Marcus called out the night’s watchword again, shouting a command as he closed with the gate guards.
‘They’ll be sounding the horns any moment now. Close the gates!’
Responding without thought to the note of command in his voice, the four men ran to the gates, starting to heave them closed as the Roman and his companions unexpectedly drew their swords and tore into them. Before the man on the fighting platform above them had a chance to respond to the sudden onslaught, they found themselves under attack by Qadir and his Hamians, two of the enemy falling to the first volley while the men below died on their attacker’s swords without ever really comprehending what was happening. One of the men on the elevated platform drew breath to shout for help, then somersaulted over the railing as an arrow hit him in the head, the air hissing out of him in a scream that was cut off by his crunching impact with the ground.
After a moment’s silence a door opened in the wooden hut that had been tacked onto the side of the palisade, an angry voice calling from just inside. The second wave of Marcus’s party hurried through the arch as Martos and Dubnus put their shoulders to the heavy gates, and the young Roman slapped Lugos on the shoulder, pointing at the open door.
‘What the fuck are you lot pissing about at now? I’ll have your fucking-’
The guard commander stepped through the door and died without ever knowing what had hit him, his corpse bouncing off the door frame with its head smashed by Lugos’s hammer. Bellowing his joy at a chance to fight, the giant Briton raised his leg and kicked the next man in line behind the guard commander back into the hut, then squeezed his bulk though the door frame and punched the hammer’s head into the fallen soldier as he struggled back to his feet. A chorus of screams sounded as he waded into the remaining occupants, the flimsy structure shaking as the warrior unleashed the full fury of his monstrous strength.
‘Shut those gates!’
Qadir and his archers hurried into the palisade as the entrance was secured.
‘There are more soldiers coming.’
Marcus lifted a wry eyebrow, raising his voice to be heard over the bestial roars that Lugos was uttering as he ripped through the helpless guards.
‘It’s hardly surprising, is it? He’s making enough noise to wake the dead.’
Theodora put her head on one side and looked down at him with a different, more calculating expression.
‘And just how long have you known that?’
‘How long have I known for certain that you’re the “Wolf’s” sister? Oh, about a week, although I was starting to wonder about you a good while before that. While we were intimate I noticed that you had the faintest hint of fair hair in your scalp, almost unnoticeable unless a man got close to you from behind and you put your head back. I put your dying your hair down to a cosmetic choice, although I’ve always preferred blondes myself, and so I thought no more of it for a while.But when I reached Porolissum I asked a few questions about Gerwulf of an old friend of mine, a man who moved in the same aristocratic circles that you and your brother flirted with during your time in Rome. When he reminded me that the prince had a younger sister — and told me what a swathe she cut through the youth of the senatorial class for a short time — it set me to thinking again, and my thoughts came back to those blonde hair roots. Clodius Albinus told me that Gerwulf’s sister was a blonde, a particularly vivacious young woman who broke several young men’s hearts when she vanished overnight, apparently following her brother when he went to serve on the frontier, and prompting all those scandalous and bitter stories about the two of you being incestuous lovers. Of course, everyone thought you’d be back in no time. The expectation was that life on the frontier would simply be too dull for you after the pleasures of the capital, but now that I’ve met you I know that wasn’t the case, was it?’
She smiled at him, her confidence returning after the shock of his revelation.
‘Far from it, Tribune. It was Rome that was tedious, compared to all the fun we had once my brother was serving. There was always a senior officer willing to look after Gerwulf’s career in return for my favours, and to protect me from being sent back to Rome. It was much more fun after he took command of these Germans though. An independent command provides so many more opportunities for mischief.’
‘Not to mention profit. And murder. And when the two of you got skilled at putting profit and murder together, you had the idea to rob the Ravenstone? It was your idea?’
Theodora laughed, her tone when she answered dripping with sarcasm.
‘Oh, aren’t you clever? Of course it was. Gerwulf’s such a boy at heart, only happy when he’s hacking his way through his enemies. Whereas I. .’
She pirouetted before him, and Scaurus applauded softly.
‘Yes, you’re the real brains. So, having heard about this place you came here and found yourself a mine owner who was single, wormed your way into his affections and persuaded him to marry you.’
She nodded.
‘I made him happier than you can imagine, Tribune. If only for a short time.’
‘Until you had him killed and took over his business.’
She shrugged.
‘Mining’s such a dangerous way to earn a living. And he had no family you see, so there was no-one to dispute my claim to the mine. Besides, by that point I was already gracing Procurator Maximus’s bed with my decorous presence, so all that tedious nonsense about the laws of inheritance could safely be ignored. After all, how else do you think I could arrange for my husband to die in such unexpected circumstances?’
‘We have to free the miners, before the men outside build up sufficient strength to break in. That gate’s not strong enough to withstand a serious attack.’
‘And yet if we do set them free, they’re likely to tear us to pieces.’
Marcus grimaced at the truth in Cattanius’s words.
‘So we either find a way to get out without being battered to death by the men we’re here to free, or we have to turn them loose and take the consequences.’
Marcus looked about him, seeing a row of a dozen barracks buildings enclosed by the palisade’s twelve-foot-high circle of half-logs, the split tree trunks presenting their flat surfaces to the raiding party.
‘There’s no way to climb that.’ Shaking his head, he turned back to his comrades in time to see a bloodied Lugos push his way out of the guard house’s doorway. ‘Cattanius, it’s on you whether we get away with this or not. Get searching for a way out. The rest of you, with me. We’ve got to leave them enough weaponry out for them to fight off the men at the gate, and that means opening the tool stores. Lugos, smash open everything I point at.’
The beneficiarius hurried to the far side of the camp, looking for any sign of another exit from the trap into which they had forced themselves, muttering under his breath at the lack of any obvious answer.
‘Nothing, no handy little gates to slip through, no need for the builders to leave a hidden exit route in a prison wall. .’ He pushed at one of the split tree trunks that composed the curved wall that enclosed the camp, shaking his head at its solidity. Running his hand down the wood as far as the ground, he found the thin space between wood and turf where the builders had dug a deep hole in which to anchor the log, and hadn’t bothered to completely fill the resulting gap. Pulling out his dagger he ran the blade along the fingertip-wide space until he reached the next log, encountering sudden resistance from the soil packed around it. Looking up, he realised that the split tree trunk was secured on either side by wooden battens that were nailed across the joins between them.
‘Got you!’
He hurried over to Marcus.
‘I’ve found the back door, but I’ll need him to open it.’
The Roman looked at Lugos, hooking a thumb at the Briton.
‘Lugos, help Cattanius. How long will you need?’
The beneficiarius shook his head.
‘That depends on him. Perhaps fifty heartbeats. But if I open the hole
too quickly the boys outside will realise what’s going on and be there to meet us.’
Marcus thought for a moment, looking at the heavy tools which his comrades had scattered across the ground before the barracks, having used Lugos’s immense strength to smash open the stores in which they were secured. The miners had realised that something was happening, and the noise from inside their barracks was growing as men hurled themselves fruitlessly at the barred doors and windows.
‘We’ll open one barrack once you’re ready to do whatever it is you’re planning, and they can do the rest of the work on their own. Just make sure you can get this fence open quickly enough, or we’ll be the first men they lay hands on. And from the sound of it they’re not in the best of moods.’
Cattanius led the rest of the party back to the wall, explaining what it was he had in mind.
‘This log’s not been sunk into the ground, just stood on the earth and nailed to the trunks to either side. So, all we have to do-’
Lugos stepped forward and swung his hammer, turning it to present the hooked blade that opposed the heavy iron beak, already black with blood. The first of the two battens that held the log in place nine feet above the ground splintered under the blow, and a second swing of the hammer tore away its companion to leave only the two at knee level intact.
‘Wait.’
Running for the corner of the barracks the beneficiarius sprinted to Marcus, who was watching calmly as the palisade’s main gate rocked under a succession of blows from the other side.
‘I hope you’re ready. That gate isn’t going to hold for much longer.’
Cattanius nodded at the barrack’s lock.
‘Do it!’
As he ran back to the palisade, Marcus and Dubnus lifted the second of the three thick wooden bars that secured the barrack’s entrance out of its brackets, throwing it aside as the men inside heaved against the doors and provoked a creaking tear in the sole remaining bar. With a crash of splintering wood one of the palisade gates was smashed open, a stream of infuriated Germans storming through the gap and goggling at the corpses of their fellows scattered around the archway. Sighting the two men outside the last barrack in the row of buildings, they charged down the line, and Dubnus pointed at the remaining door bar as the miners inside heaved at the rapidly failing barricade.
‘It’s about to break! Run!’
They turned tail and followed Cattanius, rounding the barrack’s corner just in time to watch as Lugos swung his hammer to smash the remaining battens holding the log in place. A sudden roar of voices told them that the miners were free, and an instant later, as the log toppled away from the palisade to leave a gap large enough for the raiders to escape through, the screams and howls of a pitched battle began.
Gerwulf panted up the wall’s steps at the head of his bodyguard, standing on the rampart’s fighting platform with his chest heaving from his run down the valley.
‘Where’s this damned cohort then, eh Hadro?’
His deputy pointed out into the darkness at a line of flickering lights.
‘There, Prefect!’
The German followed the pointing hand and stared out across the valley’s darkness, feeling his sense of unease growing as he stared at distant flames, his voice suddenly acerbic as he realised what it was he was seeing.
‘They don’t seem to be moving, do they Centurion?’
‘No Wolf, they marched up the road and then stopped. .’
To his credit, he stood his ground as the prefect turned on him, his snarling face made bestial by the torchlight’s shadows.
‘Whoever it is down there has laid out two lines of torches and lit them one at a time from front to back, to make it look as if they were coming over a rise! You’ve been deceived, Hadro, this is no more than a ruse to distract our attention from something else! You’ — he turned to the officer who had run to fetch him from the villa — ‘take a century and reinforce the guard on the miners’ camp!’
He watched as the centurion led his century off the wall and away up the road towards the palisaded barracks, then looked out at the torches again, shaking his head at the growing number of gaps as individual lights toppled to the ground. Turning back to Hadro he looked down his nose at the man for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice was contemptuous.
‘That’s you and I done. You’ve made one mistake too many. You’re relieved of duty; go back to your tent. I’ll come and see you in the morning when this distraction has blown over, and give you enough gold to see you right.’
He watched as Hadro shrugged tiredly and turned away for the wall’s steps, waiting for the centurion to be out of earshot so that he could quietly order two men from his bodyguard to follow the man and kill him. Given any longer he knew that his former friend would make a run for it over the mountain, with the risk that he might survive to bear witness against him for their crimes over the previous few months. It would be no more than an inconvenience, given that he intended to be far away from Dacia by the time any such accusation could surface, but he wasn’t a man given to leaving loose ends dangling when swift action could remove such a threat before it had a chance to become reality. He frowned, as the centurion stopped unexpectedly at the head of the stone stairs and cocked his head as if to listen. He was on the verge of losing his patience with the man, and ordering his killers to deal with him then and there, when an unexpected noise reached his ears, a wave of sound like the cheering of a body of men.
‘What was that?’
For once his question went unanswered as the noise came again, the roar of voices closer this time, and its volume increased once more as the first torches appeared over the ripple in the ground between the miners’ camp and the wall. He stared aghast as a flood of men spilled down the slope, sweeping down towards the century he had sent to reinforce the guards they had presumably already slaughtered.
Scaurus raised an appreciative eyebrow at the woman before him.
‘I must admit that I’m impressed. With one simple act of infidelity you persuaded your lover to deal with your husband and support your claim on his assets. Although it wasn’t just a share in the profits from the mine you were promising him, was it? Presumably Maximus expected to be sharing in the fortune to be made from the robbery of the mine’s gold?’
Theodora nodded.
‘You men are so suggestible as a sex. All I had to do was tell him how much I wanted to be with him, and all the good things that the proceeds from robbing the mine could bring us. He actually thought we were going to find a man that looked like him, kill him and use the corpse to fool the authorities into believing that he was dead.’
The tribune shrugged again, leaning back in the chair.
‘I ought to have suspected him when he refused to move the gold out of his strongroom, nicely collected and ready for Gerwulf’s arrival. After all, he really wasn’t that good an actor, was he? I met him on the way up here that first night, and if looks could kill I would have been face down and six feet under. He knew that I was being brought up here to be seduced and turned into a source of information for you and your brother, and he didn’t like it. What did you tell him, that you were both going to live happily together for the rest of your days, and that you were only taking me into your bed to ensure that I was under your control? The truth of just how badly you’d duped him must have been a shock for the poor man, when Gerwulf showed his hand and had him chained up like an ox ready for the slaughter. I’ll bet he was desperate to get the chance to try to rescue his reputation once he realised what a fool you’d made of him. Presumably that’s why Gerwulf cut the poor man’s throat and tossed him off the wall, not so much to make a point to Cattanius but mainly to silence him, before he got a chance to blurt out that you were the architect of the whole thing, rather than being the poor innocent victim.’
He raised a questioning eyebrow at her.
‘So once you had Maximus wrapped round one finger, you sent a messenger to Gerwulf, telling him to be ready fo
r your call when the strongroom was full. Presumably at that point he abandoned whatever mission he’d invented to keep his men close at hand?’
‘Yes, officially he’s on detachment from the Seventh Claudius at Viminacium, a detachment I persuaded their legatus to grant to my brother in the usual way, but I’d imagine even that fool must be starting to wonder just where he’s got to. The “Wolf’s” been raiding up and down the frontier zone for months now to keep his men fed.’
Scaurus nodded, the look of amusement fading from his face.
‘Which explains the destruction of the boy Mus’s village, and all the other raids that had the Sarmatae so fired up for revenge.You must have thought the fates were smiling on you the day that legion cohort pulled out to go to war. You sent the call out to your brother that the time to get rich had come, only to have my men march up the valley a few days later, too late for you to stop Gerwulf coming to pull off the greatest robbery in the history of the empire.’
Theodora bent close to him, and Scaurus felt the point of a sword prick the back of his neck as the guard behind him tensed.
‘You should be a little more grateful to my brother, Tribune. If he’d not spotted the tracks left by that Sarmatae warband and followed them up into the battle, you and your men would have been torn to pieces, wouldn’t you?’
He nodded equably.
‘You won’t catch me complaining on that score. I’ll still be grateful to Gerwulf for pulling our chestnuts out of the fire even when I’m having him executed for treason.’
She bent closer, her reply soft in the room’s silence.
‘You’re very confident for a man whose life hangs on a thread, Tribune.’
Scaurus shrugged, staring at her breasts appreciatively.
‘Circumstances alter cases, my dear. Can you hear those horns blowing?’ She tipped her head to listen. Barely audible through the villa’s thick stone walls, a trumpet was braying in the valley below, joined by a second. ‘They’re sounding the command to form line and prepare for battle, not an action that would be required by a single cohort in the valley, or not yet at least. I’d hazard a guess that the men who accompanied me tonight have freed the mine workers from their barracks, and given them access to their tools. And while your brother commands a powerful unit, I really wouldn’t relish having to fight off five thousand angry miners in the darkness. Oh yes, Gerwulf’s men will kill a few hundred of them, but the rest will wash over his line like a pack of dogs overwhelming a wolf. Which is apt, wouldn’t you say? And when they’ve done for the soldiers, enough of them will come here for you that you’ll never want another man as long as you live.’
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