‘Well, either the Getae are attacking the whole wall instead of one section, which is unlikely and we would have heard their heathen war cries by now, or Poppaeus has just brought forward the assault to tonight, If he has he’s mad, it’ll go off half-arsed and will be an almighty fuck-up.’
‘Shit,’ Sabinus spat, ‘he’s guessed what we’re doing from what Caelus has told him and he means to beat us to the priest.’
‘I’d better go,’ Faustus called back to them, as he scrambled back up the bank followed by his men. ‘If it is the assault I’ll still make sure that your horses are waiting for you. Poppaeus has just helped you unwittingly; if we are attacking now, the Getae will be manning the walls and the courtyard should be clear.’
‘Yes, but every one of the buggers will now be wide awake,’ Magnus grumbled, ‘and where will the priest be?’
‘I can’t imagine that slippery little shit defending the walls if he’s got a nice warm room to hide in,’ Vespasian said, grabbing the steering-oar. ‘Cast off, Varinus.’
‘Aye aye, trierarchus,’ the grizzled veteran called back with a grin as he loosed the mooring rope and pushed his oar against the jetty. Vespasian frowned at this over-familiarity but knew better than to reprimand a man to whom he was shortly going to entrust his life for a bit of harmless banter.
The boat eased out into the flow of the river and began to glide downstream towards the fortress half a mile away. Although all the oars were manned Vespasian did not order the men to start pulling; the current was doing the work for them and the efforts of eight untrained scullers would, in all likelihood, have hindered rather than helped their progress. The half-moon was obscured by a thick layer of cloud and, even though they were only ten paces or so out into the river, it was almost completely dark now that they were away from the torch-lit Roman lines. On shore, to their right, the high-pitched blare of bucinae gave way to the deep bass rumblings of cornua, horns used by the army to give battle signals, their deeper tones being more easily heard over the sharp clash of weapons and the shouts and screams of men in combat.
‘That’ll be the attack starting,’ Vespasian whispered to his brother beside him. ‘The bastard brought it forward and a lot more of the lads will die because of the chaos.’
‘When cornua blow, blood will flow,’ Sabinus said, quoting an old legionary truism.
Vespasian peered towards the shore trying to get some measure, from the noise, of what was going on. He could make out a soft, orange glow that silhouetted the riverbank and guessed that it was the torches in the fortified settlement a hundred paces inland. ‘Faustus said it will take half an hour to roll the towers forward but they wouldn’t start until that village was secured.’
‘Assuming they stick to the original plan, which at the moment they most certainly aren’t,’ Sabinus pointed out. ‘Anyway, it’s pointless worrying about it, it’s out of our hands; we’ve got to concentrate on our own problems, the first of which is where are we going to land.’
Vespasian nodded and turned his attention to keeping the boat going in a straight line. He felt a knot begin to develop in his belly and realised that the wound he had received in the Succi Pass was the first time he’d had blood drawn in combat and, although only small, it had made him far more aware of his own mortality; if he had not been wearing a breastplate he would in all probability have been killed. He was not wearing a breastplate now and he was feeling decidedly vulnerable. Images from his childhood working on the family estates flicked through his mind and for a few moments he longed to be safely home, where the most he had to fear was a kick from a belligerent mule. He banished the thought, knowing it was futile; he had made his choices and they had led him far from home to this boat. All he could do now was steel himself to face the oncoming danger and override the fear of death by trying to concentrate on the practicalities of the task in hand.
Looking ahead, he saw that a few small points of light from the fortress keep’s windows were now visible; they were getting close. When they were about level with the centre of the fortress he started to ease the boat towards the shore in an effort to find, in the deep gloom, a spot where the reed beds thinned out and he could get the boat adjacent to the bank. The wall, 150 paces away, appeared as a long slab of intense darkness haloed by a thin light from the few torches burning within the courtyard. At its extreme left the keep towered over them, its shape only definable by hints of torchlight that rose from the courtyard reaching partway up the inner wall and the odd glimmer of light from open windows in the outer wall that fell to the riverbank.
In the distance the rumblings of the cornua continued.
Eventually the boat hit the solid earth of the bank. Varinus secured the mooring rope to the base of a scraggy bush as Vespasian and his party scrambled out on to dry land. Lucius and Arruns passed them the crowbars and ropes and their Getic weaponry: bows, quivers of arrows, sleek knives and the long-handled axes, with six-inch blades and spikes on their reverse, which the tribe favoured for fighting hand to hand on horseback. Sitalces and his Thracians had also brought their rhomphaiai, which they strapped to their backs. Artebudz and Sabinus each slung a thick coil of rope over their shoulders.
‘Hide the boat amongst the reeds, Varinus,’ Vespasian whispered, attaching a quiver to his belt. ‘We’ll come back to this spot as quick as we can.’
‘Right you are, sir, good luck.’
Vespasian grunted something unintelligible, turned and led his men off, crouching low as he cautiously made his way up the bank. As he neared the summit the sound of movement close by, dead ahead, caused him to stop suddenly.
‘What is it?’ Sabinus hissed next to him.
‘Something’s moving at the top of the bank,’ Vespasian replied, pulling an arrow from his quiver and straining his eyes to peer through the gloom; as they adjusted he began to make out two or three shapes, then a few more, on the ridge of the bank. He notched the arrow; behind him he sensed his comrades doing the same. One of the shapes moved fractionally. Vespasian did not dare to breathe; then he heard a soft, flaccid-lipped exhalation followed by a snort and a couple of hard stamps on the grass-covered ground.
‘It’s just horses, lots of them,’ he whispered, lowering his bow and breathing a sigh of relief. He moved on cautiously up the hill. The others followed.
The tightness in his stomach that had been growing since they had got in the boat was now excruciating and, despite the chill of the night, he had begun to sweat with fear. It was a fool’s mission that they had embarked on and he began to resent the ease with which Antonia, from the safety of her sumptuous villa back in Rome, could expect him and his brother to accomplish it. Then he remembered his grandmother’s words of warning: do not get involved with the schemes of the powerful because they use people of his class to do their dirty work and then tend to dispose of them once they knew too much and were of no further use.
‘Having second thoughts about this, sir?’ Magnus asked, as if reading his mind as they crested the bank and paused; ahead of them the forms of countless horses at rest fell away into the darkness.
‘What makes you ask that?’
‘Well, stands to reason, don’t it? Here we are about to take on thousands of savages who anyone in their right mind would steer well clear of, in order to get a disgusting little man whom, having made his acquaintance once, no one with any sense would ever want to meet again; and all for what, I ask you?’
Vespasian smiled in the darkness. ‘Well, I suppose we’re doing it for Rome.’
‘Rome, my arse! You may be doing it for Rome but I’m doing it because you’re doing it and I’m obliged to go with you because of the debt that I owe your uncle; that’s why I was wondering whether, by any luck, you’d come to your senses and were having second thoughts.’