The Wolf's Gold: Empire V

by Anthony Riches

  ‘They don’t seem to be moving, do they Centurion?’

  ‘No Wolf, they marched up the road and then stopped . . .’

  To his credit, he stood his ground as the prefect turned on him, his snarling face made bestial by the torchlight’s shadows.

  ‘Whoever it is down there has laid out two lines of torches and lit them one at a time from front to back, to make it look as if they were coming over a rise! You’ve been deceived, Hadro, this is no more than a ruse to distract our attention from something else! You’ – he turned to the officer who had run to fetch him from the villa – ‘take a century and reinforce the guard on the miners’ camp!’

  He watched as the centurion led his century off the wall and away up the road towards the palisaded barracks, then looked out at the torches again, shaking his head at the growing number of gaps as individual lights toppled to the ground. Turning back to Hadro he looked down his nose at the man for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice was contemptuous.

  ‘That’s you and I done. You’ve made one mistake too many. You’re relieved of duty; go back to your tent. I’ll come and see you in the morning when this distraction has blown over, and give you enough gold to see you right.’

  He watched as Hadro shrugged tiredly and turned away for the wall’s steps, waiting for the centurion to be out of earshot so that he could quietly order two men from his bodyguard to follow the man and kill him. Given any longer he knew that his former friend would make a run for it over the mountain, with the risk that he might survive to bear witness against him for their crimes over the previous few months. It would be no more than an inconvenience, given that he intended to be far away from Dacia by the time any such accusation could surface, but he wasn’t a man given to leaving loose ends dangling when swift action could remove such a threat before it had a chance to become reality. He frowned, as the centurion stopped unexpectedly at the head of the stone stairs and cocked his head as if to listen. He was on the verge of losing his patience with the man, and ordering his killers to deal with him then and there, when an unexpected noise reached his ears, a wave of sound like the cheering of a body of men.

  ‘What was that?’

  For once his question went unanswered as the noise came again, the roar of voices closer this time, and its volume increased once more as the first torches appeared over the ripple in the ground between the miners’ camp and the wall. He stared aghast as a flood of men spilled down the slope, sweeping down towards the century he had sent to reinforce the guards they had presumably already slaughtered.

  Scaurus raised an appreciative eyebrow at the woman before him.

  ‘I must admit that I’m impressed. With one simple act of infidelity you persuaded your lover to deal with your husband and support your claim on his assets. Although it wasn’t just a share in the profits from the mine you were promising him, was it? Presumably Maximus expected to be sharing in the fortune to be made from the robbery of the mine’s gold?’

  Theodora nodded.

  ‘You men are so suggestible as a sex. All I had to do was tell him how much I wanted to be with him, and all the good things that the proceeds from robbing the mine could bring us. He actually thought we were going to find a man that looked like him, kill him and use the corpse to fool the authorities into believing that he was dead.’

  The tribune shrugged again, leaning back in the chair.

  ‘I ought to have suspected him when he refused to move the gold out of his strongroom, nicely collected and ready for Gerwulf’s arrival. After all, he really wasn’t that good an actor, was he? I met him on the way up here that first night, and if looks could kill I would have been face down and six feet under. He knew that I was being brought up here to be seduced and turned into a source of information for you and your brother, and he didn’t like it. What did you tell him, that you were both going to live happily together for the rest of your days, and that you were only taking me into your bed to ensure that I was under your control? The truth of just how badly you’d duped him must have been a shock for the poor man, when Gerwulf showed his hand and had him chained up like an ox ready for the slaughter. I’ll bet he was desperate to get the chance to try to rescue his reputation once he realised what a fool you’d made of him. Presumably that’s why Gerwulf cut the poor man’s throat and tossed him off the wall, not so much to make a point to Cattanius but mainly to silence him, before he got a chance to blurt out that you were the architect of the whole thing, rather than being the poor innocent victim.’

  He raised a questioning eyebrow at her.

  ‘So once you had Maximus wrapped round one finger, you sent a messenger to Gerwulf, telling him to be ready for your call when the strongroom was full. Presumably at that point he abandoned whatever mission he’d invented to keep his men close at hand?’

  ‘Yes, officially he’s on detachment from the Seventh Claudius at Viminacium, a detachment I persuaded their legatus to grant to my brother in the usual way, but I’d imagine even that fool must be starting to wonder just where he’s got to. The “Wolf’s” been raiding up and down the frontier zone for months now to keep his men fed.’

  Scaurus nodded, the look of amusement fading from his face.

  ‘Which explains the destruction of the boy Mus’s village, and all the other raids that had the Sarmatae so fired up for revenge.You must have thought the fates were smiling on you the day that legion cohort pulled out to go to war. You sent the call out to your brother that the time to get rich had come, only to have my men march up the valley a few days later, too late for you to stop Gerwulf coming to pull off the greatest robbery in the history of the empire.’

  Theodora bent close to him, and Scaurus felt the point of a sword prick the back of his neck as the guard behind him tensed.

  ‘You should be a little more grateful to my brother, Tribune. If he’d not spotted the tracks left by that Sarmatae warband and followed them up into the battle, you and your men would have been torn to pieces, wouldn’t you?’

  He nodded equably.

  ‘You won’t catch me complaining on that score. I’ll still be grateful to Gerwulf for pulling our chestnuts out of the fire even when I’m having him executed for treason.’

  She bent closer, her reply soft in the room’s silence.

  ‘You’re very confident for a man whose life hangs on a thread, Tribune.’

  Scaurus shrugged, staring at her breasts appreciatively.

  ‘Circumstances alter cases, my dear. Can you hear those horns blowing?’ She tipped her head to listen. Barely audible through the villa’s thick stone walls, a trumpet was braying in the valley below, joined by a second. ‘They’re sounding the command to form line and prepare for battle, not an action that would be required by a single cohort in the valley, or not yet at least. I’d hazard a guess that the men who accompanied me tonight have freed the mine workers from their barracks, and given them access to their tools. And while your brother commands a powerful unit, I really wouldn’t relish having to fight off five thousand angry miners in the darkness. Oh yes, Gerwulf’s men will kill a few hundred of them, but the rest will wash over his line like a pack of dogs overwhelming a wolf. Which is apt, wouldn’t you say? And when they’ve done for the soldiers, enough of them will come here for you that you’ll never want another man as long as you live.’

  Theodora’s mouth had tightened to an angry slash, and for a moment he wondered if he’d pushed her too hard. She spoke to the soldiers behind him.

  ‘You, get the men ready to move and tell them to bring my chest! If the mine workers really have been released then we’ll either meet my brother at the mine entrance or leave without him!’

  Gerwulf instinctively knew that his command was doomed, watching in silence as the oncoming mob of miners swiftly overwhelmed those of his men who were too slow on their feet to reach the turf wall before them. While the rampart was fifteen feet high on the side that faced down into the valley it was necessarily lower on the reverse, and the
miners gathered in a howling sea of men around the steps that, were they allowed to swarm up them, would allow them to get at the soldiers who had made their lives a misery over the previous ten days. A determined group of them stormed up a stairway one hundred paces to his left, trading a dozen men’s lives to gain a foothold on the rampart and then railing at the defenders with iron bars, heavy shovels and pickaxes.

  ‘How long do you think they’ll hold?’

  He turned to find Hadro beside him, the grizzled veteran’s face as stolid as ever.

  ‘Not very long. There are too many of the bastards, and they’re mad with the lust for blood. There’s still time to be away though, as long as the wall to the south remains in our hands. Are you coming?’

  The older man shot him a look of pity.

  ‘No, Gerwulf, and not just because you were about to have me killed to ensure my silence. This is over. These animals are going to kill every soldier in the valley, and how long do you think anyone that escapes will be able to run, with the legions on this side of the mountains and the Sarmatae on the other? I think I’ll stay here and face my fate. Better to die quickly at their hands than to end up on a cross alongside you.’

  Gerwulf nodded, dismissing the man from his mind.

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  Gerwulf whistled to his bodyguard, turning away to stride down the wall to the south behind their shields, shouting encouragement to his men as they stabbed and cut at the mob baying for blood below them. He winced as an unwary soldier was dragged bodily from the wall into the crowd, his leg hooked by the blade of a pickaxe. The doomed man surfaced in the sea of blood-crazed men that lapped against the wall, stabbing out once with his sword before a vengeful miner buried an axe in his back and dropped him to his knees to be kicked to death. He shouted to his men to speed up their pace, watching in horror from the corner of his eye as dozens of enraged miners crowded in to stamp the dying man’s body to a pulp. Once they were clear of the fighting he pulled his crested helmet from his head and tossed it aside, speaking to his men as the small party hurried on down the wall’s length.

  ‘From here on, gentlemen, we are soldiers of Rome no more. We only have to escape from this fucking valley to be the richest men in the whole of free Germania.’

  ‘I guessed that you’d have a plan to escape, if your scheme went wrong.’

  Theodora looked back over her shoulder with an expression of hatred as she climbed the steep path.

  ‘I’m rapidly growing bored of your smug satisfaction, Tribune. You’re not so valuable to us that I might not just lose my failing grip on my temper and have the sword that’s waiting behind you rammed through your spine. Would a period of silence be preferable to your untimely death?’

  He smiled back at her and kept his mouth closed, glancing over her shoulder at the rock face looming before them. Of the four soldiers that her brother had left behind to guard him, only two were armed, one close behind and the other bringing up the rear, while the other two were struggling to haul a heavy wooden chest up the slope. After another hundred paces the path flattened out, and the light of a guard fire twinkled against the stones that surrounded the Raven Head mine’s entrance. Theodora stopped ten paces from the blazing pile of wood, looking about her with suddenly aroused suspicion. Scaurus watched the realisation of the guards’ absence dawning upon her, but said nothing. Theodora swung back to face him, her eyes narrowed.

  ‘Where are they?’

  He frowned at the woman in apparent indifference.

  ‘Where are who? Your men set to guard the mine? Perhaps they’re underground, looking for gold.’ He raised his voice. ‘Or perhaps they’re still here and it’s just that you can’t see them.’

  With a sudden start she realised that there were men all around them, rising from the cover of the bushes and trees around the mine’s entrance. A bow twanged, and the man behind Scaurus yelped and fell, dropping his sword and shield. The soldier at the rear of the column turned and ran, shouting for help, but managed no more than three paces before an arrow took him in the back. A giant figure strode out of the darkness, swinging his heavy war hammer in an arc that ended against the helmeted head of one of the men carrying the chest, smearing his features across his grossly distended skull. He swept the hammer up again, slamming it down onto the last of the soldiers with a sickening crunch of bone as the man scrabbled in terror at his sword’s hilt. Scaurus held up his bound wrists, grimacing in discomfort as one of the soldiers surrounding them stepped in and cut him free, while Theodora glowered at them both. Shaking his hands to restore their circulation he nodded his thanks to the soldier before turning back to Theodora.

  ‘Thank you, Centurion Corvus. And now, madam, if you thought my smug satisfaction was becoming a little tedious before, you’ll be positively disgusted with what you’re about to witness.’

  She drew breath to scream for help, but Dubnus stepped out of the shadows behind her and put a big hand over her mouth while the tribune smiled warmly at her blazing eyes.

  ‘No, I think I’d prefer it if you didn’t warn your brother off. We’ve got a little surprise for him, something of a reunion. It’ll be touching, I promise you.’

  Halfway up the mountainside Gerwulf called a brief halt, looking down into the valley as he sucked air into his lungs. Below him the buildings of Alburnus Major were aflame as the mob of miners ran amok, while what little he could see of the wall in the light of the remaining torches was a mass of angry humanity gathered around a dwindling remnant of his cohort. He chuckled quietly.

  ‘They’ll ransack the entire valley hoping to find the gold, tearing the place to pieces and then doing the same to each other. Thank the gods for foresight, eh?’

  A sudden agonised grunt from behind him made the prefect turn to find one of his men reeling with a sword buried deep in his guts, while one half of his bodyguard tore into their unprepared colleagues with murderous intent. A brief one-sided fight reduced his escort from eight men to four, and he watched dispassionately as the last mewling survivor of the short struggle was finished off.

  ‘Well done, gentlemen, you’ve just doubled your money. And don’t worry, there are no more coded words. If you’re still breathing now it’s because you’re all men that I would trust with my life. Shall we go?’

  He smiled to himself as they resumed their path along the valley wall towards the Raven Head mine, knowing that two of the men following him would be doing the same, waiting for the command to complete the reduction of their party to a size that would excite no interest as they rode south for the Danubius and a new life in the land beyond the river. Another five hundred paces brought them to the mine’s entrance and the unattended watch fire.

  ‘The cowards must have made a run for it when they heard the commotion in the valley. Probably wise, since I suppose those scum down there will eventually come up here, once they get bored of destroying everything else. Come on . . .’

  Gerwulf led them into the mine, taking a torch from beside the fire, lighting it in the embers and holding it up to illuminate the narrow passageway. Two hundred paces up the dimly lit passage he frowned as a barely visible figure appeared before them, seemingly conjured out of the tunnel’s wall. He walked on cautiously, drawing his sword with his bodyguards’ footsteps close behind him.

  ‘It’s that fucking tribune.’

  He nodded at the comment, pacing forward until there could be no doubt that it was indeed Scaurus waiting for them, leaning against the tunnel’s side with his sword still sheathed.

  ‘Wondering what I’m doing here, are you Gerwulf? The answer’s simple enough, I’ve come for you. Much as it pains me to be the bearer of bad news, I’m afraid that I won’t be allowing you to leave this mine tonight.’

  Gerwulf waved his men forward.

  ‘With you as a hostage I’m sure some agreement can be—’

  The leading soldier’s head snapped back, and he fell to the ground with an arrow protruding from his forehead.

&nbs
p; ‘My man’s arm must be tired after his evening’s exertion. He usually puts his shots into the eye socket at this range. Would anyone else like a demonstration? He’s not in a very good mood, I’m afraid, owing to the unexpected death of two of his comrades.’ The remaining four men kept very still. ‘I thought not. And now allow me to introduce, I’m sorry, re-introduce you to my new friend Karsas.’

  A hard-faced man dressed in the rough, dirty clothing of a miner stepped out of the same side tunnel from which the tribune had emerged, his muscular arms crossed and his face set firm.

  ‘He is unknown to you Gerwulf, and yet you two have met before. In a valley much like this one, and not too far from here, you set your wolf pack on his people one night, without warning and without mercy. You butchered the men and raped their women before murdering them, you showed no mercy to any of them, and you left their corpses to rot.’

  Gerwulf shrugged.

  ‘You’re going to have to be more specific. There was more than one village.’

  The miner scowled, and Scaurus shook his head in disgust.

  ‘Nobody knows this better than the men who labour to keep this mine operational. They are the dispossessed, Gerwulf, men who ran from your swords and left their families to die. They have had a long time to wallow in their self-hatred, my new friend here and his comrades . . .’ More men crowded out of the tunnel behind him, and hearing a scrape on the rock floor behind them the Germans turned to find another half-dozen filling the corridor to their rear. ‘And they yearn for the chance of revenge. They tell me that they come from five villages, places of happiness and contentment which you had your men tear to pieces in order to satisfy your need to destroy. The boy you murdered was from this man’s village, forced to witness the death of his father and brothers, and the rape of his mother and sisters. He was a boy, Gerwulf, but inside he was already an old man, his spirit shrivelled by what you did to his family. And to his . . .’