‘Then you tell me who else knows that we’re here apart from your family?’
‘Just Galba,’ Vespasian admitted, flummoxed, ‘but I didn’t tell him exactly where we were going. And why would he want to help the Chatti? He hates them. Mind you, he hates everyone who can’t trace their family back to the founding of the Republic.’
‘Halt!’ Paetus called from just in front of them.
‘What is it?’ Vespasian asked, following Paetus’ gaze.
Up ahead the trees thinned considerably, letting far more light in through the canopy in thick, golden shafts, dazzling them after so long in the relative gloom.
Paetus pointed in front of them to a couple of saplings no more than six feet tall, directly in their path, twenty paces away. Vespasian squinted; as his eyes got used to the bright light he realised that each tree bore one horrific, round fruit.
‘Cut them down,’ Paetus ordered the two guides next to him.
The two Batavians edged their horses forward nervously, towards the severed heads suspended within the branches of the small trees. As they approached, one of the horses caught a front hoof on an obstruction hidden beneath the leaf mulch. There was a loud crack, followed by the creaking of swaying rope; two dark shadows swung down from above, flicking through the streaks of sunlight, directly at the troopers. Their mounts shied, whinnying shrilly, hurling them backwards, as the right-hand shape thumped into one horse; the other narrowly missed the second horse, to continue its arc towards the head of the column. It brushed the forest floor, scattering dead leaves, and then swung upwards, oozing liquid as it did, until its momentum was lost; it hung for a moment in midair and Vespasian looked up at the headless corpse of one of the sentries as he fought to control his spooked mount. Droplets of noisome fluid splashed down from the gaping neck, further unsettling the mounts below, as the body arced back down towards the two riderless horses; they could take no more and bolted.
‘This is starting to piss me off,’ Magnus complained; behind him the column was in disarray as panic swept through the animals.
Vespasian leapt from his horse, narrowly avoiding the stamping back hooves of Paetus’ mount, and ran towards the line of the body’s swing as it came creaking back at him. He braced himself on his left leg and stuck out his right so that the sole of his sandal met the corpse’s chest as it swung through the perpendicular, forcing his knee to bend on impact and throwing him onto his back. He landed with a jolt and immediately raised his head to see the corpse dangling, rotating slightly, next to the second suspended body; both had their arms bound across their chests and a dagger was secured with a length of twine in each right hand. Before he had time to ponder the weird sight, screams of pain and screeching of wounded horses rose above the shouting and whinnying; he looked back to see arrows spitting out of the trees and into the column. A few men and horses fell to be trampled where they lay writhing as the salvo carried on for no more than ten heartbeats before stopping as abruptly as it had started.
Looking to the direction whence the arrows came, Vespasian caught a glimpse of some shadowy figures fleeing on foot. ‘Paetus, we could catch them,’ he shouted, jumping to his feet and looking for his horse; it was nowhere to be seen.
‘With me!’ Paetus bellowed above the din to the steadiest troopers nearest him. He kicked his horse forward; it responded immediately, pleased to be driven from the scene of terror. A dozen Batavians followed their prefect into the shadows; they were soon out of sight.
Vespasian went to grab Sabinus’ mount’s bridle and helped to calm the beast as Magnus and Ziri both dismounted, gently rubbing their horses’ flanks as they began to settle down. Gradually a semblance of calm spread throughout the turmae with just the moans of the wounded and the snorting of unsteady, skittish horses to disturb the air.
Ansigar appeared through the disarray of the column. ‘We’ve lost three dead and five wounded, one badly, and four horses, sir,’ he reported. ‘Where’s the prefect?’
‘Chasing our attackers,’ Vespasian answered. ‘Here, let me show you something.’ He led the decurion to the dangling corpses; the two unseated guides were getting painfully to their feet and staring at the macabre sight. ‘What do you make of that?’ he asked, pointing at the daggers in the corpses’ right hands. ‘Your man, Rothaid, was found clutching his sword, un-blooded, as if it had been placed there.’
Ansigar smiled without humour, smoothing his long, wellcombed beard. ‘That’s because it was placed there.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘It means that we are fighting honourable men.’
‘You call sneaking up on people and murdering them honourable?’
‘These men don’t condemn their victims to wander the earth as shapeless forms after their death. By placing a weapon in their hands when they die, they guarantee that the All-Father Wotan’s shield maidens will find them and take them to Walhalla to feast and fight until the final battle.’
‘So it’s just a religious thing, then, and has no significance for us to worry about?’
‘It has a great significance: it means that whoever is preying upon us is definitely Germanic, but their argument is not with us Batavians. If it was they wouldn’t worry about the niceties of caring about our afterlife. Their argument must be with what we represent: Rome.’
Warning shouts came from the forest and Paetus soon appeared leading his men back in.
‘Did you get them?’ Vespasian asked the prefect as he swung off his horse.
‘One of them.’
Behind him the troopers dismounted; they heaved a dead body off the rump of one of the horses and flung it face up on the ground. He was in his mid-twenties; his blond hair was tied in a top knot and the obligatory beard was streaked with blood. He wore only plain brown woollen trousers and leather boots, leaving his swirling-tattooed chest bare and slick with the blood seeping from a spear-thrust to his heart. There was a thick silver arm ring just above his right elbow.
‘How many were there?’
‘About twenty.’ Paetus looked down at the body, shaking his head. ‘He turned to fight us to allow the others time to get away, it was suicidal. By the time we killed him the rest had disappeared into the forest as if it just swallowed them up.’
Ansigar knelt down and lifted the flowing beard; under it, around the man’s neck, was a metal band almost a hand’s breadth wide. He spat in disgust. ‘There’s only one tribe that wears an iron collar; this man’s Chatti.’
CHAPTER VIII
For three days the column moved on as fast as it could, crossing into the lands of the Chatti, and for three nights their ethereal hunters preyed upon them, taking men seemingly at will during the hours of darkness without ever revealing themselves. Indeed, there had been no sign of them since the ambush, but their brooding presence was confirmed every morning by the slowly dwindling number of auxiliaries at muster and the grisly finds of decapitated bodies in their path later in the day. On the second night, in an attempt to stem the flow of silent death, Paetus had ordered a doubling of the guard so that the sentries patrolled in fours, but to no avaiclass="underline" four men died that night. On the third night he had set no sentries around the perimeter of the camp, keeping them instead patrolling amongst their sleeping comrades; a man had still somehow disappeared.
‘Every day they manage to leave the bodies three or four miles along our route,’ Vespasian observed as they stood surveying the latest headless auxiliary nailed to the thick trunk of an oak. ‘They must know where we’re headed for.’
‘And that’s something that only Pallas, Narcissus and Callistus knew,’ Magnus pointed out, swatting away one of the many flies that had been attracted by the stench of death.
Sabinus frowned, mystified. ‘It just makes no sense. Why would Narcissus spare me for a task that he’s going to try and sabotage?’