“So you saw them, huh?” Bran said, lifting the long blade to look at it.

            “Oh yes sir, I did!” laughed Daris, setting his wine jug on the table. “They had no idea we were there. One passed so close to where I was hiding that I almost reached to tweak his darn proud Roman nose!”

            The whole room roared with laughter, the warriors sitting on crude benches along the walls hitting the tables with their jugs in glee.

            “There they were” continued Daris, after sipping some more of his wine and wiping his long moustaches, “there they were strutting around the clearing, their tents all set, nice and orderly, their commanders sitting around talking how they gonna attack and wipe us out, oh, us poor unkempt and fearful barbarians, who have no idea about war tactics, and how their glorious Roman Empire will come and take our wealth and teach us how to live without it. And their sentinels standing straight and stiff like roosters that have just eaten a grasshopper. And all this time, we’re right there around them, listening to everything they say, and trying hard not to laugh. Narzus couldn’t help himself in the end, he reached and pulled one of them’s bows from where it was laying nicely stacked and hid it in the bushes. By the time we’ve left that one was still looking for his bow; I hope he found it before a bear ate it”.

            “Narzus will get himself in trouble one of these days, with his pranks” said Bran, starting to hit again on the falx blade. The blacksmith, wide-shouldered and with arms as thick as old oak trunks, made even the falx look like a toy in his hands. “I’ve been telling him and telling him, he doesn’t know when to stop. He’s worse than a child who just has been taught how to steal honey from the bees.”

            “He’ll be ok, Bran” said Daris, emptying his wine jug. “He’s still young enough too see more fun in a fight than serious business. All right, enough chatter, I have to go to the King. We’re getting ready for the big attack, you better hurry up with those swords.”

            “This is the last one, Daris. My boys’ve been working hard for the last week, we’ve done all the extra armors the King wanted and more swords than I’ve done in the last five years. I hope the King knows what he’s doing putting his trust in these youngsters he just added to the army. They look to me like they should have spent at least one more year hanging on their mother’s skirts.”

            “You’re getting old, Bran. The older you get, the younger others seem to you. The new kids are fine, they make great soldiers and have been trained good. Well, see you later my friend.”

            “See you later, Daris, and may the Great Zalmoxes watch your back in battle, and let you die a good brave death when your time comes.”

            The day was growing old itself when Daris joined the King’s council. He bowed deeply to the High Priest and to the King himself, then took a seat at the long table in the throne room. On the table, covering the nicely leveled wood boards, clumps of dirt with little twigs stuck in them, little pebbles and squared off tiny pieces of wood were reconstituting in a small scale the whole area surrounding the pass of Tapae and the pass itself.

            “I am saying, Milord, that throwing in our cavalry first will be the best. It will scare off the Romans and make them run back before they will even think to attack the pass.” An elderly tarabostes was saying.

“Maris, I do not want them to run back. I want them to come, and I want to crush them all, to one, so Domitianus will understand once and for all that he might have conquered the rest of the world, but he won’t joke around with us. If he wants his roads to pass through our land he must pay for it. And he must pay how much the understanding was in the beginning, not change it by his whims.” The black eyes of King Duras were throwing daggers, and on his face, the jaw muscles were tightening and relaxing, like a big wolf ready to attack. “Besides, we did not spend years fortifying the entire area just to let the Romans get scared and run away. We will ambush them and kill them to the last one. This is why we need to cross Donaris and attack them in Moesia. We must make them come where we want them, so we can teach them the lesson they need to be taught.”

“Besides” The High Priest Deceneus interfered “Domitianus is busy trying to defend his flanks from the Germans to the north. Striking him now will weaken him even further and give us the advantage we need.”

            “Now, Daris” said the King turning his gaze towards the newcomer “tell us again what the Romans are planning so everybody can hear”.

            The roosters had sung for dawn when the King’s council was finally over. Ominous shadows in the twilight, the Dacian army leaders were riding towards the mountain pass.

*

            “So what you are telling me, Lucius, is that you are not able to contain the situation in Moesia. Are we Romans or what are we if a few bands of barbarians dressed in wolf skins are able to scare us away?” Furious, Domitianus threw the golden cup he was sipping his honeyed wine in the fireplace. Hissing steam filled the room with the lazy aroma of sweet grapes heated by the sun. “We are not ready yet to battle the Dacians. Not with everything else that is going on.”

            Commander Lucius swallowed hard. “Milord, we do all we can. We found out too late that such a large force was deployed in our area. They have crossed the Donaris in small groups, at night, unnoticed, for three weeks long, as we were told later. The skirmishes seemed small local brawling more likely in the beginning and we didn’t pay much attention. When we realized what was going on we tried pulling all our forces in one place but it was too late, we discovered lately that actually we had severe losses. We need more troops in the area Milord”.

            “And I shall send them. But not to you, Lucius. If you were not able to realize what is going on when your men die by the hundreds, you aren’t fit to be a field commander. You are dismissed from your functions. Stay in Rome and stay home. I don’t want to see you around.” The Emperor, frustrated, sat himself on a carved chair and started playing with a beautifully adorned Egyptian dagger. Suddenly the dagger flew off his hand to end up in the rounded arm of an ebony Nymph running from a Faun, right near Lucius’s left ear. “I said leave!”  The ex-field Commander almost got himself entangled in the rich brocade curtain of the door in his hurry to leave the room.

Alone, the Emperor started chewing on his right hand’s fingernails. He rose abruptly and with a delicate bronze hammer hit a gong set on a small table. A small dark-haired slave appeared instantly in the door. “Send Fuscus to me. I don’t care what time it is and if he is drunk as a pig or not. I want him here and I want him here now!” Shaking, the slave bowed and ran. The furies of Domitianus were well-known and well-feared by slaves and aristocrats the same.

Cornelius Fuscus, Commander of the Roman Praetorian Guard, entered the Imperial rooms with a smile on his lips. He was among the few that weren’t afraid of the Emperor’s fury accesses, and was looking forward for what he was calling “a little entertaining pass-time”, sure that it was another whim of Domitianus. He entered the room where the Emperor, finished with the right hand, now was chewing irritably on the fingernails of his left hand.

“I heard you can’t spend a single hour without me around, Domitianus”, Fuscus said with a crooked smile, while sitting himself lazily on a leather-bound long chair.

 “I need you to go to Moesia, Cornelius. That idiot Lucius messed up everything there. The barbarians can very well kill a hundred of our men under his very nose and he notices what’s going on only when there’s nobody to bring his slipper at night”. The emperor stood up and started nervously pacing back and forth.

“So I heard, Domitianus, so I heard. Bad news travel fast in our beloved Eternal City. So what exactly do you want me to do? Go there and count the dead? Catch a few barbarians and have them flogged to death as an example? Anything for my beloved emperor”.

“Stop it, Cornelius. I want you to go there and drive those barbarians back to their land, and not stop there. Cross after them and give them a lesson to remember. Take a legion with you… no, two legions. Shouldn’t need more for these obnoxious sheep-herders.”

“As you wish, my beloved Emperor” Fuscus’s eyebrows raised with an amused expression. “Those nasty boys will be put to their rightful place. And that place is to be part of the Glorious Roman Empire” he continued wearing his crooked smile again.

Domitianus stopped his pacing. The thought of the legendary Dacian gold lightened his face. “Oh yes” he said with a large smile, “part of the Glorious Roman Empire…”

*

The raven landed on Daris’s raised hand. He deftly unknotted the small slip of parchment tied to the bird’s leg, unrolled and read it. Without a word, he handed the parchment to King Duras. “The Romans are finally coming. Get ready to withdraw and lead them to the pass of Tapae” the King said, with a smile that mirrored the Emperor’s, hundreds of miles away.

Far away, on a peak of the pass of Tapae, a young woman, looking at the land stretching beyond the horizons, was wearing the same smile. The two wolves accompanying her, one gray as the ashes of burned wood, the other one white as the clouds surrounding the peak, almost seemed to smile as well. Slowly, they all three faded in the air like wisps of mist in the heat of the sun.