He saw that the skirmish was already over. Perhaps two hundred bandits lay cut up on the ground. The few who were wounded were being rapidly despatched. The rest were streaming away over the plateau towards the oak forests beyond. Some of the men gave brief chase. But it was hot, and the battle had been won.
Lucius put the dying horse out of its misery, setting his sword point just behind the horse’s still twitching ear and then driving it down into its brain. He always was soft about horses. Then he went over and ordered its rider to his feet.
Their captive was dusty and emaciated, but something proud still flashed in his eyes. He was oddly dressed, too, in only a long white robe, filthy and tattered around the hem. No armour, no arrow-guard. Nothing to give him away.
‘So,’ panted Lucius, shaking his head and blinking to clear the horse-blood from his eyes. ‘Your name?’
The man lowered his head.
‘You’ve had training. That wasn’t a bad attempt at an ambush.’
The man glared up at him with hatred burning in his eyes.
Then Lucius caught sight of something. The man was trying to hide his left hand. Lucius grabbed it and pulled it towards him. A signet ring flashed on the forefinger.
He looked at him sharply. ‘So you were a soldier? Soldier turned bandit, eh? Got cross one day that you hadn’t been paid for a few months, is that it? Got a bit peevish? So you turned on the Rome that nurtured you, that you owed everything to, and went back to live in the forests like a wild animal?’
The man turned aside and spat in the dust, and then looked at Lucius again, eyes still blazing with that strange hatred. ‘I served Stilicho,’ he said.
Lucius nodded, slowly. And then at last he said, very softly, ‘I served Stilicho, too. I like to think I still do.’
The two men stared at each other a while longer.
‘Well,’ said Lucius at last, sighing and letting the man’s grimy hand drop. ‘Enough of that.’
‘String ’em up, sir?’
Lucius turned wearily away. ‘String ’em up.’
Only eight bandits, including the leader, had been captured alive. They would be used as examples, and were led away across the plateau to the edge of the forest.
At the head of a small ravine running down off the plateau stood an ancient and battered pine tree. The prisoners were taken to the foot of the tree and stripped naked. Lucius’ men were throwing ropes over the mighty lower branch of the tree and setting nooses round the prisoners’ necks, ready to haul them up and hang them, when Heraclian came riding up and assumed command.
‘I think a special lesson is needed,’ he said.
Lucius turned away. He had no desire to see the Palatine go to work. But Marco made himself watch.
The Palatine guards tied the prisoners’ hands behind their backs, made them kneel in the dust, and beat them savagely with a whip of knotted leather thongs. They beat the leader with special savagery, but, like his fellow outlaws, he made not a sound. After the beating, the leader was kicked down into the dust, and his ankles were bound tightly together. A rope was passed between his shins and knotted round his ankles, while the other end of the rope was thrown up over the lower branches of the tree, and he was hauled up with his head towards the ground. One of the guards climbed up and hammered in a nine-inch iron nail through his crossed ankles, pinning him to the branch. And there he was left, silent but conscious, trembling with exhaustion and pain. Blood ran down from his ankles and his back, and dripped from his nose and from the ends of his hair.
Marco knew what was worst about this reverse crucifixion. The nine-inch nail through the ankle-bones was bad enough, but it didn’t kill you. No, the worst thing was to be suspended upside-down like that, unable to move, until you died. It would take about three days, maybe more. The bandits were shaded by the pine, so they wouldn’t die of thirst that soon. The blood would rush to their heads, and not return. Within an hour they would have headaches worse than you could imagine. Within a day, their lips and tongues would be purple and swollen, the whites of their eyeballs would be as purple-red as ripe plums. It wasn’t unknown for a man’s eyeballs to burst open with the pressure. But that still wouldn’t kill you. A brain haemorrhage might, or dehydration. If nothing else did, within three days you would die of agonising suffocation, unable to raise your ribcage any longer to breathe. And you would die gratefully.
If you were lucky, the crows wouldn’t find you before you died. Those gallows-birds with their strong black beaks and their bright, unsmiling eyes. But if you were unlucky, they would spot you hanging there from afar off, and come and flutter on your upturned chest, and peck out your eyeballs for a dainty treat as you still lived, or rip away the soft flesh of your lips. It was no good closing your eyes to them. They would simply devour your eyelids as well, tearing them delicately away as if they were silk. No wonder crows were thought to be the wandering souls of the damned.
The Palatine Guards nailed the eight bandits upside down like this, one by one, from the creaking, bloodstained branch of the ancient pine. The tortured men groaned, and some of them pleaded, but to no avail. The guards had no time for them, only contempt.
‘Now, now, madam, do stop your whimpering,’ said one of them cheerfully as he banged in another nine-inch nail. ‘You’ll soon be in Hades with a wooden sword up your arse.’
Lucius sat on his horse and looked out across the valley to the south, towards Rome. He knew these scum deserved no better. It was perfectly just punishment for a criminal. But all the same, he didn’t have to enjoy it.
Then they rode back across the plateau and down towards the waiting carriages of the column, leaving the tall tree behind them with its ghastly decorations of living but dying men.
Some of the soldiers had dragged clumps of brushwood from the edge of the forest, and piled them up into a pyre for burning the bodies of the slain. The stench from the battlefield was already terrible: blood and sweat and the contents of ruptured bowels mingled foully on the hot air. The men covered their faces, dragged the bandits’ corpses onto the pyre and set it burning. The bodies burnt slowly, sizzling like roasting meat, a plume of black, oily smoke rising high into the air.
‘A warning signal,’ said Heraclian with approval, ‘to any other robber bands in the area.’
Molten human fat was beginning to run from under the pyre and trickle away into the crevices in the earth. Lucius moved on, ordering the Roman dead to be laid on travoises and taken down into the valley. The ground here was too hard to dig. They would be given a decent burial in the soft earth below, as befitted any who had died in the cause of Rome.
They had lost a quarter of the force. Lucius had made the right decision, to attack when he did. But it had been a victory dearly won.
More soldiers lay injured. Those who could survive were bandaged and dressed by their comrades, and mounted on their horses.
Another lay with an arrow deep in his lungs, bubbling out his lifeblood where he lay. It was Carpicius, the new young recruit. All of eighteen summers. Even Ops’ mulish heroism hadn’t saved him in the end.
Near the boy lay Ops himself. His arm had been badly cut by that spear-thrust through the shield. It had hit an artery, and the burly Egyptian had lost a lot of blood. He clutched his arm across his chest, his other hand a rusty brown where it was encrusted with dried blood. His face was ashen pale, and his breath was shallow and uneven.
‘Come on, soldier, let’s get you fixed up,’ said Lucius.
Ops ignored him. He only gazed at Carpicius.
The lieutenant well knew that they’d been bed-mates as well as messmates. It was common enough. The men might mock a comrade, give him a scornful nickname like Mincius Flabianus if they found him in bed with another, but most of them took a bedmate from time to time. Ops would have died for the boy. Now it looked as if he was going to. And they couldn’t afford to lose such good men. Not now. Lucius turned aside and cursed under his breath. If he didn’t curse, he might weep.
&nb
sp; Marco knelt by Carpicius’ side. Why was it always the youngest who copped it first?
‘Sit up now, boy,’ said Marco gently. ‘We’ll have to get your breastplate off to get you bandaged.’
The tenderness with which soldiers cared for each other after a battle. Lucius heard but he couldn’t look.
Seeing great Hector slain, says Homer, even Lord Apollo cried out at his fellow Olympians, ‘Hardhearted you are, O you gods! You live for cruelty!’
And he thought of the words of the ancient song.
For hard is the Gods’ will,
My sorrows but increase,
And I must weep, my lover,
That wars will never cease.
Carpicius gazed up at his centurion with watery, half-closed eyes and shook his head. ‘Wait a bit,’ he whispered, blood bubbling on his lips. ‘Just a bit more.’
Marco waited a bit. The rest of the men stood near with bowed heads. After a few minutes, Marco stood and signalled, and the body of Carpicius was laid gently on another travois along with his fallen comrades.
Riding back down to the column, Lucius looked in at Olympian, who was sweating profusely in the gloom of his ornate carriage.
‘Where the hell’s the boy?’
‘The boy is not my responsibility,’ snapped the eunuch. ‘He’s gone.’
Lucius’ blood froze. ‘Gone?’
‘Here I am!’ called a voice behind him cheerfully. Looking round, Lucius saw Attila slithering down the grassy slope towards the carriage.
‘Where the hell have you been all this time?’ Lucius demanded.
The boy stopped at the carriage door and looked up at Lucius on his big horse, shielding his eyes against the sun.
‘Watching.’ He grinned, wolfishly. ‘Learning.’
Lucius was in no mood for jokes. ‘Get in the carriage,’ he said.
He dug his heels into Tugha Ban’s flanks, and the column rolled on.
They made camp that night down in the valley, after they’d buried their dead. They dug a rough square trench and mound, put up a stockade and set out staves. A defensive camp, in the heart of Italy! But times were strange.
The men were exhausted, and still they had to keep nightwatch, changing every two hours. Lucius and Marco kept the first watch with them, their eyelids almost dropping with weariness. As soon as their watch was relieved, they went down to the river with their men and bathed before they slept.
They washed the encrusted blood from their arms and faces and tunics, then took deep lungfuls of air and sank underwater for as long as they could bear, resurfacing with grateful gasps. None of them spoke in the darkness, as the river flowed coolly round them and cleansed them. They scooped up handfuls of the clear, cold water and poured it over their heads, as if anointing themselves. They prayed to their gods, to Christos, and Mithras, to Mars Ultor, and to Jupiter Optimus Maximus. They raised their eyes to the heavens and saw the wheeling stars: the Dragon coiling about the North Star, the Eagle and the Shield slowly sinking towards the western horizon; the crescent moon on her back, like the crown of Diana the Huntress; and Orion the Hunter, whom she cruelly slew, slowly rising towards dawn.
Lucius thought of his wife, and how she would see the same stars as he. Orion fading from the sky as she went outside to bring in the new-laid eggs in her white apron, and the sun rising in the early morning over that gentle Dumnonian valley. His children, Cadoc and little Ailsa, herding the chickens out into the yard with hazel twigs, their big brown eyes serious and intent, chattering to each other all the time. He smiled in the darkness, felt his beating heart. He saw the clear, trickling stream that ran down to the grey Celtic sea; the hillsides of lush meadows, full of plump white cattle, and the high ridges crested with ancient oakwoods. That country knew nothing of war and killing. His wife and children had never seen so much as a sword drawn in anger, let alone the foul aftermath of battle. It was right that it should be so. But for the future of his country, now, beyond the frontier of an enfeebled Rome, with tales of those brutal Saxon pirates drawing ever closer… He should be there, with them. He feared for everything that was.
Before he had departed from Isca Dumnoniorum to join the waiting ships at anchor in the estuary, with the last few threadbare centuries of the once mighty Legio II ‘Augusta’, he had taken her in his arms and they had sworn that they would look at the moon and the stars every evening and every morning, wherever they were, and their love would fly to each other through the night air, far apart as they were, over whatever endless plains and mountains and deserts might separate them. Whatever lands might lie between them, the same sun and moon shone down on them both. Lucius gazed up at the crescent moon, and prayed his prayer of deepest longing.
Then the soldiers returned to their camp, and slept under their blankets like newborn babes.
4
THE FOREST
The next morning Lucius washed in the river again, and saw the brilliant flash of a bee-eater flitting over the wide grasslands beyond. He crossed himself and muttered a prayer. If bees were lucky, what did a bee-eater mean?
He returned to see a fast-riding messenger of the imperial cursus pulling up outside the camp. He went over to ask him what the message was. The expressionless rider shook his head. ‘This is for Count Heraclian only.’
Lucius shrugged and allowed the rider to dismount and go to Heraclian’s tent.
A few minutes later he reappeared, remounted and vanished back down the track.
Heraclian informed Lucius that the Palatine Guard would ride in the van again from now on.
They ate bacon and hardtack and broke camp and rode on. They ascended out of the valley and onto the track again. They rode over further rough plains, sunparched and bare, dotted only with the occasional broom or kermes oak, the air heady and aromatic with juniper and wild thyme. They rode on until mid-afternoon over the parched tableland. Storm clouds began to mass again to the south, but still the storm did not break. The air was hot and oppressive, even in these mountains. Then they began a slow descent, when the track entered a dense pine forest.
Everything was dark and claustrophobic, and the heavy, thundery atmosphere that had haunted them on the day they left Rome had returned. Surely a storm must break now. And in the darkness of the forest, the weight and silence of the brooding summer air felt more ominous still. Some of the horses grew skittish and rolled their eyes to left and right of the narrow track. They showed their frightened whites, and their ears flicked furiously, their nostrils flaring for danger, for they could see nothing among the dense, dark trees that crowded in like malevolent sentries on either side of the track.
Lucius noticed Marco gazing intently into the forest to their left as they rode. He followed the direction of his gaze. ‘What is it, Centurion?’
Marco shook his head. ‘Nothing.’
They said no more.
Count Heraclian, riding with his Palatine Guard at the head of the column again, found himself thinking of Varus and his legions in the dark Teutoburg Forest, even though they were still in the heart of Italy. There was no safety left in Italy. He found himself thinking, too, of Stilicho. Sometimes, he longed for the company and the steely optimism of that man, that murdered hero of Rome, whom he had always resented and whose killing he had commanded and condoned. Worst of all, he knew himself to be a weak man. He knew also that it was the most dreadful thing for any man to feel. To be a galley-slave, to be crucified, to be the ‘entertainment’ in a show of wild beasts – these things were as nothing to the torment of waking each morning and knowing yourself to have a weak and timorous spirit, beneath your shell of resplendent bronze and scarlet. Heraclian tightened his hold on the reins and rode on.
The dark pine trees almost met over their heads, and what slender sky they could see between them was as heavy and grey as a shield. It was getting so dark that they could hardly pick out the track before them, when suddenly everything was illuminated in a stab of forked lightning which struck the forest perilously close t
o the track. A clap of thunder followed only a fraction of a second after, showing how closely the lightning had missed the column itself. The horses whinnied and reared, and their riders reined them in with savage cries.
In the creaking Liburnian carriage, its ornate gilding and its swathes of crimson curtains seeming ever more ridiculous in this harsh and ominous landscape, Olympian actually reached out and snatched Attila’s arm for comfort, giving a gasp of fright as the bolt of lightning detonated close by in the forest. The boy carefully detached himself.
‘But we should be safe enough under the tall trees,’ stammered Olympian.
He sounded as if he was complaining about the lightning, about the way things were, petulantly, to the gods who made the storm. The mark of deepest foolishness. Attila smiled to himself.
Olympian could not understand the Hun boy. He smiled often – that wolfish grin – and yet there was no happiness in it. He was full of anger, even hatred. He smiled like a little god overseeing the sacrifice.
Count Heraclian signalled that the column should ride on, and they did so grimly. Experienced soldiers like Marco and Lucius lowered their spears, and took off their iron helmets, even if it did mean getting a soaking. But pity the standard-bearer in a storm. No lowering that for safety’s sake. Poor bugger was a human lightning-rod.
A chill wind had arisen, tossing the branches of the trees about above their heads, and whipping their cloaks round them. And then it began to rain, great gobbets of water smacking down on their heads and shoulders and drumming on the roofs of the carriages housing the lucky few. After the initial noisy cloudburst, the raindrops grew finer, and gusted down in an unbroken sheet, and the soldiers at the front of the column could barely see their way forward though the veils of water. In their carriage towards the back, Genseric and Beric finally woke up. Olympian crossed himself furiously, and throughout the column soldiers and officers variously crossed themselves in the name of Christ, or made promises of future sacrifices to Mithras or Jupiter, should they reach Ravenna safely. Not a few of them made vows and promises to all three gods. No point not spreading your bets, when the stake is always the same.
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