Anthony Riches - The Wolf's gold

To his credit, he stood his ground as the prefect turned on him, his snarling face made bestial by the torchlight’s shadows.

‘Whoever it is down there has laid out two lines of torches and lit them one at a time from front to back, to make it look as if they were coming over a rise! You’ve been deceived, Hadro, this is no more than a ruse to distract our attention from something else! You’ — he turned to the officer who had run to fetch him from the villa — ‘take a century and reinforce the guard on the miners’ camp!’

He watched as the centurion led his century off the wall and away up the road towards the palisaded barracks, then looked out at the torches again, shaking his head at the growing number of gaps as individual lights toppled to the ground. Turning back to Hadro he looked down his nose at the man for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice was contemptuous.

‘That’s you and I done. You’ve made one mistake too many. You’re relieved of duty; go back to your tent. I’ll come and see you in the morning when this distraction has blown over, and give you enough gold to see you right.’

He watched as Hadro shrugged tiredly and turned away for the wall’s steps, waiting for the centurion to be out of earshot so that he could quietly order two men from his bodyguard to follow the man and kill him. Given any longer he knew that his former friend would make a run for it over the mountain, with the risk that he might survive to bear witness against him for their crimes over the previous few months. It would be no more than an inconvenience, given that he intended to be far away from Dacia by the time any such accusation could surface, but he wasn’t a man given to leaving loose ends dangling when swift action could remove such a threat before it had a chance to become reality. He frowned, as the centurion stopped unexpectedly at the head of the stone stairs and cocked his head as if to listen. He was on the verge of losing his patience with the man, and ordering his killers to deal with him then and there, when an unexpected noise reached his ears, a wave of sound like the cheering of a body of men.

‘What was that?’

For once his question went unanswered as the noise came again, the roar of voices closer this time, and its volume increased once more as the first torches appeared over the ripple in the ground between the miners’ camp and the wall. He stared aghast as a flood of men spilled down the slope, sweeping down towards the century he had sent to reinforce the guards they had presumably already slaughtered.

Scaurus raised an appreciative eyebrow at the woman before him.

‘I must admit that I’m impressed. With one simple act of infidelity you persuaded your lover to deal with your husband and support your claim on his assets. Although it wasn’t just a share in the profits from the mine you were promising him, was it? Presumably Maximus expected to be sharing in the fortune to be made from the robbery of the mine’s gold?’

Theodora nodded.

‘You men are so suggestible as a sex. All I had to do was tell him how much I wanted to be with him, and all the good things that the proceeds from robbing the mine could bring us. He actually thought we were going to find a man that looked like him, kill him and use the corpse to fool the authorities into believing that he was dead.’

The tribune shrugged again, leaning back in the chair.

‘I ought to have suspected him when he refused to move the gold out of his strongroom, nicely collected and ready for Gerwulf’s arrival. After all, he really wasn’t that good an actor, was he? I met him on the way up here that first night, and if looks could kill I would have been face down and six feet under. He knew that I was being brought up here to be seduced and turned into a source of information for you and your brother, and he didn’t like it. What did you tell him, that you were both going to live happily together for the rest of your days, and that you were only taking me into your bed to ensure that I was under your control? The truth of just how badly you’d duped him must have been a shock for the poor man, when Gerwulf showed his hand and had him chained up like an ox ready for the slaughter. I’ll bet he was desperate to get the chance to try to rescue his reputation once he realised what a fool you’d made of him. Presumably that’s why Gerwulf cut the poor man’s throat and tossed him off the wall, not so much to make a point to Cattanius but mainly to silence him, before he got a chance to blurt out that you were the architect of the whole thing, rather than being the poor innocent victim.’

He raised a questioning eyebrow at her.

‘So once you had Maximus wrapped round one finger, you sent a messenger to Gerwulf, telling him to be ready for your call when the strongroom was full. Presumably at that point he abandoned whatever mission he’d invented to keep his men close at hand?’

‘Yes, officially he’s on detachment from the Seventh Claudius at Viminacium, a detachment I persuaded their legatus to grant to my brother in the usual way, but I’d imagine even that fool must be starting to wonder just where he’s got to. The “Wolf’s” been raiding up and down the frontier zone for months now to keep his men fed.’

Scaurus nodded, the look of amusement fading from his face.

‘Which explains the destruction of the boy Mus’s village, and all the other raids that had the Sarmatae so fired up for revenge.You must have thought the fates were smiling on you the day that legion cohort pulled out to go to war. You sent the call out to your brother that the time to get rich had come, only to have my men march up the valley a few days later, too late for you to stop Gerwulf coming to pull off the greatest robbery in the history of the empire.’

Theodora bent close to him, and Scaurus felt the point of a sword prick the back of his neck as the guard behind him tensed.

‘You should be a little more grateful to my brother, Tribune. If he’d not spotted the tracks left by that Sarmatae warband and followed them up into the battle, you and your men would have been torn to pieces, wouldn’t you?’

He nodded equably.

‘You won’t catch me complaining on that score. I’ll still be grateful to Gerwulf for pulling our chestnuts out of the fire even when I’m having him executed for treason.’

She bent closer, her reply soft in the room’s silence.

‘You’re very confident for a man whose life hangs on a thread, Tribune.’

Scaurus shrugged, staring at her breasts appreciatively.

‘Circumstances alter cases, my dear. Can you hear those horns blowing?’ She tipped her head to listen. Barely audible through the villa’s thick stone walls, a trumpet was braying in the valley below, joined by a second. ‘They’re sounding the command to form line and prepare for battle, not an action that would be required by a single cohort in the valley, or not yet at least. I’d hazard a guess that the men who accompanied me tonight have freed the mine workers from their barracks, and given them access to their tools. And while your brother commands a powerful unit, I really wouldn’t relish having to fight off five thousand angry miners in the darkness. Oh yes, Gerwulf’s men will kill a few hundred of them, but the rest will wash over his line like a pack of dogs overwhelming a wolf. Which is apt, wouldn’t you say? And when they’ve done for the soldiers, enough of them will come here for you that you’ll never want another man as long as you live.’

Theodora’s mouth had tightened to an angry slash, and for a moment he wondered if he’d pushed her too hard. She spoke to the soldiers behind him.

‘You, get the men ready to move and tell them to bring my chest! If the mine workers really have been released then we’ll either meet my brother at the mine entrance or leave without him!’