‘If it’s like this at the edge of the forest,’ Magnus grumbled, sharing Vespasian’s unease, ‘I wouldn’t like to go into the heart of it; the German gods must be very powerful there.’
‘Yes, I’m getting the impression that they’re not keen on Romans.’
‘I’m getting the impression that they’re not keen on anyone.’
Throughout the day Paetus sent out patrols in all directions but they reported back after an hour or two having seen nothing more threatening than a couple of very large wild horses, some deer and a few wild boars, two of which had not been fast enough to evade the spears of the Batavians.
As the sun fell, they stopped and made camp, setting a turma on guard in pairs around the perimeter. With the forest disappearing in an all-encompassing dark, the visual menace lessened to be replaced by eerie night-sounds: owls’ hoots, strange animal cries and wind working on groaning trees.
The boars were gutted and roasted on a spit over a couple of fire-pits and provided enough hot flesh for a few mouthfuls each to supplement their army rations. It warmed them but it did not cheer them and conversation was very muted.
The five remaining turmae drew lots for their sentry duty during the night; the lucky ones getting the first or the last slot whilst the rest rolled up in their blankets grumbling, knowing that they would get a broken night’s sleep, if sleep would be at all possible with the sense of foreboding weighing down their spirits.
As dawn was breaking, Magnus nudged Vespasian’s shoulder. ‘Here you go, sir, get that down you.’ He offered him a cup of steaming hot watered-wine and a hunk of bread.
Vespasian sat up stiffly, his back aching from a night on the knobbly forest floor, and took his breakfast. ‘Thanks, Magnus.’
‘Don’t thank me, I don’t have to get up early to build up the fire and heat the wine. That’s Ziri’s job and as a slave he don’t deserve thanking.’
‘Well, thank him anyway.’ Vespasian dunked his bread into the cup.
‘If I start doing that then the next thing he’ll want is paying,’ Magnus muttered as he woke Sabinus. All through the camp men were rousing, stretching their stiff bodies and talking quietly in their native tongue as they prepared their breakfasts.
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ Paetus said, striding over, looking decidedly cheerful; behind him the last turma on sentry duty was coming in and forming up to be counted off. ‘I’ve just had a word with the two chaps leading us; they reckon that we’ll leave the forest around midday and get into more open country.’
‘What does that mean?’ Sabinus asked, sipping his wine. ‘A tree every ten paces instead of every five?’
Paetus laughed. ‘That’s about the size of it, Sabinus, but different sorts of trees and hardly any undergrowth, so we should be able to go a lot faster and we won’t have the feeling of being stalked by hideous Germanic forest spirits. We’ll just have to be a little more wary, as the land we’ll be going through is far more settled and the locals are not too keen on Rome.’
‘What savage is?’
‘Prefect!’ the decurion of the returning turma shouted.
‘What is it, Kuno?’
‘We’re two men short, sir.’
Paetus frowned. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked in a manner that questioned Kuno’s arithmetical skills.
‘Batavians can count, sir.’
Vespasian looked at Sabinus in alarm. ‘That doesn’t sound good.’
Sabinus started strapping on his sandals. ‘We’d better go and look for them.’
*
Kuno led the way with eight of his turma to where the missing men had been posted; there was no sign of them, just a tangle of footprints in the earth where they and previous sentries had been pacing around.
‘There’s no indication of a struggle,’ Vespasian observed, looking at the ground, ‘no blood, nothing discarded.’
‘Decurion, have your men spread out and search,’ Paetus ordered. ‘But they’re to keep in sight, understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Do you think they could’ve deserted, Paetus?’ Sabinus asked as the Batavians started to fan out.
‘Unlikely so far from home and especially not here.’
‘What’s so special about here?’
‘The guides tell me that very soon we’ll come to a river called the Moenus; they know a ford and once we cross it we enter the homeland of a tribe called the Chatti. They and the Batavians are enemies. They used to be a part of the same people but fell out a couple of hundred years ago, I’ve no idea what about because no one seems to remember; anyway it’s still very serious. The Batavians went north and the Chatti settled here but there is still a blood-feud between them. They’d be mad to go wandering around so close to Chatti land by themselves.’
‘Prefect! Look at this,’ Kuno shouted, walking towards them whilst brandishing an auxiliary helmet.
Paetus took the helmet, gave it a quick glance and then showed it to the brothers; blood and some matted hair clung to the rim. ‘I doubt very much whether we’ll be seeing them again.’
News of the sentries’ disappearance and probable murder spread throughout the column as it formed up not long after and it was with an increased air of trepidation that they moved out of the camp, keeping just east of north, down a gentle slope.
‘So do you think that it could be the Chatti carrying on their blood-feud with the Batavians?’ Magnus asked after the brothers had filled him in on the history between the two tribes.
Sabinus shook his head. ‘Unlikely. The Chatti’s lands start after the Moenus; they don’t live near the Rhenus so what would they have been doing there in the first place?’
‘Galba told me that he had repulsed a war band raiding across the river earlier this year,’ Vespasian informed them, ‘so they do stray this far west.’
Sabinus shrugged. ‘Well, even if they do, how would they have known that six boatloads of Batavians were going to be landing where we did?’
‘Fair point,’ Magnus acknowledged, ‘but someone did and that someone is following us. I’ve a nasty suspicion that those sentries ain’t going to be the last men to go missing on this trip.’
‘I’m afraid that you might be right, Magnus.’ Sabinus turned his head and peered into the shadow-ridden forest. ‘Even my Lord Mithras’ light has trouble piercing that gloom; without his constant protection whoever is trailing us will have a far easier time of it.’ He suddenly loosened his sword in its scabbard. A couple of Batavian outriders came into view, flitting through the trees; he let go of the hilt. ‘But what’s their objective? Are they trying to scare us off?’
‘Scare us off from what?’ Vespasian questioned. ‘How would they know where we’re going? I keep on thinking about how they found us when we landed at random in the middle of the night on the eastern side of the river.’
‘Yeah well, I think that I can answer that,’ Magnus replied. ‘They couldn’t have been waiting because they wouldn’t have known where to wait, so they must have followed us. Now, they couldn’t have started on the eastern bank because they wouldn’t have seen us come out of the harbour at night; so they had to be either in the port, in which case we would have noticed them, or already on the river slightly upstream, that way they could have tagged along behind us without our seeing.’
Vespasian digested this for a few moments and then nodded as the column broke into a trot. ‘Yes, I think you’re right. In which case whoever it is knew that we would be sailing from Argentoratum but nobody there knew that until the day before. More to the point, nobody knew that we would be leaving almost as soon as we arrived.’
‘Unless they were told before we arrived.’
‘But who else here knew what we were planning to do?’
‘No one here, but I can think of three people back in Rome who knew.’
‘Claudius’ freedmen?’
Magnus nodded.
‘But they’ve got a vested interest in our success. They wouldn’t want to jeopardise the mission; it was their idea.’