Chapter 105: A Trap

Ten miles north of the Syndicate lines, the Roman vanguard was within striking distance...

Legate Rufinus had pushed his forty thousand men out of the Alpine foothills, descending onto the terrain.

From the ridges of the western escarpment, the Roman camp looked like a city of leather tents and watchfires.

Down in the mud of the floodplains, Commander Valerius was orchestrating the defense.

He had twenty thousand armored *Custodes* infantrymen entrenched in a network of defensive ditches.

The *Custodes*, weighed down by their steel breastplates, were sinking to their knees with every step.

Valerius stood on a wooden platform behind the primary trench line.

"Keep the timber supports locked!" Valerius roared. "If you do not brace the trench walls with the oak planks, the bog will collapse and bury you alive!"

Below him, a squad of ten *Custodes* was attempting to haul an iron-reinforced wooden mantlet through the sludge.

The mantlet weighed five hundred pounds, designed to act as a mobile shield wall against Roman archery.

The men were gasping, their faces smeared with sweat.

Two of the recruits slipped, their boots losing traction in the peat, bringing the squad to a halt.

Valerius jumped down from the platform, his boots sinking into the mud. He grabbed the handle of the mantlet himself.

"You do not stop moving!" Valerius bellowed. "If you stop, you die! If Rufinus catches us with open trenches, the Thracian cavalry will ride us into the dirt! Who holds the line?"

The intrusion of their commander shattered the men’s exhaustion. It was a primal challenge...

"We hold the line!" the squad roared back, finding a surge of strength.

"Who breaks the legions?" Valerius demanded, hauling the oak mantlet forward.

"We break the legions!"

"Who bleeds for the Forge?

"WE BLEED FOR THE FORGE!"

The roar rolled down the trench line, picked up by thousands of infantrymen...

The devotion of the *Custodes* overpowered the limitations of the human body. The mantlet was hauled into position, locked into place with iron stakes.

Valerius released the handle. He nodded once to the squad, an acknowledgment of their endurance, and climbed back onto the platform.

He looked toward the center of the defensive formation.

Hidden beneath a canopy of drab-dyed canvas and winter brush were the Syndicate’s trump cards.

Twenty *Grapeshot Bombards* sat aligned, their barrels angled to sweep the center of the muddy corridor.

Decimus’s engineers were packing the final charges...

A precise ratio of Kallias’s chemical explosive was packed into the breach, sealed with a wax wad, and then loaded with five hundred iron spheres per barrel.

Suddenly, Valerius turned, his hand dropping to the hilt of his spatha.

Emerging from the supply trenches was a sight that paralyzed the infantrymen.

It was a detachment of five hundred women...

They wore boiled-leather aprons over woolen tunics, their hair tied back under canvas caps.

They carried canvas satchels filled with rolls of boiled silk thread, iron scalpels, and hundreds of the glass vials Galenus had issued.

This was the vanguard of Isolda’s new *Lex Medica*.

Leading them was Tullia, the refugee who had watched the laborer’s thigh stitched back together weeks ago.

The *Custodes* stared at them.

The idea of women walking into a fortified kill-zone was alien to the ancient military mindset.

Valerius, however, knew what the Forge Master had ordered...

"Clear the secondary trench!" Valerius barked. "The medical corps anchors behind the reserve line! Give them the reinforced dugouts!"

Tullia led her detachment down into the muddy trenches.

The women did not complain about the cold or the stench of the bog. They began setting up their field stations, unrolling canvas tarps over the mud, organizing their surgical tools.

One of the *Custodes*, a decurion, stared at Tullia as she unpacked a dozen glass vials of the poppy tincture.

"You shouldn’t be here, girl," the decurion muttered. "When the Thracians charge, the ground is going to shake. If the line breaks, they will butcher you."

Tullia stopped organizing the vials. She looked up at the armored veteran.

"If the line breaks, decurion, you will be the one bleeding to death in the mud," Tullia replied. "I am here to ensure you live long enough to die of old age. So hold the line, and I will hold the needle."

The veteran blinked.

He offered a nod of respect and returned to his post.

The sun began to dip behind the western escarpment...

Valerius snapped his spyglass to his eye, peering through the light toward the northern horizon.

Legate Rufinus was not waiting for dawn. Recognizing that his mercenaries were on the verge of a mutiny, the Roman commander was forcing an immediate engagement.

Spilling out of the foothills and down into the Arausio plains was a wave of humanity.

In the center were the three Roman legions.

Fifteen thousand men, their rectangular shields locked together, their *pilum* spears angled forward.

But it was the flanks that drew Valerius’s attention.

To the east, near the currents of the Rhone, rode six thousand Thracian cavalry.

They were horsemen, wearing scaled armor and wielding curved *rhomphaia* blades that could cleave a man in half.

To the west, hugging the rocky escarpment, marched thousands of Syrian archers and Illyrian infantry, moving to secure the high ground and rain arrows down on the Syndicate trenches.

"They are committing the entire force..." Valerius muttered, a sweat breaking out on his forehead.

Rufinus was executing a Roman pincer movement.

The cavalry would crush the right flank, the archers would pin down the left, and the heavy infantry would annihilate the center.

Valerius turned to the signal corpsman standing beside his platform.

"Raise the red flag," Valerius ordered. "Signal the forward infantry. Execute the feigned retreat."

The corpsman waved a crimson banner.

Down in the muddy trenches, the *Custodes* vanguard saw the signal.

Instead of locking their shields and bracing for impact, the front lines broke formation.

With shouts of mock panic, thousands of armored Syndicate infantrymen abandoned the forward trenches, turning and sprinting back toward the reserve lines.

From the Roman perspective, the rebels were breaking and fleeing before the first spear was thrown.

A cheer erupted from the Roman lines. The Thracian cavalry, eager for the slaughter, spurred their horses into a gallop, abandoning their disciplined formation in a rush to run down the fleeing infantry.

The Roman center broke into a march, eager to exploit the hole in the Syndicate lines.

Valerius stood still on his platform, watching the Roman army surge forward into the corridor.

"Wait for it..." Valerius whispered, tracking the distance as the Thracian cavalry hit the peat bogs near the river.