Sword of Rome(139)

‘Form wedge.’

In a series of smooth movements, the cohort’s six centuries transformed from a square to an arrowhead formation, with Juva’s first century – eight men wide and ten deep – as the tip, two centuries at their backs, and finally three centuries to add critical mass in the rear. Valerius had seen Boudicca’s horde of warriors crushed to dust between Paulinus’s flying wedges. Now he would use the boar’s head to tear the heart out of the Twenty-first Rapax. He and Serpentius attached themselves to the middle rank of Juva’s first century.

‘Charge!’

Marcus and his gladiators had been warned of their coming and those who could made way. Those who couldn’t were smashed aside or trampled mercilessly underfoot. The first two lines of defenders had no warning and no chance as the equivalent of an armoured rhinoceros battered them down. The third line snapped like a piece of silk thread under the combined weight of four hundred and eighty men in tight formation. Without warning Valerius found himself in the open ground between the three Vitellian attacking lines and their reserve cohorts.

‘On,’ he screamed. ‘On!’

He wasn’t worried about what was happening behind him because he knew that the moment the line broke Benignus had agreed to throw his final two cohorts of reserves into the gap to guarantee victory. They would pour through the hole the Fifth cohort had punched and roll up the lines from the centre. Caught between two irresistible forces, the legionaries of Twenty-first Rapax would have the choice of retreating or dying where they stood. There would be no surrendering today.

Valerius’s task now was to keep the Vitellian reserves occupied until the attackers had done their job and could come to his aid. But there was another more powerful reason for the raw emotion in his cry.

‘On! On to victory! Kill the bastards!’

Because in the front rank of the centre enemy cohort, less than sixty paces away, he had seen a glint of gold. His mind transformed it into a spread of wings, a beak opened wide in a shrill cry of defiance and cruel eyes that glinted in the sunlight. An eagle. The eagle of the Twenty-first Rapax.

‘On! The eagle! Take the eagle!’

They were charging now, all cohesion lost, with Juva at their head. The Nubian’s long legs covered the ground faster than any other man and he ran with teeth bared in a face filled with elemental savagery, emitting a raw keening sound as he went. Valerius screamed until he thought his throat would tear and beside him Serpentius growled like an attack dog.

‘On!’ The centurions took up the cry. ‘The eagle!’

It was the symbol of the legion’s power, presented personally by the Emperor, but it was more than that. A legion which lost its eagle lost its soul, and even its identity. Legions which had lost their eagles could be not just disgraced, but disbanded. And somewhere in the raging inferno of his mind, Valerius desperately wanted to inflict that humiliation on these men who had dared to support a false Emperor. It didn’t matter that Vitellius was his friend. He should not have taken arms against his own country and condemned its people to the horrors of civil war. The eagle of the Twenty-first Rapax was Vitellius’s eagle and in that moment Valerius wanted more than anything else to take it from him.

‘Kill!’

The boar’s head had caught the Twenty-first’s commander by surprise and it took time for him to react, but the centurion in command of the centre reserve cohort understood that his formation was the focus of this attack. For the moment, his only option was to hold out until his neighbouring cohorts could reinforce him. He ordered his men to form square, with the legion’s eagle and the cohort standards in the centre. A special guard of his best men had orders to keep the aquila safe or die in the attempt. It was a sensible strategy and he was happy that it would work. The wedge might have broken three fragile lines, but it was only a single cohort and it could not break a stoutly defended square. He decided not to use his javelins, because when it came to it a javelin would outreach a sword and the threat would keep the attackers from closing. All he had to do was survive for a short time and these brave fools would die.

But the centurion did not take into account the fury and the strength of the attackers, nor the fact that they still had their own pila.

Valerius waited until they were close. ‘Throw!’ The spears sailed out and the defenders automatically raised their shields to protect themselves from the hail of missiles. By the time they recovered the Fifth was on them.

Juva smashed his way into the first rank, taking two defenders with him and turning the air red with sweeps of his short sword. Men ignored the spears that jabbed at them from behind the scuta and tore at the curved shields with their bare hands, reeling back only when they received some mortal blow or had their clutching fingers removed by a blade. The first few ranks battered their way into the square and the Vitellians fought with a terrible ferocity to seal the gap. Valerius and Serpentius, at the centre of the first century, added their weight to the attack and hacked at the survivors who rose, stunned, among the carnage. A hand clutched at Valerius’s leg and he sliced down with his gladius to cut a snarling face in two. Serpentius dispatched victims with the dismissive ease of a man who had spent half his life in the arena. But gradually, as the Fifth penetrated deeper into the Vitellian square, the men ahead in the formation were cut down and subsumed in the carpet of maimed and dead or sucked into individual combats, and the friends found themselves near to the point of the wedge. Valerius felt the Spaniard move closer to his right side.