Vibulenus had marched the cohort out to a hillock with enough wood to shade them. They stood there, bristling like a bronze-flanked hedgehog, while the hostile force broke against them in furious waves. The legion, double-timing to the clash of weapons regardless of the heat, smashed into the attackers’ rear with nine times the force and a hundred times the effect that the Commander had planned.
The tortoise which chose the badly wounded and the repairable slain was still hovering over the hill the Tenth Cohort had defended.
“They wanted us to come along, too,” Niger blurted suddenly.
The older centurion struck him a fierce blow in the ribs with the heel of his hand, driving the breath out despite the leather-backed mail shirt. “Shut up and move,” he growled.
“Why didn’t you?” the tribune asked, pretending that he had not felt an impulse to slap both the centurions for hiding the plan from him. They of all the men in the legion should have known better!
“Sir,” said Clodius Afer in the embarrassment the tribune had hoped to spare him by ignoring the dereliction, “we thought we’d talked ’em out of it. And you had a lot on your mind just then. We all did.”
“Don’t know what I could’ve done to change their minds if you couldn’t,” Vibulenus said. Nor did he, now that he thought about it, which made his initial fury all the sillier. He grew angry too easily, now. He hadn’t always been like that.
They skirted another straggling pile of bodies, all of them hostiles when alive. The victims wore helmets and most had, besides their ironbraced shields, body armor: scales sewn to leather, or a plate (often cast in a fanciful shape, bestial or geometric) strapped to their broad chests. The few who fought naked did so as a statement of courage like the Celts, charging at the front of the army and gnashing their teeth as if they intended to gnaw through the Roman line.
The enemy had been ill informed and ill commanded — all the chiefs, bright with gold armor and capes of brilliant scarlet, had been in the front rank, facing the lone cohort, when the remainder of the legion began butchering the force from behind. But the enemy had never been negligible, soldier by soldier, and there was Death’s own plenty of them.
Without the volleys of javelins which fouled their shields and dismayed troops unfamiliar with missiles of such weight and accuracy, the native army might even have been able to reform after the first shock had worn off. It would have been a tough fight for the legion; and just possibly a losing fight.
Sometimes Vibulenus speculated in the darkness about what would happen if they were ever defeated.
The enemy’s baggage train stood where the troops had abandoned it to attack the Tenth Cohort. A few legionaries were poking through it, from curiosity or even a desire for loot. Some habits were too deeply ingrained to be eradicated by repeated proofs of their pointlessness.
The teamsters and other noncombatants among the baggage were of a physical type with the peasantry. They had so little initiative that they had simply waited, with no attempt to laager their wagons, when the soldiers boiled out of the train to attack the waiting Romans. They seemed scarcely less apathetic than the gangs of neck-chained slaves attached to the back of some of the wagons.
The sinkhole was half a mile from the battle site. Vibulenus had not noticed the distance when he marched the cohort out in close order after a chilling discussion with the pickets who had rushed in breathless with news of the enemy. Everyone had been too frightened — he had been too frightened — to feel fatigue.
It was a staggeringly long way back; he regretted not taking Niger’s bloody-handed help in stripping off his body armor. “Publius,” he said as thinking about the hands cast his mind much farther back along the path of his history with the junior centurion, “if you just possibly did find some bees and some honey, how in the name of Faunus do you suppose you’d get it back in the ship? Or them back?”