The Lost Ten

by Harry Sidebottom

  ‘Nothing.’

  Valens hesitated. Better to look foolish than to die. ‘Mount up, quickly, no noise.’

  They rode down the river, keeping their horses in the stream, hoping the waters might obliterate their tracks. Two smaller watercourses ran off from the river to the west, and after a quarter of an hour a larger one opened into it from the east. They turned into the latter. After no great distance, a grove of willows stood on its banks. They hobbled the horses and left them drinking. Climbing out under the trees, they established a perimeter defence, with the majority of men facing back the way they had come.

  They had not long to wait.

  A trumpet rang across the plain. At its command, Persian warriors erupted from both banks of the river just south of where they had been camped. Yelling high, thin war cries, the Sassanid horse archers raced to encircle the campsite. Drawing near, they loosed volleys of arrows to drop near vertical down into the riverbed.

  ‘They will be most disappointed,’ Hairan said.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Clemens said. ‘We can see them, and when we move they will spot us.’

  Valens turned to Narses. ‘How far to the sea?’

  ‘A long day in the saddle.’

  CHAPTER 31

  The Walls of Alexander

  THE NEW MOON HUNG LOW over the Caspian. The storm of the day had blown itself out, but the wind was still cold from the north.

  From his post on watch, the westernmost fortress stood stark against the night sky. The great wall itself stretched eastwards across the featureless plain until it was lost in the gloom. No one knew when the Walls of Alexander had first been erected. The name of the Macedonian was often given to any structures that were impressive, and whose origins were lost in time. Whoever first designed them, their intention was to keep out the nomad tribes of the Steppe, but they also formed a formidable barrier to anyone attempting to leave the realm of the King of Kings.

  Shifting his position on the damp ground – all his joints ached – he studied the fortress with the eyes of a professional soldier. It was large and rectangular, raised on an earth platform, and set behind a wide ditch filled with water. The mud-brick curtain walls were tall and broad. Even so, it would not hold out long against a besieging Roman army. The corners of the fort were not rounded, but square. Stone-throwing artillery would soon expose that weakness and bring them tumbling down. There were no projecting towers along the walls. Once the moat had been filled in, attackers with siege ladders could reach the wall without being exposed to any missiles except from ahead. If archers and bolt-throwers kept the defenders’ heads down, a storming party should reach the breach almost unscathed. Of course, after that, it would be the usual terrible work, step by step up the rubble, close to the steel.

  The deficiencies of the fortress would make little difference against the nomads. The tribes on the Steppe were far too primitive to ever undertake regular siege works. Yet somehow the slipshod construction offended his sensibilities. It was typical of Persian indolence.

  His gaze tracked west. Some four miles of reed beds and marshes separated the fortress from the Caspian. Narses had said a levee linked two wooden lookouts to the walls. The Persian claimed that when the sea had retreated, the land left behind was too soft to support heavier defences. That was another example of eastern idleness. A good Roman engineer would have sunk deep pilings, poured concrete in reinforced foundations, and extended the barrier to the waters’ edge.

  Gods below, he was tired. He was too old for this life. They had been a long time in the saddle.

  The enemy swarming over their hastily abandoned camp had indeed seen them when they left the cover of the willows. That damned trumpet had rung out, and shrill, ululating calls had come across the plain.

  They had gone north at a gallop, flat out.

  There had been nothing else for it. They could not have made much speed down in the bed of the river, and, racing down the banks, the Persians would have soon run them down.

  The going was good. Their horses were fresh, and those of the Persians already worn by half a day’s forced march. Soon they had opened a lead of almost a mile. The cries of easterners were as faint as distant birds. Only the note of the trumpet had cut clear above the thunder of their own horses.

  And then the storm had descended. Huge black clouds trailing tendrils of rain rolled down from the north. In an instant they were soaked to the skin, but the visibility was cut to no more than two hundred paces, and the trumpet could be heard no longer.

  They had slackened their pace to a fast canter to preserve the horses.

  With the sun obscured, it was hard to judge the passing of time.

  They came to a forest of ancient oaks. In its depths, moving carefully at a walk, they had altered course to the west.

  Once out of the partial shelter of the trees, they had moved back to a canter. The rain had lashed across their path. There was the danger of a horse falling – some slipped, but none went down. Not even the hardiest peasant or shepherd was abroad in the downpour. No one had seen them go, as they fled like creatures of myth from some primordial flood.

  As the day ended, the rain slackened but the murk thickened. Narses had turned them once more towards the north, going again at a walk. At the head of the column, the Persian twisted this way and that in his saddle, peering through the spitting rain and the gathering darkness. Sometimes he raised a hand to bring them to a halt. Then he would sit, head titled, listening and sniffing the air.

  Fatigue had dulled their thoughts. They sat apathetically in silence, apart from the old eunuch coughing. When Narses moved on, they followed him blindly in the darkness. Few of them noticed when it stopped raining.

  It was approaching midnight when the Persian had led the sodden and bedraggled riders through a fringe of reeds and into a grassy hollow, screened from prying eyes. The ground underfoot was damp but firm enough. Narses had urged them to be silent. The Walls of Alexander were less than half a mile away. There were six hours until dawn. They would rest here for four hours, then make their attempt.

  The familiar routine of rubbing down his horse – his weight behind the strokes as the brush dried and cleaned its coat, massaged the skin beneath – somehow refreshed his body and cleared his mind. He had sponged its eyes, nose and dock, checked its feet. After he had fed and watered both the animal and himself, Valens had placed him on sentry here at the edge of the reeds.

  It was a miracle that the expedition had got this far. None of his plans had come to fruition. Once Valens had appointed Decimus second in command, there had been no point in killing the young officer. In the mountains before the Castle of Silence he had written a warning, in both Greek and Persian, betraying everything he knew about the mission. He had tied it to an arrow. Setting off to hunt those wild goats, he had intended to shoot it over the wall. It would have been difficult to approach the walls unseen by either the garrison or his own companions, yet he was sure it could have been managed. Once inside, the others would have been taken, and he would have been rewarded. And then that fool had insisted on accompanying him. At the ambush of the supply wagon there had been nothing at all to be done. Inside the castle, the enforced intimacy of the barracks had left him unable to find an excuse to slip away from the watchful eyes of the others. As they rode out of the postern, he had dropped the arrow with the writing still attached to its shaft, but doubtless it would have been consumed in the fire.

  Yet the Persian cavalry patrols out on the plains indicated that one of his schemes had not failed utterly. The expedition would have outrun the news from the Castle of Silence, but the garrison of the Walls of Alexander had been alerted. The local he had paid back in Zadrakarta had not played him false, but had delivered the letter. The garrison was watching for them. The problem was that the Walls of Alexander stretched for hundreds of miles. In Zadrakarta he had not known where or how Narses intended to get them across the border.

  A torch flared in the distance as a sentinel
walked out onto the battlements of the fortress.

  For a moment he had the urge just to run towards the light, shouting, to get this treachery over with. The notion was ridiculous. Narses was crouched a few paces away in the reeds. He had never seen a better shot than the Persian. And there was no point in bringing destruction down on the mission, if he himself did not survive.

  How had it come to this?

  It was his own fault. His position of trust in the Camp of the Strangers had made it easy to take the money. Tullia’s family were poor, her father’s business not doing well. They needed the money. A few strokes in the ledgers and the money had vanished from the army. Everything had been fine until that shrewd little bastard Murena had been appointed.

  No, it was not his own fault. It was Murena. Even had the commander of the frumentarii not uncovered the fraud, his threats would have been more than enough. Murena knew that rather than see Tullia hurt, he would betray the entire world.

  The halo of torchlight flitted along the wall walk, tiny and alone, like a lost soul in the Stygian darkness.

  Of course, now that they had escaped the Castle of Silence there was a simple solution. No need to involve the Persians, no harsh necessity of doing harm to his sworn companions. Just kill the young boy. Get close to him, get him on his own, make it look like an accident.

  Up on the wall, the light of the torch went out.

  CHAPTER 32

  The Walls of Alexander

  THE WIND STIRRED THE REEDS over their heads. The mud sucked at their boots. Out in the swamp, invisible creatures slithered and plopped into the water.

  Of all the wildernesses in the world none was worse than a marsh. For a Roman, no desert or mountain felt so alien and frightening. Roman arms always failed where water and earth came together in a quagmire. At Abrittus, an entire imperial field army had become bogged down and was slaughtered. The body of the Emperor Decius had never been found. It was no wonder that Septimius Severus had failed to conquer Caledonia. How could it have been otherwise in a place where sea and earth could not be distinguished, where you could neither sail nor stand? How could you catch and defeat naked barbarians who could remain for days under the surface of the bog, breathing through a hollow reed?

  The marshes themselves were threat enough. They bred fevers and poisonous animals. Without warning the mud could suck you down and smother you in its depths. For Valens, the greatest terror of all was snakes. Swamps abounded in venomous serpents, and Narses had said those of the Caspian were particularly large and deadly.

  The sickle moon overhead shone from a cloudless sky. It had been too much to hope that the storm that had saved them yesterday would continue. The night was bright, but the feathery tops of the reeds offered cover. They were taller than a dismounted man and his horse.

  Narses took them along muddy trails and embankments. The Persian had hunted wildfowl here. But that was long ago, and the nature of swamps was treacherous. From one year to another channels changed course, mudbanks shifted, and solid ground dissolved. Sometimes the path he was following vanished, and they had to lead their horses belly deep through foul-smelling standing water. Twice they had come to a bottomless black pool. Their progress was slow anyway, and they lost yet more time probing for an alternative route.

  They went in single file, as quietly as they could. The reeds rustled overhead, and they had wrapped cloths around their weapons, the ornaments on their belts and the horses’ tack to muffle them. Yet the squelch of mud and the slop of water, the creak of leather and rasp of laboured breathing were painfully loud. Barbad the old eunuch had a scarf around his mouth, but it did not totally muffle his persistent coughing. Once they put up a skein of geese. They took to the air honking with a clatter of wings. The men stood, hardly daring to breathe, covering the muzzles of the horses, willing them to make no sound. Valens felt something brush against his boot. In a moment it was gone. It took all his willpower not to cry out or leap away.

  As the geese arrowed away low across the moon, Valens saw with dismay the first hint of the false dawn in the eastern sky. They had had but two hours to slip across the levee and vanish into the marshes north of the wall, and much of that precious time had elapsed.

  No outcry followed the flight of the wild geese. Narses led them on through the endless fen.

  A terrible doubt surfaced in Valens’s mind. Was the Persian lost? How could any man find his way through this damp desolation? The swaying banks of reeds all looked the same. The place would have changed out of all recognition since Narses hunted here. Were they wandering in circles? Even Hercules had been defeated by the marshes of Stymphalia and had had to shoot down its murderous inhabitants from dry ground.

  Above all, would they blunder into an enemy patrol or outpost? The Sassanids were alerted. The cavalry out on the plain the day before left no doubt of that. For a long time Valens had half suspected there was a traitor among the ten that had ridden out of Zeugma. Too much had gone wrong. The bandits killing Severus, the death of Quintus the navigator in the dust storm – so suspicious in retrospect – the trail left for the tent-dwellers to follow. Now the Sassanid horsemen waiting for them to come down from the mountains had near convinced him. How in Hades had the news preceded them down from the Castle of Silence? And who was the malignant presence in the surviving members of the brotherhood? It was not Narses. Of that Valens was quite certain. The Persian could have betrayed them at any point. All he would have needed to do was inform Naduk when they rode into the fortress-prison. Surely it was not Hairan? The young Hatrene had every reason to loathe everything Persian. They had killed his family, laid waste his home. There was Iudex. He was mad. There was no telling what his god might put into his mind. What possible reason might have inspired the other three? That ugly old pederast Aulus had an insubordinate nature. The no younger or better-favoured Clemens was likewise unruly, and was far more aggressive. Decimus, better preserved and more handsome, gave no reason to think that he was unsatisfied with the world. Valens would have thought Zabda the likeliest candidate. But Zabda, of course, was dead. And he had died saving Valens’s life.

  In the ambient light, Valens saw Narses raise his hand to call a halt. The Persian turned his horse, and handed the reins to Valens.

  ‘Pass the word to wait,’ Narses hissed, his mouth so close to Valens that the Persian’s beard tickled his face. ‘The levee is just ahead. I will go and look.’

  As he went, Narses made no more noise than a fox would going along the narrow track slightly raised above the water.

  Soon there was nothing to hear but the wind soughing through the reeds.

  Narses’s big Nisean stallion lifted its feet unhappily from the mud. Valens went to quiet it, but the black horse tried to bite his arm. Valens growled quietly. The stallion eyed him warily, but stopped playing up.

  A gasping, choking sound, then a paroxysm of coughing rent the air.

  At once the peace of the night was shattered. Persian voices shouted. A trumpet rang out. A light flared ahead. Then more appeared, one after another, running in a line like fire along a row of stubble.

  The levee was less than a hundred paces to the north. By the light of the torches, Valens could see the Sassanids on top of it. There were dozens of them spaced in a cordon along the walkway. They were on foot, their horses picketed.

  The coughing did not stop.

  A Persian officer, mounted and gorgeous in silks, shouted, obviously for silence.

  The noise from the levee dropped.

  Silence from the marsh. Then another burst of racking coughing.

  It seemed to Valens that the Sassanid officer pointed directly at him through the darkness. From back down the column came a commotion. A rider was scrambling into the saddle.

  ‘Get down!’ someone snapped.

  Barbad was mounted. With a savage kick, the old eunuch forced his horse off the track. It landed belly down in the stagnant pool with a terrible splash. Half swimming, half running, it breasted the surfa
ce. The glossy black water foamed white in its wake.

  ‘No, Barbad!’

  Just behind Valens, the boy was yelling as he heaved himself up into the saddle.

  Dropping the reins, Valens lunged at the boy. Catching him by the scruff of the neck, he hauled him back to the ground.

  The eunuch’s horse was floundering east towards an islet with a stand of trees.

  Prince Sasan filled his lungs to shout. Valens clapped a hand over his mouth.

  The three loose horses were sidling, thinking about bolting.

  ‘Someone catch them,’ Valens said.

  Hairan moved past.

  Sasan bit Valen’s hand. The sharp little teeth sank into his palm. Instinctively, Valens let go. The boy darted after the eunuch.

  Valens went into the fen a moment after Sasan. The water was up to the boy’s chest. Undeterred, he was forcing his way through. Longer legged, Valens closed the distance in a couple of strides. He dived to tackle the child. They both went under.

  The cold black sludge enveloped Valens. It forced its way into his mouth and ears. He could see nothing. For a hideous moment, neither his hands or his feet touched the bottom. Then a boot hit something solid, and he came up into the air.

  The boy was nowhere in sight.

  Looking round wildly, Valens saw a disturbance on the surface. He reached down, groping. His hand closed on something. He hauled Sasan out of the swamp.

  Gasping, the boy was going to shout again.

  Valens cuffed him hard around the ear. ‘Be silent, you fool. The old man is sacrificing his life for yours.’

  A flash of movement in the moonlight, and Barbad raced into the deep shade of the trees. A shout of command from the levee was followed by the sound of men wading down into the swamp.

  ‘Do not move,’ Valens whispered.

  He and the boy stood in the stinking mire.

  The others were frozen under the reeds along the track.

  More splashing and crashing indicated Barbad’s mad flight had crossed the tiny island and re-entered the marsh.