Altar of Blood: Empire IX (41 page)

‘No madam. It seems as if your king has encountered a good deal more difficulty in crossing the river than we did.’

Taking his turn at watching the road that led out of the south to the ruined fortress the Roman had seen nothing to excite any suspicion, passing the hours introspectively huddled into his cloak and pondering the previous few weeks’ events.

‘He will be across the water by now, and close at hand.’

He stared at her in the light of the fire, the sun having sunk below the western horizon an hour before.

‘You seem very confident that our delay here will not result in our capture.’

Gerhild smiled back at him.

‘I have told you, Centurion, that this is not my place or time to die. Or yours, for that matter.’

‘I know. This is not your field of bones and gold.’

She nodded.

‘Just so. See how your initial scepticism has become a grudging acceptance of my prediction?’

‘I didn’t say I believed your words, simply that I remember them.’

‘And nevertheless, you want to believe. You are a seeker of truth, Marcus Valerius Aquila—’

He shook his head in bafflement.

‘Why would you call me that when my name is Corv—’

‘Because it is the name your parents gave you.’ Her tone was patient as she interrupted him, warm with amusement. ‘You may wear the name of the crow, but you do so unwillingly, as the price of survival. And as I was saying, you are a seeker after truth, and justice, although I sense that you have found that the justice you have administered of late has borne only bitter fruit.’

He looked at her for a moment, chewing on a mouthful of stew.

‘I sought revenge for my father’s murder, and took the lives of men who were instrumental in the fall of our family from grace, but the cost was too high.’ Gerhild stared at him, her question unspoken but as clear as if she had shouted it at him. ‘I … we … came to the attention of powerful men, and were sent to the east. And while we were there …’

He paused for a moment, on the edge of unburdening himself, then shook his head.

‘I cannot speak of it. I lost the most precious thing in my world.’

‘And the wound will not heal.’

Marcus looked up at her, his face bleak with loss.

‘The wound will
never
heal.’

‘But it
must
. Everyone experiences the death of a loved one at some time.’ She leaned forward across the sleeping tribune and took his hand. ‘May I call you Marcus?’

He nodded, lost in his misery.

‘Marcus, the time for grieving varies with each of us, but the one undeniable truth is that it must come to an end. For a man to spend the rest of his days mourning the loss of a loved one is not right. Life must be lived, not simply tolerated in the absence of the one who brought life and colour to the days that went before. You will find a way to put her loss behind you, a better way than taking your fury out on men whose death will serve no purpose, other than to sate a lust for blood that will end with your losing yourself in wanton murder.’

He looked up at her empty-eyed.

‘I cannot even mourn her properly. I’ve never once shed tears over her loss.’

‘And you feel like an empty shell of the man you were. It
will
pass.’

She looked across the fire at the sleeping Lupus.

‘Tell me, the child, has he too suffered loss?’

He nodded, relieved at the change of topic.

‘First his father, lost in a battle in Britannia, then a soldier to whom he had grown close. Arminius is the closest thing he has to a father now, and my wife was the closest thing to a mother, until …’

‘I see. But I sense there is more?’

Marcus nodded as the memory of Lupus’s unexpected kill jumped into his mind.

‘He was blooded in the battle to escape from your people. A man ran onto his spear and died so close to him that the boy saw the life leave his eyes.’

‘And none of you has spoken to him of it?’

Marcus shook his head unhappily.

‘None of us has the words.’

Gerhild stared at him in disbelief.

‘You all have to go through it. You all kill for the first time, and learn to deal with the horror of taking a man’s life, and yet none of you seem to have the wit to use that experience to help those who come down the same road behind you. If you’ll excuse me, you can watch the tribune for a while. I have work to do.’

She got up and walked across to where the boy lay, shooing Arminius to one side and taking a seat next to him. Then, with a tenderness that was at odds with her evident irritation, she eased the sleeping Lupus’s head onto her lap and placed a hand on his temple, covering both of them with her cloak. Closing her eyes she became almost motionless, only her lips moving as she looked out across the fire’s flickering light with eyes that seemed blank and unfocused.

‘They were here.’ Amalric looked down at the embers of a large campfire in disgust. ‘Still warm. Someone was sitting here tending that fire only an hour ago. And now they run for the arms of our enemies.’

The Bructeri had been mounted and ready to ride before dawn, the young king casting anxious glances at the sky until enough light had crept into the eastern horizon to enable them to start their pursuit afresh. An hour’s ride had covered the distance between their campsite and the ruined Roman fortress, but their eager haste had been in vain.

‘They would have been mounted and away from here at much the same time we were.’ Gernot had dismounted, and was examining the ground around the fire. ‘Which means that they are only an hour ahead of us. Nothing has changed, my King, as long as we retain our hunger for revenge.’

Amalric looked back at the Hamian captive.

‘Surely if we are to follow the Romans down this road of wood then we will make ourselves vulnerable to an ambush?’

The noble nodded.

‘Possibly so, although any man who stays behind to launch an arrow at us is likely to pay a high price for his opportunity. But, to ensure that any such attack fails, I suggest that you ride at the rear of our party.’

Amalric shook his head with a hard smile.

‘Your concern for my safety is gratifying, Uncle, but I cannot throw my men into the way of danger without accepting a share of it myself. I will ride in the front rank of horsemen. Now, we go!’

‘I thought you said this was a road of wood? It’s not much better than bog.’

Gunda twisted in his saddle to look round at Cotta, who was staring down at the surface of the path that stretched out before them in something akin to horror. Once a broad walkway of rough planks, suspended above the bog on split logs laid lengthways beneath them, and anchored with wooden stakes, built by invading Roman legions to allow them to penetrate the swamps that limited their ability to manoeuvre in the German interior, it had decayed badly in the years since the empire’s retreat from the eastern side of the Rhenus.

‘This road was built so long ago that the means by which it was kept above the water has long since failed, but the wood itself has not become rotten despite sinking into the marsh. Perhaps the water in the ground here protects them, but whatever the reason it is still there, just beneath the surface, and intact for the most part. Our horses can walk on the wood, if we take it slowly.’

‘So we can only proceed at a walking pace?’

The guide shrugged.

‘Yes, but then the same will be true for the men pursuing us. I’ve ridden this road before, and walked the marshes on either side. We could leave the road, but we’d have to abandon the horses, and if you think this is unpleasant then trust me when I tell you that you really wouldn’t want to attempt the alternative.’

‘So this is the pontes longi.’

They all turned to look at Scaurus, who was holding himself in the saddle by what appeared to be an act of will. Marcus, riding alongside him, asked the question that was on every man’s lips.

‘Tribune?’

The wan-looking senior officer raised an eyebrow at him.

‘The long bridge. It is the wooden road that Ahenobarbus built. Forgetting your history lessons again, are you, Centurion?’ He winced as his horse stumbled slightly on the uncertain footing, then regained his composure. ‘Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus was one of a long line of distinguished men who were nearly all consuls during the republic, and continued to be part of the ruling class under the emperors. He was the Emperor Nero’s grandfather, which might explain a few things. He built this wooden road to allow the legions to deploy forward at speed from Aliso as far as the river Albis, during the conquest of Germany that made Augustus believe that a province of Magna Germania was possible, with all of the lands as far north and east as the Albis under Roman rule. It must have worked, because he got a good deal deeper into the country than anyone before him. He was a bit of a bastard, as it happens, made eminent men and women perform on stage like common actors and actresses when he was consul, and staged such bloody gladiatorial contests that Augustus had to publicly reprimand him. Which, given his successes as a general, must have been a bit tricky for both of them.’

He looked down the track’s watery ribbon, then back at Gunda.

‘Anyway, shall we get on with this? It isn’t going to get any easier by our talking about it.’

He had awoken shortly before dawn, coming back to consciousness like a man surfacing from deep water an inch at a time, lying on his back with his eyes open but neither moving nor speaking for a while, eventually managing a question.

‘What happened?’

Gerhild had been asleep at his side, waking as if on cue as his eyes had opened, and she had bent over him with a cup of water.

‘You slept, Roman, like a dead man. Which, after all, is what you so nearly were.’

‘The wound?’

‘Was infected. I drew the poison from it with a
pultes
, then fed you a strong potion of herbs to let you sleep.’

He had digested the seer’s statement for a moment before speaking again.

‘My dreams.’

Gerhild had smiled, shooting a knowing look at Arminius who had spent most of the night watching his master.

‘Yes?’

‘I saw a woman. Beautiful. Terrible.’

‘That was the goddess I serve, Hertha. She came to you in the night, to beckon you back from the underworld.’

He had stared at her in partial disbelief for a moment before rolling onto his side with a grunt of discomfort.

‘In which case she seems to have done the job well enough, for as you see I live to suffer through another day of your mystical nonsense.’

Climbing to his feet with Arminius’s help he had called for his mail, resisting her attempts to stop him from donning its burdensome weight, and had only allowed himself the indignity of being helped onto his mount when the two centurions had insisted upon it.

‘How far is it to the border with these Angrivarii, Gunda?’

‘Forty miles or so, Tribune.’

‘And we can do no more than a walking pace on this surface, whether it be safer than the marshes to either side or not. Two days more march then?’

The scout nodded dourly.

‘I would say so.’

‘And what are the odds of the Bructeri overhauling us, do you think?’

Cotta leaned forward in his saddle to pose what he clearly thought was an obvious question.

‘Surely they’re subject to the same restrictions on their speed as we are, aren’t they sir?’

Scaurus shook his head, too weary even to give the veteran the smile that was his usual accompaniment to a correction.

‘You need to think less like a rational military officer, Centurion, and more like a desperate king who’ll stop at nothing to recover his prestige, in the form of the witch and the eagle. We have one horse per man, and can afford to lose precisely none of these beasts to exhaustion or injury, since each horse lost equates to a man dead or captured, which are much the same thing. Whereas Amalric of the Bructeri has, by the estimation of the keenest eyes in our party, thirty horsemen. He can afford to lose ten of them and still have double our fighting strength, on top of which I am clearly unlikely to take part in any combat that may be required if and when he catches up with us, which he will know from the blood trail I’ve been leaving for the last day and a half. I’d say that the moment for him to gamble on those odds is upon him, wouldn’t you?’

‘It doesn’t look like we’ll be going anywhere without an escort, does it?’

Dubnus eyed the waiting Marsi horsemen dubiously, but Tiro spared them no more than a glance.

‘See it from his perspective. He’s going to allow us to cross his land, in return for a small fortune in coin and one or two favours, which have been left carefully unspecified, but the last thing he wants is for us to leave here and vanish off into the wilderness to perpetrate who knows what and who knows where. So yes, he’s detailed two dozen of his fiercest warriors under the command of his two oldest sons to make sure we behave ourselves until we’re off their hands and somebody else’s problem.’

‘And there’s something that prevents them from killing us all out of hand once we’re far from civilisation?’

The older man looked up at him with a straight face, lowering his voice so as not to be overheard.

‘Not really. For a start, young Varus, nobody knows we’re here apart from us. I couldn’t exactly leave a note for the governor saying “we’ve gone to recover the missing seer, come and find us if we don’t come back”, because for one thing that would betray my position in the province, and, to be brutal about it, if the king were to have decided to do away with us then there’d be very little left of us for anyone to find. And rather a lot of barbarian Germania to search even if anyone were minded to do so. I suspect that the significant amount of gold I’ve promised him upon my safe return will be an incentive for them to keep us alive, but in the end we both know that things sometimes just don’t work out the way that we plan them.’

He looked about their escort, flashing a broad grin at the unsmiling princes waiting on their horses at their head.

‘And let’s face it, my profession is, when all is said and done, not for the faint hearted. Of course I do everything I can to minimise the risks of being discovered by the officials I’m set to watch over, and to ensure that these sorts of jaunts into the unknown don’t end up with my bones being picked clean by the crows on the side of some unnamed mountain, but in the end it’s all a bit of a gamble. And we both know that you’re a gambler, don’t we? Why else would you have come here in the first place? And now it’s time to go, I think. There’s still a hundred miles of rough country to cover before we reach the edge of the Angrivarii lands.’