Betrayal by Anthony Riches

Author:Anthony Riches
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2017-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

The Old Camp, Germania Inferior, March AD 69

‘Fifth legion …’

Two hundred paces from where Marius stood, an answering command came from from the camp’s other legion.

‘Fifteenth Legion!’

Both men barked out their next words in perfect synchronisation.

‘Atten-tion!’

Marius stared out across the ranks of his three cohorts as they obeyed the order, not with the expected crisp snap of thousands of boots hitting the floor at the same moment, but rather a ragged stutter that lasted for most of the time it took him to puff out a depressed gust of air, a final distant crunch of hobnails impacting on crushed rock incensing him beyond tolerance. Some fool had not only been half asleep, but had compounded the error by stamping to attention when all around him had finally fallen silent.

‘Take that man’s name!’

The senior centurion regarded his men bleakly for a moment longer before issuing his next command. Fifteen hundred men of legio Fifth Alaudae were paraded before their emperor: the seventh and ninth cohorts that had been left behind when the remainder of the legion had marched south in search of glory and the imperial throne, and the new cohort that had been allocated the number eleven, constituted in the main from raw recruits who had joined the army not much more than a month before, with a leavening of trained soldiers to show them how they were expected to behave.

‘Five hundred men.’ He had bemoaned their failure to attract men to the legion’s service to Gaius the previous night in the officer’s mess over several cups of red, shaking his head at the prospect of the following day’s parade of the legion before their emperor. ‘Decimus told me to provide him with at least another two cohorts, instead of which I’ve got half that number, most of them halfwits and men fit for nothing better than picking stones out of the fields and tossing themselves off behind trees when they think nobody’s watching. And after tomorrow’s shambles of a demonstration of their non-existent prowess I’ll have a legatus, an army commander and an emperor up my arse. There’s a meeting with important people in my very near future, Gaius, and nobody’s going to be handing round the glass wine cups this time.’

In the cold light of a late March morning he was, if anything, more depressed than he’d been the previous night, with a sinking sensation in his gut that was only partially the result of having drunk more than was wise for a man whose legion would be on display to an emperor the next day.

‘Form ranks for battle!’

He watched with his heart in his mouth as his three cohorts swung through ninety degrees, perhaps the hardest manoeuvre they would undertake that morning as one end of the line stayed motionless while the men at the other were almost running to swing their century through a wide arc to face the Fifteenth’s cohorts who were performing the same manoeuvre. Closing his eyes in despair as he watched the

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