‘You will get your horse back, Sir,’ Alexios said, with more optimism than he felt. ‘Also we are mounting a search for your groom.’
Montanus made an impatient gesture, as though brushing the groom aside, then checked, and turned his head at the sound of hooves trotting down towards the West gate.
‘I have sent a patrol with a herald to inquire at a certain village if the Tribune’s horse has strayed that way.’
‘Strayed!’
‘Strayed,’ said Alexios quietly.
Montanus’s face turned ugly. ‘You are supposed to keep the peace in this part of the Frontier; hold the Tribes quiet, but it seems that you are scarcely fitted for the work. Maybe you are afraid of these North British, as I seem to have heard that you were of the Danubius tribes!’
That was the second time. And this time it was a deliberate insult. Alexios drew a quick, shaking breath, and let it out very carefully. ‘As you have pointed out to me, Sir, Castellum and Number Three Ordo are my command. Unless you wish to relieve me of it, I make the Commander’s decisions here. Hold me to account for them afterwards if they prove wrong.’
And then he heard what he had said.
Soon after, the groom was discovered, perfectly unharmed save for an aching head and the loss of all his clothes, sitting on the steps of the half-ruined temple to Castor and Pollux in the middle of the town, and staring owlishly in front of him. Dragged up to the fort, muffled in a blanket, and standing rather shakily before Ducenarius Aquila, he admitted that he had given himself leave last night and gone off with the rest into the town. He had gone to the women’s huts. There was a girl, a pretty girl. No, he had no idea which hut, in the darkness and murk; and they had all gone to a wine shop first – that was where he had first seen the girl. She had taken him home and given him more wine, and the next thing he had known, he had been sitting on the temple steps with no clothes on.
Looking at his greening face, Alexios knew that there would be nothing more to be got out of him. ‘Take him away,’ he said, ‘he’s going to be sick. When that’s over, pour something hot down him, or we’ll have him on our hands with the lung-fever.’
At about the same time in the Rath of Cunorix, Connla clad in the groom’s missing cloak and breeks, was facing his very angry brother. Connla laughing, and with every flaming hair of his head seeming to be living a life of its own quite unquenched by the smoking wet.
‘The Chieftain said he wished to breed from the horse. I only did the thing to please the Chieftain my brother.’
Standing on the threshold of his Hall, Cunorix looked back at him with no trace of answering laughter. ‘Did you so, little brother? It is in my mind that you did it because the Praepositus refused and you do not like the Praepositus, and also because you thought it would be fine sport.’
Connla swaggered a little, his hands on his hips and the laughter dancing like summer lightning behind his eyes. Several of the tribe who chanced to be about their business nearby had drawn closer; among them two or three girls from their looms or their grinding querns, and among the girls one who was red-headed as himself, Teleri the swordsmith’s daughter.
‘It is true that I do not love the Praepositus. And it was fine sport. Did our father himself not say that horse-raiding was a fine sport and kept the young warriors in trim for the wartrail?’
‘Horse-raiding between us and the Damnoni or the Caledoni is one thing,’ Cunorix said. ‘To steal a horse from a fort of the Roman kind in the night is another, especially from a fort commanded by a friend.’
Connla shrugged. ‘The Ducenarius Aquila is a Roman as well as a friend. Let him keep his horses if he can.’
‘But it is the Praepositus’s horse, and the Ducenarius who will suffer for it. Is there not one thought in your head?’
‘Do not you for ever treat me as though I were a bairn!’ Connla flared.
‘Then do not you for ever behave as though you were one! Where have you left the horse?’
‘In a safe place,’ Connla said; and then meeting his brother’s slightly widened gaze, added sullenly, ‘In the old branding corral.’
‘Then go now and fetch him in,’ said Cunorix.
They stood and looked at each other, the battle of their wills making almost visible sparks in the air between them. Then into the silence came the sound of running feet. Faces turned towards the gate-gap in the hawthorn hedge. The mist was beginning to thin out and grow ragged, and out of it appeared Gault, one of the young warriors of the Clan and a close friend of Connla’s. He came on and up to join the little group about the Hall threshold, and spoke to Cunorix, but exchanged a grin with the Chief’s younger brother. ‘There is a band of Wolves coming this way.’
‘One of their patrols?’ asked Cunorix.
The boy shook his head, out of breath a little, but not much, with his running. ‘Not an ordinary patrol. They are heading straight for the rath, and their leader is carrying the Green Branch.’
‘How far behind you?’
‘Hard on my tail,’ said the boy. ‘Listen.’
In the silence they heard the green plover crying, and then the faintest quiver of sound that strengthened to the light beat of hooves: ponies coming up from the ford at a trot. No patrol ever rode like that.
Out of the thinning mist appeared the silvered shapes of the troop. They checked in the gateway, as good manners demanded, then as the warriors who had gone down to meet them stood aside, came on, to the faint jingle of accoutrements and creak of damp saddle leather. In the midst of the Chieftain’s forecourt they reined in, and the troop leader, he with a sprig of broom in his hand – green branches were not easy to come by in the North in winter – swung down from his pony.
‘The sun and moon on your path, Lord of Six Hundred Spears,’ he said in formal greeting.
‘And on yours,’ Cunorix returned. ‘What is it that brings a patrol of the Frontier Wolves within my gates?’
‘The Praepositus Glaucus Montanus has lost his horse,’ the grim flicker of a smile touched the troop leader’s mouth, ‘and we are come to inquire whether by chance he has wandered this way.’
Cunorix gave him back look for look, while the ponies fidgeted. ‘Yes,’ he said clearly and deliberately. ‘My brother Connla found him wandering and recognized him.’
Connla opened his mouth, then shut it again. One of the ponies ruckled down its nose. ‘So, that is well,’ said the troop leader. ‘Now if you will have him brought out to us, we will be on our way back.’
‘It will take a small while,’ Cunorix said. ‘My brother found him up at the Glen head, and since he was already bringing in two lead horses he could handle no more, and left him up there in the old branding corral.’ And to Connla he said, ‘Go now, and fetch him.’
Connla stood a long moment quite unmoving. He had gone an odd pearly white, his eyes suddenly very dark, fixed on his brother’s. Then he flung around and strode away.
Behind him the rath went about its usual affairs. ‘Come,’ said Cunorix to the troop leader, ‘you must drink the Guest Cup while we wait.’ And the two men went together into the Hall, while the rest of the Frontier Wolves dismounted and squatted down to wait, each man with his arm through his pony’s bridle. Someone produced a pair of knuckledusters, two more began to play Flash the Fingers. The mist was clearing quickly now, a gleam of thin winter sunshine finding its way through. A few children and dogs gathered to stand and stare. From just beyond the entrance to the stable court, the tall, dark-cloaked figure that had stood there looking on from the first, still stood unmoving.
Presently, for the second time that day, the Rath of Cunorix heard the sound of nearing hooves, but this time it was one horse only, and being ridden at a furious gallop. Cunorix and the troop leader came out from the Hall, and suddenly from houseplace doorways and dark entrances of smithy and stables and store-sheds, men and women appeared, drawn by the fierce drum of nearing hooves. And up from the ford and through the gate-gap swept the Tribune’s bay stallion wit
h Connla already half out of the high military saddle. Before the Hall threshold he brought the animal up, rearing and plunging to a halt; blood flecked the white foam that spattered from its muzzle – the Tribune rode with a wolf-bit but did not misuse it – the poor brute’s eyes were wild and its flanks streaked with sweat.
The troop leader stepped forward quickly to take the bridle and draw a consoling hand down the shivering neck. ‘Was it needful to ride him so hard?’ he said to Connla who confronted him grinning, still with that odd pearly whiteness in his face.
‘I was not wishing to keep the Praepositus waiting,’ he said.
‘Very good of you,’ the leader said with heavy sarcasm; then jerking his chin to the number two rider of the troop, ‘Here, take him in charge. Go easy with him, you can see the state he’s in and his mouth’s been cut to ribbons.’
He took no care to keep his voice down, let anyone hear who wanted to. But he and Cunorix took leave of each other with the ritual courtesy which the Green Branch demanded. Then he barked an order, and the whole troop swung into their saddles, and with the Praepositus’s bay horse among them, went clattering out through the gate-gap and down towards the ford.
The swordsmith’s red-haired daughter who had come out again with a knot of other girls to watch gave a crow of high mocking laughter. Connla swung round on her, but what she saw in his face made her laugh the more. ‘So much for your horse-raiding, my bonnie lad!’ she said, and turned with a flick of her saffron skirts, and walked away.
The tall watching shadow in the entrance to the stable court made a small hissing sound of satisfaction, almost like the dry whisper of a snake moving over dead leaves, and turned his hooded head to watch her go.
If the red-haired girl had not laughed, much of what happened after might never have happened at all.
Before evening, the Praepositus’s horse was safely back in the Castellum stables, and the life of the fort had returned to normal – or as near as it could get to normal before the Tribune took his delayed departure next morning.
But in a herdsman’s summer bothy in a fold of the high moors, three men sat huddled in their cloaks with no fire on the little stone hearth to warm them or betray their presence to a passing hunter.
‘It is a full-moon-crazy plan,’ one of them said. ‘But I am thinking it might work, for all that.’
‘Of course it will work! It is the fine plan!’ said Connla’s voice out of another of the huddled shapes.
‘First we must find another mare in season, and it’s over late in the year. Pity it is that we cannot use Shadow herself.’
Connla gave a crack of laughter. ‘That would be a jest for the gods!’ And added regretfully, ‘No, Cunorix goes to whisper love talk in her ear every night; and besides, we’ll not likely be able to get her back. It will have to be a little scrub mare. The Praepositus’s bay will fancy her just as well.’
‘If there’s one to be found. What if there is none?’
‘Then we’ll use fire arrows and stampede them that way. But first we will go to Finnan Horse-herd. If there’s another horsy mare to be found in the runs, he’ll know. I sometimes think Epona the Mother of Foals whispers all the secrets of the herd in that one’s ear at night.’
Next day dawned wet and squally, the stillness of the mist given way to blustery rain, and the men taking their horses down to the watering-place cursed and huddled deep into their wolfskins; not that they really cared about the weather, they were too well used to it; but cursing it was almost as much a custom as touching the Lady as one rode past. In the dusk of the winter morning the alder scrub along the bank took on strange shapes, and the horses seemed on edge, sniffing the wind and dancing.
The Praepositus’s tall bay in particular was almost out of hand, and his rider cursed, ‘Misbegotten son of a lop-eared mother! What call for all this fretting and fuming?’ The Praepositus’s groom was confined to barracks, and the Frontier Wolf in charge of him, whose own pony would have to wait until this pampered brute had been seen to, felt thoroughly hard done by.
The last troop had gone down to the watering pool, their riders slipping from their backs, and among the wiry hill ponies the red stallion dipped his head to drink. The clear brown water riffled round his muzzle, the sky-reflecting ripples spreading out from the bank to meet and mingle in a criss-cross web of brightness from a score of other thirsty muzzles.
And then it happened. First one and then another of the ponies lifted their heads to look round. There was a shrill whinny, answered from upstream, and out from the alder scrub trotted a small rough-coated mare who flung up her head at sight of the troop-ponies, and came bucketing down the bank to join them. Instantly there was chaos at the watering pool, the ponies milling this way and that as the mare in their midst stood tossing her head, waiting as her nature told her, for the stallion fighting, and the Lord of the Herd to take her. The stallions bit at each other’s crests, one upped with his heels and caught another squarely in the ribs.
‘She’s in season!’ the optio shouted. ‘Who in Typhon’s name let her loose –’
The man had plunged into the mêlée, trying to sort things out; the red stallion neighed like a trumpet and made straight for the rough little mare, heedless of the efforts of the Scout in charge of him to hold him back.
Then it seemed to the Scout that a small thunderbolt took him in the back of the neck. Lightning shot inwards through his head from the point of impact, and he pitched forward into ringing darkness.
Up at the fort, the optio was once again reporting the loss of his horse to the Praepositus who seemed to have passed through yesterday’s fury to something quieter and more dangerous. ‘They let a mare in season in among the troop while we were watering them. Of course the ponies went mad, and in the general garboil, they – some tribesmen – knocked the man in charge of him out with a chop below the ear and got away with the horse, Sir. Him and a couple more of his friends that were hiding in the scrub upstream. It was all pretty quick, Sir, couldn’t rightly see what happened. A couple of troops are off after them, and without the mist they’ll not get far.’
‘For the sake of the troops concerned, I sincerely hope not,’ said Montanus in a tone that was softly vicious.
‘The country will help them. It’s their country,’ Alexios heard himself saying. He felt sick and furious and helpless. He and his men were being made to look fools before this high-nosed new-come Commander, and something within him knew that this was a situation that could very easily get out of hand. When he saw Connla again . . .
The optio’s eye was on him. ‘With respect, Sir, for a good many of us, it’s ours too.’
The hunt was streaming out across the hills of the border country; the three wild riders far ahead, the pursuit strung out like a skein of wild geese, streaming grimly after.
The Frontier Wolves, too, felt that they were being made to look fools. The thing that had started out as little more than a rough jest had gone beyond that now and was turning ugly. They settled down in their saddles and rode, knowing that the chase was like to be a long one. They forded the river further up, and swinging right-handwise made for the broken scrubby valleys of the high moors westward. Doubling and twisting, the quarry tried to throw them off the trail; once they almost succeeded, but just as the Scouts were swinging southward to come between them and the fringes of the Forest Country, a stray gleam of winter sunlight picked out a flying speck of fox-red, far up the opposite hillside; and one of the men shouted, pointing, ‘There they go! They’ve doubled back –’
And the hunt was off again, streaming northward.
Hills and valleys, high moors dark with the sodden wreck of last year’s heather; broken country choked up with tangles of hazel and rowan along the steep burnsides. Both hunters and hunted knew every foot of that countryside drawing up towards the Old Wall; knew the run of the valleys, the wooded patches where one could break through from one valley into another without getting skylined. Streaming along the hillsides,
splashing burns and boggy places the hunt went on.
Until suddenly, as suddenly as Alexios’s wolf-hunt had ended close on a year ago, and with scarcely any warning, the end came.
It came in the upland valley below the ruins of the old signal tower where the Commander of the Third Ordo had killed his wolf. And it came because the bay stallion, racing ahead, for all his fire and speed and courage, had not been born and bred to the northern hills, and weary as he was, his willing though bewildered heart near to bursting, slipped in crossing the burn where the autumn rains had pulled down the bank, and came crashing down. And Connla, flung clear, caught his head on a twisted alder root and knocked the senses half out of it.
The other two swung back to him; one hauled him half across his own pony’s withers, but the dark skein of the hunt was upon them, and below the ruined walls of the signal post, just as Alexios’s wolf had done, they turned at bay.
The wintry light glinted on the dirk blades. There was a sharp vicious scrap among the fallen stones and bramble scrub, and when it was over, and the hushing of the wet wind closed over the ugly snarl of fighting, two of the Frontier Wolves and one of the tribesmen lay dead, the third tribesman had escaped, and Connla, his teeth bared and eyes narrowed like a noosed animal, was standing with his hands lashed behind his back, in the midst of his captors.
A little downstream, the beautiful bay stallion was screaming and struggling to get up, with threshing forelegs and a broken back.
‘Someone see to that poor brute,’ the Optio said.
One of the Frontier Wolves – it was Bericus – drew his knife and went down the streamside; and among the alders the terrified threshing ceased.
‘Right,’ said the optio. ‘Bring him along.’
They flung Connla up onto his dead friend’s pony, and laid the dead Scouts across the backs of their own mounts. ‘What about him?’ someone asked, jerking a thumb at the sprawling body of the young brave.
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