Black Salamander (19 page)

The chiefs would not be rushed.

The situation worsened.

*

In Vesontio, proud and splendid, protected as she was by the great loop in the River Doubs and sheltered by the mountain soaring upwards at her back, street sweepers brushed away the debris of yesterday’s celebrations and agreed they’d never seen so much litter in their lives. Eggshells, pie crusts, melon pips and carrot tops were pushed into barrows, along with broken combs, false teeth, pottery shards and lost toys, while an army of slaves with buckets and shovels scooped up what the gentry quaintly called mule apples. Dogs had already disposed of the meat bones.

‘Aye, but it was worth it,’ a weathered Gaul called across the Forum. ‘Never seen a show to match it in me life!’

His companion paused to lean on his heather broom and wipe his brow with the back of his hand. ‘Handsome,’ he agreed. ‘Right handsome,’ and bent down to extricate a mussel shell which had become lodged between the paving stones. He’d never seen a mussel shell before. All the way from the coast they’d
fetched them
for
yesterday’s festiv
ities. The gutter sweeper slipped it inside his shirt to take home for his daughter.

‘Is it true,’ he called across, ‘that there was frozen puddings on the go at last night’s banquet?’

‘Not half!’ His friend laughed, tapping his broom. ‘A mate of mine was one of them sent to bring the snow down from the Alps, and watched it get mashed with flour, cherries and sweet white wine. But only for the nobility, mind. All us poor buggers get is the sodding stones to clear away.’ With reluctance he resumed his sweeping, his mind wandering back over the pageant.

What a spectacle. Riverboats decked out with banners, garlands draped from every building, music on every street corner and, oh my word, those horses which led the parade! Every one white as bloody marble, caparisoned in blue and gold and silver. Elephants there was, camels, yellow beasts with long necks (giraffes was they called?), and free beer. Wine if you wanted it, but he was a Celt and didn’t go for that nancy-boy stuff. My, there was trumpets, fanfares, dark-skinned dancers wearing saucy feather skirts and very little else, acrobats, jugglers and a sorcerer who magicked coloured smoke from fire and caused explosions loud enough to leave you deaf for days.

Aye, he was a simple man, the gutter cleaner, but in his opinion it was a smart move, building a temple here in the capital to these Castor and Pollux blokes. Not because they symbolized peace and harmony between Roman and Sequani. Rather, he felt, because Pollux had a distinctly
Celtic
ring about it. Hadn’t every king of note had a name ending with an X? Oh yes, only good could come of this.

*

The prefect charged with organizing yesterday’s spectacular was of a similar opinion, and despite his thumping hangover and the fact that his wife had got drunk again and taken all her clothes off in the middle of the banquet, by and large, everything had gone swimmingly, he thought. The processions and the inauguration ceremony reflected weeks of painstaking rehearsal, not a foot out of place anywhere, although the prefect had been a little concerned when the elephant peed over one of the horn players. However, apart from one extra honk, albeit high-pitched and off-key, the musician seemed to take it in his stride, and it was—the prefect smiled at his own joke—the only sour note in the proceedings. (His wife’s conduct aside.)

In manly defiance of the hammering inside his bruised and battered skull, he summoned his secretary.

‘Have those silly arses turned up yet?’ he demanded.

‘Um, now which exactly might those be, sir?’

‘The bloody idiots who got themselves lost, took some local byway and then couldn’t turn back because the bloody road had gone.’

‘Ah, the delegation! No, sir, they haven’t arrived.’

‘Right.’ The prefect sighed. ‘Send a message to the barracks, tell the commander to dispatch thirty men to meet them on the road and escort—’

‘You’ve already put that into practice, sir. Two days ago. Only with just a skeleton guard remaining in Vesontio, they could only spare us eight.’

‘Croesus, so they could.’ In the last final, frantic hours of the build-up to the ceremony the troubles to the north had completely slipped his mind and he thanked Jupiter
Almighty there was no bloody dissension among the
Sequani. ‘But no report from the legionaries?’ He’d forgotten about those bloody stragglers, too. Holy Neptune, if anything happened to those wretched civilians, it would be his neck on the line and his alone. The governor in charge of the province had made that abundantly clear.

‘No report so far, sir.’

The prefect ground his teeth. ‘Be sure the commander takes careful note of the names of those three soldiers who took it upon themselves to show our citizens the scenic route,’ he snarled. ‘Theodorus, wasn’t it?’ He could not recall the other two. ‘Tell him they’re to be posted to the hottest, driest, ugliest part of the Libyan desert for the next ten years, and after that they can spend another ten serving in the coldest, wettest, ugliest part of Pannonia. Together. All of them.’

Every day he wanted those three incompetents to see the misery in each other’s faces and remember exactly why there were there.

‘Morons,’ he muttered. ‘I’m sent to a place manned by bloody morons.’

Goddammit, he’d be glad to get his carcass back to Rome, away from these long winters, the bloody snow and cold. Maybe then his wife would have more to occupy her mind than a bloody wine jug. About to dismiss his secretary, the prefect suddenly realized he hadn’t seen her this morning. She deserved a bloody good spanking for her outrageous behaviour last night.

‘You haven’t seen the silly bitch, have you?’ he bellowed.

‘Your wife, sir?’ The secretary coloured, and looked away. Sweet Janus. Did the master suspect she’d slept in his truckle bed last night? (Or more accurately, hadn’t!) ‘No, sir,’ he said apologetically. ‘Not today.’

*

Deep in the forest one day’s march south-east of Vesontio, where the landscape was more rolling, the scenery more gentle on the eye, the bloodied corpses of eight men, stripped of their weaponry and armour but still in military uniform, were rolled into a single shallow grave.

The grave was shorter than might have been expected.

On account of the fact that each body was missing its head.

XIX

‘We must move through the woods,’ Arcas said, tightening the saddle strap on his stocky red and white horse. ‘It’s too dangerous to travel by road.’

‘How can it possibly be dangerous?’ Maria snorted. ‘The Helvetii are miles away, aren’t they?’ Behind her, Dexter whimpered that he thought he was getting a migraine.

‘Those ugly bastards know better than to set foot over the river.’ The Silver Fox passed the flat of his hand across his windpipe in a cut-throat gesture to emphasize his point. ‘It’s Sequani loyalists we want to avoid.’ He patted the stallion on its solid, rotund rump then turned his attention to his pair of pack horses.

‘Why should we want to do that?’ Titus looked up from where he was grinding laudanum in a mortar. ‘They’re—you’re our allies.’

‘You haven’t heard?’ Arcas continued to ram the hams, sausages and smoked tongues he’d cut down from his rafters into a hessian sack. ‘The Treveri are in rebellion. Fires, riots, sabotage, murder, ambush, you name it, they’re putting it in practice.’

‘Maybe so, but they’re doing it a hundred miles north of here.’ In the absence of wine, Titus stirred beer into the sticky sweet laudanum before measuring it into two cups to dose the injured drivers. Claudia noticed that the intervals between medication were growing increasingly shorter.

‘Seventy,’ the trapper corrected, stuffing a second sack with vegetables. ‘But word is, the legions are worried. Troops have been sent from Vesontio to crush the rebellion and, flying the colours of our ancient insignia, the Spider is crawling out of his web.’

‘I don’t like spiders,’ Dexter muttered. ‘Arachnophobia, y’know.’

‘You wouldn’t like this one, that’s for sure.’ Arcas snorted, knotting the sacks and throwing them over the first horse. ‘He gets his nickname from the web he casts, drawing in every dissident Sequani because, strange as it seems,’ he shot Theo a sharp glance, ‘not everyone adores their Roman tax collectors.’ He paused to check the knots. ‘When the Treveri started playing up, the Spider swung his underground army into action. You won’t mistake them when you see them. They fly the gold globe in a circle of red. Riches through blood, that’s their motto.’

Again Claudia noticed that Orbilio had contributed nothing, content, it seemed, to assist Hanno load the pack mules. Claudia caught his glance and with one raised eyebrow signalled have-you-heard-of-any-Spider? To which the reply was a subtle news-to-me facial twitch. But the keenness of his eye also said he didn’t disbelieve the Silver Fox.

‘Rebel, did you say?’ Maria asked. ‘I don’t believe a word of it! We’ve never heard of any revolutionaries terrorizing the area, have we, Theodorus?’

The soldier, buffing up his helmet with his sleeve, was
forced to agree with her for once. ‘Military intelligence has never mentioned him,’ he said, though his voice made it plain that just because this was fresh, it wasn’t necessarily untrue.

‘I say we take our chances with the road,’ Maria said, leaving no doubt that she considered this backwoods route a ploy to justify the Silver Fox’s exorbitant fee.

‘Me, too,’ Volso cried. ‘We’ve lost enough time as it is.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ the slipper-maker whined. ‘This man
is
our guide, we either trust him or we don’t.’

‘There’s thirty-four of us,’ the glass-blower reminded them, ‘no ragbag bandit’s going to tackle that. Not with the army in Vesontio.’

‘What army?’ Titus said. ‘You heard him, it’s a skeleton force.’

‘STOP.’ Arcas held up both hands and made a slashing motion. ‘That’s enough, all of you. I am not in your Senate, listening while you debate from dusk till dawn, neither am I some servant at your beck and call. Bicker all you wish, but be warned.’ He reached for a pitcher and with his dagger jabbed a small hole near the bottom. Beer gushed out in ugly, noisy spurts. ‘I leave when this is empty,’ he said, striding off to his roundhouse. ‘Either through the woods or on the road, the choice is yours, but decide quickly.’

‘Well,’ Maria said.

‘Well?’ Titus asked.

‘A vote,’ Theo sighed. ‘Who’s for the main road? Sixteen. So who’s for taking Arcas’s route? Sixteen.’ A flash of annoyance crossed his freckled face. ‘Who hasn’t voted? Oh.’ He gave a shamefaced laugh. ‘Me. Well, I feel we should go with the guide. Seventeen to sixteen, we follow the Fox’s trail.’

‘Young man, I’m not sure this is a joking matter.’ Maria’s finger jabbed her rebuke every bit as sharply as her voice. ‘Our lives depend on this decision—oh, will you listen to the Blubber Family back there? Can’t you lot put a sock in it?’

Her scorn only served to fuel the sobs of Gemma and her parents, neither of whom had adapted at all well to life since leaving the body of the convoy. Far from adventure being the making of the man, the brick-maker had become a gibbering wreck, barely able to speak without quivering, and his agitation was reflected in the behaviour of his wife, who clung to her daughter, weeping noisily, leaving Gemma to gulp back her own sobs.

‘Right then.’ A tightly packed quiver on his back, his bow in hand, Arcas pulled his oak door shut and secured the cattle hide over the porch. A long sword hung from his belt in an ornate scabbard. ‘What’s it to be?’ He cast a judgmental eye over the jug, where only a thin trickle remained.

‘The woods,’ Theo said.

Arcas grunted as if to say of-course-it-is, then strode towards the nursing ewe, dozing with her lazy arching horns resting against the low wall of the roundhouse. Claudia’s eyes widened. She froze. Oh, no! She could see before any of the others what he was about to do…the drawing of the dagger, the separation of the first lamb, the moving of the second, the lifting of the mother’s trusting chin…

Blood spurted in all directions. Quickly, cleanly, Arcas
slit the throats of the two baby lambs and left them where they lay.

Gemma said, ‘I’m going to be sick,’ and didn’t disappoint her audience.

Maria hissed, ‘Barbarian!’

Most simply stared.

Blood still pumped from the lifeless body of the ewe, seeping into the fluffy fleeces of her newborn lambs. Claudia swallowed hard and looked away.

‘I don’t know what you’re gawking at,’ Arcas growled. ‘They’re my sheep, not yours.’ His eyes caught Claudia’s and held them. ‘I’ve been shunned,’ he muttered, and she saw that explanations were a stranger to him. ‘What was I supposed to do, leave them to starve to death?’

He glanced back at the limp and bloodied corpses, at the roundhouse, at the sharp point of the thatch, and Claudia knew he was looking at this place in farewell. Goosepimples crept up her arms. The holiday spirit, she reflected, hadn’t lasted long.

‘Now in the name of Father Dis, will you get going?’ Arcas barked, snapping free the tether of his horse. ‘And for gods’ sake, keep close together. You.’ His gimlet gaze singled out Orbilio. ‘You had better bring up the rear. Make sure they stay in line.’