The Emperor's Knives: Empire VII (Empire 7)

by Riches, Anthony

  ‘The place is empty, my lady, with nothing more troubling than a slightly musty smell – will you come inside?’

  The two women walked into the house, Felicia looking about her with a mix of wonderment and disbelief, while Annia simply stared at the rooms’ relative opulence with unabashed approval.

  ‘Soft furniture? Glass windows? It’s lovely, Felicia! You’re so lucky to have something like this!’

  The doctor nodded in a distracted manner, turning to Cotta with a questioning look.

  ‘And there’s no sign of anyone?’

  The veteran shook his head.

  ‘No, Domina, nothing to give any clue as to who was living here before the place was emptied out.’

  She took a deep breath and then, with a brisk nod of her head, made a decision.

  ‘Very well. This house belonged to my father, and since it was never transferred to my first husband’s ownership whoever was living here would have known they had no claim to it when he was killed in Britannia. They were probably just hoping that I would never return.’ She looked about her again with a new light in her eyes. ‘This is my house, and I shall treat it as such. Centurion, would you be so good as to inform my husband that I will be taking up residence here for the period that we are in Rome, and request him to send up my clothes?’

  ‘I will, Domina. And I’ll arrange for a standing guard to be mounted on the property, to make sure that you and the child aren’t bothered.’

  Felicia smiled gratefully at him before turning to Annia.

  ‘Will you stay and keep me company? It’ll make a pleasant change from repairing broken soldiers, and we can pretend that we’re a pair of respectable Roman matrons for a few weeks.’

  Her friend looked about her for a moment before grinning at her mischievously.

  ‘I think I can bear the hardship, Domina. After all, the last time I had a proper roof over my head for more than a day or two I was running a brothel, so it’ll make a novel change not to have a constant stream of soldiers walking in with their pricks tenting their tunics.’

  A spluttering cough behind Annia coupled with the sudden look of amusement on her friend’s face made her turn back to Cotta, whose face was a picture of uncontrolled amazement. Putting a hand on his arm, she favoured him with a sweet smile of apology, patting his hand as he fought to regain his composure.

  ‘I’m sorry, Centurion, I’d completely forgotten that you don’t yet know who we are and where we’ve come from. You and I must sit down over a glass of wine when all this excitement is done with, and I’ll explain the finer workings of a city whorehouse to you. And now, Domina, shall we go and have a look around your lovely home?’

  ‘So tell me, Centurion, what sort of engineering tasks are you and your men trained for?’

  Avidus raised his eyebrows disapprovingly.

  ‘Which tasks, Tribune? All of them.’

  Scaurus frowned.

  ‘Really? I thought there was a tendency to specialise?’

  The engineer nodded knowingly.

  ‘Well there is, sir, except you have to bear in mind that we’re the only legion on the entire African coast. If our bridge builders got lost in a sandstorm or ambushed by the locals, then we’d look a bit stupid when we got to the next river only to find the crossing burned out. Third Augusta has always made sure that every man in the pioneer centuries is skilled for every task, which means that when we’re not on the march we don’t get sent to bring in the harvest or pick stones out of the fields, we get sent for training.’

  ‘So you can genuinely carry out any feat of military engineering?’

  Avidus raised a hand and tapped the raised digits with his other forefinger.

  ‘Road repair, mining operations, bridge building, demolition, siege machinery—’

  ‘What, you mean you can build bolt throwers?’

  He smiled at Dubnus’s question.

  ‘Yes. But not just bolt throwers. Siege towers, catapults, battering rams … you name it, me and my lads can do it.’

  Julius walked around the desk from his place behind Scaurus to stand beside the engineer.

  ‘The centurion here and his men have been lost in transit, from the look of it. Wherever it is they’re supposed to be going, the idiots in charge of manpower appear to have mislaid the instructions. And of course, no one wants to ask the grown-ups for fear that they’ll end up looking stupid. So at some point soon these poor sods are going to find themselves being assigned to a legion just to get them out of the way before they become a serious embarrassment, and they’ll probably end up freezing their balls off in Germania. Or …’

  He let the word hang in the air, and Scaurus raised a jaundiced eyebrow.

  ‘Or? Or what? The last time we had this discussion I ended up taking on a half-century of disgruntled legionaries and having more than one interesting conversation with the Sixth Legion’s camp prefect. It was a good thing he was feeling friendly towards us in the wake of our having rescued their eagle from the Venicones, wasn’t it? And now you want me to quietly fold a century of engineers into your cohort?’

  ‘It’s only thirty men, tribune, hardly a—’

  Scaurus shook his head.

  ‘No you don’t. He’s a centurion, they’re a century. And what makes you think that the man in charge of troop allocations won’t smell a rat when you slide this man and his soldiers up your sleeve?’

  Julius’s face went blank, and Scaurus’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

  ‘You’ve already made the deal, haven’t you?’

  His first spear shook his head.

  ‘Not my place to do so, Tribune, but the officer in question tells me that he’s open to reallocating Avidus to us if we’re happy to make a modest donation to his temple.’

  He stared at the wall behind the tribune and waited for Scaurus’s reaction in silence, knowing better than to attempt any form of persuasion on a man who he knew to be stubborn in the extreme once his mind was made up.

  ‘So you’ve offered him a bribe?’

  Julius shook his head.

  ‘Not at all. I simply enquired as to where Avidus’s century was likely to end up, and then let slip that we’d be happy to look after them for a while. The request for the donation was all his idea. Apparently they want to put in a new altar stone …’

  ‘And you, Centurion? What do you think of the idea?’

  Avidus shrugged.

  ‘I’m a soldier, Tribune. I go where the army tells me to, dig holes while unfriendly natives practise their archery skills on me, fill them in again and then start marching. As long as our pay and conditions aren’t changed, my lads and I will happily tag along with you for a while. Preferably somewhere warm?’

  Scaurus frowned and turned away, looking out through the unshuttered window at the barracks buildings that faced the headquarters.

  ‘I won’t deny that you’d be useful to us …’ He turned to face Julius. ‘How much does this transit officer want then?’

  A knock at the door interrupted Julius before he had a chance to reply, and one of Cotta’s men was escorted into the room by the duty centurion, the battered pugilist Otho. Jumping to attention, the bodyguard explained that he had been sent to inform Julius and Marcus of the fact that their women had decided to remain in the city overnight, and would they mind sending up some clothing and bedding?

  ‘Well now, I suppose that’s not entirely unexpected. I don’t suppose we should expect your ladies to stay cooped up in this rather stark barracks when there’s a house on the Aventine Hill going begging, should we? Perhaps we might go for a look at this place, the three of us, and you, Centurion Avidus, if you fancy a walk.’

  Scaurus grinned at his officers with the look of a man relishing the prospect of a break from the usual routine.

  ‘And who knows, if we’re really lucky, we might get out of the gates without an escort of jealous barbarians.’

  Mortiferum was hard at work on the Dacian Ludus’s practice ground when Se
nator Pilinius appeared at the door of the enclosed rectangle of sand-strewn ground on which they were sparring. He looked across the ranks of trainee gladiators as they toiled at the repetitive exercises that would build their strength and muscle memory, clearly searching for his comrade in the emperor’s service.

  One of the three men sparring with Mortiferum noticed his glance up at the senator, and relaxed his defence on the assumption that their opponent would break off the fight to speak with such an important visitor, but the champion gladiator seized his chance with the speed for which he was famed.

  ‘Ignore him!’

  He danced forward to attack with both swords raised, parrying the man’s clumsy defensive cut with one blade while flashing the other wide to his right, forcing the other two back as he swiftly stepped in closer and shoulder-barged his victim over a hooked ankle to send him reeling. As the helpless gladiator sprawled on the hard, sandy surface, Mortiferum lunged in, tapped him delicately on the throat with the tip of his heavy wooden practice sword, and then flung himself forward, somersaulting over the fallen man’s prone body to land on his feet with the downed fighter between them, spinning as his feet hit the sand and raising his swords to fight, shouting a command.

  ‘Stop!’

  He looked at his remaining two sparring partners with a questioning look.

  ‘Look where we are. You, stay down, you’re dead! You two, what do you do now?’

  The brighter of the trainees answered first.

  ‘We either split and come at you to either side of the corpse …?’

  Their teacher shook his head.

  ‘Not the best answer, Felix. First rule of fighting as a pair – never fight alone if you can avoid it, or a good swordsman will simply kill one of you quickly and take his time with the other.’

  ‘Or we could come at you together around him to one side or the other …?’

  The champion gladiator shrugged and grinned.

  ‘We can play at going round and round him all day, I’d say. The crowd would lose interest in that long before I would, and everyone knows what happens when the crowd gets bored.’

  Felix nodded glumly.

  ‘We have to jump the corpse together?’

  Mortiferum nodded.

  ‘That’s the best approach, nine times out of ten. One of you might stop a blade, but the other ought to get a chance to return the compliment, at least against a good to average opponent. In this case, of course, you’d both be dead before you could regain your footing. So, what was the mistake that Sergius here …’ He prodded the recumbent trainee with the boot of his toe, shaking his head at the man. ‘And you can stop giving me that look unless you want me to prod you somewhat harder with my sword next time. What did you do wrong that allowed me my opening?’

  The fallen man, who had propped himself up on his elbows to listen, replied, ‘I followed your eyes, Death Bringer.’

  ‘You followed my eyes. In point of fact, you all followed my eyes, but I went for you, Sergius, for two reasons. Firstly, because you were the closest, and secondly because you were perfectly positioned so that your corpse would put an obstacle between me and these two. Get up then.’

  Sergius rolled to his feet away from Mortiferum, knowing better than to put himself inside the reach of the deceptively dangling wooden swords. The champion fighter raised one of them to point at his training partners.

  ‘Don’t I keep telling you that watching your opponent’s eyes only tells you where he’s looking, not where his sword’s going. You need to watch the point, ladies, nothing else matters.’

  Sergius cocked his head in puzzlement.

  ‘Don’t we need to watch the other man’s body as well?’

  Mortiferum nodded, grinning back at his training partner.

  ‘When you’re ready my friend, yes you do. The time will come, if you’re good enough, that you’ll know what’s coming next just from the set of a man’s body, the twitch of a muscle, the way his eyes flicker—’

  ‘But you told us not to look at the eyes!’

  The champion gladiator’s grin widened.

  ‘Yes. I told you that, because you’re only capable of watching one thing at a time. When I face a man, I can see everything, every twitch and blink, every little tell as to his next move, and I absorb and understand them all without ever having to think through what’s happening. I see how much blood there is on the sand behind him, and whether he might slip if I push him backwards. I see the faces in the crowd, and whether they’re shouting acclaim or just baying for blood. I see the men in the imperial box and what their mood is, so I can put him down quick if they’re looking forgiving or let him make a decent show of it if I think they’ll need convincing that he’s worth saving. I can see the wounds I’ve already given him, how much they’re bleeding and how dark the blood is, so I know how badly I’ve hurt him and whether it’d be kinder to kill him clean.’ He grinned again, shrugging at the skill with which he had been gifted. ‘I see so much more than you do, a little of which is training, but most of which is just how I was born. And now …’

  He raised a hand to acknowledge Pilinius’s presence, knowing that to delay any longer would be an unnecessary and highly visible snub to the man.

  ‘And now I can see that the senator would very much like me to stop what I’m doing and go to see him. And while it’s tempting to ignore him for a while longer, I see no value to be had from antagonising him.’

  Dropping his training swords to the floor, he walked over to where Pilinius was waiting for him, making a cursory bow of his head in place of the usual obeisance, and fixing the senator with a direct stare.

  ‘Senator?’

  If the patrician was irritated at the apparent lack of respect, he hid it well.

  ‘Mortiferum. Our partners in crime and I have come to an accommodation as to how we best deal with your request for payment of the sum withheld by our new patron.’

  The gladiator nodded.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And so here …’ He took a purse from the slave standing behind him, his secretary and accountant. ‘… is your fee. Feel free to count it.’

  Mortiferum shook his head.

  ‘There’s no need for such vulgar display of lack of trust, Senator. I’m happy that any need for unpleasantness has been averted. After all, you do have a rather significant event looming in your calendar. Far better not to have it disrupted by any unpleasant occurrences, wouldn’t you say?’

  Pilinius stared at him for a moment before responding, and when he did his voice was acerbic.

  ‘Quite so, Mortiferum, quite so. But it seems that the details of my evening’s entertainment have spread beyond the circle of men I might usually have trusted with the information. I won’t ask you where you obtained that tasty morsel of gossip …’

  Mortiferum bowed his head again, knowing that Pilinius already understood just how unlikely it was that he would ever share such a sensitive source of information.

  ‘… but I would ask you to pass it no further. The powerful men with whom I share these rather singular pleasures would be far from pleased to have their tastes revealed to the city. And their displeasure might be rather more punitive than mine.’

  He turned and walked away, his slave shooting the gladiator a swift, unfathomable glance before turning to follow him. Mortiferum weighed the purse for a moment before tossing it to an identically dressed and equipped man who had walked up behind him during the conversation.

  ‘Here you are brother, this is the fee from the Perennis job.’

  His sibling caught the leather bag and also weighed it in his hand.

  ‘I told you they’d crumble if you applied a little pressure. Even that halfwit Brutus is clever enough to know there’s not a man in the city that could stand against Velox and Mortiferum.’

  Mortiferum nodded, turning back to his sparring partners.

  ‘Indeed. And now, since that little transaction has left me feeling dirty, I think I’ll work up a sw
eat by turning these three inside out a few times. Remember girls, watch the blade, not the eyes!’

  The Tungrian officers walked up the Viminal Hill as the sun was approaching its zenith, Julius wiping the sweat from his beard with an expression of disgust as Cotta walked out to meet them.

  ‘This bloody city’s too hot, too hilly and too bloody full of half-naked women for my liking.’

  Scaurus looked about him, mopping at his damp forehead with a handkerchief.

  ‘At least the ladies distracted our bodyguard enough to cause them to fall behind and thus spare us the usual running commentary on the goods in the shop window.’

  Marcus looked back down the hill, to see that the single prostitute their escort had stopped to talk to had swiftly been joined by half a dozen of her fellows. Scaurus grinned knowingly.

  ‘Well now, that’ll be hard for them to walk away from without incurring the wrath of the ladies. I suggest we get inside, before the shouting starts.’

  Cotta tipped his head to indicate an empty shop up a side road opposite the house.

  ‘Before we do, Tribune, might I suggest that I stroll across and find out who that shop belongs to? If the price sounds sensible my suggestion would be that we rent it for whatever period will make the owner happy enough not to ask any questions as to what we’re doing with it?’

  Scaurus looked across the street, sizing up the indicated building.

  ‘What an excellent idea, Centurion! Please do.’

  The officers had only been inside the domus as long as it had taken for the barbarians to extricate themselves from the clutches of the group of irascible prostitutes and walk up the hill under a hail of abuse, look around them and declare that, whilst it was clearly a very nice house if you liked that sort of thing, there was really nothing quite like a wooden hall, when there was a knock at the door. Taking the arrival to be Cotta returning from his errand, Marcus answered it only to find Excingus waiting between a pair of the veteran centurion’s men.

  ‘Ah, Centurion, how nice to find you’ve already made yourselves at home. I was hoping that my small gesture wouldn’t go astray …’