Anthony Riches - The Wolf's gold

‘Run, boy! Run, and keep running!’

His captor released the grip on his hair and punched his head again, then ripped the sword’s blade across his throat, pushing the dying man away from him and staring at the petrified child’s face for a long moment. He screamed an order to his men while the farmer writhed in his death throes at his feet, pointing at the house. A pair of them ran for the steps, and with a shiver of fear Mus realised he had little time before his hiding place was revealed and he faced the same fate as his brothers. Around the house other dwellings were going up in flames, and the few remaining farmers were being slaughtered out of hand while their women were brutally violated by the rapacious groups who had dragged them from their homes. Coming to his senses as footsteps thundered on the steps above his head, he dived out of the straw’s cocoon, rushing across the hard earth floor and squirming into a hole in the wooden rear wall which he had long used to escape the attentions of his older brothers. It was a tight fit, now that he was less the child than in those happier days, and he had to push one shoulder into the hole before contorting to ease the other through the gap, scratching his flesh badly in the process. He dragged himself out of the house, getting one foot through the hole and gathering himself to spring to his feet, but a voice shouted behind him and a hand gripped at his shoe, and Mus knew that his unseen pursuer only needed to grab his leg to pull him back through the hole. Struggling desperately, he pulled his foot from the rough boot he’d inherited from the youngest of his brothers a week before, still too big to fit his foot snugly. He scrabbled away on his hands and knees and then staggered onto his feet, running hard for the trees fifty paces distant across his mother’s vegetable garden, and kicking off the other boot as he fled for the forest’s sanctuary. The old tree that held up one side of the house was in flames, and in the lurid light of its incineration Mus looked back and saw the tall warrior pointing at him, bellowing an order at the men around him.

‘Stop him!’

A spear arced over him, a flicker of polished iron in the darkness that thudded into the earth a dozen paces beyond, and an instant later another hissed past him so close that he stumbled with the shock of it and went down on one knee. Looking back he saw a dozen men and more boiling past the house with drawn swords, their shouts unintelligible but all too clear in their delight in the chase. A blaze of terror in the boy’s mind gave him one last spurt of energy, and he sprinted the last twenty paces to the trees with his pursuers catching him fast, diving into the foliage with a grateful sob. The forest was as familiar to him in the night as it was by day, for it was here that he had usually come to hide and sulk when his brothers decided to work their frustrations out on him. Several discoveries and subsequent beatings at their hands had taught him very well how to evade capture once he was inside the forest’s edge. Jinking to the left and right, his steps silenced by the carpet of needles on the forest’s floor and his body made invisible in the long shadows, he slipped into the cover of a long-familiar cluster of trees. Burrowing into the midst of a bush in whose depths he had painstakingly picked out a hole large enough to accommodate his body, he became still, calming his breathing as he listened to the men blundering haplessly about in the darkness around him.

In the space between the house’s blazing shell and the trees, the big man waited restlessly until his followers straggled back out of the forest, tapping his sword’s blade impatiently against one booted foot. They lined up and waited nervously for him to speak, their eyes shining in the fire’s ruddy light, waiting for the big man’s verdict with the strained faces of men who already knew only too well what to expect.

‘He escaped? A dozen of you, and one small child managed to get away?’ He looked along their line with a sneer of disgust. ‘You’re all cursing your fate that you weren’t lucky enough to find a woman to climb onto, and that you’ve ended up facing me as failures. And with good reason. .’ He turned back to their leader, nodding curtly. ‘The usual. They can draw lots to see who pays for their failure. And make sure whoever it is dies cleanly, there’s no need to turn an example into a spectacle.’

Striding away around the burning house he found his deputy waiting for him, and the older man fell in alongside him as they walked back down the slope through a scene of devastation, littered with the bloodied corpses of dead farmers lit by the blazing remnants of their homes. The women’s initial screams were now reduced to moans and sobs of anguish as their degradation continued without any pause other than for one man to replace another. The big man looked about him with an expression of disgust.

‘Let them have one hourglass Hadro, then beat them back into order. I want the animals butchered and salted by morning and every man ready to march. The women are to die, all of them without exception, and you are to ensure that there will be no witnesses. We seem to have allowed at least one small boy to escape, and I’ll take no more risks. If any disobedience to this command is brought to light I’ll have every man in the offender’s tent party beaten to death. Understood?’

The first spear nodded, and when he spoke his Latin was hard-edged and guttural.

‘As you wish, Prefect.’

Dacia, September, AD 183

‘You must avenge us, my son. The simple fact of your survival is not a sufficient response to the evil that festers at the heart of the empire, or to the gross indignities to which your mother and sisters were submitted before their deaths.’

Senator Appius Valerius Aquila shifted his seat with an expression of discomfort, clearly troubled by the painful joints that had beset him in the months before his son had left Rome for Britannia. In the shadows behind him his wife and daughters stood in silence, their partially visible faces free of any expression, and in the room’s darkest recess Marcus wondered if he could see his younger brother standing in equal immobility, the child’s features almost entirely lost in the gloom.

‘Father, I cannot see-’

The old man raised an eyebrow, his face taking on that lofty patrician demeanour that his son had always found so forbidding.

‘You cannot see a way to take revenge for our deaths, Marcus? You have a wife and son now, and responsibilities to the men under your command. You have discarded the name Valerius Aquila, and now live under the assumed name of Tribulus Corvus to avoid association with a family of traitors. A new life has opened itself to you, a life for which you are well skilled. And yet. .’

Marcus swallowed nervously, unable to move a muscle under his father’s scrutiny.

‘And yet?’

‘And yet, my son, all that you are now has only come about as the result of what I made you. I took you as a baby, when my friend Gaius Calidius Sollemnis was unable to care for you.’

Marcus found Legatus Sollemnis’s sword in his hand, its gold-eagle-head pommel gleaming faintly in the light of the single lamp that was struggling for life while the darkness pressed in all around. He spoke quickly, almost absurdly eager for some approval from the man who had raised him to adulthood.

‘Father, I took revenge for the legatus after his betrayal by the praetorian prefect’s son Titus. I pursued his murderer Calgus to the edge of the empire and beyond. I crippled him and left him for the wolves.’

‘It was simple circumstance which gave you the gift of revenge for your birth father, my son. Retribution for the destruction of your true family cannot depend on Fortuna’s whims. You must travel to the heart of the empire, and hunt down every man that took any part in our murder. Until you do this you will never be able to openly raise my grandson under our proud name of Valerius Aquila. Do you wish for him to grow to adulthood under an assumed name? But worse than that stain on our honour, you will be forever at the mercy of the conscience that I worked so hard to instil in you while you were still young. Think back, Marcus, past the skill at arms I had the gladiator and the soldier pummel into you until you were a match for either of them with sword or fist. Do you not remember our discussions on the subjects of ethics and philosophy?’