Vibulenus could only pray — pray, and trust as experienced a team of non-coms as ever graced a cohort that there would be troops to support the single rank which marched at his side. He could have looked back over his shoulder, but he knew his feet would spill him if he did not watch his path. In a way, it did not matter whether he led a cohort or a rank: he had no choice but to carry out the maneuver as best he could, with however many men he had available.
Ahead of them — his pivot completed, Vibulenus was now leading his men at right angles to their original alignment — the surviving bodyguards pitched like ships in a storm of coppery bodies.
Two thousand right-flank legionaries, the first five cohorts, were tightly surrounded by native warriors. The light equipage that made the natives easy prey for the legion head-on gave them the speed to sweep like cavalry through gaps in the defenses.
Rear-rank soldiers faced around and locked shields when they recognized the new threat, but here the advantage was to the natives who had momentum and room to use their weapons while the legionaries were suddenly compressed by a double threat. The legion bristled like a hedgehog, its swords and thrusting javelins drawing blood from the yelping warriors . . . but there was no weight behind the Roman jabs, only fear, and there were ten natives for every one who fell.
“D’ye call that a fuckin’ rank?” shrieked Clodius Afer from hearteningly near the tribune. “Slow it down, Piscinus, you’re not runnin’ fer a fuckin’ bar!”
The cohort’s front was thickening with men who sprinted, gasping, to squeeze between legionaries already in position and lock step with them. Centurions, file-closers, watch clerks: possibly the bravest men in the unit, certainly the men to whom an appearance of courage was most important. In battle, the two were apt to amount to the same thing.
Pompilius Niger edged between the tribune and the man to his shield-side. The centurion’s swarthiness had been deepened by the flush of exertion, and blood from his cut lips splattered his forearm with oval markings. “No problem disengaging, sir,” he gasped cheerfully. “Bastards run like chickens soon’s we backed and let ’em go.”
The native blood that swirled and thickened on his sword, his hand, and his arm to the elbow was yellowish and anemic by contrast to the spray from his lips.
They were a hundred and fifty feet from the swarm of enemies engaging the command group, thirty double paces measured from left boot-heel to left boot-heel. A few of the warriors who had been concentrating with mad intention on the mounted force now turned to see the Tenth bearing down on them in lockstep.
It was time.
“Charge!” cried Gaius Vibulenus, and lost the hard-bought rhythm in which he had been marching when he stumbled into a run. His headache was almost a relief, because it distracted him from the fire that throbbed in the pit of his stomach every time he drew a breath.
The world in ruddy flames, and a granite fortress falling like the stage curtain of eternity. . . .
“Let’s take ’em boys!” bellowed the pilus prior from the center of the front rank, and the cohort surged forward as if it had not already crashed to one victory this morning.
The eagle standard fell with the Roman carrying it.
Only two of the bodyguards were still mounted, trying with desperate mace-strokes to protect the Commander and Falco between them. Falco had his sword drawn, but the very size of his armored mount prevented him from using the short blade to any effect.
The face beneath the gilded helmet was white with a fear Vibulenus had known only once: the moment in the Recreation Room when a ceramic spearpoint plunged toward his frog eyes.
The mounts of the bodyguards leaped simultaneously, not in snarling attacks but because spears had been thrust beneath their armored skirts. One of the toads managed to keep his seat for a moment despite the arch of the carnivore’s back. Then the pain-maddened beast twisted, grasped its rider’s right leg in its huge jaws, and flung the bawling guard in a twenty-foot pinwheel that ended in a crash of ironmongery and spraying gravel.