He smiled around at the gathered officers.
‘And the first of those is very near to here, less than a mile up this road. The road forks there, gentlemen, one track heading north along the Dirty River and so close to The Fang that the more sharp-eyed Venicone sentries would be able to count the number of teeth our colleague Otho has left in his mouth …’
He paused to allow the centurion to bare his gap-toothed grin in a face long since battered during his days as the cohort’s boxing champion, smiling to himself as the officers grinned and sniggered despite themselves.
‘But the path that we shall take heads up into the forest to the west, and then dips back into a ring of hills that the soldiers who served here when the northern wall was first manned used to call the “Frying Pan”. The ground inside the hills is more or less flat you see, and once inside we’ll be out of view from the fortress, which I expect will have Calgus and whichever king it is he’s manipulating more than a little worried. Hopefully they’ll take the bait and come after us in force, leaving our raiding party with a clear run to The Fang. So, let’s start the guessing games, shall we gentlemen?’
Marcus gathered his party in the fort’s headquarters building as torches were being lit in the narrow streets and along the length of the rampart that marked the empire’s northernmost boundary. He spent the next hour explaining to them what it was that he intended for their night’s work and checking that none of them would make any noise as they moved, waiting for Tarion to return from the task he had been set. The first spear escorted the thief into the room, watching as Tarion huddled close to the stove for a short time before he would speak, his face white and pinched from the sudden dip in temperature as the sun had set in a cloudless sky.
‘I waited at the foot of the wall, wrapped in my cloak against the cold. The weaselly little bastard almost fell over me, he was so close to the fort, but my cloak blended with the shadows and protected me from being seen.’
‘Did you see his face?’
The thief nodded at the senior centurion.
‘Just for a second. It was that red-headed lad that runs errands for the landlord of the beer house in the vicus.’
Marcus and Drest exchanged glances. The fort’s vicus was a thin affair of half a dozen buildings set up to accommodate the few whores with sufficient avarice and insufficient caution to ignore the risks and follow the cohort to the very edge of the empire.
‘Right, I’ll have that fool flogged for bringing a spy into the vicus, and then I’ll put him up on a … What?’
Marcus had raised a hand, his comment couched in a throwaway tone so as to make it easier for the first spear to ignore if he chose to do so.
‘It’s only a thought sir, but you might want to keep the whole thing to yourself for the time being, just in case the boy’s brave enough to return. There could well be more than one of them in the vicus, and I doubt the landlord’s any part of it given he was shipped in here by the army from the south less than a year ago, which means that the only way to be sure you get them all is to wait to see if the boy comes back.’
The first spear mused for a moment, nodding slowly.
‘You’re right Centurion, we’ll wait for him to return and then lock the entire vicus down while we beat the name of his conspirators out of him.’
Marcus winced inwardly before speaking again.
‘In which case, First Spear, I think it’s time we made as quiet as possible an exit from the fort and went on our way.’
The senior officer nodded.
‘You’d best make your way along the rear of the wall down to the next mile castle to the east, and then out through their gate. Are you sure you don’t want an escort to take you part of the way? We got to know the ground out there reasonably well before the orders came to stop any operations over the wall, and I’ve got a couple of decent scouts.’
Marcus shook his head.
‘I’m grateful sir, but the more men we take the more likely we’ll be detected. Besides which, my man Arabus has spent long enough with your scouts to have the ground pretty well laid out in his head, and your soldier Verus will know more than any of them, I expect. We’ll keep our numbers to nine, I think, and pray to Our Lord Mithras that the Venicones aren’t out hunting tonight.’
‘There it is. That’s The Fang all right. I stood here one evening before the rebellion started, when the forts on the Antonine Wall were no more than a succession of burned-out shells that had been abandoned twenty years before. Arminius and I had dismissed our cavalry escort and ridden up here alone, to reduce the risk of our being discovered by the Venicones and hunted down like the intruders we obviously were. They carried a fearsome reputation even then, long before we faced them on the banks of the Red River.’
Tribune Scaurus pointed out across the valley from the vantage point of the slope up which he and Julius had climbed as the day’s last light had ebbed from the western sky. The ring of hills circled about them was a line of darkness on the horizon beneath the cloudless night’s blaze of stars, but to the north-east of their place on the hillside one flickering light was perched above the shadow’s rim where the Venicone fortress stood high above the valley’s floor ten miles distant. The Tungrians had marched into the heart of the feature that Scaurus had told his centurions was called the Frying Pan, a ten-mile-wide bowl surrounded on all sides by hills, marching two abreast down tracks that were little more than hunters’ paths with their footsteps muffled by the carpet of pine needles underfoot and the dense forest on all sides. At the onset of night they had camped in the shadow of the hill at its centre, their tents raised in one corner of a long abandoned legion marching fort that had been carved into the forest twenty years before.
‘We can presume that they know we’re out here, so tomorrow we need to get their attention before they have time to wonder if there might be more to this than one auxiliary cohort chancing its arm against the only remaining tribe still intact, now that the revolt has run its course.’
Julius frowned in the darkness, remembering a hillside scattered with barbarian dead two years before.
‘You don’t believe that we broke them at the battle near the Fortress of Spears?’
‘I hoped so, at the time, but now?’ Scaurus shook his head, the gesture barely visible in the absence of a moon to illuminate the landscape. ‘No First Spear, I believe we destroyed a large part of their strength, and killed their king, but I’d wager good money they still retain enough warriors to make short work of seven hundred infantrymen. Given that our old friend Calgus now seems to be in a position of some influence over there — ’ he gestured out across the valley again ‘- and his apparent determination to claw his way back from the grave’s edge, the very word “Tungrian” should be enough to have him foaming at the mouth with the urge to see us hunted down and destroyed. After all, it was our very own Centurion Corvus who maimed him not so very long ago.’