“Doctor?”
The man ignored his new guest, his desperation increasing as he searched fruitlessly.
“Doctor?” Salonius repeated as he walked calmly across the tent and took the seat that Catilina had previously occupied.
Again he was ignored. Sighing sadly, he picked up the wine jug and brought it down on the table so hard that the handle sheared off in his grip.
Scortius jumped and stopped his furious searching to turn and stare.
“Good. Sit down doctor.”
The stricken man turned once more to his cabinet, but Salonius called to him in a clear, calm voice.
“It’s no good trying to find an antidote, doctor. You know there isn’t one.”
Scortius began to rummage once more. He muttered something in a panicky voice. Salonius didn’t catch all the details, but he noticed the word ‘emetic’ in there.
“Sit down!” This time he bellowed, and Scortius jumped again and stopped.
“I will restrain you if I have to, but we are supposed to be civilised men, doctor, so come here and sit down.”
Almost meekly, Scortius turned and wobbled across to his chair, slumping dejectedly into it. Salonius cleared his throat and fixed the doctor with a piercing gaze.
“It seems curiously fitting that I get to give you the same diagnosis you gave captain Varro. Mine’s true though. You’re going to die, Scortius. There’s no cure and the lady Catilina was very thorough. The dosage you’ve had would have reached lethal more than half an hour ago and no amount of emetics and retching is going to save you now. Varro was enough of a man to face up to what you did to him quickly and nobly. Are you capable of that?”
The doctor stared at him.
“I hope so,” Salonius said gently. “Now, Catilina is a little blinded by emotion at the moment. Given free reign, she would stake you out for the carrion feeders and see which killed you first: the poison or the animals.”
Scortius’ eyes widened at the young man’s matter-of-fact tone.
“I, on the other hand, am less emotional. You took a good friend from me; a mentor, even. But from Catilina, you took the man she loved. Now I am here to explain your choices. I’m only going to do this once, and then I go find her and look after her.”
Still, the doctor said nothing, but sat open mouthed and staring.
“First choice: Given the quantity I put in your wine, you will be dead before sundown, so you can sit and await your fate. Because I am not a forgiving man, I laced the wine also with strychnine. I realise that ironroot is not a particularly painful way to go, but from what I’ve read, strychnine will probably kill you an hour or two earlier, but very, very painfully.”
Scortius began to gag, making an ‘Ack! Ack!’ noise. Salonius smiled and went on.
“Second choice: You could try and avenge yourself on me or Catilina. I suppose you could use the time you have left before you double up in pain to go and denounce us. But the problem is, Mercurias is very well aware of what you’ve done. In fact, he went to report it to the marshal, though Catilina persuaded him to delay a little, but he’s probably been by now. I don’t think you’ll find any support there. In fact it very well might be that the guard are on their way for you right now.”
He pushed the chair back and walked past the panicked doctor, to the cot bed at the rear of the tent, where the doctor’s uniform lay folded, awaiting the funeral ceremony for Varro. Stooping, the young man collected the doctor’s sword in its fancy sheath, likely never used and rarely warn outside ceremonies.
“And your third choice?” he commented lightly as he strode back to the table, unsheathing the sword with a metallic rasp that set the teeth on edge, “Take the noble and least painful way out. As soon as you can. And certainly before the guard get here; they certainly won’t give you an opportunity afterwards.”
He dropped the sword on the table before the dying man and walked past him to the tent flap. Turning, he smiled.
“Sad that it came to this. But at least you have a choice of how to end it. I would hurry though.”
Turning his back, he pushed open the flap and walked out into the sunshine.
Catilina stood a few yards away, her arms folded and a cross expression on her face.
“Well?”
Salonius smiled.
“I just gave him something to think about.”
She sighed.
“Your heart is too soft for you to be in the revenge business, Salonius.”
He laughed and put his arm around her shoulder, turning her away from the tent.
“And you’re a very dangerous woman, my lady.”
They made a point of taking the more circuitous route to the ceremony below. Exiting the camp’s stockade by the west gate, they strode down the hill in no great hurry, coming to a halt a little over half way along the slope, by a heap of fresh earth. They paused for a long moment, side by side and gazed at the shapeless mound that held the unmourned remains of the former prefect of the Fourth army.
As they watched, a crow landed fearlessly in front of them on the summit of the heap and began to investigate the freshly-turned earth for worms. Something about that made Salonius smile.
Walking on, they passed soldiers in full dress uniform, buffing every inch of steel to dazzling brightness. Most were too busy making sure they would meet the requirements of their officers to pay much attention to the two figures strolling amongst them, but those who did look up came to attention and saluted. Salonius returned their salutes as necessary, but still felt vaguely uncomfortable doing so. He was wearing his command guard uniform with the white horsehair crest which meant that he outranked most of the men of the second, but since his elevation to the position a mere two weeks ago, he’d spent little or no time among his peers, or indeed even wearing the uniform.
They came to a halt at the bottom of the slope where, on a slight hummock, the pyre had been constructed. Captain Iasus stood nearby, directing the affair with his familiar, curt and efficient manner. According to tradition, Varro would be sent to his afterlife with full military honours. Once the pyre had burned out and gone cold, his ashes would be placed in the urn that had been paid for by his contributions to the second cohort’s funeral club. They would then be escorted back to Crow Hill, where they would be buried in the military graveyard outside the west gate of the fort, under a finely carved tombstone chiselled by one of the cohort’s best stonemasons.
Salonius had only served a short time yet in the Imperial military, in a time of relative peace. Those deaths and funerals he had encountered in his time had been of non-ranking engineers. The engineering corps had turned out for them in their best uniforms and for the more notable occasions, a representative officer of the cohort from outside the engineers would attend. Nothing he had seen had come near this scale, though he realised these were somewhat exceptional circumstances. Normally a captain would be honoured only by his own.
Salonius glanced about him. The flags of all four northern armies fluttered in the breeze, carefully sited on a slight rise in order to catch what wind there was, yet far enough to put them out of danger of the flames when they came. The standards of the cohorts of the Fourth stood in rows, jammed into the ground, gleaming and glittering.
The pyre stood fully twice the height of an ordinary man, formed of logs cut from a thicket a quarter of a mile distant, and atop it lay the still figure of Varro, wrapped in Imperial green from head to toe. A sadness touched Salonius. Though Varro had been his captain and his superior, in many ways he had been closer to being a father than a commander. Briefly he wondered if anyone else in the Fourth felt that way or whether it was just the strange circumstances into which they’d been thrown together that had done this. He must remember to have a word with the stonemasons afterwards. Time to raise an altar to Cernus. Strange really. That would undoubtedly be the first altar set up in an Imperial shrine to a purely barbarian God.