Finally, in response to the fire alarm, people began to emerge from both doors and the passage ahead in a panic. Arcadios was there instantly, shouting in his native Greek, directing the terrified slaves and servants back towards the front door, away from danger. As they moved gratefully into captivity more of the thugs began to appear and Fronto’s men set to work, breaking noses and arms, concussing and brutalising with ruthless efficiency. Hierocles’ hirelings, still in panic and confusion at the supposed fire in the baths, ran straight into the arms of Fronto’s men, unaware that they were under attack until they were on the ground, groaning.
As Fronto stood apart from the fighting, keeping his eyes peeled for a sign of the master of the house, he heard a feral roar and Clearchus, still clutching his side from his earlier beating and with poor depth perception from his swollen-shut eye, charged past Fronto and slammed into a big blond man with a flat nose and a single eyebrow that almost circumnavigated his head.
‘Think you’re big and clever now, do you, shithead?’ the man howled through split lips as the two men hit the floor, the blond brute being winded as he struck the marble with the angered Greek atop him. Clearchus hit the man four or five times with bruised and lacerated knuckles until his former attacker’s face was covered with so much blood it was hard to tell which was his and which belonged to Clearchus.
Fronto nodded approvingly. Nemesis was truly at work tonight. Then his eyes caught a stray movement and he leapt forward urgently. His hand locked around Clearchus’ wrist just as the wronged man was about to bring down his knife into the blond ruffian’s face.
‘No!’
Clearchus struggled for a moment, trying to break Fronto’s grasp and finally the fight went out of him. He dropped the knife, submitting to Fronto, and instead delivered another half dozen violent blows to the man’s head. As the Greek rose unsteadily, his anger still simmering, Fronto paused for a long moment, watching nervously, but finally the big blond mess on the floor took a single breath, and then another. Satisfied that at least Clearchus hadn’t killed the man, he looked up.
It was fortuitous timing that he happened to glance around. Another heartbeat and he’d have missed Hierocles. The Greek merchant had emerged from the passage wrapped in a towel and otherwise naked, sweaty and wet. Fronto caught his eye even as the man recognised what was happening in his courtyard and turned, running back into the passage.
Snarling, Fronto gave chase.
In the dark corridor, someone took a swing at the Roman invader and caught him a blow to the side of the head, swinging him around. Then Pamphilus and Clearchus were there, restraining the attacker and laying into him with merry abandon. Fronto reeled for a moment until his head cleared and then ran on. He turned a corner and met two sets of doors both standing open – a store room and a kitchen complex. For a moment he peered into them until he decided they were almost certainly empty and ran on.
The corridor emerged into a small guard chamber and Fronto took in the situation with dismay. Hierocles had reached the house’s rear door and three of his thugs occupied the room with small clubs, protecting their master. Fronto pulled himself up short at the door. He was armed with a gladius if he cared to draw it, but this was still three to one, even if their master stayed out of it. And the three men were, if not professional fighters, then at least clearly gifted amateurs.
‘Shame for you, Fronto. All this effort. And me untouched. But rest assured that when I report this to the boule, they will know that you broke into my house with intent to kill.’ Even as he spoke, Hierocles slipped on his chiton and reached out for his cloak.
‘We’ve killed no one, you idiot. We’ve been careful.’
Hierocles laughed as he slipped into his light leather shoes and gestured at the three other men in the room. ‘When you beat Fronto senseless and toss him out, keep his sword and use it to kill one of the girls.’
Fronto’s eyes widened. As a foreigner in the city – and especially one who had already ranted at the city council in session – it would not take much for them to convict him of murder. His blade in a young girl would almost certainly seal his fate. He looked over his shoulder for aid, but the others were all busy back at the heart of the complex. He was alone and seriously outnumbered.
Shit.
‘Thank you, Fronto. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’ve been struggling for a way to take you out of the equation, but kept coming up blank. Then you do this and answer my prayers. When you meet the young girl in the next world, give her my apologies, won’t you?’
Laughing, Hierocles opened the door and stepped out into the darkness of late evening as the three thugs took a deliberate, menacing pace towards Fronto.
There was a resounding thud and Hierocles reappeared from the dark, spinning. Behind him, Masgava stepped into the room, blowing on sore knuckles, Aurelius at his shoulder, and the two men made their way in to face Fronto’s beaming smile. The big Numidian’s punch had almost killed the Greek merchant. As Hierocles floundered on the floor, groaning, blood began to leak from his nostrils, ear and mouth simultaneously, and bloody snot-bubbles appeared as he breathed through his shattered nose. The bruise began to come up almost immediately and covered almost a quarter of his head. Despite his long shared history with Masgava, Fronto was impressed with the blow.
The three thugs stopped moving. Leaving them to Aurelius and Masgava, Fronto strode over to the fallen Greek. For each step Masgava took, the three thugs took one back away from him towards the room’s corner. One of them dropped his club immediately and held up his hands in surrender, his eyes wide in panic.
Hierocles whimpered. Still dazed, he reached up to touch his bruised head and cried out in pain.
‘Yes. I think Masgava cracked your skull in more than one place. He has strong fists and he’s very quick.’
The man tried to focus on Fronto but one of his eyes seemed unwilling to move from some spot on the floor. ‘Aghhh… I… urgh…’
‘This is where our little competition ends, Hierocles.’
The man could do little but whimper in reply.
‘Know that I am no longer taking any shit from you. You will never again touch my men or my goods. I cannot stop you using mercantile and political practices against me and, while I consider that low and contemptible, there is no law against it. But any more theft or violence against my business will be visited back upon you tenfold. Take this as a friendly warning. There is nowhere you can go and nothing you can do to stop me getting to you.’
Hierocles groaned.
‘I shall take your silence as tacit understanding. The next time one of my men comes home wounded, you will be searching the sewers for your teeth. Final warning. Stay out of my way.’
As the man writhed in pain and panic, Fronto rose and gestured to Masgava and Aurelius. ‘Come on. Time to go home.’
He made his way back to the corridor from whence he came, the other two turning away, but the big Numidian sharply snapped back towards the three thugs and flashed them a smile. The one who’d dropped his club wet his chiton.
Moments later Fronto emerged from the house with his men at his back. A quick glance confirmed that they’d taken a few bruises and that Pamphilus had broken two fingers, but they had escaped successful and essentially unscathed.
With a chuckle, Fronto pulled the figurine of Nemesis from his neck, lifted it and kissed her full on the face. ‘Thank you, lovely goddess.’ Swiftly, he planted a second kiss on Fortuna and then tucked them back in his clothes.
‘Home time, lads. I’m in the mood for a small party and I know where there’s a good stock of wine.’
CAVARINOS stood in the side street and looked about with a strange mix of sadness and nostalgia. At the lower end of the dusty road he could see the heavy ramparts, and beyond that only bright, cloudless sky and the tips of the blue hazy mountains to the south. Lining the street on both sides were stone and timber buildings that were painfully, hauntingly familiar, and mostly derelict. And to the north, the road met the main street of the oppidum that ran from the west gate to the public square near the eastern end.
For a moment he considered strolling down to the walls and looking over at the slopes and the lesser hills at the foot of the oppidum, but the thought that he would be looking down on the site of the greatest victory the Arverni would ever claim somehow made that unpalatable, and he turned his gaze from the south back to the house where his uncle had lived and where he had spent so many summers as a boy.
Indeed, he had resided in this very house during his time at Gergovia as the great revolt picked up pace and the war progressed. He’d not been back since Alesia and, though some of his personal effects were almost certainly still inside, despite losing the war and his prolonged absence, somehow it felt wrong to open that door – like disturbing a tomb.
Gergovia was very much a tomb.
It stood as a monument to the last great hope of the peoples against Rome. It was a cenotaph – the empty tomb. And yes, the oppidum itself had stood empty for so many months, but a veritable legion of the dead from both sides lay under mounds down past that wall, staring up at the fortress with dead, accusing eyes. And now, despite the tribes’ attitude to this strangely hallowed place, life was coming back. A Roman prefect with an auxiliary force of spearmen from Narbonensis, along with a few regular clerks and quartermasters had taken up residence in Gergovia, in the house where Vercingetorix had planned the war against them. The prefect was a ‘resettlement officer’, tasked with repopulating the oppidum with what was left of the Arverni – which was more than most tribes, given Caesar’s galling sparing of the tribe from slavery after Alesia. And so now almost a thousand Arverni were camped on the heights out past the west gate, awaiting the allotment of property for their new life as subjects of Rome. There was even talk that in due course Rome would relocate the tribe to a Roman style settlement on the plains below, though that would be years away yet, when ‘Gaul’ had a governor and a garrison and paid taxes and worshipped Roman gods.
Perhaps a hundred people had so far been set up in the better houses – the ones that had not fallen to wrack and ruin since their abandonment. Cavarinos was not one of them, of course. He was merely a visitor to this place that had once been his home – a pilgrim to the site of that last victory. In fact, since the Romans were being their usual officious and immovable selves and not granting access to anyone until they had been assigned a place, Cavarinos had slipped in among a family being escorted to their new home, and had easily peeled off inside and disappeared into the empty streets to find his old house.
He wasn’t even really sure what he was doing here, other than that he had felt a curious pull all the time he had been in the region and had, in the end, found himself powerless to resist. And where he would go when he left here was an equal mystery. Soon he would have to leave the lands the Romans called Gaul. He was a spirit from a bygone age, drifting among the wreckage of his world, and every day here tarnished his soul a little more. But where he would go he did not know. To Rome was unthinkable, somehow. To the land of the tribes across the northern sea? Perhaps, but he was a warm-blooded southerner and that island was a cold and rugged place, even less forgiving than Belgae lands, and it did not really appeal. To Iberia perhaps? Though there had ever been a cultural gulf between the peoples of that land and the peoples of this, as though the high, serrated mountains that separated them physically also divided them in their hearts.
And so he continued to wander as a ghost of a war long since lost.
Angry with himself, he turned away from the house and caught movement from the corner of his eye. Frowning at the unaccustomed sight, he stepped back into the shadow at the side of the street, his instincts warning him to remain unobserved. The small group passed along the main thoroughfare at the end of the street, unaccompanied by Romans. Odder still, they were no Arverni family heading for their resettlement. The cloaks they wore bulged at the waist where belted swords ruffled the material, and their hoods were pulled forward, hiding their features.
As the last of the dozen or so figures passed, it paused for a moment and turned to look down the street. The head came up and, as the hood fell back, Cavarinos noted the strange glazed cult mask that covered the face, glinting in the sunlight. The figure studied the alley for some time and Cavarinos remained still, perturbed by the mask and cloak, despite himself. Then, silently, the figure moved on and disappeared from view. Cavarinos paused for a count of ten heartbeats and then began to move quietly up the road towards the main street. At the corner he stopped again, peering cautiously out into the thoroughfare. The main street sloped up, but at a barely visible incline. The public square was visible from here, though it had undergone changes since it had fallen into Roman hands. The open space was now enclosed with a wall that utilised the surrounding buildings and sealed or gated off the streets that met there. It had become the Roman depot, with the houses of the wealthy Arvernian nobles now barracks for the Narbonese spearmen and the few legionaries. Three Romans – regular soldiers in their russet coloured tunics and gleaming bronze helmets – guarded the entrance to the compound. Most of the occupying ‘resettlement’ force would be busy in various places around the oppidum sorting out housing and repairing buildings and walls, fences and sheds in preparation for their granting to native families. A skeleton guard only would remain in the compound. After all, the only folk in the town were those dejected families that the Romans had rehomed. They had nothing to fear in Gergovia.
But clearly they did.
The dozen – and now he could see them clearly there were precisely twelve of them – cloaked figures were striding up the street as bold as orichalcum, making straight for that guarded gate as though it were they in command here and not the Romans.
Cavarinos turned and looked down the street, willing himself to be able to see the west gate, even though he knew the curvature of the street and the slope would not allow it. Somehow in his mind’s eye he could picture the two spearmen who guarded the west gate, riddled with stab wounds and tossed carelessly aside like a child’s doll. These dozen people had not entered Gergovia with such care as he. They would have left bodies in their wake, he was certain.
He was equally certain over the coming fate of the three men at the compound gate.
Trying to suppress his natural urge to shout a warning, he slipped from doorway to doorway and alley to alley, shadowing the newcomers at a safe distance – close enough to see what was happening, but safely unnoticed. He was quiet and agile, and he knew it.
It was his duty as Arverni – bred into him over years of rebellion – to aid the fight against Rome in any way he could, and these people
had
to be Rome’s enemies. That was plain to see. And yet the longer the war had gone on, the more he had turned in favour of peace. That war was lost now, and despite the deep-seated feeling that he should be with those cloaked figures, he held his tongue and remained in the shadows.
Yet if his goal was truly peace and a harmonious cohabitation with Rome as he’d come to suspect, why was he not prepared to shout a warning to the Romans? It was not a matter of self-preservation, despite the fact that calling out would almost certainly mean death for him as well as the Romans. Twelve against four was poor odds, and somehow he knew these people to be killers despite their hidden nature.
No. Not self-preservation. Somehow, he couldn’t bring himself to warn the soldiers that had so long been the enemy of his people.
It was a horrible realisation that he was neither a rebellious Gaul, nor a peaceful Roman subject.
He was a wraith, tied to a world that no longer existed.
As he watched, the Romans turned towards the approaching cloaked figures. With typical Roman arrogance they did not raise an alarm. They assumed all was safe, since they had control of Gergovia. They must be unobservant to miss the bulge of weapons and the sinister aspect of the masks. The leader of the guards was a man with a crest on his helmet, but not a sideways one like a centurion. He was their second-in-command. What did the Romans call them again? Ah yes. Optio –
chosen man
.
Today he had been chosen by death.
The optio challenged the cloaked figures, but made no move to defend himself. Three of the cloaked figures stepped forwards swiftly. At last the optio realised he was in trouble and went to draw his sword. As two of the swiftest warriors Cavarinos had ever witnessed whipped out their blades in a fluid move and put them simultaneously through the necks of the two legionaries, the cloaked figure out front swung a punch at the optio. The Gaul was huge – by a head the tallest of the cloaked group, and with the shoulders of an ox. The optio reeled from the blow, stunned and prevented from crying out a warning as he’d so clearly intended.
As Cavarinos watched, sickened, the huge cloaked figure grabbed the optio by neck and groin and dropped to one knee, bringing the body he held like a weightless toy down onto the raised kneecap and snapping his spine in two. The officer tried to shriek but the big meaty hand slipped up from the neck over his mouth and the big man leaned close, apparently asking a question of his crippled victim. When he removed his hand, the officer desperately stuttered out some whispered reply.
The giant nodded his acceptance of whatever he heard and, as the Roman shuddered and retched in agony, slowly reached up and with disturbing ease turned the man’s head to face backwards, accompanied by the tearing of tendons and the cracking of bones.
The big man stood, leaving the lifeless Roman on the ground.
‘Come,’ said a new figure from within the group in a strange, hoarse voice, and Cavarinos marked that man as the leader, despite the uniform appearance of the entire group. The dozen figures left the dead Romans where they lay and moved into the compound.
In apparent response to whatever information they had received from the officer, the dozen figures separated as they entered the depot. Three cut left and three right, moving methodically to the two other side gates where they no doubt found and dispatched more guards, though Cavarinos could not see the action from his poor vantage point. Then, as the groups of three re-emerged, they moved into selected buildings.
The other six figures made straight across the square to what had once been a luxurious house belonging to Gergovia’s resident druid. Now, a red flag adorned with the ubiquitous golden eagle and SPQR sigil hung from the upstairs window, denoting the presence of Rome. With the boldness of the invincible, the six cloaked figures entered the building and closed the door behind them.
Cavarinos held his breath for a long moment, staring into the now-empty compound. Despite not having committed himself to either side in this small engagement, he felt certain he needed to know more about what was happening here. It smacked heavily of all the clandestine manoeuvring that had occurred in the two years leading up to the revolt.
He could move
now
. The square was empty. Six had moved into the largest building and the others were scattered among the other structures, but all were inside. To move could cause him trouble if one of them happened to emerge once more as he crossed the open. Would being Arverni save him from their wrath? Somehow he suspected not, even if he’d looked the part. And he didn’t. He was still clean-shaven, his hair pulled back behind him. He wore Gallic clothing, but his serpent arm-ring and noble’s torc had gone, and at his neck he wore a figurine of a Roman God. Somehow he knew his appearance would be held against him no matter what he said.
Still, the square was empty and precious time was passing as he deliberated.
His heart in his throat and thumping a speedy tempo, Cavarinos slipped out of the shadows and loped quietly across to the gate, trying not to pay too close attention to the three corpses that lay there. His eyes darting back and forth between the various doors, he settled on the big house ahead. Clearly that was their objective, the rest simply keeping the garrison out of things.
No one emerged, and no faces appeared at the windows as he ran quietly on soft boots, shushing gravel despite his care, and he dived into the shadows at the far side, next to Vercingetorix’s house. As he stood in the shade, heaving in silent breaths, two figures stepped out of the side buildings, perhaps having heard movement. Both peered intently around the square, shared a look, and then moved out, searching the area swiftly.
But they were not Arverni, for they moved with unfamiliarity around the square, peering into places where Cavarinos knew a man couldn’t hide. Who were they if not Arverni?
Cavarinos
was
a child of this tribe, and he knew Gergovia like he knew the lines on his hand. Staying in the shadows, he moved to the rear of Vercingetorix’s house, ducked past the animal shed and turned right, running along the back of the buildings, silent on the turf. The Roman compound perimeter had made use of the boundary wall of the house’s rear field, but had left open space behind the buildings themselves, just as he’d assumed. Now easily safe from the prying eyes of the pair in the square, he passed the rear of three houses and arrived at the druid’s two-storey residence.