He glanced at Lucius standing beside him, and set his hand for an instant on the quiet man’s shoulder. ‘Right, we’ll not waste time. When you hear the horn, run like redshanks. We’ll give you what cover we can from the far bank, and have men standing roped-up and ready in case anyone goes in the water.’
Lucius smiled round at him, his eyes quiet as they always were, in his filthy and exhausted face. Somewhere in the white murk, they heard the low eerie whistling call of the Painted People.
Alexios swung Phoenix round and clattered across the bridge.
On the far side, men had already fetched axes and crowbars from the pack ponies who carried them, while others were fixing picket ropes across the breast-straps of the freshest and toughest beasts to serve as hauling lines. ‘Quick!’ Alexios called. ‘Not much time!’
But almost before he had turned Phoenix back to face the river, they were hard at their desperate labour, for they too had heard the wood-wind call of the Painted People. The wind-hush, snow-hush above the hoarse voice of the river was lost in the shouting of orders and the ring of axes on heavy timbers. Men were swarming all over the bridge; axes blinked in the dawn light as they rose and fell, while below, thigh deep, waist deep in the dark swirl of the icy water, half-clinging to snowladen alder branches as they worked, men fought to secure the hauling-lines onto the timber bridge supports on the downstream side.
The whistling call of the Painted People sounded again, very close now, and suddenly it was joined by the hunting call of the Votadini. Across the river there was a stirring in the white murk, faint shadows growing stronger as they came at the run. A flight of arrows leapt out from the cover of the ruined walls, and a high yell echoing out of the snow-swirl was cut off short. The ring of axes took on a redoubled urgency. Across the bridge, the bank was suddenly alive with battling figures half-lost in the mealy cloud; and in the same instant Alexios heard Hilarion’s shouted order, and a splintering crash and splash as one of the bridge timbers went down in a fountain of freezing spray. The bridge shuddered like a live thing in agony. It was beginning to go.
With his gaze on the small valiant band that had risen from the ruins to fling themselves between the swarming war-painted hunters and the bridge head, Alexios said to his trumpeter beside him, ‘Sound the Break off and Recall.’
And for the first time since they marched out from Castellum, the bright harsh notes of the hunting-horn gave tongue, ‘Break off! Fall back! Ta-ran, Ta-ta-ran-ta-ran . . .’
The wolf-cloaked men were coming, falling back onto the end of the tottering bridge. Alexios saw two of them go down to the Votadini throw-spears, the remaining nine reached the bridge and began the crossing. But the enemy were close behind – too close. The ponies were straining at the ropes, urged on by the yells of their drivers and the slash of reins across their necks and haunches. The bridge staggered like a drunk man, timbers falling, but the main structure righted itself and still stood. Six of the Rear Guard had reached their own side; but still on the far end of the bridge, the three last had whirled about, and stood, swords up, shields up, facing the swarm of tribesmen. And Alexios saw that the man in the centre was Lucius.
Their own archers stood loosing across the river into the thick of the tribal rush. He saw the three men give back one step on the tottering log-work, two steps, three, their chins driven down behind their shields, their blades slashing deep. A tribesman of the Votadini flung wide his arms and plunged down into the racing water; a half-naked warrior of the Painted People followed him, but the rush behind them thrust on.
‘Pull!’ Alexios yelled. ‘Pull! Fiends and Furies! Pull!’
Ponies and drivers strained again, and again, then came forward up the bank at a plunging scramble. The whole bridge had gone lax and limber; there was a whining and cracking of timbers, and with a rending crash the whole thing keeled over, and its centre and near end swept down-river in a tossing welter of beams and planking.
Alexios saw the three men – no, there were only two now – spring back and to the left making for the water above the fallen debris. He saw the howling struggle as the tribesmen on the stump of the bridge tried to check and were driven on by the rush behind them, to plunge down among the wreckage. One of the ponies had been swept away before they could cut the hauling line that held him to his baulk of timber, the rest, hacked free, were plunging up through the alder scrub; while the men, who had been standing roped up and ready waistdeep, in the whirling spate, were making for the place in midstream where the Frontier Wolves had gone down. In the yeasty turmoil, Alexios could make out little of what was happening out there. He was down the bank with half-a-dozen of his men, braced against the icy drag of the river, taking the strain of one of the swimmer’s ropes. There were two men now on the end of it. Hand over hand, they began hauling in.
‘All right,’ someone said, ‘I’ve got him.’ Arms reached out to take the sodden man-shaped bundle from the swimmer; and Alexios, one foot on the bank, reached forward in his turn to get hold of the limp body and heave it further up the bank to the man above him, saw with a jab of shock that it was Lucius.
Lucius with a great red spear-hole gaping juicily below his collarbone. He must have taken the thrust in over his guard in the very moment that the bridge went.
A few yards further downstream, they were hauling ashore the second man. The third had gone downstream with the dead of the Votadini and the Painted People and the tumble of lesser bridge timbers.
On the level ground at the top of the bank, Alexios was squatting beside his Junior Centenarius, holding him propped against his knee to ease his breathing. Blood was pumping from the hole under his collarbone in little jets; the bright blood that carries a man’s life with it. He pressed a handful of his own cloak over it, but he knew that it was no good; not with blood that colour. Lucius opened clouded eyes, and looked up into his face. ‘Has – the bridge gone?’
‘The bridge has gone,’ Alexios told him. ‘We’ll be in Bremenium by noon.’
‘Just – let me get – my wind back – think I – must have swallowed – half the river –’
‘No hurry,’ Alexios said, his throat aching.
Lucius was silent a few moments. He looked faintly puzzled more than anything else. ‘Tired,’ he said at last. ‘Stupid – feel so – tired.’
‘You’ve had a hard morning’s work. Go to sleep now.’
And like a tired child, he turned his head on Alexios’s knee and settled his cheek. He gave a small dry cough, and that was all.
It was like Lucius, his Commanding Officer thought, to die so quietly and neatly. He remained a moment longer, looking down at him. Suddenly he wondered if Lucius had known, when he brought his beloved Georgics to be burned with the Castellum papers. Then he laid the wet body down, and got to his feet.
Nearby, the second man was vomiting up half the river, but seemed to have taken no other harm.
Beyond the river, the tribesmen had melted away into the snow-fog. Alexios knew they would be making upriver towards the ford. It would take them a good while to reach it, but still there was no time to stand while the grass grew under one’s feet.
‘Get the Centenarius across his own horse,’ he said to the nearest wolf-cloaked figure. Then lifted his voice in a sharp general order, ‘Back to the ponies.’
And the bridge-breaking party, together with what was left of the Rear Guard, headed at a run for the place a little back from the river where their mounts waited, the few men who had been sent back with them already swinging into the saddle.
They were too spent for the steed-leap, and scrambled anyhow into their saddles. The two carrying Lucius’s body slung him across the back of his own horse who snorted in fear and tried to put his head round to snuff at his master grown suddenly strange, until another man grabbed his bridle. And they broke forward.
The land rose gently from the river left behind them, and somewhere ahead, just over the next ridge, the Fore Guard and Main Guard and the baggage train with
its weary wounded, would be plodding along, strung out, following the half-lost road under the snow.
‘Now for Bremenium! Ride!’ Alexios shouted, and settled down into his saddle.
14 Midwinter Night
THEY REACHED BREMENIUM ahead of the hunt, and with a couple of hours of leaden daylight left. The snow had eased off from the whirling white fog that it had been earlier, and the world had opened out again, so that they could see the great fortress while they were as yet some way off.
So that they could see what was left of it.
The walls stood up blank and dead, no sentries’ heads moved along the rampart walk; only the heads of the great catapults stood up from their emplacements like giant grass-hoppers; and smoke that was not hearth or camp smoke rose from the midst of the place, and already the ravens had gathered and were sweeping to and fro on black wings above what was within.
Somehow that was the one thing Alexios had not thought of; that they would win through to Bremenium, and Bremenium as a living fortress would not be there. It seemed impossible that the great stronghold could have fallen; not Bremenium with its massive walls and powerful catapults, its full garrison of Cavalry and Artillery as well as Frontier Wolves.
Lying up in the shelter of a patch of thin woodland, waiting for the return of the scouts he had sent in for a closer look, Alexios could still not quite believe it, despite the cold black pit that seemed to have opened in his belly.
Maybe this was why the Votadini had not tried to destroy the bridge ahead of them. Then why the fight at the bridge itself? Maybe Cunorix, having joined spears with the Caledoni, was suffering from a divided command? He would never know, and it did not much matter now, anyway. But it wasn’t possible that Bremenium had fallen. There was something crazily wrong somewhere.
The scouts got back; and their report made it clear that there was no mistake. But there was indeed something crazily wrong, some kind of horrible mystery. Both Sinister and Dextra gates were wide open, the scouts reported, and casting round the eastern side, they had found the tracks of many ponies. Driven ponies, not ridden, for the most part. There were a few Pictish dead outside the walls, but nothing like the number to be expected. But inside the gateways it was another matter. There had been hard fighting within the gates; many bodies of Picts and men of the White Shields, but for the most part Roman.
‘The gates,’ Alexios said, frowning, ‘had they been fired? Battered in?’
‘No Sir,’ said the leading scout, ‘just standing open.’
‘Some kind of trap, with us for the quarry?’
The man shook his head. ‘Just a massacre.’
And the second scout said shakily, ‘The place reeks of death and emptiness.’
‘It seems we are fated to camp on the spoor of the Painted People,’ Alexios said.
Beside him Optio Brychanus said urgently, ‘Sir, not in the fort!’
Alexios looked round and met his haggard gaze, and beyond that the cool half-mocking face of Hilarion, showing as usual nothing of what was behind it. ‘No, not in the fort. Too many ghosts, and too great a length of wall to be held by not much over a hundred men. But there’s more snow coming, by the look and feel of it; and we’ve got to get shelter for the wounded – for all of us. Maybe somewhere among what’s left of the settlement outside the walls.’
Hilarion’s mouth quirked at the corners in his grey and filthy face. ‘The bath-house, say, there should be enough of us still in fighting trim to hold that.’
But in the end, out of all the wreckage of the settlement, it was not the bath-house that they took over for their strong-point, but the waggon park close by the Dextra gate. The walled open space where the supply waggons had been used to stand, and where the levied corn and drafts of local ponies had been checked by Quartermaster or Horsemaster, and much of the local trade between the fort and the country round had been carried on. The breast-high freestone walls still stood, and along one side, what was left of stables and warehouses would give some shelter to wounded and exhausted men through the bitter winter’s night. Probably they would not be able to hold it indefinitely, Alexios thought, with a dull sense upon him of having come to the end of the road; but at least there would be shelter for a while, and a few hours’ rest, if the tribesmen did not come up with them before dusk – and somewhere to make a last stand.
Leaving his Senior Centenarius – his only centenarius, now – to take over the camp-making, he ordered twelve men including those left of the Praepositus’s escort – a scouting detachment, a foraging party, hard to say what – to enter the fort, and himself went with them.
The snow lay thick over dead men, making them all seem alike where it had drifted into corners and against walls, though in the more open places they could still be seen for what they were, Roman cavalryman, painted Pictish warrior, man from across the Western Sea with his lime-whitened shield splashed now with dried blood; brindle cloaked Frontier Wolf. No sign of any of the Arcani. So the attack must have come yesterday, though the faint smoke still rose here and there from charred and sodden timbers towards a sky that was the colour of a fading bruise, heavy with more snow still to come. The dead lay clotted thick about the Principia where the garrison must have made its last stand. The ponies had all been driven off, and the picket-lines were empty save for a few contorted carcasses of beasts that had been speared in the fighting, and one wretched hamstrung cavalry pony still struggling up and falling as he must have been doing for many hours.
The Frontier Wolves loped questing here and there; in one of the burned-out granaries they found a little scorched corn bursting out of its sacks, and scooped it up as best they could into the hollows of their shields. The hamstrung pony was put out of its misery with a dagger thrust. Alexios spoke aside to the optio. ‘Have that poor brute butchered; we’ll eat meat tonight for our Midwinter Feast.’
‘Horsemeat, Sir?’ the optio said doubtfully.
‘Horsemeat, Optio. We will make the proper sacrifice to the Lady of the Foals, and she will forgive us in our need.’
They were back at the Dextra gate, the slaughter-house smell of Bremenium clogging the backs of their throats despite the cold, when they heard a faint groan. As they checked, it came again, seemingly from below the stair that led up to the nearest catapult platform.
‘Someone’s alive – come!’ Alexios shouted, and they ran.
At the foot of the stair the sprawling dead were piled; and something stirred faintly in their midst. They hauled the dead aside, and a man’s face opened its eyes at them and groaned again.
‘Cognos!’ one of the escort men said in recognition.
Alexios knelt down beside the man, who wore the sodden rags of an artilleryman’s uniform. ‘Softly now, we’re friends,’ he said; and to the Frontier Wolves who had crowded after him, ‘Cloaks and spearshafts – make a stretcher.’
The wounded man shook his head very slightly. ‘I’m just about – broke in half. If you move me – I’ll be on my way. Thirsty, though.’
‘Bring water,’ Alexios said, and as one of his men turned away to fetch it, ‘What happened here?’
‘The Painted People – painted devils – and the Attacotti – they’ve joined spears. Wiped us out – Frontier Wolves and all’
‘What of the Arcani?’ Alexios asked.
The man’s mouth twisted. ‘D’you think we’d have been overrun if – somebody hadn’t – opened the gates?’
His head rolled sideways.
Alexios got up. ‘No need now,’ he said to the Wolf who came with his helmet half-full of water.
Back in the waggon park they had got the ponies picketed close and the wounded into shelter, and made small fires under the broken roofs of the warehouse row. Alexios ducked in under the sagging thatch into the faint warmth and the fire-flicker, and the smoke caught at his eyes and throat. It was coming on to snow again.
They had found a little meal to make warm stirabout for the wounded; the scorched corn must go to the ponies.
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‘Presently there will be fresh meat for all of us,’ Alexios said, and saw spent and famished faces lifted, the ears of his Wolves almost visibly pricked.
‘Have the Painted People spared the Commander’s cow, then?’ somebody asked.
He shook his head. ‘They left one of the cavalry ponies hamstrung.’
About him in the fitful flame-light he saw the faces change; now they had the look of men with the warm hunger-water drooling into their mouths; but in their eyes a sullen blankness. They were being asked to break the taboos of their kind, and they thought that he did not understand. For that one moment, so far as they were concerned, he was on the outside again, as he had been when he first took over his command.
‘We will make an offering to the Lady,’ he said. ‘The Mother of Foals will not hold it against us, for we also are her sons and she knows our need.’
And the moment passed.
Men grinned back at him out of gaunt and filthy and wind-cut faces; men so grey and far-gone in exhaustion that it seemed they could get no warmth from the fires to which they huddled. The smoke billowed back on them, and mingled with the smoke the first flakes of the new snowfall that flecked their hunched shoulders and fell hissing into the flames.
Men came out through the Dextra gate and scrambled across the low wall carrying great lumps of raw and bleeding horseflesh; fresh meat, horribly fresh; still warm and faintly smoking in the bitter air. Alexios pulled his thoughts back from that wretched pony maddened with pain and fear. ‘Hack that lot up small and set it to the fire,’ he said. ‘Keep the left shoulder for the atonement offering.’
And he went off to see to the next thing that must be dealt with.
The men of Lucius’s own Centenary had scraped out a shallow grave for him in the ditch that divided the waggon park from the wall of the fort. They had made it slantwise instead of following the line of the ditch, and for a moment, Alexios, scrambling down to join the little burial party, wondered why; then he remembered, the ditch would be running too much north and south, and it was important to the Christians to be buried east and west. Maybe, like the Votadini, their spirits needed to know the direction of the sunset. That would have been Anthonius’s doing. The first of the new snowfall was eddying round them, large flakes like the soft breast feathers of white birds; there were a few of them already lying at the bottom of the grave-scrape when they lifted Lucius’s body into it, and a few more settled on the harsh hairs of his wolfskin and on his lips, before they piled in the half-frozen clods and pulled down more from the steep side of the ditch to make him a good mound.