‘And how did you know that this centurion was in fact the tribune’s killer?’
Paulus looked up, a hard edge coming into his voice.
‘If I tell you that, how am I to be sure you won’t take your threats to another good man?’
Excingus smiled evenly.
‘That depends on you, Tribune. There may be no need to involve anyone else in this, as long as my colleague here and I know where to go hunting for this fugitive. Of course, I’ll interrogate my way through this entire province if I’m forced to do so, but it’ll cost me time I badly need to avoid wasting, time in which the fugitive might be running for another hiding place. I should add that it would go badly for you too, in that case. And you have a large family in Hispania, I believe?’
The tribune’s face hardened, and his knuckles whitened against the dark wood of his desk. Rapax slid a hand to the hilt of his dagger, his body tensing. After a moment Paulus slumped slightly in his chair, the fight seeming to go out of him as the consequences of any rash action sank in.
‘Very well. I have no option but to take you at your word that you’ll go after this Aquila, rather than carving a bloody path through a body of loyal soldiers.’ He sighed, closing his eyes in resignation as he spoke. ‘A man I’ve known since childhood is serving as an officer with another auxiliary cohort. He pointed the centurion out to me during the battle’s aftermath. The Tungrians had held off ten times their strength for longer than we’d have ever thought possible, buying time for the other legions to reach the battlefield. Naturally we wanted to have a look at the damage they’d done to the warband, so we walked up the hill, over a carpet of bodies so thick that they were two and three deep at the point where the two lines had clashed. There were officers from half a dozen units standing around and marvelling at the scale of the slaughter, and that the Tungrians had survived such an onslaught. And the smell…’ He shook his head slightly at the memory of the reek of blood and faeces that had permeated his clothes for days afterwards. ‘One of the Tungrian centurions walked past, covered in blood and wide eyed with the strain of what his cohort had endured, and I commented to my friend the decurion that he had two swords strapped to his belt. That’s when he told me that he’d seen the same man earlier that day, standing over the body of Tribune Perennis.’
Excingus raised an eyebrow.
‘And that’s all he told you? None of the grisly details?’
Paulus laughed without mirth.
‘Oh, I tried to get them out of him all right. I might not have liked Perennis very much, but he was still a Roman tribune and my colleague. My friend just smiled at me, and told me that the less I knew the safer it would be for me. It seems we’d both have been better off if I’d never heard any of it…’
Excingus nodded, a glint of triumph in his eyes.
‘Yes. And better still for your colleague Quirinius, given that he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. And now, Tribune, I’ll trouble you for that one last piece of information. It’ll be hard for you to give it to me, but it’ll go harder on you and yours if you keep it from me. Who was this friend of yours, exactly?’
5
Out on the hills to the north of the Wall, the Venicones had restarted their long march to their homeland at first light. By mid-morning their pace across the barren hillsides was little better than a walk, despite the likelihood that the Roman cavalry would find them and recommence the deadly game that had played out the previous day. Many of Drust’s men had not eaten anything since the previous morning. The day had dawned bright and clear, and was now warm enough to make the marching barbarians sweat heavily in the absence of any breeze to cool their labouring bodies.
‘Come on, my lads, we’ll all just have to keep marching if we’re going to avoid being speared by those horse- shagging bastards! Another few miles will see us safe!’
The Venicone king’s voice was hoarse with bellowing his commands, but there was still a hard edge to his shouted encouragement that compelled Calgus to open his legs and stride out, despite his own experience in the art of cajoling his own men to greater efforts. He had watched Drust fighting off the Roman cavalry the previous day, pulling a horseman from his mount’s back with his war hammer’s spike and cutting the stunned horseman’s throat with a hunting knife the size of a short sword before he could recover from the fall, putting his head back in a savage howl of triumph as the soldier had spasmed out his death throes at his feet. More than once he had led the brief attacks that had punished those riders who had ridden too close to the warband, swinging his heavy pole-arm to fell their horses and leave the Romans easy meat for the men of his bodyguard clustered about him. Even the discovery that his body slave was missing, along with the gold torc that was the king’s badge of authority, had failed to put the man off his stride, although for all of Drust’s bravado, Calgus doubted that the loss was anything like as trivial as the Venicone was making out. Smiling wryly at his own acceptance of the need for pragmatism in defeat, when less than a week before he had been the leader of ten thousand warriors and on the verge of a victory to upset the balance of power across the entire province, Calgus put his head back and dragged down a lungful of air into his burning chest, forcing his feet to even greater speed despite the burning pains in his legs from the previous day’s exertions.
‘Are you enjoying this yet, Calgus?’ He glanced wearily sideways to find that the Venicone king had fallen in alongside him, a grim smile on his face as he regarded his captive’s gritted teeth. It’s a long time since you walked so far or so fast, I’d imagine? I could always lend you a blade, of course, and let you make a run for it. We can’t be all that far from your own land, so you might make it to safety.’
Calgus snorted, waving a hand at the treeless hills across which the warband was making its laboured progress.
‘You know as well as I do that their cavalry will be close at hand now, trotting happily along the trail we’re leaving with their spears ready for use. One man alone in country this open wouldn’t last any time at all.’
He coughed and spat phlegm on to the thin grass at his feet, and Drust laughed.
‘This little march is doing you wonders, Calgus, we’re working you harder than you’ve managed in years. And to think you could have been no more than a head on a pole by now if not for the Venicones.’
Calgus shook his head in disbelief.
‘I imagine you’re still planning to see me decorating some Roman’s spear, unless by some good fortune they get to you first. So where are you taking me, my most unwelcome host?’
Drust leaned towards him conspiratorially, looking round to ensure that his people were all sufficiently engrossed in their own struggle to keep moving before speaking, his voice lowered to avoid it carrying.
‘You know what, Calgus? I don’t have the first idea. We’re in the middle of nowhere, in land I’ve not trodden before in my life with a pack of Roman cavalrymen on our tail and nowhere to seek shelter from them. All I can do is keep my people moving, and hope that we’ll reach some feature that we can defend against the Romans before they find some means of bringing us to bay on ground that suits them.’
The rebellion’s former leader nodded, lowering his own voice in turn.
‘Well, I know where we are, Drust, and I know where we need to go if you want a chance to hold these bastards at arm’s length for long enough that they’ll lose interest in…’
A tired shout of warning sounded from the rear of the column, and both men craned their necks to stare back down the wide track of flattened grass the warband was leaving in its wake. A body of horsemen had crested the rise over which the Venicones had laboured less than half an hour before, no more than a thousand paces behind them. Drust spat on to the ground, hefting his hammer, which, Calgus noted, still had a few hairs clinging to its flat face.
‘It was too good to last. I’ll leave you to contemplate your fate, and how you might want to buy yourself a little extra time rather than dying out here on their spears, while I make sure that our rearguard have their wits about them.’
Tribune Licinius had ridden hard, overtaking his leading squadrons minutes before their first sight of the enemy. Reining his sweating horse in alongside the leading squadron’s decurion, he quickly sized up the sprawling mass of barbarians with a grim glance at his first spear.
‘Still just as many of them as there were when we left them to it yesterday, I see. All we seem to have achieved is to have thinned them out a little, and even that small gain cost us over ten per cent of our strength. I
