‘First Adiutrix,’ he roared. ‘Ready!’
Officers repeated the cry all along the wall and a host of wide-eyed glaring faces anticipated the next order, twitching with the eagerness of starved hunting dogs. A few of the marine legionaries, driven half-mad by the waiting, would have risen, but checked at Valerius’s snarl. ‘Wait, you sons of sea spawn. You’ll have your chance. Wait!’
They waited until the ladders appeared on the wall. They waited until the wooden uprights began to vibrate beneath the feet of the men climbing them. And still he made them wait. Arrows lashed the air above the parapet and turned it into a place of death. ‘Wait!’
A first red and yellow shield appeared, raised high to protect the owner’s head from arrows and spears that had never appeared. The legionary was puzzled by the lack of opposition. He had expected to be dead by now. Valerius’s ears reverberated with the roars of the attackers, the shrieks of the dying, the deadly zupp of passing arrows and the clatter of iron spears breaking impotently against the walls.
‘Now!’ He roared the order above the cacophony.
Juva rose to tower over the twin boar emblem of the leading legionary’s scutum, a double-headed woodman’s axe held like a toy in his great paws. ‘Give a sailor an axe and watch the blood and teeth fly,’ an old friend had once told Valerius. Now he watched as the big Nubian brought the curved head down and in three terrible blows chopped the shield to splinters, leaving the incredulous owner holding little more than the boss and a few scraps of wood. But the men of the Fifteenth did not lack courage. With a scream of defiance, the man attempted to take the final step that would put him on the parapet. It was too easy. Valerius leaned out and stabbed down, forcing his gladius into the gaping mouth until blood vomited past the blade and the point scraped on backbone. The dying legionary went rigid and his fingers lost their grip on the ladder so that he fell backwards, taking the man below with him to his death. In the same instant, a second big sailor hurled a boulder that crushed a third attacker’s chest and splintered the rungs so that the whole construction fell apart, sending the remaining men into the ditch to be impaled on the iron-tipped hedgehogs, where their tent mates used them as human stepping stones. A similar combination of pitiless assaults saw off a second ladder. Meanwhile, powerful hands, long educated to push and haul on ships, expertly hooked the V-shaped ends of two specially prepared poles against the top rungs of the outermost of the four ladders. Desperate fingers scrabbled to free them, but the marine legionaries heaved until the ladders slowly swayed upright. With a terrible inevitability, they pitched slowly backward with the combined wail of a dozen doomed men heralding their entry to the Otherworld. A marine capered on the parapet, screaming insults at the seething mass of men below until an arrow took him in the eye and the caper turned into an elegant pirouette that sent him over the edge.
Valerius turned and a shudder of unease ran through him as he found himself staring into Juva’s smouldering eyes. Before he could react, the Nubian had run past him along the wall to where the occupants of a new ladder were just completing their climb. The topmost legionary swung his leg over the parapet and with a casual swing of his axe Juva severed it at the knee. While the shocked owner was staring incredulously at the mutilation, the axe reversed and looped up to take him below the chin, splitting his screaming face in two and sending his brass helmet spinning. The second man on the ladder advanced, head down, unaware of the fate of his comrade. When he finally raised his helmet to be confronted with Juva’s savage face and the plunging axe, he threw himself backwards, taking two men down with him. Juva waited at the top of the ladder, roaring defiance and daring anyone to meet him. The next man hesitated until a pilum thrown from the wall took him in the side and he fell away. Still, another took his place and scrambled doggedly upwards to where a spray of scarlet marked his end. Arrows peppered the parapet where they stood and Valerius hauled the Nubian away as a dozen new ladders targeted the gate. ‘You are more use to me alive than dead,’ he snarled. Juva glared at him for a moment and the axe twitched in his hands before he obeyed.
At their side, Serpentius grinned. ‘And I always thought sailors were soft.’
All that long day they held the walls, and all the long day the attackers fought and died. Fell back to regroup, attacked and died again. They were so brave that Valerius became sick of killing them. The life expectancy of any man who reached the parapet could be measured in seconds, but still they came and still the left-handed sword rose and fell, its blade clotted thick with the blood of countless victims. He killed, because if he did not kill Domitia Longina Corbulo would die. He killed to survive and he killed because Serpentius fought at his side and the Spaniard’s relentless savagery never waned.