Tribune Laenas stood in front of the detachment’s reserve, five centuries of his legionaries waiting one hundred paces to the rear of the Roman line, and watched with growing unease as Drust’s hammer rose and fell above the defenders’ heads. He had been every bit as unhappy as Scaurus had predicted would be the case when he was detailed to stand ready with the reserve centuries, one hundred paces behind the main line of defence.
‘Tribune Scaurus, I must…’
Scaurus’s response had been terse, his patience stretched thin by the young aristocrat’s pressing desire to put his cohort in the coming battle’s front line.
‘Follow your orders, Tribune? That would be wise!’
The young Roman had recoiled at the harsh tone in his superior’s voice, seeing something unexpected in Scaurus’s face as the older man had turned to face him in the previous evening’s gloom.
‘I only…’
Scaurus had shaken his head uncompromisingly, putting a finger firmly on his subordinate’s breastplate.
‘No! I understand, Laenas, but you’re just going to have to do as I tell you. This is going to be a world away from anything you or your men have ever experienced before. I need battle-hardened soldiers in the line when the Venicones realise that they’re the rats in this particular trap, because they’re going to fight like wild animals to escape. My auxiliaries have faced down barbarians exactly like these more than once this summer, which means that they know they can beat Drust’s men given the right circumstances. If some of your legionaries can get into the line alongside them then so much the better for all concerned, but my men need officers that they can trust standing behind them. Your first spear is going to be of questionable value in a fight from what little I’ve seen of him, and you’ve never experienced this scale of bloodletting at close quarters, for all your unquestionable willingness to fight…’
He’d smiled tightly at the younger man, shaking his head slightly, and when he spoke again his tone had been gentler.
‘I’d be content to stand as our reserve, if I were you, Tribune Laenas, and let your first experience of this vicious way of fighting be an easier introduction than my Tungrians had at Lost Eagle. And while you’re standing there, you should pray to all of your gods that there’s no need for your men to unsheathe their swords. Because if there is, then the barbarians will have broken through, and you and your five centuries will be all that stands between my command and bloody disaster. And in such circumstances, colleague, your chance for death or glory will be upon you quicker than you can appreciate.’
With a sudden, sick lurch of his guts, Laenas realised that the line was breaking before his eyes. As he watched, the tiny breach in the detachment’s defences began to widen as the inexorable force being exerted by the mass of barbarians pressing upon it forced apart the soldiers fighting to hold them back, and despite the reinforcements running from the line’s rear on both sides of the breach. Realising that he had only seconds in which to react, the young tribune ripped his sword from its scabbard and turned to Canutius.
‘Come on, then, First Spear, it seems that we’re needed after all
…’
His subordinate was staring across the narrow space between the reserve centuries and the milling barbarians, his eyes pinned wide and his face red with fear. Laenas stared at him for a moment, both horrified at the man’s apparent loss of control in the face of battle and uncertain of how he should react. As the moment of decision hung in the balance, a shout rang across the battlefield, Scaurus’s voice cutting through the fight’s rising din.
‘Tribune Laenas! Your time for glory is here!’
He nodded decisively and turned away from Canutius with a slight smile, suddenly calm in the realisation that there was only one possible course of action. Raising the weapon above his head, he summoned the strength to steady his wavering voice.
‘First Cohort! Ready spears!’
The legionaries pulled their javelins from the damp earth into which they had been pushed butt spike first moments before, and hefted their shields from their resting places in a dry rustle of wood and iron. Laenas turned back to the barbarians forcing their way through the rupture in the Romans’ line, their numbers already doubled in those scant seconds, and fixed his gaze on the redhaired giant who had smashed his way through the detachment’s line with such brutal ease. For the first time in months, it seemed, he felt his heart lift with the moment’s simplicity, felt liberated from the need to worry about the slow bleeding away of his reputation at the hands of his subordinate. Fighting back a sudden wild urge to laugh aloud in the first spear’s terrified face, he pointed his sword down the slope at the Venicones.
‘First Cohort! Follow me!’
Stepping off down the slope without looking behind him to see whether his men were following, he locked eyes with the Venicone king, watching the man with an almost detached interest as the warlord lifted his massive war hammer and strode forward to meet the reinforcements, his bellowed challenge lost in the fight’s tumult. The two men stalked closer to each other with their eyes locked together, neither willing to look away in the last seconds before they met. Above the roar of the fight Laenas thought he heard his name being called again, but ignored the distraction as the barbarian warrior broke into a run, covering the last few paces between them in seconds with his hammer swinging high.
The weapon slashed down in a humming diagonal attack, its spike intended to crack the tribune’s breastplate and smash his ribs, but he sidestepped and ducked beneath the blow, slashing at his opponent with the his sword’s blade and drawing a bloody line across the man’s thigh. Drust staggered and snarled, reversing the hammer and thrusting the heavy iron counterweight at the base of its handle into the Roman’s face, sending him reeling backwards. While Laenas was off balance, blood spurting from his shattered nose, a tribesman leapt forward and rammed his sword deep into the tribune’s armpit before dying on the shaft of a thrown javelin as the 1st Cohort’s centuries hurled their weapons in a devastating low-slung volley that withered the ranks of the attacking Venicones.
With a roar of anger the legionaries drew their swords and charged at the stunned barbarians, stabbing viciously at their enemy in their fury at seeing their officer fall. Drust and what remained of his bodyguard fought in a tight knot, briefly holding the legionaries at bay in a circle around them until Maon, standing back to back with his master, was spitted by a javelin thrust, staggering forward on to his enemy’s blades with blood frothing on his lips, falling under a hail of hacking blows. Another legionary stepped in and drove his spear through the Venicone king’s back, heaving and twisting on the weapon’s wooden shaft to force its barbed iron head deeper into the stricken barbarian’s body. Drust’s spine arched with the cold iron’s first agonising thrust into his kidneys, and he stared down in disbelief as the spear’s head ripped through his stomach wall. Dropping to his knees in agony, he allowed the hammer’s handle to slip from his grasp as he reached down to grasp the javelin’s iron head with both hands, his teeth bared in a silent scream of pain. Scaurus ran the few paces from his place at the rear of the Tungrian line, a dozen of the 10th Century’s axemen around him hacking a path into the remaining barbarians before them. He pointed his sword at the breach in the line, hurling an order at the legionaries over the fight’s hubbub.
‘Sixth Legion, advance! Close this gap!’
At the shouted command the cohort’s front rank marched onwards down the slope, their implacable attack scattering the remaining barbarians to either side in panicked attempts to escape before the line was re-established. Behind the marching centuries another soldier raised his gladius and chopped down at the fallen king’s exposed neck, the blow sufficiently strong only to half-sever Drust’s head from his body but enough to put him face down and unmoving in the grass. The sword rose and fell again, and its bearer lifted Drust’s severed head by its mane of red hair with a bellow of triumph while the owner of the javelin buried in his corpse’s back tore its barbed-iron head free from the headless body. The king’s gold torc fell from his severed neck into the hillside’s long grass, and the spearman bent to retrieve it, goggling at the fortune in gold in his hands.
‘I’ll take that! And the torc!’
The legionaries turned to find First Spear Canutius striding towards them, his panic of barely a moment before wiped away by his men’s success.
‘Those both belong to the Emperor. I’ll make sure they reach the governor, rather than have you thieving bastards…’
The legionary who had decapitated the Venicone king looked about him quickly, getting a quick nod from his mate, who had raised his spear as if to examine its bloody blade with a critical eye. He allowed the dead king’s head to dangle at his side and replied to the officer’s challenge with a curled lip, fixing Canutius with a disparaging glance.
‘Not this time, Centurion. You’re too shy when the fight’s on for my liking.’
Canutius raised his vine stick, his face hard with fury, only to stagger as the legionary behind him lunged forward, ramming the javelin’s vicious point through his armour and deep into his body. The man holding Drust’s head bent close as the officer stiffened, jerking spasmodically as the spear’s barbed-iron head tore into his heart.
‘That’s what you’ve been terrified of all this time, pushing us forward to keep your skin intact. Not so bad now, is it?’
He nodded to the spearman, who deftly withdrew his weapon’s pointed head through the hole it had punched in Canutius’s armour, and lowered the dying officer to the ground alongside the spot where Laenas lay, his open eyes staring blankly at the clouds above them.
‘That’s vengeance for you, I’d say, young Tribune. You fought well enough for a lad when you finally got the chance…’
He reached out to close Laenas’s eyes and then, spotting a minute movement of the fallen officer’s chest, bent closer to examine the fallen tribune with a critical eye.
‘Young gentleman’s not dead, not yet anyway. Bandage carrier!’
While the battle raged on fifty paces down the hill’s slope, Scaurus and Licinius hurried to the rear of the attacking legionaries surrounded by their escort of Tungrian axemen, heading for the spot where they had seen Tribune Laenas go down under Drust’s attack and finding a huddled knot of men gathered around the bodies of several men. Licinius scattered them with a barked command, pushing one man out of his path.
‘Stand aside!’
The legionaries cleared a path through to the stricken Laenas, and Scaurus, noting the body of Canutius alongside that of the young tribune, hung back behind his colleague with his eyes roaming across the scene. The bandage carrier shook his head unhappily, looking up at Licinius with a look of certainty.
‘Nothing I can do for him, Tribune, the wound’s too deep inside. He should be dead already, by rights.’
Scaurus found what he’d been looking for, a pair of legionaries sidling towards the edge of the group with neutral expressions on their faces.
‘You two! Stop where you are! The rest of you, get back in line and fight. This battle has a while to run yet!’
The two soldiers snapped to attention, eyeing the hard-faced tribune as he stalked towards them. Licinius put a toe under Canutius’s shoulder, turning the dead man’s body over.
‘He was speared in the back, from the look of it.’
Scaurus reached out and took the spear from the taller man, examining its point with a critical eye.
‘There’s blood on this weapon, legionary.’
The soldier shook his head dourly.
‘Barbarian blood, sir. I did for their king.’
The tribune shook his head in turn, then handed the weapon back and turned away, bending to kneel alongside the dying tribune.
‘Well now, Popillius Laenas, you’ll be in the company of your ancestors soon enough. Hold your head up high when they greet you, for you’ve won this fight for us. See?’ He lifted the Venicone king’s head for the dying man to see. This was their king. Without him to lead them they’ll give it up soon enough, and you’re the man that took the fight to him and sealed his fate. I’ll make sure your family know you died with a soldier’s honour…’ He bent closer to the prostrate tribune, speaking quietly into his ear. ‘But now I need you to tell me one more thing, brother. You see, your first spear lies dead alongside you, murdered by one of your own men in all likelihood. It’s common enough when an officer is hated by his soldiers, of course, but we can’t allow it to stand unpunished. So tell me, Tribune, did you see it happen?’
Laenas moved his head with painful slowness to stare at the two soldiers standing behind the kneeling tribune, a faint smile ghosting across his face, and his lips moved in speech so quiet that Scaurus had to put his ear to the dying man’s mouth to hear them.
‘Saw… nothing…’
Scaurus stared into his eyes for a moment, watching as the life left them. He patted the dead man’s shoulder and then rose, turning back to the waiting legionaries with a flat stare.
‘Today, legionaries, is your lucky day, or so it seems. Rejoin your century.’
Glancing at each other with scarcely concealed relief, the two men turned back to the fight, freezing into immobility at the sound of the harsh metallic scrape of Scaurus’s sword leaving its scabbard.
‘Of course, I could still have the pair of you lashed to death, or simply execute you both myself, here and now. So I suggest you surrender that pretty gold neckpiece before I decide which of the two would be preferable.’
The spearman turned back white faced, pulling the massive gold collar from inside his armour and putting it into the tribune’s hand. Dismissing the men with a flick of his hand, Scaurus turned back to his colleague, who stared back at him with raised eyebrows.
‘If Laenas was willing to condone their murder of Canutius then who am I to deny him that last pleasure, given the number of times the man was the cause of his humiliation?’
Licinius nodded, taking the torc from his colleague’s outstretched hand and looking over his shoulder at the battle still raging on the slope below them.
‘Agreed. Now let’s go and finish what Drust was so keen to start. We have a chance to bring peace to the north for a generation to come. I’ll see every last one of these bastards dead or a slave before night falls.’
With the gap in their line closed, and reinforced by the five legion centuries that had pinched off the Venicones’ desperate attack and killed their king, the Romans began the process of inexorably grinding the resistance out of the tribesmen trapped between their shields and the forest. Advancing down the slope behind their shields, spears and swords stabbing out to kill and maim those barbarians still willing to face them, they herded the beaten tribesmen into an ever smaller space, until their only alternatives were surrender or death. Increasing numbers of men threw down their weapons and knelt under the detachment’s spears, cursed and spat on by those of their comrades still willing to fight on in defiance of the odds facing them as more and more men fell under the Romans’ unrelenting assault or gave up the struggle.
‘It’s a hard choice. In their place I chose to fight, but…’
Marcus raised an eyebrow at the tone in Arminius’s voice, both men watching as another sullen tribesman was dragged through the Tungrians’ line at spear point, his hands swiftly bound before he was pushed into a group of his beaten comrades under the swords of a pair of lightly wounded soldiers.
‘But what? You’d have missed this life of adventure if he’d just beaten your brains out. Can you really say that you’d…’ He raised his sword and pointed at one of the wounded guards. ‘You! Keep your distance from the prisoners and stop waving your iron at them, unless you want me to come over there and do the same to you!’ The soldier saluted gingerly with his wounded arm and stepped back from the tribesmen, lowering the sword whose blade he’d been passing inches from their downcast faces. ‘Where was I? Yes, can you really say that you’d exchange a quick death and an unmarked grave for…’
He looked up as a squadron of riders rode up to his place in the line, their leader reining his horse to a halt alongside him with another mount led alongside him.
‘Centurion! Would you like to be a cavalryman one last time? There are Venicones who escaped when your line was broken to be hunted down, and Tribune Licinius has ordered me to take the best men available in their pursuit. Leave this hairy gentleman to watch the fun, and join us in the hunt!’
The Roman looked up at the rider, shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare.
‘Is that Bonehead you’ve brought for me to ride, eh, Decurion Felix? Perhaps this is really just one more chance to get my neck broken?’
The decurion grinned back, gesturing to the horse with his free hand.
‘Nobody else can ride him, not now you’ve encouraged the unruly bugger to have his own way whenever he fancies it. Come on now, the blue-noses will be gone without trace at this rate, and your tribune gave me a message for you. He said to tell you that Calgus ran…’
‘Qadir!’
The chosen man turned from his place at the line’s rear, where he was supervising the capture of the continual flow of barbarian prisoners.
‘I’ve a score to settle! The century is yours until I get back!’
Felix watched as Marcus plucked a spear from the nearest rear-ranker and jumped into the saddle alongside him.
‘Yes, he said that would have the spring back in your step.’
The two men rode hard up the slope, with the remainder of Felix’s squadron following close behind in an extended line. They quickly overtook the hindmost of the barbarians who had fought their way free as the legion centuries had closed the door on their route to freedom, a tall skinny warrior limping painfully away from the battlefield as fast as his damaged body would carry him. The decurion lowered his spear and rode the straggler down, expertly thrusting the weapon’s long blade through his neck and tearing it free in a shower of blood, not bothering to look back as his victim sank to his knees and then pitched headlong to the turf.
‘There’s more of them! Form skirmish line!’
The horsemen rode down several groups of barbarians, initially wounded men, unable to flee fast enough to have any chance of escape, but soon they began catching the unharmed warriors who had taken their chance to run for their lives. Those that prostrated themselves were spared, and a rider detailed to guard the survivors of each group, while those that continued running or turned to fight were killed without compunction by the fast-riding cavalrymen.
‘There!’
Felix pointed his blood-slathered spear at a small group of warriors running hard for the shelter of a forest still a mile distant, and Marcus’s face hardened at the sight he’d been waiting for.
‘It’s Calgus! Cut them off, but nobody touches the man in the purple cloak!’
Brought to bay too far from the trees for there to be any chance of escape, the barbarians threw down their weapons and pushed the Selgovae king forward towards the horsemen. Calgus shrugged off their hands, stepping forward to meet the point of Marcus’s spear with his head held high, advancing until the point of the weapon’s iron blade rested firmly on his chest.
‘Very well, son of two dead fathers, take my life. If you have no interest in what your real father wrote about you in all those letters he never sent, put that spear through me and take your revenge.’
Stabbing the weapon into the turf, Marcus dismounted and stepped up to the barbarian leader with one hand on the hilt of his gladius and his face dark with anger. Calgus smirked back at him.
‘As I told you yesterday, the legatus was quite a writer, it seems. I captured a writing chest full of his correspondence, and among it was a sheaf of scrolls that he wrote to you, over the years. It was quite touching really, full of his hopes for you, and talking about the few times he managed to see you by visiting your father when you were younger. He…’
‘No.’
The barbarian blinked in surprise and then opened his mouth to speak again, but found himself looking down the length of Marcus’s gladius.
‘No. For all I know you’re spinning me a tale from your own desperation. You want me to escort you back to my tribune, who will send you back to Rome for the triumph that you assume must follow this victory. There, you presume, you might live another year, or more, and there have always been those barbarian leaders who are spared when they get the chance to work their wiles on the Emperor. What’s to say that you can’t pull the same trick?’
Calgus grinned wryly.
‘You’ll never know, then, will you? You’ll have to…’
He staggered back as Marcus punched him hard in the face, a straight jab that sent him reeling dazed to the ground. Before the barbarian leader could respond, Marcus stepped forward with the eagle-pommelled gladius raised, spearing the blade’s point down into the barbarian leader’s left calf with careful precision before pulling it loose through his Achilles tendon. Calgus raised his head and screamed in agony, jerking again as Marcus repeated the process with the other leg. He pulled a knife from Calgus’s belt, ripping the purple cloak away from the prostrate chieftain and cutting two long strips from it before stepping back and tossing them to the wounded man, his eyes pitiless as the barbarian leader twisted in pain.
‘That’s your death sentence, Calgus. Use these to bind your wounds and you’re not likely to die from them, but you’ll never walk unaided again. You can stay out here and take as long to die as you like. Of course, the wolves will find you soon enough, once there’s nobody else here to frighten them away, and if they don’t I’m sure the Votadini will be happy enough to provide you with a protracted death if they get to you first. You could kill yourself, of course, if you have enough will power to open your wrists with your teeth, but I suspect you’ll hang on to the very last moment, hoping against hope for some improbable rescue. Not much of a choice, I suppose, but it’s a good deal more than you gave my birth father.’
He turned away and remounted the big grey without a backward glance, meeting Felix’s raised eyebrows with a steady, expressionless gaze.
‘That will be the last of them, I’d say. Anyone that reached the forest deserves to live. Shall we take the survivors back to join their fellow slaves?’
The small detachment rode back down the slope an hour later, the heads of the tribesmen they had overtaken dangling from their saddle horns and their prisoners staggering exhaustedly before them. Marcus trotted his mount over to the tribunes with Felix following him, and dismounted wearily, saluting the two senior officers before holding out what was left of Calgus’s cloak to Scaurus. The tribune took the garment and passed it in turn to Licinius. The senior officer nodded solemnly, tossing the prize to one of his bodyguard.
‘You took revenge for your father, then?’
‘I crippled him, and left him for the animals.’
Licinius grimaced, casting a wry smile to Scaurus.
‘Remind me never to get on the wrong side of this young man. Still, with both Calgus and Drust dead we’ll have no more problems from the tribes any time soon, at least not until the current crop of barbarian children reaches maturity and decides to come looking for revenge, by which time it’ll be somebody else’s problem to handle. Who knows, perhaps we’ll even be able to reman the northern wall with this many of the tattooed bastards either dead or on their way to new homes.’
Marcus looked out across the battlefield from the vantage point of his mount, surveying the aftermath of the Venicones’ disastrous attack. A mound of enemy dead was being stacked unceremoniously where the fighting had been the heaviest, at the point where the line had momentarily broken. Other soldiers were carefully collecting the detachment’s dead and stacking their corpses in neat lines, each body stripped of its armour and weapons in preparation for the funeral pyre for which the two Tungrian pioneer centuries were cutting wood at the forest’s edge. In another corner of the clearing a large group of tribesmen were huddling under the legion cohort’s spears, while soldiers pulled them one at a time from the mass of their comrades to be searched before they were roped into lines of downcast men ready for the long march south into slavery.
‘How many of them did we kill, sir?’
The Petriana’s commander followed his gaze.
‘About five thousand of them at a guess. It was a bit of a bloodbath, if the truth be told. The killing was almost impossible to stop once we had them pinned against the forest, especially given the casualties our men took holding their first charge.’ He caught Marcus’s frown and smiled grimly. ‘We’ve lost over four hundred men, mainly in the struggle to close the line after Drust had battered his way through it. Apart from Tribune Laenas and that worthless fool Canutius, we’ve lost First Spear Neuto and three other centurions holding them back while the Sixth Legion decided whether to join in or not. If Canutius hadn’t been speared by his own men I’d probably have done the job myself. I suppose a couple of thousand slaves will make a decent contribution to the burial fund, and see the widows and children right, even if the sheer number of them drives their price down. And now that you’ve restored some measure of the Sixth Legion’s honour by dealing with the maniac that started the whole bloody mess off, I’d suggest that you…’
He paused as a trumpet sounded. Marcus turned and looked over the heads of the labouring soldiers from his vantage point on the horse’s back.
‘There’s a rider coming in from the west. An officer from the look of it.’
Licinius frowned with bemusement for a few seconds, then nodded slowly.
‘Of course. They’ll have followed the Venicones’ tracks. I should have expected this. You’d better come with me, gentlemen, because if I’m guessing correctly this concerns all of us.’
Marcus and Felix dismounted, leading their horses behind them, and followed Tribunes Licinius and Scaurus across the slope, none of them noticing that Martos had detached himself from the body of his warriors and was following them at a discreet distance. The small party waited at the battlefield’s edge until the lone rider reached them. Equipped as a centurion, he was tall and thin, with a sardonic twist to his mouth.
‘Greetings, Centurion…?’
The newcomer looked down at them curiously, making no attempt either to dismount or salute.
‘Greetings, gentlemen. You, sir, must be Tribune Licinius, if my estimate is correct. And as to these other three gentlemen, I’d guess that you’re Gaius Rutilius Scaurus, recently promoted from prefect to tribune. Your colleague Tribune Paulus at Noisy Valley gave me an excellent description of you, and I would have recognised the youngest of you without any such help, since he bears a distinct resemblance to the physical description I’ve been given for Marcus Valerius Aquila, son of an executed senator and therefore a fugitive from imperial justice.’ He stared at Felix for a moment before shaking his head with a wry smile. ‘And you, Decurion, are perhaps the most unexpected of all. You are Amulius Cornelius Felix, I presume? Tribune Paulus told me how you got that scar on your chin sparring with him as a boy. Your presence is a very welcome bonus, since your friend Paulus also told me, only after the application of quite significant personal duress, I should add, that you hold the key to a question that Praetorian Prefect Perennis is most keen to have answered.’
The corn officer looked down at the three men in silence for a moment before speaking again, his expression one of utter confidence. I don’t suppose for one moment that you’re actually wondering who I am, since I’m sure that bad news always travels faster than good, but just for the formality of the thing, my name is Tiberius Varius Excingus. I’ve come a very long way to meet the four of you, all the way from the Camp of the Strangers in Rome, in fact, but it seems that I’ve arrived at a most propitious time, doesn’t it? A battle won, barbarians routed, everything as it should be with the exceptions standing before me, eh, gentlemen? One murdering traitor, the two most senior officers guilty of harbouring him for these last six months, and the one man who will eventually provide me with the proof of your collusion to protect the fugitive and enable me to identify just who it is that’s been writing such unpleasant letters to the prefect on the subject of his son’s death. And all in one place, which makes matters so much simpler.’
He sat back on the horse with a smile, waiting for one of the men facing him to speak. Scaurus put a hand on the hilt of his sword, stepping forward and glaring up at the corn officer.
‘You do realise that you’re surrounded by soldiers who were fighting for their lives less than an hour ago? Men with their comrades’ blood still drying on their armour, and who have killed so many times today that one more death would make as little difference to them as swatting a fly? And you’re a long way from the Camp of the Strangers, Centurion. Doesn’t that make you feel a little vulnerable?’
Excingus snorted, shaking his head in amusement.
‘I was told that you would be the pugnacious one, Rutilius Scaurus. And to answer your question, I feel as safe here talking to you as if I were walking through the forum in Rome. For one thing, I’m sure that neither you nor your colleague Tribune Licinius will want to jeopardise the lives of those you hold dear in Rome by any intemperate action. You might have been away from home for too long to know just how far the praetorian prefect has risen in the estimation of the throne, but suffice it to say that he’s been permitted to grant certain members of the Guard quite extraordinary powers. More than that, he’s provided them with sufficient latitude with regard to their personal conduct that they’re more than adequately motivated to carry out whatever orders he passes down to them. Let me stress that, gentlemen, whatever he orders. No matter how bloody, or distasteful. Given that I knew exactly who you were, do you doubt that I have already provided my associates with sufficient information to point these men of dubious honour at the very people you hold most dear?’
A long silence hung in the air between the four men before Excingus spoke again.
‘In addition, should any further explanation of the threat my presence here poses both to you personally and to your loved ones at home be required, I should also point out that my approach to the scene of your triumph here is being witnessed with great care by the two horsemen that you’ll see waiting for me some distance away. Should any violence be done to my person here, they will ensure that the truth of it is known to both the governor and the Emperor…’
‘In which case Ulpius Marcellus would have no choice other than to have us put to death immediately.’
‘Exactly, Tribune Licinius, both succinct and correct. Which would leave your family here in the province somewhat at the mercy of anyone minded to make them pay for your treason, wouldn’t you say?’
Licinius stared up at the corn officer with murder in his eyes, and then shook his head in slow, angry resignation, his eyes burning with hate as he spread his hands in a gesture of surrender.
‘Very well, Centurion. You have us all by the balls. What do you want?’
Excingus nodded gravely.
‘Very pragmatic, sir, and just as I expected. What I want is very simple, Tribune, and without either choice or alternative. Put simply, both Decurion Felix and Centurion Aquila, to use his former name, will divest themselves of both weapons and armour, and then ride with me and my escort to a place not very far from here, where Aquila will be executed for his treason by my praetorian colleague. This will be carried out quickly and cleanly, for we take no special pleasure in this duty, and when sentence has been carried out then Felicia Clodia Drusilla will be released and indeed escorted to join you here…’
Scaurus raised a hand to restrain Marcus as he tensed to leap at the corn officer.
‘No! Unless you want her dead, or worse, you must restrain yourself! Explain yourself, Centurion!’
Excingus leaned forward on his saddle horn and smiled down at the hostile faces gathered around him.
‘There’s not really all that much to explain, Tribune Scaurus. Having gathered that the centurion here has something of a reputation as a fighting man, we thought it best to have an additional means of subduing him for our short ride to justice. If I fail to return within a specified time period then the lady will find herself on the receiving end of some rather degrading behaviour on the part of my praetorian escort. It’s just a precaution, of course, I’m sure there’ll be no need for any unpleasantness. Now, given that time is passing, shall we proceed, or would you rather keep the centurion here and allow all the consequences of non-cooperation that we’ve discussed to come to pass?’
Marcus shook his head, fumbling with the buckle of his belt.
‘There’s no choice. I’ll go with this reptile and face the “justice” that’s been stalking me ever since the throne decided my father’s estate would make a nice contribution to the treasury.’
He met Excingus’s eyes with a contemptuous stare, but the corn officer’s shrug was eloquent in its indifference.
‘I don’t judge the men on whom I’m ordered to exercise the imperial will, Valerius Aquila, I’m simply an instrument of my master. If Prefect Perennis says that you have to die, that’s simply the way that it is. Shall we? You too, Decurion Felix, although obviously you’ll be staying with us for a while longer. I have so many questions to ask you.’
Marcus tossed his belt and swords aside, and tried to lift the heavy mail shirt over his head but was frustrated both by the armour’s weight and his own sudden exhaustion in the face of his impending death.
‘Let me help you, Centurion.’
Martos stepped forward with a look at Scaurus, and took a firm grip of the heavy mail coat’s shoulders, lifting the armour over the Roman’s head. As he did so, Scaurus stepped forward with renewed anger, putting a hand on his sword’s hilt and sliding the weapon halfway from the scabbard before Licinius caught his arm and stopped the movement. Excingus, momentarily startled, resumed his confident pose as he watched the two tribunes’ momentary battle of wills, grinning smugly as the older man tightened his grip on Scaurus’s arm and clamped his other hand on to his incensed colleague’s sword hand. Shaking his head firmly, Licinius pushed the blade home into its scabbard, ignoring the rage in his colleague’s eyes and speaking to him calmly, in a tone akin to that used by a father to a recalcitrant son.
‘I don’t know about you, Rutilius Scaurus, but I’d like to keep my family out of this mess. If you draw that sword he’ll have his praetorian animals rip apart the lives of everyone we care about. Think about it.’
Scaurus stood stock still for a moment, his body shaking with repressed anger, and then turned away, putting a hand to his eyes. Excingus smiled wryly at the sight, shaking his head.
‘You really do need to learn to take this sort of thing with a touch more equanimity, Tribune. If this is the worst thing that ever happens to you then you’ll have had a fortunate life by comparison with most of us.’
Marcus stepped past his tribune with a reassuring pat on the other man’s arm, staring up at the mounted man with a look of disgust.
‘Very well, Centurion, if you’re ready?’
Excingus gestured wearily to the horse alongside his own.
‘Climb aboard, Valerius Aquila, and let’s get this over and done with. You, Decurion, can ride your own beast. A fine-looking animal, you really are a very privileged young man.’
The three men turned and rode away from the knot of officers and soldiers watching them, while Scaurus, Licinius and Martos stood and watched them disappear over the ridge. Licinius raised an eyebrow at his colleague, his tone reflective.
‘That went about as well as we could have expected. The rest is up to the pair of them.’
Martos walked away from the tribunes briskly as soon as the corn officer turned his horse away, knowing that Arminius wouldn’t be far from his master at such a moment. He found the German waiting a dozen paces distant, his arms folded with disapproval.
‘We should have fought. Allowing them to take our friend away without any resistance shames us all.’
The Votadini prince shook his head.
‘They have his woman. And that bastard was very clear that he will tear through the tribunes’ families if he even suspects them of attempting to rescue the boy.’
They shared a dour glance before Arminius spoke.
‘All of these things will happen whether we resist or not. Those animals are strangers to any idea of honour.’
‘So you think we should follow them?’
The German nodded.
‘They’ll be looking behind them for horsemen, but they won’t see a pair of dirty barbarians trailing them along the forest edge if we stay far enough back.’
Martos snorted with laughter.
‘If we stay far enough back? With them on horses and us on foot? Staying far enough back isn’t going to be much of a problem. Come on, then…’
He turned for the treeline, only to find Lugos standing behind them, towering over both men. Martos raked him with a hostile stare.
‘What do you want, Selgovae?’
The warrior flexed his shoulders, great ropes of muscle moving beneath his scarred skin, and hefted the war hammer that he had liberated from the growing pile of captured barbarian weapons. Similar to Drust’s heavily decorated weapon, the hammer hanging nonchalantly from his hand was, if anything, heavier, its iron beak sharpened to a point and the handle’s counterweight formed from a disc of iron which had been patiently worked to produce a ragged edged and a viciously hooked half-moon blade.
‘Roman spared my life, now I pay back debt. And you not call me Selgovae. I have no tribe.’
The prince grimaced at Arminius, tightening his sword belt a notch in readiness for their run to the east.
‘It’s up to you. Does he run with us?’
The German nodded, tossing aside his round wooden shield.
‘Yes. Since you and I are also both dispossessed of our tribes, it seems we have no option but to accept a fellow exile. Now run!’
Marcus managed to hold to his initial resolve, to treat the corn officer with a frosty silence as they rode to meet the praetorians waiting on them, for no more than a minute. Felix kept silent as his friend’s indignant anger boiled over, stroking Hades’ neck gently as if savouring the feeling one last time.
‘So this all means nothing to you? You’re happy to carry out your master’s instructions without giving any thought to the innocent lives you’re destroying?’
Excingus’s response to the question was a look of near-incredulity.
‘And what would you have me do, Valerius Aquila? Tell the second-most powerful man in the Empire that I’m sorry, but the man you’ve sent me to kill isn’t really guilty of anything, other than being born into the wrong family at the wrong time. Should I tell him that his son, far from being the innocent victim of a fugitive from justice, was in reality a traitor who betrayed his legion and caused the loss of their eagle, one of the worst possible military reverses possible? Because believe me, I’ve heard all those stories before over the space of the last couple of months. And doubtless most of them are true…’
Marcus snorted his derision.
‘Most of them?’
Excingus laughed, shaking his head.
‘Very well. All of them, if that helps you to feel better, and more besides, no doubt. The fact remains, young man, that I am an imperial enforcer, and, having reached the dizzy rank of centurion in the Camp of the Foreigners, therefore without any real choice in this matter. Gentlemen, I am an urbane version of the men that collect their tribute from the businesses of the Subura district, but no less of a hired sword for all that, and I am as subject to the praetorian prefect’s will as if he were riding alongside us. Were I sufficiently weak minded to yield to the “justice” in your words, and release you to run again, what do you think would happen to me, eh? I would be dead before the sun kissed the western horizon, of course, and dead, I should add, at the hand of the very man with whom Prefect Perennis has paired me for the task of finding you, and erasing you from this pathetic existence that you’ve chosen as being preferable to a quick death. I have neither illusions nor any choice in this matter, Valerius Aquila, and neither do you, but to play your part, and die with as much dignity as can be managed under the circumstances.’
A long silence held for a few moments before Marcus spoke again.
‘And the decurion here? What has he done to merit whatever torture you plan to subject him to?’
Excingus raised an eybrow at the cavalry officer.
‘Do you want to tell him? No? Very well. Cornelius Felix is here because on the day of the battle in which the Sixth Legion lost their eagle he watched you take part in the violent death of the man who had betrayed the legion to the barbarians. Since that man was Prefect Perennis’s son, our pursuit of you has been invested with more than a little of his personal interest. But that wasn’t the end of it. The decurion here told a friend of his, a legion tribune called Paulus, what you’d done as you walked past them one night in camp, and that friend got drunk and told his colleague Quirinius, the legion’s senior tribune. Quirinius was then sent back to Rome, fell on hard times and imagined that he could bargain with Prefect Perennis. He sought to trade the identity of his son’s killer for some favour or other. Fool
…’ He shook his head sadly. ‘He had a beautiful wife, and a sweet child, and I had no choice but to turn my colleague the praetorian and his thugs loose on them as part of the routine cleaning up after such murders. Anyway, he told Perennis who it was that had told him about your hiding place here on the edge of the world. The prefect, being rather unhappy about a series of letters he’s received from Britannia, threatening him that the truth about his son might easily become public knowledge, gave us a second mission, more important to him than the quest to find you and put you down, believe it or not. He ordered us to find the letter writer and to silence him for good, and that trail leads from Quirinius to Paulus and from Paulus to Felix here. After that I’ll wager there’s only one more link, the letter writer himself. I’m pretty sure that the final link in the chain is your tribune, in fact I’d put good money on it, but I’ll need to be quite sure before unleashing the hounds on him and his family, which means that your questioning is likely to be somewhat enthusiastic…’
He tipped his head to the two riders set to watch his approach to the Tungrians, who had left the shade of the trees, and were cantering their horses towards the three horsemen.
‘And so that, Centurion, is why your friend Felix is accompanying us back to our camp. And now, I suggest, you might want to keep your complaints about the injustice that you’re about to suffer to yourself for a while. I like to pride myself on having a good deal more understanding of the contradictions inherent in the role that my kind and I play than my companions, but I think you’ll find these particular gentlemen a little less informed than me. That, and a lot more willing to take out their frustrations on an unarmed prisoner. So, unless you really want your woman to suffer at their hands as a means of teaching you to keep your mouth shut…?’
He raised an eyebrow, waiting until Marcus had wearily conceded the point with a dispirited nod before looking away, speaking out into the empty landscape as if talking to himself.
‘Good lad. I knew you’d see the sense of it.’