Free Legionary by Gordon Doherty

pitch camp somewhere sheltered tonight, he may come round given heat, food and water. At least, long enough to tell us more.’
    The wind whipped the falling snow into a stinging blizzard, and Gallus pulled his woollen cloak tighter. ‘It’s top priority for all of us, Felix. We’re dying out in this freezing Hades.’
    The second fort was supposed to be somewhere in this region, but the white plain rolled out unbroken.
    ‘More bloody snow…’ The optio halted in his tracks, slapping an arm across Gallus’ chest.
    The crisp and unblemished snow ended abruptly; a dark smear of activity stained the plain to the north. The second fort took on an immediate insignificance in comparison with the thousands of people swarming around it. Smoke scudded across the sky from the east.
    ‘Halt!’ Gallus barked, raising a hand. He waved the column in to tuck into the hillside. ‘We’ve got company, lots of company,’ he spoke steadily. ‘Avitus, Zosimus, get the prisoners tucked in to the side. Keep watch in either direction. Felix, you’re with me,’ he ordered, beckoning his optio. The pair jogged up to a lip of snowdrift, dropping to their stomachs just before the ridge. Gallus’ mouth dried as he took in the scene of devastation on the plain ahead.
    A ragged Gothic exodus swarmed around the broken remains of the fort, led by an army numbering thousands of horsemen and infantry, followed by a train of women, children and oxen tripling the overall number. To the east, the land was a charred checkerboard of burnt farmland stretching off into the horizon. Even the driving snow could not disguise the broken huts and tell-tale humps of mass graves pitting and scarring the land in between.
    ‘These people…they’re being
driven
from their land,’ Felix gasped. As the wind howled around them, a faint sobbing could be heard along with the drumming of hooves. ‘What is it — plague, pestilence maybe?’
    ‘There’s more to it than that, Felix; those graves are warrior graves,’ Gallus pointed to the humps, pricked with swords, hundreds of them. ‘They’ve been beaten in battle…and beaten badly. Now they’ve adopted a scorched earth policy on their own farms — desperate measures.’
    ‘Intelligence didn’t mention warring Goths tribes here?’ Felix quizzed.
    ‘No, it is, or
was
a unified kingdom according to…’ a weary look wrinkled his features, ‘…our
intelligence
. I think they were faced with something they knew they couldn’t defeat. We need to talk to our Gothic prisoners.’
    ‘They haven’t spoken a word, sir. They’ll die first — stubborn bastards, worse than the lot over the Danubius.’
    ‘They
will
talk…’ Gallus was cut off by the gasp of one of the crouched legionaries behind him. Turning, he caught the briefest glimpse of a figure high on the hillside, turning his blood colder than the chill air. Like a cobra, the figure ducked back and disappeared.
    ‘Felix, was that…’
    The optio’s face was grave. ‘Yes, sir, the riders from the forest…’
     
    Snow whipped across the huddle of legionaries, lips and noses blue as they scoured the verge above; the face that had been there only moments before now seeming like a trick of the light as they scanned the brilliant white and the foggy grey of the snowstorm.
    Zosimus scaled the shear face up to the verge — despite his enormous weight and the bitter ice that clung to the rock face he moved like a spider. Gallus and Avitus tumbled up the winding path to intercept the stranger from the other side. The snow took on a fury like never before, and they struggled to see even paces ahead.
    In a brief moment of respite as the wind changed, the tip of the hill was clear, and Gallus blinked as he saw the form of Zosimus hanging by his fingertips from the verge — as the dark figure on the hilltop hared in.
    ‘Zosimus,’ Gallus roared. His words swallowed by the storm winds as the figure swiped a blade at the defenceless legionary. A dull