walked briskly up the hill with no more attention to the litter of dead and dying warriors than he would have spared on beggars in the streets of Rome. At the hill’s summit Martos led the party into a towering hall a full fifty feet high, through massive wooden doors intricately carved with figures of warriors in battle. Inside the hall, illumination was provided by a line of guttering torches down each wall, and in the flickering light Marcus saw a group of men at the far end of the space. Scaurus strode down the hall’s length to stand before them, Tribune Laenas at his shoulder and a pair of Titus’s axemen flanking them. One of the elders stepped forward to meet him, bowing his head slightly in greeting and waiting in silence for the Roman to speak.
‘Greetings. You are Iudocus, chief adviser to the king of the Votadini, if I am not mistaken?’
Scaurus spoke slowly and carefully, allowing time for another of the elders to whisper a translation into the old man’s ear. After an initial startled glance at the use of his name by the Roman, and a moment’s muttered discussion between the elders, Iudocus turned to face Scaurus with an expression of carefully composed neutrality. He spoke, and the translator spoke his words in Latin after a moment’s pause.
‘Greetings, Roman. While your presence is welcome to us, you can see that we have removed the Selgovae usurpers from among us and dealt with them as is appropriate with the warriors of a hostile tribe. We will provide you with the little hospitality we can, given the rather damaging events of the last few weeks, but I see no reason for you to trouble yourselves further on our behalf. This fortress is…’
Scaurus raised a hand, turning to Martos and beckoning him forward. He spoke to the prince in Latin, loudly enough to be heard by the watching elders.
‘Prince Martos, Iudocus here has obviously failed to recognise either me or the perilous situation that your tribe finds itself in. Perhaps you could help him to regain a secure footing in this discussion, before he does his people some irreparable damage. The translation thing’s a bit overdone too…’
Martos nodded and stepped out in front of his tribe’s remaining leadership, and it was immediately apparent that something was making them nervous. Marcus’s eyes narrowed as he watched them fight to keep their expressions neutral, and wondered whether it was their prince’s blood-blasted aspect that was troubling them, or something less obvious. Clearing his throat, Martos addressed his words directly to Iudocus, speaking in Latin rather than his own language.
‘The tribune has requested that I speak directly to you. You all know me, I am Martos, prince of this tribe and its rightful king with the murder of King Brennus. I went to war against the Romans alongside our king with your agreement. I fought alongside Calgus and the Selgovae as he directed, and I was betrayed to the Romans at the same time that he died at the hands of the Selgovae.’ The elders looked at each other with disquiet, and Iudocus turned to the translator, only to find Martos’s broken-nailed finger in his face, his lips twisted in anger. ‘You may not like me, Iudocus, you sour-faced, long-toothed pedlar of half-truths and outright deceits, but you will listen to me, or else I’ll do to you what I did to the Selgovae I found in the dark beyond this hall, once I’d finished climbing the south wall! You’re not too old to have your cock carved off and stuffed into your mouth just like them, you old bastard! And since it was your idea that we went to war with Calgus you can be sure I won’t hesitate to push you out there to share their fate at the hands of the women, if you give me any more cause. And you can forget the pretence that you don’t speak the tribune’s language, he’s been here before.’
He folded his arms and stepped aside with a dark stare that left the elders under no illusions as to the depth of his anger, while Iudocus looked at Scaurus with narrowed eyes, the ghost of a smile touching his lips. When he spoke his voice was clear and strong, with only a hint of the tremors of old age in his almost unaccented Latin.
‘You were here in the winter, I remember you now. A quiet visitor, content to watch and listen. Looking for signs that we would go to war with your people?’
Scaurus smiled with equal insincerity, cold eyes boring into the older man’s.
‘Not really, Elder. I knew the Votadini would join Calgus in his doomed rebellion as soon as I laid eyes on you and heard you speaking with your king. It was clear to me from the start that the “lord of the northern tribes” had you in his pocket, and that you in turn had sufficient influence with your king to seal his fate. No, Iudocus, I was here to make an assessment of your people, and how likely it was that they could field an effective force after fifty years of peaceful trading with Rome. I didn’t rate those chances very highly, but then I didn’t have much of a chance to take the measure of Prince Martos here until we met on the battlefield.’
‘Where he was taken prisoner rather than face his end in battle, I believe?’
Martos bunched his fists, but stayed silent with his face set granite hard.
‘Where he lost, in point of fact, as the result of being betrayed by Calgus, which was a part of his plans of which I’m sure you’re perfectly aware. Martos and his warriors were abandoned in the path of two angry legions, with the expectation that they would be slaughtered to the last man, I should imagine. Luckily for your people, he survived. Luckily for most of them, that is. Not so lucky for you, though, Iudocus. The prince here joined with us in the hope of gaining revenge for his king’s death, and I’d say he’s within an arm-span of dealing out a good-sized piece of that retribution at this very moment. Martos?’
The warrior stalked forward again, turning his face so that his remaining eye’s cold stare played on the elders. He pulled an ornately engraved hunting knife from his belt, turning the blade to send reflected flecks of light from the torches across the hall’s lofty roof beams.
‘This, elders of my tribe, is an honourable weapon which I have sworn only to unsheathe when the blood of my betrayers is within reach. I have already used it to take the life of one of the men responsible for my king’s death, a man called Aed. He was a man very much like you, old and clever, an adviser to his king and responsible for much of the needless destruction done by Calgus since this war began. I found a way into the Selgovae camp, after our betrayal and the slaughter of most of my warriors, and I put him at the point of this blade. When we were discovered I took his life with it. I sliced open his belly and allowed his guts out, but I took something else besides his life. Aed had a box full of his masters’ documents which, when the Romans read them to me, made sense of much that had puzzled me before.’
He turned away, speaking into the hall’s dark shadows.
‘One letter in particular made me realise what fools we all were to believe that Calgus was at war simply to expel the Romans from our lands.’ He turned back to face Iudocus, his face white with anger. ‘It was from you, Iudocus, telling Aed that Brennus was an old man and past his prime, with no “reliable” successor. Telling him that you could ensure the support of the elders, and therefore the people of this tribe, for a change of leadership should this prove necessary.’ He walked deliberately towards the elders, who to a man were slowly but surely inching away from their white-faced leader. ‘You condemned your king to death, Iudocus, and thousands of our warriors with him. Did you hope to take control of the tribe yourself, and find some innocent to be king while you pulled his strings from behind the throne? Some child, father recently dead in battle and whose mother was expected to pose no problem? Except my wife wasn’t taken in, was she? She saw through you in an instant, the way I should have done before we ever marched away to war and sealed both their fates. So you had her, and my daughter, tossed to the Selgovae dogs for their sport, and my son thrown to his death from the south rampart.’
Iudocus put his hands out as if to defend himself, his face pale with terror.
‘It was the Selgovae, they…’
A sheathed knife landed on the stone floor before him with a quiet clang, a small weapon more suited to a child’s hand than a man’s.
‘Before I started the climb up the south wall yesterday I found his body on the rocks near its foot, broken by the fall and picked clean by carrion birds. I knew it was him, this was still on the belt he was wearing. I gave it to him for his last birthday…’ He walked slowly to where the child-sized weapon lay, scooping it up and ripping off the rain-stained scabbard. ‘You had my son thrown from the palisade and you gave his mother and sister to the Selgovae as playthings. She’s dead, the women tell me, by her own hand rather than face any more of their torment. She killed my daughter first, a mercy killing you could say.’
He tossed the child’s blade at Iudocus’s feet and turned away to stare into the hall’s shadows, wiping a tear from his cheek before turning back to face the elders.
‘You’re all guilty of this. You all nodded at this goat-fucker’s suggestions, and you all turned a blind eye when he murdered my son and condemned my woman and child to a slow death at the hands of dozens of Selgovae warriors. By rights I should kill you all, here in this den of your evil…’
Scaurus stepped to his side, his face creased with anger and his hand raised to point a finger at Iudocus’s white face.
‘And we won’t raise a hand to stop the prince if that’s his choice. In fact I’d put good money down that Centurion Corvus here would take his swords to you alongside Martos, given the chance. He understands more than
