The Wolf's Gold: Empire V

by Anthony Riches

  The Sarmatae nodded.

  ‘Indeed. Although in truth all I really expected from your man Corvus was a distraction, and enough time to reach my men and strike while Inarmaz’s attention was elsewhere, instead of which he did most of the job for me. And of course disposing of my nephew was child’s play. He was such a trusting fool, as, it appears, was your colleague Belletor. Did I do you a favour in making him the first of our collection of Roman heads? I’ll warn you, my brother in arms, Purta here, has designs to put all of your heads alongside his.’

  Leontius stepped closer, raising a hand to point at the fort again.

  ‘It seems there’s little left to be said then. Here’s a small demonstration of what awaits you if you’re rash enough to cross this bridge in hopes of smashing your way into Dacia.’

  He waved a hand in the air, and a flame flared brightly in the late winter afternoon’s gloom on the wall behind him, a torch wielded by one of the hard-faced centurions supervising the bolt-thrower crews. After a moment’s silence the light brightened as it found the fuel placed around the cross’s base in preparation for the demonstration. Within a few heartbeats the cross was ablaze, and the previously semi-conscious figure nailed to it was screaming at the top of his voice as the fire seared his flesh. While the expressionless Sarmatae leaders watched, he writhed horribly for a moment before sagging motionless down into the flames, lost in their twisting brilliance. The tribune turned back to them without emotion.

  ‘Crude, I know, but to the point. He purported to serve the empire but was clearly only waiting for the right moment to savage his new master’s hand. And so he pays the price by dying in screaming agony. As will you all, when you fail in this doomed attempt to break Rome’s hold over Dacia. It isn’t too late to turn away and forswear this rash assault on our borders.’

  Purta smiled and shook his head.

  ‘I think not, Roman. And since we’re delivering public justice . . .’

  He made a signal to the men behind him, who wrestled forward a struggling figure and forced him to his knees before the Sarmatae king, who raised a long knife for the Romans to see and put his hand in the captive’s hair to pull his head back. His bodyguard set their shields firmly in anticipation of any attempt to rescue the prisoner.

  ‘A head for a head, although sadly I don’t have the time to make this infiltrator suffer the way you thoughtfully arranged for our brother to spend his last moments screaming in agony.’ He looked up at the Romans, smiling at their lack of recognition. ‘You don’t know him, do you? Perhaps this will help.’

  He sheathed the knife, reaching into a pocket and pulling out something that glinted in the winter afternoon’s thin light, throwing it across the bridge to land at the tribunes’ feet. Scaurus reached down and picked up the trinket, a gold ring with a large garnet set in its claws. He raised it for Leontius to see.

  ‘So now we know just how secret the legatis’ information was. This ring was the means by which he enabled his messengers to prove they came from him, and not from some cat’s paw.’

  Purta laughed at his expression.

  ‘I see you recognise the ring. We’ve been using it to feed whatever information we want your leaders to have across the border for almost a year now, while this poor fool sweated and strained under my torturer’s attentions and told us absolutely everything he knew. You wouldn’t believe a man could have his limbs broken so many times without simply going insane.’

  Marcus stared hard across the bridge, and realised that the prisoner’s arms and legs were obscenely twisted, his fingers pointing in different directions. Purta shrugged, drawing the knife from his belt again.

  ‘All good things must come to an end, I suppose.’

  He cut the helpless spy’s throat, dropping his writhing body onto the bridge’s timbers with a dismissive shove.

  ‘That’s just a start, of course. We’ll take revenge for that slow death a thousand times over, once your ditch is filled and your walls broken. If I were you I would pray to every god you hold dear to die in battle, for I will be offering a rich reward from the gold brought to our cause by Balodi for any man who captures any of you men in a fit state to receive the attentions of my flaying knives. Roman gold for a Roman officer’s skin . . . I suppose it’s only fitting.’

  Once he was happy that his men were fed and bedded down, and with Quintus given explicit instructions to make sure that they stayed in their tents and were given no chance to wander off in search of alcohol, Marcus walked the short distance across the fort and into the hospital. The scene inside the building was much as he had come to expect, with the least seriously wounded soldiers sitting in small groups as they waited for the medical staff to work through the more seriously hurt men. Their wounds were superficial for the most part, in need only of stitching by the bandage carriers who were working their way through them with tired eyes and numb fingers, although to Marcus more than a few of them would be permanently disfigured by deep cuts to their faces. Some of them were sleeping, and one man, a long cut through one eyebrow and down his cheek already stitched, was whimpering in his sleep much to the quiet amusement of his comrades.

  ‘He always does it after a fight, sir, like an old dog dreaming about running about an’ barking, only he’s killing barbarians rather than chasing sheep.’

  Marcus smiled sadly and went in search of his wife, but before he found her a familiar voice called him from a side room whose floor was given over to men with more serious wounds.

  ‘Centurion!’

  He turned to find Scarface beckoning him with a respectful salute, and entered the room to find half a dozen men lying on straw mattresses, most with their eyes closed against their pain. One of them, his chest wrapped in bandages, was groaning quietly to himself but showing no other sign of life other than fast, shallow breathing, his skin pale and waxy in the lamplight. Scarface’s friend Sanga was wide awake though, and seemed animated enough despite his obvious discomfort. He smiled wanly up at Marcus and went to raise his arm in salute, his eyes widening at the involuntary movement’s effect on his wound.

  ‘Relax, Sanga. Have you been seen by the doctor?’

  Scarface answered for his friend, who rolled his eyes before closing them and leaving his comrade to it.

  ‘Yes, Centurion. She took a look at him and said he’d live. I had a look in through the door of her room earlier and she was up to her elbows in blood and swearing like a six-badge centurion, so I made a quick retreat before she saw me.’

  ‘No you didn’t, soldier. I was just too busy trying to stop a man bleeding to death to turn my ire on you rather than his wound.’

  Felicia walked into the room with eyes that were glazed with weariness, looking about her and weighing up the condition of the men waiting for treatment while a pair of orderlies waited behind her.

  ‘That one, please.’ She pointed to the man next to Sanga who was holding a thick wad of linen to a long gash in his thigh. ‘And make sure the table’s washed down before you put him on it.’ She leant over the groaning man and shook her head. ‘Then you can put this poor man in the quiet room. I think he’s beyond helping, so we might as well allow him to pass in peace. And you, Centurion, can come with me.’

  She led him down the corridor to a tiny office in which Annia was dozing with little Appius cradled in her lap, gurgling quietly.

  ‘Thank the gods for a docile baby. Here . . .’ She took the infant from her assistant and handed him to Marcus. ‘Have you come for a report for your Tribune?’

  He smiled at her, popping a finger into the baby’s mouth and provoking a prompt and hungry sucking.

  ‘In truth I was more interested in seeing how you’re coping, but since you mention it . . .’

  ‘We’ve lost five more of them, which is a fact of which I’m prouder than I probably should be. None of the men in the room you were in when I found you will die of their wounds, with the exception of that chest perforation, although I can’t promise that infection won’t
be a problem despite the honey I’m using to pack the holes before I close them. We’ll probably have to keep twenty or so of them for a while, the rest you can have back none the worse for their experiences other than some rather fetching scars.’

  She reached out for the child, then remembered something else, raising a finger to Marcus in the gesture he had come to know indicated her unwillingness to compromise on a point of discussion.

  ‘Oh, and you can tell your tribune what I told the Briton’s first spear when he came calling earlier. I will not be evacuating from this fort, not now and not in the morning. As long as I have patients here, here I will remain.’

  Marcus raised an eyebrow.

  ‘He’s probably a little nervous about the fact that an unknown number of Sarmatae warriors are camped out in the valley to our west, and will doubtless have our road to the east blocked all too soon.’

  She shook her head, taking Appius from his arms.

  ‘Not my problem, husband. You’d all better start working out how to keep them out, hadn’t you, unless there’s a plan to take all of these casualties away with us. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be feeding this little man, since you seem to have got him properly excited at the prospect of getting his lips around something more satisfying then your finger. Which, from the look of it, could do with a wash. Away with you!’

  ‘I see. So there’s no chance of persuading your doctor to leave the fortress, Rutilius Scaurus?’

  Scaurus shook his head with a sardonic grin.

  ‘None at all, I’m afraid Leontius. We’ve more chance of persuading the Sarmatae that it’s a bit inconvenient at the moment, and perhaps they could come back next week?’

  The other man grimaced.

  ‘Very well. In which case we should probably turn our thoughts to that rather more pressing subject. It seems that every blasted barbarian from the length and breadth of the great plain is camped down there in the valley, rather than being further to the north, and champing at the bit to get their teeth into the legions as I expect we’d all prefer. There must be more than twenty-five thousand men out there, more than a third of them cavalry, including some tribesmen we believed had been sent packing from the field with their tails between their legs.’

  Scaurus shook his head ruefully.

  ‘It’s clear that the legati have been misled by whoever it was that they had in the enemy camp. There’s no use in wasting time on that disappointment though, since it isn’t going to help us deal with those barbarians.’

  Leontius nodded.

  ‘Indeed not. So, to our situation. Despite the very welcome escape of your two cohorts yesterday, Tribune Scaurus, we still number little more than three thousand men in the face of ten times as many warriors. It looks like our defence of this pass tomorrow morning will be a brief and, if glorious, ultimately doomed affair.’ He raised a sardonic eyebrow at the assembled officers to indicate his apparent amusement at the situation. ‘However, I must say I cannot countenance any talk of retreat. For one thing my orders are to hold this place against any and all threats to the province from the north, and we all know what happens to officers who fail to keep faith with their orders. And quite apart from that I have every intention of continuing with the sequence of offices, once my spell with the army is complete, and there’s no way I’ll be granted the position of magistrate if I allow these barbarians free passage into the province without having a decent try at stopping them. So’ – he looked around him with a look of challenge – ‘we fight. After all, it’s not as if we’ve been sitting on our hands these last few weeks, as this Purta will discover tomorrow if he sends his men into the teeth of our defences. And now, gentlemen, let us turn our thoughts to night patrolling. The enemy may be of a mind to send men forward to probe our defences tonight, or given his record of turning a feint into the main attack he may even try to take us unaware and storm the ditch. Either way, I’m of a mind to make him pay heavily for the pleasure of the attempt.’

  ‘This takes me back. Do you remember the last time I took you out on a scouting mission after dark?’

  Marcus paused from his careful application of mud paste to his forehead, raising an eyebrow at his friend and replying with a sardonic tone.

  ‘How could I forget, Dubnus? As I recall it you managed to get my helmet stove in and put me in the hospital with double vision.’

  The big Briton snorted disbelievingly.

  ‘And as I recall it’ – he waited a moment to see if Marcus would attempt any defence against what he knew was coming next – ‘you managed to alert a bluenose scouting party by falling over a tree. And then when we carried you back down to Cauldron Fort, all you could think of was how quickly you could get your leg over your doctor! And in the name of Cocidius, would you stop smearing that stuff on your face? Why can’t you just grow a decent beard?’

  Marcus ignored him, spreading another handful of the paste across his cheeks.

  ‘That should do it. Shall we go and see who Julius has mustered for us to take hunting tonight?’

  A dozen men were standing to attention outside the command tent under their first spear’s scrutiny. He finished his close inspection of the last of them, acknowledging his brother officers’ arrival with a curt nod before turning back to the line of soldiers.

  ‘Now jump up and down.’

  The Tungrians jumped on the spot while he listened critically, eventually nodding reluctant satisfaction.

  ‘Nothing jingling, no coins, no belt fittings, no amulets, everyone’s scabbard loops are muffled with wool . . . It’ll do, I suppose, although I don’t think I’ve seen as revolting a collection of men in all my years of service.’ He turned to the stores officer standing a little way back. ‘Let’s kit them up then.’

  The storeman stepped forward and handed each man a folded piece of material, and in the torchlight Marcus realised that the material was white.

  ‘I’ve been saving this for a while.’

  The storeman’s voice was doleful, and Julius snorted derisively.

  ‘Then isn’t it a good thing you’ve found a worthy use for it, and cleared some space in your store.’ He watched as the soldiers wrapped themselves in the white sheets, nodding judiciously. ‘Once you’re out in the snow you’ll be all but invisible.’ Tipping his head to the centurions he stepped back. ‘All yours, brothers, and the best of luck.’

  Dubnus examined the scouting party with an equally expert eye, eventually signalling his own satisfaction, the cue for Marcus to brief the party.

  ‘This is a simple enough task, gentlemen. Just after dark this evening Tribune Leontius withdrew his cohort from the ditch defences, and brought them back inside the fort. It’s probably just as well, since leaving them out in this cold all night would be a good way to end up with half of them frozen to death by the morning, and the remainder exhausted from lack of sleep. What they were defending before he pulled them back is a walled ditch just like the one we crossed marching in this morning. There is only one easy crossing point, a wooden bridge which will doubtless be the enemy’s main objective when they attack. The Sarmatae are going to want to capture it, to stop us from burning it out, and use it to bring their warriors over the ditch and into a position from which they can attack the fort. Our job is twofold, firstly to listen for any signs of enemy activity under the cover of darkness, and secondly to make sure they don’t get any clever ideas about scouting or even capturing the bridge itself. There are a dozen of you, and three centurions, so we’ll take four men apiece. Dubnus and his men will watch and listen for any activity to the left of the bridge, Qadir will do the same on the right, and I’m going to take my party across the bridge itself for a very careful scout forward to see what we can find out.’

  He looked across the line of men, unsurprised to find that several of Qadir’s Hamians had been selected for the task. Skilled hunters, their ability to move silently and without trace had already been proven the previous year in Britannia. His gaze alighted on the expect
ed face, stolid and unapologetic at one end of the line.

  ‘Scarface. Have you not had enough excitement for one day? Wouldn’t you rather be sleeping? Tomorrow promises to be a busy day, I’d imagine.’

  The soldier shrugged, ignoring Dubnus’s pitying smile.

  ‘Plenty of time for sleep later, young sir. We can’t have you on your own in the dark with only this bunch of bed-wetting faggots between you and the barbarians.’

  Shaking his head, Marcus turned back to the other soldiers and performed the ritual check that none of them would make any unwanted noise, before submitting to the same inspection from Dubnus. That complete, he wrapped the white camouflage around himself, grateful for the warmth of an extra layer in the night’s bitter cold. Saluting Julius he led the party away from the Tungrians’ camp, out into the white expanse of the ground between the fort’s walls and the forested hills two hundred paces to its south. After only fifty paces of slow, silent progress they were alone in the darkness of the wide open space. Above them the night sky was cloudless, and despite the lack of a moon the blaze of stars provided sufficient illumination for the young centurion to be able to pick his way forward over the slightly uneven ground, with only the crunching sound of his companions’ footfalls through the snow’s frozen crust to disturb the silence. Reaching the treeline he waited for a moment to allow the rest of the party to catch up, their breath steaming in the night’s pale light, then led them on along the forest’s edge at a steady pace until he reached the four-foot-high turf wall that bounded the ditch’s western side. Peering over the rampart he could see the dark mass of the Sarmatae tents five hundred paces away, the bright pinpricks of their torches twinkling in the darkness. As he watched, a muffled thump sounded from the closest of the fort’s four west-facing towers, as a bolt thrower spat a missile out into the night on an arching trajectory that would bring it to earth somewhere in the enemy encampment. Dubnus pushed forward to join him at the wall, listening intently for any reaction from the Sarmatae, but the shot had clearly fallen to earth unnoticed by the barbarians. He shrugged, gesturing to the wall and whispering into his friend’s ear.