by Ian Ross
Fatigue coursed through his body as Castus climbed from the entrance passage into the enclosure of the fort. Round huts with conical roofs of straw and turf packed the raised terrace inside the stone rampart and palisade. Dogs barked from the darkness and torches flared bright in his face. Still he was led onward, between the huts to a second, higher wall that lay within the first. Another narrow cleft led upwards; goaded with a spear at his back, Castus stumbled through the gap and climbed towards the upper terrace of the fort.
Three or four large huts and a cluster of smaller ones stood at the centre of the enclosure, with smoke rising into the still night sky. Castus snatched a look back over his shoulder at the darkened landscape to the north, the wide spread of the valley, but rough hands pushed his head down, and he felt himself shoved forward into a low confined space. Behind him he heard Marcellinus cry out in pain; then he was wrestled off his feet and his hands were untied from the baulk of wood. The ground seemed to vanish from beneath him, and for a moment he was falling, before hard stone rushed up and struck him in the back. He lay still, breathing quickly, blood pumping through his body. Stone all around him – hard and cold and deep. He took a deep shuddering breath as the dread crawled through him. Then he began shouting.
‘Are you awake? Can you hear me?’
‘Yes… Where are you?’
‘Over here – I can reach your ankle… Do you feel that?’
‘Where are we?’
‘Underground. A storage chamber in the fort. You’re safe, don’t worry. Just don’t sit up – the ceiling’s very low and you’ll hit your head again. That was quite a clout they gave you when you started yelling. You’ve been unconscious, I think.’
Castus was lying down in total darkness, and when he raised his arms his knuckles grazed stone to either side. The chamber was more like a tunnel, barely four feet across and lined on all sides with heavy slabs. Like a sewer, he thought. Like a grave.
‘There’s water here, and food. And a straw mattress beside you somewhere. Here – I’ll pass the jug.’
Castus stretched out his arm, reaching blindly in the constricted space. His fingers hit something and water slopped over his hand. He found the rim of the earthenware jug and lifted it carefully to his mouth, drinking deeply.
‘Centurion,’ said Marcellinus’s voice from the darkness, ‘I have some bad news.’ Castus stiffened, placing the jug down. The use of his rank title seemed ominous.
‘What is it?’
‘When they were carrying us in, I heard them talking. Some of the Picts – Drustagnus was there, I think. They said… I’m sorry, brother… they said that your men did not reach the frontier.’
Castus raised his head slowly, reaching up to the stone overhead, the stone on either side. He pressed his feet against one wall and his back against the other. Fists clenched, he tried to slow his breathing, his blood.
‘What happened?’
‘The Picts attacked them as they marched – only a few miles south of your position on the hill. They didn’t have a chance. The Votadini fled at once and your men were cut down before they could get into defensive formation. Not one of them escaped. I’m sorry.’
Castus could feel the roar gathering deep in his throat. His shoulders knitted, and he punched with both fists against the wall. Punched and punched again, pressing with his back against the stone. He clenched his teeth, pummelling himself backwards, his fists and feet forwards, as if he could burst open the walls that surrounded him and fight his way out – as if he could destroy this whole fort, tear it apart with his hands and kill everyone… The shout burst from him, ringing in the confined space.
‘Stop! This won’t help us…’
Flinging himself sideways, Castus thrashed his arms out in front of him. There must be a door; there must be a way out of this tomb… Then he felt Marcellinus gripping his shoulders, pushing against him.
‘Back! Down!’ the envoy said. ‘Centurion! I’m ordering you! You’ll kill us both like this.’
His head scraped on the low ceiling as he recoiled into a crouch. He pressed his fists to his eyes, then to his gaping mouth, his furious rage turning to hard black grief inside him. His men – the century he had trained and led, were destroyed to a man. Timotheus, Culchianus, Evagrius – even the wounded men butchered.
‘We will do what we are ordered,’ he said quietly, his voice dull and edged with iron. ‘And at every command we will be ready.’ The soldier’s oath. He had lived by it all his life. Even death is a command, he thought. Even death an order, to be obeyed.
‘Stay calm, brother,’ Marcellinus said. ‘Any sudden move and we both die.’
The wooden ceiling-grating at one end of the narrow subterranean chamber had been raised, and bright daylight beamed down from above. Harsh Pictish voices as Marcellinus was lifted up through the opening. Castus crawled after him, and when he raised his arms his wrists were seized and tied. Squinting in the light, he climbed up into a ring of spears.
Surprisingly, he was not under the open sky but inside a round hut. The daylight that had seemed so blinding after his hours in darkness came from the open doorway, and a fire smoked in the hearth at the centre. Three of the guards squatted around Marcellinus as he lay on the ground; the envoy’s face was deeply lined, greyish, and Castus could see the bandages around his injured leg were swollen and black. The other guards kept their weapons levelled at Castus, forcing him down to kneel beside the open grating to the chamber below.
One by one the visitors filed into the hut. First a group of noble warriors, their arms and faces heavily scarred with beast pictures, their heads shaved at the sides and their hair matted into thick hanging pelts. After them came Cunomagla, widow of Vendognus, wrapped in a dark cloak with her fox-coloured hair bound in a plait. She had a child with her, a delicate-looking long-haired boy of nine or ten years, and held him before her as she stared down at the prisoners.
Then, stooping as he entered the hut, Drustagnus, the brute-faced nephew of the new Pictish king. Castus tensed, flexing his arms against the bonds tying his wrists. He set his jaw, glaring.
Another man entered then, older and rather small, with a hunched back, carrying a wrapped bundle. He approached Marcellinus and knelt beside him, and Castus shuffled forward on his knees with warning in his eyes.
‘Don’t worry – he’s a herbalist,’ Marcellinus said quickly. His voice was hardly more than a gasp. ‘I know him – he served Vepogenus well. He needs to look at my leg…’
The little man was peeling away the bandages. The sour smell of mortifying flesh made Castus’s stomach tighten and he looked away. The boy was gazing at the injured man on the floor with a mixture of fascination and repulsion. Something familiar in his face, Castus thought. Something he had seen before.
‘You,’ said Drustagnus suddenly, in Latin. ‘Your name?’ He was sitting on a stool beside the hearth, holding an apple. Castus remembered that the man had learned Latin as a hostage in Eboracum. He and Cunomagla too. He drew himself up straight.
‘Aurelius Castus, Centurion, Third Cohort, Sixth Legion,’ he said, trying to keep his voice level. Trying to keep the murder from his eyes.
Drustagnus smiled, and bit into the apple with his blunt yellow teeth. He spoke again as he chewed. His Latin was heavily accented and barbarous.
‘Soon, I go with my uncle. Talorcagus. Pict King. We make war on Romans. Then I return here. You – brave warrior. You teach me and all warriors skill of Roman fighting. Then, when Rome king come here, we fight. We kill him.’ He made a casual swiping gesture with his hand. ‘Then Talorcagus king all Britannia. And after him – me.’
Not a chance, Castus thought, but said nothing. Marcellinus had already told him of the preparations for war, the Pictish host assembling from all directions. Twenty thousand spears, or so the guards had claimed, and Marcellinus had said this was plausible. Warriors had come from Hibernia across the sea, and from the Attacotti of the far north. Even many of the Votadini and Selgov
ae tribesmen had thrown off their allegiance to Rome and joined the uprising. In his mind, Castus had seen them scythed down by the legions, falling in screaming waves before the iron storm of the ballistae and the javelins. But then he remembered the triumph tree with its gory harvest of heads, his men lying dead and mutilated on the road…
Drustagnus stood up suddenly, tossing the apple core into the hearth. He swept his fur cape over one shoulder, baring a scarred sword arm, and then snapped out a question to the herbalist. The little man was busy mixing a paste of herbs and fat in a pestle and spreading it on Marcellinus’s leg. He answered, quiet and deferential. Drustagnus nodded, grunted, and strode out of the hut.
‘He says your friend recovers soon.’
Castus blinked, unsure at first who had spoken; then he saw the woman, Cunomagla, looking at him. For the first time he noticed the fine tracery of markings on her skin, her bare upper arms and forehead inscribed with swirling shapes more subtle than those worn by the warriors. She spoke more fluently than Drustagnus, still with an accent, but her voice was low and rich, almost the voice of a man.
‘Thank you,’ Castus said. She looked him in the eye, her expression hard and unmoving. Assessing him. Was she too his enemy?
‘It is dark in the pit,’ the woman said. ‘I send light.’
Then she turned, urging the boy ahead of her, and made for the door. As he left the hut the boy glanced back, from under the hem of his mother’s cloak, and Castus realised where he had seen those features before. An oval face in darkness. Marcellinus’s daughter.
The light was a small oil lamp with a twisting flame that threw their shadows back into the reaching darkness of the chamber. They sat together beneath the wooden grating, so the oil smoke could rise and they could breathe the faint damp freshness of the outside air. It was night – Castus could not judge how long they had spent together locked in the pit. Three days, or four? The herbalist had come and gone several times, applying more of the foul-smelling paste to Marcellinus’s ruined leg. The envoy’s face had a sunken look as he lay back against the wall.
‘The boy, Cunomagla’s son,’ Castus said to him. ‘Yours?’
Marcellinus nodded, and the shadow of his head swept up and down. ‘Yes. You guessed. After my last campaign against these people, when I made the treaty with Vepogenus, it was sealed with a pact. A pact of brotherhood, but also of marriage.’
‘She’s your wife?’
‘Not by our terms. Only by native custom. She was fourteen or fifteen then, the king’s niece, a girl of the royal household. I thought little of it at the time, but later she was sent down to Eboracum with the other noble hostages. Drustagnus and some others. It was inconvenient – I had a Roman wife, and a family, of course. But I… well, the child was conceived. And soon afterwards I was accused of treason and imprisoned. You know the rest of that tale.’
Castus nodded, remembering what Strabo had told him, in what seemed a previous life. The escape to Gaul; the return with Constantius.
‘Does the boy know who you are?’ he asked.
Marcellinus just shrugged. ‘Two years had passed by the time I came north again,’ he said. ‘Cunomagla had returned to her people, and been married to her cousin Vendognus, who claimed the child as his own, though all knew otherwise. Perhaps the boy himself knows, perhaps not. She avoided me then. She’s a proud woman, and ambitious. That was the last I saw of either of them, until I returned here with you.’
Castus narrowed his eyes as the lamp-smuts began to smart.
‘I once thought,’ Marcellinus said, ‘that she might have been responsible for the murder of my son, my legitimate son, when he was held as a hostage. She might be capable of that, to revenge herself on me. But I think not. It would not have availed her anything. She was loyal to Vepogenus then. Now, I’m not sure where her allegiances lie…’
‘With Drustagnus, it looks like.’
‘I don’t know. And perhaps I don’t want to know.’ Marcellinus closed his eyes, head back against the stone slab of the wall. ‘You have to escape this place, brother,’ he said quietly.
‘We will. Both of us.’
‘Not me,’ Marcellinus said, smiling grimly. ‘With this leg, I’d just slow you down…’
Castus gripped his shoulder. ‘I’m not leaving without you. I swore an oath to protect you.’
‘An oath to my daughter! Very conscientious of you. She is little more than a child. Do you know, she was betrothed four years ago, to a cousin of her mother’s who lives in the southern province. But the wedding has never been arranged. Why...? My reputation. I’m still seen as suspect. And my family suffer for that. Marcellina has lived all her life at my villa – barely even been to Eboracum more than once or twice. What does she know of the world, do you think?’
‘Doesn’t matter. An oath is an oath. I swore to the gods.’
‘Well, then,’ Marcellinus said, almost under his breath, ‘May the gods forgive you.’
He woke suddenly, disorientated. The air was thick and greasy with the smoke of the lamp. Raising his head from the straw mattress, he saw Marcellinus sitting back against the wall of the chamber with the wavering flame before him. He held a wooden bowl between his palms.
‘Sorry to wake you. I have something I need to tell you.’
Castus raised himself on one elbow, blinking in the smoky glow. Marcellinus lay back against the stone slab, smiling, his eyes only half-open.
‘I am leaving you soon,’ the envoy said in a low, quiet tone. He no longer sounded pained or anguished. ‘I release you from your oath.’
‘What do you mean? Leaving how?’
‘This bowl contains a toxin made from the extract of a certain root. The herbalist smuggled it to me, at my request. He will be gone from here before morning, and so will I, by a different route.’
‘No, I can’t allow it…’ Castus stretched forward, still groggy from sleep, but Marcellinus raised a palm in warning. After so many days as an invalid, he had suddenly regained his look of authority. Sitting back against the wall, he was once more a Roman commander, a leader of men.
‘Do not try to stop me, brother. This is my choice. It is the honourable way. I have made too many mistakes in my life, and returning to this country will be the last of them. I will not be a valuable hostage to them any longer.’
‘Then give me the poison too.’
‘I’m sorry, there is only enough for one. Besides, in releasing you from one vow I must ask of you another. Escape this place… Return to my family and tell them what happened to me. Tell them that I died by own hand and by my own will. You must do this – it is my last order to you.’
He was speaking slowly, deliberately, and Castus realised with a shock that he had already drunk the poison and the bowl he held was empty. In the lamplight he could see the sweat forming on the envoy’s brow, the twitch in his jaw as his teeth clenched and relaxed.
‘Promise me!’ Marcellinus said. The bowl fell from his hands, and he wrenched a heavy ring from his finger. ‘Take this – my seal. Return it to my wife, and she’ll know that I sent you.’
He tossed the ring, and Castus caught it in his fist. There was nothing he could do to stop this now. Marcellinus’s throat was tightening, his eyes flicking open and closed. Castus moved closer, but once more the man motioned him away.
‘You may not… want to watch this,’ he said, with difficulty. ‘I’ll extinguish the lamp in a moment… Just a little more light…’
Hardly able to breathe, Castus lay down again and rolled on his side facing the wall, the ring held tight in his hand. He heard Marcellinus gasp and retch, his foot kick against the wall; the lamp was snuffed out. A long-drawn breath in the darkness, shuddering, then the wet rattle of death.
Castus lay still, waiting, counting his heartbeats. When he reached one hundred he sat up and groped in the dark for the body slumped against the far wall. He found the neck, checked for the pulse and felt nothing. The solid smoke-smelling blackness was all around h
im and he felt the dread of death crawling across his skin.
He waited as long as he could bear, and then he dragged himself to the grating and started hammering at it, yelling for the guards.
10
The music was strange, barbaric, unearthly: thudding drums, wailing pipes and voices, rhythmic shouts and screeches. Castus pressed his cheek to the rough wood of the door and squinted through the crack between the boards. Firelight dazzled his eye; then he saw capering figures in black silhouette, reeling shapes against the blaze, sparks shooting into the night sky. He saw manlike figures with the heads of animals and cruel birds, and felt the sweat freeze on his brow.
But these were men. Men wearing bird-headed masks, dancing around the fire with crooked steps, hands clasped behind their backs. He shuddered, fearful of the strange noise, the dark alien gods, the breath of magic and superstition. On his hands and knees he backed away from the door into the dank gloom of the hut.
Three days had passed since they had taken him from the pit where Marcellinus had died. He had been brought out by night and seen little of his surroundings, but had noticed the half-moon between the clouds, and realised that it must have been ten days since the battle. Ten days for the Picts to muster their forces – Aurelius Arpagius would not be expecting his delegation to return until the end of the month. Only then would he realise that something was wrong, and by that time the Picts could already be assaulting the Wall. Perhaps, he thought, the barbaric celebration outside marked the beginning of their campaign, a ritual declaration of war against Rome?
He sat on the floor of the hut and fed a few twigs and some dried moss to the meagre fire in the central hearth. This hut was his new prison: a circle of massive stones enclosing a space only five paces across, containing a straw mattress and a central fireplace. The walls rose to waist height, and above them was the sloping conical roof of smoke-blackened timbers and heavy old turf. Castus had already tested the strength of the ceiling – it would be possible for him to break a hole large enough to clamber through, but the noise of the cracking wood would surely alert the guards outside, and they would be waiting for him as soon as he emerged.