The Eagle's Vengeance (18 page)

‘Here he is! Now that my
esteemed
adviser is here perhaps we can hear the news that our spies among the Romans have brought across the river!’

Calgus took his place at the king’s side, as painfully aware as ever that he was the only unarmed man in a gathering of warriors whose bodies bristled with sharp iron. Trusted members of Brem’s inner circle, every man present wore at least two weapons on his belt, and several of them habitually carried up to another half-dozen knives about their person, whereas he had decided never to ask for the permission to carry as much as an eating knife in the certain knowledge that such permission would never be granted.

‘News, King Brem? Are the Romans finally preparing for their great retreat back to the south?’

Brem turned and grinned at him without very much humour.

‘Far from it, Calgus. Despite your repeated reassurances that they will turn tail and slink away they continue to hide behind their wall like frightened children. I have restrained my natural urge to send my warriors against them for too long, it seems to me, and now we have news of new arrivals at the fortress they call Lazy Hill. You may recognise these men by their tribal name, and I certainly do. They call themselves
Tungrians
.’ Calgus started at the name, and Brem grinned at him with fresh amusement. ‘Yes. The same men who defeated my nephew and then tore the beating heart out of my tribe. And the same men who took away your ability to walk at any better pace than that of a withered ancient. Now they have marched north again, fouling my land with the touch of their boots.’

Calgus nodded slowly.

‘Who brought this news?’

Brem pointed to the boy kneeling before him.

‘The lad here has braved the swamp after dark to bring us these tidings …’

The king was still speaking, but Calgus was suddenly unaware of his words, locking his gaze with that of the child.

‘How many men marched north, boy?’

The answer was prompt.

‘All of them, my lord King. I counted their standards as I was taught, and I saw the same nine centuries leave through the fort’s north gate as I saw arrive three days before.’

Calgus thought for a moment, then turned back to Brem who was regarding him with an expression halfway between irritation and anger at being disregarded.

‘Three days? It is not what it seems Brem. Their foray onto your land is nothing but a distraction, a ruse to draw away your strength and leave this fortress bare. They seek to rescue the eagle!’

Brem shook his head with an expression of disbelief.

‘Eagle?’ He held Calgus’s eye before speaking again, his voice louder this time.
‘Eagle?’
He stood and shouted up at the tower’s roof high above him. ‘I expect you to advise me, to share whatever wisdom you have left in you, and yet all I seem to hear from you is eagle, eagle,
eagle
! Enough! I
know
that you captured a Roman standard! I
know
how dearly they hold this statue of a bird! You do not need to wave the memory of your victory over the Romans at me with every opportunity!’

Calgus shuffled forward, his arms spread wide to implore the king to listen.

‘But my lord King, why else would they wait three days until the darkest night of the month? While these Tungrians act the part of the worm on the hook, a few of them will be moving silently across the Dirty River’s swamp and preparing to infiltrate this stronghold, hoping to—’

Brem waved an impatient hand.

‘No more, Calgus! I have already decided. We march at first light, every warrior that has answered the call to arms by that time and the remainder with orders to follow our trail. We will track these Tungrians down and then, with Cocidius’s blessing we will have their heads! Your eagle will have seven hundred pairs of Roman eyes to watch it, an entire cohort, and its shrine will become a place of dread, lined from floor to ceiling with the heads of the invaders and dedicated in my name to our god, and he will grace us with great favour as a reward for such honour being devoted to his name. And you,
adviser
, you will advise no more. Now is the time for you to fight! Since you can walk no faster than a child at the best of times you will be mounted on one of my horses, and you will ride with me into whatever battle awaits us. When the time comes I will put a sword in your hand, and you will fight our enemy alongside me, earning the respect of the people who suffer your presence with revenge for my brother seething in their hearts.’

Calgus bowed as deeply as he could.

‘Of course, King Brem. Your command is my duty. Might I enquire as to the defence that will remain about this place?’

Brem nodded sagely.

‘I am hardly as stupid as you imply, Calgus. Fifty men will be left to guard The Fang under the command of my son, more than enough to safeguard it against any raiding party, and my master of the hunt and his Vixens will be set to patrol the swamp as a precaution against any attempt to approach from the river. I have yet to meet the Roman who could cross that fetid desert of mud without betraying himself to their hunting skills, eh Scar?’

Once through the mile castle’s gate Marcus’s raiding party went forward slowly into the darkness, allowing their eyes to adapt to the absence of any light stronger than that cast by the countless pinprick stars wheeling majestically above them. Making their way stealthily down the long slope of the hill atop which Lazy Hill’s silhouette rose over the wall’s long straight line without any sound louder than the rustle of the long grass that covered the plain, they gathered around Marcus as he whispered the command to halt. Lugos uncoiled a rope that he had carried looped around his body, handing it to the Roman who in turn passed one end to the waiting legionary.

‘From here we follow Verus’s lead. Keep hold of the rope at all times, and move slowly and cautiously. If you hear a sound that you don’t like, tug the rope sharply twice and we will all stop and go to ground. If that happens, nobody moves again without my permission. Any man that loses the party will be left behind. And believe me when I tell you that I wouldn’t want to be out here alone. Arabus, stay close to Verus’s shoulder, we may have need of your instincts out there.’

The Tungrian scout nodded solemnly, taking his place behind the legionary. He had scouted the Dirty River valley’s floor the previous night, after a day spent in discussion with Verus and the Lazy Hill garrison’s scouts on the subject of how to safely pass through the river valley’s swamps. Slipping over the wall shortly after sunset, his exit had been accomplished with such stealth that the sentries set to stare into the night’s darkness had not recognised the tiny sounds of his departure as anything other than the usual nighttime noises to which they had quickly become accustomed. Marcus had warned the duty centurion to expect his return in the hour before dawn, smiling at the man’s incredulity that anyone could have left the fort without his men’s knowledge.

‘My scout learned his art in the dark forest of Arduenna, in Germania Inferior. In this darkness he could get close enough to any one of your sentries to cut the man’s throat without ever being detected.’

Shrugging at the officer’s continued disbelief, he had taken the man with him to stand on the wall, warning the legionaries on guard to be ready for the scout’s reappearance so that they could abandon their usual bored pacing of the rampart and stand staring out into the dark landscape. At length the scout had stepped out from the wall’s bulk directly beneath them, walking into the light of their torches to a collective gasp from the waiting soldiers, having approached the rampart some hundreds of paces from the fort and edged painstakingly down its length in the shadows until he was directly beneath the officers. Once through the wall gate he had briefed Marcus as to what he had found out on the Dirty River’s flood plain.

‘It is a dark and friendly place to the silent walker, Centurion,
if
you know where the paths through the swamp are to be trusted. Long ago, when this wall was your empire’s first line of defence against the northern tribes, the legions built causeways out into the Dirty River’s swamp. They built wooden walkways on the firmer ground, and dumped tons of gravel into the softer mud to make safe footpaths along which to send men out on patrol without losing them in the morass, but over the years much of this work has simply sunk into the swamp. I followed the direction that Verus gave me and crossed the river, and beyond it I found a place that he had told me about, a copse of trees close to the foot of the hill on which The Fang is built where we can wait during the day without being seen. I stayed within the trees in silence for long enough that I became accustomed to the noises of the night.’ He looked up at Marcus with warning in his eyes. ‘The valley teems with life, most of it quiet and furtive in its movements, but I also heard sounds which were not made by any animal. There are hunters roaming the swamps on the river’s northern bank I believe, quick and for the most part as quiet as I am myself, but I heard something as I was preparing to leave the shelter of the corpse, the sound of something moving through the long grass, and so I froze where I was and waited for whatever was making the noises to appear. It was a hunter, with a spear that glinted in the starlight as it probed the vegetation, searching, I presume for me. Something had alerted this hunter to my presence, my different smell, perhaps, or a small noise I made while I was crossing the valley.’

He fell silent, and Marcus looked at his man for a moment, taking the measure of his temperament and finding no fear in his eyes but rather a look of slight bafflement.

‘How many of them were there, Arabus? How many men were hunting for you?’

The tracker had held his gaze steadily even as he’d shaken his head slowly from side to side.

‘They weren’t men, Centurion. As Verus told us, the swamps are haunted by women who use dogs to hunt for infiltrators. I believe that the Dirty River’s mud masked my smell, and so when we cross the stream we must all coat ourselves with it as our main defence against detection.’

The raiding party followed the abandoned road north-west away from Lazy Hill in silence, treading carefully on the track’s gapped cobbles as they moved cautiously through the darkened landscape. Marcus found the road’s presence unexpectedly reassuring, despite its state of weed-infested disrepair and the vegetation pressing in on both sides where normally the verges would have been cleared back for twenty paces or more as a precaution against ambush. After a mile or so the ruins of a fort rose out of the forest’s black mass to their left, and Verus halted, whispering to Marcus.

‘That is Gateway Fort. It used to serve as a customs post for the frontier, a place where the tribes to the north of the wall came to gain admittance to the empire. If a local turned up at Lazy Hill without the appropriate clearance stamped on his hand in purple dye then he would have been turned around and sent away with a boot up his arse just to make the point. Now it’s just a burned-out and rotting shell, haunted by the ghosts of the men who gave their lives to take and hold this ground, the spirits of the departed indignant that we have betrayed their sacrifice by abandoning the wall. I’ve heard men coming back in from night patrols say they’ve heard noises from inside the ruins …’

Marcus nodded, looking up at the abandoned fort’s silhouette.
We over-reached ourselves to satisfy the pride of an emperor
, he mused,
and when Antoninus Pius no longer had need of the fruits of his triumph, we pulled back to the southern wall without stopping to reckon the number of men whose deaths in the service of such pointless imperial hubris were demeaned by that retreat.

He patted Arabus on the shoulder reassuringly, keeping his voice low as he replied.

‘In which case we’ll leave the spirits of the departed well alone, shall we? Let’s move on.’

Leaving the road’s course as it ran away to the north, the direction in which the Tungrians had marched earlier that day, the line of men advanced out into the Black River valley’s patchy mixture of swamp and firmer ground at a deliberately cautious pace set by Verus. The soldier took slow and deliberate paces, interspersing them with pauses where he probed the path in front of him with his spear, feeling for the firmest footing on which to lead the party forward. Marcus tested the ground to one side of the path during one such pause, finding his boot sinking into the liquid mud so easily that his leg was already immersed to the ankle before he could pull it free. The loud sucking noise made by the swamp as it surrendered its grip on the leather drew a sharp hiss from Arabus, and a stifled laugh from Arminius, who whispered in his ear as the party started forward again.

‘A fine example you’re setting us, Centurion. Perhaps we might have brought a trumpeter with us just to ensure that the Venicones know where we are?’

Verus stopped at the noise and turned back to address the raiding party, his voice a low hiss that they had to strain to pick out of the wind’s soft moan while the desolate landscape loomed around them unseen in the darkness, no less threatening for its invisibility.

‘There are thousands of sinkholes like that one on either side of the river, and any one of them can swallow an armoured soldier whole in seconds, with no trace that he ever existed other than a few bubbles. An alert man might manage to call for help before he was sucked under by the weight of his equipment, but even when the paths were well marked and fresh gravel was laid on a regular basis, men would still stumble off into the swamps and never be seen again. Now that the paths have all but sunk from sight this place is ten times as dangerous as it was before, so watch your feet!’

He turned back to resume their slow progress into the swamp, leading the party forward into the impenetrable darkness until at length what little was left of the pathway reached the river’s dark expanse. Its black water was riffled into tiny waves by a brisk wind that swirled the marsh grass through which they had made their cautious way down to the wide, slow-flowing stream’s bank. Lugos stepped forward, pulling off his heavy outer garment and easing himself into the black water as silently as he could.