‘I don’t suppose I’ll need this any longer. It seems to have served its purpose, as does my fire. But you, Arabus, your purpose is far from over. You’ve got some talking to do before you cross the river to meet your goddess.’
Scaurus was waiting impatiently in Caninus’s office, frowning at the map on the wall and considering his options when Julius hurried in, his face grim.
‘Tribune, there’s a messenger. It’s one of the prefect’s m-’
The man pushed past him into the room, utterly ignoring the centurion’s anger in his state of apparent shock, his face pale and drawn. Scaurus recognised him as Caninus’s deputy, Tornach, a tall thin man with watchful eyes, who had seldom been far from his master’s side, and he raised a hand to forestall Julius as his centurion moved to punish the messenger for entering unbidden. As the two men watched him the bodyguard pulled himself together, holding out a grain sack with shaking hands.
‘I have a message for you, sir. A message from… from…’ He swallowed and gulped in a breath, as if forcing himself to say the name. When he spoke again his voice was heavy with dread. ‘ Obduro.’
He reached into the sack and pulled out something heavy, holding it up for the tribune to see. With a lurch of his stomach the Roman realised that it was a human head, the features at once familiar despite the dreadful wounds that had been inflicted on them. The eyes were empty sockets, and the mouth sagged loosely to reveal gums from which every tooth had been torn to leave gaping bloody wounds. The face itself was battered almost beyond recognition.
‘What happened?’
The question was barely more than a whisper. The bodyguard dropped the sack on the office’s tiled floor, looking up from his master’s severed head and staring into Scaurus’s eyes as he answered.
‘We found the bandits, or rather they found us, a mile from the bridge. They waited until we were almost on top of them and then ambushed us, showering us with arrows. They dropped most of the horses with their first volley, and after that we never had a chance. Half of us were killed in the fight, the rest were beheaded after we’d been captured. Obduro chose me to bring the prefect’s head back. The faceless bastard.’ The bandit hunter looked down at the floor with an expression of self-loathing. ‘He made me memorise a message to go with it too, and told me how I had to say it. He told me if I got it wrong, or failed to speak it just as he said it, he’d know, and I would die in worse pain than if he’d killed me then and there.’ He drew himself up and stared Scaurus in the face. ‘“Tribune, as you can see, I have taken the revenge I have long promised myself on this fool. He chose to live as a lackey to you Romans, rather than honouring his goddess as we were both taught when we were young. Now I have removed his stain from my family’s history I will deal with the men you sent to patrol the road while they sleep tonight, then return to defeat you, and empty your grain store. The next time we meet, you will feel the bite of my leopard sword.”’
He looked at the tribune, his eyes filled with misery.
‘And then he killed them, every other man that wasn’t already face down. He sent them to Hades one by one, laughing as they shouted and screamed and pissed themselves with fear, laughing as they flopped about with their throats cut.’
Tornach lapsed into silence, holding one shaking hand with the other as if seeking to quiet them, and Scaurus roused himself from his amazement, nodding decisively to the waiting Julius.
‘So there’s definitive proof that Caninus was telling the truth about Obduro being his twin brother. Take this man away and have him looked after; he’s not fit for much after the shock he’s had. Parade your centuries, please, and send word to Tribune Belletor that he is respectfully requested to join me, with his men ready to march in full fighting order, and just as quickly as he likes. I’ll have the bastard’s head for this outrage, fancy sword or not. My regret in this whole matter is that I chose not to trust Caninus while he was alive, but I’ll send his brother to Hades quickly enough that he’ll have precious little time to celebrate this act of fratricide.’
Marcus disarmed Arabus, pulling his long hunting knife from the engraved leather sheath hanging from his belt, then hauled the groaning hunter across the clearing by the back of his thick woollen tunic, ignoring his grunts and curses of pain, and threw him against the trunk of a tree. Touching the point of his patterned spatha to the man’s throat, he put sufficient pressure on the sword’s hilt to dimple the skin, pinning him in place so that even without bruised ribs he would have been unable to move.
‘It seems that my suspicions were correct, Arabus, despite all of your offers of help and friendly behaviour. You were trying to lead us into a trap when we camped here, weren’t you? If I’d not heard your accomplices approaching we’d all have vanished into the Arduenna and never been seen again, supposedly as another example of the Goddess’s power, wouldn’t we?’ The tracker scowled back up at him, his face creased with a combination of fear and pain, but he said nothing by way of reply, provoking a hard smile from his captor. ‘And now you think that silence is the best answer to my questions, do you?’ He stared down into the tracker’s stony face and shook his head, hardening himself to do what was necessary. When he spoke again, his voice was harsh with the promise of retribution. ‘I’ll give you a choice. You can either talk now, tell me what I need to know and earn a swift, clean death, and I’ll leave your body whole for your afterlife, or you can spend the next few days crawling on your hands and knees with your ankle tendons cut, until you’re too weak to resist the pigs when they come for you. I’m told that even a small herd of the little monsters can strip a man’s corpse to rags and bones in less than an hour. You can have a moment to consider which exit from life you’d prefer.’
He waited in silence, then sighed and shook his head. He withdrew the sword from Arabus’s neck and moved the blade to point it at his ankles in readiness to sever his captive’s tendons. The tracker raised his hands in a placatory gesture, his evident misery betraying the quandary in which he found himself.
‘I’ll talk. But you must understand, they have my woman and sons.’
Marcus sheathed the spatha and pulled out his silver inlaid dagger.
‘You’re right, unless you want to leave this life slowly, and in more pain than you can imagine, you will talk. You’ll talk until you’ve told me all there is to know, and when I’m satisfied I’ll decide what to do with you.’
Arabus shifted, grunting at the pain in his side where Marcus’s blunt iron spearhead had slammed into his ribs.
‘I’ve been in Prefect Caninus’s service for two years, tracking down parties of bandits and showing him where they can be taken. He found me in the deep Arduenna, where I have lived and hunted the unmapped forest since I was a boy, and offered me so much coin to work for him that I was unable to refuse. I left my family there, with the eldest boy to hunt and provide food for them as I had taught him, and went to the city to become his tracker. I soon proved skilful enough in leading him to the bandits plaguing the city that over fifty men were captured and executed as a result of my ability to hunt them down. I felt no sadness for them; nobody made them turn to preying on their fellow men, and it is against the ways of the goddess to steal and murder. But one band always managed to avoid capture, and avoided our hunts time after time. Whenever I thought I had clues as to the location of Obduro and his men, I was frustrated by mistakes and ill luck. Even when I found the location of their fortress, deep in the forest…’ He paused and laughed at the look on Marcus’s face, his amusement turning to an agonised grunt as the pain of his bruised ribs sank its claws into him with the movement. ‘Yes, I found their hiding place, deep in the forest where the altars to the goddess are as many as blades of grass in a meadow; it is a secret, forbidden place for all but her most devoted followers. I waited in silence and stillness for a day and a night, watching it to be sure it was theirs, and when I was certain I took the news back to the prefect. But he was unable to gather enough force to be sure of success in such an attack on a defended position, and so he kept the secret to himself for fear that they would move their camp if it became known that it was discovered.’