‘My father used to be a soldier. Some bad men killed him and burned down our village. They hurt my mother and my sisters. And they killed my brothers. .’
Lupus responded solemnly, his own father’s death suddenly raw, as if the younger boy’s revelation had ripped away a long-hardened layer of scar tissue.
‘My father was killed by barbarians too. I live with my granddad now, but Arminius looks after me most of all.’
The two boys were silent for a moment, before Mus spoke again, wiping away a tear that was trickling down his cheek with the briskness of a child who had quickly learned there was little to be gained from crying.
‘I don’t have any family left, so I work in the mine, but there’s no digging allowed today or the miners get whipped. I went to help build the wall, but the soldier said I was too small to help, so I just thought I’d have a look around here.’
Lupus shook his head.
‘You shouldn’t be here. If the soldiers catch you they’ll probably whip you.’
Mus’s eyes widened.
‘You won’t tell them, will you?’
Lupus thought for a moment.
‘No.’ He eyed the boy with a calculating glance. ‘Not if we’re going to be friends.’
‘Friends? I don’t have any friends. The miners are alright, but they curse at me when I get in the way in the mine, and sometimes even when I don’t I put oil in the lamps to keep the passages lit, and I know every passage there is. I even know some that the miners have forgotten about.’ He looked at Lupus with a sideways glance, as if he were weighing the other boy up. ‘Do you want to see?’
‘My word. .’
Tribune Scaurus stood in the strongroom’s lamplight and looked at the wooden boxes stacked neatly against the far wall.
‘Every box contains fifty pounds of gold, and we currently have. .’ Maximus paused for a moment to consult his tablet, ‘forty-three boxes, or two thousand, one hundred and fifty pounds. We fill two boxes a day, on average, and we can accommodate six months of production without any problem, so as you can see there’s no immediate need to send a shipment to Rome given the risk of it being intercepted by the barbarians.’
Julius walked across the small room and put a hand on one of the boxes, grinning at the look of discomfort that slid across the procurator’s face.
‘So if there’s a quarter of an ounce of gold in an aurei, each of these boxes contains enough to mint over three thousand coins. Which makes the contents of this strongroom worth. .’
The first spear frowned as he did the calculation, but Maximus was ready for him.
‘Worth almost one hundred and forty thousand aurei, First Spear.’
Scaurus nodded with pursed lips, turning back to face the procurator.
‘Enough gold to qualify a man for the senate a dozen times over must be enough of a temptation in peace time, never mind now. No wonder the Sarmatae are marching on this valley. .’ He stood and looked at the boxes for a moment. ‘Of course, it can’t stay here.’
Maximus’s reaction was faster and more shocked than he’d expected.
‘What do you mean “it can’t stay here”? Do you doubt my trustworthiness, Tribune?’
Scaurus raised an eyebrow to Julius and turned to face the indignant official.
‘What I doubt, Procurator, is your ability to hold on to this rather large fortune in the event that the Sarmatae manage to breach our rather hastily laid defences. Surely you’d sleep better knowing that the gold is hidden away somewhere it’ll never be found? We could move it at night, and-’
‘Out of the question.’ Maximus’s face was stony, and the Tungrian officers shared a glance at the finality in his voice. ‘The gold stays here, and you’ll just have to do your job and make sure the barbarians don’t come anywhere near it. And now that you’ve seen the arrangements by which I keep the emperor’s gold secure, I trust you have no other cause for concern?’
‘No other cause for concern at all, Procurator. You have adequate guarding in place, the keys to this room are evidently well controlled, and this place can clearly only be entered by means of the door.’ He gestured to the massive iron-studded slab of oak that filled the room’s only doorway. ‘But it’s not theft that concerns me half as much as what happens if we all end up face down in the mud, and the Sarmatae have the time to break in here at their leisure.’
Maximus shook his head again, and both men could see from his expression that he would remain obdurately opposed to any talk of relocating the strongroom’s contents to a secret location.
‘So do your job, Tribune. And let me warn you, I’ve spoken with your colleague and superior Domitius Belletor, and warned him that I won’t tolerate any more interference in the workings of this facility like this morning. Once that wall of yours is built, my men will go back to work and they will stay there.’ He smiled thinly at the Tungrians. ‘I pointed out to him that it didn’t seem to me as if the idea to stop mining had actually been his in the first place, and that the lost production would certainly look bad for someone when this is all done with.’
Scaurus stepped close to him, resting a hand on the hilt of his sword in a gesture whose casual nature was belied by the hard look on his face.
‘Divide and rule, Procurator? How very astute of you. I should be careful though, or you might end up rueing the day that you made your opposition to putting this fortune out of temptation’s way quite so clear to us. If the Sarmatae do manage to defeat us, then when they break in here they’re more than likely to find one last defender waiting for them.’ He put a finger in the other man’s face. ‘You. And I won’t be asking for Domitius Belletor’s permission before I lock you in here to wait for them. Come along First Spear.’
Maximus flushed red as they brushed past him, his voice echoing up the steps that led back up into the daylight.
‘Are you threatening me, Tribune?’
Scaurus barked a single word over his shoulder and kept walking.
‘Yes!’
‘This is my mine. Raven Head.’
Still breathing hard from the climb that had brought them a third of the way up the mountainside, Mus gestured proudly to the massive rock that loomed over the mine’s entrance, the peak’s beak-like overhang giving it the dark silhouette of a carrion bird against the clear blue of the sky above. A hole opened in the mountainside before the two boys, heavy wooden props to either side of the black space supporting a massive cross-beam above the entrance. Lupus stared dubiously at the black square, shaking his head slightly.
‘It’s dark.’
The smaller boy smiled, stepping forward to the mine’s threshold.
‘It’s better once you’re inside. Your eyes adjust, and there are lamps too. Come on, let’s go and have a look around.’ He reached for a jar of lamp oil from a stack by the open doorway and then walked into the darkness, disappearing from view as if he had been wiped away, although when Lupus strained his eyes he caught the barest shadow of his new friend waiting for him in the gloom. Summoning up his courage he forced himself to walk into the blackness, advancing in small steps until, with a start, he found himself beside Mus, the younger child’s eyes gleaming with the light from the doorway’s pale rectangle. When he spoke the boy’s voice was no more than a whisper.
‘See, it’s no different from being out there.’
Lupus shivered.
‘It’s cold.’
‘That’s why I said to fetch your cloak. It’s colder when you get deeper into the mountain.’
Mus reached out with fingers made expert by long practice and found a lamp in a small alcove.
‘Here we are.’
He fiddled in the darkness for a moment, then Lupus heard the familiar sound of iron and flint. Blowing gently on the sparks that flew onto the lamp’s wick Mus coaxed a flame to life, bringing a meagre but to Lupus’s eyes very welcome light to the darkness. Standing with the lamp in his hand the younger boy grinned happily at his new friend.