Furius lay helpless under the centurion’s booted foot, but his snarled response was anything but.
‘You won’t dare bring me to justice, Centurion, I know things that you can’t afford to have made public!’
The boot pinning him to the floor pushed down harder, Julius turning to his brother centurion.
‘Go on; get whoever that is lying outside sorted out.’
Rufius sheathed his sword, leaving the room and allowing Martos through the door to get his first glimpse of the prostrate Furius. Julius bent and took a handful of Furius’s hair, pulling his head off the floor despite the foot pinning his neck.
‘Go on, then, let’s hear these things we don’t want to be known.’
Furius spat his frustration into the words, half choked by the position the angry centurion had forced him into.
‘Your centurion… the boy with the… unconvincing name… I know he’s a fugitive… and that you’re all… hiding him.’ He paused, swallowing painfully. ‘You put me on display… and I’ll shout that so long and loud… the gods will hear it.’
Julius laughed, wrenching the helpless man’s head to one side so that he could see the centurion standing over him.
‘Very good, ex-Prefect. You’ve just earned yourself a private death.’ He pulled a dagger from his belt, putting the blade close to Furius’s face. ‘I might blind you first, and then we’ll truss you up and take you out into the woods. I fancy staking you out and leaving you for the animals to find you…’
Disquietingly, the former officer laughed back at him in spite of his discomfort.
‘That would be… brave of you… No, I mean it!’
Julius had pulled his head back farther, threatening to finish the job of choking him to death, and he exchanged an uneasy glance with Martos.
‘Brave, eh?’
‘Yes… anything that brings… the corn officers… will bring your lies… crashing down… expose the fugitive… crush you all.’
Martos tapped Julius on the shoulder.
‘I think that what’s needed here is for this man to die an unremarkable death. Something to arouse no suspicion, perhaps?’
Julius nodded, raising an eyebrow.
‘And you know how to make this happen?’
The Briton nodded, pulling the drinking horn from his belt and pointing to their captive’s bare backside. Julius frowned uncomprehendingly.
‘We’re going to bugger him to death with a drinking horn?’
Martos shook his head, raising a hand to forestall any more questions.
‘I’ll be back in a moment.’ He leaned in closer, bending to slap Furius’s ear hard enough to provoke a howl of rage that covered his brief whisper to the centurion. ‘Make him believe he’s won. He mustn’t struggle for the next few minutes; we want no marks on his body. Just do one thing for me while I’m gone…’
Having explained what he wanted, he left the office and went to the surgery, looking around for the tool he wanted. Finding a suitably robust bone saw he worked swiftly, cutting off the last inch of the horn’s tip to reveal a hole as wide as his middle finger.
‘Perfect.’
He pocketed the horn’s tip, and then went in search of the other centurions. He found them both in the main ward, watching as the doctor, dressed in a spare tunic and apparently recovered from her ordeal, fussed over the young man they had found unconscious in the corridor.
‘He seems to have nothing worse than a slight concussion. Poor man, I thought that animal had managed to do what the barbarian archers had failed to achieve.’
She looked up as Martos approached the small group. He nodded to her, speaking to the two centurions.
‘Brothers, I need your help with our prisoner.’
Rufius and Marcus followed the Briton to the office door, where he stopped them and spoke quickly, showing them the horn and explaining what he proposed. All three men crowded into the office, almost filling the small room with their bulk. Julius gave them an exasperated stare, while Furius, hearing the rapping of boot nails on the stone floor, renewed his harangue of his captors.
‘Just surrender to the inevitable, you fools! Release me now and I may choose to overlook this stupidity. Hold me here any longer and I’ll insist on fucking the doctor’s lovely tight arse as part of the deal!’
Julius stared down at the prone figure, clearly at the end of his patience with the man’s imprecations.
‘Whatever it is you have in mind, Martos, could we just get on with it?’
Martos nodded, showing him the truncated horn with raised eyebrows. After a second the realisation dawned on the centurion, and a slow smile spread across his face.
‘Very well, Prefect Furius, I suppose you’re right. You two, unbind his wrists.’
Marcus and Rufius unfastened the belt tying Furius’s arms, but rather than allowing him up as he expected, they each pinned an arm to the floor, spreadeagling him across the stone while Julius deftly wrapped a powerful arm around his legs, preventing him from kicking out. With his neck no longer under Julius’s boot the disgraced officer craned his head round in amazement.
‘What?! Free me now, or you’ll leave me no option but to…’
He went quiet as Martos squatted down by his head, showing him the ruined drinking horn.
‘This was my father’s, and his father’s before him. I don’t appreciate having to destroy it for the sake of a piece of shit like you, but I have. A man that will attack a woman like that, one of his own people, does not deserve either to live or to leave this life quietly. And so…’
He picked up Felicia’s undergarment from the floor where the disgraced officer had discarded it in his haste to violate the helpless woman. Wadding the linen into a ball he slapped the man’s ear again, then deftly pushed the gag into his mouth as he opened it to bellow another protest.
‘Make the most of that, it’s the last contact with a woman you’ll have in this life.’
He joined Julius, taking a strong grip of one of Furius’s legs. The two men nodded to each other, pulling the man’s legs apart and revealing the Roman’s genitals and his puckered anus. Moving quickly, the Briton pushed the tapered end of the horn into Furius’s rectum, ignoring the muffled protests the helpless captive was now making.
‘Hold this.’
Passing the leg he was gripping to Julius, who flexed his powerful shoulders to hold the limbs in place despite Furius’s increasingly desperate struggles, he picked up the remnants of the doctor’s torn tunic and wrapped it round his hand before reaching for the poker, whose blade Julius had plunged deep into the fire’s coals moments before. Regarding the red-hot metal critically, he pushed it deep into the fire again, stirring up the coals for maximum heat.
‘Well, Roman, it seems we have a moment or two to kill, so I’ll tell you a story.’
Furius goggled at him, his eyes bulging in disbelief.
‘You will probably have heard it before, it’s as old as the hills themselves, but that’s no reason not to spend a moment telling it again. There was once, my grandmother told me when I was very young, a snake whose delight was to bite and kill other creatures, even those — or perhaps especially those — it could not eat. The other beasts of the forest hated and feared the snake in equal measure, since it killed simply to enjoy the sensation. One day, at the height of summer, there was a fire in the forest, and the flames leapt from tree to tree faster than the snake could slither. The snake was afraid of being burned to death, but just when all seemed lost he saw a fox, an intelligent and wily animal, running towards him, for foxes, as I am sure you know, can run fast enough to outpace a forest fire, and for many miles too.
‘So, he called to the fox and begged it to carry him away to safety. The fox, of course, was unimpressed with the request. He knew of this particular snake’s reputation, and he feared that to carry the snake on his back would be his death sentence, but the snake had one powerful argument that he knew would sway the fox. “If I bite you,” he reasoned,
“I will burn to death when I fall from your back. Why would I do such a stupid thing?” And so the fox agreed to carry the snake to a safe distance from the fire in return for the reptile’s future favour.
‘Of course, halfway across the forest, where the trees were at their thickest and the fire threatened to overtake them, the snake suddenly sank his fangs into the fox’s neck and delivered a dose of poison that was sure to kill him in seconds. As the fox was struggling in his death agonies, with his sight going dim and his ancestors calling him to join them, and as the fire started to rage around them, he raised himself up with one last mighty effort, and asked the terrified snake the obvious question: “Why have you killed me, when it means your own death?” And the snake, sliding off his back and into the flames that would burn him to death, hissed the answer with fear and shame, but with the certainty of truth. And do you know what he said?’
The Briton gave the gagged Roman a moment to respond. Furius stared at him mutely, his eyes filled with hate.
‘No? What he said was simply this: “I can’t help it. It is in my nature.”’
‘By now, of course, you will have guessed why I have taken this time to tell you this story, apart from the fact the poker needed a little more time to be hot enough for my purposes. You, although I have not known you for very long, clearly have the same lust for death and suffering as the snake in my story. You are a man who is dangerous to all around you, and you will remain so for as long as you live. Some people would be filled with curiosity as to what can lead a man to become so debased, but I am of a more practical mind. I simply want to put you out of this misery you call a life without your evil leading to any more death. And now, it seems that the means of delivering you to Hades without springing these traps of which you speak is ready.’
He hefted the white-hot poker in front of the Roman’s face, watching a bead of sweat trickle down the man’s forehead, then moved to where the horn protruded from between his legs.
‘Brace yourselves, he’s going to struggle with the strength of a bear once this starts.’
He slid the poker into the horn’s conical opening, the smell of burning filling the air as the hot metal seared its interior, then pushed the metal forcefully through its tip and into the prostrate man’s body. Without the gag Furius’s anguished screams would have woken the entire camp, and his body thrashed across the floor despite the four men fighting to hold him down as the hot metal blade tore through his internal organs. With one last massive shudder the dying man sagged lifelessly to the stone floor, his eyes suddenly glassy and empty of life. Martos withdrew the poker, filling the room with the stench of buring offal, then pushed it back into the fire to burn off the residue of Furius’s organs clinging to its surface, and tossed the ruined drinking horn on to the coals. Julius stared down at the body, shaking his head in wonder.
‘The perfect murder. No signs on the victim’s body, and no trace of the means of death. Get him dressed, brothers.’
Tribune Licinius, summoned from the bed into which he had just gratefully slumped, took one look at Furius’s corpse laid out on the operating table in his boots and tunic and called for the doctor.
‘What can you tell me about this, my dear? I’ll have to explain this to more than one very senior officer and I’d like to get my story straight before the questions begin.’
If he noticed the tense air in the room he chose to ignore it, waiting for Felicia to make her reply.
‘He had come to see his men. He was talking to me in my office when he collapsed without any warning, clutching his chest and shouting with the pain, then passed out. I couldn’t find a pulse, so I called for the officers here to help me.’
‘And all of you saw this?’
Julius answered for the three of them.
‘Not really, Tribune. We were having a quiet look at our brother officer when we heard the prefect here hit the floor, and then the doctor called for help. He was as limp as a rag when we picked him up to put him on the table.’
‘You knew that he’d been relieved of command?’
‘Yes, sir, our first spear told us about it. We just thought the prefect might have seen the error of his ways and come to visit his wounded…’
‘Hmmm. And not a mark on him, eh, Doctor?’
Felicia looked him square in the eye.
‘Not that I could find, Tribune Licinius, not a cut, nor a bruise of any significance. You’re welcome to have a look yourself, if you like?’
Licinius’s eyes narrowed, and he sniffed the room’s air ostentatiously, raising an eyebrow at windows opened wide despite the night air’s chill.
‘No need, Doctor; you’re the expert here. But that’s a nasty bruise you’ve got coming up round your left eye.’
Felicia stared straight back at him, her eyes suddenly glassy with barely restrained tears and her answer delivered in a quavering voice.
‘A patient managed to get his arm free during surgery, Prefect. It happens sometimes, and he managed to catch me a nasty blow on the face before he could be restrained. I’ll live.’
The tribune’s face softened.
‘I’m sorry, my dear, if I’d known there was a risk of any such thing happening I would have made sure he was restrained more effectively. And you, gentlemen…’
The centurions waited stiffly, pondering their fate while the senior officer paced around the table to stand close to them, speaking in a low voice that was intended for their ears alone.
‘I have no idea how you managed to achieve this, but given what I am guessing has happened here, I’m mightily relieved that this is such an obvious case of death by natural causes.’ He cocked an eyebrow at Frontinius and Scaurus, waiting silently to one side. ‘And now, gentlemen, since we’re kept from our beds by this unfortunate occurrence, we might as well go and get a cup of wine. I’ll drink to your promotion and to this fool’s timely demise in equal measure.’
The two cohorts paraded at dawn that morning, fifteen hundred infantrymen cursing the thought of another long day’s hard marching. Morban nudged Qadir in the ribs, tipping his head towards the Petriana wing as they clattered past the parade ground, heading for the road north and their main task for the day, hunting for any barbarian ambush.
‘They won’t be sweating all bloody day like we will, they’ll be sat nice and comfy on their bloody horses giving the bushes an occasional poke with their spears.’
The Hamian shrugged, muttering his response so quietly that only Morban could hear it.
‘If you can’t take a joke, Standard-bearer, you should not have joined the army in the first place.’
Morban gave him a dirty look.
‘All you need to do is learn to swear and you’ll be nicely positioned for a vine stick when the next one dies…’
He withered under Marcus’s stare as the young centurion turned and glared at him. Qadir looked down his nose at him, shaking his head almost imperceptibly.
‘Not so clever. Not with his friend still in the camp hospital.’
Morban nodded glumly, watching as Scaurus strode out on to the parade ground with Frontinius and Neuto flanking him to either side.
‘Tungrians, hear me! By the command of Ulpius Marcellus, governor of this province, I have been appointed to the command of both the First and Second Tungrian cohorts, with the rank of cohort tribune…’ The parade ground was suddenly deathly quiet, as the much-anticipated news became reality. Scaurus continued, walking slowly across the gravel with both hands on his hips. ‘For the time being nothing changes. Your officers before this announcement are still your officers now. I will, however, be reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of both cohorts, and making selective changes where I and my first spears feel they are required.’
The new tribune stopped speaking and stared across the ranks of his command, allowing time for the last sentence to sink in before speaking again.
‘We march north now to rejoin the legions, and I expect that once again we’ll have a front-row seat wh
en the time comes to finish this war by finding and destroying the enemy. With that in mind, and given the price paid in blood by the First Cohort’s Eighth Century, I have decided to release the remainder of that century to serve with the First Hamian cohort, who are currently manning this fort. Centurion Corvus will command the Ninth Century while their officer is recovering from his wound, and the First Cohort will carry the Eighth as an empty century until sufficient reinforcements are received to reconstitute it. So, I call upon our Hamian brothers to come forward and accept your acclamation before we march north…’
Marcus walked from his place in front of the 8th to one end of their short line, beckoning Morban and the trumpeter to join him behind the archers. Extending an arm to Qadir, he shook his chosen man’s hand before pointing to the waiting tribune.
‘Just march them over to Tribune Scaurus. He’ll probably want to shake your hand, and then I’d imagine he’ll appoint you centurion before the Hamian prefect gets his hands on your men. I’d say you’ve earned it.’
The chosen man stared at him in amazement.
‘Centurion?’
Marcus nodded, a smile creasing his face.
‘Yes. If Scaurus appoints you now, then rather than your reverting to temporary status you’ll get to keep the position. No matter how many other good candidates the Hamian prefect might have queued up for the job. Once your wounded have recovered you’ll have a good-sized century to chase around the hills.’
Qadir’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly.
‘I do not…’
‘Know what to say? The words ‘thank you, Tribune’ will make a good start. And he’s still waiting for you, so I suggest you get your men out there and take what you’ve earned.’
The Hamian nodded, ordering his men to march forward to the spot where the tribune was waiting. Marcus watched as he stepped through their line and snapped off a smart salute to Scaurus, then took the offered hand and shook it, all the while apparently speaking to the tribune rather than allowing him a chance to say the words he had prepared for the occasion.
Arrows of Fury e-2 Page 37
