Altar of Blood: Empire IX (45 page)

‘To a place I agreed with Dolfus would be our meeting place tomorrow. I chose it because it is rarely visited by the Angrivarii, who believe it to be haunted by the spirits of the legionaries who were killed as they fought their way across it, under constant attack by the men of five tribes led by the traitor Arminius.’

‘Traitor?’ The Briton frowned. ‘He was a German, wasn’t he?’

The older man shook his head.

‘Only by birth. He was taken hostage at an early age, ransomed to ensure his father the king’s support in the wars against the other tribes, which meant that he was given a Roman education and grew to manhood as a member of the civilised world. The emperor granted him equestrian status, and he proved himself to be an able leader of men. Too able, in fact. He performed well in the Pannonian war, and became so well trusted that the command hierarchy of the three legions campaigning on the eastern side of the Rhenus never for one moment considered him capable of betraying them. But he did, and twenty thousand men died as a consequence. Their bones are still scattered along the route they took to flee from the German attacks, for all the good it did them. Only a handful ever lived to see Aliso.’

Varus looked about him with a shiver.

‘And the Angrivarii were part of this alliance against Rome?’

Tiro nodded, nudging his horse on with a touch of his heels.

‘Both they and the Marsi were happy to take part, and even if they were whipped back into line by Tiberius and Germanicus they remain unpredictable and dangerous, which explains our somewhat ambivalent relationship with both them and most of the other tribes on this side of the river. I’m never sure whether they’ll greet us with a smile or a drawn dagger.’ He scanned the horizon again. ‘Or both.’

Husam raised his bow once more, as a figure stood up from the cover of one of the dead horses, freezing with the arrow ready to loose as his preternaturally sharp eyesight identified his target, and the white square of linen that was held across his chest. Shaking his head in disgust he eased the last few inches of draw from the shaft, muttering to himself as he watched more Germans rise from their hiding places.

‘I should have expected such a thing.’

Raising his voice to bellow a command, he lifted the bow to reinforce the threat behind his words.

‘No more than three of you, or I will start killing you, white flag or not.’

Climbing carefully over the horse’s corpse, Qadir walked slowly forward followed closely by three more men, each of them carrying a long spear ready to strike at the captive centurion. Walking steadily towards the crippled archer the centurion raised his voice to call out to his friend in Aramaic.

‘Shoot me now, Chosen Man, while you still have the opportunity!’

Husam lowered his head for a moment and then looked up again.

‘I know I should! I have ordered Munir to grant you that mercy, should he have the opportunity to send you to the arms of the goddess, but now that I have the chance I find my arm weak.’

One of the Germans walking behind Qadir barked out a command in Latin.

‘No more of your eastern gabbling! Speak Latin!’

Husam laughed out loud, the sound ringing out across the corpse-strewn marsh.

‘Fuck you, German. I have you under my bow, and given the slightest excuse I will put an arrow into the exceptionally small space between your balls! And that’s close enough!’

The German moved sideways slightly, making sure he kept Qadir between him and the Hamian’s bow.

‘I am Gernot, Lord of the Bructeri, and I come only to talk. Will you shoot a man who speaks under a flag of truce?’

Husam shifted his good leg, grimacing at the pain that was now torturing both limbs, a combination of the injury and the discomfort of his position.

‘Not if you stay where you are! But come any closer and you will test my patience just a little too much. As for talking, there is nothing to discuss! Simply turn away, and don’t come back before dark unless you want to be dining with your ancestors this evening!’

Gernot shook his head, pointing to the tree that was holding the Hamian upright.

‘I don’t think so! You have a broken leg, which means that you can only shoot in this direction! All I have to do is send my men around you on either side and they will have you at their mercy! And mercy is a quality I’m not feeling inclined to at this point in time!’

Husam laughed again, calling out across the gap between them.

‘You make it sound so simple! Whereas we both know that the ground to either side of this wooden road is an uncharted marsh, slow going to men who do not know it! If they are to avoid my arrows they will have to cast out far out to either side, so that by the time your warriors manage to get behind me the sun will be so close to the horizon that you might just as well have sat and waited for dark!’

The German shook his head in frustration.

‘Then you leave me little choice, Easterner. Unless you surrender I will butcher this captive, here before your eyes! A man takes an uncomfortably long time to die with a spear in his liver!’

The Hamian altered his point of aim imperceptibly, loosing an arrow that flickered across the fifty-pace gap between them and stuck in the wood at Gernot’s feet with a shower of spray that spattered across the man’s legs. Another shaft was fitted to the bow’s string before any of the Germans had time to react, Husam’s iron-hard eyes waiting for any move.

‘When you threaten to kill a prisoner you forfeit the right to any idea of truce! If you take your iron to my friend I will simply put an arrow through his chest to end his suffering, and then one more in your back when you turn to run!’

Qadir raised his voice, a note of anguish at his friend’s predicament straining his words as the Bructeri behind him gripped his collar.

‘Farewell Husam, best of comrades! Mention me to the goddess when you meet her!’

Gernot retreated stony-faced, pulling his captive backwards towards the place where his warriors waited, and Husam raised his voice to call after him.

‘If you wish to save lives, Gernot of the Bructeri, you simply have to keep your men away from my bow! Send your warriors at me and I will kill another ten of you before they finish me, and I will die a happy man! It’s either that or wait me out! When the sun touches the horizon I will give my life to the goddess Atargatis, but if you want me out of your path before then my spirit will be accompanied by a good deal more of your brothers than have already gone before me!’

‘I gave the archer his chance to save this one’s life. Now we must make our threat reality!’

Amalric looked up wearily at Gernot as the two men stood in the shelter of a grove of trees a hundred paces back from the point where the ambush had begun, both the track and the ground to either side littered with the corpses of horses and their riders. The remaining warriors were huddled on the track, Gernot’s older warriors and the king’s younger men talking quietly in their own groups as they waited for the sun to set.

‘I cannot see a good reason to torture this man. It will not shake that archer’s conviction that he must prevent our passage between now and the setting of the sun.’

Gernot shook his head impatiently.

‘It will demonstrate that we mean what we say!’

The king stared at him for a long time before answering.

‘It will prove that
you
mean what you say, Uncle, but I believe that he continues to be a potential hostage to use if we fail to rescue Gerhild by force. And I have decided to keep him intact for that moment.’

Gernot stared back at him incredulously.

‘But my King …’

‘You intend to tell me that this will be seen as a sign of weakness? Of an unwillingness to treat our enemies with the necessary harshness? I consider it to be an essential denial of our usual instinct to use these people for sport, recognising that I may yet need the bargaining tool of his life.’

‘Have you forgotten the ways in which they have treated us, over the many years since our people and theirs first made war on each other? Enslaved, betrayed, murdered by the tens of thousands?’

Amalric shook his head.

‘No. I have not. And nor have I forgotten our part in the events that have led us to this point. Our neighbours manage to maintain stable relationships with Rome, for the most part, some of them with histories of violence between them and the Romans that equal ours in some respects.’

His uncle stood in amazed silence for a moment.

‘I would not have expected to hear such a sentiment from you, Amalric.’

The king nodded.

‘Our views differ, Uncle. Let us agree to put these differences aside until this pursuit is complete. You can be very sure that I will fight tooth and nail to free my seer, and to return the eagle to its rightful place in our treasury, sparing no one who stands in my way. When that has been achieved let us speak again, and see if we can find common ground as to how we should approach the dangerous beast that squats on the far side of the Rhenus.’

‘Dry ground? In this wasteland?’

Gunda raised a weary eyebrow at Cotta’s disbelieving tone.

‘Dry ground, Roman. The only dry ground large enough to take our numbers this close to the track for a day’s march or more. I have used it on several occasions, to get some relief from the incessant soaking of my feet.’

Dolfus walked his horse alongside the two men’s mounts.

‘How far is it to Angrivarii territory?’

Gunda looked up the path’s watery ribbon, tinged red by the light of the setting sun.

‘Ten miles further up this track there is dry land to be found to the right, where the ground begins to rise towards the wooded hills to the north. From there another five miles march will bring us to the place you have asked me to find. We might meet some of their tribesmen, although the Angrivarii tend to avoid the place for fear of the spirits of all the men who died as they fought their way across it, and rotted where they fell. But any men we do meet will most likely only be farmers, and not capable of fighting off thirty of my tribe’s companion warriors.’

The decurion shook his head with a snort of dark amusement.

‘They won’t be thirty strong now. The caltrops we scattered behind us must have felled several horses, and that archer of yours had the look in his eyes of a man determined to leave this life the hard way, and take some of our foes with him. Tell me, can you feel any sign of their approach in the wood?’

Gunda dropped lightly from his horse’s saddle into the track’s dank water, putting a hand onto the rough wooden surface.

‘Nothing. They must be far behind us.’

Dolfus nodded decisively.

‘In which case camping for the night on this island of dry land you describe must be the only sensible thing for us to do. Lead us to it, scout.’

Gunda led the column away from the waterlogged track, and along a narrow strip of soggy going for fifty paces or so until their footing improved to dry ground, a small rise in the land having created an island in the marsh approximately twenty paces across. With the benefit of their slight elevation they were able to see in all directions, the swamp’s waters glistening with eye-aching brilliance in the late afternoon sunlight, the landscape around them devoid of any sign of trees in any direction for several hundred paces.

‘A considerable improvement. And now I see why you had us carry firewood with us.’

Gunda nodded at Dolfus’s statement.

‘There are islands like this scattered around this area, but this is the only one for miles that can easily be reached from the road. The nearest that I know of is several hundred paces further from the road …’ He pointed to the west. ‘And the path to reach it is hard enough to find in the daylight, never mind after darkness has fallen.’

Gerhild stepped between the two men, gesturing to Scaurus who was being assisted from his horse by Arminius and Lupus, shivering uncontrollably like a man with a high fever.

‘We need fire if we are to save this man’s life. The sickness caused by his wound has come upon him again, having bided its time since the goddess defeated it last night.’

Dolfus set to organising the camp while Gunda collected the firewood that had been tied to each rider’s saddle.

‘There is enough for a small fire that will burn through the night, fed carefully.’

‘Then light it now, do what you must for him while it’s still light, and allow it to burn down to embers that can be hidden from the road with a shield. We will stick out like the balls on a sacrificial bull with a fire burning on this raised ground, and I wish to offer the men pursuing us no encouragement.’

The guide inclined his head in agreement with the decurion’s command.

‘As you wish.’ He raised a hand to indicate the cloudless sky, and the quiet that had settled across the land, its oppressive quiet making the men of the detachment speak quietly despite the absence of any ears to overhear them. ‘Although any approach down the track would be heard while the horsemen were still miles distant on a night like this.’

‘So tell me again Briton, who went north with the priestess?’

Dubnus finished chewing the mouthful of the meat that he had cooked over an open fire.

‘Your decurion and his two troopers, Tribune Scaurus, his German slave Arminius, a boy who’s his pupil, and two Hamian archers. Two centurions also rode with the tribune, a retired veteran called Cotta and my comrade Marcus Corvus.’

Tiro nodded.

‘Centurion Cotta is known to me. He has performed services for the empire before, services that involved shedding the blood of one of Rome’s highest citizens to prevent an act of treason from turning into civil war. And even if it happened twenty years ago, he’s still a man worth watching for any sign that his loyalty to the throne might be slipping.’

The big Briton shook his head.

‘Cotta? The man’s a loyal Roman to the core, a true centurion. If he spilled some senator’s blood it will have been at the express orders of his superiors.’

The older man pursed his lips, leaning back against his saddle with a contented sigh.

‘So I believe. But that isn’t always how these things work, Centurion. A man who’s killed an emperor once …’ He paused, watching the Briton’s face intently. ‘Ah, so you do know what I’m talking about.’