B007IIXYQY EBOK

by Gillespie, Donna

  When their mounts were well lathered and began to tire, the road abruptly widened. A V-shaped trench and low palisade appeared at his right—part of the rectangular fortifications of the temporary legionary marching camp. Beyond, he caught sight of the neat, regular rows of the common soldiers’ goat-hide tents and at the camp’s center, the grander headquarters tent. On his left loomed a platform of logs topped with a haycock; here a bonfire could be lit in time of emergency. Ahead they heard volleys of sharp shouts, the cracking of axes into trees, the rustling rush of their falling. They passed mule-drawn carts loaded with turf-cutting tools and lines of soldiers carrying baskets of earth. At last the road stopped at a wall of soaring pines. Here two thousand men—approximately one third of the Eighth Legion—were set at various tasks, directed by twenty-four centurions on horseback. Working in full armor, helmets slung across their chests, some felled trees while others stood as sentries or guarded the baggage train; some rested while others dragged brush, stacking it to a man’s height at the roadside to act as a protective barrier in case of attack. Parties of cavalrymen attached to the legion moved through the trees, searching out ambushes and determining the lay of the land ahead. From somewhere came the sound of a rushing stream. Work progressed swiftly. Everywhere was a sense of taut expectancy—the air about him seemed ready to send lightning. Julianus was keenly aware of being at the edge of the world. The Chattians, unseen, were yet a powerful, brooding presence, looming high as the pines, waiting, watching.

  Julianus suspected then that Domitian had a second, unspoken purpose for sending him here: The Emperor wanted him to view firsthand his success—to see the extent of the ground so swiftly taken, to appreciate the thoroughness of his strategy.

  The legion’s First Centurion, Valerius Festus, rode to meet him; he was a roughened veteran of silent mien, with the look of one who was well-intentioned but inflexible, a man past middle years whose hair was flecked with iron gray. He was visibly unnerved by this unexpected arrival of so illustrious an emissary from the Emperor. Julianus swiftly made rounds of the camp, deliberating long over the catapults of various design mounted on their mule-drawn carts. Regulus, the legionary commander of whom Domitian was so suspicious, was not prepared to greet him. Julianus was given some hasty-sounding reason, but he saw wreaths cast on the ground and other evidence of minor celebration—a senior officer’s birthday, perhaps—and guessed Regulus was nursing himself back to health in the dark and quiet of his tent. Such petty infractions did not interest him. When he inquired why four cohorts were missing, he was told they were sent to aid the men of the Eleventh Claudia who were clearing a parallel assault road five miles to the west, where their progress had been slowed by a landfall. All seemed to have been carried out with predictable propriety, with permission obtained and documents signed. Generally all looked much as it should, though he knew he would have a difficult time convincing Domitian of this.

  At the last he asked to be taken to the native hill fort. Valerius Festus rode with him through a quarter mile of forest and brush, then Julianus looked upward. The freshly destroyed Chattian hill fort lay in reproachful silence atop the Taunus crest, a blackened structure nearly camouflaged by pines.

  He was seized unexpectedly with quiet horror. It was as though the crystal air purified perception and he was sharply aware that this was a place of final refuge, a scene of dark and barbarous tragedy.

  “Was it taken without battle?” Julianus asked, realizing his tone was too hushed, as if he spoke near a tomb.

  “Well, it was nothing I would call battle,” Festus replied, concealing an expression of puzzlement. “A few females and their young had to be rooted out and destroyed, that was all.”

  Julianus wheeled his horse about. “I’ll be back directly—I mean to have a look at it.”

  “You mean to go alone?” A look of sharp alarm came to Festus’ eyes. “That is unwise. There would be no way for me to guarantee your safety.”

  “I’ll have to guarantee my own then.”

  Before the First Centurion could raise another objection, Julianus urged his horse to a canter and started climbing the twisting path cut through scrub pine that led to the hill fort’s gate. He did not know why he felt so little fear; it was as though he shared some uncanny understanding with the enemy, as if their minds and his were somehow conjoined. For no reason he could name he touched the amulet of earth through the cloth of his tunic, haunted by an obscure sense it had somehow brought him to this place.

  He felt he ascended into another world, a wise, old gentle one whose wisdom lay in its millennial patience. He felt the closeness of the genius loci itself—the spirit of the place. She was an ancient hag who was yet young, with sad, watery eyes and masses of grassy hair that never knew a comb, a being formed of earth and chill air. The wind was her garments whipping about exultantly, pulling him urgently one way then another, but it was also her ardent soul, animating the surface of waters, pooling in unknown valleys, lifting the swan, carrying the ashes of the dead, hurrying the rain, a wind never held and fouled by cities.

  A goshawk shot up from behind the palisade of the fort and glided toward him silently with an occasional bat of a wing, a sentry of nature’s gods come to have a close look at him. He felt the genius loci accepted him.

  As he came closer, he saw the palisade had half fallen in one place, hanging loose like flayed flesh. The gate had been forced by burning—legionary battering rams were of little use against the hill forts of the northern forests; the native forts’ earth-and-timber construction rendered them too resilient to be vulnerable to the heavy blows of a ram. Within, he heard a flapping of multitudes of wings as if in an aviary; the place was alive with many varieties of birds come to peck at the spilled grain streaming from a broken bin by the gate.

  As always the dead nourish the living, he thought, filled with the sense he ascended not to a crushed enemy fort but to a temple of the mysteries, one immeasurably old, formed out of earth in some natural eruption, a place of the intersection of death and life. In seeking the mysteries we go underground or to the high places; is it, he wondered, because the vast stillness there leaves loud the rustle of spirits?

  He rode through the gate, sensing injured presences crowding the air. He could see straight through the broken fort to the hazed, violet hills beyond. He saw at once no weapons were stockpiled here, and he had expected none. But Domitian had a greater enemy here: Nature itself with its rambling, rebellious growth would ever be troublesome to kings.

  With a sure eye he appreciated the hill fort’s straightforward design, sadly aware this, to the world, was not architecture at all but the work of beasts, comparable to a bird’s nest or a beaver’s dam. Near the grain bin was a well, its source drained off by the Eighth Augusta’s engineers; about it the earth was packed hard where ring-dances had been performed.

  A dark and terrible stench came with a shift in the wind. He looked toward a timber shelter at the back of the fort. In the sun-dappled gloom was a confusion of corpses—three women, a boy and an infant who had died clinging to one another. Nothing could prepare a man for the look of this, the boundless terror frozen in those faces, the mother’s stiff white hand still protectively round the child. The blood was black. Their eyes were open. He fought a need to close the eyes of the babe, to protect it from the sight of what it beheld at the last. Their weapons were a cookpot, still in the hand of one of the women, and a barrel stave. All had been efficiently gutted with the stabbing point of a legionary short sword.

  He trembled, fearing the monstrousness of it would bring him to his knees. Nausea gripped him.

  Most men would call this faintheartedness. I call it knowledge. It is my curse to know what it is to be thought not human, to be thought a thing fit only for work or slaughter.

  He had a desire not to leave this place; here he could let life unravel until he found its source. In such a place he could live as human creatures were meant to live, not immured behind wall upon wall with must
y books that were copies of copies written by men who never saw the things of which they wrote. Every leaf about him seemed a volume in its niche, every trill of wind the voice of a philosophical teacher.

  His horse’s ears pricked forward.

  And he found himself listening to new sounds—fast, furtive rustlings that seemed to draw steadily closer, issuing from the deep pine forest north of the fort.

  Multitudes of light, fleet predatory creatures advanced upon the site.

  He was jerked from peace into nightmare. The forest was alive with the enemy.

  The Chattians had attacked.

  He uttered a curse, knowing he was trapped. Then he leapt from his mount, unbridled the beast and struck its haunches, sending it off at a gallop, knowing the horse’s Roman trappings would give his presence away. Then he sprinted to the sentry platform and hastily pulled himself onto the walk, his dagger in his teeth. He lay flat atop it, shielded from view by the palisade on one side and by the sagging grain bin on the other. Through gaps in the hewn wood of the palisade he had a good view of the camp site below and of the pine forest to the east.

  The air was ravaged by trilling battle cries. They began at a low pitch, then rose up to elemental strength, fierce as any gale.

  From the nearness of the cries he judged the hordes were crowning the ridge, surging through the trees on a broad front. The broken hill fort lay directly in their path.

  Far below in the Roman encampment, he heard the sentries on the tower crying the alarm. Instantly the whole of the camp was in ferment. The haycock was lit. The trumpeters blew a series of short, sharp blasts on their coiled instruments to call the men to arms.

  It seemed to Julianus that time compacted into one interminable, swaying moment. He was caught in the path of an erupting volcano. The forest about was as disturbed as turbid water. Through the cleft in the wood, he glimpsed warriors by the hundreds flashing with gazelles’ grace through the trees, then spilling down the slope, their garishly painted shields held aloft. Many streamed through the fort, but most flowed around it as a river round an obstruction. All were great in stature, powerfully muscled, with long hair whipping on the wind like war pennants. Their greatest weapon, he knew, was not the crude spears they bore but their avenging rage. Gamely he fought against falling into terror and madness, forcing himself to observe dispassionately all that passed below.

  He heard the hoarse shouts of the centurions, sharp with alarm, as they gave orders to the flagbearers to signal battle positions. At first it it seemed the orderly work of an anthill was disrupted by the strike of a foot. Then rank and file rapidly came together, and the Roman forces formed one dark, compacted mass with javelins poised. Parties of men wheeled the small ballistae around on their wagons. Already torch signals were being passed rapidly from one signal tower to the next, summoning auxiliary cavalry from the Eleventh Claudia’s encampment five miles to the west.

  He saw then a thing that surely was a trick of the mind. A half-dozen men of the legion’s first rank toppled to the ground. Some heavy missile had torn into the Roman line.

  He raised himself up to better see. What madness was this? The Chattian charge swiftly bore down on legionaries, but none of the warriors had yet hurled a spear.

  A second missile ripped into the Roman ranks, knocking five more soldiers to their knees. Now the legionaries were disoriented, breaking formation and getting in one another’s way. The mysterious missiles effectively stopped the first flight of Roman javelins.

  Then he knew the missiles were catapult bolts fired from the open forest to the north. And so that old tale, close to legend, of a catapult in the hands of the barbarians, proved true after all. He attempted to note its position, its range, still struggling to keep his hold on the rational world. He found himself feeling an errant pride in the Chattians; they had chosen well the place and time to use their long-hoarded weapon.

  The barbarian wedge-formation struck the Roman line, and the two forces collided into chaos. Chattian standards bobbed over a confusion of heads, some helmeted, some bare, then pushed past the Romans battle flags as the masses of men intermingled. With great swiftness the tribesmen broke up the Roman forces, forcing a battle on their own terms, giving the legionaries no choice but to fight as the barbarians fought—as individuals, warrior against warrior.

  He then witnessed a second unaccountable sight: At the southern extremity of the fighting, where all were packed closely in a dark knot, a group of legionaries dropped their shields and fled, disgracing themselves before their centurions’ eyes. It appeared they fled in the face of something monstrous. But smoke blotted much of the scene, for there were small fires scattered about where the Chattians had set alight the mule-drawn wagons. He peered down into shrouded mystery, wondering what horror could have inspired dozens of men to subject themselves to the army’s brutal punishments for cowardice.

  All through the fray the Roman horns brayed, competing with war cries, shrieks of agony, the fierce bell tones of iron striking iron. He judged this smoking cataclysm raged for less than the time of two water clocks, or under an hour, when there came distantly the cry of answering trumpets, and shortly after, the low thunder of hooves from two directions.

  Mounted reinforcements closed in at great speed.

  Then came the animal plaint of native cattle horns, summoning the Chattian retreat. The tribesmen knew only too well the dangers of tarrying until reinforcements came. Their one advantage lay in surprise and speed of attack; they must now retreat to the wild country, where they knew the perilous trails and the enemy did not. Gradually the Chattians disengaged, then withdrew like a quick-receding tide, leaving the injured and dead heaped on the ground. The warriors stampeded in a wild herd up the slope from which they had come. The few who were mounted set their horses on the same path Julianus had taken, which passed directly through the ruined fort.

  Now Julianus saw the grim result of the attack—nearly a thousand Roman casualties lay in the rutted road, and half as many Chattians. Remarkably, the barbarians had given worse than they got. He wondered if anyone would dare accurately report this to Domitian. Erect spears, their heads buried in the earth, were thick as grass blades on the ground. Even from this distance he could hear the piteous cries of the dying.

  Now the Auxiliary Cavalry filled the assault road with a storming of hooves, closely followed by a detachment of one hundred Arabian bowmen.

  The first of the Chattian warriors burst into the fort, their shouts full of victory; many brandished Roman short swords and legionary helmets. Julianus was tensed and ready, knowing if they saw him they would gleefully slaughter him where he lay.

  It was then that he saw, at the rear of the Chattian retreat, the warrior on the gray horse. By what sense he knew it was a woman he could not say; she was still well off from him, seeming almost reluctant to leave the field of battle. She caught his notice because unlike the others she did not simply flee; she seemed to shepherd the warriors like a flock, going back for stragglers and urging them on, shielding them with her horse, staying behind the fleeing horde as though she counted herself responsible for their safety.

  It began to unnerve him. Why did she so tempt the Fates? The Arabian bowmen were closing in rapidly, and from her anxious looks in their direction, he realized she knew it.

  Then before his disbelieving eyes she dropped from her horse and disappeared into a mass of the stragglers. Moments later she reappeared, struggling with a badly injured man. With a great effort she somehow maneuvered him onto her horse’s back.

  The Arabian bowmen now galloped alongside the cleared place around the camp, skirting the trenches, raising an accumulating mountain of dust, bearing down on all those last to retreat. The battle-maid climbed up behind her wounded companion, so she could steady him as she rode. Then she urged the horse to a gallop, but her mount moved slowly under the extra burden and she lagged behind her fellows.

  “Nemesis,” he uttered softly. She would be the first straggler caught an
d killed.

  He was amazed at how swiftly he was pulled in to the drama of her life. There was something so guileless, so elemental in that devotion.

  The tales of Rome’s foundation yield up stories of such deeds, he reflected, but who ever witnessed them in these times?

  And in the next instant he realized who she must be—the woman Domitian called Aurinia, whose name his father rendered Auriane—she lived still and was before him now. That great spirit who long ago lent him strength was as resolute as his father’s records represented her. But this was also the blood-drinking harpie, the sorceress who sowed madness on the battlefield. Surely she was the cause of that hasty desertion he had witnessed earlier. And yet as she came closer he saw nothing fearful in her aspect, nothing—and then he felt a start of excitement. Nothing fearful, yet there was something remarkable there. What was it?

  As her horse toiled up the slope at a labored canter, Julianus realized with horror that Domitian would have his prize. He knew by the bowmen’s excited shouts that they recognized her. Their mounts galloped low to the ground as the Arabian auxiliaries raced each other in their eagerness to catch her.

  I cannot let so gallant a creature fall into his hands.

  She ascended by the same path he had taken, for it was the only way clear enough for her horse. Switchbacks in the trail obscured her for a moment. Then suddenly she was so close that he could hear her crying words of encouragement to her mount. The horse seemed to respond, lengthening his heavy canter. The wounded man swayed precariously; his leather tunic was soaked with blood. The bowmen took the same narrow path two at a time, their strong, wiry horses gaining on her steadily. At their present speed he judged they would catch her perhaps two hundred feet past the gate of the fort.

  He leapt to his feet, giving little thought to the risk of being seen by the trailing warriors still streaming through the ruined fort. Hastily he gathered up handfuls of the slingstones that littered the sentry platform and began tossing them into the broken grain bin, consumed with a need to preserve her life, forcing aside his fear he would be caught and executed for abetting the enemy.