‘That, my friends, is the death that awaits us all if the Sarmatae reach this valley before we complete the fortifications needed to defend it. They combine snake venom with fresh cow dung to make a paste, age it for a while to allow the two to combine, then smear it onto bone arrowheads which soak up the mixture. My men have shields and armour, but you’re all completely unprotected, and so when they send showers of these over our defences it’ll mostly be you dying like that. You, and your families. Speaking of which, if you have women with you then you can be sure that they will be raped out of hand, and many of you men will probably suffer the same indignity. After which you will be put to work in the mines to quarry gold for your new masters.’
A man spoke out from the safety of the crowd’s anonymity.
‘Working the mines? What’s so terrible about that?’
Scaurus smiled at the shouted question.
‘Well for a start you’ll be unpaid, because they’ll have robbed the procurator’s strongroom of every coin. However little it is that you receive now, I’m sure it will be better than working for nothing. Then they’ll rob you of anything and everything of value. And you’ll be sharing your rations with twice your number of armed men who care nothing for your survival. Times will get lean very quickly and so, I expect, will all of you. But worst of all, don’t forget that any Sarmatae occupation can only be a temporary one, until two angry legions come marching up that road and drive them off, and they’ll know that all too well. They’ll work you day and night, driving you like animals to dig every last tiny piece of gold they can get out of these hills before that day. Many of you will die from exhaustion and for lack of enough food to support your exertions, and others will be executed simply to give the rest of you an example of what will happen if you slacken your work rate.’
He looked across the men gathered before him with a harsh expression.
‘By the time the legions manage to chase them off, the Sarmatae will have turned this valley into a charnel house, and all that will be left for the survivors when the legions free you, if the Sarmatae don’t slaughter you all as one last kick at the empire, will be to burn the rotting corpses of your fellow workers. I’d suggest that you think on it, but as you can see, I really don’t have time for this to be an exercise in persuasion. So, you will do exactly what you’re told, under the guidance of my soldiers, and any of you that feel like discovering what it feels like to be scourged will get their opportunity simply by stepping out of line. We have only a day or two to make this valley impregnable, which means there’s no time to be wasted. First Spear?’
Julius stepped forward, his gruff bark stiffening more than one back in the throng of miners.
‘My soldiers are going to build a turf wall right across this valley, with your assistance. It will be fifteen feet tall and fifteen feet deep at the base, with a fighting platform to the rear of the wall ten feet off the ground to allow my men to fight off attackers with their spears. Some of you will be cutting turf blocks, some of you will then carry them to the wall for laying by skilled builders, and we will work as long as we have enough light. The turfs weigh five pounds apiece, which doesn’t sound like much, but we’ll be laying about a million of them, so I think it’s safe to say that you’ve all got a full day ahead of you.’
At his command the waiting centurions stepped up to the mass of soldiers, detailing each of their men a party of ten miners to command. Scaurus, his lips pursed in speculation, watched Theodora walk away in the company of a pair of heavily built bruisers, whose role in life was clearly to ensure that she remained untroubled in a sea of sex-hungry labourers.
‘What do you think?’
Julius stared at the miners for a moment, seeing a combination of resentment and disgusted resignation in their eyes before answering Scaurus’s question with an amused expression.
‘What do I think, Tribune? Are you asking me about this rabble of work-shy tunnel rats, or the woman?’ He waited until Scaurus turned back to face him with a rueful grin. ‘I think they hate us marginally less than they fear the Sarmatae, which is only marginally less than they fear us. I think they’ll show us their arses when we march away, and piss in our water supply given half a chance. But I also think we’ll have a wall across the valley by nightfall tomorrow, and a few nasty little tricks up our sleeve besides. And that, Tribune, is all I really care about.’
He saluted and went off to join the officers marshalling their work gangs into some sort of order, leaving Scaurus staring out across the valley with a calculating gaze.
Left behind in the Tungrian camp when the centuries marched out about their various tasks, Lupus found himself alone for the first time in months. Knowing that the few remaining soldiers left to guard the camp would be of little entertainment, he took up his practice sword and shield and set about going through the set fighting routine that Arminius had taught him, and which he was expected to practise every morning and evening without fail. The boy was beginning to understand the German’s purpose in teaching him by means of the routine’s apparently endless repetition, as his wrists and ankles strengthened and his stamina improved to the point where he was no longer walking through the moves after an hour’s practice, but still fresh enough to perform in almost as sprightly a fashion as when he had begun. Stabbing and cutting at imaginary enemies, ducking and weaving in response to their attacks, he flowed from attack to defence and back again, building towards the routine’s final move, a stab to the front while thrusting his shield to the rear to deflect an attack from behind, followed by a lightning-fast spin and hack with the sword’s blade. Grunting with the effort as he made the penultimate attack, he spun into the routine’s last move only to find himself face-to-face with a slightly smaller boy whose eyes were wide at the sight of his gyrations. Surprised, he stepped back with the shield instinctively raised.
‘Who are you?’
The answer was instant, the younger child untroubled by their apparent age difference.
‘I’m Mus. What are you doing?’
Lupus frowned, thinking the answer altogether too obvious.
‘Practising. Arminius says practice makes perfect.’
‘Who’s Arminius?’
A proprietorial note entered Lupus’s voice.
‘My sword teacher. He’s German.’
‘Do you live with the soldiers?’
Lupus nodded, and Mus’s eyes misted over as he fought back tears.
‘My father used to be a soldier. Some bad men killed him and burned down our village. They hurt my mother and my sisters. And they killed my brothers. .’
Lupus responded solemnly, his own father’s death suddenly raw, as if the younger boy’s revelation had ripped away a long-hardened layer of scar tissue.
‘My father was killed by barbarians too. I live with my granddad now, but Arminius looks after me most of all.’
The two boys were silent for a moment, before Mus spoke again, wiping away a tear that was trickling down his cheek with the briskness of a child who had quickly learned there was little to be gained from crying.
‘I don’t have any family left, so I work in the mine, but there’s no digging allowed today or the miners get whipped. I went to help build the wall, but the soldier said I was too small to help, so I just thought I’d have a look around here.’
Lupus shook his head.
‘You shouldn’t be here. If the soldiers catch you they’ll probably whip you.’
Mus’s eyes widened.
‘You won’t tell them, will you?’
Lupus thought for a moment.
‘No.’ He eyed the boy with a calculating glance. ‘Not if we’re going to be friends.’
‘Friends? I don’t have any friends. The miners are alright, but they curse at me when I get in the way in the mine, and sometimes even when I don’t I put oil in the lamps to keep the passages lit, and I know every passage there is. I even know some that the miners have forgotten about.’ He looked at Lupus with a sideways glance
, as if he were weighing the other boy up. ‘Do you want to see?’
‘My word. .’
Tribune Scaurus stood in the strongroom’s lamplight and looked at the wooden boxes stacked neatly against the far wall.
‘Every box contains fifty pounds of gold, and we currently have. .’ Maximus paused for a moment to consult his tablet, ‘forty-three boxes, or two thousand, one hundred and fifty pounds. We fill two boxes a day, on average, and we can accommodate six months of production without any problem, so as you can see there’s no immediate need to send a shipment to Rome given the risk of it being intercepted by the barbarians.’
Julius walked across the small room and put a hand on one of the boxes, grinning at the look of discomfort that slid across the procurator’s face.
‘So if there’s a quarter of an ounce of gold in an aurei, each of these boxes contains enough to mint over three thousand coins. Which makes the contents of this strongroom worth. .’
The first spear frowned as he did the calculation, but Maximus was ready for him.
‘Worth almost one hundred and forty thousand aurei, First Spear.’
Scaurus nodded with pursed lips, turning back to face the procurator.
‘Enough gold to qualify a man for the senate a dozen times over must be enough of a temptation in peace time, never mind now. No wonder the Sarmatae are marching on this valley. .’ He stood and looked at the boxes for a moment. ‘Of course, it can’t stay here.’
Maximus’s reaction was faster and more shocked than he’d expected.
‘What do you mean “it can’t stay here”? Do you doubt my trustworthiness, Tribune?’
Scaurus raised an eyebrow to Julius and turned to face the indignant official.
‘What I doubt, Procurator, is your ability to hold on to this rather large fortune in the event that the Sarmatae manage to breach our rather hastily laid defences. Surely you’d sleep better knowing that the gold is hidden away somewhere it’ll never be found? We could move it at night, and-’
‘Out of the question.’ Maximus’s face was stony, and the Tungrian officers shared a glance at the finality in his voice. ‘The gold stays here, and you’ll just have to do your job and make sure the barbarians don’t come anywhere near it. And now that you’ve seen the arrangements by which I keep the emperor’s gold secure, I trust you have no other cause for concern?’
‘No other cause for concern at all, Procurator. You have adequate guarding in place, the keys to this room are evidently well controlled, and this place can clearly only be entered by means of the door.’ He gestured to the massive iron-studded slab of oak that filled the room’s only doorway. ‘But it’s not theft that concerns me half as much as what happens if we all end up face down in the mud, and the Sarmatae have the time to break in here at their leisure.’
Maximus shook his head again, and both men could see from his expression that he would remain obdurately opposed to any talk of relocating the strongroom’s contents to a secret location.
‘So do your job, Tribune. And let me warn you, I’ve spoken with your colleague and superior Domitius Belletor, and warned him that I won’t tolerate any more interference in the workings of this facility like this morning. Once that wall of yours is built, my men will go back to work and they will stay there.’ He smiled thinly at the Tungrians. ‘I pointed out to him that it didn’t seem to me as if the idea to stop mining had actually been his in the first place, and that the lost production would certainly look bad for someone when this is all done with.’
Scaurus stepped close to him, resting a hand on the hilt of his sword in a gesture whose casual nature was belied by the hard look on his face.
‘Divide and rule, Procurator? How very astute of you. I should be careful though, or you might end up rueing the day that you made your opposition to putting this fortune out of temptation’s way quite so clear to us. If the Sarmatae do manage to defeat us, then when they break in here they’re more than likely to find one last defender waiting for them.’ He put a finger in the other man’s face. ‘You. And I won’t be asking for Domitius Belletor’s permission before I lock you in here to wait for them. Come along First Spear.’
Maximus flushed red as they brushed past him, his voice echoing up the steps that led back up into the daylight.
‘Are you threatening me, Tribune?’
Scaurus barked a single word over his shoulder and kept walking.
‘Yes!’
‘This is my mine. Raven Head.’
Still breathing hard from the climb that had brought them a third of the way up the mountainside, Mus gestured proudly to the massive rock that loomed over the mine’s entrance, the peak’s beak-like overhang giving it the dark silhouette of a carrion bird against the clear blue of the sky above. A hole opened in the mountainside before the two boys, heavy wooden props to either side of the black space supporting a massive cross-beam above the entrance. Lupus stared dubiously at the black square, shaking his head slightly.
‘It’s dark.’
The smaller boy smiled, stepping forward to the mine’s threshold.
‘It’s better once you’re inside. Your eyes adjust, and there are lamps too. Come on, let’s go and have a look around.’ He reached for a jar of lamp oil from a stack by the open doorway and then walked into the darkness, disappearing from view as if he had been wiped away, although when Lupus strained his eyes he caught the barest shadow of his new friend waiting for him in the gloom. Summoning up his courage he forced himself to walk into the blackness, advancing in small steps until, with a start, he found himself beside Mus, the younger child’s eyes gleaming with the light from the doorway’s pale rectangle. When he spoke the boy’s voice was no more than a whisper.
‘See, it’s no different from being out there.’
Lupus shivered.
‘It’s cold.’
‘That’s why I said to fetch your cloak. It’s colder when you get deeper into the mountain.’
Mus reached out with fingers made expert by long practice and found a lamp in a small alcove.
‘Here we are.’
He fiddled in the darkness for a moment, then Lupus heard the familiar sound of iron and flint. Blowing gently on the sparks that flew onto the lamp’s wick Mus coaxed a flame to life, bringing a meagre but to Lupus’s eyes very welcome light to the darkness. Standing with the lamp in his hand the younger boy grinned happily at his new friend.
‘Come on, I’ll show you round.’
He turned and padded away into the darkness, his small body framed in the lamp’s pale light, leaving Lupus staring at his receding figure. Turning back to the mine’s entrance, he was momentarily gripped with an instinctive need to run for the rectangle of daylight, but knew in his heart that doing so would not only expose him to the younger boy’s derision but that some part of him would be dissatisfied with the choice to retreat in the face of his fear. Still troubled by the darkness around them, he paced forward in Mus’s wake, concentrating on not losing sight of the boy’s back. The passage walls, dimly illuminated for a few feet on either side, were rough, snagging at his fingers as he reached out for their reassuring touch, and the floor was damp and uneven beneath his boots as it sloped gently up into the mountain. Even the faintest of sounds were magnified by the tunnel’s echoes, each scrape of the boys’ boots sounding like a dozen footfalls. The pair walked in silence down the passage for long enough to reduce the entrance to a distant speck of light, and to Lupus’s surprise he found his initial panic increasingly forgotten as the means of its relief receded gradually from view.
‘Here we are, here’s the first ladder.’
Lupus frowned, looking at the wooden ladders that ran both upwards and downwards from the spot, unable to see where they led to.
‘We have to climb?’
Mus turned back to him, perhaps sensing the uncertainty in his voice.
‘We have to go down to reach the place where they mine the gold. Don’t worry, it’s safe as long as you only move on
e hand or foot at a time, at least until you get used to it.’
‘But you’re carrying the lamp?’
‘Don’t worry, I can climb the ladders one-handed. Here, you go first.’
Suitably reassured, Lupus climbed gingerly onto the ladder and started down with slow, cautious movements, quickly gaining enough confidence to speed up his pace to what seemed like a breakneck descent.
‘Good, just take it nice and steady, and don’t look. .’
The other boy’s sentence was still incomplete when Lupus found himself compelled to stare down into the darkness. He stopped and hung from the ladder’s rungs, an abrupt and irresistible terror gripping him as he realised that he had no idea what depth of empty air waited beneath his feet. Mus spoke to him from above his head, bringing the lamp close to his face to reveal a reassuring smile as Lupus looked up at him.
‘It’s not far now, just climb down slowly and be ready for your foot to reach the ground. Trust me.’ Screwing up his nerve, Lupus lowered one foot to the next rung down, waiting for a moment with sweat running down his face before moving the other. ‘Good! Keep going, we can get a drink of water when we get down.’
Lupus climbed down another dozen rungs before his foot touched rock, and he staggered away from the ladder as Mus alighted gracefully behind him. The boy took him by the arm and led him to a channel cut into the floor.
‘See, water. Have a drink, we’ve a little way to go yet.’
They drank from cupped hands, and Lupus found the ice-cold water refreshing and clean to the taste.
‘Where does it come from?’
Mus grinned back at him in the half-light.
‘Come down another ladder with me and I’ll show you. And where the gold comes from.’
Marcus walked up to his tribune and saluted smartly, repeating the gesture for Tribune Sigilis’s benefit but giving his attention to Scaurus and thereby turning his face away from the younger man as much as possible. The two men were standing by the wall’s only opening, a ten-pace-wide gap in the centre of the rampart’s eight-hundred-pace length into which a heavy wooden gate was to be set before being backed with enough turf to make it a temporarily immovable part of the defences. They were looking along the line of the planned fortification, and Sigilis was gesturing along the shallow wall with an enthusiasm that the young centurion found surprising given his previous reserve, and his apparent contentment to stay in Tribune Belletor’s shadow.
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