The Mammoth Book of Classical Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  For one befuddled moment Clodius thought it was morning.

  Then his senses began to register conflicting information. Morning in this muddy nowhere was cold and dark, but it was also shouted orders and jangling harness from the Batavian horse-lines nearby, not silence and a single bright flame which hurt his eyes; and certainly not a rougher hand on his shoulder than ever any orderly would have dared to lay.

  This was something else, and because he didn’t want it to be morning he was grateful for that conclusion for a brief additional moment before reality and the camp-major’s parting promises caught up with him.

  Better to have died back there with the others: he rubbed his eyes to clear them of sleep and saw in his mind again the rolling bloodshot eye of the draught horse as he grabbed at its mane . . . that had been the instant of choice when he might have saved himself this agony. Except that it had seemed no choice then, but a natural instinct.

  ‘Come on, then – wake up!’

  The words were as rough and insistent as the hand, and he was unable to react to either with dignity.

  ‘What is it?’ he mumbled thickly, raising himself on an elbow. It wasn’t even near morning, he decided, because he was still light-headed from the wine rather than sickened by it.

  The man with the too-bright lantern raised it higher, driving the shadows over the empty cots onto the wall of the hut beyond them. Now he could see the speaker more clearly, and was surprised and confused by what he saw. It was not one of the officers of the camp-major’s guard, but just another anonymous quartermaster. The depot was crawling with them – leathery veterans with preoccupied faces or self-important fat men with flabby jowls, little monkey clerks dancing attendance – all persons of little account in Clodius’ estimation.

  This was one of the leathery ones, the greyest and most grizzled of them, habitually wrapped in a long mud-splattered cloak and often ridiculously astride a tiny bristling pony.

  A flash of lantern-light on metal behind the grey man caught his attention: yet those were not clerks half-shadowed in the doorway, he realized with sudden fear, but two of the German mounted irregulars in full battle-order, shaggy giants with blank faces –

  He turned back to the quartermaster. It had to be the lost waggons. Or maybe the drivers and whatever else had been lashed down under those canvas sheets – the old fool had come to curse him for the lost convoy!

  If it had happened to anyone else it would have been amusing, but it was happening to him and he felt like bursting into tears again . . . only it was too late for tears, for the waggons, for the men – and most of all for himself.

  He sat up, brushing ineffectually at the cobwebs of hair on his face.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Silly question: the fellow wanted his burned waggons and dead drivers back. Or maybe his hundred and eight mules and twelve draught-horses. No, eleven draught-horses –

  ‘I want you awake first.’

  ‘What for?’ It was a sullen obstinacy that now began to wake inside him. He would be condemned, but he was not condemned yet, and no superannuated tally-man had the right to persecute him in the middle of the night, even if it was his last night on earth.

  ‘To answer my questions.’ The quartermaster stripped the cloak off the cot and thrust it at him. ‘Wrap that round you, boy. And get your feet on the ground.’

  Clodius clutched the thick folds to his chest, his defiance melting in the face of undoubted authority. Besides, the German savages at the door unnerved him; they were at once notoriously obedient to their orders and oblivious of the niceties of military law. They would chop him into pieces at a word without a second thought.

  He draped the cloak awkwardly round his shoulders and swung his feet off the cot. For a second the flame of the lantern blurred and danced as the hut lurched around him. Then his vision cleared and he fumbled with his toes for his boots. It was an instinctive movement: in any night emergency on the frontier boots and sword came first, with everything else unimportant. His eyes followed his thought to where his sword hung on its peg, just out of reach.

  As suddenly as he had stripped off the cloak from the cot, the quartermaster leaned sideways and hooked the weapon off the wall, offering it to Clodius hilt first.

  ‘If it makes you feel any better –’ he nodded and grunted – ‘but if I’d come here to murder you – you’d be twitching by now, I can tell you.’

  The hilt was ice-cold in Clodius’ hand, but the wind of suspicion in his brain was even colder, dissipating the lingering wine fumes there. Quartermasters didn’t tramp the depot in the small hours, but slept warm in well-furnished billets. Nor did quartermasters have Germans at their back –

  ‘The convoy was ambushed?’

  Clodius stared at him, then nodded mutely.

  ‘Speak when I question you. I like to hear a man’s voice.’ The grey man spoke softly this time, but the sharp edge of his words was not lost on Clodius. ‘So they ambushed the convey, then?’

  ‘Yes.’ The word, working its way over the lump in his throat, sounded half-strangled.

  ‘And you survived.’

  There seemed no answer to that shameful statement of fact, yet the grey man was still regarding him questioningly. Quite suddenly Clodius knew that an answer was required, but he could think of absolutely nothing to say. He had lost his first command and he had saved his own skin – that was the beginning and end of the story, and of his military career. And of his life.

  ‘The – the gods were with me.’

  It sounded hollow now, after what the camp-major had said, a mockery rather than a deliverance. Silence descended on the hut, and with it the dreadful loneliness which had weighed down increasingly on him ever since he had come to Britain. What had once seemed a great adventure under the wide blue skies of home had bogged down in endless nightmare under these eternal grey ones as he had journeyed northwards. It had only been endurable because he could tell himself that it would end once he had reached his legion. But now he would never reach it.

  ‘What’s your posting?’

  Despair had dulled his wits again: he stared at his tormentor uncomprehendingly.

  ‘What’s your posting, boy?’

  ‘The Twentieth.’

  ‘Valeria . . . a good legion. And your regiment?’

  The inevitable question.

  ‘The Ninth!’

  The grey man would know enough to draw all the obvious conclusions from that: the meagre political influence necessary to set Clodius’s foot on the very lowest rung of the ladder was not going to protect him from retribution a thousand miles north, beyond the edge of civilization. It would be months before the municipality of Narbonne learnt of his fate, if they ever did; and then there would be nothing left for them to do except to forget it.

  He waited for the equally inevitable snide insult, but the grey man merely nodded at him.

  ‘And how long have you been at this depot?’

  ‘How long?’ Clodius repeated nervously, caught by the change in direction of the question. ‘Three days – no, f-four days.’

  ‘Four days?’ The lantern light glinted on the man’s teeth as he clicked them in surprise. ‘Four days! Then you begin to become even more remarkable – I’m almost inclined to believe you have divine protection. Do you know why you are remarkable?’

  So it was to be sarcasm, not petty insults, thought Clodius bitterly.

  ‘Speak up – do you know why?’

  ‘B-because I ran away.’

  ‘Ran away?’ The grey head shook in disagreement. ‘Running away isn’t remarkable. Think again.’

  Clodius closed his aching eyes. The sarcasm was waiting in ambush just ahead somewhere, as unavoidable as the ambush which had destroyed everything.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The ache beat like a pulse. The whole thing was a pointless cruelty. Why couldn’t they go away?

  ‘You’re not thinking.’

  Not thinking. That was tr
ue: he wasn’t thinking and he didn’t want to think, because every thought came back to the same fearful place. It was why he had drunk the wine to the last dregs – to dull the images of thought. The wine had been the only kindness he had received, and even that had now turned sour.

  ‘Does it matter?’ he said wearily. ‘I ran away, that’s all.’

  ‘Everyone runs away. There was a time our general ran away back in the Rising. Did you know that, boy? He lost a battlegroup of the Ninth – three full regiments. Did you know that?’

  Clodius’s mind clouded with bewilderment. He was being told something, but it was beyond his comprehension what it was, just as three whole regiments stretched beyond his ability to imagine. All he could see was the creaking intractable line of his own lost waggons, elongated over miles of trackway when the going was firm and then bunching into a jam of steaming animals and jabbering drivers every time the mud slowed the lead cart no matter how he raved at them.

  ‘You still don’t understand?’

  ‘I – I –’ Clodius gave up the struggle, staring abjectly at his boots. ‘No.’

  ‘Very good.’ The grey man sounded as though he had received a full and satisfactory answer at last to a difficult question. ‘So now you will tell me just what happened. Take your time and I won’t bite you.’

  Clodius looked at him stupidly, searching the hard face for a clue – any clue – as to what was happening to him. Somewhere outside in the darkness he heard the night-guard call the second change of watch: it was still four hours short of dawn.

  He moistened his lips, swallowed the lump in his throat and tried to gather his wits.

  ‘I was – I mean we were trying to free the cart – the lead cart –’

  He stopped as the memory of the trooper’s shocked expression came back. They had stared at each other across the tilted, mud-caked wheel. There had been mud on the man’s face too, and on his hand as he plucked at the little arrow in his neck just above the iron torque he wore. He hadn’t made a sound when it had hit him: he hadn’t screamed until his hand had touched it, as though until then he hadn’t believed it was there. And then –

  ‘Not the ambush. Start at the beginning.’ The grey man’s voice interrupted the black memory. ‘Just make your report to me as you did to the camp-major, boy.’

  The drift of the grey man’s questions, confusing though they were, had kindled a tiny flicker of hope inside Clodius. But the mention of the camp-major instantly extinguished the flicker: beside that hideous memory the present seemed unreal, and no mere recounting of the facts would make them any different, or any less disgraceful.

  ‘The – he didn’t want to hear from me –’ His mouth was dry and his tongue seemed to fill it, ‘– he said –’

  The words wouldn’t come out. It was as though saying them out loud would only make them more certain.

  ‘He said? Come on, out with it!’

  ‘He said – he’d have me crucified.’

  The grey man frowned. ‘For what?’

  ‘For – cowardice . . . for running away.’

  ‘He doesn’t have the power.’

  ‘But he said – the General –’ Clodius blinked back the tears he could no longer control, ‘– he said the General never forgives cowardice.’

  ‘Nonsense!’

  ‘But –’

  ‘But nothing. I don’t care if you’re the biggest coward from here to the Golden Milestone – it doesn’t matter that you ran away. It matters that you got away. Can’t you get that through your thick head?’

  Clodius sat rigidly, his sheathed sword clasped to his breast. The pain and dizziness in his head had almost linked up with an increasing uncertainty in his stomach. A wave of nausea warned him that before very long he would be sick, humiliatingly and disgustingly sick. He knew only that he couldn’t fight the rising sickness and at the same time take in the contradictory things which were being said to him.

  ‘Look you, boy –’ the insistent voice was far off and almost gentle now ‘– why do you think we have half a legion and seven auxiliary regiments spread over this territory?’

  Why? If it was a good question it had never occurred to him to think of it. The army was where it was.

  ‘We have conquered it –’ Clodius gulped air, ‘– so we occupy it.’

  ‘We have conquered nothing and we occupy no more than the ground we stand on. So why do we stand on it? Why do we build our forts?’

  Why?

  ‘To – to protect our men . . . so that they can stand siege –’

  It was a stupid answer and he knew it.

  ‘Stand siege? These poor barbarians couldn’t lay siege to a plate of cold porridge – it is we who besiege them, boy . . . Now listen – listen carefully –’

  The dark eyes held him.

  ‘We have beaten them all summer, from the hills to the sea and back. We have killed their young men and plundered their farms and eaten their cattle. But we haven’t conquered them because we haven’t broken their spirit. And that is what we are about to do.’

  There was nothing in the world except the eyes and the voice now.

  ‘They are starving now, but that is not enough. While they starve they must look down and see us warm and snug and well-fed, sitting on their best land – and know that we shall sit there this winter and the next and the next . . . and watching our forts – smelling our forts – that will break their hearts more surely than a dozen lost battles.

  ‘But to do this our forts must be supplied down to the last measure of corn and the last pint of oil and the last nail and the last bale of hay. And do you know how much it takes to feed a soldier of Rome, boy? Did they teach you that before they promised you your vine-stick?’

  The voice shook – was it with anger or emotion? – as though the measures of corn and oil were gold and silver.

  ‘But you’ll learn – if you live you’ll learn!’ For once the grey man wanted no answer. ‘One-third of a ton of corn and a cubic yard of granary space for every man for every year, and three thousand pints of barley for every horse. And you’ll know more about lentils and hard-tack than the campaigns of the Divine Julius before you’re finished.’

  He leant forward until his face was so close that the smell of sweat and oiled leather and damp cloth enveloped Clodius.

  ‘Four supply convoys we’ve lost out of this base – yours is the fifth. And the first snows not six weeks ahead if we’re unlucky, and not half the winter quarters fully provisioned. We don’t know how and we don’t know why. But maybe you know, because you are the first and only survivor we’ve had. And if it takes a crucifixion stake on the parade ground to make you remember what you know, then so be it – the choice is yours, boy.’

  Clodius gaped at him, dismayed. ‘But I – I don’t – I mean, what if I don’t –?’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of what you know.’ The grey man straightened up abruptly. ‘Who commanded the convoy?’

  Clodius looked at him in surprise. It was the last question he expected. Obviously the man had come straight from – from somewhere outside the base without speaking to anyone.

  ‘Why – I did.’

  ‘You –?’ The grey man’s tone was incredulous rather than insulting. ‘You did?’

  ‘I mean, I was second-in-command, but –’ Clodius heard his own voice hoarse and far off. ‘– He – the captain had a fever in the night. He – they said he couldn’t ride.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘The camp-major – he said there was no one else.’

  Pale, watery dawn, with the mist hanging over the damp ground beyond the open gateway . . . the line of loaded waggons in the rutted park beside the gate and the organized chaos of the harnessing-up, with the drivers twittering in their own sing-song dialect, little dark men with greasy top-knots who pushed and pulled at the docile, soundless mules. And the handful of Batavian auxiliaries standing sullenly by their ponies . . . and the camp-major, with the fat senior quartermaster well-muffled again
st the morning chill beside him, controlling the whole scene simply by his presence, so it had seemed to Clodius. For which he was abjectly grateful, since no one took any notice of him and he had no idea what orders to give them anyway . . .

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘There was no one else – no one to spare.’

  ‘You’ve said that already. Go on.’

  ‘He – he said to keep them moving, to keep them closed up tight. No unnecessary halts – just the midday one for the mules.’

  ‘You knew about the other convoys?’

  Clodius nodded. ‘He said I – the sergeant could bring back the empty waggons and I – I could go on to my regiment.’

  ‘I mean –’ the grey head shook wearily ‘– the other convoys. Did you know we’d already lost four convoys on the north road?’

  Clodius grappled desperately with the implications of the question. If his only hope lay in being helpful then it would be a blunder to admit to the extent of his ignorance, even though it wasn’t his fault.

  ‘I knew that – that there’d been trouble,’ he compromised cautiously.

  ‘Did you know about the other convoys?’ The repeated question had an undertone of irritation.

  Clodius rocked nervously on the edge of the cot. ‘Well not exactly. I mean, not in detail –’ He couldn’t bring himself to add that since none of the officers in the depot had addressed one word to him outside the line of duty most of what little he knew had been not heard so much as overheard. But a lame explanation would be worse than none at all: he had to defend himself somehow.

  He stared bitterly at the grey man. It was all the more unbearable because it was so hideously unfair: if he had been Quintus Petillius Cerialis himself he couldn’t have saved the damn convoy. Until the ambush he had even made better time than usual if what the Dacian captain had said was true.

  ‘He said to keep them moving and I did – we made good time, as good as anyone could have done. It’s a rotten road – the bushes have been cut back, but there’s no proper surface on it yet. There’s mud –’

  ‘I know the road. I marked it out myself,’ said the grey man sharply. ‘You made good time – go on!’