the oncoming rush of men to a chaotic jumble of tumbling limbs, giving the runners just enough time to throw themselves through the closing gate. The shattered Tungrians dropped Julius to the ground as they collapsed onto their hands and knees, one of them vomiting onto the store’s immaculately raked pebbles, and Sergius’s chosen man bellowed orders for the legionaries to stand ready for any attempt to climb the wall. Sergius, unable to do anything more than put his hands on his knees and resist the urge to throw up his last meal in sympathy with the exhausted man, looked down at the prostrate Tungrian centurion with a wry smile. Shaking his head, he raised a questioning eyebrow as Annia, painted with sprays of blood and trembling violently, was wrapped in a blanket by Felicia and led away.
‘I really hope she’s worth it, this woman of yours, given that you may well never walk without a limp again. What happened?’
Julius grimaced at the pain. Felicia had offered him a linen bandage and he held it to the wound, watching as his blood stained the fabric.
‘I thought we’d got away free, but a pair of them jumped us one block from the gate. One of them managed to put his spear into my thigh before I could return the compliment.’
Sergius nodded.
‘You said you had an idea about defending this place? Given we’ve got five hundred angry-looking bandits milling around out there I’d be grateful if you were to share it with me.’
He listened to Julius speak for a few moments then raised his eyebrows in shocked understanding.
‘By all the gods but that’s a terrifying idea. Nobody could ever accuse you of being afraid to think the unthinkable, could they, Centurion?’
He turned away and walked slowly up the steps onto the store’s wall, looking out at the ragged band assembled below him just out of spear-throwing range. A man wearing a masked cavalry helmet pushed his way through the throng and walked forward a few paces, holding up his empty hands to indicate his desire to talk.
‘I could hit him with a spear from here.’
Sergius shook his head at his chosen man’s suggestion without taking his gaze off the bandit leader.
‘I doubt it. And I’d rather not raise the stakes that far this early. Those men might well soon have us at the point of their spears. That’s close enough! ’
The bandits’ leader stopped, keeping his open hands raised. With the sunset behind him the cavalry helmet was stained red, and his words boomed out across the open ground in a pronouncement of the legionaries’ impending doom.
‘Men of the First Minervia, unless there are many more of you hiding behind those walls you appear to be no more than a single century, where we are five hundred men and more. Your walls were hardly designed for a siege, and most of your compound is not even defendable. Surrender now and I’ll allow you the choice of joining us or being disarmed and sent back to your legion, but be very clear when I tell you that this grain store, like this city, is now mine.’
Sergius stepped forward, a pair of soldiers defending him with their shields from any bowshot.
‘You seem to be forgetting that there are three cohorts out there to the west, and when they come back here they’ll be the ones doing the evicting. You might be best making a run for it while you still can!’
Obduro laughed loudly, shaking his sun-burnished head.
‘By the time your depressingly malleable tribune fetches up here tomorrow I’ll be long gone. Scaurus will be reduced to deciding whether to fall on his sword or wait for the emperor’s men to do the job for him, given the amount of Commodus’s gold he’s about to lose. And that’s before any mention of a certain Marcus Valerius Aquila reaches official ears. You did know that the Tungrians are harbouring a fugitive from the emperor’s justice?’
It was on the tip of Sergius’s tongue to blurt out that the gold was safe inside the grain store’s walls, but he changed his mind just as he opened his mouth to reply.
‘If you want the grain you’d better come and get it. But there’ll be no surrender of an imperial facility while I command here, whatever that means for the timing of my meeting with the gods.’
Obduro was silent for a long moment, then shrugged his indifference.
‘It means little enough to me whether you die here and now or in some other more fitting place, First Spear Sergius, but as you wish. Bring me the prisoners.’
The three gang members who had been unable to regain the safety of the city were bodily dragged out in front of him, and at a signal from their leader the men surrounding them pulled the prisoners’ arms up to the horizontal, then used their feet to hook the captives’ legs wide. Obduro drew his sword with a flourish, pointing it at the distant forest.
‘Mighty Arduenna, grant us swift and terrible victory in our struggle to free your land from those who have subjugated your people! We offer you the blood of these unbelievers in the hope of your favour!’
He turned swiftly and raised the sword, briefly holding the position before driving the blade down into his first victim’s body at the point where neck and chest met, hacking the man’s body in half with a diagonal cut that exited his body at the opposite hip. The two halves of the ruined corpse dropped to the ground, and Obduro spun across to his next victim, using the sword’s momentum to swing the blade up into the helpless gang member’s crotch, again cleaving the body cleanly in two. The third captive stared in terror at the blood-flecked mask as Obduro stopped in front of him with the sword’s point touching his chest. He paused momentarily before pushing the blade through the man’s ribs and stopping the heart behind them, pulling the sword free and raising its blood-soaked length to the men on the walls.