flesh; it was a unit identifier similar to that on his and Dubnus’s left arms. Dubnus leaned over and stared at the marking for a moment, a smile creeping across his face.
‘Well, now. Second Treveri, are you? Which means, for a start, that you speak Latin, so don’t bother playing dumb with us.’ The bandit stared back up at him with a mixture of fear and hatred, and Julius prodded the tattoo with his dagger again.
‘It also means that you know all too well the penalty for the murder of your prefect. I think we’d better take this one back with us to Tungrorum and allow military justice to take its brutal course, eh lads?’ He turned back to Arabus. ‘Your prefect told us that your family went missing, what, a year ago?’ The guide nodded reluctantly, his eyes still locked on the prisoner. ‘Well, these boys mutinied only last autumn, so you can forget about taking that knife to this one; he wasn’t part of whatever it was that happened to them. I still want to know where that camp is, so you and my colleague here — ’ he pointed to Dubnus — ‘can go forward to find it, while Marcus and I stay here and have a gentle chat with my new friend here.’
Dubnus put a brawny arm around the guide’s shoulder, turning him away from the prisoner.
‘We can’t be far from their camp now, so you and I should go forward and leave these two to watch the prisoner. Are you coming, or do you want to stay here and glare at him too?’
The guide shot a last venomous look at the captured bandit and walked away, speaking quietly into the forest’s silence.
‘Follow me. I know this ground as well as I knew my wife’s body, before they took her from me.’ He vanished into the trees, his passage no noisier than a gentle breeze.
Julius winked at Marcus and the two men watched their friend pad into the forest in Arabus’s wake, his axe held ready to fight. Then Julius leaned over the prisoner, who was still lying on his back.
‘Well, Second Treveri, now that we have some peace and quiet, and that vicious little man isn’t fingering his knife and staring at your throat, perhaps we can have a civilised conversation. Let me make this easy for you. Either you answer every question I ask you quickly, honestly and in a way that doesn’t make me think you’re trying to be clever with me, or I’ll be forced to start carving bits off you, starting with this.’ He gripped the man’s ear with a lightning-fast move, resting the dagger’s cold, minutely jagged edge against the point where ear and scalp joined. ‘In your own time…’
The bandit’s eyes rolled helplessly.
‘What do you want to know?’
Marcus squatted down in front of him, shaking his head in mock sadness.
‘What do we want to know? Isn’t that obvious, soldier? We want to know everything.’
Dubnus and Arabus moved noiselessly across the forest’s sun-dappled floor, the big centurion mouthing a silent curse as he wove a sinuous path around the shafts of light lancing down through the forest’s canopy high above them, staying in the shadows to avoid the blink of sunlight on metal. The guide appeared to have got over his anger at being denied the chance to take sharp iron to their prisoner, and led him on with a deft eye for cover, seemingly determined to ensure that their progress would remain undetected. The centurion smiled to himself, reflecting that Julius would have been noisier than both of them put together, but his expression changed abruptly as a hint of putrefaction reached his sensitive nose. He hissed to Arabus, flaring his nostrils to indicate the unexpected smell. The guide padded carefully across to his side, whispering in his ear.
‘We’re close to their camp, I think. They have a habit of using cages to scare off any hunter that stumbles across their hiding places. I’ve found them before, after the bandits have abandoned a camp.’
Dubnus shook his head uncomprehendingly, but the guide simply gestured him on, putting a finger to his lips and moving with exaggerated care, each footstep slow and delicate as they weaved through the undergrowth, and Arabus paused with increasing frequency to ensure that they were unobserved before moving across even the smallest of gaps in the foliage. At the top of a small rise Dubnus realised what he had meant a few minutes before when he had referred to ‘cages’, as a tall arrangement of stout branches, which had been formed into a cylindrical structure, resolved itself out of the surrounding vegetation. The horizontal bars were provided by thickly interweaved strips of bark which were placed to provide a clear view in and out of the cage as much as to anchor the branches together, and the whole thing was secured to the forest floor by deeply buried pegs, each one the width of a man’s thumb. Dubnus stared at the construction with an unhappy certainty as to its contents.
‘ Surely not? ’
Arabus turned back to him, nodding grimly at his expression of fascinated horror and whispering fiercely in his ear.
‘What else were you expecting? This man Obduro understands the power of terror on men such as these. And on us, for that matter. Come on.’
He led the Tungrian closer, and with every cautious pace the stench worsened, until by the time they were close enough to see into the cage’s shadows it was almost enough to choke Dubnus, despite his experience of battle, of terrible wounds and of bodies left to rot. A corpse lolled back against the bars, its sightless eyes staring at Dubnus’s revolted gaze. The exposed portions of the body were rippling with maggots, and it was only an act of willpower that kept him from throwing up onto the forest floor. Arabus watched as he mastered the urge, his whispered comment harsh with emotion.
‘This man’s fate is a warning, both to his own people and to outsiders. If we are caught approaching their camp we will certainly suffer in exactly the same way.’
He stared at Dubnus with a level gaze, as if waiting for the Tungrian to indicate a retreat, but the big man simply nodded, gesturing to the ground before them. Shrugging, the Gaul turned away from the cage and, bent almost double, led him forward again, his pace even more cautious than before. After fifty more paces he turned his head, putting a hand to his ear.
‘Do you hear that?’
Dubnus listened, concentrating and ignoring the rustling of leaves in the early afternoon’s breeze. The faint sound of men’s voices reached him, their words unintelligible but their tone easy enough to understand. He nodded to the guide, indicating that he should stay where he was squatting, then he flattened himself against the forest floor, worming slowly forward towards the voices, carefully picking up and moving aside anything that might betray his presence by making a noise. The sounds got louder as he crawled closer; a group of men were talking without fear of being overheard and individual words started to make sense. He stopped and listened, guessing that he was still twenty or thirty paces short of them, but the discussion remained impossible to follow and, taking a deep breath, he squirmed forward again, now moving so slowly that his approach was quite literally without noise. The wind rustling the leaves high above his head died away for a moment, and the voices were suddenly disconcertingly clear.
‘… and I’m fucking telling you that there’s no way they’ll ever catch us here. He’ll make sure of that; he’ll get them to come at us the long way round, and even if they did find the crossing we’d still be safe on the hill before they were even across the river and ready to fight. And there’s no bloody infantry cohort been raised that could kick us out of those defences, not without artillery, and that legion cohort doesn’t even have a single ballista. They’re clearly not to be trusted with the heavy stuff.’
Another man laughed.
‘You should know about trust and the army!’
Dubnus nodded to himself, having already guessed that the first speaker was another of the Treveri cohort’s deserters. The reply was calm enough, although Dubnus thought he could hear an edge in the man’s voice, and a hint of distaste for the comment.
‘Perhaps I should, if you put it that way. But he’ll make sure we get plenty of warning of any attempt to attack us, and there’s just no way they’re ever going to suspect that he’s…’
The wind picked up again, and, apart from a few isolated words, the rest of the sentence was lost in the rustle of leaves. After a moment the men’s audience laughed, and Dubnus realised that there had to be at least twenty of them, from the sound’s volume. He grimaced at his proximity to their camp and started to retreat slowly backwards, sliding away from the danger of discovery as quickly as he dared. Once he had gone fifty paces or so he got cautiously to his feet and retraced his steps to where Arabus still crouched. He tugged at the guide’s shoulder as he passed, pulling the other man along in his wake.
‘It’s time we weren’t here.’
He led the guide back to where the other two men were waiting with their thoroughly cowed prisoner. Julius looked up questioningly as the scouts slipped into the clearing.
