Lucius thought of his wife, and how she would see the same stars as he. Orion fading from the sky as she went outside to bring in the new-laid eggs in her white apron, and the sun rising in the early morning over that gentle Dumnonian valley. His children, Cadoc and little Ailsa, herding the chickens out into the yard with hazel twigs, their big brown eyes serious and intent, chattering to each other all the time. He smiled in the darkness, felt his beating heart. He saw the clear, trickling stream that ran down to the grey Celtic sea; the hillsides of lush meadows, full of plump white cattle, and the high ridges crested with ancient oakwoods. That country knew nothing of war and killing. His wife and children had never seen so much as a sword drawn in anger, let alone the foul aftermath of battle. It was right that it should be so. But for the future of his country, now, beyond the frontier of an enfeebled Rome, with tales of those brutal Saxon pirates drawing ever closer . . . He should be there, with them. He feared for everything that was.
Before he had departed from Isca Dumnoniorum to join the waiting ships at anchor in the estuary, with the last few threadbare centuries of the once mighty Legio II ‘Augusta’, he had taken her in his arms and they had sworn that they would look at the moon and the stars every evening and every morning, wherever they were, and their love would fly to each other through the night air, far apart as they were, over whatever endless plains and mountains and deserts might separate them. Whatever lands might lie between them, the same sun and moon shone down on them both. Lucius gazed up at the crescent moon, and prayed his prayer of deepest longing.
Then the soldiers returned to their camp, and slept under their blankets like newborn babes.
4
THE FOREST
The next morning Lucius washed in the river again, and saw the brilliant flash of a bee-eater flitting over the wide grasslands beyond. He crossed himself and muttered a prayer. If bees were lucky, what did a bee-eater mean?
He returned to see a fast-riding messenger of the imperial cursus pulling up outside the camp. He went over to ask him what the message was. The expressionless rider shook his head. ‘This is for Count Heraclian only.’
Lucius shrugged and allowed the rider to dismount and go to Heraclian’s tent.
A few minutes later he reappeared, remounted and vanished back down the track.
Heraclian informed Lucius that the Palatine Guard would ride in the van again from now on.
They ate bacon and hardtack and broke camp and rode on. They ascended out of the valley and onto the track again. They rode over further rough plains, sunparched and bare, dotted only with the occasional broom or kermes oak, the air heady and aromatic with juniper and wild thyme. They rode on until mid-afternoon over the parched tableland. Storm clouds began to mass again to the south, but still the storm did not break. The air was hot and oppressive, even in these mountains. Then they began a slow descent, when the track entered a dense pine forest.
Everything was dark and claustrophobic, and the heavy, thundery atmosphere that had haunted them on the day they left Rome had returned. Surely a storm must break now. And in the darkness of the forest, the weight and silence of the brooding summer air felt more ominous still. Some of the horses grew skittish and rolled their eyes to left and right of the narrow track. They showed their frightened whites, and their ears flicked furiously, their nostrils flaring for danger, for they could see nothing among the dense, dark trees that crowded in like malevolent sentries on either side of the track.
Lucius noticed Marco gazing intently into the forest to their left as they rode. He followed the direction of his gaze. ‘What is it, Centurion?’
Marco shook his head. ‘Nothing.’
They said no more.
Count Heraclian, riding with his Palatine Guard at the head of the column again, found himself thinking of Varus and his legions in the dark Teutoburg Forest, even though they were still in the heart of Italy. There was no safety left in Italy. He found himself thinking, too, of Stilicho. Sometimes, he longed for the company and the steely optimism of that man, that murdered hero of Rome, whom he had always resented and whose killing he had commanded and condoned. Worst of all, he knew himself to be a weak man. He knew also that it was the most dreadful thing for any man to feel. To be a galley-slave, to be crucified, to be the ‘entertainment’ in a show of wild beasts - these things were as nothing to the torment of waking each morning and knowing yourself to have a weak and timorous spirit, beneath your shell of resplendent bronze and scarlet. Heraclian tightened his hold on the reins and rode on.
The dark pine trees almost met over their heads, and what slender sky they could see between them was as heavy and grey as a shield. It was getting so dark that they could hardly pick out the track before them, when suddenly everything was illuminated in a stab of forked lightning which struck the forest perilously close to the track. A clap of thunder followed only a fraction of a second after, showing how closely the lightning had missed the column itself. The horses whinnied and reared, and their riders reined them in with savage cries.
In the creaking Liburnian carriage, its ornate gilding and its swathes of crimson curtains seeming ever more ridiculous in this harsh and ominous landscape, Olympian actually reached out and snatched Attila’s arm for comfort, giving a gasp of fright as the bolt of lightning detonated close by in the forest. The boy carefully detached himself.
‘But we should be safe enough under the tall trees,’ stammered Olympian.
He sounded as if he was complaining about the lightning, about the way things were, petulantly, to the gods who made the storm. The mark of deepest foolishness. Attila smiled to himself.
Olympian could not understand the Hun boy. He smiled often - that wolfish grin - and yet there was no happiness in it. He was full of anger, even hatred. He smiled like a little god overseeing the sacrifice.
Count Heraclian signalled that the column should ride on, and they did so grimly. Experienced soldiers like Marco and Lucius lowered their spears, and took off their iron helmets, even if it did mean getting a soaking. But pity the standard-bearer in a storm. No lowering that for safety’s sake. Poor bugger was a human lightning-rod.
A chill wind had arisen, tossing the branches of the trees about above their heads, and whipping their cloaks round them. And then it began to rain, great gobbets of water smacking down on their heads and shoulders and drumming on the roofs of the carriages housing the lucky few. After the initial noisy cloudburst, the raindrops grew finer, and gusted down in an unbroken sheet, and the soldiers at the front of the column could barely see their way forward though the veils of water. In their carriage towards the back, Genseric and Beric finally woke up. Olympian crossed himself furiously, and throughout the column soldiers and officers variously crossed themselves in the name of Christ, or made promises of future sacrifices to Mithras or Jupiter, should they reach Ravenna safely. Not a few of them made vows and promises to all three gods. No point not spreading your bets, when the stake is always the same.
The rain pelted down and slicked their hair to their heads, and plastered their red woollen cloaks to their shoulders, and the horses’ manes clung to their withers and streamed with chill mountain rain. Puddles formed quickly on the dry summer track, at first as hard and unyielding as concrete, and then turning to yellowish, unctuous mud. Men and horses alike bowed their heads in obedience and fear and exhaustion to the superior force of the storm and the gods of the storm, and they rode on.
But Attila leant out of his carriage window and grinned into the rain.
‘Back inside, boy,’ scolded Olympian. ‘Draw the curtains.’
The boy ignored him.
Every other man in that column felt that the storm was around and about him like a raging animal, threatening to extinguish him with a single toss of its whitelight horns. But Attila knew that the storm ran through him, and that he was a part of it, and it could do him no harm. Every other man, huddled in his own private universe, felt smaller in the face of the storm: less powerful, th
reatened, diminished. But the boy felt stronger, greater, more powerful: one with the thunder, one with the universe. And looking at him, and seeing something of this truth in him, something unnatural, Olympian closed his eyes and crossed himself again.
Attila grinned out into the rain and into the black rain-drenched forest that closed in around them. When another terrific bolt of lightning hit the pines nearby, and sent one crashing to the ground in a cloudburst of sparks and smoke and brief flame, and the horses throughout the column had to be kicked hard and reined in tight as they skittered to left and right with white and rolling eyes, ears pressed back, and every other man there crossed himself and worked his lips again in furious prayer, Attila only gazed in rapture into the forest and upwards into the chaos of the dark and angry heavens and prayed, Astur, my father . . . Lord of the Storm . . .
Then a fork of lightning hit Beric and Genseric’s carriage immediately behind them.
As is the unpredictable way with lightning, it left the main carriage untouched but burst the leather straps that supported it, and the entire unwieldy apparatus buckled in the middle and sank down upon its axles. Then the back axle broke with a terrific crack. The terrified horses whinnied and reared and tried to break free, but they were still yoked implacably to the shattered carriage. The coachman lashed them down again and they subsided into nervy silence.
Gradually the rest of the column ahead slowed and then stopped, and the two mounted guards who rode alongside Olympian’s carriage wheeled and turned back to inspect the damage. They quickly concluded that the broken car would have to be pushed off the road into the forest, and the two Vandal princes would have to pack into the carriage ahead.
At that moment, Attila looked round and saw that Olympian was sitting forward, curiously hunched, with an arrow’s shaft and fletching sticking out of his vast belly. The eunuch was clutching his flesh bunched up around the arrow, and muttering, ‘I’ve been shot!’ Then he looked up at the boy and said, ‘I’ve been quite appallingly shot!’
‘It does look like it,’ Attila agreed.
Much of the arrow was still visible, however, and the boy reckoned that only an inch or two, including the head, had gone into the eunuch’s belly. Given his bulk, that would almost certainly make it only a minor flesh wound. He spared the poor man a glance of very momentary pity, and then leant out again. To the side of the window, sure enough, was another arrow embedded in the gilded woodwork of the carriage wall. As he watched, more arrows arced silently out of the dark forest and the rain, like eerie messengers from another world. Evidently the rain had done little to dampen their unseen enemies’ bowstrings just yet. One arrow struck a horse at the top of its leg; another went through a trooper’s throat and he reeled forward on his horse, clutching its neck and gargling blood all over its rain-sodden mane.
‘We’re under attack!’ cried a young optio. ‘From the left! Second squadron, to me!’
The eight cavalrymen turned and began to force their way into the dense forest, hacking at the low, spindly pine branches with their swords.
Lucius came galloping back alongside the column and reined in Tugha Bàn furiously, her front hooves slithering forwards in the yellow mud. He was apparently oblivious of the flying arrows.
‘Dismount, you fucking idiots!’ he roared. ‘Get off your horses and use your fucking legs. We’re under attack from left and right, in case you hadn’t fucking noticed. And you lot, get this fucking thing off the road - now!’
Immediately the soldiers obeyed. The horses were cut loose from the shattered carriage and reined in by fresh cavalrymen called up from behind. An arrow thumped into Lucius’ leather saddle just below his thigh, but he reached down and snapped it off without even looking down. He tossed the shaft contemptuously aside and continued to bellow commands. From the front of the column and Count Heraclian came no sign of life at all.
The broken carriage was levered and poled off the side of the road, where it crashed heavily into the trunk of a tall pine and fell still.
‘You two buggers,’ Lucius yelled at the startled Vandal princes, ‘get in the car in front!’
Beric and Genseric, huddled in their cloaks, ran forward to join the next carriage.
Lucius wheeled his horse again and glared into the rain from under the brow of his helmet. ‘Jesus, what a farce. They’re only bandits, for Christ’s sake. Fucking amateurs.’
‘Under attack again!’ yelled Marco, reining to a violent stop beside him. ‘I don’t fucking believe this.’
‘Me neither,’ Lucius shouted.
‘Remnants of the last lot?’
Lucius shook his head. ‘These are no ex-soldiers. They’re firing from both sides.’
Even as he spoke, arrows were slamming into shields and carriage walls around them, but the two soldiers ignored them.
‘Anyone would think,’ said Lucius, ‘that somebody didn’t want us to get to Ravenna.’
‘Is Count Heraclian . . . ?’ asked Marco.
Lucius pushed himself up in his saddle and craned to see if there was any sign of decisive action from the front of the column yet. He sat down again. ‘Jupiter’s balls,’ he breathed with exasperation. ‘What we have here is, in technical army parlance, a bunch of fucking amateurs. And we’re running around like ants on an anthill.’ He reined his horse round angrily again and started bawling fresh orders.
‘OK, you, Ops, get twenty men, on fucking foot, and get into those trees and slot those bastards. And you there, Trooper Shit-for-Brains, dismount the rear two squadrons and do the same on the right. I don’t want to see any more arrows coming out of that forest there by the time I count to ten.’
The tough-looking trooper and two more squadrons quickly formed up on foot.
‘Come along then, ladies!’ he addressed them cheerfully. ‘Playtime in the woods. Anything you find alive, cut its guts out and hang ’em off the nearest tree.’
He and his men vanished into the trees, and soon there came loud cries and screams from the forest. Another bandit gang was indeed being despatched.
Lucius rode back and stared in at Olympian and Attila.
‘Is it bandits again?’ wailed Olympian. ‘And ex-gladiators too?’
‘Yeah, yeah, whatever,’ growled Lucius. ‘I’m quaking in my boots. Fucking amateurs.’ He glared angrily down at the eunuch and Attila from his skittish horse. ‘Trained soldiers attack a marching column from one flank only. Fucking amateurs attack from both sides simultanously.’ He leant over and spat. ‘And why do you think that might be?’
Olympian groaned that he had no idea. The boy thought for a moment and then said, ‘Because they might just as likely be shooting across into each other.’
‘But, my good man,’ wailed Olympian indignantly, scarcely able to believe his ears that this conversation about military tactics was taking place, while he had an actual arrow embedded in his person, and was actually bleeding, slightly. ‘But, my good man, I am wounded!’
Lucius flung open the carriage door and leant in. ‘One in the gut, eh? Lift your robe up.’
‘I couldn’t possibly countenance such—’
Lucius leant forward and nicked the eunuch’s robe open neatly with his swordpoint. The head of the arrow was in fact buried only half an inch into the eunuch’s rolls of flesh, and the barbs were visible under the skin.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Shallow breaths - stop the arrowhead going in deeper. And clench your teeth.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said,’ repeated Lucius - he reached forward, grabbed the arrow just behind the head with his fist, and gave it a sharp tug; with an unpleasant slurping sound, the arrowhead came free of the eunuch’s stomach and Olympian began to bleed profusely - ‘clench your teeth. Ah well, too late now. It’s out anyhow. Get some pressure on that wound, and we’ll clean you up when we get out of this bloody ruckus.’
But Olympian had fainted.
Lucius looked at Attila. ‘Looks like you’ve got a job to do.’
> ‘You’re kidding.’
The lieutenant shook his head. ‘Just till he comes round again. Lard-arse like that will have sluggish blood - it’ll soon clot. But till then, keep your hand pressed on the wound.’ He punched the boy on his arm. ‘Tough job, I know, but someone’s gotta do it.’
And then he was away into the rain, bawling at the top of his voice to get the column organised.
Attila stared at the unconscious eunuch, blood flowing freely from the hole in his belly, and thought for a moment. Then he leant over and ripped a wide strip of silk from the bottom of Olympian’s priceless blue robe, passed it round the back of the vast, sweat-soaked waist, and tied it in front. But being silk, it was soon saturated in blood, so he made a pad from his own linen sleeve, though he didn’t think lard-arse deserved it. He ripped the robe open a little wider and bound this in a compress tightly under the silk bandage. He watched for a few moments, and, after absorbing a little more blood, the white linen showed no more sign of flow.
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