The Wolf's Gold (9 page)

Qadir shrugged, a faint smile touching his otherwise inscrutable face.

‘I only pointed out to your colleagues, Standard Bearer, that I saw you deep in conversation with Beneficiarius Cattanius shortly before you started offering odds on how long it would take us to reach the lookout post.’

Morban snorted and stuck out his bottom lip, ignoring the Hamian centurion’s comment and concentrating on the climb. Dubnus raised an eyebrow at his friend, his voice lowered conspiratorially.

‘Morban? Lost for words? I really must pray to Cocidius a little more often if he’s going to answer me in such a spectacular fashion.’

The standard bearer kept climbing, sending an embittered rejoinder over his shoulder.

‘I heard that. You’re a cruel man Dubnus, given that we once served alongside each other.’

The big Briton barked out a sardonic laugh.

‘Hah! Not really, given the regularity with which you used to fleece my purse with all manner of wagers. You even ran a book on how long it would take me to get off my back after I stopped a barbarian spear last year.’

Morban raised a disgusted eyebrow.

‘Yes, a book on which I lost money due to your rude state of health and your urge to get your hands on a century again . . .’

Marcus put his whistle to his lips and blew a quick blast.

‘Fifth Century, form line! We’ll make the rest of this climb ready to receive an attack.’ The soldiers quickly formed up into a two-deep line and the front rankers stepped forward with hard stares at the hill’s summit, pulling on their helmets and unstrapping shields from carrying positions across their backs. In the space of a dozen heartbeats the century was transformed from a line of individual soldiers into an impersonal engine of murder bristling with razor-edged spear blades and faced with iron and layered wood. They were the century’s older and more experienced men for the most part, their arms and faces bearing the scars of a succession of bloody battles in Britannia the previous year. These, Marcus knew from experience, were the men who would stand and fight without calculating the odds against them, in the knowledge that to run would be a worse option than any danger they might face. Marcus walked out in front of them and pointed up the slope’s last two hundred paces at the wooden watchtower waiting for them, its roof intermittently wreathed in wisps of grey, scudding cloud.

‘At the walk . . . advance!’

The Fifth Century followed their centurion up the hill’s last slope, the first time that any of them bar Morban had faced the potential for a fight under Marcus’s leadership, each man with a spear held ready to stab or throw as ordered by the young officer leading them forward to the summit’s uncertainty. As they approached the hill’s crest they found the watch post unoccupied, its timbers creaking softly under the wind’s intermittent caress. The building was built snugly into a half-hollow just below the summit, the bulk of it shielded from both the worst of the wind and observation from the other slope, while a wooden tower jutted up fifteen feet to provide the occupants with a view over the country beyond the ridge’s peak.

‘Halt! Kneeling defence!’

The soldiers dropped onto one knee at Marcus’s command, bracing their shields on their forward legs and lowering their heads so that their only remaining point of vulnerability was a thin vision-slit between shield and brow guard. Quintus frowned from his place behind the century, and the soldiers exchanged puzzled glances at being dropped into a defensive stance a good fifty paces short of the building.

‘Chosen Man!’ Quintus stepped forward through the century’s ranks with a salute to his centurion. ‘You are to keep the Fifth in defensive line and await my orders. In the event that you hear or see anything to indicate that I have been engaged by enemy forces, you are to use your own judgement as to whether an attack or a fighting retreat is the better option, but you must ensure that the news of whatever happens here reaches the tribune. Do you understand?’

The chosen man nodded.

‘Are you going in there alone, Centurion?’

Marcus shook his head with a smile.

‘Not quite. Gentlemen, shall we?’ Dubnus and Qadir stepped forward, both men drawing their swords. ‘I very much doubt there’s anyone within a hundred miles of here, but the post has been abandoned for long enough that I’ll not simply blunder in to see what might be waiting for us. Arabus!’

The scout stepped forward from behind the century’s line where he had been waiting in silence. A skilled scout and tracker raised in the forested hills of the Arduenna forest in Germania, he had been captured by Marcus in the act of attempting the Roman’s assassination, and turned to the cohort’s service by the revelation of his son’s sacrificial murder by the same bandit leader who had subverted him. He was acknowledged by even the most skilful of the cohort’s barbarian scouts to be the best of them, a master of both tracking and the art of seeing without being seen, and lethal with a short blade. When the Tungrians had marched away from the Arduenna he had chosen to follow them rather than return to the forest, telling the young centurion that with his family dead at the hands of the bandit leader Obduro there was nothing to keep him there. The Roman pointed up the hill and the scout nodded, loping silently away up the slope, drawing puzzled glances from the soldiers as he ran to the century’s right and headed purposefully for a fold in the ground that crossed the hilltop. Dropping onto his hands and knees, and then flattening himself fully against the damp grass, he wormed forward into the cover of the fold and vanished from sight.

Marcus led his fellow centurions onwards with only one of his swords drawn, the evilly sharp patterned spatha that he had purchased from a sword smith in the Tungrians’ home city of Tungrorum. The weapon had cost him a price that had set his colleagues’ heads shaking in disbelief, until they had seen the sword’s murderous edge and the speed with which the light and flexible weapon could be wielded. He put a reflexive hand to the eagle’s head-pommelled gladius bequeathed to him by his birth father, but left the short sword sheathed for the time being. The three centurions moved swiftly, giving little time for any enemy lurking in the watch post to react as Dubnus and Qadir spread out to either side of their comrade, while Marcus ran to the building’s main door and flattened himself against the rough timber wall, listening intently. There was nothing to be heard other than the wind’s soft susurration, and the occasional creak from the wooden structure. Putting a booted heel to the wedge holding the post’s main door closed, he drew in a long, slow breath, sliding the legatus’s gladius from its scabbard and savouring the feeling of the twin blades’ heft in his skilled hands.

‘Go!’

Kicking the wedge away he ripped the door open and threw himself through the opening, minimising the moment of danger when he would be silhouetted against the doorway’s bright rectangle. Pointing the swords into the building’s unlit gloom, he turned to track movement against the rear wall.

‘Nothing. And you can stop pointing that sword at me with quite so much relish, thank you.’

Dubnus stepped out of the shadows with a look of disdain, while Qadir surveyed the post’s wooden floorboards with a critical eye.

‘No, nothing at all. No mud, no bootprints. Even the dust is undisturbed. Either nobody has been in here or they were very skilled at hiding any trace of their presence.’

Marcus nodded, turning to the watchtower’s stairs. He climbed slowly, with one sword held in front of him, emerging into the cold morning air crouched low to avoid presenting any silhouette to a potential watcher. Looking through the viewing platform’s vision-slits he saw his Fifth Century waiting in their defensive line as he had left them, ready to fight or retreat as ordered. Moving to the tower’s other side he found an uninterrupted view down the hill’s gentle northern slope for three hundred paces, open ground that stretched as far as the forest’s edge. Climbing carefully back down the steps he exited the building to find Arabus waiting for him. The scout bowed, gesturing to the north.

‘As you suspected, Centurion, there are footprints on the far slope. Also the marks left by hooves. There have been mounted men here, and less than a day ago. I saw no sign of them in the trees, no movement at all. But they were certainly here when we marched up the valley yesterday.’

On the valley floor, five hundred feet below, Julius watched as his centuries toiled up the slopes of the mountains that surrounded them on three sides, nodding his satisfaction as they neared their immediate objectives.

‘That’s better. With the hills manned we can breathe a little easier.’

Alongside him Scaurus grunted his agreement.

‘Indeed. Defending this valley is going to be interesting enough without the risk of being showered with arrows from those heights, or finding that our enemy has found a way to outflank our wall.’

The parade ground before them was empty of men, other than a few dozen veteran soldiers from Scaurus’s Second Tungrian Cohort waiting at ease to one side. With the First Cohort tied up retaking the mountains around the valley, Scaurus had sent half of the Second Cohort’s remainder down the road under their new First Spear, charged with laying out the line of the defensive wall he was planning to erect across the valley’s narrowest point.

‘You may not be an engineer, Tertius old son, but you’ve enough sense to pick the best place to stop a cavalry charge.’ Julius had taken his colleague aside after their dismissal from the command meeting, pointing out across the valley. ‘Just find the narrowest point, preferably with a nice little slope in front of the line where we’ll be dropping the wall in, and make sure we can get water to run to it.’ He pointed back up the valley to the point where the huge rock slab of the eastern peak sealed off the far end. ‘We don’t want all Sergius’s hard work up there to leave us with a bloody great puddle on
our
side, do we?’

The men of the First Minervia’s Cohort were toiling away at the foot of the eastern peak’s steep slopes, energetically clearing away vegetation in a line down the slope from a good-sized lake that sat high above the valley floor to their rear, and Julius looked about him with a smile of satisfaction.

‘Give me a month and I could make this place impossible to take with anything less than three legions, and even then they’d pay a heavy price to break in.’

Scaurus raised an eyebrow.

‘A month? I’d say you’ve got two days, three if we’re lucky, before enough men to fill the ranks of two legions come thundering up that slope. What do you think you can do in that time?’

Julius opened his mouth to respond, but closed it again as the first of the mine workers came into sight, heading for the parade ground in a long, straggling column. They crowded onto the flat open space until it was full, and the slope which overlooked it filled up in turn, the buzz of their conversation loud enough that the two men had to raise their voices to speak. When Scaurus judged that there were no more to come he nodded to Julius, who signalled his trumpeters to blow a long hard note. Their horns’ peals echoed from the rocky hillsides, and the miners fell silent and stared at the tribune as he stepped out before them. Clearing his throat, he shouted a question at the mass of men.

‘Where are the mine owners? I believe there are three of you!’

A balding man stepped forward from the crowd, his clothes both cleaner and smarter than his fellows’.

‘I am Felix, owner of the Split Rock mine.’

He pointed down the valley to the west, and Scaurus exchanged a meaningful glance with Julius who shrugged slightly.

‘Thank you, Felix. Who’s next?’ A second man stepped out of the throng, but where his colleague had clearly bathed recently, and was dressed in fine cloth, he wore the same heavy, dirty clothing as the men around him. ‘Your name?’

‘Lartius, my Lord.’

Scaurus nodded, though not without a slight smile.

‘Tribune will do, thank you, Lartius. And you own which mine?’

‘The Rotunda, my . . . Tribune, on the southern slope of that mountain.’

He pointed to the round-topped mountain to the north.

‘I see. One more of you to come then. Will I have to resort to . . .’

He paused in mid-sentence, raising an eyebrow as a woman in her thirties stepped out from the protection of the men around her and acknowledged him in a cursory manner. Her functional clothing was drab, cut for comfort rather than display, but the soldiers standing behind Scaurus were sufficiently audible in their appreciation that Julius turned around to silence them with a glare and a meaningful tap of his vine stick against his mailed chest. She stood and waited until the sudden rumble of male voices had died away, pushing an errant lock of her light-brown hair back into place in a gesture the tribune recognised as an artifice even as his body responded to her overt sexuality.

‘Good morning, madam. And you are?’

‘Theodora, Tribune.’

‘Theodora? From the Greek?’

The woman nodded, a pair of large golden discs hanging from her ears bobbing at the movement.

‘It means god’s gift, or so my father told me when I was small enough to believe every word that came out of his mouth. I am the owner of the Raven Head mine, on the southern side of the valley, beneath the rock for which this place is named.’ She pointed at the distinctive rock poised over the mountain that formed the valley’s southern side and smiled at the Roman, and Scaurus realised that for all her aggressive swagger she was fairer of face than any of the harried-looking women he’d seen about the settlement. Warning himself not to stare, even if he hadn’t laid eyes on so welcome a sight for months, the tribune turned away from the trio and walked for a dozen paces before turning to speak again, his voice raised to carry over the throng.

‘Very well then, let’s be about our business for the day. How many men do you estimate we have here, First Spear?’

Julius grimaced, more used to counting men arranged into convenient lines.

‘Three thousand or so, Tribune.’

‘And yet the procurator with responsibility for this facility informed me that you had nearly five thousand men working your mines. Where are the rest of your people?’