Rome’s Fallen Eagle (16 page)

‘Did you talk to Paetus?’ Vespasian demanded; his mood had not been improved by the dunking.

‘I did as a matter of fact and very accommodating he was too.’ Sabinus handed Vespasian his damp cloth.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that he was very grateful that I brought the subject up; he didn’t know about the debt at all and as a mark of his gratitude has waived all interest apart from the first two years and has told me to repay it as soon as I’m able; assuming that I survive this expedition, of course.’

Vespasian rubbed his arms irritably with the cloth. ‘He’s let you off thousands; I can’t believe it.’

‘I knew that you’d share my relief, brother. I’m coming to the conclusion that he’s a very generous and decent young man, just as his father was, and what’s more he comes from a powerful family and will surely be consul one day – if we don’t get him
killed first. Just the sort of man I’d find useful as a son-in-law; after all, my Flavia’s eleven and I’ll be looking for a husband for her in a year or two.’

‘You’d marry your daughter to him so you could take advantage of his money?’

‘That’s what daughters are for, isn’t it?’

A pounding of hooves on wood and a shrill equine screech prevented Vespasian from expressing his opinion; he turned to see a horse rearing up at the top of the ramp. It brought its front hooves crashing down with an echoing report and then kicked out with its hind legs, catching an auxiliary’s outstretched forearm, snapping it back like a twig so that a jagged shard of bone tore through the flesh. The man screamed as he clutched his shattered limb, adding to the horse’s terror; it jumped forward half landing on the descending ramp, buckling a foreleg beneath it at an impossible angle and then rolled, with its three intact legs thrashing, shrieking into the river with a mighty splash.

‘Silence that man,’ Paetus called over the injured Batavian’s agonised groans, ‘and get a javelin into that horse and put it out of its misery.’

In the river the horse continued to struggle and bellow as half a dozen auxiliaries lined the side of the boat hefting javelins. After a moment’s pause to pick out the stricken beast’s shape amidst the turbulence it was creating, they flung their weapons. Another long screech testified to the accuracy of some of the throws; it was cut short by a gurgling and a rasping wheeze as the animal fought, unsuccessfully, to keep its head above the surface. It sank with an explosion of bubbles on the churned, moonlit water.

‘Thank the gods for that,’ Vespasian muttered as relative peace returned.

‘Perhaps I should have also sacrificed to the lares of this river,’ Sabinus said, ‘then they might not have felt compelled to take one of our horses.’

Vespasian turned and looked at his brother; there was no irony in his expression. ‘I thougt you worshipped only Mithras.’

Sabinus shrugged. ‘We’re a long way from my Lord’s birthplace; perhaps some help might …’ An agonised scream, not far inland, cut him short, and then another, the same voice but higher pitched. Finally a third that turned into a wail, lowering in tone that was then abruptly cut off. Someone, not far off, had just died in great pain.

All work on the shore and the six boats had ceased as the auxiliaries stared into the darkness, chilled by the sound whose memory seemed to echo still, uncannily, around them. Distant hoofbeats, galloping fast towards them, broke the silence.

Vespasian glanced around; most of the troopers were still in the process of readying their mounts, very few were fully armed and mounted. ‘Form up on me in two ranks on foot!’ Vespasian bellowed, drawing his sword.

The shouted command galvanised the auxiliaries into action; they unslung their oval shields from their backs and grabbed spears or swept their
spathae
, cavalry swords longer than an infantry gladius, from their scabbards as they ran to obey. Their comrades still aboard the boats followed Paetus’ lead, jumping into the river and wading ashore as the hoofbeats pounded closer, out of the night.

Vespasian felt Magnus’ shoulder to his right as Sabinus took up position on his left, interlocking their shields. He glanced right, past Magnus, down the line to see a wall of shields solidly formed up with Paetus at the centre and a second rank behind; some stragglers were still running up but otherwise the manoeuvre had been completed in less than a hundred heartbeats.

‘These Batavians know their business,’ Magnus muttered, ‘for cavalry, that is.’

‘Paetus! Paetus! Batavian!’ bawled a voice over the incoming hoofbeats. Their pace suddenly lessened as the shadowy figures of horsemen materialised out of the gloom; Vespasian counted eight of them.

The riders swerved around the shield wall with Ansigar in the lead. Along the line some auxiliaries began to relax their guard only to be bawled at by their decurions to raise their shields
again. Ansigar pulled his horse up and dismounted. Paetus left his position and walked towards him; Vespasian and Sabinus joined them.

‘Well, decurion?’ Paetus asked.

‘I’m not sure, prefect,’ Ansigar replied, taking off his helmet and wiping his arm across his forehead. ‘One of my lads, Rothaid, suddenly wasn’t there any more; none of the boys noticed him go, he just disappeared. Then we heard the screams; they sounded to be about half a mile from where we were but they were over so quickly and we couldn’t locate them so we hurried back.’

‘Was it Rothaid, though?’

‘Screaming? Yes, we’re certain of it; but we saw nothing out there.’

‘Thank you, decurion; stand the men down and set some sentries whilst you get the rest of the horses on land.’

Ansigar saluted and led his patrol away, barking orders to resume the disembarkation.

Paetus turned to the brothers. ‘I’d like to think that we’ve just been unlucky and run into some bandits or suchlike, but there’s something not right about this.’

‘I agree,’ Sabinus said. ‘Why would bandits draw attention to themselves by taking one man from a patrol?’

‘It’s not so much that,’ Vespasian put in, ‘it’s why would they kill him in such a public way? They wanted us to hear him.’

‘Sending us a warning, you mean? But who knows that we’re here to warn us off?’

‘Precisely;
we
didn’t even know where we were going to land, so that rules out the idea of a traitor. So we must assume that we were either tracked down the river by people who aren’t as friendly to Rome as we would hope or—’

‘Or we have indeed been unlucky,’ Paetus cut in. ‘Either way, they didn’t challenge us whilst we were landing so we can assume that there aren’t enough of them to worry us.’

‘Yet,’ Vespasian reminded them, letting the word hang.

*

The first pale glow of dawn was touching the sky ahead of them as the column began to climb, leading their horses, up into the wooded hills beyond the flood plain. There had been no more disturbances during the disembarkation, nor had there been any sign of the men who had killed Rothaid as they crossed the plain; his body, however, had been found with his eyes gouged out and his throat cut. What had interested Vespasian about the find was that Rothaid still held a sword in his right hand but, judging by its pristine condition, had made no attempt to defend himself whilst being so terribly mutilated. Having ordered complete silence during the ride he felt unable to break his own command by asking for an explanation.

They climbed higher as the sun rose and soon there was enough light to ride without risk of their mounts stumbling and they were able to put a good few miles between themselves and the river. Paetus had chosen a couple of the auxiliaries who claimed to know the way to the Amisia to lead them, and once they had threaded their way through the range and then down into the undulating forest beyond they steered the column just east of north at the beginning of what they assured their superiors would be a six- to seven-day journey.

The forest was thickly wooded with mainly pines and firs; the undergrowth, however, was surprisingly light. They were able to walk their horses with ease and occasionally break into a trot, something that would have been impossible, Ansigar had informed them, if they had been in the main body of the forest that stretched over two hundred miles to the south of them. As it was they had entered it at its northern tip where the trees, being more spaced out, allowed easier passage and let more light through the canopy, giving the lie to the forest’s name, which Ansigar said in his own tongue before explaining that the word meant ‘black’.

They pushed on throughout the daylight hours even though they had had no sleep the previous night. Travelling in the dark would have been impossible in these conditions and so Vespasian had decided to press on and camp at nightfall. As they journeyed further into the forest the air grew heavier and the
canopy denser, creating a sense of thickening gloom. Vespasian’s breathing became laborious and he found himself constantly looking over his shoulder, peering into the massed shadowy ranks of tree-trunks, or up into the weave of boughs that seemed to press down on them with menacing intent. Judging by the muttering and the nervous looks of the Batavians he was not the only one to feel an ever-increasing threat enclosing them from all sides.

‘If it’s like this at the edge of the forest,’ Magnus grumbled, sharing Vespasian’s unease, ‘I wouldn’t like to go into the heart of it; the German gods must be very powerful there.’

‘Yes, I’m getting the impression that they’re not keen on Romans.’

‘I’m getting the impression that they’re not keen on anyone.’

Throughout the day Paetus sent out patrols in all directions but they reported back after an hour or two having seen nothing more threatening than a couple of very large wild horses, some deer and a few wild boars, two of which had not been fast enough to evade the spears of the Batavians.

As the sun fell, they stopped and made camp, setting a turma on guard in pairs around the perimeter. With the forest disappearing in an all-encompassing dark, the visual menace lessened to be replaced by eerie night-sounds: owls’ hoots, strange animal cries and wind working on groaning trees.

The boars were gutted and roasted on a spit over a couple of fire-pits and provided enough hot flesh for a few mouthfuls each to supplement their army rations. It warmed them but it did not cheer them and conversation was very muted.

The five remaining turmae drew lots for their sentry duty during the night; the lucky ones getting the first or the last slot whilst the rest rolled up in their blankets grumbling, knowing that they would get a broken night’s sleep, if sleep would be at all possible with the sense of foreboding weighing down their spirits.

As dawn was breaking, Magnus nudged Vespasian’s shoulder. ‘Here you go, sir, get that down you.’ He offered him a cup of steaming hot watered-wine and a hunk of bread.

Vespasian sat up stiffly, his back aching from a night on the knobbly forest floor, and took his breakfast. ‘Thanks, Magnus.’

‘Don’t thank me, I don’t have to get up early to build up the fire and heat the wine. That’s Ziri’s job and as a slave he don’t deserve thanking.’

‘Well, thank him anyway.’ Vespasian dunked his bread into the cup.

‘If I start doing that then the next thing he’ll want is paying,’ Magnus muttered as he woke Sabinus. All through the camp men were rousing, stretching their stiff bodies and talking quietly in their native tongue as they prepared their breakfasts.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ Paetus said, striding over, looking decidedly cheerful; behind him the last turma on sentry duty was coming in and forming up to be counted off. ‘I’ve just had a word with the two chaps leading us; they reckon that we’ll leave the forest around midday and get into more open country.’

‘What does that mean?’ Sabinus asked, sipping his wine. ‘A tree every ten paces instead of every five?’

Paetus laughed. ‘That’s about the size of it, Sabinus, but different sorts of trees and hardly any undergrowth, so we should be able to go a lot faster and we won’t have the feeling of being stalked by hideous Germanic forest spirits. We’ll just have to be a little more wary, as the land we’ll be going through is far more settled and the locals are not too keen on Rome.’

‘What savage is?’

‘Prefect!’ the decurion of the returning turma shouted.

‘What is it, Kuno?’

‘We’re two men short, sir.’

Paetus frowned. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked in a manner that questioned Kuno’s arithmetical skills.

‘Batavians can count, sir.’

Vespasian looked at Sabinus in alarm. ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

Sabinus started strapping on his sandals. ‘We’d better go and look for them.’

*

Kuno led the way with eight of his turma to where the missing men had been posted; there was no sign of them, just a tangle of footprints in the earth where they and previous sentries had been pacing around.

‘There’s no indication of a struggle,’ Vespasian observed, looking at the ground, ‘no blood, nothing discarded.’

‘Decurion, have your men spread out and search,’ Paetus ordered. ‘But they’re to keep in sight, understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do you think they could’ve deserted, Paetus?’ Sabinus asked as the Batavians started to fan out.

‘Unlikely so far from home and especially not here.’

‘What’s so special about here?’

‘The guides tell me that very soon we’ll come to a river called the Moenus; they know a ford and once we cross it we enter the homeland of a tribe called the Chatti. They and the Batavians are enemies. They used to be a part of the same people but fell out a couple of hundred years ago, I’ve no idea what about because no one seems to remember; anyway it’s still very serious. The Batavians went north and the Chatti settled here but there is still a blood-feud between them. They’d be mad to go wandering around so close to Chatti land by themselves.’

‘Prefect! Look at this,’ Kuno shouted, walking towards them whilst brandishing an auxiliary helmet.

Paetus took the helmet, gave it a quick glance and then showed it to the brothers; blood and some matted hair clung to the rim. ‘I doubt very much whether we’ll be seeing them again.’