‘Come on, Calgus, let’s drop the bombast. You’re an educated man, Roman educated if the stories are true. I don’t think you believe in shouting insults and arse-slapping any more than I do.’
The other man nodded, his face staying neutral.
‘Go on.’
‘In truth I am more impressed than I expected to be. Your control of those tribesmen is better than I’ve seen before, and your recruitment of a Roman tribune to lure his legatus into your grasp was a clever stroke. Or more likely he recruited you, eh?’
Equitius paused for a moment, allowing the fact of his knowledge of Perennis’s treachery to sink in. Calgus’s green eyes narrowed with unasked questions.
‘So, now that we’ve established that you’ve done a reasonable job so far, let’s get down to business. You could just have sent that rabble to die on our swords, but you chose to talk first, and while I’d like to think that’s because our reputation goes before us…’
Calgus smiled again, shaking his head in amusement.
‘Never let it be said you lacked a sense of humour, Prefect of the First Tungrians. I came to offer you the chance to leave this battlefield intact, before you force me to send my men to slaughter yours. Will you save those lives? My aims in making this war have always been limited to the goal of a negotiated peace with Rome, certain reasonable concessions for my people and honour for both sides. After all, without a settlement, this war could last for several campaigning seasons, and consume tens of thousands of Roman lives, soldiers and innocents both. This victory, combined with the threat my warbands pose to the frontier, should be enough to bring your governor to the negotiating table. Our demands are simple enough, and do not threaten an inch of Roman territory, so there should be no need for further loss of life. After all, I am, as you suggest, an educated and civilised man at heart.’
The prefect wondered what the tribes’ demands were, if not for some retreat from the frontier. Money in tribute and improved trading terms probably, removal of all Roman troops from their forts north of the wall for a certainty.
‘So you ask me to walk away from the fight? And let you away from this place before the other two legions and the rest of the Sixth arrive? I think not, Calgus. I think you know that the time you’ll need to break my line greatly increases the chance of our being rescued, and by overwhelming force. At the least we can buy your deaths with our own. I think you know you already have the victory, and want to save your own men’s lives for another fight. You know there are other legions out there, but you don’t know where, because you haven’t got any mounted scouts to send out. Your mounted bodyguard alone wouldn’t stand a chance, not with the Petriana roaming about looking for heads. Without that knowledge, and now that I have your traitor, you know you should disengage, and get away cleanly, but I’d guess that the tribal leaders won’t let you walk away from a fight this unbalanced. If we don’t leave the field we force you to fight just by standing there. True?’
The Briton smiled easily, gesturing back towards his waiting warriors.
‘Perhaps. The one certainty is that if you and your men don’t leave immediately then you will shortly pay the price for frustrating the will of a man with twenty times as many warriors as your entire cohort musters. Think about that, while you walk back to your command. You have a few minutes in which to spare us both further spilt blood. Otherwise the next time we meet your head will be stuck on a spear’s point.’
The prefect nodded solemnly.
‘Perhaps. But you’ll have climbed a high wall of your own dead to enjoy the sight.’ Calgus walked back to his bodyguard, his mind moving over the calculations. He guessed at ten centuries in the Tungrian line, a full cohort. Given time they would make the thin line’s flanks impossible to turn, protected by impassable barricades of hastily felled trees and rows of sloping wooden spikes to impale the unwary attacker. Attack now, or pull his men away to safety, the victory already under his belt and a Roman legatus’s probably dead?
He stopped and looked up at the Tungrian line again, musing on the grim faces that had stared back at him. His own people, so familiar, obdurate in defence, incandescent in assault, but with the overlay of Roman discipline to temper their courage, which made each one of them the equal of his best warriors in terms of simple killing power. The difference, the key difference, was that no matter what the provocation, the situation, little would persuade them to break their wall of shields, from behind which their short stabbing swords would flicker like the tongues of hundreds of deadly snakes. Refusing to enter the chaotic swirl of man-to-man combat, the Tungrians could afford to fight several times their number, the more numerous enemy without any means of applying that superiority in numbers. Just one cohort, though, eight hundred men against thousands of his own. How long could that take? Even if he lost as many as he killed, or even twice as many, it was an exchange that made more than adequate sense.
He walked on, jumping back into his chariot as he reached his bodyguard. Eyes turned to him, awaiting his command, the men ready to put their lives at risk.
‘They will not withdraw. Their prefect was disappointingly resolute.’
Aed raised his eyebrows, indicating a desire to speak.
‘Then we must fight, my lord. No warrior will willingly walk away from that many heads begging to be taken. Besides, many are not yet blooded…’
‘I agree. But it must be fast. The Roman spoke of other legions, and at the very least the other cohorts commanded by their legatus must be close at hand, and their bloody Petriana too. Handled properly, their cavalry and even one full legion could carve us to ribbons if they caught us here, even though we would be more than twice their number. Send a rider to Emer and Catalus’s warbands — they’ve stood and watched the others kill Romans, they must be raring to get into the fight.’
The tribal bands moved forward at the run, eager after watching their fellows rip the guts out of the hopelessly outnumbered cohorts. The younger men joshed each other as they ran, boasting breathlessly of the heads they would take, the older warriors straining to catch a glimpse of their adversaries and take their measure. The two leaders met as they ran, agreeing swiftly on a simple left and right split, nothing fancy in the amount of time they had, a straight forward charge and hack, using their superior strength in numbers to overwhelm the auxiliaries.
On their slope the Tungrians stood impassively, still hammering out the menacing rhythm of spear and shield, the noise numbing their senses to any fear, replacing the emotion with an incoherent sense of common identity. The cohort had ceased to be a collection of individuals, and had become an engine of destruction ready to strike. The relentless pulse of its fighting heart had stripped away the feeling of self from its members and left them in a state of detachment from reality, ready for the impersonal fury shortly to be required for their survival. They watched, still pounding out their defiance, as the enemy advanced quickly across the open ground to their front, forming up into lines that roughly matched their own, one hundred and fifty paces down the slope, out of spear’s throw. Another brief command rang out from the trumpeter, silencing the drumming and bringing their spears into the preparatory position for the throw. In the sudden silence the slight noises of weapons and armour were suddenly magnified, the dull clink of equipment ringing out across the slope as both sides made ready.
In the 9th Century’s front line Scarface and his mates braced themselves for the fight to come, the veteran soldier talking quietly to the men around him. Even the tent party’s watch officer deferred to the scarred soldier’s twenty years of experience.