‘Loose!’ he shouted, and as one the men of the front rank lunged forward and hurled their javelins. The missiles curved over the leading century and struck the face of the Pictish charge. At once the next rank stepped forward and threw: javelins clashed and shivered the air.
Castus stretched up, staring over the massed helmets of Valens’s men. The enemy charge had faltered under the storm of missiles, great gaps torn in the Pictish mass. But others were pressing forward, stumbling over the fallen bodies. Now a volley of throwing darts followed the javelins, pelting sharp iron down into the enemy horde.
‘Ready spears – prepare to advance!’
He heard the trumpet call even as he spoke, and Valens’s cry of command at the same moment. The leading century seemed to rear up, massing towards the front, and then suddenly lurched into motion.
‘Advance!’
Slow heavy movement, turf thick underfoot. Ahead, the noise of Valens’s men smashing into the riven horde of the enemy. Screams, sudden and high-pitched, and the hollow thud of shields. Pacing forward, wanting to run, Castus glanced to his left, down the line of his front-rank men. Spears gripped, shields up, the line held steady.
He saw the first enemy bodies, left twisted and bleeding on the ground as the leading ranks stepped over and across them. One of his own men darted his spear down to stab at a fallen man as he advanced. Others did the same, spears rising and falling like darning needles.
Up ahead, the leading century was moving through the Picts like reapers through a wheatfield. Through the shouts, the screaming, Castus could clearly pick out the chop and suck of blades cutting flesh and hacking bone. Occasionally an enemy javelin would flicker across the wall of shields and into the ranks of the armoured men.
Cheering from the right. When he looked up again, Castus saw the first wave of cavalry crashing down the far slopes, towards the open flank of the massed enemy. He looked to the left, and there were the Alamanni pouring down the steep hillside above the defile, hollering their own barbaric war cries.
At the apex of the cavalry attack, galloping on his grey horse, was the tribune Constantine. Castus saw him clearly: the golden helmet with its feathered crest, the white cloak swinging behind him, his mouth open in a scream of joyous violence.
The cavalry struck, ripping into the Pictish flank. From his vantage point on the slope Castus saw a wave of panic pass through the mass of the enemy, warriors turning to flee from the horses, colliding and pressing together. Those who fled forward faced the advancing line of infantry, the impregnable shields and reaping blades. Others tried to retreat back into the defile, but it was already choked by fugitives. Carts and horses meshed in the rout, while the Alamanni swarmed down from the higher slopes.
The advance slowed, Valens and his men pushing against a bulwark of desperate, dying men. Swords still thundered against the pressing shields, javelins arced, but it was butcher’s work now: the hollow of the valley was heaving with trapped Picts, cropped down on all sides, dying in a bloody morass.
Then, as Castus watched, he saw a knot of enemy warriors plunging forward towards the infantry lines, all of them scarred and painted nobles, screaming defiance. At their heart was a single battle cart, their leader standing high and proud, spear raised. Castus saw the long face and goatlike beard, the dyed mane of hair, and recognised Talorcagus, High King of the Picts. For a few heartbeats the warband pressed forward, until it appeared that they might breach the mob of their own panicked men. Then Valens yelled out the order to his troops: Shield wall! And like a ship caught in a storm wave, the chariot and the warriors surrounding it veered and tilted, capsizing into the surge of bodies. Castus stared as the king went down, Talorcagus toppling from his cart and falling into the melee.
He glanced around for the cornicen, and found him staring dumbly forward at the massacre. He shook the man by the shoulder.
‘On my command,’ he said. ‘Sound charge.’
‘Great gods,’ Diogenes said. ‘This is a slaughteryard.’
Castus just nodded. They were picking their way back across the field of the battle, supervising a work detail retrieving the bodies of the Roman dead from among the slain. Behind him, he heard Diogenes cough, and then vomit noisily.
‘Sorry, centurion.’
‘Don’t be. Happens to everyone, now and again.’
Rain was falling, the water mixing with the blood to form huge red lakes between the mounds of corpses. Castus felt his boots sinking into the mire, sucking with every step. All across the valley the dead were piled, some individually, others in great mounds where they had fallen fighting or trying to flee. Dead horses and shattered carts too. There were even more at the lower end of the valley, where hundreds had pressed together trying to enter the defile. There, the ground was invisible under bodies piled two and three deep. Some of the Picts had crawled under a thicket of thorn bushes to try and escape, but archers had surrounded the thicket and filled it with arrows until all were dead. Down the defile it was the same, where the Alamanni had come whooping and howling like hunters to spear the packed fugitives below. The slaughter stretched to the river ford, where the cavalry had pursued the fleeing Picts through the shallows.
‘Are all battles like this, afterwards?’ Diogenes asked, wiping his mouth.
‘Sometimes.’ Maybe Oxsa, Castus thought, although he had been unconscious and had not seen the full extent of it. Those running skirmishes against the Carpi on the plains beyond the Danube had never resulted in such a massacre. The trapped Picts had died in such numbers it looked as though some god had destroyed them.
‘I’ve read of battles often,’ the schoolteacher said, ‘but never expected anything like this. Truly an awesome and terrible sight.’
Castus grunted. Rainwater was running down his neck. To his left, two men of his century were moving through the corpses, methodically killing any Picts that remained alive. To his right he saw a dead man sprawled against a chariot wheel; the top of his skull had been sheared away, and wet brain matter spattered the spokes. Another man, his torso cleaved from shoulder to ribcage, his face oddly placid-looking. One Pict was sitting up, slumped with his legs stretched before him. His stomach was ripped open, and entrails pooled pink and grey between his thighs. Castus nudged the corpse’s shoulder with his boot, and it rolled over backwards.
He knew the meaning of his dream now. The dead had returned to petition him for vengeance. They had got it, surely. The fury of battle had left him now, the killing rage of that last murderous charge across the valley, but Castus still felt the solid satisfaction of a job well done. Even so, there was a well of emptiness inside him. He and the men of his century had seen little real fighting, just killing; few of the Picts had put up any resistance to the charge, and those who had were easily despatched. Many had thrown aside their weapons and tried to surrender, but none had been spared. The Roman line had crossed the valley like an iron roller, crushing everything in its path.
Was that why he felt this hollowness? To watch a battle, but not truly participate, was hardly fulfilling. Then he remembered that other part of his dream: Cunomagla coming to him, accus shy;ing him. What did that signify?
He cleared his throat and spat. Dreams!
‘What will they do with all these dead men?’ Diogenes asked. ‘Theirs, I mean?’
‘Leave them to rot,’ Castus said. ‘They’re food for the crows now.’
There was a mood of festival around the camp fires that evening. The victory had been totaclass="underline" fewer than a hundred Roman dead for thousands of the enemy slain. The troops had gathered around the imperial tribunal, and built a battle trophy of piled shields and weapons taken from the enemy chiefs. They had cheered the emperor as he had stood before them, shouting out his name and saluting him imperator. But they had cheered Constantine too, when the tribune had ridden back from the river ford at the head of his cavalry, his horse sprayed with blood to the withers. The victory belonged officially to the emperor, but in the hearts of the troops his son had taken the palm.