Altar of Blood: Empire IX (50 page)

He stepped closer to the German, close enough to reach out and touch the king, his words spoken vehemently but softly enough not to be heard by the men behind him.

‘I’ll make very sure that your tribe find out that you’re the man who stole the eagle from your own treasury and gave it to me, on
his
orders. I’m giving you your freedom from his intrigues, and those of the men who will inevitably follow him, if you’ll let me do so. When I return to Claudius’s Colony I will find your file, in his doubtless comprehensive records of who informs on who within the tribes, and who has been an agent of Rome, however unwillingly, however pragmatic their association with the empire, and I will destroy it. Take him away. And if I were you I’d bury him as deep as you can when you tire of his incessant smug prating and hand him to your priests to make reparation for the things he’s done to your tribe and others over the years. He signed his own death warrant when he instructed the Angrivarii to kill my men.’

Amalric nodded, gesturing to his men to pick up the spy, then to Qadir with an open hand.

‘You are free. But as the chief priest of my tribe I suggest that you reconsider your godless ways before they get you killed. There, I have fulfilled my part of the bargain, have I not?’

Marcus nodded, taking the iron-bound box from the trooper who was carrying it and holding it out it to the king.

‘This eagle was never formally lost, so its return could only have been an embarrassment to be covered up. Swear to me that it will never again be used to torture any Roman.’

Amalric nodded.

‘I swear to honour its capture in different ways.’ He held out his hand to Gerhild. ‘Come, sister. Your people await you.’

The seer frowned.

‘But I dreamed that I was to die here, on the field of bones and gold.’

‘Not everything you dream comes true. Or perhaps this is a prediction for another day? Until the day that Hertha claims your spirit you can make good use of the extra time you’ve been given by helping my people worship the earth goddess alongside their devotion to Wodanaz.’ The king looked at Gunda. ‘And you, brother, you have spent the last fifteen years roaming the frontier on both sides of the river. You will have seen and done things that we can only imagine. Will you return to my land, and share the wisdom you have gathered with me?’

The guide shook his head with a smile.

‘No, my King. An order of banishment cannot be removed from a man’s head once sentence is passed, and your priests would be duty bound to execute me for the sin of disobeying that order, would they not?’

Amalric smiled more broadly.

‘Leave that problem to me. I am, after all, the king. I write the rules of our religion. And besides, when it becomes clear to our people that you, an outcast, still loved your people enough to become Wodanaz’s chosen means of defeating our enemy by luring them out here, onto our ground, they will clamour for you to be forgiven. When they realise that the recapture of our eagle, whose theft was abetted by my uncle Gernot of all people, and the rescue of your sister from the clutches of Roman spies were both mostly your doing, I suspect that any resistance to your reinstatement as a member of the tribe will melt away. You have my word on it.’

Gunda nodded solemnly.

‘Then I can only accept, my King.’ He turned to Marcus and bowed. ‘Give my thanks to your tribune when he wakes, Centurion. Tell him that I renounce my claim on the three aureii he promised me. I have earned something of much greater value in return.’

‘You’re telling me that the witch was actually the king’s sister?’

Dolfus drank from his water skin before answering Scaurus’s question, looking into the fire that lit the clearing in which they had made camp for the night before re-entering Marsi territory. The tribune had regained consciousness that afternoon after almost a full day of sleep so deep that his comrades had for a time feared the worst, but his recovery since waking had been swift. While the wound still troubled him it was now devoid of any sign of infection, and his demeanour was more or less back to its usual acerbic view of the world.

‘Yes, Tribune. Tiro told me that Amalric’s father was wont to use his prerogatives as the king to bed any female that took his eye, and long before his marriage produced any children he fathered Gerhild and Gunda as twins by one of his wife’s serving women. It was all kept very quiet, of course, to avoid the risk of a bastard child contesting the throne, and neither of them had any idea of who their father was until much later, when Gerhild worked it out on her own. When the queen finally managed to turn out a male heir she insisted that Gunda be outcast when the opportunity arose, despite the extenuating circumstances, to finally remove any risk to her son’s succession. And while Amalric’s father agreed in order to keep the peace with his wife, he deemed the girl too valuable to the tribe to share her brother’s fate, and instead had her incarcerated in the tower close to Thusila so that he could consult her on both his own failing health and her prophecies for the future.’

He drank again, grimacing at the memory of his service to the spy master.

‘It was Tiro who put the idea of kidnapping her onto Cleander’s desk. From what he told me it seems that he feared Amalric would seek peace with Rome, and in turn destabilise the tribes around the Bructeri. The Marsi, Chamavi, Angrivarii, and several others would all have had their noses put out of joint, whereas a hostile Bructeri would ensure the status quo in the region, and all at no more cost than the occasional soldier abducted and tortured to death. And of course he had leverage over the king, who had made his inclination towards peace clear to one or two Romans to whom he would have been better off saying nothing, including, ironically enough, your centurion’s uncle.’

Scaurus shifted his position with delicate care for his wound, looking over at Varus with a questioning expression.

‘And you, Centurion, actually had the balls to intercept Tiro’s message to the Angrivarii and replace it with your own?’

The younger man shrugged.

‘I suppose it’s a question of that old adage, Tribune, it isn’t what you know, but who you know. I’ve sat and drunk wine with my uncle Julius often enough to have heard all of his stories about the various tribal kings he met while he was ensuring that they would all keep their swords sheathed when Rome’s attention was elsewhere. He might have been the quintessential man of action, but by the gods he could talk with a cup or two of good Falernian inside him. I felt as if I knew them all personally, so approaching the king of the Marsi wasn’t quite as off-putting as it might otherwise have been. And knowing his strong motivation towards a certain yellow metal, it wasn’t too hard to recruit King Sigimund to our way of thinking, once he had an even more significant purse than the one Tiro had given him in his hands.’

Scaurus lay back, looking up at the tree branches above his head.

‘I suppose we can be grateful that Tiro wasn’t sufficiently paranoid to make sure that neither you nor Dubnus were carrying any gold with which to effect such a change of heart.’

Dubnus laughed sourly from the other side of the fire.

‘Has nobody told you? The devious bastard told us that he would need every aureus he could lay hands on, and demanded access to your private effects in order to ransack what was left of the gold that stuck to our fingers during our exposure of the praetorian prefect.’

Scaurus nodded.

‘It was always my expectation that Cleander knew well enough we’d kept something back, even if Clodius Albinus wasn’t shouting to that effect from the rooftops. I’d imagine he told Tiro to use us as a source of funds, not least to make sure such a useful asset was removed from my control. That’s a pity, but unavoidable, I guess. So how did you manage to persuade the king of the Marsi to help you out?’

He looked expectantly at Varus, a familiar frown spreading across his face as the centurion’s expression twitched with barely suppressed humour.

‘With gold, Tribune.’

‘But if Tiro had
our
gold …?’

‘Tiro had
some
of our gold. It was obvious to me from the moment he pulled me off the street and made it clear who he really was that he was likely to be serving only one interest, and that we couldn’t trust him not to leave us face down in a ditch if the situation called for it. So I took the liberty of removing most of the gold from your chest.’

Scaurus frowned at him in disbelief.

‘How? It was locked. You told me that Tiro was forced to break it open.’

Varus smiled indulgently.

‘Your officers, Tribune, have long been less convinced of your immortality than you yourself seem to be. We copied the key to your chest months ago, with the assistance of a certain German, which made it the work of a moment for me to remove most of the coin and hide it about my person, and that of my colleague Dubnus, before Tiro made his move.’

The tribune looked from Varus to Dubnus, and then back again.

‘About your persons? Does that mean …?’

Dubnus nodded sourly.

‘Yes. It does. And if you don’t mind, Tribune, I’d rather not discuss it any further. I may never be the same again.’

Mastering his sudden urge to laugh out loud with a visible show of will, Scaurus nodded gracefully.

‘Very well, we’ll pass over the means by which you managed to preserve what was left of our gold …’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Is there any of it left, by the way, and if there is … where is it?’

Varus patted his purse.

‘Enough to get us back across the Rhenus, and to take what’s left of our men wherever we decide is the safest. But as to where that might be …’

Silence fell across the circle of men, broken at length by the tribune.

‘And there’s the rub. The decurion can probably get away with just returning to his unit, and telling anyone who comes asking that Tiro went across the border into Bructeri territory and didn’t come back. Which is true, as it happens, even if it does omit a few details. But ourselves?’

Marcus poked at the fire with a stick he was holding before he spoke, his face illuminated by the blaze’s orange light.

‘It’s hard to deny that Tiro’s instructions to have the Angrivarii kill us all must have come from Cleander. Which means that any return to Rome would be risky in the extreme. It might be wise for us to find somewhere quiet and vanish for a while, the remnants of our detachment too, to avoid their being tortured for information if they’re spotted returning to the cohort. In due course Cleander will probably fall victim to his own inflated sense of self-worth, and manage to get himself executed, at which point we can possibly risk coming out of hiding. Possibly.’

‘But …?’

The young centurion looked up at Scaurus, his expression sombre.

‘But we’d be leaving Julius and two cohorts of good men at the mercy of Cleander’s decision as to whether our disappearance is genuine or just contrived, since he won’t get any reassurance on the subject from Tiro. Or anything at all, other than a bald statement from whoever he’s set to watch his spymaster that Tiro crossed the river with us and nobody came back. And it won’t take long for our association with our colleague’s cousin and his fleet to make him start thinking, will it?’

Scaurus nodded.

‘And if he suspects we’ve survived, he’ll probably stop at nothing to find out where we are. That would put Julius and Annia at severe risk of falling under suspicion, and being tortured for our whereabouts. Not to mention your son. And of course there are two cohorts of men to consider. If he sees fit to do so, a man in Cleander’s position could condemn them all to never seeing their homes and families again with the swift flourish of a pen.’

An uncomfortable silence fell upon them, each man reflecting on an unpalatable choice.

‘Rome it is then.’

Scaurus nodded at Marcus’s flat statement.

‘Unavoidably so. I’m sure we can come up with some explanation or other for our deviation from the original plan to escape by means of the fleet, and justify surrendering the witch without making ourselves look like traitors.’ He stared at the young centurion for a moment. ‘And at least one good thing came of all this. It looks to me as if whatever it was that she did to you last night has burned away both your need for revenge and your sense of self-loathing at having taken it.’

Marcus stared into the fire as he answered, his expression unreadable.

‘Possibly it has, Tribune. I no longer feel anything for the men I’ve killed, no remorse, no connection to them at all. It’s as if all that death took place somewhere else, and I was simply an observer. But as to whether it has quenched the heat of my urge to revenge on the men who killed my wife?’

He poked at the logs again, staring into the flames as if seeing something there that held his attention for a long moment before he spoke again.

‘Perhaps …’

When looking at the situation on the Roman empire’s northern frontier in the late second century AD I find it difficult to get past comparisons with the British Empire in India in the second half of the
19
th century. On the western bank of the Rhenus (Rhine) was order and prosperity, an imperial rule that had endured since the reign of Augustus almost two hundred years before, while on the eastern side of the river were a seething mass of unconquered and defiant German tribes, descendants of the men who had inflicted the first emperor’s greatest defeat upon his hitherto ceaseless expansion of the empire. Like the British in India, in their relationship with the tribes of what we might loosely call Afghanistan, while Rome had the ability to mount incursions in strength, and to punish individual tribes through both the brutal application of military power and the slightly more subtle application of political persuasion to foster discord and internecine warfare, it lacked the means of lasting conquest.

I’ve used characters in this story to hypothesise some of the reasons for that failure to succeed in creating a province of Magna Germania – bloody-minded German resistance, the lack of any network of settlements to provide Rome with a ‘soft’ urban population that would be open to both bribery and coercion to comply with the imperial cult, and the unfavourable terrain that sometimes helped the less regimented German tribal armies, comparatively unsophisticated though they were. Whatever the reason, Rome glowered across the Rhenus at the province that never quite was for hundreds of years after the disaster of AD
9
(referred to in this book and described in much greater fictional detail by Ben Kane’s excellent
Eagles
series). Protected by a sizeable riverine fleet and by legions and auxiliary cohorts that studded the west bank in constant readiness to repel invasion or mount a local police action, the northern frontier was well secured against an enemy whose impetus to cross the river was hardly strong, given the absence of pressure from further east that was to be cause of so many problems in the late empire.