Valerius glared at him. ‘What was that about?’
‘You’ll see.’ Valerius looked towards the century the Spaniard had chosen. It stood opposite one of the weak points he had identified in the Twenty-first’s line. Adiutrix’s former sailors had created a bulge in the enemy front rank, but couldn’t break the wall of shields. Serpentius tried to explain, but the air around the two men seemed to shake with the growing cacophony of sound as tens of thousands of men attempted to slaughter each other. Valerius had to put his ear to the Spaniard’s mouth to hear him. ‘Your problem is that you think of them as soldiers,’ Serpentius shouted. ‘They’re not soldiers, they’re killers, and they can do things that no soldier would even attempt. But being in the arena isn’t just about killing, it’s about entertaining.’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘Old Marcus taught me that. Please the crowd and the rewards will come. One day it might even be your freedom. But the crowd always wanted something more, something they’d never witnessed before. We would practise things that might never be seen in the arena, but made us faster and harder and turned us into athletes and acrobats. Watch.’
A dozen men in the gladiator century dropped to the ground and slithered their way like snakes through the legs of the fighting lines. At the same time, more men withdrew in threes from the unit and moved behind the third line, two of them holding a shield between them and one, the lightest and most agile of the three, backing further away.
‘What …?’
‘Wait.’
Even as Serpentius said the word, the sound of battle altered. The screams of the dying and the maimed remained undiminished, but the normal cursing and insults changed to cries of consternation and confusion. In that instant, Valerius understood what had happened and what would happen next.
‘Marcus, tell the men to prepare,’ he called urgently. ‘Serpentius, since you’re so fond of giving orders, tell Juva to bring his cohort forward.’
He ran across to Benignus and told him what was planned. The legate frowned. ‘You’re sure? It will weaken our reserves and it doesn’t seem very honourable.’
‘The only place for honour on a battlefield is when it’s over and you honour the dead.’ Valerius’s voice emerged harsher than he intended and the other man flinched. Valerius glanced back to the battle line. They didn’t have time for an argument. They must act now or the chance would be gone. ‘We have one chance to break them.’ The young legate recoiled from the savagery that accompanied the words, but Valerius was relentless. ‘You’ve seen what’s happening on the road.’ He pointed to their right, where the Praetorians were fighting and dying. ‘If we are to win, we have to win here.’
Benignus’s face flared red with fury. He had taken enough insubordination from this crippled upstart foisted on him by the Emperor. He opened his mouth to order Valerius back to his men, but the one-armed tribune laid a hand on his arm and the look on the scarred face silenced him.
‘One chance, Benignus. One opportunity for glory. But it must be now.’
The legate’s jaw clenched and unclenched and he felt the eyes of his aides on him. One chance. His eyes softened. ‘Very well.’ His voice was thick with emotion. ‘But give me a victory, Gaius Valerius Verrens, or die in the attempt.’
By the time Valerius reached his men, Juva’s cohort had lined up to their right. He called the Nubian and his senior centurion across and told them the plan. The centurion looked sceptical, but Juva’s eyes lit up with visions of glory. With a final check of their flank, Valerius gave the order. ‘Gladiators, forward, at the trot. Marcus, they know what to do?’
The lanista grinned. ‘What their tent mates are already doing.’
It was not the legionary’s way, but they weren’t legionaries, they were gladiators: trained killers. And it was effective.
Serpentius had sensed weakness in the enemy line the way he could sense weakness in an opponent’s defence. He knew the gladiators. Knew their qualities. And he knew that they were wasted in the reserves. He had ordered some of the century to crawl between the legs of their comrades and below the line of shields opposing them. A fully armoured legionary was difficult to kill. He fought from behind the protection of the curved scutum. Beyond the shield, his head was protected by an iron helmet and his body by the polished plates of the lorica segmentata. But get under the shield and a man with a short sword and no mercy could do terrible damage. Now those short, needle-pointed blades ripped up into unprotected groin and belly and the screams took on a new, horrifying dimension that sowed consternation and the seeds of panic among the tent mates of the screamers. At the same time, the remaining gladiators launched a second unorthodox assault. Acrobats, Serpentius had called them, and now they proved it. While two men held a shield face down between them, a third gladiator sprinted forward to leap on to the wooden platform and with perfect timing was propelled across the lines of fighting men and into the second and third lines of Vitellian troops to cause chaos and carnage. Their triumphs were short-lived – theirs was a virtual suicide mission – but their very existence caused dismay in the enemy ranks. These first efforts encompassed a section of line only a few dozen paces wide, but now Valerius threw more men into the attack and used all four centuries of gladiator reserves to broaden the point of contact. He waited behind the line, trying to gauge the effect of the new tactics. Gradually, the enemy’s first line disintegrated into a hundred individual fights. The shield wall was crumbling. Now was the time to break it. He ran back to where Juva’s Fifth cohort waited, eager to be part of the battle.