The Leopard Sword: Empire IV (20 page)

The heavily built officer shook his head and turned away.

‘We have our routines, friend, and they don’t vary. One of us will be on guard at all times until we leave this forest and return to the city.’

He walked away over the clearing’s rim and into the darkness, and the other soldiers bedded themselves down in their cloaks and blankets.

Felicia left the Tungrorum hospital two hours after sunset, having been delayed longer than she’d intended by the treatment of a soldier from the legion cohort who had suffered a deep cut to his thigh in training. Depressingly, the man’s wound had started to smell, with the fetid aroma of infection so horribly familiar to her, as if sepsis were setting in. After scrubbing her hands, she had dosed him with a mixture of wine, honey and the dried and ground sap of the poppy, and then set to work on the wound with her surgical equipment, working to cut and scrape away any hint of dead flesh, ruthlessly sacrificing healthy tissue in the hope of saving his life. It had been with a heavy heart that she had finally bandaged the wound and left him to sleep off the opiate mixture.

Stepping into the street she pulled her cloak about her, feeling the thick wool tight over her gently swollen belly. The baby was getting heavy now, and already her gait was slightly changed to accommodate her increasing weight and the feeling of ungainliness that the pregnancy was inflicting upon her. Taking a deep breath of the cold air she put her head down against the wind’s icy caress as it funnelled down the narrow street, pushing forward doggedly against the blast. A voice spoke from the shadows, making her start at the unexpected and unseen presence.

‘Here we are! I told you that good things come to the man with enough patience to wait for them.’

A dark shape detached itself from the darkness of the hospital’s stone wall, the faint light of the hospital’s torchlit entrance revealing a man wearing a legionary’s white tunic. Felicia took one look at his face, the nose and mouth masked by a strip of dark material, and recognised the intent in his palely gleaming eyes. She turned back to the hospital entrance less than twenty paces distant, but then froze as another man appeared out of the building’s shadow in front of her, his face similarly concealed.

‘You were right; she’s well worth waiting for.’ She could see from the set of his eyes that he was smiling at her, although she doubted that the expression would be particularly pleasant were it not concealed by the mask. ‘We’ll soon warm you up, darling. A little bit of compensation for your lot getting us banned from the city four days out of five, eh?’

She felt the first man’s strong hands grip her arms from behind, and knew that even if she’d been carrying Dubnus’s knife it would have been impossible to use the weapon in such close quarters.

‘I’m pregnant.’

The second man laughed disparagingly, his voice no more troubled than if their would-be victim had announced that she had red hair. Reaching out he flicked her cloak aside, then, with a leer the mask did little to conceal, he cupped her breasts.

‘That doesn’t matter, darling. It won’t bother us, and let’s face it, if you weren’t already baking a loaf you soon would be once we’ve all been up you a few times.’

Her eyes widened in horror, and as she felt the grip on her arms tighten the man behind her leaned forward and whispered in her ear.

‘Oh yes, darling,
all
of us. There’s another six blokes waiting for you in our barrack, and we’re going to show you a right old time. In fact we’re going to fuck every—’

A shout rang out from the far end of the street, and the man standing in front of her spun to face the source of the noise, pulling a dagger from his belt. A cloaked figure was charging towards them along the hospital’s wall, and as the man ran he unsheathed a sword, its long blade flashing gold in the light of the torches burning at the building’s entrance. The soldier behind Felicia pushed her away, turning to run as his comrade sprinted past him and dropping his dagger in his haste to escape. Felicia fell to her knees, one hand stopping her fall while the other clutched instinctively at her stomach. Her rescuer ran past and then, realising that the two soldiers were outpacing him, he abandoned his pursuit and sheathed the sword, turning round with a brisk bow to help her back onto her feet.

‘Madam. Are you . . .?’

‘I’m fine, thank you, whoever you are.’

‘Caninus. Quintus Caninus. I am the prefect of the city’s bandit-hunting detachment. And you must be the Tungrian cohort’s doctor?’ She nodded, relieved that the pain she was feeling was from skinned knees rather than in her abdomen. ‘Those men, they were soldiers?’

‘Yes, Prefect. Legionaries with a grudge against my husband’s cohort. They were planning to abduct and rape me, or at least that’s what they—’

Caninus gaped at her.

‘
Rape?
I thought they were robbing you! And you’re sure they were legionaries?’

Felicia pointed at the dagger hidden in the building’s shadow.

‘That might help?’

Caninus bent to pick up the weapon, frowning as he held it up to the light.

‘It looks like army issue. Come along, I think we need to show this to your tribune. A grudge I can understand, but this . . . this is beyond my experience, or my understanding, for that matter.’

Marcus took the second watch, smiling to himself as Julius rolled himself up in his blanket and was asleep within seconds. He looked around the camp in the fire’s meagre glow, watching Arabus closely for a moment, but the guide was soundly asleep and snoring gently. He put some more wood on the fire before padding out into the darkness, then he climbed up the hill until the fire’s gentle crackle was lost in the wind’s hissing passage through the branches above his head. Settling into the shadow of an ancient oak he listened to the noises of the night-time forest and watched the stars above his head, following the training that Dubnus had imparted to him months before and giving his senses time to adjust to the ambient noise. Allowing his thoughts to stray, he mused on impending fatherhood, and the responsibility of bringing a child into the world whilst he and anyone associated with him were still under the threat of a death sentence, and subject to an imperial manhunt driven on by the vengeful Praetorian Prefect.

A tiny sound reached him, almost too gentle to be heard above the wind’s susurration; it was the crack of a twig breaking somewhere not too close but still within earshot. Waiting with his breath held he heard another sound, again almost too quiet to be heard, and he turned his head slowly towards it, avoiding any sudden movement that might alert whatever had made the noise. Another sound came, slightly to the right of the first one, and Marcus reached for his sword’s hilt, easing the blade out of its scabbard with a care to avoid any repeat of the noise that had betrayed his presence earlier that day. The sword’s blade shone in the moonlight, and he held it upright behind his back to avoid the bar of reflected silver giving his position away.

Easing back down the slope, testing each footfall with delicate care before putting his full weight down, he slid back into the clearing’s hollow bowl and touched Dubnus on the shoulder. His friend woke instantly, his eyes flicking open to find Marcus kneeling over him with a finger to his lips. The big man rolled silently to his feet, nudging Julius with his foot, and he too rose from the ground, shedding his blanket and drawing his sword without a sound. Leaving Silus and the guide asleep, the three men climbed out of the clearing, their swords shining in the moonlight. Marcus pointed with his left hand held flat, indicating the direction from which he felt the sound had come, more or less the same place where the wild boar had taken flight earlier. They spread out a little, advancing slowly and silently into the night’s gloom, their senses alert to any tiny sound or movement. From somewhere behind them an animal grunted disconsolately into the cold night air, and a moment later another replied from the opposite direction.

‘
Go!
’

Julius’s urgent whisper sent them forward at a faster pace, sacrificing silence for speed as they weaved through the trees in a rustle of grass and snapping twigs, but after thirty paces he held up a hand to halt them, listening hard in the renewed quiet.

‘
Nothing
.’

Dubnus nodded his head in agreement with Marcus’s whisper.

‘If there was anything out here, it’s gone to earth. We’d have heard anything of any size if it had run.’

Marcus looked out into the darkness unhappily.

‘There was something out here. I know that much.’

They returned to the clearing and found Silus and Arabus still asleep. The guide awoke when Marcus touched his shoulder, blinking his eyes open and staring up at the Roman in a moment of incomprehension.

‘What?’

Julius sank back to the ground and reached for his blanket.

‘There was something moving around out there.’

Arabus grimaced, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

‘The boars hunt at night sometimes. You can hear them digging for roots when it’s quiet, and grunting and snorting at each other. It was probably the same animal we saw earlier. You see how Arduenna already has you all jumping at shadows?’

Silus opened an eye to squint at the men standing over him.

‘It’s a good thing I’ve got all you big strong infantrymen around to make sure that nothing sneaks up on me while I’m busy dreaming of beer and women. The only problem is that I don’t seem to be getting much dreaming done.’ He yawned hugely, then turned his back on them and nestled into his blanket again, muttering a last comment from beneath the rough fabric. ‘And I’ll bet not one of you dozy buggers has even thought to check the horses.’

Tribune Scaurus, predictably, was incandescent in his anger at the night’s events, hammering the point of the discarded dagger deep into the polished wood of the basilica’s wooden table. The knife remained there, standing upright and wobbling slightly from side to side in front of Belletor, as Scaurus walked away from it to the far wall, leaving the horrified tribune staring at the weapon. Turning back to face his colleague, white-faced with a rage he had fought to control ever since Caninus had brought Felicia to his quarters the previous night, Scaurus spat his fury at his incredulous colleague with the pitiless force of a fully wound ballista.

‘I’ve seen all manner of brutal and bestial acts in the last ten years, but I never thought I would see the day when a Roman soldier would offer violence and the threat of rape to a respectable matron, a military doctor, and a pregnant woman, to boot! I find myself more than amazed, Tribune; I am quite literally revolted by the idea that allegedly civilised men would stoop to so base an act by way of revenge! Were it not for our esteemed colleague Quintus Caninus’s timely return from his day’s patrolling, my doctor might still be suffering the unwanted attentions of an entire
fucking tent party
!’ The last words were roared at the top of his voice, and he advanced on the seated Belletor with such malevolence in his eyes that the usually aggressive tribune froze in his seat. First Spear Frontinius gave his colleague Sergius a meaningful glance and limped out from his place to put a restraining hand on his superior’s arm, his hard, cold grip enough to arrest Scaurus’s advance and switch the furious tribune’s attention from Belletor to himself. He leaned close to his superior, muttering into his ear in low tones intended not to be overheard.

‘This will not undo what has been done, Tribune, and while offering violence to this man might seem appropriate to you now, you will regret it in the days to come.’

Refusing to bend under his superior’s ferocious stare, he nodded to Sergius, who stepped forward and wrenched the dagger from the wood’s grip, leaving a deep scar in the smooth surface.

‘This is one of ours all right; it’s standard issue. Ah, the soldier in question seems to have been stupid enough to use his own weapon for the crime.’ He held up the dagger, turning it to the light to display letters and numbers formed out of patterns of tiny holes punched into the handle’s metal. ‘See? “Julius, VII II IV”. Soldier Julius, Seventh Cohort, Second Century, fourth tent party. The man’s as good as condemned, unless he can prove that the weapon left his ownership before the crime was committed. With your permission, Tribune?’

He looked at Belletor, who dragged his gaze away from Scaurus and distractedly waved an assenting hand. Sergius saluted, nodded to Frontinius and left, the weapon in his hand.

‘First Spear Sergius will know the truth of it soon enough, I expect. In the meantime I’d suggest that we put these hostilities to one side. Not everything is as simple as it seems.’

Scaurus stared at his first spear for a moment, knowing that the older man’s cautionary words contained a core of wisdom that he would be unwise to ignore. At length he put a hand on Frontinius’s and gently freed himself from its grip, switching his pitiless gaze back to Belletor.

‘Agreed, First Spear. But when we discover the truth of these events there will be a reckoning with whoever is brought to justice, and as they suffer their death sentence I will look into the eyes of the men who would have defiled a pregnant woman. And
you
–’ he pointed a finger at Belletor – ‘
you
would do well to avoid lecturing me in the period between then and now. Make sure that the rest of your command knows that I have detailed a guard to the doctor, four veteran soldiers to be at her side at all times, some of them men who have recovered from battle wounds under her care. I have told them that they have orders to take whatever action they see fit, should they suspect any threat to the doctor. Any man who approaches the doctor with anything but the greatest circumspection can expect to find himself looking down the shafts of their spears, and to find unfriendly eyes behind them.’

The party was back on the hunters’ track at first light. Marcus’s eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep, which had refused to return after the night’s disturbance, despite the absence of any further sign of the nocturnal intruder that he resolutely maintained he had heard.