Marcus and the men accepted their new role without complaint, but Valerius kept his next surprise until just before they boarded the ship.
‘You are now honorary members of the Praetorian Guard.’ He made the announcement in the dockside tavern where they were waiting. Serpentius looked horrified when Valerius produced the black tunics, silver-plated chest armour and helmets he had requisitioned from the Praetorian barracks, but Heracles, the muscle-bound youngster who had tracked Lucina, grinned with anticipation. ‘The tunics and helmets should do well enough and if the breastplates don’t fit we’ll get the armourer of the Seventh to alter them.’
As they waited to board, Serpentius fiddled with his helmet strap. Valerius doubted the Spaniard would ever look comfortable in a Roman uniform. He explained again why it was so important to wear the armour.
‘You have to understand what it is to be part of a legion. The Seventh, Claudia Pia Fidelis, is one of the elite units of the Roman army. It fought with Julius Caesar in the Gallic wars a century ago and won its title putting down the Scribonianus rebellion to keep Claudius in power. Its men are fighting soldiers who’ve just moved from their base on the Rhenus to Viminacium, right up on the Dacian border. They won’t welcome anyone who looks like a ration thief, and a nosy civilian investigating one of their officers could end up having an unhappy accident. But if he’s a Praetorian tribune with an escort of tough-looking veterans he’s at least going to have their respect.’
The voyage took them three days and nights and if any sea journey, with all its attendant threat of shipwreck, mishap or monster, could be described as pleasant, this one was. Balmy winds lightly ruffled the wave tops and the only sounds were the occasional barked command, the gentle rush of the waters beneath the bow and the rhythmic creak of ropes and timbers that is the heartbeat of a ship.
On the morning of the fourth day the captain shook Valerius awake and he rose to find a grey-green strip on the far horizon.
‘Land,’ the seaman explained. ‘We’re a little north of where we ought to be, but with these winds we should make port at Acruvium before noon.’
Two hours later they were sailing directly towards what looked like a continuous stretch of unwelcoming, mountainous coastline. Just as Valerius was doubting the captain’s sanity they turned into the hidden entrance to a broad inlet which narrowed, widened, then narrowed again before opening into a curiously shaped bay with a small harbour at the southern end. A circle of rugged peaks loomed over them like the walls of a gigantic prison cell and Valerius noticed his companions warily eyeing the mountains. Serpentius, whose tribe inhabited the inhospitable hills of northern Hispania, met his eye.
‘Hard. Just like home. Takes hard people to live in a place like this; hard as the rocks. They know how to survive and they know how to kill and they know how to hate. Why would you Romans want a place where they sleep in the snow and learn to chew stones before they learn to speak?’
‘Because of what lies beyond it,’ Valerius explained patiently. ‘Since Caesar’s time the barbarian tribes have been moving westwards, increasing the pressure on those who already hold the lands along the Danuvius and the Rhenus. The Empire doesn’t have enough legions to contain such a huge migration of peoples, so she uses what she has. Rivers and mountains. To hold the Danuvius, Rome must first hold Dalmatia, Pannonia and Moesia. That’s why we want a place like this.’
Serpentius spat. What did he care for Rome’s ambitions?
Acruvium turned out to be a small anchorage which was one of the few sheltered landing points on a hundred miles of coast. Valerius presented his travel warrant to the port prefect and requested an escort. The officer laughed when he read their destination. He was one of the young men Rome always sent to her far frontiers: polite, educated, capable and expendable. If he lived, a fine career awaited him when he returned home. If he didn’t, only his family would mourn him. ‘I have two clerks, and a dozen Thracian auxiliaries who are good for stopping bar fights. I can give you one of them to guide you as far as Doclea, but my advice would be to wait here for the next ship back to Italia and get on it. Viminacium is six days east of here if you happen to be a bird, but you’re not birds and that means at least twelve days along the river valleys through the mountains, which is the only way to get anywhere in Dalmatia; first south, then east. Baked by the sun during the day, chilled to the bone at night. And that’s if Fortuna smiles on you.’
‘And if she doesn’t?’
‘If she doesn’t you’ll end up dead — or, worse, not dead — among the cruellest people on this earth. See those two over there.’ Valerius followed his glance to a pair of squat, hawk-faced villains seated on boulders near the landing place. The men had the watchful intensity of hungry vultures and wore their dark, oily hair in braids. Their outer clothing was fashioned from part-cured goatskin that Valerius could smell from twenty paces away. ‘Illyrian bandits,’ the young man explained. ‘But then everyone around here is a bandit when he’s not trying to scrape a living from soil that’s an inch deep and only grows rocks. They’ve seen your armour and your horses and they reckon they could barter them to their chief for enough provisions to feed their families for a year. That makes you worth a risk. But then again they would probably have a slap at you just for fun. Their favourite method of passing the time with a prisoner is to flay him alive an inch at a time and then impale him on the branch of a thorn tree.’
Valerius shrugged. He’d heard such tales before. ‘Why don’t you kill them?’
‘We do.’ The port prefect smiled wearily. ‘We’ve been killing them for a hundred years. The only problem is you can’t kill them all.’
They left before sunrise after a night in the prefect’s quarters with their swords never far from their sides. The narrow mountain tracks confirmed their host’s information and they moved cautiously. At one point their guide stopped and studied a narrow gully ahead, his eyes scanning the rocks and scrubby bushes. Without a word he turned and they rode two miles back to where another poor road branched off, rejoining the main track an hour later.
They reached Doclea just before nightfall, a substantial and surprisingly sophisticated city laid out on Roman lines, cupped in a broad bowl in the mountains near an enormous lake which provided the local people with their main diet of fish. This time the administrator was a harassed older man who answered to the legate at Burnum, a hundred and eighty long miles to the north, and Valerius was forced to show the seal before he agreed to provide an escort. ‘But only as far as Naissus. That’s where the traders gather to carry their goods up to the market at Viminacium. You’ll be able to join a convoy there. They believe in strength in numbers.’
They crossed the border into Moesia Superior the next day, but no one noticed the difference. The mountains still crushed down on them with all their dangerous, intimidating beauty; a cursed grandeur that could kill you even as you admired it. Occasionally they would hear the sound of muted thunder and see the dust cloud over some distant valley that marked an avalanche, or the ground beneath their feet would tremble, and Valerius would make the sign against evil in the knowledge that in this gods-forsaken place Hades could not be far below.
When they joined the convoy at Naissus and took the river road east, he relaxed for the first time. Here they were surrounded by men who knew their business as well as any legionary: mercenaries, former auxiliaries contracted by the rich merchants who had organized the caravan. He’d seen men like these before: Scythians with long curved swords, Thracian mounted archers who lived in the saddle and could put an arrow through your eye at fifty paces, tough little Raetian spearmen with constitutions like camels and legs that would march forty miles in a day. More exotic still was a group of strange gold-haired, bearded men from some chilly northern land, carrying lethal double-headed axes. They wore a motley collection of uniforms or part-uniforms that appeared to represent half a dozen countries and fifteen or twenty different units. Plumed and spiked helmets, exotic fish-scale shirts or armour made of padded cloth. They looked tough and uncompromising. The merchants kept their goods covered, partly to avoid attracting the bandits who watched with greedy eyes from the hills, and partly to avoid tempting the escort, who had been known to cut a few throats and run off with some particularly rich cargo.