Free Arthur Britannicus by Paul Bannister

eyebrow, the shuddering, heavy impact of the blow dropped him stunned to his knees.
    In the blood-pumping rush of combat, Carausius felt again the sense of being immortal that he knew in combat. For him, time was oozing by only imperceptibly and the dim light of the ravine seemed bright and clear. He did not feel his wounds, and he felt detached, almost an observer of the events around him. He did not hear his own animal snarls, he felt he had all the time he needed while his opponent appeared to be moving so slowly he could have danced around him. The Briton gave himself a mental nod of approval. The gladiators’ street fighting lessons had served him again.  Better move on, he told himself semi-scoldingly, although an observer would have considered no time at all had elapsed. Carausius took a half pace sideways, reached back with his right hand and flashed out his gladius from its shouldered sheath. It was so easy and natural, it was as if every pace, every movement were choreographed. Without even the hesitation of a single heartbeat, he thrust the heavy blade through the kneeling Saxon’s neck, in the traditional killing stroke for a defeated gladiator.
    The steel went in with a sucking sound and a spurt of bright oxygen-rich arterial blood spouted upwards. Carausius twisted the sword and wrenched hard to free it of the clinging muscle, then stepped back. Beobwill’s last sound was the harsh  rattle of his lungs emptying for their final time. He was dead before he slumped sideways onto the leaf mould.
    Carausius touched the lacerated flap of flesh at his cheek, and grimaced. The light seemed to dim, his adrenaline-heightened consciousness seemed to ebb away. He felt crushing pain, here in his face, there in his foot. He stumbled on his maimed, blood-squelching toes but stood upright to face the Saxon ambushers. “Who else wants a piece?” he shouted in his grating, accented German. Around the edges of the throng men began to turn away and slip quietly into the dripping forest. A knocking clatter of metal sounded behind the centurion as his infantrymen touched shield edges and stepped forward a pace. The menacing promise of the oncoming storm of violence broke the spell and a bold ranker shouted to his fellow legionaries: “Let’s do them for the Bear!”
    The Saxons turned and began to move slowly, then more quickly through the trees, but there were too many and the retreat became a panic. They blocked each other as they tried to edge away from the ravine’s track and into the safety of the forest. A tribune shouted to the archers: “Aim for their balls!” before a hissing volley of feathered death thumped into the Saxon ranks. At the officer’s next order, a storm of heavy, lead-weighted javelins from the closing Romans thudded into the Saxons’ unguarded backs as they flinched away. From the right, two squadrons of Roman cavalry cantered down the column into position, and at a brazen blown command, the horsemen rode their leather-armoured mounts into the flanks of the shuffling barbarians, spitting them on the long lances, chopping and hacking with their heavy cavalry swords, mercilessly doing the butcher’s business of slaughter. In minutes, the Germans’ forest was their death field, an abattoir where men were slashed into bloody meat and where those Saxons who surrendered soon found themselves chained, enslaved and trudging into a lifetime of misery.
    His wounds had bled freely, and once Carausius had been carried by Juventus and two other companions back to the field aid station behind the legion’s standards, the lacerations were further cleansed with vinegar before being sewn shut. The days of the journey from the mountains of the Jura back to Mainz were a faint opium-deadened memory, a time of jolting horse-drawn carriages, flaring oil lamps at night, and the voices of the medical attendants as they told over and again of the heroic contest and of the slaughter of the Saxons. 
    Then, Carausius