Emperor by Stephen Baxter

into wedge formations, which were now pushing down the hill. The Romans carried short, heavy-looking swords with massive hilts that they drummed against their shields as they advanced. And in the last moment the Romans ran.
    When they closed, their shields thudding into British bodies, the crowd of Britons reeled back as if suffering a massive punch. From behind their shields the Romans stabbed at the faces of their enemies and clubbed at heads and necks. The blows landed with wet, meaty sounds. Cunedda saw a face split open from brow to upper teeth, a belly slashed so that grey guts poured out onto the ground, another man whose lower jaw was all but severed and left gaping almost comically from a sliver of gristle, but he fought on. Horrors, every way he looked. And everywhere blood spurted, impossibly crimson.
    The screaming became focused now, as the men of the British front rank, trapped between the Roman shields and their fellows, began to die in a mass, and the air filled with the stink of shit and piss and blood.
    Cunedda had had no idea it would be like this. Numbed, he tried to move forward. He dropped his speared shield, though he knew it left him vulnerable. But he was still so jammed in he couldn’t even raise his arms.
    And the Romans worked on. Cunedda could clearly see how they were leaning into their shields, pushing the British back even as they thrust with their short swords. For armoured men they moved with remarkable flexibility, bending and twisting as they did their grisly work of slicing into the mass of British flesh ahead of them. Their armour was not mail or solid plate but an arrangement of overlapping steel strips, somehow linked together so the soldiers could bend easily. The legionaries did their work efficiently, without humour or joy or even much interest.
    Soon the lead Romans had pushed so far into the crowd they were no more than paces away from Cunedda, and still the grinding slaughter continued. It was going to be a squalid death, Cunedda thought, like an animal trapped in a pen before a slaughterman’s knife. The waste of it overwhelmed him, a feeling stronger even than fear. But if he must die he would strike at least one blow first. He struggled to keep his feet on ground becoming slick with blood, and he tried again to raise his sword.
    Something hard and heavy smashed into the back of his head. A massive hand grasped his neck and pulled him backward. His vision swam with blood, and he knew no more.

XV
    Somehow Nectovelin had dragged Cunedda out of the thick of the fighting. He brought him to the cover of a scrap of wood, on a patch of high ground unoccupied by the Romans.
    Nectovelin, his own face a mask of blood, loomed over him. ‘I don’t want to hear a word about how you have been dishonoured by not being allowed to die. You’re smart enough to know that there’s no honour in a pointless death. And it would have been pointless, wouldn’t it?’
    Cunedda struggled to sit up. They were in the shade of the trees, in cool green. His head banged with pain; Nectovelin said a warrior on his own side had managed to clatter him with a club. He was drenched with blood, but little of it was his own.
    The roaring of the battle continued, and the air stank of shit and death. He scrambled to the edge of the copse and peered out.
    From this bit of high ground he could see the disposition of the Roman army. The Roman units were still hard, compact blocks, red and black and silver. There were ten of them, with four in a front row engaged with the British and two rows of three waiting in reserve behind. Further away was another set of ten cohorts with a similar deployment. Away from the stolid blocks of the legionary cohorts were smaller units, on foot or horseback. They were auxiliaries, he knew, cavalry or specialists such as archers and slingers. They held their positions, not needed yet.
    By comparison the shapeless British mob looked like a tide that had swept forward. And wherever