It seemed an endless crossing, though memory of that silky summer night told him that it was probably no more than eight or ten bowshots. There began to be a pull under the surface of the water; a steady pull over towards where the river must be. And then he felt the hidden safe-way rising under his feet. Reeds crowded to meet them, sere winter reeds parting to let them through, and ahead, sound and feeling more than sight, told him that the Fore Guard were pulling clear of the water, up through the alder scrub onto firm ground. A few moments more, and he and Phoenix were plunging together up the slope, with the first of the Main Guard close behind them.
And a short way ahead, the great standing-stones reared up, shapes of utter blackness against the lesser blackness of the winter’s night. Alexios felt them more than saw them; felt the Thing that the place had gathered to itself, tangible as the breath of some vast brooding being; this place that was the Death Place of the Chiefs of the Votadini and did not belong to the world of the living. Even the wind had a different note here; it harped against the great stones with a strange cold harping that seemed almost to have the tone of unhuman voices. And yet under the storm-voices of the wind and the rain, there was a great stillness.
The Van Guard had swung left hand and was skirting the standing stones. The Main Guard followed. ‘I’ll catch up with you in a while,’ Alexios said to Optio Garwin beside him. And leading Phoenix aside, he stood with his arm over the pony’s neck to watch the rest go by. He knew that having brought them to this place, he could not leave until the last of his men were clear of it.
He watched section after section loom out of the murk and disappear into it again like a legion of ghosts. Horribly like a legion of ghosts. The wounded came by, those who could walk lurching along blind and deaf to everything but the need to get themselves forward, here and there one supporting another; those who could not walk slumped in their saddles or lying along their horses’ necks, a few carried between unwounded men. He heard the slipping and scrambling that was the first of the baggage ponies coming up from the water. Soon now, there would be only the Rear Guard to come. Hilarion and the Fore Guard would be out into the winding ways of the Marsh Country again by now; the crossing of the Long Moss was half made, and nothing had gone wrong.
But in that moment there came the beating of great wings from among the alders on the islet’s northern shore, and the harsh ‘Krank!’ of a startled heron. A pony squealed in terror, and a man cried out. Back at their landing place a sudden small tumult had broken out; a scared threshing and floundering of ponies, men’s voices cursing. Alexios dropped the reins forward over Phoenix’s head and ran back. Through the wind-lashed branches of the alder trees he could see the thresh of men and ponies in the shallows; and frightened beasts under slipping packs were being hauled up the bank, by men struggling to get the way cleared for the Rear Guard following after.
‘What has happened?’ he demanded of the nearest man.
‘Heron – startled the pack ponies, Sir – two of them tried to bolt. It’s pretty treacherous footing.’
The ponies came crashing up through the alder scrub, and Alexios, pushing forward, met two men carrying up a third between them. Clear of the alder tangle they laid their burden down, and Alexios found himself squatting beside the dark shape that was coldly sodden under his exploring torch. Drowned? But he couldn’t be, not in that shallow water, he thought stupidly. The helmet thongs had been burst and the helmet was gone, and the neck felt odd – twisted. Wolf-dark. Couldn’t see – ‘Who is it?’
‘Quartermaster, Sir. Trying to stop one of the packs slipping. Got kicked on the head.’
‘Light! Get me a glim here,’ Alexios said. ‘Somebody go up yonder and send back the Medic. Tell Optio Garwin there’s nothing to turn back for. Tell him to keep the Main Guard going. Keep going at all costs; we’ll catch up . . .’
‘Somebody had produced a tinder-box and strike-a-light from its pouch of oiled linen and got a spark going, and was crouching close, shielding the tiny glim under his cloak; and by the faint glow Alexios saw the Quartermaster’s balding head twisted at an unnatural angle.
‘His neck’s broken. The hoof must have caught him here under the jaw,’ said Anthonius’s voice, and he realized that the Medic was kneeling beside him, hands moving steadily and surely over the damage.
Within a spear’s length of them the hooves and feet of the Rear Guard were trampling up from the water. But among the little group under the storm-lashed alder branches, where the tinder-box still cast a faint glow over the dead face and living faces that stooped over it, there seemed a curious hush.
‘The lads said there’d be a payment demanded,’ said Centenarius Lucius’s voice above them.
‘And the payment has been made,’ Alexios said, speaking to Lucius and to himself and to every man within hearing. He looked down into Kaeso’s watery slightly puzzled blue eyes in the crumpled face that had lost it usual red; the old chap had been annoyingly drunk most nights, and his constant niggling about his stores had been a burden to them all. But he had been the chosen one; the one who paid the toll for the rest of them to pass that way.
There was a sudden ache in Alexios’s throat. He swallowed it and got up. ‘Put him across his pony.’
‘We’re taking him with us, Sir?’ the Optio said.
‘We’re certainly not leaving him here.’
The men of the baggage train were checking the bindings of the packs. One pony, lacking his load, stood head down and shivering. Alexios drew a consoling hand down his neck. ‘No fault of yours, old warrior.’ Then to the optio, ‘His pack is gone?’
‘Yes, Sir, burst open and swept away.’
‘What was it?’
‘Meal, Sir.’
Alexios checked, his hand still on the pony’s drooping neck. ‘Well, we’ve good strong belts for tightening.’ There was still the three days’ iron rations at each man’s saddlebow; and the Frontier Wolves were trained, like their ponies, to keep going on what would mean starvation to any other troops, in time of need. They could worry about all that later. The immediate thing was to push on.
Things were being sorted out, the pack train was moving forward again with its added burden of one dead man. Anthonius had already hurried ahead after his wounded. Someone brought Alexios his pony, and he fell into place for the moment beside Lucius at the head of the Rear Guard.
Soon they had left the Death Place of the Chieftains behind them, and were out in the open Long Moss once more.
On the second part of the crossing there was no more unbroken water, for the islet which had seemed from the north to be set in the midst of its shallow loch, was in truth on the southern edge of it, and beyond lay another maze of firm ground and winding waterways and lochans, reeds bending in the wind, streaming long-fingered alder tangle. Then the alder began to give place to hazel and rowan, and Alexios realized with almost sick relief that they were pulling up out of the Long Moss, with solid land ahead of them once more.
In the lee of a thorn thicket they checked to look to the wounded and check the pack ropes again, and wring as much water out of themselves as they could, then remounted, the men with the lime daubs between their shoulders returning now to their normal places in the column, and pushed on again. There was no sign of the hunt on their trail as yet, but they must be many miles further south by dawn. And anyway, better to push on than stop here too long soaking and frozen and unable to light a fire.
There were a few grumbles of protest, but not many. Alexios, back in his old place with the Main Guard, said quick and low-voiced to Optio Brychanus beside him, ‘Optio, am I pushing them too hard?’
‘Anything short of foundering them isn’t too hard at this stage, Sir,’ said the man. ‘Later we may have to slacken speed for the sake of the wounded.’
Presently they came out onto the old half-lost track that ran direct to Castra Cunetio. For a few miles that would give them quicker travelling and be easier for the wounded. But after a while it began to carr
y them too far westward, and they left it and struck away in a more south-easterly direction, while the hills grew more wooded around them.
At daylight, well into the eastern thrust of the great forest that lay like a fleece over all the heart-land of the old province, they made a halt at last, to feed the men and see to the wounded. Mercifully the rain squalls had slackened off, and in the clearing where they had checked, there was a certain amount of shelter from the wind that boomed through the bare trees overhead. Beeches and oaks for the most part here, that flung gaunt imploring arms across the hurrying sheepswool sky, but two or three of the dark pines, outriders of the true forest further west, had crowded to the clearing’s edge, and made a sheltered place where the ground was drier than elsewhere; and there they had laid the wounded on the brown mat of pine needles; and Anthonius had got his medical case from the back of the pony who carried it, and was busy among them. Alexios, having seen the ponies grazing under guard – there was grass here, and the iron-ration corn could wait a while – and the men busy with their slim rations and the cleaning and drying out of their weapons, went over to see how it was with them.
In the patch of shelter they lay or sat, one man with his bandaged head in his hands, one man propped on an elbow looking down at the bloody remains of his sword hand, another with a knee smashed by a spear. Anthonius was bending over one who lay very flat, easing away the blood-clotted dressing from a stab wound in the belly. The man turned his head as Alexios checked beside him, and looked up with clouded eyes, ‘Water –’
‘Soon,’ Alexios began. ‘A couple of lads are bringing some up from the stream –’ and broke off, as the Medic also looked up with a small shake of the head.
‘They won’t give – so thirsty – Sir, you tell them – water for Christ’s sake,’ the man said.
‘Can’t, Sir, not with a belly wound. Wipe out his mouth with a wet rag, no more.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Alexios said, and turned and walked away feeling the man’s eyes following him.
Close by, a couple of men had cut down straight whippy beech saplings and were lopping off the branches and lashing spare cloaks and bale-sacking across them to make travoises, towed pony stretchers, for the most sorely wounded. On the far side of the clearing a burial party were finishing digging out a shallow grave.
Alexios and his two centenarii stood by as they lifted the Quartermaster’s body into it and laid the earth back over. And Alexios spoke the few words for one of his own faith. ‘Lord of Light, Lord of the Ages, slayer of the Bull, here we lay all that can die of Kaeso Quintillius, of the Third Ordo of Frontier Wolves, Thy son. Receive back into Thy strong hands all of him that cannot die. The Sun rises and the Sun sets, and always the Sun rises again.’ And when the turfs had been replaced over the small lonely mound, he knelt and made on it the Sign.
‘Poor old Kaeso,’ Hilarion said. ‘He never seemed to have much of a life apart from his store-sheds. And then to lose what he had in trying to save a bag of meal. Sometimes the gods make mean little jests.’
‘It is not the meal that matters,’ Lucius said softly, ‘he paid the toll for the rest of us to pass.’
‘And you a Christian!’
They were all on edge; and Alexios cut in quickly and somewhat at random, glancing towards where the pack ponies were already being reloaded, ‘A bag of meal that was worth more to us just now than the Ordo pay-chest, anyway.’ Two men were loading up the small iron-bound chest at that moment, and he added, ‘Even if it wasn’t almost empty.’
Hilarion’s voice took on its lazy, mocking note. ‘What fools we are, all of us, that we go round getting ourselves killed for an Empire that doesn’t even keep our pay up to date!’
Only a short while later, just as they were about to move off again, they got their first tidings of the enemy. One of the pair of scouts they had sent on ahead rode out of the trees and dropped from his pony beside Alexios with a weary salute. ‘A big war-party of Picts, Sir, moving south-east. Amlodd has gone after, to keep them in sight for a while.’
‘Any White Shields with them?’
‘No, Sir.’
‘Votadini?’
‘No, Sir, not yet.’
‘How many Pictish?’
‘Difficult to say, Sir, among the trees. About two hundred, to judge by their tracks after they’d gone by.’
‘Let’s hope they and their kin are not such skilled trackers as the Frontier Wolves,’ Alexios said. ‘Get out your bannock. You’ll have to eat on the move; we’re pushing on.’
‘It’s a hard life, Sir,’ the man’s weary face split into a grin.
‘A hard life,’ Alexios agreed. ‘No justice.’
Through all the short daylight hours they pushed on, roughly south-east, after crossing the track of the war-party, scouts out ahead, and behind them every man riding on the alert for any unusual movements of birds or beasts, any sound on the wind that might tell of enemies nearby, for the forest country must be full of war-bands by now, and every opening among the trees might show them the glimmer of lime-washed Attacotti shields, or the tasselled cat-skull standards of the Painted People; every gust of wind from the North might bring them the hunting cries of the Votadini on their trail. But after the passing of that first war-band they might have ridden through a deserted world. The decoy party had done their job well; Alexios’s thoughts kept reaching out to them, and he pulled them back, each time. However things were with the decoy party, there was nothing that he could do by worrying about them, and he needed all his wits for the men of the main force in which he rode.
The forest began to fall back, which meant that now, on the open moorlands, they had much further sight of the country round, but meant also that the hunt would be able to see them from much further off. They rode well stretched out, but careful never to lose contact between company and company, keeping well up the hill slopes and watching always the skyline, while taking care never to get skylined themselves. Time and again they had to ford small hill burns, with every ford bearing with it the possible danger of an ambush; but still they might have been riding through an empty land.
The short daylight was fading into an iron-grey dusk, and with the dusk the foul mixture of sleet and rain came on once more. Soon, while enough light lasted, they must find a suitable place to make camp. Make camp, with men drenched through and dog-weary with a forced ride of more than thirty miles behind them, and a good few of them wounded besides. A proper fortified camp to be made before they could rest and eat their pared-down ration; though he was sure enough the Votadini would not attack after dark. Of the Painted People he was less sure; they might ambush men caught in the open, but probably they would not attack a camp. What the Attacotti might do, he had no idea. His old nurse, he thought with a sudden flicker of weary humour, had neglected his education.
Finn, the native optio, drew up beside him. ‘Sir, if we turn south at the loop of the burn, and head round by Red Horse Glen, it would add only a mile or two, and we could be at the Rath of Skolawn by full dark.’
‘Might be dangerous,’ Alexios suggested.
‘We’re off Votadini territory now, Sir. The Selgovae won’t hold back the hunt on our trail, but they’ll look on it as something between us and Cunorix, and take no interest themselves, not even enough to send word to Cunorix that we’re drying off by a hearth fire of theirs. Besides, they’ll be having too much thinking of their own to do with the woods crawling with the White Shields and the Painted People.’
‘Still, we don’t want to risk stirring up a hornets’ nest behind us.’
‘We could always try asking in all courtesy, Sir?’
Alexios took a quick decision. ‘So we could,’ he said, and turned to his galloper who rode immediately behind him. ‘Take the word up to Centenarius Hilarion, we are turning south for the rath of Skolawn.’ He laughed. ‘With luck we’ll find us a fire to dry our wolfskins by tonight!’
Before the dusk had fully deepened into the dark, he was rather wishing he h
ad not said that, as he crouched shuddering with cold on the edge of a hazel thicket, his arm looped through Phoenix’s bridle, with the rest of his men; looking down towards the smoking ruins still glowing dimly red in places, in the valley below them, and waiting for the scouts he had sent in for a closer look, to come back.
Somewhere an owl hooted among the trees, and a shadow darker than the sleety darkness that surrounded them slid up to his side.
‘The Painted People have been here before us,’ said the shadow at half-breath. ‘But the fire is sinking, the thatch was too wet for it to take a proper hold.’
‘Anyone left alive down there?’ Alexios asked.
‘They have maybe driven off some of the cattle. Otherwise . . . it is not the custom of the Painted People to leave anything alive behind them on the war trail through a place of living men.’
Alexios was silent a moment. Then he said, ‘Nor, I think, would they be like to come back to such a place, once they had passed through it.’
And so at dark they came down to the smouldering ruins where dead men and cattle lay among the charred thatch that had been the Rath of Skolawn. At least they could have fire here, under cover of the fire that the Caledoni had left behind them; and meat from the slaughtered cattle, and maybe grain from under the fallen granary roof.