Anthony Riches - The Eagle's Vengeance

‘News of our return to the province will have gone before us, Julius; you can be assured that the return of two full cohorts of auxiliaries will be of great interest to the governor’s staff. You know as well as I do that there are never enough soldiers to go around. For all we know there might well be senior officers waiting for us when we dock, backed up by a century or two of legionaries fresh from battering the Brigantes back into an appropriate state of subservience. We have to face the possibility that the imperial arrest warrant in the name of Marcus Valerius Aquila, formerly of the praetorian guard, might by now also mention that the fugitive senator’s son is going under the alias of Centurion Marcus Tribulus Corvus of the First Tungrian Cohort. After all, there’s been more than enough time for the authorities to make the connection between those two names, especially when you stop to consider the fact that it’s been over a year since we allowed that blasted corn officer Excingus to escape with the knowledge of our colleague’s true identity.’

The light of realisation dawned on Julius’s face.

‘And that’s why we’re travelling on this warship, rather than wallowing around on the sea with the rest of the men in those bloody awful troop ships? And why we’ve shipped four tent parties of the biggest, nastiest men in the cohort along with their distinctively unpleasant centurion.’

The last of the officers grinned jovially down at him, his voice a bass growl.

‘Well spotted, little brother.’

Scaurus nodded, his face an impassive mask despite the urge to laugh at the effortless way in which Titus, commander of the Tungrians’ pioneer century, got away with treating his first spear like an uppity younger sibling.

‘Indeed it is, First Spear. If we face a welcoming committee, then it may be small enough to be faced down by my rank and your men’s muscle long enough to see Centurion Corvus here safely away into the hills. And if, in the worst case, we’re greeted by too many men to bluff or bully into submission, then our young colleague here can at least surrender with his dignity intact, and without his wife watching or his soldiers indulging in any noble but doomed heroics.’

He turned sharply to his bodyguard who was lurking a few feet away with a look of inscrutability, although long experience told him that the German would have heard every word.

‘That goes for you too, Arminius.’

The tribune’s German bodyguard grunted tersely, staring morosely out into the fog.

‘You will forgive me if I do not promise to follow your command absolutely in this matter, Rutilius Scaurus? You know that I owe the centurion-’

‘A life? How could I forget? Every time I turn around to look for you you’re either teaching the boy Lupus how to throw sharp iron about or away watching the centurion’s back as he wades into yet another unequal fight. I sometimes wonder if you’re still actually my slave …’

A trumpet note sounded far out in the fog that wreathed the silent sea’s black surface, muffled to near inaudibility by the clinging vapour, followed by another, higher in pitch, and the warship’s captain stepped forward with a terse nod.

‘That’s the Arab Town horn. Seems we’re making landfall just as planned, Tribune. Your feet will soon be back on solid ground, eh gentlemen?’

Titus put a spade-like hand on Marcus’s shoulder.

‘Never fear, little brother, whether there’s one man or a thousand of them waiting for you, you’ll not be taken while my men and I have wind in our lungs.’

His friend shook his head, and shrugged without any change of expression.

‘No, Bear, not this time. If there are men waiting for me then I’ll surrender to them meekly enough, rather than adding more innocent blood to my bill. And besides, the dreams still tell me that my destiny awaits me in Rome, whether I like it or not.’

Dubnus nodded, his voice taking on a helpful tone.

‘It’s true. He was rolling around in his scratcher for half the night and muttering on about something or other to do with revenge. I put it down to the amount of the captain’s Iberian that he’d consumed earlier in the evening, while I was cursing him for a noisy bastard and trying to get to sleep myself …’

Marcus nodded with a sad smile.

‘It’s a rare night when my father doesn’t rise from the underworld in order to remind me that I am yet to pay Praetorian Prefect Perennis out for the deaths of my family, while our departed colleague Carius Sigilis fingerpaints the same accusatory words in his own blood across whatever flat surface he finds in the dream.’

Julius and Dubnus rolled their eyes at each other.

‘Those words being “The Emperor’s Knives” , right?’

Marcus nodded at Dubnus’s question. Sigilis, a legionary tribune who had served alongside the Tungrians as they had fought at the sharp end of the struggle to beat off a Sarmatae incursion into Dacia, had named the men who he believed had murdered Senator Aquila and slaughtered his family in the days before he himself had died bloodily at the hands of tribal infiltrators. He had told the young centurion that he had heard the story from the mouth of an informer hired by his own father, a distinguished member of the senatorial order whose disquiet at the increasing frequency of financially motivated judicial assassinations under the new emperor, Commodus, had led him to commission a discreet investigation into the matter.

‘Yes Julius, it’s still the same message after all the months that we spent making our way back down the Danubius and the Rhenus. The shades of the departed still harass me night after night, hungry for blood to repay their own, and for revenge which can only be taken in Rome, it seems. I’ll admit that I grow weary of their persistence on the subject, when it seems unlikely I will ever see the city of my birth again in this lifetime.’

The Arab Town port’s foghorn blew again, the mournful notes distant in the clinging mist, and Marcus turned to stare out at the seemingly impenetrable grey veil.

‘So if my time for capture and repatriation has come, I will accept that fate without a fight. It seems to me that I’ve been running long enough.’

‘Only in Britannia, eh Tribune?’

‘Quite so, Prefect Castus. Quite so …’

The younger of the two men standing on the Arab Town dockside hunched deeper into his cloak, pulling the garment’s thick woollen hood over his head with a despairing look up into the fog that wreathed the port’s buildings. His companion, a shorter and stockier man who seemed comfortable enough in the wind’s chill, shot him an amused look and then glanced around at the three centuries of hard-bitten legionaries waiting in a long double line behind them. Apparently satisfied with what he saw, he resumed his vigil across the harbour’s almost invisible waters, waiting until the foghorns had been blown again before speaking again.

‘Yes, Fulvius Sorex, only in Britannia could the fog be quite this impenetrable. Thirty years of service to Rome has taught me that every province has its endearing little characteristics, those features a man never forgets once he’s experienced them. In Syria it was the flies that would crawl onto the meat in your mouth while you were chewing, given half a chance. In Judea it was the Jews, and their bloody-minded resentment of our boots on their land almost a century after Vespasian finally crushed their resistance into the dust. In Pannonia it was the cold in winter, harsh enough to freeze a river solid all the way down to its bed, and in Dacia …’

He fell silent, and after a moment the younger man glanced round to find his companion staring out into the fog with an unfathomable expression.