with his spatha, he ducked under a wild swing to gut his attacker with the gladius’s short blade, sending him tottering back with the stinking, slippery rope of his torn guts hanging from his body. Another warrior stepped in quickly, his powerful sword-thrust skating along the Roman’s hastily raised gladius and slicing open Marcus’s arm. Grimacing with the pain, the Roman arced his spatha through a full turn to hack the Briton’s arm off at the elbow before he could pull back, then reeled away from the fight as another of the warriors caught his helmet a glancing blow with his sword, lucky in that the blade skidded across the iron plate rather than chopping through it and into his skull, but still seeing stars from the blow. As he staggered backwards, momentarily unable to defend Arminius from the men around him, Lugos burst into their midst, having run the length of the stricken warband at risk of being taken for a Selgovae and speared by the Petriana’s riders, now roaming the battlefield at will.
Swinging his long sword two handed, he waded into the surprised warriors, scattering them in disarray as the heavy iron blade hacked deep into first one man’s spine, toppling him limply to the road’s cobbled surface, then chopped into another man’s skull, sending him reeling out of the fight with his eyes rolling upwards to display only the whites. Shaking his head and blinking away the momentary confusion caused by the sword’s impact with his helmet, Marcus hefted his weapons and stepped forward to confront the two men who had followed him out of the fight, a movement to his right catching his eye and making him back away again, shouting a swift command at the embattled Lugos.
‘Lugos! Down!’
In a thunder of hoofs a half-dozen riders bore down upon the Selgovae and rode down the tribesmen, one of the horsemen smashing his chosen target reeling to the ground with a crunching impact between his shield’s heavy brass boss and the hapless warrior’s face, and Marcus found himself standing alone, surrounded by prostrate bodies. A horn was blowing insistently somewhere across the field, the signal for prisoners to be taken now that the fight was almost over, and Marcus stared about him, marvelling at the destruction wrought by the Petriana’s men in the short time it had taken to avert the unconscious German’s death. He walked slowly on shaking legs to where Lugos was sitting up after diving to the ground to avoid the cavalrymen’s questing spears, straining to pull the big barbarian to his feet before wearily sitting down alongside the prone body of Arminius.
By mid-morning, Drust’s torturer believed he had the key to the captured decurion’s continued silence under his knives. He spoke quietly to his chieftain as he sharpened the tools of his trade one last time, dragging their razor-edged blades across the whetstone more for the effect that the rasping noise might have on the man strung up and waiting for the resumption of his attentions than to improve their already fearsome edge.
‘He’s a hard man, my lord, a warrior you would have been proud to fight alongside had he been born to the tribe. I have caused him great pain already, but he has given me no more than the occasional grunt as my reward. I can increase the level of pain he suffers, of course. I can sever the muscles that make his arms and legs work and leave him a cripple, saw off his manhood and show it to him before I blind him, if you like.’ He looked back at the Roman, his eyes burning with defiance, before speaking again. ‘But in all truth I doubt that this will break him, and he would die from the blood loss very quickly, and leave your men without the reward of hearing a Roman scream for mercy.’
Drust grimaced.
‘Not what we’d hoped for. You have a better idea, I presume?’
The other man raised an eyebrow at the tethered Roman.
‘I would say that he seems to be motivated by the need to avoid alerting his comrades to his agony at all costs. I would also guess that he is a proud man, and that to cry out would be to turn his back on his pride, to give in and show weakness at the end of his life. I do not believe that the knives hold the key to his tongue, but I think that he will speak readily enough if you can find a way to threaten him with the loss of his dignity. You must put him under the threat of the most degrading end that you have at your disposal.’
Drust stared at him for a long moment before nodding his reluctant understanding and turning to face the naked prisoner, looking him up and down to assess the damage already done to him by the torturer’s knives before speaking.
‘Fetch water. I need him wide awake.’
A warrior stepped forward and emptied his water skin over the Roman’s head, and the cold liquid snapped his eyes open, wrenching him from the moment of respite provided by his loss of consciousness. Drust walked forward until he was close enough to the captive to prod his blood-smeared stomach.
‘Well now, Roman, my expert in the art of persuasion tells me that he believes you cannot be broken by the use of his blades. He believes that you are too proud a man to allow yourself the slightest expression of pain or fear. And to tell you the truth, I am minded to believe him. Look at you – no, seriously, take a proper look at what he’s done to you.’
The decurion stared back at him in silence with stone-hard eyes, their defiant conviction blazing back at the chieftain. Drust shook his head in mock sadness, turning away from his prisoner and looking out across the hundreds of men gathered to watch his humiliation.
‘No, you’ll keep your mouth shut no matter what I tell him to do to you, even as we wreck your body beyond repair, and at the end of that unhappy time all I’ll have for my men’s bravery in taking you from under the noses of your sentries will be a mutilated carcass of a warrior. Your fellow soldiers will revere you for the bravery of your death, and in time they’ll erect an altar for you, somewhere where thousands of them will see it, to give them pride and fresh strength. Perhaps they’ll name a new fort after you…’
He turned back to the captive with a half-smile.
‘All of which is hardly what was in my mind when I ordered my men to bring me a Roman to make some sport with. What I had in mind was some screaming, something to put the fear of the gods into your comrades, and not a glorious end for you. So, I think it’s time we tried something a little different. We think that you are a proud man, for whom any admission of weakness would be worse than death itself. So what, I find myself asking, would your reaction be to being degraded in the face of your comrades in a manner so gross that they will be revolted by what you have become?’
Cyrus’s eyes narrowed slightly, and Drust smiled quietly back at him, seeing the Roman’s face suddenly alive with the emotion he had been seeking to inspire in his captive.
‘I thought that might get your attention. You see, there are men in every army who find the life away from women too much for them, and who turn to their comrades for the pleasures of the flesh. You, however, don’t look like such a man. You probably make jokes about them, and use humorous names to make fun of the very idea, even though you know that this happens more frequently than you would ever admit to anyone from outside of your military world. And so what, I wonder, would your comrades think, what would they do, if we were to lash you up on the walls of this fortress and have a succession of my warriors bugger you in full view of your cohort. I have thousands of men, so I’m sure that a few of them will step forward when I offer the opportunity to fuck a Roman officer in the arse before we let my man with the knives finish what he’s started. Perhaps a dozen of them would be enough to take that pride of yours and tear it into pieces so small that a man would have to get on his hands and knees to find them. And I’ll guarantee you that nobody ever set up an altar to a man who got captured and ended up dying after taking a dozen barbarians in his backside.’
Cyrus glowered at him, his face twisted with repulsion and disgust.
‘Nothing to say, Roman? Perhaps we could pull your teeth and allow two men to fuck you from both ends, just to complete the picture for your friends over there. “Go to war with the Venicones”, they’ll tell each other for years to come, “and if the barbarian bastards catch you they’ll spit-roast you.” How about that?’
Cyrus spat a bloody wad into the dirt at his feet, staring down at the barbarian chief.
‘Can I trust your word, Venicone?’
Drust raised an eyebrow at the growled response, taken aback by the unexpectedness of the Roman’s retort.
‘Trust my word? Why would that matter to a man facing imminent death?’
Cyrus grunted his answer from between gritted teeth, his voice pitched low to make the tribal chief lean closer.
‘Because, King of the Venicones, I have information that I will trade for a quick and honourable death. I know where something is. Something that you have lost, and which can still be retrieved if you know where to look for it. If, that is, you have the balls to turn aside from your flight to the north.’
Drust’s eyes widened, and he stepped in close to the captive, whispering into the Roman’s ear.
‘Tell me exactly what it is that you’re talking about. If this is a trick I’m going to make you scream for mercy
