Eagle in the Snow: A Novel of General Maximus and Rome's Last Stand

The charge went home: the mass broke up, and the horsemen disappeared into a tumultuous, sea of men. I saw the bright helmets vanish, one by one; watched rigidly as the standard dipped suddenly, as though the Eagle dived in flight; had a glimpse of a red cloak thrown high by a triumphant foe; and then the Vandals were across the ditch and smashing at the palisade with their axes. They swept round on the flanks, riderless horses with blood-stained saddles amongst them, and Fredegar’s Franks fell back, dying at every step. A loose bay with a white star fled past, snorting with terror, as we closed up in a tight circle about the signal tower; Fabianus and Aquila on my left and right, while Artorius and Scudilio stood a little beyond. I called out then: “I am dying in good company,” and they turned, smiled and lifted their sword hilts in salute. As the enemy checked and fell back before the thrust of our swords, I heard, above the screams of the wounded, and the hard yells of the Vandals, a deep voice that shouted, “Hail and Farewell.”

I turned. I saw the Eagle of the Twentieth, bright, fierce and once immortal, standing upon the fire. As I watched, it turned red and then black, and soon ceased to be anything but a lump of dripping, melted bronze.

They stormed the ditches and the ringed palisade. Fire arrows set the wooden tower blazing above our heads, and I could hear the wounded in the camp scream, as the barbarians fired the waggons and the tents, and butchered with their swords everything that moved. They closed in again and came at us, snarling like foxes, a mass of coloured shields and whirling swords. I thrust and parried and thrust again, until I was fighting behind a litter of their own dead; but still they came, and the circle grew smaller and smaller. Artorius, sobbing with rage and fighting like a madman, dropped with three swords in his chest; and Aquila, dying, killed four men with quick thrusts before he fell on the point of a boar spear. Fredegar, decapitating two men with one stroke of his great axe, was struck in the face by a fire arrow. He staggered backwards, flung up his arms, cried, “Marcomir!” and disappeared under the feet of an enemy horseman.

Scudilio said, across the body of my Chief Centurion, “I always wanted to be a Roman citizen. It is too late now.”

I said, “You have been a friend, which is better still.”

I smiled grimly, saw Fabianus lying in a huddle at my feet, and felt a searing pain in my right arm. I thrust desperately, and felt the sword go home as the bearded faces snarled about me. I heard a voice say, “Remember me to the Gods,” and, as I fell, it was Scudilio who dropped across my back with blood pouring from the javelins in his chest and neck.

It was the sixteenth day of January in the year one thousand one hundred and sixty, after the foundation of Rome, when the Twentieth Legion, the last to carry the Eagle, died at the thirtieth milestone, upon the road to Augusta Treverorum.

The last cohorts lay in their triple ranks behind the palisade, and they were as quiet as if they had been on parade. But they would salute no general as their emperor now; they would draw no gold for their pay; and they would hear no trumpets. They were beyond all hope and all fear; and they were colder than any snow.

EPILOGUE

MAXIMUS STIRRED THE ashes of the dead fire with a stick. It was light now, and the shadows were drawing back from the broken walls of the shattered camp where the listeners crouched in silence.

He said, “There is little more to tell. I remember a tent and a waggon, and voices that spoke a tongue I did not understand. I remember a voice that cried, once, in Latin, ‘He is mine. Give him to me.’ I remember the walls of a tent flapping in the wind, and a great pain in my wrist and hand. I remember warmth and hot drinks, and times of sickness and fever. I remember little else.

“When I began to recover I was in a house, and the Bishop was in the room. He had a livid scar on his cheek, and his hair was now quite white. He told me that two months after the city had been sacked, a man in the dress of the Alemanni brought me to him in a cart, secretly and by night. Before he left, the man spoke to the Bishop. He said, ‘If he lives, which I doubt, tell him it was for the sake of the happy times.’ That was all.

“I stayed there a long time. I was very ill, very weak, and very tired. Also, the hand that I had lost hurt me a great deal. The city was like all sacked cities; a place unclean and full of horror. The Bishop was kind, and I stayed on, for I had nowhere else to go. I had no purpose. I had nothing. What else was there for me to do?

“The barbarians devastated Gaul, and the provinces never recovered. They burned and sacked city after city, and made for the south; for that land of sun which was barred to them by high mountains that they could not cross.