The Wolf's gold

2

The detachment’s officers gathered in Tribune Belletor’s new headquarters soon after sunrise to meet with the mining complex’s procurator, the man charged with extracting the maximum possible output of gold from the mines whose entrances pocked the valley’s hillsides. The centurions had climbed up the road from their camp to the straggling town of Alburnus Major, casting disapproving glances at the seedy drinking establishments and whorehouses that seemed to be the town’s major form of commerce. Now they were crowded into the headquarters’ briefing room, listening intently as the mine’s administrator briefed them on the valley’s value to the empire.

Procurator Maximus was a tall, painfully thin man with a half-starved look about him that Marcus found slightly disquieting in the company of so many heavily muscled soldiers as he watched the man from the back of the room. The detachment’s senior officers stood closest to him as he went through an obviously well-practised explanation of the mine’s operation. Scaurus carefully positioned himself a half-pace behind his colleague and superior Belletor, who was wearing the smug expression of a man who felt in complete control of his situation and was unable to keep that knowledge from his face. The youngest of the three senior officers stood at Belletor’s other shoulder, his tunic decorated with a thick purple senatorial stripe identical to that of his colleague’s, and in obvious contrast to Scaurus’s thinner equestrian line. Marcus was watching him with careful glances, being sure not to stare at the man for very long so as not to draw attention to himself. Scaurus had told his centurions to form an opinion of the youngest tribune before they had set off for the meeting.

‘Keep a good eye on young Sigilis, gentlemen, and take his measure now while you have the leisure to do so. You may find yourself under his command if I fail in this continual struggle not to break my esteemed colleague’s nose, so you might as well try to understand what sort of man he is now, rather than the first time you find yourselves taking orders from him.’

Marcus observed the young tribune carefully, taking good care to keep a man between them and watch from the shadows so as not to attract his attention in return. His main impression of Lucius Carius Sigilis was that of his younger self, albeit seen from the far side of the chasm that had opened between himself and Roman society with his family’s mass execution on a false charge of treason raised by the shadowy men behind the emperor, in order to clear the way for the confiscation of their huge wealth. Watching the tribune through the throng of men between them, he realised that the confident set of the young man’s face was achingly familiar. Sigilis was clearly possessed of the same utter self-belief that had been his in the months before his uncomprehending flight to Britain. They were so alike, and yet. . Marcus smiled darkly to himself, musing on the barbarian uprising that had swept northern Britannia soon after his arrival. The Tungrians’ first desperate battles to survive in the face of the revolt’s ferocity had been the fire in which he had been transformed from son of privilege to capable centurion, his former prejudices and expectations of life burned away in the white heat of a succession of pitched battles. He wrenched his attention back to the procurator’s words, shaking his head slightly to dispel the memories.

‘And so I welcome you all to the Ravenstone valley, gentlemen, and to our mining colony of Alburnus Major. I have roughly five thousand miners currently engaged in extraction and refining processes, working for three investors who fund the necessary resource and expertise, and who in turn take a share of the profits of our enterprise. Most of our mining operations are below ground these days, since the potential for surface mining is all but done, and that makes the process much more laborious and labour-intensive. What with digging into the mountains to find the gold-bearing rock, processing the ore to extract its gold, ventilation to keep the miners alive and hundreds of men working day and night to drain off the water from the mines. . well, I can assure you that it’s all very costly.’

He beamed at the gathered officers knowingly.

‘I can however, also assure you gentlemen that it’s very much worth the expense. My last posting as a Procurator of Mines was in Mount Marianus in Spain, and we were lucky if we dug out ten pounds of gold a day. Here in Alburnus Major we’re averaging ninety pounds of gold per day, which makes the mines hugely profitable by comparison. That’s over thirty thousand pounds a year without any sign of the seams thinning out. There is said to be enough gold in these mountains to pave a road from here to the Forum in Rome itself, and I can well believe it.’ He looked around the room with a portentous expression. ‘Which means that the loss of this facility would have the direst implications for the imperial treasury.’

‘Not to mention his career.’

Ignoring Julius’s whispered comment, Marcus focussed his attention on the procurator, who was still speaking.

‘So you see, gentlemen, my original request to the governor for some soldiers to back up my own security force wasn’t made lightly. I have men from just about every province in the north-eastern portion of the empire working in this valley, and from pretty much every one of the tribes beyond our northern frontier for that matter, and there is no real way to be certain of their loyalty to the empire. I don’t doubt that among them will be a few spies sent in by the Sarmatae to wait until the time is right and then guide their warriors through the mountains to fall upon us without warning or mercy. It was something of a surprise when Legatus Albinus chose to withdraw his men from the valley, even if we did have the report that you were only a few days away.’ He looked about him with an expression of relief that to Marcus’s eye appeared in no way feigned, and spread his hands to encompass the gathering. ‘But here you are. Alburnus Major is safe again, and just in time if your encounter with enemy scouts on the road yesterday is any guide. Might I ask how you plan to establish the appropriate degree of security for my mines?’

The question was directed at Belletor, who started slightly, then scratched at his bearded chin in the manner of a man deep in thought.

‘Well, ah. .’

The silence stretched out just long enough to be vaguely embarrassing and then, just as every man present was weighing up how best to speak up without making the young tribune look foolish, Scaurus’s voice broke the silence.

‘I would imagine that my colleague’s careful thought is attributable to his desire not to provide embarrassment to the previous defenders, even in their absence. The Thirteenth Gemina Legion was responsible for the defence of the valley until recently, I believe?’

The procurator nodded knowingly, and Belletor’s face assumed the appropriately neutral cast of a man who had indeed been searching for a way to critique the mine’s defences without criticising his predecessors.

‘They were, Tribune Scaurus, and your superior is right to avoid offering offence to their deeds here, even in their absence. Although when they were recalled to Apulum to concentrate with the other cohorts of the legion I was forced to note that they left us without either manpower or physical defences to protect the emperor’s gold against the Sarmatae, other than the few men I employ to guard my strongroom.’

Scaurus nodded his understanding.

‘Knowing that we were only days distant, I would imagine that the legatus commanding the Thirteenth considered this an acceptable gamble. You’ve seen no sign of any threat from the hills to the north and west, I presume?’ Maximus shook his head. ‘I thought not. Which means that the main body of the enemy must be sufficiently distant for them to have to be content with scouting around the valley. In that case, I believe that we should proceed with Tribune Belletor’s plan for the valley’s defence. The tribune and I discussed this matter at some length yesterday, and I find myself in full accordance with his plan. Perhaps I might outline your thoughts, Domitius Belletor?’

Marcus sneaked a glance at Cattanius to find the soldier’s face a study in self-control. Arminius had confided in him that Scaurus had talked with the legion man until long after the lamps had been lit the previous evening, gleaning as much information as he could as to the dispositions and contingency plans of the previous garrison. The beneficiarius had clearly realised that the answers he had given would be at the root of the tribune’s thinking. Belletor nodded graciously, a hint of relief on his face.

‘By all means, colleague.’

Scaurus’s face hardened in concentration, and the men standing around him gathered a little closer in subconscious recognition of the real military authority in the room.

‘In simple terms, this facility is basically a four-mile-long valley with one end open and the other closed by two successive mountains which rise to heights over a thousand feet above the plain. The valley walls rise to much the same height, and there appears to be only one route in that isn’t either straight up the road that runs along the valley floor from the west, or over steep and easily defended peaks on the valley walls with excellent fields of view. It’s worth noting that the mining activity is mainly concentrated in the area of the mountains at the closed eastern end.’

Procurator Maximus nodded.

‘Indeed Tribune, that’s much as the Thirteenth Legion’s tribune described it.’

‘In which case, there are two main defensive measures necessary. Firstly, we must be ready to repel a strong attack up the valley floor. The Sarmatae might well muster a force of many thousands of men to attack a prize as rich as this, many of them mounted, and we’ll have to be ready to fight them off with only the four cohorts you saw come up the road this afternoon. Nobody else is coming to this particular party. And that means we’ll need to build a wall at the valley’s most advantageous point, Procurator. A wall high enough that it can’t be scaled without a ladder, and topped by a stepped fighting platform to allow a relatively small number of men to fight off several times their own strength. Given that the valley’s teeming with strong men I’m assuming that such a construction wouldn’t tax you too badly?’

The procurator frowned at the suggestion.

‘I’m not sure that the various businessmen who work the mines on the empire’s behalf would take well to having their workforces turned away from the mines. . not to mention the lost revenue to both them and the empire.’

Scaurus smiled at him, showing his teeth in a fierce grin.

‘I have no doubt that you’re right. But as Tribune Belletor was saying to me only yesterday afternoon as we marched into your facility, it might well be better to lose a few days’ income than risk losing the entire mine, not to mention our own lives, wouldn’t you agree? He made the point to me that the man that loses this facility must either fall in its defence or face a rather more protracted death at the hands of a disappointed imperium, and I have to say I can’t fault his logic.’

Belletor shot him a surprised glance, but kept his mouth shut. The deception Scaurus was weaving around his superior’s supposed views on defending the mine had advanced too far to be gainsaid without more embarrassment than Belletor’s dignity could bear. For his part Scaurus was making the most of his chance to put the procurator straight as to who was in command of the mine’s resources.

‘Besides, I’m sure you’re not entirely without leverage over the men you’ve entrusted to extract the empire’s gold? Perhaps you might intimate to these businessmen that their accounts are overdue a particularly thorough audit, unless, of course, the urgency of defending their investments makes such an investigation superfluous?’ He raised an eyebrow at the procurator. ‘I presume there are a variety of stringent penalties open to your discretion, if any of these businessmen is found to have more than his fair share of the profits sticking to his fingers. I can assure you that you’ll find my colleague Domitius Belletor more than sympathetic with any request to assist you in delivering imperial justice under such circumstances.’

Left with little alternative his fellow tribune nodded his firm agreement, and Scaurus held the procurator’s gaze for a long moment, waiting until the other man acknowledged his point with a slight bow of his head.

‘Excellent. So while your partners help the bulk of our men to build this wall to our specifications, the remainder will be conducting repairs on the temporary barracks accommodation to get my men out of their campaign tents and under some sturdier cover. We’ll be needing several dozen wood-burning stoves, which I assume your smiths can turn out easily enough, given they’ll have a temporary respite from making and mending mining tools. And the soldiers who aren’t busy repairing their own accommodation will be standing guard duty in the watchposts up on the peaks, looking out for any sign of a Sarmatae attack over the valley walls, unlikely though that may be. We’ll have your facility laced up as tight as a maiden’s bodice before you know it.’

He turned to Belletor, whose expression of imperious neutrality had slowly slid into one of slight bemusement as his supposed junior had taken control of the situation.

‘That was what you had in mind, colleague?’

Left without any choice, the younger man nodded graciously, although his face bore an edge of the suspicion that he had in some way been manoeuvred without having any clear understanding as to how or why. Scaurus bowed respectfully, turning to Cattanius with a slight smile.

‘I’m gratified to have reflected your thoughts so clearly. And perhaps, with your agreement, we might trouble the beneficiarius here for a better understanding of the enemy we’re facing?’

Belletor nodded again, his frown deepening as he realised that the conference had now utterly escaped his control. His colleague Sigilis was clearly working hard to keep his face immobile, but to Marcus’s eye a hint of contempt had entered his expression, although the young man was careful to keep his gaze away from either Belletor or Scaurus. Cattanius stepped forward, clearing his throat with no sign of any discomfort at the size or status of his audience.

‘Be under no illusion, gentlemen, our enemy is a proud and noble people. I warn you, if we allow them to use their mobility and fight in their preferred manner we will face almost certain defeat. Their horsemen ride with the skill of men raised in the saddle, and carry a long lance which they call the kontos. Our legionaries have a fighting chance against them in good order, but on the wrong ground, or if the formation has been weakened by their archers, this enemy can be truly murderous. Indeed their prowess was impressive enough to persuade the last emperor to take a legion’s strength of their lancers to serve in Britannia, as part of the peace agreement after we defeated them at the battle of the Frozen River. And now it seems that some part of their nation has decided to turn their backs on that treaty and make war on us again.’

He related to the gathered officers the story he’d imparted to Scaurus the previous evening about the two Dacian kings, Purta and Boraz, although the tribune noted that he omitted to tell them about the method by which the intelligence had been gathered.

‘Our spies tell us that Purta is gathering a warband of thirty thousand men beyond the mountains to the north-west of the fortress at Porolissum. Our auxiliary forts along the border make an obvious initial target for them, after which we expect he’ll be aiming to march down the road to the south-east and knock over the legions one at a time. The governor has given orders that our two Dacian legions are under no circumstances to be separated for fear of losing them individually, and it seems he’s happy enough to give up ground in order to keep his force intact.’

‘And the mine? Will he surrender that too?’

Cattanius shook his head with an apologetic glance at Scaurus.

‘If he has an opinion on the subject then Legatus Albinus hasn’t seen fit to share it with me, Tribune. What he did tell me was that the force moving on this valley and led by Boraz is believed to be relatively weak by comparison with that being fielded by Purta. It is expected that you’ll be able to hold off the barbarians without too much trouble, given the favourable nature of the terrain.’ He shot a look at Scaurus. ‘However, he also told me that if this proves not to be the case, he believes that Albinus Major can be recaptured easily enough once the main force under Purta is defeated. His exact words were “it’s not as if the Sarmatae can take the mountains with them, is it?”.’

Scaurus shot a wry smile at Belletor.

‘So there’s no pressure then, eh Tribune? We should be able to win easily enough, and if not the legions can clean up later with nothing much more lost than our reputations. That and our lives, of course.’

‘Gods below, but I can see why the boys from the Thirteenth would have been keen to have it away from here on their toes given half a chance.’

Marcus looked back down the slope at his toiling standard bearer, grinning at the man’s red face and puffed-out cheeks. The rest of the century were strung out down the slope below him, climbing easily enough in Morban’s wake as he led them in their journey towards the morning’s objective. To their right the mountain that the miners called ‘The Rotunda’ loomed over them, while to the left the valley’s side was formed by a long, steep-sided and easily defendable ridge, but to their front was a flat expanse between the mountain and the ridgeline some three hundred paces wide which had been dubbed ‘The Saddle’, through which an attacking force would be able to enter the valley with much greater ease. The Fifth Century had been tasked with investigating the observation post that had been built to watch the gap, and to provide early warning of any such approach from the north.

‘A good breakfast followed by a gentle walk in the hills? Could a man want for anything more, Standard Bearer?’

Morban looked up at him with an expression of disbelief.

‘Where would you like me to start, Centurion? Staying in my bed past the first sparrow’s fart would have been good. Eating something better for breakfast than a piece of stale bread and a slice of last night’s pork with water to wash it down would have been even nicer. After that. .’ He paused to suck in a breath before resuming his climb, legs stamping at the grassy slope for grip. ‘After that my ideal morning would include an energetic spell in the company of some expensive professional ladies, followed by a relaxing hour or two in a private bath house in the company of those same ladies. Put all those things together and it would be more or less perfect. Instead of which, I find myself climbing a mountain in the company of quite the ugliest collection of soldiers it’s been my misfortune to fall in with for many a year, and with not one but three centurions, all of whom are apparently intent on draining what little enjoyment there is to be had from the situation.’

Qadir shrugged, a faint smile touching his otherwise inscrutable face.

‘I only pointed out to your colleagues, Standard Bearer, that I saw you deep in conversation with Beneficiarius Cattanius shortly before you started offering odds on how long it would take us to reach the lookout post.’

Morban snorted and stuck out his bottom lip, ignoring the Hamian centurion’s comment and concentrating on the climb. Dubnus raised an eyebrow at his friend, his voice lowered conspiratorially.

‘Morban? Lost for words? I really must pray to Cocidius a little more often if he’s going to answer me in such a spectacular fashion.’

The standard bearer kept climbing, sending an embittered rejoinder over his shoulder.

‘I heard that. You’re a cruel man Dubnus, given that we once served alongside each other.’

The big Briton barked out a sardonic laugh.

‘Hah! Not really, given the regularity with which you used to fleece my purse with all manner of wagers. You even ran a book on how long it would take me to get off my back after I stopped a barbarian spear last year.’

Morban raised a disgusted eyebrow.

‘Yes, a book on which I lost money due to your rude state of health and your urge to get your hands on a century again. .’

Marcus put his whistle to his lips and blew a quick blast.

‘Fifth Century, form line! We’ll make the rest of this climb ready to receive an attack.’ The soldiers quickly formed up into a two-deep line and the front rankers stepped forward with hard stares at the hill’s summit, pulling on their helmets and unstrapping shields from carrying positions across their backs. In the space of a dozen heartbeats the century was transformed from a line of individual soldiers into an impersonal engine of murder bristling with razor-edged spear blades and faced with iron and layered wood. They were the century’s older and more experienced men for the most part, their arms and faces bearing the scars of a succession of bloody battles in Britannia the previous year. These, Marcus knew from experience, were the men who would stand and fight without calculating the odds against them, in the knowledge that to run would be a worse option than any danger they might face. Marcus walked out in front of them and pointed up the slope’s last two hundred paces at the wooden watchtower waiting for them, its roof intermittently wreathed in wisps of grey, scudding cloud.

‘At the walk. . advance!’

The Fifth Century followed their centurion up the hill’s last slope, the first time that any of them bar Morban had faced the potential for a fight under Marcus’s leadership, each man with a spear held ready to stab or throw as ordered by the young officer leading them forward to the summit’s uncertainty. As they approached the hill’s crest they found the watch post unoccupied, its timbers creaking softly under the wind’s intermittent caress. The building was built snugly into a half-hollow just below the summit, the bulk of it shielded from both the worst of the wind and observation from the other slope, while a wooden tower jutted up fifteen feet to provide the occupants with a view over the country beyond the ridge’s peak.

‘Halt! Kneeling defence!’

The soldiers dropped onto one knee at Marcus’s command, bracing their shields on their forward legs and lowering their heads so that their only remaining point of vulnerability was a thin vision-slit between shield and brow guard. Quintus frowned from his place behind the century, and the soldiers exchanged puzzled glances at being dropped into a defensive stance a good fifty paces short of the building.

‘Chosen Man!’ Quintus stepped forward through the century’s ranks with a salute to his centurion. ‘You are to keep the Fifth in defensive line and await my orders. In the event that you hear or see anything to indicate that I have been engaged by enemy forces, you are to use your own judgement as to whether an attack or a fighting retreat is the better option, but you must ensure that the news of whatever happens here reaches the tribune. Do you understand?’

The chosen man nodded.

‘Are you going in there alone, Centurion?’

Marcus shook his head with a smile.

‘Not quite. Gentlemen, shall we?’ Dubnus and Qadir stepped forward, both men drawing their swords. ‘I very much doubt there’s anyone within a hundred miles of here, but the post has been abandoned for long enough that I’ll not simply blunder in to see what might be waiting for us. Arabus!’

The scout stepped forward from behind the century’s line where he had been waiting in silence. A skilled scout and tracker raised in the forested hills of the Arduenna forest in Germania, he had been captured by Marcus in the act of attempting the Roman’s assassination, and turned to the cohort’s service by the revelation of his son’s sacrificial murder by the same bandit leader who had subverted him. He was acknowledged by even the most skilful of the cohort’s barbarian scouts to be the best of them, a master of both tracking and the art of seeing without being seen, and lethal with a short blade. When the Tungrians had marched away from the Arduenna he had chosen to follow them rather than return to the forest, telling the young centurion that with his family dead at the hands of the bandit leader Obduro there was nothing to keep him there. The Roman pointed up the hill and the scout nodded, loping silently away up the slope, drawing puzzled glances from the soldiers as he ran to the century’s right and headed purposefully for a fold in the ground that crossed the hilltop. Dropping onto his hands and knees, and then flattening himself fully against the damp grass, he wormed forward into the cover of the fold and vanished from sight.

Marcus led his fellow centurions onwards with only one of his swords drawn, the evilly sharp patterned spatha that he had purchased from a sword smith in the Tungrians’ home city of Tungrorum. The weapon had cost him a price that had set his colleagues’ heads shaking in disbelief, until they had seen the sword’s murderous edge and the speed with which the light and flexible weapon could be wielded. He put a reflexive hand to the eagle’s head-pommelled gladius bequeathed to him by his birth father, but left the short sword sheathed for the time being. The three centurions moved swiftly, giving little time for any enemy lurking in the watch post to react as Dubnus and Qadir spread out to either side of their comrade, while Marcus ran to the building’s main door and flattened himself against the rough timber wall, listening intently. There was nothing to be heard other than the wind’s soft susurration, and the occasional creak from the wooden structure. Putting a booted heel to the wedge holding the post’s main door closed, he drew in a long, slow breath, sliding the legatus’s gladius from its scabbard and savouring the feeling of the twin blades’ heft in his skilled hands.

‘Go!’

Kicking the wedge away he ripped the door open and threw himself through the opening, minimising the moment of danger when he would be silhouetted against the doorway’s bright rectangle. Pointing the swords into the building’s unlit gloom, he turned to track movement against the rear wall.

‘Nothing. And you can stop pointing that sword at me with quite so much relish, thank you.’

Dubnus stepped out of the shadows with a look of disdain, while Qadir surveyed the post’s wooden floorboards with a critical eye.

‘No, nothing at all. No mud, no bootprints. Even the dust is undisturbed. Either nobody has been in here or they were very skilled at hiding any trace of their presence.’

Marcus nodded, turning to the watchtower’s stairs. He climbed slowly, with one sword held in front of him, emerging into the cold morning air crouched low to avoid presenting any silhouette to a potential watcher. Looking through the viewing platform’s vision-slits he saw his Fifth Century waiting in their defensive line as he had left them, ready to fight or retreat as ordered. Moving to the tower’s other side he found an uninterrupted view down the hill’s gentle northern slope for three hundred paces, open ground that stretched as far as the forest’s edge. Climbing carefully back down the steps he exited the building to find Arabus waiting for him. The scout bowed, gesturing to the north.

‘As you suspected, Centurion, there are footprints on the far slope. Also the marks left by hooves. There have been mounted men here, and less than a day ago. I saw no sign of them in the trees, no movement at all. But they were certainly here when we marched up the valley yesterday.’

On the valley floor, five hundred feet below, Julius watched as his centuries toiled up the slopes of the mountains that surrounded them on three sides, nodding his satisfaction as they neared their immediate objectives.

‘That’s better. With the hills manned we can breathe a little easier.’

Alongside him Scaurus grunted his agreement.

‘Indeed. Defending this valley is going to be interesting enough without the risk of being showered with arrows from those heights, or finding that our enemy has found a way to outflank our wall.’

The parade ground before them was empty of men, other than a few dozen veteran soldiers from Scaurus’s Second Tungrian Cohort waiting at ease to one side. With the First Cohort tied up retaking the mountains around the valley, Scaurus had sent half of the Second Cohort’s remainder down the road under their new First Spear, charged with laying out the line of the defensive wall he was planning to erect across the valley’s narrowest point.

‘You may not be an engineer, Tertius old son, but you’ve enough sense to pick the best place to stop a cavalry charge.’ Julius had taken his colleague aside after their dismissal from the command meeting, pointing out across the valley. ‘Just find the narrowest point, preferably with a nice little slope in front of the line where we’ll be dropping the wall in, and make sure we can get water to run to it.’ He pointed back up the valley to the point where the huge rock slab of the eastern peak sealed off the far end. ‘We don’t want all Sergius’s hard work up there to leave us with a bloody great puddle on our side, do we?’

The men of the First Minervia’s Cohort were toiling away at the foot of the eastern peak’s steep slopes, energetically clearing away vegetation in a line down the slope from a good-sized lake that sat high above the valley floor to their rear, and Julius looked about him with a smile of satisfaction.

‘Give me a month and I could make this place impossible to take with anything less than three legions, and even then they’d pay a heavy price to break in.’

Scaurus raised an eyebrow.

‘A month? I’d say you’ve got two days, three if we’re lucky, before enough men to fill the ranks of two legions come thundering up that slope. What do you think you can do in that time?’

Julius opened his mouth to respond, but closed it again as the first of the mine workers came into sight, heading for the parade ground in a long, straggling column. They crowded onto the flat open space until it was full, and the slope which overlooked it filled up in turn, the buzz of their conversation loud enough that the two men had to raise their voices to speak. When Scaurus judged that there were no more to come he nodded to Julius, who signalled his trumpeters to blow a long hard note. Their horns’ peals echoed from the rocky hillsides, and the miners fell silent and stared at the tribune as he stepped out before them. Clearing his throat, he shouted a question at the mass of men.

‘Where are the mine owners? I believe there are three of you!’

A balding man stepped forward from the crowd, his clothes both cleaner and smarter than his fellows’.

‘I am Felix, owner of the Split Rock mine.’

He pointed down the valley to the west, and Scaurus exchanged a meaningful glance with Julius who shrugged slightly.

‘Thank you, Felix. Who’s next?’ A second man stepped out of the throng, but where his colleague had clearly bathed recently, and was dressed in fine cloth, he wore the same heavy, dirty clothing as the men around him. ‘Your name?’

‘Lartius, my Lord.’

Scaurus nodded, though not without a slight smile.

‘Tribune will do, thank you, Lartius. And you own which mine?’

‘The Rotunda, my. . Tribune, on the southern slope of that mountain.’

He pointed to the round-topped mountain to the north.

‘I see. One more of you to come then. Will I have to resort to. .’

He paused in mid-sentence, raising an eyebrow as a woman in her thirties stepped out from the protection of the men around her and acknowledged him in a cursory manner. Her functional clothing was drab, cut for comfort rather than display, but the soldiers standing behind Scaurus were sufficiently audible in their appreciation that Julius turned around to silence them with a glare and a meaningful tap of his vine stick against his mailed chest. She stood and waited until the sudden rumble of male voices had died away, pushing an errant lock of her light-brown hair back into place in a gesture the tribune recognised as an artifice even as his body responded to her overt sexuality.

‘Good morning, madam. And you are?’

‘Theodora, Tribune.’

‘Theodora? From the Greek?’

The woman nodded, a pair of large golden discs hanging from her ears bobbing at the movement.

‘It means god’s gift, or so my father told me when I was small enough to believe every word that came out of his mouth. I am the owner of the Raven Head mine, on the southern side of the valley, beneath the rock for which this place is named.’ She pointed at the distinctive rock poised over the mountain that formed the valley’s southern side and smiled at the Roman, and Scaurus realised that for all her aggressive swagger she was fairer of face than any of the harried-looking women he’d seen about the settlement. Warning himself not to stare, even if he hadn’t laid eyes on so welcome a sight for months, the tribune turned away from the trio and walked for a dozen paces before turning to speak again, his voice raised to carry over the throng.

‘Very well then, let’s be about our business for the day. How many men do you estimate we have here, First Spear?’

Julius grimaced, more used to counting men arranged into convenient lines.

‘Three thousand or so, Tribune.’

‘And yet the procurator with responsibility for this facility informed me that you had nearly five thousand men working your mines. Where are the rest of your people?’

Not one of the trio standing before Scaurus showed the slightest sign of discomfort at the acerbic tone in which his question was pitched. Theodora spoke again, waving a hand at the valley sides.

‘Contrary to appearances, Tribune, the mountains around us are not the dry towers of rock that they appear from the outside. They are riven by faults, cracks in the rock through which water runs down from the ground above them. If we abandon a mine for as much as a day the lower levels will be knee-deep in water, and a week would make them unworkable. Those men that you don’t see here are performing essential work to keep the workings dry, and to prevent our absence from causing problems when you finally allow our men back to work.’

Scaurus exchanged a long glance with her, gauging the truth of her statement.

‘Indeed. I recall Procurator Maximus mentioning the requirement for constant water removal. He also told me that you need hundreds of men to keep your mines dry, but not, I should point out, thousands. Once we’ve finished this discussion and your labour is put to work making this valley defendable against the Sarmatae, I shall pick a mine at random and take a tour, unguided, I should add, and see what I can see. And be assured, madam, if I should find as much as a ten-year-old child digging for gold with a spoon, then all three of you will taste the harsher end of Roman military justice. So I suggest that you all send men to your mines, just to be sure that my prohibition is being obeyed to the letter. I will have every fit man not required to keep your investments from drowning out here in the sunlight building our defences, whether you like it or not. It’s either that, or all three of you can take a turn on that.’ He waved a hand at the parade ground’s whipping post, a constant reminder of Roman military discipline. ‘It’s not the best way to start off what we all must hope will be a short and productive relationship, but the three of you will all take five strokes of the scourge if any one of you disobeys me in this.’

Lartius smiled a lopsided grin, revealing white teeth in his grimy face.

‘If you catch us, that is.’

Scaurus shrugged, his return smile hard and mirthless.

‘Try me. If any of you forces my hand I’ll have all three of you naked and bleeding in front of your workers. When I catch you.’

Felix stepped forward, his face set in the uneasy, placating smile of a penniless debtor confronted by thugs sent to collect his dues, and raised a manicured hand to the soldiers.

‘This is easily remedied, Tribune. I’m sure the message simply has yet to reach the furthest parts of our businesses. With your permission?’

Scaurus nodded magnanimously, and Felix drew his colleagues away for a moment of whispered discussion.

‘Would you really put a woman on the whipping post, Tribune?’

Julius’s quiet question creased Scaurus’s face into a smile, and he turned away from the miners to ensure that his words were not overheard.

‘No, or at least not from choice. But if they believe that I will then that, First Spear, is really all that matters. If we show these men — and especially, I suspect, that woman — the slightest hint of weakness, then they will treat us like the fools we probably are here in their world. This is a confidence trick, Julius, so let us hope that we’ve gulled these three, at least for the time being. I just wish that bloody fool Maximus had warned us that one of them was a woman.’

Nodding their mutual agreement, the mine owners turned to their closest aides with hasty instructions, then stepped back in front of Scaurus.

‘All is resolved, Tribune. Messengers will be sent to our mines to ensure that all men not drawing off the water will attend whatever work it is you have planned for us.’

Scaurus nodded graciously.

‘A wise decision, and one that will hopefully spare us all from any unhelpful indignity. And so to business. You’re doubtless wondering what you people can do in defence of your mines that three cohorts of well trained and fully equipped soldiers can’t, and my answer is simple. Nothing. But what you can do is make our preparations to defend this valley, and your investments, complete in much less time. And time is the key to this situation, my friends, because to be blunt we don’t have very much of it.’

All three of the mine owners stared at the tribune blankly, and Julius realised that they hadn’t the first clue as to what he was talking about. Scaurus shook his head, muttering an imprecation at the absent procurator.

‘I see all of this means nothing to you. In which case I should inform you that this part of the empire is at war.’

‘With who?’ Lartius’s question was both loud and incredulous, his big dirty hands spread wide and his head shaking in disbelief. ‘The whole reason I took on this mine was because Procurator Maximus assured me that the Sarmatae were no longer any danger. He told me that the legions beat them all ends up, and sent most of their warrior strength to some shithole island on the other side of the empire to keep the savages there in their place. .’

He fell silent in the face of Scaurus’s knowing smile.

‘And that’s exactly what the histories will say. Victory coins were minted, the Blessed Marcus Aurelius took the name “Sarmaticus”, a triumph was held in Rome, and the Sarmatae were declared to be a broken threat. And yet here we are, getting ready to fight those same tribesmen once again. Will our efforts here ever be recorded for posterity?’ He shook his head with a smile. ‘Given that any formal war with the Sarmatae is not possible without undermining the glory of the current emperor’s recently deceased father, then whatever happens here will most likely be recorded as “a border dispute”. But trust me when I tell you that a man can die in a skirmish just as easily as in the course of a full-blooded war. These tribesmen mean business, which requires us to all be ready for them, if you value your own lives.’

He looked across the silent crowd, judging his moment.

‘But ready for what, you ask? Let me show you.’

He gestured to Julius, who in turn nodded to his chosen man. A quartet of soldiers led forward an aging mule, and the chosen man carefully pulled a red-painted arrow from the quiver taken from one of the dead Sarmatae, jabbing the jagged bone head deep into the animal’s flank. For a moment the beast’s reaction was no more than an indignant bray and a kicking struggle against the ropes securing it, but within a few heartbeats its demeanour changed abruptly. Emitting a high-pitched squeal of distress the animal staggered sideways, away from the chosen man, then sank to its knees, its eyes rolling as the poisonous mixture coated onto the arrow’s head took fuller effect. Collapsing to the ground it lay still, panting hard with a dribble of bloody foam running from its open mouth, and Julius had to force himself to keep watching as the beast twitched spasmodically. Scaurus reached out for the arrow, taking it from the chosen man with delicate care before raising it over his head for all present to see.

‘That, my friends, is the death that awaits us all if the Sarmatae reach this valley before we complete the fortifications needed to defend it. They combine snake venom with fresh cow dung to make a paste, age it for a while to allow the two to combine, then smear it onto bone arrowheads which soak up the mixture. My men have shields and armour, but you’re all completely unprotected, and so when they send showers of these over our defences it’ll mostly be you dying like that. You, and your families. Speaking of which, if you have women with you then you can be sure that they will be raped out of hand, and many of you men will probably suffer the same indignity. After which you will be put to work in the mines to quarry gold for your new masters.’

A man spoke out from the safety of the crowd’s anonymity.

‘Working the mines? What’s so terrible about that?’

Scaurus smiled at the shouted question.

‘Well for a start you’ll be unpaid, because they’ll have robbed the procurator’s strongroom of every coin. However little it is that you receive now, I’m sure it will be better than working for nothing. Then they’ll rob you of anything and everything of value. And you’ll be sharing your rations with twice your number of armed men who care nothing for your survival. Times will get lean very quickly and so, I expect, will all of you. But worst of all, don’t forget that any Sarmatae occupation can only be a temporary one, until two angry legions come marching up that road and drive them off, and they’ll know that all too well. They’ll work you day and night, driving you like animals to dig every last tiny piece of gold they can get out of these hills before that day. Many of you will die from exhaustion and for lack of enough food to support your exertions, and others will be executed simply to give the rest of you an example of what will happen if you slacken your work rate.’

He looked across the men gathered before him with a harsh expression.

‘By the time the legions manage to chase them off, the Sarmatae will have turned this valley into a charnel house, and all that will be left for the survivors when the legions free you, if the Sarmatae don’t slaughter you all as one last kick at the empire, will be to burn the rotting corpses of your fellow workers. I’d suggest that you think on it, but as you can see, I really don’t have time for this to be an exercise in persuasion. So, you will do exactly what you’re told, under the guidance of my soldiers, and any of you that feel like discovering what it feels like to be scourged will get their opportunity simply by stepping out of line. We have only a day or two to make this valley impregnable, which means there’s no time to be wasted. First Spear?’

Julius stepped forward, his gruff bark stiffening more than one back in the throng of miners.

‘My soldiers are going to build a turf wall right across this valley, with your assistance. It will be fifteen feet tall and fifteen feet deep at the base, with a fighting platform to the rear of the wall ten feet off the ground to allow my men to fight off attackers with their spears. Some of you will be cutting turf blocks, some of you will then carry them to the wall for laying by skilled builders, and we will work as long as we have enough light. The turfs weigh five pounds apiece, which doesn’t sound like much, but we’ll be laying about a million of them, so I think it’s safe to say that you’ve all got a full day ahead of you.’

At his command the waiting centurions stepped up to the mass of soldiers, detailing each of their men a party of ten miners to command. Scaurus, his lips pursed in speculation, watched Theodora walk away in the company of a pair of heavily built bruisers, whose role in life was clearly to ensure that she remained untroubled in a sea of sex-hungry labourers.

‘What do you think?’

Julius stared at the miners for a moment, seeing a combination of resentment and disgusted resignation in their eyes before answering Scaurus’s question with an amused expression.

‘What do I think, Tribune? Are you asking me about this rabble of work-shy tunnel rats, or the woman?’ He waited until Scaurus turned back to face him with a rueful grin. ‘I think they hate us marginally less than they fear the Sarmatae, which is only marginally less than they fear us. I think they’ll show us their arses when we march away, and piss in our water supply given half a chance. But I also think we’ll have a wall across the valley by nightfall tomorrow, and a few nasty little tricks up our sleeve besides. And that, Tribune, is all I really care about.’

He saluted and went off to join the officers marshalling their work gangs into some sort of order, leaving Scaurus staring out across the valley with a calculating gaze.

Left behind in the Tungrian camp when the centuries marched out about their various tasks, Lupus found himself alone for the first time in months. Knowing that the few remaining soldiers left to guard the camp would be of little entertainment, he took up his practice sword and shield and set about going through the set fighting routine that Arminius had taught him, and which he was expected to practise every morning and evening without fail. The boy was beginning to understand the German’s purpose in teaching him by means of the routine’s apparently endless repetition, as his wrists and ankles strengthened and his stamina improved to the point where he was no longer walking through the moves after an hour’s practice, but still fresh enough to perform in almost as sprightly a fashion as when he had begun. Stabbing and cutting at imaginary enemies, ducking and weaving in response to their attacks, he flowed from attack to defence and back again, building towards the routine’s final move, a stab to the front while thrusting his shield to the rear to deflect an attack from behind, followed by a lightning-fast spin and hack with the sword’s blade. Grunting with the effort as he made the penultimate attack, he spun into the routine’s last move only to find himself face-to-face with a slightly smaller boy whose eyes were wide at the sight of his gyrations. Surprised, he stepped back with the shield instinctively raised.

‘Who are you?’

The answer was instant, the younger child untroubled by their apparent age difference.

‘I’m Mus. What are you doing?’

Lupus frowned, thinking the answer altogether too obvious.

‘Practising. Arminius says practice makes perfect.’

‘Who’s Arminius?’

A proprietorial note entered Lupus’s voice.

‘My sword teacher. He’s German.’

‘Do you live with the soldiers?’

Lupus nodded, and Mus’s eyes misted over as he fought back tears.

‘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.

‘Come on, I’ll show you round.’

He turned and padded away into the darkness, his small body framed in the lamp’s pale light, leaving Lupus staring at his receding figure. Turning back to the mine’s entrance, he was momentarily gripped with an instinctive need to run for the rectangle of daylight, but knew in his heart that doing so would not only expose him to the younger boy’s derision but that some part of him would be dissatisfied with the choice to retreat in the face of his fear. Still troubled by the darkness around them, he paced forward in Mus’s wake, concentrating on not losing sight of the boy’s back. The passage walls, dimly illuminated for a few feet on either side, were rough, snagging at his fingers as he reached out for their reassuring touch, and the floor was damp and uneven beneath his boots as it sloped gently up into the mountain. Even the faintest of sounds were magnified by the tunnel’s echoes, each scrape of the boys’ boots sounding like a dozen footfalls. The pair walked in silence down the passage for long enough to reduce the entrance to a distant speck of light, and to Lupus’s surprise he found his initial panic increasingly forgotten as the means of its relief receded gradually from view.

‘Here we are, here’s the first ladder.’

Lupus frowned, looking at the wooden ladders that ran both upwards and downwards from the spot, unable to see where they led to.

‘We have to climb?’

Mus turned back to him, perhaps sensing the uncertainty in his voice.

‘We have to go down to reach the place where they mine the gold. Don’t worry, it’s safe as long as you only move one hand or foot at a time, at least until you get used to it.’

‘But you’re carrying the lamp?’

‘Don’t worry, I can climb the ladders one-handed. Here, you go first.’

Suitably reassured, Lupus climbed gingerly onto the ladder and started down with slow, cautious movements, quickly gaining enough confidence to speed up his pace to what seemed like a breakneck descent.

‘Good, just take it nice and steady, and don’t look. .’

The other boy’s sentence was still incomplete when Lupus found himself compelled to stare down into the darkness. He stopped and hung from the ladder’s rungs, an abrupt and irresistible terror gripping him as he realised that he had no idea what depth of empty air waited beneath his feet. Mus spoke to him from above his head, bringing the lamp close to his face to reveal a reassuring smile as Lupus looked up at him.

‘It’s not far now, just climb down slowly and be ready for your foot to reach the ground. Trust me.’ Screwing up his nerve, Lupus lowered one foot to the next rung down, waiting for a moment with sweat running down his face before moving the other. ‘Good! Keep going, we can get a drink of water when we get down.’

Lupus climbed down another dozen rungs before his foot touched rock, and he staggered away from the ladder as Mus alighted gracefully behind him. The boy took him by the arm and led him to a channel cut into the floor.

‘See, water. Have a drink, we’ve a little way to go yet.’

They drank from cupped hands, and Lupus found the ice-cold water refreshing and clean to the taste.

‘Where does it come from?’

Mus grinned back at him in the half-light.

‘Come down another ladder with me and I’ll show you. And where the gold comes from.’

Marcus walked up to his tribune and saluted smartly, repeating the gesture for Tribune Sigilis’s benefit but giving his attention to Scaurus and thereby turning his face away from the younger man as much as possible. The two men were standing by the wall’s only opening, a ten-pace-wide gap in the centre of the rampart’s eight-hundred-pace length into which a heavy wooden gate was to be set before being backed with enough turf to make it a temporarily immovable part of the defences. They were looking along the line of the planned fortification, and Sigilis was gesturing along the shallow wall with an enthusiasm that the young centurion found surprising given his previous reserve, and his apparent contentment to stay in Tribune Belletor’s shadow.

‘And perhaps we might make their task even harder by embedding stakes in the upper part of the wall, pointing down to keep them from placing ladders against the parapet?’

Scaurus smiled with what looked suspiciously like a trace of indulgence to Marcus’s trained eye.

‘Indeed we might, in fact my first spear was muttering something to the same effect when we were designing this edifice. Centurion?’

Marcus snapped to attention, playing the part of an obeisant officer with all his wit.

‘Tribune, sir, you asked me to scout the valley’s northern side. I can report that the watch post between Rotunda Mountain and the ridge to the west is intact and undisturbed, but that the ground around it shows signs of having been trodden by Sarmatae mounted scouts within the last twenty-four hours. Additionally, the ground beyond the Saddle is open and has been deforested for several hundred paces, making it highly suitable for an enemy attack.’

Scaurus grimaced.

‘I suppose it was inevitable they’d have a watch on the valley. How easily can the Saddle be defended against an attacking force?’

Marcus shrugged, unconsciously calling on the military knowledge he’d gleaned in the previous eighteen months of brutal lessons at the hands of the barbarian tribes of Britannia.

‘I wouldn’t want to lead any strength of cavalry up the north slope, Tribune, it’s shallow enough for a mounted approach, but littered with rabbit holes and boulders. Any infantrymen that might be sent up it will be tired from the climb up through the forest, and would have to attack uphill into prepared defences, but if they’re going to get around that. .’ He gestured to the turf wall’s length. ‘Their leader may decide to spend his foot soldiers lavishly if it’s the price of putting men in our rear.’

Scaurus nodded, turning to Sigilis.

‘So colleague, while this wall and the fortifications we’ll use to deny the enemy the slopes to either side of it are of the utmost importance, we’ll need to be on our guard against just such an attempt to outflank them. Our colleague Belletor might well decide to mount a guard on this weak spot, with the right encouragement from a man he considers to be of equal standing? I fear I’ve used up all the presumption our fragile relationship can bear for the time being, but if you were to make such a suggestion. .’

The younger man nodded his head with a look of understanding, and Scaurus smiled easily.

‘Good. I do so dislike having to manoeuvre him when a man he considers his social equal can be so much more persuasive with a good deal less effort. In the meanwhile the only question that really matters now is just how far away the warband is, because if they arrive in front of this wall before it reaches an effective height, we might as well not have bothered going to all this effort. Perhaps a mounted reconnaissance. .’ He turned to look down the line of the defence work, the space around it teeming with labouring men cutting turfs and carrying them to the slowly ascending structure, while Marcus stood in silence, acutely aware of Tribune Sigilis’s unblinking scrutiny. ‘Yes, I think a scouting party would be our best means of finding that out. Carry a message to Decurion Silus, if you will Centurion Corvus, and invite him to join me here at his earliest convenience, along with yourself and your Hamian colleague. I believe the time has come for us to gain a somewhat better understanding of what’s on the other side of this particular hill than we have at the present.’

He paused, having noted the approach of Felix, the owner of the Split Rock mine further down the valley. The businessman was clearly in a state of agitation, practically running up the slope towards the officers, and Scaurus turned to his colleagues with a wry expression.

‘Ah, I’ve been expecting this all day. I have to say I’m surprised it’s taken him this long to realise he’s got a problem.’ He called out to the troubled mine owner. ‘Greetings, Felix, can we be of any assistance to you? You do seem a little distressed.’

Felix covered the last few paces between them in the attitude of a supplicant, his hands pressed together as if to solicit a favour, and the look on his face openly pleading.

‘Tribune Scaurus, a dreadful mistake has been made, a terrible error that must be put right! I beg of you. .’

Scaurus tipped his head to one side, his face taking on a sympathetic cast.

‘I will do whatever is within my power to assist you. Tell me, what is this “dreadful mistake”?’

Felix turned and pointed at the wall with a look of horror.

‘This wall, Tribune! It is too far up the valley, and my mine is left outside the defences! When the enemy come they will have my business at their mercy, undefended and open to their pillage!’

‘I see. .’ Scaurus stroked his chin as if in deep thought. ‘Yes, that is a problem.’

Felix’s face brightened.

‘So you’ll move the wall, Tribune?’

Scaurus shook his head sadly.

‘I’m afraid not. Not only would that be an insane waste of the progress we’ve already made, but this rampart’s current line requires it be no more than eight hundred paces long. Whereas, were I to command it to be moved in order to defend the emperor’s property to the south, including a mine which you are fortunate enough to be allowed to work on his behalf. .’ he paused to allow the statement to sink in, ‘then I would need to double its length. We would need twice as much turf, which would take twice as long, and I would then need at least twice as many soldiers to defend it. So, as you can see, I have neither the time nor the manpower to incorporate the Split Rock mine into the valley’s defendable ground, Felix. You and your men, however, will be safe enough behind this.’

He patted the eight-foot-high foundation beside him. Felix gestured helplessly in response.

‘But my mine. .’

‘Will indeed be undefended, although I’ll be happy to lend you a sword if you’re that keen on fighting to keep what’s yours?’

The mine owner’s eyes narrowed.

‘You’re making fun of me. I don’t believe you ever truly intended to defend the Split Rock, did you?’

Scaurus shrugged, his response couched in a breezy tone which did little to mask the steel that underlaid it.

‘In all truth, Felix, it was never my main concern. I simply told my officers to find the best line with which to defend the valley and its occupants, and this is what they settled on. If I were you I’d count my blessings, given that we’re here to stand between you and enough barbarians to put a very severe crimp in your day. I’d get as much of your equipment as you can out of the mine and prepare whoever’s left down there to evacuate when the Sarmatae get here. Unless you want to find yourselves fighting to defend the emperor’s gold?’

‘It’s so cold!’

Mus shrugged at the comment, even though the unconscious gesture was invisible in the mine’s gloom.

‘That’s why I told you to wear your cloak.’

They paced through the darkness, Lupus making sure he stayed close to the dim glow of Mus’s oil lamp. The younger boy stopped several times to add oil to the lamps perched on shelves cut into the passage’s stone walls, their flames providing tiny islands of light in the pitch-black that seemed to bear down on them from all sides. Eventually a slightly brighter light appeared around a bend in the passage, and Mus turned to him with a finger to his lips, whispering in his new friend’s ear.

‘Be very quiet. I don’t want them to see us.’

They crept down the corridor, and when he judged that they were close enough to the light from whatever it was that was waiting, Mus put the lamp down before leading Lupus forward again. Keeping low, they peeked around a corner into a chamber lit by torches, the open space dominated by a massive wooden wheel, three times as tall as a full-grown man and mounted on a heavy axle. A pair of muscular labourers were toiling at the device, using their strength to turn the wheel by means of bars protruding from each of the spokes, their powerful arms bulging with the effort. Another two equally powerful men sat off to one side with an hourglass and a water jug. Mystified, Lupus whispered a question.

‘What are they doing?’

Mus pointed to the wheel.

‘Look at the bottom of the wheel. Can you see the water?’

The wheel’s bottom was submerged in a pool of water, and as Lupus stared harder he realised that as it turned, the device was dragging wooden buckets attached to the rim through the pool. Whilst a little of the water captured by the buckets splashed out as they rocked to and fro, they were clearly still quite full as they swung on their mountings. From his own experience of carrying the medical wagon’s water bucket to and from whatever river or spring the cohort camped by, he knew that they were bound to be heavy. At the height of their travel the buckets were tipping over into a wooden trough carefully aligned with the top of the wheel.

‘Now you can see why the passage we climbed down from slopes uphill. The wheel takes the water up to the level of the passage we climbed down from, and the water runs down the slope and then away down the hillside.’

As they watched, the last sand ran out of the glass and the resting workers climbed to their feet and took over the task of dragging the wheel around, while the men they had replaced stretched their aching bodies before sinking down onto the rock floor to rest.

‘Is that all they do all day?’

‘If they don’t do it then the chamber would fill up with water and soon the mine would be flooded. And it’s safe now. My friend Karsas is having a rest.’

Lupus followed Mus into the chamber, and one of the workers got to his feet with a smile of greeting.

‘Welcome, little one. Who’s this you’ve brought to see us?’

‘He lives with the soldiers. He’s got a sword, and he let me hold it.’

‘So you repaid the favour by bringing him down here? You chose the right time to come forward though. If Gosakos there were not at the wheel, I expect he’d be chasing you round the chamber with his prick in his hand.’ Lupus frowned and turned to look at the men on the wheel, meeting the hungry stare of the closer of the two with a shiver of fear. ‘Not to worry, he knows what happens to men like him if they make the mistake of touching my friends. And he’ll be turning that wheel for a while now, so we’ve got time to talk if you like? It still helps to talk. .’

Mus shook his head.

‘Not today. Can we have a look at the face?’

Karsas put his head back and chuckled, winking at Lupus.

‘You want to see some gold, eh young ’un? Come on then, follow me. There’s no one to get in our way today since they’re all upstairs getting chased round the valley by your mates, and good bloody riddance to the lot of them. Always swaggering about and gobbing off about how they’re the real miners when all they ever do is quarry out the rock, while us men practically live down here to keep the place going.’

He took a torch from the wall and walked away up another passage, gesturing to the boys with his free hand.

‘Come on then, my lads, come and see where all the gold comes from.’

Scaurus was enjoying his first cup of wine of the evening when Arminius put his head round the tent’s open flap and held out a message tablet. Scaurus frowned at his unexpected appearance.

‘Shouldn’t you be away training the boy Lupus in which end of a sword makes the nasty holes?’

Arminius shrugged.

‘He seems to have found something more interesting to do, so I contented myself with a swift kick of Morban’s backside for letting him wander off without seeking permission. I’ll go looking for him again once you’ve got some food in front of you. Anyway, take this. .’ He held up the message tablet. ‘One of the woman Theodora’s bruisers brought it to the camp entrance, and a soldier ran it up here. Apparently the messenger’s waiting for you.’

The tribune sipped at his wine.

‘Well, what is it? I know damned well you’ll already have read it.’

The German smiled.

‘Not only read it, I’ve smelt it too.’

Scaurus raised an eyebrow, taking the tablet and sniffing at it.

‘My word. I see what you mean. And?’

The German shrugged.

‘It’s from the lady mine owner herself. She’s inviting you to dinner with her and her fellow businessmen.’

Scaurus grinned up at his bodyguard.

‘I see. So my choice is either to sit here, drink this decidedly average red and eat whatever unidentifiable meat it is that you’re busy burning, or go and break bread with the people whose livelihood I’m either protecting or ruining, depending on one’s point of view. That’s a tough one. .’

The German shook his head in disgust.

‘Let’s hope they’re not planning to do a re-enactment of Caesar and the senators with you, given the havoc you’ve been causing with your wall. You’d better wear the breastplate, just in case.’

Scaurus nodded in agreement, looking at the heavy sculpted-bronze armour in its place in the tent’s corner.

‘Quite so. Not only will I feel safer, but I’ve always found the old bronze to be a sure-fire winner with the ladies. Family heirloom, worn by my noble ancestor in the Year of the Four Emperors, that sort of thing. It helps not to mention that he ended up on the losing side, mind you. Give me a hand with it, if you will?’

‘Begging your pardon, Centurion, but have you seen that damnable boy?’

Morban made a quick salute to his centurion, looking about Marcus’s tent with a harried-looking stare as the Roman turned from the sword blade he’d been polishing.

‘If you mean your grandson, I’ve not seen him. I’d assumed that he was training with Arminius.’

‘That’s just the problem, sir, he’s nowhere to be found. Arminius is chewing on my leg for wasting his time waiting for the lad, and so I wondered. .’

He looked about the tent again, as if hopeful that Marcus might have Lupus hidden in one of the corners, then shook his head in exasperation and withdrew. The young centurion followed him out into the still early evening air, both men reflexively looking up and down the line of tents. Seeing the big German approaching, Marcus waited for him to reach them before speaking.

‘No sign?’

Arminius shook his head darkly.

‘Nothing. The gate guards say they saw him a few hours ago, practising with his sword, but after that there’s been no sign at all. If he’s wandered off into the town there’s no saying what trouble he might have. .’

He fell silent, raising a hand to point at something behind the other two men. Marcus turned to see Lupus sidling down the line of tents with another boy a few paces behind him. The child’s companion wore an expression that told the Roman he was poised and ready to run.

‘Not a word, either of you, or whoever that is will be on his toes and we’ll never know the truth of it. Arminius, take the standard bearer here away to the town’s beer shop for a discussion about a donation for the boy’s equipment needs. His mail looks to be getting a little short to me. .’

The German nodded knowingly, taking a firm hold of Morban’s arm.

‘Come then, Morban, we’ll combine your favourite activity with your biggest fear.’

As they walked away Marcus squatted down on his haunches, watching the two boys approach. Lupus walked up to his officer and saluted as the soldiers had taught him, his eyes alive with excitement.

‘Centurion, I’ve been in a gold mine!’

Marcus nodded calmly, smiling at the other boy who was lurking out of arm’s reach.

‘I guessed by the state of your cloak that you’d been somewhere dark and dirty. A gold mine, eh? Did you find any gold?’

Lupus’s eyes widened with the memory, the enthusiasm spilling out of him in the absence of any punishment for going missing.

‘No. Mus’s friend Karsas took us to look at something called a seam, but it was only rock. But I saw the men turning the waterwheel, and we put oil in the lamps, and Mus. .’ he turned to the other boy, ‘Mus showed me how to climb up the thirty-foot ladder like he does, with a lamp in one hand, and we went to the other side of the mountain to see the Raven, and-’

Marcus smiled at the smaller child, making no effort to move in the face of the boy’s obvious readiness to run. He gently overrode Lupus with a question.

‘Hello Mus, I’m Marcus. Are you boys hungry?’ Lupus nodded eagerly, and his new friend’s face brightened slightly. ‘I’ll tell you what, why don’t we go and see Felicia and Annia and see what they’re cooking for dinner. You can tell me all about where you’ve been and what you’ve done while we eat, and after that the pair of you can clean my boots and armour together, eh?’

He turned away from the children as he stood, hoping not to send the younger boy running simply with the movement, and walked slowly away down the line of tents without looking to see if they were following. Lupus turned to his friend, who was staring at the Roman’s back in a misery of indecision, and held out his open palm.

‘In the mine today, I was scared of the darkness and the ladder, and you told me to trust you?’ Mus nodded, still watching Marcus, and Lupus waited in silence until the boy’s gaze turned back to his outstretched hand. ‘So now you have to trust me.’

Scaurus followed the waiting messenger up the valley in the early evening’s dim starlight with one hand on the hilt of his sword, but the taciturn man led him past the miners’ camp and straight up the road into the heart of Alburnus Major, a cluster of houses that huddled in the shadow of the Rotunda Mountain. A figure walked down the road out of the gloom, and a familiar voice spoke in a tone which to the tribune’s ear was clearly edged with more than a hint of bitterness.

‘Well now, Tribune Scaurus, you seem to be getting around smartly enough.’

The tribune nodded tersely, putting both hands on his hips and forcing a note of civility into his voice, while the messenger lurked almost unseen in the darkness.

‘Good evening, Procurator. Are you joining us for dinner?’

Maximus laughed, and again Scaurus was left with the feeling that there was something he was missing.

‘No, Tribune, I won’t be joining you.’ He stepped around Scaurus, calling out over his shoulder as he continued on down the road, his last words floating away across the darkened landscape. ‘I wish you a pleasant evening, although I have little doubt you’ll find the entertainment to your taste. Unless, of course, all those stories we hear about soldiers preferring masculine company are true. .’

Watching the procurator vanish into the darkness, Scaurus shrugged and turned back to his guide, gesturing with a hand for the man to continue on his path. The messenger led him into a walled courtyard, across a wide, paved garden lit by a dozen blazing torches and decorated with tastefully planted trees and shrubs, and up to the front door of the large villa sheltered behind the high walls. He hammered at the door, which was promptly opened by an imposingly rotund slave who beckoned the tribune inside. Closing the door behind them, the man turned back to him with a slight smile.

‘Good evening, sir. Might I take your sword, before I escort you through into the dining room?’

Scaurus shrugged and eased the weapon’s baldric over his head.

‘I’ll keep the dagger if it’s all the same to you. A man needs something to eat with. And take care with that blade, it’s been in my family since the blessed Claudius was on the throne.’

The portly servant nodded, taking the weapon with the appropriate reverence and then ushering the tribune through a door and into an empty room with two couches set out on either side of a low table, on which stood a wine bottle and two beakers.

‘The lady will join you shortly, sir, I believe.’

‘The lady?’

Whether deliberately or not, the slave had withdrawn too quickly to have heard the question, leaving a bemused Scaurus to pace around the room with one hand on the dagger’s hilt, and a distinct feeling that he was being misled in some way. Glancing at the murals that decorated the walls he frowned momentarily, then raised an intrigued eyebrow as he realised exactly what it was that they depicted.

‘Good, aren’t they? I had to pay an absolute fortune to find an artist with the skill and experience to get them right, but it was worth every denarius if the reaction of the men who see them is any indication of their value. I particularly like that one, where he’s mounting her from behind. Do you see the way her back’s arched? You can almost hear the cries of pleasure as he grinds her into the couch.’

Scaurus nodded, turning to face the speaker with the distinct feeling that his face was a little pinker than might be desirable. Theodora was carefully posed in the doorway on the opposite side of the room, leaning against the door frame with her elegant chin resting on her raised hand and the other hand at her side, gently stroking at whatever gauzy, semi-transparent material had been used to make her gown. He bowed deeply, using the moment to gather his thoughts.

‘Ah, madam. I must admit you have me at a disadvantage. Your messenger led me to expect a dinner party, but your rather exotic clothing indicates that the gathering might be a more select group than I’d imagined?’

She laughed, the sound light and breathy in the room’s silence, and stepped away from the door with a calculating look on her face.

‘The confusion is purely intentional, Tribune. I wanted you all to myself, but I wasn’t sure how you would have responded to an invitation that would appear to be aimed at seeking favouritism with you.’

He raised both eyebrows, putting his hands on his hips.

‘Which is exactly what this is, I presume.’

Theodora smiled with genuine pleasure.

‘Oh yes, of course it is, and how clever of you to see through me. Mind you, I was also hoping to provoke you to come here dressed up in all that lovely armour. I do so love a man in uniform. I wish my artist were here now, I’d have him paint you just like that, looking all stern and manly. .’ She walked across the room and ran a finger down his breastplate. ‘And shiny too. All my birthdays come at once. If only you’d worn your helmet.’

Scaurus smiled.

‘If only I’d known.’

‘Ah, but half the fun of these things is the surprise, wouldn’t you say? Now, what happens if I undo this?’

She pulled at the fastenings that secured his breastplate, her delicate fingers unpicking the hooks.

‘Let’s have all that bronze off, shall we? It’s all very well for intimidating civilians, but it’s not really evening wear, now is it?’

His smiled broadened.

‘I must warn you, madam, that I’ve had a fairly hectic day, and the timing of your invitation allowed me no opportunity to bathe. I may be a little. . ripe?’

She finished teasing open the tight knots securing his breastplate’s two halves, lowering the heavy bronze armour to the floor before bending close and inhaling.

‘Marvellous! That, my dear tribune, is the smell of a man. And presumably down here we’ll find. .’ She darted a hand beneath his tunic and rubbed at his rapidly swelling penis. ‘Exactly what I’m looking for!’ She stood, laughing into his expression of delighted astonishment as she tugged him towards the door by the now thoroughly engorged member. ‘This way, Gaius. I may call you Gaius, I presume, given that I’m just about to mount this rather impressive specimen? Let’s get that first desperate coupling out of the way, shall we? I don’t want you leaking all over my furniture in anticipation when a few minutes of vigorous enjoyment can calm it all down until later.’

‘Later?’

She smirked knowingly at him, knowing she literally had him in the palm of her hand.

‘Oh yes. After a nice long dinner, with enough wine to dull your sensitivity whilst not destroying your ability, during which we can have a chat about how you’re going to defend the Raven Head mine against these beastly barbarians, I’ll be expecting you to impale me on this a few more times. Until, to be perfectly frank, there’s no more impaling left in you.’