The soldiers looked around warily at the surrounding trees and the deep shadows that lurked beneath them.
Hercules hesitantly approached the remains of the horse. Taking a sniff, his great whiskers twitching, he growled.
“Who could have done this?” Valeria asked. “And why?”
“Not who, but what, princess.” Pelonius had dismounted and was squatting beside a large bone that was lying off to one side. Picking it up, he examined it closely as the two centurions joined him. “It’s an upper leg bone,” Pelonius said. “See these marks?” The bone sported a series of deep gouges. “Those were made by the teeth of a predator at least as big as a lion, and powerful enough to break the bone in two.” He held up the jagged, splintered end for everyone to see. The other half of the bone was missing. Standing up, he proceeded to move in a wide circle around the bodies, his eyes focused on the ground. “I think this may be as far as the cavalry detachment got.” He pointed at the northern side of the road. “The foliage there is trampled, branches and even small trees broken and knocked over, and the ground has been churned by what must have been dozens of animals, large ones by the look of it.” Turning to the opposite side, he went on, “And there you see where those animals went.” He knelt down to run his fingers over a spot in the dirt alongside the road. “Horses went this way.” He got to his feet and turned to face Sergius. “I believe your men were ambushed here, then pursued into the forest.”
Centurion Cantius, who had moved off to one side, called out as he pointed at the ground, “Look here. Lions did this, plain as day.”
The others, including Sergius, who still sat his horse, came closer and looked where the centurion was pointing.
“Tell me that’s no lion track,” Cantius said to Pelonius.
“All right, centurion,” Pelonius said, “that’s no lion track. It’s roughly the same size, but lions — and wolves, for that matter — leave prints with four toes ahead of the pad of the foot. This print, as you can see, clearly has five.”
Cantius laughed. “Well, it’s a bear, then. They put five toes on the ground.”
Pelonius shook his head. “Both the toes and the pad are longer in proportion to the width than you will see on any bear, front feet or rear.”
“Then what is it?” Sergius snapped.
Pelonius said nothing.
“Dark Wolves,” Valeria breathed. “You’re all afraid to say it.”
“I’m sorry, princess,” the general said through clenched teeth, “but I don’t have time for half-forgotten legends stirred up by a dying man in full delirium. Centurion!” he called to Cantius as he rode off toward the head of the column. “Resume the march. We’ve wasted enough time here.”
“But sir,” Marcus asked, glancing off into the forest where the horses fled, “aren’t you going to search for your other men?”
“We’ll mount a search once we secure the town,” Sergius growled.
As Sergius’s soldiers quickly moved back into formation for march, Marcus turned to the scribe. “What are you thinking, Pelonius?”
“Obviously more than one animal did this,” Pelonius said, a worried look creasing his face, “but I’m not sure how many.”
“And how do you know all this?” Paulus asked.
Pelonius smiled. “You would be surprised what you can learn from scrolls.”
Marcus snorted. “You didn’t learn any of this from scrolls, old man.” At the confused looks from Paulus and Valeria, he added, “Pelonius wasn’t always a scribe.” Valeria opened her mouth to speak, but Marcus held up his hand. “Later. We need to get moving.” With a quick glance at the sun, he added, “We should reach Camaracum in another two hours.”
With one last look at the bodies and the tracks on either side of the road, Pelonius muttered, “I hope we have enough men.”
***
The closer the legion came to the village, the more bodies (all of them civilians) the soldiers found. Most were on the blood-covered road, but some had either run or been dragged off into the trees. Just as with the first two victims, the flesh and organs had been stripped away. Countless vultures and crows were feasting on the corpses, with more circling above in a dense cloud of dark wings. Those on the road took to the air as the lead soldiers approached, squawking their indignation that their meal had been interrupted. The birds off to either side looked up to stare with cold, pitiless eyes at the procession of Romans before they returned their attention to their bounty.
And everywhere were more of the mysterious tracks. When Valeria asked Pelonius how many of the beasts might be on the prowl, he scowled and said, “Too many.”
The worst thing, Valeria thought as they rode steadily closer to the doomed village, was the pungent reek of rotting flesh. The battle hardened soldiers and Pelonius barely wrinkled their noses, for the stench of the dead was something with which they were intimately familiar. Valeria had experienced the smell before, particularly when Pelonius had taken her to see the slave pens, but it had been nothing like this. The odor was so strong it was making her sick to her stomach, but she bit back her bile. She would not embarrass herself before her companions, nor would she provide any impromptu entertainment for General Sergius, who primly held a cloth over his nose and mouth.
Hercules padded along beside her, his twitching tail held low, nearly brushing the ground. He was nervous, his head snapping around at every sound that reached them beyond the squabbling of the birds and the footsteps of the soldiers and horses, and the hackles on his neck stood high.
The soldiers marched on in grim silence, their normally neat formation deformed by the need to step over and around the bodies strewn upon the road.
Camaracum was protected by a stone wall that rose twelve feet high, but it had clearly not afforded any protection to the inhabitants. The slaughter within was plainly visible through the main gate, which stood wide open.
“Stay here, princess,” Marcus said after Sergius ordered the first century into the town. “I’m going forward to see what—”
“Don’t leave me here,” she said, reaching out to take his wrist. “I told you that I’d do whatever you ordered, Marcus, and I meant it. But please, whether we go in or remain here, let us all stay together.”
“She’s right,” Septimus muttered. “I don’t like this, not one bit.” He looked at Marcus. “Your place is beside her.”
Pelonius and Paulus both nodded in agreement as the other men of the guard arranged themselves in a defensive square around the princess.
“Very well,” Marcus said. “Do you want to go into the town or stay here?”
She bit her lip, then said, “I want to go in. We need to find out what sort of monsters did this…and stop them.”
With a nod, Marcus gave the necessary commands to her escort, which tightened up their formation so they could ride through the gate.
Hoping no one would notice, Valeria reached out and took Paulus’s hand.
“It’s okay to be frightened,” he whispered.
“Are you?”
“I’m terrified.”
She managed a momentary smile. “I’m glad I’m not the only one.”
He gave her hand a tight squeeze before letting go. “Come on,” he said, nudging his horse forward, following after Marcus and Septimus.
The town was an abattoir. The streets were strewn with maggot-riddled bodies, and the air was thick with flies. Carrion birds and rats still worried off the bits of rotting flesh that continued to cling to the bones. The soldiers even came upon a few wolves and a bear, all of which were quickly put to death by the archers, but even the lowliest soldier realized that such a motley collection of beasts could not have wrought such devastation.
Sergius ordered a house to house search, and the soldiers quickly and efficiently worked their way through every dwelling and public place, looking for any survivors or the killers. But, in the end, none of either were found.
With Marcus’s grudging permission, Valeria looked through a f
ew of the homes, hoping to find some clue, but she only came away with more questions.
“Look at this,” she said as they entered a home of what must have been one of the more well-to-do citizens. The ingredients for a meal were arranged neatly in the kitchen, except for the tail of a fish that had been left behind on the floor after something had eaten the rest of it. In one of the bedrooms, clothes had been laid out, as if someone had been preparing to dress, and the adornments in the room were pristine, undisturbed. The study, by contrast, looked as if it had been struck by a whirlwind. Furniture was overturned, statues and urns lay shattered upon the marble floor, which itself was spattered with blood, as were the walls. Valeria picked up a piece of parchment from amidst the chaos. Whoever had lived here had been writing a letter to a business associate in Rome when whatever had happened…happened. The neat script trailed away in a black scrawl where the quill had ripped through the parchment. The ink well was on the floor halfway across the room, while the quill was embedded in the desk in a spatter of dried blood. “The people here must have had no idea they were in peril until the beasts were upon them.”
“This makes no sense,” Marcus growled as he stepped out on the balcony that overlooked the main street that ran through the town. “An entire pride of lions or a pack of wolves couldn’t do all this!”
“Nor would they,” Pelonius agreed. “The animals we are familiar with would never attack a village, especially one this large with a defensive wall. But there’s something else that I find odd, something I didn’t see where we found the first bodies.”
“And what would that be?” Marcus asked as he returned from the balcony.
“This.” Pelonius pointed to a pile of dried excrement on the floor near the entryway.
“What’s so special about a little pile of shit?” Septimus asked. “They’re all over the place.”
Pelonius looked at him. “And you don’t find that odd?”
“Well…” Septimus frowned. “I guess it wasn’t from all the people shitting themselves in fright.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Pelonius said. “This is baboon dung, and I have seen dung from monkeys, as well.”
“Baboons and monkeys?” Paulus asked, his face contorting in confusion.
“The forests in Aquitania are home to a great many of both,” Pelonius explained.
“I haven’t seen or even heard any monkeys since the day after we left Augusta Viromanduorum,” Valeria recalled.
“I know,” Pelonius said. “And that is more than passing strange.”
Marcus shook his head. “Baboons and monkeys might have left all this mess behind, but they didn’t kill these people.”
“No, they didn’t.” Pelonius frowned. “I think the predators followed them here.”
“What do you mean?” Valeria asked.
“Let me show you.” Pelonius gestured for her to follow, and he led her and the others back downstairs and out to the street where Hercules waited, crouched like the fabled Sphinx of Old Egypt near the door. “We’ve only been looking for, and at, people. But look here.” He drew the sword he had acquired before they set out on this journey and used it to lever aside some human bones to reveal the remains of a smaller body underneath.
“A gods-damned monkey,” Septimus whispered.
“What bits are left of it,” Marcus agreed.
“And here.” Moving to another pile of maggot-covered bodies, Pelonius pushed the human detritus aside to reveal a skull sporting an elongated snout and wickedly long incisors. “A baboon. I believe if we look more closely, we will find many more.” He turned to Valeria. “Princess, I believe we should go back out the main gate and search the approaches to the village. I think we’ll find—”
“Princess Valeria.” She and the others looked up as a junior officer on horseback rode up.
“What is it?” she asked.
“The general asked me to inform you that the legion is reforming for march. A trail of destruction leads away from the town’s rear gate and into the forest, and the general means to follow it.”
“You’re not going to look for the missing cavalrymen, then?” Marcus asked.
The officer shook his head. “The general believes them dead. We will search for their bodies when we return.”
“Thank the general for his kindness in informing me,” Valeria told him.
The soldier nodded, then turned and rode back to where the legion was assembling near the far end of the town.
Pelonius frowned. “Pursuing these beasts will place us all in very great peril.”
“We could return to Augusta Viromanduorum,” Paulus suggested.
“No, we can’t,” Pelonius said quietly. “The only safety we have is in numbers, so we must stay with General Sergius and his legion. The fifty men of the princess’s guard wouldn’t be able to protect her against the things that did this, should we be ambushed along the road back to the city. Remember what happened to Sergius’s cavalry detachment.”
“Much as I hate to say it,” Septimus grumbled, “he’s right.”
Marcus sighed. “Well, let’s be about it, then.”
***
The legion marched out the rear gate and continued into the forest to the southeast of the town. They followed a path of trampled grass and foliage, much of it stained with blood, and trees whose bark had been stripped up to thrice the height of a man, and from which limbs had been ripped and torn. The path, for lack of a better term, was as wide as forty or fifty men abreast, and it seemed to swallow the men of the legion row by row as they ventured forth.
Pelonius, his jaw tight, shook his head as he and the others closest to the princess took their horses into the gaping maw formed by the devastated trees.
“What’s wrong?” Valeria whispered. The forest around them was utterly silent.
“It’s late afternoon,” he told her in a quiet voice. “The good general would have his men, and you, in the middle of the forest when night falls, when we can hardly see what might be coming upon us during the day.”
“We’ll just have to pray that the gods protect us,” Paulus said.
“Bugger the gods,” Septimus said. “I wish Sergius had the sense to bring the entire legion with him.”
“It might not matter,” Pelonius concluded.
“Shut up, the lot of you,” Marcus hissed. “You’re scaring the princess. Keep your mouths closed and your eyes and ears open.”
“I’m not scared,” Valeria lied. Beside her, Hercules made an unhappy mewling sound.
Sergius kept his men on the move through most of the night. It wasn’t difficult to follow the path made by whatever they were hunting, but he finally called a halt after two horses and a score of men had fallen through a pile of deadfall over which the trail had led. One man had been killed, his head shattered on a rock, and both horses, their legs broken, had to be given mercy.
Half the soldiers faced outward and planted their shields, forming a defensive wall around the entire column, while the other half rested. Then the order had come down: no fires. The legion would wait in darkness for the coming of the dawn.
“You may as well get some sleep, princess,” Marcus told her after he had seen to the disposition of the men of her guard.
After a quiet, brittle laugh, she said, “Do you honestly think I could fall asleep out here?” The night was completely, utterly black. The large leaves of the trees that soared overhead blocked out even the tiniest bit of light from the moon and stars. She wasn’t sure how the soldiers could even find their manhood to relieve themselves. The thought made her giggle, and it was then that she realized how tired she really was.
“Lay down against that big cat of yours and you’ll fall asleep,” Marcus said. “You always do.”
“All right. I’ll try.” She knew where Hercules was as if by instinct, and curled up next to the hexatiger where he lay on the ground nearby. His fur was soft, his body was warm, and her nose filled with his comforting musky animal scent she had known m
ost of her life. He began to rumble, the hexatiger equivalent of a cat purring. “Paulus?” she called softly.
“Here.” His voice was so close she thought he must have spoken directly into her ear.
Her hand found his, and she pulled him down beside her and snuggled herself up against his shoulder as he wrapped his arms around her. “I wish you could take off your armor,” she whispered. “It doesn’t make a very good pillow, you know.”
“I don’t think our centurion would be very happy if I did,” he told her, and she could hear the smile in his voice.
Squirming until she was comfortable, she yawned once, twice, then fell fast asleep.
CHAPTER SIX
“Princess…”
The voice sounded to Valeria as if the speaker was somewhere far down a tunnel, and she was determined to ignore it. She had no desire to leave the warm darkness that enfolded her.
“Princess, wake up!”
The voice was accompanied by a good shake that brought her to full consciousness. Paulus was there, one hand on her shoulder, the other clasping the handle of his sword. The soft light that trickled through the trees above told her it was early morning, not long after dawn, and revealed the look of worry on Paulus’s face. The men of the legion were deathly quiet except for General Sergius, who was delivering a furious tongue lashing to someone.
“What’s happened?” she whispered.
“The legion’s aquila,” he said, referring to the sacred eagle standard that was carried by Roman legions. “It’s gone.”
She bolted upright. “What? How?” The eagle, she knew, was more than just a symbol to the men of the legion. It was, in a sense, the legion’s heart and soul. To be the aquilifer, the standard bearer who carried the eagle, was an immense honor, and for a legion to lose its eagle was beyond disgrace. In the many centuries that had passed since New Rome had been founded, four had been lost, all in battle. One had been recovered after a search that had lasted twenty years, another had been found after thirty-five, and the searches still continued for the remaining two, and would never stop until they were either found or Rome fell to dust. That was how sacred these gilded eagles were to the men of the Roman Army. And to have one somehow stolen right from under the nose of half a legion was unthinkable. Sergius could hardly suffer any greater humiliation, and his reputation and that of his family would be utterly destroyed. Unable to help herself, she looked at Septimus, who stood nearby. For once, his eyes were not darting everywhere. His gaze was fixed on the general, who continued to vent his fury at the mortified aquilifer.
Vulcan's Fury: The Dark Lands Page 6