by Whyte, Jack
Aching with the knowledge of what I must do, I dismounted beside Lorco, who lay where he had fallen, close by the wagon. He was flat on his back and mercifully his eyes were closed above the ruin of the lower part of his face. I stooped and picked up one of the loose garments that lay by my feet, and draped it very gently over his head, concealing his wounds. That done, I dug into my saddlebag to pull out the small codex that Germanus had given me before I left the school. It contained a transcription of several prayers attributed to the blessed Saint Anthony, and others attributed to Saint Martin, a native of Gaul. I opened it to the beginning of the first prayer, then knelt beside the body of my friend and read the entire selection of the prayers of Saint Martin aloud, dedicating them in the reading to the surrounding dead while focusing on my beloved friend.
By the time I finished reading it was almost too dark to see, and I stood up to leave, knowing I could do no more for Lorco or for any of them, but as I turned to remount my horse, I again saw the garments scattered about my feet and realized that I would be a fool to leave all of them there when I would surely have need of them later. I sorted through the things that I could find, surprised at how much had been left undisturbed in at least one of my chests. I filled my own saddlebags and Lorco's with clean, dry clothing, then improvised a pair of bags from two spare tunics and stuffed those full as well before tying them together and slinging them over Lorco's saddle. Only then, in what was close to full darkness, did I ride away from the killing ground, unwilling to spend a single moment longer than I had to in that place.
I rode though the dark along the riverbank for more than an hour, following the narrow path that traced the black line of willow shrubs along the waterside, and then the moon rose, full and large in a cloudless sky, and I was able to see clearly enough eventually to identify a large stand of trees that would shelter me for the remainder of the night.
I made a dry, dark camp at the base of one huge tree and God blessed me with a sound and dreamless sleep.
2
I awoke with the sun shining directly into my eyes through the screen of leaves that hung over me, and the first thought that came into my mind was a vision of Lorco dead on the ground as I prayed over him. I knew that before I did anything else, I had to find Duke Lorco and tell him about his son, about what had happened to him and about how I had come to survive the attack. It was not an encouraging incentive to leap up and be on my way, but nothing could have induced me to leap up that morning under any circumstances, since I had slept wearing full armour and my awakening body was now busily making me aware of the outrages to which it had been subjected overnight. I struggled to a sitting position and scrubbed at my eyes with the heels of my hands.
Moments later, still barely awake but trudging painfully in the direction of the river to relieve myself and wash the sleep from my eyes, I was astonished to discover that there was no river. The last vestiges of sleepiness vanished instantly as it became clear to me that at some point during my night walk—and it must have been early, probably in the darkness before the moon rose—I had somehow taken a divergent path and wandered inland, away from the river's edge. A fringe of shrubs still edged the path along which I had arrived here the previous night, and I remembered how determinedly I had watched and clung to the bulk of their blackness. But these were hazel shrubs, not osier willow as I had thought, and search as I might, they concealed no broad, placid stream of water.
That discovery led me to think about drinking water and that, in turn, made me think of food and realize that I had none, which meant that I must now think myself not merely as a coward but as a fool, as well. Until the moment we were attacked, it was true, none of us had had any reason to worry about food—we had food in abundance, from fresh-killed venison to dried chopped fruit and nuts and roasted grain. We had ground flour and salt and various dried and smoked meats, too, all of it safely stored on the wagon in boxes and casks. But now I was alone, hungry and thirsty and more than a little apprehensive of what might lie ahead of me.
All the more reason then, I thought, pulling myself together, to find Duke Lorco and his expedition quickly, and thereafter, I swore to myself, I would never go anywhere or venture into any situation without food and at least a full flask of water in my saddlebags.
I had unsaddled my two mounts and brushed them down before going to sleep the night before, and although I had been working in the dark I had tried to be thorough and militarily professional in seeing to their needs, knowing they had been saddled all day long. I was grateful that, thanks to the training hammered into us in the school stables, they had not been without rations, for it was the law according to Tiberias Cato that every horseman carry a bag of grain for his mount and keep it in his saddlebags at all times. So I had brushed the animals down and given them each a handful of grain in their nosebags before hobbling them for the night. Water had not crossed my mind, for they had both drunk deeply merely a few hours earlier, and I had been confident then that the river lay right behind our camp site. Now I examined the animals in the light of day and decided I had not done badly by them, considering the darkness under the trees the night before. I brushed them both down again, briskly, saddled them and then swung myself up onto my own and led the other out into the full morning light.
Open fields stretched away in every direction from the copse where we had sheltered, and it was easy to see from the absence of farm buildings that the land belonged to one of the latifundiae, the huge collective farming corporations that provided most of the Empire's annual grain harvest. There were no hills of any description, anywhere, just broad, flat fields with an occasional copse of trees that had been left standing to serve as windbreaks in bad weather. Far to my left, at the very limit of my vision, the fields came to an end, hemmed by dense trees. There was nothing at all on the right. The fields there simply stretched away to the low horizon, and presumably beyond that to infinity.
I turned and rode back and around to where I could see, beyond the copse, the path along which I had traveled the previous night. Sure enough, a single line of hazel shrubs, clearly a demarcation line or border of some kind set up by the landowners, extended from where I stood to the flat horizon, indicating the way I had come, and the direction of the sun on my right told me that I had been traveling from northwest to southeast. The river, I remembered from what Dirk the huntsman had said, had been running mainly southwest at the point where we had been attacked, so I knew it must now be somewhere to my left, westward of where I now sat. Wasting no more time, and talking aloud to my horses in order to avoid having to think about anything else, I set out to find the river first and then the Duke and his men.
I had ridden about five miles, and the terrain had been changing very gradually for the previous couple of miles; I had been aware of climbing an unseen gradient for some time, a barely discernible slope that only became really evident when it eventually leveled out into a plateau. Near the top my horses had to scramble to crest the steep west bank of a fast-flowing brook that had cut itself a channel in the soft ground in its rush to join the river, flowing down from a rocky outcrop south of me that was the closest thing to a hill I had seen all morning. And suddenly there was the river, straight ahead, beyond the crest of the slope and less than a hundred paces distant.
No osier willows lined the low-lying banks here. The swollen river, broad and silent but sullen and dangerous looking, filled its muddy bed almost completely, its silt-laden waters reaching to within a couple of handspans of the grassy edges of the channel. The river must have been flowing westward for some time, more or less paralleling my own route, to the north of where I was. It must have changed direction, swinging west, within a mile of the killing grounds, and the only reason I found it at all was that it meandered again, southward this time, to cross my path. As soon as I found the riverbank, however, I knew that something was far from well.
I drew rein and peered into the distance, looking for signs of life and confidently expecting to see Philli
pus Lorco's horsemen somewhere ahead of me, but there was nothing. Surprised, but not yet uneasy, I turned in my saddle and looked to left and right, but there was nothing to be seen there, either, although I could see that the open grassland ended in dense woodland on my right, about a mile north of where I sat. Nothing stirred there; no flash of sun on metal, no moving column, no pillar of dust. Puzzled now, I turned to look back the way I had come, as though I might have passed them along the way without noticing the dust and the noise or the sight of more than a hundred mounted men, and it was then that I noticed the absence of the track.
Six score of mounted troopers, three fully manned Roman turmae, one composed of light cavalry, one of mounted archers, and the third of heavy-spear-wielding contus cavalry, with all of their extra mounts, supply wagons and ancillary personnel, create a significant amount of damage when they pass over a grassy plain, particularly when the troopers are riding in formation, four or five abreast in a single column. It is impossible to conceal the evidence of their passing.
When we were attacked, we had been riding two abreast on the narrow, packed-clay path beside the river precisely because of the mess that had been created and the dust that had been churned up when Lorco's turmae had ridden over the dry fields on our left earlier that morning. We had had no wish to stir up that dust again because all of us knew from long experience how choking and debilitating it would be. We were privileged, we knew, to be apart from the main body of our force on such a hot day, because the unavoidable presence of swirling, choking, all-pervading dust, caking your face and gathering in the folds of your skin and neck, coating your tongue and filling your eyes and nostrils, trickling down your body beneath your armour back and front on runnels of sweat, to dry out and create unbearable itches in unreachable places, was a fact of cavalry life in the late spring, summer and autumn months.
There was no such track to be seen here, no matter where I looked, and so great was my disbelief that I began to ride hither and yonder, searching for it as though it was something I might have mislaid through sheer carelessness. I had good reason to be concerned, for the absence of a track meant, beyond dispute, that Lorco's cavalry had not come this way. They had taken another route, which meant that I was now lost and alone in an unknown and hostile land. I reined in my horse and sat staring up at the cloudless sky while the terror from the day before, reborn at full strength and ravening for release, built up inside me until I found myself incapable of moving. Fortunately, I recognized the peril in that thought even as it occurred to me, and I rebelled against it, hearing a new, angry voice rising inside me and insisting that although I had played the coward by moving too fast the previous day, I would not do the same this day by sitting still.
I jerked my head around hard, breaking my paralysis, and looked to my right, northward, to where the missing troopers now had to be, and forced myself to think about what could possibly have gone wrong with them. Duke Lorco, I was convinced, would not have changed direction before we caught up to him, not with his son and me riding with the hunting party. So if they had not changed direction, then they could not have passed this way yet, which plainly meant that something must have detained them. But what? And then the answer came to me, and relief swelled up in me like an enormous bubble.
They would have waited for us to catch up to them in camp the previous evening, and when we did not arrive, they would have assumed the hunting had been poor and we had remained in the field to try again at dusk. After that they would have continued to wait until long after dark before deciding we had opted for another dawn hunt. But Duke Lorco, I estimated, would not have been comfortable with his son's prolonged absence, so he might well have sent couriers to ride back early in the morning—I was convinced, in fact, that he would have done precisely that—to find the hapless and incompetent Harga and to chivvy him into making better time. And then, that done, the Duke would have waited where he was, doubtless fuming, but impotent to change anything before his lost hunting party caught up. He would not have traveled farther without first seeing his son safely back in camp.
Feeling as though someone had lifted the weight of my two horses off my shoulders, I swung them around and set out to the north at a canter, following the river again until it entered the tree line, after which I stayed as close to the riverbank as I could. I had to pick my way in places between the densest clumps of undergrowth, so that the progress I made was less swift than I would have wished. However, now that I had a purpose and a direction I could follow with confidence, I made better speed than I might have otherwise.
As I rode, weaving my way between the trees and through the undergrowth, my mind was racing ahead of me, following the logic of my suppositions about Duke Lorco's behaviour. If he had in fact sent out couriers and waited for them to return, then it was likely that by the time I caught up with him he would already have learned of his son's death and of my disappearance. The prospect of not having to be the one to tell him of his son's death was an attractive one, but I could not imagine any meeting between the two of us that would not entail my having to tell him, somehow, of what had happened to Lorco, how he had died and how I had run away, leaving everyone else behind me to be slaughtered. Thus my guilt revived and grew stronger as I rode, and my misery and self- loathing, forgotten for a brief time, returned to drape themselves over my shoulders.
That is how I was feeling when I rounded the bole of an enormous oak tree and found myself face to face with a trio of men on foot, no more than twenty paces ahead of me. The sight of them made my breath catch in my throat, but I have no doubt their surprise was as great as mine, because it was evident in the startled way they leaped backwards, groping for their weapons. For a moment my heart bounded in joy, my first thought being that they were scouts and I had found Duke Lorco and his men, but it took no more than a glance to show me that these were not Roman soldiers, far less cavalry. They were all dressed differently, but in a predominant color of red. Two of them were armoured in what looked like legionary plate armour, while the third wore a tunic of bronze-colored ring mail and had dull silver greaves strapped to his legs. This one, the smallest of the three, had been walking with an arrow nocked to his bow string, and as he sprang backwards at the sight of me, he nevertheless sighted hastily and loosed his arrow. It hit me hard and high on the left breast and was deflected by my cuirass, but it caught me off balance, and the force of its impact sent me reeling backwards, toppling me over my horse's rump to land sprawling on my knees and hands.
Fortunately for me, for I was still wearing my heavy helmet, I landed without either breaking my neck or knocking the wind out of myself. My helmet was jarred forward over my eyes in the fall, cutting off my vision, but I managed to push it up and back in time to see, between my horse's legs, the strangers starting towards me, separating widely to come at me from different directions. The bowman with the silver greaves remained in front, weaving slightly as he tried to find an angle from which to shoot me, but the other two were moving quickly now, circling to each side of me.
I had no time even to think of being afraid, although I knew beyond a doubt that if I tried to run away this time I would be dead within moments. Their encircling move, however, forcing me to tight in two directions, was one with which I was more than familiar—I had had the moves and countermoves of that attack and defense drummed into me since I was old enough to swing a practice sword. I looked down at the ground beneath my feet and saw that it was sloping downwards to my right, and then I took two long paces backwards, distancing myself from the two horses ahead of me yet keeping their bulk between me and the bowman in the ring-mail shirt.
Both of the men moving to attack me from right and left carried swords, the one a broad, heavy-bladed thing that looked as though it might be a one-edged blade, the other a long, slender, spatha-like weapon that look well cared for and well used. The man approaching on my left had the heavier, ugly weapon and he was farther away from me than his companion was. He was also slightly above me, be
ginning to move down towards me. The fellow on my right was below me and closer, just starting to crouch and raise his sword as he came at me in a sidling shuffle.
I took three running steps towards him, which he had not expected. He hesitated, wavering, and I almost beheaded him with my first slash. He barely managed to get his sword up quickly enough to save himself and my blade smashed his aside, by which time I was beside him, pivoting with my whole body and dropping into a crouch as I aimed a hacking slash at the unprotected back of his knees. It was a blow I had been taught by Tiberias Cato himself, years earlier, and when successfully delivered it was crippling. He screamed as my blade severed his hamstrings, and dropped immediately, first to his knees and then forward onto his face, but I knew he was finished as a fighter and did not wait for him to fall.
I spun on one foot and sprang up and back to face the other attacker from my left, but he had seen how I handled his friend and he was more cautious, crouching defensively and waiting for me to come to him. I knew I could beat him—there was no trace of a doubt in my mind about that—but by that time my flesh was crawling in anticipation, waiting for the impact of the arrow I knew must be coming for me at any moment because I was out in the open now, clear of the horses and vulnerable to the bowman, who had all the time he needed to sight on me. Nothing came, and finally I risked looking over to see what he was doing. It was the quickest of glances, no more than a flick of the head, but it showed me what I least expected to see, and I could not resist looking again, even although I knew the risk I was taking by looking away from the sword-wielder on my left.
