Pavo paced to and fro as the graves were filled in. It was a wretched thing, seeing the lifeless faces of the men he had trained vanish under spadefuls of earth and crystals of frost. One boy legionary, barely fifteen summers old, stared lifelessly into the sky. As the first tumbles of cold earth fell upon his face, Pavo felt an invisible hand wringing his heart, but the callus around it – the hardness known as ‘the soldier’s skin’ – held good, grew thicker. As the last spadeful of earth was patted down on the graves, Pavo crouched to one knee before the seven mounds ‘You walk with Mithras now, Brothers,’ he whispered, knowing full-well he would be seeing their faces again… tonight, in his dreams.
He rose and turned away while the men hitched their spades and weapons. There was something about this open, wintry waste that made him uneasy. Out here in this emptiness, they could come at him from anywhere. A hawk shuffled and cawed in the bare branches of a nearby poplar, and Pavo’s eyes met the bird’s. Hunter’s eyes. Watching…
‘They shot one of my testicles off,’ a voice groaned, startling Pavo from his thoughts.
He twisted to see big Pulcher on a stretcher – four men struggling to carry his weight. His brutish, pox-scarred face was warped in agony and he wrung his meaty fingers through his short, black curls. His trousers had been torn through at the crotch by a Hun archer.
‘Found it,’ said Sura, lifting an enemy arrow. Hanging from the bone tip by a few veins and sinews was a bloody white orb. With a shrug, he picked up a twig and flicked the testicle away. It plunged into the dense undergrowth nearby. Big Pulcher shot out a hand and whimpered like a man seeing his lover walk out on him. Sura did his best to console him. ‘You’ll not need it anyway – you’re, what, one hundred and six?’
Pulcher’s face boiled in sudden anger and he tried to rise from the stretcher before clutching his groin and wailing in a fresh wave of agony.
A twinge of pity and a guilty spike of amusement almost lifted Pavo’s lips into a smile. Almost. But when the hawk watching them shrieked and sped off from the poplar branches in a flurry of wings, Pavo’s senses sharpened, his head snapping round. What had disturbed the creature? His gaze latched onto the lazy wisps of smoke to the south, a short way through a knot of low hills, and his eyes narrowed. He could see nothing, hear nothing… but that was how they operated. Silent, unseen.
‘Back to the camp,’ he snapped.
The wind cut through them like knives as they marched, searching within their cloaks, mail and woollen tunics and trousers, the ruby bull banner hanging from the legion’s silver eagle standard stretched almost horizontal in the gale. Opis, the legion’s aquilifer used the standard like a mountaineer might use a pole to pick a path. The men’s teeth chattered hard. When they entered the lee of the hills, the wind dropped away. The gentle scent of woodsmoke offered a small promise of comfort when they eventually reached the approach to their camp. Pavo had stationed twelve men from this First Century to watch the basic shelter.
‘I don’t like it out here. Not one bit,’ Sura grumbled. ‘The sooner we get to this rendezvous point, the better.’
‘Why us?’ moaned Libo. ‘Why always us? While we’re sent up here into the frozen wilds to meet with… him, those feckless bastards in the Flavia Felix were tasked with “ensuring the naval supply routes run smoothly”,’ he said this with a simpering look on his face and a deliberately imbecilic voice. ‘They are billeted in the wharf at Thessalonica – right next to the tavern row. One door away from the brothel. By all the gods they’ll have worn their cocks to the nub by the time we get ba…’
He fell silent. Pavo turned to see the centurion’s good eye narrow, his nostrils twitching. Libo had the nose of a hunting dog, and Pavo had come to trust the man’s olfactory skills implicitly. He threw a hand up, halting the century.
‘Sir?’ Sura whispered.
Pavo watched as Libo crept forward another few paces, then fell to his haunches. He sniffed the air again before twisting his head back. ‘Can you smell it? The sweet woodsmoke grows sour.’
‘Sour?’ Pavo whispered.
Libo nodded once, slowly, his face lengthening. ‘With the stink of death.’
Pavo felt corpse-hands stroke his back. He stared ahead, along the tight, shallow gully that led to the campsite. He motioned with his hands, one pointing left and one right. The century parted, one half creeping up the gully’s western side, the other half the eastern side. Pavo went with the second group, Sura leading the first. They moved like cats, silent bar the odd shush of ringmail and crunch of frosted ground compacting under boots. At the gully end was the small hollow they had chosen as a campsite. Now Pavo could smell it too: the wretched stink of torn intestines. Like a tavern floor mixed with a butcher’s bin and a ripe latrine.
He halted his half of the century then fell prone, wriggling forward like an asp to the edge of the hollow in time with Sura on the other gully-side. He saw the small square ditch in the hollow floor, the picket stakes, the twenty or so tents where last night they had enjoyed warm stew and soldier-wine… and then the twelve naked bodies, roped at the wrists and hanging from tripods of spears like game, lower legs and feet trailing on the ground. Their ribs had been opened like gates, and the contents of their chests and bellies had been scooped out and lay in still-steaming piles around their feet. While they were still alive, he realised, seeing the look of steely terror fixed on one of the poor men’s lifeless faces. The rest wore death rictuses or haunted looks as they stared into eternity. The rest of the camp was deserted.
Pavo rose and picked his way down towards the dead men. Sura and Libo hurried to flank him while the bow-equipped legionaries on either side of the gully nocked and drew their weapons, watching for any surprise attacks on their tribunus.
Pavo saw the tell-tale footprints in the silvery-veined ground of the men who had done this: how they had entered the camp, creeping over the southern palisade; how they had crept up on the sentries’ backs… seeing how they had stolen away again. He approached the red-stained ground around the dead men and reached up to the dagger embedded in the haft of one tripod-leg spear. His fingers flexed around the hilt, the thumb tracing the motif on the bolster: a staring eye.
The sight was like a cold, ragged blade being drawn across his soul. Forget the dark figure they were supposed to rendezvous with here. Forget Fritigern and his vast horde. Forget the Huns and their attempts to spill into the empire. One enemy was at his heels already, neither Goth nor Hun. A Roman: the mightiest Roman alive: Gratian, Emperor of the West.
The hawk from earlier cawed nearby.
Only his most trusted men in the legion knew of the matter. He rolled his eyes to look at Sura, the most trusted of all. Sura regarded the knife hilt and then shared a look with Pavo. Both recalled the aftermath of that frantic battle against the Goths of the Black Horde, when they had fled from the blazing halls of Sirmium, the Western Emperor craning from one window, screaming after Pavo: I know who you are, legionary. You are a walking shade… for I know who you are!
It was not the eventual arrival of Gratian’s Western legions he would have to fear. But that of the Speculatores. Agents of the Western Emperor, black to their core. They were Gratian’s eyes and ears, his razor-talons. How many of them had done this? How many more watched right now or waited nearby? The wind keened above the sheltered hollow, offering no answers. He knew only one thing.
It had begun.
Chapter 1
Iudex Fritigern sat within a small square of wagons at the heart of his camp. His scarred battle helm rested upon his knees, a thick bear fur hugging his shoulders and his iron-grey hair and beard framing his pensive and haggard face. His hands shook and so he clasped them atop the crest of his helm to steady them. The tremors had started a year ago, and at first he thought it was merely the cold, but then it continued into the heat of the summer. A steady, constant trembling. You’re getting old, he thought. Never once in his youth had he imagined that his later years would be spent like this, in t
he eye of war. He let his gaze roll upwards, past the staked spear and the sapphire banner depicting a soaring black hawk – his emblem. The night sky was streaked with a treasure of stars, and the bitter air rich with the sweet scent of woodsmoke, roasting boar and the heady aroma of barley beer and wine.
Thick laughter rose and fell from the sprawling sea of tents, huts and stables outside his wagon square. Over one hundred thousand souls, giddy and gleeful, women singing and pipers marching to and fro atop wagons. He understood his people’s joy: for although they were at the epicentre of war with the empire, right now things were good. For the first time in so long, they were not compelled to run or to fight. Rooted here in lower Thracia, one hundred miles due west of Constantinople, they were masters of the land, and had been for over two years. No Huns to press upon them, no legions to mistreat or make war with them. The Romans clung to their coastal cities still, but they were like mere gem boxes, some said – oysters yet to give up their pearls. His Goths ruled all Thracia and Macedonia with an iron fist: twenty thousand spearmen and archers and five thousand horsemen, roving at will, taking wheat and coin from the many rural towns and farming settlements where once the emperor’s tax collectors had exacted such tolls.
Yet this news changed everything. He beheld the two bearers, standing before him.
‘They are coming,’ repeated Reiks Winguric in a strained hiss, his chin-tied beard rising and falling as his face contorted, the oily, black pores in his shapeless nose like pits in the firelight, the wings on his helm gleaming.
‘The Western armies of steel who crushed the Black Horde at Sirmium,’ added Reiks Judda, his toad-like face agape, ‘but doubled… doubled!’
‘They will match us for numbers, Iudex,’ Winguric persisted. ‘Thus, we must strike first, while the Eastern Army remains enfeebled.’
Fritigern looked up at the pair – two of the most senior men from his Council of Reiks. It had both impressed him and troubled him that the two had forgone the chance to pickle their brains like all the rest. Like wolves who spurn an easy meal… perhaps because they scent a fuller one in the offing? Winguric in particular was one to be watched. Rumour still clung to the man like a bad smell – though he denied he had been the one to set light to the timber Christian shrine in faraway Bosporus, several years ago. Four hundred Gothic women and children had burnt to death in that blaze. These days he professed his Christian faith as if that was proof against his guilt.
‘There have only been rumours of Gratian and his force,’ Fritigern said. ‘Not a single sighting. Other rumours claim that he busies himself moving his capital from Treverorum in Gaul to Mediolanum in Italia. He does not care about the fate of the East. If he comes, it will be a monumental undertaking of many months just to get here. We will be ready to deal with him, as we have dealt with every other Roman assault since we crossed the great river.’
‘Reiks Alatheus and Saphrax were never so slow to react to danger,’ Reiks Judda grumbled.
Fritigern recoiled, eyebrows arching as if beholding a man wearing a sandal on one foot and a marching boot on the other. ‘Those two craved fame and glory. Well they found their fame, and an unforgettable end – in one of the most crushing defeats our people have ever known. Both ended up as crow meat at Sirmium, and are now but bones and dust like the rest of the Black Horde. I have never thrown our warriors into battle so wastefully, or put our families in danger. Keep faith in me now as you have before. I will not have our people up and leave these parts because of unfounded rumours. We cannot return to a life of fear and flight or of roving, wild attacks.’
At that moment, he recalled the snatched and tense conversation with the Roman Tribunus, Pavo, in the defiles of the Rhodope Mountains on a night just like this. The tribunus had been part of a contingent of Eastern legions, headed west to reinforce Gratian’s men at the Battle of Sirmium. Were Fritigern more youthful and volatile, he might have butchered the young officer and all of his men, but he did not, for the tribunus spoke of something he thought had long since slipped into oblivion. Peace, he mouthed, recalling Pavo’s claims that genuine attempts to strike accord had been thwarted by self-serving Goth and Roman alike – the Roman Emperor of the West, even. Might there still be a way? he wondered. A chance, even one as narrow as the sickle of moonlight in the inky sky?
A shriek of laughter poured over the camp, and he and his two reiks looked up to see another, minor reiks staggering, face purple as a plum, chin wet with saliva, pointing as a fellow noble rutted on the ground, trousers around his ankles, making passionate love with a patch of turf. Others buried their faces in the bare breasts of Gothic women and some lashed their swords around recklessly, boasting of past battle heroics.
Only two others besides Winguric and Judda had refused the fare on offer. Reiks Fravitta – a dark, trident-bearded Goth of some thirty summers with a golden cloak and a predacious glare – stood some way back, one shoulder resting on a wagon, carefully watching the exchange. There was the gold-braided boy, Alaric, too. A child of war, just eleven summers, but already a champion amongst the younger soldiers, and he exhibited the composure and wit of a man twice his age.
Why are they here and not out there with the others? he wondered. Wolves or wardens?
‘Yes, we must not be rash. But equally, we cannot afford to be complacent,’ Winguric continued. ‘The Eastern capital lies a few days ride from here. Our spies say Emperor Theodosius is an unstable creature, prone to calm thought one moment then madness the next. His Nicene bishops rouse and terrorise him with threats from God; they tell him we are not Arians but devils! What if he was to send his legions at us like a spear – to pin us here and deny us the luxury of choosing if and when to mobilise?’
‘The Eastern legions are still broken and few,’ Fritigern reasoned, ‘despite the pompous shows of sentries on the walls of Constantinople. I know how many we slew at the Scupi Ridge,’ he said without a crumb of pride, recalling the mass graves, the vultures, the drone of flies and the stink of torn corpses. ‘They have only seven or so legions, most half-strength at best – such a force would not be strong enough to surround, pin or even disrupt us.’
Winguric and Judda shared a look as if reaching some tacit or pre-discussed agreement.
‘What if Theodosius has more men than you think?’ said Judda, turning back to Fritigern.
Fritigern’s eyes narrowed.
Winguric leaned forward, his leather armour squeaking. ‘Iudex… have you not heard?’
Fritigern’s eyes rolled up. A chill crept over him as he saw Winguric’s glinting eyes and that feigned concern, masking the glowing, inner triumph.
‘Our scouts saw a Roman party travelling down the coast road yesterday – the thin strip of land they still dare to travel. Legionaries, headed south after from some foray to the great river, returning to Constantinople.’
Judda craned forward now too, eyes wide like a gossiping wife. ‘Do you know who they were escorting?’
Winguric leaned a fraction closer still. ‘Athanaric,’ he whispered as if the name were a cursed oath.
Fritigern’s heart crusted over with ice. ‘What did you say?’
‘Athanaric, the fallen king, has travelled to Constantinople,’ said Winguric.
‘Your once-greatest rival for control of the tribes has crossed the river in a private galley and thrown in his lot with Emperor Theodosius,’ added Judda.
Fritigern’s mind raced. Athanaric, who had once been Iudex before him, had chosen to stay north of the river when the Huns came, making a home in the bleak, windswept heights of the Carpates Mountains, shivering in a fortress-town of stone and timber and hoping the steppe horsemen would never tread those mountain paths.
Judda’s lips twitched up into a smile. ‘He must bring a fine gift with him, surely?’
Fritigern’s fingers worked around the rim of his helm. Athanaric no longer commanded the numbers he once had, but there was still a thick band of warriors – scarred veterans, no less – serving him in
that mountain hideaway. A few thousand, maybe more. What if it was many more – waiting back in those mountains, but ready to come to his call and side with the empire? What if other non-Gothic tribes answered to him now in fear of the Huns and seeking his protection. What if this was the gift he brought for Theodosius? His confidence rolled away like a sepulchre stone: what if Gratian’s Western legions were on their way? What if Theodosius’ remnant armies from the east and Athanaric’s lot from the north already plotted to fall upon this camp, holding the Goths here like a butcher’s assistant exposing a pig’s soft throat to the blade…
‘Now you see, Iudex?’ Winguric said. ‘While these plains make a fine home… they would also make a perfect battlefield for the united forces of the Roman Emperors and Athanaric. A perfect grave. We cannot be here when they come. You may doubt Gratian’s movements, but our western scouts have noticed Western men already operating with Theodosius’ soldiers.’
Fritigern’s eyes narrowed. ‘How so?’
‘They saw a band of Roman scouts – a dozen or so – following Athanaric’s legionary escort on their way back to Constantinople. Men in dark cloaks and hoods. Westerners who rode in from Pannonia and shadowed the escort.’
‘They followed a mile or two behind. A distant rearguard of sorts,’ Judda nodded confidently.
Fritigern felt the chill, despite his furs. ‘Following the legionaries with Athanaric? Dark cloaks? They were not scouts, nor a rearguard. What you saw were living shades… Speculatores. They stalk men like death’s shadow. They are headed to Constantinople, you say? They call that place the city of God… and may God protect whomever they seek.’
Pavo glanced out to sea, watching the two ballista-equipped triremes gliding along on the calm waters of the Pontus Euxinus, tracking the southwards movement of his small infantry party like a protective hand. A low winter sun warmed their backs as they filed along the frost-veined flagstones of the Via Pontica – that coastal road being the one remaining artery allowing Roman soldiers to enter and leave the capital from the countryside. Hugging the coastline like this was the only way forces could move safely – one flank protected by the shore and the small escort flotilla. He twisted his head inland: rolling hills, streaked with sunlight and shadow. Howls and cries of animals sounded, distant plumes of woodsmoke rose. Only a fool would venture into the heart of Thracia or Macedonia – both dioceses crawling with Fritigern’s occupying hordesmen. He glanced backwards, over the silver column of his men. Ten days had passed without any further sign of the Speculatores. Pulcher had claimed to have seen something one night: a shadow moving in the darkness, but it had come to nothing. Now as the Claudia century neared the heart of the Eastern Empire, safety beckoned, and the memory of those gutted bodies in the icy north seemed almost dreamlike and unreal.
The Blood Road (Legionary 7): Legionary, no. 7 Page 2
