banter once they were on the road. Even he had quickly sensed the reluctance of his comrades to indulge in the familiar routine of insult and rebuttal, and so it was a quiet party that found Prefect Caninus’s man waiting for them by the roadside once they were safely out of sight of the city walls. The scout joined the small group with no more ceremony than a sketchy salute to Julius, and the surrender of a small wax tablet signed by Caninus and marked with his seal as proof of the man’s identity.
The scout was slightly built, with a face that was deeply lined and seamed, giving him the weather-beaten appearance of a man who had spent his entire life working in the open. A hunting bow was slung across his shoulder, and a quiver of heavy iron-headed arrows hung from his belt, while the only sign of ornamentation he carried was an intricately tooled leather scabbard containing a long hunting knife nearly the length of an infantry sword. Introduced in the prefect’s tablet as Arabus, he quickly proved to be taciturn in the extreme, and Marcus’s attempts to engage with him were met with monosyllabic answers. No attempt at conversation would elicit anything more than a nod, a shake of the head or a terse, grunted answer where a simple yes or no would not be sufficient. Julius and Dubnus rode up alongside Marcus, Dubnus tipping his head to draw his friend away from the guide, keeping silent until the three centurions were out of earshot.
‘You’ll get nothing more from him. I’ve met the type before, men who have known nothing other than the forest since birth, and nothing you can do or say will get him to open up before he feels the time is right. Mind you, I’ll tell you one thing that makes me smile.’
Marcus raised an eyebrow.
‘Go on.’
‘His name.’
What, Arabus?’
His friend grinned, shooting a quick look at the guide.
‘In the Gaulish language I believe it means “witty”. And if he was the witty one in the family, I dread to think what his brothers and sisters must have been like!’
Julius nudged Marcus, having seemingly thrown off his reverie, and held out a hand.
‘Come on, then, let’s have a look at that pretty new blade you’ve bought.’
Marcus unsheathed the patterned sword and passed it to Julius. His horse’s ears pricked up at the sound of the blade’s gentle metallic rasp against its scabbard’s throat, and Marcus leaned forward, affectionately ruffling the close-trimmed hair on top of the beast’s head.
‘Not today, Bonehead. Today we’re just covering ground.’
Julius looked closely at the blade, then swept it down to his right in a practice cut that hummed past his own horse’s head.
‘As light as a feather. And what did Uncle Sextus say when you asked him for that large a withdrawal from your saved pay?’
Marcus smiled at the memory.
‘Let’s just say the first spear wasn’t exactly delighted to have fifty aurei taken out of the pay chest all in one go. And then when he saw the sword he spent so long looking at it I was convinced he was going to pull rank and buy it himself.’
He took the weapon back from Julius, who waited until the vicious blade was safely sheathed before speaking again.
‘You think Frontinius would pay that much for a sword, when he can get an issue weapon for a tiny fraction of the price? Mind you, there’ll be a bit of a rush if you should happen to stop a spear while that nice little toy’s strapped to your waist. One of us will be wearing it before you’re cold, you can be assured of that!’
Dubnus shook his head at the older man with a smile, a wry note in his voice.
‘You can put any such idea out of your mind, Julius! Our colleague has already agreed that I’m the right man to inherit such a weapon. In my hands it would be treated with the expertise it deserves, whereas to end up in the hands of an exponent of stab and punch like yourself would be a sad end for such a fine blade.’
Julius raised an eyebrow at Marcus, who shrugged equably, and the big centurion grinned triumphantly at their colleague.
‘It doesn’t look to me like you’ve got any such agreement, Dubnus. It looks to me like it’s first come, first served.’
Dubnus shrugged in turn, the smile creasing his face taking on a calculating aspect.
‘Fair enough, the first man with his hands on the weapon gets to keep it, in the unlikely event that there’s anyone out there good enough to leave it ownerless.’ He squinted slyly across at his friend. ‘Anyway, Julius, I meant to ask if you ever got round to buying that whistle you were looking at while our colleague there was spending a soldier’s pension on his new toy.’
His friend nodded, fishing in his pouch and holding up his brightly polished whistle. Dubnus looked at him for a moment, clearly struggling to keep a straight face, then turned back to the road, leaving Julius frowning at him in puzzlement.
‘There’s something I’m not getting here, isn’t there? Why are you grinning like a standard bearer who’s discovered an extra hundred denarii in the century’s burial fund that no one else knows about, eh? What have you…?’ He looked harder at the whistle in his hand, his eyebrows suddenly shooting up as he realised that it was the one he’d believed lost. Looking up he found that Dubnus was holding his new whistle in one hand. ‘You crafty bugger! Did you know about this, Centurion Corvus?’
Marcus fought to control his laughter, his face contorting with the effort.
‘I was aware that your loss was not entirely what it seemed. At least you have a nice new whistle as a result, and a beautifully crafted one from the looks of it. And there’s Mosa Ford — I can see the fort’s walls through the trees. It’s time to start acting like a party of professional army officers again, I suppose.’
Julius snorted derisively, giving his old whistle a long hard look of reappraisal before tucking it away in his pouch again. Dubnus waited until his hand was in the pouch, then tossed the new whistle to him, forcing him to whip the hand back out and catch it in mid-air. Shaking his head, he held up the shining brass instrument with a look of disgust.
‘Ten denarii for something I didn’t even need? And you suggest that I might want to start looking like a professional? Here, you haven’t got one of these yet, have you?’
He passed the whistle to Marcus, who raised an eyebrow.
‘Thank you. But shouldn’t you be keeping the new one?’
‘No, I’ve had this one since I was commissioned; it would be bad luck to abandon it now.’ He gave Dubnus a hard look. ‘And besides, giving you that definitely gives me first call on the pretty sword.’
The party passed easily enough through the scrutiny of the legion detachment guarding the bridge over the river. Tribune Scaurus’s written instructions to them to proceed to the Rhenus fortresses were clear enough, and the impressive seal attached to the document more than proved their bona fides, but Julius found himself being drawn aside by the duty centurion once the fort’s western gate was closed behind them and the sentries had returned to their patrols along the wooden palisade walls. Marcus walked alongside the two men as they paced through the fortified settlement towards the bridge, listening quietly as the guard officer muttered his advice in the Tungrian’s ear.
‘… and you want to be careful of that dark-faced little runt you’ve brought along for the ride. I’ve seen enough of his kind to know that he’ll mean trouble soon enough.’
Julius raised an eyebrow, his face darkening.
‘His kind? You mean we can’t trust him because he’s a local?’
The duty officer shook his head dourly.
‘No, the local people are decent enough. I mean you can’t trust him because he’s from in there.’ They had reached the bridge’s western end, and Marcus looked out across the river, its surface broken by the stones that marked the shallows which had made it such an obvious bridging point for the road to the Rhenus fortresses. The duty officer pointed to the forested slopes that rose above the small settlement clustered round the bridge’s eastern end, and spat over the bridge’s parapet. ‘Laugh it off if you like, but if you’d served as close to that bloody forest for as long as I have you wouldn’t be laughing. It’s only four hundred paces from here to the tree line, but by the time you’ve walked five hundred you might as well be five hundred miles away. There are men living in that place who don’t see the light of day from one end of the year to the other, half-savage hunters without any of the values that make us the civilised people that we are. We see them sometimes, watching the fort from the edge of the trees,
