Now, as Lucius followed Alain down the lane of the oppidum, he pondered how he now had something in common with the proconsul. He and Caesar would both have to watch their backs, now that Valens was free. Who knew where the devious senator would go? Certainly, he would never show his face in Caesar’s province again. Would Caesar send letters back to Rome exposing him as a traitor, or would he tuck this incident away for later advantage? Would Valens ever try to resume his seat in the Senate? The senator had a large clientele. If he reached home alive – either in Italy or in Spain – he could easily lay low in some comfortable villa. Given time, he would probably find a way to recover politically, though it might take years. Something deep inside Lucius told him he would never be truly free until his gladius was buried to the hilt in Valens’s chest.
But that concern was for another day. Now, he would repay the debt he owed the Belgic maiden.
Some distance away, in the middle of the lane, Vitalis stood, casually holding his vine branch behind him in both hands. He watched attentively as his men entered each of the huts one by one, ensuring that each emerged and that there were no problems. Then his eye caught sight of Lucius and the boy that was with him venturing to one particularly large house. He watched curiously as they were met at the door by a Belgic maiden with eyes streaming with tears. Her eyes brightened briefly at the sight of the boy. She embraced him warmly and appeared to speak a few words of thanks to Lucius. Then, surprisingly, she invited them both in, and all three disappeared inside the hut.
Vitalis wondered how the girl could ever be so cordial after the slaughter of the previous day. Her tears had not been of joy, but of mourning. Perhaps she had lost a husband, or a father, in the battle. If so, how could she greet her enemy so openly? Vitalis could never understand such people. He would rather die than face defeat.
If the girl had been mourning one of the fallen, her misery had plenty of company. The whole town seemed to be comprised of wailing women, judging from how many he had seen already this morning.
Thinking little of it, Vitalis sighed. He had seen the horrors and loss of war in a dozen lands, and he had quite come to terms with it. There were the weak, and there were the strong. There were the conquered, and there were the conquerors. All men, everywhere, belonged to one of these groups. That was the way of things. He had heard of philosophers who claimed that it was possible to belong to neither group, that all men could simply co-exist. But such an arrangement was only possible if all men adopted it simultaneously. That could never happen, so it was utter foolishness. Like the wolves in a pack, man’s nature was either dominance or servitude. One was superior, the other inferior. Each had his place, and each needed the other to survive. The sooner the order of dominance was established and accepted by all, the better for all.
From one of the Nervii houses came the cry of a child. For a brief moment, the stoic centurion’s mind flashed to a day far in the past, a day almost forgotten, when a carefree nine-year-old Roman boy playing on the streets of Nova Carthago was summoned home, and then rather abruptly informed that the ship carrying his mother had foundered in a storm, and all were lost at sea.
Vitalis was stirred from his reflection by a sudden movement at the back of the house that Lucius had just entered. He had seen it out of the corner of his eye – a shadow only, there one moment, and gone the next. Whatever had caught his attention, there was nothing there now. Had he seen anything at all, or were the long afternoon shadows playing tricks on his mind?
XXXII
“She says, though you are an enemy, she thanks you. It is most thoughtful of you,” Alain translated what Gertrude had said.
She was weeping now, rubbing the long braid of gray hair that Lucius had given her. She held it to her face, allowing her tears to run through the oily fibers. It was her father’s hair. The single braid was the only thing Lucius had retrieved from the plundered body. He would have given her both of her father’s braids, but the other had been dyed red by the chieftain’s blood, so he thought it best to leave it behind.
“Please tell her, he met his death most bravely,” he said to Alain. “He died fighting, with his sword in his hand.”
After a long moment staring at the braid and running her fingers through the weave, she looked at Lucius with reddened eyes, said something, gave a small smile, and then gestured to the door.
“What did she say?”
“She asks that you now go.”
“I can’t do that. She helped me, and I have sworn to protect her. Should any of my people try to loot this place, she’ll need me here.”
“She considers your debt repaid, Roman. She would rather consign herself to the protection of her gods than to those who killed her father.”
Lucius looked at her but she did not return his gaze. Instead, she seated herself at the table and lovingly stroked her father’s hair.
“Alright, if that’s the way she wants it,” Lucius said, resignedly. “And how about you, Alain? You’re welcome to come with me. There are lots of boys in the legions. They clean kits, and help with the camp chores. Some decide to join the legions, when they’re old enough.”
Alain shook his head. “I will remain here. She has always been kind to me, and she will need me.”
“Well, I can’t think of a better – “
Lucius was cut short by a sound in the room behind him, a rushing sound like that of a cloak being dragged swiftly along the floor. He saw that Gertrude’s eyes were looking past him and filled with horror. She let out a sudden scream that made him instinctively draw his sword and jump to the side. That jump saved him from certain death, but it was not in time to prevent the black-robed figure that had rapidly crossed the room from the backdoor from stabbing into his arm with a jagged-edged dagger, knocking his sword to the floor.
Gertrude continued to scream as he backed away from the frail-looking figure. He immediately recognized this apparition as the druid woman that had presided over the sacrifice. The cut in his arm was deep, and he held his other hand over it to keep the bleeding under control. But before he could collect his senses, the woman swiftly came at him again, dragging one foot behind her, seemingly oblivious to her previous frailties, her sinister dagger held high and ready to strike.
“You must die! You must die!” she snarled, over and over again from within the dark hood.
To Lucius’s surprise, she spoke in perfect Latin. Puzzled by this, but still concentrating on the threat posed by the dagger, Lucius prepared to throw his body into her before she could bring the weapon down.
Gertrude screamed again. Then, quite unexpectedly, the druidess stopped in her tracks, well short of Lucius. The dagger fell from her hand and thumped onto the floor. As her body followed the weapon, face down in the rushes, Lucius saw that a javelin had pierced her body through. He looked up to see Vitalis standing in the doorway, his stance recovering after having put his entire body behind the throw.
Vitalis smiled, apparently relieved that his throw had not been too late, and nodded once to the open-mouthed Lucius. But then, as Lucius motioned to the black-robed figure crumpled on the floor, the centurion’s face turned white with the realization of who it was. Vitalis darted across the room, threw his helmet away, and knelt beside the coughing form. The old woman was now quite frail again, lying in a puddle of black-red blood. Turning her over gently, Vitalis allowed the hood to fall away from her face, revealing long locks of gray hair, an aquiline nose, and features very Latin in nature.
Vitalis gasped, his face set in a state of shock that Lucius had never seen before, even in battle.
“My boy,” the old woman said wheezing, as she looked up at him, the vitriol of her earlier tone gone entirely. She reached out a blood-stained hand to touch Vitalis’s cheek. “You are the boy I have so often seen in my dreams.”
“Mother!” Vitalis cried out. “How, in Jupiter’s name, came you here? Mother?”
But the old woman did not respond. Her eyes had glazed over while staring up at he
r child. She had breathed her last.
A silence descended on the room, as the stunned centurion held the body of his mother in his arms, looking her body up and down, his face still set in disbelief. But then, as his eyes lighted on the red-stained hand, and on the ring worn there, all animation left him. The centurion removed the ring from the old woman’s finger and stared at it as though it were the waiting mouth of hell. Even from where Lucius stood, he could tell that it was a perfect match to the one Vitalis had been given by his father.
“Vitalis,” Lucius said.
But the centurion did not look at him. He simply lay the old woman’s body down, stroked the gray hair once, and then stood. Then, as if Lucius were not there, the centurion put on his helmet, meticulously tying the chinstraps, and then turned on his heel and left the house.
XXXIII
Hours later, after Lucius’s wound had been bandaged, and he had finally said farewell to Gertrude and the boy, he went looking for Vitalis. He was somewhat surprised when Jovinus and the other soldiers informed him that the centurion had spoken to no one after leaving Gertrude’s house, and was last seen marching swiftly out of the gates of the oppidum and into the forest.
Lucius and Jovinus searched the woods vigorously, and only came upon the centurion’s tracks as the sun was just dropping behind the horizon. They followed them warily, calling out his name from time to time, only to be answered by the distant howling of wolves.
They reached the edge of a large bog just as the light began to fail, and it was there that they lost the tracks entirely. They took the hazard of striking torches in an attempt to rediscover the centurion’s tracks.
“Lucius, come look at this.” Jovinus called to him from a clump of brush, after both had searched the area extensively. Jovinus was holding his torch aloft and staring down at something on the ground.
Fully expecting that Jovinus had found the body of their comrade, Lucius was surprised when he saw that the torch illuminated a patch of muddy earth that had been recently disturbed. The exposed hem of a cloak protruding from the mud marked the spot where something had been buried. Using their gladii as trenching tools, Lucius and Jovinus dug up the buried items, and quickly identified them as belonging to Vitalis. His campaign cloak, normally immaculate, had been twisted and hastily thrown into the muddy hole. His centurion’s helmet and its cross-plume which Vitalis had somehow always kept spotless, was now caked with mud. One by one, his vine branch, his gladius, his mail armor still bearing every one of his hard-won medallions, his boots, even his tunic were all retrieved from the muddy hole.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Jovinus said. “It’s as if the man buried his entire life. But where did he go from here?”
Both men’s eyes settled on the dark swamp, only a few paces away. It looked sinister and foreboding, its gnarled trees and still, murky water giving it an almost unearthly aspect. Far back in the darkness, the torchlight reflected off of several pairs of eyes looking back at them. Whether belonging to human or beast, neither legionary could tell. Whatever kind of creatures lurked out there, they were too far across the treacherous bog to be of any concern. Still, their gaping presence was unsettling.
Then, Lucius caught the gleam of metal at the bottom of the hole. He reached down and removed two small objects from the mud, and when the torchlight revealed what they were, he somehow knew that he and Jovinus would never see Vitalis again.
In Lucius’s hand, he held the two rings.
Rome: Fury of the Legion (Sword of the Legion Series) Page 24