‘Perfect ground for an ambush …’
He spurred his mount alongside the king’s horse, ignoring the way that Brem’s bodyguards fingered their sword hilts as he did so.
‘If I might make one small suggestion, my lord King?’
‘Your idea seems to have worked, Tribune. I’ll admit that when we had the entire cohort messing about walking across those planks two hours ago I was more than a little uncertain about the idea.’
Scaurus peered through the hillside’s scattered bushes at the Venicone war band in the valley below, careful to keep his head covered by the cloak that Julius had thrown over them both with its dark-green lining uppermost.
‘So it seems. I fear, however, that this is the first and last time that our adversary will be this easily fooled by such an elementary trick.’
They watched in silence as the war band’s scouts continued on up the track, the barbarian trackers attending closely to the bootprints of the men who had been chosen to run in front of the horses and therefore add the necessary footmarks to make the phantom cohort’s trail appear authentic. Scaurus frowned down at a group of horsemen who were following the scouts.
‘I should have kept Qadir and a few of his archers with us. They could have dropped those horsemen from here with their eyes closed, and if I’m not mistaken that’s our old adversary Calgus on the black horse, looking about him as if he expects the Sixth Legion to come storming out of the trees at any moment. Never has the old adage about faeces bobbing to the surface rung more true.’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘Although I’m not sure that I would have wanted to sell my life quite so cheaply as to pay for Calgus’s skin with it. No matter. Those animals will run after Silus and his boys to the west for the rest of the day, either until they reach the end of the trail he’s laying or when they see the smoke from tonight’s camp. Either way they’ll be a good day’s march distant from The Fang as Centurion Corvus takes his men up the slope.’
Julius nodded.
‘And so it seems that your ruse has succeeded. In which case, Tribune, I find myself wondering why we should take the risk of sending up smoke again this evening? You said yourself that they’ll overwhelm us in no time if they catch up with us, and if they realise that they’re being lured away from The Fang and turn for home early enough, then they might well be closer to us than we’d like when we start burning the green stuff. Why not just let them sulk their way back home without another clue as to where we are?’
The tribune watched the war band’s rear end vanish over the rise before replying, keeping his eyes fixed on the spot where the last warriors had disappeared from sight.
‘Because, First Spear, the very last thing we can afford to have happen is for those warriors to be anywhere near The Fang when our men come down that slope and make a run for it across the Dirty River’s plain. Evading the pursuit of a few Venicone hunters is one thing, but being forced to find a way past several thousand warriors is entirely another matter. And if that means that we have to take a few risks, I’d say we can console ourselves that it’s not all that much compared to the chance that Centurion Corvus and his men are about to roll the dice on.’
He gestured to the north, and the direction that the cohort had taken once they had walked carefully away from the campsite across rough planks which Titus’s pioneers had carved from trees felled in the forest the previous evening, thereby avoiding any obvious sign of their departure, the last men away from the camp having taken up the walkway and tossed it into the trees.
‘Now, shall we?’
5
Marcus made his way back to the tiny clearing to find that Lugos had wrapped himself in his cloak and huddled into the shade of a tree. Verus seemed less distracted, and greeted the centurion’s return with a wry smile.
‘If only I’d known this copse was here when I came down that slope, I might have rested a little easier that first night.’
The thief shook his head briskly.
‘I doubt it. You’d have been too close to the fortress, and too easy to find. What did you do, when the horns started blowing and you reached the valley floor?’
The soldier looked at Tarion for a moment before answering.
‘I ran blindly out into the grass, with the sounds of the hunters closing in behind me to give me wings of fear. And then I fell into a bog, concealed in the darkness by the grass until the ground fell away and I found myself mired in its stinking mud. If I’d been wearing armour I would have sunk without trace, but naked I was light enough to keep my head above the surface.’
The thief smiled darkly.
‘You were lucky then. The mud covered your smell, right?’
‘Yes. The monster that the hunters were using to follow my scent was unable to find me, huddled in the thick rushes.’
One of the twins interrupted with a look of disbelief.
‘Monster? You were scared of a dog?’
Verus shivered, his face dark with the memory.
‘A dog. Yes. But unlike any dog you’ve ever seen. Bigger than a wolf, with a jaw strong enough to tear lumps out of a man’s body and a howl like the spirits of the dead returning for revenge on the living.’ He paused for a moment, sneering at the Sarmatae. ‘You sit there grinning at me, happy in your ignorance, so let me tell you what happened when I was taken prisoner. I wasn’t the only man taken alive, several of my comrades were also captured alongside me, and the man crouched next to me was in a sorry state. I got knocked on the head and woke up with a knife at my throat, but he had tried to run from the barbarians and was taken down by that dog as he ran, or so he told me as we lay shivering under the Venicones’ spears. He had a bite on his arm that looked as if he’d put it into a mantrap, and the animal was sitting close by, watching us with a look that promised pain if we tried anything.’
The legionary shook his head in apparent self-disgust.
‘I was terrified of the bloody thing, but at least I managed to keep my mouth clamped shut, unlike my comrade. I never knew his name, he was from another century, but I knew him for a coward soon enough. He’d pissed himself at some point, and the dog could smell it and the fear that was coming off him in waves. It kept shuffling closer with its eyes locked on him, and the closer it got the more agitated he became, until the men set to guard him were standing round us and laughing at the state of him, encouraging the beast to have another go at him. And just when I thought it was about as bad as it could get, the dog’s mistress came back with a bloody knife in her hand, fresh from whatever she’d been doing to our dead. If the dog was frightening then she was something much worse.’ He paused and swallowed, the memory clearly still vivid. ‘The bitch was as thin as a whip, all black hair, sinew and tattoos.’ He paused for a moment, shivering as he saw the woman again in his mind’s eye. ‘There were so many tattoos on her face that it was like a death mask, and her eyes were the only thing alive in her stare, if you could call them alive, horrible cold green things, and when she stared at you, well, you just knew she was looking at a corpse in her mind’s eye. She had cheekbones like axe blades, and she was festooned with weapons, a long sword on her back, a pair of hunting knives at her hips, shorter broad-bladed iron strapped to both her thighs, and one nasty little skinning blade in particular in a sheath against her spine. I found out later that they call her Morrig, but by then I’d got used to calling her The Bitch in my head. She took one look at this poor nameless bastard and I guess she must have known that there was no sport to be had from him, no resistance to be broken. She hauled him up onto his feet by his throat, turned him round until he was facing towards safety and then kicked him in the backside, sending him away towards the Wall in a staggering run. That boy didn’t need telling twice, he took one disbelieving look back at the rest of us and then ran like a madman for safety, while the woman just stood and watched him with a blank stare, as if she was waiting for something. The guards were laughing and hooting with excitement because they knew exactly what was coming. Just for a moment I hated and envied him more than anyone else I’d ever met as he ran for his freedom, but then she turned to look at the rest of us with eyes as dead as stone, and I realised just what her purpose was in releasing him.