The Leopard sword e-4

by Anthony Riches

  The legionaries launched a barrage of insulting and occasionally witty comments at the horsemen as they trotted past the marching column, and, as was equally traditional, the riders kept their gazes fixed on the direction of travel and their faces set in expressions of utter disinterest. One wag in the leading century bellowed out the first line of a song beloved of foot soldiers across the empire, and his comrades joined in with all the gusto expected of them.

  The cavalry love buggering sheep,

  In various bogs and ditches,

  When they’ve done the flock they all suck cock,

  Those dirty sons of bitches!

  The squadron rode on, the final rider turning in his saddle with a smile of glee as the horse in front of him lifted its tail to deposit a long trail of droppings in the marching column’s path.

  Silus raised a hand to signal the canter, and the riders spurred their mounts to the faster pace, their clattering hoof beats rattling dully across the empty fields. After ten minutes of riding Silus frowned, peering forward into the light mist. A man was running towards them, staggering along the road’s cobbles in a manner that suggested he was close to dropping from exhaustion. Reining in his horse, the decurion jumped down from his saddle and caught the runner by his arm as he slumped to the road’s surface.

  ‘Bandits… attacking… carts…’

  He pointed back into the mist from which he’d staggered, his chest heaving, and Silus, half carrying him to the side of the road, barked a terse question at him.

  ‘How many?’

  The hapless carter shook his head.

  ‘Mist… too many…’

  The decurion looked up at Marcus.

  ‘No telling how many of them might be waiting for us. We should probably wait for the infantry to catch up.’

  His friend hefted his spear.

  ‘Probably. And probably lose them as a result. They’ll vanish off into this murk with their prize as quickly as they appeared from it.’

  Silus nodded grimly.

  ‘Very well, we’ll go after them alone, but ride on the verge rather than the road. Let’s not give them any warning. Lower that standard too, or they’ll hear it howling from miles away once we get up some speed. Ride! ’

  Tribune Scaurus found Prefect Caninus in his headquarters, a small building tucked away behind the forum. The prefect’s men were hard at work preparing their gear and sharpening their weapons as Scaurus walked between them to the office at the building’s rear, and he felt their eyes on his back as he knocked at the office door. Inside, by the light of the lamps that had been lit to compensate for the shuttered windows, the prefect was standing at a map of the area around Tungrorum painted on the wall behind his desk, an exact copy of the one they’d discussed in the basilica the previous day. The diagram was littered with hand-painted annotations, each one consisting of three lines of text beside a small cross to indicate a location. The crosses were for the most part aligned with the main roads to east and west, and the notes that accompanied each one were abbreviated in the official style. The tribune put down the bag he was carrying and shook his colleague’s hand before turning to examine the map with him.

  ‘You keep a record of bandit activity, then?’

  The prefect nodded, waving a hand at the map.

  ‘That which is reported to my office, yes. I’m trying to spot a pattern. Something to give me an idea of where they might be hiding themselves, so that I can get on the front foot for a change, rather than just reacting to their attacks. It also gives me a clue as to how many of them are out there, and where they might be hiding. Look here

  …’ Smiling grimly he pointed to a tight cluster of a dozen crosses ten miles or so to the west of the city. ‘There’s one group of robberies, more or less where you ran into that band of thieves on your way here. Perhaps we’ll hear no more from them.’

  Scaurus examined the map for a moment.

  ‘So we have clusters of robberies here…’ He pointed to the east, on the road between the city and the small settlement at Mosa Ford, ten miles distant from Tungrorum. ‘Here…’ His finger moved to indicate the road to the south, passing within a few miles of the forest of Arduenna in its path to Augusta Treverorum, the city of the Treveri tribe. ‘And here, on the main road to the west.’

  Caninus nodded, slapping a finger into the middle of a group of twenty or so crosses.

  ‘Exactly. That’s where they’ve been attacking the grain convoys, seven times this year, and always when we’re elsewhere, as if they have some inside knowledge of my men’s movements. They always strike in force, never less than two or three hundred strong, and that means the carters never have enough men to hold them off. Especially since they managed to subvert the auxiliaries sent from the frontier to hunt them down.’

  Scaurus shook his head.

  ‘That’s been puzzling me ever since you first mentioned it. What happened to make a whole cohort of trained soldiers throw in their lot with a gang of bandits? Why abandon any hope of becoming a citizen for a life of constant uncertainty and a good-sized chance of a violent death?’

  Caninus waved a hand at his chair.

  ‘Take a seat and I’ll tell you.’ He paced across the office before turning back, his face bearing the look of a troubled man. ‘It’s the band that is operating out of the forest that’s most of the problem here. The rest of them are disorganised, slaves and deserters trying their luck, and taking advantage of the fact that we’re overstretched. If that was all there was to it I could probably keep a lid on things with the men I have, but the fact is that the man in control of that gang is undisputedly good. Almost supernaturally lucky, or skilled. Or both. They must have some sort of hiding place deep in the woods, somewhere off the usual hunting tracks, because I’ve not found any trace of them in the months we’ve been searching the forest, which we do whenever I can spare the manpower. I know, it’s not enough to explain the desertions…’ He rubbed his face wearily with one hand before continuing.

  ‘It’s their leader. He seems to have them all convinced that they’re not bandits, but rebels against the empire. He tells them that it was the imperial army that brought the plague back from the east, and that it’s the emperor’s fault we all lost friends and loved ones. He’s got them believing that they’re freedom fighters, rather than the thieving scum they really are. Worse than that, they seem to believe that he’s invincible. He wears a cavalry helmet with one of those flashy reflective face masks whenever he thinks he’s running the risk of being seen, so nobody has any idea of who he is, or where he’s come from. He carries a sword made of some strange metal which is reputed to have the strength to cut through just about anything, including, believe it or not, iron sword blades. And he’s utterly ruthless.’

  Scaurus shrugged slightly.

  ‘I’ve seen a lot of hard men in my time. What do you mean by ruthless, exactly?’

  Caninus was silent for a moment before speaking.

  ‘You asked me why a cohort of auxiliaries would desert. Well, it wasn’t a full cohort; it was three centuries of Treveri soldiers.’

  Scaurus shook his head unhappily.

  ‘Some idiot sent men recruited in the Treveri lands, which are, what, fifty miles to the south of here, to deal with a local banditry problem?’

  Caninus nodded.

  ‘You’ve guessed it. The legatus at Fortress Bonna, clearly a man without much understanding of local history, detailed the Treveri cohort’s prefect to take four centuries and clear this particular gang of bandits from the forest. If he’d been any kind of student of recent history he would have known that the Treveri have had a mixed relationship with the empire ever since their initial cooperation with the Blessed Julius in defeating the Nervians. The very fact that they threw in their lot with the Batavians when they decided to revolt should have been enough of a clue, but I suppose that after a hundred years the memory’s become a bit distant. All the same…’

  He raised his eyebrows at the irony of it
all, sharing a moment of dark amusement with Scaurus, who sat and waited for him to continue.

  ‘Anyway, nothing much went amiss until they sent a century out on outpost duty to guard the road to Claudius Colony. The bandits overran it one dark night, slaughtered every soldier who raised a sword to them and took the rest prisoner. They then put the centurion’s head on a spear. It didn’t take whoever he is — the local nickname for him is “Obduro”, by the way — to work out where the men of the other three centuries were from. He surrounded their camp the next night and called on them to kill their officers and join him in the fight for “their people’s” independence in the name of the goddess Arduenna. And so they did. Her name has a powerful magic for men raised in the shadow of the forest.’

  Scaurus opened the bag at his feet, fishing out the dented cavalry helmet.

  ‘This won’t have been his, then, from the sound of it?’

  Caninus picked up the helmet and examined the face mask, badly dented from the impact of Julius’s brow guard.

  ‘Sadly not. It would have solved most of our problems if it had been — cutting the snake’s head off, so to speak — but this is far too shabby to have been his. I presume that you took this from one of the bandits that attacked you during your march here?’ Scaurus nodded, and Caninus spread his hands, palm upwards, in a gesture of frustration. ‘You see the man’s influence? Even the dimmest of common robbers has worked out that the myth of Obduro can work for him too.’

  ‘Why “Obduro”? Why call yourself “hard”?’

  Caninus smiled wryly.

  ‘Oh it’s not his choice. That’s the name the people of the town gave him when his modus operandi became clear, after the first couple of times his men overran a guard post, or a detachment of soldiers. He has them killed, as I said a moment ago, almost literally to the last man. Nothing protracted, but no mercy shown either, except to the few men he takes back into the forest, presumably for the purposes of sacrifice to their goddess, and the one man he chooses to bring the news of his latest victory to me.’

  Scaurus frowned.

  ‘Specifically to you?’

  The prefect grinned at him without humour, his expression suddenly bleak.

  ‘Oh yes, most specifically to me. He’s developed something of a determination to see me dead, it seems. He mocks me with every fresh message that we receive from him, making sure that the survivor seeks me out and tells me in graphic details what will happen to me when I’m captured. He tells them that he’ll know if they don’t pass the message exactly as he tells them to, and that he’ll visit the same fate he has planned for me on them unless they follow his instructions to the letter. He tells them to do it publicly, not in private, so that the people around me hear everything.’

  ‘Which implies he has some good sources of information close to you?’

  The prefect stared at his boots for a moment.

  ‘Yes, that thought had occurred to me, but whoever it is must be either terrified or utterly devoted to him. Someone with a family member taken hostage, perhaps, or just a loved one who’s an easy target. Don’t forget that a score of travellers pass through Tungrorum every day, on their way along the main road from Beech Forest to Mosa Ford. Any of them could be one of his people, sent to deal out the threats he’s made to ensure obedience from whoever it is he has close to me.’

  He leaned back against the wall, shaking his head wearily.

  ‘Most of my men have family in the city, and every one of them presents an opportunity for threats and coercion to a man as ruthless as he is, so any one of them might be his agent, willing or not. The only answer that I can see is to find this Obduro and remove his head from his shoulders in the time-honoured fashion, and to do it in such a way as not to show the dice I’m rolling until they hit the table.’

  The tribune stood and walked across to the map.

  ‘And given that I’m the commander of the only battle-experienced unit that’s available to help you, I think we’d better start coming up with ways to impose ourselves on this particular gang’s freedom of action. As you say, you’ve been reacting to him for the last few months, and searching for him without any result. I’m guessing that my fourteen hundred men have much more chance of finding him than your thirty.’

  Caninus pointed at the forest’s dark mass, dominating the southern half of the map.

  ‘The only place to take the fight to him is in there. But be careful, Tribune. Arduenna has a justifiable reputation for being dangerous for the unprepared, especially at this time of year. It may be spring, but winter can return to the forest in an instant.’

  He touched the amulet on his right wrist in a reflexive gesture, and Scaurus nodded solemnly.

  ‘I see you are a believer in Mithras Unconquered. I’d be grateful of a chance to worship alongside you, if the city has a temple? And you needn’t worry, colleague. I’m not going to set a single foot into that maze of trees without your advice to guide me. And now I’d better go and see how my men are progressing with their building work.’ He picked up his cloak and made to leave, but turned as he reached the door. ‘By the way, you mentioned that you were sent here from Fortress Bonna. Is that where you were raised?’

  Caninus shook his head, pointing to the spot on the map that was Tungrorum.

  ‘No, Tribune, I’m a local boy, born and brought up here in the city. I travelled away from Tungrorum for several years in the imperial service, but when the chance came to return to my birthplace I jumped at it. Although, with hindsight, perhaps my decision would have been different had I known what I was stepping into.’

  Scaurus nodded in sympathy.

  ‘Never go back, eh?’

  The prefect shook his head slowly.

  ‘No, Tribune, it wasn’t the coming back that was the mistake. My error was in having any expectation of the place being as I’d left it.’

  The squadron parted to either side of the road, their hoof beats muffled by the soft ground as they cantered quickly to the west, their shields and spears held ready to fight. For long, anxious moments they rode steadily forward into the murk, unsure of what they might confront at any second, and with every moment the tension mounted. Marcus was starting to believe that they had missed the bandits in the mist, when a sharp-eyed rider on the right-hand side of the road pointed at the fields and shouted a warning to his decurion. Almost invisible in the fog, the indistinct shape of a grain cart was just discernible, with the figures of several men gathered around its rear apparently attempting to free a wheel from the track’s thick mud. Marcus wheeled the big grey to face the bandits, swinging the spear’s head down from its upright carrying position. The horse needed no further encouragement once it saw the weapon’s wicked iron head drop into its field of vision, and it sprang forward across the field’s heavy clay soil toward the robbers at the gallop, clods of earth flying up in its wake.

  Faced with a wall of cavalrymen charging down on them out of the mist the bandits wavered for a moment and then turned to run, their attempts to flee reduced to little better than a stagger by the field’s thick mud. Marcus picked a runner as the men scattered in all directions and rode him down, the cold iron blade stabbing brutally into the small of the man’s back and punching him to the ground with a grunt. Tearing the blade free Marcus turned the horse in search of another target. He heard a horse’s scream of distress and the sound of a rider hitting the ground hard, followed an instant later by a bellow of victory underlaid by a gurgling, agonised groan. Riding towards the noise he barely had time to react as a shaven-headed swordsman charged at him from out of the murk, a bloody blade held high and ready to strike at the horse’s long nose. Stabbing out with the spear, Marcus rammed the weapon’s iron head into the attacker’s face, sending him reeling into the mud with both hands clutching at his shattered, bleeding features.

  Having kept his seat by clinging to the enraged animal’s neck, Marcus trotted the grey forward past another three grain carts, steering the horse around the bo
dies of dead and dying bandits. At the head of the short line of carts he found a tight knot of ten or so bandits in the middle of a circle of horsemen whose spears were lowered and ready to stab into them. Silus caught sight of him and rode over to speak face to face, keeping his voice low.

  ‘Not bad with only one man down. I’ve given orders for him to be placed in one of the wagons, and perhaps if he lives long enough your woman can work her healing magic on him. As to this sorry collection of cut-throats, what do you think? Should we kill them here, or take them back to Tungrorum?’

  Marcus grimaced.

  ‘First things first, I’d say. We need to find out what they did with the carters, and where they were going with that grain. There may be more of them waiting for this lot to return, in which case…’

  ‘We could clean out that nest of snakes as well. Good idea.’ Silus turned to his men, bellowing an order to his deputy.

  ‘Double Pay! Disarm them and get them kneeling in a line beside that cart, hands tied behind their backs and their knees hobbled.’ He dismounted, and Marcus followed suit. ‘You do realise that getting information out of them is going to get unpleasant?’

  The Roman nodded, preoccupied with sliding the tip of his dagger into a sack of grain and putting the grains that spilled from the small hole under his nose, recoiling slightly from their odour.

  ‘ Qadir! ’

  The chosen man led his mount across the field, kicking at the cart’s wooden wheel to dislodge some of the mud clinging to his boots.

  ‘Centurion?’

  Marcus offered the grain to him, then watched as the Hamian put his nose to the kernels and breathed in slowly. Grimacing, he took one and popped it in his mouth, chewing it briefly before spitting the fragments out with a look of disgust.

  ‘Tainted. Mould, I’d say. And with mouldy corn it’s a coin toss as to whether you can eat it safely or not, never mind the foul taste. Get it wrong and you’ll be sick for days, weak as a baby and rolling around in your own faeces. I’m surprised that any farmer would bother shipping this to Tungrorum. There’s no way that an experienced buyer is going to give them anything for it.’