The Trumpets of Mars (Imperium #2) - Chapter 18

She spent the better part of the day questioning the villagers and the captured guards, and the picture they painted of life here after the Romans arrived was bleak. Abuses ranging from regular and rampant raping of the village women to summary execution by the guards for infractions such as being injured while mining or missing quotes. All done under a barrage of threats to the lives of their children, guaranteed to keep the larger collection of Caledonians in check.

It was all she could do to keep the men with her from killing the guards outright, and even harder to explain to the villagers why she hadn’t done it yet. She had decided that, whatever trial or punishments happened, they needed to happen here, in sight of the villagers directly affected by these crimes, so they’d know that justice had been done.

The political part of her knew that, eventually, word and the story as told by the villagers would get out, and it would play better if they were able to give first-hand accounts of how they’d received justice. The human side of her knew that she had to do it because that’s what she, as a Roman, owed these people for the actions of her countrymen.

Although the guards were able to give little beyond descriptions of their own actions, the man she’d arrested in front of the ornate, who turned out to be the foreman left behind to supervise the mining operations, was able to shed some more light on the situation, although not everything she wanted to know.

The man who sent the Romans here and was ultimately responsible for everything that happened afterward was named Oppius Plautius Dama. When she’d first heard about this village and its fate, she’d feared that Dama’s actions might have happened as some kind of agitation to support the malcontents still hiding in Roman society, hoping for another chance at Silo’s botched insurrection. As far as the foreman was able to say that, thankfully, wasn’t the case. Evil as it might be, this appeared to be the child of simple greed and not some larger scheme to damage the fledgling Britannic Empire.

Before the alliance he’d already been running a business on the Roman side of the border. The foreman seemed to have the impression that Dama had been successful, although she wondered how much of that was an employee believing Dama’s own propaganda. She might have spent most of her life in the capital, but every one of note ended up in Devnum eventually, and someone of Dama’s supposed success would have been noticed by now. It also didn’t make sense that he’d be so successful in Roman lands and yet was one of the first to cross the border and chance the backlash from this kind of operation.

Even staying off-site and using proxies to carry out his operations, he was still putting himself in the Caledonian crosshairs, which he had to know. It seemed inconceivable that this mine would produce enough money to make that risk worthwhile if he was already making money more traditionally. Before the anti-slavery laws, this kind of thing would have been shut down quickly, so to be successful, he’d have to know how to run his business without resorting to such methods.

She’d spent a lot of time with merchants and men of Dama’s supposed status to know how they thought and operated, and little of the tale the foreman told matched what she knew.

By the late afternoon she’d finished questioning enough people to know she wasn’t going to get what she needed here. The villagers were victims and saw little beyond the guards who’d taken their children and the agents left to manage the operation for little more than functionaries. They were told what they were needed to do the tasks they’d been assigned, but little else.

Answers finally came as the light began to fade when Carus rode into the village accompanied by two Caledonians Lucilla hadn’t met before. The guard and spymaster had been gone two days and the exhausted expression and bags under his eyes spoke to how busy those days had been for him.

“My Lady,” he said, dismounting and walking stiffly to her.

She sympathized with his slight limp. Days in the saddle could wear on anyone who wasn’t a superhuman man from a fantastical other world. Her sympathies, however, would have to wait.

“Tell me you have news,” she said, getting straight to the point.

“I do. The man behind all of this is named …”

“Oppius Plautius Dama,” Lucilla said, finishing his statement.

Normally, Carus was as stoic as most soldiers she ever met, keeping his feelings bottled up, or at least hidden from others. It was a testament to how tired he must be that she could see him visibly deflate at getting to the answer before he could say it.

“Ohh, you already know.”

“I know his name and that he owned businesses on Roman soil before the alliance. That is all I know, however. The people here, even the foreman, don’t have much in the way of information on him beyond what he clearly wanted them to believe … such as running several successful businesses in Rome. No one knows the location of the children or anything that will get us to them.”

“He ran several businesses in Rome, is closer to the truth. All of them failed shortly after he tried them, and he has been one step ahead of local magistrates for most of his adult life it seems. From what I’ve been able to find, there has never been a corner that Dama didn’t feel like cutting, and every business he has started, almost exclusively using money he talked out of someone else, has either collapsed spectacularly or was shut down for violating the law. He has a small army of creditors who’d like nothing more than to get a piece of him. It seems the only thing Dama is actually good at is convincing people that he’s good at businesses, and to give him money which he will then promptly lose.”

“That sounds a lot closer to what I expected than the stories his people here had to share. Tell me that stories aren’t the only thing you have, though?”

“No. I know where the children are,” Carus said, a note of pride in his voice.

“Where?”

“A villa just over the border in Roman territory. Dama’s sisters’ husband owns a mine not far across the border and keeps a villa nearby for when he has to visit his mines.”

“And you’re sure the children are there?”

“Yes. I saw it with my own eyes yesterday. As soon as I confirmed it was them, I rode as fast as I could here, since I knew you’d want to know about it. I left two men watching the villa in case the children are moved.”

“Good thinking. Are there many guards?”

“A half dozen. Enough to keep children in line, but not enough to stop a force this size. I also came across a Praetorian patrol on my way here and instructed them to gather men and wait for us by the border. I thought, since this was going to happen on Roman land, it would be good to have a better mixture of men with you. The guards might not have a problem attacking Caledonian warriors, but they might pause if there were Romans in the mix, and any fighting has a chance to get the children hurt.”

“Good. Very good. I know it’s late, but I want to ride now. We’ll camp for a brief rest near the border and then cross at first light. I don’t want to risk word getting back to Dama and something happening to the children.”

Carus gave a nod, saluted, and returned to Modius and her guards while she prepared everyone to move. She had to hand it to the Caledonians, they might have less general organization than a Roman force, but when they decided to go somewhere, they didn’t need the hours of preparations that a Roman force did. In less than an hour her entire force, save a dozen men left behind to watch over the village, just in case, were on the move to retrieve the children.

She ordered the prisoners she already had, the guards and mine supervisors, taken with them. She’d held off rendering any kind of judgment on them until she had a full picture of everything that had happened. Part of that involved interviewing the villagers, which her guards had been doing most of the day. The other part was capturing Dama and the other men responsible, so she could get a better sense of the scope of what had happened.

She knew that, if it were up to the Caledonians, they’d have just executed all of the men involved regardless of what actions they’d taken and leave it at that, but Lucilla was going for something a bit less heavy-handed.

She surprised the Praetorians Carus had arranged to meet them at the border, both with the speed of her return and the size of the force she had with her. Thankfully, Faenius had done a good job screening his new praetorians for men who didn’t support the new alliance, and removing them, which means those who remained didn’t have an issue with working with a force, the majority of which was Caledonian. Beyond that, once they heard the full situation and what was required of them, they quickly fell into the same mindset as the Caledonians.

If anything, they were more incensed over the actions of their countryman, since a Roman’s attitudes to their children was much more protective than that of the Caledonians. Properly motivated they moved just as quickly as the rest when the sun crested the horizon, and the entire group reached the villa by mid-day, when one of the men Carus left behind intercepted them to confirm the children were still there.

Although Carus advised caution, concerned that the Dama might do something premature if he saw a large force arriving, Lucilla disagreed. Once she got a sense of the operation, she worked out what kind of man Dama was, and she knew his type well. He’d hold on to every bargaining chip he had, always confident in his own ability to negotiate a way out of the situation he’d put himself in.

She decided on the straightforward approach, ordering the Caledonians and the Praetorians to surround the villa, in case Dama had any plans of escape, while she, her guards and a dozen men went straight to the main gate.

The villa itself was in a valley created by the mountainous region, which meant her force wasn’t in sight until they were fairly close, giving her a good view of the villa and its surroundings. She could see the guards panic the moment the horde of Caledonians and Romans crested the hill and began to encircle the villa. Several of the guards looked, dropped their weapons, and tried to make a break for it, only to be intercepted by praetorians on horseback, while others stood meekly, weapons sheathed, waiting for what might seem like certain death. One or two put hands to weapons, but removed them when they saw none of their fellows willing to join them.

“Open the gates,” Lucilla said, her voice flat, the threat behind it clear even if unspoken.

The guard hesitated for a second, until Cynwrig pulled his sword, nudging his horse forward. The man practically stumbled over himself to rush to the gate and push it open.

“Take the guards into custody, but don’t harm them unless they resist,” she ordered Cynwrig, since she knew the other Caledonians would listen to him.

An older man in equally as formal of a toga as the mine supervisor, although not to the tacky excess that man had taken, stormed out of the main house just as Lucilla and her men came through the gates of the outer walls. At first, he looked incensed, both at his guards and at the trespassing men, until his eyes landed on Lucilla. She could tell by the way his expression changed that he recognized her, and what that meant for him.

He was the type to take the ‘do you know who I am’ defense if someone else had tried to apprehend him, and her being there meant that it didn’t matter. Any social status he had, or pretended to have, meant little when the emperors’ daughter was the one apprehending him.

“Oppius Plautius Dama?”

“Yes,” he said, bringing himself up to his full height, attempting to maintain a regal bearing, although the fear in his eyes and slight shaking of his body gave made any attempt futile.

“In the name of the Consul and the emperor, you are under arrest for crimes against the Britannic Empire,” she said before turning to one of the praetorians with her. “Seize him and find the children.”

Dama didn’t put up a fight as two of the men dismounted and grabbed ahold of him, taking him to join the guards they’d already been bringing in. The Children were all gathered up in the largest room of the house, where they’d been eating their mid-day meal. She was happy to see they were unharmed. She knew Dama’s type and how they looked down on those they considered lesser than themselves, which was just about everyone. It was clear he had no plans of returning the children any time soon and she had feared they would have been mistreated in some way.

“They haven’t been harmed,” Dama said when she returned from checking on the children. “I was following Caledonian law and tradition and was going to return them as soon as conditions of my deal with the villagers was met.”

“Caledonian tradition and law don’t allow for you changing the terms of the agreement the children were given as hostages to secure. Worse for you, Britannic law makes any forced labor outside of imperial sanctioned punishment illegal, and the punishment for such crimes is clear. Under my authority as Consul’s representative, you are hereby ordered to be executed. Because of the Consul’s decree of how executions should be carried out and recognizing that the children were unharmed, your execution will be quick and painless, and not in the traditional Caledonian method.”

Multiple thoughts passed over Dama’s face as she declared his sentence. Anger, fear and oddly, relief. The last one was because of how old, and very false, tales of how the Caledonians executed people. When telling bogeyman stories of the people to the north, Romans would talk about men being driven down on sharpened sticks and left to die slowly, at the mercy of the animals and the gods. If true, it would be a particularly slow and horrible way to die. It was also slow and cumbersome, and not how the usually practical northerners tended to deal with executions. As with most tales of the sort, it probably had happened a handful of times, when someone wanted to send a particularly strong message, but normally the Caledonians just opted for fast and efficient beheadings.

It was the Romans who’d executed men slowly and publically and needed a man falling out of the sky to get them to switch to something less gruesome.

“You can’t,” Dams said, still trying to bargain for his life. “I was following their own barbaric traditions, and I didn’t harm any of them. I’m a Roman and they’re barbarians, for Pluto’s sake.”

“They’re fellow citizens of the Empire! You and every Roman crossing the borders was warned of what would happen if you violated the rules. Be happy the Caledonian leader didn’t come here and deal with you the way he had originally planned, or your entire family would be joining you on the chopping block.”

As she’d seen before, Damas then cycled from bargaining to anger, still trying desperately to find a way out of the situation he’d gotten himself in.

“I have friends who will make you and your demented father pay for what you’re doing. You can’t treat Romans like this. Not for the pathetic lives of north men. You will all pay for tying Rome to these people.”

“Maybe,” she said, not taking the bait. “But you will not be around to see it.”

Turning her horse to the Caledonians and the rest of their prisoners, Lucilla said, “This man and the foreman in charge of the mines will both be executed, their property seized by the empire and sold off, with all revenue going to the village and its people as restitution for their crimes. The guards will be given the option of either joining the legion in equal position as the freed slaves, to serve for ten years before being released as free men, or assigned for five years to imperial work details, where they will work and live under guard for the good of the Empire.”

As the foreman was placed on his knees next to Damas, blubbering, the Caledonians nodded in approval. Many of them would probably prefer to put all of the Romans under the executioners’ axe but seemed mollified with the decision to offer restitution to the village.

She’d considered how to handle the men that were involved, but not in charge, on the way here from the village. Had the children been poorly treated, she would have put all of the guards here under the axe as well, but their good treatment earned the men a reprieve. The legion needed bodies and, while they had committed actions they should have known were wrong, the guards didn’t deserve to die.

Considering the battle that was coming, this might be a death sentence after all, but at least this way they had a fighting chance of surviving. She thought most would choose the legions, which came with at least some semblance of autonomy. The imperial work detail was just a renaming of the Roman slave gangs made up of criminals and forced to work undesirable jobs such as in mines or forges, where life could be brutal and often short, because of the dangerous conditions, all while continually under guard with very little semblance of freedom.

“You have until we leave to return these children to their families to decide, afterwards, I will decide for you.”

The children were kept inside until the executions were finished and the bodies removed. She left behind the praetorians they had met at the border, to deal with the guards who’d agreed to join the legion and the seizing of Damas and the foreman’s properties. Although she trusted the praetorians, who’d been well screened to try and weed out undesirables, she instructed Carus to check to make sure the make sure the money really did make it to the villagers as she’d promised.

As they rode back north, she was pleased with how this played out. The children were safe, the villagers were repaid, and the bloodshed had been kept to a minimum.

She knew all of her experiences wouldn’t end this well but she felt good about her first, independent, use of real power.