been chilling enough: Their favourite method of passing the time with a prisoner is to flay him alive and then impale him on the branch of a thorn tree. The reality was fit to drive a man to madness. Festus’s eyeballs danced in his skull like white beads in a jar. As well as his skin, his Dacian torturers had removed his lips, his eyelids, his nose and any other useful protrusions. He was no longer a human being, but a mess of blood and tissue wriggling obscenely on a four-foot stake. Valerius wondered why he hadn’t mercifully bled to death until he noticed that the gaping wound where his genitals had hung had been stuffed with earth to stop the bleeding and prolong his agony.
‘I’ll do it,’ the Spaniard said. Serpentius dismounted and approached the shivering horror that had once been a man. With a short prayer and a single, almost tender stroke of his sword, he sliced through the vertebrae at the base of Festus’s neck. The Tungrian’s head flopped forward and his body went still. After that they rode on in silence, each man alert for the first sign of danger and at the same time alone with his thoughts and fears.
It was Marcus who heard the shouts, away to their left. The survivors of the cavalry patrol must have believed they’d reached the relative safety of the plain when they were caught. From a nearby ridge Valerius saw immediately that their surviving leader had chosen to go to ground rather than fight his way out. It had been a mistake. Now the patrol was surrounded on three sides of a bare hilltop by a jeering horde of Dacians who danced among the trees and darted out to hurl spears, scream insults and no doubt threaten them with the same fate as Festus. The only thing keeping them at bay was the wall of cavalry spears the Tungrians had set up on the approaches to the hill, which backed on to a sheer cliff face. The Dacians seemed in no hurry, but how long that would last only the gods knew. At least the auxiliaries still had their horses, hobbled together in a shallow dish at the base of the cliff.
He slithered back to where the others waited. ‘What now?’ Marcus whispered.
Valerius looked at each of them in turn. He had brought them to this. They owed him nothing. They owed Rome nothing. ‘Take Publius Sulla’s body. Once you’re out of the hills, keep riding west and you’ll arrive at the river. Just follow it upstream until you reach the bridge.’
‘What about you?’ Serpentius asked.
The question had only one answer. ‘I’m a Roman soldier. I can’t leave other Roman soldiers to die, not even these bastards.’
Serpentius and Marcus exchanged a glance of agreement. ‘This uniform says I’m a Roman soldier too,’ the Spaniard said. ‘Even if I’m not happy about it. Besides, if you get killed who’s going to pay us?’
‘And you, Heracles?’
‘If it wasn’t for you I would probably already be dead.’
‘Then this is what we will do.’
XXIV
Valerius looked out from the cliff top into the black void below. A ring of Dacian fires blazed around the hill where the Tungrians were trapped, but they shed no light on the perilous descent he was about to attempt. He’d studied the cliff face while there was still daylight and thought he’d chosen the safest route, but now, seventy feet above the sheer drop, he was almost unnerved by niggling uncertainty. What if he reached a point where there were no holds? What if he became trapped until the power in his fingers faded and he plunged on to the rocks below? But there was no point in delaying. He allowed himself to slip backwards over the cliff edge, his feet searching for the first toehold. He was barefoot, the better to find the tiny cracks and hollows that would support him on the descent. The face of the cliff was composed of curious honeycombed rock which provided plenty in the way of hand- and footholds, but the stone was soft so he had to test each one to ensure it would take his weight. There would be no second chances. Just one mistake and he’d end up smeared over the valley floor and that wouldn’t do the auxiliaries any good at all.
When he’d explained his plan Marcus had stared at him as if he had lost his mind. ‘A one-handed man climbing down a sheer cliff in pitch darkness? It is beyond foolishness. You are committing suicide. Let me try.’
Valerius shook his head and continued unbuckling his armour with Serpentius’s help. ‘How many cliffs did you climb in all your years in Rome, old man?’ He saw Marcus flinch at the reference to his age and smiled to take the edge off the jibe. ‘You could do it, Marcus, so could Serpentius, but only I can do what needs to be done when I reach the bottom. They are soldiers, and they will only be led by another soldier.’
‘But your hand…’
‘When I searched the cliffs on my father’s estate for pigeon eggs, I often had to climb down single-handed. If anything this is simpler.’
Which was easy to say, but, now that he put it into practice, not so easy to do. It was true that he’d climbed one-handed, but he’d always carried the eggs in his left hand and he’d had the option of dropping them if he got into trouble. Now, he edged his way downwards in the certain knowledge that if the fingers of his left hand lost their grip nothing would save him. He was sweating heavily, and not because of the warmth of the night. Yet the further he descended, the more confident he became. He might only have a single hand, but it had gripped a sword every day for the past six years. The skin had the texture of part-cured leather and the fingers the strength of an iron claw. The walnut fist of his right hand could be used to jam into cracks in the rock, and, even where there were none, to steady and balance himself. At first he clung close to the surface, but gradually he became more confident as his bare feet unerringly found one toehold after another.
He was a third of the way down when his boldness betrayed him.
Valerius knew he’d made a mistake the moment he allowed his weight to settle on the outcrop beneath his left foot. The soft rock crumbled just as his left hand loosed the grip that anchored him to the face. He felt himself falling away and flailed desperately at the rock for some kind of hold. The cliff flashed past his face and he knew he was dead.
He would never understand how he did it. As he fell, his momentum took him in a half-turn away from the wall of rock, which was now out of reach of his left hand. Yet, somehow, he managed to lunge forward with his right. A jagged slash of pain tore at him as the walnut fist jammed into a narrow cleft and the leather strings binding the socket sliced into his flesh, driven by the entire weight of his body. A heartbeat later even that agony was overwhelmed by a sickening jerk that threatened to pull his arm from its socket. He bit his lip to stop himself from crying out and for a few awful moments hung suspended, praying the cowhide would hold him. Gradually, panic receded and he was able to reach out with his sound hand and pull himself back to the rock face. Once there, he drew himself upwards to take the weight off his arm and managed to unjam the wooden hand from the fissure. He spent the next minute clinging to the face, frozen by a combination of shock and pain, but eventually he willed himself to resume the descent.
When he reached the base of the cliff he crouched for a few moments in the darkness, attempting to get a sense of his surroundings. Ahead, he could see the hilltop silhouetted in the glow of the Dacian fires. The soft snicker of a cavalry mount confirmed that the horses were picketed somewhere to his right. But had the Tungrians set a guard? That was the next hurdle. To make himself known without getting a spear in the throat. He ghosted his way past the tethered horses. If they were watched, the sentry must be asleep because he saw no sign of him. On the brow of the hill prone figures lay scattered like odd-shaped rocks, the only sign of life the almost imperceptible movement of their breathing and the occasional animal whimper. He chose a shape on the outer edge of the group and drew the dagger he’d carried at his belt.
‘Careful, soldier,’ he whispered as he placed the point beneath the sleeping auxiliary’s chin. A pair of dark eyes flicked open and the man’s mouth gaped, before immediately closing as Valerius increased the pressure. Valerius nodded slowly and allowed himself a smile. ‘I want you to call whoever is in command. Do it in a normal voice and ask him to come over. Nod if you understand.’ Valerius lifted the knife point and the Tungrian complied. By now puzzlement had replaced the fear in his eyes. ‘Good. Now say it.’
‘Lucca?’ The call was hesitant, but loud enough to elicit an ill-tempered response.
‘What the fuck do you want, Fabius? If you haven’t thought of a way to get us out of here go back to sleep.’
‘Please, I need to talk to you.’
‘I hope it’s not what I think it is,’ the auxiliary grumbled. ‘Bad enough we’re all going to die tomorrow without
