FIELDS OF MARS Read online

  Fronto could see through the spaces between shields that the javelin throwers were a one shot attack. As soon as they cast their missile, they turned and raced back up the hill. As they did, the second group of auxilia stopped at the bottom of the slope opposite the Caesarian lines and formed a rough shield wall of their own. Behind this meagre defence, the slingers skidded to a stop, fishing stones and bullets from their pouches and fitting them into the leather straps.

  There was a series of offensive calls from the far left and Fronto braved the storm as he rose above the level of the shields to look along the line. Salvius Cursor had formed a century of legionaries at the far end into a testudo and was even now moving out across the ditch toward the enemy. No, you lunatic…

  ‘Pila forward,’ Felix bellowed. ‘Send for the archers!’

  Fronto watched the heavier missiles being passed through the crowd from those who had access at the rear, and the second and third lines took a step back, allowing the second rank room to angle the weapons and prepare. The first sling shots began to ring out, thudding against the wooden shields and occasionally dinging off helmets and clonking into leather greaves. There were cries of sharp pain from a few men who had caught well-aimed bullets. These slingers would be from the Baleares, whose people were renowned across the republic with the weapon. Sure enough they were finding their targets despite the legionaries’ armour and large shields.

  ‘Iacta!’ bellowed Felix, and several hundred pila arced up over the shield wall. Many of the heavy missiles fell short due to the distance, but perhaps one in eight struck the line of men protecting the slingers. Up the slope the cacophony of mixed signals continued as the commanders argued about what to do, and to the left, Salvius’ small armoured tortoise was already rising from the far side of the ditch and approaching the enemy. They had left four men in the ditch, two dead and two screaming from the wounds the slingers had inflicted, but more than seventy men continued to approach the auxilia.

  The chaos caused by the enemy officers began to manifest in the forces arrayed at the bottom of the slope as several of the slingers and some of the swordsmen turned and began to climb the slope once more in answer to the retreat call, while others stayed put and continued to loose bullets and stones into the Caesarian line.

  ‘They’re ready to break,’ Fronto noted.

  ‘The archers are coming,’ Felix replied, hooking a thumb over his shoulder.

  ‘Then it becomes a war of attrition. I want to save men. Damn it, but Salvius might just have stumbled onto the right approach.’

  His gaze slid left and he could see the fight breaking out. Salvius’ testudo had reached the lines of Hispanic auxiliaries and carved their way through with little resistance. Even as he watched, the tribune ordered melee and the testudo broke open amid the slingers and swordsmen, exploding outwards like a drop of blood hitting a marble surface. The damage they were causing was devastating.

  ‘Screw the archers. Sound the advance.’

  Felix looked for the briefest of moments uncertain, then nodded and relayed the order to his signallers. The new call rang out and, accompanied by centurions’ whistles, the lines advanced down into the ditch and crossed it, rising into a sporadic hail of stones. Here and there men fell, but the enemy were taken aback by this advance and several groups broke and began to race back up the hill. Others prepared to receive Caesar’s force.

  Fronto stomped along in the second line, keeping pace, wondering what his new bodyguards would say if they could see him advancing in a shield wall while they guarded an empty tent. A stone clanged off the raised point of Fronto’s gladius and he felt the reverberation all the way through his hand and up his arm into his shoulder. Despite the slight numbness it caused, he bared his teeth and marched on, allowing a slight space to open in the lines so he could shake out his arm and sword and bring feeling back to the limb.

  He should be back with the officers. He knew it. No other legate would be taking the field like this. Lucilia would be horrified if she could see him. Masgava would slap him. Caesar would roll his eyes. And it was entirely unnecessary. He told himself as he stomped that it was important for a new commander to be seen to be one of his unit and to boost the morale of his men. But somewhere deep inside he had the nagging feeling that he should have let Felix rely on the archers and that the reason for his committing to battle was a selfish need to prove something.

  He hadn’t realised that Salvius’ little jibes about his age and ineffectiveness had got to him until now. Had he committed unnecessarily purely to prove something to the arrogant tribune?

  The time to ponder such things passed in a moment as the legionary in front of him cursed loudly and braced, jabbing out. There was a scream as an Iberian swordsman met the soldier’s blade. Then more. The man to the fore-left suddenly shouted in pain and fell back clutching his sword arm, which displayed a long deep cut from wrist to elbow, his own blade lost in the press. The man in the second line moved to fill the gap, but Fronto was there first. He almost submitted to panic as, before he could even swing a blade, a sling bullet clanged into his cuirass, leaving a noticeable dent and sending a numbing vibration across his whole torso.

  A swordsman came at him and he dodged slightly to the side, jabbing out with his gladius into the armpit of the man even as he lunged. The blade sank in deep – one of the killing blows taught to every soldier. The Iberian shrieked and fell, though Fronto had little time to celebrate as a well-placed blow from another native came close enough to severing his hand that it took the flesh off the top of three knuckles. Hissing in pain, Fronto lashed out. His sword met that of the enemy repeatedly as they parried and struck. A sling stone whizzed past at a bladder-loosening closeness, drawing blood on his upper left arm with a hot point of pain. Finally an opening showed, and he stabbed the Iberian in the shoulder. The man would live, but he fell back with a cry, clutching at his wound and retreating from the fight. Suddenly, in response to a whistle, the line surged forward two paces and Fronto found himself among the slingers. His sword lanced out again and again into unprotected flesh and then he was stabbing empty air as the enemy fell back, shouting, running up the slope to their camp. The auxiliaries were in a rout.

  He let them go.

  Felix called out the order to halt and then pulled the line back to the ditch and rampart. Fronto delayed, his gaze wandering along to the far end of the defences, where the men led forward by Salvius Cursor were throwing rocks at the retreating auxilia and jeering. He couldn’t see the tribune and wondered whether the officer had fallen in the fight. For just a moment he almost prayed it had happened, but stopped himself in time. A man shouldn’t toy with the gods like that. His hand went up to the twin figures of Nemesis and Fortuna at his neck, but they hung beneath his cuirass and he couldn’t touch them.

  A few moments later, he was inside the camp, watching the last enemy soldiers disappearing into their gate and the great timber leaves closing with a thud. The cacophony of mismatched calls had ended. A capsarius hurried over and yanked the sword from his unresisting fingers before applying some sort of salve to the bloodied burning knuckles and binding the hand with linen wrap. The soldier looked at the wound on his arm and shrugged, moving on to find someone with a more pressing wound.

  Fronto staggered wearily through the crowd, leaning slightly as the wound Verginius had given him last summer pulled and ached. He was as healed as a man could be from the carefully-placed injury, but still extreme exertion brought a tight reminder that it was there. He’d had rather a lot of wine last night with Atenos and Carbo, and he hadn’t felt hung over until now, but the sudden burst of violent activity so early in the day and brought on a thumping head that almost drowned out the aches and stinging knuckles. He rubbed his hair vigorously and stopped suddenly, almost walking into the figure before him.

  It was a figure straight from nightmares. The tribune was coated head to toe in blood, and other fluids. Flesh hung in ragged strips from the brow of his helmet where he h
ad driven it into a number of faces. His sword hand was a sort of purple-red colour and slick and gleaming and unspeakable things had caught on the various raised portions of his armour. The last time Fronto had seen such a gruesome figure was in the arena.

  Or at Alesia, of course…

  ‘I see you had cause to draw steel, sir,’ Salvius said, and Fronto was too tired and pained to even try and work out whether there was sarcasm in the tone.

  ‘I did my part.’ Fronto regarded the man with distaste. He had seen common soldiers and centurions on occasion with such an uncontrollable love of combat and lust for blood that they’d come back from a fight looking like that. But this had been a quick and light skirmish. Salvius looked like he’d bathed in a pool of gore. And he was a tribune. A senior officer.

  ‘That was good work,’ he said. It irked him to send any praise in the direction of the man, but Fronto had the suspicion that if he properly investigated what had happened out there it would turn out that Salvius’ push against the enemy had been the thing that turned the auxilia and sent them running, rather than the calls from above.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ The tribune’s expression was entirely neutral as he saluted and walked off, hopefully to bathe.

  That was it. First blood with the army of Pompey’s Hispanic generals. Oh, not the true first blood, of course. Fabius had had that honour before they had even arrived. But this was the first blow struck for Ilerda. It would not be the last.

  * * *

  Fronto stood with the men of the Eleventh, flags wilting in the hot sun. The calls went out and they moved across the ditch.

  It had all come as rather a surprise to Fronto. Somehow, word of Salvius’ actions had filtered through to the commanders and despite days of being reined in by Caesar, the tribune was once more in the general’s council. Three days has passed since the first skirmish, and the camp had been rapidly completed, with two more brief testing forays by the enemy that had come to naught. The cost of that first clash had been acceptable to Caesar. Ninety four dead or disabled legionaries and seventy one walking wounded. The count of dead native auxilia in front of the ditch had passed five hundred, and Salvius and Fronto and Felix had received the congratulations of the other officers.

  But somehow Salvius’ newfound celebrity had made people pay attention to him again. With Fabius and Antonius alongside, he had pressed for a retaliation and, despite three plans being swept aside by the general they had persisted until a compromise had been reached.

  Fronto was unsure, but he could at least see the strategic sense behind it.

  Three legions would move to take the small hill between Ilerda and the camp of Petreius and Afranius. If the Caesarian army could manage to get a garrison in command of that hill, they would cut off the army in the camp from both the bridge and from the supplies in Ilerda. An assault on the camp would be horrific, and simply waiting until their supplies ran out would take months. But if they could seize that single position, they could cut the enemy army off from their supplies and forage routes in one go. That would make a siege to starvation a much quicker proposition.

  There had been some discussion as to the size of the force to commit. Clearly, the more men they put into the fight, the more chance there was of success, but with the saddle between the two stronghold being only three hundred paces across, there was a limit to the space into which men could be poured. The figure of three legions had been settled upon by the more strategically minded officers, and now the Seventh, Tenth and Eleventh legions were arrayed in full battle order, ready to march. The enemy couldn’t yet know what they intended, and the most likely target would be the camp, but whatever the case, the Pompeians would work out what was happening before the legions reached their objective, and would be able to field men quickly in response. It would be a hard fight, whatever happened.

  The horns blew with centurions’ whistles for counterpoint. Standards dipped, and the legions marched forth. Salvius Cursor had been ordered not to throw himself into the front lines, but he was close enough that there was little chance of him ending this day not coated in gore again. Similarly, despite convention, Fronto had placed himself only one century back from the front line at the legion’s centre.

  Fronto fell into step, his gaze occasionally straying to the red plume of Salvius’ helmet among the press of men. He could see Carbo and Volcatius, the legates of the other two legions, on their horses at the rear. Fronto had opted to move on foot despite the urging of his bodyguards and centurions. Partially there was the worry that Bucephalus might be injured or killed in the action, but in truth he had always felt more comfortable marching than riding. It was one thing that he apparently had in common with Salvius who had also opted for boot leather, unlike his peers in the other legions. What that said about the pair of them, Fronto refused to consider. He would put it down to common sense given the gradual steepening of the terrain.

  Amid the clank and rattle of armour and weapons, the clonk of wooden shields, the grunting and muttering of men and the occasional shouts of the centurions, they moved at an oblique angle to the enemy fort, making for the gap between there and Ilerda. A small enemy garrison of perhaps two centuries had been in place on the small hill for some time, but as Caesar’s legions moved on up the gentle incline toward the saddle that dominated the bridge, the gates of the main camp opened, accompanied by the blare of horns, and the legions of Afranius and Petreius emerged, hurrying toward that low hill to intercept the attack. This time there was no conflict in calls. Both the Pompeian commanders had clearly seen the danger and agreed upon the response.

  The army marched on and Fronto could hear Felix at the front shouting at his men to hold their line and ready themselves. Upward they went, though the slope was as nothing compared to the incline that rose to the fort. Fronto caught glances here and there of the enemy legions rushing to stop them, but not enough to estimate numbers.

  Fronto felt the incline change slightly as they rose toward that knob of a hill where the two sides would meet in their first full engagement. His calves began to feel the pull, the tendons at his ankles stretching with the effort. Thousands of nailed boots dug into scrubby brown-green grass punctuated with crumbling rock and dry, sharp shrubs. Men grunted in irritation as the undergrowth scratched their legs while they climbed, leaving narrow red lines and occasionally drawing blood. Fronto smiled to hear it. It was in the nature of soldiers to concentrate on the immediate – the small things. Atop the hill sharp steep blades awaited their flesh, but they took such a threat stoically while vocalising their displeasure at the irritating lacerations of thorns and sharp leaves.

  Over to the left, the Seventh began to clatter their swords on the rims of their shields as they climbed, forming a rhythmic thumping that challenged the nerve of the enemy every bit as much as the Germanic barritus roar or the Gallic carnyx. To the right, the Tenth joined the rhythm. A few soldiers at the front of the Eleventh joined in, but Felix quickly put a stop to it.

  ‘Save your energy for the fight,’ he shouted. Fronto nodded his agreement and gradually, as they ascended, the other legions fell silent once more. A more muted thumping continued, and Fronto realised that the Pompeian legions atop the hill were clattering swords on shields in exactly the same manner. This truly was a war of brothers. Felix dropped back for a moment, allowing his men to sweep around him, and Fronto soon caught up with the senior centurion.

  ‘Are you in this fight, sir? I can’t persuade you to move out to the rear?’

  Fronto nodded, his breath coming in heaves as his body dealt with the effort of the climb.

  ‘For the record, I don’t approve, Legate Fronto. But if you’re going to be involved, I need you to work with us just as any centurion would. I will be guiding the overall fight, so you have control of my century.’

  Fronto blinked.

  ‘Don’t screw it up and get them killed, sir,’ Felix added.

  Fronto grinned, but the smile quickly faded as he realised that the centurio
n was quite serious and not simply ribbing him.

  ‘I’m throwing forward three centuries at a time in six rows, with the front twenty as the heavy shield wall, the second twenty in similar formation to provide push, and then four rows of ten in looser formation to plug gaps as they appear. At each burst of three and then three whistles, the front two ranks will swap, and at two and then four whistles, the entire century will drop back, forming gaps for the next century to move up. That way we keep a fresh line against the enemy and everyone gets a rest. Alright?’

  Fronto nodded. How was the man able to keep such a constant flow of chatter up as he climbed. The man was almost Fronto’s age, and the legate could hardly manage a yes without an explosion of breath.

  ‘Good.’ A spare whistle was thrust into Fronto’s free hand.

  Felix moved off to the side, between his century and the next, identifying a capsarius in the ranks by his leather satchel, sending him to the rear and taking his place in the ordered lines.

  Across the hillside, the whistled orders came. Fronto was not yet quite used to the calls of his new legion, but they were familiar enough for him to anticipate the commands. Felix followed suit and the front lines slowed slightly, their concentration now on holding tight formation rather than climbing safely. Another call and the front centuries began to fall into formation. The call was repeated throughout and Fronto lifted the whistle and echoed the command for Felix’s century. The front ranks formed two rows of twenty men in shield-to-shield spacing, while the next four spaced out ready to move as required. Now it would be down to Fronto.