“Some bad things have happened to me recently,” said Varro in his happy tone, “and this is really beginning to lighten my day. In fact, I daresay the longer you hold out, the happier I’ll get!”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about!” The man hanging from the tree finally became aware that he was cold and struggled to lift his head enough to see his body. He was naked. “What are you doing with me?”
“Oh, the naked part? That’s entirely unnecessary and gratuitous, I’m afraid” Varro laughed. “I just wanted to humiliate you a little. Now tell me who you are.”
“My name’s Marco. I’m a smith from…”
He was interrupted with another sharp thwack from Varro’s switch and yelped again. A sore red line crossed his chest. Varro leaned forward grinning.
“You can skip the most blindingly obvious lies. I can’t remember your name but I think it starts with an ‘a’. I know you’re in the prefect’s guard and I know you have appalling luck at dice. How’s about you come clean, or do I get to have more fun?”
The man coughed, shaking on his tether.
“Ok, I’m one of Cristus’ guard. And yes, my name’s Adana. We were sent by the prefect to keep an eye on you. Rumours have reached him that you’re on to something important and he sent us to protect you.”
“Indeed.” Varro grinned and gave a sharp flick of his switch, leaving a nasty line across the man’s hip. “Damn. I was aiming for somewhere delicate there but you moved.”
“Hey!” the man shouted in pained panic.
“Come on” cajoled Varro. “You haven’t even asked about your provost companion who you know damn well I left dead back in that barn. We’re not stupid, Adana. Just irritable and armed!”
He gave another swipe, this time across the buttocks and much harder than before. The switch came back down by his side glistening and a drip of blood dropped from the end to the dirt. The man shrieked.
“I’ve got so much more energy in my arm,” grinned Varro, “I could go on like this for hours.”
Catilina stepped into view.
“Varro, you may be having fun, but that’s all. He’s a professional soldier, like you. And a good one, if he made it to the prefect’s guard. You need to step this up.”
Varro raised an eyebrow. Catilina cleared her throat.
“Adana, tell us where the other two are.”
The dangling man frowned. “Other two?”
With a sigh, Catilina crouched down by the undergrowth at the side of the road and broke off a length of sharp, woody plant stem. With a look of concentration, she gritted her teeth and broke the foot-long stem into three pieces. Reaching down under the bemused gaze of Varro and Salonius, she retrieved Varro’s belt knife and used it to cut the ends of the three pieces at an angle. As she sheathed the knife again, she shrugged.
“My father made it a rule at Vengen that all ladies needed to be taught how to defend themselves, given the fact that there are such a large number of off-duty soldiers there at any given time, and not all of them are gentlemen. I watched the first class and decided that being able to trip someone up and bite them wasn’t good enough. I asked my father’s adjutant, Captain Cialo, and he and Mercurias came up with a diagram of what they called pressure points. It’s quite fascinating, really.”
Catilina held two of the sticks in her left hand and grasped the other tightly in her right. Slowly, she turned the hanging man so that he was facing away from then and crouched down. With one slender, immaculately manicured finger, she traced the line of muscle running from below his ear to his shoulder. Almost teasingly, she stopped half way along and drew a line inwards towards his spine with her nail. A couple of inches in, she stopped, and with a forceful thrust, pushed the sharpened end of stem into the man’s muscle. He screamed and jerked around on his rope like a fish on a line.
Salonius’ eyes widened and Varro grinned, as the blood started to run in a slow stream down along his neck and into his hair, Catilina gave the end of the stem, sticking out of the flesh, a little tap and then turned him back to face them. The man’s eyes were scrunched up tight, tears streaming up his face.
The elegant lady smiled at him.
“Adana, I would very highly recommend you start answering Varro’s questions. There are more than a hundred pressure points. I can only remember thirty or so, and we’ll run out of points before we run out of sticks, but you really don’t want to get that far.”
The man shook his head defiantly, his mouth clamped shut and his eyes closed tight.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, soldier.”
She turned to Varro. “Care to have a go?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” he replied lightly. “Where next?”
She spun the dangling figure round again and pointed to a spot on the back of the man’s leg, just above the knee. “That’s a good one.”
Varro nodded, stepped forward and drove the stick in to that spot, point first. The man screamed again.
As Varro turned him around once more and stepped back, he held out the third stick.
“Salonius?”
“Thank you, but I won’t. Fascinating to watch though.”
Catilina grasped it.
“Time to stop giving him time to breathe and recover. Salonius, cut some more sticks.”
She stepped forward and used her fingers to locate a point next to the tendon above the man’s heel. Pausing only long enough to take a breath, she drove the stick in, accompanied by new shrieks of pain.
As she returned to Varro’s side, she smiled at the weeping soldier.
“Salonius: hurry up with those sticks, I’m getting bored.”
Varro gave her a sidelong glance.
“You can be a frightening woman, Catilina.”
She shrugged. “No one stirs up trouble for my father. And no one hurts my friends.”
She grasped the switch and ripped it out of his hand. Varro momentarily saw the tear trickle down her cheek before she stepped forward and began lashing the man repeatedly with the green rod, causing lines and welts and streams of blood to pour down the man’s chest and into his face. It took a few moments to realise that the man was babbling in a panicked voice, amid sobs and the repeated smacks of the rapidly-disintegrating cane.
“Salonius!”
The young man looked up at Varro and saw Catilina thrashing wildly at the man. As Varro stepped forward, grasped the switch and gently, but forcefully removed it from her hand, he turned and led her away, across the grass. Salonius walked over to the babbling man and, crouching down, began to talk to him, all the while grasping a few more sharpened sticks as incentive.
Varro turned Catilina to face him and threw his arms around her shoulders. She buried her face in his chest and began to cry, clutching him so tight he tilted his face upwards and took a deep breath.
“It’s alright Catilina. I sent two separate riders back to Crow Hill this morning telling your father he’s not safe and that he needs to head back to Vengen.”
She shook her head without pulling away from him.
“And I told him you were with me and safe,” he added.
“No…” she said, muffled from within the folds of his tunic.
“Don’t worry” he replied. “They were well paid and promised a lot more when they deliver. And there’s two of them. They’ll make it.”
“But that won’t help you” she shouted, her voice thick with a mix of anger and despair, still muffled by his tunic.
He opened and closed his mouth a few times, unable to find the words he felt he really needed, and finally closed his eyes and held her as tight as he could, as though he’d squeeze the hurt from her. Slowly her sobbing subsided and he loosened his arms. He smiled down at her; a strange smile.
“That was most unlike you.”
She gave him a weak smile in return.
“Sometimes you just have to get it out of your system, Varro. Sometimes if you hold yourself together tight you crack like a new pot that cooled too quickly. Soldiers let their emotions out through violent behaviour and debauchery, both of which are frowned upon in a lady.”
Varro laughed.
