Behind him, Mark Antony waited with his legion and three others, cold and grim without breakfast or fires to warm them. It hardly seemed enough to tackle such a vast army, but Julius could think of nothing else to alter the balance.
A horse galloped up from behind and Julius turned in fury to wave the man down before he was seen.
He rose to a crouch as he saw the scout’s pale features, and when the man slid from his saddle, he could not speak at first for panting.
“Sir, there is an enemy force on the hill to the west! A large number of them.”
Julius looked back at the Helvetii in the dim light. They were getting ready to decamp, with no sign of panic or distress. Had they spotted his scouts and prepared a flanking position? His respect for the tribe increased a notch. And where was Brutus? The two forces clearly hadn’t met in the darkness, or the sound of battle would have been heard for miles. Had he climbed the wrong hill in the night? Julius swore aloud, furious with the setback. He had no way of communicating with his missing legions, and until they showed themselves, he dared not attack.
“I’ll have his balls,” he promised, then turned to the men at his side.
“No horns or signals. Just fall back. Pass the word to regroup at the stream.”
As they moved away, Julius heard the tinny blaring of horns as the Helvetii began to move on. The frustration was appalling and the thought of having to take them in the thick forests was nothing like the crushing victory he had hoped for.
Brutus waited for the sun to banish the dark shadows on the hill. He had the Tenth arranged before his Third Gallica, depending on their greater experience to stand anything the Helvetii could send against them. In addition, a part of his own legion were from Gaul. Julius had said a legion could be raised in less than a year. Living, working, and fighting together bound men stronger than anything, but there was always the nagging suspicion of what could happen if those men were ordered to fight their own people.
When Brutus had asked them about the Helvetii, they had only shrugged at him, as if there could be no conflict. None of them were from the tribe, and those that had come to Rome for gold seemed to claim no special loyalty to those they had left behind. They had been the sort of mercenaries who lived for nothing except pay and found companionship only amongst their own kind. Brutus knew the regular silver and food of the legions would be a dream for some of them, but still he had placed the Tenth to take the first charge.
Though he was unutterably weary after the climb, he had to admit Julius had an eye for good land. If anything, Brutus regretted leaving the extraordinarii back in the camp, but he could not have known the ascent would be easy, with only a few sprains and one broken arm from a bad fall in the darkness. Three men had lost their swords and now carried daggers, but they had crested the hill before dawn and gone over to the far slope without losing a single man. The legionary with the broken arm had strapped it to his chest and would fight left-handed. He had scorned being sent back and pointed to Ciro in the front rank of the Tenth, saying that the big man could throw his spears for him.
In the first glimmers of gray light, Brutus sent whispered orders to dress the formation that stretched across the slopes. Even the veterans of the Tenth looked a little ragged after finding their positions in darkness, and his own legion needed the staffs of their optios to create order. They loosened the ties on their spears as he watched, and with four to a man, Brutus knew they would destroy any charge sent against them. The Helvetii carried oval shields, but the heavy spears would pin them to the ground, shields and all.
The sun rose behind the mountains as the Helvetii marched unaware toward their position. Brutus felt the old excitement build as he waited for their soldiers to see the Tenth and Third looking down at them.
He grinned in anticipation of the first rays of light, and when it came, he laughed aloud at the sight. The sun spread a beam across them from the peaks. Ten thousand helmets and sets of armor went from dull gray to gold in a few minutes. The yellow horsehair plumes of the centurions seemed to glow, and the column of the Helvetii staggered below on the plain as men pointed and shouted a warning.
For the tribe, it was as if the legion had appeared out of nothing, and yet they were not without courage. As soon as the initial shock had faded, they saw the small army that clung to the slopes and almost as one they roared defiance, filling the valley.
“There must be half a million of them. I swear by Mars, there must,” Brutus whispered.
He saw the fighting phalanxes swarm to the front, bristling with spears as they began to accelerate over the ground between the armies. Their front ranks carried wide shields to batter the enemy, but the formations would never survive the broken ridges of the hill. They raced across the shifting scree like wolves, and Brutus shook his head in amazement at the numbers coming toward him.
“Archers-range!” Brutus cried, watching as four arrows flew high and marked the outermost limit of their shots. He had only three hundred from the Ariminum legions and didn’t know how skilled they were.
Against unprotected men, their fire could be devastating, but he doubted they would be more than an irritation to the Helvetii under their shields.
“Ready spears!” he bellowed.
The Tenth gathered their four, checking the points one last time. They would not aim them, but launch the heavy iron-headed weapons high into the air, so that they would be dropping almost vertically at the moment of impact. It called for skill, but it was their trade and they were experts.
“Range!” Brutus shouted.
He watched as Ciro tied a red cloth around the butt of one of his spears and heaved it into flight with a grunt. None of them could match the big man’s distance, and as the spear slammed quivering into the turf,
Brutus had his outermost point marked, fifty paces short of the arrows farther down the rocky slope. When the Helvetii charge crossed those lines, they would be running through a hail of missiles. As they pushed past Ciro’s spear, forty thousand more would be launched in less than ten heartbeats.
The Helvetii howled as they began to pound up the slope, and a dawn breeze skimmed the hillside, blowing dust off the plains.
“Archers!” Brutus called and, ten ranks back, the lines of bowmen fired with smooth skill until their quivers were empty. Brutus watched the flight of arrows as they fell into the yelling men below, still out of range of the more deadly spears. Many of the shafts were deflected as the tribesmen raised their shields and ran on, leaving only a few bodies behind them. First blood had been taken. Brutus hoped Julius was ready.
Julius was in the saddle when he heard the tribe roar. He jerked his horse round viciously, looking for the scout who had brought him the news.
“Where is the man who told me the enemy were on the hill?” he shouted, his stomach suddenly dropping away in a hollow feeling.
The call went round and the man came trotting up on his horse. He was very young and pink around the cheeks in the morning cold. Julius glared at him in terrible suspicion.
“The enemy you reported. Tell me what you saw,” Julius said.
The young scout stammered nervously under the stare of his general. “There were thousands up on the hill, sir. In the dark, I could not be sure of numbers, but there were many of them, sir. An ambush.”
Julius closed his eyes for a moment.
“Arrest that man and hold him for punishment. Those were our legions, you stupid bastard.”
Julius wheeled his horse, thinking furiously. They had not traveled more than a few miles from the plain. It might not be too late. He untied his helmet from the saddle horn and pulled it roughly over his face, turning the metal features to face the gathered men.