With the setting sun beating on his neck, the Whisperer attuned his ears to the high-pitched whistles that told him the hunting bird was keeping in close contact with its nestlings, and he spat. Traitor, patriot, what difference did it make, it was only a word. A name. And how many times had he changed that since the tribe cast him out? He buffed his ring down the side of his pantaloons. It was a man's identity that mattered. What he held true to his heart.
Those greybeards had sold their own people out, and if the tribes were too weak and too stupid to see what was happening — and sentenced those who spoke up to be shunned — then someone had to stand up for what was right. Someone had to give the tribes their spirit back before it was broken completely. They needed to be shown that the Romans were not overlords to be feared, but flesh and blood, who screamed when their bodies were sluiced with tar and set alight in the night. Who gushed blood when a broadsword hacked off their heads as they slept. Who fell when the slingshot caught them square on the temple.
It had reached the point now, though, where ambushing patrols wasn't enough. Defacing milestones wasn't enough.
Even sabotaging the likes of granaries, wells and bridges wasn't enough. The rot needed to be stopped before it infected the Nation and tranquillity could be restored to the landscape. It wasn't too late to have the water margins ring with the bleating of sheep again, instead of the clatter of hobnail boots.
'You can't reverse progress,' the Chieftains insisted, 'any more than you can make the sun rise in the north.'
Who couldn't? Measureless eyes followed the bird as it glided on unflapping wings. Was it progress that the legions, with their fancy uniforms and sophisticated ways, had turned the women against their own tribes? Fuck, no. Progress didn't produce mongrels through intermarriage that diluted the purity of the Aquitani, and the Chiefs could bleat about the benefits of fresh blood all they liked, the truth was, those half-breeds were vermin. Pests to be exterminated before they bred further, and killing the little bastards was doing the Nation a favour.
Luckily for the Aquitani, enough brave hearts still beat among the tribes to see the truth for what it was, and he nodded in satisfaction, recalling the heat that had fired in the veins of the warriors as they vowed on their oaths to smear their faces with the blood of their enemies and drive the eagle out of this land, ripping up the stones from their roads, tearing down their buildings and giving the riverbanks back to the cattle.
But it wasn't purely the physical aspects that troubled the Whisperer. Under Rome, the thinking had gone soft as well, and one only had to look up there, to the smoke spiralling upwards through the trees, to see the evidence of that degeneration. It was said that the power of the Druids was waning under Rome, now that people no longer turned to them for guidance. Fuck that. It was the power of men that was being eroded — and those bitches on the plateau were living proof.
The lies and the falsehoods he'd fed to the Druids were no more than they deserved. Bloody bitches. The HundredHanded had it coming and that was a fact. High time someone redressed the balance and put women back in their place.
Against a backdrop of the setting sun, the bird whistled and wheeled. Confident, skilful, sure of itself, it surveyed its territory with unblinking eye and soared without one feather fluttering on its chestnut-brown wings.
'We'll show them!' one of the warriors shouted, rattling the medallions of dead soldiers that hung from his belt. 'We will show these pretenders what the Aquitani are made of!'
'Aye!' cried the others. 'We have weapons, war chariots, horses, siege engines! What are we waiting for, lads?'
But just as Rumour needs an anchor to attach itself to lest it withers away into nothingness and dies, so War needs a commander.
'Patience, my friends,' the Whisperer had counselled. 'Our stocks and supplies are limited reserves. We must use them wisely.'
Food, clothing, bandages, even armour don't last for ever, he'd told them, and a direct assault on Rome would deplete precious reserves in no time.
'But we've set traps-'
'- dug pits-'
'- sharpened spikes-'
'Which we will use carefully and to our advantage,' he'd assured them. 'But to charge down on Rome would only invite disaster. We must fight the enemy on our terms, my friends, and in a way we can win.'
Think of Rome as a beehive, he'd said. United, they work in harmony and the swarm is invincible. But make them angry…
'How do we do that, though?' the young hotheads demanded. 'How do we make Rome angry enough to make them lose their discipline?'
'Women and children,' he said simply. 'We slaughter their babies, we slaughter their wives, their daughters, we slaughter everyone who's placed themselves under Roman protection, and by the axe of the Thunder God, we cut them down without mercy.'
Grief and fury, outrage and anguish were enough to make anyone's self-control crumble. Especially when those strikes were aimed at the innocent and came totally out of the blue.
Not a traitor. The Whisperer notched a three-feathered arrow into his bow. A patriot.
Without a sound, the eagle plunged to the earth.
Seven
Immersed up to his chin in hot scented water, Marcus Cornelius groaned. Most people go to sleep counting sheep, but due to a distinct lack of woolly ruminants, he'd tried counting bruises instead. Eventually he gave up, partly because there were too many and partly because he was never going to nod off with that thumping great hammer pounding his brains out. So he'd lain awake through the wee small hours, which ought to have been dark but were punishingly bright, wondering which gods he'd offended this time. He made a mental note to placate them all.
Stretched out in the bath, fragrant with myrtle and hyssop, he felt the first twinge of divine forgiveness. Sod's law stated that it would be him, one of the good guys, who was rewarded for saving the Governor's life by being clonked on the head with a footstool and he supposed he should be thankful that the scribe hadn't been armed with a knife. These pen-pushers were more dangerous than they looked.
Attendants materialized in and out of the steam, topping up the bath with hot water and adding extra phials of healing oils. Orbilio thanked them and closed his eyes again. In fairness, yesterday's sorry interlude hadn't been all bad. Between the Governor, his scribes and himself, the would-be assassins had been prevented from escaping and if he was feeling somewhat the worse for wear after that encounter, imagine what it would be like for them. Gauls who worked with Rome to make life safer and more prosperous for their own people were honoured with citizenship, should they choose to accept it. The three men who'd been lugged off to the dungeons hadn't been given that option, and, since they weren't citizens, torture tended to be Rome's preferred method of interrogation. It wasn't necessarily the most effec tive way of obtaining information. But in some cases (the attempted assassination of the Governor, for instance) it proved the most satisfying.
Holding a sponge somewhat gingerly to the goose egg on his skull, he reckoned the Governor would probably make political capital out of the attempt on his life. Personally, Orbilio hadn't been convinced that creating a new branch of the Security Police here in Aquitania would serve any real useful purpose, knowing the Governor only set it up in order to make it seem the province was in safe hands from within as well as without.
Orbilio had seen himself as nothing more than a pawn in those politics, which wasn't a problem in the short term, but the squad's success took them both by surprise.