XV
‘HE IS NOT
coming back. We all die if we stay here.’ The sailors’ spokesman, Susco, the Nubian sailmaster, was a big man but heat and thirst had shrivelled him like a piece of animal hide in a fire. His words emerged as a choked, belligerent challenge from a throat dry as dust. Behind him his shipmates stood in a tattered, swaying line, red-rimmed eyes squinting from faces blackened by the sun. Valerius noted that they had waited until the water had been distributed to make their challenge. It had given them renewed strength and fuelled their determination.
‘We should go, tonight when the sun sets,’ Susco continued. ‘East. If the tribune could not reach help in the west on a horse, we must go east.’ Valerius nodded, not in agreement, but because he understood the logic of desperation. Susco mistook it for approval. ‘We will take all the water and travel light. We can make sixteen miles before dawn.’
‘Aye,’ a ragged growl of approval from the sailors.
‘No.’
The Nubian shook his head. ‘You are outvoted, tribune, and outnumbered.’
Valerius laughed at his naivety. ‘Do you think you are in the Senate, Susco? Do you believe that what you say carries some sort of authority?
Then
you are mistaken. There is no vote. I command here and as long as I command we stay.’
‘It is you who are mistaken,’ Susco growled. ‘There are no patricians and no plebs here. Just desperate men looking for a chance of life and their fair share of what they are entitled to. If you want to stay, we’ll take what’s ours and go.’ Susco took a step forward, his fists bunched, and there was a growl as the men moved with him towards the tent. Valerius felt Serpentius moving in behind him, but he made a calming motion with his left hand. This could still be settled without violence.
‘And what about them?’ Valerius pointed to the two injured sailors lying in the shade of the makeshift awning. ‘Will they get their fair share too?’
Susco shrugged. They would die soon enough and had not been part of his plan, but he knew his supporters would never abandon their shipmates. ‘We’ll carry them.’
‘Then you won’t make sixteen miles. More like six. And what will you find? Exactly the same as you have here. More sand, more rocks and more sea. Only you won’t have shelter and your water will run out by noon and you’ll be dead by nightfall.’ Valerius sensed confusion in the men behind Susco. The sailmaster had convinced them that anything was better than the hell they were suffering here, but if Valerius could persuade them they would be better off together they still had a chance. ‘And what if you do leave at nightfall and Tiberius is just five miles down the beach, with help? Those who stay will be drinking sweet water and on their way back to civilization while you are dying by inches in the sand.’
Susco glanced to his shipmates for support, but one glance told him he’d lost them. His shoulders slumped and Valerius sighed with relief.
‘We—’
‘A Roman officer does not negotiate with scum, tribune.’ Domitia’s imperious voice rasped through the silence like a saw blade and Valerius saw the men stiffen. He turned. She was standing just outside her tent, tall and straight as a legionary centurion, her small breasts rising and falling beneath the thin shift. She glared at the sailors, eyes filled with contempt and the utter conviction of a lineage that gave her
dominion
over men like these. ‘Mutineers and deserters deserve no water and they will have none. Get back to your places or I will have you cut down by my guards. My father will hear of this when we reach Antioch. The punishment for mutiny is death and you can be sure I will urge him to show no mercy.’
The big sailor stared at Domitia. ‘We won’t take orders from a girl and we won’t be treated like dogs,’ he said. ‘We’ll have the water now and we’ll butcher you to get it if we have to.’ When Susco spoke there was a catch in his voice that betrayed his intentions and Valerius knew in that moment that he would have to kill him. With a growl the crew moved towards the tent and he felt the familiar glow of coming battle flare inside him. He drew his sword and heard the distinctive hiss of another blade being unsheathed as Serpentius stepped to his side.
‘Are you willing to die for it, Susco? Or you? Or you?’ Valerius was smiling now. The savage smile of a born killer. A victor’s snarling mask. To the men facing him, he seemed to grow, a warrior god come to earth, the scarred face offering only one thing: death. ‘A water skin is no good to a man with a cut throat or a hole in his guts. Get back to where you belong. We’ll issue the next ration at first light and Tiberius will be back before noon. Obey my order and there will be no executions. Obey and we will all get out of this alive. You have my word on it.’
They backed away, unwillingly, but they went. He knew they would return.
When they were a safe distance away he turned to Domitia. Her eyes had lost none of their certainty.
‘I expected more of you, tribune,’ she snapped. ‘Your duty is to protect me.’
He took her by the arm and pulled her back to the tent. She made no attempt to break away. ‘My duty is to get as many people out of this alive as I can, lady, and you have just made that more difficult. In fact, I think you may have killed us all.’
She looked at him and he wondered if it was contempt in her eyes. Only later did he realize it was pity. ‘Perhaps you are not like my father after all.’
He left her and went to where Serpentius was sharpening his long sword.
‘They’ll be back,’ the Spaniard said. ‘And we should be ready for them.’
Valerius nodded absently. ‘I made a mistake. I should have killed Susco.’
‘Better that way.’ Serpentius spat dryly. ‘They only had a few sailors’ knives; it would have been like killing rabbits. Might be different later.’
‘Four trained soldiers against a rabble of sailors armed with a few sticks?’
‘Maybe not just a few sticks, and more likely two than four.’
‘What do you mean?’
Serpentius’s eyes flickered towards the tent. ‘You were too busy to notice. When the general’s daughter was trying to get us killed, you were watching the sailors. I had my eye on our German mates. They’d already pulled their swords when you went for yours, and the only reason they didn’t kill you was because I was watching them.’
As darkness fell, Domitia trooped down to the beach with her servant girls to wash in the waves as had become her custom. The two slaves held up a length of curtain to allow her privacy, but Valerius noticed something he should have seen before: the way they were followed by the hungry eyes of the stranded sailors, and more hungrily still by the two German cavalrymen who sat together on the far side of the tent. He cursed himself for a fool. He had been concentrating on keeping them alive when he should have been aware of the currents flowing between the two groups, and between Domitia and her guards. Of course men forced into close proximity with three young women for weeks on end would be affected. He had discovered in Colonia that imminent death was more likely to heighten lust than to suppress it.
But was Serpentius overreacting? He approached Civilis, the senior of the two guards, and arranged that he should take the first watch.
The German nodded grimly and saluted. ‘If they come, we will be ready for them,’ he assured Valerius. But when Domitia returned from her bathing, his eyes never left the general’s daughter.
Valerius slept fitfully, tormented by dreams of lakes and rivers and bubbling streams. It could only have been an hour before he felt a looming human presence and realized Serpentius had come to wake him for his watch. But when he opened his eyes the first thing that drew his attention was the faint, unmistakable gleam of edged metal. The second was that the figure leaning over him was much bulkier than the whip-thin Spaniard. His left hand groped for his sword, but his mind told him he was already dead.
Without warning his assassin stiffened and gave an agonized groan as six inches of pointed iron emerged from the centre of his body. A point that violently twisted, making the man jerk and shudder as his vitals were torn by the long double-edged blade, the groan becoming a scream that was instantly muffled by a leathery hand. The iron point disappeared and the body slumped forward. When the hand was removed Valerius’s face and chest were drenched in a rush of warm liquid that fountained from the gaping mouth. ‘Bastard,’ he spat, and wiped Civilis’s blood from his mouth and eyes. ‘Did you have to make such a mess?’
‘They’re coming.’ Serpentius ignored his master’s complaint. ‘The other guard has gone to join them. I think he’s taken the weapons, but I thought I’d keep an eye on this one.’
As Valerius strapped on his sword, the curtain that split his sleeping area from that of Domitia and her women twitched and a wide-eyed brown face appeared. When Suki saw the gore-drenched figure with the sword she opened her mouth to scream, but Serpentius clamped his hand over her mouth and shushed her. A moment later Domitia pulled back the curtain and gaped as she recognized Valerius behind the bloody mask.
‘If it comes to it, you might be advised to use this.’ He tossed her the dagger at his belt and she caught it deftly, studying it in her hand. Her chin came up and her eyes were steady.
‘Only to kill those who come to take what is only mine to give,’ she said. And he believed her.
Serpentius disappeared from the tent and, with a last glance at Domitia, Valerius followed him.
Was it a rustle of feet through sand, or the gentle swish of surf on shore? They were only just in time. Movement, a lighter darkness against the true night and less than ten paces away. Shadowy silhouettes moved across the beach, but their stealth was illusory when faced with a hunter of the night. A sharp scream rent the air as Serpentius, the veteran gladiator, found his first victim. Valerius remained where he was between the attackers and the tent. In another fight the two men would have stayed together, each covering the other’s back, but this was no time for elaborate tactics. Serpentius was like a fox among chickens, moving silently through them, his long sword seeking out his next prey. A clash of iron on iron confirmed that the mutineers had been given weapons, but that would not save them. The darkness was Serpentius’s element, his speed their doom. A second man shrieked, then a third, and now the rest nervously shouted encouragement to each other, making them all the easier to identify and to kill. Valerius knew that those who stayed silent would be the most dangerous. By now his senses were in that high state of readiness that comes only to a warrior in battle. The first hint the man who came out of the darkness had of his presence was the sting of the
gladius
that sliced the tendons of his throat and severed his jugular, so that he died silent and bewildered, blood fountaining and feet scrabbling in the sand. Valerius registered without regret that he had just killed the surviving German guard, and waited for his next victim.
Out of the pitch dark a torch flared followed swiftly by another, and a circle of light encompassed the sandy battleground like a golden arena. Before Valerius could identify the foremost torch bearer as Susco, Serpentius appeared by his side with the same bewildering fluidity with which he had gone. Four men down, including the guard, only five left, but five men armed with swords, whose eyes glinted like ravening wolves’ in the torchlight. Five men driven beyond fear by the scent of buried water and the delights Susco had promised them with the women in the tent. But to sample those delights they first had to kill the two men who stood in their way.
Valerius waited, as he had waited in the Temple of Claudius for
Boudicca
’s warriors to break through the door and slaughter the last surviving Romans of Colonia. He had not felt fear then, and he did not feel it now.
‘Kill them. Kill them all,’ he said softly to Serpentius, the gladiator who had never lost a fight.
But Susco had other ideas.
The torches were wooden staves salvaged from the ship, capped with torn cloth from the tunics of those already dead and soaked with pitch secreted away during the forays to the wreck of the
Golden Cygnet
. Susco held one, a second crewman the other, and it was he who tossed his flaming brand over Valerius’s head and on to the roof of the pavilion where Domitia and her women waited for the outcome of the fighting they could hear so clearly in the still desert night. The cloth of the tent had spent four days in the burning sun. At the first lick of flame the tinder-dry fabric erupted with a soft
whump
, the fire instantly running the length of the roof.
A terrified scream jolted Valerius into action.
‘Go,’ he ordered Serpentius. ‘I will hold them here.’
Another man might have hesitated for a vital heartbeat, but the Spaniard slipped away without a word and left Valerius to face his enemy alone.
The odds of five to one seemed impossible. Susco thought so. He wore a mocking smile that said his victory was already certain and the fruits of it his to take at his leisure. ‘They’ll taste all the sweeter for a little roasting,’ he sneered. But delirium and thirst had impaired his judgement. He had forgotten the kind of man he was facing.
Valerius sprang forward over the sand, angling his run so that Susco’s bulk shielded him from the remainder of his attackers. He knew it had to be fast and it had to be certain. Susco drove his torch towards Valerius’s face, expecting him to meet it with his sword, which would leave Susco with a simple thrust into the Roman tribune’s exposed body. But Valerius didn’t hold his sword in his right hand. His right hand was buried in the burned-out ruins of Colonia. Now the carved walnut fist which had replaced it came up and knocked the torch aside. He ignored the heat and the stink of singed hair as it brushed
his
shoulder, at the same time stepping inside Susco’s clumsy lunge. It gave him the heartbeat he needed to rake the inside of the other man’s arm, flaying skin and muscle from the bone with the edge of the
gladius
. While Susco was still reeling in shock the sword came up in a scything backhand sweep that took him below the chin and severed his head from his shoulders. The sailmaster’s trunk swayed for a moment as a thick dark spray spumed from the neck, before it toppled slowly backwards into the sand. The surviving attackers were sailors, not fighters. When he hacked the next down without even meeting a challenge the rest dropped their swords and fled into the darkness.