‘Sit down, Antenoch, and think for a moment.’
He waited until the other man had slumped gloomily on to his bed before continuing.
‘You’re obviously an educated man, well spoken in a language which is not your native tongue. You should be an administrator to some local official, or a trader, not a common soldier on the Wall, miles from anywhere with decent food and women you don’t have to pay for. What happened?’
‘Mind your own fucking business!’
‘Come on, man, what can it hurt to tell me? I won’t be sharing the story with anyone else.’
‘You’ll tell Dubnus, and he’ll tell Morban, and he’ll…’
‘You have my word. I’ve little else of value, so it should be of some note.’
The quiet response silenced Antenoch far more effectively than a bellowed command might have. Strangely, his face softened as if with repressed memories.
‘I was adopted by a merchant in the wool trade when I was young, after my mother died, and raised as his son, alongside his own boy. I never knew my father, although I often wondered if I was actually the merchant’s bastard child. Taught to read and write, and to speak well. I imagined that I would find some place in his business, until my “brother” took it into his head that I was supplanting him in his father’s affections. He poisoned the old man against me, slowly but surely, and I ended up on the street with a handful of coins and their “best wishes”. So… I decided to earn the one thing they never could buy, for all their money, and become a Roman citizen. I planned to go back to them after my twenty-five, as an officer, of course, and snap my fingers at them as second-class citizens in their own country. Cocidius help me, I was so stupid!’
‘And now you’re stuck here.’
Antenoch looked up, his eyes red.
‘And you’re so clever? The only difference between us seems to be one of rank, Centurion, since you apparently have nowhere better to go than the arse-end of your own empire!’
Again Marcus’s response was instinctively gentle, defusing the Briton’s anger.
‘And that should make us more likely allies than enemies. Will you work with me or against me? You’d make a first-class centurion’s clerk, and with a little polish you could be one of the best swordsmen in the cohort. Besides, I could do with someone to watch my back…’
He tailed off, his persuasive skills exhausted, and wisely waited in the unnerving silence rather than spout nonsense to fill the silence. Antenoch levelled his stare, his face set hard.
‘And if I won’t, you’ll set that bastard Frontinius on me. What choice do I have?’
Marcus shook his head emphatically.
‘No, the choice has to be yours. Besides, nobody does my dirty work for me any more. Look, I need a man I can trust behind me in a knife fight, not one waiting for the chance to carve my shoulder blades apart. What do you need?’
The response was slow and measured, the Briton thinking through his position aloud.
‘I need a chance to be something other than the wild man those fools have labelled me… I’d like to learn some of those fancy tricks you pulled on me this morning. I want that bastard Dubnus to speak to me with a little respect, rather than looking at me as if I were something he scraped off the bottom of his boot.’
He looked up at Marcus, calculation written across his face.
‘What’s the pay?’
‘Standard pay, but I’ll make you an immune. You’ll never have to shovel shit away from the latrines again, just as long as you’re my man.’
Antenoch pulled a face and nodded.
‘Very well, we have a deal… but you should beware one small fact, Centurion Two Knives.’
Marcus grimaced in his turn.
‘And that is…?’
‘I promise always to be honest with you. Always to speak my mind, whatever my opinion. Whatever the likely effect. You may find my views hard to accept, but I won’t spare you them.’
‘And your view as of this moment?’
‘You look too young for credibility with men who don’t happen to be looking down the length of your sword. Put into Frontinius for permission to grow a beard. You can grow a beard?’
5
Rufius came through the storehouse door first, impaling the clerk with a fierce glare and gesturing with a thumb over his shoulder. The soldier, remembering his close encounter with the veteran officer’s dagger the previous day, made for the door, finding himself restrained by a muscular arm, as the centurion bent to whisper in his ear.
‘We’re all going to have a little chat with Annius about the quality of his rations. You’re going to stay outside and keep nosy people from trying to interrupt us. If anyone does disturb our discussion, we’ll set him on you.’
Antenoch stood in the doorway, locking his cold bruised eyes on the clerk’s for a moment before turning away to lift an axe handle from the wall, hefting it experimentally to test the wood’s weight. Behind him came Dubnus, in turn momentarily filling the doorway, his eyes flicking across the clerk without any recognition of his existence before he strode into the store. Released, the clerk bolted for the door willingly enough. Annius never cut him in on any of his swindles, so there was no reason to argue with anyone in his defence, much less that lunatic. He almost ran into the other new centurion in the entrance, shrinking back again to let the hollow-eyed officer walk through, the man not even seeming to notice him. Which suited the clerk well enough. What a combination — the freshly recruited veteran centurion he had already learned to fear and an officer the fort’s collective opinion had suddenly decided probably was man enough for the job, after all. He closed the door to the stores building and leant on it in what he hoped would appear a nonchalant attitude.
Rufius walked to the counter, dropped a bundle of equipment and clothing on to the wooden surface and smacked his hand down with a flat percussive crack.
‘Storeman!’
Annius bustled out of his office, looking about him for his clerk, then, pausing uncertainly at the sight of the new centurions, pasted an uncertain smile across his features and advanced to the counter. His jowly face and high forehead glistened minutely with pinprick beads of sweat.
‘Centurion Rufius! What a pleasure! Always good to have experienced officers join the cohort. And Centurion Corvus! All of the camp has heard of your prowess with the sword this morning, quite remarkable! How can I be of service to you and your, er… colleagues…?’
Finding his bonhomie unrewarded by Rufius’s stern expression, he looked uncertainly to Marcus, found no comfort there, and returned his regard to the older officer, his instincts muttering loudly in his inner ear to play things very carefully with this unknown quantity. How much could the man have discovered in less than a day? He cursed his own stupidity for letting that fool Trajan convince him to push the usual rake-off to such a high percentage.
To his surprise it was the younger man who stepped forward, raising a patrician eyebrow and curling his upper lip to complete the air of dissatisfaction.
‘This equipment, Quartermaster, issued to myself and my colleague Tiberius Rufius yesterday, is quite clearly defective in numerous regards. The mail is surface rusted, the sword is blunter than my grandmother’s butter knife, and even the tunics seem to have seen better days. I trust that you’ll want to remove them from service after what has clearly been a long and illustrious history, to judge from their condition. Oh, and I’m used to a longer sword than the infantry gladius, so see what you’ve got that’ll suit my style better, eh?’
Annius swallowed nervously, feeling a trickle of sweat running down his left temple. He scuttled back into the store, returning within a minute with two sets of officer’s equipment, his best. He would usually charge a new centurion two hundred and fifty for their full rig, unless they wanted somebody else’s leavings, but this was an occasion, he judged, to forget to mention payment.