Arminius Read online

  The prefect rummaged in the fold of his toga; he brought out a wooden training sword, the type that Thumelicatz had used for years, day after day for hours on end, practising every prescribed move in every combination until they were as natural as breathing.

  With a theatrical flourish the prefect held it aloft. ‘I, Marcus Vibius Vibianus, prefect of the city of Ravenna, award the gladiator, Licus of Germania, his freedom after five years in the arena.’ He presented the sword in both hands to Thumelicatz who took it without thanks.

  Knowing that he could not afford to insult the mob, Thumelicatz punched the symbol of gladiatorial manumission in the air and rotated once, accepting the accolade of the citizens of Ravenna for what he hoped was the last time.

  ‘You may become my client and bear my name,’ Vibianus said with an air of self-importance.

  Thumelicatz looked at the prefect as if he could not believe what he had just heard. ‘I’d sooner become your bitch and bear your runtish whelps, Roman.’ He barged past the prefect and walked towards the gates, ostentatiously peeling off the accoutrements of a secutor and discarding them to cheers, working the crowd in the knowledge that Vibianus would not be able to do anything against him while he enjoyed their support.

  Vibianus followed him, trying to make the best out of the situation, head held high, the very picture of a haughty magistrate.

  ‘I take it you and our esteemed prefect won’t become regular dining companions,’ Orosius commented, falling in step with Thumelicatz as he passed through the gates. He handed him a papyrus scroll. ‘This is your certificate of manumission.’

  Thumelicatz took it without reading it. ‘Thank you, Orosius. How did this come about? I thought that I was destined to die in the arena.’

  ‘You were but that’s a fact that no one had bothered to acquaint our new prefect with before he took office. When he told me that he wished to buy the favour of the mob by freeing you, who was I, a mere lanista, to gainsay him?’

  Thumelicatz’s pace slowed as they negotiated their way through the torch-lit, fume-filled bowels of the amphitheatre, clogged with terrified, shackled prisoners awaiting the jaws of the wild beasts whose famished roars echoed around smoke-stained, brick-built arches. Water dripped from the ceiling into puddles, edged by green slime, on the worn paved floor. ‘Why did you do this for me? You owe me nothing. Quite the opposite actually, I owe you everything for the personal training you gave me.’

  Orosius smiled and looked sidelong at his companion. ‘Would you believe that it was to stop you exceeding my tally and becoming the most renowned gladiator ever in Ravenna?’

  ‘Bollocks; no one gives a fuck about being anything in this shithole.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong; the prefect does. He wants to gain favour with the new Emperor, Gaius Caligula, by increasing the flow of tax from this city into the imperial coffers. He plans to do it by firstly buying the goodwill of the citizens and then making cuts, one of which was how much he pays me for my goods and services; the amount that he offered me in compensation for freeing you was derisory. I think when the Emperor finds out that Marcus Vibius Vibianus, in an effort to make himself popular, has freed the son of Arminius he’ll be called back to Rome to explain this rather novel way of containing our enemies; at the very least he would be advised to forget any senatorial ambitions.’

  ‘And things here will get back to normal for you?’

  ‘That’s all I ask; so you had better leave right now before someone tells him he’s made rather a foolish mistake.’

  ‘I need to go somewhere first.’

  ‘No you don’t, I’ve had your prize money brought from the ludus; you’re a rich man, you could almost afford to buy yourself.’

  ‘Keep it, it’ll make up the shortfall in your compensation.’

  ‘It’ll do more than that.’ Orosius signalled to two guards on the gates to the outside world to open them. ‘What else is so important that it’s going to delay your departure?’

  Thumelicatz stepped out into the street, free for the first time to go wherever he wished. He nodded at the sheathed sword hanging from Orosius’ belt. ‘May I?’

  Orosius unclipped the scabbard from his belt and handed it to Thumelicatz.

  ‘Thank you, Orosius. I need to get my mother; she’s a slave in the house of my uncle.’

  Thumelicatz pounded on the door of a substantial villa on the wide and busy thoroughfare that linked Ravenna’s forum with its citadel. After a few moments a viewing slot at head-height opened to reveal a dark, questioning eye.

  ‘I have come to see Tiberius Claudius Flavus,’ Thumelicatz announced, trying to suppress the tension in his voice.

  ‘What name shall I give, master?’

  ‘Tell him that it’s his brother’s son.’

  The slot snapped shut.

  Thumelicatz waited with growing impatience wondering if his uncle, Flavus, whom he knew as Chlodochar, would dare open the door to him after such a long absence.

  The answer came with the grating of a bolt and the clack of a key.

  The door swung back.

  Placing his hand on the pommel of his sword hilt, Thumelicatz walked through the vestibule and on into the atrium of his uncle’s house for the first time in fourteen years.

  The atrium was that of a Roman, not of a Germanic warrior from the Cherusci tribe to which both Thumelicatz and his uncle belonged. A fine mosaic floor, depicting scenes from the Aeneid, surrounded the impluvium at the rectangular room’s centre; the fountain within it was of Salacia, consort to Neptune, portrayed as a nymph crowned with seaweed. There were no weapons or other tools of war hanging on the walls, no boar tusks, no antlers, nothing that Thumelicatz’s mother had told him decorated the walls of a nobleman’s longhouse; there were no long wooden boards and benches at which his followers would feast and sing, just low, polished marble tables on ornate legs, littered with glass bowls and bronze statuettes of Roman gods. To Thumelicatz it looked like every other Roman house that he had been forced into to perform displays of swordsmanship for Ravenna’s wealthy at their luxuriant and wasteful dinner parties; he spat on the floor.

  ‘That’s exactly the sort of behaviour I would expect from a slave and a gladiator,’ came a voice from the far end of the room, oozing contempt. ‘Why aren’t you dead yet and how did you get permission to visit?’

  Thumelicatz looked up to see a tall, portly man, wearing an equestrian toga, entering the room. His hair was short and greying blond; a livid scar where his right eye should have been disfigured a round and flabby, florid face.

  Thumelicatz spat again, this time in contempt for the man he saw rather than the culture that he surrounded himself with. ‘I’m not dead because I have the protection of Donar, a warrior’s god; and I am here because I don’t need permission to go anywhere being neither a slave nor a gladiator any more, Uncle.’

  Flavus stopped; his expression changed from sneering aloofness to shocked concern almost before Thumelicatz had finished speaking. ‘You’re lying. Guards!’

  Thumelicatz pulled the wooden sword from his belt and walked up the room as four substantial bodyguards entered behind Flavus; their swords were drawn. Thumelicatz paused to the left of the impluvium.

  Flavus gestured to his men to stay back. ‘Who gave you that?’

  ‘Your prefect, not one hour ago.’

  ‘Then I shall tell him to take it back.’

  ‘He couldn’t if he tried; my certificate of manumission makes me a freed citizen of Rome. I could appeal to the new Caesar and he would have to uphold my case.’

  ‘Or he could just have you killed as Tiberius should have done years ago.’

  It was now Thumelicatz’s turn to sneer. ‘You know perfectly well why Tiberius didn’t have me killed. It was for the same reason that he refused the king of the Chatti, Adgandestrius’, offer to poison my father; because he had some honour – a concept that you forgot about years ago. Now give me my mother and I will leave you to rot in the rancid
fruits of your

  ‘She is not mine to give, she belongs to Rome; I just mind her.’

  ‘She is your brother’s wife; now that he is dead you have the right to dispose of her as you wish. Give her to me and I will leave thinking slightly better of you; I will forgo my father’s vengeance that is now mine by right and you will never hear from me again.’

  ‘And if I choose not to?’

  ‘Then I will choose to take her; and my father’s vengeance on you will be that of a man murdered by his brother.’

  Flavus laughed, hollow and mirthless; he pointed a thumb over his shoulder. ‘And you think that they will let you?’

  Thumelicatz looked along the line of bodyguards, Germanic auxiliaries who had completed their service and had stayed in the employ of their commander, he supposed. ‘If I was to think about them, I would think about them one at a time.’ In his mind Thumelicatz marked the dark-haired man on their extreme right and the older man with a full blond beard next to him.

  There was something in the casual tone of his nephew’s reply that caused Flavus to hesitate for a moment before his one remaining eye hardened. He stepped aside. ‘Kill him!’

  The four bodyguards surged forward without hesitation and together, in one line. Thumelicatz knew they had made a serious mistake; he jumped right, onto the raised side of the impluvium, as the dark-haired man’s sword slashed down where he had been an instant earlier. Sweeping his sword out of its scabbard, Thumelicatz continued the weapon’s upwards motion into the man’s jaw, severing it to sway loose – attached only by the thin skin of his cheeks – as the blond guard sliced a horizontal cut towards his thigh. With a rapid downwards jab of his left hand, Thumelicatz caught the blow with the practice sword, slowing and deflecting it, as it cleaved through the hardened wood, to slice into his calf with little momentum; riding the pain he flashed the wooden sword’s splintered rump up, forcing it into the blond man’s eye, sending him sprawling back with a desperate shriek. Jerking his dripping blade out of his first victim – who buckled, gurgling to the floor – Thumelicatz pointed it at the remaining two guards. They stopped, unsure of how to deal with a man who had just felled their two comrades in less than five heartbeats. Thumelicatz did not wait for them to come up with a plan; tossing the weapon from his right hand to his left, he accelerated the blade, backhand, towards the nearest man, in a blurred arc that terminated in the hollow, wet thud of a butcher’s cleaver rending a joint of pork. The guard’s head twisted with the velocity of the blow to slew to its right; anchored by a few unsevered ligaments, it perched on the shoulder, staring in horror at his comrade next to him as his heart gave two final, mighty beats, exploding blood into the air. The head toppled forward, pulling the body down behind it, as Thumelicatz’s blade slammed into the open, incredulous mouth of the fourth bodyguard; its tip burst out of his neck. Before the surprise had even begun to register in the man’s eyes, Thumelicatz turned and surveyed the room; his uncle was gone.

  A woman’s scream from the courtyard garden, at the rear of the house, rang around the atrium. Thumelicatz let gravity do the work of removing his sword from his final victim as the body crumpled to the blood-slick mosaic floor. With a quick glance around the room to check for other retainers intent upon defending their master, Thumelicatz ran towards the tablinum, at the far end of the atrium, and passed through it and on into the garden.

  ‘Put down your sword and your mother will live!’ Flavus stood between two of the columns supporting the portico at the far end of the garden; a woman in her sixties, tall with wild grey hair and pendulous breasts swaying beneath a thin knee-length tunic, struggled in his grip with a knife at her throat.

  Her blue eyes widened in recognition. ‘Thumelicatz!’

  Thumelicatz raised a hand. ‘Stay calm, Mother.’

  Behind Flavus, another woman of similar age, but of squatter build, lurked in an open doorway; a dagger flashed in her hand, hate ate into her face. ‘Kill the bitch anyway, Husband; and then we’ll settle with her whelp over her corpse.’

  ‘Silence, Gunda! Thumelicatz, drop your weapon.’

  ‘And what happens if I don’t?’

  ‘I slit Thusnelda’s throat.’

  Thumelicatz carried on walking forward past a large fig tree that dominated the garden. ‘And what happens then?’

  ‘Then it will be your turn.’

  Thumelicatz scoffed. ‘You’re an old man, Uncle; and you won’t get to be one day older if my mother is harmed.’ He stopped two paces from Flavus and Thusnelda; with ostentation he lowered his sword but kept a firm grip of it. ‘So what’s it to be, Uncle, death for you both or life?’

  Flavus looked at his nephew from over Thusnelda’s shoulder; uncertainty and fear played in his eyes.

  Thumelicatz held his gaze; a flicker of amusement passed over his face. ‘You were always too keen on life, Uncle; that’s why you chose it over honour and murdered my father.’

  ‘Erminatz would have had me killed; only one of us could live.’

  ‘My husband loved you, Flavus!’ Thusnelda shouted. ‘You were his younger brother; he would have forgiven you had you returned to Germania and renounced Rome. That’s why he met you and my father alone that night, he believed your lie that you were coming home to him and bringing me and my son with you; but you betrayed his trust and the bonds of blood, treacherously murdering him.’

  ‘I did what was best for—’

  A shrill scream accompanied by a flurry of skirts and hair brought Gunda diving out of the shadows, teeth bared, dagger raised over-arm, aimed above her husband’s shoulder at the side of Thusnelda’s neck.

  Flavus spun round, exposing more of Thusnelda’s body to the attack as a flash of burnished iron flicked up from below; Thumelicatz’s sword parted the knife-wielding fist from Gunda’s right arm. The look of horror on Flavus’ face as he watched his wife’s hand spin through the air, spiralling blood, was suddenly replaced by agonised surprise as Thusnelda’s sharp teeth sank into the base of his thumb; with two savage shakes of her head she ripped the flesh and muscle from the bone, exposing the joint as the point of her elbow rammed into her brother-in-law’s solar plexus. The dagger at her throat clattered to the ground, the noise drowned by Gunda’s uncontrolled shrieks as her eyes swivelled constantly between her severed hand on the floor and the newly carved stump resting in her left hand, pumping bloody spurts.

  Thusnelda kicked Flavus’ knife away as she broke from his grasp and, stooping to sweep up Gunda’s hand from the ground as she passed, stepped into the safe embrace of her son’s left arm. She turned and looked down at her erstwhile gaolers now both sunk to their knees; working her jaw, she chewed hard before spitting a semi-masticated ball of flesh into Flavus’ upturned face. ‘Now it’s my turn, Chlodochar; now you and that bitch-wife of yours will find out what I’ve been dreaming of for the last twenty-two years.’ She smiled coldly at Gunda who whimpered softly, squeezing her wrist to stem the flow of blood. ‘And don’t worry, my dear, after you’re gone you will always be remembered.’ She held out the severed hand. ‘Your finger bones will look charming woven into my hair.’

  Thumelicatz hauled on a rope and then secured it to a lower branch of the fig tree; Flavus was suspended by his wrists, his feet just above the ground.

  Thusnelda raised her head. ‘Donar, hold your hands over me and my son as we travel through strange lands and grant that we return to Germania. Accept this gift of blood, the most precious gift that I can give you other than my own son: the blood of a kinswoman who has given birth.’ Thusnelda lowered her eyes from the heavens and met those of Gunda, bound to the tree’s trunk. ‘The Great Thunderer will take you, bitch; you should thank me that I’ve given some worth to your miserable existence.’

  Gunda spat in Thusnelda’s face. ‘Our son, Italicus, will avenge us.’

  ‘Italicus! What sort of name is that for a son of Donar?’ Thusnelda raised her knife and placed it to Gunda’s throat. ‘You’ve lost everything that you were born wi
th; you even lost the ability to choose an honourable name for a son.’ She jerked her arm; honed iron sliced through flesh.

  Gunda’s eyes widened, liquid bubbled in her throat and her body juddered against its restraints.

  Thumelicatz walked forward, raising his sword to Flavus, dangling from the tree watching, with horror, the death-throes of his wife. ‘Donar, bring us home and strike me down from above with thunder and lightning if I ever have anything to do with Rome or her people ever again. I want nothing from her, I am done with her; see that I keep my oath.’ The tip of his blade slid into Flavus’ lower belly, a gasp exploded from the suspended man. Bringing his left hand to reinforce his right, Thumelicatz pulled the blade upwards, sawing. Up it sliced, cleaving through muscle and gut, releasing noisome gases and fluids and causing pain that Flavus’ screams could not do justice to. As the blade reached the ribcage, Thumelicatz withdrew it and walked behind his uncle. Putting his arms around the writhing body, he stuck his fingers into the wound and yanked it open. Grey steaming coils of slick innards flopped out, tumbling down Flavus’ legs and piling up at his feet. His shrieks warmed Thumelicatz and Thusnelda’s hearts.

  They looked at each other and smiled.

  ‘I’ve missed you, my son.’

  ‘I know, Mother. Let’s go home.’

  CHAPTER 1

  GERMANIA MAGNA, SPRING AD 41

  T HUMELICATZ WATCHED THREE mounted warriors app roaching from the west, half a mile away across the valley. Picking their way along the edge of a ploughed and sown field, a rode cleared out of the surrounding forest by the sweated labour of generations gone by, the horsemen descended the hill and skirted an area of marshland fed by a river flowing into the reed-lined lake beyond. A gentle breeze rippled its surface; it glistered silver and gold in the westering sun in stark contrast to the conifer-swathed hills encircling it. The sweet scent of so many trees’ resinous sap infused the warm air and gave the name to this high range of hills in the heart of Germania Magna: Harzland in the language of the Cherusci tribe – the Land of Sap.