Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  Night was just beginning to release its grip; a clear sky was paling to stone gray. The provisions master’s slave had just brought their rations, so the door of their carriage was unbolted and open. Auriane watched as the camp broke apart in brisk, orderly fashion, amazed anew by how so many men could move in concert, each knowing his small place in the larger order. She’d abandoned her gruel bowl with her porridge half eaten. She felt agitated as the beast that knows the earth is poised to shake.

  The eight-man divisions of each century, working with practiced ease, loaded onto muleback their long, rolled leather tents, the heavy millstones they carried for grinding their wheat. Then they began collecting up the construction tools each man carried on the march—pickax, turf cutters, sickle, and saw—and started stringing mess tins, buckets, clothing bags, and ration sacks onto the stout poles they used for carrying their soldier’s kit. So they could move about with greater ease, they hadn’t yet fastened on mail armor, or taken up helmets and shields. While one soldier from each eight-man unit doused the cookfire before his tent, another scattered a bit of meal onto the wind, as an offering to the local spirits. By the horse lines a row of glossy cavalry mounts, broad backs naked still, awaited the grooms, who worked in pairs as they brought up the heavy saddles and harness. Downstream, slaves were leading the last of the oxen and mules from a final drink at the river. At the end of the via quintana—the wide avenue that sectioned off the rear portion of the camp, separating the legionary tents from the baggage—soldiers rapidly pulled up the sharpened palisade stakes that had been driven into the turf bank thrown up from the defensive ditch they’d dug about the encampment the night before.

  It was a fleeting moment when the palisade was half dismantled and the men had not yet begun to form up in marching order.

  All at once she heard yelps of injury and surprise, accompanied by a reckless hammering of hooves. They issued from the dismantled place in the palisade, several hundred paces down the via quintana.

  Brico sprang down from the reda to investigate, but Auriane caught her arm and dragged her back. In the quarter of the camp where the Second Cohort pitched their tents, men seemed to have broken into riot. Over their angry shouts rose the bass-toned command of a centurion—Get ropes, quick-time, you lackwits, or I’ll break those rampart stakes over your backs.

  The disorder was pressing closer to her carriage as men jostled each other, fighting to escape some threat she could not see. Intrigued, Auriane grasped the side of the reda and pulled herself up.

  Above the brawling men was the dark blur of a horse’s head, whipping this way and that, ears flattened back, its eyes white-ringed and mad. A bristling mane stood up in a stubborn crest. The beast hurled itself about with the ropy looseness of a serpent caught by the tail. As it heaved skyward, ravaging the air with its forehooves, she saw a stallion of brutish conformation—short neck, heavy legs, stunted body. Its sorrel coat, still shaggy from winter, was mottled with bare patches where it was scarred from battles with its own kind. Men dropped to the ground as the stallion’s hind legs ripped out in a manic succession of kicks. The beast wheeled about like a top, spasmed sideways like a dancer on draughts, caught the end-flap of a tent with a hind hoof and ripped it down. Then it bolted, dragging the heavy goathide tent behind it while men dove out of its way.

  Somehow a wild horse had gotten loose in the camp.

  It was remarkable how disruptive this was. Nearly every man of the camp abandoned his appointed task either to join in the effort to subdue the horse, or to scramble off to escape from it. Others rushed to pull their equipment and possessions from the beast’s unpredictable path. Order disintegrated faster than she would have believed possible. She was surprised by how vulnerable the camp’s machinery was to intrusions that were singular and unexpected.

  The horse continued to make its way like some equine puppet jerked about on ropes, whirling this way, frog-leaping that way, animated by demonic music only it could hear.

  “Brico, get out, and get under the carriage,” Auriane said in a low voice. “Quickly, before anyone bolts the door. If it’s set afire you could be trapped inside.”

  “Set afire? Who would set it afire?” Disappointment showed in Brico’s face. She wanted to enjoy the show.

  “Go!”

  “All right, but . . . what of you?”

  “I think the camp has visitors. And they might need my help.”

  Brico seemed trapped in a trance of stubborn puzzlement.

  “Get under it and stay there. Now.”

  Slowly, Brico obeyed, dismayed by the unreachable calm that had overtaken Auriane’s face—she was more warrior than mistress now.

  Neither their guards nor the reda’s mule master were anywhere about, so Auriane once again pulled herself up for a fuller view. The wild horse was hopelessly entangled in trailing tent-ropes, one of which was wound about a tree stump. The frantic animal gathered itself for a final leap, only to be jerked hard to its knees. By this time it had grievously wounded or killed a man; at a distance, two legionaries hurried off, bearing a limp, unmoving comrade.

  Auriane was taut and alert as a runner waiting for a rope to drop.

  From the dense beech wood beyond the camp, where all was still steeped in night-gloom, a trilling arose. At first it was low and unearthly. Then it spread and swelled, intensifying until it was ragged, shrill, and relentless, as disharmonious as shrieking flutes, unnerving as a wasp in the ear. It pressed into the brain like an ice shard. To the soldiers, it was a sound both rabid and barbarous—a song to drive men mad, like the horrible, inchoate noise of the Sirens. Some stopped their ears. The trilling did not seem to issue from multitudes of human throats, but most knew better: This was the dreaded barritus , produced by tribal warriors amplifying their voices against their shields.

  It was the Chattian war cry.

  Auriane heard it as a warm greeting.

  Chapter 29

  Native spears arced up in a mass, numerous as the long grasses. The sky darkened as if dawn had changed its mind. Auriane scuttled beneath the reda, where Brico clung to her like a bear cub to its mother.

  The horrific hail fell everywhere, penetrating soldiers’ packs, clattering off hastily upraised shields, pinning mules to wagons, piercing limbs. The spears came and came, as if from an unquenchable source, thudding bluntly onto the reda’s roof, rocking it crazily. Brico was breathlessly sobbing. Auriane waited patiently through this as terror and rapture flooded through her together. The men of the camp scrambled about as if caught up in many small whirlwinds, seeking swords and javelins. As most had still not put on helmets or mail armor, several dozen paid with their lives.

  A rescue. Auriane had not allowed herself to hope. A crack broke open in her prison wall. The miasmas that had settled on her were blown off as if by a gale. She found herself grabbing for life again.

  From the cries she judged it a force greater than Witgern’s; he must have united his Wolves with other Chattian warbands.

  When the rain of spears began to slacken, Auriane tore off her cloak and wrapped it round Brico to conceal her, while mumbling a word or two of encouragement. Then Auriane crawled from beneath the carriage.

  She lost herself in the chaos. No one had leisure to pay any mind to a tall woman in a belted tunic with loosened hair, an animal glint in the eye, running at a crouch as she flowed among confused soldiers, panicked slaves, heaps of toppled baggage, the wounded struggling along on the ground. She glided unseen behind an optio, second-in-command to a centurion, who was threatening a recruit too slow to get into battle formation. The legionaries saw only their centuries’ signal flags, heard nothing but the shouts of their officers, the deep-throated blasts of the great, curved cornu—the Roman war trumpet—bleating commands in the language of horns, difficult to decipher beneath the competing trill of the Chattian warriors.

  She was carried forth on a wave of fierce exultation. Battle is a door. She would force it wide. Her old forests would close round he
r like the arms of a beloved. This clash of wood and iron was a cauldron in which all would be transformed. She would rejoin Avenahar. She would have Arria brought to her—somehow. When the portals of everything swung wide, improbabilities seemed no more than wicked illusions. Of course, Marcus was well—and he would find her. All these reunitings flowed together in an impossible soup, a stew of things that could not coexist, that suddenly, she believed could be, just because of that joyous, mad trilling. If Witgern has the mettle to do this, what cannot be done?

  The war-trill died off and she knew the attack must have come, though she saw only what was immediately before her. Just ahead, a century’s Capricorn standard sagged, then straightened with the crispness of a salute as men of the First Minervia forged their way forward. On these men’s left flank she saw the Bull emblem of a century of the Eighth Augusta, hoisted above helmeted heads as it closed in tightly beside the men of the First. The camp was rallying from surprise. From these units’ positions, she determined the location of the thickest part of the fighting. She worked her way in that direction as an armored shoulder rammed into her back, a loosed pig darted between her legs, tripping her, a running soldier’s hobnail-booted foot ground hers painfully into the dirt. She came to a row of twenty baggage wagons pulled tightly together to form a firewall against the onslaught. From the shadows beneath one wagon, a crouching camp follower, naked but for her breast band, grotesque with powdered antimony bleeding down her cheeks, watched Auriane with eyes sightless from terror. Auriane got a grip on the slatted side of the nearest wagon. Using its jammed back wheel as a step, she hauled herself up to survey the battle scene.

  Two wagons had caught fire; Auriane was blinded by gusts of stinging smoke. It cleared to reveal, fifty paces off, a furiously churning mass of men, pressed so tightly together it was impossible to tell attacker from defender. She saw at first only the dully gleaming helmets of legionaries, crushed shoulder to shoulder. Then she discerned an irregular line where warrior met soldier, and the scene sorted itself into two waves of men in dreadful collision.

  There they were, startlingly close at hand—long-maned warriors in loose, animal motion, manic and free as the stallion had been, bearing wickerwork shields daubed with red and blue images of Sun and Moon. The Wolf Coats. They were bestial and fearsome with their flapping pelts, swinging hair, naked shoulders, eyes spectral in faces darkened with charcoal and ash. Witgern’s battle standard, a wolf’s head with gaped jaws, bobbed about just above their roiling midst. They fought like wild dogs—for certain, frenzy mead coursed through their blood. She felt a start of amazement when she saw how far they penetrated into the camp. Their “swine’s head” formation had broken up in the charge, and their best fighters had driven a spur into the mass of legionaries, puncturing the Romans’ line like a long nail. In back of them, still spilling forth from the forest, were more warriors with blackened faces and flying hair. Through thickening smoke, she discerned a second battle standard hoisted above the chaos, one she knew only by report—the boar emblem of Sigibert.

  She wanted to shout a victory song.

  A heartbeat later she knew Witgern had made one grave mistake, which he hardly could have foreseen: His spur penetrated the part of the camp where the veterans made a stand. Their lines would hold.

  A tuba, the long, straight horn that relayed centurions’ commands, gave three brassy blasts, and the veterans of the First and the Eighth locked their great, rectangular shields. Their front rank was a moving wall of iron, pressing the native warriors back. On the left flank of these veteran cohorts, the signifer ’s flag wrote a brisk command in air. And from the center ranks, a sheet of javelins shot forth, thrown almost levelly, with such precision they might have erupted from a single war engine. The heavy javelins tore into the mass of Witgern’s men; some penetrated more than one body. It disrupted the onward press of Chattian warriors as if a chasm had opened beneath dozens of them. It caused such horror and distress that some broke and fled. Now Witgern’s wounded formed a barrier that cut off the warriors at the front of his charge from those behind. The veteran cohort continued to push them back, a segmented monster protected, front and sides, by its shining carapace of shields.

  A stray native spear whipped above Auriane’s head, ripping out strands of her hair. She dropped down to save herself, and when she rose up again, for a tantalizingly brief moment she saw him at the forefront of the crush of trapped warriors—Witgern.

  She felt a surge of wild sadness. He cut sweeping swaths with a longsword, fighting independently of his men, like some little god who expects to prevail through his own magic; there was no frenzy in his face, only an adamant calm. His men struggled to stay beside him, but they were being irrevocably pushed back. Witgern seemed to be fighting his way toward her—as though he knew where she was, through some inner sight.

  She hesitated an instant longer, coughing in sooty smoke, searching for the one person she prayed she wouldn’t see—Avenahar.

  Fria and all the hosts of lesser gods, let her not be here. . . .

  But she discerned no unbearded faces among them. While she felt a relief so encompassing that she nearly forgot where she was, organized activity to the west caught her attention: A hundred cavalrymen had formed into three long ranks on their tall, massively-built horses, their lances precisely aligned. They were colorful as a theater play with their dark scarlet cloaks, brazen helmets, gold-plumed horses, their blue signal flags whipping in the wind.

  The camp was collecting its strength. Witgern’s line was overstretched. The time for retreat had come—how quickly predator had become prey. The Wolf Coats at the back of the charge had already begun receding like a swift tide. At the forest line, escape was blocked; there, warriors’ spears were bunched like upright bristles as the Wolf Coats crowded one another in a panicked retreat.

  Now they had no room and no time.

  A cavalry trumpet boomed through the dawn. As one, the cavalrymen’s mounts broke into a menacing, slow-beat canter. They meant to charge into the side of Witgern’s retreat and split it in two. The warriors stranded within the camp would be surrounded and massacred.

  I must cover Witgern’s retreat. Auriane sprang down from the wagon.

  The earthquake she felt when she touched the ground was caused by the hooves of oncoming horses. The wild horse, the tent ropes. She bolted in that direction, darting round knots of men, parting dense smoke; five wagons were now afire. She found the wild horse, lying dead. One tent rope was still wound about a tree stump; she disentangled it from a limp hind leg and ran with it, dragging it across the path the cavalrymen must come. Somewhere behind her, she heard a man cry out—“The woman! She’s broken loose!”—and she dropped behind an overturned ox cart to conceal herself, then rapidly turned over once, to avoid being crushed beneath a backward-rolling medical orderlies’ wagon. Somehow she managed to keep her grip on the tent rope, while mess slaves and grooms hurrying out of the cavalrymen’s path vaulted over her. She came to rest against another tree stump.

  The clamor of hooves was a rockslide rumbling down a mountain.

  An instant before the first rank of tall horsemen rushed by, she pulled hard on the rope and whipped it about the second stump, so it was stretched tight, from stump to stump. Six mounts in the first rank spasmed in mid-stride. The rope snapped, but the rank’s relentless rhythm was broken; broad chestnut and bay hindquarters were pitched skyward. Their riders, too surprised to cry out, were flung over their mounts’ bronze-armored necks. The second and third ranks collapsed into each other, causing a tangle of tumbling horses, mailed men, and cavalry shields. It disrupted the horsemen’s whole front line, as those abreast of them slowed in confusion, for one of the groaning men trapped beneath his struggling horse was the officer who bore their signal-flag.

  Would this give Witgern time to flee off? She sprinted back toward the center of the fighting, flinging herself into the curtains of smoke that veiled much from view, imagining herself a hawk winging through t
urbulent thunderclouds. She did not know it, but four soldiers had been dispatched in pursuit of her.

  Had Witgern had the wit to leave fresh mounts tethered in the wood nearby? If not, the cavalry would hunt his band down like game, until every last man—and woman—was slain.

  Avenahar. . . .

  She snatched a fleeting, smoke-framed view of the Wolf Coats as they shrank into the forest, fencing with spears, scrambling over the bodies of their own. Witgern’s wolf standard trailed the retreat, thrusting itself into the air with jaunty defiance. The long cavalry swords would drop on their necks like scythes, reaping a bloody harvest.

  Find a weapon. Help him.

  Only then did Auriane allow herself to know all hope of her own rescue was gone. But the fury of the moment left no time for grief.

  Her four pursuers lost ground as a crew of ballista-men working to haul a catapult into position blocked their path. While a stubborn drift of smoke obscured her from their view, she stumbled over a fallen legionary soldier, clad only in the coarse woolen tunic they wore beneath their armor and his cold-weather breeches. She knelt beside him and turned him over. There, still in its scabbard, was his short sword; he’d not had time to unsheathe it before the gods bore him off.

  A sword of iron. Her hand hesitated but briefly above the forbidden thing; had she not already drunk deeply of the transforming draughts of battle, she might have deliberated longer.

  Gently, almost fearfully, she eased the soldier’s gladius from its scabbard.