Fortress of Spears (13 page)

‘And just what can you do on a horse?’

Qadir smiled, and Marcus caught a brief glimpse of a relaxed confidence he hadn’t seen in the man’s demeanour at any point in the weeks they had spent together since their first meeting in the port of Arab Town.

‘I have some small skill in the saddle. I …’

Something behind Marcus caught the Hamian’s eye, and his jaw dropped fractionally.

‘Oh, Deasura, that’s not a sight you’ll see every day!’

Marcus turned and stifled a laugh in the face of an irascible German sitting uncomfortably on the now distinctly unhappy-looking cavalry horse. He walked around the mare, his face alive with the first smile since Rufius’s death.

‘Well, Arminius, I can’t say you’re the most natural horseman I’ve ever seen.’

Arminius sneered down at the men standing around him, then leaned out of the saddle and put a sausage-sized finger in Double-Pay Silus’s face.

‘Just so we’re clear, I hate horses. Tribune Scaurus says I ride like a mule tender with bleeding piles, and that I have all the skill in the saddle of a sack full of shit. And despite that, before you open your mouth, I’m one of your thirty-one horsemen and that’s official. You don’t like it, I don’t like it, but the tribune couldn’t give a toss what either of us think. Wherever Centurion Corvus goes, I go. So there it is.’

He climbed down from the horse and clenched both of his massive fists, scowling around him.

‘And anyone that finds that funny had better be ready for an unscheduled sleep.’

Double-Pay Silus looked at him thoughtfully, then beckoned his pay-and-a-half across to join him.

‘See that?’

He pointed at the German, and the other man nodded with pursed lips.

‘What have we got that’ll carry him thirty miles in a day without breaking down inside a week?’

South of the Wall, in a copse overlooking the Sailors’ Town fort, Centurion Rapax and his colleague Excingus were exchanging uneasy glances. The fort was silent, without any movement, and Rapax had been watching its walls intently for long enough to be sure it was deserted. Excingus fished out his pocket tablet, once again checking their route against the directions he’d been given in Yew Grove two days before.

‘North from Waterfall Town ten miles, across the river dam and then another nine miles north up the road to Vintner’s Way, then carry on to Sailors’ Town.’ He paused, giving the silent fort another long, searching stare. ‘Well, that’s bloody Sailors’ Town right enough, and it looks just as dead as the first two ghost towns we’ve ridden past this morning. I say we push on, and get to this Noisy Valley place soonest.’

Rapax spat on the copse’s dry earth.

‘That centurion you got the directions from was close to soiling himself, and there he was with half a cohort between his precious skin and the local thrill seekers. He had no patrols out looking for information, so he had no idea of what might have happened up this way in the last few days. I didn’t like the last place, but we were close enough to friendly forces for the locals to be keeping a low profile. Here, on the other hand …’

Excingus nodded and stared across the three hundred paces that separated copse and fort.

‘We’re too far out to see what’s in there. Perhaps we should get a little closer?’

His colleague shook his head decisively, sniffing the air.

‘Smell that? It’s faint, but we’re downwind from the fort. That’s the smell of rotting meat, old son. Once you’ve had a noseful of that reek you never forget it. That fort’s full of nothing but corpses and flies, and the tribesmen are out there somewhere, lurking close to the road and waiting for some more soldiers to blunder into their trap. We can only guess what the men who were manning the place went through before they died, but I don’t intend sharing their fate. We’ll go round it, my friend, and give the barbarians plenty of chance to show themselves.’

The small party mounted their horses and walked them carefully and quietly round to the fort’s east, putting the higher ground between it and them to mask their movements from any watchers in the fort as much as possible. Only when the fort was completely out of sight was Rapax willing to allow them to return to the road, and even then it was clear he was still reluctant. He gathered his men about him, looking hard into each man’s eyes as he spoke as if weighing them for their ability to deal with the pressure they were all feeling.

‘There are fifteen of us. If we bump into anything more than a couple of dozen of them we’ll have no option but to run away from them as fast as these horses will carry us.’ He cast a dark glace around his tent party. ‘And any of you that decide that keeping your skin intact might best be achieved by outpacing the rest of us had better be ready to see the colour of your guts when I catch up with you. Right, then, march.’

4

‘I should have known that we’d end up with nothing better to do than exercise these animals and scratch our backsides with the boredom.’

The makeshift cavalry squadron had ridden to the south and east, patrolling the empty rolling landscape under Double-Pay Silus’s critical eye. Each of the soldiers was getting to know the horse with which he had been paired as they trotted easily across the rolling ground, well to the south of the hills over which the remainder of the Petriana wing were pursuing the Venicones. The detachment’s other squadrons had been thrown along the edge of the range, sweeping the margins of the forests that covered its margins for stray tribesmen, but the trainees were restricted to more sedate duty as they got to know their horses. Marcus was riding a big rangy grey which seemed steady enough, although Qadir had already confided to his friend that he had overheard the double-pay referring to the animal as ‘Bonehead’. For Qadir’s part, Silus had taken one look at his riding style and pointed him at a fine-limbed and well-muscled chestnut mare.

‘I’ve been holding that one back, in the expectation of not finding anyone capable of getting the best out of her, but I’d say you’re probably matched. See what you make of her.’

Horse and rider made a fine combination, and the mare seemed to ripple with power whenever Qadir applied the slightest encouragement.

‘So, you’re not just a skilled archer, but an accomplished horseman to boot?’

The Hamian bowed his head at Marcus’s assessment of his skills.

‘I haven’t ridden a horse this well bred for nearly ten years, and so I am a little rusty. I suppose it will all come back to me soon enough.’

Marcus grinned across at his friend, raising an inquisitive eyebrow.

‘Yes, but what is it that’s coming back, eh, Chosen? Where exactly, I wonder, did you learn to ride like a Parthian?’

Qadir shrugged dismissively.

‘My family had a little money, and my father considered horsemanship the prime virtue of any man’s life, and so it was that I was trained from a very early age to ride with all the skill of the desert Arabs he paid to teach me. They taught me all the tricks they knew, and drilled me in the use of the bow from the back of a horse until I was their equal. Until today I had more or less forgotten that time, or perhaps pushed it to the back of my mind to avoid dwelling upon its loss …’

Marcus’s grey pricked his ears up and raised his head without any change in his pace, suddenly alert despite the lack of any obvious cause for reaction, the animal’s head swivelling to left and right as he searched the ground in front of them for whatever it was that had caught his attention. With an explosion of movement less than a hundred paces from the two horsemen, a deer broke cover, sprinting away from them and eliciting an uncompromising response from Marcus’s mount. The big horse pinned back his ears and went from their easy trot to a full gallop in half a dozen strides, almost throwing Marcus from his saddle with the speed of his reaction. Regaining his seat, the centurion decided to let the animal run, enjoying the unaccustomed sensation of his mount’s raw speed. Looking back over his shoulder he saw that Qadir, despite the fact that he had been caught by surprise by the horse’s sudden charge, was crouched over his own horse’s back as the chestnut mare swiftly gathered pace. Supremely confident in his ability to stay in the saddle, the Hamian dropped his mount’s reins and pulled his bow loose from the leather carrying case across his shoulder, reaching for an arrow as the chestnut started to catch Marcus’s grey, eyes narrowed as he calculated the distance to the fleeing deer. Farther back, the double-pay and his deputy were also riding hard in pursuit, the rest of the newly formed squadron looking on with expressions of either amusement or amazement.

Marcus tightened his grip on his spear, putting his heels into the grey’s ribs to encourage the horse to greater efforts, and touching the reins to guide him around a small copse of a dozen or so stunted trees. As he flashed past the thicket he glanced into the trees, his gaze momentarily catching a flash of red in the greens and browns of the undergrowth, and with a sudden hard tug at the grey’s reins he turned the horse sharply, pulling his shield from its place on the horse’s left flank and readying his spear to stab into the foliage. With a desperate shout a tribesman pushed his way out of the trees, bellowing his defiance and brandishing his sword at horse and rider, but the grey was seemingly as keen for the fight as he was for the chase, ignoring both the barbarian’s noise and his blade as he pushed in towards the new threat, turning slightly to the right without any conscious effort on Marcus’s behalf. The horse’s move both presented his rider’s shield and opened the angle for his spear as Marcus punched the weapon forward and down, sinking its heavy iron head deep into the tribesman’s neck. The spear’s razor-edged blade sliced open the warrior’s throat, and he fell back from the challenge choking on his own blood.

Pulling the grey’s head farther round to the right, keeping the shield between him and the trees, Marcus walked the animal along the treeline, searching for any sign that other tribesmen were lurking in the shadows. Without warning five men burst from the copse and ran from the horsemen, most of them clearly wounded from the previous day’s fighting and incapable of much more than a limping shuffle. Marcus shook his head in disbelief, turning to follow them at little more than a trot and raising his weapon to strike again, slamming his spear’s iron head squarely into the rearmost man’s spine and shunting him forward half a dozen paces before heaving the weapon free and dumping him to the ground. An arrow whistled past his head with a foot or so to spare, dropping one of the faster runners in a confusion of limbs as the fallen tribesman arched his back and scrabbled for the arrow’s shaft. A moment later Qadir loosed another missile, and a second warrior staggered forward and down on to his knees with an arrowhead lodged deep in the square of his back. The last two barbarians stopped and turned to face their pursuers with their swords drawn, one of them barely able to stand from a roughly bandaged leg wound, the other, a tall, powerful warrior, raising his sword and stepping forward to protect his comrade. Marcus cantered the grey past them outside the reach of their weapons, reaching round to stab his spear’s bloodied blade into the wounded man’s chest and dropping him to his knees in grunting agony. The last warrior raised his sword in futile defiance, and Qadir put one last arrow to his bow, drawing the missile back in readiness for the split-second flight that would bury its evil three-bladed iron head in the barbarian’s chest. Marcus looked back at the man, and at the last possible moment realised that there was something familiar in the barbarian’s stance as he prepared to fight and die.

‘Qadir! Alive!’

The big Hamian stopped in mid-shot, not yet taking the tension off the arrow poised to fly from his bow, and Marcus trotted his horse back to within a few paces of the defiant warrior, aligning his spear’s gore-slathered blade with the barbarian’s chest. The tribesman stood his ground, his sword held in both hands ready to swing if the Roman came within reach, but his face spoke of desperate exhaustion rather than any eagerness to fight. Marcus peered hard at his face, nodding slightly as if some suspicion were confirmed by closer scrutiny.

‘Surrender to me now and you’ll get fair treatment! Lift that sword to me and I’ll put you down with a wound like his …’ He pointed the spear at the fallen man panting for breath on the ground next to the barbarian. ‘And if you wait here for much longer there’ll be another half dozen or more of us, all looking for a head to take and only you on your feet. Decide now!’

The warrior closed his eyes and raised his head to the sky, then dropped the sword to the ground and slumped to his knees, just as Double-Pay Silus galloped his horse round the copse and pulled up alongside Marcus, levelling his spear at the defenceless warrior.

‘Well done, Centurion! Do you need a hand sending this big bugger to meet his ancestors?’

Marcus shook his head, pointing at the corpses and dying men scattered around them, his voice hard with authority.

‘If you want a head to decorate your saddle, take any one of those that takes your fancy, neither my comrade here nor I have any appetite for the practice. But this one, Double-Pay, is
mine
.’

He dismounted as the remainder of the squadron cantered up, stepping carefully up to the barbarian, picking up the man’s sword and passing it to Qadir to remove any temptation for renewed resistance. His captive looked up from his kneeling position, glancing around at the hostile men crowding in to see their centurion’s captive, speaking in rough Latin without any sign of fear.

‘So what you do now? Torture, and then knife?’

Marcus shrugged, keeping his eyes on the other man and his hand on the ornate eagle pommel of his gladius.

‘There’s no need for me to torture you. All I want is for you to tell me your story since the last time we met, and if you do that with honesty then I will release you unharmed.’

‘Centurion, I think we’d be best …’

Marcus spoke without turning away from the captured Briton, who was now regarding his captor with a puzzled look.

‘No, Double-Pay, this is not negotiable. If this man tells us what has happened to him in the very few weeks since he and I last met, and if I believe that he’s telling the truth, then he walks free. I suggest that you carry on with our patrol, and I will stay here long enough to hear him out. I’ll keep a few men with me for safety, though, because I know from recent experience that he’s a fighter. My men Qadir, Scarface and Arminius ought to be more than enough.’