Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
“Will this work, Lucius?” Garamaros asked.
“Contra spem spero. I hope against hope,” Lucius muttered. What else could he say? They were a small group of men, women, and children. Their future attackers were a host of unknown size.
Over the last few weeks, he had directed the Dun Creg survivors in building additional defenses.
Garamaros and he had worked together to create two small, torsion-powered bolt-firing machines—scorpios—using scavenged cut timber obtained by pulling down a roundhouse for its timber posts.
Garamaros had found some ancient spearheads and wrought them into the boltheads.
Sorcha had already proven herself a capable leader. After she had directed the woman to replanting crops and to rebuilding food supplies because the settlement had been stripped bare, she had relentlessly peppered Lucius with questions.
She was clearly skeptical about his plans for the new fort defenses. Through Garamaros, he had explained everything. And still she had looked at him with doubt in her eyes. Distrust flowed off her like a heat haze off the Plains of Hispania.
At least his wrists were no longer bound. That good fortune probably existed because he had nowhere to run without risk of attack from other Britons—and the Roman army was still far away.
Be grateful for small mercies, Lucius. He swallowed a snort.
Now the three of them stood before the battered and blackened fort gates they had rehung on their massive gateposts.
Leading inward from the gateway were new earthen walls that funneled traffic towards the chieftain’s central roundhouse.
A newly dug defensive ditch, with a narrow bridge of logs laid over one end, lay camouflaged at the end of the passageway to stop attackers entering the compound.
Two bolt-firing scorpios stood behind their own waist-high earthen barriers on either side of the chieftain’s roundhouse.
These defenses should withstand an attack through the gates, depending on the size of the force. Doubts gnawed Lucius’s stomach like rats amongst a ship’s cargo.
“What happens if your plan doesn’t work?” Sorcha asked.
He understood more of her language now. “We die.”
“There is no alternative plan?”
“We run for the cliff path and beseech whichever gods you favor.”
Sorcha’s jaw dropped. She stared at him, eyes wide.
He shrugged. “My plan should work.”
Sorcha snapped her mouth closed with a click of her teeth and turned on her heel.
Not the response he had hoped for. May Mars, the god of war, be on their side when the time came for battle. His plan ought to work, but in reality the outcome was ultimately in the hands of the gods.
* * *
For the next few weeks, their preparations and drills continued until… late one morning the warning of threat came. Mizzling rain leaked from the sea-born clouds that enveloped the settlement.
Every day, Sorcha had posted lookouts above the fort’s entrance and set her brothers the task of hunting for game and scouting in the wooded hillside to their southeast. Lucius wholly concurred with her decision, but he didn’t make the mistake of telling her so.
That might have provoked her into calling them off.
A shout of alarm came from a youthful sentry standing on the platform above the entry gateway. He wore a leather tunic that was too large for him and carried a roughly hewn spear. Lucius climbed up to join him.
From the viewing platform Lucius recognized Sorcha’s four youngest brothers galloping across the ploughed land between the woods and the stream that formed a line of defense beyond the fort’s rampart and ditch.
“Blow the alarm,” Lucius ordered the sentry and hurried to meet the boys as they halted their steaming ponies in the passageway.
“Report,” he barked at them, slipping back into his military ways.
Fourteen-year-old Osgaros drew a heaving breath. “Dumnone warriors on horseback approaching from the valley,” he said.
“Numbers? Armaments?” he demanded.
Osgaros blinked. “About fifty.”
“They carry spears, swords, and bows,” his younger brother Eachann, their twelve-year-old keeper of the horses, added.
By the gods! That many. How would their forty-odd old men, women, and youths defeat them? His defenses must work.
“Any chariots?” he asked.
“I saw only one, pulled by two stallions,” Eachann said. With his eye for good horseflesh, Eachann already lived up to his name of horse lord.
Cosgrach, the next youngest brother, nodded in agreement.
Lucius grunted. Only one. Was that good or bad? Chariots could be devastating on an open battlefield, but here, if all went well, this one would be a liability. The sodden ground should slow the vehicle and their trap would obliterate it.
“Did we do well, Lucius?” Munganos asked, with all the eagerness of his ten years.
Lucius forced his attention back to the four lads in front of him. “Good work, men. Now you have jobs to do. See to your horses and report back here with your bows and arrows and slings.”
“Yes, Lucius!” They led their ponies, across the log bridge over the ditch to the horse line he had established in the northern section of the fort, where their mounts were kept in readiness for action.
Pride filled him as he watched the boys spur into action.
The emotion caught him off guard, but he didn’t have time to think on it now.
Around him the Durotriges scrambled to their allotted defensive places. Women carrying spears and slings hurried to the outer rampart. They were to be decoys, giving the attackers the impression that the fort was poorly defended by only a few survivors, mainly women.
Maonos directed youths and boys, similarly armed, to join the women. They were ordered to remain hidden behind the restored palisade that topped the ramparts, until the attackers breached the gate. The bridge was pulled off the ditch that truncated the passageway from the entrance.
Half a dozen men, some well beyond fighting age, lined up to create a shield wall in front of the chieftain’s house, directly opposite the fort’s gateway. Another half dozen climbed onto the walkways behind the ramparts of the passageway.
They held a bizarre assortment of battered old shields—the sort that might be given to a child for practice. These had been left behind as worthless by the previous attackers. When the fighting began, these men would be in the front line of action.
Everyone else carried makeshift shields fashioned from wicker and hide. Lucius hoped they wouldn’t have to withstand any hand-to-hand combat. Those shields would fall apart at the first sword blow.
This was his defensive force. Hah! His army colleagues would fall down laughing at the sight.
Garamaros and he were in charge of the two scorpios they had constructed.
They were partially hidden behind low earthen walls near the eaves of the chieftain’s house and were aimed towards the opening at the end of the passageway leading from the gate.
Lucius stripped off the hide covers that sheltered the scorpios from rain.
If the confrontation went to plan, the Dumnone war band would be annihilated.
If not, he, Sorcha, Garamaros, and all the others would meet their end today. Lucius swallowed. He had fought in many battles during his five years in the Roman army, but never had he felt such overwhelming responsibility and been so poorly armed for the fight.
Lucius jogged around the defenses, giving swift commands to those on the ramparts, to the youths and old men with spears or bows and arrows who crouched behind the earthen banks ready to spring into action as soon as the gate gave way, and finally to the men of his shield wall.
These men had begun as resentful recruits, but after a few weeks of training and the completion of the defensive measures Lucius had planned, their attitude towards him had become respectful and compliant.
Good. It needed to be that way or they would all die.
As Lucius took up his position beside a scorpio, where he would be assisted by Sorcha and her eleven-year-old brother, Cosgrach, he muttered a swift entreaty to Mars for his aid.
Garamaros, with Drustan and Osgaros to feed him bolts, operated the second scorpio, positioned on the other side of the roundhouse, beyond the shield wall.
“Let me know when there is movement, Maonos,” he called to the youth crouching on the platform above the gateway.
Maonos returned a thumbs-up.
Sorcha unbuckled the belt that held his sword at her waist and handed it to him with a determined look on her face. “You may need this.”
For weeks Lucius had thought he would never hold his spatha again. Now, in a bewildering turn of events, this woman who despised him was handing it back to him. His respect for her ratcheted up a notch.
Lucius fixed the sword at his hip as he had done so many times in the past, reassured by having it at his side once more, ready for battle.
He fingered his leather armor and sighed for something more substantial.
But Sorcha wore his chainmail, and she, as chieftain, rightly should have its protection.
By the gods she looked beautiful—ferocious and ready to face Mars himself.
Lucius turned his attention back to his raw recruits. All the Durotriges were in position. The wait for the Dumnone to take action stretched on, and the youngsters started to get restless.
Rain mizzled down, its droplets marshalling on his nape before sliding between his shoulder-blades in shiver-inducing rivulets.
“They come!” Maonos shouted.
“Direction?” Lucius called.
Maonos pointed to the causeway over the stream that ran the length of the fort rampart in its journey to meet the sea.
So far, so good.
But would the defenders hold? All was silent in the peninsula fort. Lucius strained to hear the sound of the approaching force.
There it was! The drum of feet and hooves on the roadway leading up to the entrance.