Get Out or Die (25 page)

Albia said, “I’m glad it isn’t Balbus. Somehow after the attack, even with his foreman lying dead in the yard, I kept hoping against hope that a friend like Balbus couldn’t be the traitor.”

“Felix is still a possibility.” Quintus looked at me. “Isn’t he?”

“I don’t think so. He was beside himself, telling us about how the barbarians had broken his precious statue. He’s as much a victim as Balbus and Ennia.”

“In that case, the rebel leader has to be Vitalis,” Quintus declared. “But is he, or is he not, getting active help from his father?”

“He must be,” Albia said. “He wasn’t at the secret meeting, and we agreed the Shadow of Death must have been there, or how would he know the password?”

“No!” Quintus exclaimed. “Not necessarily. We’ve got it all wrong.
I’ve
got it all wrong.”

“Gods alive! Did you hear that, Albia? I could have sworn he said he’d got something wrong!”

“Be serious and listen! I assumed that the Shadow of Death has betrayed the password as a kind of boast of how clever he is, knowing all the secret plans made at that meeting. But it did strike me as odd behaviour for such an intelligent rebel leader—and he
is
intelligent, that’s what makes him so dangerous. Now if someone else got hold of the password, someone not at the meeting, then by making it public, he’d be throwing suspicion onto everyone who actually
was
there. Sowing seeds of confusion and doubt among you all—as he has done.”

“By someone else, you mean Vitalis,” Albia said. “But how could he discover the secret password? Relia, could he have overheard the meeting?”

“Definitely not. We checked to see there were no eavesdroppers outside.”

“Later on then?” she persisted. “Silvanius might have been talking about it in the house afterwards, with Felix, or with his secretary, not realising that Vitalis was listening.”

“Or one of Vitalis’ slaves was listening, more likely,” Quintus put in. “He’s bound to have his own personal servants at the villa, and if he’s the Shadow of Death, they’ll be well used to spying on Silvanius, collecting information for the rebels. Silvanius might just be cautious in front of another Roman, even his own son. But slaves come and go around the house all the time, and you hardly notice them.”

I pictured that vast villa, with its numerous rooms and its large retinue of slaves. “That’s the answer, I’m sure of it. Vitalis’ men could easily spy on Silvanius. It wouldn’t occur to him to lock up his confidential letters, or to check for eavesdroppers every time he dictated something to his secretary.”

“It’s a good case,” Quintus conceded. “Only one thing worries me. He’s so openly in sympathy with the rebels. I’d have expected a traitor to be less obvious about it.”

“Oh really, Quintus,” I objected, “now you’re looking for complications just for the sake of it. You’ve got to face it—sometimes the simple solution is the right one, and the simple solution here is that Vitalis is the Shadow of Death.”

“All right,” he agreed, “but the gods alone know how we’re going to prove it.”

Chapter XXIII

The afternoon was deadly quiet; the money from bar sales wouldn’t have kept a slave in cabbage stalks. We got various odd jobs done, and Albia and I managed a couple of hours’ sleep each, while Quintus went off to “see one or two contacts.” I checked round outside in the late afternoon, not that there was anything to check, but I felt like a change of scene. In the stable yard I found young Milo, sitting on a pile of straw, taking his ease. Nothing remarkable about that, except that he had something in his hand, and when he saw me he slipped it under his tunic to hide it.

“What have you got there, Milo?” I asked, thinking I’d probably found the arch-villain who had been pinching the plums.

The boy muttered something, I couldn’t hear what, and looked mulish.

“I said, what have you got there?” I walked up closer.

“Nothing, Mistress.”

That sort of reply is calculated to arouse suspicion. “Show me,” I ordered.

“It’s a secret.”

“You don’t keep secrets from me, boy. Now let’s see it.”

Slowly, reluctantly, he brought out a knife. I felt a shock of recognition as I saw how the sun glanced off its long, narrow blade and gleamed on the jet inlay in its handle. Just as it had done when I’d seen it last, sticking out of the body of Quintus’ dead horse.

“
Merda,
Milo! Where did you get that knife?”

“It’s mine.”

I felt a sudden jolt of excitement. I stared at him, willing him to tell me the truth, yet trying not to show how desperately I wanted to know who had given it to him. “Oh really? I think you stole it!”

“No!” He looked frightened. “I didn’t! Tribune Marius gave it to me. But I haven’t to tell anyone. It’s supposed to be a secret.”

Marius?
That was Marius’ knife? I heard in my head Marsus’ dying words, “The tribune did this….” Well now there could be no doubt
which
tribune.

But did young Milo know Marius was a traitor? Surely not. He wasn’t the brightest of lads, but I’d always thought he was loyal.

“Why a secret, Milo?”

“He said the other lads would be jealous and take it off me.”

“When did he give you it?”

“After the barbarians attacked us. He said it was a reward for fighting well.”

If there’s one thing that angers me more than another, it’s taking advantage of youngsters. If Marius had wanted to be rid of that very recognisable knife, why couldn’t he simply have thrown it away? To give it to Milo….He’d put the boy at risk. And he’d taken a risk for himself too. Well, he’d soon be facing the consequences.

“He was good to me,” Milo added. “He wanted to give me a present. I’d seen it in his room. I asked if I could have it. At first he didn’t want to, but then….I persuaded him.” He looked down, twisting the jet-inlaid handle between his hands.

“He was good to me….” I could guess what that meant, knowing Marius. Milo was a plain boy, big and square with mouse-coloured hair and solemn blue eyes, not Marius’ type at all, you’d think. Unless he’d wanted to find out about the detailed workings of our stables….

“Does he take you to bed, Milo?”

He blushed and nodded, still not looking at me.

“And I suppose you tell him all your secrets?” I tried to make it sound light and casual, but the lad looked genuinely shocked.

“Secrets? Of course not! I don’t
know
any secrets! He’s just interested in me, and in my work—how we look after the animals, what sort of shifts we do, things everybody knows. He says I’m good with the horses, and he can help me get into the cavalry if I want.”

“Well, you are good with the horses,” I conceded. “But nobody knows the future.” I suddenly felt sorry for Milo. He’d been made a fuss of by a handsome young officer, and presumably thought he was in love. And all the while he was being used. But this wasn’t the time to tell him. Marius must get no inkling of the fact that I now knew him for what he was.

“May I keep the knife?” the boy asked. “If I make sure it stays a secret?”

“Yes, all right. But Marius gave you good advice—don’t go showing it off to anyone. If I see you with it again, you’ll have to hand it over to me. Now, haven’t you got work to do?”

Actually he hadn’t much; none of us had. I finished my walk and went back inside.

When I told Albia what Milo had said, she was overjoyed. “I told you it wasn’t Junius,” she said triumphantly, and added that she’d find us some special wine to celebrate with when Marius was firmly under arrest. It seemed to me at least possible that Junius could still be involved with his friend, but I didn’t say so to Albia.

Quintus came home shortly after, and he was delighted too. “Well done! This is just the breakthrough we need! I wonder if Junius knows what’s going on. I shouldn’t be surprised….I’ll arrest Marius as soon as he shows up. Oh, this is excellent news, Aurelia! At last I’ve got something positive for Lucius. There’s been so little to report. I’m afraid he must be thinking I’ve been malingering up here.”

“Whereas you’ve been incredibly busy, loitering in taverns and chatting up peasant girls in woodland glades.”

“Not all the time. For one thing, I saw Hawk—well, to be truthful, he saw me. He said to tell you the tribunes spent most of today hunting, but have left off now, and gone down to that old roundhouse by the river.”

“I wish they’d come home. Then you can arrest Marius.”

“Yes, and if I can get him to confirm that Vitalis is a part of the rebellion, I can round him up too….You know, at last I feel this investigation is getting somewhere. I’m going to write to Lucius straight away, and send it off first thing tomorrow.”

I wished I could share his happiness, but truth to tell, the more I thought about what Marius had done, and was presumably still doing, the more depressing I found it. He’d betrayed his army comrades—his friend Junius, and also the ambushed pay convoys—and he had betrayed us; he’d tried to get us all killed when the mansio was attacked. To me, a centurion’s daughter, treachery like that is hateful, and the idea of such a man being under my roof was horrible.

To cheer myself up, I went to see my horses. I walked round the various paddocks, looking over them all, making a fuss of the new foals and letting them get to know me. It always makes me happy and relaxed, being with the animals, which are so much less complicated than people. This year’s crop of foals were beauties. Our horse-breeding programme was beginning to show results.

The two dogs, Lucky and Dancer, came with me, but disappeared into the trees chasing small game. I went into the round stone byre, now thankfully clean of green paint, determined to make sure all was in order. Occasionally in the summer, vagrants slept in it, though it must be pretty draughty, because we’d taken out part of the front wall to make it easy for the animals to shelter there. But today there were no signs of intruders. The byre was partly boarded out to make a hay-loft above, and I debated scrambling up to check in the hay, but I’d need a ladder, and there wasn’t one handy. It could wait another day.

And then a horse screamed in the paddock, a horrible sound that turned my blood to ice. I ran outside and saw one of the foals lying on the ground thrashing about, with an arrow sticking out of its side.

I was consumed with anger, far too furious to be afraid. My horses are precious, and the thought of the Shadow-men trying to kill them in broad daylight wiped all caution from my mind. I looked round; there was nobody to be seen. Well then, I’d go and find the bastards myself. Then another arrow flew towards me. It missed, but not by much.

“No!” I yelled. “No, you don’t hurt my horses.
NO!”
And I began to race across the field towards the trees, the direction the second arrow had come from. As I ran full pelt, a separate detached bit of my mind said, “Run crooked! Twist and turn!”, the words Lucius used to call to me when we played at soldiers as children. I swerved to the left, and as I did so an arrow whizzed past my right ear, so near I felt the breeze of it flying by. But I was still much too angry to be scared. I just thought, I’ve got the direction right, and I tore on faster than ever, in a series of irregular curves but still making for the trees. By the time I got across the big field, two more arrows had passed me, quite close but not close enough.

I was yelling like a Fury, telling the bowman what I’d do when I caught him, and my screeching scattered the horses in all directions, and brought the two dogs out. They raced ahead of me, barking fiercely. They looked alarming, and might scare the bowman off. Except if they frightened him away, I wouldn’t be able to get my hands on him….

Then with the very tail of my eye I caught a flicker of movement in the trees over to my left, but I couldn’t stop to pay any attention to it. “If there’s more than one of them,” that detached cool voice in my mind said, “you’re done for.” But I was seized by a kind of battle-lust, the sort of thing I’ve heard soldiers describe, but a quite new sensation for me. I was carried along on a wave of exultation, and I wasn’t going to stop till I’d destroyed my enemies, or they’d destroyed me. And I felt invincible; I was the one who’d do the destroying. Soldiers must feel like this, otherwise nobody would ever go into battle more than once.

As I ran into the trees the man with the bow was standing there, an arrow ready on his string. I recognised him, the white-haired man from the gang that ambushed us in the woods. Then I saw a black blur as Lucky leapt at his throat and knocked him down, and Dancer’s grey shape as she started to worry at his face. I heard him scream, and I yelled, “Kill, dogs! Kill! Kill!” Neither dog had ever killed a man, but the bastard didn’t know that.

Then there was a noise in the trees to my left, and a second man was hurtling towards me, with a drawn sword. It was Veric, the scar-faced leader of the ambush party. Knowing his name gave me inspiration.

“Veric! Drop your sword! Drop it, Veric, and I’ll call my dogs off! Otherwise they’ll kill your pal there!”

The man on the ground screamed, “Veric! Help me!” He was rolling about trying to throw the dogs off him, and I hoped they were both taking large chunks out of him, but dared not turn to look. Veric hesitated, and I could have yelled for joy. He should have charged me first, put me out of action, and then gone to help his comrade, that’s what a professional would have done. He’d had me at his mercy, but his indecision had lost him the chance. And now another scream split the air, as Lucky buried his teeth in the man’s neck.

Frightened by the screaming and probably by the anger he could see in my face, Veric dropped his sword and raised his arms in the air. I grabbed the weapon and held it in both hands. It was too heavy for me, but I was angry enough to have wielded a barbarian double-axe.

I whistled at the dogs, and amazingly they stopped attacking. It looked impressive, but probably it was just that the fallen man was lying still now, blood all over his face and chest, so the hounds stood still too, looming over him and daring him to move a muscle.

Veric wasn’t done yet. I saw him go tense and instinctively flung myself to the right as he sprang at me, hands outstretched like claws. I held the sword straight out pointing at his belly, so he couldn’t come in too close, but he circled round me, forcing me to keep moving, hoping I’d stumble on a tree-root and give him an opening. There was every chance of it too; the ground was uneven and I wasn’t exactly used to this sort of thing. Now that the battle-fever was leaving me I began to be afraid, and I hadn’t the faintest clue what to do next.

Then I caught another quick flash of movement in the trees, directly behind Veric. I couldn’t see anyone there, but it must be another enemy. Gods, I thought, I’m finished. I can’t deal with more of them while Veric’s still on his feet, and I haven’t the skill to kill him. I hoped I’d be able to give one of them a serious wound before they got me.

Then that cool detached voice, which was like Lucius talking in my head, spoke again. “If he’s hiding, he must be a friend. Hold on, and keep Veric busy. Help’s coming!”

And as the thought came to me, a voice, a real voice this time, roared out: “Stand still, you scum. Freeze!” It was like a centurion’s bellow on a parade ground, and instinctively Veric half-turned. I raised the sword, preparing to stab him, but there was a hissing noise, a silver streak flew through the air, and a long, thin knife caught him in the cheek. He cried out, clutching at his face, but I wasn’t watching him really; my eyes were on Quintus, who was emerging from the trees with his sword in his hand.

He ran to us, stabbed Veric expertly up through the chest, watched the body fall, and pulled his sword out, all without a word. Then he turned to me.

“Hello, Aurelia.” He smiled as if we’d met in the course of an evening stroll. “Having trouble?”

“I’m fine, now, Quintus. Thanks for your help.”

“My pleasure.”

I bent to pick up his thin-bladed knife, which had fallen to the ground. As I reached for it, my eye was caught by a boot-print near Veric’s body. The ground was thick with them, of course, but this one happened to be easy to spot. It was from a left boot, with a worn heel and part of the stitching missing from the sole. So Veric was one of the men who attacked Quintus. I pointed it out to him, and he said, “I’ll look soon. First let’s deal with the other man.”

I called the dogs away, and Quintus bent over him briefly, and nodded. “Your hounds have finished him off.”

“Good.”

“Lucky they were with you. I’m sorry I couldn’t get to you sooner. I had to keep in cover and work my way round to you. I was near the stables when I heard you yelling, and I saw you run across the field, but there was no point both of us behaving like idiots.”

I stared at him. “Is that what I did? Behaved like an idiot?”

He cleaned his sword-blade on Veric’s tunic, then surveyed me like a drill-master looking at the lowliest recruit. “Racing across open ground, charging blind straight into the enemy when you couldn’t see them….It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”

“You must have led a very sheltered life then,” I snapped. “In my book, it’s not stupid to take risks, if you’re defending something you value.”