The Eagle's Vengeance (14 page)

Marcus looked up at Silus as the grinning decurion ranged up alongside him with a pair of riders following behind, looking down at the labouring troops with a sardonic smile.

‘No thank you, Silus. The first spear did mention the possibility at this morning’s officers’ meeting, but you know how it is for us centurions. We share our men’s hardships with the same pleasure that we take in their victories. And besides, where else would I hear the broad range of marching songs that we use to pass the time?’

The men in the century’s front rank behind him took his words as a cue for song, dragging in lungfuls of air before roaring out the first verse of a ditty they had been working on for several days.

‘We are the emperor’s finest,

We’re marching to the front,

We’re going to kill the Venicones,

’Cause they’re all fucking cunts!’

Silus pursed his lips approvingly.

‘It has a certain poetic ring to it. And not a word about the cavalry either, which makes for a pleasant ch—.’

His words were drowned out by the next verse.

‘Our cavalry’s brave when on parade,

With lots of shiny kit,

But they piss off quick when the fighting starts,

And leave us in the shit!’

Silus looked down at his friend with a wry smile.

‘We’re never going to live down that battle on the frozen lake, are we? Come on my lads, let’s leave these mules to fester in their own stink, shall we?’

The horsemen cantered away up the column’s line, pursued by the words of the song’s next verse.

‘Our cavalry ride fine horses,

Of white and brown and black,

But each noble horse is deformed of course …’

The marching men took a collective gulp of breath to bellow out the last line at the horsemen’s receding backs.

‘By the arsehole on its back!’

The riders returned two hours later with news for the tribune.

‘The wall’s still manned sir, although the centurion I spoke to at Broad Land wasn’t all that helpful. Seems to me like they’re all just waiting for the command to head south as fast as their feet will carry them. When I asked him the best way to get a party of men into Venicone territory he pointed to the west and told me I needed the next fort along, Lazy Hill.’

The impression was reinforced by the state of affairs that they found when the cohort marched up to the Lazy Hill fort late that afternoon and were directed into a waiting marching camp. Julius left his centurions supervising its renovation to the standard he expected and took Marcus and Dubnus off for a good look around. His report back to Scaurus was delivered in a tone bordering on disbelief.

‘It’s not good, Tribune, not good at all. The fort’s been rebuilt neatly enough, but the wall’s in a bit of a state. It happens with turf structures if they’re not maintained, but it’s never a good sign when there are trees growing out of the rampart. They’ve got guards posted, but none of them seem to have any apparent interest in doing anything other than stand their watches and get off duty. There’s enough rusty armour and dirty tunics here to have made dear old Uncle Sextus shit a cow if he’d lived to witness the state of them, may Cocidius watch over him, and none of the weapons that were on display looked like they had much of an edge. All of which tells me that the man at the top of this particular cohort has stopped caring what state his men are in. I had a chat with the duty centurion, since he seemed a bit more aggressively minded than the rest of them, and he confirmed it for me. The senior centurion has orders to do absolutely nothing to provoke the locals, orders which he seems to have embraced happily enough. The rest of the officers are variously bored, frustrated, and just pissed off with life, and their men are in a state of perpetual fear that the Venicones are going to come over the wall for them. I can understand it well enough, these boys are survivors of the battle of Lost Eagle, so they’ve been fighting without much respite for two years, but honestly, Tribune, this place is a disaster ready to happen.’

Scaurus nodded at his first spear’s description of the fort’s garrison, shrugging resignedly.

‘Nothing we can do or say is going to change the state of things here though, is it? The army’s grip on the north has been overextended, and these men know only too well what that might mean if the tribesmen decide to come knocking on their door. I think the best thing we can do is ignore them and get on with doing the job we came for. And for what it’s worth, I tend to share their viewpoint in one thing at least – the sooner we’re back on this side of the wall and heading south the better. Let’s go and see what the senior man can tell us about the state of affairs on the other side, shall we?’

They found the cohort’s first spear in the fort’s headquarters, and while his salute for the newly arrived tribune was smart enough, Marcus could sense just how demoralised he was beneath the surface. His chin was neither bearded nor clean-shaven, and there was a whiff of alcohol in the air that had Julius’s nostrils flaring as he sniffed ostentatiously. The legion officer smiled sheepishly, offering them seats with a wave of his hand and reaching out to grasp the back of the chair he intended to sit down in once the senior officer was seated.

‘When the guards reported you coming up the road, I dared to hope that you might be carrying orders to head south or that you might be our replacement.’

Scaurus laughed curtly, ignoring the seating and dropping his written orders onto the room’s large wooden table.

‘I’m afraid not, First Spear. We’ve been sent here by your Tribune Sorex to mount a raid into enemy territory. Our objective is a Venicone fortress that is known as “The Fang”, I believe …’

The centurion gaped, shaking his head vigorously.

‘But you can’t—’ He saw the look on the tribune’s face and regained his composure. ‘By which I mean to say that the locals are quiet at the moment and that’s just the way we’d like them to stay. They’ve enough warriors to knock over any of the forts along the wall, and you can be sure that none of the other garrisons would come to our rescue, given the general order to hold position. Not to mention the fact that the local madmen would still have us outnumbered even if half a dozen forts tipped out their men and came to the rescue.’

Julius stepped forward with his face set hard, his notoriously thin patience evidently exhausted.

‘In which case you’d better set your men to making sure that your walls are fit to repel them and your spears are nice and sharp, because we’re under orders from the commanding officer of
your
legion to go and rescue
your
eagle from those tattooed lunatics. Once the order’s given for you lot to pull back to the Emperor Hadrian’s wall the chance will be lost for ever. The days of glorious campaigns into the north are gone, and your standard will vanish into the deepest forests never to be seen again other than by the tribal priests who’ll be wiping their arses on it as part of their ritual.’

He paused for a moment to allow the thought to sink in.

‘Worse still, Sixth
“Victorious”
–’ he snorted in dark amusement ‘– will more than likely be removed from the records with the notation
“Eagle Lost – Disbanded”
. It’ll be a sad end for a proud legion, and one that’ll most likely leave
you
holding the shitty end of the stick. No one’s going to do any favours for a centurion from one of the four cohorts that survived the massacre at Lost Eagle, are they? Once the emperor loses his patience with your failure to restore your honour by getting the bird back that’ll be it for you. The cohorts that were sent to reinforce you from Germania will be detached, since they had nothing to do with the original foul up, and the rest of you will be split up to fill the ranks of the other Britannia legions while the men in the shiny armour get on with forming a new legion with an unspoiled name. I can see it now …’ He paused and stroked his chin reflectively. ‘Yes, First Imperial Legion Commodus, that’ll be it. A legion that can be trusted to look after their eagle, unsullied by the presence of so much as a single man who participated in the loss of the last one. The new eagle’s probably already been made and shipped to the province ready for the order to be given for you lot to be disbanded.’ He paused again, fixing the first spear with an acerbic glare. ‘So, all in all, if I were you I’d be trying to work out just what I could do to help us recover the bloody thing. Have you got a map of the area?’

The legion officer pulled a curtain away from a large map with a sick expression, Julius’s words clearly sinking in as he pointed with his vine stick.

‘That’s us, here at Lazy Hill. You can see the line of the wall to the east and west, and then here are the High Mountains running away to the north-east.’ He pointed to a black cross painted onto the map. ‘There’s The Fang.’ He turned to Scaurus with a hint of desperation in his voice. ‘But Tribune, as Mithras is my witness, if you try to break into that place you’ll not be seen again. We’ve only one man that ever got over those walls and even he doesn’t quite understand how he managed to escape.’

Scaurus’s eyes narrowed.

‘One of your men has been
inside
The Fang?’

The centurion smiled tightly.

‘He’s a bit of a celebrity, Tribune, but to be honest with you I’d say his door’s flapping on its hinges, so I’d advise that you take anything he tells you with a large pinch of salt. He was captured by the Venicones about three months ago, the only man left alive out of a forage party of thirty men we sent out in the days before we were ordered not to allow any detachment of less than three centuries north of the wall. We found them slaughtered, with their heads and pricks cut off for trophies, and given that several men’s corpses were nowhere to be found we reckoned they’d been taken to be stretched out on a stone altar and sacrificed to the Venicones’ gods. The general assumption was that the ink monkeys would torture the shit out of the captured lads for long enough to drive them out of their minds before killing them, and certainly nobody ever expected to see any of them in one piece again. Verus pitched up three weeks ago, stark naked apart from a fur cloak he’d taken from some woman he’d killed and covered in mud, babbling about having been on the run for eight days. And he weighed thirty pounds less than when he was taken.’

The tribune nodded decisively.

‘I’ll see him now. Alone.’ The legion man nodded, turning for the door. ‘Oh, and centurion, this man’s instability …’

‘Yes, Tribune?’

‘How does it manifest itself? Does he perhaps take drink in the morning, to soothe his nerves?’

The centurion’s face crumpled as if he’d been punched, and his eyes closed as he answered, his voice little more than a whisper.

‘No …’

‘That’s something to be said in his favour then, isn’t it?’ Scaurus stepped close to the abashed centurion, lowering his voice so as not to be heard outside of the office. ‘I suggest you get a grip of yourself man, and look to your command before it falls to pieces around you. You know how it goes – you can lead, you can follow, or you can just get out of the way. If you don’t think you’ve got it in you to provide your men with leadership, then I suggest you nominate your successor as First Spear and make way for someone that can.’

After a long silence the other man opened his eyes again, straightening his back.

‘Thank you, sir. For not just demoting me, I mean. I’ll get things straightened up round here soon enough …’

Scaurus nodded and turned away to look at the map.

‘Demoting you might be a little beyond my authority, First Spear, even if I were tempted to do so. And besides, my men and I are believers in more direct ways of dealing with officers who fail to meet the required standards. If you let me down in this then I promise you that you’ll have nowhere to hide from whichever of us survives this apparent suicide mission.’

After a few minutes’ wait the door opened and a single soldier stepped into the room, snapping to attention and saluting smartly, staring at the wall behind Scaurus. His bare forearms were covered in the marks of what appeared to be recently healed burns, and his eyes were bright and hard beneath a full head of white hair.

‘Soldier Verus reporting as ordered, Tribune!’

The Tungrians took a moment to assess his state, and Marcus realised that he was looking at the best turned out legionary he’d seen since their arrival. Scaurus stepped forward extending an arm to invite the soldier into the room.

‘Take a seat please, Verus. Be seated gentlemen, let’s not stand on ceremony.’ He waited until everyone was seated before continuing. ‘Without intending any disrespect to your comrades, legionary, you are by some distance the most well presented of the legion’s soldiers I’ve seen all day. Why would that be, do you think?’

Verus smiled darkly.

‘That’s an easy one to answer, Tribune. I’ve seen the Venicones at close quarters, and I expect to see them again before very long. When they come over that wall there’s at least one man who’ll be ready to meet his gods with clean armour, and with blood on his spear blade.’

‘I see. Your first spear tells me that you’ve recently achieved the notable status of being captured by the locals and then managing to escape?’

The soldier nodded, his face perfectly composed.

‘That’s correct, Tribune. I spent fifty-seven days as their prisoner before the gods saw fit to show me a way to escape from their fortress.’

Scaurus leaned forward, intent on the legionary’s answers.

‘Let’s make sure that I have this right. You were taken to the fortress that they call The Fang?’ Verus nodded again. ‘Your first spear told us that he believed you had been taken captive for the purpose of sacrifice, rather than being killed on the spot.’

‘So did I, sir. And I still believe that the Venicones intended to offer my blood to their gods, once they had achieved their initial purpose of breaking my spirit.’