The Eagle's Vengeance (39 page)

Marcus nodded, wrapping his arms around his wife and shooting Scaurus a glance laden with pure, undiluted murderous intent. The tribune nodded his understanding, but raised a hand to forestall the comment he expected from the younger man.

‘I know, you want to take your iron to him, but I think it better if we stay with our original plan. I don’t want the way we address the problem of Tribune Sorex to be changed in any way from what we agreed, or our freedom to act will be significantly hampered. Take some time to reassure your wife, Centurion, and we’ll make our way to the headquarters once the lamps have been lit for an hour.’

He turned to the door, smiling at the sight of Julius holding his daughter in his arms with the look of a man utterly besotted. Annia was close behind him, her expression one of relieved delight at the sight of her man having accepted the delivery of a girl with such eagerness.

‘Well now, First Spear, it seems that you two are now three. Congratulations! Do the two of you have a name for the child?’

Annia opened her mouth, but found herself cut off by her husband’s powerful voice.

‘My beautiful daughter will be called Victoria, in honour of the legion that’s based in the place of her birth. I expect that she’ll grow into a strapping young woman, and I will teach her the skills that will enable her never to go in fear of any man.’

Scaurus smiled again, watching with amusement as Annia’s eyes narrowed behind her husband’s back.

‘Excellent! And I’m sure that your most highly esteemed woman will take whatever steps are needed to ensure that Victoria retains her femininity while you’re busy trying to turn her into a Tungrian! Mind you, she seems to have adopted one Tungrian trait. You’ve clearly been too long in the field, First Spear, or you might have more of an appreciation for the delicate aroma that child seems to have created.’

Turning, Julius saw his wife’s face and twitched slightly, holding the child to her with alacrity.

‘Here, you’d better make a start on the feminising.’

Annia stepped backwards and placed her hands behind her back.

‘No you don’t, you big lump of cock-brained idiocy! You named her without my help, so you can change her without my help! Consider it as training that will enable you never to go in fear of any shit-caked child’s backside …’

Later, sitting together while Scaurus and Castus plotted the route that the Tungrians would take when they marched from Yew Grove the following morning, Marcus held his wife’s hands while she described Sorex’s attack to him.

‘Please forgive me, my love, he gave me no choice. He would have murdered Annia and the baby while they were unable to fight back …’

Her husband squeezed her hands and kissed her gently on the cheek.

‘There’s nothing to forgive. How could I think any less of you for protecting our friend and her baby in the only way that was possible. Besides, from what the legatus said he hadn’t got very far before he was interrupted.’

Felicia nodded sadly, her finger tracing the line of the half-healed cut across her husband’s face.

‘Your poor nose. No, he hadn’t got very far with me, but he told me that he’d been raping the prefect’s woman more or less since he arrived, threatening her with ending his career if she didn’t comply.’

Marcus frowned at her.

‘Does Artorius Castus know of this?’

‘No, and he
mustn’t
find out, Marcus, not if you value him as a friend. It would end their relationship, and they clearly love each other deeply. Besides, he would almost certainly confront the tribune.’

‘And?’

‘And that doesn’t sound like the way Tribune Scaurus plans to deal with him. I can assure you that he feels rather more subtlety is called for than might feel appropriate to you soldiers …’

‘Congratulations, Fulvius Sorex, on your most fortunate retrieval of the legion’s eagle. You must be delighted to have struck gold so close to home, so to speak?’

The tribune grinned triumphantly at Scaurus, dipping his head in an acknowledgement of his colleague’s praise so shallow that Marcus wondered if the intent was rather to mock Scaurus’s words.

‘Thank you, Rutilius Scaurus. It was indeed a most serendipitous discovery, given that my only intention was to keep the local tribesmen on their toes now that the army’s back on the Emperor Hadrian’s wall for good. But they do say that we make our own luck, I believe, and so it has proven here. Had I not ordered such an aggressive patrol routine we might never have tripped over the Sixth Legion’s standard in such a fortunate manner, although of course much of the honour must go to Centurion Gynax for his persistence in searching the village in question.’

Scaurus smiled, and the men around him held their silence as he had instructed them to do in the most robust of terms only moments before, swallowing their indignation at Sorex’s failure to comment upon their defeat of the Venicones.

‘Tell me colleague, were you fortunate enough to discover Legatus Sollemnis’s head alongside the eagle?’

Sorex shook his head with an expression of regret.

‘I’m afraid not. Possibly it has rotted away by now? After all, I doubt that simply placing a man’s head in cedar oil is sufficient to prevent the natural processes of decomposition for more than a few weeks.’

Scaurus smiled back at him for so long that Sorex’s smug expression began to perceptibly slip, only turning to address Julius when the superior expression had entirely vanished from the man’s face.

‘I’ll have that first item please, First Spear.’

The burly centurion reached into the bag that he had carried into the headquarters and pulled out the container in which Sollemnis’s head was suspended in oil. Removing the wooden lid, he placed the cask on the table in front of his tribune with a grimace at the smell issuing from the dark oil that slopped about inside the wooden drum. Scaurus rolled up the long right sleeve of his tunic, speaking to a baffled Sorex in conversational tones.

‘Forgive the mess, but when Centurion Corvus presented me with this item it was indeed starting to get a little gamey. As you say, the Venicones’ habit of drying the heads of their victims over burning wood chips seems to be a far from perfect means of preservation, and so I took the precaution of enhancing its chances of reaching Rome in a recognisable condition. It’s by no means a perfect way to prevent part of the human body from rotting away, but it seems to have worked moderately well in this case.’ He reached his right hand into the oil and grasped something within it with an expression of mild distaste, pulling it out of the miniature barrel with a careful flourish and scattering drops of the pungent oil across the office’s floor. ‘Here we are then, the head of a dead legatus restored to some measure of dignity after all it’s been through since his death.’

Sorex goggled at the decapitated head as Legatus Sollemnis stared back at him vacantly with eyes whose whites had been dyed black by the oil.

‘How can we be sure …?’

‘That it’s his? I took the liberty of taking the first spear of your Ninth Cohort aside when we arrived, a man we got to know moderately well while we were operating north of the Emperor Antoninus’s wall, and a man who in turn knew the legatus as well as anyone, given his routine attendance of Sollemnis’s command meetings. He confirmed that this head belonged to the legatus, and pointed out two distinguishing features that you might like to note.’

He pointed to a mole on the dead man’s jaw.

‘There’s this, for a start, and although I realise that’s far from being conclusive proof, there’s this as well …’ He turned the head and moved his finger to indicate a long white scar down the right ear. ‘Apparently he sustained the cut a year or so before he was killed, sparring with naked iron as it seems was his habit. The first spear tells me it took the bandage carriers hours to stop the wound bleeding.’

He fell silent and waited for Sorex to respond with his eyebrows raised in amused anticipation. The tribune stared at the horrific sight of the legatus’s severed head for a moment longer before stammering out a response.

‘W-well then … it, it seems that I’m doubly fortunate. I’ve restored the legion’s eagle to its rightful place and saved the Sixth Victorious from the ignominy of being disbanded, and you’ve given Legatus Sollemnis his dignity back in pursuance of my orders. Congratulations Rutilius Scaurus, you’ve earned a place in the despatch that I shall be sending to Rome in the morning to explain this gratifying turn of events.’

Scaurus smiled again, easing the severed head back down into the oil’s greasy embrace and wiping his hand on a towel offered to him by Julius before taking a heavy cloth-wrapped item from his first spear.

‘And I’m sure that Praetorian Prefect Perennis will be more than delighted to have his confidence in you repaid. After all –’ he weighed the mysterious parcel in both hands before removing the wrappings and placing the rescued eagle onto the table before him ‘– you seem to have done a masterly job of suborning a previously honourable centurion into your deceit, don’t you?’

Sorex goggled at the statue, lovingly polished to a gleaming shine and in every respect the equal of the counterfeit eagle alongside which it sat.

‘But that’s …’

‘Yes, it is a bit of a problem, isn’t it? Only a week or so ago the Sixth had no eagle, and was facing the ultimate sanction for a legion in such disgrace, and now it has two of the blessed things. It’s something of an embarrassment of riches, you might say.’

Sorex tried again.

‘That can only be a fake, cobbled together by the Venicones, or by this man Calgus I sent you to catch. Mine is the real eagle!’

Scaurus acknowledged the point with pursed lips.

‘I had the same concern, if I’m honest. After all, there was always bound to be benefit to
someone
in making a fake eagle, and I am forced to admit that yours is really rather authentic in appearance. Indeed it’s so very close to the one that Centurion Corvus and his men rescued from The Fang in terms of both its construction and finish that I’m driven to assume that it was cast from the original moulds. Moulds which, as I’m sure you know, reside in Rome.’

He waited in silence for a long moment.

‘No answer, Tribune? Doubtless you’re now considering whether you should unveil
your
eagle to your men as soon as this somewhat embarrassing meeting is concluded, and put it in the hands of a brand new and delighted eagle bearer who you will promote from the ranks of the best and most dedicated soldiers in the legion. The soldiers will be ecstatic at the removal of the shame that’s been hanging over them for the last two years, and nobody will be particularly interested in the claims of an obviously embittered auxiliary tribune to be in possession of the genuine article, not when the one you “rescued” from the Brigantes is so obviously genuine.’

Sorex met his colleague’s eye at last, and in his angry gaze Marcus could see confirmation of Scaurus’s words. The legion tribune stared back at Scaurus for a long moment before shaking his head and raising both hands before him in an apparent appeal to his colleague’s understanding.

‘What else am I to do, Rutilius Scaurus? I have no choice. Perennis holds the power of life and death over my family, and any failure to follow his instructions will bring disaster on us all. The eagle …
my
eagle … will be restored to its rightful place in the heart of the legion.’

Scaurus nodded knowingly.

‘Which is no more than I expected. And so when the three new legati arrive to take up their commands, they will find exactly what they were told to expect by their master before they rode north from Rome. Three legions camped along the length of the Emperor Hadrian’s wall in a nice compact group and with their grievances at being sent north having been neatly addressed by the pull back to this more southerly line of defence. They will find the Sixth Legion still overjoyed at the recapture of its lost eagle, and of course they will find you, as ordered, waiting for them with enough gold to award a donative of two years’ pay to every legionary in the country. Am I right?’

Scaurus looked directly into Sorex’s indignant stare for a moment before picking up the eagle that had been rescued from The Fang and turning it over, scanning the metal carefully for the tiny marks and scratches that two centuries of campaigning had inevitably worn into its surface. Putting it down again, he lifted the fake eagle and considered it equally carefully.

‘Quite excellent work, and most realistically aged too.’ He held up the metal bird, showing the fine patina of age that closely echoed that of the original. ‘So, you carried that eagle with you from Rome, with orders to restore the legion’s pride, and then you sent my cohort north on what was always intended to be a fruitless hunt after a prize you expected to have vanished in the northern mists long ago. You sent us to chase a rumour in order to carry out the last of your orders from the praetorian prefect, which was to send Centurion Corvus here to his likely death along with the rest of us, with a pair of paid assassins nice and close to him just in case the Venicones didn’t look like doing the job. And you did this because of the consequences that you knew would befall your family if you failed to carry through your orders from Rome.’

Sorex stood in silence, his face red with shame.

‘Nothing to say, Sorex? In that case I will share a suspicion with you. When these three new legati arrive to take up their commands, I suspect that it will become clear that the man behind the throne has decided to break with tradition. Where the commander of a legion would usually be from the senatorial class, these three will all be equestrians.
Equestrians
, Tribune, men without access to the highest positions in the imperium, men like me and indeed, as you’ll be painfully aware, men like Praetorian Prefect Perennis. I’m told that he’s already managed to have one of his sons put in command of the Pannonian legions, the best recruiting ground in the entire empire and so very handy for a quick march on the capital. So it’s my bet that the army in Britannia will come under equestrian command very shortly now, handed to three men who will have access to a very large amount of gold indeed, all freshly minted. Gold like this …’