If you are well, Dominus, I can ask the gods for no more.
The words mocked him. Already he had asked the gods for much. There were no rings on his hands, no bracelets on his wrists. He had given all his fine things to the gods for his safety. Now he must ask for more.
It all made sense. At the outset, the storm in the Euxine that had driven them to the island of Leuce had been divinely ordained. It had been a test, and they had failed. They had not put their trust in the gods and gone back aboard the warship. They had defied the divine prohibition and spent the night on the island. They had brought down on themselves the implacable anger of Achilles. It all stemmed from that: the murderous fight in the bar, the attack on Olbia, nearly being crushed by the raft of logs on the Hypanis, the Goths on the Borysthenes, the Brondings off the Vistula and the tempest in the Suebian Sea. Time and again souls had been snatched from the midst of life, those without the coin to pay the ferryman condemned to wander for eternity.
Amantius knew the anger of Achilles was not played out. It would fall on them again when Unferth came for his revenge. Amantius’s possessions had all gone to the gods. Desperate need had made him bold. Eunuchs were always suspected of peculation. To cover his tracks he had hidden a few of the coins he had taken from the diplomatic gifts in the possessions of the Vandal called Rikiar and in the paltry things of one of Zeno’s slaves. The former had the reputation of a thief, and Zeno habitually thought the worst of his servants. Amantius had made the offering in the lake, the nearest thing he could find to a place he recognized as sacred. To salve his conscience, he had included both of them in his prayers.
Publius Egnatius Amantius to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Censorinus, Praetorian Prefect …
What did it matter? There was nothing to say. There was no way to send the report anyway. No one would ever know the things that happened on this doomed embassy.
Amantius got up, secured the writing materials to his belt. He smoothed down the barbarian tunic and trousers he was reduced to wearing. It was time to get back for the leaving feast.
Ballista waited outside in the dark under the low eaves of the hall. They had followed the old custom and drawn lots for who sat where at the feast. The lots had not been kind. Still, he had been surprised when the slave-girl whispered her message.
‘Kadlin.’
She stood in the light from the doorway. She was as he remembered her: tall, slender, standing very straight. Her long hair framed her face, her very dark eyes.
‘Over here.’
She looked back into the hall, and quickly all around, before stepping into the dark passage between the wall and the overhanging thatch.
He took her hand and drew her further away from the light.
They stopped behind a pile of stacked logs. He let go of her hand. She moved a little back from him. Her face was a pale oval in the gloom, not much lower than his own. He had forgotten just how tall she was.
‘It has been a long time,’ he said.
‘A very long time.’ He sensed as much as saw her smile.
‘You look well.’ After all these years, he found nothing but banalities to say.
‘Your have broken your nose and teeth.’
She moved towards him. She was very close, almost touching. He could smell her perfume, her breath, the warmth of her body.
‘Did you …’ What did he want to say? Did you miss me? You know I did not want to go. Do you still love me? He could not say any of them.
Her hand came up, touched his face. She was smiling again, her eyes bright in the gloom. ‘How long have you been waiting out here?’
‘Long enough.’ He was smiling, too. ‘You took your time.’
‘What?’
‘The slave-girl, your message.’
She stepped away. ‘I sent you no message. Quick, we must go back.’
As he followed her into the light, Oslac came out from the hall.
Kadlin half turned to Ballista. ‘Thank you for escorting me.’ She spoke formally. ‘I hope we will have a chance to speak before you leave tomorrow.’ She turned back to her husband.
Oslac stood very still, his eyes moving between the two of them.
‘Kadlin.’ Ballista nodded to his brother. ‘Oslac.’
Ballista could not make out Oslac’s words as he walked back into the hall, but the tone of interrogation was unmistakable. Oslac was a jealous man; all the Himlings were. If he harmed her, he would answer for it.
XXVIII
The Inlet of Norvasund on the Cimbric Peninsula
The forest was full of the sounds of axes biting into hardwood, the smells of fresh-cut timber, disturbed earth and animal dung. Ballista walked down towards the inlet of Norvasund. Sixty men were employed cutting down trees. They had been working in shifts for three days. Every draught animal, all the plough horses and oxen from miles around on the east coast of the Cimbric peninsula, had been gathered. Harnessed in teams, they hauled the felled trees. Ballista stopped to watch one begin its short but laborious journey to the water. The mighty oak lay entire and untrimmed on the ground. Its crown fanned up to the sky, the leaves still green and vigorous. Stout ropes lashed around the severed trunk and lower branches ran to the complicated harnesses of the twenty waiting bullocks. The man in charge gave the command. The long whips of the drovers flicked out. Bellowing with pain and effort, the oxen strained against their traces. For a moment, the trunk did not move. The whips snapped again, and men shouted. With a deep rending sound, punctuated by the sharp cracks of breaking boughs, the huge oak inched forward on to the waiting rollers. Dust billowed up from the dragging foliage. The gentle incline was with them, but it would take hours before the oak reached the water.
Ballista went on down to the strand. The inlet of Norvasund ran north-west into the Cimbric peninsula. Some way inland from the sea, a promontory on the western side, the far side from where Ballista stood, narrowed the water to less than four hundred paces. He surveyed the progress of his defences. The seaward line of some hundred vertical poles already stretched all the way across, hammered down hard and roped together. The first dozen oaks were braced to them, in a row, their crowns all to the east. Two longboats were towing the next into position. The crew of another vessel were working along, fixing the inner poles, roping the whole barrier together. The final two boats were further out. Their task was to drive individual sharpened stakes in at an angle.
It would be a formidable obstacle to attack from the sea when finished. Some enemy ships should run foul of the outlying stakes, perhaps even tear their bottoms out. The oaks floated low in the water, no more than a foot or so of their trunks above the surface. But their branches would hinder any attempt to ride over them. With archers on both shores and on the five defending longships deployed inside the barrier, any attempt to sever the many binding ropes and breach the structure by towing trees away would bring large numbers of casualties. It would be a formidable obstacle, if it was finished before Unferth arrived. Ballista estimated it would take at least forty oaks. They were only a third of the way there. And it would be as good as useless if the land defences on either side were not completed.
‘Food, Dominus?’ Diocles said.
‘What have you got?’
‘Re-heated stew; not sure what is in it. I think there is some rabbit, some chicken, and definitely cabbage — very good for you, cabbage. There is bread from yesterday.’
‘If there is enough, thank you, yes.’
‘It is not Lucullan, but there is plenty.’
There were eight men, Romans and Olbians together. With Maximus and Tarchon, his two constant shadows, Ballista joined them. The firewood and kindling had already been gathered. Diocles fished out his fire-making kit. He took tinder from a pointed oval wooden case. Using a firesteel, he angled sparks from a special striking stone. With the ease of long practice, he had the fire going in no time at all.
As the food heated, they sat and watched the activity on the water.
‘It is good
your father has so many grown sons, Dominus,’ Diocles said to Ballista. As with everything he did, the young Danubian gave his words a great seriousness.
Ballista made a noise which might have been interpreted as assent.
‘There are enough leaders he can trust to defend several places at once.’
Ballista made no reply, just gazed out over the water.
Diocles stirred the stew, his brow furrowed with earnestness. ‘It has never been that way in the imperium. If a general does well against some barbarians when the emperor is elsewhere, that general’s soldiers insist he takes the purple. It leads to civil war. No matter who wins, the frontiers are stripped of troops, and more barbarians seize their opportunity. If a local Roman commander does well against them, it all starts again.’
Ballista and the others agreed.
Diocles went on. ‘No imperial dynasty has had enough men to cover all the frontiers. Take Valerian. Before the Persians captured him, he could hold the east and Gallienus one of the frontiers in the west. But that left either the Rhine or the Danube in the charge of a child. If Saloninus had not been so young, would the revolt of Postumus have succeeded? Perhaps our emperors should marry several women, breed more sons.’
‘You Romans would have to change your ways,’ Ballista said.
‘As everyone says, it is an age of iron and rust. Perhaps it demands change, even from the mos maiorum.’ At times, Diocles was weightiness personified.
‘In my countries Suania,’ Tarchon said, ‘brother often killing brother, fratricide very good, very popular.’
‘And,’ Maximus interrupted, ‘there is no telling the son will be half the man the father was.’
‘There could be another way,’ Ballista said. ‘If the emperor could find a man to really trust, he could share his power. Then each of them could adopt a younger man of abilities. Four men holding imperial power: one for each of the Euphrates, Danube and Rhine, and one in Rome or somewhere else. They would form something like a collegium of emperors.’
‘Not a fuck of a chance that would last,’ Maximus said.
Diocles said nothing, but looked more serious than normal.
‘You so sure the arse-fucking-cunt Unferth come?’ Tarchon had developed a rare talent for creating compound obscenities in different languages.
‘Yes,’ Ballista said.
‘Come here for fucking sure? Not other fucking Angle place?’
‘No,’ Ballista said. ‘Not other fucking Angle place. No other fucking Angle killed his son.’
‘Fuck, indeed,’ said Tarchon.
‘Yes, fuck, indeed,’ said Maximus.
After they had eaten, Maximus and Tarchon rowed Ballista over to the other side in a skiff. Mord, son of Morcar, and Eadric, son of eorl Eadwine, were waiting. They made their reports. The work was progressing. Nothing too bad had happened that morning: two broken limbs and a near-drowning. With over a thousand men doing heavy work in a desperate hurry, accidents would happen. So far, no one had died.
They walked past the big stacks of planks and up to the low hill where the village had been. Half a dozen other young Angle nobles stood there. In all, twenty had accompanied Ballista. The glamour of serving the war leader who had killed the Roman emperor Quietus with his own hands, who had briefly worn the purple himself and who had now beheaded Widsith Travel-Quick, was strong. Ballista wondered whether the adulation of these young warriors would seem more natural to him if he had spent his life in the north.
Eadric asked if there was anything they could do. Ballista said it would be good if they could all draw back, create a ring around him and by intercepting any messengers give him some time to consider the defences.
Neither Maximus nor Tarchon withdrew, but Ballista was so accustomed to their presence, they did not impinge on his thoughts. He sat in the sun on a pile of wood. Three days before, there had been a village here; now it was a lumberyard. The women, the young and the old had been sent inland to find shelter among the other settlements of the Angles, Chali and Aviones. The able-bodied men had participated in the destruction of their own homes. Now they were labouring at the defences; when Unferth came, they would fight as part of Ballista’s war band. Unlike the young nobles, they had not been trained almost exclusively for war. Many of them would die.
The low, round hill commanded a fine view over the inlet of Norvasund: the still, inner waters to the left and the choppier outer ones to the right which led to the Little Belt between the Cimbric peninsula and the island of Varinsey, and on to the wider ocean. From up here Ballista could see the ships working on the sea barrage, and the vestigial defences appearing on either shore. The plans for the latter were simple. Where the floating barrage came to the shore on the far, eastern side, it would be protected by a semi-circular low ditch and bank, the latter topped by wooden stakes. From the sea barrage a palisade would run forward to meet the earthworks, thus enfilading the former from the land. If anything, the defences on the eastern side were even more basic. A simple palisade running out from the barrage along the waterline — again letting archers shoot along the face of the line of oaks — before snaking back to the hill, where here at the top another palisade would block access to the headland. The demolished houses of the village had provided excellent ready-worked wood.
Ballista worried at a shred of meat caught in his teeth. Water was not an issue. A stream ran into the Norvasund just inland of where the eastern palisade would stand. They were collecting food, but it should not be a problem. Unless completely surrounded, they would be able to draw supplies from the hinterland. They were stockpiling weapons which could kill at a distance — arrows, javelins and stones to throw — and incendiary materials. If there were time, refinements could be added. Sharpened stakes could be concealed in the ditch of the eastern fortlet, and maybe below the water on the west. When the blacksmiths had finished making arrowheads, they could turn to producing caltrops. Both Castricius and Diocles were familiar with torsion artillery. There were skilled carpenters among the Angles. If there were time, perhaps they could build two or three very simple artillery pieces, something similar to the ones he had designed and used a couple of years before when defending Miletus from the Goths.
If there were time … It all returned to that. A chain of beacons stretched across Hedinsey and Varinsey. Ballista had men out in small boats in the northern and southern approaches of the Little Belt. They would have warning: several hours, perhaps as much as two days. Yet that would mean little if the defences were incomplete. If Unferth came now, the plan was for the longships to defend the as yet unblocked section of the Norvasund, the men with Ballista here in the west to make a stand on the hill, and those in the east to force-march around the inlet to join them. If Unferth came now, the plan would allow them to die with honour.
Even if there were time, these defences would not hold for ever. Still — Ballista made an effort to cheer himself — they should not have to hold for long. Oslac’s ships from Varinsey could be here in a day, two at the outside — unless Unferth came with numbers that Oslac could not hope to defeat with just the aid of those already here. In which case, the defences at Norvasund would have to manage until Morcar could sail from Hedinsey to join Oslac. That meant at least two days; at the outside, no more than four. Ballista worked free the bit of gristle, spat it out. Four days; more if the weather was unseasonal.
Mord was walking up around the post holes of a destroyed cottage. The young atheling had his big hunting dog with him.
Tarchon barred Mord’s approach. The dog bounded ahead to Ballista. It had got used to him quickly. It wagged its tail as Ballista rubbed behind its ears.
‘Young prick-arse wants talking,’ Tarchon called.
Ballista waved Mord up. Perhaps he would have to talk to Tarchon about his linguistic inventiveness.
The hunting dog was a fine hound. It looked like a Maremma from the imperium. Morcar must have imported it for his son from the Roman provinces on the Rhine.
‘I a
m sorry, Uncle,’ Mord said. ‘I know you did not want to be disturbed.’
He was far from a bad youth. Ballista wondered what his half-brother thought of his son asking to join this force.
‘Do not worry. What is it?’
‘A man has come in with a prisoner.’
‘What man?’
‘He gave his name as Vandrad.’
Ballista’s chest felt hollow. ‘What does he look like?’
‘Tall … hard to tell. He would not remove his hood.’
Could it be, after all these years?
‘He would not let me search him either.’
That sounded right. An exile caught in Angeln could be killed as an outlaw. He would not let them disarm him or see his face. Surely it could not be him? Even he would not take such a risk. ‘Let him come up, with his prisoner.’
Ballista’s eye was caught by the prisoner. Unlike the others approaching, he was bound, and he stumbled. He was barefoot, and his tunic was in shreds. He had been beaten, probably tortured. If he could stand straight, he would be tall and thin. Despite the dried blood matted in his blond hair and caked on his face, he looked familiar, like someone not seen since childhood.
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