Altar of Blood: Empire IX (42 page)

He extended a hand towards their horses, which had been fed and watered and now awaited them with their saddle bags already in place, then raised a finger to forestall the younger man as one last thought occurred to him.

‘And from now, young man, consider this before you speak or act. At least one of these barbarians will speak Latin well enough to understand everything we say to each other. Our bags will have been searched while we were at the feast last night, and every word we say will have been overheard, considered and reported to the king. So relax, Vibius Varus, and give them no reason for suspicion that we’re anything more than we’ve told them. If it helps you, tell yourself that you’re riding out to hunt in these magnificent hills.’

‘Is that what you do?’

Tiro laughed quietly.

‘Gods below, no it isn’t. The difference between us is that you’re still young, with ambition and an eagerness to serve, your life ahead of you. Whereas I am older, my skin thicker and my perspectives those of a stoic, like the last emperor. After all, everyone dies eventually, so why
not
here, on a sunny hillside with the birds singing?’

He winked at Varus.

‘Just don’t say so in front of these barbarians, eh? They might take the sentiment literally.’

‘You’re quiet this morning.’

Lupus looked over at Arminius, who was riding alongside him.

‘I slept well. All the things that have happened in the last few days seem … far away. I fell asleep with that German’s face in my mind, all screwed up in pain as he ran onto my spear. But when I woke up I couldn’t remember what he looked like.’

The German turned and looked at Gerhild, who simply stared back with her usual small smile.

‘What else did you dream about?’

‘My mother.’

Arminius raised an eyebrow.

‘Your grandfather told me that your mother died when you were very small, and that you were brought up by her mother.’

Lupus looked at him levelly, his expression untroubled.

‘It was my mother. I don’t know how I knew it, but I was sure of it in my dream. She was with another woman, who brought her to me and then walked away. She held me, and told me she loved me.’

Arminius felt a tear pricking at his eyes, feigning a cough to wipe it away.

‘Of course she does.’ He looked at the spear held across the boy’s body. ‘We’re a long way from being out of danger, Lupus. If the Bructeri find us then we’ll have to fight again.’

The young Briton stared back at him, then raised the weapon to an upright position between their horses.

‘You want to know if I can stand in line and use this to defend myself again?’ His mentor nodded silently. ‘I’ve been thinking about the moment I killed that man …’

Arminius prepared himself for whatever the boy might say next, ready to reassure him that not every man was a warrior, and that there was no shame in taking a life only to discover that doing so had deterred him from ever wanting to experience the terror of the experience.

‘And I can see that I was lucky. My parry was good, but after that I just stood there looking at him. He should have killed me, Arminius.’ His face hardened, and again the German had the feeling that he was watching the man beneath the boy’s skin asserting his presence. ‘And it won’t happen again, I’ve promised myself that. From now we practise twice a day, mornings and evenings, whenever we can. The next time my spear takes a man’s life, it won’t be luck.’

‘They went that way.’

The king’s huntsman pointed north, down an apparently arrow-straight line of open ground just wide enough for a pair of horsemen to ride along.

‘The Roman road of wood. I remember coming here with my father when I was a boy, and wondering at the sheer single-mindedness that led them to build it. He told me that when it was new the wooden surface was a foot above the marsh, and that a horse could be ridden down it with never any danger of losing its footing. And now …’

‘And now the wood is just below the water, but still there, my King. If we take it steadily no harm will come to our mounts.’

Amalric stared up the road’s visible length, stretching to the horizon in a glinting, watery ribbon that reflected the morning sun’s rays in flashes of brilliance.

‘But if we take it steadily, Gernot, will we catch the Romans before they fall into the arms of our neighbours, the Angrivarii?’

‘My King?’

The younger man pointed to the road’s wet surface.

‘If we travel slowly enough to avoid the risks of a horse slipping on the wood below the surface, which must be coated with the bog plants that grow in this part of our land, then surely our enemies will maintain the lead that they were gifted by our inability to cross the river of reeds?’

‘Whereas if we attempt to progress more quickly it is more than likely that we will lose horses to falls on the slippery wood.’

Amalric shook his head.

‘You miss my point. I have thirty men at my back, whereas the Romans are not only less than a dozen in number, but have at least one wounded man. All we have to do, Gernot, is overhaul them with only twenty men and the fight will be over before it really begins. So whereas the loss of a dozen horsemen would leave us in no different a position than we enjoy now, even a single man unhorsed presents our enemies with a problem to which they have no solution, a rider without a mount who must either be left behind or slow them yet further. You were going to counsel that we should walk our horses, to allow them to cope with the conditions underfoot?’

The noble bowed his head in agreement.

‘And you, my King, would have us move faster than that?’

‘I would. A trot, and no faster, a calculated risk. If we lose too many horses too quickly then it will be easy enough to revert to a safer rate of progress, but not to take the risk is to guarantee our failure.’

Turning his horse, he walked it to the head of the war band’s column, calling a command out across the waiting riders.

‘We will ride this road of wood at a slow trot, fast enough to allow us to overtake these Romans and yet not so fast that our beasts will be unable to control their footing. Follow me!’

‘Do you feel that?’

Cotta looked around at Gunda, having dismounted with the rest of the party to give their horses a brief rest before pushing on to the north.

‘Feel what?’

The guide looked down at his feet, an inch deep in the water that coated the wooden boards, clad in light leather boots, then at the Roman’s heavy nail-studded military footwear.

‘A tremble in the wood.’ He knelt, putting a hand to the road’s surface beneath the water that barely covered the split logs. ‘There, I can feel it properly now.’

He got to his feet and mounted his horse, looking back down the path.

‘I can’t see them, but the king’s men are back there and
they’re
not walking their horses.’

The veteran centurion walked swiftly up the short column to find Scaurus still mounted, unable to get down from his saddle without troubling his wound needlessly.

‘The Bructeri are closing on us, Tribune. The scout can feel their hoof beats on the wooden road, and though he can’t see them yet it can only be a matter of time before they overhaul us if they’re risking a trot.’

Scaurus looked past the riders behind him and down the length of road they had already ridden.

‘Which leaves us without any option. We’ll have to follow suit.’

The older man nodded grimly, then smiled slowly as a thought occurred to him.

‘I’ll warn the rest of the party. And I’ve just thought of something that might slow them down a little.’

‘Of course there was a time when the plan was for all of this to be part of the empire.’ Dubnus looked at Tiro in disbelief, and the older man laughed at his expression. ‘I know, it seems far-fetched, and it’s not something that is discussed very much any more, but it was the Emperor Augustus’s intention to incorporate all this into a new province. Magna Germania! Just another stage in the relentless conquest of the world, as he saw it, and a prudent step forward to prevent the barbarians from harassing our lands west of the Rhenus. After all, we’d dealt with the Gauls easily enough, and subdued those areas east of the Rhenus which could be reached by river.’ He waved a hand at the wooded hills through which they were riding. ‘This was in the days when the empire was young, of course, and nobody really knew quite how it actually works. These days we understand much better how difficult it is to truly conquer a people who don’t live in towns, and who can’t have their way of civilised life changed to match ours.’

The Briton nodded thoughtfully.

‘This is an interesting point. The people of my province live in towns in the south, but in the north, where we patrol the wall that was built by Hadrian, the tribes continue to resist, and in the mountains they cannot be beaten.’

The older man nodded knowingly.

‘Towns are of course easier to control. Their inhabitants are concentrated, easy to influence and easily punished if they fail to obey their new masters.’ He paused for emphasis. ‘
Vulnerable
. A careful mixture of stick and carrot, the building of baths and arenas when the population behave, and beheadings when they don’t, soon brings most people into line with our way of thinking. We match our gods up with theirs, encourage worship of each pair of deities together, and within a generation or two it is as if there was never any alternative way of living. But the peoples who live across the land this side of the river, that’s a different matter. They’re hard to reach in any numbers without using more legions than the land they populate can support, they fight like wildcats, deny our military strength by running away from it and are only too happy to put a dagger into our backs when we’re least prepared. Why the divine Augustus ever thought we might subjugate them, or why it would be worth the effort, is still a puzzle to the people that care about those sorts of things.’

‘Hubris.’

The imperial agent grinned at Dubnus.

‘Well now, Briton, there’s a word I wouldn’t have expected from a provincial auxiliary, centurion or not.’

The big man shrugged.

‘It’s true that I do indeed come from just such a hill tribe, but my father the king was careful to see me educated, and it’s hard to rub shoulders with the likes of Tribune Scaurus and my friend Marcus without some of their polish rubbing off on my rough barbarian manners.’

Tiro flinched theatrically with a self-deprecating smile.

‘Ouch. And so perish all men who underestimate you, I suspect. And yes, hubris is certainly one word for it. Perhaps blind ambition is the simplest explanation. Certainly the imperial family seem to have been of the impression that they had some divine right to conquer everything between the Rhenus and the Albis. First it was Augustus’s stepson Drusus who led the charge, defeating all manner of tribes across these lands before he was careless enough to fall off his horse and then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, unfortunate enough to die as a consequence. Then his older brother Tiberius took over and did a good deal more of the same, easy enough to understand since they were cut from the same stone, so to speak, and all seemed assured until Augustus made the mistake of confirming your friend Gaius Vibius Varus’s distant ancestor as commander of the army that was to complete the conquest of the planned province. Varus was an administrator and not a fighting general, although he does seem to have been an expert in the darker arts of suppressing an urban population in the way we discussed earlier. According to the histories he had two thousand men crucified in Judea to head off a rebellion before it could get properly started, so he wasn’t exactly restrained in his use of the stick. And it seems he took that stick to the “pacified” German tribes with a vengeance, and they paid him back by allying with the traitor Arminius, and luring Varus and his three legions into a colossal ambush.’

‘They were all killed?’

‘Not at first. But they were broken by the initial onslaught, more or less, and then hunted and harried south over the mountain range and through the swamps that stood between them and safety. A handful of them reached the fortress at Aliso, but that was overrun in its turn soon after, and any plans to consolidate our grip of a pacified “Greater Germania” were at an end. There were punitive expeditions, of course, and the dead of the three legions were collected and buried, but the locals dug them up again as soon as the armies that had been sent in to take revenge were gone, and it all ended up with Tiberius making the very sensible decision to leave the Germans to stew in their own juice. You see …’

He lowered his voice to prevent their escort from overhearing him.

‘It’s really very simple. First we side with one tribe, and give them an incentive to attack their neighbours, and then we side with another and persuade them to attack the first. Keeping the Germans at each other’s throats is the most effective way we can prevent them from ganging together and trying to cross the Rhenus, which means that we’ve had to get rather good at fomenting disputes between them.’

Dubnus looked at him for a moment.

‘And there’s a man like you somewhere in Britannia right now doing just the same thing?’

Tiro nodded with pursed lips.

‘Yes. That’s exactly the way it is. And it’s not going to change any time soon.’

‘We must be gaining on them!’

Gernot grinned at the king, having spurred his horse up alongside Amalric’s mount, then stared out down the arrow-straight path that stretched to the horizon.

‘Surely, my King! It can only be a matter of hours before we overhaul them, and then our rev—’

The scream of a horse behind them had both men twisting in their saddles in surprise, reining their mounts in to survey a scene of chaos. One of the men following behind them had been violently dismounted, and was lying prone in the thin layer of water that covered the track’s wooden surface, his horse thrashing and bucking in apparent agony. Half a dozen of the riders following behind had been forced to ride off the path into the deeper water that lay on either side, and were struggling to persuade their spooked mounts to back up and regain the comparative safety of the wooden surface, while those further back had pulled up and waited helplessly, their way forward entirely blocked by the confusion.