by Manda Scott
At last, Valerius turned to face him. Surprisingly, his eyes were at peace, and had room for the old, dry humour.
“I may do. You won’t unless everything I have done or can do fails. You kept the Crow-horse safe for me. Getting you killed would be a poor repayment.”
CHAPTER 32
THE TOMBSTONE WAS DELIVERED EARLY, BEFORE FIRST LIGHT. The factor of the prefect’s household was woken by a night slave and, blearily irritable, ordered it left in the spartan enclave of his master’s office.
Quintus Valerius Corvus, prefect of the Ala Quinta Gallorum and acting commander of Camulodunum, found it shortly after dawn as he came to his paperwork, seeking an hour’s peace before the debilitating trivia of colonial governance began to take its toll.
He had heard the watch called twice before he thought to inspect the stone he had so recently commissioned. He was studying it still, an hour later, when his first visitor called.
“What do you think of it?”
Clean and sharp and scurrilous, the stone leaned against the farther wall. The sackcloth hung over one edge; the prefect’s usually scrupulous tidiness had, this once, abandoned him.
Corvus spoke Alexandrian, for privacy and out of courtesy for his guest and friend, the physician Theophilus, late of Rome, the Germanies, Athens and Cos, and now of Britannia. Theophilus had seen too many tombstones of late to find them absorbing and his eyesight was not as good as it had once been. Still, for his friend’s sake, he leaned forward to study it.
After a while, he leaned back again. “It’s very … striking. What would you like me to think of it?”
“That Longinus would appreciate the humour, that it suits the man as we knew him and that it will serve him well in death as he served well in life.”
Theophilus nodded, sagely. “Then, indeed, for your sake as much as his, that is what I will think.” He crouched more closely and read the lines incised on the stone. “‘Longinus Sdapeze, son of Matycus, duplicarius of the first squadron, the Ala Prima Thracum, et cetera, et cetera … His heirs had this erected in accordance with his will.’ Did they indeed?” He looked up. “I hadn’t realized you were one of his heirs. Who was the other?”
Corvus pinched the bridge of his nose. “Valerius. Who else?”
“I see.” The physician’s eyes were watery and kind, and still sharp enough to see the gaps in another man’s soul. Gently, he said, “So, in effect, you are the sole inheritor. Did our departed friend leave you anything of worth?”
“Enough gold to have this monstrosity made—he picked the mason so we can only assume he knew what was coming, which is more than I did—and a certain pied war horse, if it survived him, if I can find it amidst the wreckage of the governor’s war when I finally march west to join him, if, having found the beast, I can get near it and if, having done all of these, I am stupid or reckless enough to try to mount it.”
Theophilus rose with a creak of arthritic knees and came to stand behind the prefect, kneading the man’s shoulders with bony fingers. The muscles softened, but not enough to diminish the headache he could see growing before his eyes. He said, “As your physician, I would strongly recommend that you have that particular horse poleaxed the moment you lay eyes on it, but I don’t expect that you will. Do I gather that you are going west soon?”
“Very soon.” Corvus stretched his neck. “Now that the snow is clearing, I am ordered to take the three cohorts of new recruits and my cavalry wing west “with all possible facility.” I gather the war is not going to the governor’s satisfaction. We should have continued training here for another month. As it is, I’ll leave the day after tomorrow at dawn, if the weather holds.”
“Are they ready?”
“The men? No, but they’re as ready as anyone ever is who has never seen a dead man with his gonads cut from his groin and jammed between his teeth and the kill-marks of Mona cut on his brow and chest.” Corvus smiled savagely. “The governor needs help and we are all that he has. He’ll win in the end, but he will lose more than Longinus in doing so. Our Trinovante mason, meanwhile, occupies himself in making tombstones of striking vivacity, if limited taste. If you look carefully at this morning’s gift, you’ll see the cowering native under the feet of Longinus’ horse is possessed of a fully erect phallus.”
“And the smile of a man somewhat less than cowed. Thank you. I rather thought it better not to notice either of those. The horse is good, though; whatever else may be said of them, the natives have a good eye for a horse.” Theophilus dropped the cover back over the stone. “You need fresh air. Shall we go—Ah, alas not.” He tilted his head in the direction of the disturbance at the doorway. “Would that be the procurator?”
Corvus’ face took on the weariness of a man under siege. “Who else, making that much noise at this time in the morning? Will you stay? I might need a witness when I kill him, to say that I was driven to it out of fear for my own sanity.”
“Willingly.”
Theophilus settled himself to wait. In his opinion, Decianus Catus, procurator of all Britannia, was a clerk and a money-counter who would not have rated a second glance had not the emperor chosen to make of him the second most powerful man in Britannia. Only the governor had powers of absolute veto over the procurator’s actions and even those were used with discretion. Each of these two, governor and procurator, had orders to succeed or die in the taming of Britannia, and neither man was prepared have it said afterwards in the senate that the other had hindered his efforts.
For a while, Theophilus had found it amusing to watch the governor, leader of armies and subduer of nations, hedging round a counting clerk as if the poisonous little man were a senator on the road to the imperial throne. Watching Corvus forced into increasingly harassed retreat by a man who should have drowned in his mother’s birth fluids and saved the world from his presence was not amusing at all.
The physician turned from his inspection of the wall mosaics to hear the end of a sentence.
“… fully aware of the unfortunate disappearance of the merchant Philus. However, until we either find him alive, or come across his body, it is impossible to say how he died.”
“He was slain by Prasutagos and his barbarian filth.” The procurator spoke with the hoarse, whispering force of one who has coughed too much in early life.
Corvus was leaning on his desk, staring down at the splayed whiteness of his fingers. “Procurator Catus, the King Prasutagos has been loyal since the first moment the Divine Claudius set foot in this province. He escorted the imperial cavalcade personally into Camulodunum. In any case, the Eceni were disarmed by force over a decade ago. I think it highly unlikely that even their king could rouse them to attack a group of armed slavers.”
“No?” The procurator’s eyes flew wide. “Then you are more of a fool than I thought. If I didn’t have an armed escort, I would have died ten times over in the first month I was here. Everywhere we go, they raise their ‘Skinning knives’ and look down the blades to see if they are sharp enough to kill a man.”
“Everywhere you go, I’m sure they do.” Theophilus said it in Alexandrian, peering at the bronze statuette of Horus on the small shelf above the brazier as if he commented on the workmanship. He saw a muscle in Corvus’ cheek twitch and smiled, blandly.
A little hollowly, Corvus said, “My point entirely, procurator. The peace here is tenuous at best. We cannot begin to destroy entire villages without due recourse to law. The emperor will not thank me for setting alight the tinderbox of the east for the sake of a man who has been mauled by a bear.”
“He was not mauled by a bear.”
“So you say. But if you wish me to act, you must find me not only Philus’ body, but also proof beyond doubt that he was killed by human agency.”
“Of course.” The procurator smiled at the prefect and his friend, the Greek physician. His voice slid over them both. “Prefect, if you will step outside? And you, physician? I believe your skills will provide the proof the prefect needs.”
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They should have seen it coming. Perhaps Corvus had, but there was nothing he could have done to reverse it.
Outside, an unhitched ox cart waited in the part-thaw of morning, shrouded against prying eyes. It smelled, not unpleasantly, of earth and melted ice and a little of hound’s urine, as if a wandering cur had lately marked the wheels. A century of armed men stood behind it in military order: the procurator’s veteran mercenaries.
The procurator stepped up on the wheel spokes with a surprising agility and balanced on the edge of the cart, giving himself the advantage of height. He stared down at Corvus, stone-faced. “You will recall that the merchant Philus and two of those closest to him wore at all times the badge of the leaping fish. Is that correct?”
“It is.”
Corvus was an officer of the cavalry. He had fought and killed better men than this. Theophilus watched him set aside his headache, which must by then have been fierce, and engage instead an enquiring smile. “You have located that badge?” he asked.
“Not the one belonging to Philus, but then it was of silver and had some worth. But we have two others of copper and iron, which were missed by the looters. They were found amongst the remains of the men-at-arms who served Philus and died in an effort to save his life. We were not able to bring them all back, but each is accounted for, sworn in the presence of my men.”
A retired legionary whom Theophilus remembered as viciously unsuited to leading any group of armed men stepped forward in a clash of over-polished mail, saluted and, without request or permission, said, “Forty-three different bodies found. One dozen natives, twenty-seven men-at-arms, four unidentifiable on account of…”
Corvus’ smile acquired the edge that any man who had ever served under him should recognize. The legionary stuttered to a close. Corvus’ nod was devastatingly crisp. “Thank you, Driscus, we can imagine the rest.” Speaking over the man’s head, he said, “Procurator, you have the bodies with you?”
“Of course. I could not expect you to take my word for something of this magnitude.”
The procurator had a liking for theatre and his men had been drilled to the point of automation. He stepped down from the wheel as neatly as he had stepped up. At his nod, Driscus clashed forward to lift one corner of the canvas. Three others came to help. The stripping away of the wagon’s cover was achieved in a single, clean manoeuvre. The procurator’s men, it was to be understood, were as finely disciplined as any still serving in the legions, if not more so.
Theophilus had spent large parts of his career watching men like Driscus uncover wagonloads of slain. Wearily, he waited for the wall of stench to reach him—and waited—and presently realized that it had done so and that he could relax because winter and the carrion beasts had softened the smell to something mouldily sweet and almost pleasant.
He leaned over the edge for a better look. Yellowing bones and fragmented skulls lay joined and disjoined in a child’s game of tangled ligaments and dried, stringy human hide. Tatters of clothing stuck here and there where the natives, the winter beasts and the spring birds had not yet found better use for them. On the top, lying ostentatiously on the curve of a clean-picked ribcage, lay two leaping salmon, brilliant with rust and verdigris, so that only the jewelled eyes were clean.
As was intended, they caught Theophilus’ attention, so that it took a moment to look beyond, and see the thing that mattered more. He looked up. Corvus caught his gaze and shook his head so that the physician closed his mouth over what he had been about to say and waited for a better time.
The procurator stood over them both. His breath smelled of old shellfish and was worse than the winter-cleansed dead. With the air of one educating infants, he said, “I believe this …” he prodded with a sheathed knife at a body, “was Philus. His fish badge is gone, but the skeleton has the small finger missing on its left hand, and a healed break on the ankle, as he did. As to the rest, you will observe that the bodies are unclothed. More importantly, no mail or weapons were found in the clearing.” He grinned. His men grinned with him, knowingly. They had heard this speech before, more than once. “In my experience, bears rarely make the effort to strip their kills. Native insurgents always do.”
Corvus did not grin. Distractedly, he said, “As do bandits and thieves. Theophilus, I will need details of how these men died, as far as it can be ascertained from their bones.” He had mounted the wagon’s tailgate, the better to study its contents. The act gave him back his advantage of height. “Procurator, until we have a full inventory of the bodies, including the means of death and as much identification as we—”
“How much more identification can you need? Do you deny that this is Philus?”
“… until we have full identification of the bodies that are not Roman, until we have found the nature of the injuries to the dead and had an opportunity to establish the identity of their assailants—”
“Prefect, this is nonsense. Philus was last known to be with Prasutagos. He is dead and all his men with him. At Driscus’ best estimate, there are at least two dozen sets of sword, shield and mail unaccounted for. Therefore we not only have a nest of killers festering in the stinking midden of ‘King’ Prasutagos’ steading, but the beginnings of insurrection. How could you believe otherwise?”
“Because Prasutagos, too, is dead.”
Rain had begun to fall. The patter of it on the roof tiles ripped the silence. Corvus’ smile was carefully neutral.
The procurator blinked at him, slowly. The white margins of his nostrils became yellow with the pressure of his breathing. He said, “How can you be sure?”
“I am sure of nothing, which is why I have requested that our physician make an inventory, but I know of no other man who wore the king-band of the Eceni on his only arm.” Corvus stepped back a little. “Theophilus? Would you confirm for me that the skeleton lying behind Philus has had the right arm amputated above the elbow in early adulthood, and that until very recently, something with bronze or copper end pieces lay about the remaining left arm?”
A minor miracle enabled Theophilus to keep his face straight. He murmured, “Nicely done,” in Alexandrian, and then leaned forward to smear a finger across the copper-green stains on the upper arm of ’Tagos’ skeleton and then again on the ribcage against which that arm had rested. Even those at the margins of the crowd could see the green on his finger when he held up his hand.
“The band was removed after the last fall of rain,” he said, “which was yesterday. Native craftwork of this quality would fetch a small ransom in Rome. I expect one of the procurator’s men is holding it in safe keeping, which would be wise; it could too easily have fallen from the wagon. Procurator?”
The procurator could cheerfully have killed him. Failing that, he was almost certainly going to come very close to killing the man who had taken the king-band. The threat of a flogging hung ripe in the air and several men in the procurator’s retinue had become distinctly unhappy.
Corvus cleared his throat. “Thank you, Theophilus. I think we should perhaps—”
For the fourth time that morning, the prefect was interrupted; not, this time, by the procurator, but by the sound of horses approaching at speed.
The morning was quiet and the clatter of many horses carried clearly from the eastern gates. When the gates opened, the incomers had formed an ordered block, flanked on both sides by the gate officers in an escort which was at once a guard of honour and an arrest party.
They rode sedately along the via praetoria, as measured as any delegation from Rome. The guards’ horses were restive, sidling sideways under hands that held them too hard, and men who were unsure of their position. The nine incomers they escorted were all native youths, mounted on matching chestnut geldings and dressed alike in short riding cloaks of Eceni blue, with elaborate weavings at hem and neckline. Each bore ornaments of bear’s teeth woven at the hair of their temples and a gold brooch was pinned at each shoulder, shaped as the running horse of the Eceni.
The tallest of them rode in the centre. His hair was the gold of summer corn and his eyes amber and he wore a king-band on his upper arm that matched, and perhaps exceeded, the magnificence of the one that had once graced the arm of Prasutagos, dead king of the Eceni.
Theophilus watched the procurator assess the value of that band, and of the brooches worn by the other eight riders, and of the horses they rode, and was about to step forward to intervene in what might well have been a diplomatic disaster when Corvus caught his arm and, in Alexandrian, murmured, “No. He knows. Watch,” and Theophilus did watch, with rising delight, as the young warrior broke away from his guard and his retinue and pushed his horse to a hand gallop, heading directly for the procurator.
The guards were slow and had only time to shout alarm, not to act. The procurator’s mercenaries were caught equally unprepared and failed to throw themselves bodily in front of their employer as would have been proper. Only a Coritani scout who had attached himself to the procurator’s retinue had the presence of mind to step forward, knife in hand, to face the incoming warrior and he stepped back again soon enough as the young man in the Eceni cloak brought his horse crisply to a halt and flung himself from the saddle to kneel at the feet of the second most powerful man in Britannia.
“Decianus Catus, procurator of all Britannia, Breaca of the Eceni bids you greetings and her regret that, after the death of her husband, she is in mourning and unable to leave her steading. I come in her place, her son and his, to offer you the gift of the Eceni, and our plea that you help us recover the body of our king, who was slain at the start of winter defending the life of the slave trader Philus, may the gods deal justly with them both.”
His delivery was perfect, with the cadence and clarity of a court herald. As the words fell to the echo amongst the copper-roofed villas of Rome’s first city, he unpinned the brooch from his shoulder, letting the blue cloak fall to the ground at his heels, and held out the running horse in solid gold that was worth half the annual salary of any man in the procurator’s pay. Beneath, he was naked to the waist, with scars of war or ritual about his body that made Theophilus wince and left the procurator speechless.
