Free Claudius by Douglas Jackson Page A

ten seconds later by the second, with similar devastating effect, but the third rank of each squadron wheeled away to form an unbroken barrier between the attackers and the sanctuary of the tree-lined valley wall.
    The Britons were trapped.
    A growl of rage went up from the surrounded men. They understood they were defeated, but they were warriors, they knew how to fight and they knew how to die. If they were to go to their gods they would take as many Romans as they could kill with them. The intensity of the fighting in front of the shield wall, already savage, grew to a kind of wild-eyed mindlessness as men tore at each other to reach the hated enemy. Behind them, the heavy cavalry swords rose and fell, hacking at arms and shoulders and heads, until a spray of blood and brains fell like summer raindrops on killer and victim alike. A man screamed from what was once a mouth as he realized he would never see again because his face had been sheared off by a sword blade, the way a slave would peel the skin from a ripe pear. Another sobbed as he watched, stupefied, while his lifeblood drained from the stumps of his forearms. A few had helmets, but that did not save them. The force of the falling swords was enough to crush metal and bone alike.
    ‘They’re beaten,’ Rufus said, his voice shaking in wonder at the scale of the carnage. ‘Why don’t they give up?’
    ‘They are barbarians. They don’t surrender, they die.’ The voice was flat, emotionless. Not Narcissus, but a heavy-set man in elaborate, polished armour and a legate’s scarlet cloak. He was accompanied by a staff of a dozen young officers and a twenty-strong bodyguard of cavalry who reined in their nervous horses well upwind of Bersheba.
    ‘So you were right, Master Narcissus. They came for the elephant.’
    ‘And you were right, General, to salt the baggage train with a half-cohort of infantry disguised as slaves. The gap in the column was fortuitous, but I don’t believe they would have attacked unless they believed we were weak.’
    Rufus studied the commander of the Second Augusta. Titus Flavius Vespasian had a way of holding himself that suggested he had been carved from solid stone. Now in his mid-thirties, he had used his family connections to rise steadily through the ranks of the aristocracy until the only thing standing between him and a consulship was a successful military campaign. He was tough, ambitious and intelligent, but if its owner was undoubtedly noble, the face was that of a provincial butcher, broad and puffy-fleshed, and only saved from being ugly by a rather handsome nose.
    Vespasian frowned, as if Narcissus’s attempt at flattery offended him. ‘Nothing is certain in war. If the cavalry had been less timely it would have been hot work for a while.’ He nodded in dismissal and forced his white stallion forward through the crush of the baggage train, to where his legionaries were still sweating to contain the snarling remnants of the British attack in front of their shields.
    ‘Steady, comrades. You almost have them. A ration of the best wine for the third cohort tonight.’ The encouragement was greeted by a ragged, dry-throated cheer. Then in a quieter voice to the stern-faced officer who commanded the cohort he said, ‘Give them another minute and form wedge. That’ll finish the bastards.’
    The surviving warriors were trapped in a blood-slick square perhaps two hundred paces across, hemmed in by cavalry on three sides and the fourth an impenetrable wall of shields. Five hundred men had launched themselves from the forest, confident they would slice through the thin defensive line and destroy the enemy’s talisman. Thirty minutes into the battle less than half of them were left standing, and more fell to join their dead and dying comrades with every swing of the sword.
    ‘Wedge formation.’ The centurion’s command was obeyed in three well-practised movements which turned the infantry line into four arrowheads. The