‘From here we follow Verus’s lead. Keep hold of the rope at all times, and move slowly and cautiously. If you hear a sound that you don’t like, tug the rope sharply twice and we will all stop and go to ground. If that happens, nobody moves again without my permission. Any man that loses the party will be left behind. And believe me when I tell you that I wouldn’t want to be out here alone. Arabus, stay close to Verus’s shoulder, we may have need of your instincts out there.’
The Tungrian scout nodded solemnly, taking his place behind the legionary. He had scouted the Dirty River valley’s floor the previous night, after a day spent in discussion with Verus and the Lazy Hill garrison’s scouts on the subject of how to safely pass through the river valley’s swamps. Slipping over the wall shortly after sunset, his exit had been accomplished with such stealth that the sentries set to stare into the night’s darkness had not recognised the tiny sounds of his departure as anything other than the usual nighttime noises to which they had quickly become accustomed. Marcus had warned the duty centurion to expect his return in the hour before dawn, smiling at the man’s incredulity that anyone could have left the fort without his men’s knowledge.
‘My scout learned his art in the dark forest of Arduenna, in Germania Inferior. In this darkness he could get close enough to any one of your sentries to cut the man’s throat without ever being detected.’
Shrugging at the officer’s continued disbelief, he had taken the man with him to stand on the wall, warning the legionaries on guard to be ready for the scout’s reappearance so that they could abandon their usual bored pacing of the rampart and stand staring out into the dark landscape. At length the scout had stepped out from the wall’s bulk directly beneath them, walking into the light of their torches to a collective gasp from the waiting soldiers, having approached the rampart some hundreds of paces from the fort and edged painstakingly down its length in the shadows until he was directly beneath the officers. Once through the wall gate he had briefed Marcus as to what he had found out on the Dirty River’s flood plain.
‘It is a dark and friendly place to the silent walker, Centurion, if you know where the paths through the swamp are to be trusted. Long ago, when this wall was your empire’s first line of defence against the northern tribes, the legions built causeways out into the Dirty River’s swamp. They built wooden walkways on the firmer ground, and dumped tons of gravel into the softer mud to make safe footpaths along which to send men out on patrol without losing them in the morass, but over the years much of this work has simply sunk into the swamp. I followed the direction that Verus gave me and crossed the river, and beyond it I found a place that he had told me about, a copse of trees close to the foot of the hill on which The Fang is built where we can wait during the day without being seen. I stayed within the trees in silence for long enough that I became accustomed to the noises of the night.’ He looked up at Marcus with warning in his eyes. ‘The valley teems with life, most of it quiet and furtive in its movements, but I also heard sounds which were not made by any animal. There are hunters roaming the swamps on the river’s northern bank I believe, quick and for the most part as quiet as I am myself, but I heard something as I was preparing to leave the shelter of the corpse, the sound of something moving through the long grass, and so I froze where I was and waited for whatever was making the noises to appear. It was a hunter, with a spear that glinted in the starlight as it probed the vegetation, searching, I presume for me. Something had alerted this hunter to my presence, my different smell, perhaps, or a small noise I made while I was crossing the valley.’
He fell silent, and Marcus looked at his man for a moment, taking the measure of his temperament and finding no fear in his eyes but rather a look of slight bafflement.
‘How many of them were there, Arabus? How many men were hunting for you?’
The tracker had held his gaze steadily even as he’d shaken his head slowly from side to side.
‘They weren’t men, Centurion. As Verus told us, the swamps are haunted by women who use dogs to hunt for infiltrators. I believe that the Dirty River’s mud masked my smell, and so when we cross the stream we must all coat ourselves with it as our main defence against detection.’
The raiding party followed the abandoned road north-west away from Lazy Hill in silence, treading carefully on the track’s gapped cobbles as they moved cautiously through the darkened landscape. Marcus found the road’s presence unexpectedly reassuring, despite its state of weed-infested disrepair and the vegetation pressing in on both sides where normally the verges would have been cleared back for twenty paces or more as a precaution against ambush. After a mile or so the ruins of a fort rose out of the forest’s black mass to their left, and Verus halted, whispering to Marcus.
‘That is Gateway Fort. It used to serve as a customs post for the frontier, a place where the tribes to the north of the wall came to gain admittance to the empire. If a local turned up at Lazy Hill without the appropriate clearance stamped on his hand in purple dye then he would have been turned around and sent away with a boot up his arse just to make the point. Now it’s just a burned-out and rotting shell, haunted by the ghosts of the men who gave their lives to take and hold this ground, the spirits of the departed indignant that we have betrayed their sacrifice by abandoning the wall. I’ve heard men coming back in from night patrols say they’ve heard noises from inside the ruins …’
Marcus nodded, looking up at the abandoned fort’s silhouette. We over-reached ourselves to satisfy the pride of an emperor, he mused, and when Antoninus Pius no longer had need of the fruits of his triumph, we pulled back to the southern wall without stopping to reckon the number of men whose deaths in the service of such pointless imperial hubris were demeaned by that retreat.
He patted Arabus on the shoulder reassuringly, keeping his voice low as he replied.
‘In which case we’ll leave the spirits of the departed well alone, shall we? Let’s move on.’
Leaving the road’s course as it ran away to the north, the direction in which the Tungrians had marched earlier that day, the line of men advanced out into the Black River valley’s patchy mixture of swamp and firmer ground at a deliberately cautious pace set by Verus. The soldier took slow and deliberate paces, interspersing them with pauses where he probed the path in front of him with his spear, feeling for the firmest footing on which to lead the party forward. Marcus tested the ground to one side of the path during one such pause, finding his boot sinking into the liquid mud so easily that his leg was already immersed to the ankle before he could pull it free. The loud sucking noise made by the swamp as it surrendered its grip on the leather drew a sharp hiss from Arabus, and a stifled laugh from Arminius, who whispered in his ear as the party started forward again.
‘A fine example you’re setting us, Centurion. Perhaps we might have brought a trumpeter with us just to ensure that the Venicones know where we are?’
Verus stopped at the noise and turned back to address the raiding party, his voice a low hiss that they had to strain to pick out of the wind’s soft moan while the desolate landscape loomed around them unseen in the darkness, no less threatening for its invisibility.
‘There are thousands of sinkholes like that one on either side of the river, and any one of them can swallow an armoured soldier whole in seconds, with no trace that he ever existed other than a few bubbles. An alert man might manage to call for help before he was sucked under by the weight of his equipment, but even when the paths were well marked and fresh gravel was laid on a regular basis, men would still stumble off into the swamps and never be seen again. Now that the paths have all but sunk from sight this place is ten times as dangerous as it was before, so watch your feet!’