The watcher removed his Homburg hat, exposing a head of close-cropped white hair. With his elbow, the dark man brushed ash from his hat before replacing it atop his head. He then turned up his collar and crossed the now-empty street to enter the hotel.
32
A Wolf in the Fold
The Rangers atop the escarpment heard the sounds of battle from somewhere below. The multiple shotgun blasts reverberated to them through the still night air. They moved to the end of the headland at the top of the slope above the Roman fort. Bat and Jimbo watched the wooded hummock of land through their scopes but could see nothing, not even a muzzle flash, through the dense skein of trees.
Lee watched the fort beneath them. No alarm was raised. The sentries had to have heard the booms reaching them from the forest but paid them no mind. They hadn’t yet had the experience of facing firearms, so the blasts meant nothing to them but a curious noise of unknown origin.
An extended firefight meant that they probably lost the horses. There were too many shots fired. It wasn’t a quick exchange with a small force. It was bandits perhaps but more probably the auxiliary archers showing up ahead of schedule. None of them were concerned about Boats. He knew to abandon the mounts and get the hell out.
The unmistakable sound of a Claymore erupting changed that assessment. That was a last-ditch, broken arrow move. The SEAL was in deep shit if he was playing his lethal trump card this early.
Down in the camp, the Romans were rousing. They all heard it. It was loud enough and close enough to bring some of them out of their tents. The mine going off raised a visible cloud that rose above the treetops. They didn’t make a move to mobilize, but an officer was storming around in his undies, waving a staff and ordering men up onto the ramparts. That confirmed that they were warned to expect something even if they didn’t know what form it would take.
“What about Boats?” Chaz asked.
“Boats is fucked,” Lee said. “That’s the way it is.”
“So, we leave him hanging?” Jimbo said.
“What would he want us to do? We don’t know that he’s been captured and if he’s been killed then heading back over there is a pure bonehead play. Either way, we lost the horses.”
“And the gear,” Bat said. “We’ll need to do something about that.”
“Can’t leave that shit back here when we leave,” Chaz said.
“Yeah. Catastrophic anachronisms. Heard the lecture, bought the t-shirt,” Lee snarled. “We have a new Priority Two. We stick here and watch the fort. If it is the Assyrians over there, then they’ll bring the horses and the gear to the fort. Once we confirm that we build a plan from there.”
It was an unforgiving set of options, but everyone on the team knew to move on. Mission creep is inevitable, and shit happens. All the bitching in the world won’t unscrew the pooch. They settled into positions to keep watch on the Roman fort and camp.
The sun rose behind them and the shadow of the headland receded, revealing more and more of the land between the fort and the line of trees. As Lee predicted, men emerged from the forest leading a line of horses, their horses, with all the gear they left in camp back in place atop the packies.
As the column of men moved closer, they could make out more details and saw something that Lee had not foreseen. Atop one of the horses rode a man. He was stripped naked. The man’s hands were bound before him. A loop of rope ran under the girth of the horse attached to either ankle. A prisoner.
Boats.
Mettius Trivian Bachus ordered the barbarian brought to his tent. The man appeared to be a Celt. The flaming red hair and beard were common among those people, but the man was exceptionally tall for that breed. Though his skin was marked with ink in patterns such as Bachus had seen before in Hispania. Some of the ink was artful but strange, including a quite realistic female figure wearing nothing but some strips of cloth marked with a pattern of stars and red bands. Another showed an eagle tearing at a snake and was very striking. If the man lived, Bachus would ask him about these grotesqueries.
Two soldiers threw the man roughly to the carpet. His body was covered with bruises received at the hands of the Assyrians. There was also the point of an arrow sticking obscenely from his leg.
“He’s bleeding on my carpet,” Bachus growled. The Celt was lifted and tossed to a section of bare earth.
Also in attendance were Bachus’s prime optio and the headman of the archer auxiliary, an oily brigand named Raman. The centurion also asked for Brulo, a brawny Sabine from his century.
Brulo was a dull-witted brute with a flair for creative cruelty. Titus, the prefect’s lictor, was also with them in the tent. The man said little, but Bachus had caught him time and again scratching with a stylus at a wax tablet. Scribbling notes for Valerius Gratus, no doubt.
Soldiers brought in some of the strange objects found amongst the prisoner’s belongings. These were tossed in a pile before Bachus’s camp chair where he sat warming his hands over a brazier to take the morning stiffness from them. He leaned forward to retrieve an object, a bottle of translucent blue glass made with impressive craftsmanship.
Bachus fiddled with the top of the bottle and found the metal seal atop it turned in his hand until it came free. It was secured in place by a series of grooves worked
