Altar of Blood: Empire IX

by Anthony Riches

  He bent close to Cotta, lowering his voice.

  ‘Do you know which word a man uses the most when there’s a knife being taken to his balls?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Exactly. “No”. They shout it, they scream it, they roar their lungs out with it. Doesn’t change a thing of course. Sometimes they scream for their mothers, or their loved ones, but always, always in Latin, or at least to start with. After a while they sometimes go back to their native tongues, or just become impossible to understand. My theory is that they capture soldiers on the other side of the river, where they’re supposed to be safe, knock them on the head and spirit them across the river in small boats. After all, what’s one man going missing each month when you consider how many we lose to desertion? We’ve not lost a single man in all our time manning this shithole outpost, but my lads are all fucking terrified, and no wonder.’

  He shook his head angrily.

  ‘We should just march back over that fucking bridge and burn it down to the water, but we’re not allowed to because that would make it impossible to gather the taxes that the governor’s expected to deliver to Rome.’ He spat on the ground in bitter disgust. ‘If it were left to me we’d put half a legion together and burn out every fucking town and village for ten miles, but all I get from command is that we’ve got no proof of any of what I’ve told you. And of course any proper punishment would upset the local tribes, and get in the way of trade, wouldn’t it? But one of these days, you mark me, we’ll get a legatus with some balls who’ll tell the governor to go and fuck himself, and turn us loose on that scum.’

  Cotta nodded in genuine sympathy.

  ‘And on that day I’ll be cheering you on. No wonder your boys are scared shitless.’

  The centurion looked at the veteran and his comrades with a sad expression.

  ‘And so should you be. They’ll greet you with indifference at first, ignore you and spurn your attempts to sell to them, but that’s the easy part. It’s what happens later, after dark, that I’d be worried about if I were you. Want my advice? Don’t hang around any of their villages after the sun’s down. Make your excuses mid-afternoon at the latest and head for the next village, only actually don’t go there, vanish into the forest and hole up somewhere hard to find. And don’t leave a fire burning after dark.’

  He looked at the swords that the party had strapped on before leaving the mansio, raising an eyebrow at Lugo’s heavy iron war hammer.

  ‘Know how to use those?’

  Sanga shrugged, his disdain for the officer’s nervousness barely concealed.

  ‘We’ve done our fair share.’

  The centurion nodded.

  ‘I’m sure you have. Well, you’d best be on your way, if you’re going to have time to see their capital and find a hidey-hole in the woods. Open the gate!’

  He watched as they walked out between the gate’s heavy doors, calling after them as they headed away down the road to the east.

  ‘Are you sure you can trust that German? Only I could always just cut his throat for you if you’re too attached to him to do it yourselves!’

  By the time the sun was clear of the horizon the detachment were already on the move through the forest. Dawn had found the Tungrians awake and ready to march, the morning’s dew shaken off their cloaks and a hurried handful of bread taken to sustain them for the first part of the day. Scaurus had gathered his officers and the guide to him, looking at each man in turn as he issued his orders for the day.

  ‘The same as yesterday, we advance at the pace of a cautious Hamian. Nobody hears us and nobody sees us. Until we take this priestess from her tower we need to be nothing more than silence in the forest, if we’re going to get out of this with our skins. Oh, and Gunda?’

  The scout raised his eyebrows in question.

  ‘Make sure we keep well clear of that sacred grove this morning, eh? The priests may be putting the final touches to their display of last night’s victim, and while there’s little that would give me greater pleasure than providing that hapless individual with a little revenge on the men who tortured him, the uproar that would follow might prove problematic.’

  He pointed to the path, dismissing his men to their places in the march formation, until only Marcus remained.

  ‘Is it really that horrific, Tribune? Given all we’re seen on the battlefield?’

  The tribune shrugged.

  ‘Not in terms of the simple physical reality, no. One headless corpse with its guts torn out is very much like any other, I suppose. But it’s not what they do to their victims that bothers me as much as the way in which they do it. And right now that poor dead bastard we heard screaming last night is no more than just another poor dead bastard, no matter how hard his exit from this life was. It’s always easier to take when the victim’s anonymous.’ He looked at Marcus for a moment with eyes that were suddenly empty of all emotion. ‘It’s a different matter when it’s your best friend.’

  Cotta and his companions walked along the road east from the Novaesium bridgehead with a mixture of curiosity and foreboding, the four soldiers looking around them at the open farmland to either side of the road. Arminius grinned at their evident surprise at the landscape, spreading his arms to encompass the cultivated ground to either side.

  ‘Not what you were expecting? Wondering where all the mountains and bogs have gone?’

  He laughed at their confused expressions.

  ‘Sure, the lands on this side of the Rhenus have mountains, and bogs, and forests that go on forever, but wherever a tribe makes its homeland you will find farm land. How else can they feed themselves?’

  Morban shrugged and turned back to the road.

  ‘So you lot are a nation of farmers? Doesn’t seem likely.’

  The German shook his head.

  ‘Your problem is that the Romans have long since forgotten what it is to work the land. Your masters are town dwellers, and they use slave labour to run their farms. Which means that you soldiers have often never lived on the land. You might be drafted in to collect the harvest every now and then, but that’s not the same as living on the soil that feeds you, suffering through the winter and sweating through the summer. I grew up on land like this, where the people know how to farm and how to fight …’

  He looked out over the fields affectionately, pretending to ignore Sanga’s snort of disapproval.

  ‘Fucking onion-munchers. So if we’re here, where’s the centurion then?’

  Arminius pointed away to the south-east, where a forest’s dark mass ran down the shallow hillsides to meet the cultivated land.

  ‘There. Somewhere in that forest, under the oak trees’ canopy where the sunlight is more green than gold, where the wild pigs grow to the size of this old girl …’ He slapped the mule’s rump, provoking a surprised whinny. ‘And where the tribal priests have their sacred groves, holy places where even the bravest men shrink in terror from entry without invitation.’

  ‘It’s so bloody quiet I think I can hear my damned heart beating.’

  Varus’s whispered comment made Marcus smile as he took his next slow, careful pace along the ill-defined track as it rose slowly towards a ridgeline lost in the forest’s jumble of trees. The detachment was strung out along the hunting path with two paces between each man, each of them watching a different direction in turn to ensure that an approach from anywhere would be detected with enough time to send the Tungrians into cover. He stepped forward again, flicking his glance down to ensure that his footfall would touch only clear earth, and that no twig or pebble could make a noise or unbalance him, then looked up again as his boot touched the path’s grassy track, searching the trees away to his right. A bow borrowed from Qadir rested easily in his right hand, the arrow nocked to its string tipped with a heavy-bladed three-lobed arrow designed for the express purpose of either killing its target outright through shock and blood loss, or by opening an unhealable wound in a man’s body that would eventually kill him through sepsis.

>   ‘If we go any slower we’ll start moving backwards.’

  Marcus grinned, as much at the tone in which the complaint was made as the words themselves.

  ‘A little patience will go a long way in this place.’

  Varus snorted quietly.

  ‘Patience? I wasn’t born with very much of that commodity.’

  Fifty paces up the column Dubnus raised his hand to indicate a halt, and the detachment’s men went to ground, alternately facing left and right to ensure continued vigilance. Marcus and Varus went forward to join their friend, finding him conferring with Scaurus and Gunda over what was effectively a crossroads in the forest, a track crossing their path from east to west in a wide clearing that had been cleared in the forest’s heart.

  ‘Where does it lead to, Scout?’

  Gunda pointed his hand to the east.

  ‘In that direction there is little more than an empty expanse of forest and, eventually, the Marsi tribe.’

  ‘And to the west?’

  The tribesman looked down the path for a moment before responding.

  ‘That way leads to one of my tribe’s sacred groves.’

  ‘Where they were torturing whoever it was we heard doing the screaming last night.’

  The scout nodded.

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  Scaurus looked at Marcus with a calculating expression.

  ‘I’ve been thinking, Centurion. It would be useful to know what the local tribal priests are up to in their sacred groves, although I’ve no desire to give them any hint of our presence here. So, given that you seem in good humour this morning, I wondered if you might care to take one of our sharper-eyed men with you and take a look? Quietly, and without managing to betray our presence out here.’

  Marcus nodded levelly.

  ‘There are good days and bad days, Tribune, and today that sounds like a good idea. And if I might be permitted to suggest that I be accompanied by—’

  Scaurus nodded with a wry smile.

  ‘By all means take Centurion Varus with you. Anything to reduce the risk of his whispering frightening every beast within a mile into blind panic …’ He cocked an eyebrow at Varus, who had the good grace to look vaguely embarrassed. ‘Just remember, Vibius Varus, that if you end up roped to an altar with a saw-wielding lunatic standing over you, I’m unlikely to be able to do much about it.’

  Varus frowned.

  ‘A saw, Tribune?’

  Scaurus shook his head, turning to Qadir with an expression of apparent despair.

  ‘I think we’ll have a pair of your archers to escort these two young gentlemen, Centurion, the stealthiest men you have, to compensate for our colleague’s constant urge to express himself verbally.’ He turned back to Varus, tapping him on the breastbone. ‘This, young man, is too thick for a knife to cut with any ease, and protects that which a barbarian priest covets most, once he’s had the low-hanging fruit of your eyes, your tongue and most likely your sexual organs. So to get at your heart he’ll use a saw, a horrible, locally made thing with the crudest of teeth to be fair, but still a saw for all that. And he’ll hack away at your chest for all he’s worth, cutting a slot in your ribcage until he can crack it open and pull your heart out, with you conscious for the whole time if he’s any sort of artist, given that no major blood vessel will be disrupted by his excavations until he actually pulls the heart out. So if you don’t want to find yourself suffering that sort of indignity, I suggest you keep your head down, your ears open and your mouth shut.’

  ‘Thusila? What the fuck does that mean then?’

  ‘Roar.’

  Morban turned to stare at Arminius with a look of disbelief.

  ‘Roar? They call their city “roar”?’

  The German shrugged, looking down the hill’s slope at the sprawl of huts and wooden buildings that almost filled the space between the river that flowed through it, a tributary of the Rhenus, and the forest.

  ‘Both river and city. What you see there is the home of a tribe that four generations ago was almost wiped out. Attacked by two neighbouring tribes who saw their opportunity, or more likely had it put under their noses by the Romans. Reduced to a few thousand wandering women, boys and old men, their warriors either slaughtered in a one-sided battle or enslaved and sent to Rome to feed the arena. When the Marsi allowed them to settle here it was an act of charity, but they underestimated what was left of the Bructeri. Whoever it was that led that tattered remnant here from the battlefields to the north wanted some measure of dignity for what was left of their people, so they named their new tribal capital after the noise made by the river that runs through it.’

  Sanga cocked his head to one side, listening ostentatiously.

  ‘Roar?’

  Arminius shrugged.

  ‘You have to exercise a little imagination.’

  They marched down the gently sloping road’s gradient past the outlying buildings, noting with seemingly casual glances the stares that greeted and followed them in their progress. Saratos looked about him with a look heavy with the promise of violence.

  ‘Like he say, nobody happy to see we.’

  Morban shook his head in apparent disgust.

  ‘To see us, you barbarian. And I couldn’t give a fuck whether they’re happy to see us or not as long as they show a little respect. I didn’t fight long-haired cunts like this lot all the way across the empire and back again to have my dignity spat on by the likes of this unwashed rabble.’

  Sanga grinned at his back.

  ‘As it happens Morban, you didn’t actually fight your way across anything more fucking dangerous than the mud between a tavern and a whorehouse, you usually stood behind us men and squealed every now and then when the barbarians got close enough for you to smell them.’

  The standard bearer stopped and fixed a stare on Sanga that made the soldier suddenly acutely aware of the older man’s role in controlling his portion of the century’s burial club.

  ‘But as it happens I can pretty much see your point. Although I think you’re going to be disappointed when it comes to the spitting on your dignity thing.’

  ‘It’s not exactly subtle, is it?’

  Marcus nodded grimly, looking up at the bleached skull of a bull, complete with horns, that had been nailed to a tree adjacent to the almost invisible track the four men had cautiously followed away from the point where the two paths crossed, stalking with slow and deliberate care towards the apparent source of the previous night’s screams. He gestured the other men closer, speaking in a soft voice barely louder than a murmur.

  ‘They do it to scare off the locals, which means we’re getting close. From here we’re silent, right? Move slowly, be careful with your feet and don’t even breathe hard.’

  He gestured to Husam to lead them on down the path’s slight gradient, following the Hamian’s example and examining the ground before him with exaggerated care before stepping forward, the arrow nocked to his bow ready to loose in an instant. As the four men drew closer to the grove, the number of bull’s skulls set to warn off the unwary multiplied, drawing nervous glances from the easterners, while a faint buzzing sound caught their ears. Marcus raised a hand to his companions, gesturing for them to stop and hold their positions. Laying down his borrowed bow, he lowered himself to the forest floor and crawled forward down the path with slow, careful movements, pausing every few feet to listen for a moment before resuming his cautious progress. Twenty paces from what was apparently an entry to the grove, the trees on either side intricately carved with runic patterns, he slid off the path to the right and resumed his progress with such caution that he barely seemed to be moving. Worming his way between a pair of bushes, he found himself at the edge of a patch of forest from which all undergrowth had been stripped, towering oaks looming over the open space that was apparently deserted. He waited, breathing shallowly to avoid disturbing the leaves through which he was staring, grimacing as he realised that his assumption as to what was generating the pervasive buzzin
g sound was uncomfortably accurate.

  In the middle of the grove a massive block of stone reared out of the ground, a huge boulder of white rock that had been cut down to form a flat surface and then painstakingly carved across every inch of it with runes of unknown purpose, the primitive symbols made distinctive by a dark brown inlay that made the ornately decorated rectangular slab’s purpose horribly familiar to the Roman. His prone position prevented him from seeing exactly what rested across its horizontal surface, but as he considered moving to a better viewpoint a crow swooped down from one of the trees, sending a cloud of flies up into the air above the altar and alighting atop what Marcus could only assume was the priests’ victim, pecking vigorously at the unseen body. Realising that the grove had to be deserted for the carrion bird to be so brazen, he pushed through the bushes’ cover and cautiously got to his feet with one hand on the ground, ready to thrust himself upright, the other gripping the hilt of his sword.

  The sight that greeted him was horrific, if no more so than he had expected. The corpse of the sacrificial victim was stretched out across the altar’s smooth surface, black puddles of dried blood beneath the body apparently the remnant of what had pumped from veins opened during the unknown man’s torture. His eyes had been torn from their sockets, leaving only bloody pits in which flies were swarming, and his nose had been hacked off, leaving a repulsive opening in his face that turned the Roman’s stomach. His face was pocked with bloody craters where, Marcus suspected, the crows had feasted on his pallid flesh, and the skin that remained was tinged blue from the blood loss that had occurred prior to the man’s untimely death. His legs were twisted into unnatural lines, clearly broken and the injuries used to torment him, and their skin was covered in a dozen and more burns whose shape looked dreadfully familiar to the Roman. Stepping forward with the same deliberate care that he’d used to approach the grove, he struggled to ignore the horror as he looked slowly around the tribal shrine, trying to absorb every minute detail to recount later on. The trees were decorated with human skulls, dozens of which had been nailed to the trees, and by fragments of armour and helmets of a variety of ages and models, some almost rusted away, others still relatively new, testament to the tribe’s continuing enmity with Rome. Some of the prizes were accompanied by rusted swords and spearheads. Satisfied that there was no threat to him, he turned his attention to the dead man, frowning as he reached out a hand to touch the tunic that had been cut open to allow the priests’ knives easy access to his penis and testicles. The wool was finely woven, a high quality and expensive weave for a tribesman or slave to be wearing, and his expression hardened with anger as he turned the dead man’s arm over to look for proof of the suspicion that had formed in his mind. The corpse’s hand whipped out, clutching at his arm with the strength of despair, and the tongueless mouth moved in a silent entreaty from between his blue lips.