‘Soldier.’ Valerius kept his voice steady. ‘Do you recognize what this is?’ He held up the chain with the imperial seal. Clodius had to look twice, but eventually he nodded.
‘Publius Sulla was an enemy of Rome and has paid for his crime with his life. My name is Gaius Valerius Verrens, tribune of the Praetorian Guard, and I am taking temporary command of this outpost.’ Valerius paused and Clodius clearly expected the next order to be for his execution. ‘But when I leave, the fort will be your responsibility. Do you understand?’
Clodius frowned, but he risked another nod. Valerius’s next words surprised him.
‘I can’t order you to abandon your position, but with your officer dead and rations running out you would be justified in returning with us. If you choose to leave, the men have an hour to demolish the fort and pack up their gear. My report will state that the decision was made with my full support.’
Clodius hesitated. This wasn’t the kind of judgement he expected to have to make. He shot a frightened glance towards Publius’s body.
‘Whatever you decide nothing will happen to you,’ Valerius assured him.
The duplicarius shook his head. ‘No. I’ll stay, and if I stay the men stay. I was accused of cowardice after I discovered my officer had been selling horse feed to the merchants at the river market for his own profit. That’s why I am here. If I stay I have a chance to win back my honour. General Vitellius is not a bad man, just badly advised. Ask him to send a month’s rations and a new commander.’
‘Can you control your men when they hear that the tribune is dead?’
‘I think… yes. He wasn’t their regular officer. They liked him well enough, but most of them had only really known him for a few weeks. If I can assure them that help and food is on its way, they’ll behave. Will you stay the night, sir?’
Valerius shook his head. There was still enough light left to reach the river. ‘No, we’ll leave as soon as we’re ready. Put together what rations you can for us. I’ll speak to the men before we go.’
They felt like deserters as they rode from the fort with the demoralized garrison watching from the walls. For all his fine words about honour and courage and his pledge to send reinforcements, Valerius doubted any of the legionaries he left behind would ever return to Viminacium.
He kept his eyes to the front. Behind him came Marcus and Serpentius, and at the rear Heracles led Publius Sulla’s horse, with its master’s body across its back wrapped in a bedding sheet. Eight of the fort’s cavalry troopers escorted them for the first mile and when they left Valerius felt as vulnerable as when they’d been abandoned by the patrol. The others sensed it too.
‘If I ever see that bastard Festus again, I’ll cut his throat,’ Serpentius spat.
Valerius shook his head. ‘Vitellius will make sure he’s tucked away somewhere safe. I doubt if you’ll ever see him again.’
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
They rode for close to an hour before they found the first body. The Dacians had hung it by the heels from a tree with a leather strap cut through the tendons of both ankles. He had been stripped naked, but the pale torso and walnut brown arms tied behind his back marked him as a Roman soldier. His captors had suspended him head down a few inches above a large fire, and Valerius didn’t like to think about the agonies he had experienced before his skull had exploded.
‘Do we bury him?’ Marcus asked.
Valerius shook his head. ‘It would only tell them where we are and we don’t have the time.’ And where there was one, there would be more.
‘Could have been us. Serves the bastard right,’ Serpentius muttered without conviction.
Festus was recognizable when they found him, if you looked carefully, and alive, if you could call it alive. Strange that the young port prefect in Acruvium had described the Tungrian’s fate so accurately. The words had been chilling enough: Their favourite method of passing the time with a prisoner is to flay him alive and then impale him on the branch of a thorn tree. The reality was fit to drive a man to madness. Festus’s eyeballs danced in his skull like white beads in a jar. As well as his skin, his Dacian torturers had removed his lips, his eyelids, his nose and any other useful protrusions. He was no longer a human being, but a mess of blood and tissue wriggling obscenely on a four-foot stake. Valerius wondered why he hadn’t mercifully bled to death until he noticed that the gaping wound where his genitals had hung had been stuffed with earth to stop the bleeding and prolong his agony.
‘I’ll do it,’ the Spaniard said. Serpentius dismounted and approached the shivering horror that had once been a man. With a short prayer and a single, almost tender stroke of his sword, he sliced through the vertebrae at the base of Festus’s neck. The Tungrian’s head flopped forward and his body went still. After that they rode on in silence, each man alert for the first sign of danger and at the same time alone with his thoughts and fears.
It was Marcus who heard the shouts, away to their left. The survivors of the cavalry patrol must have believed they’d reached the relative safety of the plain when they were caught. From a nearby ridge Valerius saw immediately that their surviving leader had chosen to go to ground rather than fight his way out. It had been a mistake. Now the patrol was surrounded on three sides of a bare hilltop by a jeering horde of Dacians who danced among the trees and darted out to hurl spears, scream insults and no doubt threaten them with the same fate as Festus. The only thing keeping them at bay was the wall of cavalry spears the Tungrians had set up on the approaches to the hill, which backed on to a sheer cliff face. The Dacians seemed in no hurry, but how long that would last only the gods knew. At least the auxiliaries still had their horses, hobbled together in a shallow dish at the base of the cliff.
He slithered back to where the others waited. ‘What now?’ Marcus whispered.
Valerius looked at each of them in turn. He had brought them to this. They owed him nothing. They owed Rome nothing. ‘Take Publius Sulla’s body. Once you’re out of the hills, keep riding west and you’ll arrive at the river. Just follow it upstream until you reach the bridge.’
‘What about you?’ Serpentius asked.
The question had only one answer. ‘I’m a Roman soldier. I can’t leave other Roman soldiers to die, not even these bastards.’
Serpentius and Marcus exchanged a glance of agreement. ‘This uniform says I’m a Roman soldier too,’ the Spaniard said. ‘Even if I’m not happy about it. Besides, if you get killed who’s going to pay us?’
‘And you, Heracles?’
‘If it wasn’t for you I would probably already be dead.’
‘Then this is what we will do.’
XXIV
Valerius looked out from the cliff top into the black void below. A ring of Dacian fires blazed around the hill where the Tungrians were trapped, but they shed no light on the perilous descent he was about to attempt. He’d studied the cliff face while there was still daylight and thought he’d chosen the safest route, but now, seventy feet above the sheer drop, he was almost unnerved by niggling uncertainty. What if he reached a point where there were no holds? What if he became trapped until the power in his fingers faded and he plunged on to the rocks below? But there was no point in delaying. He allowed himself to slip backwards over the cliff edge, his feet searching for the first toehold. He was barefoot, the better to find the tiny cracks and hollows that would support him on the descent. The face of the cliff was composed of curious honeycombed rock which provided plenty in the way of hand- and footholds, but the stone was soft so he had to test each one to ensure it would take his weight. There would be no second chances. Just one mistake and he’d end up smeared over the valley floor and that wouldn’t do the auxiliaries any good at all.
When he’d explained his plan Marcus had stared at him as if he had lost his mind. ‘A one-handed man climbing down a sheer cliff in pitch darkness? It is beyond foolishness. You are committing suicide. Let me try.’