our comrades, including Ahala, were not so lucky.
We have saved enough money to buy passage back to our native land. In the country of our ancestors, we hope to find family and make new friends. What appalling tales we shall have to tell of the strange lands we visited; and of those lands, surely none was stranger or more barbaric than Rome! But to you it is home, Gordianus, and we wish you all happiness there. Farewell from your friends, Zuleika and her brother Zanziba.
For many years I have saved that scrap of papyrus. I shall never throw it away.
The Hostage to Fortune
Michael Jecks
We move forwards some eighteen years to Caesar’s invasion of Britain, a troubling enough time without having a murder to investigate. This is Michael Jecks’s first venture into the Roman world. He is best known for his series of mysteries set on Dartmoor in the fourteenth century featuring Bailiff Simon Puttock and the disgruntled Sir Baldwin Furnshill, which began with
The Last Templar
(1995)
.
T here are days when you wake up and you know, you just
know
, that this one’s going to be a bastard.
All right. As a soldier, you get used to bad days. There are days when you have to stand watch all night, days when you have to break camp and carry all your belongings miles to some other gods-forsaken spot, days when you’re detailed to dig the new latrines, or clear the old ones . . . Yes, as a legionnaire, you get enough shitty days for the average lifetime. And every so often there are the other days, when you get to do what the citizens back home expect you’re doing the whole time, and risk getting a blade in the guts or an arrow in the face as your glorious general orders you to shove some barbaric, painted scum from some boggy wastelandjust so that the general can claim his glory. They’re all bastards, believe me. Especially generals. They’re no better than any other politicians.
Not that my low estimation of the intelligence and ability of the average general has anything to do with this particular bad day. No. This bad day was caused by my own mates. For my offences against the gods, which must be many, as soon as my comrades learned that I had some education, they elected me as their own private leader. Silly sods.
And now these same silly sods had let the King’s son die.
King? He was a chieftain of the Britons; one of those with a tongue-breaking name that any sensible man would refuse to try to repeat. There never seemed much point. The bastards were never around for long. Either they’d submit to our authority, or they’d die. Either way, they wouldn’t be with the army for long.
His son was taken to ensure his father’s good behaviour, along with eight other close relatives: some other of the chieftain’s family, including his own brother, and so on. We didn’t piss about when it came to taking folks. And now, as I stared down at his bloody body, a great gash in his chest like a second sodding mouth, I knew that my mates and me were all in trouble. We’d been in charge of this pen of hostages, my mates had all been guarding them, and me? I’d bloody fallen asleep, hadn’t I, with no chance of an excuse if our general got to hear of it.
Not that I was safe anyway. Not with the most important hostage, the second in line after the tribal chief, lying dead on the packed earth in front of me.
Of course, you’d think that he was killed by someone left in that stockade with him, wouldn’t you? But I knew that the first thing a hostage learned was, no knives, no swords, nothing. They’d have been patted down before they wereput in our stockade. And when the body was found, my boys would have searched the lot of them for a weapon. Since they had all been frisked and checked clear before they’d been allowed through the door, it wasn’t much of a surprise to learn that they were all clean.
Yup. No weapons in there. Other than the good old Roman ones in my lads’ hands.
I guess I should explain what we were
We have saved enough money to buy passage back to our native land. In the country of our ancestors, we hope to find family and make new friends. What appalling tales we shall have to tell of the strange lands we visited; and of those lands, surely none was stranger or more barbaric than Rome! But to you it is home, Gordianus, and we wish you all happiness there. Farewell from your friends, Zuleika and her brother Zanziba.
For many years I have saved that scrap of papyrus. I shall never throw it away.
The Hostage to Fortune
Michael Jecks
We move forwards some eighteen years to Caesar’s invasion of Britain, a troubling enough time without having a murder to investigate. This is Michael Jecks’s first venture into the Roman world. He is best known for his series of mysteries set on Dartmoor in the fourteenth century featuring Bailiff Simon Puttock and the disgruntled Sir Baldwin Furnshill, which began with
The Last Templar
(1995)
.
T here are days when you wake up and you know, you just
know
, that this one’s going to be a bastard.
All right. As a soldier, you get used to bad days. There are days when you have to stand watch all night, days when you have to break camp and carry all your belongings miles to some other gods-forsaken spot, days when you’re detailed to dig the new latrines, or clear the old ones . . . Yes, as a legionnaire, you get enough shitty days for the average lifetime. And every so often there are the other days, when you get to do what the citizens back home expect you’re doing the whole time, and risk getting a blade in the guts or an arrow in the face as your glorious general orders you to shove some barbaric, painted scum from some boggy wastelandjust so that the general can claim his glory. They’re all bastards, believe me. Especially generals. They’re no better than any other politicians.
Not that my low estimation of the intelligence and ability of the average general has anything to do with this particular bad day. No. This bad day was caused by my own mates. For my offences against the gods, which must be many, as soon as my comrades learned that I had some education, they elected me as their own private leader. Silly sods.
And now these same silly sods had let the King’s son die.
King? He was a chieftain of the Britons; one of those with a tongue-breaking name that any sensible man would refuse to try to repeat. There never seemed much point. The bastards were never around for long. Either they’d submit to our authority, or they’d die. Either way, they wouldn’t be with the army for long.
His son was taken to ensure his father’s good behaviour, along with eight other close relatives: some other of the chieftain’s family, including his own brother, and so on. We didn’t piss about when it came to taking folks. And now, as I stared down at his bloody body, a great gash in his chest like a second sodding mouth, I knew that my mates and me were all in trouble. We’d been in charge of this pen of hostages, my mates had all been guarding them, and me? I’d bloody fallen asleep, hadn’t I, with no chance of an excuse if our general got to hear of it.
Not that I was safe anyway. Not with the most important hostage, the second in line after the tribal chief, lying dead on the packed earth in front of me.
Of course, you’d think that he was killed by someone left in that stockade with him, wouldn’t you? But I knew that the first thing a hostage learned was, no knives, no swords, nothing. They’d have been patted down before they wereput in our stockade. And when the body was found, my boys would have searched the lot of them for a weapon. Since they had all been frisked and checked clear before they’d been allowed through the door, it wasn’t much of a surprise to learn that they were all clean.
Yup. No weapons in there. Other than the good old Roman ones in my lads’ hands.
I guess I should explain what we were
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