The Leopard Sword: Empire IV (44 page)

‘Now you’ve done it. The soldier that lent me this tunic’s going to shit when he sees what a mess you’ve made of it.’

He danced in fast, catching Slap’s good hand in his right fist as the bruiser made to repeat the cut, holding it steady in mid-air as the bodyguard grunted and strained in a fruitless effort to break the powerful grip on his hand. Julius tensed the bulging muscle in his right arm, physically forcing the other man’s hand down his body and turning the blade in towards him.

‘
No
. . .’

Realising his intention Slap redoubled his efforts, butting the Tungrian in the face only for Julius to ball his other hand into a fist and smash it into Slap’s face with a crack of bone. With a single, powerful, grunting shove Julius forced the knife’s blade into Slap’s crotch, sawing it to and fro while the bodyguard screamed hoarsely at the blindingly intense pain. Pulling the weapon free from the other man’s failing grasp, he pushed him away, and the bodyguard tottered backwards with his good hand gripping his ruined manhood, his wide eyes fixed on Julius as blood flowed down his legs and onto the floor in thick rivulets.

‘And that’s enough punishment, I’d say. Are you ready to leave?’

He turned to find Annia lacing her shoes, her face turned away from the ruined bodyguard. She spoke without looking up.

‘Everything I thought I had here has turned to ashes . . . and it was all a lie in any case.’

The Tungrian strode across to the door, now silent as the men outside realised the futility of their efforts to break it down with anything less than an axe.

‘You men outside! Tell Petrus that I’ll be back for him. And tell him that I’m planning to take more time over his death than I did with these two fools.’ He turned for the hidden door, taking Annia gently by the arm. ‘Let’s go, before they realise there’s another way out of here.’ He paused at the top of the stairs, shaking his head at Slap as the bodyguard stared at him through eyes slitted with the agony of his wound.

‘Remember when you called me an amateur, and how I smiled and ate shit for the sake of seeing her? There was only one amateur in the room that night, and it wasn’t me! Die slowly,
amateur
.’

Escorted away from the basilica by the city guard after delivering the revelation of his master’s murder and the slaughter of the bandit hunters, Tornach had sunk gratefully onto a pallet bed in one of the jail’s empty cells and quickly fallen asleep, his equipment stacked against the wall next to the tiny stone room’s open door. He had swiftly been forgotten by the guards, consigned to the status of ‘that poor bastard’ and the subject of idle discussion as they went about their business as ordered by Scaurus, keeping the city secure against any potential attack. As the shadows had begun to lengthen in the street outside the cell’s barred window he had risen from the bed and strapped his belt and weapons about his waist, walking out to the jail’s front office with a sheepish wave of his hand to the officer in charge.

‘Slept like a baby.’

The guard nodded sympathetically.

‘Understandable. What you saw . . .’

He left the sentiment incomplete, but Tornach pursed his lips gratefully.

‘That’s done now, and it’s time to get on with life. I’ve nothing else to do, so I might as well help you boys. Where do you need another man?’

The watch commander snorted a mirthless laugh.

‘Where
don’t
I need another man? There’s twenty-five of us to secure eight gates and keep the city calm.’ He looked at the bandit hunter with an appraising eye. ‘Why don’t you go out to one of the gates and send a man back here? That’ll let me put another body out on the streets.’

He took a tablet from a stack perched tidily on his desk, wrote a brief statement of his orders into the wax and then embossed the soft surface with the engraved official ring on his right hand. He passed the tablet to the waiting Tornach, who nodded and tipped him a respectful salute and then strode out of the door with a purposeful look on his face, just as one of the officer’s men burst into the office.

‘There’s five hundred or so men coming up the west road, and we’re pretty sure they’re not the lads that went out this afternoon.’

The watch commander frowned.

‘If it’s not the army coming back home, there’s only one other man with that sort of force to command, and the gods only know what
he’ll
do if he gets inside these walls.’ He stood, reaching for his helmet and sword. ‘If it is Obduro we’ll just have to pray he’s got no means of getting in. I’m going down to the south-west gate to see what he’s got to say for himself.’

‘
Centurion! Soldiers on the main road!
’

Sergius mounted the grain store’s wall two steps at a time in response to his chosen man’s call, responding more to the urgency in the man’s voice than the words themselves. He stood alongside his deputy breathing heavily and staring out into the evening sun’s radiance, and at length shook his head in disgust.

‘I can’t see a bloody thing, what with the setting sun and the fact that my eyes are twenty years older than I’d like. Who spotted them?’

The chosen man ushered a soldier forward, and as Sergius turned to speak with the legionary he realised that the boy was barely old enough to shave. He sprang to attention, saluting his centurion with a look of uncertainty.

‘No wonder you’ve got sharp eyes, man; you’ve not spent a lifetime straining them to stare at the horizon in fear of what might be waiting for you just over it.’ He pointed to the distant horizon. ‘Now then, in your own time, tell me what you can see, eh?’

He turned back to face the western horizon, waiting as the soldier stared out into the evening’s long shadows, and watching as the sun’s orange ball sank to meet the land’s smooth black line.

‘Not as much as I could just now, Centurion. They’re soldiers, marching on the main road. I can see their shields.’

Sergius blew out a long sigh of relief.

‘Thank Mithras for that. For a moment I thought they might be Obduro’s men, but if they’re carrying shields then they must be—’

‘No, Centurion, I don’t think they’re ours. They’re not in any sort of formation, for one thing, and they don’t look . . . well,
tidy
enough to be Roman soldiers.’

Sergius stood on the wall in the dying sun’s light, and as the dimming orb met the horizon it silhouetted the oncoming men, now less than a mile away, throwing them into sharp relief. The chosen man shook his head, screwing his eyes up in an attempt to make sense of what he was seeing.

‘What in Hades? They’re waving something over their heads, something on their spears. They look like . . .’

‘Heads.’ Sergius’s voice was flat with disappointment. ‘So much for our chances of a quiet life, eh?’ He turned back to the men waiting below him in the grain store’s wide expanse. ‘
Stand to! Let’s have you up on the wall!
’

The young legionaries watched as the bandit gang marched up the road towards Tungrorum in total silence, the distant rapping of their hobnailed boots on the hard surface the only sound to be heard. Sergius stared out at them, calculating the odds as he counted their heads for a third time and came up with the same depressing answer. Turning to his chosen man he muttered his assessment quietly, unwilling to scare his men any more than they already were.

‘At least five hundred of them. With that many men I don’t see how we’re going to—’

A screamed warning from the man to his right snatched his attention away from the oncoming bandits, and he leaned out from the wall to follow the legionary’s pointing hand. A pair of figures had burst from the closest of the city’s gates and were making for the safety of the grain store’s walls. The larger of the two was propping himself up with a spear, his pace more of a stagger than a limp, a piece of bloodstained cloth torn from his tunic tied about his leg. The woman beside him was dragging him along by the arm and looking back fearfully at the open gateway. As Sergius watched a small group of men came through the arch behind them, their murderous intent clear as they fanned out to either side of the fleeing couple, yelling challenges and imprecations. He turned and shouted down to the men guarding the store’s entrance. ‘It’s Julius! Open the gate!’

He leapt down from the wall with more agility than grace and waited while his men pulled away the stout timber beams securing the store’s entrance, joined within seconds by Julius’s watch officer and a handful of his men. Drawing his sword as the gate started to open, Sergius dived through the gap at the head of the small group and ran towards the fleeing figures, still fifty paces distant, watching as Julius, clearly unable to go any further, turned to face his pursuers with only the spear on which he was leaning as armament. The woman ran a few more paces before she realised that she was alone, then she stopped and turned round, screaming in horror as their pursuers closed in on the Tungrian. Without hesitation the exhausted Tungrian obeyed his instincts and went on the offensive, lunging awkwardly forward to stab one man in the thigh with the spear and sending him reeling away clutching at his leg. Pivoting on his good leg, he punched the spear’s butt spike through the foot of another man, who had been sufficiently unwary in his approach, twisting the weapon’s shaft and tearing it free, flipping the spear over in his hand with practised skill and slashing the blade across the man’s throat, dropping him choking to the turf. The remaining attackers spread out, still not noticing the approaching soldiers in their fixation on the Tungrian, and as Julius stood panting, the spear’s blade weaving in the air as he struggled to keep it level, one of the gang members eased around behind him and raised his knife to strike. As the attacker stepped forward to deliver the death stroke the woman leapt onto him and buried her own knife deep into his back, bearing him to the ground and stabbing at him again and again in a frenzied spray of his blood, her screams clearly on the verge of hysteria. While the remaining attackers dithered in the face of Julius’s exhausted obduracy and the woman’s berserk attack, Sergius shouted a hoarse challenge that snatched their attention away from the fugitives and onto the oncoming soldiers. They turned as one man and ran, sprinting back towards the city’s gate as it closed in their faces with a dull thud.

‘Leave them!’ Sergius pointed to the bandit horde’s front rank, now barely two hundred paces from the grain store’s walls and running as fast as their weary legs would carry them, clearly intent on cutting the tiny party off from their refuge. ‘Carry him!’ A pair of Tungrians grabbed the staggering Julius by his arms, one of them tossing away the spear on which he was leaning, while Sergius abandoned any pretence at decorum and pulled the blood-soaked woman off the mutilated body of her victim, catching her knife arm and disarming her as she spun towards him with murderous intent. He dragged her alongside him as the soldiers ran for the gate in a desperate foot race with the bandits. Calculating the odds as he ran, the realisation dawned on Sergius that it was a race they were going to lose, if only by a few yards. Julius had clearly come to the same conclusion.

‘Leave me, and save yourselves!’

The Tungrians to either side of him kept running as fast as their burden allowed, drawing their swords and preparing to die in defence of their centurion, and Sergius nodded as he ran alongside them, reaching for his own gladius. Scant paces from the gate, and instants from being overrun by the bandits, Sergius was bracing himself to push the woman away and make his stand, when a flight of spears arced down from the store’s walls, reducing the oncoming rush of men to a chaotic jumble of tumbling limbs, giving the runners just enough time to throw themselves through the closing gate. The shattered Tungrians dropped Julius to the ground as they collapsed onto their hands and knees, one of them vomiting onto the store’s immaculately raked pebbles, and Sergius’s chosen man bellowed orders for the legionaries to stand ready for any attempt to climb the wall. Sergius, unable to do anything more than put his hands on his knees and resist the urge to throw up his last meal in sympathy with the exhausted
man, looked down at the prostrate Tungrian centurion with a wry smile. Shaking his head, he raised a questioning eyebrow as Annia, painted with sprays of blood and trembling violently, was wrapped in a blanket by Felicia and led away.

‘I really hope she’s worth it, this woman of yours, given that you may well never walk without a limp again. What happened?’

Julius grimaced at the pain. Felicia had offered him a linen bandage and he held it to the wound, watching as his blood stained the fabric.

‘I thought we’d got away free, but a pair of them jumped us one block from the gate. One of them managed to put his spear into my thigh before I could return the compliment.’

Sergius nodded.

‘You said you had an idea about defending this place? Given we’ve got five hundred angry-looking bandits milling around out there I’d be grateful if you were to share it with me.’

He listened to Julius speak for a few moments then raised his eyebrows in shocked understanding.

‘By all the gods but that’s a terrifying idea. Nobody could ever accuse you of being afraid to think the unthinkable, could they, Centurion?’

He turned away and walked slowly up the steps onto the store’s wall, looking out at the ragged band assembled below him just out of spear-throwing range. A man wearing a masked cavalry helmet pushed his way through the throng and walked forward a few paces, holding up his empty hands to indicate his desire to talk.

‘I could hit him with a spear from here.’

Sergius shook his head at his chosen man’s suggestion without taking his gaze off the bandit leader.

‘I doubt it. And I’d rather not raise the stakes that far this early. Those men might well soon have us at the point of their spears.
That’s close enough!
’

The bandits’ leader stopped, keeping his open hands raised. With the sunset behind him the cavalry helmet was stained red, and his words boomed out across the open ground in a pronouncement of the legionaries’ impending doom.