The Sea of Grass Read online

  “Here they come!” one of the watchmen shouted. “They’re coming at the wall!”

  The previous night had been the hardest Marcus ever recalled surviving. The lightning had hammered them all through the darkness—first thoroughly destroying the Praetorium and Quaestorium before ranging farther—catching some of the wagons on fire and finally, inevitably, striking among the horses and starting the stampede Marcus had worried over. Panicked by the blast and the screams of the electrocuted horse, the hundreds of other animals had bolted in all directions, a great many trying to jump the wall only to come down in the ditch on the other side breaking their legs and dying most piteously.

  If only more had met their end like that because the others raced about the middle bailey stumbling into pits where their thrashing weight killed dozens of legionnaires and Gente auxiliaries—far more than the lightning would directly take and almost as many as they lost in the first rush of the walls.

  Marcus knew he should have simply killed the animals. Had he any idea how much damage they could really do he would have done it despite the protests of the Gota and the Gente, but he had foolishly stayed his hand and given Teentonka an important victory. Had the savages not been paralyzed by their ridiculous fear of the darkness, they would have lost the whole fort right then. But despite the screams and obvious confusion behind the middle walls, the savages had not left their camps to attack them.

  Now morning had come and it looked like Teetonka was ready to make up for lost time.

  Marcus permitted himself a cold grin. He was about to find out that he’d missed his opportunity.

  ****

  “Pilum…throw!”

  “Throw!”

  “Throw!”

  Black Vigil Severus’ initial command echoed around the perimeter of the fort on the tongues of the other officers. A flight of pilum shot out at just over one hundred yards and savages screamed as they fell before the sharp points.

  “Pilum!” Severus was already shouting. Half the men under his command immediately picked up another weapon while the men beside covered them with their long Aquilan shields. A few arrows glanced off the protective barrier or stuck into the dirt wall but most shot over the legionnaires and their allies as if the savages had been so shocked to see so many living men appear to defend their walls that they had loosed their arrows without properly aiming.

  “Pilum!” The other officers repeated the Black Vigil’s commands all the way around the walls of the fort.

  “Throw! Severus demanded just a bare two seconds later.

  A second flight of some two hundred pilum killed another fifty or so savages.

  “Pilum!” Severus ordered even as the steel points were sinking home.

  The survivors, and there were still thousands of surviving savages charging the walls from all four directions, continued to race forward. With a well-trained legion, Marcus knew they could get in two more throws, but with this group he hoped Severus had the sense to stop at one.

  “Throw!” the Black Vigil commanded.

  The savages were mere steps from the ditch now and almost every one of the pilum hit them. There was almost literally no place that wasn’t lined with bare flesh.

  “Swords!” Severus shouted, “and kill the bastards!”

  All around the wall, Marcus could see swords leaping from their sheaths and men stepping up to do battle. It helped their confidence that they had done this before. They knew the savages would break because they’d seen it happen. But there was a difference between this morning and then that Marcus hadn’t described to his men. Last time, the savages had thought they’d have an easy victory. Today they knew they’d have to pay the price for their glory.

  Men died—mostly savages it was true—but they weren’t killing them on the ten to one scale that would have made this attrition equal.

  Lightning struck the wall and a legionnaire died.

  Marcus stepped forward immediately to fill the hole, driving his sword hard into the gut of the savage that tried to reach the open space ahead of him. He shoved the dead man back with his shield and struck again at another. The ditch began to fill with the bodies of the dead while men screamed and died on both sides of the wall.

  Maybe he should have pulled them back to the new wall immediately, but that left them no ground to give and their enemy emboldened. They had to throw them back one more time—force them to eat ruinous losses so that when the time came to retreat again the savages were cowed at the thought of having to die on the new wall as they had on this one.

  Thunder drowned out the sounds of men dying for a few blessed seconds. Then the screams returned and Marcus added to them by hacking down another man.

  The lightning struck beside him again, taking not a legionnaire but one of the savages—as if accuracy with this powerful magic was simply too much to be expected.

  As it had during the first attack, the sight of one of their own falling to their leader’s power caused a shock of horror to jolt through the savages within sight of the tragedy. It was an extremely minor reaction, but Marcus saw what it was and understood what it meant before there had been time for the thunder to start rolling.

  Shock and fear had momentarily stolen the momentum from the attackers and Marcus felt in his gut that if he acted right now he could turn the tide of the entire battle.

  Screaming “Aquila!” at the top of his lungs he leapt onto the wall and then down onto the men who two seconds earlier had been clambering over the ditch to attack him. His sword cut down two savages and his shield slammed back a third. An excited shout rose up on the wall behind him and, Eolus, Sol Invictus bless him, the legionnaire who’d become Red Vigil after Marcus’ fight with Cyrus, leapt off the wall after him.

  Savages already shocked by the lighting strike on their comrade staggered a step backward into their fellow tribesmen.

  Other legionnaires leapt off the wall as Marcus, screaming incoherently in his fury, killed two more men. As he pressed into the mass of savages, a growing flood of his precious legionnaires charging behind him, a single savage’s nerve failed and he turned and fled.

  That one break in the attacking fervor was all it took to convince half a dozen more that victory was not to be theirs today.

  As they turned, half of them died beneath the swords of legionnaires, but the attempt to run convinced others that it was time to get the hell out of there.

  The flight of these first savages infected the whole line as more and more turned and fled as more legionnaires and the first of the Gente auxiliaries leapt off the wall and into the ditch, killing as they came.

  Familiar screams rained curses down upon them, followed by a jagged bolt of three-pronged lightning which killed many but didn’t come anywhere close to hitting Marcus’ people. Teetonka actually seemed more incensed by the broken courage of his fellow savages than he did by the actions of the defenders who were killing them. A second bolt crashed to earth, followed by a third and a fourth far more rapidly than any succession of blasts that had rocked the fort over the long night.

  Thunder claps burst without break, seemingly overlapping each other and the wind picked up markedly, gusting like the great storms that sometimes struck the Fire Islands from the wide and endless sea. Rain began to fall for the first time since Marcus had entered the Sea of Grass, but the winds were so strong that rather than fall vertically, it seemed to blow horizontally and struck like small pebbles.

  The legionnaires, with their large shields, began to struggle to keep their feet, until one after the other they let the great wooden kites go and watched them fly across the fort and over the walls into the great grassy plains.

  Lightning continued to fall into the ranks of the fleeing savages, but the breaking weather was so severe that Marcus’ men were ceasing their pursuit at the very moment they could do the most damage. “Form on me!” Marcus shouted, but he could see there was no hope that his men could respond to his voice. He, himself, couldn’t hear it. And with the near total
blackening of the sky under the raging clouds, they could barely see him either—at least not between the strokes of lightning.

  Then a new bellow rose up over the thunder as the winds erupted into ever greater violence. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out in every direction, not apparently directed, but spinning off from a huge funnel cloud that was forming out of the storm above their heads. Marcus had never seen anything even remotely like it before and when the bottom of the funnel suddenly extended toward the earth it literally obliterated some fifty feet of the outer wall out of existence.

  Then the cloud began to dance, its earthbound end squiggling chaotically about them, now descending on these legionnaires now ripping apart that group of savages. In the total fury of this unimaginable horror, all remaining military discipline fled Marcus’ soldiers, including himself, as each man tried to find some safety from the terrible storm.

  ****

  Marcus peeked out of the ditch which he had flung himself into in his effort to get back to the middle walls of Fort Defiance. The funnel cloud had departed after what seemed like hours but in reality might only have been a couple of minutes of dealing death and devastation to the fort and the surrounding savage camps. He wondered if that chaos was what Teetonka had really wanted—if in his rage, the savage shaman had decided to destroy everyone? Or had things just gotten out of control for him in the end? There was no way to know, for if Marcus ever got close enough to speak to the bastard he was not going to waste time talking. He was going to hack him to death with his sword!

  He looked around him and saw sporadic destruction everywhere. The outer wall had been destroyed in at least three places, the middle wall in two more, and the inner wall which he could see through a hole in the middle wall had a great gaping gash in it to let the savages through. Except…there were no savages to be seen—at least not living ones. Their dead bodies had been flung about the fort by the winds, outnumbering Marcus’ soldiers by at least five to one. The full fury of that funnel cloud must have caught the lot of them at the outer wall, pressed into a seething mob as they tried to overcome this final obstacle to their freedom and well, it truly didn’t look like a continued siege was going to be a problem for Fort Defiance.

  He risked attracting attention to himself, not that he thought it was much of a risk anymore. “Who’s alive? Report in now!”

  A face almost immediately appeared over the edge of the ditch a few dozen yards away from him. “Tribune? Is that you, Sir?”

  Marcus didn’t waste time with the obvious answer. “Are you injured, legionnaire?”

  The man climbed out of the ditch totally covered in mud from the brief but furious rainstorm. “No, Sir, I just…the wind…and the rain…and that strange cloud…”

  Other men were reacting to the sounds of their voices, picking themselves off the ground and out of the ditches.

  “I know! But it’s over now—”

  He broke off when he realized that the prickling sensation was as strong as ever. “At least I hope it’s over. Now run to the outer wall and report back to me on the savages. Let’s not make any assumptions.”

  The man saluted and ran to do his bidding while other men began to pick themselves up and see to the wounded.

  A low rumbling, much like thunder began to fill Marcus’ ears. He immediately looked to the sky, but the near total blackness of the clouds was dissipating and no bolts of lightning were readily apparent within it.

  A voice called to him from the gap in the inner wall. “Is that you, Tribune?”

  Marcus turned to find Calidus coming toward him. “I’m glad you survived, Calidus. How are things on the far side of the fort?”

  “We didn’t break them there like you did here,” Calidus told him. “But then that strange funnel cloud came and caught part of my line and a whole mess of savages and scattered everyone.”

  “So you held?”

  “Yes, but the wall is smashed. We’re going to have a terrible time—”

  “Tribune!” the man who’d run to check on the savages shouted. “They’re massing, Tribune! They’re massing!”

  Almost unable to believe the report, Marcus ran toward the man to see what he was reporting with his own eyes.

  A mile or so out on the plain, Teetonka had somehow manage to gather about him a crowd of warriors. There were not thousands this time, but even the hundreds he had pulled about him seemed an almost inconceivable feat in the aftermath of that funnel cloud. Could their fear of their leader really be that great?

  Even as Marcus watched, the crowd of tribesmen began to walk back toward the fort, preparing a final assault against the walls that could no longer repel them.

  “Everyone back to the inner fort!” Marcus shouted. “Right now!” All legionnaires, all Gente, all Gota, get your asses back to the inner fort. These savages have got no brains and we have to kick their heads in one more time.”

  Men stared at him in astonishment but Marcus was already running back toward the damaged inner wall. There was a huge hole in its southern face—that was where he’d have to make his stand. He’d line up his legionnaires as if they were still a hand and set the auxiliaries to guard the walls around them in case Teetonka tried to get fancy.

  To the north of him, the rumbling noise continued to grow louder.

  “Severus! Severus! Are you alive?”

  “Tribune?” a familiar voice called back.

  “Good, gather up your men and get to me. Lysander? Capitán Adán? Warrior Atta? Green Vigil Phanes? All of my officers assemble with your men right now!”

  Compelled by the urgency in Marcus’ voice, men began to run toward him—not just his officers but every functioning man left in Fort Defiance. Right out in front of them came Señor Alberto who grasped Marcus’ hand and immediately started babbling at him. “Thank you! Thank you, Tribune! Your genius has saved the lives of Carmelita and my son and even the Gota women and the men in your hospital. Digging that pit—getting them out of the building—it was genius! They are all alive! Thank you! Thank you!”

  “Señor, shut up!” Marcus snapped. “I’m glad your family is safe, but they won’t be for long if we don’t get organized. The savages are returning, understand? Now where is Capitán Adán?”

  “He’s injured, Tribune,” another of the Gente men informed him. “I saw it happen. That horrifying cloud brushed against him and flung him through the air like a wood chip. I think he has broken his arm and he is bleeding. He cannot—”

  “Señor Alberto,” Marcus cut the man off. “We may have only minutes before the savages are on us again. You are now in charge of the Gente, Teniente! Take them now and gather up every injured man you find and get them into the inner fort before the savages arrive! Run now! Don’t talk! Go!”

  Still looking shocked, Alberto began to get the Gente moving. “You heard the Tribune! All Gente, spread out and find the wounded. Let’s go!”

  “Warrior Atta!” Marcus finally caught sight of the man in the growing crowd of perhaps one hundred fifty or so men. “Are there any horses left in the fort? Can you give me any kind of mobile defense?”

  “My men are already search—”

  “Atta, Atta,” a Gota warrior came charging up on the back of what was probably a draft horse, not a war steed. “It’s a great wall of water coming from the north! We must hurry! We must—”

  “A flash flood?” Atta asked with obvious horror.

  He ran to the wall and clambered to the top to get a better view. Marcus followed him, as did just about everyone else still standing around. To the north—still many miles away—was a thin dirty blue line of something—the evident source of the growing rumbling sound.

  Something close to panic lit Atta’s eyes as he grabbed hold of Marcus’ muddy shirt. “Do you see it, Tribune? That line is a raging wave of water! Why did no one think of this? Yes, the fort is built on the lowest of hills but the land around us, we are in an old river bed. The storm was so fierce and you can see that it is still raining
in the hills. The water will race right past us on its way to the salt pan. It will…”

  His voice trailed off but Marcus did not need him to finish the sentence. It would smash right against the broken walls of Fort Defiance and wash away everything in its path. The outer and middle baileys for sure, but maybe not the inner fort. It just might hold—”

  “Tribune! The savages have begun to run, and even more are coming now!”

  Of course they were coming faster. They’d seen the wave too and their only chance of surviving was to take the inner fort before it got here.

  “New plan!” Marcus shouted. “Or rather, the same plan but move even faster! Gente get our injured into the inner fort! Legionnaires, find shields if any are left and form ranks at the broken inner wall! Gota, you are our mobile defense. The legion will hold the break in the wall but you must spearhead the defense of the rest of the fort. I don’t think we’re going to have to hold for long!”

  Men began to run to do his bidding. Screams split the morning as badly injured men were unceremoniously picked up and hauled to the only place that might offer them safety. Marcus maintained his perch on the wall, alternating his attention between the line of death approaching from the north and the mob of killers charging him from the east. Most of the added numbers coming toward him were the women and children who also badly needed a safety Marcus could not afford to give them. What a horrible, horrible day this would be even if the legion survived to see night fall again…

  The savages penetrated the outer wall and Marcus’ men fled before them. He had only enough men to form one thin defiant line across the gaping hole in his final defense and no more than four shields among all of them. He set Severus and Lysander to hold his wings and himself in the middle. Calidus and limping Phanes he placed halfway between, hoping they could bolster his exhausted line.

  “We are legionnaires!” Marcus reminded his men. “For centuries we have held the line of civilization, pushing back the barbarian hordes, standing for everything that is just and good in the world.” He raised his voice even louder. “Now is the time to prove we are worthy of our ancestors! Now is the time to prove we are legionnaires!”