The natives’ blood was pale, and it had an odor like that of raw wool which struggled with the scent of trampled vegetation.
The tribune, half supported by a soldier whom he did not bother to thank or even look at, staggered back to his feet. Every time he drew in a breath there was a sharp pain where the spear had struck him; but even if it were a cracked rib rather than a bruise, he could still function.
He could still kill.
The fighting was beginning to open out now that the nearest surviving warriors had experienced enough of the legion’s onslaught to press away from rather than toward the swordblades. A knot of the enemy had been cut off on a hillock twenty feet in diameter and no more than three feet higher than its immediate surroundings.
The warriors stood in a ring, shoulder to shoulder. Perhaps because there were no others immediately behind them to foul their strokes, the circle was defending itself ably. The height advantage permitted the long-armed natives to strike down at the eyes of legionaries attacking them, and that too contributed to the hillock being bypassed instead of overrun.
The soldiers fighting here had won many battles since they marched away from Rome; and these were the men who survived.
Titius Hostilianus, the soldier who had taken out the native who speared Vibulenus, paused to consider the defended hillock. There were twenty or so warriors here, and at least half of them bore shields painted solid blue in distinction to the multihued array of their fellows. A legionary lay at their feet. He had bent the stabbing spear when he fell on it, but its black iron point still projected through the back of his neck and spine.
Titius nodded and started to edge around the hillock. Vibulenus halted him with the flat of his bloody sword.
“Kill that one,” ordered the bareheaded tribune, pointing the weapon toward the center of a blue shield four feet away.
The native snarled like a furious cat. His spear rang on the sword, forcing the tribune’s arm down.
The shank of Titius’ javelin had bent the first time he stabbed with the point. He scowled at Vibulenus, then eyed the native who flashed his blade through the empty air in threat.
Grunting, the legionary hurled his javelin. The ferule’s four-sided spike tore through the shield and the warrior’s throat.
Gaius Vibulenus jumped into the gap, even as the native pitched backward. The Roman’s shield thrust the warrior to his left sideways, off the gravel knob, and a sword slash hamstrung the native to his right.
Warriors turned, crying out at the sudden threat in their midst. A spear cut the tribune’s left thigh and another wedged its point in the crack of his clamshell armor, breaking one hinge and gouging into his right armpit despite the resistance of the spreading bronze.
Everything was white pain. He swung about him like a blinded bear, striking but not harming his assailants. Then he stumbled to his knees in the midst of orange-skinned bodies, Niger supporting him by one shoulder and Clodius Afer by the other.
It had taken the nearest soldiers only seconds to clear the hillock once the ring was disrupted. Thanks to that and to armor with which the natives had not dealt before, Vivulenus had no wounds that were not superficial.
He hurt as if he had rolled naked in nettles.
“Are you fucking crazy?” wheezed Niger. One front tooth was broken, and his face was cut from his upper lip to the left cheek guard. When he spoke, he sprayed blood as well as spittle. “What’re you fucking doing?”
“Needed the height,” the tribune mumbled back. “Had to be able to see.” And speaking the words, he straightened his legs to use the vantage point for which he had risked his life.
It was hard to concentrate on what he had to know as an officer in the midst of battle. It would have been easier to block severe pain, a limb crushed or the shattered-glass jaggedness of breathing with an arrow through the lung. Vibulenus felt instead that ants were crawling over him, gnawing and dribbling a poison from their tails that made his flesh burn and veins throb.