Albinus snorted.
‘That won’t be cheap. How will your boys get their fill of wine and whores on auxiliary pay?’
Scaurus waved a hand dismissively.
‘Money? That won’t be a problem.’
The tribune’s response was light in tone, although Marcus knew just as well as Scaurus the direction in which the senator’s seemingly careless question had been angled. An unspoken question hung in the air between the two men for a moment before Albinus’s patience with his protégée’s apparent unwillingness to elucidate on his pronouncement reached its breaking point. While his tone remained jocular, and he smiled as he asked the question, the expression completely failed to reach his eyes.
‘You’ve not had your fingers inside those gold chests, have you Gaius?’
The steel beneath his bonhomie was sufficiently apparent that Marcus found his fingers twitching reflexively, eager for the reassuring feel of his swords’ hilts. Scaurus turned to smile at the senator with an absence of humour to match that with which the question had been asked, his grey eyes as hard as flint and his tone suddenly harsh.
‘Or rather, have I had my fingers inside those chests without sharing the spoils with you, Decimus?’
The senator’s eyes widened slightly under his relentless gaze, the only sign of his disquiet the younger man’s refusal to be cowed.
‘You take my meaning perfectly, young man. Well?’
The tribune shook his head, gesturing to the heavy brass-bound wooden chests each of which had been carried south from Britannia on one of the cohorts’ equipment wagons.
‘Not likely, Senator. Take a look for yourself.’
He nodded to Dubnus, who was waiting alongside the first cart with his axe’s head resting on the road’s surface by his right foot, and the heavily built centurion barked an order to the hulking pioneers waiting in silence beside each of the carts. The three men stood and watched in silence as the chests were physically manhandled to the ground ready for their inspection. Taking a key from his belt pouch, Marcus squatted down to open the closest of the heavy wooden boxes, lifting the lid to reveal a sea of gold aureii coins that filled the container almost to its brim. Frowning, Albinus reached down and took a coin, staring for a moment at the finely detailed figure of Britannia on the obverse before turning it over to look at the emperor’s head.
‘Ah.’
Scaurus took out another coin and held it up before him.
‘Ah indeed. Every coin in the entire shipment is exactly the same.’
Albinus shrugged.
‘So? It may be unspendable, but it’ll melt down just as easily as any other gold.’
The tribune tossed his aureus back into the chest.
‘Why not keep that coin as a memento of what we’re about to do? One aureus won’t be missed, but it’s my opinion that we’ll be in deep trouble if we remove many more.’
The senator frowned.
‘Why?’
Scaurus pointed at the chest’s interior wall, and at a line scored deeply into the grain on all sides of the deep wooden box level with the top of the mass of coins.
‘The line marks the level that the gold in the chest should reach. If we skim any of it out it’ll be more than obvious, and we’ll all doubtless be interrogated until whoever did the skimming confesses, and then dies in a manner that won’t best please their ancestors. I think it best to play this one straight.’
Albinus grinned wolfishly, lowering his voice so that only Scaurus could hear.
‘Unlike the last time we laid hands on this gold, you mean?’
The tribune nodded solemnly.
‘Indeed. These coins are highly likely to have been minted from the very same metal that we rescued from Gerwulf last year, after he took control of the Alburnus Major mine and stripped it clean. Gold which I delivered to you, at your explicit orders as I recall it, leaving you with the sole responsibility for its safe delivery to the imperial treasury.’ He paused for a moment before speaking again. ‘And, as I noted at the time, the only official record of its quantity and value.’ Albinus nodded, having the good grace to look suitably embarrassed. ‘It must have been minted into these coins somewhere under the praetorian prefect’s control …’
He paused for a moment, waiting for the senator to speak. Albinus stared at the gold with undisguised avarice again before sighing and turning back to the tribune.
‘Illyricum, most likely. Perennis has managed to put his sons in command of the armies of both Pannonia and Dalmatia, and there are several cities with the right to mint coins in those two provinces.’ He paused, chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip for a moment before speaking again. ‘So, he must have ordered the gold to be shipped from Dacia to one of his boys, who then oversaw it being minted into these rather interesting coins after which it was sent north to Britannia. I presume that Perennis had someone in place in Eboracum to make sure that it reached the right hands?’
Scaurus nodded.
‘A legion tribune. Perennis took advantage of a stupid little mutiny by the Twentieth Legion that was over almost before it began to sack every legatus in the country, and sent his own men to replace them. This man, Fulvius Sorex, was given orders to make sure that the gold was kept safe until the new men arrived. They were clearly going to use it to bribe the Britannia legions into rising up together, so that they could be marched south through Gaul to join up with the Illyricum legions north of Rome.’
‘I see. Three legions from Britannia, another four from Pannonia and Dalmatia, plus all of their supporting auxiliaries would make for an army of at least seventy or eighty thousand men, and that’s before we get into the army on the Rhenus. With that sort of military muscle to hand a man close to the throne could assassinate the emperor, take the purple and turn to face any challengers from the eastern end of the empire with his confidence high. I expect that the praetorian prefect was only waiting for word from Britannia that the legions had declared for him before striking at the imperial family, although he must have been informed of the gold’s mysterious disappearance by now. But why, I wonder, didn’t he simply send a decent-sized army north to intercept you before you reached Rome?’
Scaurus looked at his fingers in apparent disgust at the dirt ingrained beneath the nails.
‘That’s probably down to the fact that we made sure that Fulvius Sorex wasn’t in any condition to tell Perennis’s legati anything when they arrived. When we left Eboracum the Sixth Legion was under the command of their camp prefect, a man with no love for the praetorian prefect, and the story that Perennis’s men will have received from Prefect Castus is that Sorex secreted the gold away for safe keeping whilst keeping the location to himself. Worse than that, it seems that the century of men he used for the task of hiding it were apparently all killed in an ambush north of the Antonine Wall, which means that there’s nobody left alive who can identify the spot where a fortune in gold is supposed to lie hidden. And without that gold Perennis’s legati won’t dare to declare a mutiny, since its presence in the province was hardly kept secret. The soldiers of the Britannia legions will believe that the legati are keeping it for themselves, and they’re not likely to risk rebelling against the throne without getting their fair share of the spoils.’
Albinus nodded his head slowly, contemplating the gold coin in his hand.
‘So it seems that you’ve saved Commodus from an ignominious death, young man. Mind you, Perennis will doubtless be readying himself to strike anyway, and gambling on the Pannonian legions being strong enough to deal with any resistance, and given his position of power I’d say he’s got a decent enough chance of carrying it off. He’s got the praetorians, doubtless he also controls the Urban Watch, and he’ll not let us get within a mile of the palace with this gold if he gets so much as a sniff that we’re inside the city.’