The Iron Hand of Mars mdf-4

by Lindsey Davis

  Lentullus squeaked and tripped over a root. Only that spring I had managed to lay hands on part of Caesar's Gallic Wars, going cheap now that Rome had some nasty new wars to occupy its attention. According to Julius, the Suebi worshipped – in those days anyway – in a grove which people could visit for religious purposes, but if they happened to fall down there it was required practice that they should roll out of the grove horizontally. No doubt Caesar quoted other reassuring facts that might have helped us to extract ourselves from this terror, but I had never owned enough money to buy the next scroll in the set.

  Here the ground was particularly rich in unpleasant flora, deer droppings, and milky-coloured fungi of the etiolated, squashy kind. I glared at the hostile wood carving and defiantly ruled out Caesar's rite. Rolling like a log to propitiate local deities was not in our recruits' training course, and this one would never have mastered it anyway. I hauled on his arm and pulled the young fool upright. Then we turned round and started to leave conventionally.

  We regretted it.

  We were now forced to walk past something else we didn't like.

  The edifice at the grove exit was square-built, like another and much larger altar. It was set around a massive stake, and made from various narrow-shaped items, irregular or round-ended, and grey in colour. The construction must have been built up over many generations until now it was two strides in each direction and waist-high. Its components had been laid down in rows extremely neatly, first one way, then crosswise, like twigs in a well-ordered bonfire. But they were not twigs.

  It was a giant pile of bones. Bones from human arms and legs. Hundreds of victims must have been dismembered to contribute to this ossuary – first hung in the trees as offerings, then smitten into pieces with casual savagery, like choice cuts from meat carcasses. From what I knew of Celtic rites, most of them had once been young men like us.

  Before we could stop him, the tribune's dog went up to sniff this wondrous hoard of bones. We looked away, as a gesture of respect to the dead, while Tigris saluted each corner of the ossuary with his special sign of doggy reverence.

  We left the grove very fast.

  XLVIII

  We started back to camp. That was when the next nightmare began.

  Yet again I was out in a wood at dusk with Lentullus. This time it was not the silenoe that unnerved us. Suddenly we were surrounded by noise – something, or somebody, crashing through the trees in haste. We were already petrified. Then we heard a shout. Foreign voices filled the night. From the start it seemed like pursuit, and from the start we understood that we were their quarry. I forced Lentullus to change direction, hoping to give rhe rest of our party a chance.

  'I'm with you, sir!' he promised.

  'That's comforting…'

  We had lost our path and were blundering over treacherous ground where branches and deceptive clumps of moss lay in-wait to throw us headlong with wrenched limbs. I was trying to think as we dashed onwards through the brushwood. I felt fairly sure no one had seen us leave the grove. Perhaps we had not been seen at all. Somebody out there was looking for something, but perhaps they were hunters trying to fill the pot.

  We stopped. We crouched amongst bushes while the sweat careered off us and our noses ran.

  Not the pot. Whoever they were, they were making a lot of noise for men trying to lure animals into nets. They were thwacking at the bushes in order to flush out fugitives. Harsh laughter alarmed us. Then we heard dogs. Some sort of great horn boomed. Now the boisterous party was coming straight for us.

  They were so close we broke cover. They would have found us anyway. Someone glimpsed us. The shouts renewed.

  We set off again as best we could, unable even to glance back to see who our pursuers were. I had lost Lentullus. He had stopped to call the tribune's dog. I kept going. They might miss him; they might miss me; we might even escape.

  No chance. I was putting distance between us, but sounds broke out that could only mean one thing: they had caught Lentullus. I had no choice. Groaning, I turned back.

  They had to be a band of the Bructeri. They were standing round a deep pit, laughing. Lentullus and Tigris had both fallen into it. Perhaps it was an animal trap, or even one of the pits like larders that their hero Arminius had dug for keeping prisoners fresh. The recruit must be unhurt, for I could hear him shouting with a spirit I was proud of, but the warriors were taunting him by shaking their rough wooden lances. He must have been badly shaken by the fall, and I could hear that he was terrified. One of the Bructeri raised his lance. The threat was clear. I started to yell. I was tearing into the dell when someone big, with a very hard shoulder, sprang out from behind a tree and crashed me to the ground.

  Lentullus could not see me, but he must have heard my fall. For some reason my presence seemed to hearten him.

  'Sir, how are we going to talk to these men without an interpreter?' That boy was an idiot…

  The world stopped spinning. Since my answer might be the only friendly words he ever heard again, I had no heart for rebuking him. 'Speak slowly, and smile a lot, Lentullus…'

  He may have had problems deciphering it. It was difficult to sound as clear-wined and self-assured as usual when lying face down on the forest floor with my nostrils pressed into the leaf-mould, while a gigantic, bare-chested warrior, who could not possibly have understood my joke, stood with his foot in the small of my back and laughed heartily at me.

  XLIX

  Dear gods, I hate large, simple-minded jovial types. You can never tell whether they will simply mook you, or mock you with that jolly guffaw, then swipe off your head with an axe…

  My captor in fact hauled me to a more or less standing position, stripped off my sword and dagger, which be sneered at, but kept, then threw me further into the dell where the others were. They then encouraged Lentullus to scramble out of the pit by poking him with their lances. He brought out the dog, who immediately showed his loyalty by running away.

  The happy band stood us side by side and assessed their collection like naturalists collating a set of rare beetles. These lads did not look immensely sophisticated. They probably counted creatures' legs and feelers by picking them off. I started twitching nervously in limbs I didn't even own.

  They all towered over us. So did the group who soon turned up whooping triumphantly and bringing our friends from the camp. They had our missing Probus and his treasure-hunting companion. They must have discovered them first.

  I anxiously looked them over for damage. Helvetius was sporting a black eye and a terminal case of bad language, and some of the recruits had been knocked about a bit. The centurion's servant appeared to have taken the worst of it, but this was not necessarily a sign of cruelty in the Bructeri; he was such a pathetic character, he was crying out to be beaten up. The lads told me afterwards they had let themselves be taken fairly quietly. After all, our journey's motives were supposed to be peaceable. The warriors had turned up suddenly at the tents. Helvetius had properly followed the rules by trying to converse. It was only when our group had started to be manhandled that he had ordered them to reach for arms. By then it was too late. There had never been much we could hope to achieve by fighting, not in such small numbers and so far from home.

  The warriors had then scoured the woods for stragglers. With Lentullus and me they clearly felt they had a complete set.

  'Sir, what about – '

  'Whoever you're about to mention – don't!' Justinus and Orosius were not here. They were our one hope now, though of what I dared not speculate. 'Don't speak of them – don't even think about them, in case the thought shows in your face.'

  They might be dead already, as we expected to be soon.

  To my intense relief we were not being taken to the grove. At least not yet.

  It was now quite dark. They jostled us in a riverward direction, though we never seemed to come to the bank. That was another relief. If they chucked me off a jetty as a morsel for a river-god, I would immediately have to su
rrender my soul into his webby hands. I couldn't swim my way out of it. I had not much hope for the recruits either; they must have been on the same army water-skills course as me.

  We stumbled along, surrounded by tribesmen. They seemed cheerful enough having somebody to jeer at. They offered us no worse harm, though we didn't push our luck by asking who their chieftain was, or when we would be stopping for a snack break.

  After what seemed hours we reached a settlement. Rectangular buildings in timber and daub, with steeply pitched roofs which came down almost to the ground. A few pale faces staring at us in the light of smoky torches. A lowing ox.

  Our drovers whooped us through a door in an end wall and into a long byre attached at right angles to the largest house or farm. Cattle had lived here very recently; we knew that from the smell. We had tumbled into an area which had a central aisle and stalls separated by posts and hay containers. At the other end there were no stalls, just a bare hearth. We heard a mighty bar closing the door outside. Exploring this squalid guest-suite did not take us long. We just squatted on our haunches and looked round from where we were.

  'What happens now, Falco?' We had reached that point of disaster where people have no other option but to turn to me. This was when they were all likely to remind me that the trip to the River Lupia was my idea.

  'Have to wait and see.' I sounded moderately confident. 'But I don't think we can expect to be asked which highly articulate defence lawyer we would like to hire from their sophisticated legal pool.'

  'How did they know to look for us, sir?'

  'My guess is Dubnus alerted them.'

  We braced ourselves for a long wait, with not much to hope for at the end of it.

  'Maybe a beautiful virgin will bring us a pail of dinner, fall in love with me and lead us to escape,' Ascanius mused. He was the skinniest and most hygienically sordid recruit we had.

  'Unwise to expect dinner either, Ascanius.'

  Halfway along the building was a shutter. Fascinated blond children opened it and silently peered in at us. Helvetius rapidly tired of that and went to close them out. He said the big warriors were standing about in groups debating in an aimless way. He ducked back inside in case the sight of his grizzled Roman head gave them murderous ideas.

  They must have been waiting for someone. He came after an hour or so. The hum of debate increased to a livelier note. They all jabbered on in a way that reminded me of a gathering of my relatives pointlessly arguing whether Great-auntie Atia's birthday was in May or June. Even the man of note must have grown sick of it, for eventually he barged open the door and sauntered in to have a look at us.

  He was about fifty. As the russet hair had thinned and faded, he must have increased its length to compensate.

  Wild skeins of it ravelled behind him. Xanthus would have been horrified. He also had a long moustache, much in need of an enriching pomade, above which were a bulbous red nose and rather watery pale grey eyes. He was a big man in every way: broad shoulders, heavy bones, big head, big hands. He wore brown woollen trousers, a long. sleeved tunic, a green cloak, and a round gold brooch that not only pegged his ensemble together but rose and fell dramatically to show how far his chest expanded every time he breathed. Some of the others may have looked undernourished, but this fellow was fit.

  He was followed by his bodyguard. Younger men, any one of whom would have made a handsome model for a Noble Tribesman statuette had they been fattened up and taught to exhibit a mournful Celtic gaze. Left to themselves their gaze was as vacant as village youths anywhere. Most of them did without a tunic to indicate how tough (or poor) they were. They spat a lot on principle, and glared at us whenever they remembered they were there to use objectionable behaviour towards the prisoners. They all had immensely long German swords, apparently so they had something grand to loll on while their chief was occupied. He looked the type who was always wandering off to pursue other interests, and he had an air of eccentricity that gave him character. Even in Rome that faint impression of madness sometimes works for election candidates.

  We were feeling depressed and annoyed with ourselves, so when he made no attempt to communicate we stayed where we were, sitting in two rows on either side of the aisle. We let him wander up and down. None of us spoke. We were hungry and tired, and we let it show, though without appearing demoralised. A man with a proud Roman heritage to bolster him can look truculent even when squatting on two feet of compacted dung. Well, Helvetius managed it, though he had the advantage of being a centurion; it's a snooty rank.

  The chief was a man who walked slowly, with a tread that consolidated ground. He paced back to his starting- point, then turned round to us again. He made a sharp noise through his teeth, as if spitting out a raspberry pip. It seemed to be his evaluation of our group, and was resonantly an expression of contempt. I was surprised that he could find two teeth to do it through, for conspicuous along his gums were large gaps.

  'Somebody should tell him to watch that,' Ascanius said derisively. 'It's probably how he lost the rest.'

  The chieftain's eyes fell on our joking boy. We all realised he had understood.

  I stood up like a spokesperson.

  'We come in friendship,' I announced. M. Didius Falco, the ever-hopeful innocent. 'We are travelling to see Veleda, your renowned prophetess.' Veleda's name produced as much effect here as trying to interest a carrion crow in lunching off a lettuce leaf.

  'You come in friendship?' The chief's chin rose. He folded his arms. The pose was something of a cliche but in the circumstances that was his prerogative. 'You are Romans in Free Germany.' His Latin accent was terrible, but good enough for snorting at a frowsty group of renegades. 'You have no choice. We are the Bructeri,' the chief informed us haughtily.

  'We do?'

  He did his disgusted tooth noise again, then strode out. 'It's definite then,' Ascanius exclaimed incorrigibly. 'He's cancelling the virgin. No dinner for us tonight, lads!' He was right, too.

  Lindsey Davis

  The Iron Hand of Mars

  L

  The beautiful virgin must have been busy next morning, for she sent us her sister instead. Her sister had a figure like a tent-post, a face like the underside of a boulder and a negligible personality. That might not have depressed us, but she was the one who couldn't cook.

  'Thank you, my dear,' I saluted her courteously while the others were grimacing. 'We are delighted to make your acquaintance, and that of your gracious porridge pot.' She had brought four bowls between twenty-two of us, and a lukewarm metal cauldron of some glutinous gruel.

  She ignored me and stomped out. I pretended I preferred women who are not too obvious.

  The breakfast was something everyone ought to experience, so whatever else he had to scoop out of a skillet in his future life he would know it could be worse.

  This branch of the Bructeri were slow risers. We were in a sleepy hamlet that would have been an ideal recuperation spot, had the people liked us more. Only towards the end of the morning did we hear activity. 'Attention, men, something's happening…'

  We looked out of our shutter and saw that runners had been back to raid our camp.

  Helvetius and I shoved the others aside while we stood and counted in our baggage and horseflesh. 'I make that six beasts and one tent missing – '

  'Plus the cash box, the javelins…'

  'Probably some rations, and the tribune's personal kit…'

  'Oh he'll do!' Helvetius murmured proudly. 'Mithras, he's a good boy!'

  It looked as if Camillus Justinus would at least be able to report to Rome how the Bructeri had taken us. He had supplies, mounts, and a companion in Orosius. The tribesmen were off guard now they had captured us, and would not be watching out. He should get away. It was the best we could hope for. What else could we expect of one gently reared young officer, aided by a rather dim recruit?

  Something stupid, normally. (Helvetius said that.)

  The arrival of the horses signalled a change for us. It
s good face was that we were saying goodbye to our smelly byre. The gloomy aspects were that they were leaving all our baggage behind, that Ascanius had lost his chance to make love to the porridge girl, and that the Bructeri were going on horseback – our horses. They were running us alongside them, on foot. They were rapid riders. And wherever they were taking us turned out to be several days away.

  'Look on the bright side. At least we're pointing west. They could have been driving us even further into the interior… Every mile we trudge is a mile nearer home.'

  'How far is it to Rome from here then, Falco?'

  'Jupiter, don't ask!'

  As soon as the Bructeri grew tired of herding us like geese, with irritating whistles and much active use of sharp thorny sticks, we settled down into a regular formation and showed them how empire builders march. Even the recruits were now inspired to smarten up. I was worried for the centurion's servant, but it turned out that after twenty years in the army he could not only make his boots cover ground efficiently, but he could complain at the same time.

  We even sang. We invented a marching-ditty that started, 'Oh I love my little mess tin with my name punched in the rim…' and then proceeded to list numerous items of a legionary's kit (there are plenty to choose from) before reaching his girlfriend, afrer which the form remained constant but we introduced some obscene counterpoint. The recruits loved it. They had never made up their own song before.

  'Sir, this is a really good adventure, sir!'

  'How true. Swamps, forests, ghosts, glades full of skulls; filthy, frightened and famished; then all ending up as slaves…'

  'Sir, what I think is, the people we never mention are going to rescue us. What do you think, sir?'

  Helvetius gave his opinion in one word. It was anatomical.