Before them, as the moon for a moment broke clear of the low scurrying cloud, was the gleam of water, where the road came down to the river marshes. On their left flank rose the dark hunched mass they called the Boar’s Back. There ahead, in the narrows where the steep wooded slopes came down to the river was the place where the tribesmen would attack. If the desperate column, burdened by its sick and wounded, could get through the narrows to the open country beyond, they might yet stand a chance of making Regina. But the wolves were crying closer behind them. Closer and closer, wolf calling to wolf in the sodden dark among the trees.
The river drew nearer on their right, the wooded walls of the ridge on their left, closing in on them; and then suddenly the wolf calls, the hunting calls, were on their flanks as well as behind them; the hunt was closing in for the kill. A short way ahead of them, the steep slope of the ridge fell back a little, and between it and the road rose a hillock cut off by a shallow dip from the rest of the mass. If they could gain that, it would at least give them the advantage of higher ground.
The time when silence could matter was passed. Alexios shouted at full pitch of his lungs.
‘Make for the hillock!’
And an answering shout came back to him from the head of the column.
They gained the crest, and managed some kind of formation, with the wounded and the Cohort standard in their midst, even as the first rush came; a nightmare swarming-in of shadows across the dip from the wooded ridge, and up from the marshes across the now deserted road. ‘Here they come!’ someone shouted; and the defenders of the little knoll rose to meet them; and all round the defensive circle broke suddenly the clash of blade on blade, and the high battle-cry of the Marcomanni. The rain was passing, and the moon shone remotely down on the savage struggle for the narrow hilltop. The British Cohort was down to less than half strength, hopelessly outnumbered, and the end was beyond all doubt. The small desperate rampart of men round the wounded and the standard grew steadily smaller, falling back step by stubbornly yielded step, to close the gaps torn by the German spears. And for every tribesman who went down, it still seemed that there were two more to spring into his place.
Alexios heard his own voice shouting encouragement to his men; there were no longer any orders to be given. He plunged across to see how things were on the far side of the dwindling circle. ‘Centurion Clovius?’
But the moon showed him a sprawling shape, and Centurion Clovius’s unanswering upturned face, above the ragged hole that grinned blackly in his throat. And somebody lying in a soggy mess of mud and blood turned his head as he passed, and deliberately spat at him.
A tribesman came charging straight in at him. He saw a horned war-cap and raised spear against the moon, and sprang to meet them in the gap left by a fallen man. He took the blow across his sword and turned it; but everywhere the line was beginning to go. Behind him as he heard the trumpeter sounding the call that had sounded over so many last stands. ‘To the Standard! Rally – Rally – Rally . . .’
And then, unbelievably, from far up the road towards Regina, came the sound of an answering trumpet.
The door opened again; but lost in his own private nightmare, Alexios did not know that someone else had come in, until the voice of Tribune Tetricus above him said, ‘Stand up!’
He looked up then, saw who it was, and got stiffly to his feet. ‘Sir – I’m sorry. I did not hear you.’
They stood looking at each other; then the older man turned away and crossed to the window, walking lame with a lashing of bandage-linen round his left knee. Tribune Tetricus had led the relief force, and few had come out from that fight between the Boar’s Back and the marshes unscathed.
‘I have come to bring you two pieces of news,’ he said, speaking to the window. ‘Word has just come in that Abusina is back in our hands.’
Alexios said, ‘Yes, Sir.’ There was not anything more to say.
‘And the Inquiry is fixed for the day after tomorrow.’
‘Inquiry?’
The tribune gave a twitch to his shoulders. ‘Name of Light, man, did you not think there’d be an Inquiry? You are extremely fortunate to avoid a Court Martial!’
‘I can only say in my own defence, Sir, that when those heads came over the ramparts –’
‘Two heads. You never saw the third at close quarters, the tribesmen took care of that. Did it never occur to you that the Marcomanni might well think it worth the death of, say, a wounded man or an old one past his fighting days, to make you think that none of your gallopers had got through?’
‘No, Sir,’ Alexios said with a kind of quiet desperation, ‘it didn’t.’
‘And so you lost a complete fort to a pack of rebels, and cost me the lives of twice as many men as you would have lost if you had obeyed standing orders.’
‘I know I took the wrong decision, Sir.’
‘You took the wrong decision. You can tell that to the Inquiry.’
‘I suppose this is where I should fall on my sword,’ Alexios said after a moment; and was surprised and rather shaken to find that something that had come into his mind as a black jest, had turned as he spoke it, into something that he actually meant. ‘But they have taken my sword away. I didn’t take even that decision until too late. Perhaps you could arrange –’
Tribune Tetricus swung round from the window. ‘My dear Alexios, don’t be so old-fashioned. Heroics of that kind went out before they split the Empire between East and West.’ He crossed to the door, and turned once more, his face bitter and unrelenting. He was normally a kindly soul, but he loved his men, and he had lost too many of them for kindness or even justice at the moment. ‘But you might try the suggestion again on the Inquiry Court. Enlist sympathy and create a good impression.’
He went out, shutting the door behind him.
Alexios heard the small commonplace sound of the falling latch. He folded up once more onto the edge of the cot and went on sitting with his head in his hands. A small trickle of blood oozed from the knuckles of his right hand, where he had dashed his clenched fist against the rough-cast wall in the moment of the latch’s falling. But he did not even know that he had done it.
2 Second Chance
IN THE GREY autumn light the hills were dark and sodden and hostile. In places the heather had encroached on the old paved road, and the ponies’ hooves fell suddenly soft, their legs brushing through it as through shallow water. High overhead a kestrel hung bivvering against the sky, then dropped on its unseen prey. Otherwise nothing moved but the little knot of horsemen in all the emptiness.
Alexios, already wearing the uniform of the Frontier Scouts, leather tunic over crossed-gartered breeks like any barbarian, a cloak of thick rough wool that was the dark and sullen green of mountain juniper, rode staring straight ahead of him between his pony’s ears.
Behind him – more than two months behind him now – lay the Inquiry. Stern faces round the table that had been set up in the cross-hall of the Principia at Regina. Someone drumming on the table with impatient fingers. Voices that went on and on: ‘Grave error of judgement . . .’ ‘Lack of experience rather than cowardice or deliberate treachery . . .’ The President of the Court giving the final ruling, ‘That you receive a severe reprimand to be placed on the records, and that you be relieved of your post forthwith.’ And afterwards, the voice of one young officer speaking to another in the colonnade: ‘Of course if it were you or me it would be the end of our careers altogether; but then neither of us has the Dux Britanniarum for an uncle.’
Behind him was the summons to Britain. Two days’ leave spent on the family farm in the southern Down Country. His half-Greek mother crying with soft desolation; she was somewhat given to tears; and demanding to know was it for this that she had left her people in Ephesus and come to bear a son and spend her widowhood on this cold rim of the world; saying that what his father would have said she could not think. Telling him again and again how grateful he must be to his Uncle Marius for having applied for him to
be transferred back to Britain and found another posting for him. Finally, waving a damp kerchief after him as he rode away.
Behind him also, one long and most unpleasant interview with the Dux Britanniarum in his headquarters at Eburacum.
‘Command of the Frontier Scouts up at Castellum,’ his uncle had said. ‘Command of an Ordo – two Centuries in place of the one that you have commanded until now – and of the fort itself. Promotion to the rank of Ducenarius. It sounds like advancement, doesn’t it? Make no mistake, it’s not. You’re an incompetent soldier, unfit to serve in a decent auxiliary cohort, so – it’s the Frontier Wolves for you. And don’t ask me how they came by their fond-name, you’ll find out soon enough. They may make some kind of man of you, if they don’t arrange for you to have a fatal accident instead. I believe that has happened before now.’
Alexios had tried desperately to keep a grip on things, himself included. ‘Sir, I do not need to be told what I have done, nor what I deserve; I am only too well aware of both, and too bitterly sorry. I can but thank you for all that you have done for me in the past, and for this chance to redeem myself. I will do all that I may to deserve it.’
‘I suppose your mother told you to apologize and say thank you, like a good boy,’ Uncle Marius said, not bothering to keep the scorn out of his voice.
Alexios, feeling like a whipped cur, had still hung on to himself. ‘I hope I should have done both, without her prompting.’
‘And I suppose she thinks I did it all for her sake, eh?’
‘She is your sister, Sir. The whole army knows it.’
‘Half-sister,’ Uncle Marius said with asperity. ‘Ah well, even a weeping half-sister is easier to yield to than to withstand. But she is mistaken; the whole army is mistaken. All that I have done for you was done for your father’s sake, not hers. He was the best friend I ever had, I never had a son of my own, and I wanted his son to do well. I see now that I was mistaken in my dealings with you, all along. I hope to God I’m not mistaken now. Get out!’
And Alexios had got out, horrified to find himself shaking from head to foot and on the edge of laughter, with most assuredly nothing to laugh about. He must stop it, or he would end in the ultimate shame of tears here in the open forecourt. He had managed to straighten up and get as far as his sleeping quarters. Then he had kicked the door shut and flung himself down on the narrow cot with his head in his arms.
All that was behind him, and falling further and further away with every beat of his pony’s hooves; and ahead, as the road crested a shallow moorland ridge, the land changed, and the wilderness fell back as they reached the edge of the crop-lands. Away to the right a man was ploughing, a wheeling, crying cloud of gulls following the heavy ox-drawn plough. And ahead too, crouching like an old scarred hound between the waters of the great estuary that shone sword-grey beyond it, and the brown thatch of the native settlement that huddled on its landward side, Alexios saw the fort that was to be his command.
The optio of the little escort, riding beside him, pointed. ‘There’s Castellum, Sir.’
As though he needed to be told.
Alexios nodded. It should have been a proud moment, this first sight of his first command. But it was the end of something, not the beginning. He was going to rust out what was left of his soldiering days here. He was done. Finished. Broke.
He found that he had dropped his gaze from the distant fort, and was staring down at his bridle hand; at the flawed emerald ring with its intaglio-cut dolphin on his signet finger. An old and battered ring that had come down to him through a long and proud line of soldiers. And the only thing he could do for them now, having utterly failed them, was to take his beating in a way that wouldn’t shame them still further. The engraved stone was dark and secret, giving back nothing but the cold surface reflection of the autumn sky. It had nothing to say to him. Well he could do without. He straightened in the saddle, bracing his shoulders with a small jerk that was not lost on the men riding behind him.
And so they clattered up the last stretch, between the settlement and the roughly cleared practice ground, between the gravestones of men who had died there, since the Eagles first flew north, and in through the Praetorian gate of Castellum.
Later that evening, supper over, Alexios sat with the outgoing Commander and the rest of the fort’s officers over a jug of wine in the Mess. The upward light from the three-flamed lamp on the table threw their shadows far up the roughly plastered walls behind them and brought their faces forward into sharp relief. The red-faced and balding Quartermaster, drinking himself into a quiet stupor, according, as Alexios later found, to his nightly custom; the sallow, long-nosed man with the serpent-staff on the breast of his tunic, who was the fort’s Medic. The two hundred-captains, Centenarius Lucius, square, dark and a little wooden, and Centenarius Hilarion, lank, lean and freckled, pale eyes that glinted and flickered under a cap of straight sandy hair. Druim, leader of the fort’s handful of Arcani, the ‘eyes-and-ears in the dark’, who, if their reputation spoke the truth, knew when a leaf fell, three days beyond the old Northern Wall. Mouse hair in thick braids, framing a blue-eyed face apparently as open as the day.
Alexios took them in without, he hoped, seeming to stare too closely; the faces of the men who would be his officers in three days’ time. Guarded faces that as yet told him nothing of the men behind them. At the head of the table, Ducenarius Julius Gavros, the outgoing Commander, had turned reminiscent, which he supposed was not surprising under the circumstances.
‘When I first served with the Frontier Scouts, the whole Numerus was stationed at Castra Exploratorum. We were responsible for patrolling the whole of the lowlands in those days. Now, of course, we are split up – well you will have seen that for yourself, on your way up here. One Ordo doubling up with the regular garrison at Habitancum, for scouting and security immediately in front of the Wall; one at Bremenium, under the Praepositus himself; also doubled up with a part-mounted auxiliary force and the main body of the Arcani, but the nearest thing we have now to a headquarters. One up here at Castellum, almost on the old Northern Wall; something over two hundred of us, counting Druim’s lovely lads, rattling around in a fort that was originally built to house a full cohort. We are the forward observation post; our job to keep things quiet in general and an eye on the Picts in particular. It’s a flimsy arrangement. None of us could do much about backing the others up if trouble started. The old way was better.’
‘Why the change?’ Alexios asked.
Julius Gavros shrugged. ‘We’ve had peace in the north for a good while now. Sea-raiders in the south, yes, but up here things have been quiet, comparatively speaking. And the Higher Command doesn’t much like – or trust – irregular units in peace time. If it can’t do away with them, the next best thing is to split them up.’
‘And let us admit,’ said Centenarius Lucius quietly into the depth of his wine-cup, ‘that no unit was ever much more irregular than the Frontier Wolves.’
Hilarion had risen and moved across to the window, and stood with his arm along the high sill, listening. Somewhere outside in the night men were singing, without words; raising a strange haunting mouth-music above the rhythm of a softly tapped drum. ‘The Pack is giving tongue. Aye well, it’s the full of the moon.’ He swung back to the table in one stride, and flung himself down opposite Alexios, grinning. ‘Your new Command. The tribesmen more than half believe that we swear some kind of kinship with the wolves; and the mothers tell their children that if we bite them they’ll end up howling to the moon themselves.’
‘However, we seldom bite them,’ Lucius said gently.
Maybe not so wooden after all, Alexios decided.
Julius Gavros laughed. ‘It could be a useful reputation to have.’
‘You see! You’re beginning to think like one of us! That’s why you’ve been posted down to Habitancum! Oh I know it’s promotion but it’s also closer in to civilization.’ Hilarion picked up his cup and drank. ‘Ah me, so soon as we get t
he Commander comfortably into our way of thinking, the powers above send us a new one, and it’s all to do again.’
‘No disrespect to the new Commander intended, Sir.’ Druim lifted his eyes deliberately to Alexios’s face, and spoke for the first time in a long while.
‘Who would ever think such a thing?’ Hilarion said lazily into the sudden quiet. ‘Surely not the new Commander? He must be as aware as we, of the honour done us by his posting here.’ He uncoiled himself slowly from his lounging position, and sat up very straight.
Alexios stiffened, and gave him back look for look. ‘I am not sure that I understand.’
Lucius said quickly, ‘Nobody ever understands Hilarion when the moon is full.’ Then to Hilarion himself, ‘Leave it.’
Hilarion did not seem to hear his fellow centenarius. ‘Who could have dreamed that the Frontier Wolves would ever come up in the world to the point of being commanded by the nephew of the Governor of North Britain?’
Nothing more. But the silence drew out taut as a bowstring. Alexios was sharply aware of the men – even, somewhat owlishly, the Quartermaster – looking on. The thing had turned suddenly to deadly earnest. His mouth felt dry, and he knew that if the outgoing Commander made the least attempt to help him, he was finished. He stared back into the bright narrowed gaze of Centenarius Hilarion, and knew that he must not look away.
‘We must hope that the Frontier Wolves prove themselves worthy of the honour done them,’ he said at last, coolly pleasant. ‘Will you pass the wine-jug, Centenarius?’
And so the moment passed.
That night in the outer room of the Commander’s quarters, where a makeshift bed had been set up for the newcomer, Ducenarius Gavros said, ‘I’m sorry about what happened in Mess this evening.’