The German grimaced.
‘There is a young officer who has taken to his tent, I believe, and refuses to consider leaving it for fear of causing the deaths of more of his friends?’
The smile vanished from Julius’s face.
‘Yes. His century is sitting shivering in their tents with their chins wobbling, and when I went to reason with him he nearly took my head off. We’ve got until dawn to get him back on his feet, or else he’ll have to be left behind when we march…’
Arminius nodded.
‘Leave him to me.’
Julius watched the German head off down the line of tents with tired eyes, then turned back to the sentries with a dismissive sneer.
‘And the next man that turns up here without the watchword and shouting the odds, remember the golden rule. If in doubt, spears first and questions later. You call yourselves soldiers…?
Arminius found the man he was looking for without too many problems. Where the Tungrians had their tents laid out in straight lines, their Votadini allies’ shelters were gathered around their leader’s tent in a tight circle. He stopped at the perimeter of the huddle of tents and shouted across them, his voice a commanding bark.
‘Martos!’
After a moment’s pause a warrior that Arminius recognised as one of the prince’s bodyguard strolled out to meet him, eyeing the German flatly and keeping his hands close to a pair of fighting knives tucked in his belt.
‘Why do you call upon a prince of the Votadini and a free man as if you were his master, rather than addressing him with the respect that your slavery to the Romans demands?’
The German chuckled darkly, putting his hands on his hips with supreme self-confidence.
‘Free men? You and your prince submitted to Roman rule just as completely as I, once you were betrayed by Calgus and defeated by these soldiers camped around you. And you are not the man I wish to speak with. Tell your master I need his help with Centurion Corvus.’
The Votadini warrior stared hard at him for a long moment, then turned on his heel and walked back into the cluster of tents. After a moment Martos stepped out of his tent and beckoned the German to join him. He took a lungful of the cold night air and stared up at the blazing stars in the coal-black sky above them, waiting for Arminius to negotiate his way through the tents. When the German stood before him he continued to stare upwards, speaking without looking at the other man.
‘My kinsman tells me that you wish to speak with me. He told me that I had only to say the word and he would gut you like a rabbit, and I told him that taking his knives to you would be a very good way to die before his time. He is frustrated, like all of my men, not to have been turned loose to hunt down Calgus once his warriors were beaten, although I suppose that we will get over the disappointment. Especially as we expect he has run to the last of his men who currently hold our capital. So, you have my attention. What can I do for you that will not wait for daylight?’
His gaze came to rest on Arminius, who inclined his head respectfully.
‘Prince Martos, our friend Centurion Corvus has taken to his tent and will not come out. Instead he sits hunched over the head of his colleague Rufius, terrified of leading any more of his comrades to bloody death. I think we’ve seen this before, you and I, and I think we both understand what will happen if he cannot be persuaded to change his mind.’
Martos nodded.
‘He is a fugitive from their justice. Without the shelter provided by the Tungrians, he will soon be discovered. And when that happens, riders will be sent to this cohort to arrest the tribune and first spear, and take them to explain how they came to be providing our friend with a hiding place in which to escape from the Emperor’s justice. They would join him in a slow and painful death, were he to be uncovered for who he really is. But why should this concern me? I like the man, but if he insists on cutting his own throat then little I can do or say will prevent him from doing so, and as for Frontinius and Scaurus, well, one Roman officer is much like any other, I would imagine.’
Arminius spoke quickly, his voice kept low to avoid their being overheard.
‘We march tomorrow, to free your tribal capital from whatever hold Calgus still has over your people. My master is sympathetic to your people’s plight, whereas the man that will probably replace him if Corvus is discovered is a Roman aristocrat, and cares no more for the likes of you and me than for any other “barbarian”. Worse than that, he is a man of little courage from what we saw today. I fear for your people’s safety if he becomes the commander of the force on which your tribe’s survival rests.’
Martos eyed the German for a moment.
‘You present me with little choice, then? Either we get the centurion back on his feet, or we risk losing the officer most likely to want my people free without the spilling of any more of their blood.’ He sighed. ‘Again I find myself drawn into matters for which I care little, when all I want is to be set loose to hunt down Calgus. Come on, then, German, let’s put some strength back in this Roman’s backbone.’
They walked quickly to the 9th Century’s tents, Martos waving away the bodyguards who ran to join him as he strode away.
‘Any man that can best me and this ugly German bastard deserves our heads.’
The 9th’s tents were pitched in an orderly manner, and the soldiers were already tucked away and asleep, exhausted by the exertions of the day, but half a dozen men were standing around their centurion’s tent with worried faces. Seeing the two barbarians approaching, Qadir and Cyclops sent the rest away to join their tent parties and greeted the two with respectful nods. Both men knew that Martos’s intervention in the battle of the Red River had saved the cohort from being overrun, and Arminius was universally recognised as a man not to be crossed.
‘He’s still in there, eh, Cyclops?’
The watch officer nodded, indicating the tent’s door flap with a wave of his hand.
‘Young gentleman won’t come out, won’t eat or take a drink either. Just sits there staring at Centurion Rufius’s head…’
Martos put a hand on his shoulder, gently easing him to one side.
‘Leave him to us.’
The two men stepped into the tent, finding it lit by a single guttering lamp whose fuel was nearly exhausted. Martos looked at Arminius, who nodded silently and backed out of the door, calling for more oil. Marcus was sitting on his bedroll, the severed head of his friend facing him across the dimly lit space, propped against the oiled leather of the tent’s wall. The tent reeked of blood and sweat, and Marcus’s armour and flesh were still caked with gore, the untreated cut on his cheek a line of crusted blood.
‘I see your friend Rufius is dead. A pity, he was a steady hand in a fight from what little I knew of him. In my tribe, when a warrior brother falls in battle, we take a drink and celebrate his life. We commend his spirit to the gods, and pray that our exit from this life will be as noble as his. I have heard that he died with half a dozen dead men littering the ground around him. And I have also heard that you, Centurion Corvus, hacked apart a dozen men to take his head back from our mutual enemies. You Romans clearly have your own ways of marking such a glorious death, and such a feat of revenge, but this does not seem fitting…’
Arminius stepped back into the tent with another lamp, then busied himself pouring oil into the first one while Martos looked on, weighing up the exhausted and demoralised man slumped on the ground in front of him. He squatted in front of Marcus, looking into the younger man’s red-rimmed eyes.
‘So, Centurion, you have a choice. Come with us now, leave the past behind you and look forward to tomorrow. Come with us now, and we will drink to your friend’s feats of this and other days. We will send him to his gods with our thanks for the time he gave us. Or you can stay here and wallow in your misery, and tomorrow we will be forced to march away and leave you with the legions, where you will eventually be discovered to be a fugitive from justice.’
He eyed the downcast Roman with a calc
ulating eye before continuing.
‘Rufius saved your life, before you found your new home with these people, right? When your father was executed by the Emperor, and your family slaughtered, it was Rufius who helped you to escape from the men hunting you?’
Marcus nodded, smiling wanly at the memory as he answered.
‘He wasn’t the greatest of warriors, but he was every inch a soldier. He stood alongside me twice with his sword drawn when he hardly knew me. He brought me to the cohort, persuaded me to change my name from Valerius Aquila to Tribulus Corvus…’ He shook his head with the memory of that cold spring morning earlier in the year.
‘So you owed him your life twice over. Is that why you jumped into the warband today? You should have been killed in an instant, but between your men’s efforts and the favour of Mithras, you killed a dozen men or more and walked out alive with what was left of your friend. Your name is on the lips of every man in camp, thanks to that moment of madness, and the story grows with every telling, as does the number of people who hear about an insane young Roman fighting with an auxiliary cohort. We march north tomorrow, and if you don’t lead your men out of camp tomorrow morning, it will only be a matter of days before someone puts the pieces of your story together and you find yourself in irons, waiting for the carpenters to finish building not only your cross, but those on which everyone who has protected you will die in agony alongside you.’
Marcus stood up, stretching the stiffness out of his joints.
‘So if I don’t pull myself together I risk dragging everyone else into my private Hades? And what if I do march north? How long will it be before I see another of my friends hacked to pieces in front of me?’
He stared aggressively at the two men, challenging either of them to reply. Martos spoke into the charged silence, his voice harsh with emotion.
‘How long? Who knows? We’re warriors, my friend Marcus. We all live with death. None of us enjoys losing a friend, but none of us has much choice in the matter. Your father had you trained to fight, he made sure you knew how to throw your iron around. He gave you the skills you need to kill anyone that puts himself in your way. More than that, he gifted you the intelligence and aggression to survive, and perhaps even to take revenge for his murder when enough time has passed. But you won’t make a life here without facing death the way you have today, and you will face it again and again. Your friends will die, Marcus, it’s a fact of life. I’ve lost friends and kinsmen, and so has Arminius. You have two choices, Centurion, you can either learn to deal with it, or you give up now and spare those close to you by taking your own life.’
Arminius stepped in close to the exhausted centurion, gently tapping his bloody chain mail with a sad smile.
‘And whichever you choose, you must make that choice quickly now. If you’re not with us when we march tomorrow morning, you’ll represent a death sentence to the man I’ve sworn to protect with my own life. And I cannot allow that to happen.’
Marcus closed his eyes and stood silently for a moment, swaying slightly on his feet with exhaustion, then opened his eyes and regarded them without any hint of emotion.
‘Very well. You are both good men, and I trust your judgement. I will seek to deal with my loss, and not betray those left alive for the sake of those already dead.’
Martos put a gentle hand on his shoulder, guiding him towards the tent door.
‘Good. Life is for the living, Two Knives, and the more death you see, the more you will come to appreciate that truth. Let’s get you out of that mail and washed, and then the three of us can take Rufius’s head down to the fire that’s been set to deny the crows our dead, and reunite him with his brothers-in-arms. After that, I’d say that we’ll all need a drink, and a chance to remember the man at his best before we leave him here for good.’
Stores Officer Octavius found his intended partner in the torc’s purchase absent when he made his way to the man’s section of the Petriana’s camp. Enquiries as to the whereabouts of Decurion Cyrus were met with the combination of indifference and near outright hostility to which he had become accustomed in his service as a stores officer. The most helpful comment he got was from a man whose sword he had replaced with moderately good grace less than an hour before, prompting a temporary truce in the usual state of open warfare between the cavalry wing’s fighting men and the storeman they were rightly convinced was making a small fortune from supplying their needs.
‘He’s out at the turf wall supervising the guards. One of the decurions stopped an arrow this afternoon, so Cyrus has gone over to make sure Double-Pay Silus is up to doing his job for now. I can take you over to see him if it’s urgent…?’
His look of appraisal was enough to put Octavius on his guard in an instant. The stores officer and Decurion Cyrus were well known throughout the wing as men with a shared objective, wealth and all of the privileges it could buy them. Cyrus was reputed, despite his relatively lowly position as a squadron commander, to be wealthy well beyond the expectations of any of his peers, or indeed the wing’s senior officers. It was muttered that he had chanced across a large cache of barbarian gold in the previous few months, and had contrived to keep the majority of it for himself with a few well-placed bribes. As for keeping that portion that he had managed to retain to himself, his fearsome reputation for swift violence in the face of any perceived slight or wrong had guaranteed that nobody who had even the scantest idea as to what was kept in his campaign chest harboured any thought of theft. Octavius, detested though he was by the Petriana’s men, carried no such threat, and any man that suspected the presence of easy gain in his doings would have little to put him off the idea of taking a knife to either the store’s tent canvas wall or, should the necessity arise, its occupant.
‘Nothing that won’t wait. I’ll catch up with him later.’
The storeman turned away with a quiet curse, but his mood quickly lightened with the realisation that the army was unlikely to be moving from their camp alongside the ruins of the barbarian stronghold for a day or two. There were sacrifices of thanks to be made to various gods, equipment to be recovered from the dead, wounded to be carried away for treatment and the corpses of the fallen to be gathered and burned. He was sure that the governor would be unlikely to throw battle-weary soldiers on to the road without a compelling need for such a course of action. He would have plenty of time to speak with his business partner once his night’s business was complete.
*
Posting Arminius to keep guard on the command tent delayed the arrival of the latest piece of bad news at soldier level in the Tungrian cohorts by no more than an hour, and by the time of the morning meal every man in the Tungrian section of the camp was fully aware of both the facts as they were known and the inevitable speculation wrapped around them.
‘Every fort on the wall burned out, I’ve heard, women and children raped and murdered and the greybeards pegged out for the crows.’
Morban shook his head angrily at the trumpeter’s excited statement, reaching across their small tent and gripping the younger man by the tunic with an angry glint in his eyes. Short of stature and bandy legged, the standard-bearer was nevertheless solid with muscle, and a dangerous man when roused.
‘Then you’ll do well to keep your mouth shut and what you’ve heard to yourself. It’s just a story to you, eh? Well, to some of your mates it’s their women you’re talking about being fucked stupid by those dirty blue-nose bastards. Some of them have kids too. So get your bloody horn and get ready for morning parade.’
He stamped out of the tent, his breath misting in the early morning chill, almost tripping over the child sitting outside, seemingly oblivious to the cold. The boy was intent on the knife he held in one hand, and was dragging the edge of its blade across a sharpening stone. He glanced up at his grandfather before returning his gaze to the weapon’s edge.
‘I thought I could hear you and that bloody stone, Lupus.’ Morban squatted down next to his grandson, holding out a hand for
the knife. The boy surrendered it reluctantly, and stared fixedly at it while his grandfather examined the edge, snatching his thumb away with a curse as the blade drew a thin line of blood. ‘Cocidius, but that’s sharp! Six more months of your constant sharpening and you’ll have nothing left, lad.’ He handed the weapon back, watching as Lupus slid it into the sheath on his belt. ‘Look, Lupus, you don’t need to sharpen a knife every day. This isn’t normal…’ His voice faltered, foundering on the certainty that nothing he said was going to make any impact on the boy, who was staring at the ground in misery.
‘Antenoch told me to make sure I always had a sharp edge on my knife.’
Morban nodded, blinking away the tears that were threatening to run down his cheeks. The boy, despite not having reached the age of thirteen years, had used the knife to hamstring a barbarian warrior at the battle of the Red River Ford, taking revenge for the murder of his friend Antenoch. He put a hand under the boy’s chin, lifting his face until they were looking into each other’s eyes.
‘I know. It’s not easy for me either. Antenoch was my friend, as well as looking after you when I couldn’t. I…’
The boy started to cry, and Morban gathered him into his arms and hugged him tightly, feeling the child’s body shake as he sobbed out his misery, and his feeling of helplessness intensified. After a few minutes the sobbing eased, and the standard-bearer was able to gently remove the boy’s arms from around his neck and hold him out at arms’ length.
‘Come on now, lad, we’ve got a parade to get organised. I don’t even know if Centurion Corvus will be join -’
As if on cue Marcus stepped out of his tent, pitched alongside that used by the standard-bearer and trumpeter, and looked about him. His eyes were red with fatigue, and his armour was still covered in dried blood, which was flaking away as the rings rubbed against each other with his movements, but his face had a determined set despite the exhaustion that shadowed his features. Morban took one quick glance and turned to bellow down the line of tents.
Fortress of Spears e-3 Page 7