“Form your cursed ranks, you chaff-brained loafers!” Vibulenus shouted as he continued his staggering path back through the cohort. The pilus prior had not bothered to assign the tribune a task because there was no need to do so: Vibulenus was going to lead them from the cohort’s new front. “About face, the fun’s behind us now, boys!”
The tribune sheathed his sword to free a hand, stripping off blood on the sheath’s tight lip because he did not have time to wipe the blade first. It was a bad way to treat a faithful weapon, but there wasn’t any slack just now for human beings either. He physically rotated the nearest legionaries as he passed them, men who were nervous about turning their back on enemies but were unwilling to cold-bloodedly ignore an order so baldly put.
A few of their fellows followed the example and shouted orders. Then, as Vibulenus stepped through the sixth rank, two of the cohort’s trumpets began blowing the four-note recall signal.
One of the rear-rank soldiers was a Capuan named Hymenaeus. His extraction was such that when he turned and saw what was happening, it was in Greek that he blurted, “Zeus bugger me fer a heifer, here they come!”
He started to walk out, hunching to loosen his mail.
Vibulenus blocked the soldier with his shield. “Wait for it, curse ye! We’re going to do this as I say.”
Because to meet the new threat piecemeal would mean disaster for the cohort, and for the legion whose only hope was the cohort.
The command group was no longer a study in disinterested aloofness. The Commander’s bodyguard had reined its mounts to face the right flank. One or two of the guards had enough skill to bring up their beasts lurchingly onto their hind legs so that their forepaws could ramp in the air.
That had been enough to keep the natives back on the left flank . . . but the enemy that the Commander’s own party faced was quite different from warriors in the chill dawn, trying to decide whether or not to attack monsters out of nightmare. The warriors who had boiled around the legion’s right flank unhindered had both momentum and quick victories — legionaries cut down before they changed front — to enspirit them.
A carnivore sprang forward, goaded by its rider or the presence of blatant enemies. It caught a native and tossed him in the air, his chest and shoulder crushed and a blunt wedge cut from the wicker shield to match the pattern of the beast’s jaws.
The natives gave back. Their front, twenty or thirty warriors across as they encircled the right of the legion, spread like water flowing against a brick on a smooth table. They flanked the short line of guards as they had flanked the legion itself . . . and then they attacked the mounted creatures from three sides with sudden wild abandon.
“On the command, Tenth Cohort will pivot on the left file!” Vibulenus instructed as he ran the length of the cohort’s new front. Actually, only the previous sixth rank had faced about uniformly, though more and more of the men closer to the old front were obeying the trumpets. Non-coms grabbed by Clodius Afer rushed through lines of common soldiers, snarling and cajoling in an attempt to rebuild a formation disordered by contact with the enemy.
“Prepare to pivot,” the tribune ordered in a voice barely audible for his wheezing. He had just run three hundred feet, the cohort’s frontage, to reach the file that formed the open right flank of the unit’s new alignment. Already exhausted by battle and emotion, he was scarcely able to breathe, much less speak.
The men nearest to him were the ones who must start the pivot and march a five-hundred foot arc while the cohort’s left file merely turned on its left boot. They could hear him; and anyway, they would follow.
“Forward!” the tribune croaked and swept his sword out in a glittering curve.
Striding like a bronze-clad automaton, his hair bloody and windblown, Gaius Vibulenus led his men toward the enemy. His personality was again submerged in duty, but the body controlled by the tribune’s intellect had very little strength left to offer.