Macro, too, hesitated on hearing the order.
'Kill the prisoners?'
'Yes, sir. Right now.'
'I see.' Macro looked into the young optio's shadowed expression and made a quick decision. 'I'll see to it then. You stay here. Keep the men formed up and ready, just in case that lot get it into their thick British heads to try it on again.'
Cato fixed his eyes on the churned-up snow stretching out ahead of the cohort. Even when pitiful cries and screams rose up from a short distance behind him, he refused to turn and acknowledge the sound.
'Keep your eyes to the front!' he shouted at the men closest to him, who had turned to seek out the source of the awful noise.
At length it died down and the last cries were drowned out by the sound of the fight from the rear of the formation. Cato waited for fresh orders, numb with the cold and exhaustion, his spirit weighed down by the bloody deed Centurion Hortensius had ordered done. No matter how hard he tried to justify the execution of the prisoners in terms of the cohort's survival, or the well-deserved retribution for the massacre of the Atrebate inhabitants of Noviomagus, it felt wrong to kill their captives in cold blood.
Macro slowly threaded his way back through his men to take up position in the front rank of his century. He stood beside Cato, grim-faced and silent. Cato glanced at his superior, a man he had come to know well over the last year and a half. He had quickly learned to respect Macro for his qualities as a soldier, and more importantly his integrity as a human being. While he would hesitate to call the centurion a friend to his face, a certain intimacy had grown between them. Not quite father and son, more that of a much older, worldly-wise brother and his younger sibling. Macro, he knew, regarded him with a degree of pride and smiled on his achievements.
For Cato's part, Macro embodied all those qualities he aspired to. The centurion lived at ease with himself. He was a soldier through and through and had no other ambition in life. Not for him the tortuous self-analysis that Cato inflicted on himself. The intellectual pursuits he had been encouraged to indulge in when he was raised as a member of the imperial household were no preparation for life in the legions. No preparation at all. The lofty idealism Virgil lavished on his vision of Rome's destiny to civilise the world had no relevance to the naked terror of this night's fight, or the bloody horror of military necessity that had caused the prisoners to be killed.
'It happens, lad,' Macro muttered. 'It happens. We do what we must if we are to win. We do what we must to see the light of the next day. But that doesn't make it any easier.'
Cato stared at his centurion for a moment, before nodding bleakly.
'Cohort!' Hortensius bellowed from the rear of the formation. 'Advance!'
The rearmost centuries had passed through the barricade and re-formed on the far side, all the while fighting off the increasingly desperate assault of the Durotriges' heavy infantry. But once it was clear that the attempt to trap and destroy the cohort had failed, the fight went out of the Durotriges in that strange indefinable way that kindred sentiment spreads through a crowd. Warily, they disengaged from the Romans and simply stood in silence as the cohort tramped away from them. The defiant ranks of legionaries remained unbroken, and had left a trail of native bodies in their wake. But the night was far from over. Long hours remained before dawn stretched its first faint fingers over the horizon. Long enough to settle the score with the Romans.
The cohort moved on through the darkness, the square formation tightly compacted about its supply wagons bearing their load of casualties. The moans and cries of the wounded chorused with every jolt and grated on the nerves of their comrades still fit enough to march. They were straining to hear any sound of the enemy's approach and cursed the wounded and the squeak and rumble of the wagon wheels. The Durotriges were still out there, and they dogged the cohort. Slingshot whirred in from the darkness, mostly rattling off the shields but now and then finding a target and reducing the cohort's strength by one more each time. The ranks closed up and the formation steadily shrunk as the night wore on. Nor was slingshot the only danger. The chariots the cohort had last seen at dusk now rumbled along the slopes, and every so often charged in on the cohort with blood-chilling war cries. Then at the last moment they veered away, having hurled their spears into the Roman ranks. Some of these, too, found their mark and inflicted even more terrible injuries than the slingshot.
Throughout it all Centurion Hortensius shouted out his orders, and threatened terrible punishments to those he knew were best motivated by fear, while offering encouragement to the rest. When the Durotriges yelled abuse from the darkness, Hortensius returned it in kind at top parade-ground volume.
Finally the sky began to lighten over to the east, slowly gathering pale luminescence, until there was no mistaking the approach of dawn. To Cato it seemed that the morning was being drawn across the horizon almost by the willpower of the legionaries alone as each man gazed longingly towards the growing light. Slowly the dark geography around them resolved itself into faint shades of grey and the legionaries could at last see the enemy once again, faint figures stretching out on either flank, shadowing the cohort as it struggled on, exhausted and battered but still intact and ready to summon up enough strength to resist one last onslaught.
Ahead the ground gently rose up to a low crest and as the front ranks of the century reached the ridge, Cato looked up and saw, no more than three miles away, the neatly defined outline of the ramparts of the Second Legion's fortified encampment. Over the thin dark line of the palisade hung a dirty brown haze of woodsmoke and Cato realised how hungry he felt.
'Not long now, lads!' Macro called out. 'We'll be back in time for breakfast!'
But even as the centurion spoke, Cato saw that the Durotriges were massing for another attack. One last attempt to obliterate the enemy who had managed to evade destruction all night. One last effort to exact a bloody revenge for their comrades whose bodies lay scattered along the line of march of the Fourth Cohort.
Chapter Sixteen
'Yesterday afternoon, you say?' Vespasian raised his eyebrows as the cavalry decurion finished making his report.
'Yes, sir,' replied the decurion. 'Though more dusk than afternoon, sir.'
'So why has it taken you until dawn to get back to the legion?'
The decurion's gaze flickered down for an instant. 'At first we kept running into them, sir. Seemed that they were everywhere, horsemen, chariots, infantry – the lot. So we swung back and circled round during the night. I realised I'd lost my bearings after a while and had to make a best guess. Before first light, we were way over to the east, sir. Took us a while before we even sighted Calleva. Then we made the best time we could, sir.'
'I see.' Vespasian scrutinised the decurion's expression for any sign of guile. He would not tolerate any officer who put his personal safety before that of his comrades. Covered in mud and clearly exhausted, the decurion stood to attention with all the dignity he could muster. There was a tense silence as Vespasian stared at him. At last he said, 'What was the Durotriges' strength?'
He was pleased to see the decurion pause to consider the question before replying, rather than impulsively trying to gratify his legate with a hurried guess.
'Two thousand… maybe as many as two and a half thousand, but no more than that, sir. Perhaps a quarter were heavy infantry. The rest were light troops, some armed with slings, and possibly thirty chariots. That's all I could see, sir. More of them may have turned up during the night.'