Falco turned his head as if he intended to interpose himself between the Commander and the warriors who had been temporarily disarrayed by the death throes of the carnivores. Instead, he shouted something to his mount and slapped the beast’s haunch ringingly with the flat of his sword. The carnivore leaped over the kicking body of one of its fellows even as the Commander’s own mount went splay-legged and spilled the blue figure on the bloody shingle.
Falco was hunched forward, his weight aiding his mount’s graceful arc toward the Tenth Cohort and safety. The javelin thrown by a Roman desperately trying to break up the clot of natives intersected the gold-gleaming tribune at the top of the arc.
The carnivore struck the ground at a gallop in the direction of the ship. Falco tumbled backward, turned by the momentum of the javelin which projected from his right eye. His helmet sprang away like a bit of glittering waste stained green by the ill-hued sun. The iron point poking through the back of the tribune’s skull had knocked away the gilded bronze.
The natives pausing to complete the slaughter of the command group looked up to see the front of the cohort sweeping toward them as a wall of bronze and iron and vermilion. The legionaries who had not been engaged were models of ferocious precision, their crests straight and the leather facings of their shields marked only by red dye and the lightning flashes blazoned upon them in gold.
But interspersed with that orderly threat were the men who had turned the front rank into a killing machine during the initial engagement. Clodius Afer’s crest had been sheared to half its length by a slashing blow, and several other soldiers, like Vibulenus at the post of honor, were helmetless. Their shields were hacked, spangled with ripped facings and the dangling weapons they had blocked. Bosses and reinforced shield rims were rippled with the dents and stains of the crushing blows they had delivered.
And everywhere was blood; on the swords and the equipment, and in the eyes of the veterans who grinned at another chance to kill.
A few warriors broke and ran, panicked by a sight more terrible than the carnivores and toad-faced monsters they had just cut down.
The Commander stood up suddenly, his garb a synthetic blue cynosure among the shaded variance of animal dyes. He took two steps toward the cohort, bleating a cry for help more universal than Latin.
A warrior on the verge of flight turned and offhandedly slashed the blue figure across the front of both thighs. Either the blade was sharper than iron had a right to stay during a long cut, or the muscles in the blue suit were soft as milk curd. Great wounds gaped like mouths opening to the bone before they vomited blood over the Commander’s knees. He fell backward, still screaming, because the muscles that should have kept him upright had been severed.
The native who had chopped the Commander down leaped over the sprawling body, making his escape into the mass of his fellows. One blade of his spear trailed droplets of blood dark as garnets.
Another warrior eyed the twenty foot distance between him and the Tenth Cohort, then raised his own weapon to stab straight down into the Commander’s wailing mouth.
Vibulenus flung his Spanish sword overhead.
The weapon was still blade-heavy after — who knew how many? — sharpenings, and the tribune had never been trained to throw even a knife balanced for the purpose. It flew straight, but the fat part of the blade instead of the point spun into the native’s forehead.
That was good enough. The warrior’s hands shot up. His shield flew in one direction, his spear in another, as if they were pins struck down by the sword which caromed away from the impact in a splatter of blood.
Clodius Afer, straining a half-step ahead of the legionaries to either side, decapitated the native with a sweep of his own blade. The man was an artist, thought Gaius Vibulenus as he sprawled face down on the gravel, played out from exertions rather than the score of wounds which for now he had forgotten.