The Leopard Sword: Empire IV (21 page)

‘There was something else I heard, apart from the sound of breaking twigs, but I can’t say what it was. It didn’t sound like any noise a pig would make though.’

He pondered the fading memory as they made their cautious way along the track in the morning’s grey light, at length shaking his head and deciding to put the whole thing to the back of his mind. By the time the sun had reached its highest point they had covered another five miles by his reckoning, and he was starting to contemplate the stop for lunch when Arabus ducked into the cover of a gnarled elm, raising a hand to beckon them in but in such a manner that a silent approach was clearly required. Leaving a muttering Silus to hold the horses the centurions closed up on their guide in silence, squatting down in the cover of the tree and waiting for him to speak. Leaning forward to whisper, he pointed a finger at the path beyond the elm’s shelter.

‘I heard something. Not loud, but not natural. It might have been a man’s voice raised to shout, but it was so distant that I couldn’t be certain. We need to leave the path and scout forward.’

Julius nodded, and whispered his instructions in the same quiet tone.

‘Swords out, brothers. This ground’s so thick with trees that there’ll be no warning of any trouble. Marcus, go and tell Silus to get the animals into cover, and to wait for us here. Tell him the watchword is “Tungria” – and if he hears men approaching without using it he’s at liberty to make a break for it. If we get into trouble out there I’d rather the tribune knew something rather than nothing at all.’

Marcus briefed Silus, who promptly led the horses and mule off the track and away into the forest’s cover, unable to resist the temptation for a whispered parting shot at his comrade.

‘Never fear, Centurion, the first sound I hear without one of you lot bellowing the watchword and I’ll be on my toes without a second thought. Watch out for yourself, young Corvus, and try to avoid being attacked by any bad-tempered pigs, eh?’

The four men scouted forward in an extended line, keeping within sight of each other as they eased cautiously through the undergrowth. After a few minutes, and as the initial nervous energy prompted by the guide’s warning started to seep away from his muscles, Marcus found himself shivering with the day’s chill. He hunched deeper into his cloak as he slipped through the trees and bushes, the forest’s silence broken only by the gentle sigh of wind through leaves. He lost sight of Dubnus, the next man in line, as his friend moved silently down into a dip in the forest floor, and in the moment of distraction, as he glanced away from the thick undergrowth to his front, a pig burst from its cover in an explosion of movement and raced away across the soft ground. An instant later a man leapt through the bushes in pursuit, a spear raised in one hand held ready to throw.

Sergius reported back to the two tribunes after an hour’s swift investigation, his face sour with frustration.

‘The knife was stolen from the legionary named on its blade yesterday, while the man’s tent party were on fatigue detail. He reported it as missing early yesterday afternoon, and his centurion supports that claim. It’s fairly obvious that it was stolen for the purpose, as a precaution against its being lost, but that doesn’t provide us with any clue as to who it was that assaulted the lady last night. For what it’s worth, I’ve spread the word that there’s a reward on offer for information leading to the apprehension of these men, but I’m not holding my breath on a result. Nobody in the tent party in question is going to say a word, and they’re likely to have kept their plans to themselves.’

Scaurus paced across the room away from him, turning when he reached the wall, and his voice was hard-edged when he spoke.

‘To be expected, I suppose, and it leaves me without a means of identifying these soldiers, presumably as intended. I’ll not pursue justice against men that can’t be identified, but I will nurture my hunger for retribution for as long as it takes for them to make the mistake that will lead me to them.’

Prefect Caninus nodded firmly, picking up the knife from its place on the table’s scarred wooden surface and lifting it to stare hard at the blade’s glinting line of sharp iron.

‘I’m with you there, Tribune. One way or another we will have justice.’

The spearman stumbled to a halt and gaped in amazement at the uniformed Roman officer standing before him, his face distorting into the beginning of a scream as Marcus swept his sword round in a blurred arc that whipped the blade through his neck and sent his head spinning to the ground. The man’s body stood stock-still for a moment before slumping sideways to the forest floor, a jet of blood spurting from the corpse’s neck as it fell. From close by a man called out in the native tongue, and the Roman flattened himself against the nearest tree as the second hunter’s footsteps thudded softly towards him across the forest floor. As the man appeared to his right, his spear held loosely over his shoulder, Marcus kicked out with his right leg; he hooked the hunter’s feet from beneath him and pitched him onto his back, putting the sword’s point to his throat and looking down at his captive with a finger to his lips. The prostrate hunter swallowed, feeling the steel’s cold kiss against the skin of his neck, and froze into immobility while Arabus and the other centurions gathered around him.

‘
Kill him!
’

Julius put out an arm without even looking at Arabus, ignoring the threat of his long knife and taking a firm grip of his throat, hissing a warning from the side of his mouth.

‘Put the knife away before I’m forced to take it off you.’

The guide stared at him for a long moment, his knuckles white on the knife’s handle, before he realised that Dubnus had the point of his sword a fingernail’s width from his exposed armpit. The big centurion leaned in close, touching his knife to the soft skin with sufficient force to indent the vulnerable flesh.

‘Do as he says, or you’ll end up as a meal for those pigs you’re so fond of.’

Arabus slowly lowered the blade, sliding it back into the leather scabbard and stepping away from the terrified prisoner, but his face remained twisted in an expression of hatred and disgust.

‘He’s one of
them
.’

Julius grinned wolfishly.

‘You mean he’s a bandit?’

The guide nodded, not taking his eyes off the prisoner. His voice was cold, and as dead as his eyes.

‘He’s one of the men that took my woman and my son. Give him to me.’

The big Tungrian shook his head, shooting Arabus a warning glance.

‘No. Not yet, at least. I want to know what he’s doing here before anyone gets to play any revenge games with him. And I want to know one thing before we start.’ Stabbing his sword down into the soft earth he reached down and took a firm grip of the spearman’s sleeve, then he pulled out his dagger and opened up the coarse fabric with a single pass of the evilly sharp blade. He stared down at the man’s flesh, shaking his head slowly at what the knife’s pass had revealed. ‘And what do we have here, eh? Who’s a naughty boy?’

He tapped the skin of the man’s shoulder with the weapon’s point, indicating a tattoo crudely inked into the flesh; it was a unit identifier similar to that on his and Dubnus’s left arms. Dubnus leaned over and stared at the marking for a moment, a smile creeping across his face.

‘Well, now. Second Treveri, are you? Which means, for a start, that you speak Latin, so don’t bother playing dumb with us.’ The bandit stared back up at him with a mixture of fear and hatred, and Julius prodded the tattoo with his dagger again.

‘It also means that you know all too well the penalty for the murder of your prefect. I think we’d better take this one back with us to Tungrorum and allow military justice to take its brutal course, eh lads?’ He turned back to Arabus. ‘Your prefect told us that your family went missing, what, a year ago?’ The guide nodded reluctantly, his eyes still locked on the prisoner. ‘Well, these boys mutinied only last autumn, so you can forget about taking that knife to this one; he wasn’t part of whatever it was that happened to them. I still want to know where that camp is, so you and my colleague here –’ he pointed to Dubnus – ‘can go forward to find it, while Marcus and I stay here and have a gentle chat with my new friend here.’

Dubnus put a brawny arm around the guide’s shoulder, turning him away from the prisoner.

‘We can’t be far from their camp now, so you and I should go forward and leave these two to watch the prisoner. Are you coming, or do you want to stay here and glare at him too?’

The guide shot a last venomous look at the captured bandit and walked away, speaking quietly into the forest’s silence.

‘Follow me. I know this ground as well as I knew my wife’s body, before
they
took her from me.’ He vanished into the trees, his passage no noisier than a gentle breeze.

Julius winked at Marcus and the two men watched their friend pad into the forest in Arabus’s wake, his axe held ready to fight. Then Julius leaned over the prisoner, who was still lying on his back.

‘Well, Second Treveri, now that we have some peace and quiet, and that vicious little man isn’t fingering his knife and staring at your throat, perhaps we can have a civilised conversation. Let me make this easy for you. Either you answer every question I ask you quickly, honestly and in a way that doesn’t make me think you’re trying to be clever with me, or I’ll be forced to start carving bits off you, starting with this.’ He gripped the man’s ear with a lightning-fast move, resting the dagger’s cold, minutely jagged edge against the point where ear and scalp joined. ‘In your own time . . .’

The bandit’s eyes rolled helplessly.

‘What do you want to know?’

Marcus squatted down in front of him, shaking his head in mock sadness.

‘What do we want to know? Isn’t that obvious, soldier? We want to know
everything
.’

Dubnus and Arabus moved noiselessly across the forest’s sun-dappled floor, the big centurion mouthing a silent curse as he wove a sinuous path around the shafts of light lancing down through the forest’s canopy high above them, staying in the shadows to avoid the blink of sunlight on metal. The guide appeared to have got over his anger at being denied the chance to take sharp iron to their prisoner, and led him on with a deft eye for cover, seemingly determined to ensure that their progress would remain undetected. The centurion smiled to himself, reflecting that Julius would have been noisier than both of them put together, but his expression changed abruptly as a hint of putrefaction reached his sensitive nose. He hissed to Arabus, flaring his nostrils to indicate the unexpected smell. The guide padded carefully across to his side, whispering in his ear.

‘We’re close to their camp, I think. They have a habit of using cages to scare off any hunter that stumbles across their hiding places. I’ve found them before, after the bandits have abandoned a camp.’

Dubnus shook his head uncomprehendingly, but the guide simply gestured him on, putting a finger to his lips and moving with exaggerated care, each footstep slow and delicate as they weaved through the undergrowth, and Arabus paused with increasing frequency to ensure that they were unobserved before moving across even the smallest of gaps in the foliage. At the top of a small rise Dubnus realised what he had meant a few minutes before when he had referred to ‘cages’, as a tall arrangement of stout branches, which had been formed into a cylindrical structure, resolved itself out of the surrounding vegetation. The horizontal bars were provided by thickly interweaved strips of bark which were placed to provide a clear view in and out of the cage as much as to anchor the branches together, and the whole thing was secured to the forest floor by deeply buried pegs, each one the width of a man’s thumb. Dubnus stared at the construction with an unhappy certainty as to its contents.

‘
Surely not?
’

Arabus turned back to him, nodding grimly at his expression of fascinated horror and whispering fiercely in his ear.

‘What else were you expecting? This man Obduro understands the power of terror on men such as these. And on us, for that matter. Come on.’

He led the Tungrian closer, and with every cautious pace the stench worsened, until by the time they were close enough to see into the cage’s shadows it was almost enough to choke Dubnus, despite his experience of battle, of terrible wounds and of bodies left to rot. A corpse lolled back against the bars, its sightless eyes staring at Dubnus’s revolted gaze. The exposed portions of the body were rippling with maggots, and it was only an act of willpower that kept him from throwing up onto the forest floor. Arabus watched as he mastered the urge, his whispered comment harsh with emotion.

‘This man’s fate is a warning, both to his own people and to outsiders. If we are caught approaching their camp we will certainly suffer in exactly the same way.’

He stared at Dubnus with a level gaze, as if waiting for the Tungrian to indicate a retreat, but the big man simply nodded, gesturing to the ground before them. Shrugging, the Gaul turned away from the cage and, bent almost double, led him forward again, his pace even more cautious than before. After fifty more paces he turned his head, putting a hand to his ear.

‘Do you hear that?’

Dubnus listened, concentrating and ignoring the rustling of leaves in the early afternoon’s breeze. The faint sound of men’s voices reached him, their words unintelligible but their tone easy enough to understand. He nodded to the guide, indicating that he should stay where he was squatting, then he flattened himself against the forest floor, worming slowly forward towards the voices, carefully picking up and moving aside anything that might betray his presence by making a noise. The sounds got louder as he crawled closer; a group of men were talking without fear of being overheard and individual words started to make sense. He stopped and listened, guessing that he was still twenty or thirty paces short of them, but the discussion remained impossible to follow and, taking a deep breath, he squirmed forward again, now moving so slowly that his approach was quite literally without noise. The wind rustling the leaves high above his head died away for a moment, and the voices were suddenly disconcertingly clear.