This Kori was their leader, Gratian realised. He squeezed his horse’s reins and angled towards the trio. One was struck down, then another, leaving just Kori. Gratian charged through the backs of his legionaries, swinging his sword expertly towards the Goth’s neck. But Kori blocked just as adroitly. The parry was deft, but exposed the man’s flank long enough for the Celtae to pounce and pin him down.
‘He’s mine,’ Gratian raged. Slipping from the saddle, he clambered up onto the hay pile, where Kori was being held on his knees. He grabbed the man by the jaw, forcing him to rise. ‘See how the Goths pay for their actions?’ he called to his legionaries. ‘One after another, your petty fortifications tumble.’ He pointed out the smoke stains on the western and eastern horizons, where the three Julia Alpina legions and the Noricorum and the Augusta legions ravaged the stockades like this one. ‘One by one, your warriors die,’ he said, positioning his fang ring by the man’s pulsing neck veins.
Just then he noticed a lone rider draped in black, speeding up the hill from the direction of the marching camp, a mile to the south.
‘Vitalianus,’ he called in greeting across the silver-helmed, watching heads. The lead Speculator forged his way between the soldiers and clambered up onto the hay beside the prisoner. Gratian afforded him the honour of ending the skirmish. ‘Send this cur on his way.’
Vitalianus smiled, cupping the Goth’s cheek like a man wooing a maiden, then drew a small dagger from his black robes, raised the tip to Kori’s eye then pushed it slowly in. The Goth screamed, milky, gelatinous matter and blood sputtered from the socket and the good eye fluttered as the blade entered his brain.
Gratian watched the corpse slump and tumble down the side of the hay stack. He turned slowly to regard his devoted soldiers, pausing when he saw that the twin hill across the river had fallen too. Merobaudes and the Heruli punched the air in joy. The Heruli… he rumbled inwardly. His Alani guards had given him conflicting reports: all said that the Heruli had been outfoxed by the escaping Pavo on that night back at Thessalonica. One, however, claimed to have seen Pavo with a Herul on the night of their escape. That bleak night, when he had been frozen by fears of the moor-creature, the stinking shadow of death… his soul began to crackle over with ice, but he shook off the memories with a growl.
‘The truth will out, and those who betrayed me will die,’ he whispered to himself as songs of victory and solemn chants to God soared into the air. He turned his head to the north. ‘The Claudia deserters we caught last week, have they spoken yet?’ he said over his shoulder.
‘Yes, hence my speed to your side,’ said Vitalianus. ‘One spoke as we burnt him over a fire on a spit. The other is having his teeth and nails pulled out as we speak. I believe he will confirm what the first one said…’
Gratian’s ears pricked up.
‘… that Tribunus Pavo and his Primus Pilus, Sura, roamed north at the end of winter, seeking an audience with Fritigern.’
Gratian threw his head back and laughed. ‘There will be no talks. There will be no peace.’
Vitalianus arched an eyebrow, confused.
‘Haven’t you heard?’ Gratian smiled. ‘Fritigern is dead. Soon, the rest of the horde and the deserter tribunus will join him.’
Chapter 16
Within the rock-cut cells under Kabyle’s acropolis, months passed like thick tar through cloth. Only the drip-drip of water leaking from an underground streamlet gave their time in shackles any form of rhythm. Hunger and despair were great enemies in those times, and then there was the sickness – a blight that lasted an eternity and had Pavo and Sura sitting in their own mess for an age. As summer rose to its heights, the cells would flood with a strange, sepia light that poured down the rock-cut steps along the stony corridor in the mornings and departed at night. With it came an intense and suffocating heat that drenched the skin in an oily sweat and stole the moisture from their tongues.
Pavo woke one morning as the infernal heat crawled across him. He looked down over himself – slumped against the cell wall, filthy and stinking, his beard in knotted tangles. A loincloth was his only means of dress. Once-white, it was now grubbier even than Libo’s bedding. Flies buzzed around him and clustered in a thick swarm over the copper latrine bucket. The iron shackle around his ankle felt normal now after so long, the itching of the angry red band of broken skin underneath the manacle like a constant companion. He stared into space for what was probably an hour, maybe two. It was only when he heard a low breathing that he realised he was being watched. He switched his head to the cell entrance and saw a trident-bearded Goth staring at him. Not one of the two guards who usually stood there. The man had the look of a hunter, dark and baleful.
Just then, Sura stirred beside him with a groan.
Pavo started, then breathed a sigh of relief. When he looked up again, the trident-bearded menace was gone.
Sura sat upright, groggy-eyed, his face slack. For a moment, he looked around, unsure of his surroundings, and then his head sagged and a silence passed. ‘We’ll die down here,’ he said. ‘Our luck has dried up.’ He lazily shook one leg to jangle his irons as if to demonstrate. Indeed, they had wrenched, shaken and bashed the irons against the stony walls. They had scraped around the floor as far as the chain would allow them to… but found only solid bedrock. No tunnels, no cracks. Nothing. ‘The only way these chains will be unlocked is if the Western legions take this place.’
‘If it comes to that…’ Pavo started. He looked askance at the blunt wart of rock protruding from the cell wall between them, about head height when sitting. With a swift strike of the head, a man could dash out his own brains.
Sura nodded. ‘Last night I dreamt for the first time in an age. Of a loincloth made of fire and a helmet with spikes on the inside – and I was forced to choose and wear one. I think I understand it now.’
Pavo lifted the filthy half-eaten barley cake morsel they had been given as a meal at the last onset of darkness. It looked even worse than it tasted, and it tasted bad: riddled with teeth-scraping grit and pockets of glutinous substances Pavo hoped was Gothic spit. He took a nibble on it and placed it back down.
The heat rose and rose and he clutched at the cup of water sitting beside him, lifting it to his lips with a desire to gulp it all in one go. But he knew he would not receive another until nightfall, and so he sipped carefully at it, ignoring the voices telling him it did not matter, that he was only stretching out his long, painful demise.
‘Three months we’ve been in here. It’s the Kalends of July today,’ Sura said, counting off the scraped lines in the rock he had made for each day.
Pavo closed his eyes and sighed. From this rocky pit, they had heard the sounds of intensive drills and homilies – Winguric and Judda’s voices prominent, followed by the cheers of the horde warriors as they acclaimed their new Iudex and his deputy and then the blare of pipes and singing, the clacking of cups and feasting. Crowing voices carried into the cells: telling of Winguric’s new plan – to abandon the carefully positioned Gothic camps and bring the horde together as one great force again, then march south and trample the legions. Another few weeks passed, and one morning they heard the great thunder of the warriors and riders of the horde moving off to war. Over the days that followed, they heard the two spearmen posted at the gaol’s rocky entrance talking about the clashes that followed, some ending in favour of the horde, some in favour of the legions.
On the first day of August, Pavo was staring into space, weak and numb of mind and body… when a shadow crept over them both. One of the guards. The Goth eyed them both with a bright look, then crouched. ‘So, you had the old Iudex on the cusp of peace talks, I hear,’ the man whispered.
Pavo, suddenly alert, shuffled to sit a little straighter. He glanced to the rock door and saw no sign of the second guard. Where had he gone? Outside he saw the blinding white shapes of the sun-washed acropolis, of royal sentries strolling the walls, of normality. ‘What of it?’ he replied to the crouching guard,
cagily.
The guard looked one way and then the other. ‘Well Fritigern wasn’t the only one who would have opted for peace. I too yearned for it. I still do,’ he placed a hand over his heart, tilting his head to one side. ‘To be part of the empire, to be free of war again. I would give anything for that.’ He reached into his purse and brought out a key. The key to the shackles.
Pavo and Sura stared at it as if it was treasure.
A second shadow stole in. The other guard. His spear flashed forward and bundled the first man to the floor, pinning him there. ‘No, please!’ the guard wailed, the spear tip at his throat. He waved his hands theatrically.
The second guard issued a mock growl, then retracted his spear. Both guards exploded with laughter, the second helping the first up. The first leaned forward, resting his hands on his knees. ‘Guarding this place is as dull as being chained in here. We need to entertain ourselves somehow,’ he chuckled, then rose to his full height and kicked the barley-cake morsel at Pavo with a cloud of dust and long-dried blades of grass. ‘Now eat your meal, Roman scum,’ he said, cupping his own crotch. ‘I worked hard to provide the ingredients.’
Pavo closed his eyes against the kicked dust, and waited until the pair had left before opening them again. Neither he nor Sura spoke again that day. When darkness came, he saw the evil-looking trident bearded one again, staring in at them. He allowed himself a generous mouthful of water, then shuffled around so he could not see the cur, before rolling on his side, making a pillow of one arm and drifting off to sleep.
A pole fitted at one end with a vicious bronze hook struck across Pavo’s path, then jerked back violently, the hook sinking into his bare pectoral. The corpse-warrior holding the pole at the edge of the blood road wrenched once, twice, then tore the hook free, ripping the fleshy fascia from Pavo’s rib cage with a vile sound of tearing meat.
He cried out and the sound poured from his mouth and the many other grievous holes on his body: both legs were mostly stripped of flesh, his arms too – hanging in ribbons, white bone showing through. His back was a trailing tangle of strips of skin, the bony shoulder blades poking free with his every frail stumble onwards.
The crone stood ahead, backstepping in time with his pitiful progress, her face hanging and her lips still. She knew, he realised, that he was done for. The faltering steps he took on this blood-soaked road would be his last.
The cadaver king, riding around Pavo, cajoling his excited wraith masses, stopped before him again, blocking his view of the crone. In the creature’s golden breastplate, Pavo saw a dull reflection of his body: more bones than flesh. A hideous sight. His face was grey and streaked with blood and sweat, yet relatively unscathed. The corpse king took up the many-tailed, barbed whip, whirled it overhead, his lipless mouth stretching into a baleful grin… then he lashed the weapon at Pavo. The barbs snapped around his head like closing talons, sinking deep into his skin. The corpse king wrenched back and with a wet sucking noise, the agony of the biting barbs was gone. The crowds of the dead roared in glee and the corpse king held a sagging, dripping sheath of some sort aloft like a trophy for them.
Pavo stared once more at the reflection in the creature’s breastplate, seeing his own skull, stripped completely of skin, staring back, seeing that the sheath the cadaver king held up was in fact his face and scalp. The vile being drew on the gawping skin over his own head and rode around Pavo, shrieking an inhuman cry of victory.
Pavo fell to the ground. ‘It is over,’ he wheezed, his breaths growing shallow.
The crone crouched before him. ‘No, there is still one more chance. Rise, Pavo,’ she hauled him up by his skeletal limbs, holding him like a boxer’s trainer, showing him the road ahead to the olive tree and the Goddess of Peace. Still too far, through the deepest and thickest throngs of cadaver warriors yet. ‘Be ready!’
His eyes pinged open. Darkness reigned still, but the silence of night was gone. Outside the prison chambers, men howled and brayed. Boots stamping, the clatter of things being thrown to and fro, the grumble of wagon wheels and the snorting and whinnying of panicked of horses. Torchlight, flickering here and there.
‘The horde has been driven into the north, the legions are on the plain,’ an anxious cry echoed through the stony cells. ‘Imperial galleys sail up the Tonsus too, artillery-laden ships that will use the river bend against us – turn it into a noose.’
Pavo shot a look through the darkness to Sura, hearing an audible gulp. The blunt wart of rock between them jutted proudly in silhouette. The one, awful way to escape Gratian’s clutches.
‘Saddle the horses, gather the acropolis garrison,’ another Gothic voice rasped. ‘Rouse the people and have them stock the rest of the wagons.’
‘Why would I take orders from you, spearman?’ another voice spat.
‘Because it’s not my order. Because Iudex Winguric and Judda demand it,’ said the first. ‘We are to retreat to the north and gather there with the soldiers of the horde.’
The commotion rose and the sense of panic heightened. Pavo and Sura waited, breathless, wondering what their fate might be in all this.
‘The Romans,’ said a passing voice, ‘open their throats.’
Pavo felt a numb sense of acceptance. A less ignoble end than splitting one’s own head on a rock. He began to mouth a prayer to Mithras.
Just as the first tinges of dawn light turned the blackness of the prison entrance navy blue, a shadow filled it. One of the guards from yesterday. He shambled down the rock-cut steps and came over to Pavo and Sura, holding a skinning knife. Even in the low light, Pavo could see him swaying – and the reek of beer was intense.
‘Time to ventilate your necks… Ro…Romans,’ he slurred.
Pavo felt a surge of instinct, and acted before he could think it through. He tensed his body and brought his free leg round like a pole, skimming across the rock floor, batting into the calves of the Goth and sweeping him from his feet.
‘Who… wha?’ the Goth grunted as he flailed. He dropped like a stone. A thick clunk rang out in the cave, and then there was silence and stillness.
Pavo peered into the dark, until the threads of pre-dawn light betrayed the guard’s staring, open-mouthed face. The back of his head had whacked against the rock floor, blood rivulets running out from his nostrils, his eyes closed, chest rising and falling in a deep stupor. From his belt dangled…
‘The keys…’ Sura gasped. ‘Mithras’ cock and balls… the keys!’
Pavo snatched the cool iron loop and shakily fished out the first of the keys upon it. With a trembling hand, he tried it in the shackles. It did not fit.
From the cell opening, another voice called down. ‘Will you hurry up? The wagons are leaving and I don’t want to be at the back. If the Romans send a party of harrying cavalry we’ll be target practice for them.’
‘Er… coming,’ Sura cooed.
Pavo licked his desert-dry lips and tried the next key. Wrong, again.
‘Do you need me to rip their necks, you arse-wit?’ the voice said again.
Pavo flashed a look up at the entrance, seeing a second shadow approaching. Stricken with panic, he tried a third and fourth key. The fourth one slotted into the lock… but would not turn.
‘Give me the knife and I’ll do it,’ the second guard grumbled as he came into the cells. ‘Hold on, what’s going on he-’
The second guard’s words went unfinished as Pavo inserted and turned the last key, the shackle falling to the floor, Pavo shooting to his feet with an uppercut. It was a weak hit, thanks to months of malnourishment, but enough to stun the man. He grabbed the spear from the guard’s hand and rammed it into his gut, driving him against the cell wall.
‘Listen,’ Sura said as Pavo unlocked his chains.
Both heard it, out in the night: the whinnying and shouting of Goths… and the distant blare of horns, Roman horns.
‘Outside, come on,’ Pavo whispered, stretching his withered and weary body.
They scuttle
d together up the rock cut steps and burst from the gaol entrance. Both shielded their eyes from the fiery half-light of dawn. The acropolis was all but deserted. Pavo made for an already abandoned section of the walls. Crouching, he and Sura looked down over the lower town: it was like a sink, draining of people – the few thousand warriors who had not gone south to fight with the rest of the horde along with the families, the animals and wagons. He looked south along the Tonsus: the dawn light sparkled on a dozen billowing purple and white sails as the Classis Moesica’s strongest galleys sliced upriver. On the eastern and western banks, two great waves of silver rolled forward in time with the fleet, the Western Emperor and his legions, banners held high, cavalry roving wide. Pavo saw the manoeuvre play out in his mind’s eye: the ships would circle the Tonsus loop, loosing all manner of iron bolts at any Goths who dared to remain and defend the city, while the two halves of the Western Army would encircle the place. Anyone left inside was as good as dead.
Anyone…
A howl split the air, drawing Pavo and Sura’s eyes to the band of equites riding ahead of the Western legions. Before them bounded hulking, spiky ironclad creatures: the Molossian packs. The most eager of the hounds loped in through the lower town’s westward-facing gate, slavering and panting as it sped around the streets there and fell upon one tardy Gothic woman. Her screaming lasted only a few heartbeats before the dog clamped its teeth on her throat and crushed her windpipe, shaking her like a child’s toy. Three more dogs bounded in to bite on her limbs and pull at her corpse with the awful sound of snarling and ripping meat.
‘The Goths have fled,’ the rider called in Latin to a dozen more who entered behind him. ‘Comb the town for stragglers, the emperor wants captives.’
The Blood Road (Legionary 7): Legionary, no. 7 Page 28