A wiry figure hauled himself free from beneath the shuddering body.
‘How did you know it wasn’t me?’ Serpentius’s voice held no hint of how close to death he’d just come.
Valerius could find no answer. The truth was that he’d reacted without conscious thought. Only the gods would ever know why he had struck. He stood on shaking legs above the man he had killed. Serpentius tossed him a wicked-looking curved dagger that glinted in the dull light.
‘The boy?’ the Roman choked.
‘I must be getting slow,’ Serpentius sighed. ‘At least he was alone. Better this way. He would never have given up: it was in his eyes. He was that kind of man.’
‘We humiliated him. Maybe that was a mistake.’
The veteran gladiator snorted. ‘His mistake. It wasn’t the humiliation or the pain that made him come. It was because he talked. His pride couldn’t bear that.’
Valerius stared down at the handsome young face that was already losing its definition against the bones of the skull. ‘We should bury him.’
Serpentius ignored the remark and wrapped himself in his blanket. ‘He can wait until morning. He isn’t going anywhere.’ When Valerius didn’t move, the Spaniard sat up. ‘Go to sleep, Valerius. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. And don’t waste your time mourning the boy. I have a feeling he won’t be the last corpse we see before we’re done.’
XXIV
It was still early when they reached the next town. In the middle distance they could see a queue of animals, carts and people at the gates. Valerius drew up his horse and pulled the map of Imperial staging posts from the knapsack tied to his saddle.
‘This must be Parma.’ He frowned. ‘What do you think?’
‘Looks like some sort of checkpoint. They’ll be questioning everybody who enters. Could be a patrol from the Ala Siliana, or maybe the town has declared for Otho and they’re keeping the rebels out. Friend or enemy doesn’t really matter. We don’t want to get involved.’
They turned off to the right, through anonymous nut-brown fields criss-crossed by trackways and drainage ditches, avoiding the rough huts, farmsteads and occasional small villas that dotted the fertile countryside. Valerius studied the landscape around them. Away from the Via Aemilia the country was free of the threat posed by the bigger garrison towns. Politics and war held no sway here, only the all-encompassing, unbreakable cycle of the seasons and the weather. He felt the gait of his mount alter as its hooves pushed into the soft earth and the bitter-sweet scent of the soil filled his nostrils. The very land exuded a kind of eternal peace that he prayed would never be broken by the armies gathering beyond the western and southern horizons. East, too, because by now Otho’s messengers would have reached the legions in Noricum, Pannonia, Dalmatia and Moesia and it could only be days before they marched to meet the threat from Vitellius’s army.
Serpentius caught his mood. ‘It’s good to be away from the road for a while.’
Valerius smiled. ‘Yes, but don’t be fooled. This tranquillity is deceptive. Somewhere not far from here land just like this was fertilized by the blood and bones of thousands of legionaries who marched north to stop Hannibal’s advance on Rome. They failed, but their sacrifice was not wasted, because the delay and the freezing weather killed off all but one of the Carthaginian war elephants.’
Serpentius made the sign to ward off evil; the nearest he would ever come to showing fear.
Without warning, a hole appeared in the previously unbroken layer of cloud blanketing the sky above them and for a few seconds a shaft of sunlight burst through to turn some hamlet on the far horizon into a glittering jewel. For no reason, an image of two towns they would pass on the way north appeared in Valerius’s head as they had on the map he had studied less than an hour before. Cremona and Placentia had been founded as military camps to protect Italy from the Celtic tribes of what was now Gallia Transpadana, the lands between the Padus and the Alps. It struck him that, along with the river that divided them, they formed a kind of intricate brooch that held the four corners of the Empire together; a Celtic knot that had to be unravelled before any invader could enter the Roman heartland from north, west or east. Vitellius would have to untie that knot if he wanted to secure the purple. Unless Valerius could persuade him to accept Otho’s offer the Rhenus legions would be marching this way, and it was possible that here on this rich plain the future of Rome would be decided. He felt a physical pain at the thought. Was it not enough that they had risked everything to rid the world of Nero? Now Romans must suffer for the greed and ambition of his successors. A kind of hardness developed inside him, as if a stone grew to fill his belly and chest. Gaius Valerius Verrens had never shirked a challenge, but this was his greatest test. He had to succeed, because if he did not war was coming. A war that would divide friends. A war between brother and brother. The worst kind of war. Civil war.