The Wolf's Gold: Empire V Read online

  Striding away around the burning house he found his deputy waiting for him, and the older man fell in alongside him as they walked back down the slope through a scene of devastation, littered with the bloodied corpses of dead farmers lit by the blazing remnants of their homes. The women’s initial screams were now reduced to moans and sobs of anguish as their degradation continued without any pause other than for one man to replace another. The big man looked about him with an expression of disgust.

  ‘Let them have one hourglass Hadro, then beat them back into order. I want the animals butchered and salted by morning and every man ready to march. The women are to die, all of them without exception, and you are to ensure that there will be no witnesses. We seem to have allowed at least one small boy to escape, and I’ll take no more risks. If any disobedience to this command is brought to light I’ll have every man in the offender’s tent party beaten to death. Understood?’

  The first spear nodded, and when he spoke his Latin was hard-edged and guttural.

  ‘As you wish, Prefect.’

  1

  Dacia, September, AD 183

  ‘You must avenge us, my son. The simple fact of your survival is not a sufficient response to the evil that festers at the heart of the empire, or to the gross indignities to which your mother and sisters were submitted before their deaths.’

  Senator Appius Valerius Aquila shifted his seat with an expression of discomfort, clearly troubled by the painful joints that had beset him in the months before his son had left Rome for Britannia. In the shadows behind him his wife and daughters stood in silence, their partially visible faces free of any expression, and in the room’s darkest recess Marcus wondered if he could see his younger brother standing in equal immobility, the child’s features almost entirely lost in the gloom.

  ‘Father, I cannot see—’

  The old man raised an eyebrow, his face taking on that lofty patrician demeanour that his son had always found so forbidding.

  ‘You cannot see a way to take revenge for our deaths, Marcus? You have a wife and son now, and responsibilities to the men under your command. You have discarded the name Valerius Aquila, and now live under the assumed name of Tribulus Corvus to avoid association with a family of traitors. A new life has opened itself to you, a life for which you are well skilled. And yet . . .’

  Marcus swallowed nervously, unable to move a muscle under his father’s scrutiny.

  ‘And yet?’

  ‘And yet, my son, all that you are now has only come about as the result of what I made you. I took you as a baby, when my friend Gaius Calidius Sollemnis was unable to care for you.’

  Marcus found Legatus Sollemnis’s sword in his hand, its gold-eagle-head pommel gleaming faintly in the light of the single lamp that was struggling for life while the darkness pressed in all around. He spoke quickly, almost absurdly eager for some approval from the man who had raised him to adulthood.

  ‘Father, I took revenge for the legatus after his betrayal by the praetorian prefect’s son Titus. I pursued his murderer Calgus to the edge of the empire and beyond. I crippled him and left him for the wolves.’

  ‘It was simple circumstance which gave you the gift of revenge for your birth father, my son. Retribution for the destruction of your true family cannot depend on Fortuna’s whims. You must travel to the heart of the empire, and hunt down every man that took any part in our murder. Until you do this you will never be able to openly raise my grandson under our proud name of Valerius Aquila. Do you wish for him to grow to adulthood under an assumed name? But worse than that stain on our honour, you will be forever at the mercy of the conscience that I worked so hard to instil in you while you were still young. Think back, Marcus, past the skill at arms I had the gladiator and the soldier pummel into you until you were a match for either of them with sword or fist. Do you not remember our discussions on the subjects of ethics and philosophy?’

  Marcus nodded, reaching for the deeply buried memory of the challenging conversations in which he had for a long time felt more an audience than a participant, as the old man had outlined his own beliefs and values.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you know only too well that to turn your face from this crime will not stand. Only in Rome will you find the men who must be punished for our deaths.’

  The darkness was deepening around his family with stealthy inevitability now, and his brother was utterly lost to view. Even as he stared at his mother with a longing to hear her voice one last time, she too sank back into the gloom, leaving only his father’s near invisible presence on the couch before him.

  ‘Only in Rome, Marcus . . .’

  He woke with a start, and Felicia stirred from her sleep alongside him, her voice edged with concern.

  ‘What is it?’

  Marcus put an arm around her, cupping a breast in the way they usually lay before sleep came for them both.

  ‘It was the dream again. Nothing more . . .’

  Her body tensed against his.

  ‘My love . . .’

  He kissed her ear with a gentle smile.

  ‘I know. I remember your diagnosis. My sleeping mind has found some way to subvert the control I have established over my emotions, and is using images from my former life to conduct some manner of grieving that I cannot indulge in any other way. Although I expect that a priest would tell me that the dreams are sent by Morpheus at the behest of Mithras, who would have me follow a soldier’s path to take my revenge.’

  She snorted softly into the room’s darkness and reached over her shoulder to tap his forehead.

  ‘The problem lurks in here, my love. You must allow yourself to mark the passing of your family in an appropriate manner. Until you do you will continue to be haunted by these ghosts from your previous life, the life you have not yet fully allowed to die.’

  He kissed her neck, squeezing his body against her back.

  ‘I know. I will, when the time is right . . .’ He cupped the other breast, rubbing his fingers gently across her nipples. ‘And now, given that the baby is still asleep . . .’

  Later, as they lay together listening to the sounds of the camp coming to life, he held her tightly and mused inwardly upon the dream, just as he had done before several other dawns along the length of the empire’s northern frontier.

  ‘Mark the passing of my family in an appropriate manner? Never was a truer word spoken, my love. But the time and place is not here and now, it will be at some time in the future which is not yet clear to me. But the time will come, of that I am quite sure. And the place?’ His father’s words from the dream echoed in his mind. ‘Only in Rome . . .’

  ‘So we’ve marched all this way to protect a fucking mountain?’ The Fifth Century’s standard bearer glanced around at the peaks to either side of the road and spat in front of his boots. ‘Gods below, but we attract every shitty job going, don’t we? Got a cold, wet quarry that needs watching in case some stray barbarians fancy carrying off the stone? Just send the bloody Tungrians, they’re stupid enough to do anything they’re told!’

  He shook his head, changing hands on his standard’s shaft.

  ‘We can only hope they’ve got a decent whorehouse up there, or we’ll have come all this way to no purpose whatsoever. Mind you . . .’ Shaking his head ruefully, he glanced back at his audience, the column of men marching four abreast behind him. ‘The sort of woman who’s made it this far into the mountains isn’t likely to be big on the softer side of the profession. And I really hate it when the mattress thrasher sucking my cock can tickle my balls with her beard.’

  Marcus shook his head at his standard bearer’s diatribe as he marched up the road alongside the stocky veteran, resolving as ever not to rise to the older man’s habitual bitter complaint at any hint of hardship. Eighteen months as Morban’s centurion had taught him that while the twenty-five-year veteran could be silenced for a moment or two, he rarely relinquished the subject of his ire for very long. One of the soldiers slogging along i
n the ranks behind them raised his voice from the safe anonymity of the men around him to further provoke the standard bearer.

  ‘There’ll be no proper beer neither, eh Morban?’

  Catching Marcus’s glare the standard bearer wisely held back his reply, tipping his head to listen for the sound he expected and softly counting down as he waited.

  ‘Five, four, three, two—’

  An incensed bellow from behind them made both men start, despite the fact they had both been expecting it. Marcus exchanged a glance with Morban as Quintus, his chosen man, unleashed a tirade of irritated abuse in the general direction of the anonymous soldier.

  ‘I’ve a bloody good idea which one of you apes opened his mouth just then, and when I find out exactly who it was you’ll be wishin’ you never joined up! I’ll have you on extra duties for so long your dick will have withered away before you get to do anything better with it than play jerk the gherkin! I’ll break my fuckin’ pole on your back, and then I’ll—’

  ‘Call for another one, will you Quintus?’

  The standard bearer’s voice was quiet enough that only Marcus heard him, and the chosen man bellowed his challenge into the cold mountain air.

  ‘I’ll fuckin’ call for another one! That’s what I’ll do!’

  The standard bearer smirked at his officer.

  ‘That’s five times today. Morban wins again.’

  Ignoring his centurion’s raised eyebrow, he cleared his throat and put an end to his colleague’s tirade by roaring out the first line of a marching song that had been sung a lot over the previous few weeks, as the Tungrian cohorts had marched the length of the empire’s northern frontier along the Rhenus and Danubius rivers.

  ‘I got five by selling my cloak . . .’

  He paused momentarily to allow the century’s soldiers to join in, drowning out their chosen man’s indignant voice as they belted out the song in fine style.

  ‘. . . five more by selling my spear,

  the final five by selling my shield,

  that’s fifteen fucks, my dear!’

  He winked at his centurion as the men behind them drew breath for the song’s chorus, and Marcus was unable to resist a wry smile in return. His standard bearer and chosen man were at daggers drawn for most of the time, and Morban took any and every opportunity to get the advantage in their uneasy relationship.

  ‘Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve,

  eleven fucks, my dear,

  and when we get to ten fucks,

  then I’m stopping for a beer!’

  Marcus stopped marching and stepped off the road, watching the passing soldiers with his hands on the hilts of the swords that had long since earned him the nickname ‘Two Knives’. The cohort’s centuries ground wearily past him up the long road, whose course twisted and undulated with the valley’s floor as it climbed towards the mist-covered peaks that were their objective for the day.

  ‘Having fun yet, young ’un?’

  Nodding in reply to his colleague Otho’s greeting, and laughing at the wink that creased the older man’s seamed and battered face as the cohort’s Seventh Century marched past, Marcus stretched his back as he looked down the column’s length. Taking a moment to enjoy the sun’s warmth on his face, he pushed his shoulders back and rotated his head to work out some of the stiffness in his neck. His body, already wiry with corded muscle from the effort of routinely carrying fifty pounds of weapons and armour on his back day after day, had been exercised to the point of perfection by three months on the long road from Fortress Bonna in Germania Inferior. He looked around him at the towering hills on every side of the road’s long straight ribbon, shading his brown eyes against the afternoon sun with a long-fingered hand and musing on the mountainous land around them for a long moment before his reverie was interrupted.

  ‘Still having problems with dear old Quintus are you then? I could hear him shouting from here, and we’ve reached that point in the day when even the hardest of chosen men are usually hanging from their chinstraps with the rest of us.’

  He started walking again as the Eighth Century’s centurion passed him, shaking his head ruefully at his friend’s question.

  ‘What do you think, Dubnus? Mithras knows you were hard enough when you were my chosen man back in Britannia, but you were always fair enough with the men. Yes, you were as harsh with them as you had to be when they needed it, but even you knew when to let them have a little slack in their collars.’

  The big man acknowledged the point with a nod, scratching at the skin beneath his heavy beard and flicking sweat from his fingers.

  ‘Whereas Quintus . . .’

  ‘Never seems to give them a moment’s grace. Every tiny misdemeanour, all the usual silly little things that soldiers do, it all has him screaming at them as if they’re recruits rather than battle-hardened soldiers. Quite how Julius used to put up with it baffles me.’

  His friend gave him a sideways glance.

  ‘Julius never had any problem with it, Marcus. He didn’t get the nickname “Latrine” without good reason, he really can be full of shit when he thinks it’s necessary . . .’ He paused significantly. ‘And he thinks it’s necessary most of the time. Not that I don’t love him like a brother, but when I was his chosen man, before I was set to turning you from a snot-nosed youngster into a half-decent centurion, he regularly used to tell me I wasn’t hard enough on his men. So when I was transferred to command your old century last year he took his chance and appointed Quintus for the job.’

  Marcus nodded unhappily.

  ‘And now I have to deal with the consequences. I can’t demote the man, not without good reason . . .’

  ‘Which you can be sure he’ll never give you. He may be a bit of an arsehole, but to be fair he is all soldier.’

  ‘And I probably can’t persuade him to be any more lenient.’

  Dubnus nodded again.

  ‘You’re more likely to persuade Morban to stop gambling. Or drinking. Or whor—’

  ‘Yes. So I’ll just have to put up with it, I suppose.’ Marcus sighed, looking up the column’s line at the peaks rising before them. ‘At least this incessant marching is coming to an end, if only for a few days.’

  Dubnus snorted.

  ‘Yes, but at the price of being perched on top of a mountain with only a bunch of miners and goats for company. That, and any women who’ve made their way up here in search of either gold or marriage. Although they’re likely to be about as good looking as the goats.’

  His friend smiled.

  ‘Morban was telling me as much only a moment ago. I’m going to drop down the column and see how Qadir’s treating my old century.’

  Dubnus laughed.

  ‘In that case you can expect to be getting the cow’s eyes from Scarface. I hear he’s still telling anyone stupid enough to listen to him quacking on about it just how wrong it was that you didn’t take a few picked men with you when Julius put you in charge of the Fifth Century. A few picked men including him and his mate Sanga, of course.’

  Marcus shrugged.

  ‘When Julius appointed me to lead his old century he made it clear that I wasn’t to try stripping the good men out of the Ninth. I was lucky to take my standard bearer with me, although that might be a strange new definition of the word ‘lucky’. Julius told me that there wasn’t any need to bring anyone else with me, since I was inheriting “the best bloody century in the cohort”. He also mentioned that “the First Spear wouldn’t have liked it” if I were to even consider moving men between centuries.’

  Dubnus pursed his lips.

  ‘Yes, well I wish he’d stop invoking his predecessor’s name whenever he wants to justify something. “Don’t allow your men to slack off the march pace, the First Spear wouldn’t have liked it.”’

  Marcus grinned back at him, surprised to find himself appreciating his friend’s humour given the trauma of their former senior centurion’s recent death in Germania.

  ‘Indeed. “Don’t dr
ink too much of that red, the First Spear wouldn’t have liked it.”’

  Dubnus smirked, miming a cup at his lips.

  ‘When we all know very well that Sextus Frontinius would have been guzzling it just as fast as the rest of us.’

  Marcus sighed.

  ‘I know he’s just doing his best to keep our chins up, but all the same it’s time to let Uncle Sextus go, I’d say. Anyway, I’m going to see how the Ninth are doing.’

  Marcus stepped back off the road again and waited until his former century drew level with him, falling in alongside their centurion with a nod of greeting. The men were good friends, and for a while they shared a companionable silence amid the jingle of equipment and the rattle of hobnailed boots that routinely accompanied them on the march, until the century’s standard caught his eye.

  ‘That thing’s clearly been polished to within an inch of its life. It must be a shock for the poor thing after so long under Morban’s version of cleaning.’

  Qadir nodded solemnly, his reply couched in the cultured terms that had deceived more than one soldier into mistaking him for a soft touch.

  ‘My standard bearer spent a long time in Morban’s shadow, as you may recall. He seems to enjoying his moment in the sun, so to speak.’

  The man in question, a lanky individual who had been Marcus’s trumpeter when he’d commanded the Ninth Century, nodded respectfully to his former centurion, and Marcus found himself smiling back at the man.

  ‘I’d imagine you’re still missing Morban, eh, Standard Bearer? Who else is going to keep you sharp with a never-ending flow of complaints, insults and dirty stories, or lighten your purse for you whenever it gets too heavy for comfort?’

  Qadir nodded with a wry smile.

  ‘The Ninth Century is certainly a different place without him. Sometimes I find myself missing his continual flow of nonsense and incitement to gambling . . .’

  ‘But the other nine-tenths of the time?’