Emperor

XIV

It had been a bad night for the Catuvellaunian forces. Many of them had been discouraged by the Batavians' assault on the chariots and their horses, and the night had been disturbed by the screams of hamstrung and disembowelled animals.

Then, as the light had gathered, they were disconcerted to see the Roman forces drawn up on the western side of the river-this side, the British side. Nobody had had the slightest inkling that the Romans had made the crossing in the dark. Indeed, nobody was even sure how they had done so. But here they were, in the grey dawn.

The Romans were drawn up in the units of a few hundred men each that Nectovelin called 'cohorts', orderly rectangles scattered on high points of the gently undulating ground. They looked like toy blocks thrown down by some immense child, Cunedda thought. By contrast the British were just a single undifferentiated mass, with the warriors roughly drawn up in a line, their families and baggage at the back.

And, before a spear was thrown or a sword raised, the British were already melting away. The princes' coalition had always been an uneasy one.

The morning wore on.

Cunedda, restless, asked Nectovelin, 'Why don't the Romans attack?'

'They are waiting for us to charge,' Nectovelin said. 'And we will, if we are fools. If we are wise, we wait.'

'How long? All day?'

'If necessary, and all night, and another day. This is our country, remember. Let them sit here and starve.'

Cunedda said, 'But this waiting is hard. Even I long to start swinging my sword.'

Nectovelin grimaced. 'That's the British way. You draw up your army to face the other fellow's horde. After a lot of screaming and insulting and arse-showing, you might have a minor punch-up. Sometimes you'll just send in a champion or two to fight on behalf of the rest. Then, when honour is satisfied, you go home to your farm.'

'But that's not the Roman way.'

'Oh, no. The Romans believe in finishing what they start.'

'Can we win today, Nectovelin?'

'Of course we can. There are more of us than them, aren't there? And they are a long way from home. But it's out of our hands, Cunedda. It's up to the princes. I don't doubt their courage. Let's see if either of them has half the wisdom of their father.'

So the two forces faced each other, the disciplined Roman cohorts eerily calm and silent, the braying British mob facing them. As the heat gathered and the last of the morning mist burned off, Cunedda grew hot, thirsty, weary from standing, irritable from the discomfort of his heavy armour. He longed for this to be over one way or another-he longed for something to happen, anything-and it seemed to him that the tension was gathering to breaking point.

At last one man rushed forward from the British line, eyes bulging, waving a gleaming sword and howling. Cunedda had no idea who he was or why he had done this, but it was enough to break the stalemate. In a moment the noise rose to a clamorous roar, so loud Cunedda could barely think, and all around him powerful bodies surged forward with a clatter of swords on spears. Cunedda hesitated, but a shove in the back propelled him forward after the rest.

The whole of the British line hurled itself forward at once, with not a command being given.

Cunedda was swept towards the nearest patch of high ground, and the Roman cohort stationed there. But the Romans stood firm. The legionaries in the front line held their half-cylinder shields lodged in the ground so they made a fence, from behind which spears protruded, metal tips on wooden shafts. They were so still it was as if Cunedda was being pushed towards a stone wall.

And before he reached the shields, to a thin trumpet blast, Roman javelins were raised and hurled into the air.

Under a sky black with a thousand javelins the advancing British stalled. Those in the lead scrambled back and raised their shields, but those charging from behind piled into those ahead, and the mass of warriors closed up into a struggling crowd. Now Cunedda was trapped in a compressed mass, wedged so tightly he could barely breathe, and his feet were swept off the ground. He was overwhelmed by the suddenness of all this after the hours of stasis.

Then the first javelins fell. Not a pace away from Cunedda one stitched a man to the ground, where he floundered, screaming, a frothy pink fluid bubbling out of his splayed rib cage. More javelins came down, piercing heads and limbs and torsos. Battle cries were now laced with screams of pain, and the mood of the mass turned from rage and frustration to panic. But there was nowhere to go, no way to flee, or even to advance. And still the javelins fell.

With a mighty effort Cunedda managed to get his own shield raised over his head-and just as he did so a point of hardened metal pushed through splintering wood, stopping not a fraction from his right eye. He lived, he breathed. But the embedded javelin made his shield impossibly unwieldy. The javelin had bent, he found. The shaft was attached to the tip by some soft metal, and the javelin was hard even to get hold of, let alone to pull out of his shield.

As Cunedda struggled, he saw he wasn't alone. Suddenly the ground was covered by a kind of hedge of smashed shields and protruding javelins, so entangling it was impossible to move in any direction. The javelins were meant to bend, he saw, even if they didn't succeed in killing. He felt awed by the cunning. Cunedda had been part of a disorganised mob since the charge had begun; now that mob was tripping, falling, those who could still move fighting with each other for space and air.

There was a steady drumming, and Cunedda looked ahead. The Romans were at last advancing. The blank shield wall of the front rank of troops had broken into wedge formations, which were now pushing down the hill. The Romans carried short, heavy-looking swords with massive hilts that they drummed against their shields as they advanced. And in the last moment the Romans ran.

When they closed, their shields thudding into British bodies, the crowd of Britons reeled back as if suffering a massive punch. From behind their shields the Romans stabbed at the faces of their enemies and clubbed at heads and necks. The blows landed with wet, meaty sounds. Cunedda saw a face split open from brow to upper teeth, a belly slashed so that grey guts poured out onto the ground, another man whose lower jaw was all but severed and left gaping almost comically from a sliver of gristle, but he fought on. Horrors, every way he looked. And everywhere blood spurted, impossibly crimson.

The screaming became focused now, as the men of the British front rank, trapped between the Roman shields and their fellows, began to die in a mass, and the air filled with the stink of shit and piss and blood.

Cunedda had had no idea it would be like this. Numbed, he tried to move forward. He dropped his speared shield, though he knew it left him vulnerable. But he was still so jammed in he couldn't even raise his arms.

And the Romans worked on. Cunedda could clearly see how they were leaning into their shields, pushing the British back even as they thrust with their short swords. For armoured men they moved with remarkable flexibility, bending and twisting as they did their grisly work of slicing into the mass of British flesh ahead of them. Their armour was not mail or solid plate but an arrangement of overlapping steel strips, somehow linked together so the soldiers could bend easily. The legionaries did their work efficiently, without humour or joy or even much interest.

Soon the lead Romans had pushed so far into the crowd they were no more than paces away from Cunedda, and still the grinding slaughter continued. It was going to be a squalid death, Cunedda thought, like an animal trapped in a pen before a slaughterman's knife. The waste of it overwhelmed him, a feeling stronger even than fear. But if he must die he would strike at least one blow first. He struggled to keep his feet on ground becoming slick with blood, and he tried again to raise his sword.

Something hard and heavy smashed into the back of his head. A massive hand grasped his neck and pulled him backward. His vision swam with blood, and he knew no more.