The Iron Hand of Mars

XLIV

I drew a heavy breath. 'What's that, Lentullus?'

'He's not here, sir. And his pony's gone.'

Justinus sprang up, on the alert. 'Anybody know when he left?' No one did.

I was on my feet too. 'First tent, come with me! Helvetius, you keep the second tent, pack the kit, then follow us…'

Helvetius was running at my heels as I raced for a horse. 'What's the panic? I know the terrain. I can tell roughly where we are -'

'Use your head! How are we going to converse with Veleda? Dubnus is our interpreter!'

'We'll get by.'

'It's more than that,' I gasped, bridling up frantically. 'So far we've been unobtrusive. No unfriendly groups have spotted us. But Dubnus seemed broody. He was plotting, I'm sure of it. We don't want him bringing a war party on our heads!'

'Falco, maybe he just wants to get on with his trade.'

'I told him he could do that…' Now, however, I was afraid the pedlar was hoping to make a packet from a new line: selling hostages. 'We can't take the risk that what he's intending to trade with may be us!'

We tracked him northwards for a long way. It was the wrong direction for us; perhaps he was using that knowledge in the belief we would give up, though it only made me stubborn. I hoped he would grow careless. I hoped he might think we were so single-minded about our mission that he was free from pursuit altogether.

My party was the slower of our two tracking groups. We were trying to pick out just one set of hooves among the litter on the forest floor, whereas Helvetius was following our great swathe. He soon caught up with us, and we all went on together, first bending east, then south again. 'What's he up to?'

'Mithras, I don't know.'

'I'm not sure I care.'

Dubnus must have left us early and travelled by night. His start was too great. I decided we would follow until the evening, and then abandon it. We lost the trail by the afternoon.

We were among taller, more thickly growing trees than ever before, in the dense silence of truly ancient woods. A huge horned insect glared at us from the curl of a dead leaf, outraged at this intrusion. There was no other sign of life.

Taking stock, we agreed that the one certainty about our present location was that we had never expected to be in this area. With good luck, no one hostile would expect us here either. Bad luck meant none of our friends would know where to bring a rescue force – but we had ruled that out, anyway. Justinus and I had left behind instructions that if anything went wrong there would be no point in a rescue attempt, so no one was to try.

Our journey from The Island had brought us across most of southern Frisia, but by now we had to be in Bructian territory. Coming this way had been unorthodox, but less exposed. We were a long way from normal trading routes. We were also a long way from both the Roman fieldworks that still survived in the delta area and the old forts that I knew had been planted along the River Lupia. We were approaching the famously hostile Bructeri not from where they were always watching for strangers – along their home river – but by surprise from the north.

During much of our trip we had been about a hundred Roman miles, give or take forty or fifty in this endless hardwood wilderness, above the Lupia's course. That offered some safety, but we had to turn south eventually. The place to change our present easterly direction would be marked by the heights of the Teutoburger ridge. We knew the famous escarpment curved down to the sources of the Lupia. All we had to do was find the northern end, then follow the hills. Helvetius had mentioned an ancient track, but none of us relished taking it. Once there, we would have another forty-mile trip before the heights petered out at the river. By now we had come far enough to be keeping our eyes peeled for the high ground whenever the forest allowed us to scan the countryside.

We began turning south.

Our detour to look for the pedlar had disorientated us slightly. This was easy country in which to lose your way. There were certainly no roads, and forest ways are notoriously aimless. Sometimes the one we took petered out altogether, so that we had to batter through brushwood, perhaps for hours, until we reached a new path. The trees crowded so thickly that though there could have been a much better track only a few strides away, we stood no chance of finding it. Helvetius, who had been near here before for his historical research, reckoned we were still some way from the topmost end of the Teutoburger escarpment, though had we not been in deep forest, the heights might have been visible in the distance. We hacked on through the dismal woods, believing him because we had no choice. Anyway, going south could never be entirely wrong. We would come to the Lupia eventually.

At dusk we stopped. While the tents were pitched, various members of the party vanished on their own for the oak- tree routine. It was cold. The light had sunk but not gone entirely. We were heating mess tins for each tent, but they were nowhere near ready. Helvetius named the night's sentries, whilst his servant groomed his horse. Justinus had a conversation going with Sextus and one of the other lads. They were teaching him some dialect words from the Adriatic coast, since he seemed interested in languages. I was just worried and miserable as usual.

I saw Lentullus creep back after his pee in the woods. He looked furtive, which was nothing unusual. He also looked frightened.

He said nothing to anyone. I decided to ignore it, then found that was impossible. I strolled across to him.

'All right?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Anything to tell me?'

'No, sir.'

'That's a relief.'

'Well, sir…' Oh dear! 'I think I saw something.'

Lentullus was the type who would spend three days wondering whether he ought to mention that a large army of warriors in wicker chariots with war horns and broadswords was leading our way. He never knew what was important. Lentullus would get us killed rather than say anything to worry the command.

'Something alive?' I asked him.

'No, sir.'

'Someone dead?'

Lentullus paused and would not answer me. All the hairs on my neck and arms rose slowly to attention.

'Come along, Lentullus. Let's you and I take the tribune's puppy for a walk.'

We hacked through the woods for about ten minutes. Lentullus was a shy soul. We had lost him twice already when attending to nature had led him so far from the camp that he couldn't find us afterwards. He stopped to take bearings. I kept quiet rather than confuse him completely. The thought struck me that we could be out here all night while Lentullus searched for his treasure again.

I hate forests. With everywhere completely motionless, it would be easy to become terrified. Among these trees bear, wolves, elk and boar all roamed. The chill air smelt damp, with an evil autumnal unhealthiness. The vegetation was a rank, flowerless kind, with no known herbal use. Fungi like lined faces hung in ancient trees. Undergrowth caught at our clothing and flesh, snagging our tunics and scratching our arms vindictively. My breastplate had become splattered with some sort of insect juice. At this spot we seemed to be the only things breathing apart from eerie watchers from the Celtic spirit world. We could sense a lot of them, both remote and close by.

Twigs snapped, too near for oomfort, the way forest twigs do. Even Tigris was subdued. He stayed close to us instead of rushing off to scavenge for woodvoles and bad smells.

'I don't like it here, sir.'

'Show me what you found, then we can go.'

He led me through a few more thickets, over a giaut log, past a dead fox which had been torn at by something much larger – something that was probably planning to come back for the rest of it just about now. Tigris growled worryingly. A cloud of midges was mobbing my forehead. 'This is where I was standing. I thought that it looked like a path.' Maybe. Or just a coincidental space among the crowded trees. 'I went along it for a look…' He was congenitally curious. And daft. Lentullus would pick up a scorpion to see if it's true they sting.

I still had no idea what he had seen, except that its effect on the recruit chilled me. 'Come on then.'

We took the supposed path. Maybe deer came this way. The air smelt even more hostile, and the light was fading fast. Dew had made our boot. leather swell, and our feet dragged with clumsiness. Leaves crunched under foot louder than I liked. Our progress must have been audible for a couple of miles.

Then the trees stopped.

I was tired. I was cold and uneasy. At first my eyes refused to focus, fighting disbelief. Then I understood why the recruit had been afraid of his discovery.

The silent clearing we had entered lay hung with mist. It was a big clearing, or had been once. Ahead of us lay a strange low sea of brambles. The brambles and brushwood sank slightly nearer to us, then rose many feet away to a regular berm of woodland. The moat-like depression stretched sideways in each direction. The canes dipped, as if the ground beneath their tangled mass had been out away. And so it had. We knew that, even without venturing forwards – which would have been deadly dangerous. Almost at our feet the ground must fall steeply, deeper than a man's height. Below us, invisible in the brambles, fiendishly sharpened stakes no doubt snarled. At the bottom of the ditch would be a trim channel one spade wide for drainage, then the farther wall would rise diagonally into a bank, before falling back to level ground. There, woodland filled the berm. Comparatively young woodland, nor the ancient trees we had been struggling through all day, which must have been standing sturdily in the old times of legend when Hercules visited Germany.

It was a different legend we had found.

Beyond the wood there was a rampart. We could glimpse only the upper part above the vegetation. But there had to be a patrol track, faced with a timber palisade and broken by the shape of familiar square towers. Further on in the gloaming we made out the formidable bulk of a standard fortress gate.

It was silent. No sentries were patrolling and no lights showed. But here, a hundred miles from the Roman provinces, stood a Roman camp.