The Leopard Sword: Empire IV
Read The Leopard Sword: Empire IV Online
Authors: Anthony Riches
Table of Contents
By the same author in the Empire series
EMPIRE
series
Wounds of Honour
Arrows of Fury
Fortress of Spears
Anthony Riches holds a degree in Military Studies from Manchester University. He began writing the story that would become the first novel in the Empire series,
Wounds of Honour
, after visiting Housesteads Roman fort in 1996. He lives in Hertfordshire with wife and three children.
Find out more about his books at
www.anthonyriches.com
.
Empire: Volume Four
Anthony Riches
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Anthony Riches 2012
The right of Anthony Riches to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Ebook ISBN 978 1 444 71185 1
Hardback ISBN 978 1 444 71182 0
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
For Robin
The writing of
The Leopard Sword
was at one point proving to be something of a challenge, with the book half-written but stubbornly refusing to progress beyond a knot in the plot from which I couldn’t tear myself free. At the low point of this increasingly panicked situation an old friend, on hearing of my plight on a rugby pitch touchline one Thursday night, uttered the words that were to reinvigorate my writing life: ‘Just come down to my office and write.’ So I did. No internet (critical that, nothing with which to fluff about in endless prevarication), just cups of tea and the occasional chat, that and a blazing eight or nine hundred words an hour. It was like going from dial-up to super-broadband in one step. Lesson learned, I now rent a converted henhouse on a local farm – no internet there either – and when I’m not doing ‘real’ work I commute a few miles to write in blissful peace and without any opportunity to do anything but write. So to you, Eddie Hickey, go the biggest thanks of all this time round. Let’s hope my new-found regime will see me turning out two books a year with perfect equanimity.
Apart from that I have to offer all the usual but heartfelt thanks. To Helen for encouragement and occasional strong direction (and tolerating the last touches being put to the script in the south of France); to the kids for putting up with it all; and when the pressure notched up a bit the dogs for providing the alternative perspective of lives bounded by the need to get walked and fed. My agent Robin was his usual urbane self, and Carolyn the editor sat on her hands pretending to be calm while I struggled over the line.
On the subject of Hodder & Stoughton it’s worth mentioning that my publisher remains a delight to work with, so thanks to Francine, Nick, Laure, Jaime, James, Ben and everyone else whose name I’m too scatterbrained to have remembered. Clare Parkinson did an amazing job on the copyedit and rescued me from several embarrassing errors, taking all that gore and unpleasantness in her stride. Well done. John Prigent also read the original manuscript, and made more than one telling comment, as ever!
Lastly, and as ever, thanks to everyone else that’s helped me this time round but not been mentioned. To use that old cliché it’s not you, it’s me. Those people that work alongside me will tell you how poor my memory can be, so if I’ve forgotten you then here’s a blanket apology. Where the history is right it’s because I’ve had some great help, and where it’s not it’s all my own work.
Thank you.
Germania Inferior, September,
AD
182
‘Fucking rain! Rain yesterday, rain today and rain tomorrow most likely. This bloody damp gets everywhere. My armour will be rusting again by morning.’
‘You’ll just have to get your brush out again, or that crested bastard will be up your arse like a rat up a rain pipe.’
The two sentries shared a grimace of mutual disgust at the thought of the incessant work required to keep their mail free of the pitting that would bring the disapproval of their centurion down on them. The night’s cold mist was swirling around the small fort’s watchtower, individual droplets dancing on the breeze that was moaning softly across the countryside around their outpost. The blazing torch that lit their section of the fortlet’s wall was wreathed in a ball of misty radiance that enveloped them with an eerie glow, and made it almost impossible to see further than a few paces. Shielding their eyes from the light as best they could, they watched their assigned arcs of open ground, with occasional glances into the fort below them to make sure that nobody, neither bandit nor centurion, was attempting to creep up on them.
‘I don’t mind the polishing so much as having to listen to that miserable old bastard’s constant stream of bullshit about how much harder it was in “the old days”: “When the Chauci came at us from the sea, well, that was real fighting, my lads, not that you children would recognise a fight unless you had a length of cold, sharp iron buried in your . . .”’
He fell silent, something in the darkness beneath the walls catching his attention.
‘What is it?’
He stared down into the gloom for a long moment, blinking his tired eyes before looking away and then back at the place where he could have sworn the darkness had taken momentary form.
‘Nothing. I thought I saw something move, but it was probably just a trick of the mist.’ Shaking his head, he planted his spear’s butt spike on the watchtower’s wooden planks and yawned widely. ‘I hate this time of year; the fog has a man jumping at shadows all the fucking time.’
His mate nodded, leaning out over the wall and staring down into the mist.
‘I know, sometimes you can imagine—’
His voice choked off, and after a moment’s apparent indecision he slumped forward over the parapet and vanished from view. While the other sentry goggled in amazement a hand gripped the edge of the wooden wall, hauling a black-clad figure over its lip and onto the torchlit platform; the intruder’s other hand was gripping a short spear whose blade was running with the dead sentry’s blood. The attacker’s boots shone in the light, the flickering illumination glinting off the heavy metal spikes that had carried him up the wall’s sheer wooden face. The sentry stepped forward, dimly aware of shouting from another corner of the fortlet, and raised his spear to stab at the attacker even as the other man flicked his hand as if in dismissal, sending a slender shank of cold iron to bury itself in his throat. Coughing blood, he staggered backwards and stepped out into thin air, plummeting to the hard earth ten feet below.
Lying half asleep in his small and draughty barrack, the detachment’s centurion heard the unmistakable sounds of fighting as he dozed on his bed, and he was on his feet with his sword drawn from the scabbard hanging from the room’s single wooden chair before he was fully awake. Thanking the providence that had seen him lie down without removing his boots, he pulled on his helmet and stepped out through the door with a bellowed command for his men to stand to, feeling woefully under-equipped without the reassuring weight of his armour. A shadowy figure came at him out of the darkness to his right, the attacker’s spear shining in the light of the torch fixed to the wall behind the centurion, and with a speed born of two decades of practice he swayed to allow the weapon’s thrust to hiss past him before stepping in quickly to ram the gladius deep into his anonymous assailant’s chest. Shrugging the dying man off the blade to lie gurgling out what was left of his life on the damp grass, he advanced towards the fortlet’s gate, pausing to pick up a shield left lying alongside the broken body of one of the wall sentries. A throwing knife protruded from a bloody hole in the dead man’s throat, and the centurion scowled at the ease with which his men’s defences seemed to have been compromised.
As the centurion advanced cautiously down the wall’s length, in hopes of making out the detail of what was happening around the fort’s entrance, his heart sank. The gate was already open, and a flood of attackers was pouring through it with their swords drawn. Sheltering in the palisade’s deeper shadow he watched as they overran the few men who still stood in defence of the fort, battering them brutally aside in a brief one-sided combat. Having already made the decision to slip away and report the disaster to his tribune in Tungrorum, the centurion shook his head, turning away from the sight of his command’s destruction just in time to spot a dark-clad figure coming at him out of the darkness with a short spear held ready to strike. Smashing the weapon aside with the shield, he punched hard at the reeling assailant’s face with his sword hand, catapulting the other man back against the wall. The intruder’s head hit the unyielding wood with a dull thud and he slumped slackly to the ground, his eyes glassy from the blow’s force. Kneeling to dimple the fallen attacker’s throat with the point of his gladius, the centurion hissed a question into the stunned face, the one question that had been on the lips of every soldier in the province for months.