'I'll stay. You get back to the fleet. It's my fault we had to kill them.'
'No.' Cato shook his head. 'We had to silence them. Otherwise they'd have warned the pirates of the fleet's approach. We were lucky to have found them. Don't blame yourself.'
Macro shrugged, still unable to entirely shift the burden of guilt.
'You go.' Cato insisted.'Vespasian must be told the pirates are here. The message has to get through, and you're the best bet. I'll do my bit here.'
'I see. And how will you get back to the fleet once you've dealt with the men bringing the supplies?'
'I'll stay up here until the fleet arrives. If we do surprise them I'll make my way down and you can tell them to send a boat for me. If I'm badly outnumbered here, I'll run for it. After I've set this place on fire. That'll be the signal to our side that the pirates have discovered we're on to them. I'll not take any pointless risks, Macro,' Cato tried to reassure his friend. 'Sooner a live centurion than a dead hero.'
Macro laughed. 'The wisest thing you've ever said, Cato. All right then, I'll go.'
'Right now would be good.'
'What? No rest? And me just having come out of a fight?'
'Just go, Macro.' Cato took the map from inside his tunic and held it out to his friend. 'Here.'
Macro leaned over and took the map. 'I'll see you later, Cato.'
'Remember, don't stop for anything. Be careful. No more singing.'
'What's wrong with my singing?' Macro grinned, then turned away and marched across the top of the plateau. Cato watched him, until the path dipped down the far side of the mountain and his friend disappeared from view. He was alone, except for the spirits of the three men whose bodies lay on the mountain top with him. Around the silent and still lookout post, a cold damp breeze blew mournfully.
06 The Eagles Prophecy
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Cato waited until the pain in his groin had subsided enough for him to move around easily. Now that Macro was gone, the first doubts about the wisdom of the course of action he had insisted on occurred to him. If three men came up the path he would be at a disadvantage. He could count on disabling one pirate when he surprised them. That would leave a straight fight with one man, which he should be able to handle. But two men? He had seen enough fights to know that almost any two men, with their wits about them, could defeat a man on his own. Provided they took their time and divided his attention. Cato made a decision. If he was faced by more than two men he would set fire to the lookout post and run for it.
The thought of fire drew him back to the present. The pirate slowly roasting on top of the fire was beginning to smell terrible. Cato took a breath of cool air and then plunged into the shelter. The interior was filled with smoke and the stench of burning hair and seared flesh was quite sickening. Cato gritted his teeth and bent over to grab the ankles of the pirate, pulled the man off the cooking fire and dragged him outside. Before Cato could spring any surprise on the enemy he must dispose of the lookouts' bodies. A latrine ditch lay fifty feet from the shelter and Cato dragged the corpse over to the ditch and, nose wrinkling with disgust at the stench of raw human waste, he rolled the body into the ditch. When he returned to the man he had hit with the rock Cato realised the pirate was still alive, but only just.
For a moment he debated whether to finish him off. The man was dead one way or another: he could expect no mercy from Vespasian if the Roman fleet won the day. The injury to his head looked severe enough to kill him eventually, and yet Cato could not find the resolution within himself to end the pirate's suffering. If it had been a fight Cato would have no compunction about killing his man, and doing it quickly and efficiently with no sentiment. The prospect of killing a helpless man, however, disturbed him. It was irrational to have such perverse scruples, he reasoned with himself as he lifted the man under his shoulders and started dragging him towards the latrine ditch. The pirate groaned feebly as Cato hauled him across the rocky plateau and dumped him on top of his comrade.
Cato turned away quickly and made his way back to the first man, the one he had killed on the path. As he moved the body he saw that the ground was soaked with blood, and there was more splattered across the side of the boulder. Once the body had joined the others Cato cut some strips from a cloak laying outside the shelter and found a water skin before he returned to the path beside the boulder. He worked quickly, dowsing the stains and rubbing them away with the rags, expecting the enemy to arrive any moment. At last he was satisfied that he had done enough to hide the evidence of the fight. The water was already soaking into the path and would soon disappear. In any case, Cato told himself, the pirates would not be expecting any trouble up on the isolated mountain top. The threat they would be guarding against was from the direction of the sea. The mountains that ringed the bay had been hard enough going for Cato and Macro, travelling as lightly as possible. There was little chance that a heavily armed force of soldiers would be able to scale the steep slopes undetected.
Having taken care of the bodies and washed the blood away, Cato took the chance to examine the lookout station more closely. Not far from the shelter the plateau narrowed and dropped away in a precipitous cliff. From its tip it was possible to look far along the coast on either side. The pirates had constructed a crude signal station with a mast, beside which sat a small chest. Cato lifted the lid and saw bundles of brightly coloured material. All quite useless, of course, without any idea of what each pennant signified. Beside the mast sat a peculiar-looking device mounted on a small post. Two highly polished metal plates were fixed at angles to each other and Cato surmised that it might be some kind of heliograph.
He returned to the shelter, picked up the lookouts' spears then went back to the boulder to keep watch down the track that sloped away for nearly a quarter of a mile before disappearing over a small spur thrusting out from the side of the mountain. He set the spears down behind the boulder and eased himself into a position overlooking the track. He would see them coming in plenty of time. He settled down to wait, leaning up against the boulder as the sun rose into the sky and began to bathe the world in its warm glow. The light breeze slowly drove the clouds before it, clearing them away down the coast and revealing for the first time the full distance that could be observed from the top of the mountain.
For a while Cato revelled in the sense of Olympian detachment he felt as he gazed down on the bay at the foot of the mountain rising up opposite his position. Tiny figures swarmed around three ships drawn up on the beach. They had been rolled on to one side and wedged so that an expanse of their underside was clearly exposed. Smoke coiled up from fires twinkling further up the beach and Cato guessed that the pirates must be applying a fresh layer of tar to the bottom of the ships. His gaze slowly travelled along the thin strip of land that linked the beach to the citadel at the end. That was the only viable approach to the citadel since on the other three sides it was protected by sheer rocky cliffs. The landward side was defended by a solid-looking masonry wall with a gatehouse, from which a timber bridge projected across a defence ditch. Behind the wall, a jumble of whitewashed houses climbed up to the highest point of the rocky spur, where a small tower nestled above the sea, twinkling at the foot of the cliff. The pirates must have seized the citadel, or perhaps it had been abandoned long ago. In any case, Telemachus had chosen an excellent location for his base of operations, in every respect save that there was no alternative route out of the bay should an enemy block its entrance. Hence the need for a lookout station with such commanding views of the approaches to the pirate base, Cato realised. The pirates would need plenty of warning if they were to make a clean escape from the bay.