‘The Tungrian…?’
‘Indeed it is. And isn’t he magnificent? I told you that this was a man who knew how to fight, but I had no idea that he would be so good!’
Marcus looked into the Briton’s eyes, seeing there a wary expression, but one lacking the hostility he’d noted there previously.
‘You’re wounded.’
Dubnus shrugged impassively.
‘It didn’t hit anything important, or there’d be more blood.’
He grasped the arrow and adjusted his big fingers experimentally around its shaft, taking a steadying breath. A swift push tore the arrow’s head, narrow but evilly barbed, through the undamaged skin at the back of his arm, the arrow protruding from both sides of the limb. The Briton growled at the pain, a rivulet of blood snaking down his arm to drip from the spread fingers. With a casual twist of the shaft, the arrow broke into two easily removable halves.
‘I wiped… the point… with my shit…’
All three turned to look at the fallen horseman, panting for breath as the injuries inflicted by his dead horse’s weight tightened their grip on his life. Dubnus laughed at him, pulling a bloody finger across his throat.
‘You’re a dead man, I’ve already killed you. I can clean this wound, use herbs and maggots to remove any poison, but your leg is broken. Badly broken, probably bleeding inside. I’ve seen it happen before, takes an hour or so. Perhaps I should help you to die?’
‘Fuck you… blue-nose.’
His eyes found Marcus, widening with recognition.
‘You… traitor…’
Marcus stepped forward, the long cavalry sword still hanging from one hand.
‘You were sent to kill me.’
‘Would’ve… been easy… except for him… keep looking… over your shoulder… no hiding place… for you.’
Rufius gently pushed Marcus to one side.
‘Dubnus, do what you must to make your wound safe for travel. We have to be away from here in ten minutes, no more. Take him with you.’
He squatted down next to the trapped horseman.
‘I need a few minutes with my friend here…’
He waited until the Briton had shepherded Marcus away before slipping an ornately handled dagger from its sheath, and addressing the fallen rider in a quiet conversational tone.
‘Yes, we’re old friends all right. I’m the “officer” you were shouting for those blue-noses to kill yesterday on the North Road. And in fact for a long time I was an officer, and a good one too. I spent several very nasty years patrolling the Tava valley, up past the northern wall, before you idlers gave up our hard-won ground and moved back south to old Hadrian’s Wall. One of the things I learnt to do with complete expertise during my time in that forsaken place was to persuade the local tribesmen we captured to tell us the things they didn’t want to tell us. And now, before you die, I’m going to share that skill with you. So, where shall we begin…?’
Dubnus dropped a heavy hand on Marcus’s shoulder, pulling him farther away from the scene.
‘You don’t want to see that. Stay here and watch my pack.’
He drew his sword and walked to the closest of the fallen horses, pausing to wrest his throwing axe from the chest of his first victim before turning to the man’s horse. Practical necessity overrode any qualms he might have felt about either the man’s death or the use he was about to make of the dead horse. From the moment he’d agreed to do what the former officer had asked of him he’d been working out how to make good their escape, once the Roman was safe from the threat of murder. The veteran officer had disturbed his sleep earlier that night with the request, one that had made him laugh out loud with its audacity once his irritation at being awakened before the dawn call had worn off.
He’d stopped laughing when a bag full of gold had landed on the bed in front of him. The former officer, it seemed, was determined to have his help, and was willing to pay handsomely. It was enough money, Tiberius Rufius had told him, to buy every man in his cohort a decent coat of mail. He’d stopped laughing all right, but the look on his face had made it clear enough to the veteran centurion that he wasn’t going to pick the money up from where it had landed, at least not without a good reason. Which Rufius had proceeded, with a half-smile that signalled how well he understood the Briton, to matter-of-factly provide.
His task complete, Dubnus returned to find Marcus waiting where he had left him. He stuffed the carefully wrapped bundle into his pack and then led the way deeper into the copse, searching in the half-light until he found what he was looking for. The plant glistened in the grey light.
‘Woundwort. Good.’
He ripped a handful of the plant away from its stem, squeezing it hard in a straining fist until a milky fluid dribbled from between his fingers on to the arrow punctures, then reached into his pack, hidden at the foot of a tree, for a strip of cloth.
‘The juice will help to stop the bleeding. Help me to tie it.’
Dubnus wound the cloth around his bulky forearm and allowed Marcus to knot it. A slow red stain seeped through the layers.
‘Tighter… good.’
A shrill scream made Marcus start. The soldier shrugged, regarding the temporary bandage with a professional scrutiny from beneath his heavy eyebrows, a slight smile crossing his face.
‘He’ll talk soon, that German. It’s inevitable. Our friend Rufius will offer him either a quick death or a slow one. Any man that runs from a fight before it is lost will take the easy way out when there’s a knife probing the root of his cock.’
A flush of anger ripped through Marcus’s body, part reaction, part frustration at the uncontrolled spiral of events, and part hot burning disgust at what Rufius was doing to the fallen rider. Spinning, he thrust his face into the soldier’s, snarling his anger into its indifference.
‘Why did you come here? Why save me? You hate Romans!’
‘You’re an outlaw now. The German called you a traitor. You’re not one of them any more.’
The simple reversal of judgement infuriated Marcus, as much for the smug simplicity of its verdict as its perpetuation of the injustice done to his family.
‘I am not a traitor!’
Dubnus pointed into the darkness, to where the screams had sounded.
‘German or not, he’s a Roman. A cavalryman. One of their elite. Why was he hunting you? He must think you are a traitor.’
The Briton watched Marcus as he frowned at the simple verdict, attempting to gauge the man’s mettle, whether he would stand up to the rigours of the coming days. He’d wondered whether the Roman would even be able to make effective use of the weapons they’d hidden for him by the roadside, after they had slipped out of the fort through a hidden door concealed in the wall. The thick oak door had answered the first of his objections, as to how they were going to get out of the fortress without word getting back to Titus. It was faced in stone to match the walls around it, with heavy stone slabs inside the wall poised ready to fall and block the tiny entry if small wedges restraining them were knocked away. He would never have known it was there if he hadn’t been guided to its precise location.
‘It’s designed to allow troops to get out and attack besiegers, or messengers to leave in secret,’ Tiberius Rufius had told him as they forded the river between the fortress and its town on carefully placed stepping stones that lay beneath the river’s slow-moving surface. ‘But it’s a good thing it hasn’t rained hard for a week or so, or the river would be trying a lot harder to pull us off this little bridge.’
They had skirted the town and headed down the road to the two-mile marker, while he hefted his spear and thought darkly about what he was going to do to the German cavalryman if he got the chance. Tiberius Rufius had made the connection for him, pointing out that the man shouting orders to kill him over the din of their little battle could not have been a tribesman with an accent like that. It had been all the bait needed to get the big Briton off his bed and into his mail coat, intended murder in his heart, revenge for the man he’d lost the previous day.