‘Dubnus and I? I seem to recall that all you did was wave your sword about while I had to throw myself around like a fortress whore on payday.’
Rufius grinned, poking his friend in the belly.
‘One well-favoured axe-throw from no more than spitting distance and the butchery of a defenceless horse and suddenly he’s One-Eyed Horatius. Anyway, the point is that when we dug up the bundle we buried back then that was all there was worth keeping… that and the lad’s last message from his father.’
Marcus shivered at the memory of opening the watertight dispatch rider’s message cylinder and reading a few lines from his father’s message from the grave into the cold dawn air a few days before.
‘By the time you reach Britannia, I expect that Commodus and his supporters will have laid formal charges of treason at our family’s door. I will have been tortured for information as to your whereabouts, then killed without ceremony or hearing… Whatever the ugly detail of their ending, our kindred will be taken and killed out of hand, our honour publicly denounced, and our line almost brought to an abrupt full stop. You are almost certainly all that remains of our blood…’
He shook himself free of the momentary introspection, raising the cup of wine to his friends.
‘And enough of that, there’s wine waiting. Let’s have a toast, gentlemen. Tungrian comrades, living and dead.’
‘Living and dead.’
They raised their cups and drank.
‘Here’s a toast for you.’
Julius raised his cup and looked around the small group with a wry smile.
‘I’ll drink to that moment at Lost Eagle when Uncle Sextus started humping that chieftain’s severed head in front of twenty thousand wild-eyed blue-noses. That was the moment I was sure I was going to die.’
They drank again. Rufius nudged Dubnus with his elbow.
‘Your turn, Centurion.’
After a moment’s silent thought the young officer raised his cup.
‘To Lucky, wherever he is now.’
Julius drank and laughed sharply.
‘Not so lucky after all. All those years with never a scratch only to get his hair parted by a blue-nose axe. His loss, your gain.’
The four men nodded silently, sharing a moment of memory. Marcus raised his cup to Rufius, a questioning look on his face.
‘And your toast, Grandfather?’
‘My toast…? I’ll raise my cup to those we loved who are no longer with us.’
The other men nodded, lifting their cups in silent salute, Rufius draining his and hammering it down on the long wooden bar with a smack of his lips.
‘A refill, Steward! We’ll be sitting over there by the stove. It might be late in the month of Junius, but it’s bloody cold for all that.’
‘It began, Prefect, back in the month of Februarius. One of my chosen men brought a young man in peasant clothing to the fort’s main gate…’
Frontinius told Prefect Scaurus the story of Marcus’s fight to gain a place with the cohort in swift and economical sentences, taking care not to exaggerate his recollection in any way. When his story was complete Scaurus sat in silence for a moment before speaking.
‘First Spear, you present me with a dilemma greater than any puzzle requiring a solution during my years of learning.’
A long silence hung in the air between them. Frontinius judged it best to keep his mouth shut as he waited for the prefect to resume what he expected to be a one-sided conversation.
‘It occurs to me that while I know what you have done, I do not yet understand why. So, First Spear Frontinius, help me understand your decision with regard to this fugitive from imperial justice. In your own time…’
The prefect rose from his chair and paced across the room, turning to look straight into his senior centurion’s eyes. Now his face was in shadow, unreadable, while the lamp behind him would show him any emotions crossing the first spear’s face. The first spear pondered his response for a moment before abandoning any thought of attempting to put any particular shine on the story.
‘You want to know why I agreed to allow a man wanted for treason to take sanctuary with the cohort. There is no one reason, but I’ll try to make why I did what I did clear for you. I suppose we can ignore the fact that both the man and his father were innocent of any of the charges laid against their family, although I’m convinced that was the case…’
Scaurus shrugged without interest.
‘It’s immaterial, First Spear. He could be as pure as a novice priestess and that would change nothing. My question wasn’t about his widely accepted guilt, I want to know why he’s here.’
Frontinius nodded.
‘Very well. In the first place it was my prefect, Septimius Equitius, who made the request of me, and he is a man whose judgement I had learned to trust during his time in command here. He owed a debt of honour to Sollemnis, the former legatus of Sixth Victorious. The legatus was the boy’s real father, and this was the way in which he was being asked to discharge that debt. And don’t mistake this for an attempt to shift the blame to Legatus Equitius. If there’s a hammer and nails in my future then I’ll do my own dying. However protracted the agony might be I can only cross the river once. All I’m trying to say is that there was a man’s honour involved in the decision.’
He paused for a moment, picking his next line of attack.
‘There was benefit to the cohort too. I exacted a price for Corvus’s acceptance from Legatus Sollemnis in addition to the large sum of money that he contributed to the burial fund. Corvus was accompanied here by a legion centurion not long retired, a legion cohort’s first spear, in fact, and I made his service here for a year part of the bargain.’ He chuckled darkly, unable to resist the humour in his memory of Tiberius Rufius’s smug smile once he had a vine stick back in his hand. ‘Turns out the man would have killed with his bare hands for the chance to bellow his lungs out at a century one more time…
‘There was one more reason for my decision, the most important of all. I would have given Prefect Equitius the hard word if I hadn’t seen something in the boy, and neither his honour, nor the gold, and not even the bonus centurion that sweetened the deal would have swayed me. I’m not stupid enough to go risking my life, and those of the officers I serve with, not without a good reason.
Scaurus shifted, staring hard into his eyes.
‘What reason?’
Frontinius stared back at him, his eyes flint hard in the half-light.
‘He’s a born soldier, Prefect, simply that, a born soldier. I’ve spent most of my adult life chasing recruits round these hills, teaching them how to take their iron to the barbarians that threaten their people. I’ve seen thousands of them, good, bad and indifferent, and I’ll tell you now, without hesitation, that he’s the most able warrior I’ve ever met, and the best leader to boot. He knows what to do, he does it without hesitation, and he’s faster and more skilled with a blade than any man I’ve met. The men of his former century would cover his arse with their shields even if it put them at risk of catching a spear themselves. Given a different roll of the dice he would have risen to command a legion without breaking sweat…’
He stopped, unable to read the prefect’s expression in the shadows.
‘You weren’t at the battle of Lost Eagle, Prefect, but if you had been you wouldn’t be asking me to explain my decision. When you get the chance to see him fight, then you’ll know what I mean when I tell you that you’ll never see a man throw his iron around with so much grace, or so much purpose.’
The prefect laughed quietly.
‘Very poetic.’
Frontinius shook his head dismissively.
‘Fuck poetry, that was simple fact. And now, Prefect, you’ve toyed with me for long enough. You’ve made your decision, now have the decency to tell me what it is. If you want me on a cross then that’s how I’ll depart this life. But I warn you, if you plan to nail him up then you’d better have something good up your sleeve because there’s
