Marius' Mules V: Hades' Gate (2 page)

The first he had realised that something was wrong had been when the rope suddenly tautened across the forest trail, unhorsing him and sending him onto his back in the two-foot-deep snow, knocking the wind and the sense from him.

By the time he had struggled out of the white grave that had claimed him and peered through the thick, drifting flakes trying to take stock of what had happened, his horse had gone, charging off down the trail ahead, screaming with the pain of some unseen wound.

Spinning round, he had desperately sought his companions.

"Tarvos? Icorix?"

But as his vision resolved the shapes through the snow, he knew they wouldn't answer. The shapes of thrashing horse's legs rose above the white blanket that covered the world, attesting the violent and crippling wounding of the poor noble beasts. The bulky, heavy shape of Tarvos he could just make out, the big, bull-like warrior clutching his throat with both hands as a jet of dark liquid sprayed out to melt the snow. Icorix was in similar trouble, staggering backwards through the snow, gripping the shaft of the pilum that jutted from his chest, the point faintly visible as a needle projecting from between his shoulder blades.

Both were as good as dead already.

Panic had gripped Botovios then: panic on so many levels. Panic that he was alone and virtually unarmed. Panic that unless he could flee to somewhere safe he was almost certainly about to die. Panic that his vital message would not get through to the chieftains gathered at Trebeto. Panic that that very message would find its way into the hands of the beast-spawn, whore-son that was Caesar of the Romans.

Panic.

Botovios had fled, but not before he had seen the shapes of two armoured nightmares emerging from the treelines, growing as they closed on the scene like demons from some childhood tale.

Everything was eerily silent in the blizzard. The only sound was the gentle flutter of the flakes falling around him, the occasional creak of a groaning branch sagging under the weight of the snow and the rhythmic crunch of his soaked boots in the calf-deep drifts.

Winter had not been kind to northern Gaul and the lands of the Belgae, and the snowfall had been disastrous to many. Here in the hills and endless woodland of Arduenna's forest even the trees had not managed to save the ground from its white shroud, such had been the regularity and severity of the snowfall. Botovios had ducked beneath the boughs of the forest proper as he had moved off the open track, hoping that the going would be easier but if anything it was more dangerous. The snow was perhaps a foot shallower beneath the branches than in the open, but it concealed the myriad dangers of tangled thorns, fallen branches and animal warrens.

Several times the young adept had fallen, tripped or become entangled. His shins were bruised and scratched, his trousers torn and bloodied, tiny pink spots melting into the snow in his deep footprints. But his pace never let up.

Despite the fact that he had seen or heard nothing of his pursuers, he knew they were there, and close. Old Obaldos had chosen him to the calling partially for his uncanny foresight and his strange kenning of things unseen. By much the same token, he knew that there were only two men following him, and not a cohort of the cursed Romans. But he also knew that those two men were every bit as deadly as a full cohort.

What he didn't understand, and could only put down to the displeasure of Arduenna, was why his uncanny sight had not warned him of the danger in the first place. Could it be that the Goddess disapproved of his mission? Of the whole plan? If she did, why would she? How could she favour the steel and bronze clad armies of the invader over her own sacred folk?

Once again, Botovios' shin struck a hidden branch in his desperate flight and he found himself pitched into the air and hurtling forwards into the snow.

His eyes widened.

Desperately, his arms and legs flailed as he saw where he was falling. Beyond the hidden branch and a few more boles the ground slipped away into a short, steep slope that then dropped into a ravine. Far below, the icy, deep and fast river that thundered along the gorge was the first sound that cut through the eerie muffling snowfall.

Botovios' heart pounded at an alarming rate as he slid, his hands grasping desperately at slippery, frozen bark. Suddenly he had a grip, one hand deep into a hole burrowed in the slope by a hibernating animal, one foot jammed against a protruding stone.

Slowly, painfully, he pulled himself back up the slope, making sure of the sturdiness of everything he gripped before putting all his weight upon it. After what felt like an hour, he reached the flat once more and located the now-protruding branch that had felled him. He was safe - from nature and the whims of Arduenna anyway. Not from the armoured shapes that he could just make out stomping inexorably through the forest.

Botovios pulled himself up and stood, almost collapsing again into the snow. His ankle had twisted in his dangerous descent and he could barely walk, let alone run.

It was over. He could no more evade and outrun these impossible steel demons than he could fly across the gorge like a graceful hawk. His hand dropped to his belt and with a sinking heart he discovered he had even lost his eating knife in the fall and slide.

What had he or his people done to anger Arduenna so? Could it be that even she, one of the most potent spirits among the Celtic people and here in her very centre of power, was actually afeared of the Gods these Romans brought with them? He knew their names. Anyone who dealt with the Romans or studied them did. Jupiter. Mars. Minerva. Neptune. And while the sacred people of Gaul devoted themselves to their deities and the Druids bridged the gap between man and God, the cursed Romans seemed to treat their own Gods as an everyday inconvenience - more like furniture than the powers that controlled all things from beyond the veil of the seen. Something has gone wrong? Spill some wine on an altar and the Goddess Minerva will put it right. Going into a battle? Promise a shrine to Mars and he'll keep you safe. All practicality and reason. No faith. No love. No service to the unseen purely because that was what they deserved.

A horrible people.

And if their Gods were that mechanical and intertwined with the mundane, how could one such as Arduenna fear them?

But something had made the Goddess withdraw her protection, for the forest might as well be trying to kill him without even the intervention of the two murderous shadows moving through the white downfall.

In a last effort to test the will of the Gods, he tried to turn and wade through the snow. His ankle screamed at him and sent white fire lancing up his leg and straight into his brain.

He fell again.

By the time he had pulled himself up to his feet once more, the two shapes had resolved into far too much detail for his liking. Officers. He knew the signs. While in other eras he would be learning the signs of nature and the ways to please the Gods, the past four years had been filled with lessons on how the enemy worked, how their army was organised and how their commanders planned campaigns. The transverse crests on the helmets of these two nightmares labelled them: centurions. Commanders of units of eighty men plus lesser officers. The backbone of the legions and the most experienced and dangerous men Rome could field.

But why two officers here with no soldiers to command?

Close enough now to make out the details. He would run if he could, but there was no chance.

The demon to the left was shorter than Botovios - like all his kind - shorter than any Gaul really, but his body was clearly muscular and lithe. His skin tone was weathered and tanned, enhanced by a growth of stubble that covered much of it and which made his one piercing ice-blue eye almost shine. The patch of recently scarred skin that sat in place of the other made it all the more disturbing.

The one to the right was slightly shorter than his companion, but wider in the shoulder and emanating an aura of the kind of power one would usually associate with a wild bull. His stubble was every bit as face-consuming as his friend's, but was a grey that almost blended with the snow around him, his eyes dark and intense as they scanned the forest.

Both men wore exactly the sort of equipment that he had seen on other centurions: a mail shirt with extra flaps at the shoulders for added protection; a helmet that almost entirely covered the man's head with a crimson crest from side to side that stood out like blood in the snow; a red tunic and kirtle of studded straps to protect the groin. And on both men a harness across the chest hung with numerous medals, discs and torcs that looked irritatingly Gaulish. They were apparently highly experienced and well-decorated men.

The only oddity was the fact that they appeared to be wearing Gaulish long trousers after the same fashion as his own and their tunic bore long sleeves, albeit both dyed red. It appeared that the invaders were assimilating facets of his own culture to aid them in their systematic destruction of all things Celtic. He could have laughed in other circumstances.

Both men had swords drawn: the short, stabbing sword - the gladius.

Both blades glistened faintly pink. Both had been blooded with the innards of Tarvos and Icorix and their horses and had been dipped in the snow not quite thoroughly enough to completely clean them.

"Stand!" one of the centurions shouted, gesturing at him with the sword.

Botovios wondered for a moment whether to feign a lack of comprehension of this unpleasant southern language, but it seemed pointless. Latin was one of the first things the Druids had begun to teach their trusted ones after the fall of the Helvetii and the suppression of the Belgae, and he had a good grasp of both it and of Greek.

"What do you want with me?" he asked nervously - he knew the answer.

"Yes… I'd like to know that." This reply came, surprisingly, from somewhere off to the left and Botovios' head shot round to see two more centurions clambering through the snow beneath the heavily-laden branches. To his small satisfaction, he realised that the new arrivals had surprised his pursuers as much as him. Irritated them too, by the looks on their faces.

"Who in Hades are you?" snapped the shorter pursuer to the newcomers.

It was farcical. Botovios had a sudden thrill as he realised there was just the faintest chance that he might get out of this alive.

"Pullo - Primus Pilus of the Fourteenth, and Vorenus, pilus prior in the same legion. And who the hell are
you
,
soldier
?" the man stressed the last word. Botovios found himself nodding. The primus pilus was the top officer in the legion's centurionate. The chances of his hunters outranking the newcomer were tiny.

"Centurions Furius and Fabius of the Seventh." A defiant note, almost daring the others to challenge over seniority.

The air almost crackled with tension. For a moment both pairs of Roman officers locked their gaze on one another and had his ankle been stronger, Botovios would have risked running for it. Instead he stood silent, waiting to see if there was any possibility that these soldiers might just fall on each other in bloodshed. The tension suggested it as a possibility.

"We've been tracking a small party of Gauls down here that we spotted on the road from the south" the Fourteenth's senior centurion said. "You would be the pair who left the two bodies back on the forest path, then?"

Suddenly the balance changed in their favour as Botovios saw the figures of numerous soldiers emerging like ghosts from the depths of the forest, armed and ready. Unlike his two original pursuers, these two officers were not without their men.

"What's your business with him?" the bull-shouldered centurion from the Seventh demanded without an ounce of the respect Botovios would expect from a junior officer to a senior.

"Our legate," something about the tone of the word 'legate' suggested that it left a sour taste in the senior man's mouth, "Lucius Munatius Plancus, has a standing brief for his patrolling centuries to apprehend and execute any Gaul we find under arms without the permission of the general or his staff."

The two centurions from the Seventh exchanged a look and the stockier one turned back to their counterparts from the Fourteenth.

"That's ridiculous! You'll have to execute the whole Gods-forsaken nation. Anyway, this lad's unarmed, so you can leave him be. Go bother the local fauna somewhere, sir."

Primus Pilus Titus Pullo bridled. He may not be happy with his orders, but to be spoken to in such a manner by a junior from another legion was pushing the bounds of acceptability.

"Unless you have a damn good reason to be after this man yourself, centurion, you'll want to still that tongue when speaking to a senior officer unless you want to find yourself being lashed within a finger width of your life back in camp."

Botovios watched, fascinated. After four years of studying the Roman military machine from a distance and through texts he was finally getting to see it operating first hand and it seemed to be nowhere near as organised and efficient as he had been led to believe. Perhaps there was a chance for Gaul after all.

The stocky centurion ripped something - a small baton or scroll case - from a pouch and tossed it over to the senior officer, who caught it deftly and turned it over to examine it.

"That's the seal of the Camp Prefect, Priscus."

"Yes. We're on a job for him. So I suspect we take precedence over your witch-hunt for pitchfork-wielding peasants. Listen, sir: no disrespect, but we've been waiting for this one for weeks, spent time setting up an ambush and plenty of effort tracing him in the first place. He's important, and I'm not about to relinquish him to you because you happened to drop by, regardless of rank."

"By Juno, centurion, your impudence knows no bounds. Take the lad, then, but I'll be reporting this incident to the Camp Prefect when we return."

Even as the primus pilus tossed the sealed object back to Furius and he and the accompanying 'Vorenus' turned back to their approaching units and waved them on, heading away into the woods, Botovios realised with an air of sad finality that it was truly over. The original pursuers were starting towards him again and any moment now, he would be in their hands. Then, doubtless, he would be broken, burned and cut until he screamed everything he knew through shattered teeth and bloodied lips. Such a thing must not happen.