Rome’s Fallen Eagle (17 page)

News of the sentries’ disappearance and probable murder spread throughout the column as it formed up not long after and it was with an increased air of trepidation that they moved out of the camp, keeping just east of north, down a gentle slope.

‘So do you think that it could be the Chatti carrying on their blood-feud with the Batavians?’ Magnus asked after the brothers had filled him in on the history between the two tribes.

Sabinus shook his head. ‘Unlikely. The Chatti’s lands start after the Moenus; they don’t live near the Rhenus so what would they have been doing there in the first place?’

‘Galba told me that he had repulsed a war band raiding across the river earlier this year,’ Vespasian informed them, ‘so they do stray this far west.’

Sabinus shrugged. ‘Well, even if they do, how would they have known that six boatloads of Batavians were going to be landing where we did?’

‘Fair point,’ Magnus acknowledged, ‘but someone did and that someone is following us. I’ve a nasty suspicion that those sentries ain’t going to be the last men to go missing on this trip.’

‘I’m afraid that you might be right, Magnus.’ Sabinus turned his head and peered into the shadow-ridden forest. ‘Even my Lord Mithras’ light has trouble piercing that gloom; without his constant protection whoever is trailing us will have a far easier time of it.’ He suddenly loosened his sword in its scabbard. A couple of Batavian outriders came into view, flitting through the trees; he let go of the hilt. ‘But what’s their objective? Are they trying to scare us off?’

‘Scare us off from what?’ Vespasian questioned. ‘How would they know where we’re going? I keep on thinking about how they found us when we landed at random in the middle of the night on the eastern side of the river.’

‘Yeah well, I think that I can answer that,’ Magnus replied. ‘They couldn’t have been waiting because they wouldn’t have known where to wait, so they must have followed us. Now, they couldn’t have started on the eastern bank because they wouldn’t have seen us come out of the harbour at night; so they had to be either in the port, in which case we would have noticed them, or already on the river slightly upstream, that way they could have tagged along behind us without our seeing.’

Vespasian digested this for a few moments and then nodded as the column broke into a trot. ‘Yes, I think you’re right. In which case whoever it is knew that we would be sailing from Argentoratum but nobody there knew that until the day before.
More to the point, nobody knew that we would be leaving almost as soon as we arrived.’

‘Unless they were told before we arrived.’

‘But who else here knew what we were planning to do?’

‘No one here, but I can think of three people back in Rome who knew.’

‘Claudius’ freedmen?’

Magnus nodded.

‘But they’ve got a vested interest in our success. They wouldn’t want to jeopardise the mission; it was their idea.’

‘Then you tell me who else knows that we’re here apart from your family?’

‘Just Galba,’ Vespasian admitted, flummoxed, ‘but I didn’t tell him exactly where we were going. And why would he want to help the Chatti? He hates them. Mind you, he hates everyone who can’t trace their family back to the founding of the Republic.’

‘Halt!’ Paetus called from just in front of them.

‘What is it?’ Vespasian asked, following Paetus’ gaze.

Up ahead the trees thinned considerably, letting far more light in through the canopy in thick, golden shafts, dazzling them after so long in the relative gloom.

Paetus pointed in front of them to a couple of saplings no more than six feet tall, directly in their path, twenty paces away. Vespasian squinted; as his eyes got used to the bright light he realised that each tree bore one horrific, round fruit.

‘Cut them down,’ Paetus ordered the two guides next to him.

The two Batavians edged their horses forward nervously, towards the severed heads suspended within the branches of the small trees. As they approached, one of the horses caught a front hoof on an obstruction hidden beneath the leaf mulch. There was a loud crack, followed by the creaking of swaying rope; two dark shadows swung down from above, flicking through the streaks of sunlight, directly at the troopers. Their mounts shied, whinnying shrilly, hurling them backwards, as the right-hand shape thumped into one horse; the other narrowly missed the second horse, to continue its arc towards the head of the column.
It brushed the forest floor, scattering dead leaves, and then swung upwards, oozing liquid as it did, until its momentum was lost; it hung for a moment in midair and Vespasian looked up at the headless corpse of one of the sentries as he fought to control his spooked mount. Droplets of noisome fluid splashed down from the gaping neck, further unsettling the mounts below, as the body arced back down towards the two riderless horses; they could take no more and bolted.

‘This is starting to piss me off,’ Magnus complained; behind him the column was in disarray as panic swept through the animals.

Vespasian leapt from his horse, narrowly avoiding the stamping back hooves of Paetus’ mount, and ran towards the line of the body’s swing as it came creaking back at him. He braced himself on his left leg and stuck out his right so that the sole of his sandal met the corpse’s chest as it swung through the perpendicular, forcing his knee to bend on impact and throwing him onto his back. He landed with a jolt and immediately raised his head to see the corpse dangling, rotating slightly, next to the second suspended body; both had their arms bound across their chests and a dagger was secured with a length of twine in each right hand. Before he had time to ponder the weird sight, screams of pain and screeching of wounded horses rose above the shouting and whinnying; he looked back to see arrows spitting out of the trees and into the column. A few men and horses fell to be trampled where they lay writhing as the salvo carried on for no more than ten heartbeats before stopping as abruptly as it had started.

Looking to the direction whence the arrows came, Vespasian caught a glimpse of some shadowy figures fleeing on foot. ‘Paetus, we could catch them,’ he shouted, jumping to his feet and looking for his horse; it was nowhere to be seen.

‘With me!’ Paetus bellowed above the din to the steadiest troopers nearest him. He kicked his horse forward; it responded immediately, pleased to be driven from the scene of terror. A dozen Batavians followed their prefect into the shadows; they were soon out of sight.

Vespasian went to grab Sabinus’ mount’s bridle and helped to calm the beast as Magnus and Ziri both dismounted, gently
rubbing their horses’ flanks as they began to settle down. Gradually a semblance of calm spread throughout the turmae with just the moans of the wounded and the snorting of unsteady, skittish horses to disturb the air.

Ansigar appeared through the disarray of the column. ‘We’ve lost three dead and five wounded, one badly, and four horses, sir,’ he reported. ‘Where’s the prefect?’

‘Chasing our attackers,’ Vespasian answered. ‘Here, let me show you something.’ He led the decurion to the dangling corpses; the two unseated guides were getting painfully to their feet and staring at the macabre sight. ‘What do you make of that?’ he asked, pointing at the daggers in the corpses’ right hands. ‘Your man, Rothaid, was found clutching his sword, un-blooded, as if it had been placed there.’

Ansigar smiled without humour, smoothing his long, wellcombed beard. ‘That’s because it
was
placed there.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘It means that we are fighting honourable men.’

‘You call sneaking up on people and murdering them honourable?’

‘These men don’t condemn their victims to wander the earth as shapeless forms after their death. By placing a weapon in their hands when they die, they guarantee that the All-Father Wotan’s shield maidens will find them and take them to Walhalla to feast and fight until the final battle.’

‘So it’s just a religious thing, then, and has no significance for us to worry about?’

‘It has a great significance: it means that whoever is preying upon us is definitely Germanic, but their argument is not with us Batavians. If it was they wouldn’t worry about the niceties of caring about our afterlife. Their argument must be with what we represent: Rome.’

Warning shouts came from the forest and Paetus soon appeared leading his men back in.

‘Did you get them?’ Vespasian asked the prefect as he swung off his horse.

‘One of them.’

Behind him the troopers dismounted; they heaved a dead body off the rump of one of the horses and flung it face up on the ground. He was in his mid-twenties; his blond hair was tied in a top knot and the obligatory beard was streaked with blood. He wore only plain brown woollen trousers and leather boots, leaving his swirling-tattooed chest bare and slick with the blood seeping from a spear-thrust to his heart. There was a thick silver arm ring just above his right elbow.

‘How many were there?’

‘About twenty.’ Paetus looked down at the body, shaking his head. ‘He turned to fight us to allow the others time to get away, it was suicidal. By the time we killed him the rest had disappeared into the forest as if it just swallowed them up.’

Ansigar knelt down and lifted the flowing beard; under it, around the man’s neck, was a metal band almost a hand’s breadth wide. He spat in disgust. ‘There’s only one tribe that wears an iron collar; this man’s Chatti.’

CHAPTER VIII

F
OR THREE DAYS
the column moved on as fast as it could, crossing into the lands of the Chatti, and for three nights their ethereal hunters preyed upon them, taking men seemingly at will during the hours of darkness without ever revealing themselves. Indeed, there had been no sign of them since the ambush, but their brooding presence was confirmed every morning by the slowly dwindling number of auxiliaries at muster and the grisly finds of decapitated bodies in their path later in the day. On the second night, in an attempt to stem the flow of silent death, Paetus had ordered a doubling of the guard so that the sentries patrolled in fours, but to no avail: four men died that night. On the third night he had set no sentries around the perimeter of the camp, keeping them instead patrolling amongst their sleeping comrades; a man had still somehow disappeared.

‘Every day they manage to leave the bodies three or four miles along our route,’ Vespasian observed as they stood surveying the latest headless auxiliary nailed to the thick trunk of an oak. ‘They must know where we’re headed for.’

‘And that’s something that only Pallas, Narcissus and Callistus knew,’ Magnus pointed out, swatting away one of the many flies that had been attracted by the stench of death.

Sabinus frowned, mystified. ‘It just makes no sense. Why would Narcissus spare me for a task that he’s going to try and sabotage?’

‘It don’t have to be him, it could be either Pallas or Callistus,’ Magnus suggested.

‘Have him cut down and buried,’ Paetus ordered Ansigar as he remounted.

Ansigar barked a couple of orders in his harsh tongue and a group of frightened-looking auxiliaries came forward and began their unpleasant task, muttering sullenly amongst themselves.

‘The men won’t stand for much more of this, Paetus,’ Vespasian said, swinging himself up onto his horse next to the prefect. ‘How much longer are we going to be in the Chatti’s lands?’

‘Another day according to the guides. We need to cross the Adrana River and then it’s comparatively flat and mostly cultivated terrain to the Amisia in the Cherusci’s lands. So hopefully we’ll be able to pick up a bit of speed.’

‘And be more exposed.’

Paetus shrugged. ‘So will whoever’s tracking us.’

Vespasian thought of how their tormentors had managed to stay so elusive in the past days. ‘I very much doubt it, Paetus.’

As the sun reached its zenith they finally broke out of the forest onto undulating pasture; there were a few mean dwellings scattered around in the middle distance, with pasture fields surrounding them in which cows grazed. After the endless trees of the forest it seemed like a wonderfully spacious, sunlit paradise where one could breathe easily and not have to be constantly peering into the shadows looking for an unseen enemy.

‘The Adrana is less than a quarter of an hour’s ride north of here, prefect,’ one of the guides informed Paetus, pointing to a long hill a mile ahead of them. ‘We should be able to see it from the top of that. However, we can’t ford this river; we’ll have to swim across.’

‘I’m well overdue a bath,’ Paetus replied cheerily. ‘Ansigar, send a four-man patrol ahead of us to find out whether our mysterious friends are holding the river against us.’

As the patrol galloped away, Paetus led the rest of the column off at a canter. Vespasian kicked his horse forward, feeling invigorated by the space; his fear of being too exposed to unfriendly eyes was for the moment overtaken by the relief at finally being able to travel at some speed. ‘I’m looking forward to washing the smell of the forest off my skin.’

Magnus did not look so sure. ‘Nothing good ever came out of swimming a river, especially wearing these.’ He rubbed his chain mail tunic. ‘They ain’t designed for buoyancy.’

‘Take it off and strap it to your horse, it’ll be able to support it.’

Magnus grunted and turned to Ziri who was riding next to him. ‘How’s your swimming, Ziri?’

‘I don’t know, master, I’ve never tried.’

‘Fucking great! This is not going to be the time to learn.’

The column pounded over the grassland, climbing steadily until they reached the top of the hill. Paetus reined in his horse; Vespasian slowed next to him and shaded his eyes against the glare. Below them, a couple of miles away, a river meandered through verdant countryside irregularly divided up into fields. Its banks were mainly lined with a thick layer of trees but here and there they were open, revealing a slow-running, sedimenttainted body of water. The four-man patrol was already a third of the way to it. Beyond it were fields and copses for as far as the eye could see; a fat land brimming with agriculture.