©2001 by WILDBEARIES

This story is based on characters created in the film, "Gladiator" and in no way intended to infringe upon those characters or the story of that film. References to real people are strictly the product of the writer's imagination and meant to entertain the reader.
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Someone was watching them. He didn’t see anyone lurking about the outbuildings or in the nearby groves, he didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. Certainly the legionaries patrolling the perimeter of the estate reported no intruders or trouble. But the feeling was there, a prickling sensation in the spine, a feeling of unease - whenever he’d experienced these in the past it had been when someone was spying on the legion encampment or tracking him as he went about his duties. About an hour before sundown, Maximus looked up and fixed a curious eye on Drusus, “Do you feel it?”

Drusus put down his trowel and stretched, nodding, “All afternoon - I wondered if you’d noticed.”

Maximus continued fussing with a stone block, aligning it with its neighbors although it was already perfectly straight. He spoke in a low tone, as though having a normal work conversation with his fellows, “I noticed. Whoever it is, they’re good.” He walked away from the newly built stable wall and casually rinsed his hands in a bucket. Drusus followed, just as casually. “Send Manlius out to find Antoninus, see if he’s noticed anything odd.” Drusus nodded and wandered away from his general as though he hadn’t a care in the world. Once on the other side of the villa, the watched feeling left him and he walked with more purpose.

Manlius listened to the low-voiced instructions and set off carrying a bundle of firewood, maintaining a façade of routine so as not to tip off anyone who might be watching from that side of the house. He wondered how he was going to look ordinary and hurry at the same time, but shortly met up with Antoninus on the road headed up to the villa and was able to relay Maximus’ instructions without difficulty.

Antoninus had been feeling the same prickling in his spine that afternoon, so he wasn’t that surprised when Maximus sent word to him. He casually turned his horse back down the road and cantered along, surreptitiously scanning the olive groves and the nearby hedgerows separating the various fields of Maximus’ farm. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, but the prickling continued. When he reached the front gate, he signaled to three of his fellow members of Wolf’s Bane to meet up with him off to one side.

“We have intruders. The general and I are almost sure of it, and he wants us to find them. They’re very good, whoever they are, if they got past us, but we’re better. I want no clanking of weapons, no talking, everything as we’ve practiced. We’ll divide the property into quarters with the villa as the center point. Meet there in one hour, unless you find our spy sooner, in which case signal with the whistle.” Each man made sure they had one of the loud reed whistles they used when performing precision drills on horseback, then they set off, one at a time, to search their assigned quarter of the property.

Antoninus rode through the rows of olive trees, stopping now and then to chat with workmen pruning the trees, pulling weeds and checking for dead trees. The prickling feeling had lessened, and he doubted he was going to find anyone skulking in the neat rows of trees. If anyone was hiding and watching them, he imagined it would be in the underbrush near the outbuildings where there was more cover. He made the decision to forego riding up and down the rest of the tree rows and jogged his horse closer in to where the general was still slapping mortar on stones and building a new stable wall.

He dismounted and tethered the horse where it could graze, then walked over to exchange a few words with Maximus. The general looked up, acting as though surprised to see him. “Antoninus, is it sundown already?”

The cavalry officer grinned, shaking his head, “No, sir, I came up to see if Porcinus had my other bridle repaired yet.” That was actually true, but not really the reason for his visit. He mouthed to the general that he hadn’t found anything in his quarter of the property, then tipped his head toward the northeast section where another of the men had just appeared and shrugged to indicate there was nothing out of the ordinary. “I’d guess if we find anyone, it’ll be down past the stable building, the southwest section.” Antoninus gave Maximus a deferential nod - he wasn’t sure a salute would be appropriate since the general was half-nude and muddy, while he wasn’t in full uniform himself.

His horse was craning its neck, peering around with the whites of its eyes showing. Antoninus patted the sweated neck while trying to look bored and uninterested, but the prickling was stronger now, right there. . .right behind him. Maximus looked over just as an arrow thudded into the saddle of the nervous horse, sending it into a rear, ripping the reins from Antoninus’ hands. He, meanwhile, had flung himself flat on the ground. Maximus saw the whole thing and was on his way at a fast run, leaving surprised workmen in his wake.

The horse galloped off, trailing reins that eventually tangled in a fallen tree, bringing it to a swift, plunging halt a hundred feet or so away. Antoninus, meanwhile, had rolled onto his back and had his dagger out. He scanned the nearby clumps of brush, but heard distant crackling that told him the archer was already out of range and running. “Hades take him,” he cursed, getting to his feet just as Maximus came bounding up. “He’s already gone, off that way,” he pointed where the sounds of breaking underbrush had come from.

“Follow anyway, see if you can find where he’s headed,” Maximus spun around and jogged back to the stables, quickly calling to Porcinus to bring him Scarto. “Just bridled is fine, don’t waste time saddling him.” When the man ran up leading the prancing horse, Maximus flung himself onto his back and kicked him into a gallop, heading for the southwest section of the property, deep into the brush they hadn’t cleared yet.

“Stupid,” he cursed himself, he’d come as he was, in muddy tunic and trousers, barefooted and with no weapons save a fierce expression. Scarto covered the ground quickly despite the heavy going, and he was shortly out onto the road, where he met up with a startled cavalryman emerging from the wheat field on the other side of the property. “Anything?”

The horseman quickly gathered his wits and reported that he’d seen some tracks and crushed rows of wheat, but any human beings were long since gone. “The tracks led south, sir,” the man added.

Maximus sent him after Antoninus in case he needed help, meanwhile turning to gallop down the road to the front gates himself. Nothing was amiss when he got there, although the sentries looked mightily startled to see their general - the military governor - come flying up to them on a lathered horse, bareback, with no weapons or even his boots on. “If Antoninus or any of his patrol come back, send them up to the house to find me.” He turned Scarto and sped back up the road, leaving the bemused sentries staring after him.

“Perseus astride Pegasus,” one of them commented, and the other laughed. “I hope it’s not Medusa he runs into,” the first one added.

Maximus continued past the villa, heading south on the road, towards Lucilla’s estates. He jumped Scarto over the low stone boundary wall and cantered into her olive groves. There were tracks from several horses, some broken branches and a lot of dried weeds from the winter, but no interlopers. He was about to give up in disgust when a sudden rustling off to his left brought him to a halt, Scarto standing still as a statue except for a flick of his ears. More rustling. Maximus moved forward at a slow walk, Scarto stepping as delicately as if he were walking on eggs. “There’s no use hiding,” Maximus finally called out, hoping he at least sounded armed.

“I’m not hiding,” came a very young, very frightened voice, followed almost immediately by the blond head of one youngster named Lucius Verus popping out of some gorse bushes. “Please don’t kill me - General!” The boy’s eyes widened. “I thought you were the bad men, sir,” Lucilla’s son added, looking a bit less frightened.

Maximus pressed his lips into a thin line. “If I’d been armed, young sir, you might be dead now,” he told him truthfully. The boy blanched. “What are you doing out here?” Maximus questioned, dismounting and leading Scarto over to where the boy still half-crouched in the thorny weeds. He took hold of the boy’s tunic and yanked him free of the bushes, setting him on his feet in the grass.

Lucius wiped his dirty hands on the sides of his wrinkled tunic and gazed up, round-eyed, at the man who was his hero. “I was helping find the bad men, sir. I saw someone climb over the stone fence and nobody was looking this direction, so I decided to follow him.”

Hands on his hips, Maximus regarded the boy who was his son, fighting the urge to put him over his knee and wallop his backside, while at the same time having to quell the urge to laugh. He wondered if anyone would believe that the former commander of the Northern Armies, Military Governor of Hispania was standing, barefoot and muddy, facing down an eight year old boy instead of the enemy spy he had thought he was chasing. Probably not. “That was a very foolish thing to do. What if I had skewered you with an arrow?”

Lucius examined the tall figure before him, gulped, and bravely answered, “You don’t have a bow and arrows, sir.”

Brushing a hand over his face to hide his grin, Maximus sighed. “True, but I could have. And Scarto here is trained to kick and bite the enemy in battle - what if I had set him on you?”

Lucius paled, “Then, sir, my mother would have been very angry with you.”

“Never tell me a big boy like you is hiding behind his mother’s skirts,” Maximus chided him, all urge to smile fled. “Now come here, I’ll give you a hand up and we’ll go home.”

“My home is down that way, sir,” the boy said, pointing further south to Lucilla's white marble villa, but he waited while Maximus mounted, then reached up to let himself be pulled up behind him. The war horse was very much taller than his pony, but he decided he liked it. “May I hold onto you, sir?” he asked politely, afraid that he’d slide off.

“Of course, put your arms around my waist,” Maximus growled at him. The boy had spirit, at least Lucilla hadn’t made him into a sissy, despite his claim that she’d be angry if he had done the unthinkable deed of setting Scarto on him. Marcus would have liked Lucius, he decided, and he would give everything he owned to see the two of them together, half brothers, playing in the sunlight of Spain.

“Hold on now,” he cautioned, and kicked Scarto into a canter before jumping back over the low stone fence.

“Yahoo!” the boy shouted with joy as they cleared it, his fingers gripping Maximus tightly. “Sorry sir, that was exciting.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Maximus confessed, “I shout for joy myself sometimes. Riding a good horse is a wondrous thing, is it not?” Scarto was cantering rapidly up the road towards the villa, smooth as riding a boat on glassy water.

“I love horses,” Lucius stated unnecessarily, “and I love Scarto especially.”

They turned and rode into the approach to the stables, “Why him?” Maximus asked. He waved at Antoninus and Drusus, who were standing by the other workmen, looking disgusted, the interloper apparently fled.

“He’s so brave, sir! So tall and beautiful - like a horse should be. Like my father’s horses were.”

Maximus remembered General Verus, for a time co-emperor with Marcus Aurelius. He had not been that talented with horses, but apparently Lucilla, seeing her son’s infatuation with them, had told him that the man he thought was his father had been a horseman of note. He saw no reason to contradict that. “Indeed, he is,” was all he said in response. He pulled Scarto up by the nearly completed stable, handed the boy down to Drusus, and dismounted himself, giving Scarto over to Porcinus to be cooled out and groomed. “Take Master Lucius inside,” he ordered his former aide, “turn him over to his mother for a good wash, he’s been on a bit of an adventure.”

He himself went to consult with Antoninus and his three men, none of whom had found anything other than broken brush, some tracks that led nowhere, and the hole the arrowhead had left in Antoninus’ saddle. “Now I’ll have to patch it,” the younger man said in disgust.

Maximus, meanwhile, examined the arrow they had pulled from the cantle of the saddle. There was a small, flat piece of papyrus fastened to the shaft with thread knots. "Has anyone noticed this?" he asked Antoninus, who had to admit nobody had. Maximus grunted and picked the thread knots open, unrolling the small piece of papyrus. It was, he saw when he flattened the curves, a note. In very well formed letters, it read, "I am as close as your two hands, and I am not your enemy, but the enemy of Rome should fear me."

"What does that mean? Antoninus wondered, reading over Maximus' shoulder. "I am as close as your two hands?" He looked anxiously around as if the author would just appear out of thin air.

"It means," the general told him, "that we have a problem, and the writer of this note claims that he is not the one we should fear." He rerolled the papyrus and tucked it into his belt. "Gentlemen, it's sundown, time to stop work, get bathed and dressed if you're dining with us in the villa, or back to camp if you're on duty. I believe we'll hear more from this mysterious person, I just hope it's not until I've had my supper."

Antoninus agreed wholeheartedly.

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Copyright 2001 by wildbearies

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