Fortress of Spears

by Anthony Riches

  ‘And seen to be done, Centurion?’

  The praetorian shrugged.

  ‘Anyone that’s been sheltering the fugitive can expect to suffer imperial justice, that’s inevitable, but we understand the value of restraint. After all, you’re fighting a war here, and we wouldn’t want to impede your efforts to put this barbarian scum back in their place.’

  The tribune nodded.

  ‘Quickly and quietly, then, and no excessive punishment of any officers who might have been deceived by this man Aquila?’

  Excingus nodded firmly.

  ‘I think we understand each other, Tribune. In return for your assistance we’ll make sure that justice is served without a lot of unhelpful excitement.’

  Tribune Paulus nodded, and shifted his weight forward in the chair, putting his hands on the desk in readiness to stand, but neither of the men facing him showed any sign of getting to their feet. Excingus frowned slightly, raising a hand to forestall Paulus.

  ‘There is just one more thing, Tribune. Hearing your name just now, I was reminded of something I was told shortly before I left Rome.’

  Paulus nodded politely and sat back, feeling sudden discomfort with this new and apparently spontaneous line of discussion.

  ‘Yes, it was the day before we left the city. A former tribune of the Sixth Legion was found with his throat slit, apparently by his own hand. The bodies of his wife, child and closest relatives were found in the house with him, all dead from stab wounds. The assumption is that he must have lost his mind as a result of his experiences here in Britannia, and run amok with a dagger before using it to take his own life. A terrible shame, the child was less than two years old, and his wife was such a pretty little thing before he took his knife to her. I believe his name was … Quirinius?’ He made a show of consulting his tablet. ‘Ah yes, Tiberius Sulpicius Quirinius. He was a senator, since his father had killed himself only a few weeks before. Seems it ran in the family …’

  Paulus stared at the two men with a growing sense of horror, both at the news they bore and its implications. Excingus continued, his expression suddenly almost predatory.

  ‘Senator Quirinius left a journal, of sorts, in which he made several interesting statements regarding his experiences in Britannia. The most startling of these was his professed knowledge of exactly who killed tribune Titus Tigidius Perennis.’

  He waited for Paulus to react, stringing the silence out until the tribune had no option but to fill it.

  ‘But Perennis died in battle. He was …’

  Excingus shook his head firmly.

  ‘And that’s what his father believed, until Senator Quirinius’s journal came to light. It seems that far from dying at the hands of the barbarians, dying honourably with blood on his sword, the prefect’s son was murdered by a Roman. The missing son of Senator Aquila seems to have made his way to Britannia in an attempt to avoid his fate, and Tribune Perennis in turn seems to have managed to find him. We believe that Aquila must have killed him in order to maintain the secrecy around his hiding place here on the frontier.’

  Paulus pursed his lips and looked baffled.

  ‘Who would have harboured a known fugitive? That would be a death sentence!’

  Excingus nodded agreement.

  ‘And not just for anyone foolish enough to protect the fugitive. Anyone else that became aware of his presence and failed to report it to the relevant authorities would carry the same burden of guilt. And the same punishment …’

  He fixed Paulus with a hard stare, and his tone become accusatory as he continued.

  ‘The thing is, Tribune, that Senator Quirinius’s journal was quite adamant about two closely related facts. The first was that he had been told who it was that had killed your colleague Perennis. The second was that it was you who had shared that knowledge with him, apparently while you were under the influence of drink, one night after the battle in which your legion was stripped of its eagle and half its fighting strength. The battle in which the prefect’s son died, in fact.’

  Paulus sat back in his chair, his face pale with shock.

  ‘I told him …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I told him that a centurion serving with an auxiliary cohort attached to our legion was reputed to have killed the tribune before the battle.’

  ‘And that centurion was the fugitive Aquila?’

  Paulus shook his head, his face blank.

  ‘I genuinely couldn’t say, Centurion. He was just another auxiliary centurion to me.’

  ‘From which cohort?’

  ‘The First Tungrian, as I recall it.’

  ‘And how did you know that this centurion was in fact the tribune’s killer?’

  Paulus looked up, a hard edge coming into his voice.

  ‘If I tell you that, how am I to be sure you won’t take your threats to another good man?’

  Excingus smiled evenly.

  ‘That depends on you, Tribune. There may be no need to involve anyone else in this, as long as my colleague here and I know where to go hunting for this fugitive. Of course, I’ll interrogate my way through this entire province if I’m forced to do so, but it’ll cost me time I badly need to avoid wasting, time in which the fugitive might be running for another hiding place. I should add that it would go badly for you too, in that case. And you have a large family in Hispania, I believe?’

  The tribune’s face hardened, and his knuckles whitened against the dark wood of his desk. Rapax slid a hand to the hilt of his dagger, his body tensing. After a moment Paulus slumped slightly in his chair, the fight seeming to go out of him as the consequences of any rash action sank in.

  ‘Very well. I have no option but to take you at your word that you’ll go after this Aquila, rather than carving a bloody path through a body of loyal soldiers.’ He sighed, closing his eyes in resignation as he spoke. ‘A man I’ve known since childhood is serving as an officer with another auxiliary cohort. He pointed the centurion out to me during the battle’s aftermath. The Tungrians had held off ten times their strength for longer than we’d have ever thought possible, buying time for the other legions to reach the battlefield. Naturally we wanted to have a look at the damage they’d done to the warband, so we walked up the hill, over a carpet of bodies so thick that they were two and three deep at the point where the two lines had clashed. There were officers from half a dozen units standing around and marvelling at the scale of the slaughter, and that the Tungrians had survived such an onslaught. And the smell …’ He shook his head slightly at the memory of the reek of blood and faeces that had permeated his clothes for days afterwards. ‘One of the Tungrian centurions walked past, covered in blood and wide eyed with the strain of what his cohort had endured, and I commented to my friend the decurion that he had two swords strapped to his belt. That’s when he told me that he’d seen the same man earlier that day, standing over the body of Tribune Perennis.’

  Excingus raised an eyebrow.

  ‘And that’s all he told you? None of the grisly details?’

  Paulus laughed without mirth.

  ‘Oh, I tried to get them out of him all right. I might not have liked Perennis very much, but he was still a Roman tribune and my colleague. My friend just smiled at me, and told me that the less I knew the safer it would be for me. It seems we’d both have been better off if I’d never heard any of it …’

  Excingus nodded, a glint of triumph in his eyes.

  ‘Yes. And better still for your colleague Quirinius, given that he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. And now, Tribune, I’ll trouble you for that one last piece of information. It’ll be hard for you to give it to me, but it’ll go harder on you and yours if you keep it from me. Who was this friend of yours, exactly?’

  5

  Out on the hills to the north of the Wall, the Venicones had restarted their long march to their homeland at first light. By mid-morning their pace across the barren hillsides was little better than a walk, despite the likelihood that the Roman cavalry wou
ld find them and recommence the deadly game that had played out the previous day. Many of Drust’s men had not eaten anything since the previous morning. The day had dawned bright and clear, and was now warm enough to make the marching barbarians sweat heavily in the absence of any breeze to cool their labouring bodies.

  ‘Come on, my lads, we’ll all just have to keep marching if we’re going to avoid being speared by those horse-shagging bastards! Another few miles will see us safe!’

  The Venicone king’s voice was hoarse with bellowing his commands, but there was still a hard edge to his shouted encouragement that compelled Calgus to open his legs and stride out, despite his own experience in the art of cajoling his own men to greater efforts. He had watched Drust fighting off the Roman cavalry the previous day, pulling a horseman from his mount’s back with his war hammer’s spike and cutting the stunned horseman’s throat with a hunting knife the size of a short sword before he could recover from the fall, putting his head back in a savage howl of triumph as the soldier had spasmed out his death throes at his feet. More than once he had led the brief attacks that had punished those riders who had ridden too close to the warband, swinging his heavy pole-arm to fell their horses and leave the Romans easy meat for the men of his bodyguard clustered about him. Even the discovery that his body slave was missing, along with the gold torc that was the king’s badge of authority, had failed to put the man off his stride, although for all of Drust’s bravado, Calgus doubted that the loss was anything like as trivial as the Venicone was making out. Smiling wryly at his own acceptance of the need for pragmatism in defeat, when less than a week before he had been the leader of ten thousand warriors and on the verge of a victory to upset the balance of power across the entire province, Calgus put his head back and dragged down a lungful of air into his burning chest, forcing his feet to even greater speed despite the burning pains in his legs from the previous day’s exertions.

  ‘Are you enjoying this yet, Calgus?’ He glanced wearily sideways to find that the Venicone king had fallen in alongside him, a grim smile on his face as he regarded his captive’s gritted teeth. It’s a long time since you walked so far or so fast, I’d imagine? I could always lend you a blade, of course, and let you make a run for it. We can’t be all that far from your own land, so you might make it to safety.’

  Calgus snorted, waving a hand at the treeless hills across which the warband was making its laboured progress.

  ‘You know as well as I do that their cavalry will be close at hand now, trotting happily along the trail we’re leaving with their spears ready for use. One man alone in country this open wouldn’t last any time at all.’

  He coughed and spat phlegm on to the thin grass at his feet, and Drust laughed.

  ‘This little march is doing you wonders, Calgus, we’re working you harder than you’ve managed in years. And to think you could have been no more than a head on a pole by now if not for the Venicones.’

  Calgus shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘I imagine you’re still planning to see me decorating some Roman’s spear, unless by some good fortune they get to you first. So where are you taking me, my most unwelcome host?’

  Drust leaned towards him conspiratorially, looking round to ensure that his people were all sufficiently engrossed in their own struggle to keep moving before speaking, his voice lowered to avoid it carrying.

  ‘You know what, Calgus? I don’t have the first idea. We’re in the middle of nowhere, in land I’ve not trodden before in my life with a pack of Roman cavalrymen on our tail and nowhere to seek shelter from them. All I can do is keep my people moving, and hope that we’ll reach some feature that we can defend against the Romans before they find some means of bringing us to bay on ground that suits them.’

  The rebellion’s former leader nodded, lowering his own voice in turn.

  ‘Well, I know where we are, Drust, and I know where we need to go if you want a chance to hold these bastards at arm’s length for long enough that they’ll lose interest in …’

  A tired shout of warning sounded from the rear of the column, and both men craned their necks to stare back down the wide track of flattened grass the warband was leaving in its wake. A body of horsemen had crested the rise over which the Venicones had laboured less than half an hour before, no more than a thousand paces behind them. Drust spat on to the ground, hefting his hammer, which, Calgus noted, still had a few hairs clinging to its flat face.

  ‘It was too good to last. I’ll leave you to contemplate your fate, and how you might want to buy yourself a little extra time rather than dying out here on their spears, while I make sure that our rearguard have their wits about them.’

  Tribune Licinius had ridden hard, overtaking his leading squadrons minutes before their first sight of the enemy. Reining his sweating horse in alongside the leading squadron’s decurion, he quickly sized up the sprawling mass of barbarians with a grim glance at his first spear.

  ‘Still just as many of them as there were when we left them to it yesterday, I see. All we seem to have achieved is to have thinned them out a little, and even that small gain cost us over ten per cent of our strength. I suppose the best we can hope to achieve today is to harry them from their flanks, and keep them from any shelter so that they keep running all day. We need to herd them, like a flock of particularly vicious cattle, until they break from lack of food and shelter. Once they reach the River Tuidius we’ll see how well they cope with an impassable obstacle to their front and hostile spears to the rear. Pass my orders to each squadron as they join the chase, no man is to go any closer to the barbarians than one hundred paces, other than to clean up the stragglers as they fall behind. We’ll lose no more men unnecessarily today. I’m going for a look at them close up.’

  He spurred his magnificent grey stallion forward, flanked to either side by the men of his bodyguard, and cantered up the length of the warband, keeping a sensible distance between himself and any bowmen lurking in their ranks. Spotting a small hillock a short distance from the barbarians’ path he rode to its summit, using the elevation to look down into the Venicones. Licinius muttered quietly to himself as he watched the barbarians streaming past, straining his eyes to make out the finer details.

  ‘That will be their king marching there, I can see his men clustered around him.’ He squinted intently, a frown creasing his forehead as he caught sight of something that held his attention. ‘And who’s that marching alongside him in such a fine purple cloak, I wonder? I seem to recall my good friend Legatus Equitius mentioning something similar in connection with another tribal leader of our recent acquaintance …’

  Marcus and his small escort rode north-east in the wake of the rest of the squadron, following their tracks in the grass until they found their colleagues taking their lunch on the open plain, with lookouts posted to all sides. Marcus dismounted, summoning Double-Pay Silus with a quick gesture. The cavalryman walked briskly over to him and saluted crisply, his face expressionless, and Marcus took a deep breath before speaking.

  ‘My apologies, Double-Pay, I’ve been in a foul mood ever since my closest friend in all the world was killed yesterday, and I’ve been taking it out on you. We don’t have to like each other, but we do have to get along if this strange situation is going to work, so let’s forget this morning and see how the afternoon shapes up, shall we?’

  Silus nodded, his face relaxing a fraction.

  ‘Agreed, Centurion.’

  Marcus pulled off his helmet, scratching his head as he spoke, and the double-pay took a bite of the piece of hard bread in his hand, chewing vigorously as he listened.

  ‘The barbarian we captured back there was a man I knew from another fight, in another place. He told us everything he’d seen in the last day, and part of what he told us was that there’s a large tribal group heading east in front of us. They’re making for a fort on the road to the north.’

  Silus looked hard at the centurion, chewing on the bread for a moment before swallowing it.
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  ‘That’d be Alauna. I’ve been there a few times, it’s a big place, built to house several cohorts, so that if the Votadini ever got stroppy with us we could use it as a base from which to put them back in their place. More of a trading centre now, though. It’s got a decent-sized vicus too …’ The two men shared a knowing look. ‘… which would make it the perfect place for them to find food, and take their frustrations out on any civilians who haven’t already run for the hills. I’d imagine that a quick attack might find the blue-noses distracted enough to let us get at them before they even realise we’re in the neighbourhood.’

  Marcus nodded.

  ‘Perhaps a careful scout forward would be the best idea? The rest of the squadron could go north to find Decurion Felix, and tell him what we’ve discovered, and perhaps we should send a messenger party to warn the tribune. Shall we go scouting, Double-Pay? I’d imagine that your deputy can manage well enough in your absence?’

  Silus smiled happily at the prospect.

  ‘Yes, sir. Perhaps you and I, Centurion, and a few picked men?’

  Having overtaken the straggling Venicones, Tribune Licinius’s men were a good deal more circumspect than they’d been the previous day. Even without their explicit orders to avoid a straight fight, there wasn’t a man in the entire cohort who hadn’t witnessed the fate of those men who had been unwise enough to ride close enough to the tribe’s straggling mass and paid the price for doing so.

  The cavalrymen had been horrified by the mutilated bodies of their fellow riders, and the horses that the tribesmen had swiftly and crudely butchered for their meat, and nobody was looking for the same fate either for himself or for the mount that was his closest companion. They rode alongside the warband at an easy pace, those men with bows loosing the occasional arrow in the hope of inflicting a wound that might cause the victim to fall out of the Venicones’ punishing march north, while the rest of the cavalrymen ranged up and down the huge body of men searching for any signs of weakness to exploit. As the morning progressed, and the ground started to slope upwards again, a steady trickle of barbarians lost their painful struggle to keep up with the warband’s main body, no longer able to cope with the pace being set for them, and were swiftly ridden down and speared. Their heads were unceremoniously hacked from their bodies and tied by their hair to the saddles of their killers as bloody trophies of the day’s running battle, before the victorious riders spurred their mounts to rejoin the hunt, driving the warband pitilessly before them. As the morning wore on even the weak autumn sun’s heat became torture for men denied any water since the previous dawn, and the number of tribesmen falling victim to their remorseless hunters grew steadily until most of the horsemen had at least a single head dangling by the hair to bump bloodily against their horses’ flanks.