Fortress of Spears (20 page)

One of the more headstrong decurions spoke out quickly, hardly waiting for the sound of his tribune’s voice to die away.

‘They’ve killed more than enough of our men. I say we stay with the bastards to the end, until they fall to their knees with hunger and pray for a quick death!’

A few other members of the group nodded, although Licinius could see a larger number whose faces were creased in frowns. He raised a hand to the most influential of them, inviting him to speak.

‘Titus?’

The decurion in question, a good ten years older than the first speaker, stepped forward a pace and looked about his brother officers with a hard stare.

‘I say we leave these dunghill vermin to fester in their own shit. They are too many for us to take unaided, they mean nothing now that they seek only to run for the safety of their own land, and we can only throw more men after those we’ve already lost if we seek to pursue them further. To the south our own people may be in peril from the Brigantes, and my choice would be to ride to their aid, rather than to sit here watching these tattooed animals thumb their noses at us.’

He stepped back, his face flushed red with the unaccustomed attention, and a number of the older officers nodded and spoke quiet encouragement to him. Licinius opened his mouth to speak, but the words died as a third officer raised his hand to speak, waiting until his tribune had gestured for him to continue.

‘Cyrus?’

The man stepped forward, pushing through the throng of his brother officers into the torchlight.

‘Tribune, I say we have a third choice. Yes, we can ride to the south and war with the Brigantes, or stay here and ride herd on this rabble a while longer. Or we could, should we choose to do so, head to the north-east, and provide support to our brothers who have ridden with the Tungrians …’ Licinius’s eyes widened slightly with surprise, unclear as to what motivation the officer speaking might possibly have. ‘… After all, they’ve been sent north to liberate the Votadini tribal capital with barely sufficient strength for the task, and our speed and spears would doubtless be highly valued by their officers.’

The men around him were clearly equally as surprised as their tribune, and a moment of astonished silence hung over the group before Licinius spoke again, a faint smile gracing his face.

‘So, gentlemen, we could stay here and hope to catch the Venicones in some error, or we could go south to a fight we know is even now raging across the northern frontier. And yes, we could even ride to aid the Tungrians in the liberation of the Dinpaladyr. Since there’s no clear opinion in the room to which we can all cleave, I will consider the question overnight and tell you my opinion in the morning. Thank you and dismissed. Decurion Cyrus, a word, if you will?’

The tribune waited until the other officers had all left before speaking again, walking across to stand close to Cyrus, his voice kept low to ensure that his words remained between them.

‘I would have found the words “Support our brothers the Tungrians” a little hard to swallow coming from almost any of my officers, but to hear them coming from you was downright amazing. Have you been at the Falernian? Or is there some other piece of information you might like to share with me?’

The decurion kept his face imperturbable, shaking his head in response to the question. His answer was delivered in stiff, formal tones, his gaze locked on the tent’s canvas wall.

‘No, sir. I’m simply aware that there’s a third of our strength out there to the north-east with the infantry, and since we’re here anyway …’

Licinius held his questioning gaze for several seconds before turning away.

‘And you’d be sure to tell me if there were
anything
you felt I needed to know?’

His subordinate nodded firmly.

‘Of course, sir.’

The tribune walked around him slowly, his eyes fixed on the other man.

‘Good. It’s just that I still have the feeling that there’s something I’m missing here, some reason why you’d want me to march the wing to join the Tungrians. And with your reputation for being a man of substance, a man with an eye to the main chance …’

He stopped in front of Cyrus, looking him up and down.

‘One last chance, Decurion, and with no disrespect to your previous answers which I will happily overlook on this occasion should you choose to change your story. You really have nothing more to tell me?’

The decurion simply shook his head, never meeting his superior’s gaze.

‘Very well, off you go. Just bear in mind the way I’m likely to react if I discover that you’ve been keeping anything from me.’

Calgus led the Venicone warriors silently round to the Petriana camp’s southern side, keeping to the darkest shadows and moving with a slow, cautious stealth calculated to avoid their being detected by any listening patrols the Romans might have out in the scrubland that surrounded their turf walls. When he judged that they had reached the optimum spot for their purposes, less than fifty paces from the patrolling sentry closest to them, he halted the group wordlessly and indicated that they were to spread out a few paces and take cover. Taking a silver pendant from his neck, he swiftly tied its leather cord to a tree branch, and silently stripped away any vegetation that would obstruct its line of sight to the men patrolling the camp’s walls. He outlined his plan to the Venicones in a harsh whisper.

‘When one of them comes to take this trinket, we will wait until he is in the act of removing it from the branch, then hit him from all sides. You,’ he pointed to the warrior Maon, whose blow had flattened him during the Roman attack on his camp, ‘you knock him senseless and put him over your shoulder, and then you all follow me away from here. We should be well away by the time they even notice that there’s anyone missing, and by then it’ll be far too late.’

Maon frowned.

‘What if more than one of them comes for your bait?’

Calgus simply shrugged, tapping the hilt of his sword.

‘Take whichever of them goes for the pendant, and put anyone else to your iron. We only need one.’

He reached up and spun the silver disc on its cord until the leather had a dozen or more turns to unwind, feeling the tension fighting his fingers.

‘Ready?’

The men around him all nodded somberly, realising that they were about to lure a dangerous prey to them, and Calgus released the disc and allowed it to spin freely, the polished metal flickering as the moon’s pale light reflected from its whirring surfaces. Sliding into the cover of a bush, he stared through its foliage at the Roman he could see standing guard on the camp’s western entry, willing him to look up and see the disc’s silver twinkle in the darkness that surrounded them.

Cyrus strode from the tent with his face set stone hard, seething inwardly at the tribune’s words and fearful of the potential consequences of his own failure to confess the prize that he still hoped would be his, despite the urge to tell his superior officer the full story. That fool Octavius had no idea of what he was capable of doing, or he would never have allowed him within a hundred miles of the deal, whether he was short of ready coin or not. Ignoring the sentry standing solitary guard on the camp’s western gate, he pulled off his helmet and its felt liner in order to allow the night’s cold air to take the itch from his sweat-sodden hair. No, he would find whatever idiot soldier was willing to sell the torc to the stores officer for a pittance and double the offer Octavius had made him, cutting the halfwit storeman out of the deal at a stroke. There would be no intermediaries between the frontier and Rome, just a two-year wait for his discharge and then a leisurely journey to the heart of the empire. He would have plenty of time to find the right man to broker the sale of the Venicone king’s badge of authority to a wealthy collector on his behalf, and his presence and the story that he was the man who had hacked the barbarian king’s head from his shoulders would help to ensure that the price paid would be a steep one. He could comfortably expect a hundred thousand from the sale, he estimated, enough money to … He snapped out of his reverie as the flicker of something shiny in the bushes to his right caught his eye and turned back to the sentry, ignoring the fact that the man looked half asleep.

‘Stay here, keep your mouth shut and keep your fucking eyes peeled. There’s something in the undergrowth and I’m going for a look.’

Pulling his helmet back on, he strode towards the spot where he’d seen the momentary flash of light, drawing his sword and scanning the ground around him suspiciously before returning his gaze to whatever it was that was hanging from the tree, now less than ten paces from where he paused to look around and sniff the air. He could see it now, a disc of metal hanging from a low branch.

‘Must have snagged when the bastards came through, or been left as a marker and got forgotten. Their loss …’

The decurion sidled forward with his sword ready to strike and his other hand outstretched to take the object from its resting place, his attention fixed on the trinket. He didn’t see the massive Venicone warrior who rose silently from the ground to his rear, an axe handle gripped in one huge fist, or even suspect the trap until the last second, with the rush of air as the stave’s heavy shaft swept round in a vicious arc that ended with a thunderous impact with his helmet, smashing him to the ground despite the protection of its iron plate. Scrabbling disjointedly at the ground beneath him, shakily attempting to get back to his feet in defiance of his reeling senses, he felt another pulverising impact land on the helmet, and then knew nothing more.

6

The next morning was bright and cold, a harsh wind from the east making the Selgovae tribesmen occupying the Alauna fort huddle deeper into their thick woollen cloaks. They had gorged themselves on the fort’s stores the previous evening, and taken their pleasure of the vicus’s remaining inhabitants in an orgy of alcohol and rape, and many of the warriors were still the worse for wear by the middle of the next morning. A handful of corpses were scattered across the fort’s cobbles like bloodied rags, left where they had been butchered by drunken tribesmen, and a faint echo of the stench of blood was carried by the biting wind. The faint cries of distress from those of the vicus’s inhabitants that still lived bore witness that not all of the tribesmen had yet drunk themselves to the point of insensibility.

The tribal band’s leader sat in the detritus of the former commander’s residence, chewing on a piece of salted meat and basking in a quiet feeling of satisfaction. After their escape from the destruction of Calgus’s forest camp his men had run long and hard to evade the inevitable pursuit, and to have found such ready shelter and food was little less than divine intervention. His warriors could recoup their strength over the next day or two, and the fort’s intact walls and gate would protect them from any Roman units that happened across their hiding place. As he sat grinding the near-indigestible meat between his teeth, one of his men burst into the room, his sword drawn and a wild look in his bloodshot eyes.

‘Harn, there are Romans advancing from the south! Looks like a legion!’

From the elevated vantage point offered by the fort’s walls, Harn could see a long column of infantry approaching from the south, moving with a deliberate speed rather than hurrying to the attack as he would have expected. Straining his eyes, he could see that the leading soldiers were indeed legionaries, their detachment standard fluttering gaily in the wind, the stylised representation of a bull immediately identifying them as belonging to the hated 6th Legion.

He stared bleakly over the fort’s stone rampart, looking across the empty landscape to the north and reckoning the odds. ‘It would be
them
. At least there’s no cavalry to be seen, and none of their stone throwers either. We could hold this place for weeks, given the amount of food they left behind, or we could make a run to the north without fear of being ridden down. It’s a pity there’s no way to know if they’ll bottle us up in here, or just pass by and head north.’

As if in answer, the advancing cohorts’ trumpets blew again, and the column split into three, one body of men deploying to the east and another to the west, while the foremost cohort spread across the southern arc. Within minutes the whole southern horizon was lined with troops apparently awaiting the order to advance to encircle the fort. Harn frowned out at them, looking again to the north.

‘Looking to wrap us up, are they? If I could be sure there was no cavalry out there …’

A horseman rode forward from the advancing column with a dozen soldiers trotting alongside him, his armour and weapons shining in the morning light, and reined in his horse at the edge of any possibility of bowshot from the fort’s walls. A warrior close to Harn put an arrow to his bow, ready to chance his skill at the distant target, but the Selgovae leader tapped him on the arm and shook his head.

‘Let’s hear what the bastard has to say before you start trying to put an iron head into his guts. Signal him to approach!’

The Roman officer dismounted, and approached the captured fort’s walls with an escort of six men with shields held ready to protect him. At fifty paces from the wall he halted, bellowing out his challenge loud enough for every man gathered on the walls to hear it clearly.

‘Selgovae warriors! I am Scaurus, the tribune commanding this detachment, and the man with your fates held firmly in my hand! You have been lucky enough to find a fort not yet burned out, and now you line its walls wondering whether to wait us out behind them or run for the north. I cannot make that decision for you, but I can provide you with a small clue as to the treatment you can expect when we break in and put an end to your pathetic remnant. I have with me a cohort from the imperial Sixth Legion, and these are men who want little more than a chance to take their swords to you. These soldiers are not the raw recruits that were shipped in from Germania, after the act of betrayal that destroyed six cohorts of their comrades. These are men who actually witnessed what you did to their comrades at the battle of Lost Eagle, and they are desperate to take prisoners rather than heads in this coming battle. Any of you that survive will find your last few hours more painful than anything you could ever have imagined. Anyone that lives through this day will be skinned, crucified and left for the birds to feed on their raw flesh!’