In the base hospital a disciplined chaos ruled, half a dozen of Felicia’s assistants working to put the surviving Tungrian wounded on to the doctor’s table in something like the order of their medical priority. Marcus and Rufius found Dubnus dozing uneasily through the racket, his face pale from the blood he’d lost the previous day.
‘He looks dreadful. Why haven’t they dealt with him yet?’
Rufius waved an arm at the room in response to his friend’s question.
‘Look around you. Every man that goes on to the table before him has a worse wound.’
As they watched a soldier was carried from the surgery on a stretcher, his right leg swathed in bandages down to the knee, below which the remainder of the limb was missing.
‘See, that poor bastard’s lost his leg. Dubnus has it comparatively easy by comparison.’
‘Easy… you come and lie here for a few minutes and then tell me this is easy…’
They turned back to find Dubnus lying with his eyes barely open. He closed them again after a moment, the effort clearly tiring him.
‘I feel like I’ve been beaten with hammers.’
Rufius lifted a bottle of water to his lips.
‘Drink some of this. You’ll be in surgery soon enough. Get that wound cleaned out and stitched, and soon enough you’ll be scaring the shit out of the recruits like a new man. Can you remember what happened?’
The young centurion snorted, then winced at the pain that the action caused.
‘Of course I bloody can. I got a spear in the guts, not through my head. Some big bastard with an axe set about the front rank, killed three men in the time it takes to tell it, and I was stupid enough to jump in to deal with him…’
He paused, grasping the water bottle and taking another sip.
‘He swung at me and buried his axe in my shield… actually put the blade’s edge right through my board, and while he was trying to pull it free I gutted the fucker.’
‘Keeping your attention on the men to either side, of course…?’
Dubnus sighed.
‘As a matter of fact, you superior old bastard, yes, I was. What I wasn’t looking out for was a spear-thrust from behind their front rankers. The bastard must have taken a running jump at me; the blade ripped straight through my armour and skewered me like a piece of liver. I went down like a sack of shit with the whole warband baying for my head, but the rear rank managed to pull me out of the fight while good old Cyclops closed the gap and kept them off me. Remind me to buy that bad-tempered sod a beer next time I see him…’
Rufius nodded sagely.
‘I’d say you owe him a good deal more than that. Let’s have a look at your wound, then.’
He lifted the sheet to reveal Dubnus’s stomach. The wound was a four-inch-long gash, its edges a livid purple and joined by a crust of dried blood.
‘Not too bad. Of course, the first thing that our friend’s wife-to-be is going to have to do to you is open that up again and make sure it’s clean. I wonder if she’ll let us watch?’
Licinius found Furius in his temporary quarters with a terracotta flask of wine. The younger man rose and greeted him, lifting the wine in salute.
‘Tribune Licinius, welcome. Join me in a beaker or two of wine, to celebrate our escape from certain death yesterday…’
His smile faded as he realised that the senior officer hadn’t moved from his place in the barrack’s entrance, his stance formal and a writing tablet held open in one hand.
‘Cohort Prefect Gracilus Furius, I am hereby ordered by Governor Ulpius Marcellus to direct that you relinquish your command with immediate effect. I suggest that you accompany me to the commander’s residence. You can stay the night there, and avoid all the awkwardness that goes with sudden changes of command…’
The wine flask dropped from Furius’s hand and cracked on the wooden floor, his fingers suddenly numb with the shock. The wine trickled out across the floorboards unnoticed by either man.
‘There must be some…’
‘There’s no mistake…’ Licinius’s tone was gentle; he knew the enormity of the blow being dealt to the other man. ‘I can assure you that the governor is very specific in his instructions.’
‘But this simply cannot be. If anyone should be relieved of command it’s that jumped-up puppy Scaurus, not me. He…’
The grim look on Licinius’s face as he advanced across the room silenced him.
‘Citizen Furius, you were, to be brutally honest, quite the worst commanding officer I’ve met in several years of service in this province. You are a coward, which I’m told you’ve proved on more than one occasion, but worse than that you lack any real aptitude for the command of soldiers in the field. If you leave with me now, quietly and without making a drama out of your departure, you can at least go home with some dignity. The governor will send you home with the next set of dispatches to the emperor, and you can tell your friends that you took part in a battle with a fearsome tribe from the far north. Tell them it was a great victory and that you were sent home to report on it as a mark of favour. If you kick up a fuss, however, the story will get home long before you do. You don’t want that to happen, and neither will your father. Keep the family name proud, eh? Don’t embarrass the old man any more than you probably already have. Come on, I’ll have your gear sorted out and brought over later.’
Furius stared at the senior officer for a moment, the fight going out of him as he sensed the deep anger underlying the older man’s gentle tones in the hard lines of his face.
‘I’ll come with you. It wouldn’t do to make a scene…’
They walked from the tent and into the cool evening air, the sentry snapping to attention and saluting. Licinius nodded to the man, but Furius was lost in a world of his own, his downcast face a study in misery. The sentry waited until the two men were out of sight then whistled to his mate, walking a patrol beat along the line of barracks.
‘Crucifix Boy just left with that old bugger from the cavalry, and he wasn’t looking happy. Best tip the wink to the first spear…’
As he crossed the fort a pace behind Licinius, a thought occurred to Furius, a sudden shocking idea that wormed its way into his mind and sat festering for all of ten seconds before he blurted it out, his tone both aggressive and fearful.
‘It occurs to me, Tribune Licinius, that there are only two options for my immediate replacement. Either you’ll put a man of your own choosing into my place, or else…’ He looked at the man walking slightly ahead of him, finding his face imperturbable. ‘… or else my former colleague Scaurus will command both his own cohort and mine. Which is it, Tribune?’
Licinius stopped walking and turned to face him, his features skull-like in the fort’s deep shadows. His voice was harsher than before, as if he were holding on to some last vestige of patience.
‘Leave it alone, Furius. Let go of this failed attempt to regain a life to which you’re not suited, and turn back to that which you can manage.’
Furius put a hand to his head, staring up at the stars in genuine amazement.
‘So I am removed from my command and replaced by him. By him! Zeus, Jupiter and Mars, but I’ll see someone damned for this indignity. My father will…’
He quailed back against a barrack’s wooden wall as Licinius took a handful of his tunic and twisted it harshly.
‘Your father? You think the influence of a moderately successful merchant will be enough to protect you while you spread your poison round Rome. You bloody fool, do you have any idea who Cohort Tribune Scaurus’s sponsor is?’
He waited for a moment until Furius shook his head.
‘I had assumed from his slow progression…’
‘… that he was without patronage? Well then, how does this name suit you?’
He leant in close to the wide-eyed Furius and whispered a single word in his ear.
‘No.’
‘Oh yes, you heard me correctly. I heard your father had to pay a small fortune to get you back into legion service, to find a legatus willing to overlook your reputation from the last time you were allowed into uniform. And even then you lasted only a matter of months before you gave him the excuse he was waiting for to ship you on to another province, once he realised just what a liability you were. All those years that you sat on your arse at home,
