Scaurus’s eyes narrowed.
‘One of your men has been inside The Fang?’
The centurion smiled tightly.
‘He’s a bit of a celebrity, Tribune, but to be honest with you I’d say his door’s flapping on its hinges, so I’d advise that you take anything he tells you with a large pinch of salt. He was captured by the Venicones about three months ago, the only man left alive out of a forage party of thirty men we sent out in the days before we were ordered not to allow any detachment of less than three centuries north of the wall. We found them slaughtered, with their heads and pricks cut off for trophies, and given that several men’s corpses were nowhere to be found we reckoned they’d been taken to be stretched out on a stone altar and sacrificed to the Venicones’ gods. The general assumption was that the ink monkeys would torture the shit out of the captured lads for long enough to drive them out of their minds before killing them, and certainly nobody ever expected to see any of them in one piece again. Verus pitched up three weeks ago, stark naked apart from a fur cloak he’d taken from some woman he’d killed and covered in mud, babbling about having been on the run for eight days. And he weighed thirty pounds less than when he was taken.’
The tribune nodded decisively.
‘I’ll see him now. Alone.’ The legion man nodded, turning for the door. ‘Oh, and centurion, this man’s instability …’
‘Yes, Tribune?’
‘How does it manifest itself? Does he perhaps take drink in the morning, to soothe his nerves?’
The centurion’s face crumpled as if he’d been punched, and his eyes closed as he answered, his voice little more than a whisper.
‘No …’
‘That’s something to be said in his favour then, isn’t it?’ Scaurus stepped close to the abashed centurion, lowering his voice so as not to be heard outside of the office. ‘I suggest you get a grip of yourself man, and look to your command before it falls to pieces around you. You know how it goes — you can lead, you can follow, or you can just get out of the way. If you don’t think you’ve got it in you to provide your men with leadership, then I suggest you nominate your successor as First Spear and make way for someone that can.’
After a long silence the other man opened his eyes again, straightening his back.
‘Thank you, sir. For not just demoting me, I mean. I’ll get things straightened up round here soon enough …’
Scaurus nodded and turned away to look at the map.
‘Demoting you might be a little beyond my authority, First Spear, even if I were tempted to do so. And besides, my men and I are believers in more direct ways of dealing with officers who fail to meet the required standards. If you let me down in this then I promise you that you’ll have nowhere to hide from whichever of us survives this apparent suicide mission.’
After a few minutes’ wait the door opened and a single soldier stepped into the room, snapping to attention and saluting smartly, staring at the wall behind Scaurus. His bare forearms were covered in the marks of what appeared to be recently healed burns, and his eyes were bright and hard beneath a full head of white hair.
‘Soldier Verus reporting as ordered, Tribune!’
The Tungrians took a moment to assess his state, and Marcus realised that he was looking at the best turned out legionary he’d seen since their arrival. Scaurus stepped forward extending an arm to invite the soldier into the room.
‘Take a seat please, Verus. Be seated gentlemen, let’s not stand on ceremony.’ He waited until everyone was seated before continuing. ‘Without intending any disrespect to your comrades, legionary, you are by some distance the most well presented of the legion’s soldiers I’ve seen all day. Why would that be, do you think?’
Verus smiled darkly.
‘That’s an easy one to answer, Tribune. I’ve seen the Venicones at close quarters, and I expect to see them again before very long. When they come over that wall there’s at least one man who’ll be ready to meet his gods with clean armour, and with blood on his spear blade.’
‘I see. Your first spear tells me that you’ve recently achieved the notable status of being captured by the locals and then managing to escape?’
The soldier nodded, his face perfectly composed.
‘That’s correct, Tribune. I spent fifty-seven days as their prisoner before the gods saw fit to show me a way to escape from their fortress.’
Scaurus leaned forward, intent on the legionary’s answers.
‘Let’s make sure that I have this right. You were taken to the fortress that they call The Fang?’ Verus nodded again. ‘Your first spear told us that he believed you had been taken captive for the purpose of sacrifice, rather than being killed on the spot.’
‘So did I, sir. And I still believe that the Venicones intended to offer my blood to their gods, once they had achieved their initial purpose of breaking my spirit.’
The words hung heavily in the air, and Julius leaned forward to speak.
‘They tortured you?’
Verus returned his stare with an unflinching gaze.
‘Yes, First Spear. They tortured me for all of these fifty-seven days. They left me locked in a cell too small for a man to lie down in for much of the time, crouching in my own shit and sleeping so little that I lost all track of time. They used hot irons to burn my skin in their ritual patterns, inflicting enough pain on me to keep me in constant agony, but never enough to kill me. And they abused me in other ways, degraded me in a manner intended to reduce me from a man to a slave, lower than a slave …’
‘But you held firm?’
The soldier stared back at Scaurus with a look of triumph.
‘I held firm. Yes, I screamed in agony, I howled in my degradation and I cried like a baby at the shame of their using me like a woman, but I never lost my hold of who I was.’
‘And who are you, legionary?’
Scaurus’s question was gentle, but the reaction to it was anything but. Leaping to his feet and sending the chair flying, the soldier sprang to attention and roared out his answer.
‘Legionary Verus, Fifth Century, Eighth Cohort, Sixth Imperial Legion Victorious, Tribune sir!’
Once Verus had retrieved his seat and sat down again at the tribune’s gentle direction, Julius had asked him the question that Marcus had been burning to hear answered.
‘So, soldier, tell me, just how did you escape from The Fang?’
The legionary looked up at the ceiling for a moment, smiling dreamily at the memory.
‘My torturers became careless. They took my silence, and my downcast appearance for those of a man they had broken, as I gathered they had done with other men before me. They became ill disciplined with their tools, and there inevitably came a fleeting moment when one of them allowed a small knife to fall to the floor without realising the slip. I put my foot over the weapon, and when he turned away to tend to the fire in which his branding iron was heating up I stooped without making a noise and picked it up, tucking it between my buttocks beneath the filthy leggings I was wearing. When they returned me to my cell I knew that I only had a matter of hours in which to act, before the blade’s absence was noted. To understand what I did next, you have to understand the fortress’s construction.’
He raised an eyebrow at Julius, who nodded and gestured for him to continue.
‘The Fang is built on a hilltop. It looks to me to be the sort of place that has been fortified since the beginning of time, and the fortress’s walls are built on top of an old earth rampart. They put up a ten-foot tall wall of stone based on a wooden framework and set with mortar, and over the years the wood and mortar have rotted and aged to leave it quite unstable. I had already realised that the mortar holding a large stone in my cell’s outer wall was crumbling, and I had guessed that it was an external wall from the way it became so cold at night. And besides, I was uncertain as to how much more of their torture I could tolerate, or how long it might be before they would tire of my resistance and sacrifice me to their gods without waiting any longer for me to surrender my sanity to their degradation. The priest who had branded me that day had seemed particularly satisfied with his work, standing back to look at me from various angles in the manner of a man surveying a completed piece of craftsmanship. He seemed proud of his work, and I assumed that with the ritual pattern complete I might be murdered at any time.’