Soldier of Rome: Heir to Rebellion (The Artorian Chronicles) (2 page)

Preface

Gaul, A.D. 21

A year has passed since the end of the Gallic rebellion of Sacrovir and Florus. Retribution has been exacted and the province is at peace once more. And yet there are some who escaped Rome’s justice. They are led by a man whose heart burns with hate; an heir to rebellion. Knowing that there can be no victory against the legions; his vengeance can only be wrought through terror and murder. The Gallic city of Lugdunum will be the first to taste his wrath.

The city of Lugdunum flourishes; the Twentieth Legion’s Third Cohort having been stationed within the city since the end of the Sacrovir Revolt. For Centurion Proculus and his legionaries their comfortable assignment will soon come unraveled as a series of grisly murders looks to upset the order of the city. Sergeant Artorius inadvertently finds himself at the center of the search to find these mysterious killers before they undermine the city’s faith in the protection of the legions; a search that will lead him on a journey into the darkest corners of what lurks in a broken man’s wicked soul.

Chapter I: Rebellion’s Heir

Massilia, Gaul

April, A.D. 21

It was a good sword; a bit gaudy
for his taste perhaps, but a fine weapon nonetheless. Sacrovir had had an affinity for cavalry weapons, and this spatha had been specially made for him. Well balanced, it rested easily in his hands. Heracles turned it over while running an oiled cloth along the blade. The blade had been honed to a fine edge, working all the nicks and burrs from where the weapon had lain. It had been buried in Sacrovir’s heart as his burning estate collapsed over his head. The Romans had made no effort to excavate the ruins, content as they were that the rebel leader was dead.

Romans
, Heracles thought to himself as he let out a sigh.
I hate Romans!
Indeed he had plenty of reasons to hate Rome. He had been an impulsive gambler in his past life, much to his wife’s chagrin. Things were taken too far when he tried to take on the provisional governor himself.

Heracles had always taken it as a personal umbrage that his native Sparta was little more than a sub province of the Roman Empire. He had sought to humiliate the governor at a gladiatorial spectacle, placing a massive wager that he knew he could not co
ver. Before the match Heracles was caught trying to bribe one of the combatants into losing. The governor’s bodyguards beat him and dragged before the man, in full view of his fellow Spartans. The governor became enraged at how the Greek had tried to humiliate him he declared that if Heracles was determined to fix gladiatorial fights, he could do so from within the arena. His wife and children were seized and taken away, their property confiscated in retribution to what the governor called “a blasphemous insult against your betters.”

Betters,
Heracles growled inside.
No Roman is my better!

Memories
enveloped him as he remembered all too well; his wife and children were sold into slavery, while he was beaten once more and left in the hands of the local gladiatorial school where his hatred consumed him. He spent several years in the arena, being cavorted all around the Empire, gradually making his way west. It was not too far from where he was now that he fought his final battle in the arena. His hands trembled at the memory, almost cutting him on the sword’s razor sharp blade.

It was
during the autumn festival, and the magistrate wanted to celebrate with games and gladiatorial matches. Heracles was amongst the prime attractions. Heracles was not his real name; but rather one given to him for his terrifying feats in the arena. Though only a small percentage of matches ended in death, his high rate of killing made him feared amongst the other gladiators, and loved by the spectators. This time would be no different; he would not be deferring to the crowd as to whether his foe lived or died. Indeed the young whelp that faced him in the sand proved little match for him. He had seen the young man fight before, always with a masked helmet on, and often being overwhelmed by the more experienced fighters. On at least two occasions the crowd signaled that they wanted him slain by his conqueror, only to have the magistrate overturn the crowd and allow the man to live. It baffled Heracles, because the magistrate had had no issue with allowing other gladiators to be executed, even some who had fought far better than this pathetic excuse of a fighter.

He took it as an insult when on the last day of the festival
Heracles was slated to fight this man. So tired was he of watching this pathetic gladiator be allowed to live that he stabbed him through the heart with sheer malice as soon as he tripped him to the ground. Then tragedy struck. He roughly ripped the masked helm and gazed on the face of his own son. The lad reached for him piteously as blood streamed out of both corners of his mouth. Heracles’ strength left him as he fell to his knees. In an instant he realized the sick and twisted mind of his captors; to have had his own son so close for so long, and yet completely out of reach. Only now did they place father and son in the arena together, knowing that unwittingly Heracles would destroy his own flesh and blood. He sobbed that only a short moment ago he wanted, and looked forward to, killing the young man.

Heracles set down the sword and closed his eyes. He had tried to plunge his blade into his own heart, but was forcibly restrained by guards. He refused to fight thereafter and was cruelly punished by scourging. When the slave master realized there was no fight left in him, he sold Heracles to a noble family. They soon learned that he could read and write and he started his life anew. The family told him news of his wife.  She had been sold to a brothel and hanged herself. He would never learn the fate of his daughter.

His new owners
treated him kindly enough, but they were still Romans and therefore his enemies. Heracles bore the indignity of teaching their children Greek letters well enough, but he refused to allow any compassion to enter his heart. It was when the father was away that he took the first steps of his revenge on the Roman people. Pity and any sense of remorse had died with his family, making it all too easy to slash the throats of the Roman babes while they slept. The wife took much more doing, for he first had to be rid of her troublesome maidservant. He was pleasantly surprised to learn that if honed sharp enough, a butcher’s cleaver could sever a human head from its shoulders. He had at first thought to rape the domina of the house, but so hot was his hatred that his manhood failed him. She had mocked his lack of masculinity as she struggled in his grasp. He then settled for disemboweling her, spilling her entrails with repeated blows of the cleaver. He left her convulsing in agony as death took its time coming for her. With as much coin as he could carry and one of the children’s horses he fled. Racing through the night he felt a morbid sense of satisfaction. There was no room in his now blackened heart for anything else. If happiness was gone forever from his life and such feelings were the best he could hope for, then so be it.

It was in the north, outside of Augustodunum, that he met Sacrovir and Florus. The two men were Gallic nobles who sought to plant the seeds of rebellion. Heracles cared little for Gauls, viewing them as unkempt barbarians even after more than seventy years of Roman rule and influence. However, he saw an opportunity to further unleash his revenge. Unfortunately, Sacrovir and Florus were not military men. Florus was the typical pompous noble who only sought rebellion as a means of freeing himself from his debts. Sacrovir, while eager and cunning had made the most of his fortune financing gladiatorial games. He had lost a substantial portion of this when one of his best was killed by a common Roman soldier. Heracles found it ironic that his own gambling lust had long since perished.

Their army
that they spent nearly a year raising consisted mostly of thieves, debtors, and former slaves, though Sacrovir had captured the trust of a large contingent of noble youths who also flocked to his banner. Still they proved little match for the legions of Rome. Heracles had taught the rebels how to fight in a phalanx, and yet they broke at first contact with the legions and their auxiliary cavalry. Most fled into the hills, while the noble youths, who served as the vanguard of Sacrovir’s force, were either captured or killed. The surviving leaders had fled to Sacrovir’s estate, only to be hunted down after a captured rebel betrayed them.

And yet, he coul
d not let it end this way. When Sacrovir and the others fell on their swords while the estate burned over their heads, Heracles slunk away. It was only well after the Romans had left that he returned to find Sacrovir’s sword.

The result
was a great tragedy for Gaul, for the rebellion of Sacrovir and Florus had seen a generation of their noble youths destroyed; young, impressionable lads who had been brainwashed by Sacrovir’s poisoned tongue, only to be utterly savaged by Rome’s invincible legions. Those who survived were either ransomed at a heavy toll to their families, or sent to the sulfur mines in Mauretania. Heracles cared little of the Gauls suffering, and the small numbers of legionaries who died during the campaign did nothing to ease his hatred.

A knock at the door brought him out of his reminiscing. He picked up his sword and stood behind the door.

“Enter!” he beckoned as the door creaked open. A
hunched old man entered, bearing a tray of food and a bottle of port.

“Your dinner, sir,” he said as he peered into the darkness. The old man gave a jolt as Heracles
briskly closed the door behind him.

“Thank you,” the Spartan said, his sword hidden behind his back.

“I’ve got some bread cooking, sir, if you would like some,” the innkeeper said nervously. The strange man who occupied this room unnerved him, and under most circumstances he would have cast him out onto the street; however the man appeared to be quite wealthy and had paid him far more than the room was worth. Money could make even the meekest of men brave.

“Yes, that would be fine,” Heracles replied, opening the door once again. The old man smiled and shuffled out. Heracles let out a sigh. He
was becoming paranoid. He had been in Massila for four months now and his coin had kept the senile innkeeper quiet. The hustle and bustle of the busy port town had lent him an incredible amount of autonomy. No one bothered him here, and no one was looking for him either. For all the Romans knew, every rebel leader had died with Sacrovir.

A year had passed since the
disastrous rebellion and it would soon be safe to move about freely again. What he would do then he was not sure. He knew that a province revolution was impossible. If Sacrovir and Florus had failed to gain the support of the masses, he knew he would have no chance. It mattered not; for his quest was one of retribution against Rome, nothing more. His was a personal war against Rome and it was now his life’s work. He then decided that he would sow the seeds of discord by annihilating an entire Roman garrison. Surely that would give him some satisfaction; more so than a few dead legionaries amongst the piles of Gallic dead. But where would he strike? Lugdunum was to the north, along the Rhodanus River. It was a large city, and its urban police were reinforced by a cohort of legionaries. These men were from Legio XX, the Valeria Legion; one of the two that had put down the Sacrovir Revolt. The other had been Legio I, Germanica, which shared a fortress on the Rhine with the Twentieth. These men would bear the brunt of Heracles’ wrath.

Wiping out this garrison would not come
easy; a single legionary cohort was a fearsome enemy consisting of six eighty-man centuries of the fiercest and most disciplined soldiers not seen since the height of Sparta. As much as it wounded his pride, Heracles begrudgingly recognized Rome as superior to Sparta; for Sparta and all of Greece had been defeated by Rome centuries before. Rome had achieved what Xerxes and the entire Persian Empire had failed to do; subjugate Sparta. It had been nearly two hundred years since the combined forces of Macedonia, which now included Sparta, had faced Rome in battle. The Battle of Pydna had been a crushing defeat for King Perseus and was generally accepted as the classic example of how the Greek phalanx had been proven inferior to the Roman legion.

So how did one go about annihilating a cohort of Roman soldiers? Direct assault was impossible; it would take thousands of men and even then victory could not be certain. No, this w
ould require cunning and deceit rather than brute force. Heracles remembered all-too-well what had happened the last time Gauls had tried to overpower Rome. At Augustodunum the army of Sacrovir had the Roman force outnumbered at least three to one, perhaps even more? Heracles had worked diligently to try and teach that rabble of beggars and thieves how to fight in a proper phalanx. Though the phalanx was an inferior formation as opposed to the legion, it was still preferred when one’s army was undisciplined amateurs.

Sacrovir had encased his vanguard of noble youths in plate armor, in
an attempt to break up the Roman formations. The result was catastrophic. In their ingenuity, the legions had attacked this force with pickaxes, chopping down their foe like small trees. Only the vanguard and Sacrovir’s gladiators attempted to withstand the Roman onslaught; the bulk of his army of thieves fled in terror at first contact. A regiment of Roman cavalry, led by a Treveri noble named Julius Indus, had attacked both wings of Sacrovir’s force with devastating effect. What spurned Heracles even more was that Indus had at first been one of Sacrovir’s confidants, only to betray him and align his regiment with Rome. Indeed, it had been Indus’ regiment that along with a single cohort of legionaries had destroyed a far superior force led by Florus; the rebel leader falling on his sword when he saw that all was lost. The Emperor Tiberius had been most generous to Indus, awarding him Rome’s highest honor, the Civic Crown. He had also ordered the Treveri regiment to be permanently named
Indus’ Horse
.

“Enjoy the spoils of Rome while you can,” Heracles said in a low voice. “For the time will come that you will p
ay for your treachery.” A grim smile crossed his face. There was a ship bound for Mauretania leaving in the morning. It was time to visit some old friends.