Froggie stepped forward. Mamurra, leader of the Third Squad, was about to take his boys out now that First was clear of the gateway. Froggie tapped him aside and stepped through in his place, placing himself beside Glabrio on the right end of the line.
The flames were a hammer. The fort’s walls had blocked more of the heat than Froggie’d realized as he waited till he was sure his job as centurion was over and he could be a soldier again. The temple was a roiling, red-orange tower trying to pierce the clouds.
An axeman short-gripped his weapon and thrust at Froggie’s face. Froggie lifted the edge of his shield and cut low with his sword. He missed the knee joint but the blade sank so deep in the barb’s thighbone that it cracked when Froggie twisted his blade free.
The barb howled and fell sideways with his axe sticking for a moment in the cross-laminated wood. Froggie thrust beneath the lower edge. He couldn’t see the barb’s belly and chest but he could guess close enough for the work.
The barb slumped out of sight with blood spewing from his mouth. Another axeman had figured out what was happening quicker than the local warriors. He turned to cut his way out the back of the mob with his shield slung behind him. Froggie stabbed upward from just beneath the barb’s rib cage. That did the job, but Froggie had a bitch of a job tugging his blade free from a stroke so deep.
The axemen would’ve been nasty opponents on an open battlefield. One blow from their weapons would split a Roman shield, and a second would take off whichever body part it landed on, armor be damned. But the axe helves were too long to use in a mob like this, and the axemen’s cuirasses of flexible cloth wouldn’t even slow down the point of a Roman sword.
The barbs hadn’t been expecting a battle; they’d come out to butcher the Roman girls so there wouldn’t be any witnesses. What they’d found was butchery, all right. Froggie swung his sword and his shield edge, killing with every blow and striding forward.
The screams were loud, but for the first several minutes the roaring flames muffled the sound enough that those in the rear ranks thought their leaders were calling in triumph, not terror. When they finally understood and tried to flee, the real slaughter began.
The squads from the fort’s north and south gates had circled the mob, compressing it sideways while the troopers from the west gate pushed the barbs toward the city. In panic the barbs tried to run back inside their own walls.
There must’ve been five hundred of them, easy, maybe even a thousand; all the men and a lot of boys and women, some of them carrying a kid in one hand and a rock to throw in the other. Mobs are like that; they’ve got no more brains than water pouring out a hole.
The barbs in this mob didn’t have brains enough to know they couldn’t all fit through the city gate at one time—and if they had known, they still didn’t have the discipline to feed through in at least as much order as they’d come out for the attack. They piled up in the gateway and died, crushed and suffocated and puling with fear as blind as the brutal anger that had filled them only minutes before.
The temple fell with a rending crash, sweeping a wave of fire over the plaza and the buildings beyond. Sparks curled over the wall and fell on the battle indiscriminately. Helmet brims and shoulder pieces protected the troopers from the worst of it, but the flaming shower still made men step back and lift their shields overhead.
It wasn’t as though there was much work remaining for them, after all. The barbs’ own panic had seen to that.
“Save me a couple prisoners!” Froggie shouted. “I need a couple of the bastards with axes for prisoners!”
Dis! he could barely croak. He hadn’t been this dry or this tired since . . .
Dis. Since three months back when the legion entered the barb capital over the smoking ruins of its wall. Same as the time before that, and the one before that, back to the day Cataline thought to become consul by the sword when he couldn’t muster the votes. One of the people proving to Cataline that he didn’t have enough swords either was a new recruit whose buddies called him Froggie.