by Whyte, Jack
"Tribune!" His voice was low-pitched and deep. "I've found their standard. It was at the bottom of this pile."
He extended his arm, and I saw that he was holding the great silver eagle that I had been so proud to carry, perched on its staff above the SPQR symbol of the Senate and the People of Rome. Another, younger man stepped into my sight. He gripped the standard's shaft, looked up at the Eagle and then looked around him, shaking his head regretfully, his eyes coming to rest on my own. He looked just like an eagle himself, a powerful raptor with deep-set, blazing eyes of pale-yellow gold, a great, narrow, hooked beak of a nose and a mouth that was compressed into a lipless line over a strong, square chin. He was gazing directly into my eyes without seeing me, his mind focused on something other than what he was looking at. But then I saw his gaze sharpen. A furrow appeared between his brows and deepened as his attention concentrated on me. He took a step towards me and I saw his fingers, extended like talons, reach for my neck. His face, keen-eyed and predatory, came within inches of my own, and as the tip of one of his fingers touched the wetness of a tear on my cheek, I blinked. I was vividly aware of the crease marks around his eyes, which could only have been caused, I was convinced, by squinting into the sun, for even now, at the moment of my salvation, I was thinking that here was a face that could never smile or laugh.
"This man's alive! Get him out of there, quickly!" Two more men loomed up behind him and he moved aside to let them dig me out of the great pile of corpses that I had been buried in. My relief was so great that I passed out again.
I recovered eventually from the paralysis that had gripped me — the result of a powerful blow of some kind to the base of my spine — and returned to my decimated unit, where I sought and received permission to try to trace the young officer who had saved my life. I never did find him, and his distinctive face had gradually faded into the stuff of my most hidden memories, forgotten until now.
Now those golden eyes looked my way again and reminded me of a debt unpaid. A strange kind of fatalism took hold of me then as I hid among my rocks and watched his captors drag him until they passed out of sight under the shoulder of my hill. By the time they were gone, I knew what I had to do, and I knew that my chances of success were slim at best against four of them, and practically nonexistent if they were bowmen. As a boy growing up in my grandfather's home, I had been fascinated by a huge African bow that hung on one wall of his treasure room, so called because it contained all of the ancient and exotic armour and weapons he had collected in a lifetime dedicated to the study of such things. Grandfather Varrus was said to be the finest armourer and weapons-smith in Britain, but he was also known as an insatiable collector of antique examples of his art, and soldiers brought him curios and relics from all corners of the Empire, knowing he would be happy to pay for them.
Of his entire collection, that great bow was the apple of my eye. It was too big for me to pull, but that only added to my fascination. Since coming to Africa as a soldier, I had acquired a similar, though much smaller version, and had amused myself by learning how to use it properly and well. All my long hours of practice now offered me my only chance to come out of this adventure alive, for I had perfected the art of rapid, accurate fire, plucking arrows from a row stuck point down in the ground and firing them faster than anyone else I had ever come across. But I had never had anyone shooting back at me while I performed the trick. I hoped this occasion would be no different.
When I was sure they were safely out of sight and hearing, I strung my bow, took eight arrows and set out to follow them, keeping low and approaching as close as I could to the water hole without being seen. They had stopped and were setting up camp. When I could go no closer, I dug myself into the sand and covered myself with my long, sand-coloured cloak. Now I had only to continue to wait for darkness to fall, as I had been doing all day. I had already given up hope of making it to the coast that night; I honestly doubted that I would be going anywhere after this encounter. To divert myself, I spent the time trying to ignore what was really on my mind by wondering about the eagle-faced prisoner and by debating with myself whether or not I had brought enough arrows. It was a pointless debate. If I needed more than two for each of my four targets, it would already be too late to use them.
Of course, I couldn't escape from what was really on my mind, so I gave up trying and let the old struggle start up again. I was a soldier, a soldier of Rome. I tried my best to be a good one. That was half of my problem, but the other half, the really troublesome part, was that I was also a Christian, and although I didn't try to be particularly good at that, I was, by childhood training and unwilling conviction, a believing one. I believed in the power and rightness of the Christian Commandments, particularly and frighteningly the one that says, unequivocally, "Thou shalt not kill." Ever. I had learned that incontrovertible truth at my grandmother's knee. She was a very devout old lady who was appalled by her husband's craft and his love of weaponry and things military, and she made it her duty to ensure that I would grow up aware of the sanctity of all life. I have never been grateful to her. Nor have I ever been free of guilt over being a soldier, a paid killer. The part of me that was shaped by my grandmother abhors killing. The part of me that loves soldiering enjoys the anticipation of violence and the fury of the fight. And, of course, I must fight. But after the fighting, after the killing, after the violence, comes retribution: self-hatred, revulsion, mental agony and physical sickness. Every time, without fail. But always afterwards, never before.
By nightfall, I was glad I had approached so close to the water hole during daylight, for these people had no intention of passing the night in slothful sleep. As soon as the moon rose, full, flooding the desert with silver light, they were astir and preparing to move out. I had been crawling towards their camp on my belly, hoping to surprise them asleep, but their sudden activity almost caught me instead. I froze where I was, within twenty paces of where the first one passed on his way towards the tethered camels. Two of the others were kicking and cuffing their prisoner, hauling him to his feet and checking the halters tied around his neck. The fourth man set out towards me and just kept coming. I had decided I was as close as I was going to be able to get, and had already lined up my eight arrows so that they stuck up from the sand like a row of palisades. He was within seconds of noticing them and me when he stopped, even closer to me than the camel-herder had been, and began to relieve himself in a loud gush of urine that died away gradually in a dwindling stream and a series of squirts.
I gathered myself, timing my move to coincide with his readjustment of his robes, and then rose to my knees and fired. My arrow took him clean in the breastbone from about fifteen paces, the force of it lifting him backwards off his feet while he was still looking down. I had my second arrow nocked almost before the first one hit and was swinging towards the camel-herder, expecting him to have heard the sound of his comrade's death.
He had heard nothing. All of his attention was concentrated on bringing the camel he had mounted to its feet. As his body swayed backwards, adjusting to the camel's ungainly lurch in rising, I released and saw my arrow bury itself to the feathers in the soft spot just below the peak of his rib-cage. He, too, fell over backwards without a sound, but his going was seen. I heard a raucous laugh, which quickly gave way to a questioning shout of alarm.
The moonlight was bright, but I was a long way from the two men remaining with the prisoner. They still had not seen me, but they split apart instinctively, throwing themselves to my right and to my left. I snapped a quick shot at the one moving to my right, but it was an arrow wasted, leaving me with only five. I scooped up all of them and ran to my right, for no other reason than that the man there seemed to be the closer of the two. There was a small hillock of sand, no more than a wave on the ground, but I dropped flat behind it, straining my ears for any sound that might betray someone moving. The prisoner stood motionless where they had left him, his hands tied behind his back and twin ropes trailing from his nec
k to the ground. There was nowhere for him to try to run to. As far as he was aware, I was just another desert nomad. If I killed his captors, I would probably kill him, too. I estimated the distance between us at fifty paces. Nothing moved anywhere. Now what?
The camels began to mill around, off to my left, and I was almost too late in realizing what that meant. I whipped my head around to watch them and was just in time to see a black shadow rise up from the ground at their feet and move to stand motionless among them, sheltered by their huge bodies. I sighted carefully at the part of him that I could see beneath the belly of the beast that was shielding him and released my arrow, hearing a shocked scream of pain and outrage as the black shapeless shadow I had pierced went flying. Three down. One left. I knew what to do now.
"Roman," I called, pitching my voice low. "I'm directly to your left as you stand now. Start walking towards me, slowly. I'll cover you. There's still one of your hosts alive out there. If he moves towards you, or if you hear anything at all, drop flat and leave him to me.'
His head snapped towards the sound of my voice as soon as I started to speak, and he began to walk slowly towards me, as though he were taking an evening stroll. I stood up and kept my head moving, scrutinizing every shadow in sight, waiting for the fourth man to make a move, but nothing happened. When Eagle Face reached me, I let go of my bowstring with my right hand, holding the strung arrow in place between the shaft of the bow and the index and middle fingers of my left.
"Turn around." I drew my sword with my right hand, still looking around me for any signs of movement. "Stretch out your wrists." He did as I bade him, and I began sawing at his bonds, but it was impossible to keep watch and cut the ropes at the same time.
"Blast this," I said. "How's your eyesight?"
"Perfect." His voice was calm and cool.
"Good, then use it, while I cut these ropes properly, otherwise you're likely to lose at least one hand."
I laid my bow at my feet and stuck the arrow into the ground beside the other three, then cut through his bindings quickly, guiding my blade with the edge of my left index finger. He was tightly bound. "That's going to hurt like nothing on earth in a minute, once the blood starts to flow back," I told him. "Duck your head and let's get your collars off." I don't know what it was that alerted me, but my military instinct took over. I pushed him off balance, yelling "Down!" as an arrow sliced through the tiny space separating our bodies. Even before the word was out of my mouth, I was on my knees, grabbing my bow in one hand and an arrow in the other. Then I rolled and kept on rolling, arms extended above my head as another arrow and then a third came looking for me. I saw the black shape silhouetted against the moonlit sky just as I rolled into a slight depression that deepened as I moved into it. Then, hoping that I was safe for a few seconds, I shrugged out of the cloak that was threatening to choke me, nocked the arrow carefully, pivoted my hips and came to my feet in a rolling lunge, drawing the bowstring to my chin as I did so. I was lucky again. I caught him in the act of aiming at Eagle Face, and by the time he had swung back to try a shot at me, my arrow was already travelling. It took him high in the right shoulder, and he staggered back and fell to one knee, his arrow flying off somewhere into the moonlight. I was running towards him flat out, fumbling with my dagger, when my foot came down on a piece of ground that wasn't where I had thought it was; I hit it with an impact that drove every vestige of wind from my body and sent me flying end over end. I was still trying to pull myself together when I heard Eagle Face's voice above me.
"Relax. Our friend has gone off into the desert. He won't be back. You are only badly winded and will recover. He's badly wounded and will not." I looked up at him. He was massaging his right wrist and wiggling his fingers.
"You're right. This hurts like nothing else on earth." I saw then that he was talking through clenched teeth, as he nodded backwards over his shoulder and continued.
"I can't hold your sword yet, otherwise I'd go over there and put that poor swine out of his misery."
Only then did I identify the horrible sound that had been assailing my ears. It was the sustained screaming that had to be coming from the man I had gut shot beneath the camel's legs. I lay there for a few more minutes, collecting my breath, and then I got to my feet and crossed to where the screaming man squirmed on the ground. I could see, without looking too closely, that I had shot him clean through the centre of his pubic bone. This was the part I dreaded. All my ghosts came to haunt me as I dispatched him quickly, trying vainly not to get any of his warm, unthreatening, painfully personal blood on my hands. I straightened up slowly, my eyes full of the look on his face and my hands covered in his blood. Scooping up a double handful of sand, I used it to try to clean the sticky gore away, but the blood was congealing between my fingers already and I fell to my hands and knees, retching up my guilt in painful spasms. After a while, I was able to get up and go back to Eagle Face, who was still rubbing his wrists and watching me with a strange expression on his face.
"Who are you?" he asked me. "How did you come to be here? And why in the name of all the ancient gods would you be foolhardy enough to risk your life against such odds for a total stranger?"
I grinned at him, shakily. "Not such a total stranger as you think," I said. "My name is Varrus. Publius Varrus. A ghost from your past, returned to pay a debt."
A tiny flicker of apprehension appeared on his face as he thought for an instant that I might be telling the literal truth, and then his face broke into a great smile and he held out his hand to me. I was aware of the strength in his fingers as they gripped my forearm. His right eyebrow climbed high on his brow in an expression I was to become very familiar with.
"Well, Publius Varrus," he said. "We are well met this night, although I know I have never laid eyes on you before. You mistake me for someone else, I'm sure, but I am glad of your mistake."
"No mistake, Tribune. You have laid eyes on me before tonight. And hands."
"When? What do you mean?"
"Just what I say. It was a long time ago, and there's no reason why you should remember it. It's enough that I do."
"If it caused you to save my life, then I thank God for your memory. Tell me about it."
I glanced over my shoulder at the shadows surrounding us. "I'll be glad to, but I think this is not the place. We had better move away from here. The water attracts too many visitors."
He looked around him. "You may be right, my friend, but I would dearly love to sleep for an hour before we move. I haven't had much rest in the past few days, and none at all since our friends took me, yesterday."
"Could you stay awake for another hour? I left my horse among some rocks on a hill about half a league from here. It's safer than this place. You can sleep all you want when we get back there."
"Half a league?"
"No more than that."
"Can you ride a camel?"
I grimaced. It was as close as I could come to smiling. "Can anyone? I've been up on one. Can't say I enjoyed the experience too much."
"It's better than walking."
"Tribune, in this country, anything's better than walking!" During the ride back to my hill of rocks my stomach settled down again, finally, and along the way I told him about where we had first met. It pleased me when he remembered the occasion and proved it by recalling that he had noticed my tears first, and the fact that I had been a beardless boy.
"Beardless is right. And that's not all I was lacking," I told him. "That was my first campaign and my first battle. If you hadn't noticed me there, it would have been my last one, too." I told him of my search for him and my failure to trace him. "Where did you go? Why couldn't I find you?" He shrugged his shoulders. ''I moved on. I wasn't with your lot in the first place —just passing by on my way to join my own legion. Your skirmish was over when we happened along. My men handed you over to your own medics. But you were completely paralyzed,, I thought. We didn't expect you to live."
"Nobody did, but the paralysis wo
re off after a while." He shivered, and I noticed how cold the night had become. "Here," I said, "take my cloak. I have some extra gear and blankets with my horse, back there."
"Do you have any food? Real food, I mean?"
"Legion food. Dried meal and corn, nuts, raisins and dates. Some dried meat, lots of water I got earlier, and two skins of wine I was taking back with me."
"Thank the gods! You have a guest for supper."
Staying astride a camel was more easily said than done. It seemed to take years to reach the bottom of the hill where I had left my horse. We talked in quiet voices all the way back, for sound travels far on the desert at night, and I told him that I was on my way back to Britain to join the Twentieth Legion, the famed Valeria Victrix, my first posting in my homeland since joining the Eagle Standards some seven years earlier. He was interested in how I had managed to secure the transfer, and I pointed out that I had not had a major furlough in six years of frontier duty. That was all very well, he said, and I had certainly earned a long leave, but it hardly qualified me for intercontinental and inter-legion transfer. He was right, of course, and I felt no reluctance in telling him how I had managed to finagle it.
"I'm a centurion, Tribune. You know the breed. There's not much a centurion with seniority can't get, if he puts his mind to it. In my case, I was in a situation to perform a number of services for my commander. The kind of services he thought were worth rewarding."
He interrupted me, prompted, I would find out later, by the probity that was so much a part of his character. "I'm not sure I want to hear any more. It sounds to me as though the reward for you was a reward for himself, too. Safe back in Britain, you will be grateful, and unlikely to say anything that he could find embarrassing."