‘They can’t on the river side,’ Alexios said. ‘The scarp is too steep; nor right down to the estuary shore. Both those ways might be possible.’
He picked up the first of the muster rolls, crumpling it into a ball for easier burning, and dropped it into the brazier. ‘Right. Pass the word round. We had better get the Senior Optios in here and work out plans in detail in, say, an hour from now, if we haven’t got another attack on our hands at that time.’
He added another crumpled papyrus to the brazier as they went out. Too slow. He’d have to do as he had had to do at Abusina, put them on the floor and fire the lot.
He was just heaving the table aside to leave a clear space when Centenarius Lucius appeared once more in the doorway. ‘Sir, will you add this to the pyre.’
And Alexios saw that he was holding out the familiar scroll that seemed almost a part of himself; his beloved Georgics. ‘Going to have to travel light on this trip,’ he said simply. ‘I don’t really need it, anyway, you’re always telling me I know it off by heart.’
Their eyes met as Alexios reached out and took it from him; and without a word he turned and strode away.
Alexios stood for a moment looking at the treasure in his hands, then let it unroll, tore off the wooden scroll-ends and added it to the pile on the floor. Then he took a flaming stick from the brazier.
He had just finished, and the Sacellum was full of the acrid smell of burned papyrus, a stinging fog that wafted across the snarling mask of the Ordo dragon against the back wall, when the Alert sounded once more.
The first notes of an Alert, that broke off short, leaving the last three notes unsounded . . .
In the brief respite that followed the next attack, the Commander and his centenarii and the four senior optios were gathered in the Sacellum; seven wolf shapes squatting on their haunches. They had brushed aside the flakes of burned papyrus, and on the cleared patch of floor in their midst, Alexios was drawing with a charred stick.
‘We take the whole force out by the Dextra gate and down to the ford.’ Six pairs of eyes followed intently the tip of the stick moving over the map that he had drawn. ‘There, we detach ten men for a decoy party, under Optio Vedrix,’ he glanced at a small foxy-looking man who nodded in reply. ‘You will make downstream and work round under the coastwise bluffs. It will be low water in the estuary, when? Sometime about the start of the Second Watch? Take the ponies round through the shallows until you judge it safe to come ashore, follow the coast towards the old naval station; then strike inland round the back of the Fortress Rock, and head south, leaving a good trail behind you, down as though to join the Trimontium road. That way you’ll be out of the Clan hunting runs and into the Votadini Royal Territory.’
The Optio nodded again. ‘Just what Cunorix would expect us to do – the whole lot of us, I mean, this being largely a Clan matter.’
‘Yes, well, make it look as much as you can as though you are the whole lot of us. Then get lost, about – here, and head south-west to meet up with the main force somewhere – hereabouts.’
‘And the main force, meanwhile?’ Hilarion asked.
Alexios’s charred stick returned to the place where he had marked Castellum. ‘The main force crosses by the ford, straight into the heart of the Clan’s hunting runs, and heads south along the river gorge.’
Hilarion whistled softly and musically. ‘Which they won’t be expecting!’
‘We can but pray to all the gods the Ordo prays to, that they won’t,’ Alexios said grimly, the point of his stick moving on.
‘Sir,’ Lucius put in, ‘in four miles, going that way, we’ll have the Long Moss straight across our line of march.’
Alexios sat back and looked round at them. This was the dangerous bit, he knew, the bit that depended not so much on the lay of the land but on his men’s hearts, things about them that he simply did not know. ‘I had not forgotten. And in the heart of the Long Moss there stands the Death Place of the Chiefs of the Votadini. There is a way through from this side to the Place – you and I travelled most of it together, Optio Garwin, when we followed the old Chief and brought back the new one, last summer. And there must be ways from the far side as well. Have we anyone in the Ordo who knows them?’
A third man, who was of the Clan himself, looked up from the marks on the floor. ‘I do, Sir. Two or three of the men as well – I’ve taken a horse through that way from time to time, before I turned law-abiding and became a soldier of Rome. But my mother had the blood of the Little Dark People in her, the Old People of the Forest; she had the ancient knowledge, and set upon me the marks for protection.’
‘And lacking these marks for protection?’ Alexios said. ‘Will the troops take that way?’
Silence. And again the sleet-spatter sounded very loud on the window.
Then Optio Garwin suggested, ‘How if we keep to the east bank of the river, and pick up the causeway road to Trimontium?’
‘That is a possible way,’ Alexios said, ‘and we will take it if need be, but the tribesmen will be the sooner on our tails, because that way will be closer to what they expect.’
‘I have often heard it said,’ Hilarion murmured silkily, apparently talking to himself, ‘that the Frontier Wolves are a godless pack. If a man has no gods, what is there to be afraid of?’
The fourth optio, an older man, who had not spoken before, said, ‘Sir, let us keep both roads in mind for a while. It is in my heart that the men will take your way, but it would be an ill thing to bring them to the point, and find that they will not. Let you leave it to us for a while, and take the plan on from here,’ he leaned forward and touched a point on the rough map, ‘where I think, in any case, both roads become one.’
‘So be it, Optio Brychanus,’ Alexios said. ‘I leave it to you; but make haste with the finding-out . . . From here, then, it is simple, we go thus – and thus, to meet with the decoy force somewhere here, west of Trimontium, from where it is only two days’ march to Bremenium – unless of course they come too close on our heels . . .’
Presently, from the vernacular in which they had been speaking most of the time, he snapped back into the Latin tongue. ‘We have still two hours’ daylight to get through. Get the horses fed and watered as soon as maybe, the men at dusk. The rest I have told you. Do not take too long about that matter of the two roads.’
When dusk came, the fort was still in Roman hands; but the defenders had taken heavy losses, dead and wounded, since dawn, and their fighting strength was down to less than two-thirds.
With the darkness, the sleety squalls of the day had settled into a foul night of winter rain driven before a howling north-east wind, and under its cover the last preparations for pulling out were going forward. They had collected their dead into one of the store-sheds and covered them with all that they had time to move of the grain and stores that they would not be taking with them, and pulled the roof down over all. Alexios would have liked to fire the building; he would have liked to fire the whole fort, but to do that, besides giving early warning of their retreat, would look as though they were not coming back one day; and the tribesmen would know that and gain heart, while his own men, knowing also, would lose it. They had fouled or destroyed in one way or another, almost everything about the place that could be of use to the tribes, and that must serve.
Food had been given out at dusk, and three days’ iron rations for himself and his mount issued to each man. The ponies had been fed and watered, their hooves muffled with strips of bedrugs that they might make no sound on the track down to the ford; muzzle straps attached to their headgear lest a stray whinny at the scent of the tribesmen’s horses should betray them. Weapons had been checked, quivers filled and spare bowstrings issued . . .
Now all was ready; and under the booming wind it was as though the fort drew a long waiting breath. And the men keeping the last moment’s watch on the ramparts stared out towards the wind-torn enemy watch-fires that ringed them on three sides, and saw no sign of movement
anywhere.
Soon it would be low tide in the estuary.
In the Sacellum the smell of burned papyrus and melted wax still lingered. The lamp burned on the now empty table, and in its guttering light the floor still showed traces of the rough map; and Alexios paused for a moment in what he was doing and rubbed them out with his foot.
(‘It is as the centenarius said,’ Optio Brychanus had reported ‘the Frontier Wolves are a godless lot. They will take the trail that leads by the Chieftains’ Death Stones, though they say that there will surely be a payment demanded.’ ‘Payment?’ Alexios had said. ‘A life.’ The optio had been quite matter-of-fact about it ‘They say the Guardians of the Place will demand the life of one in payment for the rest to pass by. But it will cost more lives than one to get back to Headquarters, anyway; and they say the Commander’s way gives them the best chance.’)
Alexios gave a final rub to the smeared and blackened patch of floor, and returned to the work of his hands.
He had taken down the Ordo dragon and laid it on the table, and was hammering the snarling fantastic head flat, with the heavy iron-shod butt of his own spear-shaft. That should have been for the standard-bearer to do. But the standard-bearer was dead, and so it was for the Commander to get the unit’s standard back to Headquarters. He gave the thing a final blow, and flung the spear-shaft aside. The fierce head that used to rear up in beauty, drinking the wind when the troops went by at the gallop, was a grotesquely flattened mask of bronze and silver wires, as he looked down at it. But it was the Ordo dragon still. He took it up and began to bind the bright wind-sleeve like a silken scarf about his waist, starting at the tail-tip and tucking the flattened head into its own folds last of all.
He cast one last look round the narrow chamber, stripped and bare, and leaving the lamp burning, went out through the cross-hall into the winter darkness.
On the Dancing Ground and in the alleyway that led to the Dextra gate, the Ordo was ready and waiting, each man beside his mount. And Alexios saw the dark shapeless outlines of the laden baggage-ponies, and those with wounded men slumped across their backs. Centenarius Hilarion appeared out of the night. ‘Sir, the scouts have reported back all clear – also they have met up with our missing patrol – left them a couple of miles upriver.’
‘One thing less to worry about then.’ Alexios drew a small quick breath of relief. He had done quite a lot of worrying about his missing patrol in the past few hours. ‘Is all ready?’
‘All’s ready, Sir.’
‘Right. Then get to horse. Lead off, Centenarius.’
The Dextra gate, well greased in advance, opened without sound onto the windy darkness of the night beyond. And men and horses slipped forward like a long skein of ghosts, one after another through the gate and down the steep track to the ford, the men of the decoy party leading the way.
Alexios, riding with the Fore Guard on that first stretch, pulled Phoenix aside at the edge of the ford, beside the dark still shape of the Lady, muttered a quick ‘Good luck to you – for all our sakes’ to Optio Vedrix, and saw the ten shadows peel off from the rest and melt into the stormy darkness, down towards the bend of the river and the open estuary shore.
For what seemed a long time, he sat his fidgeting pony to watch the rest go by. Twenty men to the Fore Guard; then the Main Guard, upward of a hundred, riding two by two. The rag-tag company of the wounded and the baggage-ponies. The Rear Guard of twenty-five. The Third Ordo, Frontier Wolves, pulling out in good order. He wondered what kind of order they would be in when they reached Headquarters. How many of them would reach Headquarters at all. Well, if anyone could make it, the Frontier Wolves could.
One after another, the shadows passed, slowly gentling their ponies down into the water, pulling out to disappear in rainy darkness on the far side. At least the storm gods were giving them the cover they needed, seeming to spread dark wings over them, and the boom of the wind through the alder woods to cover any sound from the ford.
Alexios waited, every sense straining for some sound that might tell of trouble for the decoy party – but none came. Once a pony squealed as his feet went from under him in the swift running water, and his rider gathered him, cursing softly. But there was no rush of spearmen down the streamside.
And then clear from the fort behind them, scattered and half-lost on the wind, he heard the steady notes of the horn sounding for the Second Watch of the night. A few moments more, and Conan the senior trumpeter would come down from the Dextra gate, and the last living man would be out of Castellum. Alexios remembered with a sudden ache at the heart, the Alert that had broken off so sharply a few hours ago. Young Rufus with a Pictish arrow in his throat, lying among the rest of the dead under the pulled-down roof of the old store-shed; and with him the limp bundle of bloody fur that had been Typhon. They had done everything together from that first day behind the armourer’s shop, and they had not been parted in their dying.
There was a faint movement on the steep track, and Conan ranged up alongside. ‘That should be keeping them happy, at any rate until the Third Watch falls due,’ he said, quickly and quietly. They set their ponies to the ford.
Alexios, reaching aside by long custom to touch the Lady in passing, felt the stone rain-wet and heart-cold and curiously empty, and knew, though he instantly denied the knowledge in himself, that Rome would not come back.
12 The Rath of Skolawn
ONCE CLEAR OF the alder scrub that furred the slopes of the river gorge, Alexios heeled his pony forward and took his place at the head of the Main Guard as, with a couple of their best trackers out ahead, they swung south of the old Credigone road. And so, with the river on their left, they melted into the heart of the Clan hunting runs; into the broken country that lay between them and the Long Moss. Bremenium was four days away, maybe more, and the immediate thing was to get as far south as might be before daylight.
The wind was behind them now, on their left shoulders; thanks be to the Lord of the Legions, the flurrying sleet that had mingled all day with the bitter rain squalls had not yet turned to snow, though Alexios, huddling his chin down into the thick hairy folds of his wolfskin, was unpleasantly sure that that was coming in the next day or so.
Sometimes the night was dark as the inside of a wolf’s belly, sometimes when the skies hurrying overhead broke a little, a faint lessening of the darkness would show them the crouched shapes of thorn trees or even the outline of a hill shoulder against the low-scudding cloud mass. About midway between the fort and the start of the Long Moss, they picked up the missing patrol waiting for them at the ford of a shallow side burn coming down to join the river, added them to the Main Guard with no more than a few muttered words out of the stormy darkness, and pushed on. Presently there began to be the cold rooty smell of bog country ahead; and here and there the faint broken gleam of water.
A figure from the Fore Guard dropped back to Alexios’s side. ‘Here we are, Sir. Best call a halt for the moment.’
Alexios gave a long low-pitched whistle. His remaining trumpeter was beside him, but this was no time to be broadcasting one’s presence across the dark hills. Ahead of him, from Hilarion with the Fore Guard, and all down the long line of shadows behind, he heard the call echoed and passed on. It might have been a string of marsh birds whistling to each other. The column halted. All down the line the Frontier Wolves were swinging down from the saddle. A man leading his pony slipped by Alexios into the lead, a patch of lime daubed thickly white between the shoulders of his wolfskin.
Looking at it, Alexios thought, ‘Mithras! It doesn’t show up as well as I thought it would! What if we lose sight of it? What if the safe-way shifts with the weather? What if the ground gets softer with the winter?’
‘The trackers report the way firm and clear, Sir,’ said the man beside him.
‘Firm enough for a hundred and fifty men and horses?’
‘Firm enough for Hannibal’s elephants, if we take it well spread out.’
A short while la
ter, they were on the move again, the men walking beside their ponies to spread the load, the long files broken up into short irregular skeins each following one with a lime-daub between his shoulders. Try to take too long a string behind one leader on such a bog-trail, and unless you could leave markers at every turning point, in the nature of things each man would turn off a fraction before he came to the place where the man ahead of him had turned, and soon the men towards the rear would be turning off badly short and into real trouble.
Alexios, walking beside Phoenix, remembered the still summer night when he had come that way, following the old Chief to his Death Place, the Clansmen sniping this way and that along the firmer ground between the winding waterways and sky-reflecting pools. The flaming torches and the mourning throb of the drums, and the lingering late northern sunset casting its golden cloud-streamers across the sky. He supposed they were on the same track now. He must suppose it; must trust to the men with the lime-daubs between their shoulders. ‘When they join the Family, they bring their loyalties with them,’ Gavros had said, but he felt how it might be with him, new loyalties pulling against old, if he knew the secret and sacred ways and was being asked to betray them to men of other tribes who did not.
Presently, below the boom of the wind he caught somewhere far over to the left, the hoarse familiar winter song, so unlike its summer crooning, of the river that ran out by Castellum to the estuary; and a while later they came to the long ridge of land, its thorns and alders bare and writhing in the wind, where they had checked to see the old Chief go away from them, and waited all through the short summer night, for the young Chief to return.
Ahead, mealy-pale where the wind ruffled it as another squall came scudding by, stretched the shallow water, blurring away to a further shore that was only a formless darkness half blotted out by the driving rain.
This time there was no pause. Ahead of him Alexios saw the men and horses of the Fore Guard move steadily down into the water. ‘Easy now,’ he said to Phoenix. ‘Easy now, it is no more than a ford . . . that’s my old hero.’ The icy water was swirling to his knees, to mid thigh. Looking back, he saw the long skein of dark figures following. Looking forward, he saw the man immediately ahead, with the lime-daub showing faintly between the shoulders of his wolfskin. The wind blew Phoenix’s wet mane across his face. In a little they changed course, and then changed course again. The water boiled into icy turmoil around the legs of men and horses. The cold seemed eating from his legs up into his very heart. He wondered how it was with the wounded, straggling far behind among the baggage train. He was piercingly aware of the terror of the hungry bog on either side.