by Anne Perry
He threw back his head and roared with laughter, a shrill, hollow sound which settled on the heart like the touch of death.
She turned away, but it made no difference: she could feel him in the night, as if in the darkness he would always be there.
Chapter XVII
THE ARMY PRESSED ON along the borders, marching in close order but with outriding scouts. The weather grew colder and the east wind drove across the open spaces. Cassiodorus allowed them little rest and less shelter. Tathea knew why. She watched him as he looked at the men huddled in little groups around the campfires at night, shivering in blankets, faces pinched. He felt neither cold nor exhaustion. He had no flesh for pain, or for pleasure. She was not sure if he saw the beauty of the earth or the sky, as she did, or if they were merely a presence to him, without glory. Was it just another world to defile, to pollute with violence and filth until he saw in it a mirror of his own soul, a desolation in which he was at ease, because nothing in it reflected the Glory of God?
Was that what Asmodeus wanted all worlds for, not their life and their beauty, not even to have and to hold, but simply to defy Heaven, to inflict the ultimate wound upon the heart of God Whose soul’s name is love?
Yet if Cassiodorus pressed these men too hard, they would die of illness or exposure before he had fully corrupted their souls. Tathea stared across the tussock grass, combed by the wind, and wondered if he realised that.
The answer came to her in a way she had not expected, with the weight of a physical blow, stunning her after a hard day with several skirmishes and little ground covered. Over twenty men had been killed and another thirty-five wounded. She was slumped by the campfire alone, exhausted, feet sore and muscles aching, when a man came and crouched beside her. For an instant she assumed it was Ardesir, then she looked at him and saw the centurion she had spoken with at the beginning of the campaign.
“What is it?” she asked, thinking he wanted medicine of some sort.
In the firelight his face was haggard, his eyes rimmed in shadows. He spoke so quietly she could barely hear him. “We made a mistake today ...”
That was hardly worthy of comment. She would have dismissed him, but for the agony in his face, the fixed, terrible staring of his eyes.
“What?” she asked softly. “What mistake?”
“We found a settlement and attacked it.” He winced even as he recounted it now. “We killed everyone—even the children ... and the women. Thank God, at least we didn’t ...”
They both knew what it was he had not said.
“Isn’t that what Cassiodorus ordered?” she said bitterly, turning away from him. She had said and done all she could to prevent that. “I told you that you’d become the same as the barbarians ... now you are.”
“You don’t understand!” He was half sobbing the words and he reached out and grasped her arm as if to stop her leaving, although she had not stood up. “I don’t want to be! Most of us don’t! Somebody attacks you, you fight back. It’s going on all around you ... and ...”
She remembered his face that first time and how much she had wanted him to see the truth, and the bitterness of failure twisted inside her. “So you massacred a village of barbarians,” she said. “Perhaps you didn’t really want to, but that hardly counts now, does it? This is the last war, there are no tomorrows in which to do better. You’ve got to choose which road you are on today. If you behave like a barbarian, then that’s what you are. I know perfectly well it may cost you your life to stand against it! It will cost you your soul not to!”
“You don’t understand!” There were tears of despair in his face. “They weren’t barbarians! They were our own people! It was a Camassian village! We got lost in the wind and the snow ... we attacked our own! I looked down at them, and I saw faces just like mine, like my father’s—and, God help me, like my mother’s!”
She stared at him, at last reading the horror truly. Was it shame in his eyes, or only terror?
Beyond the fitful circle of the light there were shapes moving, men restless, unable to sleep, too cold or too frightened.
“Why are you telling me?” she said, almost under her breath. “I can’t absolve you from that.”
“I know! Hell itself can’t!” the man replied. “But you can do something about it.” His eyes were pleading, his features crumpled as if something were broken inside him. “You can tell me what to do now. I know it’s the end. I don’t suppose any of us are going home.” His voice caught, but he mastered it. “I don’t want to die with that sin on me. I used to think I was a decent man ... a bit quick-tempered, maybe, a bit lazy now and then, but not bad ...”
“Can you find twenty other men like you?” she asked. “Whom you know, from your own town, perhaps?”
“Yes. Why?” Hope flared in his eyes.
“Can you find this village again?”
He nodded.
“Bring them to that gully beyond the outcrop, before dawn,” she replied.
“Do you want spades?”
“No. I just want good men, who have families of their own.”
“Oh ... God!” Now there was a glimmer of understanding in him. But he did not argue. He rose to his feet awkwardly and stood very straight for a moment, as if he were on parade, then he disappeared into the shadows.
There were twenty-five of them when Tathea, the centurion and Ardesir set out without torches to retrace their steps to the village. They moved in near silence. It was imperative no one saw or heard them go. It was a bitter night, the ground ice-hard, grass crackling under their feet.
An hour later the first pale light of dawn painted it in streaks of white and grey, mist-edged, sparkling where the clear light struck the frost. It had a translucent, ethereal beauty no tender south could have offered. An hour later the rising sun shone pure as snow on the white wings of migrating birds, and in the sharp silence the creak of their wings was a kind of music.
They found the village. Scavenging animals had already scented the slaughter and as the soldiers stepped out of the shelter of the pines a wild dog lifted its head from a corpse and snarled warningly, then saw the number of them, and loped off. Further away carrion birds rose in the air, and descended again to tear with beak and claw.
The men moved forwards slowly, as if dazed. In the cold daylight it was easy to see that it was a Camassian settlement. No barbarians tilled the ground like this. They were nomadic, and these houses, rough as they were, had been built with the intention to remain. Blinded by snow, in fading light, perhaps it would have been easier to mistake, but now the truth was hideously plain. There were bodies everywhere, fallen where they had been caught by surprise. Men lay with spades and scythes in their hands, or tools of woodwork, chisels and mallets. A group of children had been cut down as they played. A dozen skittles were scattered over level ground, a wooden ball several feet away.
The soldiers walked among them, stiff and grey-faced.
They found nearly thirty women separately, a hundred yards away, also all dead. It was now that one of the soldiers could control his passion no longer.
“Cassiodorus is right!” he said in a thick, choking voice, breaking the silence of that terrible place. “They aren’t fit to call human! They must be wiped out before they spread any further south. If we don’t stop them, they’ll destroy the whole world.”
Another man muttered a prayer, and made a holy sign of his faith. “You’re right!” he agreed, his voice trembling. “This is an abomination.”
“They must be exterminated—like a disease!” another added.
“Cassiodorus spoke truly, we shouldn’t have doubted him.”
Tathea glanced at Ardesir, and saw the resolution in his face, unwavering, filled with misery.
“Would you say that the men who did this have forfeited their place in humanity?” she said very clearly.
There was a unanimous growl of assent.
She looked at the centurion, and he met her gaze squarely.
“That
they have soiled the good earth, and no longer deserve a place on it?” she pursued.
“Yes,” came back the answer clearly.
“Perhaps they were frightened, confused, badly led ...” She was shouted down before she could finish.
“They’re worse than animals!” one man said angrily, his rage and pain directed at her, because she argued. “Animals kill to eat. These ... creatures kill for the love of it! For God’s sake look at the corpses, if you don’t believe me! Look at them, woman!”
“I have looked,” she answered him. “And I see people killed by broadswords, not arrows. There’s not a single arrow here! I see no hoof-prints in the ground. I see the women separate, as if they had been going to be kept alive ... until something changed their captors’ minds. Tell me what you see!”
They stood staring at her in ashen silence. In the distance came the snarling and barking as wild dogs fought over the flesh. Far above them, dark against the blue of the sky, a skein of wild geese went over. The cold wind moaned as it passed through a tree.
“What are you saying?” It was little more than a whisper, yet the idea behind the words came like an avalanche.
“You know what I’m saying,” she replied.
“We wouldn’t ... do ... this!” The man covered his face with his hands. “God! That would mean we are no better than they are ... not even any different!”
“We’re not,” the centurion said softly. “God forgive us all.”
Slowly some of the men looked at each other. Others could not bear to, but stood motionless, absorbing the horror, not of the scene around them, but of that within. They had looked into their own souls, and seen the barbarians they despised looking back at them.
The centurion was the first to move. He walked forward into the middle of the group in the freezing sunlight, looking from one man to another. “There are spades and mattocks here. We’ve a lot of graves to dig. Two of you take sticks and beat the dogs off. Get on with it! It’ll be hard work; the ground’s like iron.”
They stared at him.
“Come on!” he shouted suddenly. “We killed them ... we can bury them decently.”
One man shifted wretchedly. “We thought they were barbarians!” he said, almost swallowing his words.
“No.” The centurion looked at him with pity but he yielded nothing. “A man is a barbarian by his actions, not his birth. And a man is a coward who cannot face what he has done. Find a spade!”
Ashen-skinned, the man moved to obey.
The centurion glanced at Tathea, saw the softening in her eyes, and walked on.
They returned to the camp in silence, travelling the last thousand yards separately, as if they had merely been out foraging. But each man carried in his heart a burden that weighed him down. He had seen what he could not forget.
Two days later the soldiers were forty miles to the north and east and their scouts had reported a large barbarian encampment, possible a thousand or more men, with their women and children.
Cassiodorus stood in front of the men, swaying a little on the balls of his feet. His eyes gleamed. He gazed at the thousands of soldiers marshalled in front of him.
Tathea stood far at the back of the vast throng, with the other women and servants, but even so she knew he was as aware of her as if they were alone again in the room in Parfyrion.
Cassiodorus raised his arms. “Go to your places,” he cried. “Eat well! Rest! At midnight we march. We shall fall on them at dawn and not one of them will be left alive. Not a man to murder any more of our people, not a woman to breed more fighters and killers, not a child to grow up for revenge! Go now, and prepare yourselves for victory!”
“Victory!” came back the shout as fists punched into the air. “Victory!”
At midnight, in the flare of a thousand torches, they began to move out, rigid, obedient, heads high. Twenty-five men were left, led by the centurion with the broken tooth. They stood stiff-backed, eyes forward, motionless. Seeing them, the last legion hesitated and looked to Cassiodorus.
He smiled, but it was a cruel pleasure that lit inside him, like the anticipation of a hunger to be filled.
“Did you not hear the order?” he said quietly, but his voice carried in the sharp, still air.
“I heard it,” the centurion answered. “Those are not from the tribe that attacked us. They are not yet our enemies, and I will not fall on them and slaughter them for no reason. We say this war is to save us from being destroyed. If we do the same thing, then we have destroyed ourselves.”
Cassiodorus raised his eyebrows. Almost unconsciously he ran his tongue over his lips. “Do you refuse?”
The centurion was white-faced, and Tathea could see in the torchlight the knuckles on his clenched hands shining where the skin was stretched tight across them.
“Yes we do,” he answered. “We will not obey an unjust command. We fight against the barbarism that slaughters women and children and destroys those who are no threat to us.”
Cassiodorus’ face remained unchanged. “I give you a last chance to obey a command in the field of battle,” he said distinctly.
There was a flurry of wind, ice-edged, the clouds crossed the moon and then passed, the torches flickered and then became brighter and harder.
“We will not,” the centurion repeated.
The men behind him stood rigid, as they would if they were awaiting an enemy attack they knew they could not survive. They had looked death in the face before and found strength from each other, and from within themselves.
Seconds passed as Cassiodorus realised they would not be panicked. Rage filled him for an instant, then it was succeeded by triumph. “I charge you with mutiny and cowardice on the field of battle!” he shouted, then turned to one of the centurions he trusted most. “How say you, Catullan, are they guilty?”
“Guilty!” Catullan replied without hesitation.
Cassiodorus looked beyond him to the other legionaries, rank upon rank of them stretching away into the darkness until only their helmets were distinguishable in the flare of torches. “How say you?” he repeated.
Tathea looked at their faces. They were cold, weary, caught by surprise. No one had expected mutiny.
There was a moment’s silence, then they spoke. “Guilty,” they answered. They did not know how to give any other verdict. They also did not realise yet what hideous judgement was laid upon their comrades in that single word.
Cassiodorus’ huge body relaxed and a smile made his face repulsive. He looked across at Tathea as if this whole bitter campaign were a duel between them, and all the blood and pain, the tens of thousands of men involved, were incidental, the tools used in its accomplishment, not living people.
“You are all witness to what has happened,” he said, his voice ringing in the still air. “Mutiny in the field has only one punishment.” He looked at Catullan. “We march on the enemy camp immediately. You will carry out the executions, and then catch up with us at the river.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned, his head high, a slight swagger in his step.
No one else moved. Tathea had known what must come, and yet it was still both a victory, and a price which, now it was real, was almost beyond paying. For an instant she allowed herself to hope that the centurion charged with the execution would refuse to obey. That would be the ultimate prize. She stared at his face, the realisation in it, fear making it slack. Her heart tightened as she understood he would never find it within himself to defy Cassiodorus, even at this terrible price. He would think about it, weigh one sacrifice against the other, and then yield.
He turned to his men. If he looked at their faces or wondered what they wanted, it was nowhere visible in his demeanour. He made the decision for them and gave the command.
They closed ranks around the twenty-five and, with swords drawn, marched them in a tight phalanx through the trees and over the ridge until they were out of sight.
The women and camp followers turned to one another in bewilderment.
>
Ardesir came striding across the icy grass towards Tathea, his face creased, his eyes dark and angry.
“Didn’t you know he’d do that?” he demanded when he was close to her. “They’re going to murder those men.”
“I know,” she said, wishing she could avoid the blame in his eyes. She was tired and cold, and bitterly aware of what was happening beyond the ridge. She felt as if she could hear the blows falling, even though there was barely a sound except the wind in the branches, and the shuffle of feet as the remaining people began to move off at last.
She looked past Ardesir. “Hurry!” she said to one of the women. “Mix in with the others. Don’t be caught alone!”
The woman had no idea what she meant.
“Get out!” Tathea heard the panic in her own voice. “Now! Quickly! You know what they did! Don’t you realise that when they come back they’ll see that? Maybe we’ll never get home, but if we do, do you think they’ll let you live to tell people?”
“But it was an order,” the woman argued. “What else could they do?”
The old man next to her understood. He gave Tathea a glance of gratitude, then dragged the woman away, muttering a curse at her stupidity.
“We’d better go too,” Ardesir said bitterly. “Why should they spare us? They don’t know that nobody in the City would believe us.” He strode after the others, head down, face into the wind.
She caught up with him, walking with difficulty over the rough tussocks of the grass, the iron-hard ground jarring her body. She was tired deep within herself and his anger hurt. She tried not even to think of Ishrafeli, to wish he were here where she could meet his eyes and know he understood. She had no idea where he was, even if he were still alive.
“What did you want me to do?” she demanded, matching her stride with Ardesir’s. “Let them go on in ignorance, making no decisions?”
He kept his face averted and his voice was quiet and strained when he answered. “Did you ever imagine they’d stand up to Cassiodorus? You know what he is. Didn’t you know what would happen before you spoke?”