Julius stared at him for a moment, then shook his head in disgust.
‘Get out of my sight.’
Petrus slid through the hole that opened in the Tungrian line, and when he was behind his own men he turned back to call his parting comment.
‘I’m not an impatient man, Centurion, but when I want a thing you can be sure that I always get it. You’ve got until nightfall to deliver the gold to me. Fail to do so and it’ll be your woman wishing she’d never been born, not me.’
Marcus and Arabus walked up the long, narrow path from the bottom of the moat-like depression that surrounded Obduro’s fortress, keeping carefully to the well-trodden route past the defences that littered the hillside. Marcus was holding his blunt-headed spear to the older man’s back, in a show of being the tracker’s captor. Through the eye slits that perforated the face mask of the cavalry helmet he had carried with him from Tungrorum, the young Roman could see belts of mantrap pits running away across the rising ground to either side. They were the same ‘lilies’ that the Tungrians used in defence: pits dug into the ground large enough to swallow a man’s foot and floored with pointed, sharp wooden stakes intended to cripple the victim. Lines of heavy wooden stakes protruded from the hill’s side, their points set at throat height, intended to slow any advance to a crawl and allow time for archers on the fort’s wall to reap a heavy harvest of their attackers. Marcus scanned the slope’s killing field and shook his head slowly, knowing that any attack by the auxiliary cohorts would have disintegrated into a costly disaster. He put the spear’s heavy iron knob against Arabus’s back and prodded the limping tracker hard enough to make him stagger forward with a yelp of pain. A swift glance up at the fort’s walls told him that they had an audience, a pair of heads popping up to stare down at them from the parapet over the closed main gate, and he drew breath to roar a command at them, hoping that his imitation of the bandit leader’s voice would suffice to keep his deception alive.
‘In Arduenna’s name get that gate open! I’ve no time to be wasting!’
The heads vanished from sight, and in an instant Marcus was past Arabus and running hard up the slope’s last few paces, throwing caution aside and risking the danger of stumbling into one of the fort’s mantraps in order to beat them to the gate. As he reached the palisade’s wall a heavy clank of iron inside warned him that the opportunity he sought was upon him, and he pulled the spear back until the thick iron head was alongside the helmet’s elegant replica of a soldier’s plaited hair, poised ready to throw. The man-sized wicket gate opened, and as the gate keeper looked through it, a look of bewilderment forming on his face at the sight before him, Marcus slung the blunt spear into his face. The weapon struck him cleanly in the forehead with a sharp crack of breaking bone, and as he staggered backwards, his eyes rolling up into the sockets to show only their whites, Marcus shouldered the bandit aside and burst through the gate, his patterned sword drawn. The stunned bandit’s companion, the man whose hand Obduro had hacked open demonstrating his sword’s fearsome edge, fumbled for his own weapon with a look of surprise and terror but had the sword no more than half drawn when Marcus swung his own blade in a vicious arc and decapitated him. His corpse crumbled to the ground as though it were boneless, and the Roman looked about the fort’s interior, waiting for either a challenge or an arrow to fly at him from the high wooden walls.
‘They’re all out with Obduro. I told you so.’ Arabus was close behind him, invisible to Marcus with the cavalry helmet’s restricted field of vision, and the Roman swung round to find his prisoner bolting the wicket gate behind them. ‘Now you must show me the proof of what you told me in the forest, so that I may pray to Arduenna for her forgiveness for bringing you here.’
The Roman nodded, wiping his sword and sliding it back into the scabbard.
‘This way.’
He led the tracker around the line of the fort’s walls, keeping to the shadows and moving with as much stealth as he could, until the altar to Arduenna was clearly visible. Raising a hand he pointed to the intricately decorated stone block.
‘There. Obduro hung it from the altar as an offering. He takes a token from every man sacrificed upon that stone, as evidence of his dedication to Arduenna.’
He watched as Arabus moved silently across the open ground, scanning the apparently empty fort uneasily as the tracker circled round to the altar’s far side, then bent out of sight behind it. When the other man remained out of sight Marcus made his way cautiously across the thirty-pace gap between wall and altar, finding the tracker on his knees with a weather-stained leather belt held in both hands, his face contorted in silent grief. The knife sheath was just as Marcus had remembered it — a perfect duplicate of the one on Arabus’s own belt — and he watched in sympathy as the tracker bent over the last remnant of his son’s life, his face contorted into a silent scream of grief. A voice from behind him snapped the Roman from his reverie, the harsh tone at once familiar.
‘What are you doing here? I thought you’d gone to the city for the harvest? The gate guards are dead, and…’
Grumo’s voice trailed off as the Roman turned to face him, and the big man stared harder at the cavalry helmet before raising the bow that he had lowered a moment before, pulling back the arrow already nocked to its string and levelling the missile’s polished iron head at the Roman. Marcus froze, knowing that an arrow loosed at such short range would pierce his mail armour with ease. Obduro’s deputy shook his head as he spoke, his voice hard with suspicion.
‘If you were the man you’re impersonating then that helmet would have a scratch across the faceplate from a fight in the dark a few months ago. But the helmet you’re wearing is perfect, unmarked. Newly made, in fact. Take it off and let’s see what we have here. Quickly, before I get bored and put an arrow in you just for the sport of it!’
Shrugging, Marcus pulled at the helmet’s buckles and dropped it to the ground, looking back up at Grumo as he frowned uncomprehendingly.
‘ You? But I broke your jaw…’
The Roman shook his head with a faint smile.
‘It was a good punch, but you took an age to deliver it. I managed to ride it well enough so that all I got was a bit of concussion and a bruise the size of an apple.’
The big man stepped forward a pace and lifted the bow to aim at Marcus’s face, closing the range to make sure of his kill.
‘And you were stupid enough to come back. I told Obduro that we should never have released you, but he has to indulge his need for the theatrical with these messages he insists on sending back to Tungrorum.’ Marcus raised his hands and stepped back, darting a glance at Arabus who was still kneeling behind the stone altar in silent grief, hidden from Grumo’s view. The tracker seemed frozen in his place, his stare vacant as he continued to hold the leather belt in both hands. The bandit matched the Roman’s step back with a move forward, advancing until his hip was almost touching the altar’s corner.
‘Backing away isn’t going to help you. I’m going to put this arrow into you, and then I’m going to hoist you onto this altar and give your life to the goddess.’
Marcus stepped back again, praying that Grumo would hold his temper for long enough.
‘Like all those others you’ve murdered on that stone? Just kill me cleanly!’