Following the Cilician auxiliary, Ballista concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. The going was uneven. His head hurt, and there was an unease in his stomach. The cold sweat on him was only partly due to the fog. The Goth that told him cannabis left no hangover had been lying. But, he had to admit, he had drunk a fair amount of wine as well.
Beyond the encampment, the grass was longer and very wet. Ballista’s boots were soon sodden, his trousers to the knee no better. The fog seemed denser out here. The far side of the river could not be seen. Only a faint lightening, a hint of warmth, indicated the presence of the risen sun.
Past a stand of tall oaks, the soldier cut off down to the river. They pushed through a bank of reeds and stopped at the edge of the water. A tall elm had been submerged, and the thing was entangled in its stripped, white branches.
‘What were you doing out here?’ Ballista asked.
‘Taking a shit, Dominus.’
‘You went out to it?’
‘Only to pull it in out of the current, so it did not drift downstream.’
Ballista studied the reeds and mud. He was half aware of more men arriving behind him. There was a clear trail where the soldier had waded out and back; no other disturbance. The killing had not been here. The body had floated down the river. There was no way of telling how far. Turning to the other two auxiliaries, he told them to bring it ashore. They looked back at him, crapulous and dubious.
‘That was an order,’ he snapped.
‘We will do what is ordered, and at every command we will be ready,’ they muttered.
The water would be cold, and they were undoubtedly suffering from the night before, but the discipline of the soldiers detached from the first Cilician cohort of mounted archers was poor. Ballista would have to speak to Hordeonius, although he was unsure what good it would do; the centurion was already a martinet.
Reluctance, bordering on dumb insolence, in every movement, the auxiliaries went down the slippery bank and splashed out into the shallows. The water came to their thighs. With high, exaggerated steps, they retrieved the bulky, unpleasant object and manhandled it to the side, dragging it the last part, up to where Ballista waited, backed by the newly formed crowd.
The corpse was naked. Where not streaked with fresh mud, it was pallid from its time in the water. Its extremities had been cut off: feet, hands, penis. Its face was a ruin: ears and nose gone, eyes gouged out. Liquid ran viscous from its orifices and wounds. The eunuch Amantius reeled away and threw up noisily. The rest looked on queasily. Still more men were arriving from the camp, drawn by the macabre news.
Ballista put a reassuring hand on young Wulfstan’s shoulder and asked those around the obvious question: ‘Who is it?’
No one replied. Anyone would be difficult to recognize in such a condition.
Shifting his scabbard to one side, Ballista crouched down and began to scrutinize the mutilated corpse. He remembered examining another cadaver years ago in a tunnel in the city of Arete. He had not been hungover then, and he had been thinking clearly. Today, every little thing would be an effort, let alone something like this.
Irritatingly, some fool in the crowd was intoning an apotropaic prayer in Greek. Too late to avert evil now, Ballista thought.
There were bruises on the neck, punctures and short rips in the skin where fingernails had caught. With a grunt of effort, Ballista half turned the body. Wulfstan bent down to help — the boy had spirit. There were no other obvious killing wounds. The man had been strangled.
They laid the corpse back. The thought struck Ballista that the man might have been alive when he was mutilated. Ballista felt his gorge rise. Do not be ridiculous, he said to himself. Of course he was already dead; he had been strangled.
‘Short hair, and dark — a Greek or Roman, not a Goth.’ The gudja had appeared behind Ballista. As always, the crone formed an unlovely retinue of one.
‘Yes.’ Ballista manipulated an arm. He could not remember how quickly a corpse stiffened after death, nor the time when it relaxed again. Being immersed in cold water probably altered things anyway.
‘I thought nomads like the Alani only scalped or beheaded their victims,’ Hippothous said.
Obviously, he too had noticed the horsemen stalking them for the previous three days. Neither Ballista nor, as far as he knew, Maximus, had mentioned it to anyone. The gudja was unlikely to have spoken. But Hippothous had been a bandit. He must be experienced in the fieldcraft of pursuit and evasion. Still, it was odd he had not reported the followers. Perhaps, like Ballista himself, he had not wished to dishearten the party.
‘No, they always cut off the right hand or arm,’ the interpreter cut in. ‘They make the skin into trappings for their horses.’ Biomasos was warming to his self-appointed role as local expert. ‘They tear out the eyes as well, but usually only of living captives. They blind not only those they keep as slaves but even those they intend to ransom. They are the most barbaric race on earth, except for the Heruli.’
‘And many say we Suanians are savage — next to this we are very gentle people, most eirenaic as could be termed.’ Tarchon spoke in a voice of vindication.
Ballista felt sick again. He had just discovered that the tongue was missing. He breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth; in through his nose, out through his mouth. Sensing his discomfort, Wulfstan passed him a leather bottle of water.
‘This reminds me of something in poetry,’ Mastabates said. ‘Maybe from an epic.’
Knowing his liking for the genre, Ballista looked up at Castricius. The latter just shrugged, keeping silent.
‘Not epic, but tragedy,’ Biomasos announced. ‘Aeschylus, the Choephoroi.’ The interpreter was rapidly becoming insufferable. ‘After she has got Aegisthus to murder Agamemnon, Clytemnestra mutilates the body of her husband.’
Ballista was sure he was not the only one to be thinking of another wronged woman with murder in her heart. Pythonissa was not far away in Suania, just beyond the Alani; and her brother Saurmag was with the nomads.
‘You will find it is better known from the Electra of Sophocles,’ Mastabates stated. ‘But I still think there is something more pertinent somewhere in epic.’
Ignoring the bookish Hellenes, Ballista concentrated on the mutilations. The cuts and slices were neat, as if done with practice. That was not at all good.
‘Someone must know who he is,’ Maximus said. ‘Who is missing from the Roman party?’
‘My slave was not in the tent just now, when the noise woke me,’ Castricius said. ‘I have not seen him yet.’
‘Is this him?’ Ballista asked.
The short Roman put his sharp, pointed face very close to the ghastly face of the corpse. ‘It could be.’
The fog did not lift that day, nor the next. Under it, the camp was subdued, out of sorts. The clammy entrapment was part of it, but more was down to the after-effects of the debauch. There was much idle speculation, but the death of the slave secretary seemed not to weigh that heavily on most, not even on his owner, Castricius. Urugundi guards were posted, and most felt the death was not their concern. Slaves often died — of disease and deprivation, at the hands of their owners or each other; the free were above such things.
Wulfstan was in attendance on Ballista. Both days, the big warrior mostly remained in his tent, Maximus and old Calgacus with him. As men with hangovers do, they ate and drank vast amounts, shifted about desultorily. Maximus moved on to wine mid-morning of the first day — a hair of the dog, nothing like it to straighten you out; the other two did not join him. Conversation in the tent was disjointed, rambling, but, like a dog returning to its own vomit, always circled back to the killing.
‘It is not the style of the Goths,’ Ballista said. ‘Videric and his Borani would come straight for me. They would think less of themselves if they did not pursue the bloodfeud openly.’
Maximus belched. ‘I am thinking it is more likely the Alani, or that evil Suanian bastard Saurmag, or mayb
e his poisonous sister. The mutilation would appeal to your girl Pythonissa. As the Greeks said, you could see a woman’s spite there.’
‘Loving a woman is like setting out over ice with a two-year-old colt, restive and unbroken.’ Calgacus was sometimes given to wheeling out the proverbs of the north. ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘it may be nothing of the sort. The slave was in Albania with Castricius, his fate could have followed him from there — it is not that far. Your little Roman has not been the same since. It was after that he started claiming to be Macedonian, and we all know the little shite is from Gaul; and all that bollocks about daemons — the good one that sits on his shoulder, and the spirits of death being shite-scared of him. He is as gone in the head as Hippothous with his physiconom…’
‘Physiognomy.’ Ballista wondered if Calgacus could say the word if he chose. He picked at some chicken. ‘And it could all be something else altogether.’
Wulfstan was up before dawn on the third day. In the night, a north wind had torn the fog away. There were spits of rain in the air. He prodded the fire back to life, cooked breakfast for Ballista and the other two: bacon, lots of it, fresh bread, and thin ale.
When a weak sun came up he went down to the river to wash the mud and blood from Ballista’s clothes. The water was still, like a black, polished stone. A carp flashed out in the stream, the ripples of its passing spreading wide. A big Urugundi warrior on guard watched it in a bored way
This was not the life Wulfstan was born to live. As he pounded a tunic on a stone, poetry of his childhood ran in his mind:
There is no one still living to whom I dare open
The doors of my heart. I have no doubt
That it is a noble habit for a man
To bind fast all his heart’s feelings,
Guard his thoughts, whatever he is thinking.
If the Langobardi slavers had not come, if they had not burnt his village, slaughtered his family, he would have grown to be a warrior, not a drudge. And those dreadful things would not have happened to him.
The weary in spirit cannot withstand fate,
And nothing comes of venting spleen.
Wulfstan was young — just thirteen winters, not yet a man; he did not agree. If he got his freedom, he would vent his spleen on all those who had owned him before Ballista. It should not be impossible to track them down. He had been traded one to another down the great rivers from the Suebian Sea to the imperium and Ephesus. He would retrace his steps; from Ephesus north through the Aegean and across the Kindly Sea, then up the Amber Road. Wulfstan’s return would be charted in blood and burning. The Taifali, a tribe loosely connected to the Goths in the west, were said to do to their own young men the shameful things which had been done to Wulfstan. A Taifali youth washed away the stain on his reputation when he killed a boar or a bear. Wulfstan would find redemption in blood; not in the blood of animals, but of man, and of many more than just one man.
The lowing of beasts, a deep rumbling and the high-pitched squeals of wood broke into Wulfstan’s consciousness. There was a massive cloud of dust approaching from the west.
‘The wagons are here,’ said the Urugundi guard.
VII
Ballista watched the long line of ox-wagons. There were ten of them, each drawn by eight bullocks. Slowly and very noisily, half hidden by the dust raised, they pulled into a wide circle. The drivers unspanned the beasts and began to herd them down to water in the river. There seemed no end to the animals.
‘Ho, Sarmatians, where are your women?’ one of the Urugundi called.
From under their caps, the drivers cast dark looks at the Goth.
‘Driving wagons is women’s work,’ the Urugundi said to Ballista in the language of the north. ‘Once, the Sarmatians were lords here. Now they are our skalks. These Sarmatian slaves try to keep their women away from us.’ He laughed. ‘They are right to. Their women are a good ride — big tits, good fat arses. They have no interest in their husbands when they have had a Goth between their thighs.’
The gudja silenced the warrior with a curt gesture then spoke to the drivers in a language Ballista did not know, presumably Sarmatian. It could be the tiresome interpreter Biomasos might have a use after all. The Sarmatians grudgingly acknowledged whatever the gudja had told them and carried on seeing to the oxen and hobbling the dozen or so horses which had travelled tied to the rear of the carts.
‘Now the wagons are here, my Goths will take the boats downstream to Tanais.’ The gudja spoke to Ballista in the language of Germania. ‘I will remain to guide you to the Heruli. Their winter pastures are not far from here, but they left for their summer ones some time ago. It will be a long journey east and north before we overhaul them.’
‘Thank you,’ Ballista said.
‘I doubt you will when we reach them. As everyone will have told you, they are not as other men, and their ruler Naulobates is the worst of all. The superstitious say he is not a man at all but a malignant daemon.’ The gudja smiled, as if in anticipation of the encounter.
‘I have no choice in the matter.’
‘No, I suppose you do not. The Sarmatians can help your slaves load your baggage. I will keep one wagon for myself and my servant.’ At the mention of her, the priest’s ill-favoured acolyte gave a one-toothed, senile grin.
Maximus leant close to Ballista. ‘Thank the gods we will not be without female company. Do you think the old Goth will share her?’
The next morning, the Goths were gone not long after first light. By midday, the remainder had gone nowhere. Ballista had allocated the wagons, apart from that already claimed by the gudja. The meagre money for ransoms had been divided into two. The soldiers loaded the gold into the carts in which Castricius and Ballista himself would travel. Hordeonius then officiously ordered his auxiliary archers to stand guard over them. It was a rare command of the centurion’s with which his men were perfectly happy. As it transpired, no one seemed to want to trust the Sarmatians with handling their property; conquest and cuckoldry were thought to do something to a man. So the tribesmen sat and scratched themselves as seven slaves tried to break camp and manhandle everything into the wagons. Biomasos the interpreter, Porsenna the haruspex and the other imperial functionaries, let alone the eunuchs, knew such manual labour to be far beneath their dignitas.
To get somewhat out of the chill north wind, Ballista and the freemen of his familia sat in the shelter of some willows. Castricius, Biomasus and the two eunuchs joined them. They talked in a random, inconsequential fashion as they watched the uninspiring scene.
‘If I was the sort of man to fuck another man’s wife,’ Maximus said, ‘ideally, I would like to see him disarmed.’
They all looked at the nearest Sarmatian. He was leaning in the lee of his wagon; a big man, blond, handsome. From his boots to his cap, his clothes were embroidered nomad-style. Everything about him was surprisingly clean. On his hip was a long, straight sword, suitable for a mounted warrior. A long dagger was strapped to his thigh. He had a coiled bullwhip thrust through his belt.
‘The Urugundi might have told more than the truth,’ Ballista said.
‘It could be a Sarmatian cares more if you take his sword than his wife,’ Hippothous said. ‘His chief god is worshipped as a sword, and he swears his most solemn oaths on his sword. On the other hand, if he comes home to his tent and finds another man’s quiver hanging outside, he wanders off until the stranger has finished with his wife.’
‘Marvellous,’ Maximus said. ‘A whole tribe of complaisant husbands.’
‘Oh no,’ Hippothous said, ‘no good even for you. You see, nomad women are quite hideous. Because they breathe the damp, thick air of the Steppe, drink water from snow and ice and do no hard work but sit in wagons all the time, their bodies are not hardened. They are heavy and fleshy, their joints covered, watery and relaxed, their cavities very moist. Not being swaddled as children, they are disgustingly flabby. Their very obesity prevents them receiving male seed easily.’
‘I do not know, it does not sound too bad,’ Maximus said. ‘I sometimes like my women carrying a bit of weight — warmth in the winter, shade in the summer — moist cavities and little danger of getting them pregnant. Did I ever tell you about the time — ’
‘Nonsense.’ The interpreter cut him off. ‘The promiscuity of nomads derives from an outdated story in Herodotus about one tribe, the Agathyrsi. The Sarmatians, like their cousins the Alani, are polygamous. Having several wives does not mean they are happy if another man tries to lie with them. Doubtless the Heruli are the same.’
‘It is Strabo the geographer who claims that nomad women in general are available,’ Hippothous said. ‘Anyway, they smell, never wash.’ He addressed the latter to Maximus.
‘I heard they kept their virginity until they had killed three men in battle,’ Castricius said.
‘And cut their right breast off,’ added Ballista.
‘Their mothers are said to burn them off,’ the interpreter pedantically corrected.
The wind had got up, whipping the branches above their heads. The sky was dark, threatening rain. Down by the river, bitterns boomed, deep and resonant.
‘Gods below, it is getting cold,’ said Maximus.
‘Not as cold as it will be out on the Steppe,’ remarked Castricius. ‘Winter is near continuous all year round. The north winds are charged with bitter rain, chilled with ice and snow.’
‘Mules and asses die in the cold, and cattle lose their horns,’ Mastabates joined in. ‘Only animals small enough to live underground can survive.’
‘And summer lasts but a few days. Even then there is mist. On the few occasions the sun does appear, it has little warmth,’ Castricius said.
‘That is not what Strabo says,’ Hippothous put in. He seemed to be attempting to outdo the interpreter in pedantry. ‘According to the geographer, the summer heat is too severe for those unaccustomed to it. Anyway, as a man of culture, I look forward to seeing strange and wonderful creatures — the tarandos, which changes its colour, and the colos, which runs swifter than a deer. It drinks through its nostrils and stores water in its head.’
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