‘ Swords! ’
The soldiers laid down their spears and unsheathed their blades, raising their shields and dressing their line in automatic preparation for the bloody combat that had invariably followed the watch officer’s command over the preceding months. A score or so gang members advanced from both ends of the road until they were almost nose to nose with the Tungrian soldiers, then they stopped, each of them picking one of the auxiliary troops and staring hard into his opponent’s eyes in a calculated attempt to browbeat the building’s defenders. Pugio waited for a moment until a perfect silence had settled on the two groups, then he snapped his head forward and smashed the brow guard of his helmet into the face of the man attempting to intimidate him, sending the thug reeling backwards with his nose torn and broken. The man’s comrades growled in anger, but not one of them made any move in the face of their opponents’ sword points, each one backed up by a soldier whose face betrayed his willingness to kill. Petrus stepped forward from the mass and pushed two of the gang’s front rank aside, approaching the Tungrian line with both hands held up, open and empty, and nodding to Julius with the manner of a man addressing an equal.
‘Centurion. Before this scene descends into an ugly brawl, perhaps you and I might speak as men? There really isn’t any need for violence.’
Julius stared at him for a moment, then nodded to Pugio.
‘Let him through.’
The Tungrian rank parted sufficiently for the gang leader to pass between the watch officer and the man next to him, and Petrus nodded to Julius with an apparent confidence that narrowed the centurion’s eyes in calculation. Dropping his hand to the handle of his dagger, the Tungrian stepped in close and put his face inches from the gang leader’s.
‘So why shouldn’t I gut you here and now, Petrus, given that you’re in open defiance of your house arrest? What brings you to sniff around us when you know full well what I told you I’d do if you set foot outside the whorehouse?’
The other man laughed softly, shaking his head.
‘That’s an easy one. There’s enough gold in there to make a man the master of this entire city, I’ve heard, and all of it stolen from the people of this province by a man imposed on us from Rome. And we want it back.’
Julius smiled humourlessly back at him, shaking his own head in turn.
‘Nice try. That money wasn’t stolen from the people, because it never belonged to them. It belongs to the emperor, and I’m going to make sure he gets it back.’
Petrus raised an eyebrow, lifting his arms and looking about him in a theatrical manner.
‘You are, are you? How many men do you have, Centurion. Thirty? Forty? I can bring two hundred of my bruisers here, and a mob of townsmen as well, if I tell them the right story. Do you think you can stand against five hundred gold-crazed men, or a thousand?’
Julius stared at him in silence for a moment, then, without shifting his gaze from the gang leader’s face, he held out a hand to the soldier closest to him.
‘Spear.’
He took the weapon, glancing critically at its iron blade, polished to a bright iron shine and sharp enough to draw a thin line of blood from his scarred thumb. He turned to the gang leader, raising the point until it was inches from the other man’s face.
‘See this? It’s just a spear. A six-foot-long pole with iron at both ends, and seems no different from any of the hundreds of thousands carried by the emperor’s armies across the empire. But this spear has one small difference. Look.’ He pointed to a small inscription hammered into the spear’s blade in a pattern of dots. ‘I Tungri. The First Tungrian Cohort, the proudest auxiliary cohort in the empire, and the nastiest. We’ve faced down overwhelming odds three times in the last year, we’ve been dropped in the shit by treason, stupidity and simple lack of men, and we’ve come out smelling of roses every fucking time. This spear has killed a half a dozen barbarians in that time, I’d guess, men just like you who couldn’t see what was coming at them until it was between their ribs and killing them. You ever taken a blade?’ He grinned mirthlessly into the gang leader’s face, shaking his head at the tattoos that decorated the man’s arms. ‘I don’t mean some little pricks on the arm that you got while you were off your face on cheap wine; I’m talking about having sharp iron shoved into your body so that you can feel it deep inside you, cold as ice and hot as a branding iron. That’s what we do, Petrus, we don’t cut and maim our victims to extort their money or ensure their silence, we just kill, quickly and without thinking. We kill and we move on, and we don’t look back.’
He waved an arm at his men, apeing the gang leader’s theatrics of a moment before.
‘So I’m warning you, cum-stain, that if you bring violence to these men they will take it, turn it around and ram it up you so hard you’ll wish you’d not been born. These men aren’t just soldiers, they’re Tungrians!’ He spat the last word in the gang leader’s face, and the other man flinched involuntarily at his sudden vehemence, his eyes widening as the Tungrian took a handful of his tunic. ‘In fact I think I’ll start early, and show your men what they have coming. Toenails, fingernails, kneecaps, eyes, balls… oh yes, we’ll have some fun before you go to Hades!’ He paused for a moment, giving the gang leader time to take in his slitted eyes and flared nostrils. ‘And for the main course we’ll see how far up your back passage I can get this spear. You’ll look much better face down with three feet of this little beauty sticking out of your shithole.’
Petrus nodded, swallowing his fear and pushing his jaw out pugnaciously.
‘I understand, Centurion. You have your orders. But for every action there is a consequence, whether intended or not. And in this case the consequences will be suffered by someone to whom I believe you were once very close. For a long time she was the mistress of my whorehouse, and occasionally my bed warmer too, when I couldn’t find anything younger and fresher, but this unfortunate turn of events puts her into the enemy camp. Annia has gone from being my most valuable possession to simply being a means of leverage, I’m afraid, and if I have to use that power over you that she gives me, it isn’t going to be pleasant.’ He looked at Julius for a moment with a pitying expression, and the centurion’s knuckles whitened on the spear’s wooden shaft. ‘Oh, and if you’re considering ramming that goat sticker “up me” in one of your famous fits of rage, you’d best be aware that there’s an hourglass running alongside the bed I tied her to before coming here. If I’m not back there in time to turn it over, then two of my most unpleasant men will start violating her in every way you can imagine, and probably a few more you can’t, and they’ll go at her until they can’t get it up any more, at which point the next two will take over. If she passes out they’ll wake her up with a bucket of cold water and start again, and they will quite literally fuck her half to death. And when they can’t face fucking her any more, when her every orifice is just a bleeding pit, they’ll cut her throat. The whole thing shouldn’t take more than a day or two.’ He glanced down at his fingernails. ‘So are you going to kill me now, and condemn your girlfriend to a protracted and deeply unpleasant fate?’
Julius stared at him for a moment, then shook his head in disgust.
‘Get out of my sight.’
Petrus slid through the hole that opened in the Tungrian line, and when he was behind his own men he turned back to call his parting comment.
‘I’m not an impatient man, Centurion, but when I want a thing you can be sure that I always get it. You’ve got until nightfall to deliver the gold to me. Fail to do so and it’ll be your woman wishing she’d never been born, not me.’
Marcus and Arabus walked up the long, narrow path from the bottom of the moat-like depression that surrounded Obduro’s fortress, keeping carefully to the well-trodden route past the defences that littered the hillside. Marcus was holding his blunt-headed spear to the older man’s back, in a show of being the tracker’s captor. Through the eye slits that perforated the face mask of the cavalry helmet he had carried with him from Tungrorum, the young Roman could see belts of mantrap pits running away across the rising ground to either side. They were the same ‘lilies’ that the Tungrians used in defence: pits dug into the ground large enough to swallow a man’s foot and floored with pointed, sharp wooden stakes intended to cripple the victim. Lines of heavy wooden stakes protruded from the hill’s side, their points set at throat height, intended to slow any advance to a crawl and allow time for archers on the fort’s wall to reap a heavy harvest of their attackers. Marcus scanned the slope’s killing field and shook his head slowly, knowing that any attack by the auxiliary cohorts would have disintegrated into a costly disaster. He put the spear’s heavy iron knob against Arabus’s back and prodded the limping tracker hard enough to make him stagger forward with a yelp of pain. A swift glance up at the fort’s walls told him that they had an audience, a pair of heads popping up to stare down at them from the parapet over the closed main gate, and he drew breath to roar a command at them, hoping that his imitation of the bandit leader’s voice would suffice to keep
