Chapter 11

"Cohort!" Marcus bellowed in a voice that every single legionare in the Prime Cohort could hear. "Halt!"

The men's steady steps thudded twice more, then fell silent, as the ranks of the First Aleran reached the crest of the low ridge overlooking the Canim's first defensive position. The Prime occupied the center, of course, as it always did. The Fourth, holding his cohort's right flank, took a moment to dress its ranks. The Seventh, whose Tribune spent more time in drill, had no need to straighten out its lines.

"Three days to get here," muttered one veteran to another, as Marcus passed. "We'd have done it in one. Senatorial Guard. Bunch of tenderfoot pan-sies, can't march without a causeway."

Marcus snapped his baton back against the veteran's shield, and growled, "Quiet in the ranks." He gave the man a glare, and said, "You might hurt the pansies' feelings."

No one actually laughed (and great furies help any man who had), but several muffled snorts puffed out of the men of the Prime, and Marcus could sense them settling into the tense, familiar silence of prebattle. No joke or song or stirring oration could take the fear away from soldiers. Oh, it made for a fine story, no question, the stirring speech upon the edge of battle. But when facing an enemy as determined to survive as you were, talk was cheap, and the men on the ground knew it.

The joke had helped, though, providing a small release of tension, and helped the men settle down into the mind-set of victorious legionares: that they were professionals with a job to do, and that it was time to get to work.

Marcus stalked up and down the front rank, doing his best to look like he had more interest in his men's discipline than he did in the battle raging five hundred yards away. The sound of the fight washed up to their position like distant surf, mercifully indistinct, a distant rumble of drums, a clamor of horns, an ocean of individual cries and shouts. Marcus glanced at the battle as he paced the front rank, his steps steady and unconcerned.

A few moments later, horses thundered up through the gaps between the cohorts, and the captain, his singulare, one of the First Aleran's Knights Aeris, and an escort of Marat cavalry troopers rode along the front rank of the Legion. Marcus turned and saluted as the captain drew his horse up. The captain dismounted and returned the salute. "Good morning, Marcus."

"Sir," the First Spear replied.

The captain swept his eyes over the battle below. Marcus took note of where the young man looked and for how long. Excellent. He was paying attention where he should. He'd always possessed the talent to be a skilled battlefield commander, but even so, he'd come a long way since Marcus had seen him in that first frantic defense of the walls at the Elinarch.

After a silent moment, he nodded once, and said, "What do you think, First Spear?"

"It's their first dance, sir. No telling until it's over."

The battle was being waged along a road-a common trail, not a furycrafted causeway. The gentle, rolling terrain of the Vale narrowed, at that point, where a pair of old stone bluffs faced one another across an open gap. A small town called Othos filled that opening but sported only a modest defensive wall. The town was overlooked by a small steadholt high upon the eastern bluff. The omnipresent crows found on any Aleran battlefield whirled overhead in enormous numbers, like a great, dark wheel circling high above the embattled town.

The Canim had gone to work on the defenses, throwing up earthworks outside the walls of Othos itself, and the wolfish creatures now fought tenaciously to hold the outer wall. The First Senatorial had assaulted up the middle, driving hard down the road for the earthworks. Even as Marcus watched, the first assault began to falter, as legionares failed to bull past the enormous defenders. A moment later, the trumpets began to sound a retreat, and the First Senatorial pulled back, falling into interspersed columns.

More trumpets sounded, and in the gaps between those columns, the Second Senatorial charged, hurling fresh troops into the defenders without giving them a chance to recover from the first assault. The Second almost immediately began to push forward, breaching the earthen wall in two places before the Canim managed to plug the gap, driving the Second back. Just as they did, the First Senatorial, having reorganized its ranks and given its legionares a chance to breathe, charged forward in turn, smashing into the weary defenders like an axe into rotten wood. They crested the defenses in half a dozen places in the first minute, and then it was the deep, braying horns of the Canim that sounded the retreat.

"Not bad," the captain mused aloud. "That kind of retreat isn't easy to coordinate with a countercharge."

Marcus grunted. "They've had a year and a half to train, sir, while we were on the job."

"True." The captain watched as the Canim defenders fell back to the city wall under the cover of a veritable thunderstorm of missiles. The Canim favored spears sized to fit them, and the crow-eaten things were thick and long enough to spit a cow upon. Driven by the unbelievable strength of the wolf-warriors they could pierce a legionare, body, armor, and all, and still retain enough power to wound the man behind him.

Worse than the spears, though, was the sudden thunderstorm of hurled stones. A Canim warrior could hurl a stone the size of a man's head without any particular effort, and they lobbed them in high arcs, so that they plummeted almost straight down upon the hapless Guard below. Armor and helmets of Aleran steel were of limited use against the impact of stones so large and heavy. Even when laboring Tribunes began bellowing the orders for their cohorts to shift to a tortoise formation, the rain of stones disrupted the tight ranks necessary for it, leaving men exposed and breaking upraised arms, even through the shields they wielded.

The primitive missiles were less deadly, in a relative sense, than well-aimed arrow fire, but they possessed a far greater capacity to inflict crippling injuries, and the ranks of the Guard nearest the town walls were badly mauled before they were ordered back to the earthworks and out of rock range.

The retreat left the ground before the walls exposed, and the excited crows plunged down toward the corpses; but not before Marcus was able to get a quick estimate of the fallen. The Guard had left the still, armored forms of between seven and eight hundred legionares lying dead on the killing field.

"Bloody crows," the captain muttered in a tone that only Marcus was close enough to hear. Disgust tinted the young man's voice. "The battle's not fifteen minutes old, and he's already lost a tithe of one of his Legions."

Marcus grunted his agreement. "Going to be a lonely walk to Mastings at this rate, sir."

"Especially since they outnumbered us to begin with," the captain spat. "We have to pick our moments for attrition tactics."

"Yes, sir," Marcus said.

The captain drummed the fingertips of one hand against the hilt of his sword. "I hate standing around watching."

Marcus glanced aside at the captain's profile. "You've been given your orders, sir. We're a necessary reserve."

Below, the Guard Legions were massing behind the earthworks. Scaling ropes and ladders were being prepared for the assault on the walls, and half a dozen Knights Terra, recognizable by the preposterously outsized mallets they wielded, gathered in the center to smash down the town's gates.

"Crows." The captain's voice sounded distant and tired. "I tried to warn him."

Marcus caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, and glanced up to see twin arrowhead formations of Knights Aeris streaking through the sky toward the town.