‘Leave him to our brothers the ravens,’ said the Optio.
Men were swinging back into the saddle. Someone took the dirk from the dead tribesman’s hand and cleaned it by stabbing it into the turf before adding it, with Connla’s, to his own belt.
Bericus came back up the streamside with a sullen, sick look to his mouth and the bay stallion’s gear and saddle over his shoulder.
They closed round the captive. Connla had begun to struggle in his bonds, shouting ‘Let me go! Let me go! My brother will make you weep blood that ever you laid hands on me –’
Someone struck him on the mouth and wrenched the pony’s head round. The first cold winter rain was sweeping in from the estuary as they headed back towards Castellum.
Among the stones of the ruined signal post, the grass of nearly a year had grown in over the small black scar of a cooking-fire, and no trace now remained of the day that Alexios and Cunorix had made it, and the shared day’s hunting that had been a good day and shot through with laughter.
10 Fire Along the Frontier
THE FRONTIER PEACE had been broken. Two soldiers had been killed and so had the Praepositus’s favourite horse.
Now in the Sacellum of the fort, the Praepositus and Ducenarius Aquila faced each other. The lamp had been lit on the table, for outside the wet and windy daylight was fading fast, and in the upward light the snarling silver dragon-mask of the Ordo standard seemed to hover forward on its spearshaft, its shadow, and the shadows of the two men flung far up the rough plastered walls behind them.
Only a few moments before, Connla also had stood there under guard, listening to his sentence decreed by the Tribune. He had stood there with that wicked laughter of his like summer lightning all about him. Only once he had licked his dry lower lip, as though maybe the thing was not so funny, after all. That had been so short a time ago that it seemed to Alexios that he could still hear the footsteps of guard and captive in the colonnade outside.
‘In the Name of Light, Sir!’ Alexios was saying, ‘Horse-raiding – horse stealing – they’re a rough sport, a – a game of skill, to the tribesmen.’
‘I do not need that you should explain the tribesmen of North Britain to me,’ said the Praepositus.
‘With respect, Sir, I think you do.’ (With respect, with respect . . .) ‘The whole thing was more than half in jest – only the jest went wrong.’
‘It went wrong indeed. Therefore I intend to make an example of the jester, that no one may make the same kind of jest again.’ Montanus raised his voice as Alexios tried to cut in. ‘These people forget who is master all too quickly. They need to be taught the lesson afresh from time to time.’
‘I doubt you’ll teach it them by putting the Chief’s brother up as a live target for javelin practice!’
‘It is a usual enough form of execution – and quicker than the old style crucifixion used to be, if your heart is so tender toward these people – I presume your men are trained to cast a javelin at a target?’
‘When they can see it,’ Alexios said desperately. ‘But the light is almost gone.’
‘Have torches brought out onto the place you call the Dancing Ground. That will give them light enough.’
‘Not in this wind, and with the rain driving. At least, Sir, wait till morning.’
Montanus leaned forward across the table. His face was a narrow-eyed reddish mask in the lamplight, and his shadow ran up to engulf half the Sacellum behind him. ‘And give your friends the chance to rescue him?’
Alexios was silent. He was thinking more that it might give the Praepositus’s temper time to cool; but that was a slim chance, and he knew it. It was a cool anger already, which was what made it so deadly. It was beyond mercy or reason.
‘No, Sir, I ask only to wait for better light, that the work may be done cleanly and quickly; my men are not butchers.’
‘No? I did not know that the Frontier Wolves had a great reputation for squeamishness. Will you give the necessary orders now, Ducenarius Aquila?’ A pause. ‘Or would you prefer me to take over the command and see to the matter myself?’
Again Alexios was silent, and into the silence came the sharp spatter of sleet against the window, and somewhere far off the cry of a wolf on the hunting trail. That could be his way out. He could refuse. Hand over his command. That would mean the end of whatever career was still left to him; the execution would still go on, but he would keep his hands clean of it. Only suddenly he knew that keeping his hands clean wasn’t the important thing. The important thing was that he should do what he could – the only thing he could – for Connla.
‘Well?’ said the Praepositus.
‘I will give the necessary orders, Sir,’ Alexios said stiffly. ‘I request that it shall be set down in the day-book that before doing so, I made an official protest against this execution, which I am prepared to stand by, before any future Court of Inquiry.’
‘Your request is noted,’ said the Praepositus.
Alexios spoke to the sentry at the door, and a few moments later, Centenarius Hilarion stood in the doorway. In a dead-level voice Alexios gave him the necessary orders to assemble the men for javelin practice; to have the Dancing Ground as well lit as possible by torches; to have the captive brought out.
‘Sir,’ said Hilarion, his voice as dead-level as Alexios’s own, and saluted and went out.
‘I am going to my quarters,’ Glaucus Montanus said when he was gone. ‘Send me word when all is ready.’
Alexios remained alone in the Sacellum, staring down at the table before him. He felt sick. His mouth was dry and the palms of his hands wet, and his heart had taken on a slow, heavy, drubbing beat that seemed to shake his whole body. He tried not to think. He knew what he had to do, and beyond that, thinking would not help either himself or Connla. He tried to make his mind a blank; but things from the outside world kept breaking through into the blankness of it. The squally spatter of sleet on the window, somewhere far off the howl of the wolf, answered by another, near at hand the bark of orders and the quick confused tramp of booted feet coming up from the barrack rows; a flicker of torchlight going past the window.
The Duty Optio appeared in the doorway. ‘All’s ready, Sir.’
Alexios carefully unclenched his hands and straightened his shoulders. ‘Right. I’m coming, Optio. Tell the Praepositus.’ He went out from the lamplit Sacellum and through the cross-hall into the squally murk of the winter’s dusk, and headed for the red flare of torches in the open space behind the granaries. Suddenly he felt quite calm, his heartbeat had returned to normal and he was no longer sweaty-palmed. Only nothing seemed quite real.
Along the near side of the Dancing Ground the men were gathered with their javelins. On the far side stood Connla, bound to the post that normally held up the straw-filled roughly man-shaped target for javelin practice. He had fought like a wild thing for his freedom when he was taken, but now he stood completely still, his head up, his bright hair blazing in the torchlight, like another torch, seemingly withdrawn from all that was about him as though none of it concerned him any more.
Alexios was aware of the Praepositus coming up beside him; Centenarius Hilarion reporting that all was ready, saying in a quick undertone, ‘You should have got drunk first – shall I take over, Sir?’
Alexios shook his head, ‘Thank you, Centenarius, no.’ He started walking forward across the Dancing Ground, saying something for anyone who happened to be listening, about making sure that the prisoner’s bonds were secure.
The light of the torches jumped and streamed in the wind so that sometimes the bound figure almost disappeared, sometimes sprang out into fierce relief against the tiger-striped shadows behind. The emptiness of the Dancing Ground stretched for miles like some spreading plain in a nightmare, and it seemed to take a very long time to cross it, with so many eyes on him; the eyes of his men standing with their javelins, the eyes of the Praepositus that he could feel behind him, Connla’s eyes watching him come . . .
&nb
sp; He was in front of Connla now. He had stopped walking.
‘Have you come to save me from this target practice?’ Connla asked, with a last flash of the old wicked laughter somewhere behind his face.
‘There’s only one way I can do that,’ Alexios said.
‘Fool! Do you think I do not know? Two inches in the right place is enough, they teach you, don’t they? Make it three, to be on the safe side.’
‘Are you ready?’ Alexios said.
Their eyes held each other’s. They had never been friends in the way that Alexios and Cunorix had been friends, but in that moment they were nearer to each other than they had ever been before.
‘I am ready,’ Connla said.
Alexios’s hand had already gone to his military dagger. His eyes held Connla’s, willing him not to look down, not to see the flash of the blade in the torch-flare.
The thing was done and over almost before he knew it.
Connla gave a small wet cough and sagged in his bonds. His eyes remained for one instant fixed on Alexios’s face, but they were empty, only for an instant a kind of surprise showed through, then nothing. His fiery head fell forward.
Alexios pulled out the dagger. The feeling of being in a dream had left him and he felt stripped and naked and sharply aware. He heard a sharp intake of breath here and there among his watching men, and turned and strode back to where the Praepositus stood looking on with a frown deep bitten between his brows, from the entrance of the old waggon shelter, and stopped in front of him and saluted.
‘You can have what’s left for your javelin practice,’ he said between shut teeth. And then, returning to the formal. ‘And now, Sir, I request that I resign my command here.’
‘Your request will be dealt with in due time and at the proper level,’ Praepositus Montanus said. ‘Meanwhile, as a temporary measure, Ducenarius Aquila, you will retire to your quarters and remain in detention there until further notice.’
The voice was not much raised, but pitched to reach the nearer men on the torchlit Dancing Ground; and Alexios heard the sudden faint stir among them, and felt behind him the solid wall of hostility building up on his behalf. It was his duty to obey quickly, before it could gather more strength. But something was happening down at the Praetorian gate. Someone coming? A messenger?
‘Optio, go and find the meaning of that,’ Montanus said.
The men around the Dancing Ground shuffled their feet; heads turned; the little group in the entrance to the old waggon shelter seemed caught into waiting stillness like a bee caught in amber.
The optio was back so quickly that it was clear he must have met the cause of the stir halfway. Behind him came two Frontier Wolves supporting between them a ragged and bloodstained ghost; and as they came into the leaping torchlight, Alexios recognized the third figure for one of the Arcani.
The man staggered clear of their support, and stood swaying on his feet. His face was already a dead man’s face, and new blood oozed out from below his ribs to make a shining track over the old clotted blood which fouled what was left of the rough herdsman’s jerkin he wore.
‘The Caledoni –’ he croaked. ‘Heading down for the Old Wall – way over beyond – Credigone – there’s – word of a landing of the Attacotti – a joining of spears –’
‘Where? How many?’ the Praepositus demanded.
But the man had staggered against the waggon-shed wall and was already sliding down it, leaving a thick red smear on the stones behind him.
‘How many, man?’ the Praepositus shouted.
Druim the spy-master had thrust through to the fore, and was kneeling beside his man. He looked up straight at the Praepositus with that level open stare of his quite unchanged. ‘No good, Sir, he’s dead.’
‘And no need to ask what happened,’ Alexios said beside him also. ‘How he got back to us only Mithras knows!’
The Praepositus’s eyes came round to him. ‘Still here, Ducenarius?’
Alexios straightened up and saluted, then turned and went quickly back past the Principia and across the courtyard of the officers’ quarters to the down-at-heel room he had taken over five days ago when he turned out of his own quarters for the new Praepositus.
Behind him he heard Montanus’s voice, and then Hilarion’s raised in a quick crackle of orders, and the sound of feet as the men on the Dancing Ground broke ranks and scattered to carry them out. He shut the door behind him and stood leaning against it.
He felt coldly sick and his hands were shaking. When he looked down at them the light of the small lamp in its wall niche which always burned night-long in the Commander’s quarters, showed him his dagger that he was still holding, juicy with Connla’s blood. He pulled off his neck-cloth, and sitting down on the edge of the narrow sleeping-cot, began to clean it. It seemed the obvious thing to do.
Presently the door opened and someone came in bearing a platter of bannock and meat, and a cup of wine. ‘Supper, Sir,’ he said, and set them down on the clothes’ chest, then went out.
Alexios went on rubbing and rubbing at his dagger blade that was long since clean.
The lamp flickered and leapt up when the sleety wind gusted against the broken window-glass. From outside he could hear feet, voices, the ordered sounds of the fort clearing for action. Footsteps came along the colonnade, and someone spoke to the sentry on the door. It opened and Hilarion came in.
Alexios laid down the dagger on the cot beside him. ‘Should you be here?’
‘No orders against communicating with the prisoner,’ Hilarion said, and sat down on the clothes’ chest beside the untouched food.
For a moment there was silence between them, and then Alexios said in sudden desperation, ‘Hilarion, did I miss something? Was there anything else that I could have done?’
‘Done?’
‘About Connla.’
‘Nothing except call a mutiny.’ Hilarion gave him back look for look, with a face more sober than Alexios had ever seen it before. ‘And even if you felt like getting yourself beheaded and one in ten of the rest of us stoned to death, it’s scarcely the moment for that now.’
‘Not if the word that poor devil brought in was true.’
‘Oh, it’s true all right. A pity he died before he could give us a few more details, but there’s no doubt of its truth. Things have been happening while you’ve been in here. The Arcani have deserted – just faded out like the shadows that they are. It must have been a nasty shock for Druim when his man got back.’
Alexios stared at him, while the implication of his words sank in. ‘One of them was loyal,’ he said after a moment. And then, ‘Well, that puts it beyond doubt; we’re in for the worst kind of trouble. Hilarion – what has been happening since Montanus took over – what’s the state of things in the fort?’
‘Don’t worry as to that,’ Hilarion told him. ‘Montanus is a soldier, whatever else he isn’t. All things that should have been done have been done. He has sent off a couple of gallopers to report to Bremenium and pass it on to Habitancum and the Wall. And he’s doubled the guard and posted look-out men up in the old signal tower; not that there’ll be anything to see in the dark and this foul weather – except maybe the Cran-tara playing at spirit-lights across the moors.’
The Cran-tara, the hazel branch dipped in goat’s blood at one end and the other turned into a blazing torch, carried through the tribal lands to call the warriors to a war-hosting! And now it would not be a hosting against the Caledoni and the Attacotti, Alexios thought. Not a chance of the old bond holding between the Votadini – Cunorix’s Clan of the Votadini anyway – and the Frontier Wolves – not after Connla’s death; and the Arcani would have made sure that word of that was well and truly out by this time.
No need to say any of that to Hilarion, who knew it all as well as he did himself. Instead, he said, ‘We still have one patrol out.’
‘And there’s nothing we can do about them. But they’ll get the warning of trouble as quickly as anybody else – and they?
??re the Frontier Wolves, not a bunch of raw sucklings to run blindly into a trap.’
Outside the horn sounded for the Third Watch of the night, and Hilarion lounged to his feet. With the guard doubled, he would be on duty again.
When the door closed behind the Senior Centenarius, Alexios pulled his wolfskin cloak more closely round him. It was very cold in the old quarters with the wind wailing in through the broken window-pane. But he had no thought of getting under the striped native rugs on the cot. Part of him was aware of the cold, and the footsteps of the sentry pacing to and fro in the colonnade outside, and beyond that, the tense waiting quiet of the fort standing by under arms. Part of him was back at Abusina nearly a year and a half ago . . . Scarcely thinking what he did, he took up his dagger and slid it back into its sheath, and getting up, began to walk to and fro. Four paces one way, four paces back again. The walk of a man in prison, or a wolf in a cage. He had walked like that in his sleeping cell in Regina, waiting for the Inquiry. The lamp was getting low in oil; the flame jumping, long and ragged, making batwing shadows; finally going out. The darkness rushed in on him, and still he walked in the dark; four paces one way, four paces the other, sometimes checking and flinging himself down on his cot, but always springing up again and returning to his caged pacing, listening for any sound from the outside world. It was not likely that the attack would come before first light. The Votadini never fought in the dark if it could be avoided, lest with no sun to guide them, the dead should not be able to find their way to the Western Land; but it would come; sooner or later it would come, and here he was, pent up, while outside his men stood ready for it, another man commanding them.
Four paces from the door to the window, four paces from the window to the door.
The night crawled by, and the Third Watch became the Fourth, and the Fourth ended with Cock-crow sounding its jaunty burst of notes from the rampart; and presently, the darkness in the room began to grow thinner as though a little grey water was seeping into it.