Aracos took up the bundle and slowly folded back the tattered cloth. Inside was a battered circlet of gilded bronze fashioned into the form of oak leaves. The Corona Civica!
‘He said it was yours by rights.’
Aracos was silent for a few moments, holding the thing gently between his hands. ‘How did he die?’
‘Of wounds taken in driving off an attack on the supply train he was escorting. It was three days later, before he got them into camp. The Gods know how he kept going so long.’
In the silence the wind gusted against the house, and sent a rustling charge of dry leaves along the court outside.
‘I had a feeling,’ the young Medic said at last, ‘that you could have said something in your own defence, tonight, and that you deliberately chose to hold it back.’
‘Did you?’ Aracos said, without interest.
He was remembering how it had all begun, the day when he had gone down from his village in the Rhodope Mountains with two other lads, to the recruiting station at Abdera. He could sit a horse with anyone, and it had not occurred to him that the small sharp pain that sometimes caught him in the chest after running uphill was anything to keep him out of the Thracian Cavalry. At Abdera a man with entwined serpents on the breast of his tunic had made each of them in turn run to the sacred olive tree half a mile away and back without stopping, and then laid his ear against their chests and listened to something inside. The other two had been accepted, but not Aracos, though he had run faster than either of them. He wondered later if the man had heard the small pain in his chest that the running had given him.
He hadn’t gone home, he would have been shamed, but he found that there was room for other men than warriors under the Eagles, jobs for which you did not have to have anyone listening to your chest. He had liked the man with the entwined serpents, and he was interested by this running and listening; he wanted to know what you could hear inside people that told you they had a pain. And so he had become a medical orderly, with the Thracians at first, then with the Dacian Horse in the far-off province of Britain.
He remembered the great outpost fort of Tri-montum on the skirts of its three-peaked hill. He remembered Felix at Cavalry manoeuvres, Felix in his pennant-bearer’s wolfskin, riding full tilt at the head of the flying squadron, with the long sleeve-pennant of scarlet silk filling with the wind and streaming from its silver serpent-head on the lance point. It was just at the end of those manoeuvres that the youngster had been thrown and broken his collar bone; but for that they would probably never have even spoken to each other, for clerks and orderlies and such, Aracos had very soon discovered, were in the Legions and Auxiliaries, but not of them. The odd thing was that they were very much alike save that Felix was not so dark, so that for all the seven or eight years difference between them, old Diomedes the camp surgeon called them Castor and Pollux, when Felix came to have his shoulder tended.
He remembered news of unrest filtering down from the north at the end of a long dry summer, the smoke signals feathering the sky; the Dacian Wings under those slim scarlet serpent pennants riding out to join the 6th Legion on its forced march northward. He remembered following with the baggage carts in the dust of the marching columns, the heather swimming in the heat, the Pictish harrying that began on the second day; a wolf-pack worrying along their flanks, nightly attacks, scouting patrols that came back bloody and at half strength – one that never came back at all.
He remembered the last night, the knowledge on them all that full battle was coming with the morning; the ordered stir of the camp that never died down all through the tense hours darkness.
CHAPTER FOUR
In the first ghost-grey light before a misty dawn, Aracos went down to the latrine trenches beyond the horse lines (the Legions never camped a night without digging such trenches and setting up a stockade) and found Felix there, his wolfskin flung behind him, being violently sick.
‘Felix! What is it?’
And then as the boy crouched back on his heels and turned a sweat-streaked face to him, he knew. Felix’s squadron had run into trouble more than once during the forced march north, and lost several men; the last time, he had got back with a friend’s body slung across his horse’s withers, a body with part of the face carried away by a throw-spear, that had still been alive when they set out on the struggle back to camp. That had been once too often.
‘Aracos!’ The boy was shaking from head to foot, and his teeth chattered as though he had a fever. ‘Aracos! Thank the Gods it’s you! Help me—’
Aracos caught his shoulders to steady him. ‘You’re the only one who can do that.’
‘You can – you can.’
‘How?’
‘There must be something. The German Berserks chew leaves of some sort, don’t they?’ He was beyond shame; that would come later. ‘I’d get drunk, but it only makes me sleepy.’ He bent his face into his hands.
‘Stop it!’ Aracos said. ‘You can! I’ve known men as sick as a cat in the dawn and fight like tigers an hour later.’
But when the other looked up again, he knew that he was wrong; he had served with the Eagles long enough to know the look on the face of a man who had reached the end of what he could take. Now, what in the name of Night’s Daughters was to be done? Whatever it was, it must be done quickly.
Scarcely realising what he did, he caught up the wolfskin and dragged the boy to his feet, and an instant later was crouching with him behind the long mound of earth turned up by the trench diggers. ‘Listen – I can’t give you anything; I can’t and I won’t!’ Then as Felix made a convulsive movement, ‘No listen; there’s only one way out – we’re about the same size, and like enough to pass in the dust of fighting. Strip off those leathers.’
‘You mean you—’
‘Yes.’ Aracos was already yanking at a shoulder buckle.
‘You can’t.’
‘I’ve got to, haven’t I? Quick now, off with your breeks.’ Felix obeyed him, but his eyes had a strange blankness, as though he did not hear. Aracos snatched the breeks from him and dragged them on. ‘Where’s your horse.’
Felix’s gaze turned on him with the same blankness.
‘Your horse! Where’s he picketed?’
‘The end of the second line.’
‘Right.’ He had the tunic on now, belt, sword belt, the great wolfskin with the head pulled well forward on his brows. ‘I’m away now. Don’t follow for a hundred heart-beats. Then make for the baggage park, lie up in one of the tilt carts nearest to the stockade until I come back, and pray to the Gods, for your own sake as well as mine, that I do come back. I’ll whistle “The Girl I Kissed at Clusium”. Don’t move until you hear the tune.’
The young pennant-bearer still seemed in a daze, but he could not wait to make sure he understood. All he could do was to take the youngster’s place and hope for a miracle to bring them both through the day without disaster.
Looking back, he still did not know whether he had done right, he only knew that at the time there had seemed nothing else that he could do, and that the miracle had happened. In the ordered bustle of the camp, with the watch fires turning sickly and scarcely a finger of light in the sky, he had got through the issue of food, collected the serpent pennant from its place with the Cohort Colours and the Eagle itself before the Legate’s tent. He had seen it done so often that he made no obvious mistake in the ceremonial; and at half-light, with morning mist thickening among the hills, found himself riding, still unrecognised, behind the Captain at the head of the two wings of Dacian Horse.
The manoeuvring for position, the coming and going of Scouts, the hurried Councils of War in the Legate’s tent, belonged to yesterday, and he had known nothing of them anyway; his business in life was the medical supplies, not the tactics of hill warfare. And now, as they rode down into the steep river valley across the narrows of which the Tungrians had been standing to all night, and took up their position in reserve behind the steadily forming battle line, his busin
ess was with the light sleeve of scarlet silk lifting and stirring from the lance shaft in his hand; to carry out the pennant-bearer’s duties with no betraying mistake, and to keep his face hidden.
The rising mist was warm and milky, no freshness in it. The waiting seemed interminable.
And then far ahead, a flurry of shouting broke the silence, and all along the battle line and the ranks of the Reserves ran a tiny ripple of the nerve ends, like an unheard touch on the taut strings of a harp. Somewhere out in front the Roman outposts were already engaged. The shouting came nearer; Pictish war horns were snarling in the mist and the Roman trumpets crowed in answer. And now, to the shouting, was added a clanging and clashing and an earth-shaking rumble that Aracos had heard before, but never from the fighting-ranks, and out of the mist swept a column of war chariots, driven and manned by naked, blue-painted warriors.
They swept across the Roman front, raining down throw-spears which the Legionaries caught for the most part on their shields, and wheeling about on the steepening skirts of the hillside, would have cut in between the first rank and the second. But the Cretan archers posted between the Asturian squadrons on the left flank, wheeled half left as they passed, and loosed a flight of short arrows into their midst, aiming for the teams rather than the men. Team after team came down in kicking chaos and a rending crash of broken yoke-poles and torn-off wheels; the charge lost shape and impetus, and swung away, straightening itself back into some kind of order as it went; and from farther to the right, another column came screaming down upon the Roman battle line. The mist was growing ragged before the light breeze that had begun to wake with the dawn, and a brief gleam of light from the rising sun slid into the eyes of the archers on the right wing, making their aim less sure; a team went down here and there, but the wild head of the column was into the Tungrian Cavalry before they could be stopped, and in the same instant, from dead ahead, a wave of foot-warriors came yelling out of the mist and flung themselves upon the pilums of the main battle line. The pilums drank blood, but there seemed always more, where the first wave had come from.
Aracos, in his place in the Reserve, the slim scarlet banner hanging limp from the lance-shaft in his hand, was never clear about what happened then. All that his mind kept of the battle, afterwards, was a memory of roaring chaos, until suddenly, unbelievably, the trumpets were sounding for Advance and Follow-Up, and he realised with a leap of the heart, that the Picts were falling back.
The whole struggle was moving north-westward up the curve of the valley. Close behind him, the Dacian Captain snapped an order, and the Cavalry trumpets were yelping. Felix’s horse, as though catching the surge of excitement, flung up his head with a shrill squeal, and buckled forward under his new rider. But it was not yet fighting time for the Reserves. They only moved forward, keeping station behind the reeling battle line, over dead and wounded men.
The northward surge of the battle slowed and checked once, as though the Picts were making a desperate stand, then rolled on again. The valley swung farther west, rising underfoot, the mist was growing more and more ragged, and suddenly it rolled away like a curtain, still clinging to the northern side of the valley but leaving clear the sheer heather slopes to the south, where a great spur of rock and scree jutted out almost to overhang the narrowing glen.
The man beside him shouted, ‘Mithras! Look up there!’ and following his wildly pointing finger, Aracos saw the crest of the spur swarming with Painted Men. They were prising loose stones out of the heather, and at that very instant the first of these, flung by a naked giant, came whizzing down with the power of a ballista bolt, and somewhere among the surging mass of Legionaries a man screamed – half a scream. But a far worse menace was the great boulder, already perilously poised, that topped the crag, round which the Painted Men were labouring with deadly purpose. There were lesser stones to be hauled from about its base, and spear butts made flimsy levers for shifting such a huge mass, but Aracos saw with a sickening lurch of the heart that it was only a matter of time before that vast boulder came crashing down into the midst of the Roman battlemass, bringing with it, by the look of things, half the hillside as it came.
The Eagles had been led into a trap!
Ahead, the Legionary trumpets were sounding, fiercely urgent. They were echoed by the light notes of the Cavalry trumpets, and three squadrons of Asturians broke away and headed at a slant up the steep hillside, while below them the Centurions fought to get the Cohorts back from the deadly menace of the rock-crowned spur and the great stones already crashing down, and the Pictish warrior-swarm fought as desperately to pen them in.
Suddenly out of the low sunlight leapt flame that danced up just below the hill shoulder, and spread from point to point into a single curved line of fire, red in the daylight, rippling and undulating towards the horsemen.
‘Gods! They’ve fired the heather!’
In the face of the fire across their path, the Asturians’ horses balked and wheeled about, snorting in terror, and flung back from the flames, those in front spreading instant confusion among those behind, and the whole lot, for all the efforts of their riders to check and turn them, stampeding away downhill like unbroken colts. And now the horses on the battle-wings were catching the smell of the fire and the terror of their own kind, flinging this way and that. A few moments more and they would be utterly unmanageable.
‘Right! It’s us now!’ The Dacian Captain gave quick orders to his message-rider: ‘Get back to the Decurian Sextus and bid him take Second Wing and the hind four squadrons of First forward to hold the battle flank. The rest of First Wing – With Me!’
Trumpets yelped again. Aracos drove his heel into the bay’s flank and was away at the Captain’s side; the wind of their going took the thin scarlet silk and the body of the serpent pennant filled and rippled out, as he set his horse at the slope, the rest drumming at their heels. Smoke wafted into his eyes, sparks and wisps of burning heather were breaking free and drifting ahead of the main blaze, little red tongues licking up wherever they landed; the thin wall of fire, leaping high now in the morning breeze, rippled like the thin red serpent silk, bending over as though to greet and engulf them. Aracos felt the bay brace and gather himself under him, then hold straight on, not swerving from the flames ahead. Let the Tungrians laugh in future at the Dacians’ tricks!
At the last instant the Captain gave a great shout, then with his cloak flung across nose and mouth, plunged straight into the wall of flame. Aracos galloped at his side, face driven down into the wolfskin. Hideous, blasting heat lapped him round, not a wall of flame, but a whole world of flame. He choked into the wolfskin as pain tore at his eyes and throat and lungs – then they were through. There was a stink of singeing horsehide, sparks hung in the rough wolfskin and in the horse’s mane, a fringe of flame lengthened the tail of the scarlet serpent. Ahead, the blackened and smoking hillside rose to the spur where the Painted Men still laboured savagely about the great tottering boulder. But away to the right, something moved under cover of the smitch, and next instant a flurry of javelins and sling-stones took the Dacians on the flank. Men and horses went down. Still riding hard for the spur, Aracos was aware of the Captain swaying beside him, clutching at the shaft of a javelin that stuck out from under his collar-bone – choking to him a last order to take them on and clear the spur, before he pitched down among the horses’ hooves.
So he took them on, through a vicious squall of slingstones. Where the ground grew too steep to ride they dropped from the horses and ran on, crouching with heads down behind their light bronze-rimmed bucklers. By the time they reached the spur, hearts and lungs bursting within them, he had no idea how many or how few were still behind him; he had had no chance to look round. He did not even know that many of the horses, lightened of their riders’ weight, had come scrambling after them, bringing their own weapons, the stallions’ weapons of teeth and trampling hooves, into the fight. He only knew that the time came when there were no more Painted Men left alive on the
spur, and that the terrible boulder, swaying as it seemed to every breath, was still there.
They jammed loose stones under it, and added a few war-painted bodies for good measure, but to Aracos it was all hazy, and the only thing that seemed quite real was the pain in his chest that spread all down his shield-arm and made a buzzing darkness before his eyes. He fought the darkness off. If he collapsed now they would pull off the wolfskin to find where he was wounded, and see his face. But he never afterwards had the least idea how they got back to the main force, nor how the rest of that day went, save that somehow, incredibly, it ended in a Roman victory, dragged out of what had nearly been the most hideous defeat.
When things began to seem real again, he was back in camp, and tending Felix’s bay, who had a spear gash in his flank and looked, like his neighbours in the picket lines, to have been ridden hard all day. There was a vague half-memory in him of having been hunting – not deer or wild ox, but painted men among the heather; and a rather clearer one of setting a wisp of scorched scarlet silk on a lance shaft back in the row of Colours before the Legate’s tent.
In the dusk and the ordered confusion, it was not hard to slip away unnoticed, but it could not be long before the cry went up for the pennant-bearer of the Dacian Horse. With the wolfskin stripped off and rolled into an unbetraying bundle under one arm, he made for the baggage park, and slipped in among the carts nearest to the stockade. The pain in his chest came and went, like a beast flexing its muscles to spring. He leaned against a wheel, and whistled softly, as well as he could for lack of breath, the first bars of ‘The Girl I Kissed at Clusium’.
There was no answering whistle, but as he listened, something stirred in the next cart. He went to it quickly, and pulling himself up, peered under the tilt.