“How long?” Juba asked.
“I think it is only a day after the battle. Perhaps two. It’s hard to tell the night from the day here.”
Juba coughed, wincing at the strain of his rib cage. His head still throbbed.
“You don’t look well,” Octavian said.
Juba looked up and grinned weakly. “Nor do you. Are you hurt?”
Octavian shook his head. “I thought for a while that … well, I didn’t think you would recover.”
“I’m fine. Just weak. Where are we?”
“In Vellica.” Octavian’s voice was flat as he told Juba how the battle had begun, how they had been surprised by the opening of the gates of Vellica, and how Corocotta’s slave had then surprised them further by attacking the Roman leaders with the Lance while a hidden Cantabrian cavalry force had swept in to carry them away.
Juba nodded. It was, he thought, a beautiful plan on the part of the Cantabrians. Then he frowned. “Why did they need to open the gates, though? Why risk that engagement if their plan was to capture you?”
“I think they wanted to be prepared to charge and wipe out all of us if the legions went into disarray.”
“They didn’t?”
Octavian actually managed a slight smile despite his tiredness. “They brought you and I around the battlefield and through those gates. Already the legions were advancing and the Cantabrians were preparing to fall in and close the gates.”
“That’s good,” Juba said, then wondered why he should care for the fate of the Roman legions. He stared down at the hard earthen floor between them, lost in thought.
Footsteps marked the approach of men beyond the door, and Juba looked up to see Octavian stand and straighten himself. For a man who had lost a battle and been living in a cell for a day or more, shitting in a pot, he managed to look remarkably regal.
There was a sound of a bar being moved, a lock turning free, and then the door swung inward in a wash of the light of a torch.
Juba, squinting through both the pain of his aching head and the shocking brightness of the flame, saw that two Cantabrian men had entered the room. He first looked at Octavian, who stood with his back straight and chin high. One of the men smirked, then looked over at Juba. “Awake,” he said in rough Latin. “Good. The king requests your presence now.”
The man turned to his companion and said something to him in their barbarian tongue. An order, Juba guessed, as the man approached to help him stand and walk.
Juba thought for a moment about refusing to go. He thought about demanding to know where it was that they were being taken. But then he realized that it didn’t really matter. He was too tired to object. Too broken to fight. So instead he simply nodded when the man stepped over to him, and together they began the painful labor of lifting him to his feet and getting him to walk again.
* * *
Their prison had been underground, housed beneath a small building that had been built for this purpose. And while every movement brought fresh hurt to his aching body, Juba decided that for now stairs were his greatest enemy: to reach the top he had to be held upright between Octavian and one of the Cantabrians as they struggled to make their way up and out of the stench-laden hole.
When they finally got him outside the building, Juba asked them to stop while he tried to straighten his back and stand on his own. There was still a trace of the sun’s fading glow in the sky, he could see, but stars were already beginning to light the firmament. The air was cool and crisp on his skin, and it tasted of the wood-burning cook fires that were so familiar from the Roman camp across the valley.
His stomach rumbled.
Now that the flatter ground of the fort lay before him, Juba insisted that they let him walk on his own. It was painful, but it was, he thought, a good pain. Blood was moving back into his limbs, and whatever it was that the Trident had taken from him, he felt like moving would begin to get it back.
The two guards shrugged, seemingly happy not to help him further, and then they led Juba and Octavian through the winding labyrinth of buildings that were crowded inside the hillfort. There was movement and noise seemingly everywhere. Juba saw hundreds of men and women, their faces lit by torchlight, but none jeered or spoke to them as they passed. Only a little boy reacted—making a gesture like his stomach was bursting out. What it meant among these people, Juba did not know.
Around another building, they found themselves facing a wooden stairway that climbed up the wall of the fort. Juba’s mind wailed, but he resolutely began climbing the steps one by one, leaning against the wall for support. In the end, Octavian once more had to get his shoulder under Juba’s to help him make the climb.
The stair ended at the walkway that ran along the inside of the top of the wall. Torches set at intervals along this battlement hungrily licked the night air, and beyond them, in the distance across the valley, Juba saw the lights of the Roman encampment. His heart ached in his chest, and he longed to shout Selene’s name—but of course no voice could carry so far. For all that he could reach her, his wife might as well be in distant Rome.
The hulking figure of Corocotta stood with a small gathering of other Cantabrians not far away upon the battlement, above what Juba recognized as the gate that Octavian had hoped to breach during the battle. When they got closer, Juba saw that the little slave girl stood beside Corocotta, leaning tiredly upon a simple wooden walking stick. Like everyone else, she had her back to them as she stared out into the night.
When the guards stopped short and announced themselves, Corocotta and a few of the others turned and looked at them appraisingly. “Hail, Caesar,” Corocotta said, smirking.
Juba blinked in surprise, but Octavian appeared unfazed. “No interpreters this time?”
Of course he speaks Latin, Juba realized, kicking himself for underestimating the man. He had only pretended not to do so in order to have his slave with him as an interpreter.
“I am not as uncivilized as you think,” the big man said. He nodded to the guards and then turned back to what lay beyond the wall.
The two guards pushed Juba and Octavian forward toward the wooden parapet, and at last they saw what held the attention of the Cantabrians. Seven thick stakes had been set into the ground there in a row. Two were empty, but Roman legionnaires were tied upon the remaining five. Or what was left of the legionnaires, at least. Only the man on the last of the stakes was still alive, and he was weeping in a panicked horror. The man on the opposite end of the row, Juba saw, was charred and blackened, his face frozen in the same kind of contorted scream that Juba recognized from the ambush of the Roman supply train. The three dead between them weren’t burned, but they were covered in sheets of blood that had streamed from their eyes, their noses, their gaping mouths. Their red-stained corpses were recognizably Roman only by the garments that still clung whole to what was left of their blood-drained bodies.
Juba had seen this sight, too. He had done this to a man once, moving his blood, tearing him apart from the inside, pushing the life from him in torrents as he writhed and choked. He had held the Trident in his own two hands and willed it to happen, murdering his slave, Quintus, upon Octavian’s order.
For his silence. And so that Octavian could see if it could be done.
Juba’s stomach lurched and he hunched over, dry-heaving the emptiness of his belly.
Corocotta made a rumbling sound that might have been a laugh. “You would prefer your Roman crucifixion, I am sure,” he said. “But we do not have the skill for that art here. And I am not uncivilized. I give them a choice. More than you would do for my people, I am sure.” He nodded toward the empty stakes. “Two have chosen life.”
Juba got control of his heaving. Octavian, he saw, had not seemed to react to the terrible scene. “Your people,” he said, his voice as calm as if they were speaking of the pleasantly cool night air. “You’re no outlaw. You’re king of the Cantabrians.”