The Leopard sword e-4

by Anthony Riches

  Working briefly with flint and iron he got the fire lit and burning well, piling on plenty of green wood among the good dry material until the blaze was sending a column of thick smoke into the air. Picking up his new spear, he discarded the leather cover that protected its head and went to ground, flattening himself behind a tree on the uphill side of the clearing. For the best part of an hour the scene remained peaceful, the fire’s initial fierce crackle dying away to a gentle background mutter of flames slowly devouring wood. Lying absolutely still, Marcus watched as Bonehead contentedly cropped at the grass, a cloud of small insects buzzing around its head. The horse’s ears suddenly pricked up, and it raised its head warily, looking across the clearing at something hidden from Marcus by the tree’s trunk. Holding his breath, the Roman waited for whatever it was that had attracted the horse’s attention, the faintest of noises confirming that something or someone was moving slowly and stealthily across the clearing. An arrowhead came into view from behind the tree’s trunk, followed by the bow to which the missile was nocked. Held ready to shoot, with the arrow pulled almost as far back as the weapon’s tension would allow, the barbed head swept in an arc across the clearing as the archer stopped where he stood and searched the trees around the clearing for any sign of his intended victim. Hardly daring to breathe, never mind move, Marcus watched in sick horror as the arrowhead swung back towards him, knowing that at any moment the bowman would step forward and spot him, prostrate on the ground and unable to react fast enough to evade the arrow’s lethal impact at such short range.

  The horse snorted, pawing at the ground, and for one precious moment the hidden archer was distracted, wondering if the horse was reacting to a familiar presence. The arrow’s cruel head swept away from Marcus’s hiding place, and, silently thanking Mithras as he moved, the Roman pushed himself to his feet and raised the spear to throw. The archer, still hidden behind the tree’s trunk, must have heard the faint sounds, for as Marcus drew back his throwing arm the bow swung back towards him, reducing both men’s survival to a simple, deadly race to be the first to loose his missile. Stamping forward with sudden, blinding speed, Marcus slung his spear into the other man’s body, flinching aside as the arrow, released a fraction of a second too soon in the archer’s desperation, whistled past his ear. The spear smashed into the wrong-footed hunter’s side with a heavy thump, and he fell to the ground clutching his ribs with a grunting, agonised groan. Marcus drew his sword and advanced cautiously down the slope, searching the forest about him for any sign that the man he had felled had been accompanied and then, seeing nothing, he put his foot on the hunter’s chest and rolled him over, shaking his head as the prostrate man gasped in pain. Reaching down, he picked up the spear, nodding in satisfaction as he contemplated the padded leather cap that covered its blunt, rounded iron head, designed to stun or smash the wind out of its target rather than skewer deep into a man’s body. The two men stared into each other’s eyes for a moment before the Roman reached up and untied the bandage around his face, allowing it to fall to the ground. When he spoke his voice rasped from its long period of silence, but the words were clear enough.

  ‘I don’t suppose I’ll need this any longer. It seems to have served its purpose, as does my fire. But you, Arabus, your purpose is far from over. You’ve got some talking to do before you cross the river to meet your goddess.’

  Scaurus was waiting impatiently in Caninus’s office, frowning at the map on the wall and considering his options when Julius hurried in, his face grim.

  ‘Tribune, there’s a messenger. It’s one of the prefect’s m-’

  The man pushed past him into the room, utterly ignoring the centurion’s anger in his state of apparent shock, his face pale and drawn. Scaurus recognised him as Caninus’s deputy, Tornach, a tall thin man with watchful eyes, who had seldom been far from his master’s side, and he raised a hand to forestall Julius as his centurion moved to punish the messenger for entering unbidden. As the two men watched him the bodyguard pulled himself together, holding out a grain sack with shaking hands.

  ‘I have a message for you, sir. A message from… from…’ He swallowed and gulped in a breath, as if forcing himself to say the name. When he spoke again his voice was heavy with dread. ‘ Obduro.’

  He reached into the sack and pulled out something heavy, holding it up for the tribune to see. With a lurch of his stomach the Roman realised that it was a human head, the features at once familiar despite the dreadful wounds that had been inflicted on them. The eyes were empty sockets, and the mouth sagged loosely to reveal gums from which every tooth had been torn to leave gaping bloody wounds. The face itself was battered almost beyond recognition.

  ‘What happened?’

  The question was barely more than a whisper. The bodyguard dropped the sack on the office’s tiled floor, looking up from his master’s severed head and staring into Scaurus’s eyes as he answered.

  ‘We found the bandits, or rather they found us, a mile from the bridge. They waited until we were almost on top of them and then ambushed us, showering us with arrows. They dropped most of the horses with their first volley, and after that we never had a chance. Half of us were killed in the fight, the rest were beheaded after we’d been captured. Obduro chose me to bring the prefect’s head back. The faceless bastard.’ The bandit hunter looked down at the floor with an expression of self-loathing. ‘He made me memorise a message to go with it too, and told me how I had to say it. He told me if I got it wrong, or failed to speak it just as he said it, he’d know, and I would die in worse pain than if he’d killed me then and there.’ He drew himself up and stared Scaurus in the face. ‘“Tribune, as you can see, I have taken the revenge I have long promised myself on this fool. He chose to live as a lackey to you Romans, rather than honouring his goddess as we were both taught when we were young. Now I have removed his stain from my family’s history I will deal with the men you sent to patrol the road while they sleep tonight, then return to defeat you, and empty your grain store. The next time we meet, you will feel the bite of my leopard sword.”’

  He looked at the tribune, his eyes filled with misery.

  ‘And then he killed them, every other man that wasn’t already face down. He sent them to Hades one by one, laughing as they shouted and screamed and pissed themselves with fear, laughing as they flopped about with their throats cut.’

  Tornach lapsed into silence, holding one shaking hand with the other as if seeking to quiet them, and Scaurus roused himself from his amazement, nodding decisively to the waiting Julius.

  ‘So there’s definitive proof that Caninus was telling the truth about Obduro being his twin brother. Take this man away and have him looked after; he’s not fit for much after the shock he’s had. Parade your centuries, please, and send word to Tribune Belletor that he is respectfully requested to join me, with his men ready to march in full fighting order, and just as quickly as he likes. I’ll have the bastard’s head for this outrage, fancy sword or not. My regret in this whole matter is that I chose not to trust Caninus while he was alive, but I’ll send his brother to Hades quickly enough that he’ll have precious little time to celebrate this act of fratricide.’

  Marcus disarmed Arabus, pulling his long hunting knife from the engraved leather sheath hanging from his belt, then hauled the groaning hunter across the clearing by the back of his thick woollen tunic, ignoring his grunts and curses of pain, and threw him against the trunk of a tree. Touching the point of his patterned spatha to the man’s throat, he put sufficient pressure on the sword’s hilt to dimple the skin, pinning him in place so that even without bruised ribs he would have been unable to move.

  ‘It seems that my suspicions were correct, Arabus, despite all of your offers of help and friendly behaviour. You were trying to lead us into a trap when we camped here, weren’t you? If I’d not heard your accomplices approaching we’d all have vanished into the Arduenna and never been seen again, supposedly as another example of the Goddess’s power, wouldn’
t we?’ The tracker scowled back up at him, his face creased with a combination of fear and pain, but he said nothing by way of reply, provoking a hard smile from his captor. ‘And now you think that silence is the best answer to my questions, do you?’ He stared down into the tracker’s stony face and shook his head, hardening himself to do what was necessary. When he spoke again, his voice was harsh with the promise of retribution. ‘I’ll give you a choice. You can either talk now, tell me what I need to know and earn a swift, clean death, and I’ll leave your body whole for your afterlife, or you can spend the next few days crawling on your hands and knees with your ankle tendons cut, until you’re too weak to resist the pigs when they come for you. I’m told that even a small herd of the little monsters can strip a man’s corpse to rags and bones in less than an hour. You can have a moment to consider which exit from life you’d prefer.’

  He waited in silence, then sighed and shook his head. He withdrew the sword from Arabus’s neck and moved the blade to point it at his ankles in readiness to sever his captive’s tendons. The tracker raised his hands in a placatory gesture, his evident misery betraying the quandary in which he found himself.

  ‘I’ll talk. But you must understand, they have my woman and sons.’

  Marcus sheathed the spatha and pulled out his silver inlaid dagger.

  ‘You’re right, unless you want to leave this life slowly, and in more pain than you can imagine, you will talk. You’ll talk until you’ve told me all there is to know, and when I’m satisfied I’ll decide what to do with you.’

  Arabus shifted, grunting at the pain in his side where Marcus’s blunt iron spearhead had slammed into his ribs.

  ‘I’ve been in Prefect Caninus’s service for two years, tracking down parties of bandits and showing him where they can be taken. He found me in the deep Arduenna, where I have lived and hunted the unmapped forest since I was a boy, and offered me so much coin to work for him that I was unable to refuse. I left my family there, with the eldest boy to hunt and provide food for them as I had taught him, and went to the city to become his tracker. I soon proved skilful enough in leading him to the bandits plaguing the city that over fifty men were captured and executed as a result of my ability to hunt them down. I felt no sadness for them; nobody made them turn to preying on their fellow men, and it is against the ways of the goddess to steal and murder. But one band always managed to avoid capture, and avoided our hunts time after time. Whenever I thought I had clues as to the location of Obduro and his men, I was frustrated by mistakes and ill luck. Even when I found the location of their fortress, deep in the forest…’ He paused and laughed at the look on Marcus’s face, his amusement turning to an agonised grunt as the pain of his bruised ribs sank its claws into him with the movement. ‘Yes, I found their hiding place, deep in the forest where the altars to the goddess are as many as blades of grass in a meadow; it is a secret, forbidden place for all but her most devoted followers. I waited in silence and stillness for a day and a night, watching it to be sure it was theirs, and when I was certain I took the news back to the prefect. But he was unable to gather enough force to be sure of success in such an attack on a defended position, and so he kept the secret to himself for fear that they would move their camp if it became known that it was discovered.’

  Marcus shook his head in puzzlement.

  ‘But when we arrived in the city Caninus would have had all the men he needed, and more besides. What was it that stopped him from taking us into the forest to defeat Obduro, I wonder?’

  Arabus shook his head, grimacing at the pain gnawing at his body.

  ‘You do not understand. If you worshipped Arduenna as we do, you would know that none of her followers would ever knowingly guide outsiders like you to the secret places where the altars to her magnificence are hidden, and Caninus is a devoted worshipper of her greatness.’ He smiled at Marcus’s raised eyebrows. ‘You believe him to follow Mithras, your soldiers’ god, but he was born and raised here, and for a true man of Tungrorum there can only be one deity: our goddess Arduenna.’ Seeing that his captor’s expression was still one of disbelief, he shrugged easily. ‘Believe me or don’t believe me, it means little enough to me. In helping your soldiers to find their way to her holy places, the prefect would have been sealing his own doom in the afterlife…’ He sighed, and even in his agony his expression softened to something like pity as he stared up at the Roman. ‘I have told you, many are her weapons. When I die, I expect to enter her realm, a forest like this only stretching away into the mist forever, where the hunter will never fail to make his kill, and the feasting knows no end. But if I betray her…’

  Marcus shook his head at the thought, reflexively touching the Mithras-blessed amulet at his wrist.

  ‘Who set you to follow and kill me?’

  The tracker’s face darkened.

  ‘Before I tell you that, you must understand why I came after you. Last winter, while we were confined to the city by the snows, the prefect’s deputy came to me in secret. Like me, Tornach was born in the forest and is a steadfast believer in her power, and I had come to trust him as a decent man. When others under the prefect’s command tried to abuse their power over the people we encountered on patrol, looking to rob or rape them, he always ensured their discipline, without favour or exception, and always in the goddess’s name. Even the non-believers were forced to accept her disciplines, and he was without mercy in punishing any man that broke her commandments. I treated him with great respect, and believed him to be a man I could follow. But that night he came to me with a hard face, and with a blade drawn and ready to use. He told me that my woman and sons were captive, held by Obduro in his hidden stronghold, and that I was to carry out his orders without fail if I wanted to see them alive again. As proof of their captivity he showed me a silver bracelet that I gave my woman when she bore my eldest son, and he threatened them with a slow, dishonourable death if I failed to obey. And from that day I was a servant of Obduro.’

  He hung his head for a long moment before raising his gaze to stare at Marcus, his expression both contrite and defiant.

  ‘You judge me. I see it in your stare. And yet you have a child in your woman’s womb. In years to come, if you were held to ransom with that child’s life, what would you do, I wonder?’

  Marcus pursed his lips and nodded slowly.

  ‘Yes, so do I. Now answer my question.’

  ‘Who set me to follow you, with orders to put an arrow in you and bury any idea that you might discover Obduro’s fortress? It was Tornach, of course. Caninus made no secret that he expected you to attempt another search of Arduenna. He was worried that your presence would make the goddess angry with us all, but he did not feel able to prevent you from leaving the city. Tornach took me to one side and gave me a choice, either to find and kill you here, and earn my family’s freedom, or to refuse to do so and have my body dumped in a city bone pit, without the honour to earn Arduenna’s favour, and bring death on Obduro’s sacrificial altar to my sons. He showed me the knife I gave to my eldest son before I left the forest, the sister to the knife I wear on my own belt, as proof that he had my family in a safe place, and he promised in her name that I would join them when I had fulfilled this last task.’

  ‘So he gave you no choice at all.’ Marcus’s glance lingered on the running-boar decoration adorning the hunter’s empty sheath. ‘And it was Tornach who planned to kill us, the last time we ventured into the forest?’

  ‘Yes. He is the most devoted of the goddess’s followers I have ever known. For him, your boots treading on this ground is an insult to all he believes. The prefect may be a believer, but he is still a servant of your empire. I do not believe he had any part of the plan to kill you.’

  The Roman saw sincerity in the tracker’s pain-slitted eyes. He raised the dagger again, allowing Arabus’s eyes to linger on the blade for a long moment.

  ‘I have one last question for you. It will be hard for you to give me what I need to know, I suspect, but you
have no choice in the matter. If you are to live, you must guide me to the altars of Arduenna, and tell me what I need to know if I am to find Obduro’s fortress.’

  Arabus gritted his teeth against the pain burning in his chest before grimly shaking his head.

  ‘I told you that I will not betray my loyalty to Arduenna. No unbeliever can be allowed to find the sacred groves dedicated to her, and it is there that Obduro has his hiding place. You can send me to Hades, but I cannot tell you what you want to know.’

  Marcus held the dagger up again.

  ‘I know. I ask you for the one thing that you know will prevent you from receiving the favour of your goddess. But you are going to show me where to find Obduro. Not because of this — ’ the Roman sheathed the weapon before leaning forward — ‘but rather because of this…’ He tapped the wounded man’s empty sheath, putting a finger on the stylised boar carved into its thick leather, then handed him his knife, presenting the handle to him in a gesture of trust. ‘You’re going to help me find Obduro because today is not your day to die, but rather your day for revenge.’

  Scaurus stalked out in front of the Tungrian centuries with Arminius at his shoulder, buckling on his helmet as the five centurions gathered round him in a silent, hard-faced group, Prince Martos standing slightly off to one side in unconscious reflection of his place within the cohort’s world. He looked at them in silence for a moment before speaking.

  ‘Gentlemen. Our colleague Prefect Caninus has been murdered along with his men, ambushed by his brother Sextus, the man known as “Obduro”. He was killed out of hand as an act of revenge for an imagined slight from their shared past. By now the bandits will have crossed the Mosa and turned west, and they plan to track First Spear Frontinius and your brother officers down the road towards Beech Forest with the intention of striking at them after dark, when our men are camped for the night. And under such circumstances they might just prevail.’ He shook his head, looking about him again with an intent stare, gauging his officers’ resolve. ‘Which, Centurions, is not an eventuality I intend to permit. We will march to the west behind them, moving as fast as the men can carry their equipment and weapons, and we will trap the scum between our shields and those of our comrades. Martos, I’d be grateful if your men would scout the ground before us to avoid our falling into any trap that might be laid out for us.’ The Votadini prince nodded his acquiescence. ‘Thank you. Decurion Silus will lead his mounted century ahead of us, find the enemy and report back, whilst also taking word of this development to the first spear and carrying my orders for him to turn east and put Obduro and his men into the jaws of a trap from which there will be no escape. I’ll have that man’s head on a spear, cavalry helmet and all, by the end of the day. You’ve got a five-hundred count to get them ready to march, and then we move. Centurion Clodius, you are hereby appointed senior centurion until we join up with the rest of our force, then First Spear Frontinius will resume his command. Centurion Julius, a moment, please. The rest of you are dismissed.’