The Leopard sword e-4

by Anthony Riches

  He turned away, leaving Morban staring open-mouthed after him. Morban waited until Marcus had turned the corner and was away to his own quarters before muttering quietly to himself, shaking his head in disgust.

  ‘The next thing I know he’ll be taking over my book as well. I think I preferred the other version.’

  Julius waited until the last of the soldiers on an evening pass had returned to barracks before setting off into the city, this time dressed in his uniform with both sword and dagger strapped to his belt. Skirting around the Blue Boar to the east he found the streets deserted, and walked quietly up to the shrine to which Annia had directed him, his hobnails muffled by rags tied about his boots. Looking up and down the street to ensure that he was unobserved he reached into the shrine, feeling about behind the goddess’s statue until he found a narrow horizontal slot through which to insert the key, a long rod with a two-pronged anchor-like device at its end. Turning the key from vertical to horizontal he jiggled it gently until he felt the anchor’s metal tips engage a pair of holes in the bolt holding the hidden door closed. Pulling the rod to the right he felt a gentle click as the bolt disengaged from its keep, and with only a little pressure the heavy door opened easily on well-oiled hinges. Sliding through the narrow opening he closed the wooden door, which was cunningly faced with a stone cladding to blend seamlessly with the wall, and in the darkness he slid the bolt back into place by touch.

  A patch of dim light appeared above him at the top of a flight of stone stairs, and a figure stepped into the meagre illumination, beckoning him on. Mounting the steps with one hand on his dagger and ready to fight, he realised as he drew close to the top that it was indeed Annia. Dressed in a light tunic and with her cosmetics removed, she hugged him enthusiastically.

  ‘I thought you weren’t coming!’ Her whisper was so soft as to be virtually inaudible, and she put her mouth to his ear to be heard better. ‘Take those swords off and come inside.’ She ushered him into the room, lit by a single lamp, and pulled the door closed before rearranging the wall hanging that concealed it. Gesturing to a couch, she poured him a cup of wine and came to sit alongside him. ‘The secret door was already here when I took the place over. The Boar’s been a brothel since it was built thirty years ago, and whoever designed it had an eye to the future. Not only are all the rooms observed from secret passages, to make sure that any pillow talk of value is overheard by the guards and reported back to Petrus-’

  Julius started with surprise.

  ‘ Petrus? ’

  She put a finger to his lips.

  ‘ Shhhh! There’s no guarantee that he doesn’t have a man outside this room with an ear to the door; it wouldn’t be the first time he’d had me spied on. I’m his property, Julius, and he’s a jealous master. If he found out about the door to the street he’d have it sealed up the same day.’

  ‘But Petrus is the procurator’s man. How would he be…’

  He stopped talking and thought for a moment, then shook his head at how obvious the truth was once it was in the open.

  ‘Petrus is the real power in the city. He’s the man that controls the gangs, and Albanus is so deep in bed with Petrus that when my master tells him to jump the only question he’s allowed to ask is how long he has to stay off the ground. I knew from the second I saw you that I still feel exactly the same way about you that I did fifteen years ago, but I didn’t dare to let you know it, because if you saw it so would they. And once Petrus knew, he’d have had you dealt with, quickly and quietly. And then he’d have told me all the details while he was grinding me into that bed, taking his pleasure from my despair. It was far safer for his musclemen to tell him that I was indignant and aloof. I’m sorry.’

  The Tungrian put a protective arm around her.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be that way any longer. Come with me now; bring whatever you need and leave for good. You’ll never have to whore again, or suffer that arsehole’s attentions.’

  He stopped talking, his eyes fixed on her shaking head.

  ‘If I walk away from here I have to leave the city now. You may think you could protect me, but I know that he’d have my life in a matter of days as a lesson to anyone else contemplating the same idea. I can only leave this place under one of two circumstances. Either you need to be marching away, and have the means to take me with you, or Petrus needs to be dead along with every man that might seek revenge for him in order to prove himself as Petrus’s successor. Unless you can make either of those two things happen tonight, then tomorrow I shall still be the mistress of the Blue Boar.’

  The small party rode east at dawn the next morning, Marcus, Julius, Dubnus and Silus all mounted on cavalry horses while a mule laden with several days’ worth of food followed Silus’s mount. If his comrades found Julius’s demeanour even more dour than they were accustomed to, they made no mention of it.

  ‘He went into town again last night,’ Dubnus had confided to Marcus while they were waiting for Silus to arrive with the horses on which they were to carry out their mission. ‘He clearly thought he was keeping it to himself, but one of my lads was doing double guard duty as a punishment for that squabble with the legion, and he told me he saw the stupid bastard walk off towards the forum once everyone had turned in for the night.’

  The two men had exchanged uneasy glances, knowing that by rights such behaviour ought to be reported to the first spear, and knowing also that neither of them would do any such thing.

  ‘He’ll tell us about it in his own time, and until he does we’ll just have to watch his back.’

  Dubnus had nodded unhappily at his friend’s decision, and it was only Silus who had carried on with the usual banter once they were on the road. Even he had quickly sensed the reluctance of his comrades to indulge in the familiar routine of insult and rebuttal, and so it was a quiet party that found Prefect Caninus’s man waiting for them by the roadside once they were safely out of sight of the city walls. The scout joined the small group with no more ceremony than a sketchy salute to Julius, and the surrender of a small wax tablet signed by Caninus and marked with his seal as proof of the man’s identity.

  The scout was slightly built, with a face that was deeply lined and seamed, giving him the weather-beaten appearance of a man who had spent his entire life working in the open. A hunting bow was slung across his shoulder, and a quiver of heavy iron-headed arrows hung from his belt, while the only sign of ornamentation he carried was an intricately tooled leather scabbard containing a long hunting knife nearly the length of an infantry sword. Introduced in the prefect’s tablet as Arabus, he quickly proved to be taciturn in the extreme, and Marcus’s attempts to engage with him were met with monosyllabic answers. No attempt at conversation would elicit anything more than a nod, a shake of the head or a terse, grunted answer where a simple yes or no would not be sufficient. Julius and Dubnus rode up alongside Marcus, Dubnus tipping his head to draw his friend away from the guide, keeping silent until the three centurions were out of earshot.

  ‘You’ll get nothing more from him. I’ve met the type before, men who have known nothing other than the forest since birth, and nothing you can do or say will get him to open up before he feels the time is right. Mind you, I’ll tell you one thing that makes me smile.’

  Marcus raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘His name.’

  What, Arabus?’

  His friend grinned, shooting a quick look at the guide.

  ‘In the Gaulish language I believe it means “witty”. And if he was the witty one in the family, I dread to think what his brothers and sisters must have been like!’

  Julius nudged Marcus, having seemingly thrown off his reverie, and held out a hand.

  ‘Come on, then, let’s have a look at that pretty new blade you’ve bought.’

  Marcus unsheathed the patterned sword and passed it to Julius. His horse’s ears pricked up at the sound of the blade’s gentle metallic rasp against its scabbard’s throat, and Marcus le
aned forward, affectionately ruffling the close-trimmed hair on top of the beast’s head.

  ‘Not today, Bonehead. Today we’re just covering ground.’

  Julius looked closely at the blade, then swept it down to his right in a practice cut that hummed past his own horse’s head.

  ‘As light as a feather. And what did Uncle Sextus say when you asked him for that large a withdrawal from your saved pay?’

  Marcus smiled at the memory.

  ‘Let’s just say the first spear wasn’t exactly delighted to have fifty aurei taken out of the pay chest all in one go. And then when he saw the sword he spent so long looking at it I was convinced he was going to pull rank and buy it himself.’

  He took the weapon back from Julius, who waited until the vicious blade was safely sheathed before speaking again.

  ‘You think Frontinius would pay that much for a sword, when he can get an issue weapon for a tiny fraction of the price? Mind you, there’ll be a bit of a rush if you should happen to stop a spear while that nice little toy’s strapped to your waist. One of us will be wearing it before you’re cold, you can be assured of that!’

  Dubnus shook his head at the older man with a smile, a wry note in his voice.

  ‘You can put any such idea out of your mind, Julius! Our colleague has already agreed that I’m the right man to inherit such a weapon. In my hands it would be treated with the expertise it deserves, whereas to end up in the hands of an exponent of stab and punch like yourself would be a sad end for such a fine blade.’

  Julius raised an eyebrow at Marcus, who shrugged equably, and the big centurion grinned triumphantly at their colleague.

  ‘It doesn’t look to me like you’ve got any such agreement, Dubnus. It looks to me like it’s first come, first served.’

  Dubnus shrugged in turn, the smile creasing his face taking on a calculating aspect.

  ‘Fair enough, the first man with his hands on the weapon gets to keep it, in the unlikely event that there’s anyone out there good enough to leave it ownerless.’ He squinted slyly across at his friend. ‘Anyway, Julius, I meant to ask if you ever got round to buying that whistle you were looking at while our colleague there was spending a soldier’s pension on his new toy.’

  His friend nodded, fishing in his pouch and holding up his brightly polished whistle. Dubnus looked at him for a moment, clearly struggling to keep a straight face, then turned back to the road, leaving Julius frowning at him in puzzlement.

  ‘There’s something I’m not getting here, isn’t there? Why are you grinning like a standard bearer who’s discovered an extra hundred denarii in the century’s burial fund that no one else knows about, eh? What have you…?’ He looked harder at the whistle in his hand, his eyebrows suddenly shooting up as he realised that it was the one he’d believed lost. Looking up he found that Dubnus was holding his new whistle in one hand. ‘You crafty bugger! Did you know about this, Centurion Corvus?’

  Marcus fought to control his laughter, his face contorting with the effort.

  ‘I was aware that your loss was not entirely what it seemed. At least you have a nice new whistle as a result, and a beautifully crafted one from the looks of it. And there’s Mosa Ford — I can see the fort’s walls through the trees. It’s time to start acting like a party of professional army officers again, I suppose.’

  Julius snorted derisively, giving his old whistle a long hard look of reappraisal before tucking it away in his pouch again. Dubnus waited until his hand was in the pouch, then tossed the new whistle to him, forcing him to whip the hand back out and catch it in mid-air. Shaking his head, he held up the shining brass instrument with a look of disgust.

  ‘Ten denarii for something I didn’t even need? And you suggest that I might want to start looking like a professional? Here, you haven’t got one of these yet, have you?’

  He passed the whistle to Marcus, who raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Thank you. But shouldn’t you be keeping the new one?’

  ‘No, I’ve had this one since I was commissioned; it would be bad luck to abandon it now.’ He gave Dubnus a hard look. ‘And besides, giving you that definitely gives me first call on the pretty sword.’

  The party passed easily enough through the scrutiny of the legion detachment guarding the bridge over the river. Tribune Scaurus’s written instructions to them to proceed to the Rhenus fortresses were clear enough, and the impressive seal attached to the document more than proved their bona fides, but Julius found himself being drawn aside by the duty centurion once the fort’s western gate was closed behind them and the sentries had returned to their patrols along the wooden palisade walls. Marcus walked alongside the two men as they paced through the fortified settlement towards the bridge, listening quietly as the guard officer muttered his advice in the Tungrian’s ear.

  ‘… and you want to be careful of that dark-faced little runt you’ve brought along for the ride. I’ve seen enough of his kind to know that he’ll mean trouble soon enough.’

  Julius raised an eyebrow, his face darkening.

  ‘His kind? You mean we can’t trust him because he’s a local?’

  The duty officer shook his head dourly.

  ‘No, the local people are decent enough. I mean you can’t trust him because he’s from in there.’ They had reached the bridge’s western end, and Marcus looked out across the river, its surface broken by the stones that marked the shallows which had made it such an obvious bridging point for the road to the Rhenus fortresses. The duty officer pointed to the forested slopes that rose above the small settlement clustered round the bridge’s eastern end, and spat over the bridge’s parapet. ‘Laugh it off if you like, but if you’d served as close to that bloody forest for as long as I have you wouldn’t be laughing. It’s only four hundred paces from here to the tree line, but by the time you’ve walked five hundred you might as well be five hundred miles away. There are men living in that place who don’t see the light of day from one end of the year to the other, half-savage hunters without any of the values that make us the civilised people that we are. We see them sometimes, watching the fort from the edge of the trees, and we used to send patrols in to try to get hold of one, but it was like trying to catch fucking smoke. And it scared the shit out of the lads.’ He looked into the distance through the open gates for a moment before speaking again. ‘I stopped ordering patrols after we lost a man last year. One minute he was there at the back of the column, the next he was gone, disappeared in broad daylight without either trace or echo. We never saw him again, but that night some of the lads reckoned they could hear him screaming, just a faint sound on the breeze that only the young ones could make out, but they swore it was there.’

  He spat on the ground and made the warding gesture to the guide’s back.

  ‘No, that’s one of them all right. If he’d turned up here alone I’d have had his throat cut and chucked him in the river, but since he’s under your protection all I can do is warn you. Where are you going from here?’

  Julius pointed a hand to the east.

  ‘Claudius Colony, then Fortress Bonna.’

  ‘Straight to the Rhenus, eh? Fair enough. You should be fine as long as you stick to the road and don’t go into the forest. Just watch the little bastard, all right?’

  He stood and watched as the party remounted and rode away up the hill to the east, and Julius waited until the fort was completely out of sight before raising a hand to halt their progress. He stared at the densely packed trees for a moment, then turned to Arabus.

  ‘Time for you to start earning your corn. You’ve been briefed on what we’re supposed to be doing?’

  The scout returned his gaze for a moment then looked at the forest, drawing in a deep breath through his nose and sighing as if in satisfaction.

  ‘Yes, Caninus told me what I am to do. You wish to search the edge of Arduenna, from here down the river’s bank back to the west until we find any sign that the bandits have a camp.’ A look of serenity touched his face
as he contemplated the place he clearly considered to be his home. ‘Come, then. Follow me into Arduenna.’

  He led them across the hundred-pace-wide strip of ground between road and forest that had been cleared of trees years before as a defence against ambush from the forest. The barren ground had clearly been tended by a gang of local labourers recently, to judge from the absence of any vegetation other than grass and small bushes. On reaching the trees Arabus paused, inhaling deeply as the scent of pine trees washed over them on the breeze.

  ‘We will lead the horses until we find a track. Watch your footing.’

  He pushed forward into the dense undergrowth, moving with deliberate caution, and the centurions followed him into the trees, looking about them in interest. The light dimmed slightly as they walked away from the forest’s edge, taking on the ethereal green shade with which they were all familiar, but apart from that Marcus was unable to discern any difference between the Arduenna and any other forest in which he’d walked. Arabus padded forward, leading his horse through the trees with his gaze on the ground until, after a few minutes’ walking he turned back and beckoned the centurions to him. A faint track bisected the forest floor, and they looked down its visible length to the point where it vanished into the dense undergrowth fifty or so paces to what Marcus could only presume was the south-west. Arabus pointed to the path with a smile of pride.

  ‘As I expected, this is a hunters’ track. I have not hunted this part of the forest for many years, but my memory still serves me well enough.’

  Julius looked up and down the track.

  ‘If we follow this path surely we must run a risk of meeting other travellers?’

  Arabus shook his head.

  ‘I will scout ahead on foot while you ride a hundred paces behind me, and leave my horse tethered to your mule. I will hear anyone coming up this path before they hear me, you can be assured of that.’

  And so the party spent the rest of the day working their way along the hunters’ track, moving at Arabus’s cautious pace and with one man always watching the path behind them, until the light shining through the canopy above them started to dim. The guide stood waiting for them as they crested a low ridge, then pointed up the low hill’s spine, deeper into the forest.