Their plan to mount a pre-emptive assault had been overtaken by the Celtiberians, who had clearly been watching intently and had sallied forth from their palisade as soon as they saw the legionaries begin to form up. They were there now, perhaps three hundred of them, bellowing defiance, solitary piercing yells that joined and rose steadily to a roar, a straggling line about a thousand feet from the Romans in a field that dropped from both lines of soldiers down a slight slope towards a strip of flat ground in the centre, some five hundred feet from where Fabius was standing.
He felt the heft of his sword, weighing it in his hand. He and Scipio had first whetted their blades with Celtiberian blood a week before when they had charged through the breach and taken the wall, and now the battle-lust was coursing through him again, and he was yearning for more. It was time.
Scipio turned towards the primipilus, and then to him. He raised his sword, and his mouth opened in a snarl. For a few seconds all that Fabius could hear was the pounding of the blood in his ears, and then he was bounding forward, running as fast as he could towards the charging Celtiberians, his sword raised, yelling at the top of his voice.
He could see the centre of the field more clearly now: a strip of level ground about thirty feet across where the two slopes converged. There were pools of standing water left by the recent rains, and patches of mottled ground where the mud showed through. It was a natural feature, an area of boggy ground that would normally have been covered by grass, but something that could have been protected and maintained to give the illusion of continuous firm ground. In that instant Fabius realized that there was something wrong. It was a trap. The Celtiberians may have been reduced by hunger and exhaustion, but what had seemed a desperate, disorganized charge had in fact been a ploy, duping the Romans into thinking that they could be met halfway and easily destroyed. They were being drawn into a killing ground, just as he and Scipio had once goaded an enraged water buffalo into a dried-up watercourse that was liquid mud beneath, leaving the beast trapped and wallowing and easy prey to their spears. If they carried on unchecked, the legionaries would become enmired in the same way, thrown into disarray and distracted by the need to stay upright — moments in which they would take their eyes off the enemy and the Celtiberians would have the advantage.
Fabius knew that the Celtiberian chieftain would be watching them with eagle eyes; if Fabius tried to stop the legionaries now, showing that he had spotted the trap, the chieftain would also halt the momentum of his own charge. But Fabius could play them at their own game: he must lead them into thinking that the Romans were going headlong into the morass, ignorant of its dangers. He sprinted further ahead, running as fast as he could, holding his sword high. The Celtiberians were like a foaming floodtide surging down the slope, swords and limbs waving, muddy water spattering above them like spindrift flecking the crest of a raging surf. Fabius was less than a hundred feet away from the mud now, and he counted the seconds. One. Two. Three. He suddenly stopped and turned, staggering sideways to regain his balance, and bellowed as loud as he could: ‘Halt! Hold the line!’
The primipilus of the fabri saw and understood and repeated the command, and it was conveyed down the line by the centurions and optios on either side. In a few seconds the entire Roman force had come to a shuddering halt, on firm ground on the very edge of the mire.
The centurions bawled another order: ‘Defensive positions.’ The leading men squatted down and drove the base of the pila into the ground, angling them forward towards the enemy and grasping them firmly with both hands. Between them the next line of men held their pila at the horizontal, tightening up to present a bristling wall of spears, their legs planted apart and flexed to withstand the coming onslaught. Behind them the third line stood with their pila poised to throw and their swords drawn, ready to cut down any who made it through.
Scipio had caught up with Fabius and they both stood ahead of the line, panting hard, every muscle in their bodies tense, swords held hard. Fabius’ calculation had worked: it was too late for the Celtiberians to stop. Their chieftain could only stir his men up even further, to increase the momentum of the attack so that they might make it through the mire before it bogged them down.
The centurions bawled again: ‘Steady! Hold your positions!’ The lines of pila seemed to quiver in unison, shaken by the thunderous approach of the enemy. Individual warriors could be made out more clearly now as they hurtled down the slope, the swifter ones running ahead screaming and waving their shields, then discarding them so that they could sprint even faster. Some were wearing old Corinthian helmets and Roman cuirasses taken in past battles, others nothing more than rough woollen tunics, but all of them held javelins or the curved double-edged Celtiberian sword. The shrieks and screams became a steady roar again, pummelling Fabius’ ears, and as they neared the mud he could feel a chill on his face, as if the war god were sweeping in his chariot down across the mire and brushing them with the cold wind of death.
He could barely breathe. He gripped his sword as tight as he could, trying to keep his nerve. Then the first warrior flew into the mud, slipped forward and lunged wildly, running straight into one of the pila a few feet to Fabius’ left, breaking it as the tip passed through his neck and falling in a spray of blood. Another followed, and then another, each of them speared and then hacked to death by the rear line of legionaries. A javelin narrowly missed Scipio but struck the upper thigh of the primipilus, severing the artery and causing blood to gush out in a pulsing fountain, soaking Scipio and Fabius. The primipilus fell with a grunt, his hand pressing on the wound, and his place was taken by the second centurion of the cohort, who turned and bellowed at the rear line of legionaries. ‘Make ready with your pila.’ He watched for the main mass of Celtiberians to reach the mud, and then bellowed again: ‘Let fly.’ The pila swished through the air over Fabius like arrows, some of them bouncing off armour, but others finding their mark, bringing down dozens of warriors in a tumbling pile that tripped up many who came behind. The whole mass seemed to slide forward across the mud and crumple against the Roman line, the warriors writhing and shrieking as the legionaries hacked to death any who had not been killed by the pila of the front line.
Fabius felt his heart race. The time had come to go forward. Scipio roared, and plunged into the morass. The front two lines of legionaries dropped their pila and followed, swords drawn. Then Fabius was in the mire himself, slogging ahead with mud up to his knees, hacking and stabbing. A Celtiberian with braided red hair flew at him just as he was withdrawing his sword from a body, and he slashed upwards with all his might, catching the man under the chin and slicing his entire jaw off through to his forehead, leaving a mass of blood and mucus and brain where his face had been. The man fell with a shriek and Fabius lurched forward, thrusting his sword into another man’s head and then slashing the tip across an exposed neck, the jugulars exploding in a sheen of blood that sprayed over his face and into his eyes. He blinked hard, slashing his sword blindly, and as his vision cleared he saw that the legionaries had already moved forward, following Scipio as he ploughed through the slew of mud and blood towards the far slope.
Suddenly a horn blew, a deep, resonating sound, not a Roman trumpet, but from somewhere in the Celtiberian lines. The warrior Fabius had been stalking quickly backed off, and he saw others do the same to his right and left. The legionaries who had surged forward to engage the enemy were left reeling and panting, staring at the retreating Celtiberians, some of them red-faced and spitting and others pale with the shock of combat. It had lasted for only a few minutes, but dozens of bodies lay jumbled in the mud, most of them Celtiberian but the glint of Roman armour visible here and there among them. Fabius felt his left hand, noticing for the first time that it was sliced across with a sword cut, and then looked up again. The centurions were bawling down the line, ordering the men who had gone forward to return to firm ground, and those who had stayed in the line to tighten up and take up their pila again, in readiness for another onslaught.