Chapter 18

Lucilla 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 quotas. All done under a barrage of threats to the lives of their children, guaranteed to keep the 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 that yet. She had decided that, whatever trial or punishments happened, they needed to happen here, in sight of the Caledonians who’d marched with her, so they could spread the word 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 tent, 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’d 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 Lucilla 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. Since 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 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 sister’s 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 here as fast as I could, 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 Lucilla 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, was 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 attitude towards 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.