The Wolf's gold e-5

by Anthony Riches

  ‘Halt! Kneeling defence!’

  The soldiers dropped onto one knee at Marcus’s command, bracing their shields on their forward legs and lowering their heads so that their only remaining point of vulnerability was a thin vision-slit between shield and brow guard. Quintus frowned from his place behind the century, and the soldiers exchanged puzzled glances at being dropped into a defensive stance a good fifty paces short of the building.

  ‘Chosen Man!’ Quintus stepped forward through the century’s ranks with a salute to his centurion. ‘You are to keep the Fifth in defensive line and await my orders. In the event that you hear or see anything to indicate that I have been engaged by enemy forces, you are to use your own judgement as to whether an attack or a fighting retreat is the better option, but you must ensure that the news of whatever happens here reaches the tribune. Do you understand?’

  The chosen man nodded.

  ‘Are you going in there alone, Centurion?’

  Marcus shook his head with a smile.

  ‘Not quite. Gentlemen, shall we?’ Dubnus and Qadir stepped forward, both men drawing their swords. ‘I very much doubt there’s anyone within a hundred miles of here, but the post has been abandoned for long enough that I’ll not simply blunder in to see what might be waiting for us. Arabus!’

  The scout stepped forward from behind the century’s line where he had been waiting in silence. A skilled scout and tracker raised in the forested hills of the Arduenna forest in Germania, he had been captured by Marcus in the act of attempting the Roman’s assassination, and turned to the cohort’s service by the revelation of his son’s sacrificial murder by the same bandit leader who had subverted him. He was acknowledged by even the most skilful of the cohort’s barbarian scouts to be the best of them, a master of both tracking and the art of seeing without being seen, and lethal with a short blade. When the Tungrians had marched away from the Arduenna he had chosen to follow them rather than return to the forest, telling the young centurion that with his family dead at the hands of the bandit leader Obduro there was nothing to keep him there. The Roman pointed up the hill and the scout nodded, loping silently away up the slope, drawing puzzled glances from the soldiers as he ran to the century’s right and headed purposefully for a fold in the ground that crossed the hilltop. Dropping onto his hands and knees, and then flattening himself fully against the damp grass, he wormed forward into the cover of the fold and vanished from sight.

  Marcus led his fellow centurions onwards with only one of his swords drawn, the evilly sharp patterned spatha that he had purchased from a sword smith in the Tungrians’ home city of Tungrorum. The weapon had cost him a price that had set his colleagues’ heads shaking in disbelief, until they had seen the sword’s murderous edge and the speed with which the light and flexible weapon could be wielded. He put a reflexive hand to the eagle’s head-pommelled gladius bequeathed to him by his birth father, but left the short sword sheathed for the time being. The three centurions moved swiftly, giving little time for any enemy lurking in the watch post to react as Dubnus and Qadir spread out to either side of their comrade, while Marcus ran to the building’s main door and flattened himself against the rough timber wall, listening intently. There was nothing to be heard other than the wind’s soft susurration, and the occasional creak from the wooden structure. Putting a booted heel to the wedge holding the post’s main door closed, he drew in a long, slow breath, sliding the legatus’s gladius from its scabbard and savouring the feeling of the twin blades’ heft in his skilled hands.

  ‘Go!’

  Kicking the wedge away he ripped the door open and threw himself through the opening, minimising the moment of danger when he would be silhouetted against the doorway’s bright rectangle. Pointing the swords into the building’s unlit gloom, he turned to track movement against the rear wall.

  ‘Nothing. And you can stop pointing that sword at me with quite so much relish, thank you.’

  Dubnus stepped out of the shadows with a look of disdain, while Qadir surveyed the post’s wooden floorboards with a critical eye.

  ‘No, nothing at all. No mud, no bootprints. Even the dust is undisturbed. Either nobody has been in here or they were very skilled at hiding any trace of their presence.’

  Marcus nodded, turning to the watchtower’s stairs. He climbed slowly, with one sword held in front of him, emerging into the cold morning air crouched low to avoid presenting any silhouette to a potential watcher. Looking through the viewing platform’s vision-slits he saw his Fifth Century waiting in their defensive line as he had left them, ready to fight or retreat as ordered. Moving to the tower’s other side he found an uninterrupted view down the hill’s gentle northern slope for three hundred paces, open ground that stretched as far as the forest’s edge. Climbing carefully back down the steps he exited the building to find Arabus waiting for him. The scout bowed, gesturing to the north.

  ‘As you suspected, Centurion, there are footprints on the far slope. Also the marks left by hooves. There have been mounted men here, and less than a day ago. I saw no sign of them in the trees, no movement at all. But they were certainly here when we marched up the valley yesterday.’

  On the valley floor, five hundred feet below, Julius watched as his centuries toiled up the slopes of the mountains that surrounded them on three sides, nodding his satisfaction as they neared their immediate objectives.

  ‘That’s better. With the hills manned we can breathe a little easier.’

  Alongside him Scaurus grunted his agreement.

  ‘Indeed. Defending this valley is going to be interesting enough without the risk of being showered with arrows from those heights, or finding that our enemy has found a way to outflank our wall.’

  The parade ground before them was empty of men, other than a few dozen veteran soldiers from Scaurus’s Second Tungrian Cohort waiting at ease to one side. With the First Cohort tied up retaking the mountains around the valley, Scaurus had sent half of the Second Cohort’s remainder down the road under their new First Spear, charged with laying out the line of the defensive wall he was planning to erect across the valley’s narrowest point.

  ‘You may not be an engineer, Tertius old son, but you’ve enough sense to pick the best place to stop a cavalry charge.’ Julius had taken his colleague aside after their dismissal from the command meeting, pointing out across the valley. ‘Just find the narrowest point, preferably with a nice little slope in front of the line where we’ll be dropping the wall in, and make sure we can get water to run to it.’ He pointed back up the valley to the point where the huge rock slab of the eastern peak sealed off the far end. ‘We don’t want all Sergius’s hard work up there to leave us with a bloody great puddle on our side, do we?’

  The men of the First Minervia’s Cohort were toiling away at the foot of the eastern peak’s steep slopes, energetically clearing away vegetation in a line down the slope from a good-sized lake that sat high above the valley floor to their rear, and Julius looked about him with a smile of satisfaction.

  ‘Give me a month and I could make this place impossible to take with anything less than three legions, and even then they’d pay a heavy price to break in.’

  Scaurus raised an eyebrow.

  ‘A month? I’d say you’ve got two days, three if we’re lucky, before enough men to fill the ranks of two legions come thundering up that slope. What do you think you can do in that time?’

  Julius opened his mouth to respond, but closed it again as the first of the mine workers came into sight, heading for the parade ground in a long, straggling column. They crowded onto the flat open space until it was full, and the slope which overlooked it filled up in turn, the buzz of their conversation loud enough that the two men had to raise their voices to speak. When Scaurus judged that there were no more to come he nodded to Julius, who signalled his trumpeters to blow a long hard note. Their horns’ peals echoed from the rocky hillsides, and the miners fell silent and stared at the tribune as he stepped out before them. Clearing h
is throat, he shouted a question at the mass of men.

  ‘Where are the mine owners? I believe there are three of you!’

  A balding man stepped forward from the crowd, his clothes both cleaner and smarter than his fellows’.

  ‘I am Felix, owner of the Split Rock mine.’

  He pointed down the valley to the west, and Scaurus exchanged a meaningful glance with Julius who shrugged slightly.

  ‘Thank you, Felix. Who’s next?’ A second man stepped out of the throng, but where his colleague had clearly bathed recently, and was dressed in fine cloth, he wore the same heavy, dirty clothing as the men around him. ‘Your name?’

  ‘Lartius, my Lord.’

  Scaurus nodded, though not without a slight smile.

  ‘Tribune will do, thank you, Lartius. And you own which mine?’

  ‘The Rotunda, my. . Tribune, on the southern slope of that mountain.’

  He pointed to the round-topped mountain to the north.

  ‘I see. One more of you to come then. Will I have to resort to. .’

  He paused in mid-sentence, raising an eyebrow as a woman in her thirties stepped out from the protection of the men around her and acknowledged him in a cursory manner. Her functional clothing was drab, cut for comfort rather than display, but the soldiers standing behind Scaurus were sufficiently audible in their appreciation that Julius turned around to silence them with a glare and a meaningful tap of his vine stick against his mailed chest. She stood and waited until the sudden rumble of male voices had died away, pushing an errant lock of her light-brown hair back into place in a gesture the tribune recognised as an artifice even as his body responded to her overt sexuality.

  ‘Good morning, madam. And you are?’

  ‘Theodora, Tribune.’

  ‘Theodora? From the Greek?’

  The woman nodded, a pair of large golden discs hanging from her ears bobbing at the movement.

  ‘It means god’s gift, or so my father told me when I was small enough to believe every word that came out of his mouth. I am the owner of the Raven Head mine, on the southern side of the valley, beneath the rock for which this place is named.’ She pointed at the distinctive rock poised over the mountain that formed the valley’s southern side and smiled at the Roman, and Scaurus realised that for all her aggressive swagger she was fairer of face than any of the harried-looking women he’d seen about the settlement. Warning himself not to stare, even if he hadn’t laid eyes on so welcome a sight for months, the tribune turned away from the trio and walked for a dozen paces before turning to speak again, his voice raised to carry over the throng.

  ‘Very well then, let’s be about our business for the day. How many men do you estimate we have here, First Spear?’

  Julius grimaced, more used to counting men arranged into convenient lines.

  ‘Three thousand or so, Tribune.’

  ‘And yet the procurator with responsibility for this facility informed me that you had nearly five thousand men working your mines. Where are the rest of your people?’

  Not one of the trio standing before Scaurus showed the slightest sign of discomfort at the acerbic tone in which his question was pitched. Theodora spoke again, waving a hand at the valley sides.

  ‘Contrary to appearances, Tribune, the mountains around us are not the dry towers of rock that they appear from the outside. They are riven by faults, cracks in the rock through which water runs down from the ground above them. If we abandon a mine for as much as a day the lower levels will be knee-deep in water, and a week would make them unworkable. Those men that you don’t see here are performing essential work to keep the workings dry, and to prevent our absence from causing problems when you finally allow our men back to work.’

  Scaurus exchanged a long glance with her, gauging the truth of her statement.

  ‘Indeed. I recall Procurator Maximus mentioning the requirement for constant water removal. He also told me that you need hundreds of men to keep your mines dry, but not, I should point out, thousands. Once we’ve finished this discussion and your labour is put to work making this valley defendable against the Sarmatae, I shall pick a mine at random and take a tour, unguided, I should add, and see what I can see. And be assured, madam, if I should find as much as a ten-year-old child digging for gold with a spoon, then all three of you will taste the harsher end of Roman military justice. So I suggest that you all send men to your mines, just to be sure that my prohibition is being obeyed to the letter. I will have every fit man not required to keep your investments from drowning out here in the sunlight building our defences, whether you like it or not. It’s either that, or all three of you can take a turn on that.’ He waved a hand at the parade ground’s whipping post, a constant reminder of Roman military discipline. ‘It’s not the best way to start off what we all must hope will be a short and productive relationship, but the three of you will all take five strokes of the scourge if any one of you disobeys me in this.’

  Lartius smiled a lopsided grin, revealing white teeth in his grimy face.

  ‘If you catch us, that is.’

  Scaurus shrugged, his return smile hard and mirthless.

  ‘Try me. If any of you forces my hand I’ll have all three of you naked and bleeding in front of your workers. When I catch you.’

  Felix stepped forward, his face set in the uneasy, placating smile of a penniless debtor confronted by thugs sent to collect his dues, and raised a manicured hand to the soldiers.

  ‘This is easily remedied, Tribune. I’m sure the message simply has yet to reach the furthest parts of our businesses. With your permission?’

  Scaurus nodded magnanimously, and Felix drew his colleagues away for a moment of whispered discussion.

  ‘Would you really put a woman on the whipping post, Tribune?’

  Julius’s quiet question creased Scaurus’s face into a smile, and he turned away from the miners to ensure that his words were not overheard.

  ‘No, or at least not from choice. But if they believe that I will then that, First Spear, is really all that matters. If we show these men — and especially, I suspect, that woman — the slightest hint of weakness, then they will treat us like the fools we probably are here in their world. This is a confidence trick, Julius, so let us hope that we’ve gulled these three, at least for the time being. I just wish that bloody fool Maximus had warned us that one of them was a woman.’

  Nodding their mutual agreement, the mine owners turned to their closest aides with hasty instructions, then stepped back in front of Scaurus.

  ‘All is resolved, Tribune. Messengers will be sent to our mines to ensure that all men not drawing off the water will attend whatever work it is you have planned for us.’

  Scaurus nodded graciously.

  ‘A wise decision, and one that will hopefully spare us all from any unhelpful indignity. And so to business. You’re doubtless wondering what you people can do in defence of your mines that three cohorts of well trained and fully equipped soldiers can’t, and my answer is simple. Nothing. But what you can do is make our preparations to defend this valley, and your investments, complete in much less time. And time is the key to this situation, my friends, because to be blunt we don’t have very much of it.’

  All three of the mine owners stared at the tribune blankly, and Julius realised that they hadn’t the first clue as to what he was talking about. Scaurus shook his head, muttering an imprecation at the absent procurator.

  ‘I see all of this means nothing to you. In which case I should inform you that this part of the empire is at war.’

  ‘With who?’ Lartius’s question was both loud and incredulous, his big dirty hands spread wide and his head shaking in disbelief. ‘The whole reason I took on this mine was because Procurator Maximus assured me that the Sarmatae were no longer any danger. He told me that the legions beat them all ends up, and sent most of their warrior strength to some shithole island on the other side of the empire to keep the savages there in their place. .’

 
He fell silent in the face of Scaurus’s knowing smile.

  ‘And that’s exactly what the histories will say. Victory coins were minted, the Blessed Marcus Aurelius took the name “Sarmaticus”, a triumph was held in Rome, and the Sarmatae were declared to be a broken threat. And yet here we are, getting ready to fight those same tribesmen once again. Will our efforts here ever be recorded for posterity?’ He shook his head with a smile. ‘Given that any formal war with the Sarmatae is not possible without undermining the glory of the current emperor’s recently deceased father, then whatever happens here will most likely be recorded as “a border dispute”. But trust me when I tell you that a man can die in a skirmish just as easily as in the course of a full-blooded war. These tribesmen mean business, which requires us to all be ready for them, if you value your own lives.’

  He looked across the silent crowd, judging his moment.

  ‘But ready for what, you ask? Let me show you.’

  He gestured to Julius, who in turn nodded to his chosen man. A quartet of soldiers led forward an aging mule, and the chosen man carefully pulled a red-painted arrow from the quiver taken from one of the dead Sarmatae, jabbing the jagged bone head deep into the animal’s flank. For a moment the beast’s reaction was no more than an indignant bray and a kicking struggle against the ropes securing it, but within a few heartbeats its demeanour changed abruptly. Emitting a high-pitched squeal of distress the animal staggered sideways, away from the chosen man, then sank to its knees, its eyes rolling as the poisonous mixture coated onto the arrow’s head took fuller effect. Collapsing to the ground it lay still, panting hard with a dribble of bloody foam running from its open mouth, and Julius had to force himself to keep watching as the beast twitched spasmodically. Scaurus reached out for the arrow, taking it from the chosen man with delicate care before raising it over his head for all present to see.