The Eagle's Vengeance (3 page)

Julius shook his head dourly.

‘I’ve puked up everything in my guts, puked once more for good fortune, and then last of all I chewed the round pink thing and swallowed. I’ve nothing left to give, Tribune, and so my body has settled in a state of discontented resentment rather than open rebellion. Now I’m just bored with this snail’s pace that seems to be the best this tub can do.’

‘Aphrodite’s tits and hairy muff, don’t let the captain hear you calling his pride and joy a
tub
! I caught him stroking the ship’s side yesterday, and when he saw I was watching he just gave me one of those looks that said “I know, but what’s a man to do?”’

Scaurus turned and nodded at the second largest of the four centurions standing about him, a heavily muscled and bearded man in his late twenties.

‘Quite so, Centurion Dubnus. The man’s as proud of his command as a legion eagle bearer, and just as likely to reach for the polish from the look of it. Did you not see the way he frowned when the goat they sacrificed before we sailed sprayed blood all over the deck?’

The tribune turned back to face Julius, the first spear just as heavily set and with the same thick beard as Dubnus, sharing his brooding demeanour and predisposition to dispensing casual violence to malcontents and laggards, although where the younger man’s thick mane and beard were jet black, the senior centurion’s hair was visibly starting to turn grey.

‘And as for your urgency to get your feet on dry land, First Spear, I’d imagine that the
Mercurius
’s captain is probably equally keen not to run his command ashore in the fog. Apparently we’ll know we’re getting closer when we can hear the Arab Town trumpets, if his navigation’s up to the job. And remember if you will, that for our colleague here a return to Britannia raises fresh questions as to just
who
might be waiting for us when we arrive.’

He tipped his head at the least heavily muscled of the centurions, a lean, hawk-faced young man who had sought refuge with the Tungrian cohort two years previously and who was now listening to their conversation with a look of imperturbability, then turned back to his senior centurion.

‘News of our return to the province will have gone before us, Julius; you can be assured that the return of two full cohorts of auxiliaries will be of great interest to the governor’s staff. You know as well as I do that there are never enough soldiers to go around. For all we know there might well be senior officers waiting for us when we dock, backed up by a century or two of legionaries fresh from battering the Brigantes back into an appropriate state of subservience. We have to face the possibility that the imperial arrest warrant in the name of Marcus Valerius Aquila, formerly of the praetorian guard, might by now also mention that the fugitive senator’s son is going under the alias of Centurion Marcus Tribulus Corvus of the First Tungrian Cohort. After all, there’s been more than enough time for the authorities to make the connection between those two names, especially when you stop to consider the fact that it’s been over a year since we allowed that blasted corn officer Excingus to escape with the knowledge of our colleague’s true identity.’

The light of realisation dawned on Julius’s face.

‘And that’s why we’re travelling on this warship, rather than wallowing around on the sea with the rest of the men in those bloody awful troop ships? And why we’ve shipped four tent parties of the biggest, nastiest men in the cohort along with their distinctively unpleasant centurion.’

The last of the officers grinned jovially down at him, his voice a bass growl.

‘Well spotted, little brother.’

Scaurus nodded, his face an impassive mask despite the urge to laugh at the effortless way in which Titus, commander of the Tungrians’ pioneer century, got away with treating his first spear like an uppity younger sibling.

‘Indeed it is, First Spear.
If
we face a welcoming committee, then it may be small enough to be faced down by my rank and your men’s muscle long enough to see Centurion
Corvus
here safely away into the hills. And if, in the worst case, we’re greeted by too many men to bluff or bully into submission, then our young colleague here can at least surrender with his dignity intact, and without his wife watching or his soldiers indulging in any noble but doomed heroics.’

He turned sharply to his bodyguard who was lurking a few feet away with a look of inscrutability, although long experience told him that the German would have heard every word.

‘That goes for you too, Arminius.’

The tribune’s German bodyguard grunted tersely, staring morosely out into the fog.

‘You will forgive me if I do not promise to follow your command absolutely in this matter, Rutilius Scaurus? You know that I owe the centurion—’

‘A life? How could I forget? Every time I turn around to look for you you’re either teaching the boy Lupus how to throw sharp iron about or away watching the centurion’s back as he wades into yet another unequal fight. I sometimes wonder if you’re still actually
my
slave …’

A trumpet note sounded far out in the fog that wreathed the silent sea’s black surface, muffled to near inaudibility by the clinging vapour, followed by another, higher in pitch, and the warship’s captain stepped forward with a terse nod.

‘That’s the Arab Town horn. Seems we’re making landfall just as planned, Tribune. Your feet will soon be back on solid ground, eh gentlemen?’

Titus put a spade-like hand on Marcus’s shoulder.

‘Never fear, little brother, whether there’s one man or a thousand of them waiting for you, you’ll not be taken while my men and I have wind in our lungs.’

His friend shook his head, and shrugged without any change of expression.

‘No, Bear, not this time. If there are men waiting for me then I’ll surrender to them meekly enough, rather than adding more innocent blood to my bill. And besides, the dreams still tell me that my destiny awaits me in Rome, whether I like it or not.’

Dubnus nodded, his voice taking on a helpful tone.

‘It’s true. He was rolling around in his scratcher for half the night and muttering on about something or other to do with revenge. I put it down to the amount of the captain’s Iberian that he’d consumed earlier in the evening, while I was cursing him for a noisy bastard and trying to get to sleep myself …’

Marcus nodded with a sad smile.

‘It’s a rare night when my father doesn’t rise from the underworld in order to remind me that I am yet to pay Praetorian Prefect Perennis out for the deaths of my family, while our departed colleague Carius Sigilis fingerpaints the same accusatory words in his own blood across whatever flat surface he finds in the dream.’

Julius and Dubnus rolled their eyes at each other.

‘Those words being
“The Emperor’s Knives”
, right?’

Marcus nodded at Dubnus’s question. Sigilis, a legionary tribune who had served alongside the Tungrians as they had fought at the sharp end of the struggle to beat off a Sarmatae incursion into Dacia, had named the men who he believed had murdered Senator Aquila and slaughtered his family in the days before he himself had died bloodily at the hands of tribal infiltrators. He had told the young centurion that he had heard the story from the mouth of an informer hired by his own father, a distinguished member of the senatorial order whose disquiet at the increasing frequency of financially motivated judicial assassinations under the new emperor, Commodus, had led him to commission a discreet investigation into the matter.

‘Yes Julius, it’s still the same message after all the months that we spent making our way back down the Danubius and the Rhenus. The shades of the departed still harass me night after night, hungry for blood to repay their own, and for revenge which can only be taken in Rome, it seems. I’ll admit that I grow weary of their persistence on the subject, when it seems unlikely I will ever see the city of my birth again in this lifetime.’

The Arab Town port’s foghorn blew again, the mournful notes distant in the clinging mist, and Marcus turned to stare out at the seemingly impenetrable grey veil.

‘So if my time for capture and repatriation has come, I will accept that fate without a fight. It seems to me that I’ve been running long enough.’

‘Only in Britannia, eh Tribune?’

‘Quite so, Prefect Castus. Quite so …’

The younger of the two men standing on the Arab Town dockside hunched deeper into his cloak, pulling the garment’s thick woollen hood over his head with a despairing look up into the fog that wreathed the port’s buildings. His companion, a shorter and stockier man who seemed comfortable enough in the wind’s chill, shot him an amused look and then glanced around at the three centuries of hard-bitten legionaries waiting in a long double line behind them. Apparently satisfied with what he saw, he resumed his vigil across the harbour’s almost invisible waters, waiting until the foghorns had been blown again before speaking again.

‘Yes, Fulvius Sorex, only in Britannia could the fog be quite this impenetrable. Thirty years of service to Rome has taught me that every province has its endearing little characteristics, those features a man never forgets once he’s experienced them. In Syria it was the flies that would crawl onto the meat in your mouth while you were chewing, given half a chance. In Judea it was the Jews, and their bloody-minded resentment of our boots on their land almost a century after Vespasian finally crushed their resistance into the dust. In Pannonia it was the cold in winter, harsh enough to freeze a river solid all the way down to its bed, and in Dacia …’

He fell silent, and after a moment the younger man glanced round to find his companion staring out into the fog with an unfathomable expression.

‘And in Dacia?’

Castus shook his head, a slow smile spreading across his face.

‘Ah, the rest of the morning wouldn’t be long enough to do Dacia justice. But, and this is my point, this misty, swamp-ridden, rain-soaked nest of evil-tempered, blue-painted madmen gives Dacia some bloody stiff competition. Let’s just say that …’ His expression hardened. ‘There! There they are!’

He thrust out an arm to point at a dark spot in the murk, and his companion narrowed his eyes to gaze in the indicated direction, nodding slowly.

‘You know I do believe you’re right, Prefect Castus. I can hear the oars.’

As they watched, huddling into their cloaks for warmth, the indistinct shape gradually coalesced out of the fog and hardened into the predatory lines of a warship being propelled slowly across the harbour’s dark-green water by slow, careful strokes of its banked oars.

‘That will be what we’ve been waiting for, I presume?’

Sorex nodded in reply to the older man’s question.

‘I expect so. That, and the First Tungrian Cohort, or so the despatch said, with the Second Cohort to follow in a few days’ time. Bloody auxiliaries …’

The prefect’s smile became wry, and he turned to raise an eyebrow at his superior, a man a good twenty years younger than him and no more than a year into his military career.

‘I’d be careful not to take that tone with their commanding officer if I were you, Tribune. As I recall the man, he’s not the type to receive a slur of any nature without turning it around and ramming it straight back down your throat. He always was a headstrong type even in the days when he was little more than a boy in a man’s tunic, and he’s gained more than enough experience of battle since then to have worn his patience with
less
experienced men as thin as my third best pair of boots.’

Sorex pouted, not deigning to make any response as the crew shipped their oars neatly and allowed the vessel to coast gently up to the dock under the helmsman’s skilled control. Fully resolved out of the fog’s murk, the ship was revealed as a swift and deadly engine of maritime destruction, with bolt throwers mounted fore and aft and a crew of thirty marines standing to attention on the main deck. Men leapt smartly down onto the dock’s wooden planks and swiftly moored their vessel against the quay before reaching to grasp the gangplank being thrust out from the ship’s side. The captain was the first man down the narrow bridge, a hard-faced bearded man who threw Sorex a perfunctory salute and nodded to Castus as he waved a hand back at the docked warship.

‘Yes, Tribune Sorex, your cargo’s safe. There’s an imperial official who’s not taken his eyes off the chests all the way across from Germania, Procurator Avus, as dry and humourless a functionary as it’s ever been my misfortune to welcome aboard the
Mercurius
. The bloody fool even insisted on sleeping on the deck beside them, despite the fact that I had half a dozen of my marines standing guard on them at all times.’ He turned back to the ship and barked an order at his second in command. ‘Get those chests brought on deck and ready to unload, and make sure the marines stay with ’em to keep the soldiers at arm’s length until they’re off the ship and properly signed over to the army! Those thieving fuckers could be up one of Vesta’s virgins without the bitch knowing that she was no longer in possession of her cherry until the bulge started to show.’

A party of men was making their way down the plank behind him, led by a tall, angular man clad in the sculpted bronze armour of a senior officer, and Prefect Castus stepped forward to meet him as his feet touched the quayside, his hand thrust out in greeting.

‘Rutilius Scaurus! Few sights could give me more pleasure than to see
you
returning to this revolting excuse for a province!’

The newcomer stared down at him for a moment before a smile of recognition creased his face. Taking the older man’s hand he nodded slowly.

‘Artorius Castus! I’ve not seen you for the best part of ten years, when you were first spear of Twelfth Thunderbolt and I was a fresh-faced junior tribune, good for nothing more than running messages and annoying the senior centurions with my enthusiasm and ignorance. I thought you would long since have retired to enjoy the fruits of your service.’

Castus grinned back at him fondly.

‘Retirement’s not for me, young man. They made me Provost of the fleet at Misenum as a reward for long service, but you know as well as I do that all the Rome fleet’s sailors really do is stage mock sea battles in the Flavian arena and raise the awnings over the audience when the sun gets too hot to bear. That’s no life for a soldier, now is it?’ Scaurus shot him a knowing glance. ‘So, I used what little influence I had to get appointed as Sixth Victorius’s camp prefect, and here I am up to my arse in unfriendly natives once again. But I’m forgetting my manners …’