“That pendant was mine once,” she said, her voice betraying the first traces of emotion. “I gave it to the man I loved, on the eve of a great war. He never returned. Now your legionary wears it for luck.” She sneered. “It’s nothing but a bauble to him. A trinket.” And with astonishing strength she gripped Rufinius’ forearm and trained her fierce eyes on his. “Steal it for me.”
He tried to pull free but her fingers bit deeper.
“I have come a long way in search of this,” she hissed. “If the legionary dies now, they will burn him with it, or use it to pay for the cremation. If I lose my prize, you will lose my favor.”
Her words sent a cold prickle of doubt crawling through him. “You really are mad,” was all he could manage.
The Celt was weakening, his hands planted on the ground as he tried to throw Gederus off. His arms trembled and gobs of saliva dropped freely from his mouth.
Rufinius looked around wildly, unable to pull free of her grasp, hoping desperately that none of the others had recognized him.
“Do this for me,” she intoned, “and you will never have to beg for work from those ignorant farmers again.”
He flinched. “How do you―?”
There was a gasp from the crowd and he looked up in time to see Gederus fall backwards, clutching his face. The Celt sprang up, a shard of rock raised to strike, but Rufinius was moving, suddenly free of the woman, his feet leaving the ground as he caught the man by the waist and drove him to the dirt. The stone clattered to a stop between them.
There was an instant of shocked incomprehension. Then the warrior lunged for the stone.
Neither man saw Gederus coming; there was just the flash of steel and a wet smack as the short sword punctured the Celt’s neck, locking his body in a single, agonizing convulsion. A gush of blood escaped the man’s nose and a short, sharp exclamation ― almost a laugh ― burst from his lips. Then, with a grinding of bone, Gederus twisted the blade and he was dead.
“Put this thing on the fire,” he commanded the crowd, now watching in silence. Then, reaching out a hand, he hauled Rufinius to his feet. “Thank you, friend. You’ve got a sharp eye.”
Rufinius could not muster a reply, but looked back to the woman, fear and questions in his eyes. The firelight poured shadows into the lines and hollows of her face and, smiling, her mouth became a toothless burrow, gouged in festering soil. She nodded, the gesture loaded with complicity, before drifting away into the wooded shadows.
****
Now, in the damp and sludge of Isca, he stooped and clawed up a handful of mud.
“This,” he announced, raising the rank pile for the crowd to see, “is Roman soil!”
The words were met with a roar of approval.
“We do not fight to claim it from uncivilized hands. We fight to protect it from those who have no place here! Imagine building a fine house only to find, as soon as it was completed, that it was overrun with thieves and savages. What would you do?” He surveyed them. “You would take up your sword and drive them out!”
A murmur of assent from the crowd, but a wry smile from the woman.
“Gederus understood this.” He pointed to the flames as they continued the hungry work of lifting skin and hair and clothes from the body. “He fought and died that we might keep this land pure. Keep it Roman.” He lifted the clod still higher, thick black ribbons of liquid dirt streaming down his wrist. “Tell me, legionaries, what greater claim can we hold to the land than this? That the blood that ran in his veins now runs through this soil!”
They erupted, to a man, and he felt the glow of pride start to kindle in him.
“He fought for you,” he urged them. “Will you fight for him?”
With a sound like a rainstorm, every sword was drawn and held aloft.
“Will you fight with me?”
“Yes!” they roared.
“Then we will drive our enemies out of this land and into the seas!” he cried. “And let every Celt understand that if they are not Roman, they are dead!”
The applause, the cheers, the stamping of feet and bellowing of voices rose like a solid thing, prickling the hairs on his arms and rising on clattering wings towards the clouds.
And then he saw the woman beckon him and turn away.
With a last look at Gederus, curled like a newborn in his nest of blazing branches, he stepped down and followed her. The time had come to close the deal.
****
Three days after the death of the Celt, the cold finally broke and they marched west. The countryside burbled and sang with the slow death of winter, the snow decaying to a brownish slush beneath their sandals.
Rufinius marched in the front rank of the column alongside Gederus, who did not seem in the least embarrassed to show his gratitude to the small, rattish yokel whose intervention had saved his life.
“Your accent,” Gederus announced as they shared a skin of wine the morning after the fight. “You’re from the country?”
“The Piano Grande.”
“You lucky devil!” Gederus beamed. “More beautiful than all the buildings of Rome. Why on Earth did you leave?”
Rufinius dropped his gaze, embarrassed. “I grew up a vagrant, moving from farm to farm as the work demanded. Shepherding, plowing, harvesting, cutting wood...And ever since I could remember, people had been telling me how lucky I was to be part of the glory of Rome. So I finally decided to go and find some of it for myself.”
“And they sent you to us, you poor bastard!”
The words had obviously been meant as a joke, but something in the pained smile he got in return caused Gederus to knit his brows together. “If you think this is bad, wait until we reach the Silures’ territory. The most barren collection of rock this island has to offer, but they’ll slaughter anyone who comes near it. There are some hard fights ahead.”
Rufinius knew this all too well; it had been almost the sole topic of conversation since his arrival. The Silures were the most savage and hostile of the Celtic tribes, refusing all civilization, choosing instead to flee westward into the mountains and valleys. This was where the legion was bound.
“How many battles have you fought?” he asked.
“Fifty. Not including the paid fights. How about you?”
He toyed with the wine skin, feeling the first tug of jealousy. “None.”
He had not forgotten his deal with the woman, but all his attempts to acquire the pendant had so far come to nothing. Gederus never removed it, not even when he slept or washed. He caught Rufinius staring at it as they relaxed in the baths, soaking in the caldarium in the few hours before the legion set out.
“A fine piece, isn’t it?” he said, lifting it to the light and letting it spin slowly.
“Very nice,” Rufinius conceded, perhaps a little too quickly.
What at first appeared to be just another piece of Celtic knotwork was, in fact, a twisting golden serpent, exquisitely detailed down to the scales on its back and the curve of its fangs as it devoured its own tail. A single stone, black and cold, marked its eye.
“Where did you get it?”
“A group of bandits surprised me on the road in northern Gaul. The best of them was carrying it.”
“Why don’t you sell it?” The question sounded awkward and loaded to his ears.
“Never sell anything you earn in a fair fight,” Gederus replied firmly. “The man who beats me can take it. Nobody else.”
Rufinius reflected on this as they marched. What if, a few weeks from now, some Silure peasant was wearing the thing?
He was still trying to concoct a means of stealing it two days later, when the legion left the road and struck out across country. The putrefying remains of winter made the going hard. Twice they had to abandon their route and find higher ground as they met rising flood waters and valleys blocked by mudslides.
They were fording a river, white water surging around their thighs, when the first attack came. The tree-line on the far bank shivered and burst
into a horde of screaming figures, ghostly white and naked, the flash of bronze and iron in their hands.
Rufinius, already preoccupied with keeping his footing, froze, his hand at the hilt of his sword, his lungs gripped tight by fear. With a bellow of fury, the first warrior entered the water.
****
“That happened to me, at the start.” Gederus indicated Rufinius’ trembling hands as they sat with the rest of the legion on the riverbank, their clothes steaming.
Rufinius found it hard to speak. His mind was still ruled by the memory of the vibration that had travelled up the length of his arm as a man’s face opened in a blossom of red meat and gristle beneath the point of his sword. The young warrior had misjudged his attack, leaving himself open and Rufinius, seeing his chance, had very nearly backed away from it. The idea of releasing something as absolute and irreversible as death on a man had terrified him. It still did. Only the threat of having his ashes scattered in this alien wasteland had prompted him to action, all notions of flight or mercy stillborn.
The few surviving Celts had soon fled, surprised by their opponents’ overwhelming numbers and leaving the corpses of their kinsmen to a trio of carrion crows circling overhead.
“So what saw you through?”Gederus asked.
Rufinius shrank a little under his comrade’s searching gaze.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, glancing at the length of gold chain just visible around his friend’s neck. “I had training...”
Gederus waved the words away. “Every man fights for something, even if it’s just his pay. What is it you fight for?”
He offered the first lie that occurred to him. “For Caesar.”
“That’s very noble,” Gederus nodded, and he began to relax. “But it’s crap.”
Rufinius searched frantically for any trace of accusation in the words.
“We all took the oath when we enlisted,” Gederus went on. “We all eat and sleep and shit for Caesar. But tell me, when you were knee deep in that water with your enemy at your throat, did you spare him a single thought?”
Rufinius opened his mouth to argue, considered lying, then shut it again.
“You need something of your own to stand for,” said Gederus. “Only a monster fights without cause. So I’ll ask you again; what’ll it be?”
“I...don’t know.”
Gederus coughed, spat and stood up. “Well I suggest you decide before we run into any more Celts. I’d be sorry to lose you.” He started towards the point where the column was reforming.
Rufinius remembered the sight of him striding calmly through the waters to meet the charge, his sword and dagger at the ready, silently marking up each of the attackers for death.
“I don’t want to die here,” he called after him.
Gederus paused. “That’s as good a reason as any.”
“And what about you? Why do you fight?”
“Honestly?” Gederus hoisted his features into a lopsided smile. “Because it’s the only thing I’m good at.”
****
As the legion moved further west, crossing the brown and turgid expanse of river that marked the fringe of the Silures’ territory, the frequency and savagery of the attacks increased.
Every time the alert was sounded, Rufinius felt the same paralyzing fear that had gripped him in the water. But whenever he drew his sword, the killing became a little easier, his thoughts a little clearer, until he found something approaching calm in those frantic, deadly contests. Gederus explained the phenomenon to him as they marched.
“When you’re fighting a man for your life, it shakes out everything that’s not essential. You stop caring if your woman really loves you, or who owes you money, or where you’re going to sleep tonight. You just want him to die so you can go on living.”
Rufinius nodded, relieved that someone else had understood this first.
“And when you realize how much of yourself you’ve abandoned,” Gederus continued, “you start to see what’s left. And that’s the real you.”
The sensation grew in him like a weed; the need to put down and destroy the enemy before they could do the same to him. Every Celt he butchered prolonged by a fraction the separate contest he played each night against Gederus, lying awake in the hope that this time, his friend might finally be careless. But Gederus never once failed to bind the chain around his wrist, falling asleep with the pendant locked securely in his fist.
Two games; one soft and subtle, full of smiles and false conversation; the other brutal and honest, played with swords and blood and luck. He only had to win this first game once. But he could not escape the burgeoning fear that, sooner or later, somebody else would beat him at the second.
At last they reached a broad river valley at the foot of steeper hills. The battle here was long and savage and it was twelve hours before they finally drove the Silure warriors to higher ground. Before the sun set, their Centurion announced that this was where they would make their mark; a fortress, to dam up the mouth of the valley and control access to the river until reinforcements could be called for.
Within a week, the defensive wall was in place and, the very next day, it started to rain. It came in torrents, filling the air until even breathing had to be done with the face tipped downwards. The foundations of the new buildings inside the wall began to disintegrate and the river burst its banks, filling the valley with its fetid, sucking waters.
For Rufinius, this came as a tremendous relief. If they could not cross the valley, neither could the Celts and that one, deadly game could be put on hold. So it was with a cold shock that he received the news that Gederus was to be sent into enemy territory.
“The Centurions want to mount an attack as soon as the waters recede,” he explained as they huddled round a meager fire. “I’m going across to scout out their defenses.”
Rufinius considered for a moment, then formed the words with a slow dread. “Let me come.”
The Centurions, impressed by his performance to date, offered no objection so, before dawn the next morning, both men stole out into the rain, which had lessened to a stubborn drizzle, and followed the valley to its narrowest point.
Fear gnawed at Rufinius like a fire at dry timbers but he could not bear the prospect of seeing the key to his prison carried off into those hostile peaks, never to return.
They forded the river with difficulty and made their way in silence through the dark and sodden valleys beyond. What they found there filled them both with a leaden certainty about the legion’s prospects.
Every wind-blasted peak was crowned with a fortress, ready to rain down arrows on every side, while teams of warriors stalked like specters between the withered, stunted trees that clung to the slopes.
Filthy, cold and soaking wet, he and Gederus turned towards home. They were halfway there when the first cry went up.
“Have they seen us?” Rufinius asked, panicked.
A chorus of voices rose in response, arrows diving into the soil around them. Then they saw the warriors coming, wild and hard at their heels.
“Run!” spat Gederus.
Their flight was confused and directionless, and it was pure chance that finally brought them to the river’s edge, the alien calls still loud in their ears.
As they struggled through the surging water, Rufinius experienced a moment of startling objectivity ― the two contests had converged. The final moves must be played now, or he stood to lose everything.
Gederus reached the bank and hauled him free of the torrent. Turning to hurry onward, he realized Rufinius still held him by the arm.
“Give me the pendant.”
“What?”
“Please.” He held out a hand, the fingers flexing impatiently. “I need it.”
Gederus pressed a protective hand to his chest. “What for?”
There was a splash as the first of the Silures entered the river.
“Just give it to me!” he shrieked.
Gederus pulled away, his
countenance hardening.
“I don’t know what you’re playing at, but if you don’t come with me now I’ll cut you down and carry your corpse home.”
“Then do it!” With fumbling fingers, Rufinius drew his sword. “Fight me for it.”
Gederus looked him over and for an instant might even have accepted the offer, but a glance at the opposite bank was enough to convince him to shake his head and step away.
And that was when Rufinius slashed open his cheek.
The two men staggered apart, eyes wide. Rufinius felt his hands begin to shake while, with deliberate calm, Gederus drew his sword and leveled it at his friend’s head.
“Do you really want to do this?”
Rufinius held his ground. “Yes. Do you?”
The big man hesitated and Rufinius made his move. Another darting slash, a twist, and he felt something wet burst along the edge of his blade. Gederus fell against him, throwing an arm around his shoulder and almost bearing them both to the ground. His mouth worked to take in air but only succeeded in producing red froth. Then he slumped to the ground and lay still.
Rufinius was still kneeling over the body when the first of the Silures reached him and, as the sediments of personality were pared away again by the purity of battle, he realized that something had changed. It almost didn’t matter what they did to him now; he had played the game and won. And yet, somehow, he fought, long and hard and well, until at last he stood alone, the master of a crop of bodies lying open to the rain.
When it was done he re-sheathed his sword, fastened the pendant around his neck and began the long task of dragging his friend’s corpse back to the fortress.
****
She was waiting for him in the lumber yard, the great stacks of moldering timber forming a narrow alleyway that screened them from the activity of the rest of the fortress. She was younger than he remembered, her features stronger, more handsome. There was something of the blush of motherhood about her.
The Phantom Queen Awakes Page 12
