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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Banks of the Danube,

North of Vindobona

May 20th, 166 CE

“Lēgāte, futui sumus,” Centurion Lucius Sextius Caelius, the First Spear of the Tenth Legion Gemina, said to its commander.

He was standing on the ground by the legate’s right knee, as the senior officer sat his charger, resplendent in muscled cuirass, scarlet cloak and official sash of the same color. When the man looked down, the eyes under his crested, heavily decorated helmet were fixed and staring in a way that made the senior centurion suddenly realize his commander had come to the same conclusion as he had about their situation.

And had no earthly idea of what to do about it.

The tribunes were all out somewhere trying to shore things up, except for the highest-ranking one, the tribunus laticlavius. Who was a young second cousin of the legate and was having a very permanent nap over yonder, where he’d stopped a slingstone by head-butting it.

Lucius went on, hoping to get through to the man:

“These Hermanns, there are just too many of them, sir, and they’re not stopping for shit. Sir.”

Lucius wiped a cloth at the blood running into his eyes from the cut on his brow; he could taste it, mixed with the even more familiar salt of sweat running down and under the cheekpieces of his helmet. It wasn’t the first time he’d tasted his own blood in twenty-three years with the Eagles, or the twenty-third for that matter, but he didn’t recall ever feeling such a conviction of impending death along with it.

Plus the usual aches and stings, a feeling in the muscles of his shield arm that reminded him he wouldn’t see forty-four again, the throbbing headache you got from wearing a helmet all day (and getting thumped on it occasionally), and a thirst so complete that even gulping down a full canteen on his way here from the left flank hadn’t cut it much.

He’d been making payments on a snug little villa south of Vindobona for his retirement for years, and his woman of twenty years and their children lived there. They’d already been drawing up plans and an invitation list for the official wedding when this last hitch was over at the end of next year, gregarius miles style. His eldest boy Marcus was just about old enough to enlist himself, and champing eager to do it, the young fool.

What a waste of money I could have spent on drinking Falernian and screwing fancies and betting as much as I felt like on slow charioteers and clumsy gladiators.

He felt as if he was chewing on brass strips, coated with bitter alum. Dying in battle himself was one thing. It surprised him to wake up alive some mornings and he hadn’t really expected to make it this far. This was the biggest battle he’d ever been in, but there had been plenty of fighting on this frontier even during the ostensible peace of Antoninus Pius’ reign.

But if this monumental buggering cladis went the way he thought it would there would be nothing left of the Tenth but the detachments sent to the Parthian war. The countryside would be burned out all the way south to Sirmium . . . or even further. The Marcomanni host had already shed a dandruff of raiding parties who found pillage more attractive than a pitched battle, and there were pillars of smoke to the west and south marking their progress.

“We’re in some difficulties, yes, Primus Pilus,” the legate said stolidly.

Lucius fought down an impulse to scream and hack the man’s leg off; it wouldn’t do any good. Neither would replying:

Some difficulties, yes, and the Alps are likely to slow you down a bit, you blue-blooded filius meretricis!

They were about a mile southwest of the Danube here, and on a long low slope facing northeast. There were woods on the other side of the road behind them, both a bit further upslope still, but the command group had an excellent view of the engagement over their own troops’ heads.

Here the Romans were, their line running from a little west of north to a little east of south; there the Hermanns were, right now in close contact. It was painfully obvious that the Marcomannic line was a lot thicker than the Roman, though the terrain features securing the flanks meant they couldn’t overlap, and they didn’t have enough discipline to rotate their front rank with rested men. Which was probably why there were still Romans alive on this field.

Not just Marcomanni and Quadi. Long-beards, Vandalii . . . odds and sods from all over the sodding Barbaricum.

The battle would have been mostly amid fields of barley that would be ready for harvest in summertime, if thousands of men hadn’t been trampling—and killing and dying—across it since an hour before noon. Now it was looking to be a red sunset in a few hours, of which the only good feature was that now the sun was in the enemy’s eyes. Dust was heavy on his tongue, and the stink was thick enough to cut into chunks and burn like peat.

It would also have been a very good position, if the Tenth was at full strength, putting the enemy in the dubious position of fighting uphill, with a big deep river at their backs. The lowest parts of the slope were . . . had been . . . in young fruit trees and pollarded willows, which slowed and broke up German attacks a little. The Roman right wing was secured on a low wooded hill, and their left on one that was bare, but steep on its eastern side.

Cavalry and reserves had been stationed behind, to contain any breakthrough and pursue once the barbarians lost heart. Pursuit meaning cavalry and auxiliaries taking the heads in their usual fashion, and chasing the rest into the Danube to drown, and with luck leaving some prisoners to sell.

Except that the reserves had all been committed, and then chunks of cavalry had been dismounted and pushed into thin spots, and now the line was nothing but thin spots and the men were starting to look over their shoulders and it was hard to blame them.

“Sir, if we were full strength, we could have done this. But we had five thousand three hundred and twenty-two men to start with as of the morning roll call, that’s counting every ass-wiping piece of sponge from the auxiliaries. We’re half strength, with the detachments off east. I know it, you know it, and that spurcifer Prince Ballomar over there knew it when he started this, and we just can’t hold them here anymore. If we pull back now maybe we can get some men back to Vindobona—get the standard away, at least.”

The Eagle of the Tenth stood not far from where the legate sat his horse, swept-back golden wings outstretched with the aquilifer carrying the staff proudly, lion’s head on his helmet and the guard from Lucius’ own cohort around it. His face was impassive; you had to be unmoved by death, your own or another’s, to get that position.

To the First Spear’s eyes the golden wings shone with holiness and dread. The divine Julius Caesar had bestowed it, when the Tenth was raised for the conquest of Gaul more than two hundred years ago. The Tenth had carried it from one end of the world to the other. Legionnaires would die for the standard as they would for Rome—the Eagle was Rome.

And there were many times their number of Germans down there, all of the barbarians ready and eager to help them do just that sort of heroic self-sacrifice. The Tenth had come out here expecting a really big raiding party . . . 

And found a giant army of nothi Germanici burning and plundering and killing and molesting the sheep.

It wasn’t like granddad’s day, either. It wasn’t naked savages with clubs, or a metal point on their wooden spears if they were really lucky. Though there were still plenty of madmen possessed by Wōdinaz, bare-arsed save for their holy bearskins . . . and you had to cut them to ribbons before the frothing-mouthed bastards would decently die, as well.

But far too many of the Marcomanni and Quadi and other border tribes had done hitches in the auxilia by now, or their brothers and fathers and grandfathers and cousins had, and brought back what they’d learned to pass on to youngsters. The chiefs and their handfast men had mail coats nowadays, and good helmets and shields and some idea of how to fight in groups.

Even a lot of the ordinary farmers the chiefs called up to fight had at least metal-strapped leather caps and boiled cowhide breastplates and a reasonable spear and sword—Roman merchants would sell them gear in exchange for their cattle and pigs and furs and sometimes for their neighbors, and their own smiths kept picking up tricks.

The legion was still killing them two or three to one . . . 

But there’s always a Hermann irrumātor number three and four and five, he thought, despairing. All right, now he tells me to go back to my post, and I do, and we all die. Kill a few Hermanns first, and at least I won’t have to live with the shame of losing our Eagle.

Hooves clattered behind the command group and his head twisted around automatically, but the party coming down from the road were obviously Romans, you could tell that at a glance. For that matter, they still had some cavalry covering the flanks and rear, enough to raise the alarm if not block any move in force.

Romans, but civilians and therefore useless, he thought.

The legate’s mounted guard detail swiveled their horses and brought spears down in an X as one of the newcomers broke away and rode close, but Lucius recognized who it was. Josephus ben Mattias, the merchant—a Jew, a citizen, moderately rich until recently and then somehow much richer, well known along the frontier as a hard bargainer but one who kept his deals fairly and to the inch. What he was doing here, the Gods only knew. He had a German bodyguard with him, an ex-gladiator like most in the trade, though not that weird Sarmatian she-devil he’d used to drag around.

“Hail, most noble Legate Sextius Lollius Tiberianus,” the Jewish merchant cried formally, saluting.

He was in helmet and mail shirt himself, and his Latin had only a little of the characteristic lilt of someone who’d spoken Greek first and learned the Roman tongue later.

“Let him through!”

Josephus preempted questions: “As a loyal citizen of the rēs pūblica Rōmāna, I have brought my household, my friend Lucius Triarius Artorius and his household”—even then, Lucius’ eyes narrowed slightly. There were rumors about a newcomer of that name, wild ones—“and a new weapon of great power to your aid on this bloody day,” he said . . . or declaimed.

He pointed to the left wing, the northern wing, where the First Cohort had been doing its best since it was sent to contain a breakthrough an hour and a half ago, and where a column of Germans was obviously getting ready for a final push. Screaming and stamping their feet and hammering swords and spears on their flat plank shields, with various crude-to-bestial standards and banners swaying and chiefs giving pep talks. Some of them were doing it while standing on shields held up to shoulder height by their followers.

Six oddly harnessed six-horse teams from the road behind the Romans were heading to the hill there at a slow trot, their wheeled burdens bouncing behind them as they took the slope. On the western side that rose gently, until it ended in a near cliff facing the foe.

“They are going there. Have I your permission to act to support the emperor’s loyal soldiers?”

“Yes, yes,” the legate said.

The oddity seemed to jar him a little out of his funk, if only in the sense that an irritating fly you had to brush out of your face would.

Primus Pilus, see to it on the way back to your cohort!”

“Sir!” Lucius said, and signed his optio forward with his horse.

The First Spear leapt creditably into the saddle, very nimbly for a man in his early forties, wearing armor and after a very hard day.

“What the caca is going on, Josephus?” he asked the Jew as they cantered along behind the line. “What are you doing here? New weapon? What does that mean? You’ve got Hercules’ club or Jupiter’s thunderbolt with you? Or Mithras is dropping in for a drink? Your Jew God throws thunderbolts too, doesn’t he? I’ll take anything I can get right now. Including Wōdinaz and Thunraz and Balðraz if they were on my side.”

“He smites in any way He pleases, honored senior Centurion, with fire or plague or flood,” Josephus said. “The Lord gives, the Lord takes, blessed be the name of the Lord.”

They were far enough behind that no stray arrows or slingstones were likely to impede their passage; if the First Spear was going to die, he intended to do at the head of his own personal command. There wasn’t much wreckage or detritus or many bodies (except for the laid-out Roman wounded being attended to) either, because the Roman force had been falling back slowly over the past hour. The whatevers the Jew had brought looked a little like carroballistae now, though he couldn’t see any details.

Any of those would be welcome; usually a legion had about fifty of the mobile dart throwers, but the detachments sent to the Parthian war in the east had taken nearly all of them. The country was more open there anyway, and they were very useful against cavalry hanging on your flanks. The Parthians had forts and walled cities too, though their field armies were mostly mounted archers and cataphracts. Most of the fighting here had been against small raiding parties for nearly a generation now.

The bolt casters had been sorely missed in a biggish set-piece battle like this. Fifty of them showering four-foot darts through two or three men at a time, shield or armor or no, would be just what was needed to discourage the Hermanns now whipping themselves into a frenzy around Prince Ballomar right opposite his own First Cohort. And obviously intending to punch through and roll up the line; just the spot to send your reserves, if you still had any reserves.

Which we don’t. Six catapults . . . six will be six better than none. Not enough, but some help.

The distance behind the line also made it possible to talk at something less than a complete scream, because it gave them a slight distance from the waterfall roar of combat. Battle cries and screams of agony and rage, metal thudding on shields and occasionally clanging iron on iron, the whicker of arrows and the whistle of javelins, bellowed orders and the sound of cornua and tubae.

He noted absently that the merchant was using one of those big new-fangled saddles with rests for the feet on straps, but didn’t have enough time to comment on it as Josephus went on:

“And I meant just what I said, Primus Pilus, a new . . . a novel weapon,” Josephus said with a tight smile. “You won’t believe it until you see it and hear it anyway. I didn’t,” he added mysteriously.

A few hundred paces ahead of them the six-horse teams were wheeling half a dozen somethings into line abreast on the hill that anchored the Tenth Legion’s left wing. That had a barely perceptible slope up from the road, but a really sudden, steep drop-off ten paces high or a bit more toward the river eastward. You could climb it from that direction, but you’d need to use your hands, or a spear butt, and you couldn’t do it quickly.

Now he was close enough to see that the machines looked a bit like ordinary field catapults, but mounted differently. On two-wheeled carriages, not just carried in a small cart. The two-wheeled arrangement had been linked to another two-wheeled cart by a pole, and the second vehicle apparently held ammunition. Now they were being unlinked and the ammunition carriers opened up and when the pole was dropped to the ground the catapult was at throwing level.

Clever, he thought. Faster to move around a battlefield.

Josephus smiled, looking almost smug despite the massed German mad-dog killers less than long bowshot away.

“It’s not the catapults, though they’ve some good new tricks, it’s what they’ll be throwing,” he said. “Hail and fare you well, Primus Pilus! May we meet and drink together to victory after the battle! Oh, and beware—there will be very loud noises.”

He spurred his horse toward the hill, looping around to take it from the easy western side. Lucius turned right, down the slope to the Roman position, slid off his mount as someone took the reins and strode forward to his position beside the cohort standard—a tall spear with two scarlet tassels hanging from a crossbar at the top, and the crowns and disk medallions of unit decorations below.

His optio handed him his shield and he settled the nearly twenty-pound weight of laminated wood and leather and iron by strap and handgrip, ignoring another sharp twinge in his shoulder. He’d been hefting it, or the double-weight training version, since his enlistment—and before, when his own father, who’d been a promoted ranker, put him through his paces.

So I can use it today until the Hermanns kill me, which shouldn’t be long. You can rest when you’re dead.

The next-senior centurion shouted into his ear; they were only three ranks back from the front and the noise was like the end of the world.

“What orders?” Lucius heard bawled into the side of his head.

“Stand and die, what else?” he screamed back. “Let’s take some of the fellatizing Hermann bumboys with us.”

The noise ebbed just a bit as the Germans in actual contact on this flank backed and then trotted away to join the mass forming for the next attack, snarling and roaring and throwing things that banged and rattled on the Roman shields like hail on a tile roof as they went. One rock slammed into his own upraised shield, rocking him back on his heels and making him thankful for the pain in his shoulder. It beat having the stone slam into his face, beat it all the way to the River Styx and back.

The Roman troopers took the opportunity to switch ranks at the centurions’ orders, or in some cases the optios if the century commander was dead; the frontline men stepping sideways and then walking backward between the files in a clatter of armor as the next rank stepped up, then switching to the rearmost position, leaning on their shields and gasping, gulping water cut with raw issue wine that was nearly vinegar until they coughed, and tending to hurts too minor to send you back to the medicii.

Everyone was tired, though. A lot of the faces beneath the helmet-brims were gray, a lot of limbs had rough bandages of rags around them.

“What’s that?” the other centurion asked, pointing to the hill on their left.

Lucius glanced that way. The catapults were in position ten paces up and a hundred and fifty north. They looked ready for business; they had an unusual arrangement of two metal shields on either side of their throwing trough, hinged to the vertical bronze tubes that contained the sinew springs, and thin lines of smoke were coming up from behind them.

Maybe the new weapon was flaming bolts, which might impress the Hermanns. Though they wouldn’t kill them any deader than dead. Setting your target’s chest hair on fire after skewering his gizzard was gilding the lily.

“It’s that crazy Jew merchant Josephus, brought us some carroballistae, says they’re improved types and heap big bad news,” he yelled. “Got a friend with a spooky reputation with him. Can’t hurt, and I’ve got to grant him guts.”

“I’ll buy him a long drink and a thousand years with the best whores in the afterlife,” the other centurion shouted, grinning. “With the ghosts of Helen of Troy and Dido of Carthage in his bed at the same time, if I get a big enough pension from Hades.”

Lucius nodded. “No brains, since he’s come to join in this cluster buggery, but guts to spare, I grant him that.”

He shrugged armored shoulders: “Jews, what can you say?”

It was commonly known that Jews were crazy; the number of doomed rebellions they’d launched against the Empire was solid evidence of that, if refusing to eat delicious ham wasn’t proof enough of madness. Detachments from the Tenth had fought Bar Kokhba’s uprising in Judea when his own father was a new-minted optio, just thirty years ago now. And from the old man’s stories it had been pretty much like fighting rabid Germanii drunk on Wōdinaz, except extremely quick and tricky ones instead of lumbering ox-stupid dolts foaming at the mouth.

“Now let’s push your century to—”

The first of the catapults on the hill cut loose with the familiar tunng-WHACK, though much louder than you’d expect from a light carroballista. It was throwing some sort of round projectile, not a dart, and it blurred through the air trailing smoke . . . 

* * *

As the little column came off the road Artorius reined his horse aside and pointed.

“There!” he shouted, pointing at a hill on the north end of the Roman line. “Set up there, a bit back from the edge of the slope down eastward, and angled back from the right to take the enemy in defilade!”

Filipa Chang nodded, Sarukê saluted, and the six . . . 

Engines, he thought.

Six engines of the battery headed that way across the trampled grain stalks of the field, bouncing a little as the wheels hit furrows. Sarukê and Filipa were in the lead, the Sarmatian to manage the teams with her near-supernatural talent for handling horses, and Filipa to site the catapults and oversee their operation. He’d discovered she was very good at estimating ranges, and that was a valuable talent now that tracking lasers were nostalgic memory.

None of the crews were trying to run away screaming, at least, though the freed slaves and tenant’s sons looked to be feeling a combination of fear and exaltation as they ran along beside the catapults. The scar-faced grizzled veterans riding on each lead left-hand draught horse were mostly grinning, or at least snarling in a contented sort of way.

They knew what their new toys could do, and were willing to risk German spears to see it happen with live, but soon to be dead, targets.

The hill had a gentle slope on the western side, and dropped off more sharply on the east, which was perfect. Josephus peeled off with a wave to talk to the legate, since you had to at least make a gesture toward the chain of command; Artorius waved back, then ignored him and concentrated on his part of the job, heeling his horse into a gallop after his command.

He pulled up just as the teams wheeled to put the business end of the engines toward the enemy, each one to the left a bit further forward, following the line his left arm cut as they’d been trained.

“Dablosa!” he called to the chief bodyguard. “Get your men about ten yards in front of the engines. Deal with anyone who comes up over the lip of the hill.”

The Dacian nodded and sorted his three men out—one was still in Vindobona with Mark and Paula.

The battery were about twenty feet up above the rest of the battlefield here, which would help a bit, and he could see a massed enemy formation forming into a blunt wedge—what the Germans called a swine array, named for its resemblance to the head of a wild boar.

Obviously someone on the other side, probably Prince Ballomar himself, intended to snap the Roman line at the end and roll it up.

These aren’t like field guns, he thought, not for the first time, looking at his soon-to-be-no-longer-secret-weapons. Think of them as field mortars, but short ranged. Those bombs have about the same punch as a heavy mortar round. But we never got targets like this. Like firing into a subway platform in New York at rush hour!

They were about two hundred yards away from the enemy, and the ground between the Germans and the Tenth Legion’s line of battered shields was littered with broken weapons and dead men—the dead mainly Germans, many with the Suebian hair knot above their right ears, but scores of armored Romans too. Each deposit of corpses or twitching, moaning wounded ran in wavering north-south lines across the slope.

“Like waves on a beach,” he murmured to himself. “Washing higher and higher each time.”

The smell was pretty bad; he’d been close to ripped-open bodies before, but not in thousands-strong masses like this, and it was as if a major blood bank had slashed all its containers and let them flow into an open sewer, and then the sun heated it all until it steamed. Battles in this age were concentrated, not like the twenty-first century, when you dispersed to survive.

Concentrated in time and space.

Here you fought close enough to see a man’s eyes and smell the stink of his breath. Such safety as there was meant standing shoulder to shoulder with your comrades; it was just as deadly as the fighting he’d done in his younger days, but less lonely.

The noise was a white blur at this range, but a snarling beat was growing from the German swine array, the individual screams and howls settling into a unified:

Ha-ba-da, Ha-ba-da, HA!-BA-DA, HA!-BA-DA . . . ”

And then they broke into a screaming, pounding run with the standards of their chiefs—often topped by the skulls of men and horses, bears and wolves—leaning forward with the war leaders and their sworn men grouped around them. Prince Ballomar’s own flag, an antlered man with a spear painted on cloth and hanging from a crossbar, was toward the point of it. Artorius . . . who rarely thought of himself as Arthur Vandenberg any more . . . pointed to it and shouted:

“Filipa! That flag is the aiming point!”

She didn’t look up as she dashed from one catapult to another, but she waved an arm without turning. They’d mounted the weapons on something like Civil War Napoleon twelve-pounder carriages, except that they had split trails—the recoil was low enough that you could do that, and each trail had a big spade’s-head thing on the end that dug into the ground. As the trails were drawn apart the horse teams wheeled around to face away from the business end of each weapon; a man ran back with a rope and hook and hitched it to the drawbars.

The horses pulled, with the drivers yelling and urging them on . . . and a ratcheting sound came as that force went through pulleys to draw back the curved iron throwing arms. Each was run into a slot in a bronze column full of twisted ox sinews, one each on either side of the throwing trough. A six-horse team could exert a lot of force and the pulleys they’d rigged used mechanical advantage well. The draw weight was in multiple tons and it didn’t take long to cock the action, seconds rather than minutes.

He was close enough to see the fixed grin of tension as the nearest catapult team brought a round bronze ball from the limber; they knew what it could do, and they were only just convinced that the foreign magicians could keep the evil spirits under control. It was the size of a man’s head, sheet metal soldered and crimped together from two halves beaten into shape around a wooden ball. The all-up weight was twenty-five pounds or so, with the powder and lead shot inside.

Filipa bent behind the sights of the first: “Range two hundred—up . . . up . . . left traverse . . . that’s right!”

Then: “Light the fuse!”

The crew chief opened the top of a perforated brass candleholder and applied the flame inside to the loose end of the long string. That ran from a wooden plug through the bronze sphere that sat ahead of the cable linking the throwing arms. The fuse was woven hemp soaked in saltpeter solution and carefully dried, and it caught with a sputter and shower of sparks. A moment’s wait to be sure it had taken, and—

“Shoot!”

Tunng-WHACK!

The curved four-foot arms whipped forward too quickly to actually see; they seemed to jump from full back to slamming into the rope-wound rests without crossing the intervening space. The ball wasn’t quite as fast; it was a blurred streak leaving the throwing trough, but you could follow it once it was a hundred feet away, and it was trailing a thin plume of smoke and sparks.

The Germans reacted; they knew about catapults even if they didn’t use them. It would be a rock, traveling fast. It might kill one man, or two or three, and cripple more. That didn’t mean much to them, not with victory in front of their eyes . . . and the eyes of sworn lord, comrades, kinfolk, neighbors and oath brothers on them, to witness their honor or their shame.

Arrows or spears or stones from a sling could kill just the same, after all, and a man who died facing the foe feasted with the Gods forever. A bubble of space shaped like a teardrop opened where a practiced eye could see the shot would fall; they wanted to kill before they died if they could, to have slaves in the afterlife.

Artorius levelled his binoculars, a taut grin on his face as he rode to the crest of the hill nearest the enemy. They’d all seen what the spray of raiding parties spun off from the Marcomanni host thought was a pleasant day’s exercise in the fresh air.

These guys have it coming. Oh, so much.

The bronze sphere struck the newly cleared space, bounced head high and spinning, visibly bent out of shape, and—

CRACK!

A snapping flicker of red light, instantly hidden by the puff of dirty gray smoke. Black powder made the fog of war more than a metaphor—in fact, he was pretty sure that was what had given rise to the proverb in the first place. Scores of men opened out from that center like the petals of a flower—an incongruous image for limbs torn loose, blood and bits of flesh and sharp fragments of bone spattering twenty yards, brains cracked open like hen’s eggs by lead balls traveling too fast to see.

Thirty-yard kill radius, he thought coldly. Quite a few of them within thirty yards.

One severed head arched up, still covered in a helmet that had a gilt boar as a crest, seemed to pause for a second, then fell back into the smoke. Beyond the circle of dismembered and the dead were a penumbra of figures that shrieked and writhed and crawled. The harsh fireworks stink drifted toward them on the westward breeze.

And the Marcomanni swine array froze in place—jerkily, by blobs and sections and individuals, looking back over their shoulders or craning around to see what the thundercrack meant.

“Battery—shoot!” Filipa shouted.

She’d been at that farmhouse too.

Tunng-WHACK! Tunng-WHACK! Tunng-WHACK! Tunng-WHACK! Tunng-WHACK!

That curiosity meant none of the Marcomanni were looking up when the next five bombs arrived; they mostly hadn’t realized the catapult had anything to do with the big noise yet. And then right on the heels of the sound of the catapults:

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!

Like a ripple of monstrous firecrackers in a string, by malignant luck landing nearly down the middle of the swine array. Artorius grinned savagely as the whole formation vanished amid a fivefold ripple of red flashes and clouds of smoke.

When that began to clear a few seconds later, overlapping circles of dead and wounded lay, or moaned and screamed and whimpered and writhed and tried to crawl or tried to stuff guts back into bodies.

The fringe at the rear was running—he trained his field glasses and saw men limping, or with faces blood splashed and distorted by terror looking over their shoulders . . . And he saw unwounded warriors throwing away shield and spear and dashing for the Danube, heedless and witless and howling in bug-eyed terror, with tears running down their bearded faces. By then the second volley was ready:

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!

“Cease fire!” he shouted.

They only had enough for twelve rounds from each catapult, and that made his back teeth ache from clenching. That wasn’t enough to actually kill off many of the enemy as a share of their total numbers, which were huge. Even with the dense-packed formations there just wasn’t enough ammunition or enough launchers.

It would have to be a mental gut punch or kick in the crotch, alien and incomprehensible and terrifying even to hardened killers.

That seemed to be working, though the unfamiliarity would be gone after this. There weren’t many Germans left around the area that they’d selected as the launching ground for their final attack, and most of those were running. They were probably screaming that Thunraz of the Thunder had aimed his hammer at them, which from their point of view was a perfectly rational explanation. They lived in a perceptual universe alive with spirits good or bad, the barrier between world and otherworld thin as cloth.

Which all meant that right now Wōdinaz wasn’t with them after all, they weren’t going to win, and evil spirits would eat their souls if they didn’t get out of Dodge, pronto.

The grin died as he saw that Prince Ballomar’s standard was still up; and there were about sixty or seventy warriors with him, hale or at least still standing. The barrage had landed not where he was but where he’d been a few seconds before, probably unavoidable and providing him with—living—shields to absorb the lead shot.

A tall man in armor of gilded scales, with a rearing serpent or dragon on the top of his helmet, stood beneath it. Artorius focused his glasses; the man’s face was covered in blood, probably mostly other people’s, which made his teeth more white by contrast as he shouted—and pointed his sword right at the hill that bore the catapults.

Oh, shit, Artorius thought, startled into English. Why can’t enemies all be conveniently slow on the uptake?

Ballomar started forward, swinging the sword around his head in a flashing glitter. The standard-bearer followed, and then men by ones and twos and then groups. Even with ears battered by the explosions, Artorius could hear their shrieks—mostly on the lines of:

Slahadau!”

Which was the imperative form of the verb “to kill.” It was one of the first things you picked up in the Proto-Germanic of this century. Fuchs had packed a book on that ur-language, too.

Kill!

Slahadau ubilôz wikkaniz!”

“Kill the evil wizards!

“Oh, shit,” he said.

Then he dismounted and ran for the nearest limber. Filipa was standing frozen—she’d seen what he had, and knew they couldn’t depress the catapults enough to bear on this threat. Sarukê was beside her, mounted and reaching for her bow; Sarmatians were nomads and didn’t have a hang-up about retreating, but she wasn’t going to leave her friend, lover and sword-sister. Josephus and his bodyguard were galloping up from the base of the hill to the west; the Jew was drawing his spatha, face set.

Sarukê looked at Artorius as he grabbed a ball out of the rack in the limber, turned and ran back toward the edge of the slope.

“Get the shot!” he screamed. “Light the fuses short!”

There were about as many of his followers around the catapults as there were German warriors with Ballomar, but they mostly weren’t really trained to sword and spear—it would be like ducks trying to fight wolves, or at least foxes. The veterans were highly skilled but past their best, there was Sarukê, and the four other ex-gladiators . . . 

And I’m no Miyamoto Musashi with the sword yet, either.

His example did more than his words, as he ran toward the edge of the slope leading down to the battlefield. Sarukê moved first, and Filipa a moment later, both snatching round bombs out of the closest limber and dashing after him. The Sarmatian woman even had the fuse on hers cut short by the time her horse arrived at the edge, because she’d caught the cord between her teeth and trimmed it with her dagger as she rode.

Artorius copied her, and noticed Filipa doing so too; it was a three-arm job if you wanted speed. He pulled something he’d just had made for the battery out of his pouch; a brass tube full of the new distilled naptha, with a flint and a steel in the form of a wheel, beside a wick running down into the reservoir, all covered by a hinged lid.

Not quite the Ronson granddad had in Vietnam, but it’ll do, he thought, as his thumb spun it.

A nearly invisible flame touched the end of the short-cut fuse. He hefted the twenty-five pound weight overhead in both hands and stepped to the edge of the steep drop, a knife-sharp break here. That gave him eyes on Prince Ballomar not twenty feet below, toiling upward by chopping the edge of his big hexagonal shield into the ground to brace himself from slipping. Some of his followers had slipped, tumbling and sliding back down.

Dawi, wikkô!” Ballomar screamed.

In German, or the proto-language, that was the imperative of the verb to die; another term you picked up.

“Eat this, filius canis!” Artorius . . . or Vandenberg . . . shouted back, and threw it hard at his face.

Then he threw himself back from the lip of the steep slope, twisting in the air and landing facedown, arms over his head. He’d seen Ballomar in the beginnings of a frantic duck too, but he didn’t have any place to hide.

CRACK!

This time he was close enough to feel the hot wind from the explosion, and hear the whine of a few lead balls.

Filipa lit and threw hers a second later; Sarukê did the same, wheeled her horse, leaned far over, snatched Filipa up and had her slung across the saddle and safely a few yards distant when—

CRACK! CRACK!

The last explosion seemed to push the final group of Marcomanni over the lip of the slope; one was smoking all along one side, and fell over limply. Prince Ballomar wasn’t limp, though the thin bronze of the serpent crest on his helmet had been cut through and dangled to one side, and his shield arm was drooping. He panted like an overburdened hound, and blood and spittle ran from his broken teeth and sprayed out ahead of him and down his reddish-blond beard.

The ex-gladiator bodyguards were all sprinting in his direction, but they’d need a few seconds . . . 

There were no words in the barbarian prince’s scream as he charged, sword high. Artorius waited; no point in trying to leap to his feet wearing a mail shirt, that would just trap him halfway up.

Instead he held himself motionless until the long blade passed the top of its arc and started to drive down.

Let him think the evil wizard is paralyzed with fear of his heroic manliness, he thought.

That was probably how it usually went in their sagas or songs or whatever.

Never hurts to be underestimated in a fight.

Then he jerked aside just enough at the very last instant. The steel plunged into the soft dirt beside him, spraying some into his face. His left hand snapped out and caught the sopping-wet sleeve of Ballomar’s right arm and pulled hard.

That gave him extra leverage as his left leg came up, knee bent, and then straightened with all the strength of his thigh to drive the heel of his boot into the other man’s crotch below the short mail shirt. There was a hard thump and the feel of things crushed flat and ruptured between the hammer of the hobnailed leather and the anvil of Ballomar’s pubic bone.

Even through the berserker fury, that went home. The other man froze, eyes bulging, mouth open and working but unable even to scream. Artorius flicked himself upright with the Marcomannic chief as a lever and kicked again, a side-thrust kick into the side of the prince’s knee.

There was a tooth-grating crackle; not bone breaking so much as tendons snapping as the joint was suddenly punched sideways in a way not suited to the design or construction of knees. Ballomar toppled, still trying to scream and instead making small mewling noises. Artorius scooped up the Marcomannic sword, put the point at the base of the other man’s throat, leaned both hands on the hilt and pushed.

He was panting as if he’d run two miles in full kit, and he staggered slightly as he wrenched it free. Fifteen feet away, Josephus was in the act of bringing his sword down on a Marcomanni in a mail shirt . . . but who’d lost his shield and helmet somewhere. His German bodyguard had just topped a head like a boiled egg, which made Artorius blink even now. Three more were being dispatched with businesslike efficiency by Dablosa and his crew.

Just then an arrow whickered past Artorius’ neck, nearly close enough to brush the feathers against his skin, and there was a meaty thock sound. His head whipped up, in time to see a tall warrior falling back with the arrow in the center of his face, dropping the heavy spear he’d been about to drive home.

Sarukê shot again, into the chest of another spearman not more than ten paces from Artorius. The Marcomanni looked down, coughed a sheet of blood, and collapsed. Artorius looked at her; Filipa had slid down and was holding herself upright by clutching at the stirrup leather of the new-style saddle, staring as the catapult crews swarmed forward and joined Josephus and Dablosa in dealing with the Germans still moving. Ganging them under three and four to one, with the veterans giving advice and sometimes stepping forward to drive home a blade.

The Sarmatian looked down and said to Filipa in her rough Latin:

“You know, Germanii-man think-say so how bow is unmanly weapon.”

Artorius started to laugh. The Sarmatian followed suit.

Filipa bent over and puked her lunch out on the horse’s hooves.


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Framed