Lucius released his hold on the man and sat down on the ground, speechless, and crestfallen. He did not even move to stop Finnan from regaining his feet and timidly walking away, all the while looking back to see if the stupefied legionary was following him. But Lucius did not follow. Vitalis had betrayed him – his confidant and trusted comrade of so many campaigns, whom he had fought alongside, whom he had saved on countless occasions. The whole affair about his mother must have been an elaborate ruse, albeit a somewhat imaginative and cold-hearted one. To think that Vitalis would play on his loyalty in such a way. It seemed on the verge of fantasy.
Lucius stumbled back to his tent with his mind in a daze, and he did not think of much else for several hours after.
V
“Leave the mounts here, Centurion,” Piso said, throwing a leg over the rain-spattered mane of his own horse to dismount. “Two men to guard them, no more, Vitalis. We go the rest of the way on foot. Better for the element of surprise, you see.”
Two squads of legionaries moved in a line through the trees – twenty-one men – following Piso and Amelius. They were far from the column, having marched away from the road at the bidding of their tribune. Now they followed, obediently but reluctantly, as the two nobles worked their way closer to the clearing that marked the edge of a small farm. Piso halted the two squads, still concealed just inside the tree line.
“Get down!” Piso commanded the soldiers. The tribune and his companion moved behind a large moss covered trunk, shrouded in brush, where they would have a good vantage point to survey the place. Snickering like trickster schoolboys, the two watched and waited.
“Are we to scavenge the farm for wheat, sir?” Vitalis said with controlled impatience, after stewing for several moments.
Piso looked back contemptuously at the veteran and whispered harshly, “You are to do what I tell you, Centurion, and when I tell you! Now get back with your men!”
Vitalis returned to the rank red-faced.
“What are we doing here, Centurion?” Jovinus whispered, leaning on his spear, his standard left back with the rest of the century. “This place couldn’t feed a – ”
“Shut up!” Vitalis snapped.
Vitalis was on edge. Lucius could sense it, as surely as he felt his own skin crawling with perspiration from the infernal humidity. The centurion still avoided looking him directly in the eyes, and Lucius now knew without a doubt that his old comrade was part of the conspiracy, no matter how outlandish that seemed.
Lucius caught a short glance from Piso over the tribune’s shoulder. He had received similar glances from Piso and Amelius all morning, and he knew the two nobles were up to something. Lucius surmised it was no coincidence that his squad was one of those chosen for this little foray away from the column, and he was ever vigilant in his search for some clue that would unravel the two nobles’ plan before it could be put into execution.
The column had marched early that morning, and Piso had pushed the cohorts hard, as if he had an appointment to keep. The young noble evidently had expected to reach the main Roman army this day, and thus he and his companion were bedecked in their finest attire should they encounter the legate of the Seventh Legion or, Jupiter forbid, the proconsul Gaius Julius Caesar himself. They wore scarlet cloaks that were so deeply colored that they must have been packed away for the duration of the expedition. Their bronze corselets carried a shine that must have kept their slaves up all night to attain. Their mounts were freshly brushed and combed as if they bore a triumphator’s chariot.
All throughout the morning’s march, they had encountered farms of various size situated between banks of trees and rows of hedges, but they had found all to be abandoned, and the surrounding fields stripped bare to deprive the Roman invaders of forage. The Nervii were nowhere in sight, but fresh tracks in the mud gave ample evidence of large numbers of men and horses moving about.
“I want two squads, Vitalis, nothing more,” Piso had said, after reining in his horse next to the halted century. “That damned Aeduan horse is off gallivanting, otherwise I’d use them.”
The column had stopped for a rest interval at midday, just as the heat of the day intensified, and the bubbling clouds began to rise above the tree line.
Piso had glanced dismissively at the perspiring file of men that comprised Lucius’s squad. “They will do.” The tribune had said casually, as if he did not know one rank from another, but Lucius knew better.
“Weapons and shields only, Vitalis,” Piso had added, as the first flash of lightning and the rolling crackle of thunder announced the arrival of the afternoon rains. “Leave kits behind. There is a farm I wish to examine a few miles off. It shouldn’t take long. Your men can ride on the mounts we took from the village.”
The twenty-one man contingent – two squads – including Piso and Amelius, had left the column and had set out onto a narrow forest path under darkening skies. The clouds released a light rain that pattered the helmets of the legionaries and wetted the manes of their horses. From his mount near the rear, Lucius had watched the scarlet cloaks and plumed helmets of the nobles at the head of the formation. He had concluded on the previous night, as he had tossed and turned in his bedroll, that he had never seen either of them before they had joined the Seventh. Aside from the small loot he had taken at the Nervii village, he could think of nothing he might have done in the small time they had been with the legion to incite them to murder him. He had wracked his brain to come up with a reason for the plot against him, and no matter from which angle he considered it, he kept drawing the same conclusion – that this had to do with his life before he had joined the legions – those tragic events that had so thoroughly shaped his destiny.
It was the only thing that made sense.
Now, as he stood on the edge of a clearing, looking out over the small farm with the rest of his squad, his nearly forgotten past was coming back to haunt him.
Tucked away in a small valley where the forest had been hewn back to form several small fields, the Nervii farm did not seem significant, or worth the tribune’s time, in any way. It was nothing more than a small hut with a low rock wall, a small stone mill somewhat removed, and a few animal pens. The fields could not yield much wheat, perhaps enough to feed a handful of families – nothing more. The only thing that distinguished it was the fact that it was intact. For some reason, the Nervii had spared it from the destruction they had meted out upon the other farms of the region. Perhaps it belonged to someone important among the Nervii.
After more waiting with no activity at the farm, Piso began to sigh heavily, and a look of disillusionment came over him, as if he were a child told he could not play.
“Are you sure about this, Amelius?” he said, resting his back against a large tree trunk. “We’ve been waiting for ages.”
“Just wait a little longer, my friend,” his blonde-haired companion replied, expectantly. “I rode by here earlier this morning. I know what I saw. Give it time. I'm sure she will come out.”
“I bloody well hope so. This had better be worth it. We had best be getting back to the column as it is.”
Piso looked up at the gray clouds above the treetops, and then at the rank of legionaries, his eyes finally settling on Lucius. This time he was not smiling, and Lucius felt a hatred in that stare that he had not felt before.
“But not without taking care of our other business first,” Piso mumbled, his eyes still on Lucius.
The tribune’s attention was pulled away by Amelius’s hand on his shoulder.
“You see,” Amelius whispered, pointing at the small hut. “Just as I said.”
Two people had emerged from the dwelling. One was a boy, no more than ten years old and weighed down by a large bucket that he embraced in order to carry it. The other was a young Belgic maiden with long blonde hair. Even under the gray sky, her golden hair seemed to shine like fields of grain. It was tied once near the nape of her neck and hung all the way down to her waist. Like the boy, she, too, was encumbered by a large bucket, but she sang merrily as she worked, bending and kneeling as she and the boy fed the penned animals. Though her gray woolen dress was plain and tattered in several places, it revealed a bosom and curves that caught the lustful eyes of every legionary hiding in the woods.