The Leopard sword e-4

by Anthony Riches

  ‘Nobody questions my judgement without paying the going price for that brief moment of pleasure, a price that only I can decide! Nobody! Now, does anybody else want to ask the same question, or might we head for the fortress and get out from under Arduenna’s divine intervention?’ A moment’s silence spun out, with only the faint sound of snowflakes hitting the men’s helmets to break the quiet. ‘No? Very well, let’s be away from here. You can leave him to lie where he fell, and the animals can have his corpse as an offering to the goddess. Get his cloak around the prisoner and let’s get moving. Storm or no storm, his comrades are still searching for him, and I’d rather not risk them finding us. Let’s move! ’

  A heavy weight settled on Marcus’s shoulders, the stink of wet cloak wool a momentary and comforting reminder of his men, and then a hand gripped his arm tightly, pulling him in the direction of their travel with a steady but irresistible strength. Obduro’s unearthly voice spoke quietly, close to his ear.

  ‘Well, I couldn’t let him live, now could I, Centurion? You of all people will understand the confidence trick that is leadership, the art of convincing those who follow you that you are a man to be feared. I lead these men as you might command a pack of dangerous dogs: I throw them scraps to keep them quiet, and I punish with a fist of iron any of them who decide to challenge me.’ Marcus nodded his understanding, and the bandit leader spoke again, guiding him to the left with a gentle pull of his arm. ‘Let’s not have you walking into a tree, eh? I want you conscious to witness what I have decided to reveal to you. You are to be privileged, Centurion; you are to see a part of Arduenna that no man not already pledged to our cause has ever seen without dying in agony as a sacrifice to the goddess. Today is clearly your lucky day.’

  Frontinius found the Tenth Century’s centurion standing in the middle of the bandit camp, the freshly cleared ground beyond its edge studded with the stumps of felled trees. With a rending tear of splintering wood another tree on the clearing’s edge arced into the open space, and two tent parties of the bearded pioneers fell on it in a flurry of axes, working swiftly to trim off the branches, which in turn were dragged away by waiting soldiers from the other Tungrian centuries already across the river. The remaining axemen set about the long trunk with practised strokes, hacking the sixty-foot log into sections short enough to be grappled by a team of soldiers and carried away to the growing pile of wood in the clearing’s centre, while other men laid the resin laden branches as the foundations for more fires.

  ‘Your boys are making good progress, Titus. I’ll soon have more labour across the bridge than you’ll be able to supply with work.’

  The huge centurion nodded, casting an experienced eye around the clearing.

  ‘There’s space for three, maybe four fires. Enough to keep us all alive until this snow stops falling.’ He pointed to the first pile of wood. ‘This is tall enough to burn for hours. Leave me to start building the next fire, and you get that one alight.’

  The first spear nodded and turned away, calling out into the clearing’s frenzied activity.

  ‘ Martos! ’

  The barbarian prince stepped out of the pack of labouring soldiers, an earthenware jar tucked under one arm, while on either side of him a pair of his warriors fended off any man who ventured too close.

  ‘First Spear. Has the time come for your fire miracle?’

  Frontinius nodded.

  ‘It has.’ Martos made to put the jar at Frontinius’s feet, but the first spear raised a hand to stop him. ‘No, hold it a little longer, if you will. It’s harmless enough sealed up in that container, and I need fire ready to use before I can release it to work its magic.’

  Martos grunted, flicking snow from his long hair and turning to his men.

  ‘“Fire”, he says, as if the lighting of a fire in a snow storm were the easiest thing in all the world. Aerth! We need a flame!’

  One of his warriors came forward from the group gathered about their leader, an older man with a deeply lined face. At his side a younger man carried a bundle of some kind wrapped up in his cloak. Aerth fished in a belt pouch, waving several more of Martos’s warriors forward with a grumbling, gravel-throated command in his own language.

  ‘Make the shelter.’

  Four men knelt together in a huddle, three of them placing their shields to form a small curved wall against the wind, the fourth placing his board over the others to complete the enclosure. Snow no longer fell inside the tiny space and the blizzard’s wind was no more than a swirl of air. Aerth now knelt on the tiny patch of ground and bent his head, growling another command.

  ‘Kindling.’

  The young warrior knelt beside him, opening his bundled cloak and spilling an armful of twigs and dead bracken into the shields’ protection. The barbarian tested the kindling with his fingers, shaking his head at the results.

  ‘Still damp.’ He reached into his bag and pulled out a piece of rough wool, the untreated woven fibres thick with the natural waxy grease that soldiers treasured as waterproofing. Frontinius smiled darkly at Martos, ignoring the snow whipping past his face.

  ‘Your man seems to know his subject. That’s from one of our cloaks, I presume?’

  The Votadini leader nodded wryly, his one eye narrowing in a smile.

  ‘You know how it is, First Spear. A man must take his opportunities to gather the materials required for his expertise wherever he can. And your soldier will not have missed such a small piece of his garment.’

  Aerth stared up at the two men for a moment and then turned back to his task, his face a mask of concentration. Using a small knife he shredded the oil-encrusted wool into thin strips and reduced each one to its constituent fibres, then his nimble fingers wove them into a ball of kindling. Seeing Frontinius’s frown, Martos leaned forward and spoke quietly into the Tungrian’s ear.

  ‘He is a master at this. The secret lies in achieving the right mix of dry and damp material to sustain a flame.’

  As he spoke the kneeling warrior looked up, his grating voice barely distinguishable from the blizzard’s howl.

  ‘And knowing which of the gods will answer my prayer.’

  He stared up into the grey clouds briefly, his lips moving as he muttered an invocation to whatever deity it was that guided his hands, then he bent forward and struck a hard blow at the flint in his left hand with the rough iron haft of his dagger. A shower of sparks spat down into the kindling, and he bent so close to the ball that his nose was almost touching it, then blew softly onto the tiny spots of light. The men around him held their breath, but after a moment he knelt back on his heels with a grunt, raising his head to stare into the sky and repeat his invocation for divine assistance. Flint and iron met again, and again the barbarian bent over his kindling and blew with the delicate care of a man tending his firstborn, but again he sat back with a slight shake of his head. ‘The forest goddess is strong, and she forbids the flame in her kingdom.’ He lifted the dagger and pulled back his left sleeve to reveal a forearm crudely scored with cuts. Most of them had long since healed to white scars, but a few were fresher, their marks a livid red on his pale flesh. Martos leaned close to Frontinius, muttering in his ear.

  ‘Sometimes the gods want blood as the price of their assistance. This is his secret.’

  Frontinius nodded solemnly, watching as Aerth dragged the dagger’s shining blade down the length of his arm, the cut finely judged to be more than a scratch yet not so deep as to require stitching. A dark red rivulet ran down his arm to his fingertips, and, once more intoning the vow to serve his gods, the barbarian flicked his fingers three times, shooting drops of blood into the kindling’s entwined wood and leaves. Bending to his task again he lifted the dagger to strike, muttered a final word of entreaty, and hammered the iron home, sending a shower of sparks into the ball. After blowing gently on the kindling he turned his head away to breathe, then blew again, a little harder this time and with an intent focus on one of the few lingering spots of light. At first the
spark remained no more than a hint of fire, but then it blossomed, taking hold of a scrap of greasy cloak material and swelling from spark to tiny flame. Aerth turned the ball in his hands, seeking to play the infant fire onto the best of the kindling, then looked up at Martos with a decisive nod. The one-eyed Votadini chieftain gestured urgently to the mound of wood and foliage.

  ‘Now is the time, First Spear! The fire will quickly burn through that much fuel!’

  Frontinius reached out to take the jar and pulling its stopper. He turned to the dark mass of wood, pouring a generous measure of the liquid onto a thick limb that protruded into the clearing, its branches thickly coated with dark green needles, then he ran a trail of the pungent fluid along the limb and into the centre of the fire. An acrid smell filled the air, making his eyes water as he stepped back.

  ‘Light that. But keep your face away from it. When it ignites it will burn like fury.’

  Aerth stepped forward with no sign of having listened to the Roman officer’s words, his eyes fixed upon the ball of kindling whose heart was now ablaze between his cupped hands. He stooped to hold it beneath the outstretched branch, playing the growing flame on the reeking wood. In an instant the flame found fuel, igniting the evaporating spirit with a loud whump and an explosion of fire that sent the barbarian back on his heels. He raised a hand to protect his eyes from the fire as it roared from infancy to full adulthood in a heartbeat, greedily chasing the trail of liquid laid by the first spear into the centre of the bonfire. The Votadini watched in amazed silence as the man-high pile of fresh timber went up in a pillar of flame, the pine needles laid beneath the logs giving up their stored resin in gouts of flame strong enough to take hold of the green timber

  ‘For the secret of this fire, I would give everything I have, and cut myself one hundred times.’

  Frontinius turned to find Aerth at his shoulder, his eyes fixed on the blazing pile of wood, his eyebrows no more than a memory and the residual stench of burnt hair. He unstoppered the jar again and held it up for the other man to sniff, watching with dark amusement as the barbarian recoiled at the eye-watering vapour rising from the container’s wide neck, replying in the man’s own language.

  ‘There is no secret, brother. This is naphtha, a natural liquid which can be purchased for more coin than you and I could ever imagine spending on the simple task of lighting a fire. Even the small amount that lit this blaze cost my tribune enough gold to pay eight soldiers for a year.’

  Aerth nodded, staring deep into the fire’s heart, and Frontinius realised that he was fascinated by the flame, drawn to it by something deep in his being. He clapped the barbarian on the shoulder and turned away, handing the jar to his century’s chosen man.

  ‘Put a guard on this. Two good men… no, four men that you could trust to defend your woman’s honour. The contents are worth enough money to pay the century for a year, and there will be more than one man with his eye on that jar now the power it contains is known.’

  He looked about him in the bonfire’s flickering light, bellowing an order over the swelling flames’ angry roar.

  ‘Centurions, to me! Let’s get some more of these fires burning!’

  ‘Perhaps you Romans will see the sense in leaving Arduenna well alone in future, eh? Many are her weapons, and this untimely snow is simply another example of her ability to deal with any intruder bent on defiling her sacred groves. She has shown that she will not tolerate your boots on her soil in sufficient numbers to defeat us, and we can wrap ourselves so deep in her protection that you might never find us in a month of searching. A little to the right here.. ’

  The path along which Marcus was being guided began to flatten out after its long climb, and after another moment of walking, still being guided by Obduro’s hand on his sleeve, the Roman felt a sudden change in the air around him. The snow was no longer being whipped into his face, and he felt stone underfoot. When the bandit leader’s hollow voice spoke again its note was subtly different.

  ‘Down these steps… that’s it, feel for them with your feet and take it slowly, we don’t want you going down them head first. And here we are. That’s better.’

  Marcus heard the sound of a cloak being shaken, then felt hands on the knot of his blindfold, while the point of a weapon dug sharply into his back and froze him in place. The rough woollen strip was pulled clear of his eyes, and he found himself blinking in the light of a blazing torch held by one of his captor’s men, while Obduro himself stood barely an arm’s reach from him, apparently examining him closely from behind the anonymity of his mask. Despite his readiness for any attempt at intimidation by his captor, Marcus was nevertheless taken aback by the experience of finding himself face to face with the bandit leader. Where he had been expecting a big man, capable of dominating his men with brute force, the bandit leader was of no better than average height and build. What caught the breath in Marcus’s throat was the mask attached to his cavalry helmet; when viewed from so close, its perfect shining surface reflected the scene around them.

  In the reflection’s foreground were two figures, his own and that of the hulking bandit who had stunned and blindfolded him in the forest. The big man Grumo was lurking behind him with a spear held ready to drive through his armour’s rings and deep into his back, a slight smile on his coarse-featured face. Around them, its reality distorted by the mask’s curves, was a cave, every feature thrown into stark relief by the light of a dozen torches attached to the walls. Looking around him Marcus saw nothing to change his first impression, of sandy walls and a rock floor swept clean of any sign of previous occupants. The cave was twenty paces across and forty deep, and in a deep recess at the far end he could see a heavy wooden chair. Looking back at Obduro, he realised that the proximity of the blazing torch to the man’s masked face was deliberate, making his eyes quite impossible to make out in the dark shadowed pits of the mask’s apertures.

  ‘This is the lowest level of our refuge, the place where we bring our prisoners for interrogation.’ The bandit leader’s voice took on a different quality in the confined space, adding a booming echo to the unearthly quality granted to it by the mask. He waved a hand at the men standing to either side, and they moved smartly into what appeared to be a well-practised routine, lifting the torches that lit the cave from their places on the walls and carrying them down the length of the underground room into the recess at the far end. Fitting the brands into iron loops set in the rock, the bandits quickly transformed the cave’s far end from deep shadow to a blaze of light, surrounding the wooden chair with an arc of fire.

  ‘Leave us.’

  Waving the guards away, Obduro beckoned Marcus with his hand, drawing his sword as he walked through the cave at a leisurely pace, and dropping into the chair with the blade across his knees.

  ‘You may sit, Centurion. I dare say you’re used to more comfort, but I can assure you that you’re having a very easy time of it by comparison with the last man I brought to this place.’ With an arc of torches arrayed behind him the bandit’s aspect was changed again, the arc of fire rendering even the helmet’s gleaming surface almost invisible, and presenting Marcus with nothing more than a darkened silhouette. ‘I usually feel safe to remove this helmet’s uncomfortable burden at this point, for two reasons. One is that all this light behind me makes my face impossible to see. Can you guess the other?’

  Marcus spoke after a moment’s deliberation, making the swift decision not to back down in the face of the bandit leader’s supreme self-confidence.

  ‘Why worry, when it is your intention to kill them?’

  ‘Right in one. My men in the city told me that you were a bright one, Centurion Corvus, and I can see why.’

  The Roman shifted in surprise.

  ‘You know my name?’

  Marcus instinctively knew from the set of the other man’s head behind the mask’s inscrutable features that he was grinning behind the shining metal.

  ‘Better than that, Centurion. I know both of them.’r />
  ‘So when did he go missing?’

  Dubnus shook his head unhappily.

  ‘We found the bandits’ camp, as expected. It seemed to have been deserted only a short time before, and we were in the act of checking it for any sign of them when the snow started falling. A moment after that they started shooting arrows at us from out of the trees. One of the men took a shaft in the leg, and Marcus charged into them to give us time to get him out. I went back for him, but the snow was so bloody thick that I could have been twenty paces from a fortress wall and never known it was there. I called his name several times, but there was no answer. I shouldn’t have turned my back on him, not for a second.’

  He stopped talking, and watched his superior’s face as Frontinius stared at the forest’s snow-covered floor, then back up at his officer, raising his voice to be heard over the blizzard’s constant moan.

  ‘So he’s either dead or captive. Either way there’s nothing I can do. Look about you…’

  Most of the three cohorts were gathered round blazing fires built of felled pines while the remainder were working in tent-party-sized gangs, using torches fashioned from branches to hunt the surrounding forest for anything that would burn. All of them were huddled into their cloaks, every man wearing every piece of clothing he had carried from the city in an attempt to keep the storm’s cold at bay.

  ‘I know. We’ve next to no chance of finding the same spot in this weather, and sending men out in this might just be their death sentence.’

  Frontinius nodded grimly.

  ‘And in any case I’ve got work for you. Round up a couple of tent parties, borrow some axes from Titus and get about cutting down some more trees. It looks like this weather’s set in for the night.’