Prologue
Jan 1st 381 AD
A glacial wind screamed along the frozen
banks of the River Danubius. The waters – grey like the bruised sky – foamed
and churned, ragged chunks of ice bucking and clashing like warring galleys. At
a section where the currents fell calm, the ice had gathered, uniting to form a
broad, frozen rib that stretched from bank to bank.
From
the thickly-forested north, a whinny split the air, and the sound of hooves
rose like a speeding drumbeat. With a puff of falling frost, a lone Hun rider burst
from the treeline and sharply reined in his stocky mount. Zolt was a warrior of
many years with a face that was more scar than skin, bald but with a ring of
thin hair that hung to his shoulder blades and a threadlike moustache. He
walked his horse to the river shallows, eyeing the ice bridge with suspicion.
Tentatively, he heeled the steed forward. Clop…clop,
went the hooves as the animal stepped gingerly out onto the wintry walkway,
snorting and nickering. An eerie crackling sounded all around, shooting off in
every direction. He slowed for a moment, stricken with terror… but the ice
held. Rolling his shoulders, he sucked in a breath and guided his horse on, his
eyes widening and his lips peeling back in glee as he reached the southern
banks. He sped on up the short stretch of scarp there, frost flicking from his
mount’s hooves, before riding onto the plain. There, he circled, eyes switching
across the land: white, deserted, just the low moan of the winter wind. He
twisted in the saddle and shouted back to the northern banks in a throaty,
strange voice: ‘Tengri the Sky God has shown us the way. The bridge is good.
The door to the empire lies open!’
The
northern woods shook, frost and dead pine needles toppling in a shower, before
a thunder rose and Zolt’s band spilled into view. Seven hundred Hun riders,
wrapped in grey-brown furs and goatskins, backs laden with quivers, bows,
ropes, axes and spears, their horses small but hardy and muscular. ‘Whoop!’ they cried as they milled and
jostled at the northern end of the ice bridge, eager to join their leader on
the other side. They began crossing in a column, two abreast, chattering and
laughing amongst themselves, some swishing their swords in the air as if
lacerating invisible victims. The cries faded for a moment when the bridge
groaned and crackled in protest… but the ice again held good. The first of them
reached the end of the bridge and climbed up onto the southern banks to gather
around Zolt.
‘Tengri
has laid out great treasures for us,’ said Zolt. ‘See the rising smoke there?’
he pointed to the pale wisps rising from the south, about a mile away. ‘It is a
farm or a settlement of some kind.’ The
riders around him rumbled with excitement. For nearly five years the growing
Hunnic bands on the north side of the river had watched the goings-on in the
empire, locked out by this angry and unbridged artery of water. There had been
shambolic and disastrous attempts to craft boats, but skittish horses and poor
craftsmanship had seen each effort fail. Zolt himself had spent entire days
gazing over at the pasture and croplands – and that was nothing compared to the
greater treasures rumoured to lie further south. His clan’s kam had regaled them with tales of the
towering spires of marble, terraced orchards and golden palaces that lay beyond
the eye’s reach. But then he recalled the old storyteller’s voice, throaty and
crackly, falling low as he warned of the steel-clad sentinels who guarded these
lands and their riches: the legions.
‘No
longer,’ Zolt whispered, his lips quirking at one side. He had witnessed the
chaos that had unfolded after the Goths had been allowed to cross the river,
five years ago on a now long-gone bridge of boats. Hundreds of thousands of
them – lost prey for the Huns. At first, it had all gone quiet. Then, he had
noticed a slow thinning of the dutiful Roman watchmen on the stone turrets that
dotted these southern banks, hearing cries from others summoning them away.
Gradual at first, then a sudden and complete withdrawal. The kam had translated
for those who did not know the Roman tongue: fire and steel sing across Roman Thracia, he had said, the Goths are in revolt! Soon, the great
stone turrets and forts were empty, the parapets bare. The hinterland too –
devoid of imperial soldiers, wagons and mule trains taking wheat and wine
between the distant cities. The war with the Goths had been like a tornado,
sucking everyone and everything towards the heart of the Roman lands, far from
this now-forgotten border. The memories faded and his eyes once again beheld
the faint smoke column. Had some brave Roman or Goth dared to make a home here
again?
‘Whatever
structures we find there, we will raze. We will take the people’s heads and
rope them to our saddles, fill our bags with their precious things.’ As his men
cheered, he pulled on a baked leather helm with a trailing soft leather
aventail, the V-shaped browband giving his already baleful face the look of a hungry
predator. One hundred and fifty of his men had crossed the bridge now. Enough, he thought, eager to act, to
urge his horse on across the frost-veined ground and lead the charge, the rest can catch up. He dipped his
head, filled his lungs and shaped his lips to roar them onwards.
But
the flat-faced rider beside him decided to snatch his thunder. ‘Forward, for
Tengri the Sky Go-’
The
‘o’ in god drew out into an ‘aww?’ as Flat-face saw something blur up from the
south – near the smoke column – and hurtle up through the grey sky. Zolt and the
rest of the riders stared up too, muttering in awe… then rising in a clamour of
fright as the strange object began to dip, speeding down towards them. Flat-face’s
mouth was still open in astonishment when the smooth ball of granite – half as
big as his head – punched through his face like a fist through a watermelon.
Blood, skull and brain showered all behind him in the heartbeat before the rock
then plunged on down and into the ice-bridge’s southern end. Flat-face’s
headless body swayed and listed in the saddle as his horse bolted ahead onto
the hallowed southern plain, taking the sagging corpse on its final journey. Zolt
and the rest of the riders gawped at the sight, then jolted at the stark crack that rang out behind them. Zolt
twisted in his saddle to stare at the two jagged lines shooting from each side
of the hole where the rock had smashed through the ice. More than one hundred
riders were on the bridge and each of them halted, grasped by fear. ‘Move,
move… mo-’ Zolt stammered.
His
cries were drowned out by what sounded like a groan from a waking giant, as the
bridge shifted and tilted violently. Showers of frost and freezing water
sprayed up. Horses and men fell and slid as huge sheets of ice rose like the
fins of river monsters. With gouts of foaming water and hefty splashes, Hun
horsemen plunged into the icy currents, thrashing, most never having washed let
alone learned to swim. A fraction of them sped and leapt over onto the southern
banks in a flurry of spinning hooves as the icy crossing dissolved into the
raging torrents. But more than eighty were carried off downriver, flailing and
screaming or blue-faced and staring, shocked through with the cold. More than four hundred riders stared from the northern
banks.
Zolt stared back at them, then at the shard
bridgeheads, and finally at the one hundred and seventy or so riders stranded
with him here on strange lands. His heart thundered with indignation. The riders
wheeled in a circle around him, panicked, beseeching him for direction. Zolt’s
head snapped round to the south, to the smoke column and the unseen demon’s mouth
that had spat out that rock.
‘Leave
none alive,’ he shrieked, kicking his horse on to lead the others in a headlong
gallop through the frost. They screamed as one as they rode, lassos whirling
overhead, leather aventails and hair flailing, bows drawn and nocked, eyes
fixed on the low rise obscuring the source of the smoke.
Up,
up over the rise they pelted… and then saw the iron line of nearly one hundred
and fifty men crouched on one knee just beyond the crest, spears pointing like
a set of fangs, ruby-red shields arrayed like a wall, sinister
eyes shadowed under the rims of their silvery helms. The Hun horses
screamed and whinnied, many running onto the lances, bellies tearing, ribs
cracking. Some riders were thrown over the legionary blockade, skidding and
rolling through the frost some way behind. Zolt pulled up just in time, loosing
his bow into the eye of one Roman, his mount kicking a second in the head. He flicked
his lasso to loop it around the neck of a third, and yanked tight to break the
man’s neck, but in the instant before he claimed that third life, a Roman spatha slashed through the lasso rope.
The sudden release of tension caused Zolt to topple from his mount and roll
through the frost, backwards down the rise. The absence of the saddle under him
was like a missing limb. Shame! the
kam’s voice screamed in his head. We
sleep, eat, fight and die on horseback!
Every
time he tumbled over he saw, stalking towards him, a Roman officer with a
fin-topped helm and a vest of iron mail, his crimson cloak billowing behind him.
He had the look of eagles about him, dark-eyed, pointed and gaunt. Neither young nor old – some twenty-five
summers, no match for me! thought Zolt. The Roman swung his spatha once in
his grip. Zolt rose and drew his sickle and a dagger in his other hand for good
measure. He crouched and weaved like an acrobat as all around him the rest of
his men tangled with the other legionaries. He flashed his sickle towards his
opponent’s flank, only for the officer to dodge spryly – suffering just a slash
across the hand. He then went for the Roman’s other side, only for the officer
to block. Zolt staggered back, surprised by the strength of the wolf-lean man.
He had little time to dwell on such matters, however, as the Roman followed up
to swing an elbow into his nose. An explosion of sparks and light filled his
head. When the daze lifted, he realised he was on his back. The fin-helmed
officer stood over him, sword held blade-down over his chest, the red cloak
fluttering in the wintry wind, blood trickling from the slashed hand.
‘Do
it,’ Zolt said in a strained hiss of broken Greek. ‘The rest of my clan and the
thousand others of the steppe will avenge me when they pour across the next ice
bridge. They’ll pluck your head and parade it high on their spears.’
He
half-expected some kind of instant riposte, but the Roman officer stared at
him… no, through him. Those hazel eyes
were lost, elsewhere. ‘Then they had best be quick, rider,’ the Roman said at
last in a low burr, ‘for I am but a walking shade.’ With that, he brought the
sword down, piercing through armour and ribs, slicing Zolt’s heart in two.
***
Pavo worked his sword clear of the corpse with an unctuous,
sucking noise, then drew the blade across the frosted grass to clean it of
blood. His pulsing heart slowed and the grip of battle slackened. Behind him,
the smash of iron on iron and screams of dying men faded to be replaced by
gasps and croaks and whispered prayers of victory.
‘For the Claudia,’ panted one voice,
thick with emotion.
He turned to the rise, seeing the
men of the First Century slacken in relief. Seven legionaries lay still on
reddened earth; another dozen groaned and clutched wounds. Pavo betrayed not a
chink of emotion, the ‘soldier’s skin’ like a layer of old boot leather around
his heart. He quietly stooped to pack a little frost around the stinging gash on
the back of his hand. Primus Pilus Sura,
his most trusted man in the legions and out, wrenched his spear clear of the
shoulder of another Hun corpse, his blonde hair shuddering and his boyish
features ruined by a snarl. ‘We weren’t sent here to fight Huns,’ he seethed at the toppling body.
‘Thank Mithras we were here
though,’ said Pavo, peeling his helm from his head and scruffing a hand through
his short, dark hair. He offered a nod to the onager crew – fifty strides back
– who had measured the range and unleashed the rock that had destroyed the ice-bridge.
‘Imagine we were not. These bastards would have poured across, then sent back
word to others. The nightmare on the far banks would have spilled over here in
its entirety.’
‘Still a bit of a nightmare on
this side too, Tribunus,’ said
Centurion Libo, throwing his helmet to the ground and scratching behind his ear
like a dog, flakes of dry skin spraying from his wild, matted hair. His
painted, wooden eye remained fixed and staring while the good eye swivelled to
look south, he like the many others thinking of the turmoil still ongoing many
miles away.
‘There will be an end to it,
soon,’ Pavo said in a tone he hoped might convince his charges, even if he
didn’t believe it himself. It was the popular rumour: that the Gothic War would end soon. The ‘Black Horde’ of
Alatheus and Saphrax had been destroyed near the city of Sirmium along with
those two wretched warlords. Only Fritigern’s half of the Gothic forces
remained. Only, Pavo thought with a
snort, thinking of those vast numbers camped in the south. It was said that the
armies of the West would soon march to these lands in full to join the
patchwork Eastern legions and crush Fritigern. The possibility enthused most
Romans, but not Pavo. For the Western legions would be hunting more than just
the Goths. They had another quarry too. Come
on then, Pavo mouthed into the wintry ether, his eyes shadowed by his
dipping brow, his top lip curling like that of a cornered hound.
‘Rig up some pallets for the
wounded,’ boomed Rectus, the lantern-jawed medicus, sweeping his peak of hair
back only for the wintry gale to dishevel it again instantly. He set about
guiding the men in fashioning stretchers from leather sheets and spears and
hoisting the injured legionaries onto them while others dug graves for the seven
fallen ones.
Pavo paced to and fro as the
graves were filled in. It was a wretched thing, seeing the lifeless faces of
the men he had trained vanish under spadefuls of earth and crystals of frost. One
boy legionary, barely fifteen summers old, stared lifelessly into the sky. As
the first tumbles of cold earth fell upon his face, Pavo felt an invisible hand
wringing his heart, but the callus around it – the hardness known as ‘the soldier’s
skin’ – held good, grew thicker. As the last spadeful of earth was patted down
on the graves, Pavo crouched to one knee before the seven mounds ‘You walk with
Mithras now, Brothers,’ he whispered, knowing full-well he would be seeing
their faces again… tonight, in his dreams.
He rose and turned away while the
men hitched their spades and weapons. There was something about this open,
wintry waste that made him uneasy. Out here in this emptiness, they could come
at him from anywhere. A hawk shuffled and cawed in the bare branches of a
nearby poplar, and Pavo’s eyes met the bird’s. Hunter’s eyes. Watching...
‘They shot one of my testicles
off,’ a voice groaned, startling Pavo from his thoughts.
He twisted to see big Pulcher on
a stretcher – four men struggling to carry his weight. His brutish, pox-scarred
face was warped in agony and he wrung his meaty fingers through his short, black
curls. His trousers had been torn through at the crotch by a Hun archer.
‘Found it,’ said Sura, lifting an
enemy arrow. Hanging from the bone tip by a few veins
and sinews was a bloody white orb. With a shrug, he picked up a twig and
flicked the testicle away. It plunged into the dense undergrowth nearby. Big
Pulcher shot out a hand and whimpered like a man seeing his lover walk out on
him. Sura did his best to console him. ‘You’ll not need it anyway – you’re,
what, one hundred and six?’
Pulcher’s face boiled in sudden
anger and he tried to rise from the stretcher before clutching his groin and
wailing in a fresh wave of agony.
A twinge of pity and a guilty
spike of amusement almost lifted Pavo’s lips into a smile. Almost. But when the
hawk watching them shrieked and sped off from the poplar branches in a flurry
of wings, Pavo’s senses sharpened, his head snapping round. What had disturbed
the creature? His gaze latched onto the lazy wisps of smoke to the south, a
short way through a knot of low hills, and his eyes narrowed. He could see
nothing, hear nothing… but that was how they
operated. Silent, unseen.
‘Back to the camp,’ he snapped.
The wind cut through them like
knives as they marched, searching within their cloaks, mail and woollen tunics
and trousers, the ruby bull banner hanging from the legion’s silver eagle
standard stretched almost horizontal in the gale. Opis, the legion’s aquilifer used the standard like a
mountaineer might use a pole to pick a path. The men’s teeth chattered hard.
When they entered the lee of the hills, the wind dropped away. The gentle scent
of woodsmoke offered a small promise of comfort when they eventually reached the
approach to their camp. Pavo had stationed twelve men from this First Century
to watch the basic shelter.
‘I don’t like it out here. Not
one bit,’ Sura grumbled. ‘The sooner we get to this rendezvous point, the
better.’
‘Why us?’ moaned Libo. ‘Why
always us? While we’re sent up here into the frozen wilds to meet with… him, those feckless bastards in the Flavia
Felix were tasked with “ensuring the naval supply routes run smoothly”,’ he
said this with a simpering look on his face and a deliberately imbecilic voice.
‘They are billeted in the wharf at Thessalonica – right next to the tavern row. One
door away from the brothel. By all the gods they’ll have worn their cocks
to the nub by the time we get ba…’
He fell silent. Pavo turned to
see the centurion’s good eye narrow, his nostrils twitching. Libo had the nose
of a hunting dog, and Pavo had come to trust the man’s olfactory skills implicitly.
He threw a hand up, halting the century.
‘Sir?’ Sura whispered.
Pavo watched as Libo crept forward
another few paces, then fell to his haunches. He sniffed the air again before
twisting his head back. ‘Can you smell it? The sweet woodsmoke grows sour.’
‘Sour?’ Pavo whispered.
Libo nodded once, slowly, his
face lengthening. ‘With the stink of death.’
Pavo felt corpse-hands stroke his
back. He stared ahead, along the tight, shallow gully that led to the campsite.
He motioned with his hands, one pointing left and one right. The century
parted, one half creeping up the gully’s western side, the other half the
eastern side. Pavo went with the second group, Sura leading the first. They
moved like cats, silent bar the odd shush of ringmail and crunch of frosted
ground compacting under boots. At the gully end was the small hollow they had
chosen as a campsite. Now Pavo could smell it too: the wretched stink of torn
intestines. Like a tavern floor mixed with a butcher’s bin and a ripe latrine.
He halted his half of the century
then fell prone, wriggling forward like an asp to the edge of the hollow in
time with Sura on the other gully-side. He saw the small square ditch in the
hollow floor, the picket stakes, the twenty or so tents where last night they
had enjoyed warm stew and soldier-wine… and then the twelve naked bodies, roped
at the wrists and hanging from tripods of spears like game, lower legs and feet
trailing on the ground. Their ribs had been opened like gates, and the contents
of their chests and bellies had been scooped out and lay in still-steaming
piles around their feet. While they were still alive, he realised, seeing the
look of steely terror fixed on one of the poor men’s lifeless faces. The rest
wore death rictuses or haunted looks as they stared into eternity. The rest of
the camp was deserted.
Pavo rose and picked his way down
towards the dead men. Sura and Libo hurried to flank him while the bow-equipped
legionaries on either side of the gully nocked and drew their weapons, watching
for any surprise attacks on their tribunus.
Pavo saw the tell-tale footprints
in the silvery-veined ground of the men who had done this: how they had entered
the camp, creeping over the southern palisade; how they had crept up on the
sentries’ backs… seeing how they had stolen away again. He approached the
red-stained ground around the dead men and reached up to the dagger embedded in
the haft of one tripod-leg spear. His fingers flexed around the hilt, the thumb
tracing the motif on the bolster: a staring eye.
The sight was like a cold, ragged
blade being drawn across his soul. Forget the dark figure they were supposed to
rendezvous with here. Forget Fritigern and his vast horde. Forget the Huns and
their attempts to spill into the empire. One enemy was at his heels already,
neither Goth nor Hun. A Roman: the mightiest Roman alive: Gratian, Emperor of
the West.
The hawk from earlier cawed
nearby.
Only his most trusted men in the
legion knew of the matter. He rolled his eyes to look at Sura, the most trusted
of all. Sura regarded the knife hilt and then shared a look with Pavo. Both
recalled the aftermath of that frantic battle against the Goths of the Black
Horde, when they had fled from the blazing halls of Sirmium, the Western
Emperor craning from one window, screaming after Pavo: I know who you are, legionary. You are a walking shade… for I know who
you are!
It was not the eventual arrival
of Gratian’s Western legions he would have to fear.
But that of the Speculatores. Agents
of the Western Emperor, black to their core. They were Gratian’s eyes and ears,
his razor-talons. How many of them had done this? How many more watched right
now or waited nearby? The wind keened above the sheltered hollow, offering no
answers. He knew only one thing.
It had begun...
Hope you enjoyed the sample. You can buy Legionary: The Blood Road here