He saw a look of impatience creeping onto Sanga’s face and returned his attention to the tablet.
‘… dedicated to the memory of the soldier Scarface …’
He looked up at Sanga with a look of confusion.
‘Did he not have a proper name?’
Saratos snorted.
‘Yes, have proper name, but he call Scarface by men he fight and die with. So Scarface is he name for altar.’
Sanga nodded, his eyes misty.
‘Couldn’t have put it better myself.’
The mason shrugged.
‘As you wish, gentlemen. So … a man whose scars were all in his front. A noble sentiment for a soldier, I’m sure. How soon would you like this to be completed, and where shall I place it?’
Sanga weighed the handful of coins with a meaningful clink of metal.
‘Here’s how it is. We’re marching on tomorrow, as far as the northern wall and then some more, and we’ll be back inside a week or two. When we march back we want to see a nice, crisp new altar, with a carving of a soldier fighting, in the front rank mind you, and that wording, installed on the roadside as close to the fort as you’re allowed to put it. Think you can manage that?’
The mason drew himself up, holding up his splayed hands to display the broad, scarred fingers that were the tools of his trade.
‘With these two hands, gentlemen. I’ll put my other commissions on hold until this task is completed.’
He spat on his palm and offered it to Sanga, who took it in a powerful grip.
‘Done.’
He handed over the coins, nodding as the mason slipped them into his purse.
‘Just don’t let me down, eh? Old Scarface meant a lot to me. If I find myself disappointed, then mark me well, you’ll be wearing your danglers for earrings.’
The mason bowed obsequiously as the soldiers turned away, weighing the purse in his palm with a smile as he watched the two men disappear down the hill into their camp.
Calgus shuffled flat-footed into the eagle’s shrine, pausing for a moment to look around the room’s smoke-blackened walls. The dead-eyed gazes of several dozen men returned his scrutiny, their stares unblinking in the dim light of the shrine’s lamps, part of the mystique that the tribe’s holy man had woven around the legion standard since the crippled Selgovae leader had surrendered it to the new king as the price of his safety among the Venicones. Pride of place among the severed heads that lined the shrine’s walls was given to that of the legatus his own champion had killed on the same afternoon that his once powerful tribe had overrun the Sixth Legion early in the revolt two years before and captured their precious eagle standard. Stored for many months in a jar of cedar oil to prevent it rotting, the head had then been dried in a smokehouse until the skin was taut around the dead Roman’s skull, and its features shrunk in size to those of a child, albeit still recognisable as the defeated legion’s commander.
‘You have come to worship the eagle, perhaps?’
The former Selgovae king frowned momentarily, then smiled as his eyes found the priest in the room’s half-darkness.
‘I come to refresh my memories of the glory I won in taking the eagle from the Romans. You will recall that my tribe were at war with the invaders long before your people deigned to join us in our fight?’
The holy man stepped out from beside the wooden case in which he kept the eagle with a forbidding look on his face.
‘I recall that your leading us to war resulted in the death of my king, and the loss of enough men to force the Venicones back onto our own land. Were the Romans to attack us now, rather than huddle behind their wall, then I doubt that we would have the strength to resist. It is fortunate for all of us, but especially for you, that they seem to lack any further appetite to come north.’
Calgus nodded his reluctant acceptance of the sentiment.
‘It seems that everyone is tired of war, Priest, except for me. I still dream of one more battle, and another defeated legion to send the Romans south with their tails between their legs. We only have to tempt them over the wall and onto your tribe’s ground, and we could yet have them by the balls.’
The priest grimaced.
‘One more battle, Calgus? One more chance for my people to bleed for your ambitions? You may not be king here, but it’s clear that you still harbour ambitions that will either result in the destruction of Roman power over the north of their province or the Venicone tribe being crushed beneath their boots, if you were ever to get your own way on the matter.’
He stepped closer to Calgus, pulling a dagger from his robes to show the Selgovae the blade’s bright line, and the former king recoiled involuntarily before regaining his equilibrium.
‘You threaten me, Priest?’
The holy man laughed hollowly.
‘No, Calgus, I do not. If I wanted you dead I would simply whisper in the ear of King Brem’s master of the hunt, and have him send one of his Vixens to deal with you. Imagine the shame of that, Selgovae, dying at the hands of a woman.’ He leaned closer to the deposed king, lowering his voice. ‘They are vicious bitches, Calgus, more likely to hack your balls off and leave you to bleed to death than to give you the mercy of a clean death, and I would set them upon you without a second thought to spare my tribe the risk of your leading us to yet more disaster, if I did not already know that your death is close to hand.’ He lifted the blade again. ‘No, I show you this sacred knife, with which I perform my rites of sacrifice and augury, to make clear the means by which I have predicted your doom.’
Calgus smiled broadly, shaking his head in disbelief.
‘Your bloody-handed “augury” may deceive the simpletons of your tribe, Priest, but you have no more chance of predicting what is to come from examining the guts of a dead sheep than I have of ever running again. You can take your predictions and put them where the sun—’
The priest laughed again, turning the knife’s blade to catch the lamplight and sending flickers of illumination across Calgus’s face.
‘The sun? Or perhaps you meant to say “the son”, the child of a man who suffered a sad reversal of fortune at the end of his life. The son returns, Calgus. The son.’
The priest smiled at him without any hint of warmth, and the Selgovae’s eyes slitted as the meaning of his words sank in.
‘What?’
The amusement had fled from his face in an instant, replaced by a snarl of anger, but if the priest was discomfited by the change it wasn’t apparent.
‘I read your fate in the liver of a blameless lamb, Calgus, and from your reaction it’s clear enough that you know all too well of what I speak. I sacrificed the animal in order to see your fate, Calgus, and when I laid its liver on the altar I saw three things in your future.’
Gritting his teeth at having to stoop to entertaining the priest’s tale, Calgus put his face inches from the other man’s.
‘And?’
The priest shook his head in dark amusement.
‘What, you wish to know my “bloody-handed prediction”, do you? I thought that they were only for simple—’
‘Tell me what you saw, Priest!’
The holy man opened his hands.
‘Very well, Calgus, since you insist. There were three things in your future, as revealed to me by the gods through my ability to read the sacrifice. I saw the son, still strong with the urge for revenge. Doubtless you have ordered the deaths of enough men that one of their sons has survived to dream of revenge upon you. I saw a prince, a man apart from those around him. Might he be the same person as the son? I cannot say. And I saw death, Calgus, unmistakable and implacable. Death.’
The Selgovae shook his head in bafflement.
‘The son … I know of such a man. But I know of no prince, nor of any king I killed whose son remains alive to seek revenge.’ He frowned. ‘And death? Whose death, Priest?’
The holy man shook his head again.
‘I am not blessed with such powers that I can predict the
future to such a degree of accuracy. All I know is that there is death in your future. Perhaps it beckons the son, perhaps it will take the prince. Most likely this death is your own, since I named you in the sacred words I said before sacrificing the lamb. But there will be death, Calgus. And soon.’
3
The Tungrians paraded to march north again at first light the next day, Tullo’s tablet safely tucked away in a corner of Tribune Scaurus’s campaign chest. Drest and his companions were never far from Marcus’s place at the head on his Fifth Century, and as the Roman marched his men onto the parade ground he felt the eyes of the Sarmatae twins on his back. Julius and Scaurus stood in conversation for a few moments, the tribune emphasising his words with several chopping gestures into his empty palm, after which the muscular first spear stalked down the line of his centuries followed by a pair of men the soldiers had learned to give careful respect over the previous year. Going face-to-face with Castus’s mercenaries with the barbarian giant Lugos looming over one shoulder and Scaurus’s muscular servant Arminius at the other, the first spear stood for a moment in silence, allowing time for their threat to become apparent with his hard stare fixed on the Sarmatae twins’ bruised faces. Both of the men arrayed behind him were carrying their usual weapons, in Lugos’s case a war hammer so heavy that few other men could lift it without grunting and straining at the effort required, let alone wield it with the giant’s terrifying speed and power, one side of the weapon shaped into a pointed iron beak while the other sported a viciously hooked axe blade. Julius pointed to the twins, his face hard with purpose.
‘You pair of maniacs are a little bit too quick to start throwing sharp iron around for my tribune’s liking, so he’s instructed me to make it very clear to you that the use of swords for training bouts is specifically forbidden.’ Ram and Radu stared back with what Marcus, standing nearby, had strongly suspected was a deliberate failure to understand, and the first spear crooked a broad finger at Drest. ‘You, come here and translate this so there’s no chance of misunderstanding. You two, listen to me and don’t fucking interrupt unless you want a bloody good hiding.’
He waited for Drest to translate, smiling grimly as the threat of violence sank into the twins’ expressions.
‘These two men …’ He hooked a thumb back over his shoulder at the barbarians behind him. ‘… are the two nastiest bastards you’re ever likely to encounter, and they both seem to have a soft spot for Centurion Corvus for reasons I struggle to understand. So, in the event that either of you takes a blade to my centurion without my permission, they are both ordered to take their iron to you with equal vigour. And that, gentlemen, will mean that you will be fighting for your lives. Do. You. Understand?’
Both men listened to the translation with glum faces, nodding at its completion. Julius nodded dourly, speaking over his shoulder as he turned away to get the column moving.
‘Good. You two, watch them. And don’t wait for an order to deal with them if they get uppity, just put them out of the fight in any way you choose, and we’ll worry about the niceties afterwards.’
‘Niceties?’
Arminius smiled knowingly at Lugos’s frown. The hulking Selgovae tribesman’s grasp of Latin had improved over the months since his capture early in the campaign against Calgus, but many words still eluded his understanding.
‘Yes. Niceties. You know the sort of thing, finding a small coin to put in the dead man’s mouth for the ferryman. Gathering wood for a pyre.’
Lugos nodded solemnly.
‘Niceties. A good word. I would remember it.’
‘I will remember it.’
The big man turned to stare down at the Fifth Century soldier who had reflexively corrected him without any invitation to do so, his expression quizzical.
‘This is … wait, I remember … yes, this is … piss taking?’
‘No!’
The Tungrian’s eyes widened, and he raised his hands in disavowal of any idea that he might have been making fun of the Selgovae warrior looming over him. Lugos stooped his neck until his face was close to the soldier’s, who was prevented from shrinking away by the unhelpful refusal to budge of the men behind him, and patted his hammer’s roughly shaped iron beak.
‘Yes. Will. Is another good word. I will teach you not take piss. I will give you tickle with hammer. You will need “niceties”.’
Arminius peered around the big man at the terrified soldier, raising an eyebrow.
‘What he needs is a change of leggings, I’d say. Leave him alone you big horrible bastard, you’ve made your point.’
The Tungrians marched north again that morning at a fast pace, alternating the double march with the standard pace all day to cover the best part of thirty miles, their hobnailed boots rapping onto the parade ground at Three Mountains an hour before sunset. Julius watched his men stagger wearily onto the flat surface with an appraising stare, grateful that he’d not been carrying a shield, spears or a pack for the day’s march.
‘The men are just about shattered, Tribune, so I propose that just this once we might break the first commandment and allow them to use the marching camp that was left here last year when the Petriana wing cornered the Venicones in the ruins of the fort.’
The burned-out shell of the large fort that had guarded the road north before the northern tribes’ revolt stood before them, its soot-stained stone walls looming over the parade ground in mute testimony to the ferocity of the storm of iron that had washed over the empire’s northernmost defence under Calgus’s leadership. Tribune Scaurus nodded slowly, scanning the fort with hard eyes.
‘That looks like a punishment frame up there.’
Julius turned back to face him with a grim smile.
‘It is, and it was used to torture and kill one of our own not too long ago. One of the Petriana’s decurions told our own tame cavalry decurion the story, and Silus told it to me in turn one night after a few beers. It seems one of the Petriana’s officers had a hard-on for treasure, and used to go looting whenever he got the chance. Silus knew the man of course, and he told me that he kept his stolen gold in an oak chest that was always locked, with no one brave enough to try to rob him on account of how fierce he was. Anyway, although they never found out quite how it happened, the same night that our old friend Tribune Licinius managed to bottle up the Venicones in there –’ he tipped his head at the fort’s blackened walls ‘– while he was chasing them north after we beat Calgus at the Battle of the Forest, the ink monkeys crept out in the dark and lured this gold-struck idiot into some sort of trap. They dragged him off into the fort, strapped him up there on that frame and went to work on him with their knives right in front of the cavalry lads, cut him a hundred times and then stuck a spear through each thigh and slit his belly wide open, but he never gave out as much as a squeak. Which, fool though he was, is not something I could have hoped to match under the same circumstances. In the end their king got bored of the whole thing and cut his throat, leaving him hanging up there as a lesson for the horse boys to keep their distance. Apparently when the tribune ordered his campaign chest to be opened there was enough gold in there to retire a legion century and still have enough left over for them to get pissed and laid every night for a month.’
Scaurus smiled wryly at the first spear.
‘The moral being not to get too greedy, eh?’
Julius barked out a laugh.
‘The moral being not to be so stupid as to wander away from your unit at night when there’s barbarians about, I’d say. Anyway, the fort’s unusable without a few days’ putting new gates up and the men are just about beaten for the day, so …’
The tribune nodded.
‘Agreed. It’s not as if there’s a barbarian army in the field. We’ll use the existing marching camp, but let’s not relax too much. We’ll do without listening patrols, since there won’t be anything to listen to out here, but let’s keep the guard routine nice and tight, shall we?’
‘I never thought I’d
be so grateful to see another bloody legion fortress.’
Felicia glanced across at Annia with a look of concern, realising from her assistant’s pale face and look of discomfort that she was badly in need of a rest from the wagon’s constant rattling over the road’s cobbles. The high stone walls of Yew Grove had come into sight as the road had crested the last hill that lay between the gold convoy and its destination in the softening light of late afternoon, and the soldiers marching at the convoy’s front and rear had promptly started belting out a marching song at the tops of their voices.
‘They sound rather grateful too.’
Annia managed a strained smile at her friend’s straight-faced statement.
‘I’d imagine they’re sending a message to the vicus whorehouses, given that we’re less than a mile away from hot baths and free time.’
Felicia laughed.
‘You’re probably right. When did a man ever think with anything other than his stomach and what hangs from the end of it?’
She passed across the leather bottle which she had filled with tea brewed from the leaves of the raspberry bush the previous evening.
‘Another drink of this might help to ease the cramp?’
Annia waved it away with a disgusted expression.
‘I’ve already had enough of that for one lifetime. The midwives may well swear by it, but all I know is that it tastes like horse piss. Save it to offer your new suitor, one mouthful of that might shrivel his prick up for a day or two and stop him sniffing round you like a dog after a bitch.’
Felicia’s expression darkened. Tribune Sorex had met the convoy just after midday, escorted by several centuries of legionaries heading north under the command of a hard-faced centurion with a thick black beard and a long scar that bisected one eye and ran to his jaw.
‘On you march, Centurion Gynax, I’ll escort the gold back into the fortress. Good luck with your quest for the eagle!’
Gynax had saluted with what had looked to Felicia like a knowing look, and Sorex had sent his men on to the north with a lazy wave of one hand before reining his horse in alongside that of the camp prefect and chatting to his more experienced subordinate for a while. Once satisfied that no harm had befallen his precious cargo, he had dropped down the convoy’s line until the medical wagon had passed, falling in alongside the doctor with a broad smile.
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