Casca 37: Roman Mercenary by Tony Roberts

Author:Tony Roberts [Roberts, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Amazon: B00KGHL308
Published: 2014-05-19T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

They lay flat on their stomachs on the grassy ridge above the town of Epamanduodurum, studying it as the light of day faded. The river snaked through the valley below, changing direction from the north-east to the south-east just after it passed out of the town. Off to the right the mountains rose high, lost in the gloom and the scudding clouds that raced across the darkening sky, laden with rain, or even worse, hail and sleet.

The road from Cabillonium appeared from round the shoulder of the ridge they were on, and wriggled across the river valley to the town, then entered it and ran straight through the center of the town. It crossed the Dubis and then passed out of the town via a gatehouse and vanished in a long, wide valley straight ahead from the view that Casca and his comrades had.

“That’s the road we want,” Casca confirmed. “But we’ve got to get through that lot first,” he added, indicating the people milling in and around the town. Even from the distance they were at, it was plain that these were tribesmen and their families, children too. The Alemanni had crossed the Rhine with everything they had and intended to stay. This was no temporary raid; it was a migration.

There were guards, inevitably, and they looked more formidable than the ones they had encountered in Lugdunum. They had spears, true, but they also had long swords in their belts and were armored in chainmail. Clearly they had raided or stolen Roman army stores somewhere.

The town had a low stone wall, topped by a walkway and ramparts, and dotted along this were small guard towers at irregular intervals. There were three visible gates. The first, below where they were hid, lay to the south west, where the road on the near side of the river entered the town. There was one on the other side of the river to the north-east, and a third gate to the south-east, off to the right.

The town had a simple grid pattern of streets with the forum in the center close to the river, and a small fort on the far side, close to the north-east gate. Some of the buildings showed signs of neglect and here and there round wooden huts had sprung up in spaces where no house had previously existed or one had burned in the recent past, possibly as a result of the town falling to the Alemanni.

“Anyone want to comment on how we’re to do it?” Casca asked, looking left and right at the row of faces.

“Walk up and demand entry,” Gerontius suggested. “We’re a warband, after all.”

“Doubt they’d just open the gates like that,” Casca objected. “And we’re hardly dressed like Alemanni; more like a rag-tag band of all sorts. They’d be suspicious.”

“Gunthar here is Alemanni,” Wulfila said. “They’d be familiar with his dialect and slang, surely. Any member of a tribe knows one from his own no matter where they meet.”

“True enough,” Casca conceded and turned to Gunthar.

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