‘It’s good,’ he said.
The lieutenant smiled. ‘Now mind how you travel,’ he said.
Attila stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’
Lucius gestured impatiently towards the hills beyond. ‘Time you were off, lad.’
‘You’re letting me go?’
He sighed. ‘And I thought you were quick-witted. Yes, I’m letting you go.’
‘Why?’
The lieutenant hesitated. ‘You might be safer on your own. Not with the column.’
‘Won’t you . . . Won’t you get into trouble?’
The question was ignored.
‘Travel by night if you can. The moon’s only crescent now but use it when it comes up full. The country people are all right, but remember that most of the shepherds are part-time bandits as well. Or they might take fancy to you in quite another way, if you get my meaning - something a bit exotic. So steer clear of them, I would. Don’t use the sword unless you have to. Otherwise, keep it hidden under your cloak. Look poor, or even better, mad. No one bothers to rob a madman.’
The boy nodded.
‘Shake,’ said the lieutenant.
The boy held out his hand.
‘Your sword-hand, dummy.’
‘Oh, sorry.’
The boy held out his right hand, and they shook.
‘How do I know you might not stab me in mid-shake? You’re no real friend of Rome, are you?’
Attila grinned.
‘Right,’ said Lucius, ‘now bugger off. I never want to see you again.’
‘Me neither,’ said the boy. He grinned up at the tall lieutenant again, one last time, shielding his eyes against the sun. Then he turned away and started to jog-trot down the rows of vines and into the field beyond. At the last minute he turned and called back, ‘I’d go back to Britain if I were you! Rome’s all done!’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Lucius called back, waving him away. ‘Watch out for yourself.’
The boy ran up through the neighbouring meadow and over the crest of the hill and turned back and waved one last time and was gone.
Lucius walked back to his horse, remounted and rode back towards the forest.
5
CLOACA MAXIMA
‘Well?’ said Marco.
Lucius fell in beside him. ‘He got away.’
Marco nodded. ‘Thought he might.’
‘Get anything out of the captives?’
‘General Heraclian ordered us to let them flee. Said it wasn’t worth risking our necks for.’
‘Did he indeed?’
‘He did. One thing we learnt, though: they spoke good Latin. Fluent, in fact.’
Lucius frowned. ‘Why shouldn’t they?’
‘Well, they were Goths.’
Lucius reined his horse to a halt. ‘They were what?’
‘A Gothic war-band.’
Lucius stared ahead between Tugha Bàn’s flicking ears. This was making less than no sense. ‘Where’s Heraclian now?’
Marco harrumphed. ‘He and the Palatine have gone on ahead, along with all the other hostages, mounted up now. In fact, we’ve lost sight of them. For some reason we’re stuck with the carriages.’
‘The fat eunuch?’
‘Gone, too.’
‘What, mounted? How . . . ?’
‘Don’t ask. It wasn’t a pretty sight.’
‘But as far as they know we’ve still got Attila?’
‘As far as they know.’
Lucius kicked his horse forwards again and they rode on in pensive silence for a while.
Then Marco said, ‘Permission to, sir?’
Lucius nodded.
‘Well, sir, do you ever get the feeling somebody doesn’t want us to get to Ravenna?’
Lucius shook his head. ‘I don’t know what I think. I don’t know what the hell’s going on. One thing I do know: I’m glad I’m just a poor, dumb bonehead of a soldier. Not a bloody politician.’
His centurion grinned.
When it became clear to Lucius that they had lost the Palatine Guard for good, he sent two of his men on for reinforcements. They were to ride forward at all speed to the next main road and imperial cursus station, and there send out for more reinforcements. From Ravenna, if need be.
‘You think we’re going to be attacked again?’ asked Marco quietly.
‘I know we are. So do you. In fact,’ said Lucius, looking at his depleted column: forty cavalrymen, a handful of wounded, and two lumbering great Liburnian cars. ‘In fact, we are in serious trouble.’ He turned back to Marco. ‘But keep it under your helmet.’
They had ridden for about a further half an hour when the column shuddered to a halt.
The two troopers hung from a branch across the road. They had been stripped naked and then flayed. One had had his right hand cut off and stuffed in his mouth, his fingers splayed obscenely over his raw and bloody face. The other’s mouth was stuffed with his own genitals.
‘Cut them down,’ ordered Lucius quietly.
They were lowered into blankets and buried at the side of the road.
Lucius addressed his horror-stricken men, trying his best to keep the horror out of his voice and eyes. He told them they were in deep shit. He told them they were up to their eyeballs in the Cloaca Maxima. He told them he didn’t have a clue what was going on, and they might not survive at all, let alone get to Ravenna. But they must keep together, and then they’d have a chance.
‘Don’t start running,’ he said. ‘We’ve been through worse than this before.’
The men knew their lieutenant of old. They set their faces grimly, shouldered their shields, hefted their spears, and with renewed resolve the column moved on.
Attila had already stolen a mule.
He had crept into a little farmyard in late afternoon, and set the ducks quacking furiously at his intrusion. But nobody stirred. An ancient, fly-blown mule was standing sullenly in the shade of a stone barn, tethered to a fence. Attila untied the frayed old rope and began to lead the animal out of the farmyard as silently as he could. The cobbles were thick with straw, so the boy and the mule made little sound.
There was a narrow window at the end of the barn, and he could hear noises inside. Unable to resist the risk, he turned the mule alongside the barn wall and hoisted himself up on its back to peer in through the window. The scene within was lit by a slash of late afternoon sunlight coming in through the open doorway.
An older man was bucking up and down in the hay, naked but for his shirt, while underneath him lay a young girl on her back, similarly undressed. There must have been thirty years between them. Maybe they were father and daughter. Such things were known to be as common as sunshine in these remote rural parts, and the long, lazy hours of summer had to be passed somehow. The girl seemed to be enjoying it well enough, anyway, judging from the urgency of her thrusts beneath him, and from the give-away curling of her toes, and from her sweat-streaked face, and from the little gasps that came from her open mouth. The boy felt the warmth of the mule underneath him and a stir of hot longing in his belly and below, and he slid dry-mouthed and wondering from the ancient and indifferent mule and led it silently out of the farmyard. He draped the frayed rope over its withers for a rein, hauled himself up again, using a fence post for lift, and sat astride its bristly, mud-flecked back and rode away.
He rode on down the valley into a wide champaign country, through tall grasslands and meadows still bright with the last flowers of the year, crown daisies and mayweed, centaury, yarrow and feverfew.
He should have sensed them; or he should have taken note of what his senses told him. But now he was away from the column and free at last, with nothing between him and his far, beloved homeland - so he thought. It made him careless, light-hearted, light-headed. He even whistled as he rode.
He should have noticed his sullen mount’s ears flicking back and forth. He should have heard the muffled sounds of pots and pans clanging, should have smelt the woodsmoke, and the unmistakable smell o
f a camp of men and horses. But he rode down through the meadow with his legs hanging loose and his hands loose on the rope, whistling like the boy he was. When he rode round the end of the copse he saw before him a camp of some two hundred men. Tents, campfires, horses tethered to stakes. And no more than a hundred yards between them.
One of the men happened to look up from where he was kindling his campfire, and stared. He stood up and stared some more. Then he turned to his comrades lounging near the tent.
‘Well, would you look at that?’ he said.
They looked, and saw at the far edge of the meadow, the tousled-looking boy with the unmistakable slanted eyes and the blue tattooed scars on his cheeks. They scrambled to their feet in an instant.
‘The lamb walks straight into the lion’s jaws,’ said another.
They grinned.
Then they scrambled fast for their horses as they saw the boy wheel his ancient mule round and urge it forward into a trot as hard as he could.
He wouldn’t get far. But they didn’t want to lose him again.
Lucius was becoming more anxious with every mile they covered, though he betrayed nothing to his men. Now the sun was going down, and they still hadn’t struck camp. The terrain was difficult. They had passed through dense woods, and emerged onto a flat but rocky plateau, surrounded on three sides by dark forest and on the fourth by a steep drop into the valley. It was no place for a secure camp, but if they went on they’d be in deep forest again. The light was failing fast, and his men were exhausted. So, for that matter, was he.
Halfway across the plateau, he raised his hand and called a halt. Something had caught his eye in the trees ahead, maybe half a mile away. Marco stopped beside him.
‘See anything?’
‘No, sir.’
They stared a little longer. They were about to move forward again when an unlikely figure emerged from the shadows of the trees and came trotting furiously towards them. No more than trotting, but there was an urgency to it all the same. The mount was an ancient, dusty mule, and the boy who clung to its bony back was jolted around like a rag doll. But he clung on with fierce determination, kicking his heels into the mule’s skinny flanks all the way.
‘Can’t shake this one off even if we wanted to,’ growled Ops close behind. ‘He’s like a nasty dose of Syrian clap, he is.’
As the boy drew closer they could see the fear in his eyes. He came to a panting halt before them at last, his mule wheezing beneath him as if it were about to expire where it stood. The boy twisted round to look back into the trees. He could see nothing. He turned back and collapsed, gasping, along his ungainly mount.
‘Back so soon?’ said Lucius. ‘What’s up?’
The boy hauled himself upright. His face was streaked with grime and sweat. ‘They’re coming this way.’
‘Who?’
Attila shook his head. ‘I don’t know. But it’s me they want.’
‘You?’
‘I don’t know why.’
‘Me neither,’ growled Ops.
‘Shut it, Decurion,’ said Marco. ‘Have you had that arm of yours stitched up yet?’
Ops shifted uncomfortably in his saddle. ‘Will soon, sir.’
Marco shook his head. It was a standing joke in the century that, while Ops was quite happy to face a line of howling Picts and not flinch, he hated needles.
Marco turned back to Attila.
Shielding his eyes from the setting sun, the boy looked up at the two grim-faced Roman officers in their tall, scarlet-plumed helmets. ‘I thought I might be able to outride them, but . . .’
Lucius shook his head, smiling at the thought. That mule couldn’t outride a lame tortoise. ‘Not a chance. They’d track you, anyway.’
The boy lowered his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, almost whispering.
It was Marco who replied, leaning down a little to the boy’s level, his bear-like growl softened for once. ‘Sorry’s got nothing to do with it, lad. You’re our responsibility, and any bunch of marauding barbarians, begging your pardon and all that, that wants to get their hands on you, is going to have to come and take you. Without our permission. Is that understood?’
The boy nodded. ‘Understood.’
Marco straightened his back again. ‘So. How many of them?’
The boy had finally got his breath back. ‘Two hundred? Maybe twice as many horses, and fresh-looking.’
Once again, Lucius admired the boy’s military eye. But the situation was desperate. It would take the Goths only a matter of minutes to saddle up, don their armour and ride out after him. He turned to Marco.
‘I know, I know,’ said the centurion.
Lucius wheeled back and roared at the column. ‘Century, dismount! Packs off, spades out, picks at the ready. There’s work to do.’
Even after eight years of service, he could still be impressed by the speed and stamina of his men. Soon they had gouged a circular trench out of the ground deep enough to trip a horse and rider, and thrown up an earth-and-stone rampart within. They left only a narrow opening, wide enough for a single mounted man. Exhausted, caked with sweat and dust, every muscle in their bodies burning, they set to beating the rampart solid with the flat of their spades, and putting up a rough but effective stockade on top. Not a man complained. Not a man went slow. Not a man stopped for water till the work was done. Even Ops, with his wounded arm and his face still pale with blood-loss, slaved as hard as the rest of them. Even that skinny new lad Salcus set to with a will. And Marco as well. Lucius looked them over, and thought of the two hundred Gothic horsemen coming their way. And for the sake of this one inscrutable boy, all their lives would be spared. But he and his men had a job to do, and not a man here would shirk it. He knew them well enough. The Caligatae: the Boots, the Iron Hats, Marius’ Mules, the Poor Bloody Infantry. He wouldn’t swap his century - what was left of his century - for any other band of men in the world.
He scanned the treeline continually, but there was still no sign of their attackers. What was taking them so long?
‘Use the wagons, too,’ said a voice.
Lucius looked round. It was the boy.
He frowned. ‘I don’t usually take tactical advice from twelve-year-olds, but . . .’
‘Fourteen.’
‘Whatever.’
Lucius considered again. Then he started giving orders for the two carriages to be dragged into the defensive circle.
The boy interrupted again. ‘On their sides. You need to tip ’em over.’
Lucius growled, ‘You’re beginning to try my patience, boy.’
But Attila was unperturbed. ‘Leave ’em upright and it’s the easiest thing in the world for your enemy to come in close under cover, lasso them, hitch them up to a team of horses and just trundle them away on their own wheels. And then your circle’s wide open. Tip ’em over on their sides and they won’t budge.’
Lucius harrumphed. ‘It’s not the Roman way.’
The boy grinned. ‘No, it’s the Hun way. Oh, and tip ’em over with the wheels on the inside, so they can’t use ’em for climbing.’
So Lucius barked further orders, and soon the two great gilded carriages were roped up to teams of straining horses. With a lot of creaking and cursing, and then an almighty crash, they toppled over into the dust. Lucius had to admit they made a useful extra barrier round about one-third of the circle. And with only forty men to defend the perimeter, they needed all the extra help they could get.
They drove the horses in through the narrow gateway, along with the boy’s rickety stolen mule, tethered them in the centre, and closed the gap off with a further rank of bristling staves. Lucius had a quiet word in Tugha Bàn’s twitching ear, and she settled down on her hooves and lowered her head to sleep.
Silence settled over the circle of men.
A few had gathered enough kindling to light a couple of small campfires, and they sat cross-legged in the flickering orange firelight, taking careful swigs of water and mouthfuls of ground-u
p hardtack. It wasn’t much, but it was all they had left. None of them felt much like leaving the circle to do a bit of twilight hunting. The sun was almost gone, and darkness was settling over the face of the world. The little summer birds were already sleeping with open eyes in the forest, and in the valleys below the cattle were settling into silence for the night.
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