Thunder of the Gods (8 page)

‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. I’m looking for the Third Legion’s officers. Do you know where I might find them?’

The detachment’s chosen man, a heavily built man with the look of a pugilist, stepped forward and nodded vigorously.

‘Yes Tribune, I’ll have one of the men walk you up there.’

‘Up?’

The big man smiled.

‘Nothing but the best for our young gentlemen, sir. They’ve rented a villa on the mountain slopes, high up, with a view for miles around.’

The soldier gestured to one of his men.

‘You, take the officer here up to the Honeypot.’

Marcus raised an eyebrow in question.

‘Honeypot?’

The chosen man smiled knowingly.

‘You’ll see why we call it that soon enough sir. I presume you’ll be moving in with the other gentlemen?’

Marcus held his gaze for a moment, reading the man’s barely hidden cynicism as to the legion officers’ professionalism, and by association his own.

‘Thank you, Chosen.’

He turned away, leaving the soldiers staring after him, and followed his guide along the road’s path as it ran through a further belt of forest until it branched into three, one running straight on, a second climbing gently away to its left, and another taking the steepest path up into the foothills.

‘This way sir.’

The soldier indicated the steepest of the three roads, and after a moment’s walk Marcus found his calves aching at the sudden and unaccustomed exercise after so long at sea. The soldier turned back, and, seeing the pained expression on the officer’s face, slowed his pace.

‘Keep walking,’ said Marcus. ‘I’m just unfit from too long on a ship coming here from Rome.’

The road ran out of the forest and on up the slope into a wide open area in which a dozen or so palatial villas had been built on the hillside, high above the groves of bay laurels that had given the city’s richest and most decadent suburb its name.

‘Are these the largest houses in Daphne?’

The soldier shook his head.

‘No sir. Some of the villas lower down the hill are bigger, but the young gentlemen say they like to be above the town, for the privacy.’

Marcus nodded, turning to take in the view over the ranks of trees across the valley, the mountains five miles distant on the far side a misty grey in the afternoon’s haze. When they reached the house in question he dismissed the man to rejoin his fellows, striding through the open gate into a well-maintained garden clearly designed around several mature trees, which had been left in place when others around them had been felled to make way for the house’s construction. A lone red-haired figure in a sweat-soaked tunic was exercising with sword and shield in one corner, repetitively cutting and stabbing at a wooden post with a blunt practice weapon, stepping back into a defensive shield brace after every strike, before stamping forward to repeat the attack. As Marcus strolled towards him the man spotted him from the corner of his eye and nodded, but continued his exercise with undiminished vigour.

‘You’re opening your body up for too long when you lunge.’

The labouring man, clearly no older than Marcus himself, shot him a sideways glance.

‘You speak from experience?’

His voice was taut, that of a driven man, as he stabbed the sword at the post again. Marcus shrugged.

‘Enough not to have any strong desire to see any more. Britannia, mostly, plus enough experience in Germania and Dacia to make me appreciate the protection to be had from a well-made shield. You must be Varus?’

The exercising man stopped in mid-thrust, slowly straightening out of the lunge with a look of resignation.

‘You mean I must be the man who rode away when his cohort was ambushed and massacred by the Parthians?’

Marcus nodded.

‘Why else would you be pushing yourself so hard in the heat of the day, when your fellow officers are probably all indulging in rather more relaxed pastimes given the stories the soldiers at the road gate told me?’

Varus propped the shield against the wooden post, crossing his arms with the blunt sword blade pointing back over one shoulder.

‘I know what you’re thinking. I see it in every man’s face, when they realise who I am. I’m the officer who ran from battle, and left his men to die. The man who saved his own life on the pretext of bringing the news of the Parthian attack back to the legion.’

‘Whereas …?’

Varus snorted.

‘Whereas
what
? You want to hear my side of the story? You want me to tell you how my senior centurion implored me to bring the story of their glorious fight to the death back to the legion? I’m tired of the sound of my own voice, and of trying to convince myself that I didn’t just run for my life.’

He stared at Marcus, his expression close to pleading.

‘That I didn’t agree to his request simply because I’m a coward. So why would I waste my time on you, when you’re not going to believe it either?’

Marcus shrugged again.

‘So what’s the truth of it?’

Varus stared back at him.

‘The
truth
of it? The truth of it is that I was ready to die, friend, ready in an instant. And yes, I know it would have been a hard death if they’d managed to take me alive, but I would have fallen on my own sword if it came to that. And then the first spear asked me to leave, and showed me a way to avoid that ignominious death, and I took it, like a … like a
fucking
coward! I grabbed it and I ran for my life. Can you imagine that, you with your scars, and your two swords, and your Britannia, Germania and Dacia?’

Marcus smiled wryly.

‘Of course I can. Any soldier who says he hasn’t considered running at some point or other is nothing more than a liar. So now you wish you’d stayed and shared that glorious death with your fellow soldiers, do you?’

Varus nodded mutely, and Marcus smiled at him without humour.

‘In that case, Tribune, you may have your wish granted soon enough.’

He turned away and walked towards the house with Varus following. In the villa’s airy atrium a servant hurried up with a bowl of water.

‘He wants to take your equipment, and wash your feet.’

Marcus waved the man away with a reassuring smile.

‘I’m not staying that long, thank you.’

He followed the sound of voices into the house’s central courtyard, stopping at the sight of a swimming pool with seven men in their twenties reclining on benches around the edge, their attention fixed on a trio of naked women floating in the pool’s crystal-clear water.

‘What’s this, Varus? Have you found yet another new pair of ears for your story of how you ran away when the Parthians came knocking? And who’s this oaf without the good manners even to disarm himself before coming into the house, never mind take his boots off?’

The speaker had risen to a sitting position and was eying Marcus with a look of disparagement. The man reclining to his left, his tunic marked with an identical broad purple stripe to his comrade’s, spoke without looking up from his study of the girls’ naked bodies as the pool’s rippling water caressed their pale flesh.

‘Control yourself, Flamininus. Whoever you are, state your business and be on your way.’

Marcus looked at them each in turn, unconsciously taking stock of each man with a swift, ruthless assessment, as his gladiator mentor had taught him a decade before:

‘Some men will fight, young Marcus, and some men won’t. Some will fight just for the hell of it, while others will have to be looking down the blade of a sword before they’ll raise their own weapons. And the secret to knowing which is which, who’ll come at you and who’ll run from you, is all in the eyes. Oh yes, a man’s willingness to offer you violence can sometimes be understood by the set of his body, or the way that he moves, but the truth is always there to be seen in an instant, there in the middle of his face. Just look in a man’s eyes, and you’ll see everything you need to know about him, when you’ve looked at enough men and done enough fighting.’

The man called Flamininus was on the verge of springing to his feet, his stare filled with hostility and the need to do harm.

‘Tribune Umbrius told you to state your business! And you can salute, while you’re at it!’

Marcus looked back at him with a face set in hard lines, unable to control his reaction to the man’s arrogance and need for violence.

‘I’ll salute, when I see someone worthy of the respect.’

The eyes fixed on him around the pool snapped wide with shock at the flat statement, and Flamininus surged to his feet.

‘
Hold!
’

The broad stripe tribune had raised his head to look at Marcus with a calculating gaze, the female bather momentarily forgotten. He waved a hand at his colleague, and Flamininus slowly sank back onto his bench with the look of a man whose grip on his temper was tenuous at best.

‘Who are you, stranger? It might be useful to know your name before I turn this animal loose on you.’

Flamininus grinned at him with his teeth bared in a half-snarl.

‘You’d be well advised to keep him restrained, unless you want blood in your swimming pool. My name is Tribulus Corvus, Tribune, Third Gallic.’

The broad stripe shook his head in obvious amusement.

‘Oh no you’re not. These men around this swimming pool represent the entire senior officer strength of the Third, us and the legatus.’

Marcus allowed the smile to spread slowly across his face.

‘Then I seem to be the bearer of news, gentlemen. Legatus Lateranus has been replaced with immediate effect. We arrived together by ship from Rome this morning to take up our positions,
your new legatus and I, with orders to take the legion north to deal with the threat to the empire’s frontier with Parthia. And on behalf of your new commanding officer, since the last man to hold the position seems to have made a very swift exit, I have been sent to summon you to a command meeting this evening. You will attend the legion’s headquarters building in Antioch by the time the lamps have been lit, and any man failing to do so will be making a prompt return to Rome, dismissed from his position.’

He turned to leave, weighed the moment for an instant, and then turned back.

‘Speaking personally, I think it might well be for the best if none of you were to attend.’

With a growl of anger Flamininus leapt to his feet and strode around the pool, raising one big fist with the clear intention of knocking the newcomer to the floor. Marcus waited for him, stepping forward while his opponent stormed around the pool’s narrow side, moving so close to the water’s edge that his would-be assailant was forced to turn step around the pool’s corner to confront him, momentarily throwing out an arm to retain his balance.

‘I’ll have your f—’

He staggered back as Marcus struck a lightning-fast jab into his face, using the heel of his hand to deliver a crushing blow to the tribune’s nose and then, as his victim’s momentum made him stagger forward another pace, kicked his feet from under him and swept him into the pool, sending a wave of sparkling droplets over the reclining tribunes. The naked women squealed in horror, flinching away from the flailing tribune.

‘Anybody else?’

Marcus waited for a moment, then shook his head with a look of disappointment, as Flamininus dragged himself from the water with a stream of blood dripping from his broken nose.

‘Do you want to try again?’

The soaked, bleeding man shook his head with a look of venomous hatred.

‘I thought not. As I said, all you have to do if you want to avoid facing battle against the Parthians is to stay here and give your new legatus a reason to dismiss you. Then again, it might be entertaining for Varus here to see how you react to facing the enemy, rather than being forced to tolerate your jibes on a subject he understands a good deal better than you.’

He turned and left, leaving the group staring after him. At length one of them spoke.

‘Who the fuck was
that
?’

Varus turned back to face them with a hard smile, patting his practice sword and turning away.

‘That, you bastards, was Britannia, Germania and Dacia. And unless I’m much mistaken, he’ll very shortly be Parthia too. As will we all.’

The tent party, of which Sanga was the defacto leader, found their new quarters much as expected, given that barracks buildings were constructed to the same pattern all over the empire. Four bunk beds for the eight men more or less filled the space, while a smaller room was walled off from the living space to allow for the storage of weapons. The veteran soldier looked around the cramped room, then pointed at the closed wooden shutters.

‘Different province, same shitty barracks. Get that fucking window open, it smells like a donkey took a shit in here.’

Daylight did little to improve the picture.

‘Not donkey shit. Look more like soldier.’

Sanga shook his head.

‘Dirty bastards. You, get your spade out and carry that turd down to the latrines. You, fetch a bucket of water and wash away whatever’s left.’ He stuck his head through the open window, drawing in a lungful of clean air before bellowing his anger into the afternoon’s comparative warmth.

‘You bastards had better watch out or you won’t see me coming!
’

Saratos shook his head.

‘You waste breathe. Local soldier no speak Latin, he speak Greek. And you no speak Greek.’

His friend wrinkled his nose again, as the freshly laid faeces assaulted his sense of smell with renewed vigour.

‘I’ll teach the bastards some fucking Latin. Starting with the words “good”, “fucking” and “kicking”.’

He turned to the rest of the tent party.

‘Right, we’ve all seen a turd before, so stop looking like you want to honk up your biscuits. Get your fucking kit stowed and we’ll go for a look around and see if we can’t scare up something to drink or screw. Except for you …’

He pointed at the tent party’s newest recruit.

‘You can stay here and make sure the locals don’t take a shine to our kit. Don’t wash that shit off that spade once you’ve dumped it in the log cabin, and if anyone comes poking round just wipe it down their face as hard as you like. That ought to do the trick.’