Path of the Tiger, стр. 414

Viridovix released his sword from his grasp, and Maharbaal stumbled back and collapsed, with the longsword protruding from his stomach. Before Maharbaal had even hit the ground, however, Viridovix had whipped out two carving knives from his belt, gripping one in each hand. With twin stabs, swift and precise, he plunged each blade into the badger’s weak spots – one in the throat, and the other in the groin – and then with a powerful frontal kick he smashed the fatally wounded badger like a cannonball through the shield wall around him.

With his blood pouring from his wounds and battle-fury continuing to gush unabated through his veins, Viridovix plucked his longsword from Maharbaal’s body and charged through the gap in the shield wall opened up by the careening badger. Now freed from the confines of the locked shields, he began fighting his way out towards his fellow gladiators, who had turned the tide of the battle and were now decimating the integrity of the tortoise.

As the tortoise formation disintegrated into disordered, blood-spraying chaos, Batiatus saw that the battle was lost, and amid the anarchic madness he managed to rally a few straggling survivors to his side.

‘Break formation!’ he croaked, his voice cracking with exhaustion, his earlier nausea and discomfort all but banished by the adrenalin of battle. ‘Scarlet and Green Squadrons, about turn, rear face! Reform tortoise around me! Orange Squadron, what’s left of you, to the front! Blue Squadron, take up right flank! That’s it, move, MOVE! Take positions! Lock shieeeelds … NOW!’

The last few remaining troops formed a new and compact defensive tortoise around Batiatus, and as soon as they locked shields he gave the order to retreat. Together the soldiers and Batiatus began making their way towards the far end of the hall, where the brazen bull continued to bellow out its nightmarish cries over the clamour of the raging battle and the screams of the dying and wounded.

Behind the brazen bull, Lepidus and Claudius cowered while Octavian paced and cursed with naked fury as he watched his forces being obliterated by the gladiators. Kurush stood waiting in sombre silence, unafraid and stoic in the face of death. He was ready to make his last stand, and he held his long scimitars loosely, one in each hand.

At that moment a stray arrow streaked across the hall and buried its broadhead tip in Lepidus’s throat. The old man’s eyes bulged with sudden terror, and he reached up to the arrow, trying with feeble fingers to pull the projectile out even as frothy blood started to bubble from between his lips. He stumbled and then fell face-first into the raging fire beneath the brazen bull, writhing in agony and screaming with an unearthly shriek as the flames consumed him.

Claudius screamed shrilly too, as he watched his old friend dying.

‘The whole world has gone mad!’ he screeched hysterically. ‘It has all descended into utter chaos! All is lost! We’re all going to die! We will all be slaughtered like beasts! Oh by the gods, I don’t want to die! I’m not ready to die! Save me, somebody save me!’

Octavian, who had watched Lepidus’s death with a cool disconnect, reached down and subtly curled his fingers around the hilt of the ornate jewelled dagger he wore on his hip.

‘There is a way to survive this night,’ he murmured darkly. ‘Come, embrace me my old friend, and I will show you.’

‘How?! How?!’ Claudius bleated, trembling like a leaf in a gale, weeping and wringing his liver-spotted hands. ‘All is lost! All is lost!’

‘Not all,’ Octavian whispered. ‘Come, put your arms around me.’

Claudius placed his shaking arms around Octavian, who stood tall and firm, and held him tight. Octavian kissed him on both cheeks … and then shoved the dagger between Claudius’s ribs, burying the blade up to its hilt. Claudius gasped out in shock as the cold steel punctured his flesh, and every one of his withered muscles tensed with rigid shock. Octavian then calmly plucked the blade out, stepped behind Claudius, and then opened his fellow Huntsman’s throat from ear to ear.

Claudius groaned in agony, flapping his hands weakly and trying to speak as hot blood started gushing down his chest and frothing out of his mouth.

‘Shh, old friend, shh,’ Octavian whispered in a soothing tone in Claudius’s ear, stroking the old man’s wispy hair with his free hand. ‘I said that there was a way to live through this night … but not for both of us. I’m sorry, but all is indeed lost now … for you, at least.’

He fell back, pulling his dying friend’s body on top of him. As his friend shuddered and choked and bled out, Octavian cupped his hands, filled them with Claudius’s hot, gushing blood, and smeared it over his face and throat. He then lay back under the weight of the old man’s corpse, preparing play dead and to wait out the night with as much stillness as the now-lifeless body on top of him.

Back in the thick of the fighting, Crixus saw Viridovix trying to hack his way out of what was left of the main defensive square, with his longsword whirling about him in deadly arcs of blinding speed while he simultaneously stabbed, parried and raked with his deadly bear-claw. The mass of his enemies, however, was too great for even his mighty combat prowess, and it was clear that without assistance he would not make it out of the square alive.

‘Spartacus! General!’ Crixus bellowed gutturally. ‘To me! Our brother needs our help!’

The General grunted with effort as he caved in the helmet of a nearby soldier with his war-hammer, and he looked up to see Crixus scything a wide path through the soldiers with great whirling slashes and rolling thrusts of his long scimitars, one wielded in each hand. Spartacus, meanwhile, had just dispatched an adversary with his gladius, and he jumped up and hurdled over the falling body. Oenomaus was busy