Traitor Page 6

  At once Cynbel’s shoulders sank, his eyes closed, and he became the tutor who had helped raise me from a child.

  ‘You are a good man, Corvus.’ He smiled. ‘Your father is a great one.’

  The words were alien to me. For years I had known my father to be Beatha’s killer. That had been proven false, but…

  ‘He sold her…’

  Cynbel shook his head. ‘No, Corvus. He sold Beatha to your best friend’s family to stop you both running away. If she was free, you would have run. He was going to do it when the time was right, and you had both been persuaded to stay here, in Iadar.’

  I felt sick.

  I had been so wrong.

  What had I done?

  ‘If you hate him, Corvus, then you must also hate me. The decision was made not as master and slave, but as friends. As brothers. Do you hate me, Corvus? Do you hate me?’

  I couldn’t speak.

  ‘Do you hate your father?’

  Tears ran over my cheeks.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘No…’

  No.

  ‘Then let’s go to him, child.’ He put his arm over my shoulder. ‘Let us go and make peace with your father.’

  Chapter 12

  It was a long time before I said anything.

  ‘I can’t,’ I told Cynbel, leaving the rest unsaid – I can’t face my father after everything I have done. Everything I have accused.

  Beneath our hillside the shimmering sea continued to roll towards the land. The sun continued to climb. Life went on as it ever had, but to me, it had changed beyond all measure. I’d thought my father was my enemy. He had tried instead to be my saviour.

  And I had wanted to kill him for it.

  ‘Cynbel, what have I done…?’

  My head sank between my knees.

  ‘Nothing that can’t be undone.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘He forgives you, you know?’

  I looked up at him.

  ‘He forgives you. He has told me so, several times. He speaks candidly with me, Corvus. I have told you, your father is my greatest friend.’

  A smile grew across his face. ‘You should have seen the pride in him in recent weeks. “My son!” he says. “Standard-bearer of the Eighth! Can you believe it, Cynbel? My son, a standard-bearer!”’

  I did not know this man that Cynbel spoke of. My face said as much.

  ‘Because he is father to you, and friend to me,’ Cynbel explained. ‘We all have different sides for different people, Corvus.’

  ‘When I came back I… I came to kill him,’ I admitted. Patricide. The most heinous of crimes.

  ‘But you didn’t,’ Cynbel dismissed it. ‘You could have, but you didn’t.’ He squeezed my shoulder. ‘Your father would have done the same thing, in your position. Yes, he would have, Corvus. You are your father’s son, and he forgives you.

  ‘Now,’ he smiled, ‘will you forgive him?’

  * * *

  We walked to Iadar and my father’s villa. Shrubs gave way to orderly fields and orchards.

  It was Cynbel who held Ahren’s reins. ‘He’s a good-looking horse.’

  He didn’t ask where I’d acquired him. He didn’t ask why I was here in Iadar, while my legion was at war.

  ‘I can’t stay,’ I told him, addressing my desertion.

  ‘We’ll find a way,’ was all he said.

  ‘Is my father still sickly?’ I held the words for a long time before I said them. They were a release, and yet they caused me pain. For so long I had held him as an enemy. For so long I had been wrong about him.

  ‘He is dying,’ Cynbel said honestly. ‘But he’s been dying for a long time.’

  I felt that there was more. ‘What?’

  ‘I believe,’ my teacher told me, ‘that he has been holding on to life to make peace with you.’ He smiled. ‘And now he can.’

  I said nothing to that. The truth was that I was sick with nerves. I felt as though I was about to meet my father for the first time.

  ‘You said he was proud that I was a standard-bearer?’

  Cynbel nodded.

  ‘Then he will be ashamed, now.’

  ‘He is not,’ the Briton said gently, and I heard certainty in his words.

  I looked across at him. ‘He already knows?’

  ‘He knows.’ Cynbel did not seem worried by that fact. ‘Riders came from the legion. They were grave. They came out of honour for your father, believing you to have been murdered by the rebels.’

  I looked at my feet.

  ‘Was…’

  Cynbel grasped my meaning. ‘No. He was not.’

  Marcus had not ridden with them.

  ‘They were dispatched by a Centurion Paulus, who said that you had fought alongside him with great valour.’

  ‘Paulus is a good man,’ I said. Then I was struck by something that Cynbel had said. ‘My father thinks me dead?’

  He shook his head, and laughed before affecting my father’s voice. ‘No son of mine is getting murdered by a bunch of poxy rebels. Those were his words. “He is up to something,” he said.’

  And I was. Desertion.

  ‘He will be glad to see you, Corvus.’

  I ignored him.

  ‘I said, he will be glad to see you. Corvus. Corvus, what are you looking at… what’s wrong?’

  Smoke.

  I snatched Ahren’s reins from Cynbel’s hand. He made no protest. He knew where that smoke was coming from as well as I did.

  I pulled myself onto Ahren’s back and dug my heels into his flanks. ‘Yar!’

  I didn’t look back, but I felt Cynbel run after us. He was left in Ahren’s dust as the horse pounded the track.

  Fear shook my hands and tears stung my eyes as I closed on my father’s estate. The buildings were hidden from me by the trees of his groves, but the smoke remained in the sky, fanning the flame of my panic.

  Finally I saw the building. The modest villa that had been our home. I saw where black smoke had belched from a window before the fire had died, and failed to take further hold.

  I saw no one, living or dead.

  ‘Father!’

  There was no sign.

  ‘Father!’ My eyes were wet and my stomach was sick. I threw myself from Ahren’s back.

  ‘Father!’

  I ran into the home of my childhood. Thick smoke clung to the rooms like a curse, but I neither saw nor heard flame. I dropped to my haunches and looked for my father, expecting him to have collapsed on the floor. I could not see him. I began to cough, and hack. I needed air. I pushed open a door, the wood hot beneath my hands, and burst through to the light of the courtyard where I had once tried to kill my father.

  And that was where I found him.

  * * *

  He was hanging from his favourite tree, the fruit of my treason. He looked pathetic now, his body limp, face thick with blood.

  I wanted to rage. I could not scream. Instead, my knees went weak and I staggered towards him. I cried out as I touched his still-warm flesh. I wept that he had died before I could make amends.

  ‘Father!’

  He could not hear me. He had left this life without hearing the apology of his son, and the shame that he carried. ‘Father…’

  I’d never known him as a young man. He sired me at an advanced age, but even then he had been strong and vital. When I had grown into a man myself I had fought him here, and he had been broad shouldered and strong as oak – only Cynbel’s intervention had saved us from killing each other, and then I had run away, and to the legions. Since that day my father had become reduced by old age and illness, and the man I had seen weeks ago had been withered, and bone.

  Now he was gone, and it wasn’t until Cynbel found me at his feet that I lifted my head.

  I saw fear in the Briton’s eyes. I was not the same man who had walked with him from the hillside, and he had seen this face before.

  It was the mask of a killer.

  ‘Corvus…’

  I stood. Only
then did I see the painted message that had been scrawled across the wall of my father’s sanctuary.

  ‘See to my father,’ I told Cynbel.

  ‘Corvus…’ he tried.

  I pulled free of his grasp and walked away to the wall. I ran my hand across the wet paint of a word that had condemned a good man to a violent death.

  A word that would forever define my life.

  TRAITOR

  Part Two

  Chapter 13

  I found the first and only witness to my father’s murder cowering in an orchard. He had ducked back into cover quickly when I saw him, but he could not outrun Ahren, nor his rider, who had grown up on this estate, and knew every inch of it.

  ‘Who are you?’ I demanded.

  He was dark skinned and wide eyed. A young man with a twisted leg – no doubt the reason he was here in my father’s fields, and not drafted for military service.

  ‘Chessa, master.’

  I looked around me. I saw a dropped basket and spilled fruit. ‘You are my father’s slave?’

  ‘No, master, I am a free man. I work for your father.’

  ‘Tell me what you saw, Chessa. You do not need to call me master.’

  My words were meant to put the man at ease. My posture did not. I no longer possessed my armour, but astride Ahren and with fire in my eyes, there could be no doubt in Chessa’s mind that he beheld a killer.

  ‘Talk!’

  He talked. His answers were long, and frightened, and garbled, and so I sifted fact from fear.

  Four men had come on horses.

  ‘Romans? Rebels?’

  Romans, he believed.

  ‘Why Romans?’

  Their shields. Their uniforms. Their manner.

  ‘What did they look like?’

  Hard to tell, but two were very tall for Romans.

  ‘What of their horses?’

  One pale. Three dark.

  ‘What did they do?’

  Two had dismounted at the front of the house. Two at the back. One of them had shouted a name.

  Corvus.

  I heard the rest of the story. It was what I had expected, but not what I had hoped for. A martial corner of my heart wished to hear that, when confronted by the four riders, my father had appeared in the doorway of his home, sword in hand, to fight them, but he was no soldier. He was a sick man, and had likely been dragged from his bed, thrown down the stairs, and then strung up in the tree like game.

  Chessa had been too distant to see faces, or too scared to remember them. ‘They were Roman soldiers,’ was all he could tell me again. ‘They left quickly, once the fire had started.’

  ‘And you did nothing but watch?’

  My hands were shaking. They wanted blood.

  Anyone’s blood.

  ‘Go to the house and assist Cynbel,’ I ordered. The young man saw the murder in my eyes and fled towards the villa as fast as his twisted leg could take him.

  I turned Ahren, and rode hard for Iadar.

  * * *

  I slowed my horse as we approached the outskirts of the town, then tied him in a copse of trees where I hoped he would remain unnoticed.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ I promised.

  My father’s villa lay in the countryside three miles from the port, and there was no sign of the smoke by the time I was walking the paved streets of my childhood. Over the past fifty years, Iadar had been a settling place for Roman veterans – men whom Marcus had quizzed eagerly about their service in war – and they had brought with it the trappings of civilization. The roads were swept and busy, arteries for merchants, slaves and soldiers to be pumped in and out of the heart of the town: its port.

  I could smell the place before I saw it. Salt, fish, spice, sweat and dung. My body was tingling with grief and rage from the sight of my father, but I retained enough sense to know that this was not the place to be seen as a killer. I wanted blood, but to get it I needed answers, and so I forced my hate inside my stomach where it boiled and burned alongside my shame.

  I should have been there for him.

  I willed myself to concentrate. I moved slowly through the mass of sailors, slaves and ship’s cargo. Burdens were carried by men and beast alike. Donkeys brayed. Men yelled. There was always shouting at the port, but today it was different. Urgent. There was something in the air that I had never seen before.

  It was panic. There was panic in the port. It was controlled, and orderly, but it was there. Voices were sharper and higher than they would usually be. The skin of men’s faces was tighter. Their eyes were wider.

  There were soldiers here, if they could be called that. Tax collectors, not life-takers. They were on guard against thieves, and ready for the chance to force bribes. They were not looking for killers or deserters. They had no interest in me. They were not the men who came to my father’s home, I knew that. They were not the men who’d shouted my name.

  I pressed on, ignoring the sullen look of a man that I crossed in front of. I was focused on someone. His chest was as thick as the barrels being loaded onto ships bound for distant lands. I looked at the decks and saw people, frightened people. They were crammed in, shoulder to shoulder, but they were not slaves. They were refugees, I realised, fleeing the war.

  ‘Where are you looking to go?’ Barrel-chest asked me. ‘That one’s for Arminium.’ He pointed to one ship. ‘That one for Brundisium.’

  ‘I’m looking for a friend, Milos, not a ship.’

  He didn’t recognise me.

  I put out my hand. He stared into my eyes. First he saw something to be afraid of, and then, somewhere, the boy that he had once known.

  ‘Corvus!’

  * * *

  Something in my expression had told Milos that I wanted to talk alone, out of earshot of others. Ports were full of eavesdroppers and gossip, which was exactly why I’d gone to Milos in the first place.

  I felt the intrigue in his eyes as we walked clear of the waterfront’s bustle. The local man could recognise trouble when he saw it. He was masking his surprise well, but behind his act he was doubtless struggling to fit the boy he had known to the man he saw now. I knew there was a chance that he might have heard of my service, but I was willing to bet that he had not.

  Milos’s family were long of Iadar, but not Roman citizens. He was Dalmatian born and father to three sons. They had played with Marcus and I in the times when we were not called to perform duty for our families. As I grew older, and my love for Beatha had grown stronger, it was Milos that I had asked about ships, and distant cities. It was Milos who had booked the passage that would take Beatha and I to our new life.

  I had waited for her in the port that day when she was taken from me. I had waited alone, and then my world had been torn apart.

  There were questions in Milos’s eyes.

  I answered with a look.

  He gave a single, compassionate nod. He did not know, but he understood. ‘So what brings you here, my friend?’

  ‘I’m looking for four Roman soldiers,’ I told him. ‘Real killers, and with horses. Are they in town?’

  Milos narrowed his eyes. It brought his thick eyebrows together.

  ‘Two of them are tall. Very tall.’

  He looked at me for a long moment then, but said no more.

  ‘Let’s go and have a drink,’ he suggested.

  ‘I don’t have time to drink, Milos. I need to find them.’

  ‘You have time, my friend.’ He patted my arm. ‘They’ve left on the road to Siscia.’

  For a moment I said nothing. I had expected that Milos would have heard some gossip, but how did he have the answers so readily?

  He saw my wonder, and answered with a sad smile. ‘As I said, let’s have a drink.’

  * * *

  I sat with Milos in an empty inn on the edge of town. I had been desperate to get after the men who had killed my father, but there were four of them, and they were ahead of me on the road. I needed to see Cynbel. I needed to bury my father. Vengeance wou
ld have to wait, but it would come, and something in Milos’s manner had convinced me that he could be a help in bringing it about.

  ‘How is your father?’ he asked.

  ‘Sick,’ I answered, pushing my grief down further. I would deal with it another day, when the men who had killed him lay gutted.

  ‘Life can be a bastard.’ Milos shrugged. He was not fooled, and his words were enough to acknowledge that some tragedy had befallen me.

  ‘It can.’ We drank to that. ‘How are the boys?’

  A flash of pain crossed his face. ‘Life can be a bastard,’ he said again. ‘The curse of having healthy boys is that when Rome calls, they must answer. All three of them went to the marshalling grounds with the rest of the youth of Dalmatia. They were supposed to serve Tiberius and Rome, but now they serve Bato, and the liberation.’ I could see that there was more.

  ‘Mytilus was killed at Salona.’ The father exhaled, and I grieved for his eldest son.

  ‘I’m sorry, Milos.’ Another ghost. ‘Ranko and Zoran?’

  ‘So far as I know, they are well. Bato has taken his forces to a place called Mons Claudius.’ I didn’t know it. ‘It’s a mountain range north of Poetovium.’

  That was as far from Siscia as Siscia was from Iadar. Milos read my thoughts.

  ‘Iadar is in no danger. These people fleeing, they’re coming from the east.’ As a man of the port, he was well informed about the goings on in the regions.

  ‘Corvus,’ he asked then, ‘are you all right?’

  No. My father was dead, Beatha was dead, my brothers were dead, and the pain of it was a war in my skull. ‘More wine,’ I growled at the innkeeper. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said a second later. ‘More wine, please.’

  ‘Can you tell me more about what’s going on?’ I asked Milos.

  He looked concerned, but continued. ‘Bato made a good effort along the coast at first, but the walls at Salona kept him out. He was injured, I heard, in the head, but that didn’t stop him riding north to join the battle there.’

  My hands tensed. That was a battle I knew well.

  ‘Our boys beat the legion in the day,’ Milos sighed, ‘but then the Romans came back and attacked like cowards in the night.’